"They are pearls of the first quality."

"Pearls!"

"Yes, the pale green colour is only a clever coating of paint that can be removed easily by the use of a certain spirit. Look here where I have worked at this one a little--I had to, you know, in order to be certain. I have n't harmed the painting."

He showed her a bead that had a picture of a desert on it, with tiny palms waving, and a primitive well. From the back of this he had removed the pale green colouring and there instead glowed the rich ivory-grey thick yet luminous substance of the pearl.

"I was pretty certain of it from the first, that is why I was so keen.

It is one of the most wonderful necklaces the world has ever seen. It once belonged to the Russian royal family--as your old man in Seville did. He knew what he was doing when he gave it to your mother, and when he wrote out that paper, which was a deed of gift, witnessed by his old Chinese servant and the Russian consul. I had it translated first thing this morning. It will hold good in a court of law. It was the Chinese servant who painted the pictures on the pearls to hide and disguise them, and by Gee! he was an artist, that fellow. Only a trained eye like mine would have suspected the truth. And let me tell you, Mrs.

Valdana, with any one but you I should have made use of my knowledge to my own advantage. It is my business to do so. Every business man is ent.i.tled to make use of the ignorance of those he deals with. That is business training, _we_ have learned it and paid for it, the other party has n't. It is like a doctor's fees. You pay him because he knows better than you. He has been in training for years, and paid with his mind and his soul for that training, while you have been busy with other things--training in another direction perhaps. Well, the time comes when you need his training and you pay for it."

"I understand," said Val quietly.

He laughed.

"No, you don't understand at all. You could never understand such a method. You have never got the best of any one in your life. That is why I am not going to use my method in your case. But I can tell you,"

he added with a grim smile, "it is a unique case. I never did such a thing before in my life and never will again. It is a good thing after all that there are not many people like you in the world, Mrs. Valdana.

Jewellers with hearts might be ruined."

"It is very kind of you, but I can't accept this sacrifice of your interests," said Val, stammering a little, very embarra.s.sed and uncomfortable. "I couldn't dream of accepting it," she added firmly.

"Don't worry--skip," said he laughing. "My sacrifice is only comparative. At the worst I stand to make anything between five to twenty-five thousand pounds out of the deal."

"Are you sure?"

"Dead sure--seventy-five thousand pounds sure," he said dryly. "My philanthropy does n't run to such risks as that. It only means that if you had n't happened to be _you_, it would have been I who took seventy-five and the rest and you who got the speculative twenty-five."

"I think you are too kind," she said. "I don't know how to thank you."

"Don't try," he said blithely. "It will be a good deal all round, and everybody happy. That old Russian knew something when he told your mother to put it by for a day of need. Now I am going to fix the matter instantly and give you a cheque for half the amount on the Bank of France. The rest you shall have to-morrow. Sit down while I get busy."

She asked him to make out a clear statement of the sale, price, etc., and to give it to her. She had a special purpose in this. In the act of writing he looked up suddenly.

"By the way, talking of doctors, do you remember a man called Westenra who was on board the _Bavaric_?" He looked at her keenly, for he remembered very well the talk of her interest in that same man. But of the truth he had no inkling.

"Yes," she said slowly.

"Well, what do you think? I got appendicitis in New York last May, and my partner, who is an American, said to me, 'There is only one man for you, and he is the best man in New York; come along to his nursing home.' And when I got there who was his famous guy but our man from the _Bavaric_! What do you think of that?"

"I knew he was a surgeon," said Val evenly.

"Well, I tell you, I was surprised. He did me up bully. He 's got a fine place there in 68th Street. A tip-top show; everything running on wheels. And a corking, handsome girl that he 's going to marry, at the head of things."

He applied himself to his writing.

"Is he not married already?" said Mrs. Valdana, and he thought, as he had often thought before, what a strange melancholy cadence her voice possessed.

"A widower, I believe. The nurses told me so at any rate. You know what jolly gossips they are. But Miss Holland is a cut above the ordinary American nurse, that's why they 're so jealous of her, I guess, and ready to say that she 's been after the doctor for years, and only made a success of the place because of that. And why not, I say?

That's what most women make a success of things for, isn't it, Mrs.

Valdana--some fellow?"

"Or a failure of things!" said Mrs. Valdana, following some train of thought of her own. There was a deeper melancholy in her voice, and he thought how tired and ill she looked.

