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Authors: Melville Davisson Post

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“Oh! I say, come in.”

And I had to go in. I could not have the beast feel that I was spying on him. I pretended to be seeking a match for my cigarette. I got one from his candlestick on the table and turned to go out, but he stopped me.

I do not know whether it was a word or a gesture that arrested my attention. I thought the beast, at his ease and with his cocky air,
was now more loathsome. One could bear with him, perhaps, in his misery and in his habiliments of squalor, but cleaned and fed and comfortable and turned out for a gentleman he was beyond the patience of the saints. And yet I had to treat him with the courtesies of a guest—a distinguished guest in this country house; a godfather of this girl welcomed back to England!

He made a little gesture toward the framed strip of vellum on the mantelpiece.

“Is that the old cock's secret cipher?”

I said it was the puzzle Sir Hector Bartlett had left to his contemporaries: two crowned Assyrian figures preceded by two wedge-signs; followed by a cuneiform inscription, all painted in India ink on a strip of vellum.

“Tell me about it,” he said.

I loathed the creature, but I could not fail in what my hostess would expect of me with a
guest. And I told him what was well known about the thing.

Sir Hector Bartlett had been the ablest Assyriologist in Europe. Under his hands the ancient writing in Asia had taken the completeness and the uniformity of a national language; before him these languages had been mere fragments puzzled out; and with a large conception he had welded these fragments together and shown this to have been the learned written speech of a great vanished age in Asia. This big conception had lifted the whole thing onto an elevated plane; it had laid forever the claims of Halévy that this wedge-writing was a mere cabalistic script of the Sumerian priests. He had shown it to be the speech of a people.

But the little skepticisms of his contemporaries had enraged Sir Hector. He said they were pretentious persons fit to work out puzzles, and so he had left a puzzle for them in his will. Let them work it out and they would find the treasure that he had found by deciphering the great inscription of Darius on the rocks of Behistun.

“Did he find a treasure?”

Backmartin cut in, shooting out his head with a sort of reptilian eagerness.

I explained that such was the common rumor at the time. He was known to have got some concession from the Crown to confirm his right in what he might discover, and a report was current that the Louvre had offered him seventy thousand pounds for what he had shown the director of fine arts in Paris on his way home.

“What did he show him?”

The reptilian gesture was even, if possible, more eager in its appeal.

One did not know, I went on; there was every conjecture. Backmartin's big, loose face worked like soft rubber.

“And he said that thing up there,” he indicated the mantel with his hand, “would tell where he hid it, if anybody could understand what it meant?”

“Yes.”

“And what did the other learned Johnnies say about it?”

They said it was nonsense, I continued. They said it was an absurdity on its face. No inscription ever had two royal figures drawn in;
the wedge was never inclined to the left; it was always pointed toward the right, or downward or aslant to the right, or two combined at their heads to form an angle. They said no word or syllable or
gunu
-sign of either the Persian, Susian, or Babylonian language was indicated; they said the thing was a hoax.

“But the old cock said they were only fit for puzzles, didn't he?—an' he would make one to fit their wits—eh, what?”

It was what Sir Hector had uttered about it, I told him. He held these learned men in a bitter contempt. Their knowledge of deciphering inscriptions, he said, was confined to the Black Cabinets of Berlin and Vienna, and their knowledge of Assyriology to the sacred books of the Jews—he would leave them an inscription within the zone of their intelligence.

I heard the casement door of the drawing-room to the terrace open, and I went out, Backmartin followed me with a sharp look. He had grasped the situation. He knew that things had gone to pieces and why I came; some of it by inquiry, no doubt, and the remainder by a sort of instinct. He was slack and despicable—baggy in the chair—and the glance seemed
to emerge from a trace, in the beast, of something firmer.

I found Marjorie on the terrace; and I advanced toward her as toward something heavenly and denied. She was lovely beyond any descriptive words that I can write here. To catalogue her would be to give no adequate impression. Dark hair, and great deep eyes, and the alluring figure of a Nereid are not descriptive phrases, but they are fragments of fancy that another man—to know the thing I mean—must fit his own beloved woman into.

I loved her, and, to me, she possessed the charm of dreams.

And now that God denied her to me I adored her more. There is this quality, strange and bitter, in a loss, that it doubles the value of the thing removed; when it is gone once, wholly, one sees with an uncanny clearness how incomparable it was. To-night this terrace was some delicate, vague kingdom of illusion. It would presently vanish. There would be only an hour of it with her. And it seemed to me, as I walked slowly beside her the length of the flag-paved terrace, that this hour was priceless. Into it the mysterious purpose of every day that
I had lived, of every day that I would yet live, seemed to converge, and to escape with the sound of my footsteps moving on the flag. I must convince her!

And I labored to that end with every argument, with every insistence. And in the vague light I noted every detail of her: the long lashes, the exquisite mouth, the slender body. But it was not these visible things, however potent, that so wholly overcame me. It was a thing for which we have no word, of which there is no material evidence, that moved subtly from this girl into every fiber of me. The perennial charm of romance attended her. She came forth from haze, from shadow; there clung about her the freshness, the mystery of those fairy women that the soul of a man eternally longs for.

And unless I could persuade her, she was lost to me!

I cannot remember what I said; it must have been to offer what I had, to replace the things this disaster had swept out. My insistence must have revolved about this fixed idea; for she would only shake her heavenly head. I must not bribe her—she could not take a bribe.

