The Dream Doctor Part 12

"No," he said with a twinkle of scientific mischief, "no, I'm going to sleep it off."

"Thank heaven!" I muttered.

"Because," he went on seriously, "that case interrupted a long series of tests I am making on the sensitiveness of selenium to light, and I want to finish them up soon. There's no telling when I shall be called on to use the information."

I swallowed hard. He really meant it. He was laying out more work for himself.

Next morning I fully expected to find that he had gone. Instead he was preparing for what he called a quiet day in the laboratory.

"Now for some REAL work," he smiled. "Sometimes, Walter, I feel that I ought to give up this outside activity and devote myself entirely to research. It is so much more important."

I could only stare at him and reflect on how often men wanted to do something other than the very thing that nature had evidently intended them to do, and on how fortunate it was that we were not always free agents.

He set out for the laboratory and I determined that as long as he would not stop working, neither would I. I tried to write. Somehow I was not in the mood. I wrote AT my story, but succeeded only in making it more unintelligible. I was in no fit condition for it.

It was late in the afternoon. I had made up my mind to use force, if necessary, to separate Kennedy from his study of selenium. My idea was that anything from the Metropolitan to the "movies" would do him good, and I had almost carried my point when a big, severely plain black foreign limousine pulled up with a rush at the laboratory door. A large man in a huge fur coat jumped out and the next moment strode into the room. He needed no introduction, for we recognised at once J. Perry Spencer, one of the foremost of American financiers and a trustee of the university.

With that characteristic directness which I have always thought accounted in large measure for his success, he wasted scarcely a word in coming straight to the object of his visit. "Professor Kennedy," he began, chewing his cigar and gazing about with evident interest at the apparatus Craig had collected in his warfare of science with crime, "I have dropped in here as a matter of patriotism. I want you to preserve to America those masterpieces of art and literature which I have collected all over the world during many years. They are the objects of one of the most curious pieces of vandalism of which I have ever heard.

Professor Kennedy," he concluded earnestly, "could I ask you to call on Dr. Hugo Lith, the curator of my private museum, as soon as you can possibly find it convenient?"

"Most a.s.suredly, Mr. Spencer," replied Craig, with a whimsical side glance at me that told without words that this was better relaxation to him than either the Metropolitan or the "movies." "I shall be glad to see Dr. Lith at any time--right now, if it is convenient to him."

The millionaire connoisseur consulted his watch. "Lith will be at the museum until six, at least. Yes, we can catch him there. I have a dinner engagement at seven myself. I can give you half an hour of the time before then. If you're ready, just jump into the car, both of you."

The museum to which he referred was a handsome white marble building, in Renaissance, fronting on a side street just off Fifth Avenue and in the rear of the famous Spencer house, itself one of the show places of that wonderful thoroughfare. Spencer had built the museum at great cost simply to house those treasures which were too dear to him to entrust to a public inst.i.tution. It was in the shape of a rectangle and planned with special care as to the lighting.

Dr. Lith, a rather stout, mild-eyed German savant, plunged directly into the middle of things as soon as we had been introduced. "It is a most remarkable affair, gentlemen," he began, placing for us chairs that must have been hundreds of years old. "At first it was only those objects in the museum, that were green that were touched, like the collection of famous and historic French emeralds. But soon we found it was other things, too, that were missing--old Roman coins of gold, a collection of watches, and I know not what else until we have gone over the--"

"Where is Miss White?" interrupted Spencer, who had been listening somewhat impatiently.

"In the library, sir. Shall I call her?"

"No, I will go myself. I want her to tell her experience to Professor Kennedy exactly as she told it to me. Explain while I am gone how impossible it would be for a visitor to do one, to say nothing of all, of the acts of vandalism we have discovered."

VII

THE GREEN CURSE

The American Medici disappeared into his main library, where Miss White was making a minute examination to determine what damage had been done in the realm over which she presided.

"Apparently every book with a green binding has been mutilated in some way," resumed Dr. Lith, "but that was only the beginning. Others have suffered, too, and some are even gone. It is impossible that any visitor could have done it. Only a few personal friends of Mr. Spencer are ever admitted here, and they are never alone. No, it is weird, mysterious."

Just then Spencer returned with Miss White. She was an extremely attractive girl, slight of figure, but with an air about her that all the imported gowns in New York could not have conferred. They were engaged in animated conversation, so much in contrast with the bored air with which Spencer had listened to Dr. Lith that even I noticed that the connoisseur was completely obliterated in the man, whose love of beauty was by no means confined to the inanimate. I wondered if it was merely his interest in her story that impelled Spencer. The more I watched the girl the more I was convinced that she knew that she was interesting to the millionaire.

"For example," Dr. Lith was saying, "the famous collection of emeralds which has disappeared has always been what you Americans call 'hoodooed.' They hare always brought ill luck, and, like many things of the sort to which superst.i.tion attaches, they have been 'banked,' so to speak, by their successive owners in museums."

"Are they salable; that is, could any one dispose of the emeralds or the other curios with reasonable safety and at a good price?"

"Oh, yes, yes," hastened Dr. Lith, "not as collections, but separately.

The emeralds alone cost fifty thousand dollars. I believe Mr. Spencer bought them for Mrs. Spencer some years before she died. She did not care to wear them, however, and had them placed here."

