THE TUBE OF MUMMY-BROWN.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 1160, 25 May 1894, Page 9

THE TUBE OF MUMMY-BROWN.

Richardson picked up the soft -little cylinder and looked at it again. “ What did you call it ?” he asked.

“ Mummy-brown,” replied Knowlton, taking a brush from between his lips to speak, and touching the canvas before him with it.

“ Brown it undoubtedly is,” remarked his friend; “ but where does the mummy come in ?”

“In the tube, my boy,” returned the painter, half-closing his eyes and putting his head on one side to observe the effect of his last stroke; “ because it is made of pulverised Egyptian mummies, and it is one of the best colours we have.”

Richardson put the tube back upon the much littered studio table, and whistled softly. “ Well,” said he, “you may count me out if ever I become a painter, when it comes to using dead men’s bodies to make pictures with. I’d be afraid they would come back again !” “ Nonsense,” said Knowlton, laughing; “ they are entirely too dead for anything of that sort, you may be sure, and if they are sensitive to feelings they never show it. Observe how lam using this tube, for instance, upon this Frenchman’s coat; do you suppose any well-meaning Egyptian would like to have himself clothing a foreigner in any such manner, if he knew it ?”

“ No, I suppose not. The colouring is rich, too,” remarked Richardson, thrusting his hands deep into his pockets and surveying his friend’s work with the eye of an uneducated critic, “though the same can’t be said of the models, judging from appearances. And by the powers that be, Francis,” he added suddenly, “ you’ve made that tall fellow a very good likeness of you! Did you know it ?” Knowlton shrugged his shoulders. “ I had an idea his face was something like mine,” he answered, “but as that is a common trick of ours, I have not given it a second thought. What lam striving for is a good picture, not portraits, and I must realise something from it, too. By heavens, Richardson, it has come to be a case of dire necessity, and that’s all there is to it!”

“ Rent not paid ?” asked his friend. “ That’s too bad—l’ve been there myself, and then it is a very uncomfortable thing to have hanging over one. As long as one can climb up and down the water-pipe, and thus avoid meeting the landlady on the stairs, life is made endurable, but with you, I suppose—”

“ There isn’t a water-pipo within twenty feet of my window. No, I must sell, or got out, so—the mummy-brown again, if you please!” Richardson handed the paint to him onco more, somewhat gingerly. “ I can’t help feeling I’m dealing with a pioco of a d?ad body,” he said, colouring at Knowlton’s pitying look, “and I should think you would do the same, believing, as you say you do, in transmigration and re-incarna-tion, and ail that sort of stuff. Suppose, for instance, that you were painting this picture with a piece of your own father’s body, when lie was an Egyptian, 10,()00 years ago!” “ Or, better still,” returned Knowlton, squeezing a fresh supply of paint out upon liis palette, “my own old-timo body, say !” As ho spoke ho touched tho paint with the tip of one finger, and a shiver, at tho same time, passed over him, leaving him strangely pale and shaken. “Yes, but-—hello, what’s wrong?” exclaimed Richardson, noticing the change in his friend’s face.

“ Nothing—l don’t know —a touch of vertigo, that’s all,” returned the painter, confusedly. “ I—what were you saying ?” “ Only that if your supposition were so, tho contact of the two bodies—tho new and tho old—would make itself felt in the

new.”

“ Yes ?” said Knowlton, smiling again and returning to his work; “ but Ido not believe in transmigration to that extent, my dear fellow. There is a lino, you know, that even we fanatics havo t-o draw, and I rather imagine it is somewhere near that point in this case. But, to change the subject, will you be at tho Idler to-night, as usual ? If Mrs McGwiginn should happen to take it into her good old head to ask me to pay or skip out, I’ll have to realise on some of my personal property, and as I don’t know the best places in town, I want you to steer me around. Won’t object, will you ?” “Not in the least. My services are always at your disposal, and I’ll be at tho club at half after 7or 8. And now I must tear myself av r ay; so, until then ” and the end of tho sentenco was lost in tho slam of the door as ho went out. The artist listened until the echo of his friend’s retreating footsteps had died into the murmurous silence of the great tenement in which he lived, and then going softly to tho door himself, he turned the key in it. Coming back to the table, he drew his chair close to it and cast a furtive glance about the unhome-liko room and into the deep shadows that lurked in the cobwebby corners. Then, with compressed lips and trembling hands, he drew tho palette to him and gently pressed a finger into the little daub of mummy-brown still upon it. A cold thrill shot up his arm, shaking the very nerve-centres of his body as it did so, and making him shudder again and again, even as he sank back into the chair half-unconscious. In another moment a sudden dusk filled the room through which tho familiar pieces of furniture and draperies seemed to lose their familiarity and to take new shapes and colours unto themselves. With staring eyes he strove to pierce the mist that half obscured his vision and to shake off the weird feeling that had seized upon him; but gradually the lids [dropped and closed, and to his distended nostrils there came, as he lost consciousness, a faint, sweet odour, which even then he recognised—the smell of cedar-pitch and myrrh. How long the terrible dream which followed lasted he could not know; but at last he woke to life again, and, struggling to his feet, he staggered to ihe window, threw it open and let the faint breath of air stirring in the court-yard far below sweep up past him and into the dark room behind. The dusk was just falling over the city, and far, far belorr him he could hear tho tenement’s inhabitants of the first and second floors preparing their evening meal, singing and cursing by turns as the preparation pleased or displeased them. The night air cooled his fevered face and refreshed him, however, and the great beads of perspiration that had gathered on his forehead were gone, as he turned back to the room again. “lama fool!” he exclaimed, impatiently, “and hungry, I dare say. No wonder I imagine things!” and catching up the worn soft hat that lay beside his tumbled bed, hurried out into the hall and down the weary length of stairs to the street.

