The Mummy and Miss Nitocris Part 11

Brenda would. Phadrig stood on the middle line between the two courts with his hands folded in front of him. She certainly felt a little nervous, but she knew her skill, and she sent a scorcher of an undercut skimming across the net. The ball stopped dead. Phadrig gave a flick with his right forefinger, and it hopped back over the net and ran swiftly along the ground to Brenda's feet. She flushed as she picked it up and changed courts. Then she raised her racquet and sent a really vicious slasher into the opposite court. Phadrig, without moving, raised his hand at the same moment. The ball, hard as it had been driven, stopped in mid-air over the net, hung there for a moment, then dropped on Brenda's side and rolled to her feet again. She picked it up, walked to the net with it in her hand, and said quite good-humouredly:

"I think you're a bit too smart for me, Mr Phadrig. I can't pretend to play against a gentleman who can suspend the law of gravitation just to win a game of tennis."

"I did not do it to win the game, Miss van Huysman," he replied with a gentle smile; "I only desired to amuse you and the other guests of Professor Marmion. Now, it may be that some excellent but ignorant people here may think that that ball is bewitched, as they would call it, so if you will give it to me, I will send it out of reach."

She handed him the ball, wondering what was going to happen next. He took it and put it on the thumb of his right hand as one does with a coin when tossing. He flicked it into the air, and, to the amazement of every one, saving always Franklin Marmion, it rose slowly up to the cloudless sky, followed by the gaze of a hundred eyes, and vanished.

Then he bowed again to Brenda, and said in the most commonplace tone:

"It is out of harm's way now. Thank you once more for your condescension."

"But how did it go up like that?" asked Brenda, looking him frankly and somewhat defiantly in the eyes.

"That, Miss Huysman," he replied with perfect gravity, "was only a demonstration of what Spiritualists and Theosophists are accustomed to call levitation. It is only a matter of reversing the force of gravity."

"Is that all?" laughed Brenda, as she turned away. "You talk of it as though it were a matter of turning a paper bag inside out."

"The one is as easy as the other," he smiled. "It is only a question of knowing how to do it."

She walked back to her chair very much mystified, and, for the first time in her so far triumphal journey through the interlude between the eternities which we call life, a trifle humiliated: but that fact, of course, she kept to herself. As she dropped back in her chair, she said to Lord Leighton:

"That was pretty wonderful, wasn't it? I'm quite certain that there's no trickery about it. What he did, he really did do."

"I don't pretend to be able to explain it," he replied, "but for all that I've seen very much the same sort of thing done by the fakirs in India, and I think it's generally admitted that that is either a matter of trickery or hypnotism. They make you believe you see what you really don't see at all."

"That's about it," said Merrill, with a short laugh, "Of course no one who knows anything about the East will deny that hypnotism is a fact, although I must say that these same fakirs have tried it with me more than once and found me a quite hopeless subject."

Even as though he had heard him, Phadrig came towards them at the moment, and said in his polite, impersonal tone:

"Commander Merrill, I am going to try one or two experiments now which I should like to have very closely watched. I know that there is no keener observer in the world than the skilled British naval officer. May I ask for your a.s.sistance?"

There was something in his tone which made it quite impossible to refuse, so he replied:

"You have shown us a good many wonders already, Mr Phadrig, and unless you've hypnotised the whole of us, I haven't a notion how you have done it; but if I can find you out I will."

"That is exactly what I wish, sir," said Phadrig, as he bowed to the ladies and went back to the centre of the circle. Merrill followed him, and, with the three Professors, formed a square about him.

Phadrig, turning slowly round so that his voice might reach all his audience, said:

"Ladies and gentlemen, you have all heard of or seen the strange performances of the Indian fakirs: the growing of the mango plant, the so-called basket trick, and the throwing into the air of a rope up which the performer climbs from view of the spectators. I am not going to say whether those are tricks or not. Their knowledge may be different from mine, therefore I do not question it. I only propose to show you the same kind of performance without the use of any coverings or concealment, and leave you and these four gentlemen to discover any deception on my part if you can. I will begin by giving you a new version of the mango trick, if trick it is, with variations. Professor Marmion, would you have the goodness to ask one of the young ladies to bring me one of those beautiful white roses of yours?"

Franklin Marmion was on the point of saying: "I'll bring you one myself, and see what you can do with it," but he was a sportsman in his way, and, seeing that his guests were so far not all inclined to be frightened at what they had seen, he refrained from spoiling the "entertainment," as they evidently took it to be, and so he asked his daughter to go and get one of her nicest Marechal Niels.

She rose from her chair and went to her favourite tree; Merrill followed her with a ready penknife. They came back with a fine half-blown rose on a leafy twig about nine inches long. As she held it out to Phadrig he declined it with a bow and a wave of his hand, saying:

"I thank you, Miss Marmion, but it will be better for me not to touch it. Some one might think that I had bewitched it in some way; will you be kind enough to give it to Commander Merrill and ask him to put the stem into the turf: about two inches down, please."

She handed the rose to Merrill, and as he took it their eyes met for an instant, and she flushed ever so slightly. He, with many unspoken thoughts, knelt down, made a little hole in the turf with his knife, and planted the rose. When he stood up again Phadrig went on in the same quiet impersonal voice:

"Now, ladies and gentlemen, you know that this rose is of a pale cream colour slightly tinted with red. It shall now grow into a tree bearing both red and white roses. It will not be necessary for me to touch it."

