Читать книгу The Insane Root - Rosa Praed - Страница 7

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The heavy curtains of the Pacha's sitting-room closed behind Marillier, and with a dazed sensation, as though he had been breathing some heady Oriental perfume, he lingered for a moment or two in the second reception-room, which was now used as a sort of ante-room to the Ambassador's private apartments. It was strewn with flowers, and had the usual row of cards of inquiry laid upon the inlaid centre table. The portière which divided this from the further and more generally used drawing-room, was slightly parted; he could hear the rattle of tea-cups, the gentle tones of Mademoiselle Isàdas, and the mellow voice of Ruel Bey. So absorbed were the two, that they did not hear the approach of Marillier, and he, standing with the curtain in his hand, could see the scene framed as if it were a picture.

A pretty picture. The tea-table was set beneath a tall palm, of which one of the fronds hung over the portrait of the Emperor of Abaria, casting a shadow upon the refined features and the melancholy eyes with their haunting, world-wearied expression. As Marillier's gaze dropped from the Emperor's portrait to the face of the girl below it, he was struck in a sudden and, as he thought, incongruous fashion by a faint similarity, an indescribable alikeness in the oval contour of both faces, and in the shape, and, he fancied, the expression of the eyes. He could not define the likeness to himself, but accounted for it upon the supposition that Mademoiselle Isàdas must be, upon her mother's side, of Oriental descent.

He had, of course, seen her many times since the occasion of their first interview; indeed, it had become almost a habit that when leaving the Pacha he should, after his afternoon visit, receive a cup of tea at her hands; but beautiful as she had always seemed, never had her beauty struck him so forcibly as to-day. There was a tinge of pink upon her cheeks, and a brighter light shone in her eyes, while at the same time, he noticed a suggestion of emotion, held in check, no doubt, by the presence of the butler, who was only now closing the door behind him. Marillier wondered at the sudden tightening in his own chest as he guessed the cause of the emotion. Ruel Bey was standing by the tea-table, his Greek head thrown a little back, his eyes lowered towards Mademoiselle Isàdas, as he held towards her in one hand a peach, in the other a bunch of purple grapes, and asked her which she would prefer.

She chose the peach, and he seated himself and began to peel it, while just then Rachel perceived Marillier.

She welcomed him with her soft, friendly smile--no words. It was one of Mademoiselle Isàdas's peculiarities that her eyes and smile were often more eloquent than her utterance. She made him his tea, Russian fashion, as he liked it, and pressed cakes upon him--little wafers encrusted with nougat.

'Do you know,' she said, 'these are made after a receipt I brought with me from the convent. We were allowed to have them upon certain fête days, and when we had specially-favoured visitors--not that this often happened to me.'

'So you had not many visitors?' asked Marillier, helping himself to a wafer.

'No, not many. During all those years, they were so few that I could count them on my fingers. Thanks, monsieur,' as Ruel Bey handed her the peach, and with a new sensation of delight Marillier watched her little white teeth meet in the luscious fruit.

'How is the Pacha?' asked Ruel Bey

'Better,' replied the doctor. 'A little tired just now and going off to sleep. By the way, he asked me to tell you that he wants the despatches brought him in good time for correction.'

Marillier did not add the last part of the Pacha's injunction. It was not necessary, for the first secretary got up at once.

'Then I must go down to the Chancellery, for I am altogether behindhand. A thousand thanks, mademoiselle. You will permit me to find you here this evening when I come to the Pacha after dinner? It would be delightful to have some music.

Marillier saw the two pairs of eyes meet. Ruel Bey's full of ardent beseeching and of a meaning at which he could only guess: the girl's troubled, he fancied reproachful.

'I don't know,' she answered. 'Sometimes my singing annoys Excellence instead of pleasing him.'

'That is only when you sing Irish songs,' said Ruel Bey, lightly. 'Mademoiselle, two things puzzle me. How have you--brought up in a foreign country--learned to sing Irish melodies with an entrain that seems born of the very soil, and, in truth, with the faintest touch of the Irish brogue, which is the most fascinating of all accents in a woman's speech? And why should our cold, cynical Excellence show angry emotion over "Love's Young Dream"--the effect of which he might be supposed to have forgotten. But no--' and, with a whimsical shake of the head, Ruel Bey sang softly,--

'He'll never meet A joy so sweet In all his noon of fame.

Another glance at Rachel, and the whimsical manner changed to one of scarcely-veiled tenderness as he sang on, still more softly,--

'That hallow'd form is ne'er forgot

Which first love trac'd;

Still it lingering haunts the greenest spot

On memory's waste.

'Twas odour fled

As soon as shed;

'Twas morning's winged dream;

Oh, 'twas light that ne'er can shine again

On life's dull stream.'

