CHAPTER II.
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.