Aladdin of London Part 7

"Is that Miss Anna's portrait over the fireplace, sir?"

"You know her, Kennedy?"

"I have seen her once, on the balcony of a house in St. James' Square.

That was last night when I was on my way to sleep in a cellar."

"My poor, poor boy, and to-night you will sleep in one of the most beautiful rooms in England. How wonderful is fortune, how amazing--er--how very--is not that seven o'clock by the way? I think that it is, and here is Fellows come to show you your room. You will find that we have done our best for you in the matter of clothes--guesswork, I fear, Kennedy, but still our best. To-morrow Westman the tailor is to come--I think and hope you will put up with borrowed plumes until he can fit you up. In the meantime, Fellows has charge of your needs. I am sure that he will do his very best for you."

The young butler said that he would--his voice was still raised to a little just dignity, and he, in company with Silas Geary, the housekeeper and the servants' hall had already put the worst construction possible upon Alban's reception into the house. His determination to patronize the "young man" however received an abrupt check when Alban suddenly ordered him to show the way upstairs. "He spoke like a Duke," Fellows said in the kitchen afterwards. "There I was running up the stairs just as though the Guv'ner were behind me. Don't you think that you can come it easy with him--he ain't the sort by a long way. I tell you, I never was so astonished since the Guv'ner raised my wages."

Alban, of course, was sublimely unconscious of this. He had been conducted to an enormous bedroom on the first floor, superbly furnished with old Chippendale and excellent modern Sevres--and there he had been left to realize for the first time that he was alone and that all which had happened since yesterday was not a dream but a hard invincible truth so full of meaning, so wonderful, so sure that the eyes of his brain did not dare to look at it unflinchingly. Boyishly and with a boy's gesture he had thrown himself upon the bed and hidden his face from the light as though the very atmosphere of this wonder world were insupportable. Good G.o.d, that it should have happened to him, Alban Kennedy; that it should have been spoken of as his just right; that he should have been told that he had a claim which none might refute! A hundred guesses afforded no clue to the solution of the mystery. He could not tell himself that he was in some way related to Richard Gessner, the banker; he could not believe that his dead parents had any claim upon this foreigner who received him coldly and yet would hear nothing of his departure. Pride had little share in this, for the issues were momentous. It was sufficient to know that a hand had suddenly drawn him from the abyss, had put him on this pinnacle--beyond all, had placed him in Anna Gessner's home as the first-born, there to embark upon a career whose goal lay beyond the City Beautiful of his dreams.

He rose from the bed at length, and trying to put every thought but that of the moment from his head, he remembered that he was expected to dine alone in the great room below, and to dress himself for such an ordeal in the clothes which the reverend gentleman's wit had provided for him.

Courageous in all things, he found himself not a little afraid of all the beautiful objects which he touched, afraid to lift the Sevres pitcher, afraid to open the long doors of the inlaid wardrobe, timid before the dazzling mirror--a reluctant guest who, for the time being, would have been thankful to escape to a carpetless floor and glad to wash in a basin of the commonest kind. When this pa.s.sed, and it was but momentary, the delusion that a trick was being played upon him succeeded to it and he stood to ask himself if he had not been a fool to believe their story at all, a fool thus to be made sport of by one who would relate the circ.u.mstance with relish to-morrow. This piece of nonsense, however, was as quick to give way to the somewhat cynical common sense with which, Alban Kennedy had rightly been credited as the other. He turned from it impatiently and began to dress himself. He had last dressed in black clothes and a white waistcoat for a school concert at Westminster when he was quite a little lad--but his youth had taught him the conventions, and he had never forgotten those traditions of what his dead father used to call the "decent life." In his case the experience was but a reversion to the primitive, and he dressed with every satisfaction, delighted to put off the shabby old clothes and no less content with his new appearance as a mirror revealed it to him.

