Stolen Idols. E. Phillips Oppenheim
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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 is for that reason,” Mr. Endacott pointed out, “an unsuitable place for my niece. My establishment here, too, is impossible. No European woman could keep house under the prevailing conditions. That is why I am hurrying my niece off, although I myself shall follow before long.”
“My father will be interested to see you again,” Gregory ventured.
“Your father, if his tastes had lain that way,” Mr. Endacott ruminated, “might have been a brilliant scholar. He preferred sport and life. We met, not so many years ago, in Pekin. He was dabbling in diplomacy then. He certainly had the gifts for it. He was, in fact, the most popular Englishman who ever appeared at the Court there. He was received and granted privileges where I could never follow him. He was, I suppose, your instigator in this buccaneering expedition of yours.”
The young man laughed a little uneasily. There had been a vein of contempt in the other’s tone.
“I suppose it must have seemed a horrible piece of vandalism to you, sir,” he remarked. “However, there it is. The adventure appealed to me and we wanted the money badly enough.”
His host looked out across the harbour at the swaying lanterns of the small boats and beyond to the great lighthouse.
“Money!” he repeated. “The password of the West. Somehow I never thought I should return to it.”
“Money counts for something out here, too,” Gregory protested. “Look at your friend and partner, Wu Ling, trading up the river with machine guns and rifles to protect himself. For what? To make money. He’s doing it for Johnson and Company. You’re one of the firm, Mr. Endacott.”
The latter nodded.
“Touché,” he admitted. “But let me point out to you, young gentleman, that the things Wu Ling brings back to our warehouses are things of beauty.”
“Which he pays for with rubbish,” Gregory rejoined. “Half of your warehouse is an abomination; the other half, I admit, a treasure house.”
Mr. Endacott gently inclined his head.
“I cannot defend myself,” he acknowledged. “I am a partner in the firm because they insisted. All my savings for twenty years, which I advanced to them, were, they tell me, the foundation from which the business has been built up. But, believe me, I have never seen inside a ledger. Once every twelve months, a strange little man brings me a slip of paper. I look at it, and the business for the year is finished.”
“It is perhaps as well,” Gregory observed, “that your associates are probably honest. Wu Ling, for instance.”
“Wu Ling is an amazing person,” Mr. Endacott pronounced.
“Is he altogether Chinese?” Gregory enquired. “There have been times when he has puzzled me.”
“No one but Wu Ling knows who Wu Ling is or where he comes from,” was the enigmatic reply. “He is a power unto himself.”
“He saved my life,” Gregory remarked, “but I don’t think that he approves of me.”
“Tell