Читать книгу The Mystery Lady - Robert William Chambers - Страница 11
II
ОглавлениеMr. Welper came in.
He was a man of sixty, perhaps, under middle height, rather fat, smoothly shaven, carefully but very simply dressed.
His grey hair was closely clipped; his features pasty but regular and almost expressionless—except the eyes. These were a hazel hue, shaded by remarkable lashes which, on a woman, would have been beautiful,—long, curling black lashes partly veiling the slyest pair of eyes that Whelan had ever encountered.
Urbane, softly moving, soft of voice, and with small, soft, pallid hands—these and the long lashes shadowing two sly eyes were the salient features which checked up the surface personality of Mr. Welper.
He bowed cautiously to Miss Dirck; he bowed very cautiously to Mr. Whelan.
The latter said: “I received your letter, Mr. Welper. Have you brought the inscription?”
Mr. Welper bowed again and Whelan indicated a chair beside his desk and asked his visitor to be seated.
Out of his breast-pocket Mr. Welper produced a folded paper, opened it, and laid it politely upon Whelan’s desk.
“Oh,” remarked Whelan, “a photograph?”
“There were reasons why I could not bring the original document.”
Whelan gave him rather a sharp glance.
“On what substance were these symbols written?” he asked bluntly. “It makes some difference, you see.”
“The original is written on parchment,” said Mr. Welper softly.
“Skin, fibre, wood, stone,—genuine Maya records are written on these. Unless I can examine the parchment I cannot tell you whether or not your records are genuine.”
He continued to study the photograph before him for a moment:
“However,” he added, “genuine or not, these Maya and Aztec characters are not difficult to decipher. I think I can translate this into English for you without much difficulty—”
He spoke into the transmitter of his desk telephone: “Please bring me the Maya and Aztec keys, Mr. Francis.”
In a few moments a thin young man with bulging forehead and scant hair came in, laid the two working documents on his desk, and retired.
Whelan spread out the photograph; Mr. Welper looked over his shoulder; Miss Dirck, deadly pale, got up and came toward the other side of the desk.
Mr. Welper rose noiselessly as though to intercept her.
“Pardon,” he said, politely,—and impolitely covered the photograph with one pasty little hand—“the matter is confidential, and I am not at liberty to show this document to anybody except Mr. Whelan.”
The girl flushed as though she had been struck. She had halted half-way across the room.
Whelan looked at Mr. Welper in surprise, then with a smile and the slightest of shrugs he asked the girl to step into the inner office where his assistants were at work.
As she passed the desk where Whelan sat he noticed that she had lost all her colour.
When she had gone, and the door was closed behind her, Whelan and his visitor bent over the sheet of hieroglyphs. And this is what they saw:
For a few minutes the two men neither spoke nor moved. Finally Whelan half-reached out for the working list of Maya hieroglyphics, hesitated, reconsidered, pushed away the volume.
“This document of yours isn’t genuine,” he said bluntly.
“I beg your pardon?” said Mr. Welper very gently.
“I say it isn’t genuine. No Maya ever wrote this jargon.”
“Jargon?”
“Certainly. It’s nonsense. It has been written by some European.”
“Doesn’t this inscription mean anything, Mr. Whelan?” demanded his visitor, visibly worried.
“It’s not an ancient Maya inscription.”
“Are these not Maya symbols?”
“Yes—some of them.”
“Have these symbols no meaning?” insisted Welper.
“Yes—but this is not the way the Mayas wrote their chronicles.... They didn’t do it this way. They didn’t employ their ideographs in this manner.... And there are symbols here with which I am not familiar. ... I don’t believe they are Maya ideographs or Aztec phonetics.... I don’t know what they are—what they stand for.... The whole thing looks to me as though some European, with a smattering of Maya and Aztec, and a vague general idea of hieroglyphics, had attempted to write something using symbols.”
“If,” suggested Mr. Welper softly, “some European did this, how long ago did he do it?”
“I don’t know. Yesterday, perhaps; perhaps three hundred years ago. Maybe I can tell you if you show me the original manuscript.”
“It is on parchment and seems very old,” breathed Welper.
“It may seem old and be no older than a forgery furnished yesterday,” remarked Whelan, examining the photograph through a lens.
Presently he shrugged his shoulders: “This,” he said, “is not a Maya inscription; it is a fraud.”
