The Mummy and Miss Nitocris | Page 6

have been! Good-night!"
CHAPTER II
BACK TO THE PAST
The City of a Hundred Kings, vast and sombre, stretched away into the dim, soft distance of the moonlit night to right and left and far behind him. In front lay the broad, smooth, silver-gleaming Nile, then approaching its full flood-time, and looking like a wide, shining road out of the shadows through the light and into the shadows again--symbol of the visible present coming invisibly out of the domains of the past, and fading away into the still more hazy domain of the unknown future. Symbol, too, in its countless ripples under the fresh north wind, of the generations of Man drifting endlessly down the Stream of Time.
He was standing in the dark shadows of a huge pylon at one end of the broad white terrace of the palace of Pepi in Memphis--he, Ma-Rim[=o]n, Priest of Amen-Ra and Initiate of the Higher Mysteries.
Nitocris was standing beside him with her hands clasped behind her and her head slightly thrown back, and as she gazed out over the river the moonlight fell full on the white loveliness of her face and into the dark depths of her eyes, where it seemed to lose itself in the dusk that lay deep down in them, a dusk like the shadow of a soul in sorrow.
He looked upon her face, and saw in it a beauty and a mystery deeper even than the beauty and the mystery of the Egyptian night as it was in those old days--the face of a fair woman, a riddle of the gods which men might go mad in seeking to read aright, and yet never learn the true meaning of it.
The silence between them had been long and yet so solemn in its wordless meaning that he had not dared to break it. Then at length she spoke, moving only her lips, her body still motionless and her eyes still gazing at the stars, or into the depths beyond them.
"Can it be true, Ma-Rim[=o]n? Can the gods indeed have permitted such a thing to be? Can the All-Father have given His Chief Minister to be the instrument of such a foul crime and monstrous impiety as this?"
And he replied, slowly and sadly:
"Yes, it is true, Nitocris, true that thou art now Queen in the land by the will of the great Rameses; and true also it is that the shade of Nefer is now waiting in the halls of Amenti till his murderers shall be sent by the hand of a just vengeance into the presence of the Divine Assessors."
"Ah yes, vengeance," she replied, turning towards him with a gasp in her voice, "that must come; but whose hand shall cast the spear or draw the bow? We claim kinship with the gods, but we are not the gods, and what mortal hand could avenge a crime like this?"
"A woman's hand is soft and a woman's lips are sweet, yet what so cruel or so merciless in all the world as a woman? As there is nothing liker Heaven than a woman's love, so there is nothing liker Hell than a woman's hate. So saith the Ancient Wisdom, O Nitocris; and therefore, as thou hast loved Nefer the Prince, so shalt thou also hate Menkau-Ra and Anemen-Ha, his murderers and the destroyers of his promised happiness."
She shivered as he spoke, not with cold, for the breath of that perfect night was well nigh as soft as her touch and as warm as her own breath. She turned swiftly and laid her hand on his shoulder. Her touch was as light as the falling of the rose-leaves in the gardens of Sais, yet he trembled under it, and his face, which had been as pale as her own before, flushed darkly red as she looked into his eyes.
"You--yes, you, Ma-Rim[=o]n, you too love me, do you not--truly? The stars are the eyes of the gods: they are looking on you. Tell me, do you love me? Does your blood throb in your veins when I touch you? Does your heart beat quicker when you come near me? Are your ears keener for my voice than for that of any other woman--tell me?"
His hands went up and clasped hers as they lay on his shoulders. He took her right hand and pressed it to his heart, and laid her left hand on his cheek. Then he let them fall. He stepped back, bowed his head, and said:
"The Queen is answered!"
"Not the Queen, but the woman, Ma-Rim[=o]n, and as a woman loves to be answered. And now the woman shall speak. Nefer is dead, yet is not Nefer re-incarnated in another form, another man of another build, but yet Nefer that was--and is beside me now?"
She whispered these words very softly and very distinctly, and