CHAPTER III.
When George Lauriston arrived with the doctor at the door of 36, Mary Street, the lights in the windows on the first floor had grown dimmer, and George, who would have opened the door as he had done before, and gone up stairs with the doctor without ceremony, found that the key had been turned and the bolts drawn. He rang the bell, and made the knocker sound with a loud rata-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-tat that echoed through the now quiet street. No notice whatever was taken of this, except by a gentleman who lodged on the third-floor front opposite, who threw open his window and wanted to know in a husky voice what the things unutterable they meant by kicking up such an adjective-left-to-the-imagination row in a respectable neighbourhood.
But No. 36, Mary Street remained as silent and unresponsive as ever.
After a pause Lauriston knocked again, regardless of the growing strength of the maledictions of the gentleman opposite. Then a shadow was seen against the curtains of one of the first-floor windows, and over the carved lattice-work a head looked out. George moved closer to the door, and left the doctor to speak.
“Who is it knocking?”
“It is I, Dr. Bannerman. I have been sent for to attend a young lady who has been severely burned, and if the door is not opened immediately I shall return to my house.”
“Are you alone?”
“Say yes. I’ll go,” said Lauriston in a low tone.
“Alone? Yes.”
The head disappeared, and Lauriston went a little distance down the street and crossed to the other side. He saw the door of No. 36 cautiously opened upon the chain, and then, after a few impatient words from the doctor, it was thrown wide by the man in the fez, and shut as the other entered. The young man walked up and down impatiently, never letting the house go out of sight until, after about half an hour, the doctor re-appeared, and the clank of the chain was heard as the door was bolted again behind him.
“Well!” said Lauriston eagerly.
“Well!” said the doctor easily.
A doctor is the last sort of man to be readily astonished; but it was hardly possible that the oldest priest of the body should find himself in attendance on the entrancing mistress of an Eastern palace on the first floor of a lodging-house in Mary Street without a mild sense of passing through an unusual experience.
“You—you saw her?” continued the young man, breathlessly.
“Yes, and dressed the arm. Nothing at all serious; nothing to alarm anybody. She won’t be able to wear short sleeves for some time, and that’s about the worst of it.”
“Unimpressive logs these doctors are,” thought Lauriston, perceiving that his marvellous Eastern lady, with all her romance-stirring surroundings, had awakened in the man of science absolutely no more interest than he would have felt in a butcher who had broken his leg. The only thing to be noted in his quiet, intelligent countenance was a deep and curious scrutiny of the face of his young companion.
“You are not a friend of long standing of this lady’s, I understand?” he said, after an unobtrusive but careful examination.
“Oh, no; it was by the merest accident I was in the house at all. I was given that address by mistake as that of one of my friends. Why do you ask?”
“It is nothing, nothing. Your manner when you came to me was so strangely excited—in fact, it is so still—that I could not help thinking what a difference thirty years make in a man’s view of things.”
“I was thinking something of the same sort. You seem to see nothing new, interesting or strange in a patient who appears to me to be the mysterious Rosamond in a labyrinth of extraordinary circumstances.”
“I admit I cannot see anything extraordinary in the circumstances; moreover, I marvel at the strength of an imagination which is able to do so.”
“Will you tell me just what you did inside that house, and just what you saw?”
“Certainly. I was admitted, as you know, by a tall dark man who, by his dress and complexion, I should judge to be either an Arab or a North African.”
“Don’t you think it strange that no attention was paid to my first knock, and that you were admitted with as many precautions as a policeman in a thieves’ kitchen?”
“That was all explained to me by the young man himself, who seemed to be a very intelligent fellow.”
“How? What did he say?”
“He said that a lady who lodged in the house with her governess and chaperon, and who, he gave me to understand, was shortly to become his wife——”
“His wife!” interrupted Lauriston, with a rush of blood to his head.
“—had been frightened by an utter stranger who had by some means got into the house, and forcing himself into the presence of the young lady, who was asleep during the temporary absence of her companion, had woke her and caused her, in her alarmed attempt to escape, to set on fire the thin muslin wrapper she was wearing. Is not this substantially correct?” asked the doctor calmly.
“Yes; but——”
“It seemed to me quite natural that our Arabian or African friend should look upon the unexpected visit as something like an intrusion, especially as the stranger, on leaving the house, flung the aggrieved fiancé headlong over the staircase of his own dwelling.”