I looked up finally like a man sinking in the pit, and I saw, beyond her across the terrace, a face pressed against the glass door of the library. For a moment the face seemed unfamiliar—or was I unhinged by my emotion?—there was something fine in it; something having a momentary control; something that had no proper being in the sodden features; something long submerged, trodden down, filth-covered, in a sort of awful effort to get on its feet.

Then the face relaxed into its vacuous abominations, and Backmartin opened the door.

“Oh! I say,” he called to us, “if I might have a Bible I would read a chapter before I turn in—it's a sort of habit, y' know.”

I had to turn, sharp, to conceal the disgust in me. But Marjorie went in to him with some courteous word—I don't remember—found a big old family Bible on a shelf among the dictionaries, and put it on his table. He was stooping over it when she came out to me.

She made no comment.

And I returned to my labor of a cursed Sisyphus. But I changed the tenor of it. If
we must be equal before she would listen to me, then I would make us equal. If she would not be as well off as I was, then I would be as poor as she. I would abandon what I had, and we would go empty-handed into some new land. I was as good a man as that first one in Asia. I would till the earth and build a home and face the wilderness for her. And I would do it like one who finds a kingdom! We would go this very night, the two of us, with nothing. We would step out of the world leaving forever the rubbish of these great possessions!

She looked at me with a high face.

She stood with her arms hanging, her lips parted, her slender face gleaming like a flower; her hair spun darkness—her great eyes on me as though she saw a man there that she had never seen before.

Then a voice startled us as from another world.

Backmartin was standing before the library, with his hand on the latch of the closed door behind him. He was speaking to us, he was making some interrogation. Whether he had come out at that moment, or been there a long time, I do not know.

My forbearance with the beast very nearly went to pieces; but something in the voice, something strange, peculiar, unlike the creature, restrained me.

“Is any place about this house paved with stones?”

There was an unstable quality in Backmartin's voice, as though it issued from one holding himself together with an immense effort. And there was sincerity in it. I could not see the man's face.

“This terrace,” I said, “is paved.”

He came running out, at that, and over the whole length of the terrace. Then he came back to the library door and stood with his hand pressed against his mouth as in some reflection.

“But
upon
it!” he said. “There is nothing
upon
it.”

Then he flung the door open.

“Come in here,” he said.

We went in behind him.

I was astonished at the man when the light uncovered him. He was the Backmartin of the old days; a ruin of that man, surely, and yet the man returned as by some sorcery into
a brief, unstable control of this debauched, abandoned creature. That this control
was unstable
, at the virtue of a breaking effort, and uncertain of continuance, the aspect of him and the quavering voice evidenced. But while it held the ruin of the man together it gave that ruin a certain authority of life and a certain dignity of manner.

“And put it upon a pavement of stones!” he repeated; “that's the direction, ‘
upon
a pavement of stones.'”

“What direction?” I said. “What are you talking about?”

He indicated the vellum with its cuneiform inscription above the mantel.

“The direction in that cipher,” he replied. “It says, ‘upon a pavement of stones.'”

“You have deciphered that inscription?” I was incredulous. “After all the learned men in Europe failed on it?”

A faint smile struggled into his tense, hard-held face.

“Did not Sir Hector say that their knowledge of Assyriology was confined to the sacred books of the Jews, and that they were only fit to work out puzzles?—well, that's what it is,
a puzzle, connected with the sacred books of the Jews!”

He went over to the mantel and took up the framed inscription. He put his finger on the two royal Assyrian figures.

“That's a ‘King,' ” he said; “there are two of them, that would be ‘Kings,' and there are two wedges before them, that would be
two
‘Kings.' And the remainder of it is made up of cuneiform characters put together to form the reference in Roman numerals: sixteen, seventeen, five. That is to say: ‘Two Kings, sixteen, seventeen, five.' That would be ‘Second Kings, chapter sixteen, verse seventeen, line five.' ”

He turned about and put his big finger on a line of the Bible open on the table before him.

“And that line says: ‘And put it upon a pavement of stones.'” He turned about to us. “Somewhere on a pavement of stones Sir Hector has concealed whatever it was that he brought out of Asia.”

We looked at him in a sort of wonder. The girl's fingers were on my arm; she was tense now in a consuming interest.

Backmartin went on: “The terrace out there
is paved with stones, and if this verse said
under
a pavement of stones I would know where to look. But it doesn't say
under;
it says
upon
… now, how could it be
upon
that terrace? There's nothing
upon
it.”

Marjorie suddenly cried out as with an inspiration. “But there is something ‘upon it'; there is a square of tiles laid down before this door; they would be ‘
upon
' it.”

Backmartin stood up at that; he looked a moment at the mosaic making a wide step before the door. Then he turned to me.

“Your car is standing out there; get a chisel and a hammer from the tool box.”

I got the implements and we raised the tiles. Under them, upon the flag pavement, was a thin, square copper box. We took it into the library and put it on the table. No one spoke.

Backmartin carried the box, and we followed after him. He put it on the table. And then he did an inexplicable thing. He went on through the library door into the hall. I thought he went to seek a tool to cut the copper, and I followed. I found him in the hall putting on my greatcoat. In the light his contorted face was covered with sweat.

“Awaken your driver,” he said, “and get me to the coast.”

I hesitated in my profound astonishment.

BOOK: The Bradmoor Murder
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