This somehow appealed more closely to such imagination as the majority of the spectators possessed. They had regarded the other marvels they had seen merely as bewilderingly clever examples of legerdemain: but for a man to make a single sprig of rose grow into a tree bearing both red and white roses without even touching it meant something quite unbelievable--until they had seen it. Instinctively the circle narrowed, and Phadrig noting this, said:

"Pray, come as close as you like, ladies and gentlemen, as long as you do not pa.s.s my guardians, for they have undertaken that you shall not be deceived."

The result was that a smaller circle was formed round the square, at the angles of which stood Merrill and the three men of science. Phadrig stood at one side facing the east. Then he spread his hands out above the rose, and said slowly:

"Earth feeds, sun warms, and air refreshes: wherefore grow, rose, that the power of the Greater Knowledge may be manifested, and that those who believed not before may now see and believe."

He raised his hands with a spreading movement and, to the utter amazement of every one except Franklin Marmion, who now saw that this man certainly had approached to within measurable distance of the borderland which he had himself so lately crossed--wherefore in his eyes there was nothing at all marvellous in anything he had done--the leaves on the sprig grew rapidly out into branches as the main stem increased in height and thickness, red and white buds appeared under the leaves and swelled out into full blooms with a rapidity that would have been quite incredible if a hundred keen eyes had not been watching the marvel so closely; and within ten minutes a fine rose-bush, some three feet high, loaded with red and white and creamy blossoms, stood where Merrill had planted the sprig.

After the first gasps of astonishment there arose quite a chorus of requests from the younger members of Phadrig's audience for a rose to keep in memory of the marvel they had seen; but he shook his head, and said with a smile of deprecation:

"I regret that it is not possible for me to grant what you ask. For your own sakes I cannot do it. If I gave you those roses they would never fade, and it might be that those who possessed them would never die. Far be it from me to curse you with such a terrible gift as immortality on earth."

The gravely, almost sadly spoken words fell upon his hearer's ears like so many snowflakes. Instinctively they shrank back from the beautiful bush as though it had been the fabled Upas. They had begun to fear now for the first time. But there was one among them, a young fellow of twenty-two, named Martin Caine, who was already known as one of the most daring and far-sighted of the rising generation of chemical investigators, to whom the prospect of an endless life devoted to his darling science was anything but a curse. Intoxicated for the moment by what he had seen, he sprang forward, exclaiming:

"I'll risk the curse if I can have the life!"

As his hand touched one of the roses, Phadrig's darted out and caught his wrist. He was a powerful youth, but the instant Phadrig's hand gripped him he stopped, as though he had been suddenly stricken by paralysis. He turned a white, scared face with fear-dilated eyes upward, and said in a half-choked voice:

"What's the matter? If what you say's true, give me eternal life, and I'll give it to Science."

"My young friend," said Phadrig, with a slow shake of his head, "you are grievously mistaken. You have eternal life already. You may kill your body, or it may die of age or disease, but the life of your soul is not yours to take or keep. Only the High G.o.ds can dispose of that. Who am I that I should abet you in defying their decrees? Here is my refusal of your mad request."

He plucked the rose which Caine had touched, held it to his lips and breathed on it. The next instant the withered leaves fell to the ground, and lay there dry and shrivelled. The stalk was brown and dry.

As he released Caine's wrist he dropped the stalk in the middle of the bush, and said in a loud tone:

"As thou hast lived, die--as all things must which shall live again."

As quickly as the rose-bush had grown and flowered so quickly, it withered and died. In a few moments there was nothing left of it but a few dry sticks lying in a little heap of dust.

The circle suddenly widened out as the people shrank back, every face showing, not only wonder now, but actual fear; and now Franklin Marmion felt that Phadrig had been allowed to go as far as a due consideration for the sanity of his guests would permit. The other two Professors were disputing in low, anxious tones, as if even their scepticism was shaken at last: Martin Caine had drifted away through the opening press to hide his terror and chagrin. The Adept stood impa.s.sively triumphant beside the poor relics of the rose-bush, but obviously enjoying the consternation that he had produced--for now the l.u.s.t of power which ever attends upon imperfect knowledge had taken hold of him, and he was devising yet another marvel for their bewilderment. But before he had arrived at his decision, something else happened which was quite outside his programme.

The Prince broke the chilly silence by saying to Nitocris in a tone loud enough for every one to hear:

"I hope, Miss Marmion, that I have justified my intrusion by the skill which my friend Phadrig has displayed for the entertainment of your guests?"

She turned and looked at him, and, as their glances met, he saw a change come over her. Her eyes grew darker: her features acquired an almost stony rigidity utterly strange to her. His eyelids lifted quickly, and he shrank back from her as a man might do who had seen the wraith of one long dead, but once well known.

"Nitocris!" he murmured in Russian. "Phadrig was right: it is the Queen!"

She swept past him--Oscar Oscarovitch, the man who aspired to the throne of the Eastern Empire of Europe--as though he had been one of his own slaves in the old days, and faced Phadrig.

"It is enough, Anemen-Ha that was. Hast thou not learned wisdom yet, after so many lives? Is the inmost chamber of thy soul still closed in rebellion against the precepts of the High G.o.ds? No more of thy poor little mummeries for the deception of the ignorant! Go, and without further display of the weakness which thou hast presumptuously mistaken for strength. The Queen commands--go!"

Only Phadrig and Franklin Marmion saw that it was not Nitocris, the daughter of the English man of science, but the daughter of the great Rameses who stood there crowned and robed as Queen of the Two Kingdoms.

Phadrig raised the palms of his hands to his forehead, bowed before her, and murmured: