She beamed her gratitude. “Give me, please, one of my father’s black pearls—any one you do not want for yourself.”
Gravely Dan took from his pocket the envelope Gaston of the Beard had entrusted to him for Tamea, and spread the pearls on his open palm. Tamea selected one that was worth ten thousand dollars if it was worth a penny, and handed it to Julia.
“Observe, Julia,” she said, “the warm bright glow in the heart of this pearl. It is like the warm bright glow in the heart of you, my Julia. Take it. Thus I reward those who love me—thus and thus,” and she kissed Julia’s russet cheeks.
Julia eyed her employer with amazement and wonder. “Glory be, Misther Pritchard,” she gasped, “what’ll I do with it?”
“Put it away in a safe deposit box, Julia,” he suggested. “It is worth a small fortune. And remember what I told you. Nothing that may happen must be unusual. Understand. Now take Tamea upstairs and dress her while I call on Sooey Wan and set dinner back half an hour.”
CHAPTER VI
With a shower bath, a change of linen and the donning of dinner clothes, Dan always felt a freshening of the spirit—rather as if the grime of commercialism had been washed away. Whether he dined alone or with guests he always dressed for dinner.
Sooey Wan, who added to his duties as cook those of general superintendent of Dan’s establishment, in defiance of the authority vested in Mrs. Pippy, and who was, on occasion, valet, counselor and friend, came up to his room with another cocktail just as Dan finished dressing. Also, he brought a cocktail for himself, and, while waiting for Dan to adjust his tie, the old Chinaman helped himself to one of Dan’s gold-tipped cigarettes.
Ordinarily, Sooey Wan permitted himself few liberties with his boss, but upon occasions when his acute intuition told him that the boss was low in spirits, Sooey Wan always forgot that Dan was his boss. Then Dan became merely Sooey Wan’s boy, the adored male baby of the first white man for whom Sooey Wan had ever worked. The years fell away and Dan was just a ten-year-old, and he and Sooey Wan were making red dragon kites in the kitchen and planning to fly them the following Saturday from Twin Peaks.
Indeed, Pritchard, senior, had left to Sooey Wan a large share in the upbringing and character-building of his only son, for Dan’s mother had died that Dan might live. It had been Sooey Wan who had imparted to Dan a respect for the inflexible code of the Chinese that a man shall honor his father and his mother and accord due reverence to the bones of his ancestors and the land that gave him birth. It had been Sooey Wan who, inveterate gambler himself, nevertheless taught Dan that when a man loses he shall take his losses smilingly and never neglect to pay his debts. Into Dan’s small head he had instilled as much Chinese philosophy and as much Chinese honor as he would have instilled into a son of his own had his strange gods not denied him this supreme privilege.