The chauffeur opened the door. Quelch helped her to descend, and they entered the dim hall. Without meeting his glance, she bade him good night and passed swiftly upstairs, well aware that he remained standing there, following her with his eyes. Breathlessly she closed and locked the door upon herself. But she could not shut out the agitation of her veins or the wild beating of her heart. Fright had come into the room with her. The thing had gone too far—grown too big for the manipulation of the little hands she had thought so clever. She sat staring at them, and at the white reflection of herself in the glass. Flirtation had overswept the neat confines laid down by her, and come washing over in a big wave that had nearly overwhelmed her. This would never do. She must get back to where she was before, on the safe and unassailable rock where she had always dwelt as Pat Temple’s wife. It was incomprehensible that she had ever lost her footing from that rock, and she could not quite remember how or when it had occurred. Somehow, the little pink idol was mysteriously connected with the event. It occurred to her now to calm her troubled musings by a sight of it. Gazing into its deep-pink fire-lit heart, her agitation passed; at last she rose and began to take off her gown. But in the middle of undressing, her movements and her glance became fixed. On a small writing-table at the foot of her bed something was glittering with the emerald eyes of a hundred serpents. For a moment she stood rigid, then flew to it, as a foolish bird flies to the snare. All the stars in heaven seemed to have come down to lie there linked together by a silvery thread.
It was a chain of diamonds, flexible and long as her chain of pearls and of a loveliness and brilliancy indescribable. Tenderly, adoringly, she gathered it up. It ran like fire and water through her fingers, flashing laughing, winking. When she held it altogether in her two palms, it was as though the sun had set in a pool of crystal dew. When it slipped down over her red-brown hair to her throat and shoulders and the shadow of her bosom, her beauty seemed enhanced to unearthliness. She gave a long sigh, and something went fluttering out of her. It might have been the little pale-faced conscience. Perhaps it was her soul taking wing. Whatever it was, she neither recked nor reasoned. The work begun by the rose-red idol had been accomplished by the chain of stars. She was lost.
Chapter Two.
The sea hath its pearls,
But none more rare
Than the soul of a woman
Sweet and fair.
I found that in a book, darling mine, and it made me think of you. All pearls make me think of you, with their lovely inner light shining and glowing through the faint pink bodies of them.
It is your birthday to-day, and I cannot be with you or get you anything here that you would care for. So I am sending you a fifty-pound note. Buy yourself a pearl. Or anything you like. There should be some good jewellers in Kimberley. And send me a pound of Hankey’s, like an angel. Can’t get any here, and haven’t had a decent smoke for a week—
Thus Pat Temple, writing to his wife from some far spot on the borders of the Congo. She lay reading the letter among her pillows, and drinking her morning tea. Quotations and tag-ends of verses were not unusual in Pat’s letters. He may not have been what is called a deeply read man. His favourite books were The Tower of London, Marcus Aurelius, Buffon, Pickwick Papers, Grimm’s Fairy Tales, and The Cloister and the Hearth. Life kept him too busy to make many new friends in the book line, but his mind had a way of seizing on to phrases and verses, and he never forgot anything he had once read that dealt with woman’s purity or men’s chivalry. Not that he quoted to the world. It was only in letters to his wife that these things sometimes slipped out from the deeps of his heart and mingled themselves with demands for his favourite brands of tobacco.