"You ought to get away for a change, Mrs. Valdana," he said, when he handed her the cheque and shook hands in farewell. "You look like a woman who 's come to the end of her tether."

She felt like it too. She went home like a woman who has heard the sentence of death p.r.o.nounced upon her. In the Metro she lay back in her corner with closed eyes and whispered to herself.

"What is the good? What is the good? Oh, that one might let go--lay it all down and go to rest!"

But she knew she could not. There are always ropes to bind the hopeless ones fast to life--to pull them forth from the shadows back to the bleak grey road of life. Bran was her rope.

At the concierge's lodge she was informed that several visitors had called and gone, but one, more persistent, waited for her on her landing.

"He has been many times, poor soul," said she, "and one has not the heart to refuse him entrance. I think he is one of those whom Art has been too much for."

Val hardly heard her. A sort of numb dulness that had taken possession of her prevented her from feeling anything but a pa.s.sing vexation that she might not be alone; heavily she climbed the stair and came at last to the door. A tall loose figure in grey tweeds rose up at her from the doorstep.

"Val! Will you forgive me for d.o.g.g.i.ng you like this?" said a humble trembling voice she did not know. She had to peer into his face and examine him before it dawned upon her that it was Horace Valdana.

"How did you find me?" she said dully. He was sitting doubled up in the most comfortable chair in the studio. But there was no comfort in his face or att.i.tude. His arms, pressed in a curious way against his stomach, seemed holding something there that hurt him.

"Bribed one of Branker Preston's office boys."

This simple statement was in keeping with all the rest he had uttered within the last hour. The man was changed. He was finished with lying and subterfuge because life had finished with him--or was finishing rapidly. The hand of death was on him at last, there could be no mistake about it this time. His doom was dight. He had lied and lied, but nothing he could now say availed, for his face told the truth. He was doomed, and by some strange act of justice the fell disease that had him in its grip was the very one he had only pretended to have years before when playing for her sympathy and money.

And Val, during that hour in which she sat listening to him not so much pleading his cause as merely stating his case in all its hideous pitifulness, came to the decision that she had no longer right nor reason for withholding such help as he begged. It had been a black, terrible hour.

Not less so because she was really touched by the look of suffering on his face, by those spasmodic jerks of his arms, and that habit of holding fast to something within that ate like a rat at his vitals, while sweat broke out on his forehead and a grey agony pa.s.sed ghostlike across his face. Her heart could never harden itself against suffering, and she came nearer in those moments to forgetting the wrongs Valdana had worked upon her than ever before.

And it looked uncommonly like her duty to forgive this man and take care of him now that he so urgently needed it. There was no one else in the world to do it. For his mother was dead, and his secret buried with her. She had died very suddenly, the end doubtless brought on by the dreadful anxiety of having to carry that same secret unshared. Such provision as she could secretly make for him she had made, but it was only a slight one, and Valdana had long been at the end of his resources.

"And if you turn me down, Val, and you have every right to, I shan't blame you a bit. I shall see what the Seine can do for me--though I 'd rather it had been the old Thames."

A better man would have given the river first refusal perhaps, but Valdana had never set up for a hero, and was not going to begin now.

In the end her decision was clinched as often happens by something outside herself. A terrible spasm seized him, doubling him up right there before her, turning him grey, and jerking a groan of agony from the very depths of him. A fit of shivering succeeded, and it was plain that the man was not fit to be up and about. His place was in bed, under medical supervision.

With decision came energy, and in a few moments she had him lying on the large divan in which she and Bran were used to sleep, covered up, and a steaming cup of tea inside him. Then she ran downstairs to the concierge's lodge and telephoned for a doctor. Afterwards she sent round to Bran's governess to ask them to keep him for the night. They were good responsible people, and she knew that she could trust them with her child--for a night at least, until she knew what further was to be done.

The doctor suggested a hospital; such a case, he said, needed constant nursing and care.

"Unless you are well enough off to have a nurse to help you," and he tried not to look doubtfully around him at the big bare studio, "I should think you had better try and get rid of the responsibility of this hopeless case by putting him into one of the English or American hospitals here. You are American, are n't you?"

"I have plenty of money," said Val, leaving his question unanswered, "and am quite able to have help in nursing him here. Please give me full instructions and information."

The doctor looked surprised, and more so when, after he had examined Valdana, she paid him his fee and took down the address of the best cancer specialist in Paris.