“There’s no one here. Mrs. Ellis has gone out; Sundran, my servant, is in bed, and I won’t—won’t let Rahas come. I’m afraid of him; I hate him, I hate him.” And she stamped her little velvet-shod foot, that came softly enough down on the pile of disordered rugs. “Oh, send some one to me—it does hurt so.”
“I will! I will!” he said hastily. And afraid of the emotion which was choking his voice and causing his own eyes to overflow, he dashed out of the room and down the stairs.
At the foot of them he came suddenly, with a great start, face to face with a tall, gaunt, dark-visaged man, who seemed to spring up like a magician from out of the gloom without sound or warning. He wore an Oriental dress of loose trousers, jacket and sash of a deep crimson, and a fez on his black hair; but there was no trace of likeness, no trace of a similarity of race, between the ivory skin and long liquid eyes of the girl Lauriston had just left, and the swarthy complexion and fierce, lowering expression of this man.
“What are you doing here?” he said fluently enough, but with a strong foreign accent, clutching at the young man’s coat with long lean fingers.
Lauriston, without replying, flung him aside so deftly as well as forcibly that the other staggered and reeled back against the wall, and the young soldier dashed open the door and was out of the house in a moment. Addressing the first respectable-looking man he met in the street as he hastened in the direction of Fitzroy Square, he asked the address of the nearest doctor’s, and a few moments later was at the door of the house indicated. He hurried the doctor up as if it had been a case of life or death, and burned with impatience because that gentleman’s footsteps were more deliberate than his own. For there was more in his heart than anxiety that the tender little arm should be quickly eased of its pain. The forbidding face of the man he had met on his way out haunted him, and filled him with a sullen rage, the origin of which he did not clearly understand. He was the “Rahas” the girl had wished to avoid; Lauriston felt sure of that: and he was alone, excited with indignation against the strange intruder, in the house with the injured girl. He would go up stairs to her, furious, full of savage inquiries. What claim had he upon her? What would he do to her?
Lauriston was in a fever of doubts and questions and tempestuous impulses utterly foreign to him. An odd fancy would recur again and again to his mind in this new tumult of thoughts and feelings.
She—the lovely, lissom creature whom he had held in his arms, whose heart he had felt for a short moment beating against his own, was the fascinating if somewhat soulless lady of the Eastern tales; he—the dark-faced, evil-looking being whose eyes and teeth had gleamed out upon him menacingly in the darkness, was the wicked genie who held her in his power.
Well, and if so, what part in the tale was he, George Lauriston, to play?
Within one short hour, the self-contained, ambitious young man seemed to have changed his nature. The absurd, frivolous, or perhaps dangerous question had become one of momentous importance to him.