As Solar Pons and his distinguished associates discover, the exotic East exports more than spices and wise men. The perceptive importer must discern between the valuable and the questionable treasures.
Solar Pons and I were at breakfast one fair morning only a week after our return from the country and the curious affair of the Whispering Knights, when the door below was thrown violently open, and there was a rush of feet on the stairs that stopped short of our threshold. Pons looked up, his grey eyes intent, his whole lean figure taut with waiting.
“A young woman, agitated,” he said, nodding. He flashed a glance at the clock. “Scarcely seven. It is surely a matter of some urgency to her. The hour has only now occurred to her. She hesitates. No, she is coming on.”
The sound of footsteps was now scarcely audible, but they came on up the stairs. In a moment there was a faint, timorous tapping on the door to our quarters, and an equally timorous voice, asking beyond the door, “Mr. Pons? Mr. Solar Pons?”
“Pray play the gentleman, Parker,” said Pons.
I sprang up and threw open the door.
A sandy-haired young woman not much over her middle-twenties stood there, a package wrapped in a shawl pressed to her breast. She looked from one to the other of us with candid blue eyes, her full lower lip trembling uncertainly, a slow flush mounting her cheeks toward the scattering of freckles that bridged her nose and swept under her eyes. Then, with that unerring intuition that women especially seem to have, she fixed upon Pons.
“Mr. Pons! I hope I’m not intruding. I had to come. I had to do something. Uncle will do nothing — just wait for whatever is to happen. Oh, it’s dreadful, Mr. Pons, dreadful!”
“Do come in, Miss...?”
“I am Flora Morland of Morland Park, Mr. Pons. You may have heard of my uncle, Colonel Burton Morland?”
“Retired resident at Malacca,” said Pons promptly. “But do compose yourself, Miss Morland. Let me take that box you’re holding.”
“No, no!” she cried, and pressed it momentarily closer to her body. Then she bit her lip and smiled weakly. “But that is why I came. Forgive me, Mr. Pons. You shall see for yourself — now.”
She threw back the shawl and revealed a box, scarcely as large as a cigar box, made of kamuning wood. It was beautifully carved on the top and around on all sides, with curious figures, like a bas-relief. It seemed obviously Oriental in design.
“Open it, Mr. Pons!” She shuddered a little. “I don’t know how I could bear to have carried it all this way. I can’t look again!”
Pons took the box gently from her. He pushed the breakfast dishes to one side and set the box on the table. He stood for a moment admiring its workmanship, while Miss Morland waited with an apprehensive tautness that was almost tangible in the room. Then he threw it open.
I fear I gasped. I do not know what I expected to see — a priceless jewel, perhaps? — a bibliophile’s treasure? — something fitting to the exquisite box containing it. Certainly it was nothing I could have dreamed in my wildest imaginings! In the box laid a mummified human hand, severed at the wrist, affixed to the bottom of the box by two bands of white silk.
Pons’ emotion showed only in his eyes, which lit up with quick interest. He touched the dried skin with the fingertips of one hand, while caressing the carved box with the other.
“Intarsia,” murmured Pons. “An Italian art, Miss Morland. But this box would appear to be of Oriental origin; the subjects of the ornamentation are all Oriental. Would you care now to tell us how you came by it?”
He closed the box almost with regret, and, Miss Morland having taken the stuffed chair near the fireplace, came to stand against the mantel, filling his pipe with the detestable shag he smoked.
Miss Morland clasped her hands together. “I hardly know how to begin, Mr. Pons,” she said.
“Let us start with this fascinating object you have brought us,” suggested Pons.
“It was delivered to my uncle three days ago, Mr. Pons. I myself took it from the postman. It was mailed first-class from Kuala Lumpur. My uncle was in his study that morning, and I took it in to him. I recall that his face darkened when he saw the package, but I supposed that it was only in wonder at who might have sent it. It was ten years ago that he left Malaya. He looked for some clue to its origin; there was no return address on the package. He began to take off its wrappings. I had turned away from him to put some books back on the shelves, when suddenly I heard him make a kind of explosive sound, and on the instant he slipped from his chair to the floor. He had swooned dead away. I ran over to him of course, Mr. Pons — and that’s how I came to see what was in the box. There was a little card, too — linen paper, I thought, Mr. Pons — I believe such details are important to you. On it was written in a flowing hand a single sentence: I will come for you.”
“The card is not now in the box,” said Pons.
“I suppose my uncle removed it.
I closed the box, Mr. Pons. I couldn’t bear to look at what was in it. Then I brought my uncle around. I expected him to tell me what was in the box and what it all meant, but he said nothing — never a word. Seeing that the box was closed, he assumed that he had closed it before or as he fainted, and that I didn’t know what was in it. Mr. Pons, I was deeply shocked by what was in the box, but I was even more profoundly disturbed by my uncle’s failure to say anything at all of it to me. Since the day he received it, furthermore, he has been very busy, and everything he has done is in the way of putting his affairs in order.”
“Did your uncle notify the police?”
“If so, I don’t know of it, Mr. Pons.”
Pons puffed reflectively on his pipe for a moment before he asked, “I take it you are an orphan and have been living with your uncle. For how long?”
“Ten years,” she replied. “My mother died when I was very young, and my father five years after Uncle Burton returned from Malaya. He has been very kind to me. He has treated me as his own child.”
“Your uncle is not married?”
“Uncle Burton was married at one time. I believe there was some cloud over the marriage. My father occasionally talked about my aunt in deprecatory terms, called her ‘the Eurasian woman’. My cousin Nicholas, who spent the last five years’ of Uncle Burton’s tenure with him in Malacca, also married a Eurasian woman. My aunt died before my uncle’s return to England.”
“Your cousin?”
“He returned with Uncle Burton. He’s a barrister with offices in the City. His wife is the proprietress of a small, but I believe thriving, importing business in the Strand.”
“Your cousin — Nicholas Morland, is it?”
“There were three brothers, Mr. Pons — my father, Nick’s father, and Uncle Burton.”
“Your cousin, I take it, was your uncle’s assistant in Malacca?”
“Yes, Mr. Pons.”
“How old is your uncle, Miss Morland?”
“Seventy.”
“So he was fifty-five when he retired,” mused Pons. “How long had he been the resident in Malacca?”
“Fifteen years. He went out there when he was forty. I never really knew him, Mr. Pons, until his return. I hadn’t been born when he was sent out. But Uncle Burton seemed to be very fond of me from the moment he saw me, and it seemed only natural that he would invite me to live with him when Father died. Uncle Burton is very wealthy, he has many servants, and, though he is regarded by some of them as a martinet, they do stay, most of them. And he has a large and secluded home in Chipping Barnet. It seemed the most natural thing to do, to live with him. He sent me to school, and through a small private college. For my part, I am expected to play hostess whenever he has one of his small parties, which are attended chiefly by my cousin and his wife and some other ex-Colonials and their wives. I rather like that now, though I didn’t at first. But my uncle is the soul of rectitude. He will tolerate no deviation from proper conduct, so there are never any social problems for me to deal with.”