THE STAGE FILLS
The party which gradually assembled on the lawn about four was somewhat
small, but very select. Nitocris had too much common sense and too much
real consideration for her friends and acquaintances to get together a
mere mob of well-dressed people of probably incompatible tastes and
temperament, and call it a party. She disliked an elbowing crowd and a
clatter of fashionably shrill tongues with all the aversion of a
delicately developed sensibility. No consideration of rank or social
power or wealth had the slightest weight with her when she was
distributing cards of invitation, wherefore the said cards were all the
more eagerly awaited by those who did, and did not, get them. The result
of this in the present case was that, although every one accepted and
came, rather less than fifty people had the run of the broad lawns and
the leafy wilderness about them on that momentous afternoon.
The first of the arrivals was Professor Hartley, reputed to be the
greatest mathematician in England. He was a large man with rather heavy
features, lit up by alert grey eyes, a big, dome-like cranium, and a
manner that was modest almost to diffidence. He brought his wife, a
slim and somewhat stern-featured lady, who, in the domestic sense, kept
him in his place with inflexible decision, and worshipped him in his
professional capacity, and two pretty, well-dressed, and obviously
well-bred daughters. Their carriage drew up, turned into the drive
precisely at four. Punctuality was the Professor's one and only social
vice.
Next came Commander Merrill in a hansom. This would be one of the very
few meetings that he could hope for with his lost beloved--as he now
sadly thought of her--before he put H.M.S. _Blazer_ into commission, and
so punctuality on his part was both natural and excusable. Then came a
few more carriages containing very nice people with whom we have here
but little concern; and then Miss Brenda, deeply regretting her
beautiful Napier, with her father and mother in a very smart Savoy
turn-out followed by a coronetted brougham drawn by a splendid pair of
black Orloffs. This was followed by an equally smart dog-cart driven by
a rather slightly-built but well set-up young man with a light
moustache, bronzed skin, and brilliant blue eyes. He was good-looking,
but if his features had been absolutely plain he could never have looked
commonplace, for this was Lord Lester Leighton, son of the Earl of
Kyneston, and twenty generations of unblemished descent had made him the
aristocrat that he was.
Nitocris did not like pompous announcements by servants, and so she
received her guests, who were all acquaintances or friends, in the
great porch through which many a brilliant presence had passed, and had
two maids waiting inside to see to the wants of the ladies, and their
own coachman and a couple of grooms to attend to matters outside.
Merrill was made as happy as possible by a bright smile, a real
hand-clasp instead of the usual Society paw-waggle, and instructions to
go and make himself agreeable and useful. Brenda also received a hearty
"shake"--Nitocris did not believe in kissing in public--and when the
Professor and Mrs Huysman had gone in, she whispered:
"I suppose that's the Prince's brougham. You must wait here, dear, and
do the introductions. You're responsible, you know."
Brenda assented with a nod and a smile, as the brougham drew up and the
smart tiger jumped down and opened the door. The Prince got out, and was
followed by Phadrig the Adept. As she looked at the two men, Nitocris
felt as though a wave of cold air had suddenly enveloped her whole
being--body and soul.
"Niti, this is our friend, Prince Oscar Oscarovitch, whom you have been
kind enough to let me invite by proxy. Prince, this is Miss Nitocris
Marmion."
Of course all the world knew of Oscar Oscarovitch, the modern Skobeleff,
the lineal descendant of Ivan the Terrible, the crystal-brained,
steel-willed man who was to be the saviour and regenerator of
half-ruined, revolution-rent Russia, but this was the first time that
Nitocris had met him in her present life. When she had returned his
stately bow, she looked up and saw with a strange intuition, which
somehow seemed half-reminiscent an almost perfect type of the primitive
warrior through the disguise of his faultless twentieth-century attire.
He was nearly two inches over six feet, but he was so exquisitely
proportioned that he looked less than his height. His skin was fair and
smooth, but tanned to an olive-brown. His forehead was of medium height,
straight and square, with jet-black brows drawn almost straight across
it above a pair of rather soft, dreamy eyes that were blue or black
according to the mood of their possessor. His nose was strong and
slightly curved, with delicately sensitive nostrils. A dark glossy
moustache and beard trimmed _à la_ Tsar, partly hid full, almost sensual
lips and a powerful somewhat projecting chin.
