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.