The moral fibre of a man as deeply in love as George was is not at
its strongest on his wedding day.
So he gave up in despair his first lesson in the moral duties, and
whispered to her such pretty babble as comes up to the lips of all
lovers in the first day of their happiness, and, being perfectly happy
and inclined at all issues to be satisfied with his bargain, it was
some time before he noticed that his bride’s interest in his
love-prattle was growing fainter and fainter, until at last she
scarcely gave more, as her share of the conversation, than an
occasional nod or a weary little smile.
“Are you tired, dearest?” he asked solicitously, wakening suddenly to
a consciousness that all was not well with her, as she began to move
restlessly about in his arms, and her eyes roved round the room as if
she found it impossible to keep her attention fixed on what he was
saying.
“No, no,” she answered hastily, and she clasped her arms round his
neck again, but with a distinct subsidence of her first outbursts of
spontaneous affection.
George began to be alarmed. Was she tired of him already? Could she,
child as she was, find his caresses irksome within ten hours of her
wedding? He tried to persuade himself that it was only his fancy which
made her small face look drawn and weary in the warm soft light of the
afternoon sun, until he noticed some little puckers about her mouth
like the premonitory symptoms of a child’s outburst of tears.
“What is it, Nouna, my darling, tell me?” he whispered tenderly.
She shook her head feebly, but then, her steadfastness giving way, she
put up her lips to his ear, and murmured in a shamefaced broken voice:
“I’m so hungry!”
“Hungry!” he repeated with a great shock.
“Yes,” answered she, beginning to whimper now that the effort was
over, and the confession made. “I overslept myself this morning, and
had to come away without any breakfast. And I ate all those little
tiny sandwiches as soon as I got here, and I’ve had nothing since
except stra--awberries!” At this climax of her tale of distress she
broke down, and sobbed gently while George picked her up in his arms,
and carrying her to the bell, rang violently.
“What would you like, my dearest?” he asked, when the landlady, who
was a very superior creature indeed, but who felt that a bride was
interesting enough to condone the condescension, appeared in person.
“Oh, some tea, I should like some tea, and--and anything I can have at
once!”
“What can my wife have at once?” asked George, with all a young
husband’s joy in the words “my wife.”
“Well, sir, would she like a chop? Do you think, ma’am, you could
fancy a chop?”
“Oh, yes, I _should_ like a chop!” cried poor Nouna hungrily, rather
to the surprise, even then, of her husband, who was more prepared to
hear her ask for the wing of a partridge, or a couple of plovers’
eggs.
Upon reflection, however, it could not but occur to him that even a
particularly small and dainty-looking bride may reasonably be expected
to need some solid food between the hours of half-past seven in the
morning and close upon six in the afternoon, and he lamented his own
idiotcy in not making proper provision for this. The landlady, who had
taken for granted, on receiving no orders for dinner, that her new
lodgers intended to dine out, behaved with great energy on discovering
the mistake. Without obliging them to wait very long, she translated
“chop” into a very tempting dish of cutlets and _pommes sautées_, and
supplemented that with a tart, sent for hastily from a pastrycook’s,
in the enjoyment of which repast Nouna got uproariously happy, and
told George that she thought being married was “lovely.” To hear
herself called “Mrs. Lauriston” by the landlady who came up ostensibly
to apologise, but really to get another look at the little bride,
threw her into such ecstasies of delight that she could not answer any
question to which those magic words were added. When the pineapple,
which she had left untouched because she did not know how to handle
it, was placed upon the table, the servant asked what was to be done
with “the black woman” who, she said, was becoming very restless and
unhappy, and wanted to see “her little missee mistress.”
“Let her come up at once,” said Nouna quickly. Then, as soon as the
maid had shut the door, she threw herself into her husband’s arms and
began to coax him to let Sundran stay.
To this George objected in the strongest manner; but she begged so
hard, she assured him so plaintively that she was not used to waiting
on herself, scouting the idea that he could replace her maid, and
reminding him with tears in her eyes that he could not refuse her
first request after leaving her alone on her wedding day and returning
to make her cry as he had done, that the young husband could not steel
himself to that most desirable point of obduracy, and, entirely
against his will and to his own inward rage, he gave permission for
Sundran to remain “for a few days.” It was a pretty and characteristic
trait in the wilful young creature that she clung, even in the midst
of the novel excitements of her marriage, to the old servant who had
loved her and served her since her babyhood; but it could not but
cause the young husband pain and even a feeling akin to jealousy to
learn that he was not all to her that she just now was to him. He bore
the Indian woman’s blessings and thanks as well as he could, when
Nouna embraced her and told her that she must love Mr. Lauriston, he
was good, not like other Englishmen, and he would let her stay.
