The Green Mummy

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The Green Mummy

by Fergus Hume

CONTENTS

CHAPTER

I THE LOVERS

II PROFESSOR BRADDOCK

III A MYSTERIOUS TOMB

IV THE UNEXPECTED

V MYSTERY

VI THE INQUEST

VII THE CAPTAIN OF "THE DIVER"

VIII THE BARONET

IX MRS. JASHER'S LUCK

X THE DON AND HIS DAUGHTER

XI THE MANUSCRIPT

XII A DISCOVERY

XIII MORE MYSTERY

XIV THE UNEXPECTED HAPPENS

XV AN ACCUSATION

XVI THE MANUSCRIPT AGAIN

XVII CIRCUMSTANTIAL EVIDENCE

XVIII RECOGNITION

XIX NEARER THE TRUTH

XX THE LETTER

XXI A STORY OF THE PAST

XXII A WEDDING PRESENT

XXIII JUST IN TIME

XXIV A CONFESSION

XXV THE MILLS OF GOD

XXVI THE APPOINTMENT

XXVII BY THE RIVER

The Green Mummy

CHAPTER I

THE LOVERS

"I am very angry," pouted the maid.

"In heaven's name, why?" questioned the bachelor.

"You have, so to speak, bought me."

"Impossible: your price is prohibitive."

"Indeed, when a thousand pounds--"

"You are worth fifty and a hundred times as much. Pooh!"

"That interjection doesn't answer my question."

"I don't think it is one which needs answering," said the young
man lightly; "there are more important things to talk about than
pounds, shillings, and sordid pence."

"Oh, indeed! Such as--"

"Love, on a day such as this is. Look at the sky, blue as your
eyes; at the sunshine, golden as your hair."

"Warm as your affection, you should say."

"Affection! So cold a word, when I love you."

"To the extent of one thousand pounds."

"Lucy, you are a--woman. That money did not buy your love, but
the consent of your step-father to our marriage. Had I not
humored his whim, he would have insisted upon your marrying
Random."

Lucy pouted again and in scorn.

"As if I ever would," said she.

"Well, I don't know. Random is a soldier and a baronet; handsome
and agreeable, with a certain amount of talent. What objection
can you find to such a match?"

"One insuperable objection; he isn't you, Archie--darling."

"H'm, the adjective appears to be an afterthought," grumbled the
bachelor; then, when she merely laughed teasingly after the
manner of women, he added moodily:

"No, by Jove, Random isn't me, by any manner of means. I am but
a poor artist without fame or position, struggling on three
hundred a year for a grudging recognition."

"Quite enough for one, you greedy creature."

"And for two?" he inquired softly.

"More than enough."

"Oh, nonsense, nonsense, nonsense!"

"What! when I am engaged to you? Actions speak much louder than
remarks, Mr. Archibald Hope. I love you more than I do money."

"Angel! angel!"

"You said that I was a woman just now. What do, you mean?"

"This," and he kissed her willing lips in the lane, which was
empty save for blackbirds and beetles. "Is any explanation a
clear one?"

"Not to an angel, who requires adoration, but to a woman who--
Let us walk on, Archie, or we shall be late for dinner."

The young man smiled and frowned and sighed and laughed in the
space of thirty seconds--something of a feat in the way of
emotional gymnastics. The freakish feminine nature perplexed him
as it had perplexed Adam, and he could not understand this rapid
change from poetry to prose. How could it be otherwise, when he
was but five-and-twenty, and engaged for the first time?
Threescore years and ten is all too short a time to learn what
woman really is, and every student leaves this world with the
conviction that of the thousand sides which the female of man
presents to the male of woman, not one reveals the being he
desires to know. There is always a deep below a deep; a veil
behind a veil, a sphere within a sphere.

"It's most remarkable," said the puzzled man in this instance.

"What is?" asked the enigma promptly.

To avoid an argument which he could not sustain, Archie switched
his on to the weather.

