The Project Gutenberg eBook ofScheherazade: a London night's entertainmentThis ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.Title: Scheherazade: a London night's entertainmentAuthor: Florence WardenRelease date: December 18, 2023 [eBook #72450]Language: EnglishOriginal publication: London: Ward And Downey, Publishers, 1889Credits: an anonymous Project Gutenberg volunteer*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SCHEHERAZADE: A LONDON NIGHT'S ENTERTAINMENT ***
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.
Title: Scheherazade: a London night's entertainmentAuthor: Florence WardenRelease date: December 18, 2023 [eBook #72450]Language: EnglishOriginal publication: London: Ward And Downey, Publishers, 1889Credits: an anonymous Project Gutenberg volunteer
Title: Scheherazade: a London night's entertainment
Author: Florence Warden
Author: Florence Warden
Release date: December 18, 2023 [eBook #72450]
Language: English
Original publication: London: Ward And Downey, Publishers, 1889
Credits: an anonymous Project Gutenberg volunteer
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SCHEHERAZADE: A LONDON NIGHT'S ENTERTAINMENT ***
BYFLORENCE WARDEN,Author of“The House on the Marsh,” “A Woman’s Face,”“A Prince of Darkness,” etc.
NEW EDITION.
WARD AND DOWNEY, Publishers,12, YORK STREET, COVENT GARDEN, LONDON.1889.
Richard Clay & Sons, Limited,London & Bungay.
CHAPTER I
CHAPTER II
CHAPTER III
CHAPTER IV
CHAPTER V
CHAPTER VI
CHAPTER VII
CHAPTER VIII
CHAPTER IX
CHAPTER X
CHAPTER XI
CHAPTER XII
CHAPTER XIII
CHAPTER XIV
CHAPTER XV
CHAPTER XVI
CHAPTER XVII
CHAPTER XVIII
CHAPTER XIX
CHAPTER XX
CHAPTER XXI
CHAPTER XXII
CHAPTER XXIII
CHAPTER XXIV
CHAPTER XXV
CHAPTER XXVI
CHAPTER XXVII
CHAPTER XXVIII
CHAPTER XXIX
CHAPTER XXX
CHAPTER XXXI
CHAPTER XXXII
“Here, shall we go three in a hansom?”
“Hansom be hanged! It’s a lovely night. Let’s walk.”
“Massey is afraid the loved one will be there before him.”
“Never fear! A beautiful woman was never yet kept waiting by an Irishman.”
“Right ye are! And yet there are no men about better worth waiting for,” retorted Clarence Massey, amid the laughter of his companions.
The speakers were three young subalterns, who had been dining in Fitzroy Square with an enthusiastic old soldier who had been a major in their regiment fifteen years before. On learning, three weeks ago, of the arrival of his old regiment at Hounslow, he had sent to all the officers an invitation to dinner, which had been accepted by the Colonel and by such of the rest as were disengaged on the evening named. Clarence Massey, a pale-faced, bright-witted little Irishman; “Dicky” Wood, a tall, thin, weedy-looking young fellow, renowned for the sweetness of his disposition; and George Lauriston, the best-looking man and most promising young soldier in the regiment, were on their way to finish the evening at different entertainments.
Lauriston was rather too well-conducted a young fellow to be altogether popular, having been brought up in Scotland, and being too much occupied with his ambitions to shake off a certain amount of reserve and rigidity left by his early training. But, on the other hand, these qualities served to heighten the strong individuality of a character uncommon both in its strength and in its weakness, and to add to that subtle gift of prestige which is so capriciously bestowed by nature. So that now, as in the old time at Sandhurst, his comrades would rather be in his society than in that of companions with whom they had greater sympathy.
They had not gone many steps down Fitzroy Street, when Massey began to beguile the weary hours by singing snatches of the most amorous of Moore’s melodies below his breath as he walked along. On being asked to desist, he reviled his companions for their insensibility to music and love, and there ensued a hot, if amicable, dispute both as to the justice of the accusation and the competence of the accuser. Dicky Wood took up the challenge on behalf of music, and Lauriston on that of love, and Massey grew more and more pert in his assertions that no Saxon could possibly do justice to either the one or the other.
“There’s no warm blood in your veins,” he maintained energetically. “Young or old, handsome or ugly, ye’re all tame—tame as dormice, and ye haven’t a chance with the Irish boys. For your passionate lover, your devoted husband, the ladies must come to us.”
“How about the Colonel?” asked Dicky, in a voice louder than he intended; for, as he spoke, a figure some little distance ahead of them, on the other side of the street, stopped and turned.
“Talk of the d——!” said Lauriston, in a low voice.
Massey, much dismayed, looked ready to take refuge in flight.
“Let’s go back and turn down the first street,” he murmured, his brogue coming out strongly in his excitement. “There’s a kind of court-martial look about his left eye that makes him a worse person to face than one’s tailor at Christmas-time.”
“Nonsense!” said Lauriston. “Don’t be a fool, Massey. He’s in an angelic temper this evening; and he’s not half a bad fellow at any time.”
“Not to you—you were born with a silver spoon in your mouth, and if you were to blow up an arsenal you would get off with a ‘severe censure.’ But I’m not so lucky.”
However, he was persuaded to walk on; and in the meantime the dreaded Colonel was crossing the street to meet the young men. He was a small spare man, who from the other side of the road looked insignificant, but who seemed to grow in height and importance as he came closer, until, when face to face with you, he had the dignity and imposing appearance of six feet two. A sabre-cut over his left eye had drawn up the eyebrow in a manner which gave an odd expression to his weather-beaten and prematurely old features, and imparted additional intensity to the gaze of a pair of piercing blue-gray eyes, which looked out from his thin, rugged face like the guns from a concealed battery. His expression, however, as he drew near the young men, was one of such mitigated ferocity as passed in him for amiability, and the grating tones of his voice were charged with as little harshness as the unmusical nature of the organ permitted.
“Who is that calling on the Colonel?” he asked, turning to keep pace with them in an unexpected and unwelcome access of sociability.
Colonel Lord Florencecourt was an Irishman, and his countryman, finding him in a softer mood than usual, plucked up his native audacity.
“They were running down love and the ladies, Colonel, and I was calling upon all true Irishmen to help me to support their cause.”
The young lieutenant had recovered sufficiently from his fright to wing this speech with a little mischievous barb, for Lady Florencecourt was a notoriously undesirable helpmeet.
The Colonel laughed harshly.
“Support the cause of the ladies? Very like supporting the cause of the cannon-balls that come whizzing about your ears from the enemy’s camp! While you are praising their velocity, and the directness of their flight, whir-r-r comes one through the air and stops your fool’s tongue for ever.”
The dry grimness with which he spoke set the young men laughing. But Massey, encouraged by perceiving that his chief was in good humour, began again softly to sing:
“Oh, say, wilt thou weep when they darken the fameOf a life that for thee was resigned?”
