CHAPTER XX
Table of Contents
From the moment when the taxicab drove away and left her in the deserted street, Maggie was conscious of a strange sense of suppressed excitement, something more poignant and mysterious, even, than the circumstances of her adventure might account for. It was exciting enough, in its way, to play the part of a marauding thief, to find herself unexpectedly face to face with a possible solution of the great problem of Prince Shan’s intentions. But beneath all this there was another feeling, more entirely metaphysical, which in a sense steadied her nerves because it filled her with a strange impression that she had lost her own identity, that she was playing somebody else’s part in a novel and thrilling drama.
The street was empty when she inserted the little key in the front door. There was not a soul there to see her step in as it swung open and then softly, noiselessly, but without any conscious effort of hers, closed again behind her. She held her breath and looked around.
The hall was round, painted white and dimly lit by an overhead electric globe. In the centre was a huge green vase filled with great branches of some sort of blossoms. Not a picture hung upon the walls, nor was there any hall stand, chest, closet for coats or hats, or any of the usual furbishings of such a place. There were three rugs upon the polished floor and nothing else except a yawning stairway and closed doors. Whatever servants might be in attendance were evidently in a distant part of the building. Not a sound was to be heard. Still without any lack of courage, but oppressed with that curious sense of unreality, she turned almost automatically towards the door on the left and opened it. Again it closed behind her noiselessly. She realised that she was in one of the principal reception rooms of the house, dimly lit as the hall from a dome-shaped globe set into the ceiling. She moved a yard or two across the threshold and stood looking about her. Here again there was an almost singular absence of furniture. The walls were hung with apple-green silk, richly embroidered. There were some rugs upon the polished floor, a few quaintly carved chairs set with their backs against the wall, and opposite to her the ebony cabinet of which La Belle Nita had spoken. She moved towards it. Somehow or other, she found herself with the other key in her hand, stooping down. She counted the drawers—one, two three—fitted in the key, turned it, and realised with a little start the presence in the drawer of a roll of parchment, tied around with tape and sealed with a black seal. She laid her hand upon it, but even at that moment she felt a shiver pass through her body. There had been no sound in the room, which she could have sworn had been empty when she entered it, yet she had now a conviction that she was not alone. She turned slowly around, her lips parted, breathing quickly. Standing in the middle of the room, a grim, commanding figure in his flowing green robes, the dim light flashing upon the great diamonds in his belt, stood Prince Shan.
To Maggie at that moment came a great throbbing in her ears, a sense of remoteness from this terrible happening, followed by an intense and vital consciousness of danger. The man who had brought new things into her life, the polished gentleman of the world, with his fascinating brain and gentle courtesy, had gone. It was Prince Shan of China who stood there. She felt the chill of his contempt and disapproval in her heart. She had forfeited her high estate. She was a convicted thief,—an adventuress!
She gripped at the side of the cabinet. Her poise had gone. She had the air of a trapped animal.
“You!” she exclaimed. “How did you get here?”
He answered her without change of expression. A sense of crisis seemed to have made his tone more level, his face stony.
“It is my house,” he said. “I do not often leave it. I sat in my sleeping chamber behind”—he pointed to the silken curtains through which he had passed—“I heard your entrance and guessed with pain and regret at your mission.”
“But a quarter of an hour ago you were at the ball!”
“You are mistaken,” he replied. “I do not attend such gatherings. I had given you my word that I should not be there.”
“But I saw you,” she persisted, “in that same costume!”
“Surely not,” he dissented. “The person whom you saw was a gentleman from my suite, who wore the dress of an inferior mandarin. He is sometimes supposed to resemble me. I should have believed that your apprehension of such things would have informed you that no Prince of my line would wear the garments of his order for a public show.”
Her fingers had left the drawer now. She stood upright, pale and desperate.
“That woman of your country, then—La Belle Nita—did she lie to me?”
“How can I tell?” he answered coldly, “because I do not know what she said.”
Maggie made an effort to test her position.
“I came here as a thief,” she confessed. “I am detected. What are your intentions?”
He moved very slowly a little closer to her. Maggie felt her sense of excitement grow.
“You came here as a thief,” he repeated, “as a spy. Why did you not ask me for the information you desired?”
“Because you would not have told me,” she replied, “at least you would not have told me the truth.”
“For a price,” he said, “the truth would have been yours for the asking. For a different price it is yours now.”
Again without noticeable movement he seemed to have drawn nearer. The edge of that cool ebony cabinet seemed to be burning her fingers. Try however hard, she could not frame the question which had risen to her lips.
“The price,” he continued, “is you—yourself. A few hours ago it was your love I craved for. Now it is yourself.”
He was so near to her now that she faced the steady radiance of his wonderful eyes, so near that she could trace the faint lines about his mouth, the strong, stern immobility of his perfectly shaped, olive-tinted features.
