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He returned at the top of his spirits and health. Of course he was hall-marked West African, but no man gets rid of that stamp. Moreover there was more than health in his expression. There was a new look of pride in his eyes and when he spoke of a bachelor it was in terms of sympathetic pity. "Jim," said he, after five minutes of restraint, "I am engaged to be married."
This I felt was at last the home of the "dope trust," as O'Connor had once called it, the secret realm of a real opium king, the American end of the rich Shanghai syndicate. A door opened and there stood a Chinaman, stoical, secretive, indifferent, with all the Oriental cunning and cruelty hall-marked on his face.
Instantaneously his eyes flashed; then were dulled. Imperturbable, listless, hall-marked the prey of ennui, he waited, undecided, upon the stoop, while the watcher opposite, catching sight of him, abruptly abandoned his slouch and hastened across the street. "Excuse me" he began in a loud tone, while yet a dozen feet away, "but ain't this Mr. Maitland?"
His broader experience of that world over the pass which stretched around the globe and back to the other range-wall of the valley, seemed only to make him fall more easily into the simple ways of the fellow-ranchers of the Doge's selection, who were genuine, hall-marked people, whatever the origin from which the individual sprang.
"An honest concern!" he repeated. "Do you mean that that it is not honest?" Mrs. Cary beamed with recovered equanimity. "Good gracious! How could you suppose I should mean such a horrid thing, dear Prince! Of course everything to which you put your hand is hall-marked. Otherwise I should never have dreamed of investing my money in the Marut Company." There was a silence.
If I have the opportunity of seeing a man or testing a ring, what do I care, what does it matter to me, whether he is successful or unsuccessful, whether the ring is hall-marked or not! I have my own eyes, ears, and intelligence at command. What more do I want? Give me the man or the metal: in a very short time I have decided their worth to my own satisfaction.
"If there wasn't considerable cause it would be incredible you should make such a mistake. Can you deny that I am hall-marked, that the fact of my parentage is written large in my flesh?" He felt her eyes fixed on him, painfully straining to see him through the rain and darkness; and, when she spoke again, he knew she knew that he did not lie. "But wasn't it wrong" she said. "I suppose so.
He had scarcely before in his life worn evening dress in a domestic circle which included ladies certainly never in the presence of such certificated and hall-marked ladies as these. His future, however, was to be filled with experiences of this nature. Already, after this briefest of ventures into the new life, he found fresh conceptions of the great subject springing up in his thoughts.
He was fenced in on every side, safe from the vulgarity of the world. He was hall-marked a public-school man. He was a citizen of his world, I was an alien. He was rich. I had not even a savings-bank book. "I was going away after the match when I discovered he had been thinking about me. That was Belvoir all over.
That most vital function tended consequently to become more and more hall-marked as foreign; it no longer depended in any direct sense on Peking for protection.
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