Chloris White was one of those utterly corrupt, abandoned and
dangerous women in whom certain noble and loveable qualities flourish
with a rank and prolific luxuriance impossible in colder and better
balanced natures. She had liked George Lauriston from the first, with
the impulsive yet not altogether undiscriminating liking of a woman
clever enough, while knowing the worse side of men thoroughly, to
understand that there is a better and to work upon that also when it
suited her purpose. When chance threw the young officer in her
daughter’s way, she spared no pains both by her own investigations and
those of Rahas, in whom she found an agent ready to her hand--subtle,
secretive, and not above bribes--to find out whether Lauriston as a
son-in-law would satisfy her affection and her ambition for Nouna.
Every report proved satisfactory; there was nothing against him but
his poverty; and as Chloris White, at three-and-thirty still in the
height of her vogue, helped herself with both hands to the savings of
centuries and revelled in the spoils of city and county, there was no
reason to make that an insuperable obstacle. For this half-bred Indian
woman was born ambitious, and was determined that in her child should
be fulfilled such aspirations as she had failed to realise in her own
person.
The illegitimate daughter of an Indian Maharanee and an English
government official, Lakshmi--for that was Chloris White’s real
name--had been born with the germs of marvellous beauty and
ungovernable passions, both of which developed until at fifteen, when
she became, by various artful ruses, the wife of a deeply-enamoured
young officer, who was even at the time ashamed enough of his marriage
to wed the little witch under an assumed name--she was the most
fascinating little fury in the Presidency. Though her husband had
well-founded suspicions of her infidelity, she was clever enough to
prevent his obtaining proofs of it, and at last, despairing of getting
free in a more legal manner of this burden upon his life, a half
savage wife, ignorant, vicious and violent, he left her when his
regiment returned to England, leaving such provision as he, then a
poor lieutenant, could afford for her and his child, a girl only a few
weeks old, whose paternity he affected to doubt. Four years passed,
during which he heard no more of either of them. The poor lieutenant
became, by unexpected deaths, heir to a title; he wanted to marry.
Detectives, set to work both in England and in India, could find no
trace either of mother or child. Finally, the husband decided that
they must have gone down in the whirlpool, as such a woman would be
most likely to do. He risked the venture and married. For years more
no rumour of the lost wife troubled him, until, when he was Viscount
Florencecourt, Colonel of his regiment, and father of two boys for
whom he would have died, a horrible phantom rose, conjured up by a
letter from the solicitors Messrs. Smith and Angelo, who made known to
him that his wife, Lady Florencecourt, had arrived in England. He
tried silence, denial; but the wild Lakshmi had grown into a
remarkably capable woman, and her lawyers were furnished with ample
proofs that the lady now leading a notorious life in London and the
little dare-devil imp whom the young lieutenant married seventeen
years ago, were one and the same person. She had ferreted him out,
hunted him down.
Lord Florencecourt submitted; he would consent to anything, if she
would only hold her peace. At first Lakshmi was merciful, contenting
herself with a warning that his daughter had claims upon him to which
he would have to give ear by and by. Then, having heard of Lady
Florencecourt’s pearls, Lakshmi demanded them for a wedding gift to
his daughter. It was at this point that he saw Nouna by accident in
the barrack-yard at Hounslow, and the fact was sprung upon him that
this daughter of whom he was in vague dread was already the wife of
his favourite officer. The next blows followed quickly: he must allow
a thousand a year towards the support of the young couple, must cause
his “exclusive” sister to call upon them, must induce Lady
Florencecourt to receive them. The wretched man had fulfilled every
command, unable to console himself even with the reflection that these
troubles were undeserved. At last, fearing that Lady Florencecourt’s
rudeness to Nouna, whom she suspected of being his daughter, would
bring down upon them the last, worst punishment, he had to confess the
whole story, and purchase her civility to young Mrs. Lauriston at the
price of such a course of lectures, curtain and otherwise, as the mind
of man recoils from considering.
For her husband Lakshmi had no mercy. He had treated her badly, the
first and the last man who had ever had a chance of doing so, and the
power she now held over him she used with the cruelty of a nature in
its depths half savage still. But for this young fellow, who had
treated her child with quixotic honour and delicacy which she, of all
women, knew how to appreciate, she felt, when the awful discovery of
her identity stunned him into momentary idiotcy in her presence, an
impulse of pity and tenderness almost as strong as any she had ever
felt for the daughter whom Chloris with all her faults adored.
