“Yes, I did, but——”
“But I refused it. Well, when they told me at Lagos that you were surely lost in the desert, I asked for it. I—I—almost believed it would bring us together again.”
“Let’s have a look at it,” chimed in Fairholme.
She was strangely reluctant at first, and her unwillingness to produce that sinister carving was not to be wondered at, for she had seen sufficient of the men of Oku during the past few hours to disturb her dreams for many a year. But Warden joined in the chorus of persuasion, and she brought the canvas bag from her room.
“Please open it,” she said to her lover. “I dare not. Though I confess to an uncanny confidence in its power, I am still afraid of it.”
He drew forth the calabash with a sudden movement, hoping to startle some of the onlookers by the extraordinary vitality of Domenico Garcia’s masterpiece, but Evelyn alone was affected, and she uttered a cry of dismay.
“It is ruined!” she exclaimed. “The moist heat has destroyed the lacquer! Even the eyes have gone. Oh, Arthur, please do throw it away this time. The thing is dead!”
In her excitement she had used exactly the right phrase. The man of Oku was dead, in fact decomposed. His face had melted away, his mosaic eyes had fallen out, the mocking smile worthy of a triumphant demon had faded from his thick lips. In truth, the mask on the gourd was a mere travesty of its former self.
Warden was quite as bewildered as the girl.
“Well,” he cried, “that is really the most amazing coincidence I have ever known. It knocks any of my adventures into a cocked hat. Just think of it—this thing lived, I tell you. It was a superb creature of genius. It must have been found two hundred years ago when some Portuguese or Spaniards looted Benin. It was brought to England only to be lost in a sailing ship that foundered on the east side of the Isle of Wight. After passing a couple of centuries under the sea, it bobbed up serenely one day last August, disturbed from its resting–place when the Emperor’s yacht struck the sunken wreck. I firmly believe it was made within a few miles of this very place, yet it survived through the ages until the hour when the Oku power is broken for ever, and now it is destroyed. Did you ever hear anything like it? Surely this is a thing not dreamed of in our philosophy.”