At dinner at Maple Lodge on the evening of their arrival, George
Lauriston and his wife met the gentle Dicky Wood, who had come down
the day before, and spent the afternoon riding with the son of Sir
Henry’s steward. Nouna was much pleased by this compliance with her
wishes, and showed her appreciation of it by flirting very prettily at
dinner with the young guardsman. Later in the evening she held in the
verandah a little court, and chanted them some half-wild,
half-monotonous Indian songs in a tiny thread of sweet voice, with
some plaintive low notes that lived in the memory. And George, who was
standing with Ella some yards away from the rest of the group, felt
thrilled through and through by the weird melodies, and liked to fancy
that in these native songs of hers the soul-voice, that, in the
tumultuous life of emotions and sensations in which she found her
happiness, had small opportunity to be heard, forced up its little
note and promised a richer fulness of melody by and by.
It was not by the man’s choice, but the girl’s, that he and Ella found
themselves together. At the present time there was only one woman in
Lauriston’s world, and in his absorption in his wife the ungrateful
fellow was incapable even of feeling his old friendly pleasure in
Ella’s society. Her interest in him, on the other hand, as is the way
with that splendid institution for the comfort and consolation of
man--plain women, had grown tenfold stronger since he had lowered
himself to the usual dead level of his foolish sex, by marrying
through his eyes. To Ella this downfall was quite tragic; she had
thought and hoped so much for him; he had feeling, sense, ambition,
was, in fact, not the mere beautifully turned out figure-head of a man
who, under various disguises of light or dark complexion, slim or
heavy build, was continually saying to her the same commonplaces,
betraying to her the same idea-less vacuity, at dinner, ball, and
garden-party. Yet here he was, bound for life, and by his own choice,
to a beautiful pet animal, with all the fascinating ways of a kitten,
who could gambol and scratch, and bask in warmth and shiver in cold,
and whom nevertheless he undoubtedly worshipped. Ella, whose mind was
of an intellectual cast, and in whom the passions had as yet only
developed in an ardent but hazy adoration of dead-and-gone heroes,
very naturally underrated the strength of one side of a man’s nature,
and was cast down when the creature whose sympathetic comprehension of
her highest aspirations had made her raise him to a demi-god proved to
be in truth only a very man. She fancied, poor child, that he showed
deterioration already; when she reminded him at dinner that she had
not yet returned a book of Emerson’s he had lent her, George laughed
carelessly, and said he had forgotten all about it.
“Don’t you remember you particularly advised me to read the articles
on ‘Goethe’ and ‘Napoleon’?” she asked rather acidly.
“Oh, yes, they’re very good,” said he, with a man’s irritating
frivolity, smiling at his wife, who was shutting one eye and holding
her glass of claret up to the light, in imitation of an elderly
connoisseur, for the amusement of Dicky. Then, perceiving in a pause
that he had offended Ella, he hastened to say penitently: “I haven’t
done much reading lately; but you have, I suppose; you are always so
good.”
“I don’t read because I am _good_, but because I like it,” she
answered coldly.
And George, reflecting on the oddity of Ella’s trying to improve him
as he had tried to improve Nouna, had taken the snub meekly as a bolt
of retributive providence.
But when she got an opportunity of speech with him alone in the
verandah, in a rather melancholy and remorseful frame of mind, she
“had her say” after her sex’s fashion.
“One mustn’t expect you to be the same person that you were three
months ago, George,” she began, with a very humble, deprecating
manner. “Otherwise I would ask you why we don’t hear of your coming to
the front as a writer, as we heard then there was a probability of
your doing.”
George laughed with the same maddening indifference to his
deterioration, and asked if he might smoke. With a cigarette between
his lips, flourishing before her eyes the privilege of a man, he felt
more of a man’s commanding position.
“I haven’t come to the front,” said he, “because I haven’t made any
steps at all, either forward, backward, or in any direction. I’ve been
lazy, Ella, miserably, culpably lazy, and if my great thoughts have
not yet stirred the world, it is no doubt only because they have not
been committed to paper.”
“Oh, if you are satisfied, of course that is everything. Ambition, I
see, is not the great, never pausing, never ceasing motive-power that
we poor foolish women are taught to believe; it is a pretty whim, to
be taken up alternately with a fit of smoking, or mountain-climbing,
as we girls change about between tennis and tatting.”
“Not quite, Ella,” said George, doing her the justice to grow serious
when he saw how deeply and unselfishly she was in earnest. “Ambition
does not die for lying a short time hidden by other feelings; and
surely even if it loses a little of its bitter keenness, it gains by
being no longer wholly selfish.”
“A beautiful answer, at least. And no doubt contentment is better than
ambition.”
