Читать книгу Seven Sins - Sax Rohmer - Страница 8

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Dr. Fawcett observed a change stealing over the ascetic face of Lord Marcus. The dreamy blue eyes grew hard, the jaw more angular. He remembered vaguely that Lord Marcus had formerly been a soldier, and these were the eyes of a soldier which now looked out from the mask of the visionary.

"I appreciate, Chief Inspector,"—his musical voice remained low and untroubled—"that you have power to enforce this request. But if I assure you that the lady you desire to see, although present in the body, is actually far from this house, if I assure you that she has remained throughout oblivious of all that has occurred here, will you accept my word, and not compel me to arouse her? I assure you upon my honor that to do so might prove fatal."

Firth glanced uneasily at Dr. Fawcett. "The decision on that point rests in your hands, doctor, but for my part I must certainly see this lady."

"Can I count upon your support, sir?" asked Lord Marcus, turning to the surgeon. "If I make certain stipulations, as indeed I must, will you see that they are carried out?"

"To the best of my ability, Lord Marcus. But the conduct of this inquiry is in the hands of the Chief Inspector, not in mine."

"My stipulations are these," Lord Marcus went on: "I will permit you to see the shrine on the understanding that no sound is made, no word spoken. If you consider, Chief Inspector, that an interrogation is necessary, I must ask for more time."

The three men exchanged glances, and Firth nodded.

"Verra weel," he said dourly. "This is the queerest business that ever came my ways, but I must carry out my duty. Lead on, sir."

Lord Marcus extended a long, slender hand, inviting his visitors to return to the lobby. Again, in passing, they all glanced down at the dead man. "Be good enough to remain immediately outside the door when I shall have opened it," he said; "no foot but mine must cross the threshold. And be silent."

He pulled a cord, and the purple curtain opened in its centre, to reveal another of the silver-plated doors. This also opened in the centre, its twin leaves sliding silently to right and left. As it opened, an overpowering wave of incense swept out into the lobby.

The tall, robed figure entered. An imperative gesture warned them to pause on the threshold. It was significant that they all moved on tiptoe as one does in the echoing vastness of a cathedral, although the place into which they looked was of no such dimensions. It was, however, of surprising form.

The floor was paved with shiny black stone; the walls were plastered and covered with mural decorations of Ancient Egyptian figures. It was lighted by two globular lamps resting on slender silver tripods to right and left of a golden curtain which occupied a great part of that wall which faced the door. The ceiling was apparently of dull black, creating an impression of space above. Apart from the two silver lamps there was absolutely no furniture whatever in the apartment.

Raising a finger to his lips as he looked back across his shoulder, Lord Marcus, stepping silently in his sandals, advanced to the golden curtain and drew it aside. The origin of those clouds of incense which permeated the house now became apparent. A silver burner rested on a third tripod, and, because of draught occasioned by their entrance, sent up wavering spirals of aromatic smoke through a perforated cover.

In spite of the injunction to silence, three sibilant inhalations marked the astonishment of the onlookers.

Recessed beyond the curtain a sort of shrine or altar lay. Upon a dais covered with a leopard skin rested a throne, evidently of great antiquity and inlaid with silver and gold. The recess embracing this throne was semi-circular, and decorated with designs from the Book of the Dead, so that a grotesque procession of gods of the Nile marched in eternal monotony behind the woman seated there: figures with the heads of hawks, of cats, of crocodiles; a saturnalia such as might have haunted the dreams of a sleeping Pharaoh.

This woman wore the asp headdress of royal Egypt, a dull gold bangle on her right arm and a number of antique rings upon her fingers. She sat in a rigid pose, her hands palm downward, her body upright, her knees and feet pressed closely together—and her beauty was melodramatic in its flamboyance, in its stark passivity.

Hair dressed in a barbaric fashion resembled polished copper; wide-open eyes which stared eerily before her were of amber flecked with green: beautiful eyes but they held no human spark of life or love or passion, but seemed to survey a past dead world. A sheath-like garment of transparent tissue permitted the curves of her body to gleam through it like those of an ivory statue. No pulse throbbed in that white throat: there was no perceptible movement of her breast. Her lips were slightly parted in a sibylline smile.

Invasion of this secret temple produced no visible change in that entranced beauty. Lord Marcus raised his arms like a priest before the altar, and intoned words in his soft, musical voice, and in a language unfamiliar to any of those who listened. The long-lashed eyes of the woman never flickered. Lowering his arms, he stood aside, and for a period of perhaps a minute allowed the three men to watch—and to wonder. Then, turning, he gave a sweeping gesture to intimate that they should retire.

Stepping again on tiptoe, with extreme caution, acutely aware of their clumsy shoes, those who had watched withdrew. Lord Marcus reclosed the silent door, and replaced the purple curtain ...

It was Dr. Fawcett who broke an awkward silence. His expression, as he watched Lord Marcus, was diagnostic, but the effort which it cost him to recapture his professional manner was not lost upon Inspector Firth.

"Hypnotism?" the doctor inquired, with raised eyebrows.

