And then he was aware she was in the room again, smiling at him and exhibiting a package. Her presence seemed to revive him.
"At last I am to be enlightened," he murmured.
"I am afraid you are doomed to be disappointed," she said, as she came and stood by his side at the table. "I have made such a mystery of it, whereas, no doubt, you will find it trivial."
"You said it was a weird idea. I am sure it is a charming one. Whatever it is, you know what it will be to me."
"I know, darling," she said, suddenly grave again.
She bade him cut the string and open the package. At last, as he was removing the many wrappings, "It is an old door-knocker," she said; "the figure of a lovely grotesque old wizard, wrought in bronze. I came across it on the door of a fifteenth-century house in Delft a year or two ago, and it so fascinated me that I bargained for it with the owner. It has ever since remained one of my pet possessions, and I at once thought of it for you. Tell me truly what you think of it!"
Wyndham held up the strange bronze man, slim and long, with fantastic bearded head, and grasping in one hand a rod that merged into a huge serpent that lay coiled round the body. The two legs were welded at the bottom into one big foot, the heel of which formed the hammer. It was a piece of grotesqueness worthy of the East, finely and subtly modelled, and quaint rather than grim in its suggestiveness.
"A masterpiece!" he said at last. "I have never seen anything of the kind to match it."
"I should say it is by an artist of at any rate the early renaissance," she ventured, her face agleam, for she had awaited his verdict with anxiety. "The modelling is so careful and scientific."
"Those were the days when artists still thought only of their work, and so much forgot their own existence that they took no pains to proclaim themselves to the world. The work of the so-called dark ages remains, the artists lie unknown and unheard of, if indeed they were known to the world at any time."