As their eyes met the shiver of revulsion passed through her again. She
hardly heard his murmured compliments, but her attention awoke when he
turned to the man who was standing behind him, and said with a very
graceful gesture of his left hand:
"Miss Marmion, this is the gentleman whom you have so graciously
permitted me to bring to your house. This is Phadrig the Adept, as he is
known in his own ancient land of Egypt, a worker of wonders which really
are wonders, and not mere sleight-of-hand conjuring tricks. He has been
good enough to accompany me in order to convince the learned of the West
that the Immemorial East could still teach it something if it chose."
Nitocris bowed, and as she looked at the figure which now stood beside
the Prince, she shivered again. She had a swift sense of standing in the
presence of implacable enemies, and yet she had never seen these men
before, and, for all she knew, she had not an enemy in the world. She
was intensely relieved when Lord Lester Leighton came up and held out
his hand, and she was able to ask the Prince and his companion to go
through to the lawn.
No one would have recognised the shabby denizen of the grimy room in
Candler's Court, Borough High Street, in the tall, dignified Eastern
gentleman who walked with slow and stately step through the spacious old
hall of "The Wilderness." He was clad in a light frock-coat suit of
irreproachable cut and fit. The correctly-creased trousers met
brightly-burnished, narrow-toed tan boots; a black-tasselled scarlet
tarbush was set square on his high forehead, and the dark red tie under
his two-ply collar just added the necessary touch of Oriental colour to
his costume, and went excellently with the lighter red of the tarbush.
It is hardly necessary to say that when he and the Prince went out on to
the lawn, they were, as a Society paper report of the function would
have put it, "the observed of all observers."
"I'm so glad you were able to be here in time for my little party, Lord
Leighton," said Nitocris, when she had ended the welcoming of the other
guests. "Dad will be delighted, too----"
She stopped rather suddenly, remembering that Dad would have to tell his
young friend the sad story of the mysterious loss of the Mummy; but
another subject was uppermost in her mind just then, and, taking refuge
in it, she went on quickly:
"Come along to the lawn. I want to introduce you to a very distinguished
gentleman--and his wife and daughter. No less a person, my lord, than
the great Professor Hoskins van Huysman!"
"What!" exclaimed Leighton, with a laugh that was almost boyish for such
a serious and learned young man. "_The_ Huysman: the Professor's most
doughty antagonist in the arena of symbols and theorems? Oh, now that
_is_ good!"
"Yes; I think you will find him very interesting," replied Nitocris,
hoping in her soul that he would find Brenda a great deal more
interesting. "Come along, or Dad will be beginning to think that I am
neglecting my duties, and I must be on quite my best behaviour to-day.
We are favoured by the presence of another very celebrated celebrity
to-day. That tall man who came in just before you was Prince Oscar
Oscarovitch."
"Oh yes," he said lightly; "I recognised the brute."
"The brute? Dear me, that is rather severe. Then you know His Highness?"
she asked in a low, almost eager, voice.
"There are not many men in the Near or Far East who have not some cause
to know His Highness," he replied in a serious tone, tinged by the
suspicion of a sneer. "He is about the finest specimen of the
well-veneered savage that even Russia has produced for the last
century. He is a brilliant scholar, statesman, and soldier; delightful
among his equals--or those he chooses to consider so--charming to men,
and, they say, almost irresistible to women; but to his opponents and
his inferiors, a pitiless brute-beast without heart, or soul, or honour.
A curious mixture: but that's the man."
"How awful!" murmured Nitocris. "Fancy a man like that being in such a
position!"
But, although she did not understand why, she had heard his
harshly-spoken words with a positive sense of relief. They exactly
translated and crystallised her first inexplicable feelings of desperate
aversion--almost of terror.
She led Leighton to a little group on the left side of the lawn,
composed of the three Professors and the wives and daughters of two of
them. As they approached them, Nitocris became sensible of a curious
kind of nervousness. She did not know that by this commonplace action
she was reuniting two links in a long-severed chain of destiny, but she
had a dim consciousness that she was going to do something much more
important than merely introducing two strangers to each other. She
looked quite anxiously at Brenda, who had turned towards them as they
came near, and saw that, just for the fraction of a second, her eyes
brightened, and a passing flush deepened the delicate colour in her
cheeks. It was almost like a glance of recognition, and yet she had only
heard his name two or three times, and certainly had never seen him
before. Then she looked swiftly at Leighton. Yes, there was a flush
under his tan and a new light in his eyes. When she had completed the
introductions she looked away for a moment, and said in her soul:
"Thank goodness! If that is not a case of love at first sight, I shan't
believe that there is any such thing, whatever the poets and romancers
may say."
