“If one philosophizes and keeps his love to himself it is all right, but this lady is not to be won by any man. She has devoted her life to a particular purpose and we have devoted our lives to her.”
“That sounds very romantic and interesting,” I observed, already half suspicious that Deverell himself was in love with her. “What is the special purpose to which you are all pledged?”
A shrug of the shoulders and a smile made up the only answer.
Deverell then closed the panel and made me the subject of conversation. He asked all manner of questions about my life, and when I brought the story down to the China Sea he showed a familiarity with my movements which indicated a system of spies that aroused my admiration, and I was free in expressing it. It was through their elaborate system, he admitted, that they had learned I was in Hong Kong and where I was stopping. He admitted, too, that they had been in touch with me from the day I entered their waters and had come to regard me as a kindred soul, to which fact I owed my invitation from their Queen.
It was considerably after eight bells before I retired but my sleep was not long or heavy, for the strangeness of the situation and its possibilities impressed me, not with fear but with exultant expectancy. At breakfast time Deverell, wearing a smart uniform, escorted me aft to the private quarters of the Queen, which reminded me of those of an officer of flag rank in the American Navy. They had the same private galley and air of exclusiveness of a flagship, but they were much more spacious and were fitted out with a daintiness that bespoke generations of culture. The dining-room was a reproduction in miniature of those one finds in the best homes of England, with nothing about it to suggest the sea. Back of it and separated from it by odd Chinese curtains, was a luxurious lounging room, with large ports cut through the over-hang. On one side of it was the Queen’s sitting-room and library, and on the other her boudoir.
I was ushered into the dining-room and in a moment the Queen appeared. As she parted the curtains and paused for just an instant in the doorway with an air of diffidence, I was transfixed by her marvellous beauty, to which, as Deverell had said, the painted picture had done only partial justice. Tall, and with the figure and the manner of a goddess, I was fascinated by her eyes, deep blue and filled with sentiment and sympathy; eyes that could never be brutal but which must yearn for love and tenderness; not the eyes of a woman born to command, for there was a softness about them that was almost pleading, but of one created with a desire to be herself commanded and dominated by a stronger nature. Through them she looked at me as a child might look, but with more of understanding, yet as much of curiosity. Unconfined, her hair, when I saw it, would have swept the floor, but it was twisted into a great black, glistening crown; a little detail that made her appear more than ever the Queen.
Deverell started to introduce me but she interrupted him. “I already know Dr. Burnet,” she said, as she swept toward me with superb grace and infinite charm of manner and extended her hand, small and soft.
“And I feel that I already know you” was a blunder into which her eyes led me.
Instantly the look of animation which had come into her wonderful eyes gave way to one of sadness. “But I fear,” she said, “that the reports you have heard regarding me are very different from those I have had concerning you, and which caused me to want to meet you, that I might thank you for your kindness to Captain Deverell.”
I stumbled into another tactless reply: “I have only one fault to find with what I have been told. You should be known as ‘The Beautiful White Angel.’” It was not a polite thing to say but I was hopelessly, almost heedlessly, in love, and it always has been my way to go straight at things.