“Oh, say, wilt thou weep when they darken the fame
Of a life that for thee was resigned?”
“Not at all, my boy,” broke in the Colonel, in his file-like voice; “she will say: ‘What a fool that boy was, and how tiresome he got at the last!’ Nothing, believe me, wearies a woman so much as agrande passion. Trust me; I once watched a friend through all the phases of one.”
“Did he die, Colonel?” asked Massey, in a small voice.
“No, but he had to take a very strong remedy. Well, now, lads, I don’t want to impose a misogynist’s society on you any longer, especially as I have small hopes of making any converts under five-and-twenty. Only take an old fellow’s advice: Singe your wings at as many candles as possible, and you will run the less risk of being burnt to a cinder by any one of them. Good-night.”
They raised their hats to him, and he hailed a passing hansom and drove off, just as they turned westward into one of the streets leading into Portland Place.
“He himself was the friend, I suppose,” said Dicky, when they had commented on the Colonel’s unusual sociability.
“Thegrande passionwas certainly not for Lady F.,” said Massey.
“By Jove, if she was the remedy, itwasa strong one!” added Lauriston.
“I shall take his advice, and distribute my attentions more,” remarked Massey, who was never in the society of any woman under fifty, of high or low degree, without devoting all his energies to ingratiating himself with her.
“Old buffers like that always talk in that strained fashion about the dangers of women, but as a matter of fact it isn’t till you’re over fifty yourself that they become dangerous at all.”
“No,” said Lauriston, with ablaséair pardonable at three-and-twenty. “Hang it all, the difficulty is, not to avoid their charms, but to find a girl decent-looking enough to dance with twice and take down to supper without being bored to death!”
“You don’t find manygrandes passionsknockin’ about nowadays,” observed Dicky sagely.
“At least not in our set,” amended Massey; “nor in this country.”
“Oh! I suppose they’re common enough over the Channel!”
“I won’t say that, but there’s something in the eye of an Irish girl that sets your heart beating nineteen to the dozen——”
“Provided it’s an Irish heart.”
“Provided it’s nothing of the sort!” cried Massey hotly. “Provided it’s any heart with warm red blood in it, and not brimstone and treacle!”
“Gentlemen, a little calmness, please,” suggested Lauriston, who was being hustled off the pavement by the uneven walk and excited gesticulations of the disputants, “or it will come to vivisection in a minute to prove the correctness of your studies in anatomy.”
However, the argument still went on, growing every moment more lively, until, both disputants turning to Lauriston as referee at the same time, they found that he had disappeared. The common wrong made them friends again at once.
“He’s given us the slip,” said Dicky.
“We’ll pay him out for it,” added Massey.
They were standing on the pavement of one of those shabby, ill-kept streets which intersect the busier, broader thoroughfares of this part of London. The noisy children, who played in the gutters during the day and turned their skipping-ropes across the flag-stones in the evening, had now gone to bed, and the stream of poor, struggling, obscure London life flowed by intermittently. A quiet, care-worn woman passed quickly, with her basket on her arm, counting up the pence she had left after her evening’s bargaining; a few paces behind her came a couple of public-house loafers—pallid, vacuous, with flabby hats, and the slimy black coats a great deal too long for them, so much affected by this class; and then a line of loud-voiced, shrill-laughing girls, with dirty faces and Gainsborough hats o’ershadowed by a plentiful crop of bedraggled feathers.
Not a tempting neighbourhood this by any means, nor one in which two dashing hussars of one or two and twenty could expect to pick up desirable acquaintances, or to take a deep interest in their unknown brethren; and yet the eyes of these two young soldiers had fallen there upon a sight fascinating enough to make them forget the mean flight of their companion, and to ignore the smell of fried fish, the hoarse cry of the costermonger at the corner of the street, even the occasional contact of a greasy elbow.
A low iron railing stood out from the wall of the house by which they had stopped, fencing off a third of the pavement. It was a house with a large, arched double-door, an imitation, on a modest scale, of the more imposing entrances of the dwellings in adjacent Portland Place; a house that had evidently seen better days, and still held its head higher than most of its neighbours. To the left of the door were three bells, placed the one above the other; over the lowest of these was a small brass plate, with this inscription in red letters, “Rahas and Fanah;” while between the two windows of the ground-floor hung a board with the same names painted on it, and underneath the words, “Oriental Merchants.” These lower windows were so begrimed with dust and soot that they imparted a film of occidental unloveliness to the oriental merchandise within. Rows of engraved brass bowls and vases, of curious design, and without the rich golden glow which, in the magnificent and expensive Eastern bazaars of Regent Street, suggests the popularising touch of Birmingham; hanging lamps of metal and glass, of strange and clumsy shapes, lovely only to the initiated; a long, graceful, and unserviceable-looking gun, inlaid with mother-of-pearl, inviting you to believe it came fresh from the hands of an Arab sheikh—all these, against a background of Turkish tables, Indian plaster figures, hookahs, and strange weapons, formed an odd collection which, veiled by the murky dimness of ostentatiously dirty window-panes, and railed off three feet from the reckless errand-boy, had no attraction whatever for the denizens of Mary Street.
Now Clarence Massey and Dicky Wood were not Oriental enthusiasts. They had been educated up to toleration of Japanese screens, and to a soulless and calm admiration of the colours of Japanese plates. So much their girl cousins, their partners at balls had done for them; but they had soared no higher, and hanging lamps, unless of coloured glass profusely ornamented with beads, had little meaning for them. Yet there they stood spellbound, staring into the mysteriously obscure little Oriental warehouse, as if it had been an Aladdin’s palace of quaint splendours. For the little picture had human interest. A small lamp, not of ancient Asiatic, but of modern European pattern, was set on the narrow mantelpiece in a space cleared for it amid brass trays and Indian pottery, and by its light the young men could see, seated at a table close under the dismantled fireplace, a dark-faced man whose head was covered by a scarlet fez. Behind him stood a girl attractive enough to rivet the attention, not alone of a couple of susceptible young hussars, but of an army of veterans. From her head hung veil-fashion over her shoulders a long piece of thin, yellowish, undyed silk, kept in its place by a fillet of gold, from which dangled a row of tiny sequins that glittered and shone on the peeping fringe of black hair that overshadowed the upper part of a little face that looked dusky against the shining silk. A strip of gold-intersected gauze, worn as a yashmak, covered, but scarcely concealed her breast and the lower part of her young face, showing row upon row of many-coloured beads around her neck, and gleaming, regular teeth between open lips, that were, perhaps, somewhat too flexible and somewhat too full. She stood there motionless for a few moments, evidently unseen by the man at the table, and brimming over with hardly contained girlish merriment. The young men watched, fascinated, unwilling to acknowledge to themselves that this little scene, passing in what was after all a public shop crammed with wares piled high to attract all comers, was part of a strictly domestic drama into which it was not their business to pry.
