“Perhaps you recall, madame, that yesterday Lord Almsbury mentioned I had brought several objects of interest and value with me from abroad? Some of those things were in my coach and in the hope that you might honour me by looking at them I had a case unpacked last night. Would you be so kind, madame?”
Amber was about to refuse but decided that she might as well do that as go back upstairs and sit alone, and probably cry again. “Thank you, sir. I’d like to see them.”
“They’re in the library, madame.”
The great room was dark, oak-panelled and but dimly lighted. Before the fireplace there was a large table spread with several articles and next to it was a torchère; the shelves of books stood far away in the spreading gloom. Almsbury was no ardent scholar and the place smelled unaired and musty.
Amber approached the table without interest, but immediately her indifference turned to delight, for it was covered with a great number of rare and delicate and precious things. There was a small white marble statue, a Venus with the head broken off; a blackamoor carved out of ebony with an enamelled skirt of ostrich feathers and real jewels in the turban and around the thick muscular arms; a heavy gold frame, exquisitely wrought; tortoise-shell jewel-boxes and diamond buttons and dainty blown-glass perfume-bottles. Each was perfect of its kind and had been selected by a man whose taste was never-failing.
“Oh, how beautiful! Oh! Look at this!” She turned to him eagerly, eyes sparkling. “Can I pick it up if I’m careful?”
He smiled, bowed again. “Certainly, madame. Please do.”
Forgetting that she did not like him she began to ask him questions. He told her where he had found each one, what its history was, through whose hands it had passed before it had come to him. She liked the story of the blackamoor best:
“Two hundred years ago there was a Venetian lady—very beautiful, as all ladies in legends are—and she owned a gigantic black slave whom her husband believed to be a eunuch. But he was not and when the lady bore his black child she had the infant killed and a white one put in its place. The midwife, from some motive of jealousy or revenge, told the husband of his wife’s infidelity and he killed the slave before her eyes. She had the ebony statue made, secretly of course, in her lover’s memory.”
At last, when there was no more to be said, she thanked him and turned away with a sigh. “They’re all wonderful. I envy you, my lord.” She could never see a beautiful thing without longing violently to possess it.
“Won’t you allow me, madame, to make you a gift?”
She turned swiftly. “Oh, but your Lordship! They must mean a great deal to you!”
“They do, madame, I admit it. But your own appreciation is so keen I know that whichever you choose will be loved as much by you as it could be by me.”
For several moments she stared at them critically, determined to make the one choice she would not regret, deciding first on one and then another. She stood bent forward, tapping her fan on her chin, wholly absorbed. Slowly she became aware that he was watching her and gave him a swift sidelong glance, for she wanted to catch his expression before he could change it. As she had expected he glanced hastily away, refusing to meet her eyes, but nevertheless the look she had surprised on his face made the frank good-natured lust of Lord Rawstorne seem naive and artless. The repugnance she had felt the first moment of their meeting came back again, stronger than ever. What is there about this old man? she thought. He’s strange—he’s strange and nasty.
She picked up the blackamoor—which was very heavy and about two feet high—and turned to the Earl. Once more he presented to her a face cool and polite, austere as an anchorite’s.
“This is what I want,” she said.
“Certainly, madame.” She thought that a hint of a smile lurked somewhere about his thin mouth, but she could not be sure. Had her choice amused him, or was it only her imagination, perhaps a trick of the lighting? “But if you are of a timid nature, madame, perhaps another choice would be more comfortable to you. There’s an old superstition the statue’s cursed and brings ill-luck to whoever owns it.”
She glanced at him sharply, momentarily alarmed, for she was passionately superstitious and knew it. But she decided instantly that he did not want to part with the blackamoor after all and was trying to scare her into making a less valuable choice. She would have kept it now no matter what the curse might be and her eyes glittered defiance.
“Pooh, my lord! That’s a tale to scare children and old ladies! But it doesn’t scare me! Unless you have some objection—I’ll take this.”
He bowed again and this time she knew that he was smiling, ever so faintly. “I protest, madame. I have no objections at all —and I knew that you were a person of too much wit to be alarmed by such foolishness.”
