"Alas, sir," I replied, "I have no doubt your conclusions are correct,
but at the present moment I seem to be in a fair way to die of
starvation. You spoke of a secret; for heaven's sake, tell it me, if you
have any pity for my distress." He laughed genially. "There lies the strangeness of it all. Those who
know the secret cannot tell it if they would; it is positively as
ineffable as the central doctrine of Freemasonry. But I may say this,
that you yourself have penetrated at least the outer husk of the
mystery," and he laughed again. "Pray do not jest with me," I said. "What have I done, _que sais-je_? I
am so far ignorant that I have not the slightest idea of how my next
meal is to be provided." "Excuse me. You ask what you have done? You have met me. Come, we will
fence no longer. I see you have self-education, the only education
which is not infinitely pernicious, and I am in want of a governess for
my two children. I have been a widower for some years; my name is Gregg. I offer you the post I have named, and shall we say a salary of a
hundred a year?" I could only stutter out my thanks, and slipping a card with his address
and a bank-note by way of earnest into my hand, Mr. Gregg bade me
good-bye, asking me to call in a day or two. Such was my introduction to Professor Gregg, and can you wonder that the
remembrance of despair and the cold blast that had blown from the gates
of death upon me, made me regard him as a second father? Before the
close of the week. I was installed in my new duties; the professor had
leased an old brick manor house in a western suburb of London, and here,
surrounded by pleasant lawns and orchards, and soothed with the murmur
of the ancient elms that rocked their boughs above the roof, the new
chapter of my life began. Knowing as you do the nature of the
professor's occupations, you will not be surprised to hear that the
house teemed with books; and cabinets full of strange and even hideous
objects filled every available nook in the vast low rooms. Gregg was a
man whose one thought was for knowledge, and I too before long caught
something of his enthusiasm, and strove to enter into his passion for
research. In a few months I was perhaps more his secretary than the
governess of the two children, and many a night I have sat at the desk
in the glow of the shaded lamp while he, pacing up and down in the rich,
gloom of the firelight, dictated to me the substance of his "Text-book
of Ethnology." But amidst these more sober and accurate studies I always
detected a something hidden, a longing and desire for some object to
which he did not allude, and now and then he would break short in what
he was saying and lapse into revery, entranced, as it seemed to me, by
some distant prospect of adventurous discovery. The text-book was at
last finished, and we began to receive proofs from the printers, which
were intrusted to me for a first reading, and then underwent the final
revision of the professor. All the while his weariness of the actual
business he was engaged on increased, and it was with the joyous laugh
of a schoolboy when term is over that he one day handed me a copy of the
book. "There," he said, "I have kept my word; I promised to write it,
and it is done with. Now I shall be free to live for stranger things; I
confess it, Miss Lally, I covet the renown of Columbus. You will, I
hope, see me play the part of an explorer." "Surely," I said, "there is little left to explore. You have been born a
few hundred years too late for that." "I think you are wrong," he replied; "there are still, depend upon it,
quaint undiscovered countries and continents of strange extent. Ah, Miss
Lally, believe me, we stand amidst sacraments and mysteries full of awe,
and it doth not yet appear what we shall be. Life, believe me, is no
simple thing, no mass of gray matter and congeries of veins and muscles
to be laid naked by the surgeon's knife; man is the secret which I am
about to explore, and before I can discover him I must cross over
weltering seas indeed, and oceans and the mists of many thousand years. You know the myth of the lost Atlantis; what if it be true, and I am
destined to be called the discoverer of that wonderful land?" I could see excitement boiling beneath his words, and in his face was
the heat of the hunter; before me stood a man who believed himself
summoned to tourney with the unknown. A pang of joy possessed me when I
reflected that I was to be in a way associated with him in the
adventure, and I too burned with the lust of the chase, not pausing to
consider that I knew not what we were to unshadow. The next morning Professor Gregg took me into his inner study, where
ranged against the wall stood a nest of pigeon-holes, every drawer
neatly labelled, and the results of years of toil classified in a few
feet of space. "Here," he said, "is my life; here are all the facts which I have
gathered together with so much pains, and yet it is all nothing. No,
nothing to what I am about to attempt. Look at this;" and he took me to
an old bureau, a piece fantastic and faded, which stood in a corner of
the room. He unlocked the front and opened one of the drawers. "A few scraps of paper," he went on, pointing to the drawer, "and a lump
of black stone, rudely annotated with queer marks and scratches,--that
is all that drawer holds. Here you see is an old envelope with the dark
red stamp of twenty years ago, but I have pencilled a few lines at the
back; here is a sheet of manuscript, and here some cuttings from
obscure local journals. And if you ask me the subject matter of the
collection, it will not seem extraordinary. A servant girl at a
farmhouse, who disappeared from her place and has never been heard of, a
child supposed to have slipped down some old working on the mountains,
some queer scribbling on a limestone rock, a man murdered with a blow
from a strange weapon; such is the scent I have to go upon. Yes, as you
say, there is a ready explanation for all this; the girl may have run
away to London, or Liverpool, or New York; the child may be at the
bottom of the disused shaft; and the letters on the rock may be the idle
whims of some vagrant. Yes, yes, I admit all that; but I know I hold the
true key. Look!" and he held me out a slip of yellow paper. "Characters found inscribed on a limestone rock on the Gray Hills," I
read, and then there was a word erased, presumably the name of a county,
and a date some fifteen years back. Beneath was traced a number of
uncouth characters, shaped somewhat like wedges or daggers, as strange
and outlandish as the Hebrew alphabet. "Now the seal," said Professor Gregg, and he handed me the black stone,
a thing about two inches long, and something like an old-fashioned
tobacco stopper, much enlarged. I held it up to the light, and saw to my surprise the characters on the
paper repeated on the seal. "Yes," said the professor, "they are the same.