years since I saw it, what you will see. You will see a brooding face and eyes cast down to the dunghills. You will see thick lips and coarse features. You will see expressed as glaringly as here you see the triumph of the spirit, the debasement of the body. You will watch your Image and you will sink. You will never look at it, you or others, without conceiving an unworthy thought, just as you could never look upon this one without feeling that some one has stretched down his hand, that somewhere there is a murmur of sweet voices speaking to you from above the clouds.”
“But the jewels!” the young man persisted.
“Bah!” Endacott muttered, as he turned on his heel.
Ballaston, with wondering eyes, watched the erstwhile professor disappear.
“Looney!” he murmured, under his breath.
“I desire pardon,” Wu Ling interpolated politely.
“A madman!”
Wu Ling smiled.
“He is a personage of great learning,” he declared. “He is a friend of Chinese scholars who have never spoken to any other foreigner. He has great knowledge.”
“What are you going to do with that?” Ballaston asked, motioning towards the Image.
Wu Ling sighed. He stood for a moment in silent thought, his eyes fixed upon his treasure. Then gently and almost with reverence he turned away, beckoned his companion to precede him, passed out and locked the door.
“Who can tell?” he ruminated. “We have a great warehouse here filled with strange goods, as you see, another and larger in Alexandria, an agent in New York. All the things come and go. We do not hurry. We have jade there which we have not even spoken of for twenty years, silk robes from the chests of him who was emperor, ivory carvings from his Summer Palace, denied even to the great merchants. Perhaps we sell. Perhaps not.”
“You must be rolling in money,” the young man sighed.
“I desire pardon,” Wu Ling rejoined, mystified.
“You must be wealthy—very rich.”
Wu Ling smiled tolerantly. He turned back, swung open once more the door, and turned on the light. He pointed to the Image, serene and benevolent.
“What counts money?” he murmured.
They were about halfway through the outer warehouse on their way to the lighter room beyond, when a thing happened so amazing that Ballaston stopped short and gripped his companion by the shoulder. Returning towards them was Endacott, and by his side a girl. She was dressed simply enough in the white clothes and shady straw hat which the climate demanded, but there were other things which made her appearance in such a place curiously incongruous. She broke off in her conversation and looked at Gregory Ballaston in frank astonishment. It was certainly an unusual meeting place for two young people of the modern world.
“I am taking my niece to see our new treasure,” Mr. Endacott observed, a little stiffly. “Will you lend me the key, Wu Ling, or will you take us back yourself?”
“I will return,” Wu Ling replied gravely. “The young gentleman will excuse.”
“If I too might be permitted one more glimpse,” Ballaston begged.
The girl smiled at him and glanced at her companion. Mr. Endacott recalled the conventions of his past.
“I should like, my dear,” he said, “to present our young visitor to you, but I am not sure that I remember 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,”
