The honeymoon was over, and the London season drawing to a close
before the Colonel, who, to Lauriston’s great regret, seemed, since
that inauspicious introduction to Nouna, to have withdrawn into a
permanent coldness towards him, made an attempt to bridge over the
restraint which had grown up between them. It was one evening when
George, to do honour to a visitor who was a friend of his, had dined
at mess, that the Colonel broke silence towards his old favourite, and
inviting him, at dessert, to a chair just left vacant by his side,
asked if he was still as anxious as ever to get leave for September.
George was rather surprised.
“I am more anxious than ever for it now, sir,” he said. Then, seeing
that Lord Florencecourt’s brows contracted slightly with a displeased
air, he added apologetically, “You know, sir, I should not have
ventured to ask for more leave this year if you yourself had not been
kind enough to propose it. And now my wife is longing for the promised
change.”
The Colonel instinctively frowned still more at the mention of the
obnoxious wife, and after balancing a fruit-knife on his fingers for a
few seconds, with his eyes fixed as intently upon it as if the feat
were a deeply interesting one, he said very shortly:
“You still intend to go to Norfolk? It’s a damp climate, an unhealthy
climate--not one suitable to a lady born in India, I should think.
Beastly dull, foggy place at all times. Why don’t you go to
Scarborough?”
George could not remind him that it was he himself who had probably
suggested the Millards’ invitation, and certainly done his utmost to
persuade him to accept it. The knowledge that it was disapproval of
his wife which had caused this sudden change in the Colonel’s views,
made him suddenly stiff, constrained, and cold.
“I have promised my wife, Colonel; it is too late to change my plans
and disappoint her.”
The Colonel glanced searchingly up at him from the corners of his
eyes, and said almost deprecatingly:
“I see--of course not. I only meant to suggest that the quiet country
life the Millards lead might bore her, and, the fact is, our place
will not be as lively as usual this year. I shall have some unexpected
expenses to meet. I’ve been warned of them, and they will not be long
in coming.” Here he paused, gazing still on the table, and seeming not
so much to watch as to listen for some sign of comprehension on
George’s part. “And so,” he continued, at last raising his eyes, and
speaking in his shortest, bitterest tone, “I shall have to retrench,
and there will be no merrymaking at Willingham this year.”
“I am very sorry to hear it,” said George, puzzled by a swift
conjecture that he was expected to make some more significant remark,
and wondering what it ought to have been.
He was wishing he could withdraw from this awkward _tête-à-tête_,
when, in a low distinct voice, the Colonel struck him into perplexity
by the following question:
“How would you like to exchange into the ----th, and go over to
Ireland?”
“Not at all,” answered George, just as low, and very promptly.
He was extremely indignant at this suggestion that he should go into
exile just for having pleased himself in the matter of his marriage,
which was unmistakably his own affair.
“Would you not if by so doing you could confer a very considerable
favour upon one whom you used to be glad to call an old friend?” said
the Colonel in the same low voice, and with a strange persistency.
Around them the sounds of laughter and of heated but futile
after-dinner discussions, beginning in wine and dying away in
cigar-smoke, filled the hot air and rendered their conversation more
private and at the same time freer than it could have been if held
within closed doors. George looked at the ashy pale face of the
prematurely aged officer, and it seemed to him that his own frame
shivered as if at touch of some unexpected mystery, some unknown
danger. He answered with much feeling:
“Tell me why it is a favour, Colonel. I would do more than this to
show I am grateful to you. Only let me understand.”
But the very sympathy in his tones seemed to startle the Colonel, who
drew back perceptibly, with a hurried glance straight into George’s
eyes. It seemed to the latter, who was now on the alert for
significant looks and tones, that at the moment when their eyes met
the Colonel took a desperate resolution. At any rate, when he spoke
again it was in his usual manner.
“It’s nothing,” he said, waving the subject away with his hand.
“Nothing but a passing freak which I beg you will not think of again.”
His tone notified that the discussion was closed, and for the whole of
the evening George considered, without finding any satisfactory clue
to an explanation, what Lord Florencecourt’s motive could be for so
strongly objecting to Nouna’s appearance in the neighbourhood of
Willingham. His prejudice against swarthy complexions could scarcely
be sufficiently obstinate for him to hope to clear the county of them:
but what was the origin of the prejudice?
