Stolen Idols. E. Phillips OppenheimЧитать онлайн книгу.
his name, or that I have even heard it.”
“Ballaston,” the young man interposed, with some eagerness, “Gregory Ballaston.”
“This, then, is my niece, Miss Claire Endacott,” the ex-professor proceeded. “She will be your fellow traveller, I imagine, if you leave on to-morrow’s steamer.”
The two young people shook hands, and they all turned back into the recesses of the warehouse.
“You are coming to England?” Ballaston asked.
She nodded.
“It is so nice to meet some one who is going to be on the ship,” she said. “I came from New York here last month, knowing scarcely a soul.”
After that they remained without speech for a few moments. Somehow or other their surroundings and their mission seemed to demand silence. Wu Ling gravely opened the door and turned up the light. The girl drew a little breath of joy as she gazed at the Image.
“But that is wonderful!” she exclaimed.
“It is the work of a great master,” her uncle explained gravely. “The hand which fashioned that Image was the hand of a man who knew the secrets of the ages, who came as near the knowledge of what eternity means as any man may. There is much to think about—little to speak of.”
Their silence was the silence of entrancement; Ballaston’s attention alone curiously distracted. It was a strange environment for her modern and vivid beauty, this chamber with its clinging odours, its ancient treasures of silk and ivory, the time-defying Image gazing serenely past them. Wu Ling and Endacott himself seemed entirely in the setting; the girl, with her masses of yellow hair and almost eagerly joyous expression, a butterfly wandered by chance into a vault. Yet he had another impression of her before they left. He caught a glimpse of her parted lips, the strained light in her clear, grey eyes, as though in a sense her spiritual self were reaching out towards the allegory of the Image. Then her uncle gave the signal. Wu Ling gravely switched off the light and they trooped back into the warehouse.
“Somehow,” the girl reflected—“I suppose it is because I have just come from the art classes and the museums of New York—I feel as though that were the first real thing I have ever seen in my life.”
CHAPTER III
“Well,” Claire exclaimed, laughing at Gregory Ballaston across the table, “how have you enjoyed your dinner?”
“Immensely,” he answered, with enthusiasm.
“Have you ever dined more strangely?”
“I don’t think I have,” he confessed. “It was most frightfully kind of your uncle to ask me. I was never so surprised in my life.”
“Nor I,” she admitted candidly. “To tell you the truth, when we all came together in the warehouse this afternoon, it seemed to me from his manner that you were not particularly good friends, and I was afraid he was going to hurry me off without a word. Then your intense curiosity to have another look at that Image——”
“Entirely assumed,” he interrupted. “I wanted a chance to be introduced to you.”
“Of course that wasn’t in the least obvious,” she laughed. “Anyhow, even then I never dreamed of this. It was just when you were going that he asked your name again and seemed so interested. Do you realise that he must know something about you or your family?”
“I wondered,” Gregory admitted.
She glanced at the door through which her uncle had disappeared in search of cigarettes.
“Anyhow,” she continued, “it is delightful to think that you are going to be a fellow passenger on the Kalatat. Don’t you sympathise with me for being rather glad to get away from here?”
He looked around at the almost empty room, at the comfortless linoleum upon the floor, the Chinese servants, moving like ghosts about the table, at the cane-bottomed chairs, the few articles of cheap furniture. It was an amazing environment.
“Your uncle,” he remarked, a little hesitatingly, “apart from his household surroundings, seems to be a man of great taste.”
“He has wonderful knowledge,” she said, “and a wonderful sense of beauty, but he lives absolutely within himself. I am perfectly certain he doesn’t know that he has eaten curried chicken and rice every night for a week. Why, if I hadn’t thought of it, we’d have had nothing but water for dinner.”
“You’re a good Samaritan,” he murmured.
“Come and sit outside,” she invited. “The verandah is the only possible place here. We’re a great deal too near the rest of the houses, but the city looks almost beautiful now the lights are out, and the harbour is wonderful. The chairs, as you will discover, are horrible, and there isn’t a cushion in the place.”
“Tell me about yourself,” he begged, when they were established, “and why you came here.”
“You see,” she confided, “Mr. Endacott’s brother, my father, was a professor at Harvard. He died when I was eleven years old and my mother died a year afterwards. I was sent to boarding school in Boston and New York. When I was nineteen I was to be sent either to an aunt in England or to my uncle here. My aunt in England lives at a place which reminds me of your name—Market Ballaston, it is called.”
He looked at her in astonishment.
“Why, that is where I live!” he exclaimed. “Tell me your aunt’s name?”
“De Fourgenet,” she replied. “She married a Frenchman, the Comte de Fourgenet.”
“Good God! Madame!”
“Madame?”
“That is what we call your aunt in the neighbourhood,” he explained. “She is my father’s greatest friend. You know, of course, that she is an invalid.”
“I have heard so,” the girl admitted. “A motor accident, wasn’t it?... Uncle,” she went on, as he stepped through the window, “do you realise that Mr. Ballaston knows Aunt Angèle?”
“I imagined that he might,” Mr. Endacott acknowledged, a little drily. “It was not until I heard your name for the second time,” he continued, turning to the younger man, “that I realised who you must be.”
“It is a very small world,” Gregory Ballaston remarked tritely, as he accepted one of the cigars which Mr. Endacott was offering.
“Geographically it has contracted for me during the last twenty-five years into a radius of a few miles round the city here,” Mr. Endacott confided. “To come back into the world again at my time of life will seem strange.”
“But you won’t really mind it,” the girl assured him. “You will find a country house not too far from Aunt Angèle, you will have all your manuscripts, your books, your treasures round you. It is true, isn’t it, that you sit in your little office every day without stirring? Why, you can do the same thing in England as here. And then, there must be some of your old Oxford friends who would like to see you.”
Mr. Endacott smiled thinly.
“Thirty years,” he reminded her, “is a long way to look back. To pick up the threads, the friendships dropped more than a quarter of a century ago, is not easy. At the same time,” he went on, “it is right that I should return to England. It marches well with affairs here.”
“You must have found the life out in these parts very interesting, sir,” Gregory Ballaston remarked. “I don’t know whether it would get monotonous to you, but to any one coming upon it suddenly it is an amazing corner of the world. Off the ship, I have only seen three Europeans since I have been here.”
“It