When the time came for them to finish their stay in Norfolk by the
dreaded three days at Willingham, neither George nor Nouna made any
secret of the fact that they felt the coming visit to be a severe
ordeal. Undoubtedly it would be a cruelly abrupt change from the
cheerful homeliness of the Lodge, to the penitential atmosphere in
which the household of Lady Florencecourt passed their days. So
notorious was the character of the gracious _châtelaine_ that
Willingham Hall was commonly known in the neighbourhood as the House
of Correction, a title to which the severely simple style of its
architecture gave no very flat denial. Willingham Church stood in the
grounds belonging to the Hall, so that Nouna had had an opportunity of
shuddering at the sombre dreariness of the mansion even before the
return call she had made with Lady Millard and Cicely, on which
occasion she had sat almost mute on a high-backed chair, looking as
insignificant and unhappy as a starved mouse, thinking that Lady
Florencecourt’s light eyes looked like the glass marbles with which
she played at solitaire, and what a good model her face would be for
one of those indiarubber heads that children squeeze up into grotesque
grimaces.
She cried at parting with the Millards, like a little girl sent to
school for the first time. Sir Henry, with his simple good humour;
Lady Millard, with her quiet manners, and the quick black eyes whose
flashing keenness and sympathy showed the burning soul of the New
World flickering in uneasy brightness among the glowing embers of the
Old; Cicely and Charlotte, fair, kind creatures, who filled up the
pauses gracefully, the one by merely smiling, the other by a gentle
rain of chatter which she had been taught to think a fascinating
social accomplishment; and, above all, Ella, of the sallow face, the
sharp tongue, and the warm heart, were a group to live pleasantly in
the memory, and to make the approaching encounter with the unamiable
hosts of Willingham more disagreeable by contrast. It added to poor
Nouna’s forlornness in these circumstances that her husband absolutely
forbade her taking Sundran with her, as, although he was very anxious
for an accidental meeting between Lord Florencecourt and the Indian
woman, he felt that he could not force upon his host the presence of a
person to whom, if only as the result of a prejudice, he had a strong
aversion.
Lady Florencecourt sent a lumbering old family travelling carriage,
with powdered footmen and bewigged coachmen, to bring Mr. and Mrs.
Lauriston to the Hall. Nouna rather liked this old-world state, which,
as her education had embraced the experiences of Paul Clifford and
Martin Blakeborough of “The King’s Mail,” stimulated her imagination.
She crammed her little fingers tightly into her husband’s hand as they
entered the long straight drive, with a deep grass border on each side
flanked by tall trees, which led up to Willingham Hall.
“Keep up your spirits, George,” she quavered, as the carriage drew up
at the imposing front door. “There aren’t any spikes to get over if we
have to run away.”
And she entered the hall with the air of a prisoner who hopes he’ll
get off because he’s such a little one. They were shown up to their
room at once, and when they came down to the drawing-rooms, which were
a succession of vast wildernesses, with all the defects of apartments
too large for the human atoms who lived in them, they found, to
Nouna’s great relief, that not only was the great Mr. Birch there
already, but he had brought with him a real live daughter, a girl
about twenty, who seemed just as much relieved by the sight of a young
face as Nouna herself was. Lord Florencecourt was there, looking as if
he had been kept in against his will from the society of his boys; and
Lady Florencecourt, who made it a boast that she never interrupted her
charitable work for anybody, worked away at certain hideous
convict-like garments, which she was knitting in very coarse scrubby
gray wool for the unlucky poor, while she held forth on the
ingratitude of the “masses,” the vicious extravagance of the
“classes,” and the shortcomings of everybody all round; while Mr.
Birch, who was a bald-headed man with a great expanse of knobby
forehead, which was in itself a tower of strength to his party, agreed
with everything--perhaps a habit he had contracted at Westminster.
