THE PRIESTESS OF AMEN RA

In the cold light from the tall studio window Frank Morewood's face seemed almost haggard, and certainly the right hand which held the little square of photographic paper trembled perceptibly. His left hand still retained its glove, although he had been George Dunbarton's guest for fully half an hour; his hat was pushed back on his head, his cane beneath his arm, as though he had forgotten everything except the negative before his eyes.

"Dunbarton," he demanded, with an obvious effort at unconcern, "is this some silly trick you have been playing me?"

The other, openly impatient, shrugged his shoulders beneath the velvet painter's jacket, and took a step toward the Frisian cabinet upon which lay a box of cigarettes.

"A trick, indeed!" he repeated across the flaming match. "You must think I have very little on my mind!" Then, under the inspiring influence of the Melachrino, his just resentment of the charge expressed itself more vehemently. "You break in upon me like a wild man; you insist that I stop in my serious work to develop your wretched little film; you watch every step of the process with the most unflattering suspicion, and now, by Jove, you're not satisfied!"

"Dunbarton," Morewood calmly replied, holding the print above his head, "you cannot realize what this may mean to me; the thing is too strange, too weird."

Dunbarton blew a smoke ring toward the ceiling, thoughtfully. "These amateur snap-shots are usually a trifle weird," he admitted, "they seldom do the subject justice, especially in the eyes of ardent admiration. Better keep your treasure covered up, old man, if you don't want it to fade out altogether. It isn't fixed, you know; it's just a negative."

"It's the most positive thing that ever came into the world," his visitor asserted; "the truest, the most wonderful."

"And so have twenty other pretty faces been for you, my dear boy," the confidant urged. "Each wonder commonly endures about a month."

"This wonder has endured three thousand years and more," retorted Morewood, once more regarding the photograph with reverent awe.

"A case of re-incarnation, I suppose?" the other suggested lightly, with a glance at his neglected easel that might have been accepted as a hint. "You'll excuse me if I daub a little on the masterpiece while the light lasts?" he added. "Going; no? Well, I'm glad to have you stay. Trouble? Oh, none at all. Always happy to oblige a friend. Of course, if you mean to follow up photography you ought to learn how to do these little things for yourself. And, by the way, do get a decent camera instead of a Cheap Jack department store affair such as every Seeing New Yorker has slung across his shoulder. Get out of the light, please. Sit down, do! Take off your hat; have a cigarette; make yourself comfortable, confound you!"

"Thanks, old man," Morewood answered, "I won't smoke; and, as for work this afternoon, I mean to tell you something which shall put all other thoughts out of your head for a while. I mean to tell you presently of the most wonderful thing that ever happened in the world."

"Great Scott!" the artist groaned; "is it as bad as that? Please keep your stick a little farther from my canvas, if you don't mind."

"It's quite a long story," Morewood admitted, disposing of the cane.

"Most of yours are!" his friend interjected.

Already the shadows were beginning to invade the painter's spacious studio; lurking in the folds of Flemish tapestry and Oriental stuffs, and filling distant corners where the glint of steel and copper arms and arabesques suggested the twinkling eyes of impish and unearthly listeners. If there is a time for everything, the early twilight is the season for story-telling, and the painter felt far less reluctance than he feigned when he resigned himself to listen. Throwing himself upon a divan and clasping his hands about an elevated knee, he said, "Begin your yarn, old fellow, I'm all attention."

Morewood took off his hat, bestrode a chair, and rested both elbows on its back.

"Dunbarton," he remarked, by way of introduction, "I don't suppose you have ever so much as heard of the college of Amen Ra?"

"Never in my life!" the other admitted frankly. "Where under the sun may be the college of Amen Ra?"

"No longer anywhere beneath the sun," Morewood replied, "but it used to be in Thebes about sixteen hundred years before Christ, as nearly as I can remember."

"Quite near enough," Dunbarton assented amiably. "We will not let a century or so retard a narrative which is to comprehend three thousand years."

"Don't jump too quickly at conclusions!" protested Morewood. "The story as I know it goes no farther back than the early sixties, when a party of five friends from Philadelphia——"

"Quakers?" inquired the painter.

"I don't know!" replied the other, not without a touch of irritation. "Five acquaintances, men of cultivation and means, who in the course of travel ascended the Nile as far as the first cataract. At Luxor they rested for a week, with a view to visiting the site of the great city of Thebes, and especially its marvelous and mystic temple of Amen Ra, unequaled upon earth for the sublimity of its ruined magnificence——"

"For further particulars, see Baedeker!" Dunbarton muttered.

