Of course if it had been something really nice Miss Sanderson was after, like an eleventh-century bowl or a miniature by Behzad, she would have been a lost woman. As it was, she knew a good deal more about emeralds than the Adorner of the Monarchy. I could as easily have conceived him taking an interest in Mission furniture. The point was that those clairvoyant eyes of his, as black and deep as Avernus, yet humourously three-cornered, could find anything for anybody. They even say he was the one who found that French countess for Prince Salar-es-Somebody. However, for extra precaution I called in Peter. There were half a dozen obvious enough reasons why he was a better man for Miss Sanderson’s affair than I, the most important being that I had something else to think about just then than trinkets for beautiful ladies. Things had already been looking rather funny behind the scenes in Tehran. They got funnier until that day when the fat little Shah was stopped in the nick of time from running away to Isfahan and the Germans. His valuables had gone, his bodyguard had gone, he himself was on the point of going, when the British and Russian ministers demanded even more insistently than Miss Sanderson an audience with him. Precisely what they said to him has yet to be published, though we got a fairly reliable version of it before night. But the Shah did not go to Isfahan.
Peter and Miss Sanderson did, however. The first definite news we had of them was from there, in a note of Peter’s that came through as soon as the Russians had cleared the road. Not that the note brought any real news. It merely contained an inclosure for M. Godet and laconic thanks for my own part in that affair. Nor did we hear anything more about our enterprising pair before I had to leave Tehran myself. And here I had run into them again, alive and married, in Washington! It was a common enough whirligig of life, but I was simple enough to be amused by it. I wished that blessed General would hurry up with his National Army. In the meantime I speculated as to which of Mrs. Maturin’s emeralds was the Persian one. That, of course, must have been what she meant she owed me. What interested me more, though, was how they had managed to get through the Turkish lines, and how long it had taken them to get married. They must have had adventures, those two.
If life were like stories, Esmeralda would at this point have turned back to me and have taken up her part in these reminiscences, or I would have prepared for it by shouting across the table at Peter. But both these young people were otherwise occupied, while the lady from Pittsburgh continued to be engrossed in Rodman and his aunts. I therefore plied my fork in undistinguished silence, outwardly trying to look intelligent and inwardly comparing the Shoreham with the Hôtel de Paris. If one was rather better appointed and the other a little livelier, it would be hard to say which of the two could collect queerer fish out of the seven seas. Washington and Tehran, for that matter, are a good deal alike. Neither quite looks its part, and in both there is a great deal more news than ever comes out in any paper. I would not swear, either, that it is more reliable or less fantastic in one capital than in the other. What I found most fantastic, though, was that I, whose own affairs are far from glittering, should turn out to be a sort of Harun-ar-Rashid, carelessly presenting a capricious lady with the jewel of her heart’s desire and an unfortunate gentleman with a fortune and a wife. As I considered it I began to feel the pride of the creator in his handiwork. After all, Providence needs a poke now and then. Even Mr. Belasco: would he do as well for us in that new play to which we were going after dinner? Which for some obscure reason reminded me of my newly married cousin Millicent, who didn’t want her cook to make friends with the cook next door because the people in that house were Presbyterians. And so on, and so on.
Dessert was in sight before the General finished what he had to say about the improvisation of the Air Service, whose deficiencies I hope he overstated. He then pronounced highly enlightening and worthy of being brought to the attention of the M. I. D. Mrs. Maturin’s report of the military preparations of India and Japan—as observed from the port-holes of ocean greyhounds, the windows of first-class compartments, and the lobbies of the best hotels. And at last Mrs. Maturin turned to me.
“But where is it?” I demanded, beginning with what interested me least. “Which one is it?”
It was her turn to be mystified, having been occupied with affairs of state while I was mooning about her and Peter. But, noticing that my eyes were on the points of green light in her bronze hair, she came around quickly enough.
“Oh, it isn’t there. It’s—it’s quite a story,” she broke off. I was ready to believe her. But dessert was already on, and I hadn’t waited all that time to hear the threadbare old yarn of bargaining in Asia. “The funny part of it,” Mrs. Maturin went on, “is that I saw the Peacock Throne after all—thanks to you.” She leaned toward me as if to confide the most delightful of secrets. “That’s where I got my emerald.”
If jaws could drop, mine would have crashed into my plate. My partnership with Providence had gone rather farther than I foresaw if it had been the means of providing the lovely Esmeralda not only with a historic precious stone, but with one from a piece of furniture which does not exist. I began to feel vaguely uneasy. I remembered what in my pride of a Harun-ar-Rashid I had almost forgotten, that look of Peter’s across the table. And so many questions suddenly surged up into the back of my head that I again asked the one which interested me least.
“How soon did you young people make up your minds to get married? In Tehran?”
“Oh dear no! It wasn’t till we got to India. And then we were driven into it. People kept making the most stupid mistakes—insisting on giving us the same room, and all that sort of thing. Of course it was a mad thing to do, to trail off like that with a man I had never seen or heard of the week before. But I was just wild to get that emerald. And Peter was such a sport—not like the rest of you old fogies in Tehran. And then out there in Persia, in sight of the war, things didn’t look just as they would here. We had no end of a time, you know. I wondered afterward that I ever had the courage to go through with it. But,” she added irrelevantly, “if it hadn’t been for that, I would have gone straight to Paris and cut Pierre Loti’s throat!”