The two younger ladies drew instinctively nearer and nearer each
other, until they were close enough to grow confidential, and to enter
upon a strictly defensive alliance. By the time Lord Florencecourt
suggested an excursion through the grounds to see the ruins of an old
Norman church which had been built at the same period as the one still
standing, and within a stone’s throw of it, adversity had made Nouna
and Miss Birch inseparable as love-birds. Before the evening was over,
little Mrs. Lauriston had reason to congratulate herself on having
found such an ally. For her acid hostess treated her with only the
barest possible show of civility, and Lord Florencecourt, while making
a determined effort to be more courteous, betrayed in his eyes such a
rooted and cold dislike that Nouna, with her strong sensitiveness to
every shade of feeling in the people with whom she came in contact,
shrank into herself and was completely miserable, casting forlorn
glances across the table at her husband, who felt scarcely happier
than she, but in whom was growing stronger every moment the
determination to learn the reason of an invitation which had evidently
sprung from no spontaneous wish either of host or hostess. Two other
guests had joined the party before dinner, an elderly couple named
Admiral and Mrs. Bohun, very old friends of Lord Florencecourt’s.
Neither added much to the liveliness of the circle, but whether from
native dulness or through Lady Florencecourt’s peculiar gift of
causing the people about her to show always at their worst in her
society, did not appear. At all events, when the ladies left the room
at dessert, Nouna was so much overcome by the dire prospect before her
that she slipped round to her husband, and hissed into his ear, in a
doleful and not altogether inaudible whisper:
“Don’t be long, or you won’t find me alive!”
She had not under-estimated the relaxation of the drawing-room.
Throughout the length of the suite of cold-looking apartments
wax-lights flickered weakly in numbers wholly inadequate to the size
of the rooms. The piano had been opened, and Lady Florencecourt
invited the younger ladies to play; as Miss Birch hesitated, with not
unnatural diffidence before such an audience, Nouna rushed recklessly
into the breach, regardless of the fact that she was a totally
incompetent performer.
“I knew she’d go back to her knitting, and that’s in the furthest
room,” she volunteered in explanation, as the elder ladies sailed
away.
But the astounding badness of her performance soon brought Lady
Florencecourt back, not indeed so much to criticise as to find out
whether the curious sounds the instrument was giving forth were not
the result of an excursion of her Blenheim spaniel along the keys.
“Is that Indian music, Mrs. Lauriston? Something that is usually
played to an accompaniment of tom-toms?” asked Lady Florencecourt,
holding up her glasses, not, however, before she had ascertained that
she was listening to a mangled version of “Auld Robin Gray.”
“Yes, it’s an ‘Invocation to a Witch,’” answered Nouna imperturbably.
“It ends like this, all the tom-toms together,” and she put her arms
down upon the piano with a crash.
Her face was perfectly grave, but she began to feel the promptings of
a wicked imp within her, urging her to rebel against this most
unwarrantable discipline to which she was being subjected. Mrs. Bohun
had followed her hostess, and as Nouna rose abruptly from the piano,
the old lady said gently:
“You mustn’t be offended by my saying so, but it seems impossible to
realise that you are a married woman. You must have been married while
you were still in short frocks!”
Nouna, who wore an elaborate dinner-dress of emerald-green velvet,
with loose folds of Nile green silk falling straight from her neck to
her feet, was for a moment rather crestfallen to find how little
dignity a train could give.
“Ye-es,” she said reluctantly. “But I wear long ones now. And I’m
sixteen.”
Mrs. Bohun smiled. “That is very young for the responsibilities of a
wife.”
“I haven’t any responsibilities,” answered Nouna quickly. “My mother
gives me an allowance--or at least the lawyers do; at any rate, I have
one.”
“But isn’t that a responsibility?” asked the old lady, much amused.
“Oh, no. I just spend it, and then mamma has the responsibility of
sending me some more.”
Neither Mrs. Bohun nor Miss Birch could keep her countenance at this
_naïve_ disclosure, but its effect upon Lady Florencecourt was to
make her grow grimmer than ever.
“I’m sure it’s a very nice thing to have such a good mamma,” said Mrs.
Bohun indulgently. “Don’t you think so, Clarissa?”
“Undoubtedly.”
The tone in which Lady Florencecourt gave this short answer, caused
Nouna to look up at her.
“Do you know my mother?” she asked abruptly.
“I have not that honour,” answered Lady Florencecourt, many degrees
below zero.
