Читать книгу The Insane Root - Rosa Praed - Страница 3

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In the Abarian Embassy in London, Isàdas Pacha lay sick unto death. He was an old man, and upon several previous occasions when he had been stricken by illness it was thought that he could not recover. Nevertheless, when newspapers and Cabinets were speculating upon his probable successor, he had invariably risen up from his bed and had again handled the reins, continuing to transact the duties of Ambassador to the Court of St James's entrusted to him by his Imperial master.

He was greatly in the favour of his Emperor, and was, after his own fashion, a power in the courts of Europe. Though it was said, and indeed with truth, that most of the business of the Chancellery was carried on by his clever, fascinating and ambitious first secretary, Caspar Ruel Bey, it was the brain of Isàdas Pacha which inspired despatches, the hand of Isàdas Pacha--that shrivelled, forceful hand--which gave the last decisive touch to the helm.

Isàdas Pacha was old and had lived an unholy life. He had loved many women--the prey of some, the tyrant of others--had drunk much wine, had gambled and fought and rollicked, had nourished revenge upon the fruit of diabolical knowledge, had strange byways of intrigue, vice and of wisdom where was little good and much evil. He had, in fact, to quote an austere London surgeon who attended him, violated every law of health, morals and religion, and was a standing disproof of the power of those laws. For his marvellous vitality and his commanding intellect had brought him successfully through a varied career, to what now-at its close, seemed the very zenith of influence and popularity. Nor were the influence and popularity undeserved. He had been a faithful servant to an effete and demoralised civilisation--a state which from its geographical position was at that time one of the chief factors in Christian and Mahometan policy. He had done his country's work--not always righteous--in many lands, and had felt the pulse-beats of many nations. He had the wile of the East and the common sense of the West, and was consulted by both in hours of crisis and difficulty. The decorations heaped upon him had been genuinely won, and only a week before his illness, the last and crowning order of merit--the highest gift in his sovereign's power to bestow--had been sent him with an autograph letter from that sovereign, by whom he was both loved and trusted. The ideal of an autocratic sovereignty was the ideal to which Isàdas Pacha clung. It had ruled his actions; and' the glittering jewel which represented it, was now placed by his desire, at the foot of his bed, and solaced his dying hours. Thus, a strong and lasting devotion had been inspired in him by the original of an oil painting--the portrait of a man with regular, refined features, dark haunting eyes, and an expression of the most profound melancholy, the most utter satiety to be seen on human countenance--which hung at the end of the long suite of reception rooms in the Embassy, its frame surmounted by the jewelled and gilded insignia of Eastern monarchy. This was the portrait of his most sacred Majesty, Abdullulah Zobeir, Emperor of Abaria.

It was in obedience to this devotion that Isàdas Pacha, when taken ill at a watering-place to which his doctors recommended him, had desired that he should be brought back to London in order that he might die under the Imperial flag.

The floated limply over the grey roof and straight unlovely walls of the Embassy. There was scarcely a breath of wind in the heavy, exhausted London atmosphere--the atmosphere of a London August. Certainly it was only the first week in August and Parliament was not up, and there was a stream of smart carriages drawing up in front of the corner house of that dull, old--fashioned London square, one patch of which had been for so long a piece of Abarian territory. From the carriages tired footmen alighted, and cards were left and inquiries were made. In some cases the answers to the inquiries were brought out and repeated to beautifully-dressed ladies, past their youth maybe--ladies whom presumably the Pacha had loved or admired. The Pacha was witty and amusing, while his position was such that women still liked to be admired, even loved, by him, though he was not very far from eighty. In other instances the inquiries were evidently merely perfunctory--official tributes to his diplomatic status. Royal messengers came and received with a becoming expression of concern the doctors' bulletin, and minor royalties called personally. One or two great ladies, still in London, left bouquets of flowers or scribbled on their cards messages of sympathy. All these were carried to the ante-chamber of the Pacha's room that he might himself be made aware of these marks of attention, upon which he laid much store. And the old man, even his great sickness, gloated over the cards and the flowers and the royal messages of sympathy.

It was just after one of these great personages had called and departed, that a quiet doctor's brougham drove up to the Embassy. There had been other doctors' broughams there already. Specialists had been summoned in conjunction with the Pacha's regular attendant; but in August, many of the principal London physicians are out of town. Perhaps it was partly on this account, partly because he had already met privately and had interested the Pacha, partly because he was the cousin of Ruel Bey the first secretary, that Doctor Marillier had been called in.

Doctor Marillier was not a great London doctor--one, that is to say, who has won his position step by step and in accordance with the traditions of the College of Physicians and all the written and unwritten laws of British medical etiquette. Though to all intents and purposes, he was British, he belonged by descent to a Jersey family. His mother was a Greek and her sister had married the father of Ruel Bey, a man whose exact nationality it would have been difficult to determine. Doctor Marillier had taken his degree in Paris, and had subsequently practised in Algeria, where he had imbibed some out-of-the-way theories of medicine from his friend, that very singular Eastern physician known as the Medicine Moor. He had never followed the beaten track, and though during the last year or two he had settled himself as a consulting physician in London, he was looked upon as something of a quack by his medical brethren and suspected of unprofessional practices. Early in his career he had acknowledged himself, in a series of articles written under the shadow of the Salpêtrière, a follower of Charcot. Then he had become an eager disciple of the astronomer Flammarion, and later, an avowed student of hypnotism according to the methods of the Nancy school. Probably he would never have gained notoriety in London, had it not happened that by chance he was called in to an important public personage, and had cured that personage in defiance of the verdicts of other well-known physicians. This cure had caused him to be talked about. Moreover, his relationship to the delightful first secretary at the Abarian Embassy, had brought him into some social prominence.

