George Lauriston’s gloomy forebodings at the entire change in their
manner of life brought about by Nouna’s becoming a comparatively rich
woman, were not, in the first few weeks at least, fulfilled. The new
way of living pleased the volatile child-woman much better than the
old; and as she was never happy or miserable by halves, her joy in her
good fortune was so strong as to be infectious; it was impossible to
live in the neighbourhood of her full sensuous delight in existence
without catching some of its radiance; and George, while ashamed of
the weakness which made him take the colour of his life from hers,
when he had meant in the most orthodox way to make her tastes and
feelings accord with his own, found a fierce and ever-strengthening
pleasure in the intoxicating love-draughts his passion afforded him,
until his ambition, which perhaps had been none of the highest, began
to sleep, and thought and principle to grow languid under the
enervating influence of the question: What good in heaven or earth is
worth the striving for, when this, the most absorbing soul or sense
can imagine, is close to my hand, at my lips? And so, as in all
encounters of the affections, the greater love was at the mercy of the
less; and George, telling himself that time and experience would
develop in her all those other qualities which his own efforts had
failed to draw out, but which, being part of his conception of the
ideal woman, must lie dormant somewhere in the queen of his heart,
gave himself up to adoration of those excellences in her which had
been already demonstrated; and they lived through those hot summer
weeks in happiness, which caused the one first awake in the morning to
touch the other softly, doubtingly, to make sure that their life of
dream-like joy was a reality still.
George had had, of course, to indulge the cravings of Nouna’s
sociability, and to submit to the entertaining of visitors, and to the
establishment of an institution which in its beginnings rather shocked
him. Nouna, finding that the social day began late, readily understood
that this necessitated “stealing a few hours from the night,” and she
accordingly encouraged such of her husband’s friends as met with her
approval, to “come and smoke a cigar with George after dinner.” As
this invitation was invariably accepted, and as the entertainment
always included a perfectly served little supper, under the famous
golden silk ceiling, Mrs. Lauriston’s “midnight parties” soon began to
be talked about, and to afford a nice little scandal to be worried by
all the women who were jealous of the little lady’s rapid and
surprising success. Even when with August the dead season sets in,
there are always men detained in town by business or caprice, and
Nouna found no falling off in attendance at these receptions, so
consonant with masculine tastes and habits, and there was a general
outcry of aggrieved bachelordom--bachelordom in its wide sense,
including those who had attained a more complete form of existence,
but still wallowed in the unworthy habits of the less honourable
state--when the time came for Mr. and Mrs. Lauriston to start for
Norfolk.
Lord Florencecourt, who was already at Willingham, had asked George,
with an assumed carelessness which the latter was too well-informed to
misinterpret, whether they intended to take “that hideous black
woman,” whose ugliness, he declared, had nearly made the rest of his
hair turn white the only time he saw her, with them to Norfolk. George
said no, but he was not sorry when, later, Nouna insisted upon
Sundran’s accompanying them, as he had a lurking wish to see what the
effect would be if the woman were to confront the Colonel. Nouna had
scoffed at the notion of his being insane, and on learning that his
marriage might possibly have had an effect on his mind, she expressed
great curiosity to see this formidable wife.
George laughed rather mischievously.
“I’m afraid you’ll have to forego that pleasure, Nouna,” he said,
shaking his head. “I heard from Ella Millard the other day that Lady
Florencecourt is so much shocked by what she has heard about you and
your wicked heathen ways, that she has quarrelled with her brother,
Sir Henry, about their invitation to you, and has refused to visit
them while you are at the Lodge!”
Nouna, who was playing at packing, having been busy for twenty minutes
with a delicate Sèvres tea-pot and some yards of tissue paper, let
the china fall from her hands at these words, in a torrent of
indignation. She scarcely glanced at the broken fragments on the
floor, as she burst forth with great haughtiness in the high-flown
language she habitually used when her passions were roused:
“Indeed! Does then the wife of this miserable little wooden soldier
think the granddaughter of a Maharajah unworthy to bear the light of
her eyes? We will see, we will see. Perhaps she is a little too
imperious; there may be powers in the earth greater than hers! I will
write to my mother, who has never yet failed to fulfil my wishes, and
I will tell her to search if she can find means to humble this proud
lady of the fens, so that she may sue to me to receive me in her
house, heathen, foreigner, though I am!”
And with a superb gesture Nouna signified her contempt for the
ironical laughter her husband could not restrain.
“Oh, little empress,” he said, good-humouredly, “you will have to
learn that all magicians have limits, and that even a mother so
devoted as yours can’t carry out all the freaks that enter into one
little feminine head. The very king of the black art could not move
Lady Florencecourt!”