“You are too wonderful,” he went on, “to remain a daughter of the crude West. I want to take you back with me to the land where life still moves to poetry, to the land where one can live in a world unknown by these struggling hordes. You shall live in a palace where the perfume of flowers lingers always, with the sound of running water in your ears, a palace from which all sordid things and all manner of ugliness are banished because we alone have found the key to the garden of happiness.”
He raised his hand, and it seemed as though unseen eyes watched them from every quarter. The silken curtains through which he had issued were drawn back by invisible hands, and the inner apartment was disclosed. Its faint illumination was obscured with purple shades. There was a high lacquer bedstead, with little ivory ladders on either side, a bedstead hung with silks of black and purple and mauve. There was a huge couch, a shrine opposite the bed, in which was a kneeling figure of black marble. A faint odour, as though from thousand-year-old sachets, very faint indeed and yet with its mead of intoxication, seemed to steal out from the room, which had borrowed from its curious hangings, its marvellous adornments, its strangely attuned atmosphere, all the mysticism of a fabled world.
“You have come,” he said. “Will you stay?” The inertia seemed suddenly to leave her limbs. She threw up her head as though gasping for air, escaped, somehow or other, from the thrall of his eyes, and passed across the smooth floor with flying footsteps. Her fingers seized the handle of the door and turned it, only to find it held by some invisible fastening. She shook it passionately. There was not even sound. She turned back once more. Prince Shan had only slightly changed his position. He stood upon the threshold of the inner room, and his arms were outstretched in invitation.
“Am I a prisoner?” she sobbed.
“You came of your own free will,” he replied. “You will stay for my pleasure and for the joy of my being. As for these things,” he went on, moving slowly to the cabinet, picking up the pile of papers and throwing them on one side contemptuously, “these are only one’s amusements. I pass my lighter hours with them. They interest me in the same manner as a chess problem. We do not care, we in the mig
hty East, which of you holds your head highest this side of Suez. All you western nations are to us a peck of dust outside our palace gates. Listen, dear one. We can leave, if you will, to-night, and top the clouds before sunrise. And I promise you this,” he went on, “when you pass from the greyness of these sordid lands into the everlasting sunshine of the East, you will not care any longer about these people who go about the world on all fours. Day by day you will know what life and love mean. You will find the cloying weight of material things pass from your brain and body, and the joy of holy and wonderful living take their place.”
Her whole being was in a turmoil. She drew nearer to the papers upon the table. She was now within a yard of Prince Shan himself. He made no effort to intercept her, no movement of any sort to stop her. Only his eyes never left her face, and she felt a madness which seemed to be choking the life out of her, a pounding of her heart against her ribs, a strange and wonderful joy, a joy in which there was no fear, a joy of new things and new hopes. With the papers for which she had come only a few yards away, she forgot them. She turned her head slowly. His arms seemed to steal out from those long, silken sleeves. She suddenly felt herself held in a wonderful embrace.
“Dear lady of all my desires,” he whispered in her ear, “you shall make me happy and find the secret of happiness yourself in giving, in suffering, in love.”
For a long and wonderful moment she lay in his arms. She felt the soft burning of his kisses, the call of the room with its intoxicating, yet strangely ascetic perfume, the room to which all the time he seemed to be gently leading her. And then a flood of strange, alien recollections and realisations seemed to bring her from a better place back to a worse,—the sound of a passing taxicab, the distant booming of Big Ben, sounds of the world outside, the actual day-by-day world, with its day-by-day code of morals, the world in which she lived, and her friends, and all that had made life for her. She drew away, and he watched the change in her.
“I want to go!” she cried. “Let me go!”
“You are no prisoner,” he assured her sadly.
He clapped his hands. She had reached the door by now and found the handle yield to her fingers. Outside in the hall, the front door stood open, and a heavy rain was beating in on the white flags. She looked around. She was in her own atmosphere here. Their eyes met, and his were very sorrowful.
“My servants are assembling,” he said. “You will find a car at your service.”
Even then she hesitated. There was a strange return of the wonderful emotion of a few minutes ago. She hoped almost painfully that he would call. Instead, he lifted the silk hangings and passed out of sight. Somehow or other, she made her way down the hall. A butler stood upon the steps, another servant was holding open the door of a limousine just drawn up. She had no distinct recollection of giving any address. She simply threw herself back amongst the cushions. It was not until they were in Piccadilly that she suddenly remembered that she had left upon the table the papers he had scornfully offered her. Then she began to laugh.
CHAPTER XXI
Table of Contents
It chanced that the box was empty when Maggie, with flying footsteps, hastened down the corridor and pushed open the door. She sank into a chair, her knees trembling, her senses still dazed. Deliberately, although with hot and trembling fingers, she folded over and tore into small pieces a programme of the dances, which she had picked up from an adjoining chair. The action, insignificant though it was, seemed to bring her back into touch with the real and actual world, the world of music and wild gayety, of swiftly moving feet, of laughter and languorous voices. For a brief space of time she had escaped, she had wandered a little way into an unknown country, a country from whose thrilling dangers she had emerged with a curious feeling that life would never be altogether the same again. She glanced at the clock at the back of the box. She had been absent from the Hall altogether only about an hour and twenty minutes. There was still at least an hour before it would be possible for her to plead weariness and escape. And opposite, in the shadows of the distant box, the mock Prince Shan seemed always to be gazing at her with that cryptic smile upon his lips.
