CHAPTER VI.
We have all met fairly bad people with strikingly good faces, and perhaps fairly good people with strikingly bad faces; but when the eyes of a stranger who has no reason to love you are much nearer together than beauty demands, when his lips are thin, straight, and very close under his nose, moreover when he smiles at you with his mouth only and shows you even more politeness than the occasion requires, you must be more than simple-minded to put implicit trust in him.
Lauriston noted these traits in Rahas, and mistrusted him accordingly. But the meeting itself being an adventure, and therefore welcome to a young man in love, he beamed with perfect good humour and began to apologise for his abrupt conduct on the night of his first visit. Rahas stopped him at once, smiling and waving the subject away as if to be flung over the rail of his own staircase by such a person as his visitor were the highest honour he could wish for. He, for his part, seeing this gentleman pass, could not resist the impulse which prompted him to open the door and beg him to enter, that he might apologise for his obtuseness in not instinctively recognising the gentleman as a person of high honour and distinction, incapable of any but the noblest motives, the most lofty conduct. He bowed to Lauriston, Lauriston bowed to him; they positively overflowed with civility, though from the sly black eyes of the Asiatic, and from the frank brown ones of the Englishman, there peeped out an easily discernible mutual antagonism.
“Will this gentleman, whose name I have not the honour of knowing——”
“My name is Lauriston,” said George, who knew that this cunning-looking person could easily find it out if he were to conceal it.
“Will Mr. Lauriston,” continued the merchant with a bow, “do me the honour to smoke with me? I have narghilis, cigars, cigarettes, such as, if I may make the boast, you could not find in the palaces of your Prince of Wales.”
“Thank you,” said Lauriston, who indeed felt some temptation to stay in the house, but had no fancy for his companion; “it is very kind of you to ask me, but I must be returning to my quarters. We soldiers, you know, are very strictly looked after in England.”
The merchant smiled in a manner which implied that his ignorance of English manners and customs was not so limited as might have been inferred from his slow, pedantic speech, and his retention of the costume of his own country.
“That strictness is, however, somewhat relaxed in the case of favoured officers—at least, they say so in Smyrna,” said he ingenuously. “But perhaps the real reason of Mr. Lauriston’s reluctance to accept my humble invitation is the feeling that to do so would be an unbecoming act of condescension from an English officer to a foreign tradesman.”
“No, I assure you——”
The merchant raised his hand. “Perhaps Mr. Lauriston will allow me to explain. My uncle and I are established here at present in only a very modest manner. We live in what I suppose may be called a back street of your vast city; we have no acre-wide apartments, no gaudy shop-windows in which our treasures are arranged by cunning shopmen to catch the eye of the vulgar. We have only, as you know, a few of the cheaper and simpler products of our own rich land, placed without thought or care in these two small dusty windows, not to attract the casual passer-by, but to let our great clients know that this is where Rahas and Fanah may be found. We are merchants, not shopmen; we have for our customers the chiefs of your great bazaars, the heads of your most renowned London houses. If an English nobleman wants a carpet such as emperors might tread upon, or a millionaire of Manchester seeks a priceless cabinet of carved ivory, delicate as lace, fragile as a fairy’s fingers, it is to us that their agents come, to Rahas and Fanah, who are here merely obscure tradesmen known to a few, but in our country (and all Asia is our country, overrun by our agents, swarming with our depôts) merchant-nobles, the guests and the friends of kings.”
It was not difficult to believe him as he stood, stately and dignified, his black eyes glowing with roused pride, his graceful dress giving an air of distinction to his tall, lean figure. Under the influence of a passion which was at least genuine he appeared to so much greater advantage that George Lauriston did not hesitate to give way to his importunity; and the merchant led him from the little front-room in which they had been standing, where small objects such as those that filled the windows were scattered about on tables and shelves and piled on packing cases, into an apartment of the same size at the back, communicating with the front-room by folding-doors, but showing, as soon as they were passed, the difference between a living-room and a mere workshop or office.
