War and the Weird Part 4

"I was in the small room where I had taken tea with Ombos and Margot some weeks before. Supper was laid on a superb octagon table. 'They were good tricks, were they not?' said Ombos, with an easy laugh. His keen eyes smote keen into mine. 'Now you will in truth be able to go away and tell people how I tricked you, how it was plainly all a cheat.'

"At that moment Margot came in with a big ap.r.o.n tied about her. She greeted me pleasantly, setting a tray down on the table.

"'We do our own work here, Captain Crabbe,' she said. 'Do you want to make yourself useful?'

"I rose promptly. My little adventure into the occult world with Ombos had been rather exhilarating. I was glad when she told me to follow her out, through a long corridor into the kitchen, where she gave me a can-opener and a tin of sardines.

"'Open those up and turn them into this little dish, please. And if you have any hygienic aversion to tinned things, please forget it. Otherwise you will have to eat some of my hot teacakes.'

"Margot was standing at the table, cleaning a crisp head of celery. The position showed me her profile, with a little wisp of black hair escaping near one ear.

"We sat down to one of the most cheerful meals three people have ever enjoyed. We sat chatting there for nearly an hour. All the while I was trying to reconcile this man Ombos who sat talking boyishly with the student of occultism and black magic I had talked with an hour or so before. If I had felt any resentment of the tricks he had played on me it would have vanished utterly. Afterwards Margot made real Turkish coffee over a dainty spirit lamp ... once--in a critical stage in the coffee-making, too--she looked up and her eyes sought mine; then her red lips parted in a smile. She poured out the coffee deftly, blowing out the lamp, and put the little copper pot on a plate.

"Ombos surveyed his coffee with the air of a connoisseur, his head turned on one side.

"Margot produced the bowls of cigarettes and reached over my shoulder to offer me one. 'You want Egyptian?' she said smiling. 'You see I have a good memory--you smoked them last time.'

"A warm faint perfume came from her hair.

"It was ten o'clock when I rose to leave, Ombos and Margot came out to the front to say good night: my last glimpse, as I walked down the _pave_ street, was of Margot--a bare-headed figure, with wistful grey eyes, calm with the mysterious wisdom of pure womanhood. She waved her dainty lace handkerchief to me.

"That was the last of Ombos in the flesh. The next day, after German sh.e.l.ls had poured on Ypres for six hours without cessation, my regiment left the town, and we went out a mile or two to take over some trenches.

"A month later my duty took me back to Ypres, and I found myself walking up the Rue Bar-le-Duc towards the little antique shop. Overhead the sh.e.l.ls whistled without cessation. It was now a city of the dead--one could not realize that it was the same pleasant little town where I had met with so strange an experience a few weeks back. Men, children and horses were lying dead in every gutter.

"In due course I arrived at the shop. A large hole had been ripped in the _pave_ road before the door, and I had to step over a dead and twisted soldier to gain an entrance. Of course the place was empty.

Ombos, Albertus Magnus and all the wonderful contents of the s.p.a.cious old rooms had disappeared. I made a search of the house, and it was not without a curious sensation in my heart that I entered the room where the Master of Masters had towered in his niche. Silence--only the faint boom of a gun far away in the French trenches--awful, ghastly silence.

Then a deafening roar and a falling of masonry as Krupp's marked down another house in the town of sorrow. The horror of it!

"I turned dismally away, out into the Rue Bar-le-Duc, and along the square. A few scattered lights shone feebly through the evening mist, and over towards the Norman bridge the yellow flames from a burning house lit up the sky with a lurid glow. At nearly every street corner little groups of civilians had collected and were talking and gesticulating in a terrified manner. When a big sh.e.l.l came with a hoa.r.s.e, rattling noise through the air, like a racing motor cycle on the track at Brooklands, they would rush into their homes, panic-smitten. If death winked, and pa.s.sed them over, out they would creep again. And so they lived in an inferno of sh.e.l.ls for weeks on end.

"An ambulance wagon overturned in the middle of the road attracted my attention. I could not repress a shudder as I looked on the sh.e.l.l-shattered wreck.... It was the old type of four-horse ambulance used by the army in South Africa; possibly it had jolted into the sh.e.l.l-swept death-trap of Spion Kop, or carried men into the reeking enteric camps of Ladysmith. Well, it had made its last journey this time! The four dead horses had not been cut away from the traces, and from underneath the huddled and twisted heap stuck out an arm, and in the hand was clutched one of those short, stumpy whips which are used by the lead driver of a gun. I can see that poor chap in my mind thrashing and urging his team of horses into a gallop, for it was not reckoned wise to meander about the streets of Ypres, and then--one blinding crash.

