The tomb of Ts'in
“I am Shun the son of the great mechanic Chu-Shun upon whom the door
fell when the Emperor passed. This my father told me before the day,
fearing the treachery of the eunuchs. Behold the pelican on the left
wall with the bronze neck… afterwards the spirit steps of jade…
afterwards river of silver, afterwards… door of bronze. Here Emperor…
behind a great room filled with most precious treasures.”
He read it twice, then handed the bracelet to the girl. She looked at
him for the space of a minute. Here, in the heart of prosaic London,
with the dull roar of the traffic coming to them gustily across the
sparse herbage of a most commonplace park, Shun the son of Chu-Shun
spoke across the gulf of twenty centuries.
“It is very wonderful,” she said, and looked at the bracelet.
“I think you had better let me keep this bracelet,” he said; “at any
rate for a while. I beg you to believe”--he raised his hand
solemnly--“that I consider only your own safety, and I am moved to the
suggestion by the knowledge that you attach no sentimental value to
the ornament, that it was given to you by somebody whom your mother
likes, but who is repugnant to you, and that you only wear it in order
to save yourself the discomfort and exasperation of a daily argument
with your parent.”
She stared at him in open-eyed amazement.
“How--how did you know that?” she asked.
“You carry it in your bag. You frowned when you took it out to show
me,” he said cheerfully. “You carry it in your bag only because you
must keep it by you in order to slip it on and off when you are out of
somebody’s sight. If it were your fiancé, you would either wear it or
leave it at home--engaged people clear up their differences as they go
along. Evidently you are a lady of strong character, strong enough to
respect the foibles or the demands of your elders. Therefore it must
be your father or your mother; and since fathers are naturally
indignant and notoriously unsentimental, I cannot imagine that he
would insist----”
“Thank you,” she said hurriedly. “Will you keep the bracelet for me,
and return it at your leisure to this address?”
She extracted a card from her bag, and he looked at it and read:
Miss Yvonne Yale.
406, Upper Curzon Street, S.W.
“Yvonne,” he read gravely. “I’ve never known anybody named Yvonne.”
He put the bracelet in his inside pocket, and buttoned the worn coat
again.
“I have no card,” he said. “I am Captain Ted Talham of the Victorian
Mounted Infantry, of the Bechuanaland Mounted Police, of the Imperial
Bushmen, and I am, in addition, a general in the army of the Dowager
Empress of China, a mandarin of the Fourth Class, and a wearer of the
Sun of Heaven and the Imperial Dragon Orders.”
He recited this with all gravity. There was no glint of humour in his
eyes. The girl checked her smile when she realised how serious this
good-looking man was. There was pride in the recital of his dignities:
it was a very important matter that he should be Captain of Irregular
Horse, and as tremendous a happening that he should wear the
decorations of the Manchu dynasty.
She held out her hand.
“I am sure my mother will be glad to meet you,” she said, “and as for
myself I cannot tell you how grateful I am that you should have been
so providentially at hand this afternoon.”
He bowed, a ceremonious and correct little bow.
“That is the luck of the game,” he said.
There was an awkward pause. He was so evidently trying to say
something more.
“I think it is right, and it is my duty,” he said at last, “to point
out to you the very significant fact that so far I have not offered
you my address. This,” he went on oracularly, “is all the more
significant and alarming when I tell you that the intrinsic value of
the bangle”--he tapped his pocket--“is anything from fifteen hundred
to twenty-five hundred pounds.”
“Impossible!” said the startled girl.
It was altogether an amazing afternoon.
He nodded.
“Possibly the latter figure,” he said. “Let the fact sink into your
mind, and add to it the alarming intelligence that I have no address,
and I have no address because I have exactly three yen in unchangeable
Chinese silver between myself and the ravening world.”
A wave of pity surged over the girl, and there were tears in her
eyes--tears that sprang most unexpectedly from unsuspected wells of
sympathy.
She fumbled in her bag, but he stopped her.
“I beg of you,” he said reproachfully. “If you can’t trust me with two
thousand pounds’ worth of jade, believe me, I can trust you with my
secret, and a secret is only existent just so long as either of the
two parties affected do nothing overtly or covertly to destroy the
basic foundation upon which it rests. My secret is momentary
penury--remove that and the secret ceases to be.”
He would have said more, but checked himself.
“In fact,” he concluded, “if you offer me money, I shall offer you
your jade bangle, and there will be the end of the matter.”
She was laughing now--her eyes danced with merriment.
There was something amusing in the situation. This seedy gentleman
with his unchangeable yen, his problematical dinner and bed, with two
thousand pounds in his inside pocket, appealed to her sense of the
grotesque. If young De Costa knew! Young change-counting,
bill-checking, tipless De Costa, who had given her two thousand pounds
in the innocence of his heart.
“Promise me that you will call?” she asked laughingly, “with or
without the bangle.”
“With the bangle,” he said. “To-night I shall make it very clear to
the ‘Noble Child,’ ‘Hope of the Spring,’ and ‘Star of the Yamen’ that
the bracelet has passed to my possession and that henceforward if they
wish to follow its wearer they must follow me.”
He shook hands again, lifted his hat, and turning abruptly, left her.