Doctor Marillier's cousin, Ruel Bey, was one of the most popular young men in London. It was he who made the balls at the Abarian Embassy a feature of the London season. He acted well, he sang well, he danced divinely. In those days, the cotillon had just become a fashionable craze, and no hostess of the great world thought her entertainment complete unless Ruel Bey organised and led the figures. Doctor Marillier did not dance the cotillon, did not sing, did not act, had not that peculiar charm of manner which is found in both men and women of mixed nationality, but he had gifts of his own, powers of his own, even a certain odd charm all his own.

Lucien Marillier stepped out of his brougham and rang at the great double door of the Embassy. The door was opened on the instant; the hall-porter being the one servant in the house whose office at that time was no sinecure. Incongruously, as some people thought, there was no touch of the East about the Pacha's establishment. His hall-porter was like the hall-porter of all other persons to whom such a functionary is indispensable, and sat in a chair that might have been built--probably was built--in the reign of Queen Anne. For the Embassy had Adams ceilings and Georgian staircases, and panellings removed from a mansion in Bloomsbury, and it had been decorated and furnished in the early Victorian epoch, and was all loftiness, mahogany, gilding, bareness and anachronisms, with, all through, a touch of foreign lands and a suggestion, mainly under the surface, of the sensuous East.

The butler, with his following of footmen, who appeared in answer to Doctor Marillier's request that Ruel Bey might be informed of his arrival, was a bland, portly, and wholly English official, quite in keeping with the Adams frieze and the early Victorian decoration.

He ushered the visitor into a room leading off the central hall and there left him. Doctor Marillier waited. His portrait might have been drawn as he stood perfectly immovable against the marble mantelpiece. A short man, with shoulders disproportionately broad in regard to his height, thick, and slightly hunched. Out of the ungainly shoulders rose a head which, though ugly, would, had it been placed upon a commanding form, have made Doctor Lucien Marillier one of the most distinguished-looking men of his day. A striking head, with darkish hair getting grey at the temples, combed back from an intellectual brow and cropped close behind; rugged features, a thin, slightly beaked nose, and lips sharply curved, extremely flexible, the upper one in its defined lines and firm moulding, showing will, order and logic, the under one, protruding ever so little, hinting at the emotional; the face clean-shaven and giving a curious impression of greyness; the skin fine, the jaw strong, a cleft in the centre of the chin; the eyes grey, keen, penetrating, somewhat pale and cold, with a black line round the iris, and changing, when feeling was aroused, to a grey like that of dull steel. The hands were capable, deft, strong and tender, with broad, soft fingers, long and square at the tips, and a full flexible thumb--the typical doctor's hands.

A door opening at the end of this room disclosed the Chancellery, a long, sombre room, decorously busy, where fezzed heads were bending over writing-tables set here and there beneath the windows. Ruel Bey himself could be seen, through a second folding door, in an inner and more luxuriously-furnished apartment, where he was writing hastily.

Presently he rose, saying a word or two in French to one of the attachés, and coming through the outer room, he closed the door behind him and advanced with outstretched hands to greet his cousin.

'A thousand pardons. It was absolutely necessary it I should leave a despatch ready to be copied. The Pacha's seizure throws a great deal upon me. You understand, Lucien?'

'Perfectly. Your credit at the Court of Abaria depends upon the way in which you deal with this crisis, eh?'

'Oh, as to that!' The young man shrugged his shoulders in the inimitable French manner. 'Isàdas left most things to me, but his was the responsibility. The Emperor was satisfied while Isàdas signed and, as he believed, inspired. It's extraordinary the confidence they have over there in Isàdas. But now that he cannot sign!...And the whole wasps' nest of intriguers will be buzzing round the Emperor's ears...Well, the time is not ripe! His Excellency must not die, Lucien. For my sake do what you can to save him.'

'I will do what I can, not for your sake, but firstly for the sake of my profession--secondly, for that of Isàdas Pacha himself, and thirdly, for that of European interests. Not to speak of the Emperor of Abaria, who relies at this political juncture upon his representative's appreciation of the English national temperament.'

Doctor Marillier spoke coldly. His deep voice vibrated when he alluded to the sacred obligations of his profession. His accent had a burr, due probably to his foreign extraction. 'Don't let us waste time,' he added. 'Take me to the Pacha.'

Ruel Bey nodded and immediately led the way up the broad staircase, stopping, as he passed through the ball to speak to the butler, desiring him to inform Mademoiselle Isàdas that Doctor Marillier had come.