Lauriston’s good looks also, his muscular figure and healthy,
sun-browned face added considerably in her sensual eyes to the
attraction his chivalrous character gave him. As he still leant back
against the wooden support of the verandah, staring not at her but
over her head in a struggle to get back his wits and realise the
nature of the blow which had stunned him, Chloris White came forward
and laid her hands winningly upon his shoulders with a pretty maternal
air of compassion, which was the sincere expression of a kindly
impulse tempered by an ever-present professional sense of the
picturesque and moving. Her touch, the glance down at her face which
it compelled him to give, brought remembrance back in a flood and
filled him with loathing so overwhelming that he affected to stagger
back inadvertently from the inadequate support on which he was
leaning. Respect for women dies hard in men of decent lives, and
George would not have had even this abandoned woman know the horror
and disgust she excited in him. She had kept her child pure, he must
remember that; but all the stories he had heard of her unequalled
rapacity and depravity rushed into his mind with the lightning
rapidity of thought in moments of intense excitement, and gained a
horribly fascinating force of likelihood as, by the light of all he
knew about her, he examined the face of Lord Florencecourt’s wife.
Chloris White was still at thirty-three a woman of surprising beauty,
of small, lithe, youthful figure, and face far surpassing her
daughter’s in perfection of feature. But the daring process of
changing her hair from raven black to a subdued golden tint had
rendered necessary a change of complexion which gave a weird
prominence to her long, black-fringed eyes, and helped to stamp the
countenance with the unmistakable impress of evil. There was in her
beauty none of the essential coldness of the English types, whose
worst representatives lure for the most part at the outset by an
appearance of straightforward innocence in the gaze of confiding blue
or grey eyes. She was a glowing spark from the forge of Evil, burning,
searing, daringly brilliant and unmistakable, whose allurement
appealed directly to the viler side of men; her attractions were the
poisonous charms of stagnant waters and forest swamps, of venomous
reptiles that hang or creep in sinuous curves where vegetation is
rankest, where no breeze penetrates to disperse the fumes of damp and
decay: her beauty was the beauty of corruption.
George Lauriston was not the man to remain long the prey of vain
imaginings; almost as soon as he recovered full use of his mind after
the first stunning shock, he was entirely himself again, understanding
that a contest between them was inevitable, and deciding as rapidly
what were to be his chief weapons. His first impulse had been to avoid
a discussion, by withdrawing at once without an explanation, resigning
his commission, and emigrating with Nouna to the uttermost parts of
the earth. But close upon this idea had followed the certainty that
this spoilt creature, baffled in her ambition for her child, would use
the means of compensating herself offered by her hold over the
Colonel, and by proclaiming and proving herself to be the real Lady
Florencecourt, bring ruin to the family. Chloris also prepared herself
for a struggle. She knew that the cynical philosophy which would
quietly accept a daughter and a fortune from hands such as hers, was
not to be found in company with the virtues for which she had chosen
her son-in-law.
Therefore, with head bent like a penitent Magdalen, so meek that the
harshest could not spurn her, she drew back as it in shame, and
addressed him in a low murmuring voice of an indescribably vibrating
quality, sweet, deep-toned, and penetrating as the sound-waves of an
organ through quiet aisles. The voice, like the face, shook George
with an unspeakable horror. For in every glance, in every tone, he saw
a sickening, awful likeness to the young wife he worshipped, and in
the power this depraved woman exercised over half the fools of the
day, his unhealthily excited fancy saw a hideous burlesque of the
undue dominion Nouna had already got over him. He listened without
looking at her at first, until the irresistibly melting tones made it
impossible to forbear meeting her eyes in the searching demand to know
whether the face would belie the words.
“You will not let me touch you, the husband of my own child. I do not
blame you. I can even say I am sorry you have come, since to meet me
has given you pain. I am not proud for myself, I am only proud for my
child--my children. While I kept myself apart from you for your
happiness, my soul, all that is best and truest in me, was with you.
You are my judge, my son, but remember that.”
Even the high-flown speech was like Nouna in her serious moods. George
glanced at her. Her eyes, to which the rest of her face, beautiful as
it was, seemed in moments of excitement only a sort of unnoticed
setting, were like liquid fire.
“I am no judge, madam,” he said, “and I thank God for bringing me here
to-day.”
Her expression changed; evidently she had prepared herself for an
outburst of anger, and was less able to cope with a masculine
quietness.
“You are glad you came to-day?” she faltered, not knowing what this
might portend, for her visitor gave no sign of working himself up to a
good, warming height of indignation.