CHAPTER II.
THE MAN IN THE DRAWER.
His Excellency Prince Chu-Hsi-Han, Ambassador to the Court of St.
James, picked up the card from the tray, and examined it calmly
through his rimless glasses.
“Is the distinguished stranger below?” he asked.
“Excellent Highness,” said the Mongolian in the livery of the Embassy,
“I placed the distinguished stranger in the red room.”
The Ambassador nodded.
“Conduct him to my unworthy presence,” he said, and the servant bowed
twice and left the room silently.
He returned in a few minutes and announced the visitor in faultless
English.
“Signor Tillizinni.”
Tillizinni, spare of build, with his keen, eager face and his black
and white colouring, formed a strong note in that room of soft
pearl-blue draperies and shaded lights. He offered his hand with a
little bow to the impassive Oriental who rose from his desk to meet
him.
“Your Excellency expected me?” he asked, and the Ambassador smiled,
for Tillizinni spoke in the Chinese--that peculiar “Mandarin Chinese”
which only the statesmen and diplomatists of China employ.
“You are a veritable signor,” he said quietly. “You have the accent
which suggests a course of training in the forbidden city.”
Tillizinni flushed--he was susceptible on the intellectual side.
“I am flattered,” he said. “Yet I studied no nearer to Pekin than
Florence.”
“I congratulate you,” said the Prince, and with his own hands drew a
chair forward.
“Be seated,” he said, “and tell me exactly what you require.”
He was speaking in English now.
Tillizinni took from his pocket a long envelope and extracted a number
of newspaper cuttings.
“Your Excellency wrote an article in the _North American Review_,” he
said, “which dealt extensively with the early history of your
country.”
The Ambassador nodded.
“You dealt extensively with the life of the First Emperor.”
Again the Ambassador nodded.
“One could not deal effectively with the history of China,” he smiled,
“unless one wrote of the First Emperor. He built the great wall and
stimulated all the best efforts of my countrymen--and though it was
two thousand years ago, his influence is still felt.”
It was Tillizinni who smiled now.
“His influence is felt here in London,” he said grimly, “and in no
place more completely than in Scotland Yard, which, as your Excellency
may know, affords me employment.”
“At Scotland Yard?”
The Chinese Ambassador’s eyebrows rose.
“At Scotland Yard,” repeated the other. “But if your Excellency will
proceed----”
The Prince was a great littérateur, and since he was riding his
hobby, needed little encouragement.
“The First Emperor did many wonderful things,” he said. “He also did
many things, which I say humbly and with due reverence to his
illustrious memory”--he bowed his head--“were not wise, for he
destroyed all the literature which China possessed, burnt books and
documents, and forbade on pain of death any attempt on the part of
students to retain the writings of the just. All this you will find
dealt with in the story in a sketchy way.”
Again Tillizinni nodded.
“Here is a paragraph I would like to direct your special attention,”
he said, and indicated a page on which a paragraph had been outlined
with blue pencil.
“Pardon me!” said his Excellency. He was apologising for the fact that
it was necessary for him to employ his pince-nez; for your well-bred
Chinaman be he all but blind, does not wear his spectacles in the
presence of his guest.
“Ah, that,” he tapped the blue paragraph with his finger, “that is a
literal extract from the writings of our greatest historian, and
describes the burial of the First Emperor.”
He read aloud in his soft English, tracing the printed lines with his
tapered fingers as he proceeded:
“In the 9th moon the First Emperor was buried in Mount Li, which in
the early days of his reign he had caused to be tunnelled and prepared
with that view. Then, when he had consolidated the Empire, he employed
his soldiery, to the number of 700,000, to bore down to the Three
Springs (that is, until the water was reached), and there a firm
foundation was laid and the sarcophagus placed thereon. Rare objects
and costly jewels were collected from the palaces and from the various
officials, and were carried thither and stored in huge quantities.
Artificers were ordered to construct mechanical crossbows, which, if
any one were to enter, would immediately discharge their arrows. With
the aid of quicksilver, rivers were made--the Yangtsze, the Yellow
River, and the great ocean--the metal being made to flow from one into
the other by machinery. On the roof were delineated the constellations
of the sky, on the floor the geographical divisions of the earth.
Candles were made from the fat of the man-fish (walrus), calculated to
last for a very long time. The Second Emperor said: ‘It is not fitting
that the concubines of my late father who are without children should
leave him now’; and accordingly he ordered them to accompany the dead
monarch to the next world, those who thus perished being many in
number. When the interment was completed, some one suggested that the
workmen who had made the machinery and concealed the treasure knew the
great value of the latter, and that the secret would leak out.
Therefore, so soon as the ceremony was over, and the path giving
access to the sarcophagus had been blocked up at its innermost end,
the outside gate at the entrance to this path was let fall, and the
mausoleum was effectually closed, so that not one of the workmen
escaped. Trees and grass were then planted around, that the spot might
look like the rest of the mountain.”
Tillizinni nodded.
“That is the trouble,” he said.
“Trouble?”
It is not etiquette for a high-born Chinaman to express his
astonishment in the exclamatory style of the West; yet the Prince was
obviously astonished.