"Not entirely, doctor," Lord Marcus replied, and that hard light had died from his eyes: he was again the prophetic dreamer. "Kyphi has singular properties, and a preparation of hashish, which I can procure only from Aleppo, more widely opens the inner eye. Personal magnetism, which is fully established between us, directs the quest of the released spirit."

Chief Inspector Firth interrupted. "I am afraid, sir, there are certain important points which I must clear up before I can send for an ambulance and have the body removed."

"I beg that you will make your inquiries as brief as possible."

"I'll do that. First and foremost I would ask, Dr. Fawcett: Are you prepared to say that yon woman is in a trance?"

"Yes, or under the influence of some drug."

"She's no' just pretending?"

"I am prepared to state that she is unconscious. I can say no more without a proper examination."

"Verra good, doctor. And now, Lord Marcus, I understand that this woman, who has been drugged or hypnotised by you, is being used for some kind of an experiment. Am I right?"

"She is playing her part in the Rites," Lord Marcus replied, in that musical, weary voice, "which are probably more than two thousand years old, and which, it is equally probable, have never been attempted by any living man. You may have observed that to-night is the night of the full moon. It is the full moon of the Ancient Egyptian Sothic month of Paophi, which means that, failing, I cannot even attempt to do what I sought to do for a whole year again."

"Might I ask, Lord Marcus," the doctor interjected eagerly, "what you sought to do?"

"Certainly." The reply was calm and courteous. "You, very properly, in common with these officers, assume that I am mad. I assure you that I am sane. The ancients, so scorned in this machine age, knew more of the power of the spirit than we to-day even suspect. I have endeavored for more than twenty years to recover some of that lost knowledge. To-night I had sent an untrammelled soul upon a voyage of exploration. I sought to know why the world was so sorely afflicted, and when its punishment would end."

"It is possible that ye mean, sir," said Firth, and he was funereally Caledonian in his dourness, "that ye sought to find out when the war would end?"

"Substantially, perhaps, that was my object. It is vain of you to endeavor to conceal the fact, Chief Inspector, that you regard me as a mental case, and even despise me a little for behavior which you look upon as egregiously flippant at a time of national stress. But you are wrong. I stood, to-night, upon the edge of knowledge denied to men for thousands of years, when, ordained by some fatality which I cannot even pretend to explain, that man died who lies there before us."

"Fatality may be right," murmured the Chief Inspector, his eyes fixed upon Lord Marcus with an expression no doubt similar to that which fired the eyes of Torquemada when he rebuked a heretic. "Mysel', I would ca' it the Hand of God. His ways are strange and beyond computing. And I think, Lord Marcus, that what ye sought to know, it is not intended that man should know."

Lord Marcus smiled: It was a sweet and a wistful smile. "You may even be wiser than I, Chief Inspector. I am perhaps not sufficiently purified. Indeed, I may venture too greatly. But I sought, not for my own good, but for the good of the world. This I ask you to believe."

And in fact, despite all that they had seen, all that they suspected, despite memories of the entranced woman upon whose lips rested a smile at once voluptuous and mystic, no one of the three doubted this man's sincerity. But each, in his different degree, doubted his sanity.

Bluett had managed to recall the fact that Lord Marcus in his younger days had been a notable boxer: he remained, for all his asceticism, a physically powerful man. Furthermore, the Detective-sergeant, whose special province was the morals of Mayfair, had recognised the woman. She was none other than the once notorious Mrs. Vane, whose adventures, matrimonial and extra-matrimonial, had afforded society journalists just before the war many spicy paragraphs. In his practical way he was reconstructing what might have occurred; and in the light of this reconstruction, Lord Marcus Amberdale already as good as stood in the dock. He cast a swift glance from ingenuous eyes at his superior. But there was nothing in the way in which Firth was looking at Lord Marcus to suggest that he shared Bluett's views.

"Do I understand, sir," said the Chief Inspector, "that in spite of what has happened, you would wish to renew this—er—expeeriment?"

Lord Marcus shook his head sadly. "Not at all. To do so would be useless. The shrine has been defiled. Forgive me—the implication does not reflect upon yourselves. But I must very gradually, and with infinite care, recall the traveller."

"I see," said Firth. "In the meantime, sir, I am afraid I shall have to put through a few routine inquiries here regarding the dead man's possessions and so on, but I will endeavor to keep as quiet as possible. May I have the lady's name?"

"She is Mrs. Vane, the only woman I have known in thirty years who possessed at once the ethereal subtlety and the physical courage to pursue the path so far." Instinctively, startlingly, he turned to Detective-sergeant Bluett. "You are thinking of the stories which are told about this lady. I would reply that her physical life is beside the point: I neither condone nor condemn it. There are qualities present which I have found in no one else: those of a priestess of Isis. With your permission, Chief Inspector, I will retire."

And Chief Inspector Firth was about to reply and to give the necessary authority, when all four men started and turned as one. Clouds of incense swam, now, visibly in the nearly still air of the lobby; a slowly writhing pall of oily vapor hung over the body of Sir Giles Loeder. But it was towards the silver-plated front door with its cabalistic inscriptions, that all eyes were directed.

Someone had quietly inserted a key in the lock!