“I don’t know what contentment is, except by seeing it in the faces of
cows and pigs. No passion could be stifled by such a tepid feeling as
that. I am not contented, I am happy. So will you be some day, and you
will let your bright wits rest a little while, and you will
understand.”
Understand? No, she felt that was impossible, as she looked down at
the big, handsome man sitting on the hammock below her, his eyes
bright, not with serene, but with ardent happiness, content to bend
all his faculties to the will of a creature whom he must know to be
his inferior in every way. She did not wish to understand such a
decadence as that.
“Then you will give up all idea of writing?”
“No. I am more anxious to distinguish myself than ever, as things have
turned out. A man who suddenly finds himself to be married to a rich
wife feels as if he had got off at a false start, and is put at a
disadvantage. But so far I own my wife has taken up all my time. You
see, she didn’t know she was going to be rich any more than I did, and
being hardly more than a child, she wants as much looking after at
first as a baby at the edge of a pond.”
“And this is the sort of woman who gets a man’s best love!” thought
Ella half bitterly, half disdainfully.
“And of course you choose her friends for her,” suggested Ella, not
quite hiding her feeling.
“I can’t quite do that, yet at least,” said George. “Nobody but all of
you has got further than acquaintance yet.”
“But of course you are very particular about those acquaintances?”
Decidedly Ella was in her most disagreeable mood to-night.
“I do my best,” said he briefly.
“And of course it’s all nonsense about the smoking-parties, and
Captain Pascoe being there nearly every night.”
George felt a shock. Mentioned in that manner, the evening calls of
his friends, the admittance among the callers of a man whom he
cordially disliked but whom he had no grounds strong enough for
insulting, were heavy accusations.
“I see my own friends as freely as I did when I was a bachelor,
certainly,” said he, cold in his turn. “Nouna is too sensible to
prevent that. As for Captain Pascoe, he has not been in our house more
than three times at the outside.”
Ella dared not say more on this subject, even if she had had more to
say. She looked out at the swallows, flying low over the young trees
of the plantation on the other side of the road, and asked musingly:
“Do you like being rich?”
“It’s not bad for a change,” answered George philosophically.
“I hate it. I always feel with papa, so glad to shake off the big
house and the footmen and the feeling that the great human world is
surging round without touching you, and to get back to my tiny room
where I can almost water the plants in my window without coming in at
the door, and to the farm and my pensioners that I take tracts to.
They never read them, but it is quite as much a matter of etiquette to
leave them as it is to make calls in town, and they are dreadfully
insulted if I forget.”
“But you’ve always been well off?”
“Yes, but that doesn’t make any difference. Money rolls together in
such ugly fashions. Look at mamma’s. When her father made his
millions, thousands of people were ruined. Well, you know, that’s
horrible!”
“They chose to speculate, remember. They must have known no lottery
has all prizes.”
“It’s hideous to think of, all the same. On the other hand, if your
property descends to you by a long line of greedy land-scrapers, you
know it has grown in value because other people’s has decreased, and
that your tenants have to pinch themselves to make up your handsome
rent-roll. And you haven’t even done the wretched work for it that the
speculator has done to get his!”
“It’s lucky all capitalists are not so soft-hearted, or there’d be an
end to enterprise, which by the by is brother to your god Ambition.”
“Oh, I’m not making preparations for re-organising the universe, only
lifting up a little weak mew of discontent with my corner of it. And
your wife’s money: is it the result of a robbery of recent date, like
ours, or plunder that has been rolling down for generations, like Lord
Florencecourt’s?”
“Well, really, I’ve never put it to her trustees in that way, and, now
I think of it, why I really don’t know. But as Nouna’s father was a
soldier, and there’s very little loot to be got in our days, I expect
it has rolled down.”
“And you don’t really care how it was got together?”
“Yes, I do, now I think of it. But to tell you the truth, the lawyers
have managed things so easily for us that all we’ve been called upon
to do is to spend the money, a very elementary process.”
“What a strange thing!”
“Why? By the by, so it is, when one comes to think about it. It’s
altogether contrary to one’s personal and traditional experience of
lawyers.”
“When mamma married,” said Ella, pursuing her own train of thought,
“her money was tied up and fenced round with as many precautions as if
poor dear old papa had been a brigand. He often laughs about it, and
says she couldn’t buy a pair of gloves without a power of attorney. So
that it really does seem very astonishing.”
“It does,” assented George, who, never before having had experience of
money in any but infinitesimal quantities, had been much readier to
take things for granted than was this granddaughter of a Chicago
millionaire.
“What would you do, George, if you found out it had been made by
supplying bad bayonets to the English army, or anything like that?”
she asked, half-laughing, but not without a secret wonder whether this
easy-got gold would turn out to have unimpeachable antecedents.