“Fiancé! How do you know he is her fiancé? You have only his word for it.”
“It did not occur to me to ask for the lady’s,” said the doctor drily.
“Well, but the room, the lamps and the spears and the tapestries! Her dress too! Do you have many patients dressed like that?”
Dr. Bannerman looked at him again. If he had seen nothing to surprise him in his patient, he saw much in his questioner.
“Her dress? Let me see; she had on a white muslin wrapper with one sleeve burnt off. No, I saw nothing astonishing in that. Her governess, a rigidly dignified Englishwoman, was with her.”
“And the furniture of the room——”
“Was the usual furniture of a back bedroom in the better class of London apartments.”
“Oh.” A pause. Lauriston looked half relieved, half puzzled.
He did not want to think that the little section of an enchanted palace, in which he had passed through such a brief but exciting experience of something altogether new and intoxicating in life, was the mere vision that his calmer reason began already to tell him it must be.
“You didn’t go into the front room then?”
“No.”
Lauriston felt better.
“But I could see into it, and there was nothing extraordinary in it.”
“It was the other room,” murmured Lauriston.
“Well, we are at the corner of my street, and I will wish you good-night. We professional men have to keep early hours when we can.”
“Shall you call there again?”
“Possibly. But, if you will take an old man’s advice, you will not.”
“You will tell me why?”
“I will. I saw nothing of the marvellous sights you appear to have witnessed, but I saw something which you did not, or at least not in the same way. That little black-haired girl’s eyes are the eyes of a woman who is born to be a coquette—perhaps something more; and who can no more help looking up into the eyes of every man she meets with a look that draws out his soul and his senses and leaves him a mere automaton to be moved by her as she pleases than fire can help burning, or the spider help spinning his thread.”
“I will never believe it. You may have had thirty years’ more experience than I; but, by Jove, where a woman is concerned, one man’s guess is as good as another’s. And I am quite as firmly convinced that the child is an innocent and good little girl as you are that she is the contrary. I know it, I am sure of it; as I held her in my arms——”
“Ah!” interrupted the doctor.
“Wrapping my coat about her to put out the flames,” continued Lauriston hastily, “I looked at her face, and was quite touched by its helpless, childlike expression of innocence.”
“And will it take my thirty years of extra experience to teach you that to hold a woman in your arms is not a judicial attitude?”
Lauriston was silent. Emboldened by the knowledge that the doctor did not even know his name, and was by no means likely to meet him again, he had allowed himself to talk more freely than he would otherwise have done to a stranger. In the ferment of emotions he was in, however, the older man’s drily cynical tone seemed to him satanic. He was by this time, therefore, quite as anxious to leave the doctor, as the latter could possibly be to get rid of him. He was raising his hat for a rather reserved and abrupt leave-taking, when Dr. Bannerman stopped him with a good-humoured touch on his arm.
“Now what have I done that you should give me my dismissal like that? Merely told you what your own good sense—for you’re a Scotchman I know by your accent, though it’s far enough from a canny Scot you’ve been to-night—will tell you in the morning. Set your affections on a blue-eyed lassie among the hills, or on a prim little English miss; she may not be quite so warm to you as a little southern baggage would be, but then she’ll be colder to other people, and that restores the balance to your advantage. Now, I shall probably never see you again, so we may as well part good friends; and for goodness’ ” (the doctor said something stronger than this) “for goodness’ sake think over my advice. It’s ten times better than any physic I ever prescribed.”
He held out his hand, which Lauriston shook warmly.
“Thank you, doctor. I’m not a Scotchman, though I was brought up among the heather. You’re right. Your prescription is a very good one, and I’ll take as much of the dose as—as I can swallow.”
And in a moment he was striding down the street.
When he woke up the next morning, George Lauriston felt like a small boy who has been well thrashed the night before and who, sleeping soundly after an exhausting burst of grief, can’t for the life of him remember, for the first moment, the nature of the load of affliction which still burdens his little soul. Had he had more champagne the night before than was strictly necessary to support existence? Or had he been plucked in an exam.?