On returning home George tried to probe the misty memories which the
Colonel’s appearance had, on his introduction to Nouna, stirred in her
mind. But he could elicit nothing further. Nouna was now showing at
times little fits of petulance, born of the absence of violent novelty
in her life now that the husband was growing to be quite an article of
every-day consumption, as much a matter of course as dry toast at
breakfast, and she was not going to be troubled to remember or try to
remember faces.
“I dare say I only fancied I ever saw anybody like him,” she said with
a little wearied twist of her head and sticking forward of her round
chin. “I can’t count every hair on the head of every old gentleman I
see.”
And however often he might return to this subject, and in whatever
mood she happened to be, George could learn nothing more definite than
her first vague impression, which grew even fainter as the meeting
faded into the past.
In the meantime Nouna was becoming rather weary of looking into the
pretty shop windows without being able to buy anything, and of walking
among the people in the park without joining in any other of their
amusements. George had had designed for her a tailor-made
walking-dress of white cloth embroidered in gold thread and
bright-coloured silks which, with a small white cloth cap embroidered
in the same way, caused her appearance to make a great sensation among
the conventionally ill-dressed crowds of Englishwomen with more money,
rank, and beauty, than taste. He was himself much surprised to see how
easily she wore a dress of a cut to which she was unaccustomed, and
how well she looked in it. The conventional shape of the gown only
emphasised the difference between the natural movements of her lithe
form and the stiff bobbings and jerkings and swayings which mark the
gait of the ordinary English girl. The reason was simply that Nouna
had by nature that great gift of beauty of attitude and movement which
we call grace; and as among the handsomest women of England only one
in every hundred is graceful either by nature or art, that quality
alone would have been enough to make the half Indian girl conspicuous.
Therefore there was much discussion among onlookers as to her
nationality. The Indian type is not common enough among us to be
widely recognised, or the delicate little aquiline nose, the long
eyes, and the peculiar tint of her skin, might have betrayed her; as
it was, conjectures wavered between France and Spain as a birthplace
for her; for while she wore her dress like a Parisian, she certainly
walked like a Spaniard. By no means unconscious of the attention she
excited, Nouna would have liked to come in closer contact with some of
the handsome Englishmen who seemed by their respectfully admiring
looks to be so well-disposed towards her. For she was decidedly of a
“coming-on” disposition, and not at all troubled with raw shyness or
an excess of haughty reserve. Neither was she conscious of anything
forward or improper in her sociability.
“All these gentlemen that we pass, and those standing in a crowd near
the railings under those trees--they are gentlemen, the English
gentlemen mamma thinks so much of, aren’t they?”
“Oh yes,” answered George smiling, “they are among what are called the
best men, though it’s rather a rum term to apply to some of them.”
“I should like to know some of them: you do, I see them nod to you.”
“Wouldn’t you rather know some of the pretty ladies?”
“No,” answered Nouna promptly. “Their dresses always drag on the
ground one side, and they wear dreadful flat boots like Martha the
servant. I like the gentlemen better.”
“But you mustn’t judge people only by their dress, Nouna,” said the
young husband, feeling rather uncomfortable.
“I can’t judge them by anything else till I know them,” said Nouna
fretfully.
George was silent. He was disappointed to learn that she was so soon
weary of the perpetual _tête-à-tête_ which had lost no charm for
him; but he had the sense to own that his ambitions, even the daily
meeting with his comrades at parade, made his life fuller than his
young wife’s could possibly be. He resolved to call upon the Millards,
who, anxious not to intrude upon the newly-married couple before they
were wanted, had refrained from calling upon the bride until they
should hear again from George. On the morning of the day he had fixed
for his call, a note came for him from Captain Pascoe, asking him to
join a party up the river in a couple of days. Nouna read the note
over his shoulder.
“Shall you go, George?” she asked with interest.
“No, dear, how can I? I’ve got a little wife to look after now.”
“But if you were to write and say no, you couldn’t come because you’d
got a wife, perhaps he’d ask me too!”
George had no doubt of this, believing indeed that this was the result
Captain Pascoe had aimed at.
“Captain Pascoe is not quite the sort of man I should like you to
know, dear,” he said.
“Isn’t he an English gentleman?”
“Oh yes, but English gentlemen aren’t all angels, you know.”
“And aren’t you ever going to let me know anybody who isn’t an angel?”
“Well, darling, I don’t think anybody else is good enough.”
A pause. George hoped she was satisfied for the present. She was still
behind his chair, so that he could not see her face. At last she
asked, in a low, rather menacing tone:
“Are angels’ wings made of feathers, like birds’?”
“I don’t know, dear, I suppose so,” said George laughing, and turning
to look at her and pat her cheek.
