“He’s nane sa dafty as he looks,” thought Mrs. Jasher, who was Scotch, although she claimed to be cosmopolitan. “With his mummies he is all right, but outside those he might be difficult to manage. And these things,” she glanced round the shadowy room, crowded with the dead and their earthly belongings. “I don’t think I would care to marry the British Museum. Too much like hard work, and I am not so young as I was.”
The near mirror—a polished silver one, which had belonged, ages ago, to some coquette of Memphis—denied this uncomplimentary thought, for Mrs. Jasher did not look a day over thirty, although her birth certificate set her down as forty-five. In the lamplight she might have passed for even younger, so carefully had she preserved what remained to her of youth. She assuredly was somewhat stout, and never had been so tall as she desired to be. But the lines of her plump figure were still discernible in the cunningly cut gown, and she carried her little self with such mighty dignity that people overlooked the mortifying height of a trifle over five feet. Her features were small and neat, but her large blue eyes were so noticeable and melting that those on whom she turned them ignored the lack of boldness in chin and nose. Her hair was brown and arranged in the latest fashion, while her complexion was so fresh and pink that, if she did paint—as jealous women averred—she must have been quite an artist with the hare’s foot and the rouge pot and the necessary powder puff.
Mrs. Jasher’s clothes repaid the thought she expended upon them, and she was artistic in this as in other things. Dressed in a crocus-yellow gown, with short sleeves to reveal her beautiful arms, and cut low to display her splendid bust, she looked perfectly dressed. A woman would have declared the wide-netted black lace with which the dress was draped to be cheap, and would have hinted that the widow wore too many jewels in her hair, on her corsage, round her arms, and ridiculously gaudy rings on her fingers. This might have been true, for Mrs. Jasher sparkled like the Milky Way at every movement; but the gleam of gold and the flash of gems seemed to suit her opulent beauty. Her slightest movement wafted around her a strange Chinese perfume, which she obtained—so she said—from a friend of her late husband’s who was in the British Embassy at Peking. No one possessed this especial perfume but Mrs. Jasher, and anyone who had previously met her, meeting her in the darkness, could have guessed at her identity. With a smile to show her white teeth, with her golden-hued dress and glittering jewels, the pretty widow glowed in that glimmering room like a tropical bird.
The Professor raised his dreamy eyes and laid the beetle on one side, when his brain fully grasped that this charming vision was waiting to be entertained. She was better to look upon even than the beloved scarabeus, and he advanced to shake hands as though she had just entered the room. Mrs. Jasher—knowing his ways—rose to extend her hand, and the two small, stout figures looked absurdly like a pair of chubby Dresden ornaments which had stepped from the mantelshelf.
“Dear lady, I am glad to see you. You have—you have—” the Professor reflected, and then came back with a rush to the present century—“you have come to dinner, if I mistake not.”
“Lucy asked me a week ago,” she replied tartly, for no woman likes to be neglected for a mere beetle, however ancient.
“Then you will certainly get a good dinner,” said Braddock, waving his plump white hands. “Lucy is an excellent housekeeper. I have no fault to find with her—no fault at all. But she is obstinate—oh, very obstinate, as her mother was. Do you know, dear lady, that in a papyrus scroll which I lately acquired I found the recipe for a genuine Egyptian dish, which Amenemha—the last Pharaoh of the eleventh dynasty, you know—might have eaten, and probably did eat. I desired Lucy to serve it tonight, but she refused, much to my annoyance. The ingredients, which had to do with roasted gazelle, were oil and coriander seed and—if my memory serves me—asafoetida.”
“Ugh!” Mrs. Jasher’s handkerchief went again to her mouth. “Say no more, Professor; your dish sounds horrid. I don’t wish to eat it, and be turned into a mummy before my time.”
“You would make a really beautiful mummy,” said Braddock, paying what he conceived was a compliment; “and, should you die, I shall certainly attend to your embalming, if you prefer that to cremation.”
“You dreadful man!” cried the widow, turning pale and shrinking. “Why, I really believe that you would like to see me packed away in one of those disgusting coffins.”
“Disgusting!” cried the outraged Professor, striking one of the brilliantly tinted cases. “Can you call so beautiful a specimen of sepulchral art disgusting? Look at the colors, at the regularity of the hieroglyphics—why, the history of the dead is set out in this magnificent series of pictures.” He adjusted his pince-nez and began to read, “The Osirian, Scemiophis that is a female name, Mrs. Jasher—who—”
“I don’t want to have my history written on my coffin,” interrupted the widow hysterically, for this funereal talk frightened her. “It would take much more space than a mummy case upon which to write it. My life has been volcanic, I can tell you. By the way,” she added hurriedly, seeing that Braddock was on the eve of resuming the reading, “tell me about your Inca mummy. Has it arrived?”
The Professor immediately followed the false trail. “Not
