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.