In the Shadow/Chapter 6
CHAPTER VI
DOCTOR LEYDEN
VIRGINIA, my dear," said Sir Henry, "permit me to introduce my old friend, Dr. Leyden." He turned to the scientist. "Miss Moultrie has been for many years our daughter by adoption, Maurits, and she is soon to become doubly so by an even closer tie."
The naturalist bowed. "May your wishes be many and your wants few!" he said to Virginia.
"Thank you, Dr. Leyden," she answered. "There is one less of each now that I have met you."
"That alone is worth coming from the Orinoco to hear," answered Leyden with a flashing smile.
Dr. Leyden, traveler, collector, naturalist, and archæologist, was a man past middle age, but still in the prime of life. He was of medium height; a trifle heavy in build, but possessed of an alertness of motion due to the steady nerve tension of the short, strong muscles. One could scarcely think of him as relaxed, he would be tense, keen, alert, even in sleep. His face was Dutch in type; not of the stolid, square, phlegmatic character which is incorrectly accepted by most people as typical of the Hollander, but the cleanly chiseled, broad-browed, highly intelligent, and strikingly handsome face seen among the nobility of the Netherlands. With Leyden this fineness of feature was rendered more pleasing by the stamp of a rugged intellectuality and an ever-present kindliness of expression. The eyes were of a clear blue-gray, and set well apart; the hair and crisp mustache brown, flecked with gray. His skin, from long exposure, was seamed in hundreds of crossed lines and tanned to the color of saddle leather. Virginia had expected to meet an elderly man of physique which bore evidences of the racking effects of extremes of climate, for she had heard Sir Henry mention the fact that Leyden was addicted to chronic malarial fever as the result of multiple exposures; she was astonished to find a man of still youthful appearance and a grade of physical and masculine beauty which would anywhere attract the eye.
Leyden pleased Virginia; his words and courtly way of saying them; his manner, appearance, all aroused her interest; from the first glance he inspired her with friendship, confidence, respect. She was anxious to appear well in his eyes; was desirous of his esteem, yet felt instinctively that his atmosphere was her natural medium; to sum up, they were sympathetic. She felt that she could be entirely natural with him.
"Have you seen Giles, Dr. Leyden?" she asked. "He wished to be told the instant you arrived."
"He has but come from the stables," said Leyden. "I have not seen him; I fancy he is dressing. He will be down directly; it is probable that he knows of my arrival."
Sir Henry laughed. "My dear Maurits," he said, "I see that you are still the same." He turned to Virginia. "You must know, my dear, that Dr. Leyden is a bushman—a tracker—one of those marvelous people who will look at a wisp of straw and tell you that your neighbor's dog is a mongrel. Now make him tell you how he knows these things."
Leyden laughed; his gray eyes rested for a moment on Virginia's face, met her own, and the girl had a sensation of being photographed.
"It is not necessary to tell Miss Moultrie; her powers of observation are sufficient."
Virginia glanced up quickly, puzzled, interested, and as she looked, her ready faculties gathered the trend of his ideas. They were standing on the turf path which led to the stables; in front of them was a bare spot where the grass was worn away; the ground was moist as a shower had passed in the afternoon. Virginia connected what had been said, glanced down instinctively; her eyes brightened. She laughed softly to herself.
She turned to Leyden. "You know, because here is the print of a man's riding boot coming from the stables; it has come since the rain, and there is a little scratch behind the heels where the rowel of a spur has dragged." She laughed outright and turned to glance at the house. "And you know that Giles's rooms are on this side, because you know how fond he is of pets, and the pigeons are all fluttering around that corner window."
Sir Henry stared. "My word! My dear child"
"Thank you, Miss Moultrie," said Leyden, "you more than bear me out." His keen eyes rested on her. "If you will permit me to say so, your quickness of perception is extraordinary for a house dweller; you apply these things, the things you see; you apply them to the convenience of your daily life."
"Does not every one?" asked Virginia.
"Ach, no! Five senses are not enough to tell some people how to distinguish between friends and foes; two are sufficient for you, your sight, your hearing. But come, Miss Moultrie, will you not do us the honor to join us? Sir Henry can not enjoy his déjeuner until I have told him the name of a new orchid which he has discovered in his greenhouse, though I suspect it to be from a bulb which I sent him from the Essequibo and of which he has forgotten the existence."
