Throughout the journey back to town from Richmond there was, after
that brief caress, scarcely more communication between George and his
wife than if they had been strangers. Nouna, surprised in a flagrant
act of disobedience, was disposed, by the very leniency with which she
had been treated, to look upon her husband’s reserve as ominous; while
he on his own side was too much absorbed in considering what steps he
ought next to take to dispel her fears of punishment by so much as a
few gentle words.
The fact was that George, who, like other reserved people of strong
feelings, could only control the expression of those feelings, when
strongly excited, by mounting over himself the strictest guard, wore
on this occasion an unconscious panoply of sternness which was far
more alarming to the impressionable Nouna than the most passionate
outpouring of invective could have been. As the hansom they had taken
from Waterloo Station drove up to the door of their house, and George
flung the doors open with a sudden impulsive movement forward as if he
would have sprung out without waiting for the driver to pull up, he
was recalled to a consciousness of his wife’s presence by a frightened
moan at his elbow, and looking round hastily, he saw her huddled up in
the corner watching him with eyes full of fear. The sight startled him
horribly, for the discovery of the evening had poisoned his mind with
evil knowledge and rank suspicions.
“What is the matter? Why are you looking frightened?” he asked with a
constrained look and tone which seemed to the frightened creature both
fierce and harsh.
Nouna drew a long, shivering breath and did not answer, her eyes
moving with the helpless, agonised expression of a field-mouse
imprisoned for a few moments in human hands. Not in the least
understanding the effect his manner had upon her, Lauriston’s
suspicions suddenly took form as he remembered the presence of Rahas
at Thames Lawn. As a matter of fact Nouna was entirely ignorant that
either the Oriental merchant or Sundran was at the house she had just
visited with the harmlessly quixotic intention of pleading for Dicky
Wood. But Lauriston could not know that, could scarcely at that moment
have believed his wife’s oath if she had sworn the truth. He turned
sharply round in his seat to get a full view of her face, and she,
scared out of all self-control, uttered a little shriek. He did not
touch her, he did not attempt to reassure her; with a heavy, hopeless
sigh he turned away, took off his hat, and passed his hand over his
forehead. They had reached home, the footman was advancing from the
open door; George noticed with disgust that the man must have
witnessed the little scene. He got out and held out his hand to his
wife, who rejected it and hung back until he quietly gave place to the
servant, and walked to meet the Colonel, the sight of whom on the
pathway a short distance from the house, had been the cause of his
start forward in the hansom.
As the two men met they exchanged eager, anxious glances.
“Well!” said the Colonel shortly.
Lauriston, who looked haggard, white, and shaken, waited for him to
speak further.
“What has--she done?”
Unwilling so much as to mention the name of the woman he reluctantly
acknowledged as his daughter, Lord Florencecourt glanced towards the
house she had just entered to indicate whom he meant.
“Done! What has she done? God knows.”
“Well, what do you suspect? You can speak out to me; I am not
sensitive now. Has she done--the worst? You looked at her as if you
could have killed her. I saw as you passed.”
Poor George stared at him in consternation.
“I looked--at my wife--as if I could have--killed her!” he repeated
stupidly.
“Yes, by Jove, you did.”
George said nothing more for a few moments, being altogether shocked
to learn that he could become unconsciously the most repulsive of
tyrants to the very creature whom, in all the wreck of his life and
his hopes, he unswervingly and with a new smarting fervour, adored.
“I suppose,” he said at last, “I’m going off my head. I swear I hadn’t
the least idea there was anything unusual in my manner. Poor little
thing!” he murmured abstractedly, while the Colonel continued to
regard him very curiously.
George turned instinctively towards his home, and glanced through the
trees at the windows of his wife’s room with a great yearning in his
whole face. The Colonel put his arm briskly through the young man’s,
and tried to lead him towards the nearest gate. They had wandered into
Kensington Gardens.
“Come and dine with me at the Wellington Club. I’ve called twice at
your place since I left you, and have been hovering about ever since
on the look-out for you. Come--a glass of Rudesheimer----”
George drew back. “No, thanks, Colonel; I can’t come to-night. I must
go back to my wife. You see--leaving her like that----”
He stammered and stopped. The Colonel considered him again
attentively.