"This day in September; one could well believe that it is still
the month of roses."

"What! With those wilted hedges and falling leaves and reaped
fields and golden haystacks, and--and--"

She glanced around for further illustrations in the way of
contradiction.

"I can see all those things, dear, and the misplaced day also!"

"Misplaced?"

"July day slipped into September. It comes into the landscape of
this autumn month, as does love into the hearts of an elderly
couple who feel too late the supreme passion."

Lucy's eyes swept the prospect, and the spring-like sunshine,
revealing all too clearly the wrinkles of aging Nature, assisted
her comprehension.

"I understand. Yet youth has its wisdom."

"And old age its experience. The law of compensation, my
dearest. But I don't see," he added reflectively, "what your
remark and my answer have to do with the view," whereat Lucy
declared that his wits wandered.

Within the last five minutes they had emerged from a sunken lane
where the hedges were white with dust and dry with heat to a vast
open space, apparently at the World's-End. Here the saltings
spread raggedly towards the stately stream of the Thames,
intersected by dykes and ditches, by earthen ramparts, crooked
fences, sod walls, and irregular lines of stunted trees following
the water-courses. The marshes were shaggy with reeds and
rushes, and brown with coarse, fading herbage, although here and
there gleamed emerald-hued patches of water-soaked soil, fit for
fairy-rings. Beyond a moderately high embankment of turf and
timber, the lovers could see the broad river, sweeping eastward
to the Nore, with homeward-bound and outward-faring ships afloat
on its golden tide. Across the gleaming waters, from where they
lipped their banks to the foot of low domestic Kentish hills,
stretched alluvial lands, sparsely timbered, and in the clear
sunshine clusters of houses, great and small, factories with
tall, smoky chimneys, clumps of trees and rigid railway lines
could be discerned. The landscape was not beautiful, in spite of
the sun's profuse gildings, but to the lovers it appeared a
Paradise. Cupid, lord of gods and men, had bestowed on them the
usual rose-colored spectacles which form an important part of his
stock-in-trade, and they looked abroad on a fairy world. Was not
SHE there: was not HE there: could Romeo or Juliet desire more?

From their feet ran the slim, straight causeway, which was the
King's highway of the district--a trim, prim line of white above
the picturesque disorder of the marshes. It skirted the
low-lying fields at the foot of the uplands and slipped through
an iron gate to end in the far distance at the gigantic portal of
The Fort. This was a squat, ungainly pile of rugged gray stone,
symmetrically built, but aggressively ugly in its very
regularity, since it insulted the graceful curves of Nature
everywhere discernible. It stood nakedly amidst the bare, bleak
meadows glittering with pools of still water, with not even the
leaf of a creeper to soften its menacing walls, although above
them appeared the full-foliaged tops of trees planted in the
barrack-yard. It looked as though the grim walls belted a secret
orchard. What with the frowning battlements, the very few
windows diminutive and closely barred, the sullen entrance and
the absence of any gracious greenery, Gartley Fort resembled the
Castle of Giant Despair. On the hither side, but invisible to
the lovers, great cannons scowled on the river they protected,
and, when they spoke, received answer from smaller guns across
the stream. There less extensive forts were concealed amidst
trees and masked by turf embankments, to watch and guard the
golden argosies of London commerce.

Lucy, always impressionable, shivered with her hand in that of
Archie's, as she stared at the landscape, melancholy even in the
brilliant sunshine.

"I should hate to live in Gartley Fort," said she abruptly. "One
might as well be in jail."

"If you marry Random you will have to live there, or on a baggage
wagon. He is R.G.A. captain, remember, and has to go where glory
calls him, like a good soldier."

"Glory can call until glory is hoarse for me," retorted the girl
candidly. "I prefer an artist's studio to a camp."

"Why?" asked Hope, laughing at her vehemence.

"The reason is obvious. I love the artist."

"And if you loved the soldier?"

