The Green Mummy - Fergus Hume (best love novels of all time txt) 📗

CHAPTER I THE LOVERS

“I am very angry,” pouted the maid.

“In heaven’s name, why?” questioned the bachelor.

“You have, so to speak, bought me.”

“Impossible: your price is prohibitive.”

“Indeed, when a thousand pounds - “

“You are worth fifty and a hundred times as much. Pooh!”

“That interjection doesn’t answer my question.”

“I don’t think it is one which needs answering,” said the young man lightly; “there are more important things to talk about than pounds, shillings, and sordid pence.”

“Oh, indeed! Such as - “

“Love, on a day such as this is. Look at the sky, blue as your eyes; at the sunshine, golden as your hair.”

“Warm as your affection, you should say.”

“Affection! So cold a word, when I love you.”

“To the extent of one thousand pounds.”

“Lucy, you are a - woman. That money did not buy your love, but the consent of your stepfather to our marriage. Had I not humored his whim, he would have insisted upon your marrying Random.”

Lucy pouted again and in scorn.

“As if I ever would,” said she.

“Well, I don’t know. Random is a soldier and a baronet; handsome and agreeable, with a certain amount of talent. What objection can you find to such a match?”

“One insuperable objection; he isn’t you, Archie - darling.”

“H’m, the adjective appears to be an afterthought,” grumbled the bachelor; then, when she merely laughed teasingly after the manner of women, he added moodily:

“No, by Jove, Random isn’t me, by any manner of means. I am but a poor artist without fame or position, struggling on three hundred a year for a grudging recognition.”

“Quite enough for one, you greedy creature.”

“And for two?” he inquired softly.

“More than enough.”

“Oh, nonsense, nonsense, nonsense!”

“What! when I am engaged to you? Actions speak much louder than remarks, Mr. Archibald Hope. I love you more than I do money.”

“Angel! angel!”

“You said that I was a woman just now. What do, you mean?”

“This,” and he kissed her willing lips in the lane, which was empty save for blackbirds and beetles. “Is any explanation a clear one?”

“Not to an angel, who requires adoration, but to a woman who - Let us walk on, Archie, or we shall be late for dinner.”

The young man smiled and frowned and sighed and laughed in the space of thirty seconds - something of a feat in the way of emotional gymnastics. The freakish feminine nature perplexed him as it had perplexed Adam, and he could not understand this rapid change from poetry to prose. How could it be otherwise, when he was but five-and-twenty, and engaged for the first time? Threescore years and ten is all too short a time to learn what woman really is, and every student leaves this world with the conviction that of the thousand sides which the female of man presents to the male of woman, not one reveals the being he desires to know. There is always a deep below a deep; a veil behind a veil, a sphere within a sphere.

“It’s most remarkable,” said the puzzled man in this instance.

“What is?” asked the enigma promptly.

To avoid an argument which he could not sustain, Archie switched his on to the weather.

“This day in September; one could well believe that it is still the month of roses.”

“What! With those wilted hedges and falling leaves and reaped fields and golden haystacks, and - and - “

She glanced around for further illustrations in the way of contradiction.

“I can see all those things, dear, and the misplaced day also!”

“Misplaced?”

“July day slipped into September. It comes into the landscape of this autumn month, as does love into the hearts of an elderly couple who feel too late the supreme passion.”

Lucy’s eyes swept the prospect, and the spring-like sunshine, revealing all too clearly the wrinkles of aging Nature, assisted her comprehension.

“I understand. Yet youth has its wisdom.”

“And old age its experience. The law of compensation, my dearest. But I don’t see,” he added reflectively, “what your remark and my answer have to do with the view,” whereat Lucy declared that his wits wandered.

Within the last five minutes they had emerged from a sunken lane where the hedges were white with dust and dry with heat to a vast open space, apparently at the World’s-End. Here the saltings spread raggedly towards the stately stream of the Thames, intersected by dykes and ditches, by earthen ramparts, crooked fences, sod walls, and irregular lines of stunted trees following the water-courses. The marshes were shaggy with reeds and rushes, and brown with coarse, fading herbage, although here and there gleamed emerald-hued patches of water-soaked soil, fit for fairy-rings. Beyond a moderately high embankment of turf and timber, the lovers could see the broad river, sweeping eastward to the Nore, with homeward-bound and outward-faring ships afloat on its golden tide. Across the gleaming waters, from where they lipped their banks to the foot of low domestic Kentish hills, stretched alluvial lands, sparsely timbered, and in the clear sunshine clusters of houses, great and small, factories with tall, smoky chimneys, clumps of trees and rigid railway lines could be discerned. The landscape was not beautiful, in spite of the sun’s profuse gildings, but to the lovers it appeared a Paradise. Cupid, lord of gods and men, had bestowed on them the usual rose-colored spectacles which form an important part of his stock-in-trade, and they looked abroad on a fairy world. Was not SHE there: was not HE there: could Romeo or Juliet desire more?