“For a few days, until she gets used to managing for herself,”
murmured poor George explanatorily.
But the excited woman refused to hear or to heed this provision. He
wished Sundran in--India within the next half hour; for Nouna, in
whose mind the consciousness that by marrying she had done something
irrevocable, not yet fully understood, was just waking a childish
dread which made her cling to the old, well-known face with a new
tenacity, insisted on retaining the Indian up stairs, and asked her
all sorts of affectionate questions concerning “Mammy Ellis,” who, she
learned, had been in a great fright about her, but had been comforted
by a letter from the Countess, who, she said, had treated her very
handsomely. Nouna, whose smiles had been on the borders of tears all
day, cried a little at this mention of her mother, and on looking up
again after drying her eyes found that Sundran, whether or not acting
on a mute suggestion from George, had discreetly retired. Her tears
ceased instantly, like those of a naughty little nursery tyrant when
“papa” comes in; and George, respecting this sudden shyness of a girl
whose heart he knew he had scarcely as yet half conquered, went
straight to the piano, opened it, and began to sing snatches of
love-songs to a very fair improvised accompaniment by way of paying
his court to her in a less obtrusive manner.
The device succeeded admirably. George was by no means a great singer.
A respectable baritone voice in a perfect state of non-cultivation is
a very common gift among young men; but there was enough passion and
poetry awake in his heart to-night for a suggestion of something more
interesting than the straightforward bawling of the ordinary singing
Englishman to find its way to his lips and vibrate in the notes of
“Lady, wake, bright stars are beaming.” It is needless to say that his
ears were well open to every sound behind him, and that he felt all
the significance of the soft creaking of the casters as Nouna drew her
arm-chair, little by little, close up to him, until at last she leaned
on the end of the piano by the bass notes and watched his face with a
furtive wide-eyed scrutiny which he was careful not to divert by
appearing to notice its intensity. Unable to keep his eyes off her
face altogether, he took care that the yearning, passionate glances he
cast at her should be so rapid as to leave on her mind the impression
that they were a result of the intoxication produced by his own song,
instead of the song being the result of the intoxication produced by
the glances. He saw that she was in a more deeply thoughtful mood than
he had yet seen her in during their short acquaintance; and he wanted
her to give spontaneous speech to her thoughts, and thus to gain an
insight into that mysterious recess of which he knew so little--her
mind. At last, when he had come to the last note of the “Ständchen”
out of Schubert’s _Winterreise_, which he sang with more passion, if
with less sentiment than an artist would have thrown into the
beautiful melody, he turned to her and attempted to embrace her. But
she shook him off, saying imperiously:
“Go on. I like it. It helps me to think.”
Perhaps this was scarcely the comment he hoped or expected, but the
repulse was passionate, not unsympathetic or chilling; and George laid
his hands obediently again on the instrument with only one longing,
inspiring look at the lovely, flexible face. Then he sang Beethoven’s
“Adelaide,” with a strange effect. For the well-worn song was quite
new to Nouna, and as it proceeded it seemed to George that the spirit
of the passionate music called to her and found an answering echo, for
her long black eyes grew soft and liquid, like water under the trees
on a summer night, and when the last word was sung and the last note
played, she lifted herself in her chair, and held out her arms in
irresistible invitation.
“What does the song make you feel?” he asked, whispering, with his
arms round her. He began already rashly to feel assured that the
low-minded sensual Rahas was wrong; she must have a soul, since she
was so susceptible to fine music; than which conclusion nothing could
be more futile, as a more enlarged artistic acquaintance would have
proved to him.
“It makes me feel that I love you,” she answered, unconsciously
touching the root of many pretty fallacies concerning the noble
influence of music on devotion. For if she had been better educated
she would have said “it raised her, took her out of herself,” and
would have delayed her illustration of the fact that it only raised
her far enough to throw her in the arms of the nearest affectionately
disposed person.
George felt rather disappointed, having founded his ideas of women
upon a ceremonious acquaintance with less ingenuous specimens of the
sex. But if she was more unsophisticated than the everyday young
ladies he had met, she was certainly more bewitching, and presently
the thoughtful mood came over her again, and she looked up into his
face with the searching expression that had shone in her eyes when she
first came to him at the piano.
“I have been looking at you while you played, and I have been
thinking,” she said gravely.
“Well, what did you think?”
“I have been thinking that we shall not be happy.”
George was at heart rather startled. The words echoed too strongly
certain misgivings which had from time to time oppressed him in the
course of the day for him not to feel that they bore some of the
weight of sagacious prediction. But he would not for the world have
acknowledged this to her.