"I should mount the baggage wagon and make him Bovril when he was
wounded. But for you, dear, I shall cook and sew and bake and--"

"Stop! stop! I want a wife, not a housekeeper."

"Every sensible man wants the two in one."

"But you should be a queen, darling."

"Not with my own consent, Archie: the work is much too hard.
Existence on six pounds a week with you will be more amusing. We
can take a cottage, you know, and live, the simple life in
Gartley village, until you become the P.R.A., and I can be Lady
Hope, to walk in silk attire."

"You shall be Queen of the Earth, darling, and walk alone."

"How dull! I would much rather walk with you. And that reminds
me that dinner is waiting. Let us take the short cut home
through the village. On the way you can tell me exactly how you
bought me from my step-father for one thousand pounds."

Archie Hope frowned at the incurable obstinacy of the sex. "I
didn't buy you, dearest: how many times do you wish me to deny a
sale which never took place? I merely obtained your
step-father's consent to our marriage in the near future."

"As if he had anything to do with my marriage, being only my
step-father, and having, in my eyes, no authority. In what way
did you get his consent--his unnecessary consent," she repeated
with emphasis.

Of course it was waste of breath to argue with a woman who had
made up her mind. The two began to walk towards the village
along the causeway, and Hope cleared his throat to explain--
patiently as to a child.

"You know that your step-father--Professor Braddock--is crazy
on the subject of mummies?"

Lucy nodded in her pretty wilful way. "He is an Egyptologist."

"Quite so, but less famous and rich than he should be,
considering his knowledge of dry-as-dust antiquities. Well,
then, to make a long story short, he told me that he greatly
desired to examine into the difference between the Egyptians and
the Peruvians, with regard to the embalming of the dead."

"I always thought that he was too fond of Egypt to bother about
any other country," said Lucy sapiently.

"My dear, it isn't the country he cares about, but the
civilization of the past. The Incas embalmed their dead, as did
the Egyptians, and in some way the Professor heard of a Royal
Mummy, swathed in green bandages--so he described it to me."

"It should be called an Irish mummy," said Lucy flippantly.
"Well?"

"This mummy is in possession of a man at Malta, and Professor
Braddock, hearing that it was for sale for one thousand pounds--"

"Oh!" interrupted the girl vivaciously, "so this was why father
sent Sidney Bolton away six weeks ago?"

"Yes. As you know, Bolton is your step-father's assistant, and
is as crazy as the Professor on the subject of Egypt. I asked
the Professor if he would allow me to marry you--"

"Quite unnecessary," interpolated Lucy briskly.

Archie passed over the remark to evade an argument.

"When I asked him, he said that he wished you to marry Random,
who is rich. I pointed out that you loved me and not Random, and
that Random was on a yachting cruise, while I was on the spot.
He then said that he could not wait for the return of Random, and
would give me a chance."

"What did he mean by that?"

"Well, it seems that he was in a hurry to get this Green Mummy
from Malta, as he feared lest some other person should snap it
up. This was two months ago, remember, and Professor Braddock
wanted the cash at once. Had Random been here he could have
supplied it, but as Random was away he told me that if I handed
over one thousand pounds to purchase the mummy, that he would
permit our engagement now, and our marriage in six months. I saw
my chance and took it, for your step-father has always been an
obstacle in our path, Lucy, dear. In a week Professor Braddock
had the money, as I sold out some of my investments to get it.
He then sent Bolton to Malta in a tramp steamer for the sake of
cheapness, and now expects him back with the Green Mummy."

"Has Sidney bought it?"

"Yes. He got it for nine hundred pounds, the Professor told me,
and is bringing it back in The Diver--that's the same tramp
steamer in which he went to Malta. So that's the whole story,
and you can see there is no question of you being bought. The
thousand pounds went to get your father's consent."

"He is not my father," snapped Lucy, finding nothing else to say.

"You call him so."