"You had better not tell Guijon that," said Sir Henry with a smile. "I doubt if my slight authority would restrain him from open insult." He led the way toward his elaborate greenhouses.
"I will venture to say," observed Leyden, "that this particular plant is a rare Phælenopsis which I found up the Essequibo, on a peculiar expedition I made in the company of a native physician of Georgetown. He had just graduated from Guy's Hospital and was doing some original work in leprosy, and wished to investigate the disease among the Indians and bush negroes, some of whom he proposed to inoculate. The fellow was very intelligent, black as the ace of spades, and finely educated, in spite of all of which an old Obeah doctor got hold of him and convinced him that he possessed a sure cure for the disease which was only efficacious if accompanied by certain rites, incantations, symbols, and such nonsense. It was to me most interesting. Here was a man of European education; as the Americans would say, 'advanced,' skillful in his profession, yet quite amenable to superstition." Leyden laughed softly. "That, you see, was where the African crowded the creature of light; hereditary instincts and impulses jamming the brain, education, freedom of thought into the corner while it fed and growled and glutted itself. If the degree of his thoughts had been registered and a piece of French glass let into the place occupied by the temporal bone the workings of this freakishly well-convoluted brain could have been no more evident. Ha, ha!" It was a remark rather than a laugh. "It is so with all of these primitive peoples; if one will but wait, the savage will show itself … just as one waits for a tiger on the edge of the jungle. It is only a question of time before these things break cover … like a boy playing with a diving bottle. … You know, Henry, a bottle weighted to its specific gravity plus; it bobs up in time and when it doesn't it stays down for good, and there is the end of the diving bottle and the aborigine, and money thrown into the ditch for an education … ha, ha."
Virginia listened, puzzled; the theory she understood of course, but not the man. Leyden appeared genuinely amused at the incident which he had just cited, yet she felt instinctively that he was not a cynic, a scoffer, or a "laughing philosopher." She could not know that with his views the sight of an aborigine aping a savant furnished the same amusement as might an ostrich attempting to fly to the top of a palm; it was the effort which amused him, not the failure.
As they walked toward the greenhouses Leyden rambled on lightly, his pleasing voice, with its clean-cut enunciation and faint hint of a foreign, or more properly, polyglot accent, lightly sketching places, people, and things. Virginia listened with keen pleasure; she was too feminine not to be powerfully attracted by the subtle assurance of the winning voice, the mental clearness of the views portrayed from a source of such classic, masculine beauty. For, when Leyden spoke, the light of his brilliant intellect shone through his clear eyes and his thoughts went home to the listener as if driven on the cold, blue point of a rapier. Virginia was conscious of a sympathy amounting almost to self-obliteration. She was one of those women who are the spoil of the strongest; she might have loved Giles, but a man like Leyden, virile, forceful, gently masterful, could have made her his slave. Virginia was strongest in the face of her enemies.
They reached the greenhouses and found the gardener, a Breton imported by Sir Henry from a château famous for its culture of peaches, busily taking temperatures.
"Guijon," said Sir Henry, "this gentleman believes that he can tell us the name of our strange orchid."
The gardener scowled. "It is a waste of the gentleman's time," he replied in guttural English. He was a crabbed, sour-visaged man, with a barrel chest, bent spine, and very bowed legs. For years his position had hung in the balance; an equivalence between high professional skill and lacking respect. "There is no such plant as this; it is a freak, the sport of nature, a bulb dropped by accident through a hole in the basket and possessing a strange form as the result of unnatural conditions. I have hunted through the plates in the library in London; I have shown the rather poor photograph of it which you took, accurately colored by myself, to savants in the Botanical Gardens. There is no such plant; I think that I shall call it the Phælenopsis Guijonis." He scowled, but this was his habitual expression. No one had ever surprised a trace of amiability upon his sour face, far less a smile. His underlings would have fled had they heard him laugh.
