Part 26 (2/2)

”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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sionately. 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 amus.e.m.e.nts. I pa.s.s my lighter hours with them. They interest me in the same manner as a chess problem. We do not care, we in the mighty 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 pa.s.s from the greyness of these sordid lands into the everlasting suns.h.i.+ne 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 pa.s.s 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 pa.s.sing 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!”

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