"Upon the night of their arrival," continued the narrator, unheeding the interruption, "a fÊte was given in their honor by the Consul, Mustapha Aga. It was in the middle of this festivity, and during a dance by the Gaivasi girls of Luxor, that a strange nomad from the desert made his appearance unexpectedly. The Sheik Ben Ali, he was called, and his errand was to inform Mustapha Aga of the discovery, near a certain oasis, of an object of unusual interest, nothing less than a mummy case of surpassing beauty which had once held the body of a high priestess of Amen Ra."

"Hold on!" Dunbarton interrupted, relinquishing his grasp upon his knee. "Your local color is so intense that I feel myself in danger of becoming interested."

"Just wait until I get a little farther," answered Morewood, with a touch of triumph; "I only wish you could hear the story as it was told to me."

"By whom, if one might ask?" inquired Dunbarton, and his friend replied impressively:

"By a venerable man whom I met by the merest chance late one afternoon in the Egyptian room of the Metropolitan Museum—a strange old man, poorly dressed, but who had evidently seen better days, for he had traveled much in the East and knew the country well."

"I recognize the type," Dunbarton commented, "and make no doubt your learned friend was in the end prevailed upon to accept a trifling loan——"

"That has nothing to do with the story," Morewood retorted. "How far had I got?"

"You were in Luxor, at the last reports," the other prompted, "attending an informal little dance of Gaivasi ladies."

"Yes, yes," cried Morewood, taking up his thread again. "It was, indeed, a scene to captivate the traveler's fancy."

"Never mind the scene!"

"I don't intend to. Escorted by Mustapha Aga and his guard, they left the revels and followed the mysterious sheik out into the desert to a grove of palm-trees, where, bathed in the Egyptian moonlight, lay the marvelous mummy-case."

"What had become of the mummy?" asked Dunbarton.

"Hush!" Morewood whispered reverently. "Hear the story. The case, though decorated throughout with a surpassing skill, was most remarkable for the extreme beauty of the woman's face portrayed upon its upper end, in colors which had defied the ravages of time."

"I know the kind!" the painter put in. "Flat nose, wide mouth, two staring eyes, that might be either rights or lefts."

"The art of that period was, as we know, conventional," returned Morewood, "and it was that very fact which made this particular painting so remarkable, for it was realistic, vivid; it conveyed, indeed, a distinct impression of personality."

"Oh, amazing!" Dunbarton murmured.

"The most amazing thing in the world, as you yourself will presently admit," continued the story-teller. "You may believe the travelers were overjoyed to be the first outsiders to whom the treasure had been shown. They were not only men of talent and cultivation, but each was abundantly able to pay the very moderate price demanded by the sheik, and they lost no time in closing the bargain. To avoid contention, they drew lots among themselves for the privilege of becoming the owner of the mummy-case."

Here the narrator made an effective pause, and Dunbarton took the opportunity to light another cigarette.

"At first," pursued Morewood, "good fortune seemed to favor the eldest of the party, who was designated to me simply as Mr. X., though I strongly suspect him to have been no other than my old acquaintance of the Museum. But he had a generous disposition, and, touched by the keen disappointment of another member of the party, he relinquished his rights in favor of the second highest number, after an ownership of barely thirty seconds. Mr. P. forthwith became the sole possessor of the coveted object. I need not now recount the circumstances which led in the course of a few months to the transfer of the property to each in turn of the remaining members of the company, Mr. G. and Mr. Q. But here begins the mystery."

Another dramatic pause and the speaker's voice deepened.

"Within the year, P. lost his life by the explosion of a fowling piece without visible cause; G. disappeared while bathing in the Nile in the vicinity of a crocodile pool, and Q., after a period of captivity among hostile Arabs, died of a snake bite. Mr. X. alone survived, and arrived in Cairo broken in health, only to learn that the greater part of his fortune had been lost through the knavery of an agent. Truly, the priestess of Amen Ra had signified her displeasure in a most convincing manner."

"Who the deuce was she?" demanded Dunbarton.

"Why, the mummy, as I should have told you."

"But you didn't," remarked the painter. "And why do you suppose she was displeased?"