“Don’t you love me then, my wife?” he asked slowly, in a voice so
sweet, so thrilling, that Nouna listened to the words just as she had
done to his singing. “If you do you cannot be anything but happy, for
you are the very breath of my life to me; to be with you is happiness
enough for me; and just as your body is mine now to cherish and
defend, so your very soul shall become a part of mine, and my joy in
you shall be your joy, till every pleasure I feel shall thrill through
you, and every distinction I win shall make you glow with pride.”
She watched his face with all seriousness as he spoke, and then shook
her head.
“I love you,” she said, “but not in your way.”
“You don’t know me yet. A woman’s love grows more slowly than a man’s,
more reasonably, perhaps; but you will learn to love me as I wish, you
can’t help yourself, I will be so good to you. You are only a child. I
can wait.”
“Ah,” she said, half sorrowfully, half amused. “There is where you are
wrong. If I were English, I should perhaps be still a child. But I’m
not; I’m a woman.” She looked at him steadily, in deep earnest,
stopping in her play with her white sash, and shaking her hair free
from his touch to impress upon him that he must listen to her with
attention. “You think I shall be something different by and by.
Perhaps I shall; I never know what I am going to be, or what I am
going to do. But I do know I shall never be what you want--always the
same, always loving. I never love anybody without hating them too
sometimes. Sometimes I hate Sundran, and often Mammy Ellis, and I
shall hate you when you frown at me.”
“But I sha’n’t frown at you.”
“Yes, you will. You’ll frown when I long for more jewellery, when I
say I hate England and wish I was back in India; and you’ll frown more
when I forget that I’m married and laugh and amuse myself just as I
used to do.”
“I shouldn’t like you to forget you are my wife, certainly,” said
George, troubled for a moment. “But then I won’t give you much chance
of forgetting it, my darling.”
The evening ended peacefully after the events and storms of the day,
each feeling that they had a better understanding of each other, and
yet each acknowledging that they still had much more to learn than
they had expected. But that night, long after Nouna, tired out, had
gone happily and peacefully to sleep in his arms, George lay awake,
and acknowledged mournfully to himself that he had made a bad
beginning. He had shown want of self-control over the diamonds and
Rahas’s visit, he had shown weakness in letting Sundran stay, and he
recognised vividly that the dignity of husband required a very long
list of qualities for the proper maintenance of the character. A
little more conduct like that of to-day, and the young wife to whom he
ought to be as a sun-god, a model of what was right and noble, would
begin to despise him, and all would be over. They would sink at once
to the level of the ordinary cavilling, cooing young couple whom every
new-made husband so heartily contemns. George fell asleep resolved to
inaugurate a new _régime_ of immaculate firmness and forbearance in
the morning.
But how could he have reckoned upon the irresistible charm of a waking
woman, fresh after the night’s sleep as an opening rose, all smiles,
blushes, babbling girlish confidences, sweet reticences, a creature a
thousand times more bewitching, more beautiful, than in his hottest
young man’s dreams he had ever imagined a mortal could be? Her
loveliness dazzled, intoxicated him; spaces of time which a week
before were called hours passed like brief seconds in her society. He
tore himself from her side too late: for the first time he was late
for parade. On the following morning it was Nouna herself who hurried
him off, and he was charmed with this dutiful wifeliness until he was
suddenly startled out of all attention to an order from his superior
officer by the appearance of his wife, in a white dress and the
baby-bonnet he had bought for her, on the parade-ground.
As for the Colonel, the unexpected apparition of this extraordinary
little figure had an almost ghastly effect upon him. George saw him
glaring at the poor child as if her white drapery had been the flimsy
garment of an authentic ghost.
“Who brought that girl here? Tell her she has no business on the
parade-ground,” said Lord Florencecourt in an almost brutal tone.
Much incensed, George rode forward with a crimson face, and saluting,
said: “Colonel, that lady is my wife.”
He did not notice the rapid movement of curiosity and excitement which
his announcement made among such of the other officers as stood near.
They had all looked at the girl’s pretty face with surprise and
admiration, but the information that she was the wife of a comrade
produced upon them much the same effect that the discovery of a fox in
an animal they had taken for a rabbit would have on a group of
hunting-men.
But George’s attention was wholly absorbed by the strange demeanour of
Lord Florencecourt, who seemed to have forgotten all about his
marriage, for he started and stared at him with a fierce amazement
utterly bewildering to the younger man.
“Your wife!” he echoed in a low voice. And he faced Lauriston with a
searching look, which the young lieutenant met steadily.
