"Oh, confound it, if I can't get at my oysters!" he complained, leaning back into his group again with a sigh.
"You divide the honors with the mysterious unknown, eh?" Kerr inquired across the table.
"Hang it, there's no division! I'd offer you a share!" Harry laughed, and it occurred to Flora how much Kerr could have made of it.
"Purdie'd like to share something," Buller vouchsafed. "He's been pawing the air ever since Crew cabled, and this has blown him up completely."
"Crew?" Flora wondered. Here was something more happening. Crew? She had not heard that name before. It made a stir among them all; but if Kerr looked sharp, Clara looked sharper. She looked at Harry and Harry was vexed.
"Who's Crew?" said Ella; and the judge looked around on the silence.
"Why, bless my soul, isn't it--Oh, anyway, it will all be out to-morrow. But I thought Harry'd told you. The Chatworth ring wasn't Bessie's."
It had the effect of startling them all apart, and then drawing them closer together again around the table over the uncorked bottles.
"Why," Judge Buller went on, "this ring is a celebrated thing. It's the 'Crew Idol'!" He threw the name out as if that in itself explained everything, but the three women, at least, were blank.
"Why celebrated?" Clara objected. "The stones were only sapphires."
"Quite so," he nodded to her, "but there are several sorts of value about that ring. Its age, for one."
He had the attention of the table, as if they sensed behind his words more even than Judge Buller could have told them.
"And then the superstition about it. It's rather a pretty tale," said Kerr, looking at Flora. "You've seen the ring--a figure of Vishnu bent backward into a circle, with a head of sapphire; two yellow stones for the cheeks and the brain of him of the one blue. Just as a piece of carving it is so fine that Cellini couldn't have equaled it, but no one knows when or where it was made. The first that is known, the Shah Jehan had it in his treasure-house. The story is he stole it, but, however that may be, he gave it as a betrothal gift to his wife--possibly the most beautiful"--his eyebrows signaled to Flora his uncertainty of that fact--"without doubt the best-loved woman in the world. When she died it was buried with her--not in the tomb itself, but in the Taj Mehal; and for a century or so it lay there and gathered legends about it as thick as dust. It was believed to be a talisman of good fortune--especially in love.