“Why doesn’t she look up? I can swear she has deuced fine eyes!” murmured Massey, who was getting much excited.
Dicky nudged his friend impatiently into silence, feeling that speech destroyed the spell, and awoke unwelcome recollections of the ordinary rules of social life which they were bluntly ignoring. In one moment they would walk on certainly. In the meantime, Dicky thrust his arm through that of his friend, and turned slowly round as a preliminary movement, keeping his eyes, however, still fixed upon the veiled houri. She remained immovable for a moment, and then from under the pale folds of rough silk appeared two slender arms of an ivory tint, several shades lighter than that of her face. They were bare to the shoulder, laden with massive bracelets, some silver, some silver-gilt, that stood out like cables round the soft flesh, or glittered with sparkling pendants of the precious metal: as, her face alight with girlish gaiety, she slowly advanced her small, lithe, olive-tinted hands, with the fingers curved ready to close upon the young man’s eyes, a couple of bracelets slid down her left arm with a little clash, which, though inaudible to the two spectators outside the window, was evidently the means of announcing her presence to her companion. He started up, and, turning round, seized her wrists as she attempted to spring, laughing, away from him. She was now so far back in the room that Massey and Dicky Wood caught only a vague, indistinct glimpse of long folds of soft white stuff under the silken veil, and of a crimson sash bound loosely round the hips of the little figure that crouched, laughing, against the wall. But they saw the eyes, such long, roguish, languishing eyes, that Massey felt that what heart his small and early loves had left to him was gone again, while even the more self-contained Dicky felt an odd and unaccustomed sensation, which he was afterwards unromantic enough to compare to a premonitory symptom of sea-sickness.
At that moment, however, the girl suddenly caught sight of the faces outside, and directed her companion’s attention to the window. As he turned abruptly, drew back into himself with a sudden expression of reserved and haughty indignation, and approached the window to draw down the blind, the girl, with a ringing laugh of mischief, which even the lads outside could hear, took advantage of his momentary retreat to escape.
The two young men, on finding they were discovered, walked on at once with involuntary and guilty haste, without at first speaking. Massey broke the silence with a deep sigh, and stepping into the road, hunted out the name of the street and entered it in his pocket-book.
“No. 36, Mary Street,” he murmured devoutly.
“You will dare to show your face here again then?”
“My face! I mean to show more than my face next time. I shall go boldly in and buy up the shop.”
“Always supposing the fire-worshipping gentleman with the fez does not recognise you and try some pretty little Eastern practical joke upon you, such as inducing you to spend a couple of hours head downwards in the water-butt, or nailing you up in one of his own packing-cases. Oriental husbands have got a nasty name, you know.”
“Husbands! That lovely girl is never the wife of a man with a face like old brown Windsor! Or if she is, he has so many others that he can’t have time to look after them all. If I only knew hernumber, that when I call I might inquire for the right one!”
“You’d better give it up, Massey; Indian dishes are proverbially hot ones,” said Dicky warningly.
But the young Irishman was too much excited to listen to anything but the suggestions of his own imagination concerning the lady.
“I don’t believe she’s Indian,” he rambled on; “I never saw a type quite like it. The face is too delicate for a Creole; I wonder if she’s an Arabian. She looks like a princess out of theArabian Nights, now doesn’t she?”
“Yes, perhaps she does. And you had better remember all that means before you set about stealing a march on the genie. Little cunning, sensual creatures with the mind and manners of cats—”
“I tell you who she is like,” pursued Massey, ignoring interruptions, “she is Scheherazade. You remember, the sultan’s wife who tells the stories, and fascinates him into sparing her life, after he’d sworn to kill all his wives on discovering what a faithless lot they were.”
“And then the story breaks off without letting one know whether she turned out any better than the rest. Wise chronicler, he knew where to stop! And if you’re wise, you’ll follow his example, and leave the tale where it is at present.”
But that was asking too much. The very next day, Massey rang boldly at the bell of Rahas and Fanah, Oriental merchants, and spent two or three pounds on trumpery brass pots and pans and on ill-made plaster animals, purposely choosing small articles that he might fritter away his time the more slowly, and in fact hang about on the chance of another sight of the Eastern beauty. He was served by the man he had seen the evening before, a genuine Oriental with grave, composed, leisurely manners. Massey longed to put some question to him which should lead to the discovery whether he was married, but this was not easy, as the Oriental merchant’s black eyes had an expression which suggested that he was not to be trifled with; “a sort of creepy, crafty, stick-you-through-with-a-chopstick-and-serve-you-up-with-chilis look,” as he afterwards described it to Dicky. However, he elicited the information that the dark-visaged one came from Smyrna, which did not help him much, as the only thing he recollected to have heard about that place was that:
“There was a young person of Smyrna, whose grandmother threatened to burn her.”
“There was a young person of Smyrna, whose grandmother threatened to burn her.”
He came out crestfallen after a stay of an hour and a quarter, but had his drooping spirits raised by running against Dicky Wood as he turned into Portland Place.
“Hallo, where are you going to?” “Hallo, where are you coming from?” said they at the same moment.
They both had grown red, and presently began to laugh as the truth came out. Scheherazade, whatever names you might call her, had a captivating presence which absolutely demanded to be seen again.
The ardour of those two young men for Indian art-products grew hotter and hotter as the week wore on, and their alternate pilgrimages to Mary Street resulted in nothing but the accumulation of a vast hoard of lacquered and engraved articles which not even the most indiscriminate present-giving could keep within due bounds. The senior partner in the firm, a small gentleman, leather-coloured and lean, with a grey beard and a white turban, had indeed turned up and induced suggestions that the mysterious lady might be his daughter, and glimpses had been caught of a lean, withered, white-robed ayah, who could by no means be mistaken for the interesting fair one; but it was not until the ninth day after their first visit that Massey was able, with great excitement, to announce that, on paying a late evening visit to Mary Street, he had seen the mysterious fair one disappearing helter-skelter up the staircase, and heard her close sharply, not to say bang, a door on the first floor.
“She had bare feet in loose sandals—feet you would have given ten years of your life to be walked upon by,” continued Massey rapidly, “with anklets that jingled as she went up. Old brown Windsor hustled her off as I came in—I’m afraid he must be her husband; and yet—I don’t know. Wonder if one could get lodgings in that house; it’s let out in floors, I know.”
“Not to us; they’d know what we were up to,” said Dicky gloomily. “I believe both of those beggars suspect us already. They’re only waiting for us to have spent our last half-crown on narghilis that we can’t smoke and cotton-wool beetles, and then they’ll politely bow us out and snigger to themselves over our greenness. We’ve been making fools of ourselves, Massey; I shouldn’t wonder if she was a decoy, a made-up old thing, very likely, the mother of old brown Windsor, henna’d and dyed and veiled till she looked beautiful at a distance, but a regular mummy at less than twelve paces.”