“Yet you say that the symbols have a meaning,” urged Mr. Welper. “Can you read these symbols, Mr. Whelan? Here is your key—”
“I don’t need it, thank you. I can decipher these symbols without a key—I mean the Maya ideographs and numerals—”
“Would it be too much trouble for you to write in pencil under each symbol what it stands for?” pursued Mr. Welper.
“Not at all,” said Whelan, picking up a pencil.
This is what Whelan wrote:
When he finished he said: “You see? That’s not Maya work. Some white man has composed this jargon, using these hieroglyphs—or rather misusing them.” ... He handed the paper to Mr. Welper: “Probably I could tell you how old your original parchment is if you care to bring it around.... Did you buy it in some antique shop?”
Mr. Welper did not seem to hear the question.
“Mr. Whelan, I thank you,” he said. “I shall not further encroach upon your valuable time.”
He offered his remarkably small, soft hand:
“Once more, thank you, and good-bye.”
“Good-bye,” said Whelan, looking after him with the slightest scowl as he disappeared through the door.
Something about the touch of that small, pudgy hand annoyed him, too. Scarcely conscious of what he did he went to the wash-basin, rinsed his hand, dried it, came back and picked up the desk telephone.
“Please say to Miss Dirck that she may return,” he said.
Miss Dirck, with pencil and tablets, had been noting the titles of certain translated volumes on the shelves: The Letters of Cortes to Charles the Fifth, printed in Seville in 1522; Castillo’s Conquest of New Spain, printed in Madrid in 1632; volumes by Alonzo de Mata; Ojeda; Herrera; Juan Torquemada; Lopez de Gomara; Toribio de Benavente, the Franciscan; the Jesuit, Juan de Tobar; Padillo, a Dominican; Arrias Villalobos; Abbé Raynal; and the Abbé D. Francesco Saverio Claverigo, who wrote in Italian, and whose works were translated by Charles Cullen.
This is as far as she had written on her tablets when Whelan’s message came.
Instantly and swiftly she moved toward Whelan’s office. He rose to receive her.
“Where is that man?” she asked excitedly.
“He has just left,” replied Whelan, surprised by her tone and manner.
“May I see that paper he brought?”
“He took it away with him—”
The girl ran for hat and coat.
“Please,” she said breathlessly, “forgive my rudeness. I’ll come back—”
She had her hat and coat on and was out of the door before Whelan could stir or utter a word.
He was sufficiently astonished to remain immobile in his chair for several minutes. Presently, however, being a busy man, he turned to the papers on his desk again. Then, too late, he noticed her reticule of black leather and black silver lying beside her black-edged handkerchief. The handkerchief was faintly fragrant.
As he picked it up, with the idea of tucking it into the hand-bag, an automatic pistol fell from the reticule to the carpet.
Whelan picked it up, replaced the weapon in the little black hand-bag, went swiftly into the outer office.
“Which way did that young lady go?” he asked his secretary.
The secretary, naturally, didn’t know, and Whelan hurried to the corridor and called to the museum guard on duty: “Which way did that girl go, Mike?”
“Th’ wan in black, Sorr?”
“Yes! Did she take the lift?”
“Faith, I seen her go skippin’ an’ bucketin’ down the stair, Sorr. Sure she’s the light-footed wan, Misther Whelan,—she is that, Sorr!”
Whelan hastened through the corridor into the gallery.
It was too early for many visitors in the museum. He scanned the few people there with a single glance. The girl in black was not among them.
However, he took the lift and descended to the ground floor. No sign of her in any gallery, or in the lobby where a few early school-children, personally conducted, lingered around the big metallic mass which had fallen to the earth from interstellar space.
No guard on duty had happened to notice her; but a small, freckled, cloak-room boy remembered a very pretty lady in black who sped out into the sunshine of Central Park, West, as though the devil were at her heels.
“How long ago?” demanded Whelan.
“I dunno. Half’n hour, I guess.”
Whelan surveyed the lad in silent disgust, forgetting, perhaps, that time drags very slowly with a small, freckled boy who has to work for a living.
“She’ll miss her reticule and come back for it,” he reflected as he returned to the lift and was hoisted toward his own domain.
Seated at his desk once more he gazed curiously at the reticule.
“Probably,” he thought, “she’ll be back within half an hour.... It was rather a queer proceeding.... I didn’t care for that man, Welper.... But she was—unusually—ornamental....”
He shrugged his well-set shoulders and opened a volume on the Archæology of Guatemala. But he was aware of a faint perfume in the air. It came from her handkerchief in the satchel, and he found it difficult to concentrate his thoughts upon Guatemala.
