“What is it, Nunks dear?” she enquired. “You know very well that none of the servants can hear that bell, only me.”
“It was you I wanted,” her uncle declared. “Tell me, child, in what devil-sent spirit of idiocy did I waste all those years in a musty, God-forsaken country, whose only charm is that no one can understand it and no one ever will. Was I a fool or am I a fool now?”
She laughed softly, leaning against the side of the open window.
“You were a fool,” she decided. “I was a fool too, because I didn’t believe in England. I didn’t believe in the green, or the trees, the flowers, the softness, the rest of it all.”
“You were too young to be foolish,” he said. “It is only the old who can find the way to folly. Do you know that during the last few days I have discovered some manuscripts which, if I had been seated in that musk-scented den in the corner of the warehouse, with the smell of the East in my nostrils and the soft, purring call of mystery all the time in the atmosphere, would have sent me into a state of wild excitement. Here, to-day, I am gently and pleasantly interested. I have learned values.”
“Tell me about the manuscripts,” she begged, passing finally through the window and throwing herself into an easy-chair close at hand.
“There is a love poem here,” he confided, “written in his own handwriting by an emperor to a singing girl. I shall lock it away. It was not meant to be read by barbarians. Here are the details of the first plot to overcome the monarchy, and here,” he went on, “is a document more interesting than any I have yet come across—more difficult to decipher, because there are priestly words in it and phrases not used in modern Chinese. However, I have mastered it so far as to know what it is about. In this atmosphere it is strange even to dream of it.”
He paused for a moment. It was a lazy hour in a July afternoon. Even the birds had ceased to sing, but there were bees humming amongst the flowers and the sound of a reaping machine in a meadow on the other side of the red brick wall. Every now and then the roses bent their heads in a flutter of the light west breeze and lent wafts of perfume to an air already sweet with the odour of verbena and heliotrope.
“What about that last manuscript?” she asked.
He tapped the strange piece of thick, stained paper beneath his fingers, yellow in places, drooping at the edges, covered with what seemed to her to be meaningless hieroglyphics in the faintest of pink-coloured ink.