Part 73

Her situation was always, clearly before her. She was alone in the world; with very little, almost nothing. The estate her father inherited he had finally spent in making great explorations. There was no unknown taste of the world that he had not undertaken to enter. The final driblets of his fortune had gone into his last adventure in the Great Gobi Desert from which he had never returned.

The girl had been taken by this aunt in London, incredibly rich, but on the fringes of the fashionable society of England, which she longed to enter. Even to the young girl, her aunt's plan was visible. With a great settlement, such as this ambitious woman could manage, the girl could be a duchess.

The marriage to Lord Eckhart in the diplomatic service, who would one day be a peer of England, had been a lure dangled unavailingly before her, until that night, when, on his return from India, he had carried her off her feet with his amazing incredible sacrifice. It was the immense idealism, the immense romance of it that had swept her into this irrevocable thing.

She got up now, swiftly, as though she would again realize how the thing had happened and stooped over the table above the heap of jewels. They were great pigeon-blood rubies, twenty-seven of them, fastened together with ancient crude gold work. She lifted the long necklace until it hung with the last jewel on the table.

The thing was a treasure, an immense, incredible treasure. And it was for this--for the privilege of putting this into her hands, that the man had sold everything he had in England--and endured what the gossips said--endured it during the five years in India--kept silent and was now silent. She remembered every detail the rumor of a wild life, a dissolute reckless life, the gradual, piece by piece sale of everything that could be turned into money. London could not think of a ne'er-do-well to equal him in the memory of its oldest gossips--and all the time with every penny, he was putting together this immense treasure--for her. A dreamer writing a romance might imagine a thing like this, but had it any equal in the realities of life?

She looked down at the chain of great jewels, and the fragment of prickly shrub with its poppy-shaped yellow flower. They were symbols, each, of an immense idealism, an immense conception of sacrifice that lifted the actors in their dramas into gigantic figures illumined with the halos of romance.

Until to-night it had been this ideal figure of Lord Eckhart that the girl considered in this marriage. And to-night, suddenly, the actual physical man had replaced it. And, alarmed, she had drawn back. Perhaps it was the Teutonic blood in him--a grandmother of a German house. And, yet, who could say, perhaps this piece of consuming idealism was from that ancient extinct Germany of Beethoven.

But the man and the ideal seemed distinct things having no relation. She drew back from the one, and she stood on tip-toe, with arms extended longingly toward the other.

What should she do?

Had the example of her father thrown on Lord Eckhart a golden shadow? She moved the bit of flower, gently as in a caress. He had given up the income of a leading profession and gone to his death. His fortune and his life had gone in the same high careless manner for the thing he sought. For the treasure that he believed lay in the Gobi Desert--not for himself, but for every man to be born into the world. He was the great dreamer, the great idealist, a vague shining figure before the girl like the cloud in the Hebraic Myth.

The girl stood up and linked her fingers together behind her back. If her father were only here--for an hour, for a moment! Or if, in the world beyond sight and hearing, he could somehow get a message to her!

At this moment a bell, somewhere in the deeps of the house, jangled, and she heard the old butler moving through the hall to the door. The other servants had been dismissed for the night, and her aunt on the preliminaries of this marriage was in Paris.

A moment later the butler appeared with a card on his tray. It was a card newly engraved in some English shop and bore the name “Dr. Tsan-Sgam.” The girl stood for a moment puzzled at the queer name, and then the memory of the strange outlandish human creatures, from the ends of the world, who used sometimes to visit her father, in the old time, returned, and with it there came a sudden upward sweep of the heart--was there an answer to her longing, somehow, incredibly on the way!

She gave a direction for the visitor to be brought in. He was a big old man. His body looked long and muscular like that of some type of Englishmen, but his head and his features were Mongolian. He was entirely bald, as bald as the palm of a hand, as though bald from his mother he had so remained to this incredible age. And age was the impression that he profoundly presented. But it was age that a tough vitality in the man resisted; as though the assault of time wore it down slowly and with almost an imperceptible detritus. The great naked head and the wide Mongolian face were unshrunken; they presented, rather, the aspect of some old child. He was dressed with extreme care, in the very best evening clothes that one could buy in a London shop.

He bowed, oddly, with a slow doubling of the body, and when he spoke the girl felt that he was translating his words through more than one language; as though one were to put one's sentences into French or Italian and from that, as a sort of intermediary, into English--as though the way were long, and unfamiliar from the medium in which the man thought to the one in which he was undertaking to express it. But at the end of this involved mental process his English sentences appeared correctly, and with an accurate selection in the words.

“You must pardon the hour, Miss Carstair,” he said, in his slow, precise articulation, “but I am required to see you and it is the only time I have.”

Then his eyes caught the necklace on the table, and advancing with two steps he stooped over it.

For a moment everything else seemed removed, from about the man. His angular body, in its unfamiliar dress, was doubled like a finger; his great head with its wide Mongolian face was close down over the buhl top of the table and his finger moved the heap of rubies.

The girl had a sudden inspiration.

“Lord Eckhart got these jewels from you?”

The man paused, he seemed to be moving the girl's words backward through the intervening languages.

Then he replied.

“Yes,” he said, “from us.”

The girl's inspiration was now illumined by a further light.

“And you have not been paid for them?”

The man stood up now. And again this involved process of moving the words back through various translations was visible--and the answer up.

“Yes--” he said, “we have been paid.”

Then he added, in explanation of his act.