Sir Henry looked annoyed; Virginia flushed. Leyden smiled, said a few words in Gaelic; Guijon's features writhed; the eyes of Leyden twinkled, he delivered himself of a volley of guttural words, and Virginia, who had often heard Guijon muttering to himself in his Bigouden Breton as he worked, was amazed, for the quaint inflections of the odd character were all present; one would have sworn that it was the voice of Guijon talking, except that the tones were less explosive. Leyden said a few more words in the same tongue; Guijon answered, his face contorted into strange shapes; Leyden loosed a broadside; Guijon laughed outright. Sir Henry looked alarmed and Virginia was almost panic stricken, but Leyden clapped the griffin on the shoulder and led the way to the orchid.
It was in flower, wonderfully so, with a pale light shimmering up from its livid depths through the raw-tinted, translucent corollary cup; diaphanous as the pinna of a girl's ear, flesh-tinted, exotic, poisonous, passionate, it claimed the eye. Leyden bent over it; Virginia did the same and drew back repelled at its stagnant, fetid breath. Insects were struggling in its saliva; it was a vampire plant.
Leyden straightened his back and turned to the gardener, this time speaking in English. "You are right, my friend; it is the Phælenopsis Guijonis; I sent the bulb from the Philippines where I bought it from Arthur Brown, the marine painter. He told me that he found it in Basilan, and being unable to identify it had decided that it was a new variety and had named it after himself; I saw his in flower; it was not half the size of this, and far less brilliant." He turned to Sir Henry. "When you told me of the orchid I thought it probable that it was the plant which I sent you from the Essequibo, a new variety also; I called it the Phælenopsis Leydensis."
Guijon stepped back; his round, blood-shot eyes reddened by the cheap, muddy sour wines which he swilled daily, fastened on the face of the scientist.
"Gaste! and you tell me that you are the great Leyden! … the botanist!"
"No," answered Leyden, a touch of austerity in his tone. "I am Leyden the collector; I know less of botany than I do of beasts, less of beasts than I should."
Guijon bowed; Virginia listened for the crack of his vertebræ.
"I have read your books," said Guijon humbly. "They are masterly. My greenhouses are honored."
Giles joined them at this moment, and Dr. Leyden greeted him warmly. They returned to the house.
"Dessalines is coming for dinner," said Giles to Virginia. "I thought that I should ask him; he told me that he might have to leave at any moment."
Leyden caught at the name. "Dessalines … Dessalines," he repeated. "A Frenchman? ah! Dessalines was the name of the liberator of Hayti."
"He is a Haytian," said Sir Henry. "A young man to whom we are under the greatest obligation. He saved our two children from drowning!"
"So! You astonish me!" exclaimed Leyden. He glanced quickly from Sir Henry to Virginia.
"Come, Maurits," said Sir Henry. "I wish you to see my water garden. I will tell you of the incident on the way. Are you two children coming with us?"
"I—I think not. I have some letters to get ready for the post," replied Virginia uncertainly. For some unaccountable reason she disliked hearing the rescue discussed at any time; with the wise, examining eyes of Leyden upon her, she felt that it would be insupportable. She felt a shrinking—a nervousness—the sensation which a woman wears with her surgeon.
Manning was absent, having gone to London; Virginia had a suspicion that he had accepted a rather undesirable invitation to avoid the dinner to which Dessalines was asked.
The day wore on, poisoned for Virginia by disquieting anticipations of the evening. She said nothing to Giles concerning this, but kept him near her. In the afternoon Leyden drove with Lady Maltby; Virginia learned that besides being an old friend he was regularly commissioned by Sir Henry and several of his neighbors who were interested in horticulture, to inspect their gardens and greenhouses and keep them supplied with such plants as he thought would be desirable.
Just before the dinner hour Virginia descended to find the others of the household awaiting the arrival of the guests, Lady Woodville and her sister, Miss Byng, and Dessalines. The two former arrived shortly after Virginia went down. Lady Woodville and her sister, neighbors; the former a widow, the latter a spinster, were unexciting; both handsome, well born, not interesting. It would have been an indignity to have called either pretty; they were useful, as are all such, in chinking the spaces between the larger blocks.
Virginia, talking to Miss Byng, found herself ill at ease; her eyes flew frequently to the tall clock, her ears were acute to catch a heavy step and the rumble of a deep voice in the hall; she knew precisely how the voice would sound, how its resonant vibration would roll in megaphonic whispers beneath the vaulted ceilings with their ornate pendants of stucco; her hands fluttered.
