He Part 8

'Sir,' said Leonora, 'may I request you to inform me why we find you, rampaging an unbidden guest, in the chamber which is sacred to hospitality?'

'[Greek: Ten d' apameibomenos prosephe koruthaiolos] Asher,' answered the magician, dreamily. 'Do my senses deceive me, or--that voice, that winsome bearing--am I once more with Helen on the walls of Ilion?'

'No, sir, you are in 30 Acacia Gardens,' replied Leonora, severely.

'_Why_, permit me to repeat myself, do I find you here, an unbidden guest?'

'To say that I never guessed you'd find me here,' answered the magician, 'might seem a mere trifling with language and with your feelings.'

'My feelings!' exclaimed the proud girl, indignantly, 'just as if---- But answer me!'

'When a man has seen as much of life as I have,' answered the magician, 'when the aeons are to him merely as drops in a bucket which he will never kick--and when he suffers,' he added mournfully, 'from attacks of multiplex personality, he recognises the futility of personal explanations.'

'At least I can compel you to tell us _Where is the mummy?_' said Leonora.

'I am, or lately was, that mummy,' said the wizard, haughtily; then, drawing himself up to his full height, he added, 'I am the REAL JAMBRES! Old Gooseberry Jamberries,' he added solemnly. 'No other is genuine!'

'You are playing, sir, on our credulity,' replied the girl; 'no living man can be a mummy,--outside of the House of Lords or the Royal Academy.'

'You speak,' he said tenderly, 'with the haste of youth and inexperience. When you have lived as long as I have, you will know better. Hearken to my story.

'Three or four thousand years ago--for what is time?--I was the authorised magician at the Court of Ptolemy Patriarchus. I had a rival--the noted witch Theodolite. In an evil hour she won me by a show of false affection, and, taking advantage of my pa.s.sion, mummified me alive. To this I owe my remarkable state of preservation at an advanced age. _Tres bien conserve_,' he added fatuously.

'But she only half accomplished her purpose. By some accident, which has never been explained, and in spite of the stress of compet.i.tion, she had purchased _pure_ salts of potash for the execution of her fell purpose in place of _adulterated_ salts of soda.

'To this I owe it that I am now a living man; and in a moment----'

A certain stiffness of demeanour, which we had noticed, but ascribed to pride, worked an unspeakable change in the mage. As we looked at him _he hardened into our cheap mummy_.

'Here's a jolly go!' said Leonora, her mind submerged in terror.

I sprang to the bell, '_Soda water at once!_' I cried, and the _slavi_ appeared with the fluid. We applied it to the parched lips of the mummy, and Jambres was himself again.

'Now will you tell me?' I asked, when he had been given a cigarette and made comfortable, 'why we found you--I mean the mummy--under the Three b.a.l.l.s?'

''Twas a pledge,' he replied. 'When my resources ran low, and my rent was unpaid, the landlady used to take advantage of my condition and raise a small sum on me.'

All seemed now explained; but Leonora was not yet satisfied.

'You have----' she began.

'Yes, a strawberry mark,' he replied wearily, 'on the usual place!'

'The quest is accomplished,' I said.

'Nay,' replied Jambres, to give him his real name. 'There is still the adventure of the Siege Perilous.'

CHAPTER XII.

THE WIZARD'S SCHEME.

'We must, as you are aware, visit the Siege Perilous in the Hall of Egypt, and risk ourselves in the chair of the Viewless Maiden, of Her that is not to be seen of Man.'

'We know it,' said Leonora.

'It is,' continued the mage, 'your wish to accomplish the end for which you set forth. This seems to you an easy matter enough; young hearts are full of such illusions, and, believe me, I would willingly change my years, which are lost in geological time, for one hand's breadth of your daring. Know, then,' continued this strange creature, 'that the time has now come when matters must be brought to an end between us. It will be my business, and, I will add, my pleasure,' he continued with a lofty air which sat drolly enough upon him in his yellow duds, 'to conduct you to the Siege Perilous. From you, in return, I must exact an unquestioning obedience; and I will add a measureless _confidence_. I beg you to bear in mind that the slightest resistance to my will must be followed by consequences of which you cannot estimate either the reach or the extension.'