The dining room at "Five Gables" was normally a little dark in the daytime, for it looked upon the drive where ancient trees shaded its lofty latticed windows. At night, however, Richard Gessner's fine silver set off the veritable black oak to perfection, and the room had an air of dignity and richness neither artificial nor offensive. When Alban came down to dinner he perceived that a cover had been set for him at the end of a vast table, and that he was expected to take the absent master's place; nor could he forbear to smile at the solemn exercises performed by Fellows the young butler, and two footmen who were to wait upon him. These rascals, whatever they might say in the kitchen afterwards, served him at the table as though he had been an eldest son of the house. If they had expected that the ragged, shabby fellow, who entered the house so stealthily an hour ago, would provide food for their exquisitely delicate sense of humor, they were wofully disappointed. Alban ate his dinner without uttering a single remark.

And last night it had been supper in the caves! There must be no charge of inconsistency brought against him if a momentary shudder marked this recollection of an experience. A man may bridge a great gulf in a single instant of time. Alban had no less affection for, no less interest to-night in those pitiful lives than yesterday, but he understood that a flood of fortune had carried him for the time being away from them, and that his desire must be to help but not to regret them. Indeed, he could not resist, nor did he wish to resist a great content in this well-being, which overtook him in so subtle a manner. The sermons of the old days, preached by many a mad fanatic of Union Street, declared that any alliance between the rich and the poor must be false and impossible.

Alban believed it to be so. A mere recollection of the shame of poverty could already bring the blood to his cheeks, and yet he would have defended poverty with all the logic of which his clever brain was capable.

So in a depressing silence the long dinner was eaten. Methodically and with velvet steps the footmen put dish after dish before him, the butler filled his rarely lifted gla.s.s, the whole ceremony of dining performed.

For his own part he would have given much to have escaped after the fish had been served, and to have gone out and explored the garden which had excited Mr. Geary to such poetic thoughts. Not a large eater (for the East End does not dare to cultivate an appet.i.te), he was easily satisfied; and he found the mere length of the menu to be an ordeal which he would gladly have been spared. Why did people want all these dishes, he asked himself. Why, in well-to-do circles, is it considered necessary to serve precisely similar portions of fish and flesh and fowl every night at eight o'clock? Men who work eat when they are disposed.

Alban wondered what would happen if such a custom were introduced into the House of the Five Gables. A cynical reverie altogether--from which the butler's purring voice awakened him.

"Will you have your coffee in the Winter Garden, sir? Mr. Gessner always does."

"Cannot I have it in the garden?"

"Oh, yes, if you like, sir. We'll carry out a chair--the seats are very damp at night, sir."

Alban smiled. Was he not sleeping on the reeking floor of the caves but twenty hours ago.

CHAPTER IX

ANNA GESSNER

They set a table in the vestibule overlooking the trim lawn, and thither they carried cigars and coffee. Alban had learned to smoke fiercely--one of the few lessons the East End had taught him thoroughly--and Richard Gessner's cigars had a just reputation among all who frequented the House of the Five Gables--some of these, it must be confessed, coming here for no other particular reason than to smoke them. Alban did not quite understand what it was that differentiated this particular cigar from any he had ever smoked, but he enjoyed it thoroughly and inhaled every whiff of its fragrant bouquet as though it had been a perfume of morning-roses.

A profound stillness, broken at rare intervals by the rustling of young leaves, prevailed in the garden. Night had come down, but it was a night of spring, clear and still and wonderful of stars. Distantly across a black waste of heath and meadow, the spire of Harrow Church stood up as a black point against an azure sky. The waters of the Welsh Harp were as a shimmering lake of silver in the foreground; the lights of Hendon and of Cricklewood spoke of suburban life, but might just as well have conjured up an Italian scene to one who had the wit to imagine it. Alban knew nothing of Italy, he had never set foot out of England in his life, but the peace and the beauty of the picture impressed him strangely, and he wondered that he had so often visited the Caves when such a fairyland stood open to his pleasure. Let it not be hidden that he would have been easily pleased this night. Youth responds quickly to excitements of whatever nature they may be. He was as far from realizing the truth of his position as ever, but the complete change of environment, the penetrating luxury of the great house, the mystery which had carried him there and the promise of the morrow, conspired to elate him and to leave him, in the common phrase, as one who is walking upon air. Even an habitual cynicism stood silent now. What mattered it if he awoke to-morrow to a reality of misunderstanding or of jest? Had not this night opened a vista which nothing hereafter might shut out?

