The Mystery of a Turkish Bath
was dark, too, but with a pale clear skin that was more lovely than any
dead blonde whiteness; and to crown her charms, she had long rippling
hair of jet black hue that was parted from her brow and fell like a veil
to her delicate arched feet, and through which the serious, darkly--
glowing eyes looked straight at the wondering faces before her.
The pause she made before entering was brief, but not so brief that
every eye there had not scanned enviously and wonderingly her perfect
beauty--from the clear-cut, exquisite face and bare, beautifully--shaped
arms, to the graceful ankles, gleaming white as sculptured marble
through the veiling hair.
Mrs Jefferson first recovered speech.
"Who is she?" she whispered eagerly. "Not at our hotel I think. Looks
like a walking advertisement of a new hair restorer. She'd be a fortune
to them if she'd have her photograph taken so!"
The newcomer meanwhile advanced and took one of the chairs near Mrs
Jefferson. That lady suffered strongly from the curiosity that is
characteristic of her admirable nation. She re-seated herself for the
purpose of studying the strange vision, and, not being in the least
degree afflicted with English reticence, she set the ball of
conversation going by an immediate remark:
"Had any of these baths before?"
The person addressed looked at her with grave and serious eyes.
"No," she said; and her voice was singularly clear and sweet, but with
something foreign in the slow accentuation of words. "I only arrived at
this hotel last night."
"Oh!" said Mrs Jefferson, "is that so? I thought I hadn't seen you
before. Come for your health?"
"Yes," said the stranger, accepting a glass of water from the attendant,
who had just come forward.
"Not gout, I suppose?" suggested Mrs Jefferson, conscious that there
were arched feet in the world even more exquisite in shape and size than
her own.
"Gout! Oh, no!" said the stranger, smiling faintly. "They say my
nerves are not strong. I sleep badly, I am easily startled, and easily
fatigued." She paused a moment, and one delicate hand, glittering with
rings, pushed back the dark weight of rippling hair from her brow. "I
have had a great mental shock," she said, quietly. "Such things require
time... one cannot easily forget..."
Her eyes had grown dreamy and abstracted. The hand that had pushed back
her heavy hair fell on her lap. She looked at it and its shining rings,
and Mrs Jefferson's sharp glance followed hers. Was there a plain gold
circlet among that glittering array?--was the beautiful stranger wife or
maiden?
"If any man saw her now!" she thought involuntarily. "My! I wouldn't
give much for his peace of mind afterwards! What owls she makes us all
look!"
"Nerves are queer things," she said aloud. "Can't say I'm much troubled
with them, except here," and she moved her foot explanatorily. "Just
that joint. It's agony sometimes. Suppressed gout, you know. You
wouldn't think so to look at it, would you?"
"That the gout was--suppressed? certainly I should," answered the
stranger, smiling. "There is no external sign of it. I always thought
gout meant large lumps, and swellings of the joints."
"So it does," said Mrs Jefferson, with an involuntary glance at the
moist and crimson sufferer on her right. "But my form of it is
different. It is much worse, but no one sympathises with me because it
doesn't _look_ so bad as the other gout."
"It is not often that people do sympathise with illness," said the
beautiful woman. "When we ourselves are well, we think suffering can't
be so very great after all, and when we are ill we are quite sure no one
else has to bear so much pain. Human nature is essentially selfish. It
is a natural incident of living at all that we should estimate our own
life as more important than our neighbours."
"Well," laughed Mrs Jefferson, "if we sacrificed it to them, it might
be a doubtful benefit. I often thank my stars I wasn't born in the age
of martyrs. If J. had been, I'm sure the very sight of the rack or the
faggot would have made me swear anything."
"The history of religions is a very curious history," said the stranger
in her low clear tones. "Looked at dispassionately, it has done very
little for mankind in general, save to prove one fundamental truth that
is more significant than any doctrine or dogma. That truth is the
inherent need in all humanity of something to worship. From the highest
to the lowest degrees of civilisation that need has made itself the
exponent of external forms. It is the kernel of all religions."
"A kernel that is surrounded with a very hard shell," said Mrs
Jefferson glibly. She liked discussions, and was accustomed to say she
could talk on any subject--having indeed come from a country where women
did talk on any subject, whether they were acquainted, with it or not.
"I don't think there is much spirituality in any modern religion," she
went on. "I surmise it's dead. Science has got the upper hand of
theology and means to keep it. People are not content now-a-days with
being told `you must believe so and so.' They want a reason for
believing. You're not a Romanist, are you?" she added suddenly.
"I--oh no," said the stranger with a faint smile.
"I'm glad of that, for I was just going to say that the Church of Rome
has done more to retard rational and spiritual progress than any other.
I don't believe in the voice of man barring the way to inquiry. God
made man, and, as far as I have ever been able to learn, He made them
all on one pattern. The offices and dignities they give themselves
won't make them one whit greater or more important in His eyes."
"You are a democrat, I see," said the beautiful woman, looking gravely
and scrutinisingly at the eager flushed face, with its ruffled damp
curls, and quick restless eyes.