Yes, her womanly intuition was right as far as it reached; but she could
not yet grasp the full meaning of the marvel which she had helped to
bring about. With her father, she believed in the Doctrine of
Re-Incarnation as the only one which affords a logical and entirely just
solution of the bewildering puzzles and ghastly problems of human life
as seen by the eyes of ignorance. She had grasped in its highest meaning
the truth--that Man is really a living soul, living from eternity to
eternity. An immortality with one end to it was to her an unthinkable
proposition which could not possibly be true. For her, as for her
father, Eternal Life and Eternal Justice were one. Where a man ended one
life, from that point he began the next: for good or for evil, for
ignorance or for knowledge. A life lived and ended in righteousness
(not, of course, in the narrow theological sense of the term) began
again in righteousness, and in evil meant inexorably a re-beginning in
evil. That was Fate, because it was also immutable Justice. Man
possessed the Divine gift of free will to use or abuse as he would, so
far as his own life-conduct was concerned; but there was no evasion of
the adamantine law of the survival and progress of the fittest, which,
in the course of ages, infallibly proved to be the best. This, in a
word, was why "some are born to honour and some to dishonour."
Yet she had still to fathom an even subtler mystery than this: the
mystery of sexual love. Why should one man and one woman, out of all the
teeming millions of humanity, be irresistibly attracted to each other by
a force which none can analyse or define? Why should a woman, confronted
with the choice between two men, one of whom possesses every apparent
advantage over the other, yet feel her heart go out to that other, and
impel her to follow him, even to the leaving of father and mother and
home, and all else that has been dear to her? Why in the soul of every
true man and woman is Love, when it comes, made Lord of all, and all in
all? It is because Love is co-eternal with Life, and these two have
loved, perchance wedded, many times before in other lives which they
have lived together, and, with the succession of these lives, their love
has grown stronger and purer, until "falling in love" is merely a
recognition of lovers; unconscious, no doubt, to those who have not
progressed far enough in wisdom, but none the less necessary and
inevitable for that.[1]
Is it not from ignorance of this truth, or wilful denial of this law,
that all the miseries of mismarriage come forth? Again the woman has
the choice. She obeys the bidding of her own lust of wealth and comfort
and social power, or she submits to the pressure of family influence, or
the stress of poverty, and crushes--or thinks she does--the ages-old
love out of her heart and marries the man she does not love, never has
loved, and never can. She has defied the eternal Law of Selection. She
has desecrated the sanctity of an immortal soul, and she has defiled the
temple of her body. She has sold herself for a price in the
market-place, and has become a prostitute endowed by law with a
conventional respectability, and for this crime she pays the penalty of
unsated heart-hunger. Instead of the fruits of Eden distilling their
sweet juices into her blood, the apples of Gomorrah turn perpetually to
ashes in her mouth. Often weariness and despair drive her to the brief
intoxication of the anodyne of adultery, a further crime which is only
the natural consequence of the first.
But it must not be thought that women are the only sexual criminals.
There are male as well as female prostitutes made respectable by
convention, and the debt-burdened man of title who marries to get gold
to re-gild his tarnished coronet is the worst of these; for too often he
drags an innocent but ignorant maiden down to his own vile level. Yet
the chief criminal of all is not the individual, but the Society which
not only encourages, but too often compels the crime. For this it also
pays the penalty. The collective crime brings the collective curse,
for, if human history proves anything, it proves that the Society which
persistently denies the Law of Selection, and continually defiles the
Altar of Love, in the end goes down through a foul welter of lust and
greed and gluttony into the nethermost Pit of Destruction.
Nitocris had not learned this yet. It was not within the plan of Eternal
Justice that her virgin soul, purified by the strenuous labour of many
lives towards the Light, should yet be darkened by the shadow of such
grim knowledge as this. It was enough for her now that she should be the
ministering angel of Love and Light.
