The Sleuth of St. James's Square by Melville Davisson Post (black authors fiction txt) 📕

A moment later the butler appeared with a card on his tray. It was a card newly engraved in some English shop and bore the name “Dr. Tsan-Sgam.” The girl stood for a moment puzzled at the queer name, and then the memory of the strange outlandish human creatures, from the ends of the world, who used sometimes to visit her father, in the old time, returned, and with it there came a sudden upward sweep of the heart—was there an answer to her longing, somehow, incredibly on the way!

She gave a direction for the visitor to be brought in. He was a big old man. His body looked long and muscular like that of some type of Englishmen, but his head and his features were Mongolian. He was entirely bald, as bald as the palm of a hand, as though bald from his mother he had so remained to this incredible age. And age was the impression that he profoundly presented. But it was age that a tough vitality in the man resisted; as though the assault of time wore it down slowly and with almost an imperceptible detritus. The great naked head and the wide Mongolian face were unshrunken; they presented, rather, the aspect of some old child. He was dressed with extreme care, in the very best evening clothes that one could buy in a London shop.

He bowed, oddly, with a slow doubling of the body, and when he spoke the girl felt that he was translating his words through more than one language; as though one were to put one's sentences into French or Italian and from that, as a sort of intermediary, into English—as though the way were long, and unfamiliar from the medium in which the man thought to the one in which he was undertaking to express it. But at the end of this involved mental process his English sentences appeared correctly, and with an accurate selection in the words.

“You must pardon the hour, Miss Carstair,” he said, in his slow, precise articulation, “but I am required to see you and it is the only time I have.”

Then his eyes caught the necklace on the table, and advancing with two steps he stooped over it.

For a moment everything else seemed removed, from about the man. His angular body, in its unfamiliar dress, was doubled like a finger; his great head with its wide Mongolian face was close down over the buhl top of the table and his finger moved the heap of rubies.

The girl had a sudden inspiration.

“Lord Eckhart got these jewels from you?”

The man paused, he seemed to be moving the girl's words backward through the intervening languages.

Then he replied.

“Yes,” he said, “from us.”

The girl's inspiration was now illumined by a further light.

“And you have not been paid for them?”

The man stood up now. And again this involved process of moving the words back through various translations was visible—and the answer up.

“Yes—” he said, “we have been paid.”

Then he added, in explanation of his act.

“These rubies have no equal in the world—and the gold-work attaching them together is extremely old. I am always curious to admire it.”

He looked down at the girl, at the necklace, at the space about them, as though he were deeply, profoundly puzzled.

“We had a fear,” he said, “—it was wrong!”

Then he put his hand swiftly into the bosom pocket of his evening coat, took out a thin packet wrapped in a piece of vellum and handed it to the girl.

“It became necessary to treat with the English Government about the removal of records from Lhassa and I was sent—I was directed to get this packet to you from London. To-night, at dinner with Sir Henry Marquis in St. James's Square, I learned that you were here. I had then only this hour to come, as my boat leaves in the morning.” He spoke with the extreme care of one putting together a delicate mosaic.

The girl stood staring at the thin packet. A single thought alone consumed her.

“It is a message from—my—father.”

She spoke almost in a whisper.

The big Oriental replied immediately.

“No,” he said, “your father is beyond sight and hearing.”

The girl had no hope; only the will to hope. The reply was confirmation of what she already knew. She removed the thin vellum wrapper from the packet. Within she found a drawing on a plate of ivory. It represented a shaft of some white stone standing on the slight elevation of what seemed to be a barren plateau. And below on the plate, in fine English characters like an engraving, was the legend, “Erected to the memory of Major Judson Carstair by the monastery at the Head.”

The man added a word of explanation.

“The Brotherhood thought that you would wish to know that your father's body had been recovered, and that it had received Christian burial, as nearly as we were able to interpret the forms. The stone is a sort of granite.”

The girl wished to ask a thousand questions: How did her father meet his death, and where? What did they know? What had they recovered with his body?

The girl spoke impulsively, her words crowding one another. And the Oriental seemed able only to disengage the last query from the others.

“Unfortunately,” he said, “some band of the desert people had passed before our expedition arrived, nothing was recovered but the body. It was not mutilated.”

They had been standing. The girl now indicated the big library chair in which she had been huddled and got another for herself. Then she wished to know what they had learned about her father's death.

The Oriental sat down. He sat awkwardly, his big body, in a kind of squat posture, the broad Mongolian face emerging, as in a sort of deformity, from the collar of his evening coat. Then he began to speak, with that conscious effect of bringing his words through various mediums from a distance.

“We endeavored to discourage Major Carstair from undertaking this adventure. We were greatly concerned about his safety. The sunken plateau of the Gobi Desert, north of the Shan States, is exceedingly dangerous for an European, not so much on account of murderous attacks from the desert people, for this peril we could prevent; but there is a chill in this sunken plain after sunset that the native people only can resist. No white man has ever crossed the low land of the Gobi.”

He paused.

“And there is in fact no reason why any one should wish to cross it. It is absolutely barren. We pointed out all this very carefully to Major Carstair when we learned what he had in plan, for as I have said his