A quiver passed over Rachel Isàdas's sensitive features. Marillier saw that she was thrilled to the quick by a peculiar emotional note in the voice of Ruel Bey, and he thought of what the Pacha had said concerning the power of musical vibrations. Then came, too, into his mind a remembrance of what Tolstoi has written on this subject in his novel The Kreutzer Sonata. There was silence for a few moments. Mademoiselle Isàdas, recalled by Ruel Bey's reiterated question, uttered in a tone of daring which annoyed Marillier, said gently,--

'I cannot tell why the Pacha should have been so moved as he was the other evening by those words. But for myself, it is not strange that I should be able to sing Irish melodies, even with a touch of the brogue, as you say. We had an Irish nun in the convent, and she taught me how to sing that very song, which was one of many that I found in an old bundle of music left me by my Irish mother.'

'Your mother?' exclaimed Marillier, startled out of his previous theories.

'Yes; my mother was an Irishwoman,' answered Mademoiselle Isàdas, 'but, of course, I cannot remember her, for she died in Algeria soon after I was born.'

Both men gave an involuntary exclamation. To both, the mystery of the Pacha's emotion seemed solved. But Marillier felt still a little perplexed, and unconsciously his eyes were again lifted to the portrait of the Emperor of Abaria. How then could he have detected the trace of Oriental descent in the features of Mademoiselle Isàdas? And it was there! Now that he had once observed this, it appeared to him to proclaim itself remarkably. Yet the Pacha, he knew, belonged to an old Avaranese family.

Again, Marillier was annoyed with Ruel Bey for his daring, knowing the thought which must be in the young man's mind as well as in his own.

'And you do not remember your father either, mademoiselle?' asked the first secretary.

'No, answered the girl, simply. 'No one has ever spoken to me about my father. I know nothing of him. I suppose he must have died before I was born. That, at least, is the explanation I have given myself. When I once asked Excellence to tell me about my father he seemed to shrink so from the subject that I concluded it was a painful one to him and I never asked again. After all,' she added with an unconscious cynicism, which seemed to Marillier infinitely pathetic, 'when one has been alone from babyhood there is no great need to distress the living by questions about a parent for whom his child had no existence.'

'That is true,' said Ruel Bey. 'Isàdas Pacha would be the first, I imagine, to appreciate your sound philosophy. Mademoiselle, I shall bring up my violin this evening in the hope of having some music. For the moment, adieu.' He stooped and raised the girl's little hand to his lips. 'Excuse me, Lucien,' he added, 'we shall meet to-morrow.'

Ruel Bey went down to the Chancellery, and Marillier Mademoiselle Isàdas were left alone. She offered him some more tea; he accepted it mechanically and mechanically also ate some grapes she which handed him.

'Mademoiselle Isàdas,' he said suddenly, 'my cousin is more fortunate than myself. I have never heard you sing.'

'That wish can be very easily gratified, doctor,' she answered with the sweet friendliness she always showed him. 'But I must not sing just now, for if the Pacha is going to sleep, it would disturb him. I wish I could do something better than that to prove to you my gratitude.'

'What have I done, mademoiselle, that can deserve your gratitude?'

'You have saved Excellence. His death would mean a sad loss to me.'

'And yet you are not greatly attached to your uncle,' said Marillier, bluntly.

'Am I not? How deeply you read into people's minds! That, I suppose, comes of your power of diagnosing patients. I have heard that it is wonderful.'

'I am right then?'

She hesitated, but seemed compelled to frankness by his searching eyes.

'The Pacha frightens me,' she said in a low tone. 'Sometimes he repels me, and yet sometimes he almost fascinates me. I have often tried to analyse my feelings towards him, and I cannot. I think that I could love him if he only cared for me.'

'You think he does not care for you?' asked Marillier, intensely interested in the girl's confession.

'I feel that there are moments when he positively hates me,' replied she. 'I have never said this to anybody; not even to--' she paused and blushed. He filled up the gap.

'Not even to Ruel Bey?'

'No,' she almost whispered.

'Are you frightened of Ruel Bey too?' he asked, with a roughness of which he was scarcely aware till the girl's startled eyes met his own.

'Why do you ask that?' she said agitatedly. 'Is there any reason for your question--any reason why I should not feel myself safe with Ruel Bey?'

'So that thought has occurred to you, and there have been moments in which you have feared the fascination of Ruel Bey?'

'Oh, that is true--that is true!' she cried. 'How is it that you know? Doctor Marillier, there is no reason why I should fear Ruel Bey; there can be none. Tell me that I may trust him.'

'I cannot tell you that, Mademoiselle Isàdas, for I--I do not know. Your own pure instinct must that question. Trust your instinct, and remember what I said to you the first time we ever talked together. Trust me also, for I will defend you against him if need be; and, if need be, even against myself.'

