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Page 31
Of those joys for which thousands of her plainer sisters yearn
and starve to the end of their days she had experienced a
surfeit. Always she sought for novelty, for new adventures. She
was confident of herself, but yet--and here lay the delicious
thrill--not wholly confident. Many times she had promised to
visit the house of Lou Chada's father--a mystery palace
cunningly painted, a perfumed page from the Arabian poets dropped
amid the interesting squalor of Limehouse.
Perhaps she had never intended to go. Who knows? But on the
night when she came within the ken of Chief Inspector Kerry, Lou
Chada had urged her to do so in his poetically passionate
fashion, and, wanting to go, she had asked herself: "Am I strong
enough? Dare I?"
They had dined, danced, and she had smoked one of the scented
cigarettes which he alone seemed to be able to procure, and
which, on their arrival from the East, were contained in queer
little polished wooden boxes.
Then had come an unfamiliar nausea and dizziness, an
uncomfortable recognition of the fact that she was making a fool
of herself, and finally a semi-darkness through which familiar
faces loomed up and were quickly lost again. There was the soft,
musical voice of Lou Chada reassuring her, a sense of chill, of
helplessness, and then for a while an interval which afterward
she found herself unable to bridge.
Knowledge of verity came at last, and Lady Pat raised herself
from the divan upon which she had been lying, and, her slender
hands clutching the cushions, stared about her with eyes which
ever grew wider.
She was in a long, rather lofty room, which was lighted by three
silver lanterns swung from the ceiling. The place, without
containing much furniture, was a riot of garish, barbaric colour.
There were deep divans cushioned in amber and blood-red. Upon
the floor lay Persian carpets and skins of beasts. Cunning
niches there were, half concealing and half revealing long-necked
Chinese jars; and odd little carven tables bore strangely
fashioned vessels of silver. There was a cabinet of ebony inlaid
with jade, there were black tapestries figured with dragons of
green and gold. Curtains she saw of peacock-blue; and in a tall,
narrow recess, dominating the room, squatted a great golden
Buddha.
The atmosphere was laden with a strange perfume.
But, above all, this room was silent, most oppressively silent.
Lady Pat started to her feet. The whole perfumed place seemed to
be swimming around her. Reclosing her eyes, she fought down her
weakness. The truth, the truth respecting Lou Chada and herself,
had uprisen starkly before her. By her own folly--and she could
find no tiny excuse--she had placed herself in the power of a man
whom, instinctively, deep within her soul, she had always known
to be utterly unscrupulous.
How cleverly he had concealed the wild animal which dwelt beneath
that suave, polished exterior! Yet how ill he had concealed it!
For intuitively she had always recognized its presence, but had
deliberately closed her eyes, finding a joy in the secret
knowledge of danger. Now at last he had discarded pretense.
The cigarette which he had offered her at the club had been
drugged. She was in Limehouse, at the mercy of a man in whose
veins ran the blood of ancestors to whom women had been chattels.
Too well she recognized that his passion must have driven him
insane, as he must know at what cost he took such liberties with
one who could not lightly be so treated. But these reflections
afforded poor consolation. It was not of the penalties that Lou
Chada must suffer for this infringement of Western codes, but of
the price that she must pay for her folly, of which Pat was
thinking.
There was a nauseating taste upon her palate. She remembered
having noticed it faintly while she was smoking the cigarette;
indeed, she had commented upon it at the time.
"The dirty yellow blackguard!" she said aloud, and clenched her
hands.
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