“I shall never be your wife,” cried the widow, stamping again. “I wouldn’t be your wife for a thousand or a million pounds.
Marry your mummy, you horrid, red-faced, crabbed little—”
“Hush! hush!” whispered Lucy, taking the angry woman round the waist, “you must make allowances for my father.
He is so excited over his good fortune that he—”
“I shall not make allowance,” interrupted Mrs. Jasher angrily. “He practically accuses me of stealing the mummy.
If I did that, I must have murdered poor Sidney Bolton.”
“No, no,” cried the Professor, wiping his red face. “I never hinted at such a thing. But the mummy is in your garden.”
“What of that?
I don’t know how it came there.
Mr. Hope, surely you do not support Professor Braddock in his preposterous accusation?”
“I bring no accusation,” stuttered the Professor.
“Neither do I, Mrs. Jasher.
You are excited now.
Go in and sleep, and to-morrow you will talk reasonably.” This brilliant speech was from Hope, and wrought Mrs. Jasher into a royal rage.
“Well,” she gasped, “he asks me to be calm, as it I wasn’t the very calmest person here.
I declare: oh, I shall be ill!
Lucy,” she seized the girl’s hand and dragged her towards the cottage, “come in and give me red lavender.
I shall be in bed for days and days and days.
Oh, what brutes men can be!
But listen, you two horrors,” she indicated Braddock and Hope, as she pushed open the door, “if you dare to say a word against me, I’ll have an action for libel against you.
Oh, dear me, how very ill I feel!
Lucy, darling, help me, oh, help me, and—and—oh—oh—oh!”
She flopped down on the threshold of her home with a cry.
“Archie!
Archie!
She’s fainted.”
Hope rushed forward, and raised the stout little woman in his arms.
Jane, attracted by the clamor, appeared on the scene, and between the three of them they managed to get Mrs. Jasher placed on the sofa of the pink drawing-room.
She certainly was in a dead faint, so Hope left her to the administrations of Lucy and the servant, and walked out again into the garden, closing the cottage door after him.
He found the heartless Professor quite oblivious to Mrs. Jasher’s sufferings, so taken up was he with the newly found mummy. Cockatoo had been sent for a hand-cart, and while he was absent Braddock expatiated on the perfections of this relic of Peruvian civilization.
“Will you sell it to Don Pedro?” asked Hope.
“After I have done with it, not before,” snapped Braddock, hovering round his treasure. “I shall want a percentage on my bargain also.”
Archie thought privately that if Braddock unswathed the mummy, he would find the emeralds and would probably stick to them, so that his expedition to Egypt might be financed.
It that case Don Pedro would no longer wish to buy the corpse of his ancestor.
But while he debated as to the advisability of telling the Professor of the existence of the emeralds, Cockatoo returned with the hand-cart.
“You have lost Mrs. Jasher,” said Hope, while he, assisted the Professor to hoist the mummy on to the cart.
“Never mind! never mind!” Braddock patted the coffin. “I have found something much more to my mind: something ever so much better.
Ha! ha!”
CHAPTER XIV. THE UNEXPECTED HAPPENS
In spite of newspapers and letters and tape-machines and telegrams and such like aids to the speedy diffusion of news, the same travels quicker in villages than in cities.
Word of mouth can spread gossip with marvelous rapidity in sparsely inhabited communities, since it is obvious that in such places every person knows the other—as the saying goes—inside out.
In every English village walls have ears and windows have eyes, so that every cottage is a hot-bed of scandal, and what is known to one is, within the hour, known to the others.
Even the Sphinx could not have preserved her secret long in such a locality.
Gartley could keep up its reputation in this respect along with the best, therefore it was little to be wondered at, that early next morning every one knew that Professor Braddock had found his long-lost mummy in Mrs. Jasher’s garden, and had removed the same to the Pyramids without unnecessary delay.
It was not particularly late when the hand-cart, with its uncanny burden, had passed along the sole street of the place, and several men had emerged from the Warrior Inn ostensibly to offer help, but really to know what the eccentric master of the great house was doing.
Braddock brusquely rejected these offers; but the oddly shaped mummy case, stained green, having been seen, it needed little wit for those who had caught a sight of it to put two and two together, especially as the weird object had been described at the inquest and had been talked over ever since in every cottage.
And as the cart had been seen coming out of the widow’s garden, it naturally occurred to the villagers that Mrs. Jasher had been concealing the mummy.
Shortly the rumor spread that she had also murdered Bolton, for unless she had done so, she certainly—according to village logic—could not have been possessed of the spoil.
Finally, as Mrs. Jasher’s doors and windows were small and the mummy was rather bulky, it was natural to presume that she had hidden it in the garden.
Report said she had buried it and had dug it up just in time to be pounced upon by its rightful owner.