Miranda of the Balcony: A StoryMason, A. E. W. (Alfred Edward Woodley)
General
Miranda of the Balcony: A Story
Mason, A. E. W. (Alfred Edward Woodley)
Fiction
The hotel was one of many balconies, situated upon the Embankment.
From the single window or his bedroom Charnock looked across the river
to where the name of a brewery perpetually wrote itself in red
brilliant letters which perpetually vanished. It was his habit to
sleep not merely with his window open, but with the blinds drawn up
and the curtains looped back, and these arrangements he made as usual
before he got into bed.
Now, the looking-glass stood upon a dressing-table in the window, with
its back towards the window-panes; and since the night was moonless
and dark, this mirror, it should be remembered, reflected nothing of
the room or its furniture, but presented only to the view of Charnock,
as he lay in bed, a surface of a black sheen.
Charnock recurred to his adventure of the morning, and thus the
abusive stranger was in his thoughts when he fell asleep. He figured
also in his dreams.
For, after he had fallen asleep, a curtain was raised upon a fantastic
_revue_ of the past week. Hassan Akbar strode quickly and noiselessly
behind his quarry, tracking him by some inappreciable faculty, not
through the muddy Sôk, but across the polished floor of the ball-room
in the musical comedy. Again Charnock shouted "Look out!" and the Moor
with one bound leapt from the ball-room, which was now become a
landing-stage, into a felucca. The crew of the felucca, it now
appeared, was made up of Charnock, Lady Macbeth, and Hassan Akbar, and
by casting lots with counters made of vaseline, Charnock was appointed
to hold the tiller. This duty compelled extraordinary care, for the
felucca would keep changing its rig and the bulk of its hull swelled
and dwindled. At last, to Charnock's intense relief, the boat settled
into a Salcombe clipper with the rig of a P. and O., but with
immeasurably greater speed, so that within a very few seconds they
sailed over a limitless ocean and anchored at Tangier. At once the
crew entirely vanished. Charnock was not distressed, because he saw a
hansom cab waiting for him at the Customs, though how the hansom was
to pass up those narrow cobbled streets he could not think. That
however was the driver's business.
"I hope your horse is good," said Charnock, springing into the cab.
"She comes of the great Red-hotter stock," replied the cabman, and
lifting the trap in the roof he showered packets of visiting cards,
which fell about Charnock like flakes of snow.
Charnock had not previously noticed that the cabman was Major
Wilbraham.
The cab shot up the hill through the tunnel, past the closed shop. A
figure sprang from the ground and thrust a face through the window of
the cab. The man was in Moorish dress, but the face was the face of
the abusive stranger of Plymouth--and all at once Charnock started up
on his elbow, and in the smallest fraction of a second was intensely
and vividly awake. There was no sound at all within the room. But in
the black sheen of the mirror he saw a woman's face.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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