"Oh, dear me, how can you talk so, Haken?" said the host fretfully; "the man below examines the tickets."
"As if anyone could not forge or steal one," retorted Haken, voicing his nephew's thoughts. "Well, in to-morrow's papers I shall look for a criminal scandal." And with his odious chuckle Haken brushed past Prelice towards the ballroom of the left-hand flat.
His lordship, tired of watching new arrivals, thought that he also would go and view the revellers. But he had hardly moved half-a-dozen paces when he unexpectedly began to think of Easter Island. A sweet, heavy perfume, as of tuberoses, was wafted in his nostrils. But why should such a familiar fragrance recall that desolate land, environed by leagues of ocean?
[CHAPTER VI.]
A STARTLING DISCOVERY.
Odour is one of the strongest aids which memory can have, and a chance whiff of a particular scent will recall to the most lethargic brain, circumstances both trivial and important of long-forgotten years. But the well-known fragrance of the tuberose usually brings funerals to mind, since that flower is so extensively woven into burial wreaths and mortuary crosses. It was strange indeed that it should conjure into an idle-thinking mind the vision of a heathen festival.
There were many people crowding the corridor, so that it was impossible for the young man to tell who wore the flowers which gave forth the magical scent—for magical it was in its effect. They might adorn a man's button-hole or a woman's bodice. He could not tell, since the evening-dress of both sexes was veiled by voluminous dominos. But as he leaned against the wall, the vision became clearer and more insistent. His body was in London—in Alexander Mansions, at a masked ball, as he well knew—but the scent of the tuberose had drawn his spirit across leagues of trackless sea to the uttermost parts of the earth. The present vanished, and he beheld the past.
Before him, as the interior vision opened, he saw colossal images of a vanished and forgotten race, rudely hewn into the semblance of human beings, each bearing a cylinder—according to Captain Cook's description—on its gigantic head. These reared themselves from vast platforms of Cyclopean architecture, overgrown with tropical vegetation, and strewn with bleaching bones. And in the soft radiance of the southern moon Prelice beheld a kneeling crowd of bronze-hued worshippers, tattooed and painted, adoring the weird stone gods. An old priest, his face and body streaked with white pigment, murmured strange names over a rude stone altar, whereon blazed a clear fire. He invoked terrible deities incarnate in the giant idols—Kanaro! Gotomoara! Marapate! Areekee!—and cast upon the flames the yellow leaves of a sacred herb. A thick white cloud of smoke spread like a milky mist before the statues, veiling their grotesque looks and vast outlines, and the sickly scent of the tuberose grew powerful. Then did the priest become rigid as the dead, and his spirit blended with the spirits of those grim gods he worshipped. Finally, the fragrance which loaded the heavy air—whether of Easter Island or London Prelice could not tell—passed away, and with that odour passed the vision.
It could only have lasted a minute or so, but was so terribly vivid that Prelice could scarcely believe that his surroundings were real when the material asserted its sway. He had closed his eyes to behold the vision, which the scent had invoked, and opened them again, with a bewildered expression, to see the pushing, laughing, chattering throng of guests. Although a commonplace young man, and contemptuous, as a rule, of the unseen, he felt that the recollection had not been brought back for nothing. The dead man at Lanwin Grange had been reading about Easter Island when foully stabbed, and the accused girl had described to her lover the white smoke and sickly perfume, which also had to do with that isolated land. And Mona also—Prelice remembered faithfully what Shepworth had told him—had been in a state of catalepsy, like the priest of the vision. And, after all, although he chose to call what he had seen mentally a vision, it was simply a vivid recollection of what he and Dr. Horace had beheld a year or two before. But what had a fetish worship in Easter Island to do with a murder in Kent? That was a question which Prelice could not answer.
There was no time to invent possible explanations or to reason out answers. Being in Rome, the momentary dreamer had to do as the Romans did; and as Prelice was at a ball, he was compelled, out of courtesy to his hostess and host, to enjoy himself. He did not have far to go for an adventure, as a lady in a blue domino, and with a fringed mask to disguise her voice, stole to his side, and engaged him in airy conversation. Who she was the young man did not know, and probably she was equally ignorant of his identity. But on this especial night, Mrs. Rover's flat was Liberty Hall with a vengeance, for men and women, trusting in masks and dominos for concealment, flirted and danced and drank and laughed with one another in a most outrageous manner. There was no need of introductions, or of reticence, or of timidity; in that Eden's Bower of flowers and ferns faces were hidden, but souls were revealed.