It was furnished with extreme simplicity and hung with the most inexpensive kind of thin Indian curtains. There were two or three small painted tables, on one of which was a common metal coffee-pot surrounded by three or four tiny earthenware cups, while on another stood a small decanter labelled brandy, an ice-pail, a stand with soda-water bottles, two deep tumblers, and a liqueur glass. The seats consisted of ottomans covered with dark striped stuff, a few plain large cushions, and a couple of low chairs, very small in the seat and very wide in the back. A brass lantern took the place formerly filled by a chandelier, and gave forth a soft weak light through orange-tinted glass. The floor was entirely covered by matting, which added to the invitingly cool aspect of the room. To the right as he entered from the front room, Lauriston noticed a tall paper screen placed before the doorway of a third apartment, the door of which had been taken away and replaced by thin coloured curtains, through which there shone a much brighter light than that given by the brass lamp.
“My uncle’s room,” said Rahas, indicating the inner apartment with a movement of his hand, as he brought forth for his guest, from a cupboard in the wall behind the curtains, cigars, cigarettes, and a hookah. “He gives up the best to me, though I am only a junior partner in the firm, by right of my father—a mere clerk in fact.”
Lauriston took a cigar and seated himself in a chair; while his host sat on one of the ottomans, his left elbow buried in a cushion, languidly smoking a long hookah. Something in the atmosphere of the room, its studied coolness, the stately composure of its owner, the faint perfume which began to rise from the bubbling water of the hookah, began to exercise over Lauriston the same enervating influence which he had felt in the far more luxurious chamber above. The soft voice of the merchant, speaking in measured tones, as if speech were spontaneous music, lulled him into a state of dreamy expectancy of some further experience new and strange.
“You would fall very easily and naturally into our Eastern ways, more easily than most of your race, I think,” he said; and Lauriston felt conscious, now that he saw him reclining at his ease, of a charm in the manner of the Oriental which he had not seen before. “You can rest, which is to most of the men of North Europe an impossibility.”
Lauriston sat upright in his chair, consciously struggling against the charm which was ensnaring his senses. “What you call rest,” he said earnestly, “is a temporary torpor necessary to you, a warmer-blooded race, and is the natural reaction from your passionate moods, in which you are all fire. But for us, a colder nation, what you call rest is a dangerous soothing of the mind and stimulating of the senses, an enslaving pleasure to be avoided by those who have a battle to fight, and much to win. The only wholesome rest for us is dead, dreamless sleep.”
“And yet,” said the Oriental, smoking solemnly on, yet observing his companion with attentive eyes, “you give way to the pleasure, and you court the charm.”
Lauriston grew red, though the subdued light did not betray his blushes. “When one suddenly meets with a new experience a little curiosity and interest are only natural,” he said.
“Yes, yes. But the curiosity and interest of Englishmen display themselves in ways so strange to us of another race. For instance, I will tell you a tale: Two young men of your race, men well-born perhaps, clothed in the fashion of your princes and your nobles, hideous and ill-chosen to us, but of the taste which in England is called the very best—see by night in a dark little dusty room where the blinds have not been pulled down, a man and a lady. The lady is beautiful, not dressed as their women are, and neither is English, the young men think. So they stare in until they attract the man’s attention, when for shame they slink off, to return the next day, and the next, and the next, always foolish, trifling, impertinent, spying and prying for another sight of the lady, whom they never behold again. Then a third young Englishman—perhaps I need not say more about his course, but that it is bolder than that of the others——”
Lauriston interrupted him. “I see,” he said in a low voice strongly-controlled, “that you believe me to be merely the accomplice of the two others. I do know who they are, I know they got me here by a trick, although until this moment I never guessed one word of it. Sir,” he rose, very quietly and composedly, but with passion which was unmistakably fierce and strong glowing in his handsome face, “I don’t know how to address a gentleman of your country, but I wish to apologise in the humblest and fullest manner for an offence which I committed in all ignorance. By Heaven, when I meet those two infernal little cads——!” he broke out suddenly, forfeiting all right, in his vehemence, to the praise bestowed by Rahas on his capabilities of repose.