“What, would ye slander beauty herself? Is nothing sacred to you? Look here, I’ve got an idea. You know how jolly quick Mr. George Lauriston shuts us both up if we venture to have an opinion of our own about anything—female beauty for instance?”
“He has been putting on a little too much side lately, certainly.”
“I tell you that young man wants taking down. You know how he sneered the other night at mess when we said we’d discovered a new beauty?”
“Yes, he did. Well?”
“Well, we’ll make him see her and judge for himself and satisfy our curiosity at the same time.”
“What are you up to now?”
“I tell Mr. George Lauriston my brother has taken rooms at 36, Mary Street; I ask him to call. I tell him to go straight in, upstairs to the first floor, and that the first door is my brother’s. He won’t find him naturally, because he will not be there; so he’ll inevitably see the lady, and we’ll pump him afterwards, as to what she looked like, what she said, how she spoke.”
“Massey, you’re off your head. There’d be a deuce of a row. Scheherazade would scream, brown Windsor would draw his scimitar, there’d be a scrimmage on the stairs, and what would happen to you and me when Lauriston got back would be better imagined than described.”
“By Jove, if I could find out who she is I’d think it cheap at a black eye.”
“I shouldn’t.”
Dicky being the weaker if the wiser, however, gave way in the end, and George Lauriston duly received and accepted the invitation to call at 36, Mary Street, on a certain evening to see Massey’s brother, a clever and rising engineer, whom Lauriston had met and was anxious to meet again.
As the day of the appointment drew near, both of the conspirators, who had grown more lax in their attendance at the Oriental warehouse as repeated disappointments told upon their energy, felt qualms as to Lauriston’s action when he should have discovered the trick played upon him; and at last Massey told Dicky that he had an invitation up the river which would take him out of town on the evening named, and Dicky confessed in reply that he had got leave to go down to Brighton that afternoon.
“It will be just as much fun to hear what he says afterwards as it would be to watch him go in from the little shop on the other side of the way, as we proposed,” said Massey.
“And he’ll have cooled down a bit before he sees us, so that if anything comes of it he won’t be able to rush off red-hot and do for us,” added Dicky, more honestly. “I suppose old brown Windsor won’t stick him with a yataghan, or anything of that sort if he really does meet the lady,” he continued in a low and lugubrious voice. “You see, I’m sure the black men guess what we’re after, spending all our time and money over tea-trays and idols as we’ve done lately. And it would be rather hard if they were to think poor Lauriston was in it, only cheekier than the rest of us, and were to make him into a curry for what we’ve done.”
“Pooh, nonsense, Lauriston can take care of himself as well as anybody. He isn’t much of a soldier if he won’t think a back-hander over the staircase a small enough price to pay for the sight of a houri handsome enough for a Sultan’s harem.”
“But, Massey, he’s half a Scotchman. He wouldn’t look twice at a woman who hadn’t raw bones and red hair, and not at her if she wasn’t well provided with the bawbees,” suggested Dicky in the pride of his knowledge of different phases of human nature.
“All the better for us then; he’ll think it’s a mistake and won’t guess what we’ve been up to.”
So the guilty pair went their ways and left their consciences behind them.
Ifthere were in the wide world a good-looking, stalwart young man of twenty-three for whom an unexpected meeting in romantic and picturesque circumstances with a beautiful woman could be expected to be without danger, George Lauriston might well have been the man.
Not that he was a prig; not that the highly inflammable substance, a soldier’s heart, was in his case consuming for some other lady. But he was not quite in the position, and not at all in the mind of the majority of his comrades of his own age. He was the poor son of a brilliant but unlucky soldier who had died bravely in his first campaign; and he was so eaten up with the ambition to distinguish himself, and to render famous the name which his father had already made honourable, that all other passions merely simmered in him while that one boiled and seethed on the fires of an intense and ardent nature that as yet had shown but little of its powers. That he had a keen intellect was well known; it shone out of his brown eyes, and gave interest to a face, the chief characteristic of which was a certain, frank, boyish brightness. A good face, an honest face; none but the better qualities of the nature it illustrated showing through it yet, no sensual curves to spoil the firm lines of the mouth, which, for the rest, was more than half hidden by a moustache some shades lighter than the brown hair, which had a very pretty hero-like curl about the temples. To the rare eyes which read more than superficial signs in a man’s countenance, there might perhaps have been something suggestive in the fact, unnoticeable to any but the very keenest observer, and therefore unknown even by most of his intimate friends, that the two sides of his face did not exactly correspond in a single feature. One nostril was somewhat larger and higher than the other; the left corner of the mouth scarcely level with the right; and the same with the eyes and eyebrows, the difference being in all cases very slight but none the less real. It might have been argued with some point that a man whose face showed these irregularities was just as likely to be guilty of startling inconsistencies as a man with a heavy jaw is to turn out a brute, or one with a receding chin to prove a soft and yielding fool. So far, however, George Lauriston could boast a fair record, having earned his universally high character as much by the heartiness and spirit with which he threw himself into all games and sports, as by the energy and devotion he showed in the discharge of the various duties of his career.
Like most men of strong natures, he enjoyed more prestige than popularity among his equals in age and rank, being looked upon by the weaklings with secret contempt for his temperate and orderly life, and by the superior sort with a little unacknowledged fear. For these latter had an inkling that there was something under the crest, whether boiling lava or a mere bed of harmless, quiescent pebbles who should say? It was only the old officers in the regiment, as it had been only the more experienced masters at college, who could discern of what stuff this bright-eyed young soldier was made, and knew that the fire within him, which could never find enough food for its devouring energy, was a spark of the flame that, fanned by the breeze of blessed opportunity, makes men heroes. Love, except in its most fleeting forms, he had not yet felt, and did not, for the present at least, mean to feel: it would come to him at the proper time, like other good things, in some glorified form, and not, as it had come to his father, in the shape of a romantic devotion to a pretty but foolish woman who had been a clog and a burden as long as her short life lasted. With a well-defined ideal in his mind, and with all thoughts of pleasure in the present swallowed up by dreams of distinction in the future, he found all women charming, but none irresistible. Many of the girls he knew were handsome enough to please a fastidious taste, some had an amusing vivacity, some a fascinating innocence, here and there was one with the rarer attraction of sweet and gentle manners; but the beauties were vain and spoilt, the simple ones inane or ill-dressed, and one had doubts about the heart of the wits, and the head of the soft and silent ones. So that George Lauriston had never yet been brought face to face with the alternative of vain longing for a woman he could not get, or marriage on £200 a year. In such a situation, he had often avowed what course he would take: “Marry her and have done with it,” was his brief formula. He was of a nature too independent and self-sufficing to be very strongly influenced by the varying outside circumstances of his life or by the more lax and easy-going principles of his common-place companions; therefore the views inculcated by his old Scotch aunt of a woman as a sacred thing, and of love and marriage as concerns in which a Divine providence took an extra and special interest, still remained in his mind, though of course somewhat clouded by the haze of experience. It follows that his opinions on conjugal loyalty were even aggressively strong.