The double doors of white and gold leading to the reception-rooms seemed to be guarded by a large stuffed leopard looking as though it were about to spring. Marillier stopped for a moment before it. He had been told that it was from the spring of this very leopard that Isàdas Pacha had saved the Emperor of Abaria, and thus earned the monarch's lasting gratitude.

'Mademoiselle Isàdas will wish to speak to you, said Ruel Bey to his cousin. 'She told me last night that she had great faith in you and that she believed you would cure the Pacha.'

'I trust that I may justify Mademoiselle Isàdas's faith,' replied the doctor, 'but the Pacha is an old man.'

'Yet he has the vitality of the devil. Ffolliot and Carus Spencer gave him over last time, and he recovered notwithstanding. But do what you can to reassure Rachel Isàdas. She is genuinely distressed at the thought that he may die, and, from the mere mundane and selfish point of view, well she may be.'

Doctor Marillier looked at the young man keenly and not altogether approvingly.

'Why? I ask from the mundane point of view.'

'Oh, well, her position would be different. One can never tell how far she would be provided for. Isàdas Pacha has lived like a rich man, but he has never been wealthy, and I believe there is a law in the republic of Avaran which requires that half a man's possessions must go when he dies to his legitimate kin. You know of course that Isàdas is Avaranese by birth, and I have no idea whether he has disposed of his family estates or if they were confiscated in the revolution. His real name is Varenzi, and Isàdas, so to speak, an official title. Though the Abarian Government employs few Abarians, it insists that its officials shall, technically speaking, be Abarian. By the way, however, talking of the law of inheritance in Avaran, I have never heard that Is-das has a single--legitimate--relation.'

Again Doctor Marillier's keen eyes searched his cousin's face. They were standing in the first of the--reception-rooms, a desert of gilding and upholstery, with a huge crystal chandelier in the centre, and at one end, just over the two men, that melancholy and haunting portrait of the Emperor of Abaria. A message had been sent apprising the Ambassador's nurse of Doctor Marillier's arrival.

'You imply what I have not altogether understood. I have only seen Mademoiselle Isàdas once--at the last ball here. I gleaned then that her position was equivocal. What is her exact relation to the Pacha?'

Again Ruel Bey shrugged, and the shrug was eloquent. 'The world will tell you that she is his niece--when it speaks officially. But all the world knows that she is not his niece, and would not hesitate to say so--unofficially. But even officially she is not recognised. It is a significant fact that Mademoiselle Isàdas has not attended one of the Queen's drawing-rooms, and that she does not wear the order of the Leopard and the Lotus which the Emperor of Abaria always presents to a daughter of an ambassador, or to an officially-recognised niece of an ambassador, when she is the only lady in the Embassy--in that case even to the wife of the first secretary.'

Doctor Marillier made a gesture of extreme disapproval.

'I dislike to hear you speak in that way, Caspar. You gave me the impression that you wanted to marry Mademoiselle Isàdas.'

Ruel Bey smiled.

'The wife of an aspiring Minister, a potential Ambassador, must be, like Cæsar's wife, above suspicion--at any rate, as regards her social antecedents. I confess that I should prefer to marry a lady with no haziness about her parentage...But--we are human, Lucien, and a pair of lovely eyes is apt to play the deuce with such prejudice.'

At that moment a nurse advanced towards the door of the second reception-room. Here were massed the bouquets, and here lay the cards and notes sent by royal, diplomatic and social admirers of the Pacha. Doctor Marillier at once proceeded to the door of the Ambassador's bedroom, which opened off the furthest apartment of the suite--that which was his usual sitting--room. Ruel Bey remained in the second reception-room idly sniffing at a bouquet of orchids and sprigs of scented verbena. Here also, as he waited, an illustrator might have found subject and opportunity. In odd contrast to his cousin the doctor, striking as was the personality of each, Ruel Bey had the face and form of a Hermes--the Apollos seem mostly insufficiently virile for comparison. One could, however, imagine Ruel Bey with winged feet, and the muscular development presumably to be associated with an Olympian messenger. Certainly he might have been modelled as a Hermes, save for his Bond Street get-up, his moustache and the fez. The fez, however, gave a certain outlandish distinction, and its deep red enhanced the brilliancy of his dark eyes, the clearness of his olive skin, and the sheen of a few curling tendrils of dark hair showing beneath it on neck and brow. As one looked at him one thought instinctively of grape leaves, of honey-throated song, of the love of women, and the glory of young-limbed strength. Yet though here was the old joy in life of the Olympians, there was something, too, of the later Hellenism, something of modern Greek craft, a touch of imported Eastern sensuousness; much, too, of self-interest. That was to be read at moments, in the shifty gleam of his full, soft eyes, in the ripeness of his fruit-like mouth, in certain charming mannerisms that did not breathe a wholehearted sincerity. He was less of a man's than of a woman's man.

Women are intuitive, but where they love and admire, they do not analyse. Probably few of the great ladies who petted him, of the nobly-born women who would have married him had he been a little richer, a little more highly placed--or of the less frailer creatures who idolised him for a year, a month, a week--were capable of analysing Ruel Bey. He appealed to the senses of women, not to the soul.