"You are wondering where we are?" He answered the unspoken question: "Above the library, between the outside wall and the chimney-stacks. You'd have to tear the house down to find it, without the Key." As he spoke, he was lighting two of the candles Achmet had provided us with, and although his hand was quite steady, he had become frightfully pale. I, too, felt myself growing paler, felt again the cold grue, as if the wind of death had stirred my hair.
"Reach into my breast pocket and you'll find a small vial. Put a drop of the contents on your handkerchief and hold it against your mouth for a moment," said Mr. Jelnik, with a sharp glance at me.
I obeyed mechanically. The scent had an indescribably tingling, spicy odor, and left a cool and grateful sensation in one's parched and dry throat. My blurred vision cleared, my dull and throbbing head was relieved.
"An Alexandrine Copt gave me that," he said, watching its effect with satisfaction. "He told me he had gotten it from a temple papyrus, and that it was undoubtedly one of the lost perfumes of Punt, used by the higher priesthood in their mysteries. Once a year he sends me such a tiny vial as you see. I could hardly have survived my searchings in this house, without that saving perfume. Do you feel able to go on?"
"Yes."
"Come, then," and with that he stepped through the opening, and I after him.
The room was not large—perhaps some nine feet high, some eight feet wide. The walls were of such exquisitely grooved and polished red mahogany that the candle-light was reflected in them as in mirrors; one seemed to be surrounded by twinkling red stars. On each side of the opening stood a tall and narrow cabinet, somewhat like a high-boy, and in one corner was a chest with iron clasps and handles. Over in another corner was a heavy, medium-sized square table, on which stood a blackened candelabrum and a tarnished silver-gilt cup. There were two chairs drawn up to this table. On one of them, fallen forward, was something.
Mr. Jelnik placed the candles in the empty sconces. We two stood looking down, he with pity, I with a mounting, sick horror, at the thing before us—the poor, huddled thing that had lain there so long. For it was not, as one might suppose at first glance, a frayed and threadbare mantle flung across one corner of the table. By the long black hair it was a woman, and a young woman.
She had on what must once have been a most beautiful brown silk dress, trimmed with quantities of fine lace, and looped up over a stiff brocaded petticoat. Her skeleton feet were in the smallest of low-cut shoes, the tarnished silver buckles of which were set with rhinestones. Her head rested on her arm, outflung across the table. The other arm hung limp, and the fingers pointed downward, as if accusingly. She had quantities of glorious black hair, and this alone had death respected; nothing else of her loveliness remained. Under her fleshless hand lay the soiled and yellowed papers she had written, and over which, in biting mockery, she had kept watch and ward.
"Who is it? Oh, God, God!—who is it?" I gasped, and heard my voice rattling in my throat like a dying woman's. As, perhaps her voice had rattled, here in the dark. The thought of her, sitting here in awful loneliness these long, long years, while life, all unknowing, ebbed and flowed within reach of her, made me shudder.