And the truth might be as Richard Gessner had promised--a truth of permanence, of the continued possession of this wonderland. Who shall blame him if his heart leaped at the mere contemplation of this possibility?

It would have been about nine o'clock when they carried his coffee to the garden--it was just half-past nine when Anna Gessner returned unexpectedly to the house. Alban heard the bell in the courtyard ring loudly, and upon that the throttled purr of a motor's heavy engine. He had expected Silas Geary, but such a man, he rightly argued, would not come with so much pomp and circ.u.mstance, and he stood at once, anxious and not a little abashed. Perhaps some suspicion of the truth had flashed upon him unwittingly. He heard the voice of Fellows the butler raised in some voluble explanation, there were a few words spoken in a pleasing girlish tone, and then, the boudoir behind him flashed its colors suddenly upon his vision, and he beheld Anna Gessner herself--a face he would have recognized in ten thousand, a figure of yesternight that would never be forgotten.

She had cast aside her motor veil, and held it in her hand while she spoke to the butler. A heavy coat bordered and lined with fur stood open to reveal a gray cloth dress; her hair had been blown about by the fresh breezes of the night and covered her forehead in a disorder far from unbecoming. Alban thought that the cold light in the room and the heavy bright panelling against which she stood gave an added pallor to her usually pale face, exaggerating the crimson of her lips and the dark beauty of her eyes. The hand which held the veil appeared to him to be ridiculously small; her att.i.tudes were so entirely graceful that he could not imagine a picture more pleasing. If he remembered that he had likened her to little Lois Boriskoff, he could now admit the preposterous nature of the comparison. True it was that nationality spoke in the contour of the face, in its coloring and its expression, but these elementals were forgotten in the amazing grace of the girl's movements, the dignity of her gestures and the vitality which animated her. Returning to the house unexpectedly, even a lad was shrewd enough to see that she returned also under the stress of an agitation she could conceal from none. Her very questions to the servants were so quick and incoherent that they could not be answered. The letters which the butler put into her hands were torn from the envelopes but were not read. When she opened the boudoir window and so permitted Alban to overhear her hurried words, it was as one who found the atmosphere of a house insupportable and must breathe fresh air at any cost.

"Has my father returned, Fellows?"

"No, miss, he is not expected until late."

"Why did you not send the carriage to the station?"

"Mr. Gessner said that you were coming to-morrow, miss."

She flushed slightly at the retort and made as though to step out into the garden--but hesitating an instant, she said:

"I have had nothing to eat since one o'clock, Fellows. I must have some supper."

"Yes, miss."

"Anything will do--tell cook it does not matter. Has Lord Portcullis called?"

"No, miss--not since yesterday."

"Or Mrs. Melville?"

"This afternoon. She asked for your address, miss--but I did not give it."

"Quite right--I suppose that Captain Forrest did not come?" She turned away as though not wishing to look the man in the face--a gesture which Alban's quick eyes instantly perceived.

Fellows, on the other hand, permitted a smile to lurk for an instant about the corners of his mouth before he said--

"I understood that Captain Forrest was at Brighton, miss."

The girl's face clouded perceptibly, and she loosened her cloak and threw it from her shoulders as though it had become an insupportable burden.

"If he calls to-morrow, I do not wish to see him. Please tell them all--I will not see him."

The butler smiled again, but answered, "Yes, miss."

Anna Gessner herself, still hesitating upon the threshold suddenly remembered another interest and referred to it with no less ardor.

"Oh, that reminds me, Fellows. Has my father spoken again of that dreadful silly business?"

"Concerning the young gentleman, miss?"

She heard him with unutterable contempt.

"The beggar-boy that he wishes to bring to this house. Did he speak of him to-night?"

Fellows came a step nearer and, hushing his voice, he said, with a servant's love of a dramatic reply:

"Mr. Kennedy is in the garden now, miss--indeed, I think he's sitting near the vestibule."

She looked at him astonished. Ugly pa.s.sions of disappointment and thwarted desire betrayed themselves in the swift turn and the angry pursing of her lips. Of her father's intentions in bringing this beggar-boy to the house, she knew nothing at all. It seemed to her one of those mad acts for which no sane apology could be offered.