The Pyramid Chapter 1

CARLTON SEES HER AGAIN

There is no question as to whether he saw her or merely thought that he saw her. Such questions, constantly rising in everyone’s experience, can never be settled, anyway.

There is that well-known brain-expert in Berlin, for example, who even goes so far as to say that half the things we think we see in the course of a day’s ramble are nothing but so many illusions. Again, there is that army of professors who claim that everything we see is an illusion.

Let us hasten to remark, however, that this is not a scientific treatise. It is the simple, unvarnished narrative of George Carlton, once of California, sometimes of New York, and occasionally of Cowes, in which latter place his wife’s people are well and favorably known in the yachting set.

Let us not anticipate.

George wasn’t married then. He and Alice Wentworth were delightfully dawdling away a sunshiny afternoon at a restaurant in the Bois de Boulogne. One of Alice’s aunts was also there.

Alice, who herself was as English as a cup of tea—clear complexion, violet eyes, fine-spun “apricot” hair—had all manner of aunts. They are more particular about aunts in merry England than elsewhere—especially when a girl belongs to a wealthy and somewhat aristocratic family, and her father and mother happen to be dead.

The present aunt, albeit she was the best of souls, is of no great consequence. Suffice it to say that she was ultra-respectable, detested suffrage, managed to worry along with not more than a half-dozen servants when at home, and spent most of her time trailing round with Alice wherever the will of this sweet and exceedingly attractive child of fortune happened to lead her.

That also had become the chief occupation of Carlton, ever since he had met her on a friend’s yacht at Cannes.

They were sitting there—the three of them—in that happy daze which is apt to fall upon well-situated visitors to the Bois de Boulogne on sunshiny afternoons. The Tzigane orchestra was zimming and swirling through one of those unwritten rhapsodies for which Tziganes are famous—weird sort of music with all sorts of haunting tremors and quavers and minor chords in it.

Probably no one had spoken for the last fifteen minutes. They were perfectly content with each other. Even the aunt was content with Carlton—now that her solicitor had furnished her with a private report as to the unexceptional standing of Carlton “in the States.” Away back in Revolutionary days there had been a younger son of a great house, and he was the ancestor of the American Carltons.

Every now and then Carlton was touching the tip of Alice’s little finger with the tip of his little finger—quite accidentally, of course—when suddenly he gave a start, leaned forward, was rigid for a second or two with absorbed attention. Alice saw the erstwhile careless hand grip the table, then relax. She swept her violet eyes upon him.

It was just about settled by this time that they were to be married, and she had begun to show those first delicate, timid burgeons of wifely care.

“What is it?” she asked.

Her own listlessness had disappeared. Perhaps there had flashed through her mind the thought that she did not know this man she was willing to marry quite so well as she thought she did. Anyway, she had seen something in his face that would have made any woman a bit uneasy.

Aunt Mary, her eye on a group at another table, among whom were some people whom she thought she recognized, had let the incident pass unnoticed.

Carlton relaxed, let out an uneasy little laugh, again touched the smooth, pink tip of Alice’s little finger.

“What was it, George?” she repeated. “Really, you looked as though you had seen a ghost.”

Said Carlton: “Maybe I did.”

“See a ghost? How absurd!”

There was a shade of reproach in Alice’s violet eyes, but there was a kindling of interest there as well. Carlton was always so dreadfully dramatic.

According to most of Alice’s friends, all Americans were picturesque. Carlton was not picturesque. So far as manners and looks were concerned, he was certainly far above the average. But he was always doing surprising things, saying surprising things like that.

“Maybe I did,” he repeated softly as his level, gray eyes met hers, with only the barest suspicion of humor in them.

Neither did Alice smile. She looked back at him seriously, trying to comprehend. That was a quality of hers—one of many—which had convinced Carlton that very first afternoon that they had ever met that she was the one girl in the world with whom he could ever possibly get along.

“Tell me,” he went on softly and still quite seriously, “did you notice that woman who just passed—there, between those two clumps of oleanders, or whatever they are?”

