Delphi Collected Works of Marie Corelli

by Marie Corelli

  “My dear El-Râmi! You here? At a theatre? Why, I should never have thought you capable of indulging in such frivolity!”

  “Do you consider ‘Hamlet’ frivolous?” queried the other, rising from his seat to shake hands, and showing himself to be a man of medium height, though having such peculiar dignity of carriage as made him appear taller than he really was.

  “Well, no!” — and the young man yawned rather effusively. “To tell you the truth, I find him insufferably dull.”

  “You do?” and the person addressed as El-Râmi smiled slightly. “Well, — naturally you go with the opinions of your age. You would no doubt prefer a burlesque?”

  “Frankly speaking, I should! And now I begin to think of it, I don’t know really why I came here. I had intended to look in at the Empire — there’s a new ballet going on there — but a fellow at the club gave me this stall, said it was a ‘first-night,’ and all the rest of it — and so—”

  “And so Fate decided for you,” finished El-Râmi sedately. “And instead of admiring the pretty ladies without proper clothing at the Empire, you find yourself here, wondering why the deuce Hamlet the Dane could not find anything better to do than bother himself about his father’s ghost! Exactly! But, being here, you are here for a purpose, my friend;” and he lowered his voice to a confidential whisper. “Look! — Over there — observe her well! — sits your future wife;” — and he indicated, by the slightest possible nod, the American girl before alluded to. “Yes, — the pretty creature in pink, with dark hair. You don’t know her? No, of course you don’t — but you will. She will be introduced to you to-night before you leave this theatre. Don’t look so startled — there’s nothing miraculous about her, I assure you! She is merely Miss Chester, only daughter of Jabez Chester, the latest New York millionaire. A charmingly shallow, delightfully useless, but enormously wealthy little person! — you will propose to her within a month, and you will be accepted. A very good match for you, Vaughan — all your debts paid, and everything set straight with certain Jews. Nothing could be better, really — and, remember, — I am the first to congratulate you!”

  He spoke rapidly, with a smiling, easy air of conviction; his friend meanwhile stared at him in profound amazement and something of fear.

  “By Jove, El-Râmi!” — he began nervously— “you know, this is a little too much of a good thing. It’s all very well to play prophet sometimes, but it can be overdone.”

  “Pardon!” and El-Râmi turned to resume his seat. “The play begins again. Insufferably dull as ‘Hamlet’ may be, we are bound to give him some slight measure of attention.”

  Vaughan forced a careless smile in response, and threw himself indolently back in his own stall, but he looked annoyed and puzzled. His eyes wandered from the back of El-Râmi’s white head to the half-seen profile of the American heiress who had just been so coolly and convincingly pointed out to him as his future wife.

  “I don’t know the girl from Adam,” — he thought irritably, “and I don’t want to know her. In fact, I won’t know her. And if I won’t, why, I shan’t know her. Will is everything, even according to El-Râmi. The fellow’s always so confoundedly positive of his prophecies. I should like to confute him for once and prove him wrong.”

  Thus he mused, scarcely heeding the progress of Shakespeare’s great tragedy, till, at the close of the scene of Ophelia’s burial, he saw El-Râmi rise and prepare to leave the auditorium. He at once rose himself.

  “Are you going?” he asked.

  “Yes; — I do not care for ‘Hamlet’s’ end, or for anybody’s end in this particular play. I don’t like the hasty and wholesale slaughter that concludes the piece. It is inartistic.”

  “Shakespeare inartistic?” queried Vaughan, smiling.

  “Why yes, sometimes. He was a man, not a god; — and no man’s work can be absolutely perfect. Shakespeare had his faults like everybody else, — and with his great genius he would have been the first to own them. It is only your little mediocrities who are never wrong. Are you going also?”

  “Yes; I mean to damage your reputation as a prophet, and avoid the chance of an introduction to Miss Chester — for this evening, at any rate.”

  He laughed as he spoke, but El-Râmi said nothing. The two passed out of the stalls together into the lobby, where they had to wait a few minutes to get their hats and overcoats, the man in charge of the cloakroom having gone to cool his chronic thirst at the convenient “bar.” Vaughan made use of the enforced delay to light his cigar.

  “Did you think it a good ‘Hamlet’?” he asked his companion carelessly while thus occupied.

