Part 7

“There’s a deed-box on the cabinet behind you,” said Thorndyke.

Blowgrave turned round sharply. “God bless us!” he exclaimed. “It has come back the way it went. Harold must have slipped in at the window while we were at tea. Well, I’m glad he has made restitution. When I look at that bowl and think what he must have narrowly missed, I don’t feel inclined to be hard on him. I suppose the scarab is inside--not that it matters much now.”

The scarab was inside in an envelope; and as Thorndyke turned it over in his hand and examined the hieroglyphics on it through his lens, Miss Blowgrave asked: “Is it of any value, Dr. Thorndyke? It can’t have any connection with the secret of the hiding-place, because you found the jewels without it.

“By the way, Doctor, I don’t know whether it is permissible for me to ask, but how on earth did you find out where the jewels were hidden? To me it looks like black magic.”

Thorndyke laughed in a quiet, inward fashion. “There is nothing magical about it,” said he. “It was a perfectly simple, straightforward problem. But Miss Nellie is wrong. We had the scarab; that is to say we had the wax impression of it, which is the same thing. And the scarab was the key to the riddle. You see,” he continued, “Silas’s letter and the scarab formed together a sort of intelligence test.”

“Did they?” said Blowgrave. “Then he drew a blank every time.”

Thorndyke chuckled. “His descendants were certainly a little lacking in enterprise,” he admitted. “Silas’s instructions were perfectly plain and explicit. Whoever would find the treasure must first acquire some knowledge of Egyptian lore and must study the scarab attentively. It was the broadest of hints, but no one--excepting Harold Bowker, who must have heard about the scarab from his Uncle Arthur--seems to have paid any attention to it.

“Now it happens that I have just enough elementary knowledge of the hieroglyphic characters to enable me to spell them out when they are used alphabetically; and as soon as I saw the seal, I could see that these hieroglyphics formed English words. My attention was first attracted by the second group of signs, which spelled the word ‘Reuben,’ and then I saw that the first group spelled ‘Uncle.’ Of course, the instant I heard Miss Nellie speak of the connection between the scarab and Uncle Reuben, the murder was out. I saw at a glance that the scarab contained all the required information. Last night I made a careful tracing of the hieroglyphics and then rendered them into our own alphabet. This is the result.”

He took from his letter-case and spread out on the table a duplicate of the tracing which I had seen him make, and of which he had given me a copy. But since I had last seen it, it had received an addition; under each group of signs the equivalents in modern Roman lettering had been written, and these made the following words:

“UNKL RUBN IS IN TH MILL FIELD SKS FT DOWN CHURCH SPIR NORTH TEN THIRTY EAST DINGL SOUTH GABL NORTH ATY FORTY FIF WST GOD SAF KING JORJ.”

image: img_035 caption: The transliteration of the hieroglyphics.

Our two friends gazed at Thorndyke’s transliteration in blank astonishment. At length Blowgrave remarked: “But this translation must have demanded a very profound knowledge of the Egyptian writing.”

“Not at all,” replied Thorndyke. “Any intelligent person could master the Egyptian alphabet in an hour. The language, of course, is quite another matter. The spelling of this is a little crude, but it is quite intelligible and does Silas great credit, considering how little was known in his time.”

“How do you suppose M. Fouquet came to overlook this?” Blowgrave asked.

“Naturally enough,” was the reply. “He was looking for an Egyptian inscription. But this is not an Egyptian inscription. Does he speak English?”

“Very little. Practically not at all.”

“Then, as the words are English words and imperfectly spelt, the hieroglyphics must have appeared to him mere nonsense. And he was right as to the scarab being an imitation.”

“There is another point,” said Blowgrave. “How was it that Harold made that extraordinary mistake about the place? The directions are clear enough. All you had to do was to go out there with a compass and take the bearings just as they were given.”

“But,” said Thorndyke, “that is exactly what he did, and hence the mistake. He was apparently unaware of the phenomenon known as the Secular Variation of the Compass. As you know, the compass does not--usually--point to true north, but to the Magnetic North; and the Magnetic North is continually changing its position. When Reuben was buried--about 1810--it was twenty-four degrees, twenty-six minutes west of true north; at the present time it is fourteen degrees, forty-eight minutes west of true north. So Harold’s bearings would be no less than ten degrees out, which, of course, gave him a totally wrong position. But Silas was a ship-master, a navigator, and of course, knew all about the vagaries of the compass; and, as his directions were intended for use at some date unknown to him, I assumed that the bearings that he gave were true bearings--that when he said ‘north’ he meant true north, which is always the same; and this turned out to be the case. But I also prepared a plan with magnetic bearings corrected up to date. Here are the three plans: No. 1--the one we used--showing true bearings; No. 2, showing corrected magnetic bearings which might have given us the correct spot; and No. 3, with uncorrected magnetic bearings, giving us the spot where Harold dug, and which could not possibly have been the right spot.”

On the following morning I escorted the deed-box, filled with the booty and tied up and sealed with the scarab, to Mr. Blowgrave’s bank. And that ended our connection with the case; excepting that, a month or two later, we attended by request the unveiling in Shawstead churchyard of a fine monument to Reuben Blowgrave. This took the slightly inappropriate form of an obelisk, on which were cut the name and approximate dates, with the added inscription: “Cast thy bread upon the waters and it shall return after many days”; concerning which Thorndyke remarked dryly that he supposed the exhortation applied equally even if the bread happened to belong to some one else.

II. THE CASE OF THE WHITE FOOT-PRINTS

“Well,” said my friend Foxton, pursuing a familiar and apparently inexhaustible topic, “I’d sooner have your job than my own.”

“I’ve no doubt you would,” was my unsympathetic reply. “I never met a man who wouldn’t. We all tend to consider other men’s jobs in terms of their advantages and our own in terms of their drawbacks. It is human nature.”

“Oh, it’s all very well for you to be so beastly philosophical,” retorted Foxton. “You wouldn’t be if you were in my place. Here, in Margate, it’s measles, chicken-pox and scarlatina all the summer, and bronchitis, colds and rheumatism all the winter. A deadly monotony. Whereas you and Thorndyke sit there in your chambers and let your clients feed you up with the raw material of romance. Why, your life is a sort of everlasting Adelphi drama.”

“You exaggerate, Foxton,” said I. “We, like you, have our routine work, only it is never heard of outside the Law Courts; and you, like every other doctor, must run up against mystery and romance from time to time.”

Foxton shook his head as he held out his hand for my cup. “I don’t,” said he. “My practice yields nothing but an endless round of dull routine.”

And then, as if in commentary on this last statement, the housemaid burst into the room and, with hardly dissembled agitation, exclaimed:

“If you please, sir, the page from Beddingfield’s Boarding House says that a lady has been found dead in her bed and would you go round there immediately.”