Lion in the Valley - Elizabeth Peters [68]
Remarkably, Ramses made no attempt to defend himself, but listened in silence, his narrow countenance even more inscrutable than usual. Upon the conclusion of the lecture I ordered him to his room—not much of a punishment, since he usually spent the hottest part of the day there working on his grammar.
Emerson and I had never succumbed to the lazy habit of afternoon rest which is common in the East. There is always a great deal to do on an archaeological expedition, aside from the digging itself. I knew Emerson would be busy that afternoon, for as he admitted, the stratification of the ruined buildings at the base of the pyramid was complex in the extreme. His copious notes and sketches would have to be sorted and copied in more permanent form.
He was frowning and muttering over this task when I began to set in motion the scheme I had contrived that morning.
I found Enid lying on her cot. She was not asleep; her wide eyes stared unseeingly at the ceiling and she did not turn her head when I entered, after giving the emphatic cough that was the only possible substitute for a knock—there being, as the Reader may recall, no door on which to knock.
I understood the cause of her lethargy, and the despair of which it was the outward sign, and I was tempted to mitigate it by assuring her that I was about to take action. I decided I could not risk it; she might have tried to dissuade me from the course I contemplated. Subterfuge was necessary, and although I deplore in the strongest possible terms the slightest deviation from straightforward behavior, there are occasions upon which moral good must yield to expediency.
“I have brought you something to read,” I said cheerfully. “It will, I hope, beguile the hours more effectively than Meyer’s Geschichte des Altertums.” For such was the volume she had tossed aside.
A slight show of animation warmed her pale cheeks, though I fancied it was politeness rather than genuine interest. She took the books and examined the titles curiously. “Why, Amelia,” she said, with a little laugh. “I would not have suspected you of such deplorable taste in literature.”
“Only the book by Mr. Haggard is mine,” I explained, taking a seat on the packing case. “The other belongs to Ramses—a collection of what are called, I believe, detective stories.”
“They are very popular stories. You don’t care for them?”
“No; for in my opinion they strain the credulity of the reader to an unreasonable degree.”
I was pleased to see that our little literary discussion had cheered the girl: her eyes twinkled as she said, “To a more unreasonable degree than the romances of Mr. Haggard? I believe his plots include such devices as the lost diamond mines of King Solomon, beautiful women thousands of years old—”
“You give yourself away, Enid. You would not be so familiar with the plots if you had not read the books!”
Her smile faded. “I know—I knew—someone who enjoyed them.”
Her cousin Ronald? He had not struck me, from what I had heard of him, as a reading man. I was tempted to inquire why the memory brought such a look of sorrow to her face, but decided I must postpone further questions, since I had only a limited time in which to put my scheme into effect.
“Mr. Haggard’s stories,” I explained, “are pure fantasy and do not pretend to be anything else. However rational the mind—and mine is extremely rational—it requires periods of rest, when the aery winds of fancy may ruffle the still waters of thought and encourage those softer and more spiritual musings without which no individual can be at his or her best. These so-called detective stories, on the other hand, pretend to exhibit the strictly intellectual qualities of the protagonist. In fact, they do nothing of the sort; for in the few I have read, the detective arrived at his solutions, not by means of the inexorable progress of true reasoning, but by wild guesses which turned out to be correct only because of the author