  “Excellent,” replied El-Râmi. “The leading actor has immense talent, and thoroughly appreciates the subtlety of the part he has to play; — but his supporters are all sticks, — hence the scenes drag where he himself is not in them. That is the worst of the ‘star’ system, — a system which is perfectly ruinous to histrionic art. Still — no matter how it is performed, ‘Hamlet’ is always interesting. Curiously inconsistent, too, but impressive.”

  “Inconsistent? how?” asked Vaughan, beginning to puff rings of smoke into the air, and to wonder impatiently how much longer the keeper of the cloak-room meant to stay absent from his post.

  “Oh, in many ways. Perhaps the most glaring inconsistency of the whole conception comes out in the great soliloquy, ‘To be or not to be.’”

  “Really?” and Vaughan became interested.— “I thought that was considered one of the finest bits in the play.”

  “So it is. I am not speaking of the lines themselves, which are magnificent, but of their connection with ‘Hamlet’s’ own character. Why does he talk of a ‘bourne from whence no traveller returns,’ when he has, or thinks he has, proof positive of the return of his own father in spiritual form; — and it is just concerning that return that he makes all the pother? Don’t you see inconsistency there?”

  “Of course, — but I never thought of it,” said Vaughan, staring. “I don’t believe anyone but yourself has ever thought of it. It is quite unaccountable. He certainly does say ‘no traveller returns,’ — and he says it after he has seen the ghost too.”

  “Yes,” went on El-Râmi, warming with his subject. “And he talks of the ‘dread of something after death,’ as if it were only a ‘dread,’ and not a Fact; — whereas if he is to believe the spirit of his own father, which he declares is ‘an honest ghost,’ there is no possibility of doubt on the matter. Does not the mournful phantom say—”

  “But that I am forbid

  To tell the secrets of my prison-house

  I could a tale unfold, whose lightest word

  Would harrow up thy soul; freeze thy young blood;

  Make thy two eyes like stars start from their spheres;

  Thy knotted and combinèd locks to part.

  And each particular hair to stand on end. . .?”

  “By Jove! I say, El-Râmi; don’t look at me like that!” exclaimed Vaughan uneasily, backing away from a too close proximity to the brilliant flashing eyes and absorbed face of his companion, who had recited the lines with extraordinary passion and solemnity.

  El-Râmi laughed.

  “Did I scare you? Was I too much in earnest? I beg your pardon! True enough,— ‘this eternal blazon must not be, to ears of flesh and blood!’ But, the ‘something after death’ was a peculiarly aggravating reality to that poor ghost, and Hamlet knew that it was so when he spoke of it as a mere ‘dread.’ Thus, as I say, he was inconsistent, or, rather, Shakespeare did not argue the case logically.”

  “You would make a capital actor,” — said Vaughan, still gazing at him in astonishment. “Why, you went on just now as if, — well, as if you meant it, you know.”

  “So I did mean it,” replied El-Râmi lightly— “for the moment! I always find ‘Hamlet’ a rather absorbing study; so will you, perhaps, when you are my age.”

  “Your age?” and Vaughan shrugged his shoulders. “I wish I knew it! Why, nobody knows it. Yo
u may be thirty or a hundred — who can tell?”

  “Or two hundred — or even three hundred?” queried El-Râmi, with a touch of satire in his tone;— “why stint the measure of limitless time? But here comes our recalcitrant knave” — this, as the keeper of the cloakroom made his appearance from a side-door with a perfectly easy and unembarrassed air, as though he had done rather a fine thing than otherwise in keeping two gentlemen waiting his pleasure. “Let us get our coats, and be well away before the decree of Fate can be accomplished in making you the winner of the desirable Chester prize. It is delightful to conquer Fate — if one can!”

  His black eyes flashed curiously, and Vaughan paused in the act of throwing on his overcoat to look at him again in something of doubt and dread.

  At that moment a gay voice exclaimed:

  “Why, here’s Vaughan! — Freddie Vaughan — how lucky!” and a big handsome man of about two or three and thirty sauntered into the lobby from the theatre, followed by two ladies. “Look here, Vaughan, you’re just the fellow I wanted to see. We’ve left Hamlet in the thick of his fight, because we’re going on to the Somers’s ball, — will you come with us? And I say, Vaughan, allow me to introduce to you my friends — Mrs. Jabez Chester, Miss Idina Chester — Sir Frederick Vaughan.”