The sight of his over-coat lying on a chair, with the lining blackened and burnt, recalled the adventures of the preceding evening. But they came back to his mind in a hazy sort of way, nothing very clear but that odd little figure in white, with the slender arms, and the long black eyes, and the chains and bracelets that jingled and glittered as she moved. It was an odd incident certainly, and not the least odd part of it was the seriousness with which the old doctor had warned him to have nothing more to do with the mysterious lady of the sandal-wood screens and skin-covered couch. Nothing was less likely than that he should: in cold blood and in the healthy and prosaic atmosphere of morning, Lauriston felt not the slightest wish to run possible melodramatic dangers in the endeavour to see again the beautiful little girl whose romantic surroundings had afforded him an hour’s excitement the night before. The burn she had so unluckily sustained through no fault of his, had been pronounced not serious; if he were to attempt even a civil call for inquiries, he would probably be ill received in the house as a person whose presence had already brought more harm than good.
Therefore George Lauriston, who was deeply interested in a war-game which was being played that day, treated the subject as dismissed, not without some shame at the absurd pitch of excitement to which this meeting with a presumably low-bred woman had for a short time raised him. He retained nevertheless just sufficient interest in the little episode, or perhaps just enough shyness about his own share in it, to say nothing whatever upon the subject to Massey or Dicky Wood, neither of whom had the courage to question him. The blunder—for he never suspected a plot—might remain unexplained. And the conspirators, not guessing what a brilliant success they had had, decided that the train had been laid in vain.
But accident—Lauriston was the last person in the world to call it fate—threw him within a fortnight again in the way of the mysterious lady. He was returning one afternoon from Fitzroy Square, after a call at the house of the old officer whose dinner-party had indirectly led to the adventure, when by pure accident he found himself in Mary Street, opposite to the very house where his mysterious introduction had taken place. He retained a vivid enough recollection of all the circumstances to feel a strange shock, half pleasure, half a vague terror, when the red-lettered inscription “Rahas and Fanah, Oriental Merchants,” with the star and crescent underneath, caught his eye. He stopped involuntarily, and glanced up at the windows. Nothing in the daylight appearance of the house gave any indication of the luxurious glories within. The blinds of the two windows in which the lights had shone on the evening of his startling visit were half drawn down, and there was no sign of the carved lattice-work which he remembered so clearly. The third window on the first-floor was open, and while he looked the curtain—not a gorgeous hanging of bullion-embroidered tapestry, but the common white lace curtain of commerce—moved, and the black curly head of a young girl appeared at the window. It was the mysterious lady of the lamps.
Although seen thus in the strong afternoon sunlight, apparently dressed like an ordinary English girl in a silk dress that was a sort of green shot with pale grey, she produced an entirely different impression on him from that of his first sight of her, the charm of the warm-tinted skin and the glowing eyes was as great for him as ever. He raised his hat, and she beckoned to him with a coquettish and mischievous little curve of her tiny fore-finger under her chin. He felt his heart leap up, and though, when she whirled round and disappeared from the window, he tried to walk on, telling himself vehemently that he should be worse than a fool to yield to the magnetic attraction this dark-skinned elf seemed to exercise upon him, he relaxed his speed, trying to assure himself that it was too hot to race along like a postman. But at the creaking of a door in the street behind him he was obliged to look back, and there, peeping out like a tiny enchantress in this dingy London wilderness of dirty, screaming children, costers with their barrows, the public-house loafer and the catsmeat man, stood the girl, laughing at him, and inviting him with bewitching eyes and dazzling teeth, her head bent downwards to avoid the blaze of the sun, which shone full on her head and on the little ivory hand which she held up against her dusky soft black hair as a most inadequate screen.
George Lauriston hesitated. If he had foreseen in continuing this acquaintance merely a flirtation with a pretty and somewhat forward girl, all his ascetic principles and resolutions would have had to give way under the strong admiration she had excited in him. But the strange circumstances of his first meeting with her which, though they had been thrust into the background of his mind by the absorbing interest of his deep-seated ambition, now again appealed to his imagination with great force; the advice of the old doctor, and perhaps a suggestion of that sacred instinct which the lower animals listen to and live by, all tended to warn him from a danger more than ephemeral, and at the same time to throw over the acquaintance an extraordinary glamour of romantic attraction.
The girl apparently guessed his reluctance, which she was not without means to overcome. Advancing a step further in the doorway, and leaning forward so that her slight grey-and-green-clad figure was visible almost to the waist, she pointed to her left arm, which hung in a picturesque sling of soft orange Indian silk. This gesture was irresistible. He felt that it justified his immediate and hasty return. How could he excuse his boorish conduct in not calling before to ask after the little arm that had been injured through him?
