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.”