"Well," said Mrs Jefferson, "I don't exactly know what I am. My views
are liberal on most subjects. I've travelled a good bit, and I think
that enlarges the mind. I've just run over to have a look at England.
Our people are laughing at her pretty well. The Gladstone party have
made a lovely hash of affairs haven't they? But perhaps you don't care
for politics, being foreign."
"Oh, yes, I do," answered her strange companion. "And I am specially
interested in English politics," she added. "Like yourself I was
curious to see a nation who seemed determined to court their own shame,
and to deify the being whose career is signally marked by obloquy and
disaster."
"His day is pretty well over, I fancy," said Mrs Jefferson, eagerly
scenting an opportunity for a brilliant display of political knowledge.
"That Irish business has settled him. They call him the greatest
statesman of the age! A man at dinner last night was lauding him up to
the skies. There was quite a battle about him. We showed, however,
that, putting his talking powers aside, he really is no statesman--only
a grasping selfish old bungler, who cares nothing for his country except
it keeps him in office, and has done nothing really great or good during
his whole career. They make a fuss about the Education Act, but the
credit of passing that belongs to Foster. As for the Disestablishment
of the Irish Church, that is a disgraceful business--a robbery of the
dead who had left their money to support a faith they believed in. He
is responsible--to my thinking--for all the anarchy, confusion and
misery in that poor unhappy Ireland. I believe," and she leant forward
and dropped her voice, "I believe that at heart the man is more than
half a Romanist. See how he has favoured the High Church party, and if
ever he gives a clerical appointment it is always to a Ritualist priest.
They don't call themselves _clergymen_ now. Well," and she drew
herself up once more, "I, for one, wouldn't like to have his sins on my
shoulders. I should think he ought to be haunted by as many victims as
Napoleon Buonaparte. What with financial humbug, war taxes--the
blunders of the Alabama business--the disgrace and bloodshed of the
Transvaal affair and the Egyptian war--crowned by the undying and never
to be forgotten shame of Gordon's sacrificed life, I wonder he can lay
down his head at night and sleep. When he heard of that hero Gordon's
death he should have taken a pistol and blown out his blundering brains.
But perhaps," she added more calmly, "he was afraid of meeting his
victims until he couldn't help himself. However, he might have gone
into one of those `retreats' his favourite Ritualists are so fond of,
and spared England any more blunders and follies."
"You are very bitter against him," said the stranger calmly. "Be sure
that his own actions will also be his own avengers. Life would be made
much more tolerable if we would only keep that fact before us. To my
mind there is no backbone or support in a religion that teaches
irresponsibility. That is the great fault of you Christians. Your
faith is not a thing you take hold of, and grasp and act upon. Hence
your many national disasters. You shelve your future, or what you call
your salvation, on the merits of a Sacrifice, and think yourselves
relieved of all further trouble. In the world, and in society, religion
is a tabooed subject--it is only kept for Sundays and for churches. I
believe your clergy know no more of the _real_ doctrines of
Christianity, those deep and _mystical_ truths underlying the teachings
of Christ, than the child at his mother's knee. I have been to your
great cathedrals and churches. I saw only lip-service and routine. I
heard only stale maxims, weak explanations of the allegories and
parables that fill your Biblical records; flowing rhetoric and vague
expressions of some undefinable joy and glory in an equally undefinable
Hereafter, that was sometimes described as a place, and sometimes as a
state. That was all. I feel such things cannot long stand against the
tide of advancing thought. Modern Christianity is not the Sermon on the
Mount, and has little title to the name of its founder. It has not a
feather's weight of importance in the minds of the worldly, the
fashionable, the pleasure-seeking; its sentiment is extinct, save in a
few faithful ignorant hearts, who adore what they cannot comprehend, and
live in a state of hope that all will come right in some vague future."
The beautiful eyes had grown sad and thoughtful. They rested on the
eager wondering face before her, yet seemed to look through and beyond
it, as the eyes of one who sees a vision that is mere airy nothingness
to the surrounding crowd.
"It will come right," she went on slowly and dreamily, "but not as men
think, and not because the religion of earth teaches fear of punishment
and hope of reward as the basis of spiritual faith. No. Something
higher and holier and deeper than any motive of self-safety will perfect
what is best in man and eliminate what is vile."
"If that is so," interposed Mrs Jefferson, glibly, as she rose from her
chair to proceed to the Second Room--"I guess man will want a pretty
long time to `perfect' in. I don't see how he's going to do it here."
"I did not say `here,'" answered the stranger, in her slow, calm way, as
she, too, rose and prepared to follow the little American. "For what,
think you, are the ages of Eternity intended?--sleep and dreams?"
Mrs Jefferson gave a little shudder. "I surmise we're getting a little
too deep," she said. "Let's keep to Gladstone and the Irish Question
while the thermometer's at 110."
CHAPTER TWO.
THE SECOND ROOM.
The second room differed in no way from the first, except in the matter
of heat.
The beautiful stranger floated in--her face all the lovelier for the
faint rosy flush that glowed through the clear skin. If Mrs Ray