Max Pemberton - Murder Mysteries Boxed-Set - 40+ Books in One Edition

The rain was pitiless, and the night was dark. But Lelia did not pass out when the others left. I had taken up a position close to the stage-door, and scanned the faces of those going into the night, but hers was not among them. Bright faces they were for the most part—the faces of girls moved by all the curious romance of the theatre, moved to desire of excitement, in some cases to desire of shame; a merry throng of irresponsibles, who would die peeresses or paupers, in old family mansions or in the gutter. And they went to lovers and to suppers with the gas-jets lighting up their faces, and the black still thick upon their eyes, while I waited as the rain fell and struck me, cold and chill, with disappointment. I had forgotten "The Raven" as the crowd surged out; but he, too, was looking, and when all had gone he spoke to me with a voice hard as the crack of dry wood:

"Again!"

It was the one word only, but I turned upon him with a sharp reply, when I saw, by the light streaming through the still open door, that there was a smile upon his lips, while he gripped my arm tightly with his hand.

"Again, and unto seventy times! Seek and find—seek and find—like all the fools before and since, unto seventy times!"

He was either a madman or a fanatic, and I determined to let him be, giving him smile for smile and jest for jest; but he gripped my arm yet tighter, saying:

"Come!"

I went with him down the passage and into the open Strand, passing from the valley of the disreputable to the highway of the respectable going home to supper and to bed. Nor did he pause until we had gone westward many paces, when he drew me with him to a small eating-house by Covent Garden, and there we sat. In the clearer light of the room I had that opportunity to observe him which the dark of the passage had denied me; and in truth he was a strange man, much furrowed in the flesh, and glittering with the light of madness in his eyes. But he drank full well from the cup set before him, and there were diamonds, large and lustrous, upon the fingers which he raised. I waited for him to speak, for the advance had been of his, and not of my seeking; but he drank many glasses before he spoke, and then it was in the tone of the hard-mouthed cynic who has bitten into life and found gall for his palate.

"Again, Roderick Connoley"—having my name in what way I knew not—"again, and the woman is no nearer—no nearer, but more distant, while you wait."

"What my business is to you, I cannot think," I answered, "or why you should seek to discuss it."

He replied with a loud guffaw, throwing his sod- den cape over his shoulders so that the rain ran down upon his shirt and over the heavy-linked chain hanging at his waistcoat.

"Why should I discuss it?" he said. "Because, my friend, the only serious thing that man does discuss is woman. Since the world began he has discussed her; since the day that there was chaos and she sat a star in the heavens; and he will discuss her when the world is no more. Sometimes it will be the good thought from which springs the tree of life; sometimes it will be with the more base and degrading idea of self, which they call possession—such an idea as moves you now, the evil, ill-gotten desire for a woman who may be innocent, but whom you would make guilty before the day comes—you, I say, who find life at a stage-door!"

He pointed threateningly with his finger across the table, and I knew that he spoke the truth. I could find no answer to his accusation, so I drank deeply of the wine and avoided the search of his eyes. But I continued to feel his look; almost the terrible grasp of his hand upon mine. There was silence for some minutes before he spoke again, and then it was with another voice, as though one had put ice upon his tongue.

"One fool often makes two," he said, as he called for a second bottle of wine. " Forget that I have spoken, for I am but the servant of the Master, and how shall the servant speak when the Master has not spoken? I brought you here for your ends, not for mine, and therefore would serve your ends before my own. You are Roderick Connoley, a barrister, with little money and with less employment; your life, for what it is worth, is a dream mostly dreamed in tobacco-smoke; and what you lack in performance at the moment you find in promise for the future. As a so-called man about town, you are condescending enough to patronize the vices, for which you care little, but in the true pleasures of living you remain a child. In this respect you are as other men, for how many of the thousands who drift on the sea of enjoyment in this city know any thing of those treasures which Life can give to him who understands her? I have watched you as I have watched others, and have been moved to pity for you. I have even spoken to the Master, who has listened to me as I have talked of yon, and has made known his will about you. This night your lesson in pleasure shall begin; but it remains with you to profit all or to lose all. At this moment I say no more, for the hour is at hand, and we go. Look! the clock is about to strike midnight."