On one occasion, when a young married officer of the regiment—a harmless creature enough, but with a youthful ambition to be thought “fast”—was vapouring away at mess about his achievements with the girls, Lauriston broke in, in a deep voice:
“Nonsense, laddie, everybody knows you can’t tear yourself away from your little wife. And do you think we should think better of you if you could?”
With these well-known principles and opinions, his more susceptible young comrades, Massey and Dicky Wood, were justified in not considering that they were exposing Lauriston to any danger of the heart, in plotting his encounter with the dusky little wife of a foreign shopkeeper.
It was nine o’clock on the evening appointed by the conspirators when Lauriston, after dining at the “Criterion” with a friend, drove up in a hansom to number 36, Mary Street.
It was dull, wet, and rather cold—the fag end of one of those dismal days that so often mar the brightness of the season in an English May. Seen through the damp drizzle in the darkness which was already closing in, as if night were jealous of the gloom of day, and were hurrying to push her out of the field, the street looked dirtier and shabbier than ever, and Lauriston wondered to himself how Frank Massey could have taken rooms in such a wretched neighbourhood. He did not recognise it as the street in which he had slipped away from his friends on the night of the dinner-party in Fitzroy Square; but seeing the number 36 on the door, and observing that a light was burning in two of the three windows on the first floor, he paid the cabman, and, according to his instructions, turned the handle of the door, and walked in. There was a modest and economical light over the door, which threw small and weak rays over a bare, wide, and dingy hall, papered with a greasy and smoke-dyed imitation of a marble, which exists only in the imagination of the more old-fashioned order of wall-paper designers. The ceiling was blackened and smoke-hung, the deep wainscoting and the wood of the once handsome banisters were worn and worm-eaten, the wide stairs had only a narrow strip of cheap oilcloth up the middle, scarcely reaching to the now ill-polished space on either side. On the left hand were two doors, framed in oak with a little carving at the top; between the panels of both these doors a small white card was nailed, with the words “Rahas and Fanah, Oriental Merchants.” Only one chair—a substantial, elaborately carved old hall chair, which looked like a relic of some sale at a nobleman’s house, but on which errand boys’ pocket-knives had now for some years exercised their uninspired art carvings—broke up the monotony of the bare walls; and a well-used doormat lay at the foot of the stairs. There was no other attempt at furnishing, but against a door at the end of the passage by the staircase a huge stack of packing-cases marked with foreign characters were piled almost to the ceiling, and gave forth a scent of mouldy straw to complete the attractions of the entrance-hall.
“Rum place to hang out in!” he murmured, as he put his first foot on the creaking stairs. “Number 36, Mary Street—yes, that was certainly the address.”
On the first landing things looked a little more promising. There was a carpet, and outside each of the three doors a small, black skin rug, while against the wall, on a bracket of dark wood, with a looking-glass let in the back, there burned a lamp with a pink glass shade.
Lauriston knocked at the door which he judged to be that of the room in the windows of which he had seen a light.
There was no answer, and there was no sound.
He waited a few moments, and then knocked again—a sounding rat-tat-tat with the handle of his umbrella, such as none but a deaf person or a person fast asleep could fail to hear. Again no answer; again no sound. He tried the other two doors with the same result; then, much puzzled by this reception, he went back to the first door, and after a third fruitless knock, turned the handle and peeped in. Nothing but black darkness in the two inches he allowed himself to see. He opened the next door. Although the blind was down and there was no light inside, he could see quite clearly that it was a small room with nobody in it. Now, as this apartment looked on to the street, it was evident that the lights he had seen in the windows must be those of the room into which he had first peeped, as the two doors were on a line with each other.
“There must be a double door,” he said to himself, and going back again, he opened the first door wide and found, not indeed the obstacle he had expected, but a heavy curtain, thick as a carpet, which might well be supposed to deaden all outer sounds.
He drew this back, and in a moment became conscious of an intoxicating change from the gloom and the drizzle outside. A faint, sweet perfume, like the smell of a burning fir-forest, a soft, many-tinted subdued light, the gentle plash-plash of falling water all became manifest to his senses at the same moment, and filled him with bewilderment and surprise. In front of him, at the distance of three or four feet, was a high screen of fine sandal-wood lattice work, over which was flung a dark curtain, embroidered thickly with golden lilies. Through the interstices of the aromatic wood were seen the glimmer of quaint brass lamps, the flashing of gold and silver embroideries, the soft green of large-leaved plants.
Lauriston knew he must have made some awful mistake; no young English engineer would go in for this sort of thing. But his curiosity was so great concerning the inhabitants of this Eastern palace on a first floor in Mary Street, that he was unable to resist the temptation of a further peep into the interior. He stepped forward and looked behind the screen.
It was a large room. No inch of the flooring was to be seen, for it was covered with thick carpets and the unlined skins of beasts. The fireplace and the entire walls were hidden by shining silks and soft muslins, draped so loosely that they shimmered in the draught of the open door. At the four corners of the room stood clusters of broad-leaved tropical plants, round the bases of which were piled small metal shields, glittering yataghans, long yellowish elephant-tusks, and quaintly-shaped vessels of many-hued pottery; above the dark foliage spears and lances were piled against the wall, pressing back the graceful draperies into their places, and shooting up, straight and glistening, like clumps of tall reeds. The ceiling was painted like a night sky—deep dark blue, with fleecy grayish clouds; from it hung, at irregular intervals, innumerable tiny opalescent lamps, in each of which glowed a little spark of light. Besides this, a large lamp of brass and tinted glass hung suspended from two crossed silken cords nearly in the middle of the room, and immediately under it a small fountain played in a bronze basin.
Round three sides of the room was a low divan, covered with loosely thrown rugs and cushions, some of sombre-hued tapestry, some resplendent with gorgeous embroidery.
The whole of this most unexpected scene formed only a hazy and harmonious background in George Lauriston’s eyes; for in front of him on the divan, between the two trellised windows, lay a creature so bewitchingly unlike anything of flesh and blood he had ever seen or dreamed of, that the young Englishman felt his brain swim, and held his breath with a great fear lest the dazzling vision before him should melt away, with the scents and the soft lights and the rustle of the night air in the hanging draperies, into the drizzling rain and the damp and the darkness of the street outside.