>From their feet ran the slim, straight causeway, which was the King’s highway of the district - a trim, prim line of white above the picturesque disorder of the marshes. It skirted the lowlying fields at the foot of the uplands and slipped through an iron gate to end in the far distance at the gigantic portal of The Fort. This was a squat, ungainly pile of rugged gray stone, symmetrically built, but aggressively ugly in its very regularity, since it insulted the graceful curves of Nature everywhere discernible. It stood nakedly amidst the bare, bleak meadows glittering with pools of still water, with not even the leaf of a creeper to soften its menacing walls, although above them appeared the full-foliaged tops of trees planted in the barrack-yard. It looked as though the grim walls belted a secret orchard. What with the frowning battlements, the very few windows diminutive and closely barred, the sullen entrance and the absence of any gracious greenery, Gartley Fort resembled the Castle of Giant Despair. On the hither side, but invisible to the lovers, great cannons scowled on the river they protected, and, when they spoke, received answer from smaller guns across the stream. There less extensive forts were concealed amidst trees and masked by turf embankments, to watch and guard the golden argosies of London commerce.

Lucy, always impressionable, shivered with her hand in that of Archie’s, as she stared at the landscape, melancholy even in the brilliant sunshine.

“I should hate to live in Gartley Fort,” said she abruptly. “One might as well be in jail.”

“If you marry Random you will have to live there, or on a baggage wagon. He is R.G.A. captain, remember, and has to go where glory calls him, like a good soldier.”

“Glory can call until glory is hoarse for me,” retorted the girl candidly. “I prefer an artist’s studio to a camp.”

“Why?” asked Hope, laughing at her vehemence.

“The reason is obvious. I love the artist.”

“And if you loved the soldier?”

“I should mount the baggage wagon and make him Bovril when he was wounded. But for you, dear, I shall cook and sew and bake and - “

“Stop! stop! I want a wife, not a housekeeper.”

“Every sensible man wants the two in one.”

“But you should be a, queen, darling.”

“Not with my own consent, Archie: the work is much too hard. Existence on six pounds a week with you will be more amusing. We can take a cottage, you know, and live, the simple life in Gartley village, until you become the P.R.A., and I can be Lady Hope, to walk in silk attire.”

“You shall be Queen of the Earth, darling, and walk alone.”

“How dull! I would much rather walk with you. And that reminds me that dinner is waiting. Let us take the short cut home through the village. On the way you can tell me exactly how you bought me from my stepfather for one thousand pounds.”

Archie Hope frowned at the incurable obstinacy of the sex. “I didn’t buy you, dearest: how many times do you wish me to deny a sale which never took place? I merely obtained your stepfather’s consent to our marriage in the near future.”

“As if he had anything to do with my marriage, being only my stepfather, and having, in my eyes, no authority. In what way did you get his consent - his unnecessary consent,” she repeated with emphasis.

Of course it was waste of breath to argue with a woman who had made up her mind. The two began to walk towards the village along the causeway, and Hope cleared his throat to explain - patiently as to a child.

“You know that your stepfather - Professor Braddock - is crazy on the subject of mummies?”

Lucy nodded in her pretty wilful way. “He is an Egyptologist.”

“Quite so, but less famous and rich than he should be, considering his knowledge of dry-as-dust antiquities. Well, then, to make a long story short, he told me that he greatly desired to examine into the difference between the Egyptians and the Peruvians, with regard to the embalming of the dead.”

“I always thought that he was too fond of Egypt to bother about any other country,” said Lucy sapiently.

“My dear, it isn’t the country he cares about, but the civilization of the past. The Incas embalmed their dead, as did the Egyptians, and in some way the Professor heard of a Royal Mummy, swathed in green bandages - so he described it to me.”

“It should be called an Irish mummy,” said Lucy flippantly. “Well?”

“This mummy is in possession of a man at Malta, and Professor Braddock, hearing that it was for sale for one thousand pounds - “

“Oh!” interrupted the girl vivaciously, “so this was why father sent Sidney Bolton away six weeks %go?”

“Yes. As you know, Bolton is your stepfather’s assistant, and is as crazy as the Professor on the subject of Egypt. I asked the Professor if he would allow me to marry you - “

“Quite unnecessary,” interpolated Lucy briskly.

Archie passed over the remark to evade an argument.

“When I