But at the same moment, standing on that smooth, shady lawn, there were
also two incarnations of the destroying angels of Hate and Darkness, for
even here, amidst this pleasant scene of seemingly innocent pleasure and
laughter, the Eternal Conflict was being continued, as it is and must
be, wherever man comes in contact with his kith and kind.
Soon after Nitocris and Brenda had joined the group, Phadrig approached
the Prince, who happened for the moment to be standing alone at the
bottom of the lawn, and said softly in Russian:
"Highness, my dream, as you are pleased to call it, has proved true.
That is the Queen--she who was once the daughter of the great Rameses,
Lady of the Upper and Lower Kingdoms."
"What?" laughed the Prince. "Miss Marmion, that lovely English girl,
your old Egyptian Mummy re-vivified! Well, have it as you like. You are
welcome to your dreams as long as you use your arts to help me to lay
hands on the beautiful reality. I have seen many a fair woman, and
thought myself in love with some of them, but by the beard of Ivan, I
have never seen one like this. I tell you, Phadrig, that the moment my
eyes looked for the first time into hers, only a few minutes ago, I knew
that I had found my fate, and, having found it, I shall take very good
care that I don't lose it. And you shall help me to keep it; I shall try
every fair means first to make her my princess, for, whether she was
once Queen of Egypt or not, she is worthy now to sit beside a sovereign
on his throne--and it might be that I could some day give her such a
place--but have her I will, if not as fairly-won wife and consort, then
as stolen slave and plaything, to keep as long as my fancy lasts. And
listen, Phadrig," he went on in a low tone, but with savage intensity.
"Your life is mine, for I gave it back to you when the lifting of a
finger would have sent you into what you would call another incarnation;
and from this day forth you must devote it to this end until it is
attained, one way or the other. I know you don't care for money as
wealth, but in this world it is the right hand of power, and that you
love. All that you need shall be yours for the asking in exchange for
your faithful service. Are you content with the bargain?"
"No, Highness, that will not content me," replied Phadrig, in a voice
that had no expression save unalterable resolve.
"What! Is not that enough for you, a penniless seller of curios?" said
the Prince, with a sneer in his tone. "Then I will add to it the ready
aid and unquestioning obedience of our secret police, here and in
Europe. Will that satisfy you?"
"I do not need the help of your police, Highness," answered the
Egyptian, in the same passionless accents. "They are skilful and brave,
but they have not the Greater Knowledge. I could turn the wisest of them
into a fool, and frighten the bravest out of his senses in a few
minutes. Use them yourself, Highness, should it become necessary. They
would be less than useless to me."
"Then what will satisfy you?" asked the Prince impatiently, but with no
show of anger, for he knew the strange power of the man whose help he
needed.
"I do not ask you to believe in the reality of what you call my dreams,
Highness," replied Phadrig slowly, "but I do ask--nay, I require, as the
price of my faithful service, your solemn promise in writing, signed and
attested, that, if and when my dreams become realities, and your own
hopes are fulfilled, the independence and sovereignty of the Ancient
Land shall be restored; her temples and tombs and palaces shall be
rebuilt; her ancient worship revived in my person, and the sceptre of
Rameses replaced in the hand of Nitocris the Queen."
The Prince was silent for a few moments. To grant the seemingly
extravagant demand meant to reduce the splendid dream and scheme of his
life to cold, tangible writing, and to put into this man's hand the
power to betray him. On the other hand, their aims were one, and only
through him could Phadrig hope to realise his dreams. Of course they
were only dreams; but he was faithful to them, and so he would be
faithful to him. At the worst it would be easy to arrange a burglary,
or, for the matter of that, a murder in Candler's Court, and that would
make an end of the matter.
"Very well, Phadrig," he said at length. "It is settled. I will trust
you, for it is necessary that we should trust each other. You shall have
what you ask for within a week. Now I must go. I shall tell them that I
have been arranging the exhibition of your powers which you are going to
give them. It will be well to startle them sufficiently to shake their
British beef-sense up into something like fear. Make them wonder, but,
for the sake of our hostess, don't frighten them too much."
Phadrig only acknowledged his promise with a bow, and he turned away and
joined the growing group in which Nitocris and Brenda were still the
central objects of attraction.
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|FOOTNOTE: |
| |
|[1] The Doctrine, of course, affords the same explanation of|
|friendships between man and man, and woman and woman. |
| |
+------------------------------------------------------------+