He rose up from the table, this amiable madman I had met, and I knew not how to humor him. I remembered that it was a terrible night, the rain falling pitilessly, and the streets empty; so I followed the old man into the street, and entered the single brougham that was at the curbstone. It was an adventure, and why should I not pursue it?

Part II—The Lord of the Hundred Lanterns

When we left Coven t Garden we seemed to drive by way of Bloomsbury toward the north of London. The rain was still falling, but the clouds skirmished over the heavens, leaving gaps through which the stars shone, and there was light from the moon newly risen above the endless roofing. I had a mind to ask my companion whither he went; but he appeared to be sleeping as he reclined deeply in the cushions, and I, in my turn, was almost overpowered by an incontrollable drowsiness. It was just at the moment when I opened my eyes for the last time—eyes then almost fixed in sleep—that I observed a strange movement on the old man's part; for he started up of a sudden, holding something to my nostrils, and in that moment I fell asleep.

The sensations of waking have been described often. I shall not attempt to describe them again, saying only that, when I awoke from that which appeared to me an unusually long sleep, it was with the sense of a profound delight and realization of ease. I seemed to be sunken deeply in a bed of silk, whereof the huge cushions towered up around me, so that, as my eyes opened, I saw nothing but the roof of the room in which I lay. Gilded spandrels richly dowered with mosaic united in a star of silver in the centre of the chamber, and from the silver star shot down a soft white light that drew the eyes in sympathy and yet bathed them in content. There was something so rich, so resplendent in all this maze of gold-work, in the flow of the steady rays of white light that poured upon me, in the ease of the bed whereon I rested, that I lay for many minutes content to let the mystery be. What did it matter? I suffered from some dream; such things as men shape in that keen moment of imagination when the brain wakes and the body is yet sleeping; but I would not be fooled by them.

I thought thus, and closed my eyes, opening them again when some minutes had gone. The light was still shining, and it shone with a greater power, as it seemed to me, making clear the darker portions of the room, lighting the niches and the black recesses. The air I breathed seemed laden with a strange perfume, as of the perfume of unknown flowers; but to breathe it was to take strength, to feel a newer energy and a newer life. I looked around the chamber, raising myself upon my elbows in the great bed, and sitting up so that I saw all the wondrous sight. It was a great room, banked up by twenty couches,—for that upon which I rested proved to be a couch,—and, as I judged, at least a hundred silver lanterns hung down from its painted roof. All the upper portions—the metopes in the frieze of the entablature, and the frieze itself—were covered with strange Eastern pictures depicting fables and tales from the myths of Greece and the richer stories of the East. But no pen may tell of the splendor of the mosaics let into the painted walls, or of the paintings which filled the lower panels. When I looked at length from the walls to the centre of the room the sight that met my gaze was not less bewildering. There were vases of jasper and of agate, from which there stood out wide-spreading palms and the lesser palms of the forests of the East; there were tables studded with gems and with precious stones, the like of which I had seen in no land; there were hookahs in pure amber, and smaller lamps in amethyst stone from which the vapor rose. Many smaller tables placed by the couches were heaped up with fruit such as was not then to be had in London, and there were goblets chased after the fashion of the chalice known to the Western Church. I saw that a dish of the fruit and one of these goblets had been placed at the foot of my own bed, and I drank of the wine,—a deep draught and luscious,—and as I drank the sensation of pleasure, pure and without blemish, came upon me. Perhaps for the first time in my life I lived—lived in an existence which no tongue can make clear; an existence which promised to be infinite, unmarred by any bridge of death, wanting nothing of the promise of priests; an existence of the imagination, in which the body had no part. And in the very ecstasy of living I leaned back in my cushions and closed my eyes to dream.