The lady, however, was in forgiving mood. She drew back into the doorway as soon as she saw that her end was gained, and when he reached it she was leaning against the old carved oak banisters, waiting for him, all smiles and laughter.
“Yes, come in,” she whispered, putting her finger to her lips and glancing at the inner door on her right hand.
Again Lauriston thought reluctantly of the Arabian Nights, and the lady kept in a cage by the tyrannical genie, but it was too late to retreat now, even if he could have found strength to resist the spell of the dancing eyes, or the dumb eloquence of the wounded arm. She sprang forward as soon as he had entered and shut the door softly. It was cool in the bare hall after the heat of the streets. The girl’s dress was a simple robe of silk, with lights and shades of grey changing into green, made something after the fashion of the so-called æsthetic gowns he had aforetime abhorred, but falling in straight crisp folds instead of clinging to her like damp rags, as did the garments of crumpled South Kensington devotees a few years ago.
She mounted two steps and turned, holding the banister-rail and leaning on it.
“I thought you would have come before,” she said with a first touch of shyness, looking down upon her hand with a most coquettish air of being quite ready to look up again if she were invited to do so.
“I didn’t dare,” said Lauriston at the foot of the stairs, “I was so ashamed of the mischief I had done.”
“You might have called to ask if I had got better.”
“What would Mr. Rahas have said?”
“Rahas!” A great flood of crimson blood mounted to her face, glowed in her cheeks, and heightened the brilliancy of her eyes, which flashed a liquid light of haughty indignation from china-blue white and velvet-brown iris. “Rahas! What right has he to speak? He has no claim in the world upon me!”
Evidently the impetuous little lady and the despised Rahas, whatever their relation to each other might be, had been expressing a mutual difference of opinion. The Englishman watched with equal measure of admiration and astonishment the rise of the sudden wave of passion which seemed almost incredibly strong for such a small creature to sustain. She was struck in the midst of her anger by the expression of his face.
“What are you laughing at?”
“I did not mean to laugh. I was wondering to see you so angry.”
The girl smiled, quite restored to good humour.
“Ah, yes, they used to say that when I was at school. English girls”—with a flash of contempt—“can’t be angry or sorry or happy or anything; they can only eat and drink and sleep and wrangle and giggle.”
“You are not English then?”
“I English! You did not think I was English the other night?”
“No.”
“What did you think I was?”
“A little fairy princess.”
“But when my sleeve caught fire, and you took me in your arms and put it out; you did not think I was a fairy then?”
“No,” said Lauriston, stupefied by the daring of her childish coquetry.
“Well, what did you think I was then?”
“A poor little creature in danger through my blundering.”
“And what did you think of me when I said: ‘Away; leave my presence?’ ” asked she, imitating the stately tone and attitude she had used.
“I thought you a very dignified young lady.”
“You did not think me unkind?” with anxiety.
“Certainly not.”
“Oh!” A pause. “I am very glad you did not think me unkind.”
She looked down for a few moments, and played with the tiny bow at the top of her injured arm’s silken sling. “You see,” she went on earnestly, “when Rahas came up stairs he said you had flung him on one side, and I said you were perfectly right, and he was then very disagreeable. And Mrs. Ellis, my governess, came in, and they both said they did not believe what you said, and you would never dare to show your face here again. And I said”—the girl drew herself up like a queen as she repeated her own words—“ ‘Do you think that I, the daughter of an English gentleman, do not know the signs by which to tell an English gentleman?’ He will come back to ask my pardon for the accident, to learn if it was serious. That is what I said,” she continued, dropping her majestic manner, “and so I have watched for you; oh, how I have watched for you! You see, I was anxious, for my credit’s sake, that you should not long delay.” The last words were uttered in a demure tone, an afterthought evidently.
“I have been very busy,” murmured Lauriston, trying guiltily to look like a Cabinet minister on the eve of a dissolution. “I really couldn’t get away before.”
“Of course not, or you would have come,” said she simply. “And I suppose you did not like to come in because you did not know my people. But you will come up stairs now and know my governess, and she will see that all I have said about you is true. Please follow me. I forgot that it was discourteous to keep you waiting here.”
She was like a child playing a dozen different parts in half an hour. Now, with the manner of a chamberlain, she led the way up stairs and ushered Lauriston into the smaller sitting-room into which on the night of his unexpected visit he had only peeped.