Day after day, she said, she had sat by my side, many times every day, softly calling my name. Doctor Feng was responsible. He had an idea—perhaps because he knew my love for Thelma—that her voice might be the means of rousing me from my stupor. And, thank God, the experiment had succeeded, though Thelma confessed she had almost given up hope after many weary weeks. At last, after hundreds of failures, her call had reached my subconscious mind, the dormant cells of memory had suddenly awakened, my unbalanced mind once again returned to its normal state.
As I looked into her great grey eyes, I saw how filled she was with anxiety concerning me. I gazed at her in silence. The suffering she had undergone seemed to have had no power to mar her great personal beauty. Though her face was colorless it was calm, and her eyes were full of sadness.
One subject alone was uppermost in both our hearts, but old Feng had forbidden us to mention it. Therefore as we strolled along together through the gay streets of Cannes with its well-dressed merry-making throngs, our conversation was but a stilted one.
To me that passing hour seemed a year. Soon I was to learn the truth so long hidden—the secret of the great mystery was to be solved, for I saw from Doctor Feng’s manner that he knew the truth, and would at last disclose it.
When at last the hour passed and we returned to the Beau Site, Thelma took me up in the lift to a comfortable private suite where, in the sitting-room, Feng was standing before the window which gave a wide view of the Mediterranean, calm in the amber glow of late afternoon.
“Let us sit down,” he said, and I noticed how much more marked his slight American accent had become. “What I have to tell you, Yelverton, will take some little time. It will surprise you too, for it is a remarkable and complicated story—an amazing hotchpotch of love, hate, avarice, and a callous, cruel cunning perfectly devilish. I may as well begin at the beginning.”
I took an easy chair and the old man went on with his strange history.
“First of all,” he said, “it is necessary to go back to the days when Thelma’s father was alive and on the China station. You will remember I told you he was able to render a very great service to Sung-tchun, who was one of the leaders of the Thu-tseng. Exactly what that service was we shall never know—the secret would involve too many men who are still alive.
“But whatever it was, it was very important—very much more than a mere matter of organizing the escape of Sung-tchun from Siberia. That, of course, was important, but, after all, it was only a matter of one man’s life. There must have been something far greater, of which we shall probably never learn.
“Do you remember my once saying to you that the arm of the Thu-tseng was long?”