“The king! Perhaps not, because he is a foolish male thing,” retorted
Nouna coldly, “but what my mother wills to do she does, and I trust
her.”
And she would not suffer any further word on the subject.
George was in the depths of his heart not without a little anxiety
about this Norfolk visit. Unconventionality is so much more
unconventional in the country, where every trifling detail in which a
man differs from his neighbours is nodded over far and wide as a sign
of mental aberration, while in the case of a woman it is held to
warrant even graver doubts. Nouna herself was in the highest spirits
at the prospect; delightful as life in London was, a change after five
weeks of her new home was more delightful still. She had had made for
the occasion a varied assortment of dainty white frocks, of the kind
that charm men by their simplicity, and women by their costliness, and
a white costume with fine lines of red and gold, for yachting on the
broads, which might have carried off the palm at Cowes. Nouna had the
instinct of dress, a regal instinct which revelled in combinations and
contrasts, in forms and folds, which everyday English women might
admire or marvel at, but copied at their peril. She travelled down,
the day being cool, in a Spanish cloak of mouse-grey velvet, lined
with ivory silk, and fastened with clasps of smoked pearl and silver.
On her head she wore a cap of the same colours. The milliner, an
artist spoiled by ministering to a long course of puppets, was aghast
at the order, and suggested that it would make Mrs. Lauriston look,
well--er--brown. Nouna replied, with a great sweep of the eyelashes,
that she _was_ brown, and she should be sorry to look anything else.
And indeed her beauty was seen to great advantage in this original
setting, and its tints might pleasantly have suggested to the fanciful
brown woods in the haze of a grey October day.
They reached Gorleth, the nearest railway-station to Maple Lodge, at
half-past four. Sir Henry and his daughter Cicely were on the
platform, Cicely in a short grey riding habit, looking in this
practical garment a thousand times handsomer and more captivating than
she had done in her most brilliant ball-dress, according to the wont
of her countrywomen, who, from the royal ladies downwards, never look
worse than when dressed solely with the view to charm.
Let it be acknowledged once for all: the Englishwoman, to her credit
be it said, is a riding animal, a walking animal, a boating animal, a
cooking animal, a creature fond of hard work and hard play, full of
energy and capabilities for better things than the piano-strumming and
Oxford local cramming which are now drummed into her so diligently.
But her social qualities are so poor as to be scarce worth cultivation
unless some better methods be discovered than those now in vogue. Her
dancing is more vigorous than graceful, her conversation is inane, her
deportment in full dress uneasy and deplorable, and her manner at
social gatherings where no active muscular exertion is required of
her, dull and constrained. Ten girls are handsome and attractive in a
boat or on the tennis-ground to one who at an “at-home” or a dance is
passable enough to make a man want an introduction. The metropolis has
the pick of the market, if the term may be allowed, in marriageable
maidens as in flowers and fruit. But all alike lose their freshest,
greatest charm when they are plucked from their natural setting of
country green.
George had an inkling of this truth as he helped his tiny wife out of
the railway carriage, amidst the stares of a crowd of country
market-folk, who gaped as they would have done if a regulation fairy,
gauze wings, wand and all, had suddenly descended down the wide
chimney on to their cottage hearth. He should love and admire her
whatever she did, but he wanted her to sway the sceptre of conquest
over all these friends at Willingham and Maple Lodge, and his heart
ached with fear lest a breath of disapproval should touch her, lest
she should appear to any disadvantage under such new conditions.
She herself, happily, was tormented by no such fear. She ran up to Sir
Henry, who was dressed in a vile suit of coarse mustard-coloured
stuff, a common little hat on his head, and a broad smile of recovered
bliss on his face, looking as no self-respecting farmer among his
tenants would have dared to look, and rejoicing in his escape from
town and tight clothes.
“Why, you little town-mouse,” he said, laughing good-humouredly as he
looked down on the tiny lady, “I don’t know how you will live down
here. We shall have to feed you on butterflies’ wings and dew-drops; I
should think a mouthful of plain roast beef would kill you.”
“Oh no, it wouldn’t, Sir Henry,” cried Nouna, distressed and offended
by these doubts cast on her accomplishments. “I eat a great deal,
don’t I, George?”
“Well, more than one would expect, to look at you,” admitted her
husband, remembering the fiasco of the wedding breakfast.
“Besides,” said Nouna astutely, “everything that one eats comes from
the country. The town produces nothing but soot; perhaps you think I
live upon that, and that’s what made me half a black woman.”