I thought I noticed a shade of annoyance cross the face of the magnate.

"Never mind that," he interrupted. "Let me introduce Miss White. I think you will find her story one of the most uncanny you have ever heard."

He had placed a chair for her and, still addressing us but looking at her, went on: "It seems that the morning the vandalism was first discovered she and Dr. Lith at once began a thorough search of the building to ascertain the extent of the depredations. The search lasted all day, and well into the night. I believe it was midnight before you finished?"

"It was almost twelve," began the girl, in a musical voice that was too Parisian to harmonize with her plain Anglo-Saxon name, "when Dr. Lith was down here in his office checking off the objects in the catalogue which were either injured or missing. I had been working in the library. The noise of something like a shade flapping in the wind attracted my attention. I listened. It seemed to come from the art-gallery, a large room up-stairs where some of the greatest masterpieces in this country are hung. I hurried up there.

"Just as I reached the door a strange feeling seemed to come over me that I was not alone in that room. I fumbled for the electric light switch, but in my nervousness could not find it. There was just enough light in the room to make out objects indistinctly. I thought I heard a low, moaning sound from an old Flemish copper ewer near me. I had heard that it was supposed to groan at night."

She paused and shuddered at her recollection, and looked about as if grateful for the flood of electric light that now illuminated everything. Spencer reached over and touched her arm to encourage her to go on. She did not seem to resent the touch.

"Opposite me, in the middle of the open floor," she resumed, her eyes dilated and her breath coming and going rapidly, "stood the mummy-case of Ka, an Egyptian priestess of Thebes, I think. The case was empty, but on the lid was painted a picture of the priestess! Such wonderful eyes! They seem to pierce right through your very soul. Often in the daytime I have stolen off to look at them. But at night--remember the hour of night, too--oh, it was awful, terrible. The lid of the mummy-case moved, yes, really moved, and seemed to float to one side. I could see it. And back of that carved and painted face with the piercing eyes was another face, a real face, real eyes, and they looked out at me with such hatred from the place that I knew was empty--"

She had risen and was facing us with wild terror written on her face as if in appeal for protection against something she was powerless to name. Spencer, who had not taken his hand off her arm, gently pressed her back into the easy chair and finished the story.

"She screamed and fainted. Dr. Lith heard it and rushed up-stairs.

There she lay on the floor. The lid of the sarcophagus had really been moved. He saw it. Not a thing else had been disturbed. He carried her down here and revived her, told her to rest for a day or two, but--"

"I cannot, I cannot," she cried. "It is the fascination of the thing.

It brings me back here. I dream of it. I thought I saw those eyes the other night. They haunt me. I fear them, and yet I would not avoid them, if it killed me to look. I must meet and defy the power. What is it? Is it a curse four thousand years old that has fallen on me?"

I had heard stories of mummies that rose from their sleep of centuries to tell the fate of some one when it was hanging in the balance, of mummies that groaned and gurgled and fought for breath, frantically beating with their swathed hands in the witching hours of the night.

And I knew that the lure of these mummies was so strong for some people that they were drawn irresistibly to look upon and confer with them.

Was this a case for the oculists, the spiritualists, the Egyptologists, or for a detective?

"I should like to examine the art gallery, in fact, go over the whole museum," put in Kennedy in his most matter-of-fact tone.

Spencer, with a glance at his watch, excused himself, nodding to Dr.

Lith to show us about, and with a good night to Miss White which was noticeable for its sympathy with her fears, said, "I shall be at the house for another half-hour at least, in case anything really important develops."

A few minutes later Miss White left for the night, with apparent reluctance, and yet, I thought, with just a little shudder as she looked back up the staircase that led to the art-gallery.

Dr. Lith led us into a large vaulted marble hall and up a broad flight of steps, past beautiful carvings and frescoes that I should have liked to stop and admire.

The art-gallery was a long room in the interior and at the top of the building, windowless but lighted by a huge double skylight each half of which must have been some eight or ten feet across. The light falling through this skylight pa.s.sed through plate gla.s.s of marvellous transparency. One looked up at the sky as if through the air itself.

Kennedy ignored the gallery's profusion of priceless art for the time and went directly to the mummy-case of the priestess Ka.

"It has a weird history," remarked Dr. Lith. "No less than seven deaths, as well as many accidents, have been attributed to the malign influence of that greenish yellow coffin. You know the ancient Egyptians used to chant as they buried their sacred dead: 'Woe to him who injures the tomb. The dead shall point out the evildoer to the Devourer of the Underworld. Soul and body shall be destroyed.'"

It was indeed an awesome thing. It represented a woman in the robes of an Egyptian priestess, a woman of medium height, with an inscrutable face. The slanting Egyptian eyes did, as Miss White had said, almost literally stare through you. I am sure that any one possessing a nature at all affected by such things might after a few minutes gazing at them in self-hypnotism really convince himself that the eyes moved and were real. Even as I turned and looked the other way I felt that those penetrating eyes were still looking at me, never asleep, always keen and searching.

There was no awe about Kennedy. He carefully pushed aside the lid and peered inside. I almost expected to see some one in there. A moment later he pulled out his magnifying-gla.s.s and carefully examined the interior. At last he was apparently satisfied with his search. He had narrowed his attention down to a few marks on the stone, partly in the thin layer of dust that had collected on the bottom.