"That is only from habit. I can't call him Mr. Braddock, or
Professor Braddock, when I live with him, so `father' is the sole
mode of address left to me. And after all," she added, taking
her lover's arm, "I like the Professor; he is very kind and good,
although extremely absent-minded. And I am glad he has
consented, for he worried me a lot to marry Sir Frank Random. I
am glad you bought me."

"But I didn't," cried the exasperated lover.

"I think you did, and you shouldn't have diminished your income
by buying what you could have had for nothing."

Archie shrugged his shoulders. It was vain to combat her fixed
idea.

"I have still three hundred a year left. And you were worth
buying."

"You have no right to talk of me as though I had been bought."

The young man gasped. "But you said--"

"Oh, what does it matter what I said. I am going to marry you on
three hundred a year, so there it is. I suppose when Bolton
returns, my father will be glad to see the back of me, and then
will go to Egypt with Sidney to explore this secret tomb he is
always talking about."

"That expedition will require more than a thousand pounds," said
Archie dryly. "The Professor explained the obstacles to me.
However, his doings have nothing to do with us, darling. Let
Professor Braddock fumble amongst the dead if he likes. We
live!"

"Apart," sighed Lucy.

"Only for the next six months; then we can get our cottage and
live on love, my dearest."

"Plus three hundred a year," said the girl sensibly then she
added, "Oh, poor Frank Random!"

"Lucy," cried her lover indignantly.

"Well, I was only pitying him. He's a nice man, and you can't
expect him to be pleased at our marriage."

"Perhaps," said Hope in an icy tone, "you would like him to be
the bridegroom. If so, there is still time."

"Silly boy!" She took his arm. "As I have been bought, you know
that I can't run away from my purchaser."

"You denied being bought just now. It seems to me, Lucy, that I
am to marry a weather-cock."

"That is only an impolite name for a woman, dear. You have no
sense of humor, Frank, or you would call me an April lady."

"Because you change every five minutes. H'm! It's puzzling."

"Is it? Perhaps you would like me to resemble Widow Anne, who is
always funereal. Here she is, looking like Niobe."

They were strolling through Gartley village by this time, and the
cottagers came to their doors and front gates to look at the
handsome young couple. Everyone knew of the engagement, and
approved of the same, although some hinted that Lucy Kendal would
have been wiser to marry the soldier-baronet. Amongst these was
Widow Anne, who really was Mrs. Bolton, the mother of Sidney, a
dismal female invariably arrayed in rusty, stuffy, aggressive
mourning, although her husband had been dead for over twenty
years. Because of this same mourning, and because she was always
talking of the dead, she was called "Widow Anne," and looked on
the appellation as a compliment to her fidelity. At the present
moment she stood at the gate of her tiny garden, mopping her red
eyes with a dingy handkerchief.

"Ah, young love, young love, my lady," she groaned, when the
couple passed, for she always gave Lucy a title as though she
really and truly had become the wife of Sir Frank, "but who knows
how long it may last?"

"As long as we do," retorted Lucy, annoyed by this prophetic
speech.

Widow Anne groaned with relish. "So me and Aaron, as is dead and
gone, thought, my lady. But in six months he was knocking the
head off me."

"The man who would lay his hand on a woman save in the way of--"

"Oh, Archie, what nonsense, you talk!" cried Miss Kendal
pettishly.

"Ah!" sighed the woman of experience, "I called it nonsense too,
my lady, afore Aaron, who now lies with the worms, laid me out
with a flat-iron. Men's fit for jails only, as I allays says."

"A nice opinion you have of our sex," remarked Archie dryly.

"I have, sir. I could tell you things as would make your head
waggle with horror on there shoulders of yours."

"What about your son Sidney? Is he also wicked?"

"He would be if he had the strength, which he hasn't," exclaimed
the widow with uncomplimentary fervor. "He's Aaron's son, and
Aaron hadn't much to learn from them as is where he's gone too,"
and she looked downward significantly.