“You’ve not been telling her anything of our talk this afternoon, have
you?” he asked, with a shade of contempt. “I cannot understand that
craze of a newly-married man to be babbling of all his affairs to his
wife. I should as soon think of consulting a new hunter as to an
investment in Consols.”
“I have told her nothing.”
“Then what is the matter with you? You look more upset than you did
this afternoon.”
“I have seen Nouna’s mother.”
The Colonel’s jaw dropped, and his irritability suddenly disappeared.
“Madame di--di Valdestillas?” he said in a subdued, tentative tone.
“Oh, no; I’ve had my way. There’s an end once for all to all humbug,”
answered George bitterly. “I’ve seen Chloris White.”
Then both remained silent for a while. Truly after this there seemed
little to be said. At last the Colonel said in a low voice:
“Now, my boy, you see what I’ve had to live through the last few
years. You don’t wonder any longer at my opinion of women?”
But George felt no sympathetic softening. He thought that a man should
make sure of the death of his first wife before he married a second,
and that he should show a little human feeling for his own daughter.
“I don’t wonder either, Colonel, at Chloris White’s opinion of men,”
he said drily.
“You think you have a grievance against me, I see.”
“Frankly, I do. Why didn’t you make a clean breast of it when you
found it was I who had married your daughter? You might have trusted
me, Colonel, as if I had had no tongue; you know that. And you saw me
fall into a villainous trap and live on that infamous woman’s money.
O God! The thought of it! When just a whisper would have put me
right.”
“Well, well, the murder’s out now, and one sees things differently. I
knew what your wife’s influence over you was, and I thought if I
breathed a word it would get to her ears and set her clamouring for
her pitiful title. A man’s a weak thing in a beautiful woman’s hands,
as no one knows better than I. I’ll do what I can for you; I’m bound
to, and I will. What do you propose to do?”
“Resign my commission, give back every cursed penny I can, and get
employment abroad to work off the rest.”
Lord Florencecourt looked up, startled.
“Resign your commission! You mustn’t think of that. The worst’s over
now; it is I, not you, who have anything to fear from the devil. Give
up your house, of course; I’ll allow you five hundred, six hundred a
year. You are quite free from any obligation, for I acknowledge your
wife is my daughter, and her mother would force me in any case to
contribute to her support. Do you see?”
“Quite. I accept your offer, Colonel, in this way. You shall allow
Nouna five hundred a year until we have cleared off every farthing we
have spent under a misapprehension. But for the future my wife and I
will live on my earnings and what I have besides of my own.”
“But why leave the army?”
“Cowardice, partly. I feel disgraced and beaten down, and I’ve lost
heart for the old ambitions. And--I have other reasons. Over here
there is a constant risk of Nouna’s meeting----”
He hurried this last sentence, but stopped abruptly in the middle of
it.
“You might exchange. Come now, that would solve all difficulties.
Nobody would know the style you used to keep here, and you could make
a fresh start quietly.”
George considered the proposal for a few seconds, and then shook his
head.
“Look here, Colonel, it’s no use denying it; I’m broke--as surely as a
man who’s gone to the dogs on his own account; the only difference is
that I’ve been thrown to ’em. There’s an awfulness about the thing
I’ve been made to do that has bowled me over--pride, self-respect, and
all. I shall work round again all right, I’ve no doubt, but I can’t
set to it in England or in the army. Help me to get away as fast as I
can; it’s the greatest kindness you can do me.”
He had made up his mind past gainsaying. The Colonel was deeply moved,
self-reproach adding force to his compassion.
“If you won’t be persuaded,” he began slowly, “I suppose I must help
you your own way. How would Paris suit you?”
“Any place would suit me where I could get anything to do. And Paris
would be lively for Nouna,” he added, half to himself.
The Colonel would have preferred that Nouna’s name should be left out
of the discussion. He continued: “A young American, a connection of
Lady Millard’s, who is engaged in a bank here called the ‘London, New
York, and Chicago,’ was telling me at their place a few nights ago
that the firm intend to start a branch establishment in Paris, for the
use chiefly of the English and American colonies. They have an opening
for a young man of good birth and address. It’s a wretched thing, I
know, for you,” he went on with a change of voice, glancing again
regretfully from head to foot of the handsome young soldier.