"Because," the other replied, with conviction, "she had been accustomed in life to veneration, worship, love, and naturally she did not like to have her coffin knocked about from place to place."

"I see," Dunbarton admitted gravely, but with the suspicion of a yawn suppressed. "What became of the coffin?"

"It had been shipped meanwhile to Germantown as a gift to the aunt of the last owner, a lady of so far unblemished reputation, who almost immediately acquired the cocaine habit."

"What? Cocaine in the sixties?" cried the painter captiously.

"Perhaps it may have been opium," Morewood admitted. "At all events she took to something pernicious, lost everything she had, and finally sold the precious relic to a Mrs. Meiswinkle, of Tuckahoe, who gave it a conspicuous place in her baronial hall."

"Which promptly burnt down without insurance," Dunbarton supplemented at a venture.

"As it happens, it didn't," Morewood answered with spirit. "But from that day misfortune following misfortune fell upon the family—troubles, disappointments, losses. I have all the details, if you care to hear them."

Dunbarton made a sweeping gesture of negation, and his friend resumed: "It so happened that this Mrs. Meiswinkle, who was something of an amateur in occultism, received one day a visit from a noted adept in theosophy. This gentleman, who had newly come from Thibet and was in consequence highly sensitive, had scarcely set foot in the house when he announced the presence of a sinister influence. 'There is something here,' he cried, 'that simply radiates misfortune.'"

"Extraordinary acumen!" Dunbarton murmured, having got the better of the yawn.

"Of course," Morewood proceeded, "it did not take an expert long to identify the mummy-case, and of course a weight of evidence to support the adept's assertion was not long in accumulating. All the misfortunes which had befallen its recent owners were quickly traced in some direct way to the possession of the mysterious coffin, and in the end Mrs. Meiswinkle needed no great persuasion to rid herself of the thing forever."

"How?" Dunbarton asked.

"She made a present of it to the city of New York."

"Noble woman!" cried the painter. "That simple act of patriotism may account for much!"

It was a frivolous remark, but more than once Morewood had noticed that his companion glanced over his shoulder when a breeze from the open windows stirred some bit of drapery, although the studio was still well lighted by a golden sunset. The storyteller's manner would have made a stoic nervous. His muscles twitched, his eyes had brightened, and his bearing was that of one determined to throw off the burden of a mighty secret.

"Dunbarton," he said solemnly, "that mummy-case stands at this moment in the uptown corner of the first Egyptian room, numbered 22,542 in the catalogue, which reads, 'Lid of Egyptian coffin, unearthed at Thebes,' and the name of the donor; nothing more. No word to tell that this poor shell of papier-machÉ once contained the mortal body of a priestess of Amen Ra; no hint of her surpassing loveliness except the lineaments you painters sneer at, and the ill-drawn hands crossed on her breast. She is gone; she is forgotten—she that was the most beautiful of Nature's works!"

"Frank," said Dunbarton, "has this story of yours anything to do with your Kodak film?"

"Yes, everything!" Morewood declared, speaking rapidly. "Listen. To-day I smuggled my camera into the Museum, and stood before the mummy-case undetected. But scarcely had I pressed the button when I was arrested by an official, who confiscated the machine and took it to the parcel room. I lost no time in finding the Director, gave my name and yours for surety for my respectability, and, after some delay and red tape, got back my property."

"You were lucky," the other commented coolly. "The rules are very strict. Well? Is that the end?"

"No!" exclaimed Morewood, "only the beginning, as I firmly believe. I am now about to tell you of an extraordinary fact, which I have so far purposely kept back." Dunbarton sighed.

"I am going to startle you," went on Morewood. "While the casket was still in the possession of Mrs. Meiswinkle, she, acting under the theosophist's direction, sent for an expert and had a photograph taken of the lid, with every possible safeguard against deception or mistake."

He spoke with tremulous deliberation; now he rose to his feet, and his eyes, fixed upon the wall above his listener's head, seemed to gaze beyond its limits.

"George, I should not tell you this, had I not the proof of its truth which even a scoffer like yourself can hardly question. When the plate was developed it was not the painted features of the mummy-case that looked from the negative, but—the face of a living woman! The face of the priestess of Amen Ra, unchanged through three thousand years, and alive!"

"That must have jarred them!" Dunbarton commented irreverently. "It was going it pretty strong, even for Thibet." But his cigarette dropped to the floor unheeded.