"I swung round with a great desire to get away from the appalling scene, and as I did so, I noticed a girl in a doorway struggling in the grip of a powerful, swarthy-faced man of middle age. In the fading light I caught a glimpse of her face, and I was out of the shadow and by her side like a sky-rocket.

"'Let her go!' I said shortly. 'Before I mop out the gutter with you.'

"The man turned on me.

"'Who the devil----'

"'That's enough!'

"A Red Cap--a corporal in the Military Police--loomed into view, and with an imprecation the rough backed away from the girl, turned, and in a moment was lost in the gloom. I brought my eyes back to the girl who had confronted me in the red light of sunset, and I stood gazing at her dumbly, fascinated, but with never a word to say. She was burning with anger and shame, trembling like an aspen, too.

"_It was Margot!_

"The girl glanced up at me, a look that set my heart throbbing. It was my first real sight of her since I had seen her that afternoon with Ombos. I had thought her pretty then, but there is a distinct gap between a pretty woman and a lovely woman, and she was as beautiful as a Greek marble. Indeed, but for the carmine of her lips, and long dark eyelashes, she might have been chiselled out of pellucid stone, for her skin was dead white. She was--or had been--beautifully and expensively dressed, and there was breeding and refinement in every line of her face.

"'Don't you know me?' I said.

"The girl looked at me intently.

"'I know you, of course,' she said.

"I won't waste time in trying to tell you what my thoughts and sensations were. Rather I will tell you instead, what I did.

"It was some minutes later, and already we had started to walk slowly back in the direction of the Rue Bar-le-Duc.

"'And now you want to know--' she said.

"'Yes--that's it--what's become of Ombos ... and the bronze statue?'

"Margot looked up at me, and a strange melancholy transformed her face.... She was at a loss for words.... 'Poor Ombos--oh, poor, cranky Ombos,' she muttered. 'One morning I found him dead in his room, with all his wonderful, brown, powdery-looking books. He was leaning on a table over an old volume that he was fond of.... And then the doctors came. He had died, they afterwards said, of failure of the heart's action.'

"'Dead,' I murmured mechanically....

"'Then everything was very uncomfortable. But I saved a good sum of money, and I sent most of the valuable things to Paris to be sold--no living soul coming forward to make any claims. Ombos left everything to me ... bonds, securities, and all. Come this way--I have a little room up the side-street.

"'He left me well provided for. He----'

"'Yes; but why on earth do you stay in this dead city,' I broke in.

"'Sssh!... Don't interrupt unless I ask you questions.

"'I'll tell you all about everything. It's extraordinarily difficult....'

"I waited.

"'You see,' she picked her words carefully, 'Ombos was so--queer about that horrible Albertus Magnus of his. He had made me promise never to part with it and it seemed to me--stupidly perhaps--that I owed him that--to see that his only wish was carried out to the letter. Otherwise I should never dare to have stayed here. You couldn't expect me to move about with a gigantic bronze figure without making ample preparations.'

"'Ah!'...

"'This is where I live,' she said in a low voice.

"Margot had halted in front of an alley leading over rough cobbles, into a small square of what appeared to be old oak-fronted houses. A narrow pa.s.sage-way ran down by one side of the end house.

"'Won't you come inside, and--see Albertus? This way,' she said. 'It's rather dark, I'm afraid.'

"In pitch-black darkness, guided by Margot's hand, I stumbled through a doorway into a s.p.a.cious hall--a mysterious, fusty-smelling cavern of a place--along a pa.s.sage, and then up a flight of worn stone stairs. It was one of those old houses where one could feel the silence and hear the shadows. The steps came out upon a bare landing with oak-lined walls, lit only by a solitary flickering candle, and Margot, halting before a locked door, opened it and motioned me to enter.

"The room was in darkness, and I knew not what fear, akin to that little grey shadow of a fear, was to be found in the darkness there. At first I hesitated. Then Margot came with the candle, and as it guttered, the flame threw distorted shadows; at one moment lighting up a dark spot with a sudden flash, and then sending queer, erratic reflections chasing across the oak panelling. Then a flicker displayed the unmade bed on which Margot had lain.... She coloured deeply.

"'You have stored the bronze statue in some other part of the house,' I said at a venture.

"She looked at me, as I thought, a little uneasily.

"'You aren't afraid of that old statue?' she exclaimed. 'We might at least light up the candles,' she added, as I made no reply; and she turned and put a burning taper to the candelabra.