But as he closed the door, a small, heavy-bladed dirk, upon a sholf directly over the spot where he had hastily shoved the unfinished picture and its easel, jarred by his haste, whirled slowly round until it rested upon the very edge of the shelf, where it balanced to and fro and trembled in the breeze that still puffed in at the open window.

Morgan, the favourite story-teller bf the Bohemian Idler’s Club, was talking as Richardson and the painter came in from their journey to the pawn-shop, and the usual audience of interested listeners was collected about him.

“It may or may not have been a humbug,” he was saying, with a shrug of his shabby-genteel shoulders, " but it was devilish queer any way you take it. I saw the man do it five times, too, and he failed but once.”

“ What do you call it—hppnotism ?” asked a newcomer.

“ I don’t know ; he simply says he sensitises the water and lets you call it what you like. First he puts the tumbler of plain hydrant water into one room, and he and the subject go into another. He makes a few passes —that is where the hypnotism comes in, I suppose—and once the man is under his control, the professor walks into the other room and stands with his hand over that tumbler of water for perhaps a minute, not uttering a sound. Then he sends some of us into the room with the sleeping subject, and he stays with the rest of the witnesses. When everything is ready, he tells one of them to take his penknife and thrust the blade carefully into the water* He does so, and

we hear a muffled scream from the other room, as if tho hypnotised man had felt the stab. This was repeated threo times, and every time the subject screamed and twisted about in his chair, as if in agony while the knife remained in the water. As soon as it was removed, tho pain apparently ceased, and ho rested quietly again. I was sceptical, of course,” concluded the talkative Morgan, “and said it was all chicanery; but, after seeing tho thing half a dozen times, I felt differently, and 1 must say that it is extremely peculiar, if not mysterious.” “ What had the subject to say for himsolf when he came to ?” asked Richardson, who had joined tho group. “Very little, except that someone had tried to stab him, and had succeeded throe times in sticking a knife into his back, he thought.”

“ And did he know of tho tumbler of water and its bearing on its hallucination?”

“ No, ho had been kept in still another room -when first brought to the house, and had not seen or hoard of tho water,”

“ That is rather peculiar,” said Richardson, thoughtfully. “ I should like to havo seen it myself.” As lie spoke, Knowlton, who had been talking with a fellow-painter at the other side of the smoke-filled room, started across it in answer to a beckoning nod of Richardson’s. He had taken only a few steps, however, before he stopped suddenly and clutched convulsively at his breast, while an inhuman shriek, shrill and piercingly loud, burst from his lips. For a second he swayed there in the silence that followed —for every man in tho room had heard the scream, above the talk and laughter, and had turned to see what it meant—and then his knees bent and he fell heavily upon the roughly-carpeted floor, an insonsible mass. A young physician who had been chatting near the fire-place hurried forward as Richardson did the same, and, kneeling at the stricken man’s feet, ho tore open the shirt and put his hand over tho heart.

“ Ho is quite dead, gentlemen,” he said in a moment, in answer to tho enquiring looks of those collected about them. Then he got to his feet and brushed the dust from his trousers. But as they picked tho lifeless artist carefully up, not one among the number saw the queer, white mark, just over the heart, that came and went again like a very old scar. The next morning, after hurried arrangements had been made for tho funeral by Knowlton’s Bohemian friends, Richardson had occasion to return to the studio. The door was locked, but with a key of his own he let himself in without disturbing tho awe-stricken Mrs McGwiginn. The body lay upon the bed, beneath a sheet, and the early morning light drifted through tho broken blinds and fell across it with an uncanny effect. The visitor went quietly to the bed, and, turning the sheet back from the face, looked down into the still features of his dead friend. Then he covered them again and movod away. As he passed tho easel, which stood where Knowlton had last shoved it in his haste, he turned deathly pale and caught at the mantel for support. “My God!” he cried, recoiling from the painting as if it were alive, and staring down at it with horror-filled eyes. Then he hurried past it and threw opon the shutters, letting a flood of light into the room. A stray bit of early sunshine fought its way through the grime-covered window and crept along the floor to where the easel stood; and, doing so, it lighted upon a bright bit of metal that caught and reflected the light into Richardson’s face.

Beneath tho easel, as if hiding like a common murderer from justice, was the heavy dirk, driven into tho uncarpeted floor about .an inch. Some night wind, more boisterous than the rest, had shaken it from the shelf, and, plunging downward to the floor, it had passed directly through the painting, not an eighth of an inch from tho heart of tho largest figure on the canvas—the man in the brown coat. —Edward Jack Appleton.