George Lauriston hurried out of the church, and turned towards his
home still in the heat of a first impulse of passionate anger against
Madame di Valdestillas and Mr. Smith for inciting his wife to deceive
him; but as he walked and reason began to form a crust over the still
flowing stream of passion, he resolved that he would not reproach his
wife with this new concealment until he had accused her instigators,
and learnt from them the meaning of it. With this decision fresh made,
he forbore to enter his house until he should have recovered enough
equanimity not to repel his wife by a fresh aspect of suspicion, and
he was in the act of turning back within a few feet of the door, when
a hansom drove up and Lord Florencecourt jumped out of it.
Catching sight of George, he paid the cabman, and came up to him with
a face in which the younger man fancied he perceived less of
constraint and more of the old frank friendliness than he had seen
there since his marriage. In fact, the Colonel felt that the first of
the barriers between them, that of concealment, was now broken down,
and he began to breast his difficulties more manfully with the
certainty that he was “in for it.”
“I came down by the next train, George,” he said simply; “I thought
when that infernal black woman let out on me, we had better come to an
understanding at once and have done with it.”
“Much better, I should think, Lord Florencecourt,” said Lauriston
rather bitterly. “It would have been better if Nouna and I had been
fairly dealt with from the first, and not forced to begin our life
together in this smothering fog of mystery, deceived a little bit by
everybody, and obliged to get every scrap of knowledge about our own
circumstances by fighting for it.”
The Colonel dug his stick into the ground and avoided meeting his
eyes. “You have heard Sundran’s story, I suppose?”
“Not yet.”
“Well, well, it’s not all my fault,” said he. “An indiscretion
involving a lady now, you know, er--moving in society--you see, one
has not only oneself to consider.”
His manner had suddenly become confused, incoherent, tentative,
utterly unlike his usual soldierly abruptness. He seemed to be drawing
back from his first open and friendly impulse, and to be more anxious
for some exposition of his companion’s sentiments than for an
opportunity of expressing his own. George was quite ready to take up
the challenge.
“An indiscretion, Colonel! It seems to have been a serious one. My
wife signed her name at our wedding as Nouna Kilmorna.”
The Colonel started, taken quite off his guard.
“The d----l she did!” After a pause, he added: “Then, by Jove, she
must know---- Oh, these women, these women, there’s no making a
contract with them! They wriggle out of the terms of it like eels.”
“You are speaking of her mother?”
“Yes, confound her!”
The veteran’s philosophy, which he was fond of putting at the service
of his friends, failed him at such a crisis as this, and left him at
the mercy of the very commonest of all resources--interjectional
expletives. But they did not serve the purpose of the simple
explanation his hearer wanted.
“Things seem to point to a contract there is no wriggling out of,”
Lauriston suggested, as respectfully as the nature of the hint
allowed.
The Colonel looked at George, and saw that he was at bay.
“Perhaps I had better have made a clean breast of it before,” he
admitted grimly; “only it’s one of those deuced awkward things a man
always shunts as long as he can. I did go through a form of marriage
with the--the lady’s mother.”
“With Madame di Valdestillas?”
“Oh, ah, yes, with Madame di Valdestillas. Of course she--she wasn’t
Madame di Valdestillas then. She was a little half-bred Indian gipsy.”
George looked cold. The light tone Lord Florencecourt now seemed
inclined to take, was not, all things considered, in the best taste.
“She was your wife, then?” he said.
The Colonel answered by a slight convulsion of the top vertebræ of
his spine, to admit as little of the accusation as possible.
“Did you divorce her?” he asked, rather puzzled.
“Well, I don’t know whether a divorce out there would be held quite
regular over here. There’s the difficulty, you see.”
From which George gathered in a flash of astonishment that the austere
and respectable viscount had, when the chain of his first matrimonial
alliance grew irksome, troubled no court of law to regain his liberty.
“You understand,” continued the Colonel, meeting his companion’s eyes
full for the first time, “that it is quite as much to the lady’s
interest as to mine that the affair should not become common gossip.”
“To the mother’s interest, perhaps, not to the daughter’s,” said
George coldly.
“How does she suffer? She is received everywhere, made a fuss with,
treated as a lion, as if she were descended from the skies. Would it
improve her position for it to be known that her mother had been
divorced, legally or illegally? What better provision could I, a poor
man, make for her than I do, if she were my acknowledged legitimate
daughter?”