  For one instant Vaughan stood inert and stupefied; the next he remembered himself, and bowed mechanically. His presentation to the Chesters was thus suddenly effected by his cousin, Lord Melthorpe, to whom he was indebted for many favours, and whom he could not afford to offend by any show of brusquerie. As soon as the necessary salutations were exchanged, however, he looked round vaguely, and in a sort of superstitious terror, for the man who had so surely prophesied this introduction. But El-Râmi was gone. Silently and without adieu he had departed, having seen his word fulfilled.

  CHAPTER II.

  “WHO is the gentleman that just left you?” asked Miss Chester, smiling prettily up into Vaughan’s eyes, as she accepted his proffered arm to lead her to her carriage,— “Such a distinguished-looking dreadful person!”

  Vaughan smiled at this description.

  “He is certainly rather singular in personal appearance,” he began, when his cousin, Lord Melthorpe, interrupted him.

  “You mean El-Râmi? It was El-Râmi, wasn’t it? Ah, I thought so. Why did he give us the slip, I wonder? I wish he had waited a minute — he is a most interesting fellow.”

  “But who is he?” persisted Miss Chester. She was now comfortably ensconced in her luxurious brougham, her mother beside her, and two men of “title” opposite to her — a position which exactly suited the aspirations of her soul. “How very tiresome you both are! You don’t explain him a bit; you only say he is ‘interesting,’ and of course one can see that; people with such white hair and such black eyes are always interesting, don’t you think so?”

  “Well, I don’t see why they should be,” said Lord Melthorpe dubiously. “Now, just think what horrible chaps Albinos are, and they have white hair and pink eyes—”

  “Oh, don’t drift off on the subject of Albinos, please!” pleaded Miss Chester, with a soft laugh. “If you do, I shall never know anything about this particular person — El-Râmi, did you say? Isn’t it a very odd name? Eastern, of course?”

  “Oh yes! he is a pure Oriental thoroughbred,” replied Lord Melthorpe, who took the burden of the conversation upon himself, while he inwardly wondered why his cousin Vaughan was in such an evidently taciturn mood. “That is, I mean, he is an Oriental of the very old stock, not one of the modern Indian mixtures of vice and knavery. But when he came from the East, and why he came from the East, I don’t suppose anyone could tell you. I have only met him two or three times in society, and on those occasions he managed to perplex and fascinate a good many people. My wife, for instance, thinks him quite a marvellous man; she always asks him to her parties, but he hardly ever comes. His name in full is El-Râmi-Zarânos, though I believe he is best known as El-Râmi simply.”

  “And what is he?” asked Miss Chester. “An artist? — a literary celebrity?”

  “Neither, that I am aware of. Indeed, I don’t know what he is, or how he lives. I have always looked upon him as a sort of magician — a kind of private conjurer, you know.”

  “Dear me!” said fat Mrs. Chester, waking up from a semi-doze, and trying to get interested in the subject. “Does he do drawing-room tricks?”

  “Oh no, he doesn’t do tricks;” and Lord Melthorpe looked a little amused. “He isn’t that sort of man at all; I’m afraid I explain myself badly. I mean that he can tell you extraordinary things about your past and future—”

  “Oh, by your hand — I know!” and the pretty Idina nodded her head sagaciously. “There really is something awfully clever in palmistry. I can tell fortunes that way!”

  “Can you?” Lord Melthorpe smiled indulgently, and went on,— “But it so happens that El-Râmi does not tell anything by the hand, — he judges by the face, figure, and movement. He doesn’t make a profession of it; but, really, he does foretell events in rather a curious way now and then.”

  “He certainly does!” agreed Vaughan, rousing himself from a reverie into which he had fallen, and fixing his eyes on the small piquante features of the girl opposite him. “Some of his prophecies are quite remarkable.”

  “Really! How very delightful!” said Miss Chester, who was fully aware of Sir Frederick’s intent, almost searching, gaze, but pretended to be absorbed in buttoning one of her gloves. “I must ask him to tell me what sort of fate is in store for me — something awful, I’m positive! Don’t you think he has horrid eyes? — splendid, but horrid? He looked at me in the theatre—”

  “My dear, you looked at him first,” murmured Mrs. Chester.

