Читать книгу The Insane Root - Rosa Praed - Страница 4

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The door into the vestibule opened. There was a light step upon the parquet of the outer reception-room. Ruel Bey put down the bouquet, detaching a sprig of verbena, which he fastened into his buttonhole. His hand trembled as he did so; he knew the step, and he wanted to gain time and to conceal his agitation. Presently he looked up, apparently frank, bright, welcoming. A girl approached through the ornamented folding doors.

'Monsieur Ruel,' she began in formal, hesitating accents; then glancing round and seeing that he was alone, advanced less timidly. He put out his hand, and with that grace and charm which all women loved, drew her to a seat.

'Dearest,' he murmured.

She shrank a little.

'No...I don't think you ought.... Your cousin is here.'

'I have told him you wished to speak to him. If anyone can save the Pacha, it is Lucien Marillier.'

'I knew that...I felt sure of it. He will not mind telling me what he really thinks.'

'I will leave you alone with him when he comes out. He will tell you the truth--as far as doctors ever I tell the truth. Remember that Excellency is an old man.'

'Poor Excellence,' said the girl, softly. 'It must be hard to lie, perhaps dying, and to be--so unloved.'

Ruel Bey waved his hand over the heaped flowers ad the array of cards. 'He is honoured, and that is better than being loved.'

'Do you think so? Oh, no, Caspar, you don't really think so.'

'No,' he answered, coming closer to her, and bending forward so that his lips touched her hair, 'I don't think so--when I look at you.'

The girl did not answer. She seemed to be pondering his words, and not altogether with satisfaction. He withdrew a pace or two, and leaning against the mantelpiece, his cheek upon his hand, looked down upon her admiringly as she sat at the corner of the fireplace in a large-armed, gilded chair. She was very beautiful. The most ambitious of men might well consider it more important to be loved by her than honoured by the world.

Her absolute claims to beauty set aside, there was something peculiarly attractive, and, at the same time, peculiarly pathetic, about this girl. She showed race in every line of her. Was it from the Pacha or from her mother that this was inherited? She was called the Pacha's niece; she bore his name; it was supposed that she was his brother's child. And yet, in the accounts printed of the Pacha's lineage and career, no mention was made of his brother. Besides, Ruel Bey had said, and all the world knew, that Isàdas was the titular name given with the honours that Emperor had conferred. He belonged to a family before it became a republic, had supplied rulers to the island kingdom of Avaran. The revolution had driven him thence, and in all the vigour of his manhood Count Varenzi had entered the service Abdullulah Zobeir, the youthful Emperor of Abaria. His brother's child, had there been one, would have inherited the name of Varenzi, but Rachel had never been known save as Mademoiselle Isàdas. That pathetic look in Rachel Isàdas came from the blending of evident dignity of race with an expression wistful, deprecating, shadowed, as of one impressed by a certain incongruity in her position, and not entirely free from a dread of being slighted, were she to assert that position. Mademoiselle Isàdas's proud little head had a timid droop; her slender form, in spite of its stately carriage, a shrinking air, as though she dreaded and wished to avoid observation; her eyes a startled, almost beseeching gaze, when she was suddenly addressed or taken notice of by a stranger.

Her head looked small for her body, though she was tall and very slight. Her throat, too, was unusually slender. She had pretty, soft, dark hair, the brown which shows reddish glints; her face was oval, the nose finely chiselled and a little short; the upper lip short too and extremely sensitive, like that of a child, alone in the world's fair, and scarcely knowing whether to laugh or to weep. The eyes were brown, soft, and plaintively appealing, with something of the expression in the eyes of a St Bernard dog.

They were not the bright black eyes of the Avaranese, but had a suggestion of the East in their long almond-shaped lids and their dreamy intensity when her face was in repose, though they would light up at moments with a childlike gladness, and had, too, the limpid purity which one sees in the eyes of a child.

Suddenly now, she glanced up at Ruel Bey's face. The two looks met, and both underwent a curious change. In both pairs of eyes a flame was kindled. A magnetic impulse drew the man and woman together. She had risen, and now moved, frightened, it seemed, of that very impulse, half evading his outstretched arms. A dimple in her throat attracted him. He put his lips to it, brushing the satin skin as if savouring its sweetness, and ardently kissed the flower-like hollow at the base of her throat.

'I love you,' he whispered.

Trembling slightly, she shrank away from him, and stood with bent head and cheeks faintly red. Again, he would have embraced her, but she refused the caress, not without dignity.

'I love you, sweet,' he repeated.

'You say so...but...' she spoke with hesitation. 'It is not fitting that you should tell me so in this way. It is not the custom.'