Quite unmoved this time by her hostess’s frigidity, Nouna mused a few
moments with her eyes fixed on the lady’s face. Then she said slowly:
“I believe Lord Florencecourt knows mamma though----”
She stopped short, bewildered by the sudden change these few words
brought about in the placid, self-satisfied countenance. Then, as
there was a moment’s awkward pause, she went on hurriedly--“At least,
I know mamma has an old portrait--one of those old-fashioned dark
things with glass over them, that is like him. I knew when I met him
first at the barracks that I had seen his face somewhere, and when I
thought, I remembered the picture.”
Now Nouna had begun to speak in all innocence, but when she noticed
that her words had some magical power of discomposing the woman who
had been discourteous to her, she mischievously slackened her tone,
and watched the effect with much interest. Lady Florencecourt’s square
heavy face was not capable of any very vivid or varied expression when
her usual stolid self-complacency had been frightened out of it. But
the lower features quivered slightly, and a vixenish look, which boded
ill for her husband’s peace during their next _tête-à-tête_,
brought a spark of angry brightness into her light eyes. Her next
speech, and the tone in which it was uttered, gave the same
impression.
“Very possibly,” she said in a voice which implied an offensive doubt.
“Of course, my husband, when he was a subaltern in India, gave his
portrait right and left to all sorts of persons, as young men will
do.”
“In India! He has been in India! Oh, then that accounts for it. He
must have met my mother there. I’ll ask him.”
And as the voices of the gentlemen were heard in the hall, Nouna
prepared for a spring at the door. Lady Florencecourt laid a heavy
hand peremptorily on her arm.
“No,” she said in a suddenly subdued voice, retaining her hold on the
fragile wrist, and looking down into the little creature’s eyes with
some entreaty and even fear in her own. “Don’t tease Lord
Florencecourt about it now. I--I want to talk to you.”
She drew Nouna with her towards an ottoman, and invited Mrs. Bohun to
join them.
“I quite agree with you, Harriet; it is a wonderful thing in these
days to have a mamma to appeal to,” she continued, in a kind of
grudgingly gracious tone. “Mrs. Lauriston is quite the only person I
know who is not suffering from this horrible depression in everything.
I don’t know whether you have heard”--and she lowered her voice to a
confidential murmur--“that my husband wants to get rid of Willingham.
All the tenants are asking for twenty-five per cent. reduction on
their rent, and as you see, Lord Florencecourt has given up the
shooting this year. Even I have had to make some sacrifices, and to
dispose of part of my jewellery.”
Nouna was touched. Such a misfortune as this appealed to her
imagination, and this most unexpected, uncalled-for candour disarmed
her antagonism.
“Your jewellery! Oh, how dreadful!” she cried with deep sympathy. “I
think I could bear anything but that.”
She glanced down at one of the diamond bracelets her mother had sent
her on her wedding-day, and hugged the little arm that bore it close
to her breast. Mrs. Bohun sympathised less sensationally.
“Dear me!” she said gently. “Not your pearls, I hope, Clarissa?”
“Yes, my necklace; the double row with the dragon clasp.”
“Dragon clasp!” repeated Nouna quickly.
“Yes, it had a very uncommon clasp: a dragon in diamonds, with ruby
eyes.”
Nouna stared at her with open mouth, in a manner which would have
excited remark in anybody but this eccentric little person; but she
offered no further observation, although she remained seated near the
elderly ladies, considering Lady Florencecourt’s face with deep
interest, until the boys came in for a dull half-hour in the
drawing-room. To them the lively little lady was an unexpected
blessing. By the time the butler marched in with a huge Bible and
Prayer-book, Nouna was sitting on a sofa, with Regie leaning over her
shoulder and Bertie’s arms round her neck, to the great scandal of
Lady Florencecourt, who regarded her sons rather as a handsome present
she had made to their father than with any more vulgarly maternal
feeling, and who would have been shocked at such a breach of filial
respect as a spontaneous hug.