“Yes. You would have let me go on for months living like a skunk.”
The Magdalen look gave place at once to a vindictive tightening of the
lips and narrowing of the eyes.
“You are not satisfied with what I have done for you?”
“No, madam.”
“Why, what would you have?”
“I would have had you let me know the truth. I deserved it.”
“But you would have objected to my daughter’s having the fortune which
made her happy.”
“If you knew I should object, you had the less right to deceive me.”
He was not going to prate about his honour to this creature; he did
not even think she would understand him, but he was mistaken. Now that
she saw what tone he was going to take she adjusted hers to meet him,
and became cool and haughty.
“My daughter’s nurse, Sundran, came to me to-day to tell me where to
find the husband who deserted me when I was no more than a child; she
thought, poor woman, I did not know. I gathered that her recognition
did not surprise you.”
“Well, madam.”
“Will it satisfy you to have your wife acknowledged as the Honourable
Nouna Kilmorna, only daughter of Lord Florencecourt?”
“No, madam. Nouna is my wife, that is enough for me. I only want you
to understand that she must be content to live for a few years like a
poor officer’s wife, some day she shall have as much rank and position
as she could wish.”
“Oh, that would be charming for you; but Nouna! Do you think she is
the sort of girl to be happy by herself in stuffy lodgings while you
are amusing yourself ‘getting on’? Come, you know better. If she
couldn’t be contented like that during her honeymoon, do you think she
could now?”
The bitterness of this thrust, to which experience had given a barbed
point, made him wince.
“She is only a child,” said he; “feeling my love about her day by day,
she will learn to be happy in that, as you would have been if your
husband had been all your heart wanted,” he added, as a happy thought.
But Chloris White only laughed, having the coarse cynical honesty of
her kind. “Do you really believe that?” she said. “Well, you are
wrong. In my case, because no one man could ever have been to me all
my heart wanted; in Nouna’s case, because she is, disguise it what way
you like, her mother’s child. Give her jewels, new gowns, gaiety,
luxury, and you may hold what room there is in her heart for a man;
shut her in two rooms, restrict her to one frock for each of the
seasons, and you will see, if you don’t know, just how much happiness
your love is able to give her. I tell you she must have pleasure,
pleasure, pleasure; and if you won’t let her accept it openly, passing
through your hands as a gift from you, I’ll let her have it secretly
through somebody else’s.”
A spirit of evil seemed to flash a hideous lightning across her
handsome face as she uttered this threat. George was horrorstruck.
“You don’t mean what you say,” he said, catching his breath. “You, who
were noble enough to keep apart from your child for her sake! You
would not destroy your own work now!”
“I would destroy anything when I’m worked up to it,” she said coolly.
“Listen, Mr. Lauriston. The world makes distinctions as to the ways in
which money is made; but it makes none as to the way in which it is
spent; that can and does confer nothing but honour. Well, that part of
the business is all I ask of you. As to the way I get it, why many a
man of your trade might think himself blessed if he got his with so
clear a conscience. There are no villages burned to give me a cocked
hat, nor towns plundered that I may build a villa. My money’s my own,
to do what I like with, and I choose to give it to my children to make
them a position in the world. Nobody knows where it comes from, and
nobody need know; and you can call it your wife’s money, not yours, if
you are so particular. But she must and shall have it. Money is not
made by looking at it by me more than by anybody else. I’ve worked for
a fortune to give my daughter, because I mean her to have the best of
everything in this world. I’m ready even never to see her except by a
trick, but I won’t have my work foiled just at the last by any
squeamish folly on your part; if you won’t have wife and fortune
together, you shall have neither, I swear.”
“You don’t seem to understand, madam, that your control over your
daughter ceased when she became my wife.”
“Did it?” retorted Chloris White, with scornful emphasis. “Well, you
can entertain that opinion, if it comforts you, for a few days longer.
But don’t depend too much on your legal rights when you are dealing
with a person who lives outside the law.”
“I can trust your love for Nouna to conquer any impulse you might have
to do her harm through me,” said George, a bull-dog defiance rising in
him and affecting the tone in which he uttered these sufficiently
pacific words.
“You can trust me to keep her from having her life ruined by any man’s
pig-headedness,” said Chloris, throwing herself into a long cane
lounging chair with much spirit in voice and attitude. “Do you think I
brought up Nouna virtuously to secure her happiness?” she asked
mockingly. “No, I meant her to be happy in spite of it. I meant her to
enjoy all the honours of the great world, and all the luxury of the
other one; I meant her to become what she has become, a society pet, a
society lion, by the very ways and manners which in me are Bohemian,
shocking, impossible. Oh! They are easily gulled, those
feather-brained ladies of the ‘best’ society. However, it is ‘the
best,’ and so I mean my daughter to keep there.”
