If there 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 the _Arabian Nights_ was 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.