"Sidney is a decent young fellow," said Lucy sharply. "How dare
you miscall your own flesh and blood, Widow Anne? My father
thinks a great deal of Sidney, else he would not have sent him to
Malta. Do try and be cheerful, there's a good soul. Sidney will
tell you plenty to make you laugh, when he comes home."

"If he ever does come home," sighed the old woman.

"What do you mean by that?"

"Oh, it's all very well asking questions as can't be answered
nohow, my lady, but I be all of a mubble-fubble, that I be."

"What is a mubble-fubble?" asked Hope, staring.

"It's a queer-like feeling of death and sorrow and tears of blood
and not lifting your head for groans," said Widow Anne
incoherently, "and there's meanings in mubble-fumbles, as we're
told in Scripture. Not but what the Perfesser's been a kind
gentleman to Sid in taking him from going round with the laundry
cart, and eddicating him to watch camphorated corpses: not as
what I'd like to keep an eye on them things myself. But there's
no more watching for my boy Sid, as I dreamed."

"What did you dream?" asked Lucy curiously.

Widow Anne threw up two gnarled hands, wrinkled with age and
laundry work, screwing up her face meanwhile.

"I dreamed of battle and murder and sudden death, my lady, with
Sid in his cold grave playing on a harp, angel-like. Yes!" she
folded her rusty shawl tightly round her spare form and nodded,
"there was Sid, looking beautiful in his coffin, and cut into a
hash, as you might say, with--"

"Ugh! ugh!" shuddered Lucy, and Archie strove to draw her away.

"With murder written all over his poor face," pursued the widow.
"And I woke up screeching with cramp in my legs and pains in my
lungs, and beatings in my heart, and stiffness in my--"

"Oh, hang it, shut up!" shouted Archie, seeing that Lucy was
growing pale at this ghoulish recital, "don't be fool, woman.
Professor Braddock says that Bolton'll be back in three days with
the mummy he has been sent to fetch from Malta. You have been
having nightmare! Don't you see how you are frightening Miss
Kendal?"

"'The Witch' of Endor, sir--"

"Deuce take the Witch of Endor and you also. There's a shilling.
Go and drink yourself into a more cheery frame of mind."

Widow Anne bit the shilling with one of her two remaining teeth,
and dropped a curtsey.

"You're a good, kind gentleman," she smirked, cheered at the idea
of unlimited gin. "And when my boy Sid do come home a corpse, I
hope you'll come to the funeral, sir."

"What a raven!" said Lucy, as Widow Anne toddled away in the
direction of the one public-house in Gartley village.

"I don't wonder that the late Mr. Bolton laid her out with a
flat-iron. To slay such a woman would be meritorious."

"I wonder how she came to be the mother of Sidney," said Miss
Kendal reflectively, as they resumed their walk, "he's such a
clever, smart, and handsome young man."

"I think Bolton owes everything to the Professor's teaching and
example, Lucy," replied her lover. "He was an uncouth lad, I
understand, when your step-father took him into the house six
years ago. Now he is quite presentable. I shouldn't wonder if
he married Mrs. Jasher."

"H'm! I rather think Mrs. Jasher admires the Professor."

"Oh, he'll never marry her. If she were a mummy there might be a
chance, of course, but as a human being the Professor will never
look at her."

"I don't know so much about that, Archie. Mrs. Jasher is
attractive."

Hope laughed. "In a mutton-dressed-as-lamb way, no doubt."

"And she has money. My father is poor and so--"

"You make up a match at once, as every woman will do. Well, let
us get back to the Pyramids, and see how the flirtation is
progressing."

Lucy walked on for a few steps in silence. "Do you believe in
Mrs. Bolton's dream, Archie?"

"No! I believe she eats heavy suppers. Bolton will return quite
safe; he is a clever fellow, not easily taken advantage of.
Don't bother any more about Widow Anne and her dismal
prophecies."

"I'll try not to," replied Lucy dutifully. "All the same, I wish
she had not told me her dream," and she shivered.