The genuine black woman, Sundran, was meanwhile creating a great
sensation; so that, to save her from the rustic wit, which made up in
blunt obtrusiveness what it lacked in point, she was packed with her
mistress inside the Millards’ one-horse brougham, which, like all
their surroundings in their country retreat, was almost ostentatiously
modest and even shabby. George was content enough to share the
coachman’s seat.
“I thought the maid would sit outside; I hadn’t reckoned upon your
bringing a lady of so striking a complexion, George,” said Sir Henry
apologetically. “The old carriage is such a lumbering concern that I
thought the brougham would be quicker, and there’s a cart for the
luggage.”
George laughed. “If I had my choice I’d go on the cart,” said he. “I
am yet unspoiled by my promotion to matrimony.”
It was a pleasant drive over the flat country, too marshy to be dry
and burnt up even in summer. Sir Henry and his pretty daughter kept
pace with the carriage, and flung breezy commonplaces at their guests
with smiling, healthy faces that made their conversational efforts
more than brilliant. Nouna peeped out like a little bird at the flat
green fields and the pollard willows with an expression which seemed
to say that she had quite fathomed the hidden humour of the whole
thing.
“I like the country,” she called to Cicely with an exhaustive nod, as
if she had lived in and loved the fields for years.
And at sight of the Lodge itself she grew rapturous.
Sir Henry Millard’s modest country residence was nothing more than a
fair-sized one-storied white cottage, close to the road, from which it
was separated only by a little garden just big enough to contain a
semicircular drive, a small half-moon lawn, and two side-beds full of
roses. A stone-paved verandah ran the whole length of the house, and a
hammock swung between two of the supports of the green roof, in what
would have been glaring publicity if there had ever been any public to
speak of on the quiet road in front. It would have been rather a
pretty little place if Sir Henry, to meet the requirements of his
family, had not preferred enlarging it by adding at the back various
hideous red brick wings and outbuildings of his own designing, to the
more reasonable course of taking a larger house. The pleasure of
conceiving and superintending these original “improvements” had
indeed, while it lasted, been the most unalloyed joy of Sir Henry’s
simple life; to worry the architect, who had had to be called in at
the last to put a restraining check on Sir Henry’s inspirations, which
threatened to dispense with the vulgar adjuncts of passages and
staircases; to test the building materials, samples of which lay about
the sitting-rooms for days; above all, to do a little amateur
bricklaying during the workmen’s dinner hour--were joys the mere
memory of which thrilled him more than any recollection of his
honeymoon.
Whatever the architectural defects of the house might be, Nouna had
nothing but admiration for it. The tiny little hall; the box-like
drawing-room to the right, with high glass cupboards on each side of
the fireplace containing apostle spoons, old china bowls, fragments of
quartz and the like; the bare-looking dining-room to the left,
furnished as plainly as a school-room, and even the bake-house which
led out from it, all enchanted her by their novelty; while the bedroom
up stairs, ten feet square, into which she was shown, put the climax
to this deliciously new experience, and made her feel, as she
expressed herself to her husband, “that she wished she had married a
farmer.”
To George’s delight she ran down stairs within twenty minutes of her
arrival in the simplest of white muslin frocks, with a wonderful
scarlet and gold sash. But he had no time to congratulate her on her
good sense in dressing so appropriately before she was off, in a huge
garden-hat taken with instinctive knowledge of what was most becoming
from a collection in the hall, to see the farmyard--Sir Henry’s pride.
They made an odd pair--the broad-shouldered, solid-looking country
gentleman, in his rough suit, and the small airily-clad person who
varied her progress by occasional ecstatic bounds in the air, which
made the ends of her sash swirl in the breeze like the wings of some
gorgeous butterfly. George and the girls, with Lady Millard, followed
much more sedately. When, after due admiration of cows and horses,
pigs and poultry, they all returned to the verandah, fresh objects of
interest presented themselves in a pretty group of riders at that
moment climbing the hill upon which the lodge stood.
“Uncle Horace!” cried the girls, as Nouna recognised in the eldest of
the party Lord Florencecourt. He was accompanied by two pretty boys of
about eight and ten on ponies which they already managed as if boy and
pony had been one creature.
“How Horace worships those boys!” muttered Sir Henry enviously.
Charlotte had run down to open the gate, and there was much clatter of
lively greeting. Lord Florencecourt, though he seemed happier down
here with his children than he had been in town, showed his old
constraint with Nouna. It was therefore with great surprise not only
to the young husband and wife, but to their host and his family that
they learnt the object of his visit.