“Provision!”
“Yes, I allow her a thousand a year, supposed to have been left her.
Why not? She is under no obligation, and I----”
“--Will be relieved from the charge for the future. I guessed
something of it this morning, of course, and was only anxious to know
how much we owed you.”
“Owed me! It is not a debt. I acknowledge, I am the first to
acknowledge, the claims of my own child, especially now she is your
wife.”
“Oh, I acknowledge the claims too. It is only my pride that makes me
waive them on behalf of my wife. Until I know all the circumstances of
the case I prefer to stand independently.”
“Why, what further circumstances do you want to know?”
“There are two more versions of the story I must hear before I can
understand all its bearings. You understand, Colonel, that where a
woman is concerned, the man’s view of the question is not enough to
judge by. I must hear Sundran and Madame di Valdestillas.”
“Hear every hag in ---- if you please,” said the Colonel irritably.
“Only I warn you it is foolish behaviour rattling the bones of
decently buried skeletons.”
“If it were only an old scandal I shouldn’t care,” said George with a
deepening of the collected gravity he had shown all through the
conversation. “But you must see, Colonel, that the whole course of our
lives depends on the following into its corners of this wretched
story. My wife and I, starting quietly in a humdrum way, a pair of
very poor town-mice, suddenly find ourselves in a Tom Tiddler’s
ground, and are bidden not to trouble ourselves how we came there, or
why we are inundated with invitations, and our eccentricities treated
as delightful innovations, when a few weeks before they would have
been ‘bad style.’ It isn’t in human nature not to ask why.”
“Why can’t you take my explanation and be satisfied?”
“Because it goes such a very little way. It explains why we receive
one thousand a year, when we are getting and spending five thousand;
why you treat Nouna with secret liberality, but not why you show her
open dislike. Above all it explains your relation with Madame di
Valdestillas, but not your objection to my seeing her.”
The Colonel, who had been fidgeting uneasily with his cane, grew
suddenly still.
“If you see her,” he said slowly after a pause, “she’ll consider the
contract broken, and she’ll ruin every man jack of us; and you and
your wife may say good-bye to domestic felicity as well as I and mine.
Be warned, George; you’d better leave things as they are, for both our
sakes.”
“I can’t,” said Lauriston, who felt that a chill had come upon spirits
and senses at the Colonel’s homely but forcible warning. “No man can
blunder on like this in the dark and be satisfied. Whatever I find
out, it sha’n’t hurt you more than I can help, Colonel.”
He added something about Nouna’s waiting for him to take her out,
anxious to get away. But the Colonel, who seemed loth to part with
him, turned back when they had shaken hands at his initiative, and
said:--
“Madame di Valdestillas is abroad, is she not?”
“So I have been told. But in the mesh of lies they have entangled me
with, I shouldn’t like to answer for the truth of it.”
“Look here, if you will leave this to me, I’ll write to her lawyers
and arrange a meeting for you and me at the same time. And we’ll talk
to her together.”
“Thanks, Colonel. But I can’t wait for that; and I’m not going to
trust to the lawyers this time.”
“But if she is abroad?”
“If!”
This terse reply seemed to disconcert Lord Florencecourt, who left him
without further protest or comment, and made straight for the park.
George went back to his own house and inquired if Sundran had
returned. On learning that she had not, he went up stairs in search of
his wife, but was told she had gone out soon after he himself left the
house. Her husband was not to wait for her to dinner, as she had gone
to see Mrs. Ellis and might stay to tea with her.
Though this freak was perfectly consistent with Nouna’s capricious
character, George was just in the mood to regard the message with
vague suspicions of some trick. However, as he did not know Mrs.
Ellis’s address, he had no means of following her, and seeing that it
was already nearly six o’clock, he started off at once for Mary
Street. The door of No. 36 was opened by a young servant, apparently
new to the place, who told him, in answer to his inquiries, that a
black woman had come there that afternoon to see Mr. Rahas, adding
that after staying a very short time she had gone away again in the
cab which brought her, Mr. Rahas himself putting her in, giving the
direction to the cabman, and at the last moment jumping in after her.
“I suppose you don’t remember what the direction was?”
The girl was a cockney, and scented backsheesh. She nodded with much
shrewdness. George put his hand to his pocket.