It was a woman he saw, a small and slender woman, lying almost at full length, supported by a sliding pile of cushions, the one on which her head rested being a huge square of gold-tinted satin, with peacocks’ feathers stitched down in all directions upon the smooth silk. Below her on the ground was a little inlaid Turkish table, on which burnt, in rather dangerous proximity to the lady’s light draperies, an open lamp. A loose but clinging garment of soft white stuff hid her figure and yet disclosed its outlines, the graceful curves from shoulder to hip, and from hip to heel, while the tip of an embroidered velvet slipper peeped out beneath its folds, and a slender rounded arm, laden from shoulder to wrist with armlets and bracelets, gold, silver and enamelled, escaping from its loose open sleeve, hung down straight over the side of the divan, and looked in the soft light which fell on it from the lamp, like purest ivory seen in the last rays of a sunset. Long gold and silver chains which, had she been erect, would have reached below her waist, hung round her neck and jingled together over the side of the couch. A great soft scarf of many skilfully blended colours was bound about her waist and fastened by a large Indian ornament of roughly hewn precious stones. The robe she wore had become disarranged by her reclining posture, so that great folds of the soft white muslin had gathered about her neck, forming a white nest-like frame for her small head, which was covered by a tiny scarlet velvet cap, from under which her short and curly black hair escaped in a tangled bush that cast a shade over a little white face. Her eyes were closed and a most ghastly livid pallor was spread over her features from forehead to chin; so that Lauriston, with a great shock, was awakened out of the state of moonstruck bewilderment and admiration into which the strange sight had thrown him, by a horrible belief that he was standing in the presence of a dead woman.
“Great Heaven!” broke from his stammering lips as he made one quick step forward.
But at the sound of his voice the sleeping girl awoke; and her opening eyes falling at once upon a stranger, she sprang into a sitting position with a startled cry. In a moment he saw what had caused his mistake. A blue glass in one side of the octagonal lantern above had thrown a livid light on the young girl’s face, which he now saw to be healthily flushed with sleep, and animated with the most vivid alarm.
He was retreating hastily with a confused murmur of apologies for his intrusion, when a bright glare of flame flashed up blindingly in a pointed tongue of light and smoke towards the ceiling, and with a shriek the girl started to her feet. The hanging open sleeve of her white gown had caught fire as, waking like a child and not yet quite mistress of all her faculties, she had, in her change of position, allowed the flimsy light material to swing over the little lamp. Lauriston’s light overcoat hung on his arm. He wrapped it round the panting, struggling, moaning girl, swept up with his left hand a leopard skin that was uppermost amongst the rugs at his feet, and binding that also tightly about her, succeeded in very few moments in stifling the flame. He had said nothing all the while, there being no time for discussion; the girl, after the first cry, had submitted, with only low murmurs of fright and pain, to his quick and vigorous treatment. He looked down, when she at last fell merely to sighing and trembling and gasping for breath, at the curly head from which the little scarlet cap had fallen in his rough embrace. The thick tousle of hair, soft, not as silk, but as finest wool, was entirely innocent of curling tongs, and hung in disorder about a face which had something more of passion, something more of a most innocent voluptuousness in every curve and in every glance than are ever to be found in the countenance of an English girl.
Lauriston still held the little creature tightly in his arms, and as he did so the feelings of pity and anxiety, which had been the first to stir in his heart when his prompt measures choked down the rising flame, gave place to an impulse of tenderness as she looked up with long, soft, shining, black eyes full of wondering inquiry. This small helpless thing, quivering and sighing in his arms and gazing with the velvet, innocent eyes of a fawn into his face, made his heart leap; with an agitation new and strange, he pressed her close to him, and clasped her head against his breast.
If it had been indeed a fawn that he had been caressing, he could not have been more amazed and confused when the girl slipped lithely through his arms, and shaking off the impromptu bandages in which he had swathed her, tossed the ends of her long scarf over her burnt and blistered left arm and the blackened rags of her sleeve and bodice, and said haughtily, in English as good as his own, and moreover with the accent of perfect refinement:
“I am much obliged to you, sir, for your kind help; but as you are a complete stranger to me, I shall be glad if you will either give an explanation of your visit, or bring it to a close!”
The unexpected dignity and self-possession of this young creature, who could not be more than sixteen, together with the shock of discovering that the fantastic and dreamy-eyed being whom he had been treating somewhat in the free-and-easy fashion of theArabian Nightswas a mere nineteenth century young English lady, reduced poor Lauriston to a level of abject consternation. And yet, against her will, there was something in her indignation more alluring than repellent; even as he stammered out the first words of a humble apology, the transient gleam of anger faded out of her long eyes, and he saw only before him a graceful tiny creature, calling forth his pity by the pain in her arm which made her wince and bite her under lip, and passionate yearning admiration by the seductive charm of every attitude and every movement.
“I beg you to forgive my intrusion, madam. This address was given to me, by mistake, as that of one of my friends. I can’t describe to you the distress I feel at my share in your accident. Tell me how to summon your friends; I will go at once, and send a doctor. Please forgive me; for heaven’s sake, forgive me.”
White wet beads stood on his forehead; he was in an agony as, the danger past, she evidently felt more and more acutely the smarting pain of her injured arm and shoulder. She gave way, as her plaintive eyes met those of the young soldier, and burst into tears.
“There’s no one here. Mrs. Ellis has gone out; Sundran, my servant, is in bed, and I won’t—won’t let Rahas come. I’m afraid of him; I hate him, I hate him.” And she stamped her little velvet-shod foot, that came softly enough down on the pile of disordered rugs. “Oh, send some one to me—it does hurt so.”
“I will! I will!” he said hastily. And afraid of the emotion which was choking his voice and causing his own eyes to overflow, he dashed out of the room and down the stairs.
At the foot of them he came suddenly, with a great start, face to face with a tall, gaunt, dark-visaged man, who seemed to spring up like a magician from out of the gloom without sound or warning. He wore an Oriental dress of loose trousers, jacket and sash of a deep crimson, and a fez on his black hair; but there was no trace of likeness, no trace of a similarity of race, between the ivory skin and long liquid eyes of the girl Lauriston had just left, and the swarthy complexion and fierce, lowering expression of this man.
“What are you doing here?” he said fluently enough, but with a strong foreign accent, clutching at the young man’s coat with long lean fingers.
Lauriston, without replying, flung him aside so deftly as well as forcibly that the other staggered and reeled back against the wall, and the young soldier dashed open the door and was out of the house in a moment. Addressing the first respectable-looking man he met in the street as he hastened in the direction of Fitzroy Square, he asked the address of the nearest doctor’s, and a few moments later was at the door of the house indicated. He hurried the doctor up as if it had been a case of life or death, and burned with impatience because that gentleman’s footsteps were more deliberate than his own. For there was more in his heart than anxiety that the tender little arm should be quickly eased of its pain. The forbidding face of the man he had met on his way out haunted him, and filled him with a sullen rage, the origin of which he did not clearly understand. He was the “Rahas” the girl had wished to avoid; Lauriston felt sure of that: and he was alone, excited with indignation against the strange intruder, in the house with the injured girl. He would go up stairs to her, furious, full of savage inquiries. What claim had he upon her? What would he do to her?