The question gave George a great shock. He jumped up from the hammock
across which he had been sitting, with a white face.
“Good heavens, Ella! What makes you say that?” he asked in a low
voice, each word sounding as if it were being ground out of him.
“Don’t take it like that,” said she nervously, almost as much moved as
he, and impelled by his strong feeling to be more impressed than she
had been at first with her own surmise. “I only suggested--it came
into my head--I don’t know anything about it.”
“Oh, well, you shouldn’t say things like that, you know, Ella, even in
fun. The mere suggestion gives one such an awful shock. It’s like cold
water down one’s back,” said he, trying to laugh.
“I didn’t mean it, indeed,” said she, quite unable to take a jesting
tone. “As if one would say a thing like that in earnest! I never
guessed you would think twice about a foolish speech like that!”
But they both felt uncomfortable; and both were glad when George,
noticing that Dicky Wood was standing near anxious to get a word with
the jolly nice girl Ella, but much too diffident to come forward at
the risk of intruding unwelcomely upon a _tête-à-tête_, drew him
into their group by asking if he had been in Norfolk before.
And so both George and Ella were able to shuffle off the burden of a
conversation which had grown decidedly difficult to keep up, and the
memory of which made a slight constraint between them, on the man’s
side especially, for two or three days.
Nouna, to her husband’s great comfort and gladness, was behaving
beautifully, and putting new life by her gaiety into the whole
household, the younger members of which, in spite of Ella’s
intelligence and her sisters’ beauty, were a little wanting in those
electric high spirits which, in the routine of a quiet country-house,
are as sunshine to the crops. The day after their arrival was Sunday,
and the morning church-going had been a fiery ordeal for George, not
from religious indifference, but from the misgiving that if Nouna
could not keep from smiling in the course of a well-conducted service
in a West End church, she would certainly be carried out in
convulsions from the Willingham place of worship, where the school
children, summer and winter, sniffed through the service in a
distressing chorus, while the loud-voiced clerk’s eccentric English
rang through the building, drowning the old vicar’s feeble voice; and
where the vicar’s wife, a strong-minded lady, whose district-visiting
was a sort of assize, had been known to “pull up” her reverend husband
publicly from her pew immediately below the pulpit when, as not
infrequently happened, he turned over two leaves of his sermon instead
of one, and went quietly on as if nothing had happened. “Turned over
two leaves? Bless me, so I have!” he would murmur, and rectify his
mistake with a tranquil nod.
So George had put his wife through a very severe drill before
starting, and had strictly forbidden her so much as to sneeze without
his permission. She had a narrow escape at the offertory, when one of
the churchwardens, with a lively remembrance of the artifices of his
own youth, shovelled a penny into the fingers of each of his offspring
with one hand, while he presented the plate menacingly with the other.
But glancing up at her husband and perceiving a frown of acute terror
on his face, she contrived to choke in silence; and the day was
gained.
On the following Monday too, when the dreaded Lady Florencecourt
fulfilled her threat of calling and proved equal to her reputation for
unamiability, the young wife was, as she triumphantly averred
afterwards, “very good.” The county censor proved to be a fair, florid
woman of middle height, rather stout, and with features so commonplace
that, without the saving shield of her title, they would have been
called common. She had arrogant and capricious manners, an oily
self-satisfied voice, and an ill word for everybody. Whenever her
husband, who accompanied her on this occasion, ventured to make a
remark, she turned to look at him with a resigned air, as if she were
used to being made a martyr at the stake of his imbecility. She
examined Nouna from head to foot through a gold double eyeglass, as if
the young wife had been a charity-girl convicted of misconduct, and
made no remark to her except to ask her if she was interested in the
Zenana Missions, to which Nouna replied rather haughtily that Indian
ladies were no more in need of missionaries than English ones: after
which thrust and counter-thrust it may be imagined that the
conversation languished, and that later in the day George had great
difficulty in persuading his wife not to break off their engagement to
go to Willingham. She said it would just spoil the end of their visit
to the Millards, for one of whom she had begun to feel a real
affection. This was the sharp-tongued Ella, whose intelligence she had
the wit to recognise, and whose smart sayings amused her.
It was on the evening of a day in the course of which this
oddly-assorted pair of friends had been a good deal together that
George, on going up stairs to his room after a last cigar with his
host, found his wife, not as usual fast asleep like a child, but
perched upon the bed in the attitude of a Hindoo idol, with a big book
open on her crossed knees, and her eyes fixed upon the nearest candle.
“Hallo!” said he, “what’s the matter?”
She turned her eyes upon him slowly, with an air of suspicion and
curiosity.
“Nothing is the matter,” she said gravely, and turning down a whole
half-leaf of the book before her to keep the place, she closed it
carefully, and handed it to him with an affectation of solemn
indifference. “I have been reading,” she added with decision.