“You see I haven’t lost much time in paying my respects, Mrs.
Lauriston,” he said, speaking in a lively tone, but with an
ill-concealed reluctance to meet her eyes. “Those girls would like to
flatter themselves that my visit is for them, but they are all wrong.”
“Never mind, uncle, Regie and Bertie come to see us,” cried Ella,
giving a kiss to the youngest boy.
Lord Florencecourt continued: “The fact is, Mrs. Lauriston, we know
that you will be so run after down here, that when you have been seen
a little there will be no getting hold of you. So my wife sent me to
ask you and George to stay with us from Friday to Monday the week
after next. Mr. Birch, our member, will be there, and we thought as he
has come to the front so much lately you might like to meet him.”
Nouna stole a triumphant glance at her husband, and the girls, who
were near enough to hear, could not forbear little unseen
eyebrow-raisings of astonishment. He went on: “Lady Florencecourt will
call upon you on Monday, but she thought it best to send her
invitation at once to make sure of you.”
“It is very kind of Lady Florencecourt; I shall like to come very
much,” said Nouna, who was brimming over with delight and triumph.
“Only I don’t think I could do much to entertain a rising member of
Parliament. I can’t talk politics; but perhaps he’d like to learn to
make cocked hats out of newspaper, and then he can amuse himself when
the other members are making dull speeches.”
“I’m sure he’d like it immensely if you will teach him,” said Lord
Florencecourt, with cold civility, which would have damped frivolity
less aerial than Nouna’s.
The girls thought Lady Florencecourt must have been bewitched thus to
transgress her own well-known rule of ignoring any stranger whose
pedigree was not at her fingers’ ends. She had, besides, gone so far
as to gibe at her brother for admitting “a loose-mannered young woman
of unknown and questionable antecedents”--as she styled young Mrs.
Lauriston--into the society of his daughters. And now she was sending
a pressing invitation by the mouth of her husband, whose prejudice
against the interloper was hardly concealed! Decidedly Nouna had a
dash of Eastern magic about her. Meanwhile the young lady herself was
troubling her head very little with the problem. She was much struck
with the blue eyes and curly dark hair of the younger of the two boys,
and bending down to him with her little head perched on one side in
the coquettish manner she used alike to man, woman, child or animal,
she asked with a smile what his name was.
“Allow me to present him with proper ceremony,” said Ella playfully.
“Permit me to introduce you,” gravely to her small cousin, “to Mrs.
George Lauriston. Mrs. Lauriston,” turning to the lady, “the
Honourable Bertram Kilmorna!”
She had scarcely uttered the last word when Nouna shot up from her
bending attitude as if at an electric shock, and fixed her great eyes,
wide with bewilderment and surprise, on Lord Florencecourt, who was
standing behind Ella and his son, near enough to hear these words and
to see their effect.
“Kilmorna!” she repeated in a whisper, still looking full at the
Colonel, whose rugged face had grown suddenly rigid and grey. Then,
without further ceremony, she ran away to her husband, who was talking
to Lady Millard at a little distance.
“George, George!” she said in a tumultuous whisper, her face quivering
with excitement, “I don’t want to go to Lady Florencecourt’s; tell him
I don’t want to go!”
“Why, what’s this? How has the Colonel offended you?” asked George
laughing.
“He hasn’t offended me at all. Only I’ve changed my mind. I know I--I
shouldn’t like Lady Florencecourt. I’d rather not go.”
But as George insisted that it was impossible to break an engagement
just made, without any reason, she broke from him with an impatient
push, and disappeared into the house just before Lord Florencecourt,
who had abruptly discovered that he was in a hurry to be off, took his
leave. Ella prevented George from fetching his wife out.
“It is only some little caprice of hers,” she said persuasively, not
guessing that there was any mystery in the matter, and considering the
young bride’s conduct as the result of some girlish freak. “I think
she was offended because uncle didn’t introduce the boys to her. She
will be all right if you leave her alone a few minutes.”
But George was not unnaturally annoyed at his wife’s rudeness, and he
followed her into the little drawing-room, where he found her with her
nose flattened against the window, staring at Lord Florencecourt’s
retreating figure. She had no explanation to give of her conduct, but
persisted in begging him not to take her to Willingham. As he remained
firm on this point, and continued to press her for her reasons, she
grew mutinous, and at last peace was only made between them on the
conditions that she would go to Willingham if he would not tease her
with any more questions.
And George had to be content with this arrangement, being above all
things anxious to learn the meaning of the miraculous change of front
on the part of Lady Florencecourt and her husband.