“Then if I met one I should pull them out,” she cried in a flame of
fury, and before her husband could recover from his astonishment, she
had fled out of the room.
He followed her with a troubled countenance, and found her face
downwards on the bed, sobbing her heart out. No remonstrances were of
any use, she only murmured that she would like to be a nun, it was
more interesting than to be a wife shut up and never allowed to speak
to anybody.
“But, Nouna, the Indian ladies are much more shut up than you are.”
“They have beautiful wide palaces to live in. I shouldn’t care if I
had a palace.”
“Well, you know I can’t give you a palace, but if you will be good and
leave off crying, I will take you on the river myself one day.”
“Will you? When, when?” cried she, starting up excited, all her griefs
forgotten.
“I’ll see if I can take you to-morrow.”
She flung her arms round his neck, not to ask his pardon for her
petulance, but to assure him that he was the best, kindest husband
that ever lived, and that no Indian Maharanee in all her splendour of
marble courts and waving palms was ever so happy as she.
George kept his promise, and on the following day took her down to
Kingston, and rowed her up as far as Shepperton and back. She was
delighted with the river, and, charmed with the idea of being a person
of responsibility, showed great aptitude for a beginner at steering.
Being one of those quick-eyed, neat-handed persons whose wit is rather
nimble than profound, she acquired accomplishments of this nature with
a feminine and graceful ease; and sitting with the ropes over her
shoulders, her dark eyes intent with care gleaming from beneath her
white baby-bonnet, she made a picture so perfect that, as usual, every
man who passed looked at her with undisguised admiration, and glanced
from her to her companion to find out more about her through him. All
this George, who was not too much lost in his own adoration to note
the casual votive glances offered to his idol, bore with complacency,
until, just as they entered Sunbury Lock, on the return journey, a
well-known voice calling his name from a boat that was already waiting
inside the gates, startled him. He turned and saw a crew of four men,
two of whom were Captain Pascoe and Clarence Massey. The impetuous
little Irishman dragged the two boats alongside each other, and
instantly plunged into conversation with Nouna, who seemed delighted
with the incident. George was not a Bluebeard; still, remembering all
the circumstances of Nouna’s previous acquaintance with the all round
lover, Massey, he by no means desired the friendship to grow closer
between them, and he was not pleased by the glances of interest which
Nouna exchanged with Captain Pascoe, who had an air of quiet
good-breeding particularly attractive to women. The two boats passed
each other again and again on the way to Kingston, for the stronger
crew seemed to be in no great hurry, and were not perhaps unwilling to
be occasionally passed by a boat steered by such an interesting little
coxswain. At any rate the smaller craft arrived first at Bond’s, and
George took his wife up stairs to the coffee-room for a cup of tea.
Then she discovered that she felt rather “faint,” and had forgotten
her smelling-salts; would George go out and get her some? What could a
newly-fledged husband do but comply, however strong his objection
might be to leaving his wife alone in a public room? There was no one
in it, however, but a cheerful and kind little waitress, who seemed
quite overcome by the young lady’s beauty; so he gave Nouna a hurried
kiss when the girl’s back was turned, and hastened off to fulfil her
behest as fast as possible.
He found a chemist’s very quickly, and returned with the
smelling-salts in a few moments. But Nouna had entirely recovered from
her faintness, and instead of finding her reclining on the horse-hair
sofa with closed eyes and a face of romantic paleness, George
discovered her enthroned in an arm-chair, all vivacity and animation,
holding a small but adoring court composed of the crew that had dogged
their progress on the river. Massey was talking the most; but Captain
Pascoe, by virtue of his superiority in years and position as well as
a certain distinction of appearance and manner, was undoubtedly the
most prominent and the most favoured courtier. For a moment George
stopped in the doorway, as a terrible remembrance of the tale of the
genie who locked the lady up in a glass case flashed into his mind. He
dismissed the ugly fancy immediately; what reason had he for supposing
Nouna had any unconfessed motive in sending him away? There was
nothing now but to make the best of it, to join the party, and even to
hear Captain Pascoe repeat the invitation up the river as Nouna had
hoped, and reluctantly to add his own acceptance of it to his wife’s.
The train in which the husband and wife returned to town was not
crowded, and they had a compartment to themselves. The excitement of
entertaining being over, Nouna took off her bonnet and leaned back in
a corner with her eyes closed, tired out.
“Where are your salts, dear?” asked George, putting his hand tenderly
on her wavy hair.
She opened her eyes languidly.
