Munsey's Magazine/Volume 86/Issue 4/The Unwritten Story/Chapter 6
VI
By the end of that week—all things at the Charleston end of the affair having been put in good train—Professor Maximilian Veazie, alias Brackett Townsend, alias any number of other things, found himself back in Boston again. There, after an appointment made by telephone with Elijah Lockwood, he was not long in calling at the ancient mansion on Beacon Hill.
Admitted by a trim-mannered, soft-spoken colored maid of the aristocratic shade known as “high brown,” the professor waited in a drawing-room the bay windows of which, some with light purple panes, overlooked Beacon Street. For the first time in his life, he found himself on the inside of one of those hallowed Beacon Hill citadels of blue-bloodedness dominating the Common; and very agreeable indeed he thought the situation.
“This is strictly all right, eh?” he murmured. “We're getting on in the world!”
His keen eye appraised the grand piano of ancient pattern; the Shiraz rugs and Hindu tapestries; the Chippendale mirrors, the comb-back Windsor rockers, the chandeliers with prism pendants; the many curios from far explorations, now reposing in a carved walnut corner cabinet of many shelves; the black-stocked ancestral portraits with primly folded hands. A framed coat of arms and a family tree with the names “Brewster,” “Cotton,” “Eliot,” and “Cabot” scattered along its branches, set the professor nodding approval.
The deliberate ticking of a grandfather's clock, from the winding stair in the hall-way, added a touch of dignity to this house of impeccable traditions. In the vast marble fireplace a cheery blaze vied with the splash of color made by jonquils in the window, their golden yellow vivified by the last slant of February sunshine through the bare-boughed, secular elms along the Common's rim.
“Pretty soft!” he pondered, walking up and down, awaiting the arrival of old Lockwood. He stopped for a moment to inspect the painting of a little girl, hardly more than a baby, that hung over the mantelpiece. “H-m-m-m! There she is, all right! We'll soon resurrect her! Damned lucky Harriet's got blue eyes, like this kid! That's a point I didn't think of. Whew! I might have made a devil of a slip-up on that; but luck's playing my game. I'm all right, and I'm going to stay all right!”
He turned back to the window, thrust both hands deep into his excellently tailored trousers, and teetered slightly on his polished toes as he looked out at the motor traffic streaming up and down Beacon Street. This was living—a harbinger of wondrous things to be!
“Yes, I'm surely going among 'em now,” thought the professor. “And so can Harriet, and Disney, too. I'm—why, I'm a blooming philanthropist, that's what I am! Doing good to all hands, making the old man happy, setting up the women for life, and getting a good rake-off myself—not bad, eh? Blessed if I can see why Harriet would rather run a cheap Charleston beanery! Aren't women the damnedest, though? I'd rather drive a mule than a woman, any day!”
His calculations pursued a course as heartless as those of a taxicab meter; but all at once they were interrupted by the entrance of Elijah Damascus Lockwood.
“My dear professor! I am glad indeed to see you!” The old man, blinking through his glasses, cordially shook hands. “Where have you been? Busy?”
“Busy is not the word, sir—absorbed in research.”
“And what good wind brings you here? News of my daughter?” Lockwood's heavy brows twitched, as always when emotion moved him. “You have found some clew to her whereabouts?”
“I am very glad, sir, to say I have.”
“Ah! And—and where—”
“I do not know precisely, but—”
“Tell me, what has been revealed?”
The professor sat down in a Sleepy Hollow chair, passed a hand over his closed eyes, and for a moment seemed plunged in profound cerebration. As he communed with the inner forces, old Lockwood stood in front of the fire, watching him with pitiful eagerness.
“Well?” he half choked. “For Heaven's sake, professor, tell me all you can!”
“I will indeed, sir. Unfortunately I have not discovered the exact place as yet, but I know the general location, and—”
“Where—where is it?”
“My controls tell me, as I informed you before, that it is in one of the Southern States.”
“Which one?”
“Ah, that I cannot say!” Veazie looked up sharply at his victim. “To find out anything more may require considerable labor and expense.”
“What, for God's sake, are labor and expense to me?” The old man's voice almost cracked into a falsetto of eagerness. “Go on with your search, professor! Spare nothing! Only find her!”
“I can guarantee nothing, you understand. The astral forces are not to be coerced; and I am hampered, in one way, by not having any material object connected with the—ah—the abduction.” Veazie got up and began pacing the floor, as if in mental agitation. “Pardon me, sir, but the strain—”
“I understand; but tell me, what do you mean by saying that you need a material object?”
“I mean that if I had something that was aboard the yacht at the time when the pirates attacked it, I might establish closer rapports, get the proper vibratory aura on the correct plane, and—”
“What kind of an object do you need?”
“Oh, anything that played a vital part in the affair.”
Old Lockwood turned and pressed a button. After an interval so brief as to suggest that she had been stationed in the hall near the drawing-room door, the colored maid appeared.
“Irene, fetch me the cedar box from my room.”
“Yes, sir;” and Irene vanished.
“Just a minute now, professor, and you shall have plenty of material with which to establish your rapports.”
Anxious silence fell, broken only by the tick of the old clock measuring off fateful moments, the fall of a glowing coal in the grate, the hum of motor traffic in the street outside.
“Ah, here we have it!” the old man ejaculated, as Irene returned with a box of no mean proportions. “Set it on that table there, Irene. Now, professor!”
The box, opened by Lockwood's trembling hand, yielded several neatly wrapped packets—pitiful souvenirs of a past so long departed that many memories of it had faded into the merciful limbo of oblivion which soothes all griefs and rights all wrongs; but the old aristocrat's deeply sunken eyes gleamed with a sudden tear at view of some of the sacred relics—a little dress, a pair of run-over shoes, an envelope inscribed “Marian's hair when she was two.”
One by one he took the things out, with rather senile divagations, and handed them to Veazie. The professor inspected them and laid them on the table. At length only one packet was left, larger than any of the others.
“More clothing?” queried the professor. “I think we have enough already.”
“No, not clothing,” Lockwood answered. “This package, strange as it may seem, contains a human skull.”
“A what?”
“A skull—the skull of an African witch doctor or medicine man.”
“Skull, eh?”
The professor's voice had lost somewhat of its suavity. It held a startled quality. He seemed rather to boggle at dealings with a skull; but Lockwood continued undoing the packet, explaining meantime:
“In my day, you understand, I was an explorer, an archæologist. I collected many strange things in many lands. This”—he disclosed inner wrappings of coarse yellow Egyptian linen—“is perhaps the most singular object of all my collections. It is the skull of Burrum Gao, chief medicine man of the Massabamba tribe, on the head-waters of the Niger. See now!”
While Veazie regarded him in rather an alarmed silence, the old man unwrapped the last folds of linen; and now, disclosed to the last blood-red light of the sinking February sun that angrily gleamed through the big bay window, Veazie beheld the skull.
“A curious thing, isn't it?” asked Lockwood, his mind childishly diverted from his daughter by his antiquarian instincts. “Perhaps a bit incongruous, to be placed with these other souvenirs; but, as its history is so intimately connected with Marian's kidnaping and disappearance, I have always kept it in this box. Its story, I think you will agree, is well worth hearing.”