“You frighten me,” said Alice, her voice but little more than a whisper. “Bur-r-r! Your tone, your question, and this weird music. What did she look like?”

“Green eyes and straight brows—black!”

“Bur-r-r!” went Alice again.

“Uncanny, all right,” said Carlton. “Something imperious about her—something Egyptian—cattish, cruel, beautiful, but—oh, you know—the lady-villain at Drury Lane, only more so.”

Up to this time Miss Wentworth’s interest, though genuine enough, might have been classed as academic. But it had obviously become suddenly more than that. The delicate pink of her complexion—the kind you hardly ever see except in England and the American Northwest—had quickly receded, then rushed back again a little more pronounced than before. She had swept a rapid, tremulous glance around her.

“No, I didn’t see her,” she said. “Tell me about her.”

Carlton lit a cigarette, repeated that uneasy little laugh of his, glanced at the blissfully complacent aunt—unconscious she of any mystery greater than the family receipt for Christmas puddings—then back at Alice.

“I told you that I had seen my ghost,” he remarked.

“My ghost, too!”

Alice might have said this. Those were the words which had flashed into her mind, but she kept her silence. After all, it could have been a mere coincidence. She had regained her equanimity.

“How was she dressed?” she asked.

“You can’t tell how a ghost is dressed unless you have time to look. I only had a glance—clearer, this time, than before; still, only a glance.”

“You insist?”

“On nothing, my Rose of Sharon, if it’s going to upset you. Only, if I am to be a victim of delusions, I’m honor bound to tell you.”

“Tell me, anyway.”

“Three times now,” said Carlton, disguising his obvious seriousness by a light motion of his hand into the air in case the aunt might be looking—“three times now, and each of the times when I was in your blessed company—which isn’t surprising, seeing how close I stick round—I’ve either seen, or thought I saw, this same creature.”

While he spoke the orchestra swooned and palpitated in a delirium of enchantment.

“Perhaps this confounded music has gone to my head,” said Carlton. “There was music on the other two occasions, as well—this same sort of music, crazy and wild. I suppose that Beethoven could stir up one sort of ghost—blue, angelic; and Sousa another. But this sort of music is hers—savage, Egyptian.”

“The Pembertons are also going to Egypt,” said Aunt Mary, catching the last word and wishing to be polite.

By the time that the young people had smiled at her and nodded, she had relapsed once more into the comfortable lethargy of a well-fed dowager.

“Do you remember when we dined at the Savoy? I saw her then—just that glance—same impression of green eyes and black brows—queer, striking, slightly ghoulish. Big dining-room, lots of people moving about, especially women, I not noticing any of them but you, naturally, until the ghost appears.

“I shouldn’t have noticed her, then, if it hadn’t been for the odd way she looked at me, my feeling that I had seen her before. Looked again and she was gone.”

“Could it be—” Alice began.

“You are going to ask me for a scientific explanation,” said Carlton. “But the very fact of my having studied psychology, psychiatry and things makes me all the more chary of trying to explain. As a fledgling scientist I, for one, am ready to admit that science doesn’t know a blessed thing about the insides of our heads at all.”

“And the other time?”

“The same thing, only a trifle more so. Do you remember that evening in Munich when we were walking back from the opera—moonlight, wonderful air, crowds, fragments of Aida still mingling all round? Well, just before we came to the hotel I saw her again—that same level, inscrutable look from her green eyes, very close to us, general impression of wealth and good taste, yet bizarre. As soon as I could I turned to look after her. She had disappeared.”

“Could it be—” Alice began again, and this time Carlton didn’t interrupt her. “Could it be telepathy?”

“It could be telepathy,” the American assented good-naturedly, “if you knew such a creature and happened to be thinking about her. But, of course, you—”

He paused, the slight suggestion of banter in his face and voice going out as he saw how the pink in Alice Wentworth’s face again fled under his scrutiny.

“Listen,” she whispered tremulously, while she forced a smile. “I also have something to tell. Oh, could it, could it be that you speak of my Aunt Rhodopis?”