“Salts! Oh, I don’t know. I never use them!”
George was knocked over by this appalling confession.
“Never use them! Then you did not want them when you sent me out for
them?” he said, almost stammering.
She half raised her heavy eyelids again with a malicious little smile,
and patted his hand re-assuringly, with some pride in her own
ingenuity, and quite as much in his.
“Clever boy!” she whispered languidly. “You see I wanted to go up the
river again, and I knew you wouldn’t introduce him so that he could
invite me.”
And clasping her little hands, which she had relieved of her gloves,
with a beatific smile of perfect satisfaction, she curled her head
into her left shoulder like a bird and prepared to doze.
“How did you know it was Captain Pascoe?” asked George in a hard, dry
voice.
“Heard the little red man call him so,” murmured Nouna sleepily.
George drew back, shocked, wounded, and perplexed. To correct her for
petty deceits was like demonstrating to a baby the iniquity of
swallowing its toys; she could not understand how it was wrong to
obtain by any means in her power anything she wanted. There was no
great harm done after all, when the deed was followed by such quick
and innocent confession. But none the less, the habit showed a moral
obliquity which could not fail to be a distressing sign that the
ennobling influences of matrimony, literature, the arts and religion
had not yet had any great and enduring effect. He withdrew into the
corner furthest from her, bewildering himself with conjectures as to
what the right way to treat her might really be, not at all willing as
yet to own that the wives who fascinate men most are not the docile
creatures who like clay can be moulded to any shape their lord and
master may please to give them, but retain much of the resistance of
marble, which requires a far higher degree of skill and patience in
the working, and had best be left alone altogether except by fully
qualified artists of much experience in that medium. Even in the midst
of his disturbed musings a consolation, if not a light, came to him.
He heard Nouna move. He was staring out at the darkening landscape
through one of the side-windows, and did not look round: before he
knew she was near him she had climbed into his lap.
“Put your arms round me; I want to go to sleep,” cooed she.
And, alas, for philosophy and high morality! at the touch of her arms
all his fears and his misgivings melted into passionate, throbbing
tenderness, and he drew the head of the perhaps not wholly undesigning
Nouna down on to his shoulder with the sudden feeling that his doubts
of her entire perfection had burst like bubbles in the air.
Nevertheless, it became clear again that evening that young Mrs.
Lauriston contemplated a revolution in the tenor of her quiet life.
“I wonder,” she said pensively at supper, resting from the labour of
eating grapes, with a face of concentrated earnestness, “that mamma
has taken no notice of the letter I sent her the very day after I was
married. I told her of a very particular wish I had, and you know
mamma always has let me have every wish I have ever made; I can’t
understand it.”
“What wish was that?” asked George, feeling it useless to complain of
the want of confidence which had prevented her from communicating it
before.
“I want to have a large house that I can furnish as I please, and
where I can receive my friends,” said Nouna with rather a haughty,
regal air.
George began to see that it was of no use to oppose the sociable bent
of her mind, and he occupied himself therefore in wondering whether
this wish of Nouna’s, expressed in a letter which passed through the
lawyers’ hands before his last visit to them, had had any relation to
their unexpected announcement of a possible accession of his wife to
fortune.
A few days later the conjecture acquired still more force through a
letter from Mr. Angelo, informing him that the will case of which he
had spoken had been decided out of court, and that Mrs. Lauriston was
entitled to an income of four thousand a year, and a house in Queen’s
Gate which she could let or occupy at her discretion. The property
was, by the late Captain Weston’s bequest, to be hers on her majority
or on her marriage, whichever event should take place first; therefore
if Mr. and Mrs. Lauriston would call at their office at an early date,
Messrs. Smith and Angelo would put them in possession of all further
details, and be able to complete certain necessary formalities. These
formalities, however, turned out to be very few and very simple, and
George was surprised at the ease with which such a young woman as
Nouna could enter into possession of so considerable an income. As for
her, she was crazy with delight, and on learning that she could have
an advance to furnish her house and make in it what alterations she
liked, she awoke into a new life of joyful activity which seemed
almost to suggest some superhuman agency in enabling her to be in half
a dozen places at once.