They stood like this for some moments, each finding it hard to control
his seething anger. The Colonel, as became the elder man and
commanding officer, recovered himself first, and told George curtly
that, as parade was over, he had better rejoin his wife and lead her
off the ground. This suggestion the young man was glad enough to take,
and he saluted and rode off without a word, still in a state of hot
indignation. The sight of Massey and Dicky Wood standing beside his
wife, evidently both doing their best to make themselves agreeable to
her, and succeeding to all appearances very well, did not tend to
soothe him, and on reaching the spot where they stood, he swung
himself off his charger in a most unamiable mood. He had self-command
enough left not to reproach her in the presence of his comrades, but
the tone in which he said, without taking any notice of them, “Come up
to my rooms, Nouna,” and the young wife’s sudden pallor at his words
caused the two young fellows to exchange significant looks, which both
Lauriston and his wife unluckily saw, expressive of fear that the poor
little lady was going to have “a bad time of it.”
At the door of the officers’ quarters they came upon the Colonel, who
was looking as uncompromisingly fierce as ever. He examined Nouna from
head to foot with a straightforward aggressive scrutiny which made
George’s blood boil, while his wife, for her part, stopped short to
return his stare with equally simple directness.
“George, who is he?” she asked suddenly in a low eager voice, turning
to her husband as he put his arm brusquely within hers to lead her
past.
“Lord Florencecourt, the Colonel,” he whispered back, in an important
tone, hoping that the officer’s position would impress her
sufficiently for her to awake to her want of respect.
But before George could see what effect his words might have, the
Colonel himself, who was looking very haggard and grizzly this
morning, an object grim enough to arrest any woman’s attention, broke
into the whispered conversation with brusque coldness. He had not lost
a word of the rapid question and answer, and a slight change passed
over his ashen gray face as if the blood were flowing more freely
again, as he noted the unconcern with which the lady heard the
announcement of his name.
“Pray introduce me to your wife, Lauriston,” he said in such a hard
voice that the request became an abrupt command, without taking his
eyes from her face for one second. “Perhaps, indeed, we have met
before. Mrs. Lauriston seems to know me. In that case I hope she will
pardon my short memory.”
“No, I haven’t met you,” said Mrs. Lauriston hastily, looking at him
with open aversion and turning to take her husband’s arm as if she
considered the hardly-formed acquaintance already too long.
“Then my memory is better than yours, I am sure,” said he, with a
ghastly attempt to assume his usual society manner. “What was Mrs.
Lauriston’s maiden name?” he asked, turning to the young lieutenant.
“Miss Weston, Nouna Weston,” answered George, with growing curiosity
and interest.
The Colonel’s face remained impassive as wood.
“Ah! Any relation to Sir Edward Weston, the architect?”
“Are you, Nouna?”
“I never heard of him,” said the girl, while her eyes remained fixed,
with the fascination of repulsion, on the Colonel’s hard, lined face.
“My father was Captain Weston, and he died in India; I don’t know
anything else.”
“You came here this morning to see your husband drill?”
“Yes.”
“Ah!” The Colonel seemed to be revolving something in his mind, and he
looked again at Nouna for a moment doubtfully, as if uncertain whether
to ask her another question. However, he refrained from doing so, and
only said, still coldly but with a perceptible diminution of
harshness: “I must apologise for detaining you, Mrs. Lauriston, but
your husband is such an old friend of mine that I could not resist the
temptation of making your acquaintance on the first opportunity.”
With a formal salute the Colonel retreated, and George hastened up
stairs to his rooms with his wife to take off his uniform. At any
other time Nouna would have found great delight in immediately trying
on his sash and drawing his sword; but the encounter with the Colonel,
while it had one good result in averting her husband’s displeasure
with her for following him to the barracks, had damped her spirits in
a very marked fashion.
“George, how could you say that the Colonel was nice?” she asked
almost before the gentleman in question was out of earshot. “I think
he is the most horribly cold, hard man I ever met. It is quite right
for him to be a soldier; he looked as if he wished I were the enemy
and he could hack at me.”
“Nonsense, child,” said George. “He thought he had met you before,
that’s all. And you looked at him in the same way. Are you sure you
never saw him until to-day?” he asked curiously; for he had been
struck by the puzzled interchange of scrutinizing looks, and was still
rather anxiously in the dark as to the circumstances of his wife’s
life before he met her.
“Quite sure,” said Nouna slowly, looking straight before her and
trying to pierce the gloom of old memories. “I seem to have seen
somebody a little like him, I don’t know when and I don’t know where,
but I am sure I have never before to-day seen him himself. Why,
George, he is too horrid to forget!”
And with a start and a little shiver of dislike, she dismissed the
subject and bounded across the room to play like a kitten with the
ends of her husband’s sash.