But he was checked in all the heat of his outbreak by sounds behind him which recalled him to the fact that he might have unseen listeners to his very unrestrained language. Turning sharply, he saw the curtains behind the screen move and open against the light, as if some one were retreating between them. Rahas attempted to reassure him by a gesture of the hand.
“My uncle thought we were quarrelling perhaps,” said he in a leisurely manner.
But the knowledge that everything he uttered could be heard by a person who might or might not be a desirable confidant cast a strong constraint on Lauriston, who tossed the end of his cigar into an ash-tray by his side and made at once for the door. The merchant shook his head gently, and with courteous words begged him to return.
“I guessed the truth before, and you must pardon my anxiety to have it confirmed by your own lips,” he said gravely and deferentially. “Or rather,” he went on, as Lauriston turned and hesitated, “I did not guess, I knew.”
In his astonishment at the merchant’s confident tone, his companion came a step nearer to the chair he had left, and at the next words of his host reseated himself, overcome by an attraction he this time made no great effort to resist.
“Between your first and your second visit I learnt the causes and effects of your appearance here; between your second visit and this, the third, I learnt that it was not your intention to appear here again.”
“How did you learn it?” asked Lauriston, with some incredulity, but with the tinge of respect for possibly supernatural agencies to be expected in a man brought up north o’ Tweed.
“You are an Englishman, and would not believe me. Yours is a brave nation, an energetic and a splendid race; but you have no imagination, no religion but faith in beef and bricks and mortar and the Stock Exchange.”
“I believe in beef certainly, and I don’t like humbug,” said the young officer rather shortly. “But I’m not a fool, and when I hear about anything of which I have no experience, I listen and do my best to understand.”
The merchant bowed and went on: “You are doubtless not ignorant, Mr. Lauriston, of the importance we of the East attach to astral influences, nor of the fact that the subject is with us considered a study worthy a high place among the sciences.” Lauriston bowed his head in assent. “It is one of the principles of that science—you understand I speak according to the beliefs of my countrymen, without prejudice to the acumen of yours—that persons born under the ascendency of a particular star, whose name in your tongue I do not know, and whose name in mine would bear no meaning to you, possess a power which I can best describe as magnetic over persons born under the ascendency of another particular planet. Now I am one of the former class, and the lady who lives on the first floor of this house is one of the latter.”
Lauriston felt an impulse of rage at the fellow’s presumption.
“How did you know anything about her planet?” he asked in a constrained tone.
“I cast her nativity two days ago,” answered the merchant, dropping his voice as if from pure laziness, almost to a whisper. “I know something about astrology myself, and as I take in the lady the respectful interest of a friend, I put my services at her disposal, by her own request. I may own that I took a personal interest in finding out whether her destiny would cross my own.” He paused a few moments, during which Lauriston, in spite of the studied incredulity with which he listened to all this, felt his excitement rising. “But I could find nothing to justify my hopes. As far as my skill could serve, I made out that her destiny was bound up with the countrymen of her father, the land of her adoption.”
While setting this down as quackery, the young Englishman was interested and stirred by the Oriental’s measured utterances.
“Yet you say your own planet, horoscope, whatever you call it, gave you an influence over her?” he asked in a careless tone.
“In this way,” the merchant went on: “I can make her sleep, and in her sleep I can bring before her eyes what vision I will; I can learn things concerning her which she herself in her waking hours does not know.”
“Why, that is a sort of mesmerism; they do that over here without any aid from the planets.”
“So you think. So perhaps the sea thinks that her tides advance and recede independently of the moon. And so, in Europe, Nature’s occult marvels are sneered at, and great forces wasted, which we Asiatics turn to account in moulding the courses of our lives.”
“Will you explain?”
“In England a person gifted with this force which his neighbours ignore and he himself cannot understand, casts another into a sleep, a trance. Here is this creature, for good or for ill, at his mercy, in his power. What does he do? Teach him some great truth? Force from him some vital secret? Subdue the acknowledged evil in him to some good end? No. He makes him find a pin, drink a glass of water, blow his nose. Then, having accomplished this noble end at some expenditure of his own vital force, he awakens the sleeper; and what is gained? A dozen fools have gaped, cried: ‘Marvellous!’ or, ‘Well, I never!’ according to their measure of refinement, and gone their ways no whit wiser than before.”
