SCHEHERAZADE:
A
LONDON NIGHT’S ENTERTAINMENT.
BY
FLORENCE 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.
[IMPRINT]
Richard Clay & Sons, Limited,
London & Bungay.
CONTENTS.
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
SCHEHERAZADE:
_A LONDON NIGHT’S ENTERTAINMENT._
CHAPTER I.
“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 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 a _grande
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.
“The _grande passion_ was certainly not for Lady F.,” said Massey.
“By Jove, if she was the remedy, it _was_ a 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 a _blasé_ air 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 many _grandes passions_ knockin’ 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 her _number_,
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 the _Arabian
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.”
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.