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Page 75
Lady Muriel found the drawing-room of her former employer in some
confusion; rugs were rolled up, bronzes were being packed. But
in the disorder of it the proprietor was imperturbable. He
merely elevated his eyebrows at her reappearance. She went
instantly to the point.
"Hecklemeir," she said, "how would you like to have a definite
objective in your explorations?"
The man looked at her keenly.
"What do you mean precisely?" he replied.
"I mean," she continued, "something that would bring one fame and
fortune if one found it." And she added, as a bit of lure, "You
remember the gold plates Hector Bartlett dug up in Syria?"
He came over closer to her; his little eyes narrowed.
"What have you got?" he said.
His facetious manner - that vulgar persons imagine to be
distinguished - was gone out of him. He was direct and simple.
She replied with no attempt at subterfuge.
"I've got a map of a route to some sort of treasure - I don't
know what - It's in the Karamajo Mountains in the French Congo;
a map to it and a water color of the thing."
Hecklemeir did not ask how Lady Muriel came by the thing she
claimed; his profession always avoided such detail. But he knew
that she had gone to Bramwell Winton; and what she had must have
come from some scientific source. The mention of Hector Bartlett
was not without its virtue.
Lady Muriel marked the man's changed manner, and pushed her
trade.
"I want a check for a hundred pounds and a third of the thing
when you bring it out."
Hecklemeir stood for a moment with the tips of his fingers
pressed against his lips; then replied.
"If you have anything like the thing you describe, I'll give you
a hundred pounds . . . let me see it."
She took the water color out of the bosom of her jacket and gave
it to him.
He carried it over to the window and studied it a moment. Then
he turned with a sneering oath.
"The devil take your treasure," he said, "these things are
water-elephants. I don't care a farthing if they stand on the
bottom of every lake in Africa!"
And he flung the water color toward her. Mechanically the
stunned woman picked it up and smoothed it out in her fingers.
With the key to the picture she saw it clearly, the shadowy
bodies of the beasts and the tips of their trunks distended on
the surface like a purple flower. And vaguely, as though it were
a memory from a distant life, she recalled hearing the French
Ambassador and Baron Rudd discussing the report of an explorer
who pretended to have seen these supposed fabulous elephants come
out of an African forest and go down under the waters of Lake
Leopold.
She stood there a moment, breaking the thing into pieces with her
bare hands. Then she went out. At the door on the landing she
very nearly stepped against a little cockney.
"My Lidy," he whined, "I was bringing your gloves; you dropped
them on your way up."
She took them mechanically and began to draw them on . . . the
cryptic sign of the cleaner on the wrist hem was now to her
indicatory of her submerged estate. The little cockney hung
about a moment as for a gratuity delayed, then he disappeared
down the stair before her.
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