George looked at the title of the ponderous volume, and observed that
it was _The Complete Works of Xenophon_. He opened it without a smile
at the page she had turned down, and remarking that it was about
half-way through the volume, said she had got on very well if she had
read so much in one evening.
“I skipped a little--the dry parts,” she observed modestly, but in
such a tone that it was impossible for George to tell whether she
meant to be taken seriously or not.
“Dry!” he exclaimed, raising his eyebrows, “why, he is the very
lightest of light reading. Xenophon was the most frivolous man I ever
knew; he was at school with me.”
She crawled to the foot of the bed, and stretching over the rail to
the dressing-table, on which George had placed the volume, she
recovered it with a violent muscular effort, and turned back the
leaves to the title-page.
“This book was published in 1823; so you are much older than you told
me you were, I see,” she said simply, while George, unable to contain
himself longer, burst out into a long laugh, and made a dive at her,
which she evaded like a squirrel, still staring at him with unmoved
gravity, so that his mirth died away in wonderment and in a rush of
tenderness as he perceived the pathos of this futile plunge into the
mazes of learning.
As he recovered his gravity the expression of her mobile face also
changed; after a moment’s shy silence their eyes met, and each saw the
other through a luminous mist.
“What are you crying for?” she asked tremulously; and in a moment
flung herself impulsively into his ready arms. “Why didn’t you marry
Ella?” was her next question, shot suddenly into his ear in the midst
of an incoherent outburst of the passionate tenderness that glowed
ever in his heart for her.
“Marry Ella!” said he, feeling a shock of surprise at the remembrance
that he had indeed once offered to make the good little blue-stocking
his wife. “Why, what makes you ask such a question as that? Are you
jealous?”
“Oh, no. But I see that she would have had you, and therefore you were
foolish not to have her.”
“Well, I’m afraid it’s too late now, and I shall have to put up with
the consequences of my folly,” said he, pressing her tenderly to him.
“That’s just what I thought,” she agreed quite plaintively. “Miss
Glass says a good wife must cook, Ella says a good wife must read, but
nobody says a good wife must just sing and laugh and amuse herself as
I do. And so when you’re tired of kissing me, you will feel you had
better not have married me, but only have amused yourself like Dicky
Wood--” She paused significantly.
“Dicky Wood!” echoed he sharply.
“--With Chloris White.”
George moved uneasily; he was angry and disturbed.
“You must not say such things--you must not think them. The name of
such a woman as that is not fit to pass your lips.”
“But, George,” she argued, looking straight into his eyes with
penetrating shrewdness, “if you had not been you, say, if you had been
Rahas or Captain Pascoe, I might--”
He stopped the words upon her lips with a great gravity which awed her
and kept her very still, very attentive, while he spoke.
“When God throws an innocent girl into the arms of an honest man,
Nouna, as you came into mine, she is a sacred gift, received with such
reverent love that she must always hold herself holy and pure, and
never even let any thought of evil come into her heart, so that she
may be the blessing God intended. I was born into the world to protect
you and shield you from harm, my darling; and so my love was ready for
you at the moment when your innocence might have put you in danger,
just as it will be to the end of your life.”
“Supposing you were to die first?” suggested she, not flippantly, but
with an awestruck consideration of possibilities.
“A soldier can always last out till his duty’s done,” said George,
with quiet conviction.
After this Nouna remained silent a little while, but that her ideas
had not been working in quite the desired direction was evident when
she next spoke.
“If, as you say, your love will keep me safe and good whatever I do, I
needn’t be so particular,” she argued, “and it won’t do me any harm to
go and see this Mrs. Chloris White, and ask her to leave poor Dicky
alone, and let him meet some one who will be a blessing to _him_. I
want him to marry Ella.”
George was thunderstruck.
“Go and see Chloris White! I’d as soon let you go to the Morgue!”
“But I know I could persuade her to give him up; I know just what I
would say, just how I would look. I’ve thought it all over; and surely
anything’s better than that he should rush back to her as soon as he
gets to town, and undo all the good we’ve done him in the country.”
She spoke with a pretty little matronly air of perfectly sincere
benevolence.
“My dear child,” said her husband decisively, laying his hand on her
head with his gravest air of authority, “you cannot go; it is out of
the question. You must not even mention such a wild idea to any one;
they would be horribly shocked. But we’ll keep poor Dicky safe among
us by much better means than that, I promise you. So now go to sleep,
and don’t ever let such an idea come into your head again.”
She let herself be kissed quite brightly and submissively, and rubbed
her cheek against his with affection which might have been taken to
argue docility. But her own fantastic notion of helping her friend
remained in her mind quite unmoved by her husband’s prohibition.