Egyptologists -- Fiction; Horror tales; Love stories; Mummies -- Fiction
The letter contained these lines: "I know you at length for the
cunning scamp you are. How you must have laughed at me. But I forgive
you. We shall be away a year, at least. As always, everything I have
is yours. Let us find you here on our return. I cannot write more.
My heart is too full. Pinsent, she loves me! D. H." The last three
words were deeply underlined. By the end of that week I had completed
the revision of my book and forwarded the manuscript to Mr. Coen.
Afterwards, I was uncomfortably lonely and unoccupied. I waited in
from three to five every afternoon, but no one came. The rest of the
days I spent wandering about the streets nursing the long sickness
of too much thinking. The end of it was, I disobeyed Miss Ottley and
went one afternoon to call on her. I might as well have saved myself
the trouble. She was "out," likewise her father and Dr. Belleville.
Two days later I called again. Again everyone was out. Then I wrote
a guarded note and sent it with an advance copy of my book, asking
for an expression of her opinion. After much waiting, I received a
long typewritten disquisition challenging on apocryphal authority my
attribution of a stele superscribed by Amen-aken to the fourteenth
dynasty. It was signed by Miss Ottley, but I failed to recognise it as
her composition. One evening, however, having nothing else to do, I
applied to its verbiage the simple rules of a well-known cipher. This
gave me an astonishing result. "Impossible see you without endangering
your life. Constant supervision." But it was worth testing the matter
further. I therefore composed a formal reply to the challenge, showing
my reasons for concluding that Amen-aken had unwarrantably altered for
purposes of his own glorification the historic record of a predecessor.
I used the same cipher and embodied the following message by its aid:
"Shall pass the house before midnight Friday. Throw letter from window
explaining all! I live to serve you." This document I forwarded to Miss
Ottley enclosed in a letter in which I took pains to show that I had
been disappointed by her criticism, and that I was not anxious for the
correspondence to be continued. Then I waited as patiently as possible
for Friday to come round. The hours passed with leaden feet, but they
passed--and midnight found me in the lane walking slowly by the house.
It was wrapped in gloom from roof to basement, but her window was open.
As the clocks began to chime, a white thing flashed out and fluttered
to my feet. It was a kerchief weighted with a golden bracelet. I felt
a paper crinkle in its folds. Hastily concealing it within my coat, I
pressed on and returned by a circuitous route to Bruton Street. Soon
I was poring over my treasure. It was typewritten like the challenge.
It read: "I have been obliged to typewrite this, because I am a close
prisoner and am forbidden the use of pen or pencil. But they make
me work as their stenographer some hours each day--and I was forced
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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