Lauriston was in a fever of doubts and questions and tempestuous impulses utterly foreign to him. An odd fancy would recur again and again to his mind in this new tumult of thoughts and feelings.
She—the lovely, lissom creature whom he had held in his arms, whose heart he had felt for a short moment beating against his own, was the fascinating if somewhat soulless lady of the Eastern tales; he—the dark-faced, evil-looking being whose eyes and teeth had gleamed out upon him menacingly in the darkness, was the wicked genie who held her in his power.
Well, and if so, what part in the tale was he, George Lauriston, to play?
Within one short hour, the self-contained, ambitious young man seemed to have changed his nature. The absurd, frivolous, or perhaps dangerous question had become one of momentous importance to him.
WhenGeorge Lauriston arrived with the doctor at the door of 36, Mary Street, the lights in the windows on the first floor had grown dimmer, and George, who would have opened the door as he had done before, and gone up stairs with the doctor without ceremony, found that the key had been turned and the bolts drawn. He rang the bell, and made the knocker sound with a loud rata-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-tat that echoed through the now quiet street. No notice whatever was taken of this, except by a gentleman who lodged on the third-floor front opposite, who threw open his window and wanted to know in a husky voice what the things unutterable they meant by kicking up such an adjective-left-to-the-imagination row in a respectable neighbourhood.
But No. 36, Mary Street remained as silent and unresponsive as ever.
After a pause Lauriston knocked again, regardless of the growing strength of the maledictions of the gentleman opposite. Then a shadow was seen against the curtains of one of the first-floor windows, and over the carved lattice-work a head looked out. George moved closer to the door, and left the doctor to speak.
“Who is it knocking?”
“It is I, Dr. Bannerman. I have been sent for to attend a young lady who has been severely burned, and if the door is not opened immediately I shall return to my house.”
“Are you alone?”
“Say yes. I’ll go,” said Lauriston in a low tone.
“Alone? Yes.”
The head disappeared, and Lauriston went a little distance down the street and crossed to the other side. He saw the door of No. 36 cautiously opened upon the chain, and then, after a few impatient words from the doctor, it was thrown wide by the man in the fez, and shut as the other entered. The young man walked up and down impatiently, never letting the house go out of sight until, after about half an hour, the doctor re-appeared, and the clank of the chain was heard as the door was bolted again behind him.
“Well!” said Lauriston eagerly.
“Well!” said the doctor easily.
A doctor is the last sort of man to be readily astonished; but it was hardly possible that the oldest priest of the body should find himself in attendance on the entrancing mistress of an Eastern palace on the first floor of a lodging-house in Mary Street without a mild sense of passing through an unusual experience.
“You—you saw her?” continued the young man, breathlessly.
“Yes, and dressed the arm. Nothing at all serious; nothing to alarm anybody. She won’t be able to wear short sleeves for some time, and that’s about the worst of it.”
“Unimpressive logs these doctors are,” thought Lauriston, perceiving that his marvellous Eastern lady, with all her romance-stirring surroundings, had awakened in the man of science absolutely no more interest than he would have felt in a butcher who had broken his leg. The only thing to be noted in his quiet, intelligent countenance was a deep and curious scrutiny of the face of his young companion.
“You are not a friend of long standing of this lady’s, I understand?” he said, after an unobtrusive but careful examination.
“Oh, no; it was by the merest accident I was in the house at all. I was given that address by mistake as that of one of my friends. Why do you ask?”
“It is nothing, nothing. Your manner when you came to me was so strangely excited—in fact, it is so still—that I could not help thinking what a difference thirty years make in a man’s view of things.”
“I was thinking something of the same sort. You seem to see nothing new, interesting or strange in a patient who appears to me to be the mysterious Rosamond in a labyrinth of extraordinary circumstances.”
“I admit I cannot see anything extraordinary in the circumstances; moreover, I marvel at the strength of an imagination which is able to do so.”
“Will you tell me just what you did inside that house, and just what you saw?”
“Certainly. I was admitted, as you know, by a tall dark man who, by his dress and complexion, I should judge to be either an Arab or a North African.”
“Don’t you think it strange that no attention was paid to my first knock, and that you were admitted with as many precautions as a policeman in a thieves’ kitchen?”
“That was all explained to me by the young man himself, who seemed to be a very intelligent fellow.”
“How? What did he say?”
“He said that a lady who lodged in the house with her governess and chaperon, and who, he gave me to understand, was shortly to become his wife——”
“His wife!” interrupted Lauriston, with a rush of blood to his head.
“—had been frightened by an utter stranger who had by some means got into the house, and forcing himself into the presence of the young lady, who was asleep during the temporary absence of her companion, had woke her and caused her, in her alarmed attempt to escape, to set on fire the thin muslin wrapper she was wearing. Is not this substantially correct?” asked the doctor calmly.
“Yes; but——”
“It seemed to me quite natural that our Arabian or African friend should look upon the unexpected visit as something like an intrusion, especially as the stranger, on leaving the house, flung the aggrievedfiancéheadlong over the staircase of his own dwelling.”
“Fiancé! How do you know he is herfiancé? You have only his word for it.”
“It did not occur to me to ask for the lady’s,” said the doctor drily.
“Well, but the room, the lamps and the spears and the tapestries! Her dress too! Do you have many patients dressed like that?”
Dr. Bannerman looked at him again. If he had seen nothing to surprise him in his patient, he saw much in his questioner.
“Her dress? Let me see; she had on a white muslin wrapper with one sleeve burnt off. No, I saw nothing astonishing in that. Her governess, a rigidly dignified Englishwoman, was with her.”
“And the furniture of the room——”
“Was the usual furniture of a back bedroom in the better class of London apartments.”
“Oh.” A pause. Lauriston looked half relieved, half puzzled.
He did not want to think that the little section of an enchanted palace, in which he had passed through such a brief but exciting experience of something altogether new and intoxicating in life, was the mere vision that his calmer reason began already to tell him it must be.
“You didn’t go into the front room then?”
“No.”
Lauriston felt better.
“But I could see into it, and there was nothing extraordinary in it.”
“It was the other room,” murmured Lauriston.
“Well, we are at the corner of my street, and I will wish you good-night. We professional men have to keep early hours when we can.”
“Shall you call there again?”
“Possibly. But, if you will take an old man’s advice, you will not.”
“You will tell me why?”
