She who sleeps A romance of New York and the Nile
“One, please.” He watched her dazedly. “It’s amazing to think that my
father knew your mother. I have heard him speak of her singing
Thaïs.”
“The critics said she did not merely _sing_ Thaïs, she _was_ Thaïs.”
“Is she----?”
“She died when I was a baby,” the girl replied simply. “Here, in
Paris.”
“You were born in Paris?”
“Yes.”
“How did you come to live in America?”
“My foster-father is an American. He was once engaged to marry my
mother, you see. But she changed her mind--unfortunately.”
As she spoke the final word, an expression of such implacable hatred
crept over her beautiful face that Barry flinched. It was so that he
remembered her on that night in the _wâdi!_
“It’s dreadful to say and dreadful to hear,” she went on; “but my
father ruined my mother, in every sense of the word. She would have
died in a pauper’s hospital but for Paul Ahmes.”
“Who is Paul Ahmes?” Barry asked, a sort of new awe in his voice.
Marguerite Devina glanced up at him, and her eyes were very bright.
“He is the greatest-hearted soul in the world,” she answered in a
queer tone of challenge. “My mother brought him nothing but sorrow.
Yet he spent all he had to try to make her happy--at the end. And he
took the place of my father--afterward.”
“And is he, also, an operatic artist?”
She gave a little choking laugh.
“No,” she replied. “He is, or used to be, a vaudeville artist! He
retired years ago. He was known throughout Europe as ‘The Great
Ahmes.’ He was an illusionist. Not so famous as Houdini, but equally
clever in his own way.”
Watching her closely and trying to steady his voice:
“Ahmes is surely an Egyptian name?” said Barry.
“Yes,” she replied composedly. “He used to work as an Egyptian. There
is Arab blood on his father’s side. He was always billed as ‘The
Wizard of the Sphinx.’”
With a curious eagerness she poured out these confidences. Obviously
she wanted to do so. She watched Barry with those long, lovely eyes,
as if inviting further and closer cross-examination; as if challenging
him to put her upon trial.
“Is--your guardian--in Paris?”
“I expect him to-day.”
“Did you expect _me?_”
The abruptness of the thrust startled her, Barry determined. But if it
were so her defence remained impregnable.
“No,” she replied, laughing; “how could I?”
And even as she lowered her dark lashes and looked in her bag for a
cigarette, sanity whispered: “How could she? This girl, whose every
movement, every expression, every feature, and every mannerism are
familiar, yet is not, cannot be, Zalithea!”
Memory plays odd tricks at times, and as Barry struck a match to light
their cigarettes, a hitherto forgotten remark of Professor Blackwell’s
flashed, intact, through his mind. It had been made on the evening
that the Professor had examined Zalithea. “There is a small scar under
the hair, just above the right ear, which suggests that the
theory--now generally accepted, I believe--that surgery was practised
by the ancients is not without foundation.”
“Have you a small scar under your hair above the right ear?” he asked
suddenly.
At this Marguerite Devina unmistakably grew pale.
“Yes,” she answered, and looked at him with half-veiled alarm. “How
strange you should know that!”
“Professor Blackwell told me.”
“Is he a clairvoyant?”
“No,” said Barry, and laughed without mirth. He met the glance of the
dark eyes. “I once thought _I_ was, though. Now--I don’t know what to
think. But there’s something I must tell you. Perhaps I should have
told you right away. You are the living image, a miraculous double, of
someone----”
“Someone?”
“Someone I love very dearly. There! I’ve told you! I came here, to
Paris, to find her. And when I saw _you_----”
His voice failed him. He turned his head aside miserably.
The girl was silent for a time; then, very gently:
“Do you mean,” she asked, “that you have come from America to--look
for her?”
Barry nodded.
“What made you think you would find her in Paris?”
“I don’t know. We were--very happy in Paris. But I’m on my way to
Egypt.”
“To Egypt!”
“Yes. That was where--we met.”
“And you really expect to meet her again, in Egypt?”
“I don’t dare to expect. But if I left off hoping----”
He did not complete the sentence. Marguerite Devina had abruptly stood
up. Her head was averted.
“Please forgive me,” said Barry. “I didn’t mean to hurt you.”
Even as the words left his lips, he remembered where he had last
uttered them--and to whom. She turned to him impulsively, and the
memory was complete. Her lashes were wet with tears.
“You haven’t!” she said. “But I must go.”
Barry reached out a detaining hand.
“Please,” he pleaded, “let me see you again!”
She averted her head once more, and:
“If I can,” she murmured. “I’m sorry--but I must hurry away now.”
And, stumbling in her haste, she walked around the little table and
ran across the lobby.…
Back to his room Barry went in a state of mind which he found himself
incapable of analyzing. Was it possible, in the natural order of
things, for two human beings to be so absolutely alike? As well ask
himself if it were possible for a girl to live three thousand years!
One being possible, why not the other?
He was curiously reluctant to leave the hotel. Therefore Jim dined
with him in the grill room whose chef has been preserved for posterity
by Orpen’s brush. Of Marguerite Devina they saw nothing. At the end of
dinner:
“If I don’t stop thinking about this muddle,” Jim declared, “I shall
become completely cuckoo. It’s the Folies Bergères or a lunatic
asylum for mine. Make your selection.”
The selection was made. And it was at a late hour (Paris time) that
Barry returned to the Chatham. The night porter handed him a letter.
