The desire for knowledge—knowledge

for its own sake—had died, and the passionate hope which hitherto had

animated with tireless energy the heart and brain of this splendidly

equipped intellect had suffered total eclipse. The central fires had

gone out. Nothing was worth doing, thinking, working for. There was nothing to work for any longer!

The professor’s first step was to recall as many of his books as

possible; his second to close his laboratory and stop all research. He

gave no explanation, he invited no questions. His whole personality

crumbled away, so to speak, till his daily life became a mere

mechanical process of clothing the body, feeding the body, keeping it

in good health so as to avoid physical discomfort, and, above all,

doing nothing that could interfere with sleep. The professor did

everything he could to lengthen the hours of sleep, and therefore of

forgetfulness.

It was all clear enough to Dr. Laidlaw. A weaker man, he knew, would

have sought to lose himself in one form or another of sensual

indulgence—sleeping-draughts, drink, the first pleasures that came to

hand. Self-destruction would have been the method of a little bolder

type; and deliberate evil-doing, poisoning with his awful knowledge all

he could, the means of still another kind of man. Mark Ebor was none of

these. He held himself under fine control, facing silently and without

complaint the terrible facts he honestly believed himself to have been

unfortunate enough to discover. Even to his intimate friend and

assistant, Dr. Laidlaw, he vouchsafed no word of true explanation or

lament. He went straight forward to the end, knowing well that the end

was not very far away.

And death came very quietly one day to him, as he was sitting in the

armchair of the study, directly facing the doors of the

laboratory—the doors that no longer opened. Dr. Laidlaw, by happy

chance, was with him at the time, and just able to reach his side in

response to the sudden painful efforts for breath; just in time, too,

to catch the murmured words that fell from the pallid lips like a

message from the other side of the grave.

“Read them, if you must; and, if you can—destroy. But”—his voice

sank so low that Dr. Laidlaw only just caught the dying

syllables—“but—never, never—give them to the world.”

And like a grey bundle of dust loosely gathered up in an old garment

the professor sank back into his chair and expired.

But this was only the death of the body. His spirit had died two

years before.

4

The estate of the dead man was small and uncomplicated, and Dr.

Laidlaw, as sole executor and residuary legatee, had no difficulty in

settling it up. A month after the funeral he was sitting alone in his

upstairs library, the last sad duties completed, and his mind full of

poignant memories and regrets for the loss of a friend he had revered

and loved, and to whom his debt was so incalculably great. The last two

years, indeed, had been for him terrible. To watch the swift decay of

the greatest combination of heart and brain he had ever known, and to

realize he was powerless to help, was a source of profound grief to him

that would remain to the end of his days.

At the same time an insatiable curiosity possessed him. The study of

dementia was, of course, outside his special province as a specialist,

but he knew enough of it to understand how small a matter might be the

actual cause of how great an illusion, and he had been devoured from

the very beginning by a ceaseless and increasing anxiety to know what

the professor had found in the sands of “Chaldea,” what these precious

Tablets of the Gods might be, and particularly—for this was the real

cause that had sapped the man’s sanity and hope—what the inscription

was that he had believed to have deciphered thereon.

The curious feature of it all to his own mind was, that whereas his

friend had dreamed of finding a message of glorious hope and comfort,

he had apparently found (so far as he had found anything intelligible

at all, and not invented the whole thing in his dementia) that the

secret of the world, and the meaning of life and death, was of so

terrible a nature that it robbed the heart of courage and the soul of

hope. What, then, could be the contents of the little brown parcel the

professor had bequeathed to him with his pregnant dying sentences?

Actually his hand was trembling as he turned to the writing-table

and began slowly to unfasten a small old-fashioned desk on which the

small gilt initials “M.E.” stood forth as a melancholy memento. He put

the key into the lock and half turned it. Then, suddenly, he stopped

and looked about him. Was that a sound at the back of the room? It was

just as though someone had laughed and then tried to smother the laugh

with a cough. A slight shiver ran over him as he stood listening.

“This is absurd,” he said aloud; “too absurd for belief—that I

should be so nervous! It’s the effect of curiosity unduly prolonged.”

He smiled a little sadly and his eyes wandered to the blue summer sky

and the plane trees swaying in the wind below his window. “It’s the

reaction,” he continued.