'The conventual custom!' he said, with a laugh. 'Dear nun, we are in London--not in the convent.'

'I wish that I were back in the convent,' she said, 'for many reasons.'

'But you would not wish to be a nun?' he asked.

'No. I have not a vocation. But one is safe in the convent.'

'And you are not safe here? Is that what you mean?'

'I was peaceful in the convent,' she exclaimed. 'I was not torn and troubled and frightened by strange thoughts and feelings--feelings I had never known before.'

'Foolish one, is it of the feelings that you are afraid? Why fear what is the only thing worth living for--love?'

'There should be peace in love, joy in love--not terror and unrest.'

'Yet you love me, Rachel? You cannot deny it?'

'I don't know. How can I tell? Your love is not the love I have dreamed of--read of. It is not holy, pure, spiritual. It is not--' she stopped short.

'Not the love you have read of in the journals of Saint Theresa--or in the Meditations of St Thomas à Kempis? No, I grant you that. It is a more human sort of thing. A thing of the world--possibly of the devil--not of the Church.'

Rachel shrank again, and there was puzzle and deeper dread in the straight gaze of her brown eyes. 'Oh, it is when you say things like that--it's that strain in you which makes me afraid. Why should you say "not of the Church--possibly of the devil?" I don't understand. The blessing of the Church, should be upon all true love. Marriage is a sacrament.'

Ruel Bey gave the nameless gesture--the instinctive gesture of the sceptic. 'How many London marriages are what you call a sacrament? But I don't want to argue that point. It is enough for me that I love you. Your prayers, dear saint, may call down the ecclesiastical blessing. Assuredly mine--will not. I am content--for the moment--with love itself, love in its least spiritual aspect, its most human joy.'

The girl blushed more deeply. She was struggling to get out some words which were difficult.

'I suppose that you feel as a man feels. I cannot tell. But--I don't know what it is in you that draws me, almost against myself, and then repels me. You do not speak of love as--'

'As Saint Theresa and St Thomas à Kempis speak of it?' he rejoined with tender raillery. 'No. I speak of it as the diplomat, as the man of cities, as one who belongs to the world of men, and not to the cerulean heaven, must speak of love. I have blood in my veins, not celestial lymph. I would clasp the flesh rather than adore the spirit. I love you as the old Greeks loved, as the modern man loves--not after the fashion of the mediæval monk. Except Fra Lippo Lippi. He had the courage to carry off his nun. I give him grace, and salute her memory.'

Ruel Bey laughed and touched his finger tips, blowing a kiss to the fair, frail Madonna whom Lippi had loved and painted, with that enchanting mannerism which, in the drawing-rooms of a certain set of women, had gained him the reputation of culture of a kind.

Still Rachel had not said what she wished to say; and still the red in her cheeks, which was that pale red peculiar to such a type, deepened, and her speech faltered.

'I did not mean what you seem to think. I cannot explain myself to myself--how much less to you! I have told you that you draw me to you--and yet, at the very moment, it is as though an invisible barrier were placed between us. And I do understand. Though you laugh at the conventual customs, I am not so ignorant as you fancy of the ways of the world. You forget that, though it is only a few months since I left the convent, I am nearly twenty-five, and that is not very young. I have had friends among girls who were married, and I have seen how such things are arranged even in London. You...It is now two weeks since you...told me that you loved me. I have no mother--no one but my uncle, and he seems strange and far away--but he is my guardian. And...and ... you have not asked me from him.'

'My child, is it that which is troubling your simple soul! The foreign blood in you speaks, as well as the French bringing-up. You expected a conseil de famille--the bargaining about settlements--the exact amount stipulated for pin-money--all the ordinary preludes of matrimony. Well, let me tell you frankly that I have no private means; that it has always been expected I should marry a fortune instead of bestowing one; that, in short, from the worldly point of view, there would be many difficulties; that for the moment--till I am appointed Minister to the Court of--some little minor kingdom--and that's a poor enough basis of negotiations in the matter of pin-money and settlements--I can't--'

'Oh! No! No!' the girl interrupted, overcome with shame. 'How could you suppose that I thought of such things? You know...you know...'

'I know that you are adorable. I know that I you. I know that when we are alone together, I cannot bow and give you my finger tips as if we were dancing a minuet. I know that the temptation of that fascinating dimple, and of those sweet lips, remind me somehow of the Song of Solomon, can't be resisted. I know that I want to sip the honey, to snatch the joy, and to forget the sordid details which, in any case, dear, should not be forced into the critical hours of a serious illness. Wait! Listen to what Marillier has to say. I think I hear him coming out now from the Pacha's room. I will leave you to have your talk.'