The telephone rang; but Clarke ignored it until the jangling became too insistent, when he muffled the bell with several towels and a small cushion.
"Too bad," he apologized, as he took the cord from his lounge robe and completed the throttling of the almost stifled annoyance, "but I simply can't be disturbed."
In which he was wrong: for to contemplate that wonder from Samarcand was more disturbing than any voice that could creep in over the wire. He fingered the rings of dull, hand-hammered gold that were sewed to one of the salvaged sides; he wondered what palace wall had been enriched by that precious fabric—and with it all came the knowledge that that very rug had been a part of his own past. The life that had been knotted into its pile and the sorcery that had been woven into its pattern were speaking to one of Clarke's forgotten selves. Yet he was certain that he had never before seen it; for one could never have forgotten such as this, though seen but for an instant. Truly, the rug was a stranger, but the presence that accompanied it was demanding recognition.
In the meanwhile, Diane tired of hearing the operator's "They don't answer," and abandoned her efforts to remind Clarke of an engagement.
"I wonder," she mused, as she finally set aside the useless telephone, "what deviltry my bien aimé is devising."
And then she sought the rendezvous unattended, and made the customary apologies for Clarke's unaccountable absence.
He might have retreated into that dusky inner kingdom which from the very beginning he had held against Diane—a silence into which he plunged unaccompanied, not lacking appreciative company, but loving solitude and electing seclusion rather than the sharing of the fancies that twisted and the thoughts that writhed in his strange brain.
As Diane made her well-rehearsed apologies and frothed behind her vivacious mask, Clarke noted the manila envelope that was fastened to the web of the rug from Samarcand, and addressed to him: a letter, doubtless from Siraganian.
"We regret," wrote the Armenian, "that thus far we have had no success in finding at any cost a rug of the weave you ordered. However, we take pleasure in forwarding you this rug which a caravan stopping at Meshed left with our agent in that city with instructions to forward it to our New York office and thence to you. We are pleased that your agent saw fit to use our facilities for forwarding it to you, and wish to congratulate you on having obtained such a priceless specimen. Should you at any time care to dispose of it, be so kind as to give us an option on it, for we are in a position to offer you a better price than any dealer or collector in the United States. . . ."
The rug itself was improbable enough—but Siraganian's letter! An insoluble riddle. It couldn't be a jest. Then who?
True enough, Colonel Merbere's expedition must have passed through Samareand, Yarkand, and Kashgar on its way into the unknown stretches of Chinese Turkestan; but his acquaintance with the colonel was slight, and he had no friend in the colonel's train. And what obscure acquaintance of the "wish you were here" post-card banality would send a rug which in the old days served as a gift from one prince to another?
Diane's arrival cut the thread of fancy.
"Oh, Ham, but it is gorgeous," enthused la belle Livaudaise as she entered the roseate duskiness of Clarke's studio. And to herself, "Another rival. . . ."
