Fire-Tongue, Sax Rohmer [trending books to read TXT] 📗

instant the dynamic force beneath the placid surface exhibited itself in every line of his gaunt face. He was transfigured; he was a man of monstrous energy, of tremendous enthusiasm. Then the enthusiasm vanished. He was a creature of stone again; the familiar and taciturn Nicol Brinn, known and puzzled over in the club lands of the world.

“Name?”

“She gave none.”

“English?”

“No, sir, a foreign lady.”

“In.”

Hoskins having retired, and having silently closed the door, Nicol Brinn did an extraordinary thing, a thing which none of his friends in London, Paris, or New York would ever have supposed him capable of doing. He raised his clenched hands. “Please God she has come,” he whispered. “Dare I believe it? Dare I believe it?”

The door was opened again, and Hoskins, standing just inside, announced: “The lady to see you, sir.”

He stepped aside and bowed as a tall, slender woman entered the room. She wore a long wrap trimmed with fur, the collar turned up about her face. Three steps forward she took and stopped. Hoskins withdrew and closed the door.

At that, while Nicol Brinn watched her with completely transfigured features, the woman allowed the cloak to slip from her shoulders, and, raising her head, extended both her hands, uttering a subdued cry of greeting that was almost a sob. She was dark, with the darkness of the East, but beautiful with a beauty that was tragic. Her eyes were glorious wells of sadness, seeming to mirror a soul that had known a hundred ages. Withal she had the figure of a girl, slender and supple, possessing the poetic grace and poetry of movement born only in the Orient.

“Naida!” breathed Nicol Brinn, huskily. “Naida!”

His high voice had softened, had grown tremulous. He extended his hands with a groping movement The woman laughed shudderingly.

Her cloak lying forgotten upon the carpet, she advanced toward him.

She wore a robe that was distinctly Oriental without being in the slightest degree barbaric. Her skin was strangely fair, and jewels sparkled upon her fingers. She conjured up dreams of the perfumed luxury of the East, and was a figure to fire the imagination. But Nicol Brinn seemed incapable of movement; his body was inert, but his eyes were on fire. Into the woman’s face had come anxiety that was purely feminine.

“Oh, my big American sweetheart,” she whispered, and, approaching him with a sort of timidity, laid her little hands upon his arm. “Do you still think I am beautiful?”

“Beautiful!”

No man could have recognized the voice of Nicol Brinn. Suddenly his arms were about her like bands of iron, and with a long, wondering sigh she lay back looking up into his face, while he gazed hungrily into her eyes. His lips had almost met hers when softly, almost inaudibly, she sighed: “Nicol!”

She pronounced the name queerly, giving to i the value of ee, and almost dropping the last letter entirely.

Their lips met, and for a moment they clung together, this woman of the East and man of the West, in utter transgression of that law which England’s poet has laid down. It was a reunion speaking of a love so deep as to be sacred.

Lifting the woman in his arms lightly as a baby, he carried her to the settee between the two high windows and placed her there amid Oriental cushions, where she looked like an Eastern queen. He knelt at her feet and, holding both her hands, looked into her face with that wondering expression in which there was something incredulous and something sorrowful; a look of great and selfless tenderness. The face of Naida was lighted up, and her big eyes filled with tears. Disengaging one of her jewelled hands, she ruffled Nicol Brinn’s hair.

“My Nicol,” she said, tenderly. “Have I changed so much?”

Her accent was quaint and fascinating, but her voice was very musical. To the man who knelt at her feet it was the sweetest music in the world.

“Naida,” he whispered. “Naida. Even yet I dare not believe that you are here.”

“You knew I would come?”

“How was I to know that you would see my message?”

She opened her closed left hand and smoothed out a scrap of torn paper which she held there. It was from the “Agony” column of that day’s Times.

N. November 23, 1913. N. B. See Telephone Directory.

“I told you long, long ago that I would come if ever you wanted me.”

“Long, long ago,” echoed Nicol Brinn. “To me it has seemed a century; to-night it seems a day.”

He watched her with a deep and tireless content. Presently her eyes fell. “Sit here beside me,” she said. “I have not long to be here. Put your arms round me. I have something to tell you.”

He seated himself beside her on the settee, and held her close. “My Naida!” he breathed softly.

“Ah, no, no!” she entreated. “Do you want to break my heart?”

He suddenly released her, clenched his big hands, and stared down at the carpet. “You have broken mine.”

Impulsively Naida threw her arms around his neck, coiling herself up lithely and characteristically beside him.

“My big sweetheart,” she whispered, crooningly. “Don’t say it—don’t say it.”

“I have said it. It is true.”

Turning, fiercely he seized her. “I won’t let you go!” he cried, and there was a strange light in his eyes. “Before I was helpless, now I am not. This time you have come to me, and you shall stay.”

She shrank away from him terrified, wild-eyed. “Oh, you forget, you forget!”

“For seven years I have tried to forget. I have been mad, but to-night I am sane.”

“I trusted you, I trusted you!” she moaned.

Nicol Brinn clenched his teeth grimly for a moment, and then, holding her averted face very close to his own, he began to speak in a low, monotonous voice. “For seven years,” he said, “I have tried to die, because without you I did not care to live. I have gone into the bad lands of the world and into the worst spots of those bad lands. Night and day your eyes have watched me, and I have wakened from dreams of your kisses and gone out to court murder. I have earned the reputation of being something more than human, but I am not. I had everything that life could give me except you. Now I have got you, and I am going to keep you.”

Naida began to weep silently. The low, even voice of Nicol Brinn ceased. He could feel