The Pyramid Chapter 2

AUNT RHODOPIS

When Carlton had referred to himself as a “fledgling scientist,” he had done scant justice to himself.

As a matter of fact, if he had been forced to earn his living he could have been doing so since a long time either in private practice or in connection with any of the large hospitals which make a specialty of nervous and mental diseases. He had always had a passion for such things, and if his money had prevented him from pursuing his profession with any degree of regularity, it had at least permitted his development along another line.

This particular line was that field of research which most scientists regard as beyond the frontier of legitimate research; who stick to the old régime, anyway, whatever their private beliefs might be, for fear of seeing themselves driven away from the scientific fleshpots on the charge of being cranks or dreamers.

It takes money, as well as courage, to be a follower of such scientific freebooters as Hudson and Sir Oliver Lodge.

Carlton had both money and courage. He also had—or, at least, his friends were all ready to concede that he had—a fair amount of intellect as well.

And Carlton could see no good reason why he should not investigate the uncharted hills and valleys of the far West of science as boldly as his grandfather had investigated the hills and valleys of California. His grandfather had found a gold mine or two. Why shouldn’t he?

He had started out with spiritualism, had worked his way—figuratively speaking—up to East Indian magic and back again. Until Alice Wentworth became the all-absorbing theme of his observations, he had been a pretty frequent visitor at the big hospitals of London, Paris, Berlin, and Vienna.

In the course of his life, up to the present, there was just one word which he loved and feared, a word that at once ensnared his passionate interest and yet filled him with contemptuous despair. This word was “occult.”

He had a consuming thirst for everything that this much-abused word implicated. He had a horror, none the less, of the charlatans who delight in its use.

It was through this personality—here so slightly and poorly limned—that Carlton again flashed his interest upon the extremely fair, subtle, and responsive creature at his side.

“Your Aunt Rhodopis?” he exclaimed. “Have I met her?”

Alice shook her head. There had come a disquieting moisture into her eyes, but she smiled.

“Not unless”—she faltered—“not unless this is she.”

“Tell me what she looks like.”

“She looks like what you say this ghost of yours looks like. At least, that is the way I remember her.”

“How long is it since you have seen her?”

“Not for years—not since I was twelve.”

“Eight years,” Carlton calculated. “You and she are not on good terms.”

“None of us are on good terms with Aunt Rhodopis. She is queer, terrible.”

“Not mad?”

“No, not mad. In fact, she is a very remarkable woman, I believe, in many respects. Lives in a great old house—a regular museum filled with Egyptian treasures. She travels a good deal—out East—is something of an Oriental herself.”

“She looks like—”

“The devil,” Alice flared. “Beautiful, in a way—green eyes, straight brows, but somehow bizarre—just as you described that ghost of yours.”

“Not a blood relation of yours?” Carlton suggested.

“Yes, of my mother’s. Very distant, I fancy, though it was my Aunt Rhodopis who cared for me after my mother’s death.”

“So you came to know her well.”

Alice shook her head.

“My only memory of her is as a mystery—a dark mystery.”

“But kind?”

Again Alice shook her head, while the delicate pink stain crept from cheek to temple, then back again. Her next words came in a mere breathing whisper.

“She struck me.”

“Good Lord!”

There was that about the way that Alice had delivered her last bit of information which meant that the blow had been no mere spanking of a wayward child.

Whatever might have been the dark secret and the dark character of Aunt Rhodopis, the present aunt conveyed no sense of aristocratic middle age, as she beamed upon the two young people at the table with her. She had just come out of a pleasant reverie of meeting Colonel Pemberton and his estimable family during the season at Cairo.

She glanced first at her niece, then at the young man. Mr. Carlton was really quite presentable—quite presentable even though he were an American. But, then, he had some excellent English blood in his veins—and blood will tell, whatever new-fangled ideas were coming into favor concerning the abolishment of the House of Lords.

“So you think you also will be going to Egypt, Mr. Carlton?” she interrogated, as she had already done a dozen times before. Really, it was high time that Alice was getting settled, and, apart from his nationality, Carlton was rather unobjectionable.

“Oh, yes, indeed, if you’ll permit me,” Carlton answered heartily. “I haven’t been out to Egypt for two years now, and this will give me an added motive. You may not believe me, but I had intended going out, anyway. Matter of some half-baked scientific researches of mine.”

Auntie nodded her head approvingly.

“Americans—so Sir Edward Plunkton tells me—have been doing some really remarkable excavation in Egypt recently.”

“It was another sort of excavation that I intended,” said Carlton good-naturedly. “Myths, traditions, magic—things like that. Not very respectable, I fear, but interesting. And then, the last time I was in Cairo I saw any number of mad or half-mad beggars—”

“How dreadful!”

“Dreadful, yet interesting—like germs. And there was something that has since turned up that has somehow—”

He had checked himself and fallen into momentary absorption. It is a way that many young men have who are wont to think of the more serious things of the world—even when they have an Alice Wentworth at their side.

They rode back to Paris in comparative silence. Already the season was very late and the fashionable exodus for the south had begun, but there was still plenty to attract their attention, furnish an excuse for no great effort at conversation.

But all the way both Alice Wentworth and George Carlton were conscious, in a way, that both were thinking of the same thing—of the same person, perhaps. They were thinking of that odd ghost of his, of that odd aunt of hers. Were they the same? Had it been, as Alice had suggested, a queer case of telepathy, by which her mind had suggested to his, without the intermediary words, a fleeting, disquieting portrait of this other aunt?

Aunt Rhodopis!

The very name again brought up in Carlton’s thought some half-forgotten things he had heard on that last trip of his to Egypt. It was concerning these that he had come within an ace of blurting out something a little while ago.

The train of recollection thus started was still uppermost in his mind, a little while later, as, at the door of the hotel, he bade Alice and her aunt good day. He had detained the girl’s fingers in his own for a second longer than necessary. Their eyes had met with what must have seemed to both of them as a new understanding.

Then Carlton, unexpectedly even to himself, put the question so softly that none but she could hear. None would have understood the significance of it, even if they had heard.

“Tell me,” he asked earnestly, “did you ever hear of the Woman of the Pyramid?”