'There could be no need for that,' she answered, and, as in their first interview, a childlike faith in himself which stirred the depths of his heart, shone from her eyes.

'Mademoiselle,' he cried, 'tell me this--only this. Do you love Ruel Bey?'

A deep flush suffused Rachel's cheeks; her eyes dropped, and she reared her small head with, as he fancied, something of outraged dignity. He had the sense of virginal pride aroused in her, of maidenly passion which had been unwarrantably laid bare.

'That,' she said, 'is a question which no one but he has any right to ask.'

'I am answered,' said Marillier, gently, and yet with some bitterness. 'I am rebuked for my presumption as I deserve to be. And yet I have some claim to your confidence and his; for, as I told you before, if practical difficulties should arise to interfere with your joint hapiness, it might be in my power to smooth them. He may be--is your lover, your future husband; think of me, to whom he stands in nearest blood relation, as your friend. Forgive me,' he went on, and ventured to touch the hand which Ruel Bey had kissed. 'I am much older than you, Mademoiselle Isàdas--older than the man you love; and then, my profession, and all the graver interests of life which it forces me to consider, removes me from the circle of ordinary acquaintanceship, even of ordinary friendship. Grant me its privileges; they shall not be abused. I am deeply sympathetic with you. I long to know more of your inner feelings. If I understood them, I might be able to help you in circumstances we can neither of us fully foresee. The power to do this would be a compensation for the loss of joys, which from the conditions of my life have been forbidden me. To be of service to you, no matter in what capacity, under what limitations, would be one of the greatest pleasures I could know.' She was moved by his appeal, and her slim fingers grasped his, as a child's fingers might grip the strong hand of one whom it recognised as a protector of its weakness. Again he was thrilled by contact with, as he phrased it, that little bundle of nerve fibres.

'I thank you,' she said. 'I trust you, as my friend--my best friend.'

'That is agreed.'

He held her hand for a moment against his breast, and she could feel his heart throb, but he did not kiss it as Ruel Bey had done. Then he released it, laying it gently back upon the tea-table.

'We understand each other, and we are friends--always. Mademoiselle Isàdas,' he added in a different tone, 'it seems to me that you have not many friends.'

'You are right,' she answered. 'I have scarcely any friends, as you would use the word. None at all in London.'

'And yet you must have made friends since you came to the Embassy, among the English ladies whom the Pacha knows.'

She shuddered slightly.

'I think I must be different in my thoughts and feelings from the ladies whom the Pacha knows. And you are mistaken if you think that they come to see me at the Embassy. Of course they come very often; but they talk chiefly to the Pacha and to the secretaries, and they admire the trophies and the leopard outside, and the Abarian shields, and ask to have the inscriptions translated; and they say it is all very foreign and interesting, and they look at me strangely, and some patronise me in a way I do not like--as though I were a part of the foreign mise-en-scène--odd and rather interesting too. But that is all. They do not make friends with me.'

Marillier mentally went over his own list of women acquaintances. He too had few intimate friends. He did not know one woman of the world whom he could ask to befriend Mademoiselle Isàdas. He regretted that he had lived like a hermit absorbed in his profession and his books.

Mademoiselle Isàdas went on,--

'There has scarcely been time to know anyone intimately. It is only three months since I came to London. That was the middle of the season, when everyone was busy. Then we went to Scarborough and the Pacha got ill. But it does not matter. I am used to feeling lonely; only I can't help missing the convent life sometimes and the dear nuns.'

'Yet that life must have been cramped and depressing for one so young, who was not a nun,' he said.

'Cramped and depressing?' She gave a little laugh. It seems to me that London life--its banal fashionable life--is much more cramped and depressing. My nuns were not at all the kind of persons you might imagine. They were full of intellectual interests. The Reverend Mother was wonderful. She had been a great lady; she knew the world and yet was not of it. Many well-born girls were educated at the convent; and the Reverend Mother and the Sisters were quite proud when their girls made good marriages. You see we were not out of the reach of Parisian echoes.' 'I see. It seems strange to me that you were not one of those fated to make what you call a good marriage. Did you never go away from the convent?'

Rachel blushed slightly.

'I stayed with my friends in their homes sometimes; but I had no thought of marriage. I could not marry unless I loved. It would have been impossible for me to marry as some of the girls did. All were not happy; the outside brilliance meant very little in reality. I had one or two friends who wrote to me afterwards, and they were miserable--miserable. I always said to myself that, at least, should not be my fate. At one time I thought I had a religious vocation, but it was not so. The Reverend Mother herself questioned me and pointed out to me that I did not understand my own nature and that I should be making a mistake. She told me that I should wait and cling to my ideals and hold myself apart till the time came, if it were God's will that it should come, when my heart would be really touched.'

