Then his eyes,
following her look and mine, lit on the cluster of lamps in the drawer. He gave a sort of cry of surprise and joy as he bent over and touched
them:

“My lamps! My lamps! Then they are safe—safe—safe! ... But how, in
the name of God—of all the Gods—did they come here?”

We all stood silent. The Detective made a deep sound of in-taking
breath. I looked at him, and as he caught my glance he turned his eyes
on Miss Trelawny whose back was toward him. There was in them the same look of suspicion which had been there when
he had spoken to me of her being the first to find her father on the
occasions of the attacks. Chapter IX

The Need of Knowledge


Mr. Corbeck seemed to go almost off his head at the recovery of the
lamps. He took them up one by one and looked them all over tenderly,
as though they were things that he loved. In his delight and
excitement he breathed so hard that it seemed almost like a cat
purring. Sergeant Daw said quietly, his voice breaking the silence
like a discord in a melody:

“Are you quite sure those lamps are the ones you had, and that were
stolen?”

His answer was in an indignant tone:  “Sure! Of course I’m sure. There isn’t another set of lamps like these in the world!”

“So far as you know!”  The Detective’s words were smooth enough, but
his manner was so exasperating that I was sure he had some motive in
it; so I waited in silence. He went on:

“Of course there may be some in the British Museum; or Mr. Trelawny may
have had these already. There’s nothing new under the sun, you know,
Mr. Corbeck; not even in Egypt. These may be the originals, and yours
may have been the copies. Are there any points by which you can
identify these as yours?”

Mr. Corbeck was really angry by this time. He forgot his reserve; and
in his indignation poured forth a torrent of almost incoherent, but
enlightening, broken sentences:

“Identify! Copies of them! British Museum! Rot! Perhaps they keep a
set in Scotland Yard for teaching idiot policemen Egyptology! Do I
know them? When I have carried them about my body, in the desert, for
three months; and lay awake night after night to watch them! When I
have looked them over with a magnifying-glass, hour after hour, till my
eyes ached; till every tiny blotch, and chip, and dinge became as
familiar to me as his chart to a captain; as familiar as they doubtless
have been all the time to every thick-headed area-prowler within the
bounds of mortality. See here, young man, look at these!”  He ranged
the lamps in a row on the top of the cabinet. “Did you ever see a set
of lamps of these shapes—of any one of these shapes? Look at these
dominant figures on them! Did you ever see so complete a set—even in
Scotland Yard; even in Bow Street? Look! one on each, the seven forms
of Hathor. Look at that figure of the Ka of a Princess of the Two
Egypts, standing between Ra and Osiris in the Boat of the Dead, with
the Eye of Sleep, supported on legs, bending before her; and Harmochis
rising in the north. Will you find that in the British Museum—or Bow
Street? Or perhaps your studies in the Gizeh Museum, or the
Fitzwilliam, or Paris, or Leyden, or Berlin, have shown you that the
episode is common in hieroglyphics; and that this is only a copy. Perhaps you can tell me what that figure of Ptah-Seker-Ausar holding
the Tet wrapped in the Sceptre of Papyrus means? Did you ever see it
before; even in the British Museum, or Gizeh, or Scotland Yard?”

He broke off suddenly; and then went on in quite a different way:

“Look here! it seems to me that the thick-headed idiot is myself! I
beg your pardon, old fellow, for my rudeness. I quite lost my temper
at the suggestion that I do not know these lamps. You don’t mind, do
you?” The Detective answered heartily:

“Lord, sir, not I.  I like to see folks angry when I am dealing with
them, whether they are on my side or the other. It is when people are
angry that you learn the truth from them. I keep cool; that is my
trade! Do you know, you have told me more about those lamps in the
past two minutes than when you filled me up with details of how to
identify them.”

Mr. Corbeck grunted; he was not pleased at having given himself away. All at once he turned to  me and said in his natural way:

“Now tell me how you got them back?”  I was so surprised that I said
without thinking:

“We didn’t get them back!”  The traveller laughed openly. “What on earth do you mean?” he asked. “You didn’t get them back! Why, there they are before your eyes! We found you looking at them
when we came in.”  By this time I had recovered my surprise and had my
wits about me. “Why, that’s just it,” I said. “We had only come across them, by
accident, that very moment!”

Mr. Corbeck drew back and looked hard at Miss Trelawny and myself;
turning his eyes from one to the other as he asked:

“Do you mean to tell me that no one brought them here; that you found
them in that drawer? That, so to speak, no one at all brought them
back?”

“I suppose someone must have brought them here; they couldn’t have come
of their own accord. But who it was, or when, or how, neither of us
knows. We shall have to make inquiry, and see if any of the servants
know anything of it.”

We all stood silent for several seconds. It seemed a long time. The
first to speak was the Detective, who said in an unconscious way:

“Well, I’m damned! I beg your pardon, miss!”  Then his mouth shut like
a steel trap. We called up the servants, one by one, and asked them if they knew
anything of some articles placed in a drawer in the boudoir; but none
of them could throw any light on the circumstance. We did not tell
them what the articles were; or let them see them. Mr. Corbeck packed the lamps in cotton wool, and placed them in a tin
box. This, I may mention incidentally, was then brought up to the
detectives’ room, where one of the men stood guard over them with a
revolver the whole night. Next day we got a small safe into the house,
and placed them in it. There were two different keys. One of them I
kept myself; the other I placed in my drawer in the Safe Deposit vault. We were all determined that the lamps should not be lost again. About an hour after we had found the lamps, Doctor Winchester arrived. He had a large parcel with him, which, when unwrapped, proved to be the
mummy of a cat. With Miss Trelawny’s permission he placed this in the
boudoir; and Silvio was brought close to it. To the surprise of us
all, however, except perhaps Doctor Winchester, he did not manifest the
least annoyance; he took no notice of it whatever. He stood on the
table close beside it, purring loudly. Then, following out his plan,
the Doctor brought him into Mr. Trelawny’s room, we all following. Doctor Winchester was excited; Miss Trelawny anxious. I was more than
interested myself, for I began to have a glimmering of the Doctor’s
idea. The Detective was calmly and coldly superior; but Mr. Corbeck,
who was an enthusiast, was full of eager curiosity.