CHAPTER II

PROFESSOR BRADDOCK

There was only one really palatial mansion in Gartley, and that
was the ancient Georgian house known as the Pyramids. Lucy's
step-father had given the place this eccentric name on taking up
his abode there some ten years previously. Before that time the
dwelling had been occupied by the Lord of the Manor and his
family. But now the old squire was dead, and his impecunious
children were scattered to the four quarters of the globe in
search of money with which to rebuild their ruined fortunes. As
the village was somewhat isolated and rather unhealthily situated
in a marshy country, the huge, roomy old Grange had not been easy
to let, and had proved quite impossible to sell. Under these
disastrous circumstances, Professor Braddock--who described
himself humorously as a scientific pauper--had obtained the
tenancy at a ridiculously low rental, much to his satisfaction.

Many people would have paid money to avoid exile in these damp
waste lands, which, as it were, fringed civilization, but their
loneliness and desolation suited the Professor exactly. He
required ample room for his Egyptian collection, with plenty of
time to decipher hieroglyphics and study perished dynasties of
the Nile Valley. The world of the present day did not interest
Braddock in the least. He lived almost continuously on that
portion of the mental plane which had to do with the far-distant
past, and only concerned himself with physical existence, when it
consisted of mummies and mystic beetles, sepulchral ornaments,
pictured documents, hawk-headed deities and suchlike things of
almost inconceivable antiquity. He rarely walked abroad and was
invariably late for meals, save when he missed any particular one
altogether, which happened frequently. Absent-minded in
conversation, untidy in dress, unpractical in business, dreamy in
manner, Professor Braddock lived solely for archaeology. That
such a man should have taken to himself a wife was mystery.

Yet he had been married fifteen years before to a widow, who
possessed a limited income and one small child. It was the
opportunity of securing the use of a steady income which had
decoyed Braddock into the matrimonial snare of Mrs. Kendal. To
put it plainly, he had married the agreeable widow for her money,
although he could scarcely be called a fortune-hunter. Like
Eugene Aram, he desired cash to assist learning, and as that
scholar had committed murder to secure what he wanted, so did the
Professor marry to obtain his ends. These were to have someone
to manage the house, and to be set free from the necessity of
earning his bread, so that he might indulge in pursuits more
pleasurable than money-making. Mrs. Kendal was a placid,
phlegmatic lady, who liked rather than loved the Professor, and
who desired him more as a companion than as a husband. With
Braddock she did not arrange a romantic marriage so much as enter
into a congenial partnership. She wanted a man in the house, and
he desired freedom from pecuniary embarrassment. On these lines
the prosaic bargain was struck, and Mrs. Kendal became the
Professor's wife with entirely successful results. She gave her
husband a home, and her child a father, who became fond of Lucy,
and who--considering he was merely an amateur parent--acted
admirably.

But this sensible partnership lasted only for five years. Mrs.
Braddock died of a chill on the liver and left her five hundred a
year to the Professor for life, with remainder to Lucy, then a
small girl of ten. It was at this critical moment that Braddock
became a practical man for the first and last time in his dreamy
life. He buried his wife with unfeigned regret--for he had been
sincerely attached to her in his absent-minded way--and sent
Lucy to a Hampstead boarding school. After an interview with his
late wife's lawyer to see that the income was safe, he sought for
a house in the country, and quickly discovered Gartley Grange,
which no one would take because of its isolation. Within three
months from the burial of Mrs. Braddock, the widower had removed
himself and his collection to Gartley, and had renamed his new
abode the Pyramids. Here he dwelt quietly and enjoyably--from
his dry-as-dust point of view--for ten years, and here Lucy
Kendal had come when her education was completed. The arrival of
a marriageable young lady made no difference in the Professor's
habits, and he hailed her thankfully as the successor to her
mother in managing the small establishment. It is to be feared
that Braddock was somewhat selfish in his views, but the fixed
idea of archaeological research made him egotistical.

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