There was such a parrot-like pomp about the creature's tautology, and such an old-world affectation of fine manners in his constant obeisances, that I could hold it no longer, but fairly laughed out in his face.

I dreaded, it is true, lest some such fate as Ustani's might punish me for my temerity, but for reasons which doubtless seemed sufficient to himself the wizard merely looked at me through his veil, shook himself a little in his swathings, and said in a matter-of-fact voice, 'Well, well, perhaps we have had enough of such talk as this. Let's get ahead with the business before us. That business is to reach the Siege Perilous, or Magic Chair. Thither will I guide ye, and there ye shall see what ye shall see. But first it is needful, as all sages have declared, that ye shall show your confidence in me! I value not wealth.

Gold is mere dross--nay, I have the mines of King Solomon at my disposal. But when the weary King Ecclesiast confided to me, in his palace of ivory and cedar in Jerusalem, long ago, the secret of these diamond treasures, he bade me reveal it to none who did not show their confidence in me.

'Let _them_ entrust _you_,' said Solomon, 'with their paltry wealth, ere _you_ place in _their_ hands opulence beyond the dreams of avarice. Give me, then, merely as a sign of confidence, gold, much gold, or,' he continued in a confidential and Semitic tone, 'its equivalent in any safe securities, American railways preferred. Don't bring bank-notes, my dear--risky things, risky things! Why, when I was pals with Claude Duval--but 'tis gone, 'tis gone! Now, my dears, what have you got? what have you got?'

'I have,' answered Leonora, in her clear sweet voice and girlish trustfulness, 'as is my invariable custom, my _dot_, namely, 300,000_l._ worth of American railway shares, chiefly Chicago N.W. and L. & N., in my pocket.'

'That's right, my dear, that's right,' said the Erie wizard; 'just hand those to me, and then we can start at once.

'_And when_ (he went on in italics) _o my Leonora when that mystic change has been worked which has been predestined for countless ages and which shall come as sure as fate, then on another continent kindred to thine yet strange, even in the land of the railways that thy shares are in, Thou and I, the Magician and the Novice, the Celebrated Wizard of the West and his Accomplished Pupil Mademoiselle Leonore will make a tour that shall drag in the dollars by the hatful. NOW COME!'_

CHAPTER XIII.

THE PERILOUS PATH.

Forth we rushed into the darkness, through the streaming deluge of that tropic clime. For the seraphic frenzy had now come upon the mage in good earnest, and all the Thought-reader burned in his dusky eyes.

We presented, indeed, a strange spectacle, for the mage, in his silvery swathings, held Leonora by the hands, and Leonora held me, as we raced through the gloom.

In any other city our aspect and demeanour had excited attention and claimed the interference of the authorities.

In Berlin Uhlans would have charged us, in Paris grape-shot would have ploughed through our ranks. _Here_ they deemed we were but of the sacred race of Thought-readers, who, by a custom of the strange people, are permitted to run at random through the streets and even to enter private houses.

We were not even followed, in our headlong career, by a crowd, for the public had ceased to interest itself in frenzied research for hidden pins or concealed cigarettes.

After a frantic chase Jambres (late 'the Mage') paused, breathless, in front of a building of portentous proportions.

How it chanced I have never been able to understand, but, as I am a living and honourable woman, this hall had the characteristics of ancient Egyptian architecture, and that (miraculous as it may appear) in perfect preservation.

There are the hypostyle halls, the two Osirid pillars--colossal figures of strange G.o.ds, in coloured relief--there is the great blue scarab, the cartouche, the _pschent_, the _pschutt_, and all that we admire in the Rameseum of the Ancient Empire.