Nouna, who found nothing very exhilarating in the assembled company
after the departure of the boys, seized the very first opportunity to
retire, and was up stairs before anybody else. When her husband
followed a little later, he found the door of the room wide open, the
candles flickering and guttering in the draught, but no Nouna. Her
jewel-case was open on the dressing-table, and the contents were
scattered about in reckless disorder, a bracelet lying on the floor, a
diamond earring glistening on the top of a high-heeled boot, a couple
of rings embedded in a hairbrush. George looked into the
dressing-room, and then went back into the corridor, where he heard a
long way off the rattling of the Fiji shells on his wife’s dress. He
drew back into the room, and received her in his arms as she rushed
through the door like a whirlwind. She gave a little cry when he
caught her.
“Where have you been?” he asked.
“Where have I been? Oh, nowhere; only speaking to Lady Florencecourt’s
maid.”
“What about?”
“Nothing. I wish you had let me bring Sundran; I can’t do my own
hair.”
“Why, it isn’t much longer than a boy’s. I might as well say I
couldn’t do mine. I’ll be your maid to-night.”
She made no objection, but quietly tilted up her chin as an intimation
that he might unfasten her frock for her, with such an unusual air of
reflective absorption that he stopped in the midst of his careful but
clumsy ministrations to ask her what she was thinking about.
“Nothing,” said she, as her glance fell on her scattered trinkets.
“What have you been doing with your jewellery?” And he picked up some
of the ill-used treasures and piled them up in the velvet tray. “Why,
where’s the pearl necklace that you keep on the top?”
He saw a slight but rapid change in her face which convinced him that
he was, as the children say at hide and seek, “warm.”
“Have you lost it? Is that the trouble?” he asked kindly.
“There’s no trouble. I left it at home,” she answered with so much
vivacity and mendacious promptitude that George saw it would be of no
use to ask more questions.
On the following morning, however, his curiosity was appeased in an
unexpected and startling manner. As soon as he appeared at the
breakfast-table, he was conscious of a decided change for the worse in
the already chilly and depressing atmosphere. If Lady Florencecourt
had been cool, her husband constrained, the day before, the lady was
an icicle, her lord a statue this morning. Lord Florencecourt avoided
him, would not meet his eyes, and absolutely--so it seemed to
George--slunk out of the way of Nouna altogether; while his wife
maintained all through breakfast such a frigid attitude to both the
young couple, that George was boiling with indignation before the meal
was ended, and contrived to meet his hostess alone within a few
minutes of the break-up of the party. He had some difficulty in
keeping the anger he felt from bursting through the formal speeches in
which he told her of an unexpected summons which would force him and
his wife to curtail their visit and return to town that very morning.
“As soon as you please, Mr. Lauriston,” said Lady Florencecourt,
icily. “And as I may not have another opportunity of seeing your wife
alone, perhaps you will be kind enough to return this to her”--she
handed George a small parcel, through a torn corner of which peeped
the pearls he supposed Nouna to have lost--“and to inform her that
though, like other ladies, I am forced to submit to be robbed by my
husband to deck out another woman, I am not reduced to receiving back
my own jewels from her hands when she has done with them.”
George looked at her very steadily, and gave no sign of the tempest
within him except the trembling of his hands.
“I will give this packet, not to my wife, but to your husband, madam,”
said he in a very low voice. At that moment Lord Florencecourt’s
footsteps were heard outside the door, and George added: “I shall not
have to wait for an opportunity.”
Upon the first sound of her husband’s tread, the lady had visibly
quailed, in spite of her Amazonian reputation: as he entered the room,
and with a searching glance seemed to take in at once the chief
features of the situation, she made an attempt to walk majestically to
the door.
“Stop,” said he, raising his hand a very little way; “I want to speak
to you. Mr. Lauriston,” he went on, turning formally to the young man,
who noticed that his nervousness of the morning had given place to a
look of steady determination, “if my wife has had the folly and bad
taste to insult you, I apologise for her, and beg that you will take
no steps consequent upon her impertinence until you have first had an
interview with me.”
“I shall be glad to have that interview as soon as possible, Lord
Florencecourt, as I must leave your house this morning.”