“Waterloo station--side for Richmond,” she said promptly.
Richmond! George remembered the address given by Captain Pascoe in his
note. It might be only a coincidence, but a coincidence when one is on
the track of a mystery becomes either a guiding or a misguiding light.
He asked, as he dropped a half-crown into the girl’s hand, whether Mr.
Rahas had returned home, but it was not with the intention of settling
accounts with him then. On learning therefore that he had not come
back yet, George simply went away and got as quickly as he could to
Waterloo.
Thoughts of Lord Florencecourt, Madame di Valdestillas, and the haze
of inconsequent romance which seemed to surround their conduct to
their daughter faded before a fiery fear that this untamable sun-child
to whom he had given all his heart had been led into some trap by
Rahas; for George suddenly remembered that, as he did not know Captain
Pascoe’s handwriting, the signature might have been merely a blind.
Ridiculously unlikely as the supposition was, the unhappy young
husband could think of no less fantastic explanation of the facts; no
reasoning could have dissolved his belief that it was to Thames Lawn,
Richmond, that her sudden journey had been taken, and his only comfort
was in knowing that he had followed her up so quickly that his arrival
there could scarcely fail to be within less than an hour of hers.
At Richmond he darted out of the station and jumped into a fly.
“Thames Lawn. Drive as fast as you can,” he said.
The driver, instead of starting, turned, after the manner of his kind,
to debate.
“Thames Lawn!” he repeated, reflectively. “Don’t know it, sir. Who
lives there?”
“I--I don’t know the name of the people who have it now,” said George.
He was on the point of jumping out of the fly to make inquiries in the
station, when another driver joined in the discussion.
“Thames Lawn!” cried he, “why it’s the place where they foreign swells
live that gives the big parties. Prince and Princess Wesenstein.
That’s the place. Where you drove the young gent that give you half a
sovereign.”
“Oh--ah--yes,” said the other, and touching his hat to his fare with a
nod to signify that it was all right, he gathered up the reins and
started.
A foreign prince and princess who gave big parties! To even an
intelligent Englishman the idea suggested by these words was more
consistent with his suspicions of some grave villainy than the mention
of an English lady and gentleman would have been. Yet the munificent
and showy hospitality implied in the brief description did not agree
with his fears of an ambush. A drive through the narrow High Street,
filled with the overflowing, lively crowd of a bright summer evening,
brought him in a few minutes to the lodge-gates of Thames Lawn. George
left his fly waiting outside, and made inquiries at the lodge. The
Prince and Princess were at home, the lodge-keeper said, but there was
no gentleman of the name of Rahas staying with them that he knew of.
There were often gentlemen with foreign names staying there, as his
highness himself was a foreign gentleman.
“Has he a very dark complexion?” asked George, with a new doubt in his
mind.
“No, he’s as fair as any Englishman, like most Germans,” said the
lodge-keeper, rather superciliously, with for the first time a
suspicious expression in his dull British grey eyes. “There’s a dark
gentleman visiting there this afternoon,” he added, after a few
moments’ consideration, during which he had carefully taken stock of
his questioner, and perhaps satisfied himself that he was not “after
the spoons.”
“Oh, was he alone or with a lady?” asked George, with careful
carelessness.
“Well, sir, he was with a walking bundle of white tea-cloths,” said
the lodge-keeper, rendered more sympathetic by the chance of airing
his own humour.
“You are sure,” said George, with a great heart-leap, “that the lady
was dressed in white, and not in grey, with a grey cap?”
“No, sir; no lady in grey has been here to-day. I can count the ladies
as comes here,” he added, with just meaning enough to give the young
husband an impulse of thankfulness that he had forestalled his wife.
He thanked the man and made his way through a winding avenue of lime
and chestnut trees to a grass-plot studded with flower-beds and
surrounded by a circular drive leading to a large, square-built brick
house, which seemed to rise out of a bank of laurels and other shrubs
lightened by clusters of rhododendrons. The portico was smothered with
creepers, which were carefully trained to extend over the walls. Long
trails of still green Virginia creeper swung backwards and forwards in
the air above a thick mass of geraniums of various colour that were
banked up round the pillars of the entrance. The door was open,
showing at the end of a wide hall a sloping lawn and a glimpse of the
river. As George rang the bell, a gust of wind blew into his face the
petals of overblown roses from stands of flowers that lined the hall,
with perfumes of pungent sandal and sickly sweet exotics. A footman in
a striking livery of purple and gold, whom the lowness of the roof of
the hall magnified into a giant, appeared at once in answer to the
bell, and without coming to be questioned, lifted a gorgeous crimson
and silver curtain with heavy fringes that rustled as it was raised,
and stood aside, inviting the visitor to enter.