The girl's eyes dropped; she took up from a worktable near her a doll she had been dressing, no doubt, when Ruel Bey interrupted the occupation, and her fingers played with it in a manner intensely feminine.

'This is for the Children's Fete at the convent on New Year's Day,' she said. 'I used always to dress the dolls. The Sisters said I did it better than any of them, and I am going to send a boxful this year. Each doll is to represent a flower. This'--and she held up the dainty wax thing for him to admire--'is one of the family of anemones. There will be red and pink, and pale and dark blue, and mauve and purple. You know how the anemones grow under the olive trees in the South? There were woods and olive groves round my convent.'

'Where was your convent?' asked Marillier.

'Not very far from Toulon. The Convent of the Assumption. You may have heard of it?'

'No,' said Marillier, touched and amused by the girl's simplicity. What should he know about convent schools for girls?

'I thought it possible,' she said, 'because, for one thing, the music was so famous. People used to come a long way to the services. And there were lay Sisters who went about as nurses, and who were sent for to nurse sick people--Catholics--at Hyères and some of those winter places. And beside, I heard you telling the Pacha that you had lived in Algiers, and this convent was connected with one in Algiers, where I was taken as a little baby and kept till I was old enough to be sent over to the school.'

'You were born in Algeria,' said Marillier, thoughtfully. 'And your mother was an Irishwoman? You don't remember your mother, Mademoiselle Isàdas?'

'I have told you; she died a fortnight after I was born.'

'So the Pacha has been your only guardian--your only relative? He ought not to hate you, mademoiselle. That is a strange fancy of yours.'

'I cannot help it,' she answered in the low, timid voice in which she spoke of her relations with the Ambassador. 'Do you remember my telling you that I had a sort of second-sight, something like that which you described to me by which you know whether your patients will live or die.'

'Stay!' he said. 'I spoke too confidently. I told you at first that I knew in connection with the Pacha. Now I am obliged to tell you frankly that I cannot say I know.'

'Do you mean,' she said, with a startled glance up at him from the doll she was still caressing with her fingers, 'do you mean that you are not certain whether Excellence will live or die?'

'Yes, I am obliged to say that I am not certain. I hope and think he may live for several years yet, but my power of diagnosis in his case seems curiously blurred. I cannot say I know.'

There was a little silence.

'I am very, very sorry,' she murmured distressfully. 'Do not think too much of it. I will do all that my medical science enables me to do. Beyond that, trust and wait. I was obliged to say this, because I must be true to you, and I could not let you remain under even the slightest misapprehension. But I bade you trust me. Trust me still.'

'Yes, I will trust you.'

'And now go on telling me. You spoke of your inward vision in regard to your feeling that the Pacha had no real love for you.'

'Love! Oh, no, no. It has never been love, but I have interested him. He has felt, too, that he has a duty to perform towards me. I have read all that in his face. It was the sense of duty that made him come and see me when I was twelve years old. He was then Abarian Ambassador to the Court of Italy. I shall never forget the expression of his eyes when he took my hand and looked into my face.'

'He was moved at the sight of you?'

'Yes, strangely moved. I could tell that. And he seemed to be searching for something. I wondered afterwards if he was trying to find a likeness in me to somebody he had loved--or hated. I wondered if that could have been my father, and if he had hated him. For, oh! Doctor Marillier, he did find something which made him hate me.'

'Surely you must have been mistaken. Or, if there were that momentary feeling, it must have passed?'

'Yes, it passed. After a little while he became, just--Excellence, as you know him, only younger and handsomer. But the strange thing is, Doctor Marillier, that even when I knew that he hated me I did not hate him. I was sorry for him. Every time he came to see me, though I shrank from him at the time, I always felt sorry when he went away. And when at last, he sent for me to come here, though I was miserable at leaving the Reverend Mother and the Sisters, and the dear old happy life, I was glad in a curious way--glad at the thought of being with him and of perhaps doing something to make his life less lonely. He has never, you know, had wife or child of his own.'

'He has had other things,' said Marillier.

'Oh, yes, he has had power and grandeur and the confidence of his Emperor and the friendship of princes. He has had everything, I suppose, that a successful diplomatist could have desired. But what has it availed him now that he is going into the darkness? And he loves life.'

'Yes, he loves life,' repeated Marillier, his mind going back to the talk he had had with the Ambassador a little while back. 'I will do what I can, mademoiselle, to preserve his life for him.'

'I should have liked,' she said thoughtfully, 'to make the darkness lighter for poor Excellence, but he still hates me, Doctor Marillier; he hated me the other evening when I sang that Irish song. And I wonder why! I wonder why!'

Marillier echoed the words 'I wonder why!'