Page:The Mating of the Blades.djvu/77



Hector inclined his head.

“Yes,” he said. “It would be like giving up something that I have waited for … through the centuries …”

He stood there, staring into the fretwork of delicate purple and heliotrope shadows that cloaked the room like a silken veil.

In the corner was a pedestal of ebony and nacre which supported a great Persian incense bowl. Heavy smoke clouds floated and twisted about like a vaporous, gigantic furnace of opal colors wreathing up to the ceiling, with a hot, honey-sweet scent of lilies and lotus buds and sandalwood, and it seemed to Hector as if he were on the borderland of dim, half-forgotten things, on the frontier of a new life—new, yet, somehow, subconsciously remembered—which was remote, not in years nor in distance, but in codified, standardized principles of civilization, from the life, the personal experiences, the very physical and psychical reactions he had known heretofore; as if the ancient blade that was throbbing in his hand were a pointing the way to a Life of To-morrow beside which his Life of Yesterday and To-day faded to a wretched, meaningless dream.

It was like a rush of giant splendor that threatened to overwhelm his mind, his sober, prosy, saving British commonsense and prejudices. … And then, out of the trooping shadows where Ali Yusuf Khan had squatted down on a heap of pillows, came the words, in gentle, purring Persian:

“Take the money, saheb, and keep the blade. No, no, no!” as Hector, recalled to earth, was about to