"And mark me, George," Morewood said, very gravely, "it was the same face, I have not the slightest doubt, that you and I beheld to-day appear before us, the same strange, wonderfully beautiful face that I hold now in my hand."

"By Jove!" ejaculated Dunbarton, alive at once to the arcane significance of the statement. "But you can't really believe——"

"I believe nothing that I have not seen," asseverated Morewood. "Nothing that you have not seen yourself. I, too, was incredulous at first; I laughed at the story of the photograph as the figment of a disordered brain; but it took possession of me, haunted me night and day, until I determined to prove its wild impossibility to myself. I bought a camera, took it to the Museum, as I have told you, and came directly here with the result. You yourself developed the film; you saw the face appear; if you can suggest any other explanation of the mystery, in Heaven's name let us discuss it reasonably."

"Let me look at the glass film again," Dunbarton suggested, below his breath. He picked up the smoldering cigarette and, coming to his friend's side, looked long and gravely at the glass film. Both men were silent for a time, so silent that they could hear their own hearts beating.

"She is indeed beautiful," said the painter, finally. "To our eyes she seems about twenty years old, though Eastern women reach perfection early. That diadem upon her brow is, I think, the two-horned crown of Isis. The drapery falling down on either side is certainly Egyptian and probably of a period antedating the Pharaohs, but the type of feature is scarcely Oriental."

"Yet Cleopatra was a blonde," Morewood suggested.

"True," assented the other, "and possibly the race three thousand years ago differed materially from the degenerate Sphinx-like personalities of the hieroglyphics. We must get Biggins of the Smithsonian to give us his opinion."

"Never!" cried Morewood, thrusting the negative in his breast.

"But in the interest of science——" protested Dunbarton.

"Science?" Morewood returned scornfully; "what has science to do with this? What right have I to betray a lady's confidence?"

Dunbarton made a sign of impatience. "Your lady has been dead a matter of three thousand years or more," he remarked.

"That's not true!" the other contradicted, warmly. "I tell you, man, that woman is alive to-day. Don't ask me to explain the unexplainable. I simply know that she lives, as young and innocent as every feature of her face proclaims her. For years, for centuries, perhaps, she has been trying to make herself known to the stupid brutes who have been incapable of comprehending. But now, thank heaven, she has selected me to do her will—whatever it may be—and I shall consecrate my life to her!"

He grew very pale as he spoke, but there was a rapt joy in his face.

"See here, old man," Dunbarton remonstrated kindly, with a hand on his shoulder, "you're rather overwrought just now, and I don't blame you. But take a friend's advice, and don't get spoony on a girl so very much older than yourself. It never turns out well."

"That's my affair!" Morewood said, doggedly.

"Of course, of course!" Dunbarton assented. "She's awfully pretty, I admit, and no doubt well connected; but, even if we overlook her playful little way of killing people, think of the difficulties about meeting, and that sort of thing."

"I'm willing to leave it all to her," Morewood said. "A priestess of Amen Ra must have learned by this time every mystery of life and death, and I am confident that in the proper time and place I shall meet her face to face."

"Old chap," Dunbarton pronounced with conviction, "what you need is a good night's rest."

But Morewood did not reply to this, for the gentle swaying of an Eastern curtain just then caught his eye. It hung before the open door of the studio, and the movement might have come from some breath of air. But immediately it occurred again, and this time accompanied by the vision of a human hand, clearly in search of something on which to rap.

"There's someone there," said the painter, whose eyes had followed the other's, and he spoke lower: "Possibly a model in search of work." Then he raised his voice in an encouraging "Come in!"—the tone that painters use to models who are often pretty and sometimes timid.

Morewood paid no attention; he stood transfixed, watching the swaying curtain. His finger tips tingled with a strange electric current and his pulses beat with an unreasoning hope. Then Dunbarton said, a little louder:

"Come in; please come in."

"I think the curtain must be caught," replied a low, melodious voice without. Dunbarton took three strides across the room, seized the drapery, and, with a single movement of his arm, swept it aside.

"Oh!" he cried, starting back, while Morewood clutched the table for support. Then, instantly recovering themselves, both men bowed as in the presence of a queen. And well they might.

