FullReads

A wind was coming up and I think it was the rattle of the window that aroused me. There was no moon, but under the open stars the world was filled with a thin, ghostly light, and the scene below the window was blurred a little like an impalpable picture.

A low-masted sailing ship lay in the open sea; there was a boat at the edge of the loch, and human figures were coming out of the boathouse with burdens which they were loading into the boat. Almost immediately the boat, manned with rowers, turned about and silently traversed the crook of the loch on its way to the ship. But certain of the human figures remained. They continued between the boathouse and the beach.

And I realized that I had opened my eyes on the loading of a ship. The boat was taking off a cargo.

Something stored in the boathouse was being transferred to the hold of the sailing ship. The scene was inconceivably unreal. There was no sound but the intermittent puffs of the wind, and the figures were like phantoms in a sort of lighted mist. Directly as I looked two figures came out of the boathouse and along the path to the drawing-room door under my window. I took off my shoes and crept carefully out of the room and down the stairway. The door from the hall into the long, low room was ajar. I stood behind it, and looked in through the crack.

My uncle was burning letters and papers in the fireplace with a candle, and in the chair beyond him sat the strangest human creature that I had ever seen in the world.

He was a big Oriental with a sodden, brutal face fixed as by some sorcery into an expression of eternal calm. He wore the uniform of an English skipper. It was dirty and sea-stained as though picked up at some sailor’s auction. He was speaking to my uncle and his careful precise sentences in the English tongue, coming from the creature, seemed thereby to take on added menace.

“Is it wise, Sahib,” he said, “to leave any man behind us in this house?”

“We can do nothing else,” replied my uncle.

The Oriental continued with the same carefully selected words:

“Easily we can do something else, Sahib,” he said, “with a bar of pig securely lashed to the ankles, the sea would receive them.”

“No, no,” replied my uncle, busy with his letters and the candle. The big Oriental did not move.

“Reflect, Sahib,” he went on. “We are entering an immense peril. The thing that will be hunting us has innumerable agencies everywhere in its service. If it shall discover that we have falsified its symbols, it will search the earth for us. And what are we, Sahib, against this thing? It does not die, nor wax old, nor grow weary.”

“The lad knows nothing,” replied my uncle, “and old Andrew will keep silent.”

“Without trouble, Sahib,” the creature continued, “I can put the young one beyond all knowledge and the old one beyond all speech. Is it permitted?”

My uncle got up from the fireplace, for he had finished with his work.

“No,” he said, “let there be an end of it.”

He turned about, and under the glimmer of the candle I could see that the man had changed; his big pale face was grim with some determined purpose, and there was about him the courage and the authority of one who, after long wavering, at last hazards a desperate venture. He broke the glass box and put the Buddha into his pocket.

“It is good silver,” he said, “and it has served its purpose.”

The Oriental got softly onto his feet like a great toy of cotton wood. His face remained in its expression of equanimity, and he added no further word of gesture to his argument.

My uncle held the door open for him to pass out, and after that he extinguished the candle and followed, closing the door noiselessly behind him.