“No, he’s as fair as any Englishman, like most Germans,” said the lodge-keeper, rather superciliously, with for the first time a suspicious expression in his dull British grey eyes. “There’s a dark gentleman visiting there this afternoon,” he added, after a few moments’ consideration, during which he had carefully taken stock of his questioner, and perhaps satisfied himself that he was not “after the spoons.”
“Oh, was he alone or with a lady?” asked George, with careful carelessness.
“Well, sir, he was with a walking bundle of white tea-cloths,” said the lodge-keeper, rendered more sympathetic by the chance of airing his own humour.
“You are sure,” said George, with a great heart-leap, “that the lady was dressed in white, and not in grey, with a grey cap?”
“No, sir; no lady in grey has been here to-day. I can count the ladies as comes here,” he added, with just meaning enough to give the young husband an impulse of thankfulness that he had forestalled his wife.
He thanked the man and made his way through a winding avenue of lime and chestnut trees to a grass-plot studded with flower-beds and surrounded by a circular drive leading to a large, square-built brick house, which seemed to rise out of a bank of laurels and other shrubs lightened by clusters of rhododendrons. The portico was smothered with creepers, which were carefully trained to extend over the walls. Long trails of still green Virginia creeper swung backwards and forwards in the air above a thick mass of geraniums of various colour that were banked up round the pillars of the entrance. The door was open, showing at the end of a wide hall a sloping lawn and a glimpse of the river. As George rang the bell, a gust of wind blew into his face the petals of overblown roses from stands of flowers that lined the hall, with perfumes of pungent sandal and sickly sweet exotics. A footman in a striking livery of purple and gold, whom the lowness of the roof of the hall magnified into a giant, appeared at once in answer to the bell, and without coming to be questioned, lifted a gorgeous crimson and silver curtain with heavy fringes that rustled as it was raised, and stood aside, inviting the visitor to enter.
George crossed the hall, with an involuntary thought, as he glanced up at the rich colours of the painted ceiling, and brushed close to a cluster of delicate flowers unknown to him, that shook fairy bells in the stirred air, of the vivid pleasure this luxurious extravagance of scents and hues would give to Nouna.
“I wish to see Mr. Rahas, who called here this afternoon,” said George to the servant, pausing at the entrance of the room which, the first glance told him, confirmed the impression given by the hall.
“I will see, sir. I think Mr. Rahas is on the lawn,” answered the man, still holding up the curtain in invitation to the visitor to pass under it.
After a second’s hesitation George went in. The room was long and low, with French windows opening on to a verandah, from which the lawn ran down to the river. The walls were painted in eighteenth century fashion but in the nineteenth century spirit. Grey pools fringed with delicate bulrushes, astride on whose bent heads sat gauze-winged elves; a smooth summer sea with the phantom ship of Vanderdecken crossing the sun’s path like a shred of mist; a siren asleep under the sea with a feathery pink sea-anemone for pillow, the sunlight shining down through the green water so that you looked and saw the baleful maid and looked again and lost her. All these pale fairy pictures, which emerged at intervals out of a fleecy background of cloud and tree, gave place as the eye travelled round the walls to deeper-hued representations of less ethereal romance. A golden-haired Guinevere, with blue unholy eyes and loose mouth red with kisses, looks lingeringly out of her window in the dawn to where among the grey trees of the distance the gleam of a helmet makes a faint spark of silver light. A furnace-eyed, cynical Vivien, with passionate triumph fanning the glow of her swarthy evil beauty, glides up in the gathering darkness among overhanging cypresses from where, an undistinguishable heap, lies the insensible body of the conquered Merlin. A tiny brown-skinned, lithe-limbed Cleopatra, clad in chains of coins and little else, crouches submissive and seductive before Cæsar, raising long black eyes, twinkling with a thousand meanings, to the conqueror’s face, while the black soldier-slave stands in the background, still holding the mattress in which he has brought his queen hidden, and casting furtive, fearful looks at the world-famous pair.