“I will. I saw nothing of the marvellous sights you appear to have witnessed, but I saw something which you did not, or at least not in the same way. That little black-haired girl’s eyes are the eyes of a woman who is born to be a coquette—perhaps something more; and who can no more help looking up into the eyes of every man she meets with a look that draws out his soul and his senses and leaves him a mere automaton to be moved by her as she pleases than fire can help burning, or the spider help spinning his thread.”
“I will never believe it. You may have had thirty years’ more experience than I; but, by Jove, where a woman is concerned, one man’s guess is as good as another’s. And I am quite as firmly convinced that the child is an innocent and good little girl as you are that she is the contrary. I know it, I am sure of it; as I held her in my arms——”
“Ah!” interrupted the doctor.
“Wrapping my coat about her to put out the flames,” continued Lauriston hastily, “I looked at her face, and was quite touched by its helpless, childlike expression of innocence.”
“And will it take my thirty years of extra experience to teach you that to hold a woman in your arms is not a judicial attitude?”
Lauriston was silent. Emboldened by the knowledge that the doctor did not even know his name, and was by no means likely to meet him again, he had allowed himself to talk more freely than he would otherwise have done to a stranger. In the ferment of emotions he was in, however, the older man’s drily cynical tone seemed to him satanic. He was by this time, therefore, quite as anxious to leave the doctor, as the latter could possibly be to get rid of him. He was raising his hat for a rather reserved and abrupt leave-taking, when Dr. Bannerman stopped him with a good-humoured touch on his arm.
“Now what have I done that you should give me my dismissal like that? Merely told you what your own good sense—for you’re a Scotchman I know by your accent, though it’s far enough from a canny Scot you’ve been to-night—will tell you in the morning. Set your affections on a blue-eyed lassie among the hills, or on a prim little English miss; she may not be quite so warm to you as a little southern baggage would be, but then she’ll be colder to other people, and that restores the balance to your advantage. Now, I shall probably never see you again, so we may as well part good friends; and for goodness’ ” (the doctor said something stronger than this) “for goodness’ sake think over my advice. It’s ten times better than any physic I ever prescribed.”
He held out his hand, which Lauriston shook warmly.
“Thank you, doctor. I’m not a Scotchman, though I was brought up among the heather. You’re right. Your prescription is a very good one, and I’ll take as much of the dose as—as I can swallow.”
And in a moment he was striding down the street.
When he woke up the next morning, George Lauriston felt like a small boy who has been well thrashed the night before and who, sleeping soundly after an exhausting burst of grief, can’t for the life of him remember, for the first moment, the nature of the load of affliction which still burdens his little soul. Had he had more champagne the night before than was strictly necessary to support existence? Or had he been plucked in an exam.?
The sight of his over-coat lying on a chair, with the lining blackened and burnt, recalled the adventures of the preceding evening. But they came back to his mind in a hazy sort of way, nothing very clear but that odd little figure in white, with the slender arms, and the long black eyes, and the chains and bracelets that jingled and glittered as she moved. It was an odd incident certainly, and not the least odd part of it was the seriousness with which the old doctor had warned him to have nothing more to do with the mysterious lady of the sandal-wood screens and skin-covered couch. Nothing was less likely than that he should: in cold blood and in the healthy and prosaic atmosphere of morning, Lauriston felt not the slightest wish to run possible melodramatic dangers in the endeavour to see again the beautiful little girl whose romantic surroundings had afforded him an hour’s excitement the night before. The burn she had so unluckily sustained through no fault of his, had been pronounced not serious; if he were to attempt even a civil call for inquiries, he would probably be ill received in the house as a person whose presence had already brought more harm than good.
Therefore George Lauriston, who was deeply interested in a war-game which was being played that day, treated the subject as dismissed, not without some shame at the absurd pitch of excitement to which this meeting with a presumably low-bred woman had for a short time raised him. He retained nevertheless just sufficient interest in the little episode, or perhaps just enough shyness about his own share in it, to say nothing whatever upon the subject to Massey or Dicky Wood, neither of whom had the courage to question him. The blunder—for he never suspected a plot—might remain unexplained. And the conspirators, not guessing what a brilliant success they had had, decided that the train had been laid in vain.
But accident—Lauriston was the last person in the world to call it fate—threw him within a fortnight again in the way of the mysterious lady. He was returning one afternoon from Fitzroy Square, after a call at the house of the old officer whose dinner-party had indirectly led to the adventure, when by pure accident he found himself in Mary Street, opposite to the very house where his mysterious introduction had taken place. He retained a vivid enough recollection of all the circumstances to feel a strange shock, half pleasure, half a vague terror, when the red-lettered inscription “Rahas and Fanah, Oriental Merchants,” with the star and crescent underneath, caught his eye. He stopped involuntarily, and glanced up at the windows. Nothing in the daylight appearance of the house gave any indication of the luxurious glories within. The blinds of the two windows in which the lights had shone on the evening of his startling visit were half drawn down, and there was no sign of the carved lattice-work which he remembered so clearly. The third window on the first-floor was open, and while he looked the curtain—not a gorgeous hanging of bullion-embroidered tapestry, but the common white lace curtain of commerce—moved, and the black curly head of a young girl appeared at the window. It was the mysterious lady of the lamps.
Although seen thus in the strong afternoon sunlight, apparently dressed like an ordinary English girl in a silk dress that was a sort of green shot with pale grey, she produced an entirely different impression on him from that of his first sight of her, the charm of the warm-tinted skin and the glowing eyes was as great for him as ever. He raised his hat, and she beckoned to him with a coquettish and mischievous little curve of her tiny fore-finger under her chin. He felt his heart leap up, and though, when she whirled round and disappeared from the window, he tried to walk on, telling himself vehemently that he should be worse than a fool to yield to the magnetic attraction this dark-skinned elf seemed to exercise upon him, he relaxed his speed, trying to assure himself that it was too hot to race along like a postman. But at the creaking of a door in the street behind him he was obliged to look back, and there, peeping out like a tiny enchantress in this dingy London wilderness of dirty, screaming children, costers with their barrows, the public-house loafer and the catsmeat man, stood the girl, laughing at him, and inviting him with bewitching eyes and dazzling teeth, her head bent downwards to avoid the blaze of the sun, which shone full on her head and on the little ivory hand which she held up against her dusky soft black hair as a most inadequate screen.
George Lauriston hesitated. If he had foreseen in continuing this acquaintance merely a flirtation with a pretty and somewhat forward girl, all his ascetic principles and resolutions would have had to give way under the strong admiration she had excited in him. But the strange circumstances of his first meeting with her which, though they had been thrust into the background of his mind by the absorbing interest of his deep-seated ambition, now again appealed to his imagination with great force; the advice of the old doctor, and perhaps a suggestion of that sacred instinct which the lower animals listen to and live by, all tended to warn him from a danger more than ephemeral, and at the same time to throw over the acquaintance an extraordinary glamour of romantic attraction.