  “Yes; but I’m sure I didn’t make him shiver. Now, when he looked at me, I felt as if someone were pouring cold water very slowly down my back. It was such a creepy sensation! Do fasten this, mother — will you?” and she extended the hand with the refractory glove upon it to Mrs. Chester, but Vaughan promptly interposed:

  “Allow me!”

  “Oh, well! if you know how to fix a button that is almost off!” she said laughingly, with a blush that well became her transparent skin.

  “I can make an attempt” — said Vaughan, with due humility. “If I succeed, will you give me one or two dances presently?”

  “With pleasure!”

  “Oh! you are coming in to the Somers’s, then!” said Lord Melthorpe, in a pleased tone. “That’s right. You know, Fred, you’re so absent-minded to-night, that you never said ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ when I asked you to accompany us.”

  “Didn’t I? I’m awfully sorry!” and, having fastened the glove with careful daintiness, he smiled. “Please set down my rudeness and distraction to the uncanny influence of El-Râmi; I can’t imagine any other reason.”

  They all laughed carelessly, as people in an idle humour laugh at trifles, and the carriage bore them on to their destination — a great house in Queen’s Gate, where a magnificent entertainment was being held in honour of some Serene and Exalted foreign potentate who had taken it into his head to see how London amused itself during a “season.” The foreign potentate had heard that the splendid English capital was full of gloom and misery — that its women were unapproachable, and its men difficult to make friends with; and all these erroneous notions had to be dispersed in his serene and exalted brain, no matter what his education cost the “Upper Ten” who undertook to enlighten his barbarian ignorance.

  Meanwhile, the subject of Lord Mel — thorpe’s conversation — El-Râmi, or El-Râmi-Zarânos, as he was called by those of his own race — was walking quietly homewards with that firm, swift, yet apparently unhasting pace which so often distinguishes the desert-born savage, and so seldom gives grace to the deportment of the cultured citizen. It was a mild night in May; the weather was unusually fine and warm; the skies were undarkened by any mist or cloud, and the stars shone forth with as much brilliancy as though the city
lying under their immediate ken had been the smiling fairy, Florence, instead of the brooding giant, London. Now and again El-Râmi raised his eyes to the sparkling belt of Orion, which glittered aloft with a lustre that is seldom seen in the hazy English air; — he was thinking his own thoughts, and the fact that there were many passers to and fro in the streets besides himself did not appear to disturb him in the least, for he strode through their ranks, without any hurry or jostling, as if he alone existed, and they were but shadows.

  “What fools are the majority of men!” he mused. “How easy to gull them, and how willing they are to be gulled! How that silly young Vaughan marvelled at my prophecy of his marriage! — as if it were not as easy to foretell as that two and two inevitably make four! Given the characters of people in the same way that you give figures, and you are certain to arrive at a sum-total of them in time. How simple the process of calculation as to Vaughan’s matrimonial prospects! Here are the set of numerals I employed: Two nights ago I heard Lord Melthorpe say he meant to marry his cousin Fred to Miss Chester, daughter of Jabez Chester, of New York, — Miss Chester herself entered the room a few minutes later on, and I saw the sort of young woman she was. To-night at the theatre I see her again; — in an opposite box, well back in shadow, I perceive Lord Melthorpe. Young Vaughan, whose character I know to be of such weakness that it can be moulded whichever way a stronger will turns it, sits close behind me; and I proceed to make the little sum-total. Given Lord Melthorpe, with a determination that resembles the obstinacy of a pig rather than of a man; Frederick Vaughan, with no determination at all; and the little Chester girl, with her heart set on an English title, even though it only be that of a baronet, and the marriage is certain. What was un certain was the possibility of their all meeting to-night; but they were all there, and I counted that possibility as the fraction over, — there is always a fraction over in character-sums; it stands as Providence or Fate, and must always be allowed for. I chanced it, — and won. I always do win in these things, — these ridiculous trifles of calculation, which are actually accepted as prophetic utterances by people who never will think out anything for themselves. Good heavens! what a monster-burden of crass ignorance and wilful stupidity this poor planet has groaned under ever since it was hurled into space! Immense! — incalculable! And for what purpose? For what progress? For what end?”