Spinster of This Parish

by W. B. Maxwell

“Nothing,” said Dyke gaily. “I liked your way of putting it. The Incas! They covered themselves with emeralds, didn’t they? Very apt—your historical allusion. Emmie, did you hear what Mr. Cunlip said?”

While he spoke he was packing up his specimens in their tissue paper. He put the envelope in his waistcoat pocket, and, with compliments to Mr. Cunlip, he hurried away.

“Let’s walk, Emmie. No more cabs. Besides, all this has excited me. The days of the Incas! Ha, ha.”

And as they walked on, through Holborn and New Oxford Street, he told her the story of how he had found those emeralds quite by chance, high up in the mountains. As he sat resting in the fierce sunshine, he had seen one of them on the edge of a small basin of sand among black rocks, and had scratched for the others with his hands. He described the place—oh, yes, he could find his way back all right; he had mapped it very carefully, and given the corrected map to his partner, Pedro del Sarto. But he himself needed no maps; he could take you there blindfolded—a valley narrowing to and shut in by a perpendicular cliff a thousand feet high, down the face of which the melted snow had made deep channels—a valley where no white man had ever stood, where perhaps no man of any colour had even been since the Spanish Conquest four hundred years ago, till he, Dyke, came to tear the secret out of its lonely heart and profit by the discovery.

As she listened, she fancied that she could see it all in imagination. People on the crowded pavements jostled them, they passed close to the noses of van horses in crossing the Tottenham Court Road, and they noticed nothing of these surrounding sights, sounds, or pressures. They were both of them thousands of miles away.

The time of the Incas! Yes, he honestly believed that he had stumbled upon the trace of workings of emerald mines that were in use before the advent of the Spaniard. He might prove wrong, of course. He had been in a hurry, with no time for close investigations. Perhaps what he fancied had been wrought by human beings labouring was really made by nature using such of her tools as lay handy—storm, frost, sunshine, and the upheaving forces that had built the whole mountain backbone of the continent. In any case, the real point was—How many emeralds had man or nature left there?

At any rate, Dyke would go now and see for himself. It would be a lark. Let us leave it at that.

“Not a word to anybody, Emmie. You and I and old Pedro. No one else—till the day when I give my queen a tiara of green stones all as big as filberts, with a few Brazilian diamonds to flash among the greenness. Then when you go to the Opera—on one of the grand nights—you lovely Emmie, like a high priestess of the sun—then—But I say, let’s have tea. That is, if you don’t mind paying for it”; and, laughing, he grasped her elbow and led her into a crowded tea-shop.

They sat there, on a seat against the wall, at the end of a table that was occupied by other people; and Dyke while waiting for their tea and while eating two crumbly currant scones, continued to talk to her, but in a voice so low that no one else could hear. His eyes flashed sometimes, he raised his head and shook his hair; he was talking enthusiastically, with a freedom that he could only use to her, and in the midst of it quite automatically he pushed his cup across the marble table for more tea and picked up and began to eat another cake.