The Great God Gold
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would. No Jew, or even Christian for that matter, would everbelieve that a newspaper defrayed the cost of an expedition out of pureregard for the interests of the Hebrew faith." He laughed. "The publicknow too well that a `boom' means to a newspaper increased circulation,and, therefore, increased income. Before these days of the yellowjournalism, the press was supposed to be above such ruses; but now thepublic receives the journalistic `boom' with its tongue in its cheek."
"You're quite right, Professor, quite right!" remarked Frank, for thefirst time realising that to "work" the treasure of Israel as a "boom"for his group of newspapers and periodicals was impossible. "I've onlyregarded it from the business side, and not from the sentimental. I seenow that any newspaper touching it would be treading dangerous ground,and might at once wound religious susceptibilities."
"I'm glad you've seen it in that light!" replied the old scholar,stroking his grey hair. "As far as I can discern, the best mode ofprocedure--providing of course, that we can discover the key number tothe numerical cipher--is for me to write an article in the_Contemporary_ with a view to obtaining the financial assistance of theJewish community. I know the Jew well enough to be confident, that all,from the Jew pedlar in the East End to the family of Rothschild itself,would unite in assisting to discover the sacred treasures of theTemple." And for half an hour or so they chatted, until Frank was ableto slip away with Gwen into the drawing-room where, without a singleword, he clasped her in his arms passionately and kissed her upon thelips.
He held her closely pressed to his breast, as he stroked her soft hairtenderly, and looked into those wide-open, trustful eyes. Surely thatfrank expression of true and abiding love could not be feigned! Thereis, in a true woman's eyes, a love-look that cannot lie! He saw it, andwas at once satisfied.
In a low voice he begged forgiveness for misjudging her, repeating hisgreat and unbounded affection. She heard his quick strained voice, andlistened to his heartfelt words, and then, unable to restrain her joy athis return, her head fell upon his shoulders, and she burst into tears.
She was his, she whispered, still his--and his alone.
And he held her sobbing in his strong arms, as his hand still strokedher hair and his lips again bent until they touched her fair white browin fierce and passionate caress.
CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT.
DESCRIBES CERTAIN CURIOUS EVENTS.
Has it never struck you that this twentieth century of ours is theessential age of the very young girl?
Supreme to-day reigns the young woman between the age of--well say fromsixteen to twenty--who dresses her hair with a parting and a pigtail,wears short skirts, displays a neat ankle, and persists in remaining inher teens. Grumpy old fossils tell us that this species is a product ofan advanced state of civilisation which insists that everything must benew, from a dish of _peches a la Melba_ to the tint of that eternalhoarding in front of Buckingham Palace. One can only suppose that theyare correct. Ours is a go-ahead age which scoffs at the horse, andpokes fun at the South-Eastern Railway, which forsakes Saturday concertsfor football, yet delights in talking-machines.
Is it any wonder therefore that the statuesque beauty and the skittishmatron of a year ago no longer finds herself in demand forsupper-parties, Sandown or Henley? No, she must nowadays stand aside,and watch the reign of her little sister who dashes off from the theatreto the Savoy in a motor-brougham still wearing her ribbon bow on herpigtail, much as she did in the schoolroom.
The young of certain species of wild fowl are termed "flappers," andsome irreverent and irascible old gentleman has applied that term to thego-ahead young miss of to-day. Though most women over twenty-one mayattempt to disguise the fact, it is plain that the young girl justescaped from the schoolroom now reigns supreme. Her dynasty is at itszenith. She is the ruling factor of London life. Peers of the realm,foreign potentates, hard-bitten soldiers from the East, magnates fromPark Lane all hurry to her beck and call. The girl in the pigtail andshort skirt rides over them all roughshod. And what is the result ofall this adulation upon the dimple-faced little girl herself? In themajority of cases, I fear it results in making her a stuck-up, _blase_and conceited little prig, for she nowadays takes upon herself a gloryand exalted position to which she is entirely unsuited, but which shehas been taught to consider hers by right.