George crossed the hall, with an involuntary thought, as he glanced up
at the rich colours of the painted ceiling, and brushed close to a
cluster of delicate flowers unknown to him, that shook fairy bells in
the stirred air, of the vivid pleasure this luxurious extravagance of
scents and hues would give to Nouna.
“I wish to see Mr. Rahas, who called here this afternoon,” said George
to the servant, pausing at the entrance of the room which, the first
glance told him, confirmed the impression given by the hall.
“I will see, sir. I think Mr. Rahas is on the lawn,” answered the man,
still holding up the curtain in invitation to the visitor to pass
under it.
After a second’s hesitation George went in. The room was long and low,
with French windows opening on to a verandah, from which the lawn ran
down to the river. The walls were painted in eighteenth century
fashion but in the nineteenth century spirit. Grey pools fringed with
delicate bulrushes, astride on whose bent heads sat gauze-winged
elves; a smooth summer sea with the phantom ship of Vanderdecken
crossing the sun’s path like a shred of mist; a siren asleep under the
sea with a feathery pink sea-anemone for pillow, the sunlight shining
down through the green water so that you looked and saw the baleful
maid and looked again and lost her. All these pale fairy pictures,
which emerged at intervals out of a fleecy background of cloud and
tree, gave place as the eye travelled round the walls to deeper-hued
representations of less ethereal romance. A golden-haired Guinevere,
with blue unholy eyes and loose mouth red with kisses, looks
lingeringly out of her window in the dawn to where among the grey
trees of the distance the gleam of a helmet makes a faint spark of
silver light. A furnace-eyed, cynical Vivien, with passionate triumph
fanning the glow of her swarthy evil beauty, glides up in the
gathering darkness among overhanging cypresses from where, an
undistinguishable heap, lies the insensible body of the conquered
Merlin. A tiny brown-skinned, lithe-limbed Cleopatra, clad in chains
of coins and little else, crouches submissive and seductive before
Cæsar, raising long black eyes, twinkling with a thousand meanings,
to the conqueror’s face, while the black soldier-slave stands in the
background, still holding the mattress in which he has brought his
queen hidden, and casting furtive, fearful looks at the world-famous
pair.
George shuddered: Cleopatra was like Nouna. He cast only a hasty
glance at the other pictures, noting the last, a scene drawn from the
most moving of modern romances, where Manon Lescaut, bewitching in her
little frills and flounces of butterfly Parisian finery, descends upon
young Des Grieux in his sombre Abbé’s gown, and wins him, with smiles
and tears and caresses, to her for ever.
These wall-paintings were all by well-known artists, and they stamped
the room with a magnificent individuality. The mantelpiece was of
white marble, carved by an eminent Italian sculptor, whose taste ran
much to Cupids. The hangings of the room were pearl-white satin, and
the furniture, in the slender eighteenth century style, was white wood
covered with the same material. Tall white wood cabinets, also lined
with the satin, filled the spaces right and left of the mantelpiece.
Both were filled with old china, a Sybarite’s collection, which
contained no piece unique without being beautiful, or beautiful
without being unique. Handsomely-bound books, of the kind which are
written to be illustrated, lay on the tables among Venetian decanters
and bowls of cut flowers. The floor was of polished wood, cool to the
feet. In the verandah outside were low lounging chairs and a table
with champagne-cup.
After a hasty survey of the room George walked to one of the windows.
Mr. Rahas was in the garden, he thought, the servant had said. But
there was no sign of him on the lawn or under the trees that bordered
it on each side as far as the river’s brink. As George looked out, and
put one foot on the tesselated floor of the verandah to get a wider
view, he heard a sound of a chair scraping the pavement, and then his
own name called. He turned round and saw Dicky Wood peeping up,
flushed, amazed and excited, from under a Japanese umbrella which he
was holding over himself as he lay in a hammock between two of the
verandah pillars. In a moment George’s eyes were opened as he noticed
the free-and-easy manner in which the lad was enjoying himself, in a
light suit, a cigar in his mouth, his tie hanging loose, and observed
the consternation on his face. It was the home of Chloris White, and
Nouna, with her usual wild wilfulness, had stuck to her project of
visiting this royalty of the half-world, and begging Chloris to relax
her hold on Dicky. The coming of Rahas and Sundran remained
unaccounted for; but George for the moment did not trouble about that;
he was thanking Heaven it was no worse.
