entirely at case in his servants' presence, he pretended to be vastly delighted with the contents of a manuscript which he held before him. Not until he saw the observant Li King make a silent gesture to his companion did he realize that the manuscript was upside down in his hands.
"Then, softly, almost imperceptibly, the entire household was corrupted. All the servants came to regard their master as a madman. Protesting at first with mighty threats against this treatment, Brasswell gradually subsided into silence; for his angry ravings only strengthened their conviction that he was mad.
"The eyes of all his house were upon him; they followed him from the tower room to the dungeon; they were everywhere. He could not escape them. At length a terror of his own kind seemed to possess him, and he ran when he heard his servants approaching. He ceased to sleep in his usual bedchamber; and his servants, searching through the gloomy castle for their demented master, often found him hiding with the spiders in some sunless hole.
"At length, a night of terrible storm descended upon them. The thunder blasts rocked in the battlements, and the lightning, darting into the enormous shadows like phantom rapiers, revealed Brasswell huddled in a heap of decaying tapestry in an uninhabited quarter of the castle. Awakened by the tumultuous storm, he became sharply conscious of a presence near him. Too terrified to move, he lay shivering miserably, when a blinding flash of lightning, illuminating the place for an instant, revealed a figure towering over him, a tall figure with ashen face, wearing the garb of a Buddhist priest.
"Like a thing pursued, Brasswell fled shrieking through the echoing corridors and up the circling stairways, until he reached the top of the castle. Flinging himself into the tower room, he unlocked the massive stone coffin and seizing the beautiful Unfinished Buddha, he rushed to the casement and threw it into the storm. The fitful lightning revealed it lying on the beach below, the waves of the river creaming around it. Brasswell's Chinese servants braved the storm to recover the god. Returning to the tower room, they found their master dead. Seeing that the huge stone coffin in which the Buddha had been entombed was now empty, they placed their master's body within it, and locking the lid, they threw the key in the Rhine.
"At dawn, they carried the Buddha to the private dwelling of a Japanese lady in the city below; but the lady had departed life in the storm of that night, gone out as if in answer to a moonbeam sent from the deep deep water world as a signal that he was waiting for her."
The strange recitative had come to a close. The collector sighed deeply:
"'And they are gone: ay, ages long ago
Those lovers fled away into the storm.'"
In the silence that fell, Hammersmith sat staring at the gentle, musing countenance of the Buddha. As if in answer to his unspoken question the collector answered softly, "It is quiescent now; the spirit has fled. It is as it was in the beginning; but the beauty of die past clings to it with the same charm that invests a room in which a long-dead queen has slept."
Hammersmith cleared his throat.
"I am a rich man. Name your price; I will pay it."
The collector shook his head.
"It is beyond price. See," he murmured, caressing the Buddha, "see with what ineffable calm it reposes, wise in the understanding that human desires are but