When at last, after having shown in the arrangement of her handsome
home some of the skill of an artist, and herself superintended the
work of the most intelligent artisans a distinguished firm in Bond
Street could furnish, Nouna introduced her husband in triumph to the
little palace on the south of the park, poor George was overwhelmed by
a crowd of bitter and sorrowful feelings to which Nouna’s
half-childish, half-queenly delight in the change from the home of his
creating to the home of hers gave scarcely anything more than an added
pang. What could he hope to be to her now but a modest consort half
ignored amidst the pretty state with which she evidently meant to
surround herself? What sense of authority over her, of liberty for
himself, could he hope to have, when, instead of her sharing his
prospects, he was simply sharing hers? Since she could so lightly
part, with no sensation stronger than relief, from those associations
with their first days of wedded love which he held so dear, what hold
could he really have on her heart at all? And suddenly, in the midst
of his grave reflections, Nouna herself, to-day clothed in a
whirlwind, shattering or fluttering every object and every creature
she came near, would fly at him down some corridor, or through some
curtain, like an incarnate spirit of joyous triumph, and force him,
with or without his will, to rejoice with her in her work. But with a
laugh, and a rush of light words and a tempestuous caress, she would
leave him again, it being out of the question that a man’s sober feet
could carry him from attic to cellar with as much swiftness as she
felt the occasion required of her, the new mistress. So George made
his tour of inspection for the most part by himself, civilly declining
the offer of the housekeeper as a guide. This he felt as a new
grievance, this staff of servants, whom he and even Nouna had had no
hand in choosing, Mr. Angelo, with his customary strange
officiousness, having undertaken that and many other details of the
new household. On this point, however, George could console himself;
as soon as he and his wife were installed, he should make a bold
demonstration of the fact that, however weak he might be in the dainty
little hands of his wife, he was not to be ruled by anybody else, and
intended, with that one important exception perhaps, to be master in
his own house.
Even while he made these reflections, he was the unseen witness to a
little scene which, in his irritable frame of mind, filled him with
anger and suspicions. He was standing on the ground floor, at a bend
in the hall, screened from view by a mass of the tall tropical plants
with which it was a canon of taste with Nouna to fill every available
nook, when his attention was attracted by a peculiar soft treble knock
on the panels of the door of an apartment which he had not seen, but
which he had been told was the housekeeper’s room. Looking through the
great leaves, which he separated with his hand, he saw Mrs. Benfield,
the housekeeper, standing at the door. The next moment a key was
turned and the door opened from inside, another woman let her in, and
immediately the door was re-locked. George, already not in the best of
humours, would not stand these mysteries in a place which, as long as
he chose to live in it, he was determined should be his own house. He
crossed the hall, and knocked sharply on the panels.
“Who is it?” asked Mrs. Benfield’s voice.
“It is I, your master.”
There was a pause of a few seconds, and George could hear the rustling
of women’s gowns. Then the door was unlocked and thrown wide with much
appearance of deferential haste by Mrs. Benfield.
“I am sorry to have kept you so long, sir; but the locks are new and a
little stiff just at first, and I----”
George did not hear the rest of her explanation. He was looking at the
woman whom the housekeeper introduced as a friend of hers, avowing
that she had been afraid it would be considered a liberty to have a
visitor so soon; but she was so anxious to have a sight of the young
master and mistress that----
George interrupted. “Of my wife? Pray come with me then, she will be
quite pleased to find herself an object of so much interest.”
He spoke courteously and with suppressed excitement, making a step
forward to where Mrs. Benfield’s visitor sat close against the window
and with her back to the light. For he had a strong suspicion of the
identity of this stranger, who shrank into herself at the suggestion,
and said she thanked Mr. Lauriston, she would rather not be seen; she
felt rather uncomfortable at having come.
“You need not, indeed,” said George in a vibrating voice, gazing
intently at the black silhouette, of which he could make out
exasperatingly little but the shape of a close bonnet. “I am sure my
wife will have particular pleasure in seeing you. I beg you to let me
fetch her.”
The lady--there was no mistaking a certain refinement in the voice,
even in that hurried whisper--was evidently agitated; but she said
nothing as Lauriston retreated towards the door. He crossed the hall
to call his wife, scarcely leaving the door of the housekeeper’s room
out of sight as he did so. But in that moment when his eyes were not
upon it, the mysterious stranger found means to escape; for when Nouna
flew down and rushed into the small apartment at her husband’s
bidding, there was no one for her to see but Mrs. Benfield, who, much
perturbed and grey about the face, explained that her friend, being a
nervous woman, had not dared to face the ordeal of a personal
introduction to the young lady.
George said nothing, and let his wife wander away again without
further explanation, thinking that after all the one small bit of
knowledge he had gained he had better at present keep to himself.
He knew by the unmistakable evidence of the voice that he had just
seen and spoken with Nouna’s mother.