“In five minutes, if you like. In the meantime, if you wish to ask
questions about that infernal gewgaw,” and he looked savagely at the
necklace, which George had torn from its covering, “I will tell you at
once I did not give it to your wife, as Lady Florencecourt persists in
imagining, but I sold it to a dealer without the least idea what was
to become of it. Are you satisfied?”
“As to your share in the matter, my lord, perfectly.”
“As for my wife, she shall apologise to you herself.”
“There is no need for any apology,” said George, without condescending
to look in the direction of the lady. “I am quite satisfied with your
explanation.”
He left the husband and wife together, and finding Nouna, who was in a
state of tearful anger against the dragon, he helped her to pack her
trunk, and then filled and fastened his own portmanteau. These tasks
were scarcely finished when Lady Florencecourt, pale, trembling, meek
as a startled lamb, her eyes red with violent crying, her whole manner
so utterly subdued and abject as to make one doubt her identity,
knocked at the door, and finding them engaged in packing, begged them
most earnestly to forget her impatience of the morning and to stay, as
they had intended, until the Monday. Poor Nouna was so much affected
by the evident distress of this haughty personage, that she burst into
tears and put her arms round her, assuring her that she had not
noticed any impatience at all, and that she would be glad to stay. But
George, whose masculine nature was not so easily melted, persisted
quietly but firmly that they were obliged to return to London at once.
Whereupon Lady Florencecourt extracted a promise from Nouna that she
would come to dinner as soon as they should all return to town.
“Oh yes,” said Nouna readily, “I want to see the dear boys again; I
always like boys, but I never liked any so well as Regie and Bertie.”
At these words Lady Florencecourt fell a-trembling again most
unaccountably, and she soon withdrew to order the carriage to take her
guests to the station.
It was a most uncomfortable leave-taking. In spite of her
importunities, Nouna could not see the boys again; Lady Florencecourt
was as much too humbly cordial as she had before been too loftily
cold; and Lord Florencecourt, who accompanied them to the station, hid
a painful nervousness under his usual shield of impenetrable reserve.
At the station, however, a little incident occurred which laid bare
his defences in an untoward manner.
In an honourable determination not to lead Lord Florencecourt into any
meeting with the Indian woman which could bear the appearance of a
trap, George had ordered Sundran to return to town at once, and to get
everything ready for her mistress’s return on Monday. But Sundran had
lost the train, and had to put off her journey; so that she was in the
station on Saturday morning, waiting to go by the very train in which
her master and mistress so hastily decided to travel. She was waiting
on the platform, a limp bundle of white clothes, too proud to take
shelter in the waiting-room from curious glances, but flashing looks
of grand contempt around her with her black eyes, when she caught
sight of her young mistress in the doorway, and hastened up to her
with a low cry of loving welcome. The train was coming up, and as it
was market day, there was a bustling and mildly-excited crowd on the
platform, jostling one another with baskets, and chivying to madness
the solitary porter. In the confusion Lord Florencecourt was for a few
moments separated from his departing guests, whom he rejoined just as
Nouna had mounted into an empty compartment, and was handing her
sunshade to Sundran, who was standing on the doorstep. George stood on
the platform, much excited; as soon as he caught sight of Lord
Florencecourt, for whom the crowd made way with respectful
recognition, he told Sundran sharply that he had got a seat for her,
and she must come to it at once. She stepped down, and he put his hand
on her arm, and made her turn her back to Lord Florencecourt, and run.
In doing so she dropped Nouna’s sunshade. Before George could prevent
her she had stopped, wheeled round to pick it up, and seen the Colonel
face to face.
With a hoarse and guttural cry she drew herself upright, pointing at
him with a lean, dark finger.
“Captain Weston!” she hissed out fiercely, while her black eyes
flashed, and her fingers clenched as if she would have flown at his
throat.
Lord Florencecourt saw her; over his rugged features a dull flush
spread, dying again quickly; he raised his hat mechanically, not
looking at Nouna; and without any change in the fixed expression of
dead reserve he had worn all the morning, turned and made his way
through the yielding crowd out of the station. George bundled Sundran
into a carriage, and went back to his wife just in time to jump in as
the train started.
A quick, shy glance at her face told him she had heard the Indian
woman’s words.