All Gundred’s inquiries could elicit no more definite information. The old man merely repeated his statement, and asked to be allowed to await Kingston’s return. Baffled, interested, acutely puzzled, Gundred must needs leave the riddle of his mission unsolved, and take refuge in the customary platitudes about the charm of Oriental life. And thus it happened that when Kingston returned at last, dusty and hot, from his expedition, he found his wife sitting amid the gilded disorder of the drawing-room, engaged in a difficult dialogue with a stranger.
That this was the long-lost uncle Kingston was soon brought to realize, and heard with unmitigated amazement that the Abbot, or Bishop, or whatever his rank might be, had come in answer to some imagined call. The old man had a fantastic charm. His air of frail antiquity, the wistfulness of his voice, the very incongruousness of his clothes gave him a fascination not easy to describe. He was someone out of an alien life, a visitor from the world beyond Kingston’s ken. A flavour of mysterious knowledge hung about his wandering glances, his soft, quiet, hesitating speech, his gentle, deprecatory manner; those misty eyes of his had the wonder and the wisdom of eyes that have pierced far into the hidden depths. His present surroundings, his present garments had a sharp and crying inappropriateness, yet, though in his air and build there was no obvious majesty, the comparison was all to the disadvantage of the surroundings and the garments. Even Gundred’s luxurious and splendid room seemed to grow tawdry and vulgar by contrast with this unimposing little figure in its midst. The manner of his irruption, too, into modern London life, as well as the announcement of his equally abrupt departure, increased the air of fantasy that hung round him. Flashing by out of another life, flashing on into another life, this grotesque little old tortoise was to spare them an hour on his road through the immensities. Kingston had no sense of kinship as he talked with this new-found uncle--hardly, indeed, any sense of talking with a fellow human being. The visitor was too clearly a dweller in strange worlds, belonged, in all his words and ways, too obviously to another sphere of existence. As for Gundred, her faint horror at entertaining a confessed Buddhist was tempered by the discovery that the Buddhist was an Abbot or a Bishop--at all events, held some conspicuous position in the heathen hierarchy. And even a heathen Bishop was clearly better than a heathen who was not a Bishop of any kind. She soon, however, thought it necessary to vindicate her superiority by attempting to convert the pagan prelate. After one effort, brief though bold, she was forced to desist. Mild, shrinkingly meek, the new uncle yet showed a certain confident command of spiritual weapons too mighty for his niece’s resisting powers.