Part 74

“These rubies have no equal in the world--and the gold-work attaching them together is extremely old. I am always curious to admire it.”

He looked down at the girl, at the necklace, at the space about them, as though he were deeply, profoundly puzzled.

“We had a fear,” he said, “--it was wrong!”

Then he put his hand swiftly into the bosom pocket of his evening coat, took out a thin packet wrapped in a piece of vellum and handed it to the girl.

“It became necessary to treat with the English Government about the removal of records from Lhassa and I was sent--I was directed to get this packet to you from London. To-night, at dinner with Sir Henry Marquis in St. James's Square, I learned that you were here. I had then only this hour to come, as my boat leaves in the morning.” He spoke with the extreme care of one putting together a delicate mosaic.

The girl stood staring at the thin packet. A single thought alone consumed her.

“It is a message from--my--father.”

She spoke almost in a whisper.

The big Oriental replied immediately.

“No,” he said, “your father is beyond sight and hearing.”

The girl had no hope; only the will to hope. The reply was confirmation of what she already knew. She removed the thin vellum wrapper from the packet. Within she found a drawing on a plate of ivory. It represented a shaft of some white stone standing on the slight elevation of what seemed to be a barren plateau. And below on the plate, in fine English characters like an engraving, was the legend, “Erected to the memory of Major Judson Carstair by the monastery at the Head.”

The man added a word of explanation.

“The Brotherhood thought that you would wish to know that your father's body had been recovered, and that it had received Christian burial, as nearly as we were able to interpret the forms. The stone is a sort of granite.”

The girl wished to ask a thousand questions: How did her father meet his death, and where? What did they know? What had they recovered with his body?

The girl spoke impulsively, her words crowding one another. And the Oriental seemed able only to disengage the last query from the others.

“Unfortunately,” he said, “some band of the desert people had passed before our expedition arrived, nothing was recovered but the body. It was not mutilated.”

They had been standing. The girl now indicated the big library chair in which she had been huddled and got another for herself. Then she wished to know what they had learned about her father's death.

The Oriental sat down. He sat awkwardly, his big body, in a kind of squat posture, the broad Mongolian face emerging, as in a sort of deformity, from the collar of his evening coat. Then he began to speak, with that conscious effect of bringing his words through various mediums from a distance.

“We endeavored to discourage Major Carstair from undertaking this adventure. We were greatly concerned about his safety. The sunken plateau of the Gobi Desert, north of the Shan States, is exceedingly dangerous for an European, not so much on account of murderous attacks from the desert people, for this peril we could prevent; but there is a chill in this sunken plain after sunset that the native people only can resist. No white man has ever crossed the low land of the Gobi.”

He paused.

“And there is in fact no reason why any one should wish to cross it. It is absolutely barren. We pointed out all this very carefully to Major Carstair when we learned what he had in plan, for as I have said his welfare was very pressingly on our conscience. We were profoundly puzzled about what he was seeking in the Gobi. He was not, evidently, intending to plot the region or to survey any route, or to acquire any scientific data. His equipment lacked all the implements for such work. It was a long time before we understood the impulse that was moving Major Carstair to enter this waste region of the Gobi to the north.”

The man stopped, and sat for some moments quite motionless.

“Your father,” he went on, “was a distinguished man in one of the departments of human endeavor which the East has always neglected; and in it he had what seemed to us incredible skill--with ease he was able to do things which we considered impossible. And for this reason the impulse taking him into the Gobi seemed entirely incredible to us; it seemed entirely inconsistent with this special ability which we knew the man to possess; and for a long time we rejected it, believing ourselves to be somehow misled.”

The girl sat straight and silent, in her chair near the brass fender to the right of the buhl table; the drawing, showing the white granite shaft, held idly in her fingers; the illuminated vellum wrapper fallen to the floor.

The man continued speaking slowly.

“When, finally, it was borne in upon us that Major Carstair was seeking a treasure somewhere on the barren plateau of the Gobi, we took every measure, consistent with a proper courtesy, to show him how fantastic this notion was. We had, in fact, to exercise a certain care lest the very absurdity of the conception appear too conspicuously in our discourse.”

He looked across the table at the girl.

The man's great bald head seemed to sink a little into his shoulders, as in some relaxation.