“You don’t understand these people,” said George, disgusted by her
shameless cynicism, but resolved to go through with the contest, and
to make the best terms he could. “She has made friends among them now,
real friends. When they hear she has lost her fortune they will simply
try to make up for the loss by inviting her more, making more fuss
with her than ever.”
Chloris White shook her head contemptuously.
“Poor gentility,” she said, “that depends on the broken dainties cast
to it by its betters--for betters in money are betters in
everything--is worse off than the frank poverty that lives on offal.
Now poverty in any shape is loathsome, and it shall not come near my
daughter. Fortune with honour is the best possible thing, but fortune
without honour is the next best, infinitely better in Nouna’s case
than any amount of love in garrets. You see I am acting on principle.
If you insist--and I see by your English bulldog face you mean to
insist (it is a trick of your country, and of no use with a woman) in
refusing my daughter the fortune she is entitled to, I shall encourage
the suit--the secret suit--of a lover who will be more compliant.”
She took a cigarette-case from the table beside her, and striking a
wax match on a tiny box that jingled among other objects from a
_châtelaine_ at her side, she lit a cigarette, and puffing a long
spiral cloud into the air above her, watched it disperse and fade with
much apparent interest.
To George she had become, in the course of the last few moments, no
longer a beautiful, depraved human creature with one fair spot in her
nature that had to be touched, but a slimy noisome thing to be shaken
off as quickly as possible and avoided for ever. He looked at her
steadily, so steadily indeed that she turned her head on one side, and
shot at him an oblique glance, in preference to bearing the full brunt
of a gaze of such mortifying disgust and contempt. Then, bowing to her
very coldly, he said he was afraid he had intruded upon her too long,
and seeing a few steps off the open door by which he could pass
through to the front of the house without re-entering the
drawing-room, he was retreating towards it, when a voice in the hall
struck upon the hearing both of him and of Chloris at the same time,
causing her to start up from her lounging attitude with a bound of
thirsty triumph, crushing all his cold armour of pride and laying bare
in a moment the wounded passionate heart it had hidden.
He sprang forward, panting, feverish, imploring, like a weak boy at
her mercy, held her wrists, looked down into her face with eyes that
let light into the recesses of passion within him.
“For God’s sake spare her, don’t let her see you, Nouna--she has come
to see Chloris White, the devil’s part of you, about young Wood. Don’t
see her. Remember, she is your child and my wife. Show the angel’s
side once more. Be true to your own soul. Listen. You are your child’s
religion. While she worships you, while she holds you the ideal of all
that is pure and lovely, the spirit of good in you is kept alive by
her devotion. If you cast yourself down from that altar you kill in
yourself everything that is not vile, base, devilish; you ruin the
mind you and I have watched over and kept pure; you throw yourself and
her into an endless hell. You are a woman--you will have pity.”
He poured out these words in a hot lava-torrent of passionate emotion
which surprised and moved the woman to whom sensations were the breath
of life. However, she was not conquered; she looked up in his face and
said with languid insolence:
“So! One can make fire out of wood at last! Well, you should have woke
up sooner. I intend to see my daughter.”
George heard the patter of Nouna’s steps on the polished floor of the
room within. With one rapid glance at the window, which was some few
feet further down the verandah than the spot where he stood, and
without one word or sound to warn her of his intention, he snatched
Chloris up in his arms, and ran across the lawn towards the river in a
slanting direction away from the window, to a spot where he saw a
couple of boats moored to the bank. Utterly taken by surprise, and as
instinctively submissive as her sex usually are to a masculine _coup_
of this kind, Chloris White scarcely uttered a faint exclamation
until, seeing the direction of their course, she asked, coolly:
“Are you going to drown me?”
“No. Though it’s what you deserve,” he panted briefly. And reaching
the boats, he got into the nearest, a solidly built skiff, put Chloris
down on the cushioned seat in the stern, pushed the boat off, and
paddled her easily with the tide to the shadow of the trees, so that
Nouna, if she came to the window, might not see them.
“What do you expect to gain by this astonishing stratagem?” asked
Chloris.
“I intend to prevent you seeing Nouna until she has got clear of the
house.”
“In the meantime young Wood will have met her, she will have found out
that Chloris White is at home, and will have made up her mind to wait
until she does see me.”
