Under the illumination of the shaded lamp and the glowing bank of peat on the study hearth, Emanuel in his velvet jacket and slippered ease had seemed a delicately refined creature, of so ethereal a type that life for it outside the atmosphere of books, and of a library’s thought and talk, would be unnatural, or even impossible. With his back to the afternoon sunshine, however, and with rough, light clothes suggesting fresh-air exercise, Emanuel was a different person.
In stature he was a trifle taller than Christian; perhaps he was also something heavier, but what the newcomer noted most about the figure was the wiry vigor of muscular energy indicated in all its lines and movements. There was apparent no trace of any physical resemblance to his father, the massive Lord Julius, and Christian, as this fact occurred to him, remembered what he had heard about the race from which the mother had come. He could not say that Emanuel’s face was like anything which he had thought of as distinctively Jewish. The forehead was both broad and prominent, and at the top, where early baldness exposed the conformation of the skull, there were curious sutural irregularities of surface which attracted attention. The rest of the face was indefinably distinguished in effect, but not so remarkable. Christian thought now that it was a more virile countenance than he had imagined it to be. Vague suggestions of the scholarly dreamer flitted through its expressions now and again, but it was still above all things the face of a man of action.
Christian had said to himself, in that crowded instant of analysis, that he had never seen any Jewish face which at all resembled this of his cousin’s. Yet somewhere he had seen a face so like it!—the memory puzzled and absorbed his mind. The same crisping, silky black-brown hair; the same full line of brow and nose; the same wide-open dark eyes, intently comprehending in their steady gaze—how strangely familiar they were to him! He saw them again in his mind’s eye, and they had the same shadow-casting background of sunlight—only as he looked at the mental picture, this sunlight was fiercer and hotter, and there was a golden, hazy distance of purple-blue sea. Suddenly he laughed aloud, and his brain was alive with recollections.
“I never recognized you last night,” he declared. “Is it not strange that I should have been so blind? But seeing you in the sunlight—ah, I remember you well enough.”
Emanuel smiled too, a little awkwardly. “Of course I was not making any secret of it,” he said. “It would have come up naturally, sooner or later, in the course of talk.”
But Christian had turned to the lady, and was speaking with gay animation. “He it is whom I have so often thought of, for years now, as the ‘mysterious stranger’ of my poor little romance. How long is it ago? Oh, ten years perhaps, since I saw him first. It was at Toulon, and I was walking along the quai in the late afternoon, and he stopped me to ask some question, and we fell to walking together and talking—at first about the old town, then of myself, because he wished it so. A long time passed, and lo! I saw him again. This time he came into Salvator’s little shop at Cannes—it was in the Rue d’Oran—and I was alone, and we talked again—it seems to me for more than an hour. And I wondered always who he could be—because he made me feel that he had friendly thoughts about me. And then, once more—it was a year ago last summer—he met me again, and came and sat beside me on a seat in the Jardin Public, at Nice. It must have been in June, for the season was ended, and it surprised me that he should be there.”
“Oh, yes, I know all about it,” put in Kathleen. “He told me of his seeing you, and what he thought of you, almost as soon as your back was turned. But at that time, of course—things hadn’t happened.”
“Ah, but he wanted to be kind to me, even then,” the young man broke forth, with a glow in his eyes. “I felt that in his tone, the very first time, when I was the young boy at school. Oh, I puzzled my brain very often about this young English gentleman who liked to talk to me. And here is a curious thing, that when the Credit Lyonnais gave me my summons to come to England, it was of him that I thought first of all, and wondered if he had not some part in it. And then I was so dull—I come to his own house, and sit at his own table with him as my cousin, and do not know him at all! It is true that he had no beard then—but none the less I am ashamed.” He spread his hands out and smiled a deprecatory gesture at them both as he added: “But then everything has been upside down in my mind since I came to England. It has been as if I were going up the side of a straight cliff in a funicular railway—my heart throbbing in terror, my brain whirling—afraid to look down, or out, or to realize where I was. But to-day I am happily at the end of the journey, and the good safe ground is well under my feet—and so I am not confused any more, but only very, very glad.”
The elder couple exchanged a frankly delighted smile over the enthusiast’s head. “You take him for a stroll about the place,” said the wife. “Perhaps I will come and find you, later on.”
In obedience to the suggestion, the two men turned, and went off together across the lawn.