The peculiar thing about the goldfish was that they were made of gold. They were part of an eccentric but expensive toy, said to have been made by the freak of some rich Eastern prince, and Mr. Smart had picked it up at some sale or in some curiosity shop, such as he frequented for the purpose of lumbering up his house with unique and useless things. From the other end of the room it looked like a rather unusually large bowl containing rather unusually large living fish; a closer inspection showed it to be a huge bubble of beautifully blown Venetian glass, very thin and delicately clouded with faintly iridescent colour, in the tinted twilight of which hung grotesque golden fishes with great rubies for eyes. The whole thing was undoubtedly worth a great deal in solid material; how much more would depend upon the waves of lunacy passing over the world of collectors. Mr. Smart’s new secretary, a young man named Francis Boyle, though an Irishman and not credited with caution, was mildly surprised at his talking so freely of the gems of his collection to the group of comparative strangers who happened to have alighted in a rather nomadic fashion in the neighbourhood; for collectors are commonly vigilant and sometimes secretive. In the course of settling down to his new duties, Mr. Boyle found he was not alone in this sentiment, and that in others, it passed from a mild wonder to a grave disapproval.
“It’s a wonder his throat isn’t cut,” said Mr. Smart’s valet, Harris, not without a hypothetical relish, almost as if he had said, in a purely artistic sense: “It’s a pity.”
“It’s extraordinary how he leaves things about,” said Mr. Smart’s head clerk, Jameson, who had come up from the office to assist the new secretary, “and he won’t even put up those ramshackle old bars across his ramshackle old door.”
“It’s all very well with Father Brown and the doctor,” said Mr. Smart’s housekeeper, with a certain vigorous vagueness that marked her opinions, “but when it comes to foreigners, I call it tempting providence. It isn’t only the Count, either; that man at the bank looks to me much too yellow to be English.”
“Well, that young Hartopp is English enough,” said Boyle good-humouredly, “to the extent of not having a word to say for himself.”
“He thinks the more,” said the housekeeper. “He may not be exactly a foreigner, but he is not such a fool as he looks. Foreign is as foreign does, I say,” she added darkly.
Her disapproval would probably have deepened if she had heard the conversation, in her master’s drawing-room that afternoon, a conversation of which the goldfish were the text, though the offensive foreigner tended more and more to be the central figure. It was not that he spoke so very much; but even his silences had something positive about them. He looked the more massive for sitting in a sort of heap on a heap of cushions, and in the deepening twilight his wide Mongolian face seemed faintly luminous, like a moon. Perhaps his background brought out something atmospherically Asiatic about his face and figure, for the room was a chaos of more or less costly curiosities, amid which could be seen the crooked curves and burning colours of countless Eastern weapons, Eastern pipes and vessels, Eastern musical instruments and illuminated manuscripts. Anyhow, as the conversation proceeded, Boyle felt more and more that the figure seated on the cushions and dark against the twilight had the exact outline of a huge image of Buddha.
The conversation was general enough, for all the little local group were present. They were, indeed, often in the habit of dropping in at each other’s houses, and by this time constituted a sort of club, of people coming from the four or five houses standing round the green. Of these houses Peregrine Smart’s was the oldest, largest, and most picturesque; it straggled down almost the whole of one side of the square, leaving only room for a small villa, inhabited by a retired colonel named Varney, who was reported to be an invalid, and certainly was never seen to go abroad. At right angles to these stood two or three shops that served the simpler needs of the hamlet, and at the corner the inn of the Blue Dragon, at which Mr. Hartopp, the stranger from London, was staying. On the opposite side were three houses, one rented by the Count de Lara, one by Dr. Burdock, and the third still standing empty. On the fourth side was the bank, with an adjoining house for the bank manager, and a line of fence enclosing some land that was let for building. It was thus a very self-contained group, and the comparative emptiness of the open ground for miles round it threw the members more and more on each other’s society. That afternoon one stranger had indeed broken into the magic circle; a hatchet-faced fellow with fierce tufts of eyebrows and moustache, and so shabbily dressed that he must have been a millionaire or a duke if he had really (as was alleged) come down to do business with the old collector. But he was known, at the Blue Dragon at least, as Mr. Harmer.
To him had been recounted anew the glories of the gilded fish and the criticisms regarding their custody.
“People are always telling me