Gwen Griffin was a perfect type of the very young girl, courted, pettedand flattered by all the men of her acquaintance. Having no mother toforbid her, she was fond of going motor-rides and fond of flirtation,but through it all she had, fortunately, never developed any of thoseobjectionable traits so common in girls of her age. She had managed toremain quite simple, sweet and unaffected through it all, and six monthsbefore, when she had found the man she could honestly love, she had cuther male friends and entered upon life with all seriousness.
A week had gone by, and Frank had called every evening. Once he hadtaken her to dine at the Carlton, and on to the theatre afterwards, fornow they had, by tacit though unspoken consent, agreed that all bygonesshould be bygones.
Often he felt himself wondering what had been the real cause of hermysterious absence from home, yet when such suspicions arose within him,he quickly put them aside. How could he possibly doubt her love?
The Doctor was back again at Horsford, leading the same rural uneventfullife as before, but daily studying everything that had any possiblebearing upon the assertion of Professor Holmboe.
Frank came down to visit Lady Gavin one day, and as a matter of coursewas very soon seated with the ugly little man in his cottage home.
Diamond, over a cigar, was relating the result of his most recentstudies, and lamenting that they were still as far from obtaining aknowledge of the actual cipher as ever.
"Yes," murmured the young man with a sigh, "I'm much afraid that oldHaupt will get ahead of us--even if he has not already done so. How isit that you can't get your friend Mullet to assist us further?"
"He has left London, I believe. He disappeared quite suddenly from hisrooms, and curiously enough, has sent me no word."
"You hinted once that he's a `crook.' If so, he may have fled onaccount of awkward police inquiries--eh?"
"Most likely. Yet it's strange that he hasn't sent me news of hiswhereabouts."
"Not at all, my dear Doctor," responded the other. "If a man is inhiding, it isn't likely that he's going to give away his place ofconcealment, is it?"
"But he trusts me--trusts me implicitly," declared Diamond.
"That may be so. But he doesn't trust other persons into whose handshis letter might possibly fall. The police have a nasty habit ofwatching the correspondence of the friend of the man wanted, you know."
"Perhaps you're right, Mr Farquhar," said the Doctor, with a heavyexpression upon his broad brow. "The more I study the problem of thetreasure of Israel, the more bewildered I become," he went on. "Now asregards the original of the Old Testament, it is not all written inHebrew, I find. Certain parts are in Aramaic, often erroneously calledChaldee. [From Daniel, ii, 4, to vii, 28; Ezra iv, 8, to vi, 18; vii,11 to 26; and Jeremiah x and xi.] Again, we have a difficulty to facewhich even Professor Griffin had never yet mentioned to me. It is this.On the very lowest estimate, the Old Testament must represent aliterary activity of fully a thousand years, and therefore it is butreasonable to suppose that the language of the earlier works would beconsiderably different from that of the later; while, on other grounds,the possible existence of local dialects might be expected to showitself in diversity of diction among the various books. But, curiouslyenough--though I am handicapped by not being acquainted with the Hebrewtongue--all the authorities I have consulted agree that neither of thosesurmises find much verification in our extant Hebrew text."
"I've always understood that," Frank remarked. "Yes. I've been readingdeeply, Mr Farquhar. Curiously enough the most ancient documents andthe youngest are remarkably similar in the general cast of theirlanguage, and certainly show nothing corresponding in the differencebetween Ho
mer and Plato, or Chaucer and Shakespeare. Though we knowthat the Ephraimites could not give the proper (Gileadite) sound of theletter _shin_ in _Shibboleth_, [Judges, xii 8] yet all attempts todistinguish dialects in our extant books have failed."
"I think," said Farquhar, "that such remarkable uniformity, whiletestifying to the comparative stability of the language, is in part tobe explained by the hypothesis of a continuous process of revision andperhaps modernising of the documents, which may have gone on until wellinto our era."
"Exactly," remarked the Doctor, "yet in spite of this levelling tendencythere appear to remain certain diversities, particularly in thevocabulary, which have not been eliminated, and these serve todistinguish two great periods in the