In his room he tore open the envelope. He began to read. Then, rushing
to the telephone, he banged the lever up and down in a frenzy of
impatience. At last:
“Hullo! Hullo!” he called, in a high, unnatural voice. “Ring Miss
Marguerite Devina!”
“Miss Devina left this evening, m’sieur.”
And when dawn came it found Barry haggard, wild-eyed, pacing the room,
ever and anon taking up a crumpled letter and reading and rereading
it.
CHAPTER XXXII.
THE GREAT AHMES
“Barry Dear:
“I don’t ask you to forgive me. I never meant to see you again. But
when Jim spoke to me to-day I realized, somehow, that _you_ were here.
And I knew you would come. And I knew I would have to see you. I
didn’t know how hard it would be--because I never believed you cared,
like that.
“I don’t know how to tell you what I see now, I _must_ tell. It all
began, really many years ago, when I was a baby, and when Paul Ahmes
was giving up everything to make my mother’s last days bearable. She
had never loved him, but they had one thing in common. It was their
passion for Egypt. She made her great success in an Egyptian opera and
he as an Egyptian performer. He used to buy Egyptian antiques with all
he could save. He knew more about these things than any dealer in
Europe. Most of his stage properties were real. They inspired him.
“One day my mother read that a ring which had been the property of the
real Thaïs was being auctioned at Sotheby’s in London. This ring had
once belonged to her. She never sang Thaïs without wearing it. But
poverty had forced her to sell it. Paul Ahmes, knowing what happiness
the recovery of this ring would give her, went to London to buy it.
This was like him. He did not bid, himself, as all the auctioneers
knew him. He sent someone.
“Barry--your father was at that auction--and he has the ring to-day!
When Ahmes heard that John Cumberland had secured it, he wrote to him,
and without mentioning my mother’s name told him all the
circumstances. Your father did not believe him.
“My mother died the night after Ahmes returned.
“Soon after that, before I can remember, we left Paris and went to
live in America. I grew up to look upon Ahmes as my father. I was
always surrounded by things belonging to Egypt, for my guardian had
left the stage and become a professional dealer in antiques. He was
sometimes away for months together, in Egypt, where he had agents now
that his business had grown so big. He had changed his name. John
Cumberland was one of his clients.
“But, Barry, very few of the wonderful and beautiful things he
received from Egypt ever left Ahmes’s possession. They went into his
own collection--which is priceless; for this was his ruling passion
now that my mother was dead. He sold copies, or restored originals
mostly, to his wealthy customers. Some of the most famous museums in
the world contain his work! His love of everything belonging to Egypt
simply wouldn’t allow him to sell a genuine piece. His genius for
making duplicates (for he is, truly, a genius) made it easy for him to
keep them.
“And all the money he earned in this way was spent acquiring more and
more rarities for his private museum.
“Then--this was years ago--he stumbled upon the tomb of Zalithea. He
reached it through a long narrow passage cut at some time by Arab
robbers. He found there the great stone sarcophagus, and he raised and
wedged the lid. The sarcophagus was empty.
“Thinking that one day this discovery might profit him, he reclosed
and concealed the opening. This opening, I must tell you, came out in
another valley, _behind the tomb_, and it led, through a hole in the
roof, into the _shaft_ between the first and second portcullis. You
remember where the roof had fallen? This second portcullis the thieves
had broken, and also the door of the chamber where the sarcophagus
was.
“I unknowingly inspired him to what followed--I and his wish to score
over John Cumberland, whom he had taught me to detest. He said I had
the true Egyptian profile. The showman in him came to life--this part
of his strange nature was only sleeping; and he thought of the wildest
plot that surely any man ever attempted to carry out.
“He said to me, ‘I will sell _you_ to John Cumberland! And if you play
your cards properly you will marry a millionaire!’ I was completely
under his influence, Barry. I had never known any other kind of life
but this commercial use of Ahmes’s genius as an illusionist. I don’t
want to excuse myself. I prepared for the thing with enthusiasm!
“This was when we came secretly to New Jersey. Mr. Brown, who took the
house, was formerly Ahmes’s stage manager. His wife acted as cook.
There were other members of my guardian’s old company there as well.
For no one who had ever worked for Ahmes wanted to leave him.
“Here for a long time I lived like a nun. No one outside our small
household ever saw me. When I went anywhere I was always heavily
veiled. Ahmes taught me to speak _Coptic_. This was the mysterious
language of Zalithea! Arabic I knew, because I had had an Arab nurse
from childhood--an old member of Ahmes’s company--Safîyeh!
“A year before the papyrus was brought to your father, Ahmes went to
Egypt. He erected the screen, as you know, his agent, Hassan es-Sugra,
having traced the real, or front, entrance to the tomb. He broke
through as far as the first portcullis, which he knew was intact. Then
he reclosed and hid the entrance as you found it. The hieroglyphic of
‘She Who Sleeps’ he himself carved in the rock.
“By the other tunnel, the one he first discovered, he took in lifting
gear and swung up the stone sarcophagus lid. The painted sarcophagus,
which he had made in New Jersey and shipped out, he put inside. Then
he lowered the stone lid again. The tables, lamps, couch, and other
things he set in place. Some of these were genuine. Some he had made.
He also added the cartouche of ‘She Who Sleeps’ to the ancient