“Why brute?” asked Loree, surprised. It was not a word she would have thought of applying to him.
“He has such a gentle voice,” Mrs Cork said, and seemed to think that answer enough. “He had a wife once—a lovely woman, they say. He is mad about beauty. She died in childbirth about fifteen years ago, leaving him a son whom he adores. He has the reputation of being extreme in his loves and hates. Extreme people are always dangerous.”
Smiling her weary enigmatic smile, Mrs Cork bade her good night.
A beautifully appointed car fetched them the next day in the cool of the afternoon, and Quelch met them at the door of the famous Diamond Office, a substantial stone building with no hint in its squat face of the romance it housed. Quelch trod its corridors as if he owned them. Because of being his guests, they were not constrained, like other visitors, to stand behind a rail, but invited to approach the counter where men and women sat pushing innumerable little objects that looked like dull bits of broken glass into cone-shaped heaps. It was difficult to believe in the concealed splendour of those dingy heaps. The two women lingered, plunging their fingers into hidden glory and speculating on the possible future of each stone. Some were for the engagement rings of little shop-girls, some might gleam in a crown, and be dyed with a queen’s blood, as were the diamonds of poor Draga of Serbia. The past of each was silence, a secret buried in the earth’s bowels; its future endless, almost eternal, like the hills. Tout passe, tout lasse, tout casse—only the hills remain—and diamonds!
Among the exhibits specially shown to the guests of Heseltine Quelch was a macabresque souvenir of the swift and sharp death that sometimes descends upon those who work in the depths of a diamond mine. It was a strange cleft object, floating in a jar of spirits-of-wine. Mrs Cork gave one quick glance and looked away with a shiver, but Loree stared in great curiosity.
“What can it be?” she exclaimed.
“A thing often spoken of but seldom seen,” said the young De Beers man. “A broken heart.”
It was indeed a human heart that had once beaten in a man’s breast, and it was cleft apart from top to point almost as if divided by a sharp knife or hatchet. But no weapon had performed this grim piece of artistry. It was the fantastic result of a great fall of reef upon the head of a native. Death must of course have been instantaneous, for though when the body was recovered it was not so crushed as might have been expected, a medical investigation revealed the strange phenomena of the broken heart which is kept to this day by De Beers, as one of the wonders of the world.
There were freakish stones, too. Curiosities kept just as they had been dug from the mine. One had the face of a clock clearly marked on it, though by no human agency; another showed a church window, another a perfectly shaped capital V. One was like the bead of a rosary, with all its points pushed in instead of projecting. Mrs Cork exclaimed much over these, but what moved Loree most was the sight of the cut and polished gems which a clerk set out before them. These were the show-stones kept for the glory of De Beers and the ravishment of visitors, row upon row of them nesting in cases upon such delicate shades of velvet as best became their beauty.
Loree’s breath came in little gasps as she gazed upon them—rose-red, amber-coloured, silvery, sherry-brown, smoky blue and water-white. It seemed to her that she was drinking some magic draught in an enchanted garden full of roses, dancing daffodils, and frozen dewdrops imprisoning a thousand spurts of flame.