“Yes, well, and you? How do you use this force?”
“In different ways. Sometimes to extort an enemy’s secret, sometimes to test a woman’s faith—but this last not often; for experience and Mahomet teach us that women have no souls, and that by concerning ourselves more with what they do than with what they feel, we shall spare ourselves many disappointments.”
“You are a Mahometan then?”
“With the modifications which result from long contact with men of other faiths. Thus I drink wine, in moderation; I look upon images and statues without horror; and I believe that by springing from a race whose men have for generations believed that women may have spiritual life, the best of your European maids do indeed attain in time to something which may pass for a soul.”
“And Nouna?”
The merchant smiled. “Ask Mrs. Ellis, her guardian, who has known her for some years, what impression the bible-readings, the church-goings, the preachings, the prayings, the exhortations of her Christian teachers have had on her, the letters of her mother, whom she adores, and who never writes to her daughter without an exhortation to religion! All the bishops in the world would not make Nouna more of a Christian than her Persian kittens.”
“You can say as much of many English girls,” said Lauriston hastily and uneasily.
“Of most,” assented the Oriental readily. “And of nine-tenths of the most orthodox of your alms-giving and priest-loving women. What spirit lives in their charity? in their worship? When man no longer cares for their devotion, they yield it to God, the priest, and the respectful poor.”
“And you can see no evidence of a soul in that very capacity for devotion?”
“No more than I see in the much more absorbing devotion of my dog.”
“That seems to me a creed as degrading to the man who holds it as to the woman whose self-respect it kills.”
“And like all creeds, in practice it loses both its best and its worst characteristics. I never go out in London without seeing hundreds of women more vile, more wretched, more miserable, than my more merciful religion would ever allow those weaker creatures to become; while in our harems, which shock you so much, there is many a woman for whose power on earth some of your proud European beauties would willingly exchange their hopes of heaven.”
“Perhaps,” said Lauriston shortly; and, after a pause, he said, “You say Nouna’s destiny is bound up with that of an Englishman; if that is so, and he is one of the right sort, depend upon it he will do more for her than all her teachers and preachers ever did.”
“You think so?”
“I am sure of it. I believe the influence of an honest man’s love to be stronger than that of all the mesmerists that ever hid pins or learned secrets.”
“You believe it, even after the proof I gave you! Will you hold to your belief in the face of this? I now, at this moment, by the force I hold over her, command her to leave her room up stairs and come down here to us.”
There was a long silence: the Asiatic held the stem of his hookah in his hand and sat like a statue, his lips tightly compressed, his eyes brilliant and fixed. Lauriston also left off smoking, listening and watching the door with intense excitement which made him sick and cold. For some minutes there was not a sound to be heard but the faint night-cries and noises that came through the open window. At last a board creaked in the hall outside, a knock was heard on the door of the front-room, then the turning of the handle, and a voice called weakly:
“Rahas, are you there?”
Lauriston started up; the merchant never moved. The door of the room they were in was drawn softly ajar, and Nouna’s voice almost in a whisper asked:
“Has Mr. Lauriston been here? Tell me, hasn’t he been here?”
The young Englishman crossed the room with two strides, and pushed the door gently open with a shaking hand. The little weak voice thrilled him to the heart. She peeped in round the door, all in clinging white, with a laugh in her eyes at sight of him, but with a rather subdued and dreamy manner.
“I fancied you were here. I seemed to hear you call me,” she said sleepily, as she came in and very composedly leaned upon his arm.
In the midst of the glow and the glamour cast upon him by the girl’s entrance, Lauriston was startled by the voice of Rahas close to his ear:
“Will you not acknowledge now that it was my influence over her which brought her down?”
“No,” answered the young Englishman in a husky voice, “her own words prove that it was mine.”
The merchant shrugged his shoulders, and with a bow to the lady, who was too much occupied with her companion to notice it, retreated behind the screen into the curtained room.