George made no answer. He was indeed considering what step he should
next take. Luckily for him his silence, which was really the result of
want of resource, impressed Chloris White differently. She was not
used to being thwarted and treated as a person of small account, and
she grew impatient and fretful at being made a fool of. To be forced
to sit, with a complexion adapted for the half-light of the verandah
and the lamps of the dinner table, in the full yellow glare of the
evening sun, hatless, with no becoming sunshade to throw a soft shadow
over her face, exposed without any of the clever artifices of her
treasury to the disillusionised stare of the pleasure-crews that rowed
past, was an ordeal which subdued the haughty security of this queen
of an artificial realm more surely than innocent George could have
guessed. She looked up at him, blinking in the unaccustomed strong
daylight, with a malignant expression of spiteful hatred, and then
looked over the boat-side into the shallow water, cowering miserably
before the combined forces of blunt, coarse, overmastering nature, and
blunt, coarse, overmastering man.
“Well, you have got your way this once--make the most of it,” she said
bitterly. “Let me get back on the bank; the sun makes my head ache.”
“You will let her go without seeing her?” said George, utterly
unconscious in the earnest realities that were occupying him, of the
frivolous details which had gained his victory, and suspicious of her
good faith.
“Yes, yes, yes, I tell you. She can go and you can go--the sooner the
better. I am worn out with your coarse violence; I must go to my room
and lie down.”
George paddled slowly back to where there was a pathway among the
trees. An inkling of the truth broke upon him as he compared the
superb disdain and contemptuous coolness with which this woman had
treated him in the verandah with the broken-spirited petulance she
showed now. He became rather ashamed of his stratagem, and helped the
humbled woman to land very gently, with lowered eyes, feeling for the
first time a spark of human kinship with her in this little exhibition
of unamiable nature. “I am sorry if I have been rough,” said he
humbly. “You see I have been much disturbed to-day.”
She made no answer, being by this time safe on the bank. She gave
him--feeling more at ease already in the shade of the trees--one
flashing, enigmatical glance which, while it did not betray her
thoughts or her feelings towards him very definitely, yet renewed the
impression of evil which her feminine helpless querulousness in the
boat had for the time laid in abeyance; then she turned, and letting
her golden-coloured gown trail after her on the narrow path, she
walked away with the free motion from the hip, and graceful, alluring
bearing which had come to her with her Eastern blood. But to George
she looked, as she got further and further from his sight in the black
and dim recesses of the plantation, like a huge, sinuous serpent, with
head and upper part raised from the ground, ready to spring at and
coil round its victim.
He remembered with a start that her word was not to be relied on, and
bringing the boat with a few strokes back to where he had first found
it, he jumped ashore, made fast the painter, and crossed the lawn
rapidly to the window of the drawing-room. Nouna was there alone,
leaning over a low chair, utterly absorbed in the picture of Guinevere
at the window. She turned round on hearing footsteps, and screamed at
sight of her husband. He sprang across the floor to her; but, struck
suddenly with a terribly vivid sense of the likeness between her and
the wretched woman he had just left, he felt his first impulse to take
her in his arms freeze up, and merely said that she must come home
with him. She cast a last lingering look of admiration at the
paintings on the walls, and let her husband lead her out through the
hall, where she tried to lag behind him with inquisitive glances into
all the corners, burying her head among the hot-house flowers in a
subdued ecstasy of enjoyment, and altogether showing a manifest
reluctance to leave this strange little paradise of delights. They
walked down the avenue in silence, except that he told her to make
haste, and rebuked her rather sharply for a stealthy glance behind her
at the house.
At the lodge-gates the fly in which he had come was waiting. When he
had helped her in there came upon him a strong sense that he and
she--an ill-assorted pair enough, with many a struggle and a
heart-pang in store for them--were all that was left, each to the
other, in a mass of tumbled ruins of fair prospects that had been
solid and stately that morning. And as she cowered, very silent and
subdued, expecting a scolding for her escapade, he put his arms round
her, just before the sheltered road where they were driving joined the
highway, and pressed a fervent, throbbing kiss on her lips. She
returned it demonstratively, according to her wont, and then, as they
were close upon the High Street, they had to calm down their
exuberance, and he asked:
“What were you thinking about, Nounday?”
“I was thinking how lovely it would be to live in a house like that,”
she answered _naïvely_.
It was natural enough, and George said so to himself, and would not
let himself be tortured by the thought that the innocent remark was
significant.