Presently the door was stealthily opened. A face as pale as death, with black eyes like pieces of coal, was framed for a moment in the shadowed slit. A little waft of familiar perfume stole in. La Belle Nita, her flaming lips widely parted, as soon as she recognised the sole occupant of the box, crept through the opening and closed the door again.
“You are here?” she exclaimed incredulously. “Your courage failed you? You did not go?”
“I have been and returned,” Maggie answered. “Now tell me what I have done that you should have plotted this thing against me?”
The girl sat on the edge of a chair and for a moment hummed the refrain of a sad chant, as she rocked slowly backwards and forwards.
“‘What have you done?’ the rose asked the butterfly. ‘What have you done?’ the mimosa blossom asked the little blue bird, whose wings fluttered amongst her leaves. ‘You have taken love from me, love which is the blossom of life.’”
“It sounds very picturesque,” Maggie said coldly, “but I do not follow your allegory. What I want to know is why you lied to me, why you sent me to that house to meet Prince Shan?”
“How did I lie to you?” Nita demanded. “The papers you sought were there. Were they not yours for the asking, or was the price too great?”
“The papers were there, certainly,” Maggie acquiesced, “but you knew very well—”
She stopped short. Slowly the Oriental idea of it all was beginning to frame itself in her mind. She dimly understood the bewilderment in the other’s face.
“The papers were there, and he, the most wonderful of all men, was there,” Nita murmured, “yet you leave him while the night is yet young, you return here without them!”
Maggie rose from her chair, moved to the side table and poured herself out a glass of wine, which she drank hastily. Anything to escape from the scornful wonder of those questioning eyes!
“I did not go there,” she said, “to make bargains with Prince Shan. I believed as you wished me to believe, that he was here in that box. I believed that I should have found the house empty, should have found what I wanted and have escaped with it. Why did you do this thing? Why did you send me on that errand when you knew that Prince Shan was there?”
“It was my desire that he should know that you are no different from other women,” was the calm reply. “I was a spy for him. You are a spy—against him.”
“It was a deliberate plot, then!” Maggie exclaimed, trying to feel the anger which she imparted to her tone.
La Belle Nita suddenly laughed, softly and like a bird.
“You very, very foolish Englishwoman,” she said. “A hand leaned down from Heaven, and you liked better to stay where you were, but I am glad.”
“And why?”
“Because I have been his slave,” the girl continued. “At odd, strange moments he has shown me a little love, he has let me creep into a small corner of his heart. Now I am cast out, and there is no more life for me because there is no more love, and there is no more love because, having felt his, no other can come after. Here have I sat with all the tortures of Hell burning in my blood because I knew that you and he were there alone, because I was never sure that, after all, I was not doing my lord’s will. And now I know that I suffered in vain. You did not understand.”
Maggie looked across at her visitor reflectively. She was beginning to regain her poise.
“Listen,” she said, “did you seriously expect me to accept Prince Shan as a lover?”
The girl’s eyes were round with wonder.
“It would be your great good fortune,” she murmured, “if he should offer you so wonderful a thing.”
Maggie laughed,—persisted in her laugh, although it sounded a little hard and the mirth a little forced.
“I cannot reason with you,” she declared, “because you would not unde
rstand. If you love him so much, why not go back to him? You will find him quite alone. I dare say you know the secrets of his lockless doors and hordes of unseen servants.”
La Belle Nita rose to her feet. About her lips there flickered the faintest smile.
“Young English lady,” she said, “I shall not go, because I am shut for ever out of his heart. But listen; would you have me go?”
For a moment Maggie’s poise was gone again. A strange uncertainty was once more upon her. She was terrified at her own feelings. The smile on the other’s lips deepened and then passed away.
“Ah,” she murmured, as with a little bow she turned towards the door, “you are not all snow and ice, then! There is something of the woman in you. He must have known that. I am better content.”
Alone in the box, Maggie was confronted once more with spectres. She felt all the fear and the sweetness of this new awakening. The old dangers and problems, the danger of life and death, the problem of her well-ordered days, fell away from her as trifles. There was wilder music in the world than any to which she had yet listened,—music which seemed to be awakening vibrant melodies in her terrified heart. The curtain which hung about the forbidden world had been suddenly lifted. Little shivers of fear convulsed her. Her standards were confused, her whole sense of values disturbed. Her primal virginity, left to itself because it had never needed a guard, had suddenly become a questioning thing. She sat there face to face with this new phase in her life. She was not even conscious of the abrupt pause in the music, the agitated murmur of voices, the sudden cessation of that rhythmical sweep of footsteps on the floor below.
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