Against the background of green velvet curtain with its embroidery of dull gold, there stood a lady all in poppy red, crowned with a headdress seemingly of the flowers themselves. It was not the dress of any period of time, for since the beginning of time flowers have grown for women to wear, and the two onlookers, being masculine, knew only that she wore them, and cared not whether they had bloomed in Eden or the Rue de la Paix. Time was for the moment eliminated, disregarded: the centuries rolled away like dewdrops from a rose, for, by the grace of Isis and Osiris, were they not bowing before the peerless priestess of the rites of Amen Ra? It was she and none other—the mistress of the mummy-case, the mystery of the Kodak film; the lady of Thebes three thousand years ago.

Morewood passed his hand across his brow and caught his breath; Dunbarton was the first to recover the power of speech.

"Madam," he said, and his voice shook a little, "you do me far too great an honor. What is your will? You have but to command me."

"I venture to assert a prior claim to do your bidding," put in Morewood, coming forward quickly.

The priestess of Amen Ra tried to control a little laugh, and failed bewitchingly. "I am looking for a Mr. Dunbarton," she explained.

The painter drew himself erect and bowed with dignity. "I have the good fortune to bear that name," he said, taking a sidewise step which left his friend a trifle in the background.

"Oh, I am so glad!" cried the lady. "Then perhaps you can tell me where to find a Mr. Morewood?"

"Your humble and devoted servant!" the other man pronounced himself, executing a maneuver which totally eclipsed Dunbarton.

"Really?" asked the lady, her face radiant with pleasure. "How very fortunate!"

At this Morewood fairly beamed with satisfaction, but she went on rapidly, in a silvery ripple of feminine narrative:

"Do you know, Mr. Morewood, that you have something of mine and I have something of yours? It was not my fault and it wasn't yours, either; it was the stupid person in the parcel room of the Museum. Of course two Kodaks are exactly alike, if one of them hasn't got a name scratched on the bottom with a pin; but I don't suppose he ever thought of looking, so he gave you mine and me yours, and I should never have found out who you were if you hadn't been arrested. Of course it wouldn't have made very much difference, after all, if my Cousin Jack hadn't snapped me in a most ridiculous Egyptian fancy dress."

Dunbarton gave a groan as of agony suppressed, and Morewood's face might have been in color a fragment of the sacerdotal robe of Ra.

"Oh!" moaned the painter, "if I could only howl!"

"Don't mind him, please!" the other man pleaded. "You see, I, too, had used a film, and we were rather interested in seeing how it came out."

"Oh, but yours came out beautifully!" she reassured him. "My Cousin Jack developed it after lunch. That's the way we discovered the mistake, and here it is. We made up our minds that you must be at least seventy-five years old to want to photograph a hideous mummy-case."

It was then that Dunbarton mastered himself and became once more conscious of the duties of hospitality.

"A thousand pardons!" he protested, "for not offering you a seat. This is a painter's workshop, as you see, and therefore public property in a way. Might I suggest a cup of tea? It won't take me a minute to telephone for a chaperon."

The priestess was graciously pleased to laugh.

"I should like tea," she said, with an approving glance about the room, flooded with the last of a long sunset; "but, if you don't mind, I detest chaperons. You see, I'm from Oklahoma."

There was an instant's hesitation, then:

"My friend, Mr. Morewood," remarked the painter, "has just been telling me the strangest story in the world. Perhaps you can induce him to repeat it for you."

He laughed a mocking laugh and turned to busy himself with the silver tea-service standing on an Adams table, while Morewood drew forward a low chair for the lady.

"Is your story romantic?" she asked, as she settled her poppy-colored ruffles; "has it a heroine?"

"Oh, yes, indeed," he answered, by no means including Dunbarton in the confidence. "No less a personage than the priestess of Amen Ra."

She looked at him suspiciously, while the veriest suggestion of a blush suffused her cheek.

"Is there anything about photographs in it?" she demanded, regarding him defiantly.

"Yes," he replied, "there is; a lot!"

"Then I don't care to hear it, for it's certain to be stupid," she protested, pouting.

"It is," he told her, frankly; "and I shall not inflict it on you now. But some day, when we know each other better."

"We start for Boston to-morrow morning early," she interrupted; "and from there we go to Bar Harbor for mamma's hay fever. We're staying at the Waldorf."

"Then I shall return the camera this evening," said Morewood.

"If you do," she said, "my Cousin Jack will be very glad to talk photographs with you."

"How old is your Cousin Jack?" Morewood demanded.

"Twelve," replied the lady, with just the shadow of a smile.