I cooked some tinned asparagus, boiled a
tinned chicken, and opened a jar of prunes. Breakfast spread on the lid
of a brandy box looked and smelled very good. I carried it up to the
pylon and whistled "Come into the garden, Maude." Miss Ottley appeared at once, round eyed with surprise. "Your father has already eaten," I observed. "In all likelihood he will
sleep for hours yet. Kindly sit down. You'll excuse my novel breakfast
call. It is the only invitational air I am acquainted with." She stared at me. "May one not be lighthearted when all goes well?" I asked. "One may," she answered. Then her eyes fell and she coloured painfully. "But not two. I slept at my post. Oh! how could I?" Her voice was quite
despairing and bitterly contemptuous. I bit at the leg of a chicken which I held in my fingers. "After all,
you are a woman, you know," I commented, with my mouth full. "This
chick's prime--done to a turn." "How tired you must be!" "I'm not complaining. Nor do I grudge you the extra rest. You look
better. Hungry?" "Y-yes," she admitted. "Then don't be a ninny spending time in vain regrets. Fall to and
repair your waste tissues. In plain English--eat." She sat down on a ruined column and I handed her a plate. "You look--positively merry!" she said. "You are nursing
some--pleasant--or profitable reflection." She considered the words
with care. "I have discovered that I may have--told the truth to your father last
night after all. By accident." "I beg your pardon." "I believe I have found your friend Ptahmes, Miss Ottley." The plate slid off her lap and broke. Chicken and gravy littered the
pavement. But she had no idea of it. "Impossible!" she cried. I explained my examination of the sarcophagus and the result in detail. She sat gazing at me like a graven image. When she had finished she
arose and vanished--without a word. I followed and found her standing
beside the great lead coffin, my kerchief in her hand. She had reopened
the chisel hole, and the cavern was already saturated with the infernal
gas. I snatched my handkerchief away and once more blocked the vent. Then I exerted all my strength and with a prodigious effort placed the
lid on the sarcophagus. With a woman's curiosity to reckon with, such a
precaution seemed a vital safeguard. I found her standing in the pylon,
breathing like a spent runner. "You might have taken my word," I said coldly. "You'd have saved
yourself an ugly headache at the least." Her face was crimson; her eyes burned like stars. The fumes of that
uncanny perfume had made her drunk. She swayed and leaned dizzily
against a pillar. I went up and took her hand. The pulse was beating
like a miniature steam hammer. "Sit down," I said. She laughed and sank at my feet in a heap. "Oh! Oh!" she cried and fell
to sobbing half hysterically though tearlessly. "Lord!" I said aloud. "What a bundle of hysterical humours it is, and
how plain to look on when its resolution takes a holiday." That is the way to treat hysteria. Miss Ottley sat up and withered me with a glance. "I--I
am. It--it's not hysteria," she stammered, between gasps. "Besides--you--confessed--it--overcame--you, too." Then she fainted. I sprang up, but even as I moved I heard a loud sigh
in the cavern. "The sick man first," I muttered, and let the girl lie. But at the door of the cavern chamber I stood transfixed. A dark shape
bent over the patient's cot, hiding Sir Robert Ottley's face from view. It seemed to be a man, but its back was presented to my gaze. "What the
deuce are you doing here, whoever you are?" I cried out, and started
forward. The shape melted on the instant into thinnest air. "Nothing
but a shadow," I said to myself. It was necessary to say something. I was shocked to my soul. I stood for a moment shaking and dismayed. The shadow had been so thick and bodily and had fled so like a spirit
that I had work to do to readjust my scattered faculties. Of course a
shadow--and my eyes, dazzled by the sunlight without, had momentarily
failed to pierce it. A reasonable and quite ample scientific
explanation. But what had cast the shadow? Pish--what but myself? And
yet: and yet: I was shivering like a blancmange. Never had my nerves
used me so ill. Perhaps, however, that accursed perfume had affected
them. Ah! there was a reassuring solution of the puzzle. Reassuring to
my reason, be it understood, for the fleshy part of me was taken with
an ague and refused for many seconds to return to its subjection to
my will. Sometimes now I doubt but that the flesh has an intelligence
apart from the brain cells and nerve structures that usually control
it. Indeed, I have never met a man of intellect whose memory does
not register experience of some occasion in which his flesh took
independent fright--like a startled hare--at some bogie which made his
sober reason subsequently smile; nay, contemptuously at times. "Well,
well," I said at length and pushed forward--to receive another shock. Sir Robert Ottley was almost nude. The bed clothes had been pushed
down past his waist. His fingers convulsively gripped the paillasse. His face was livid. His eyes were open and upturned. His whole form
was stiff and rigid. A fit? It seemed so. His pulse was still. He
did not breathe. But a cataleptic fit then, for at a lance prick the
blood flowed. I forced him to his right side and tried massage. No
use. Strychnine and nitro-glycerine equally refused to act. Finally I
saturated a cloth with amyl nitrate, placed it over his open mouth and
tried artificial respiration. A whole hour had passed already, but I
refused to give in. It was well. In another twenty minutes my efforts
were rewarded with a sigh. I kept on and the man began to breathe. When
it seemed safe to leave off, I disposed him easily and watched events. First his normal colouring returned. Then his mouth closed. Finally his
eyes revolved. The lids closed and opened several times, then rested
closed. His pulse beat feverishly, but in spite of that he slept. I
walked to the door. Miss Ottley--whom I had completely forgotten--still
lay insensible where she had fallen. I picked her up and brought her
into the cavern. She awoke to consciousness in transit. I forced her
to drink a stiff nobbler of brandy, and very soon she was in her old,
cold, bright, proud, self-reliant state--armed cap-a-pie with insolence
and egotism. "Is your father subject to fits?" I asked. "He has never had, till this, a day's illness in his life," she
responded--with a touch of indignation. I nodded. "Well, his period of disease indemnity has passed. While you
swooned he had a fit. I use the expression colloquially. You would
probably have so described his condition had you seen him. As for me I
don't know. The symptoms were unique. I restored him by treating him
as a drowned man. He was in a sort of trance. From this moment he must
never be left, even for a second." "He was insensible?" "He was inanimate." "That perfume!" she cried. I shrugged my shoulders. "No doubt."