Glancing up suddenly as the great clock gave its whirring premonition of the hour, her eyes met Leyden's. He was standing near, in conversation with Lady Maltby. Excusing himself, he came to Virginia.
"You are a tiger lily to-night," he said, his perfect color perception approving the shade of her flame-colored gown with its jet sequins.
"I feel more like the tiger; my ride made me ravenous," she answered with a smile, conscious, but not realizing that her nervousness had fled at the first inflection of the steady voice, and at that instant the sad notes of the clock sounded the hour and before the deep vibrations had drifted from the ear, Virginia heard the resonant tones for which she had been so nervously waiting; at the same moment her eyes met Leyden's. It seemed to the girl that she leaned upon that steady gaze; her nervousness fled away.
"Count Dessalines," announced the footman.
Virginia was conscious of a swift sense of disappointment; more than that—almost of vexation. Struggling with the swollen river, carrying Giles in his great arms—upon the cricket field, potent and replete with action—astride his man-killing stallion, Dessalines had been magnificent. In the drawing-room, in evening dress, he became at first sight, bizarre; when the primary sense of buffoonery had passed, uncouth. Immaculate, unctuous, smiling, suave, with a luster of black satiny skin, the yellow lamplight aglisten in his kinky hair, the snowy shirt bosom beneath the face of jet, the impression was grotesque; as one gradually appreciated the massive structures—the gross anatomy beneath the fine and faultless fabrics, noted the great deltoids bulging under the broadcloth, the huge thighs, bowed legs, the vast extent of homo—what had at first sight been burlesque became shocking! Evening dress upon such a monster offended all sense of the congruous; it stripped him of his dignity.
"Ach!" mutterd Leyden in Virginia's ear. "If he could but wear a burnoose or a scarlet turban or a leopard skin and a necklace of teeth! And now listen when he talks; architects do not design drawing-rooms for such a voice. He should be banging a drum with his fist, and howling!"
Virginia laughed; Leyden meant that she should; he realized that Virginia was affected by the great black presence and knew that there is nothing to slacken tension like laughter.
Dessalines' amphorous voice was filling the room as the hostess led him to those of the guests whom he had not met. Virginia, watching him closely, saw that as the women fluttered, so Dessalines would expand; his manners were perfect, his face gracious and suave, his bearing self-conscious and self-confident. With Sir Henry he said a jesting word, with Giles his manner approached the patronizing. From Giles he passed to Dr. Leyden and then as he paused, Virginia's great eyes opened wide in the fullness of perception.
The cool, steady eyes of the naturalist met those of the Haytian and one watching closely could have seen the flat nostrils slightly dilate; the voice of the Haytian seemed to falter; he mumbled a trifle, seemed ill at ease, hesitated awkwardly. Dr. Leyden's cool, even voice cut through his as the hum of a bullet cleaves the rumble of a drum; Dessalines, bewildered, found himself listening submissively to the words of a master.
"Ah, yes, Comte Dessalines," Leyden was saying, "I know your country well; a beautiful country, but if you will permit me to say so, open to improvement in many ways. With your advantages there is much that you may do."
"That is to be my work," said Dessalines. "The uplifting of Hayti—not the uplifting of myself at the expense of Hayti; the stamping out of ancient savagery, the promulgation of our ethics, political and social, of the economics and religion of advanced civilizations." The great voice began to swell; the rhythmic roll of euphonic words restored the African's self-confidence. "My people, …" he began majestically.
"Are for the most part kind and harmless negroes, hag-ridden by unscrupulous leaders," interrupted Leyden in a dry, practical voice; "just so. All that your people need is decent treatment; to be encouraged to diligence and thrift—what any peasant class needs. Exactly, I am very glad to find that you take such a sensible view of the case."
Dessalines, his oratorical bubble pricked, subsided helplessly, smiled, shuffled a trifle, and seemed for the moment at a loss. At this moment dinner was announced and Dessalines, as guest of honor, took out his hostess.
"If I had let the fellow run on," muttered Leyden to Virginia, as she laid her hand upon his arm, "we would all have been carried away by his eloquence; he would have wrung our hearts with sympathy for his magnificent cause … and a good dinner would have got cold!"