Such a great light of relief broke over his face that Dicky, who had
tumbled out of the hammock in a shamefaced manner, and with as much
celerity as if it had been his Colonel who confronted him, took
courage to say:
“I--I didn’t expect to see you here, Lauriston.”
“I suppose not,” said George shortly, with less moral indignation than
irritation with this fool for being the cause of the horrible
uneasiness to which he had been a prey. “I haven’t much taste for the
fruit that grows on the high road.”
Dicky, who was not a philosophical admirer, grew red and angry.
“I won’t hear a word against Chloris--I mean the Princess--even from
you, Lauriston,” he began, holding himself very erect.
George put his hand on the young fellow’s shoulder. He was not two
years older than the young scapegrace, but the prestige of his
reserved character gave him authority.
“I didn’t come here to quarrel with you, laddie,” he said gravely.
“When you find what did bring me, you won’t be so loud. Tell me, why
do you call her the ‘Princess?’ Who’s the Prince?”
His thoughts ran again on Rahas.
Dicky glanced round the lawn.
“He isn’t about now,” he said carelessly. “He’s a little dried-up
German with dyed hair and moustache; seventy, if he’s a day.”
“Did you ever meet here a man named Rahas?”
“Rahas! Oh, yes. He’s a sort of commission agent, who gets any Indian
thing you want, from a pound of Assam tea to an elephant. Why, you
know him, of course; for he lived in the same house with Mrs.
Lauriston before you married her,” rattled on Dicky, encouraged by
George’s lenity.
“Does he ever speak of her--my wife?”
“No, he won’t. I began to chaff him once; only a harmless word or
two,” he went on hastily, seeing a change in his companion’s face,
“And he--well, he got all sorts of dark colours, and his eyes spat
fire. I think he once went in for being a sort of rival, you know--at
least, I mean before you knew her.”
“Have you seen him to-day?”
“Yes, I think he’s talking to Chl--the Princess--now somewhere. No, by
Jove, here she is.”
From where they were standing in the verandah they could hear the
rustle of the silver fringe, and the tipity-tap of high-heeled shoes
on the polished floor. She was a little woman, this famous personage,
though it was only by comparison that you could discover the fact; for
she bore herself with the easy dignity of a queen, and before he saw
more of her than a golden head and a robe of buttercup silk peeping
between draperies of black lace, he knew without debate that he had
seen so much grace of movement in no English woman, and only in one
who was not English. As she advanced through the long room in a very
leisurely manner, a couple of spaniels playing about her feet, a
painted fan in her hands, he found that he was waiting for her near
approach with something stronger than curiosity. First his involuntary
admiration of her carriage was changed suddenly, without warning or
definite thought, into a sick disgust that grew, with the next few
steps she took, into horror equally without cause, without
explanation. Then his blood stood still, hot and fiery, in his veins,
and seemed to be scorching his body, as the horror became in a moment
a definite, devilish dread, so ghastly that the mind refused it as a
thought, and the lips were paralysed and could give it no vent. When
at last she reached the open window, and the mild evening light showed
him her face without disguise, he saw nothing but the outline he had
seen in silhouette against the window in his own house on the day he
and Nouna entered it.
His own house! Great heavens, no. This woman’s house; bought with the
foul earnings of her infamous calling!
For Nouna’s mother was Chloris White.
As he realised this, face to face with her, George reeled back against
one of the supports of the verandah, and burst into a stupid idiot’s
laugh. The whole foundation on which heart and brain were busy
building for a life’s work and a life’s happiness, had sunk beneath
his feet and swept all into a hideous, yawning pit of ruin. And so for
a moment the brain gave way and the horrible pain was dulled, while
Chloris White, recognising her son-in-law with a shock, dismissed the
enamoured Dicky on some futile errand, and gave all her attention to
the unexpected and disastrously unwelcome visitor.