“Can you get it for me?” asked Lauriston, with a first sign of
eagerness.
“I think so, but--the salary is miserable and----”
“What will they give?”
“Something like a hundred and twenty at the outside to begin with.
It’s starvation.”
“Not a bit of it. It’s more than my pay.”
“Yes, but your wife!”
“My wife?” George’s face broke with a ray of a smile. “She shall be
all right. She is no more than a bird to keep; and we shall live very
near the housetops, where she will be at home.”
In fact, the idea of having her all to himself again sprang up a
bright little fountain in desolation, unlooked for in his breast. The
Colonel pulled his moustache. Nouna, he thought, was the sort of bird
to make a very uncomfortable flapping against the bars of any but the
most expensive of cages.
“When can I know whether they will give me the berth?” George asked.
“I almost think, from the manner in which they spoke, that what I
should say about you would settle it. They are particular as to the
stamp of man. You could hear in a week.”
“How soon can I get away, Colonel?”
“As soon as you like; I’ll see that it’s all right.”
“Thanks. I want to wind up all my affairs here quietly, and slip away
at any moment when I have arranged for the payment of the debts we
have incurred.”
“You can make me security for those. And, by the by, I can give you
some good introductions in Paris.”
“Many thanks, Colonel, but it would only be prolonging the social
death-struggle. One can only die game to society on--on the income we
shall have.”
“Don’t you think, for your wife’s sake, you are wrong in resolving to
be so independent? How will you keep her amused?”
“Oh, that won’t be difficult in Paris. The very air is more
exhilarating than here, and she is just the person to appreciate its
pleasures.”
“But the pleasures ladies love are no cheaper there than here,
remember.”
Lauriston would not be cheated out of the rags of comfort he had
collected for himself, and Lord Florencecourt was obliged to leave him
without even discovering how small the income was to which the young
fellow was trusting. The money he had inherited from his aunt--all he
had to depend on besides what his own work could produce--brought him
in only a little over a hundred a year; and he had even been obliged
to encroach upon next year’s income in the early days of his marriage,
when it seemed easier to trust to the literary work he had been
promised for the future than to refuse his new-made wife the pretty
trifles she set her heart upon. Now the idea of making money by
writing again occurred to him, and pricked him to instant action with
the thought that something might still be made of life if Nouna could
only be induced to be happy in her changed circumstances. This was
Lauriston’s weak side. He knew that if Chloris White chose to be as
bad as her word, and to excite Rahas’s evil thirst for Nouna’s beauty,
he should have to enter into a conflict with a stealthy and
unscrupulous enemy, the thought of whose underhand weapons filled him
with fury and loathing. He must get away with his wife at once, as
secretly as he could, trusting that the mother might overpower the
fiend in Chloris, and induce her to leave her child safe in the care
of a man whom she must at least respect. In the meantime the change in
their circumstances must be made known to Nouna without delay.
George returned to the big house which was so detestably impregnated
with the thought of Chloris and her vilely earned money, and inquiring
for his wife, learnt that she was in her bath. This was with Nouna by
no means the perfunctory daily ceremony of Europeans, but was a
luxurious pleasure in which she spent many hours of the hot summer
days, having had a room fitted up to recall, as far as possible, her
dim half-imagined memories of the cool inner courts of an Indian
palace. George knocked at the door and Nouna, recognising the tread,
in a timid and uncertain voice bade him come in. The room was paved
and wainscoted with tiles; the bath, a large one six feet square, but
only three deep, was sunk into the floor with two steps down into the
water on all the sides, the whole being lined with sea-green tiles
that gave a pretty tint to the water. A lamp hung in brass chains from
the ceiling; a long mirror reaching down to the ground occupied the
middle of the wall. A sofa, a rug, a table with fruit and coffee, and
a little window conservatory with thin lace curtains before it, were
all the rest of the furniture. Nouna, in a blue and white cotton
garment which was no great encumbrance, was peering up from the corner
of the bath furthest from the door like a frightened water-nix. As
George came over to her, she made straight for the opposite corner,
and seeing that she did not mean to be approached nearer, he moved
away from the bath and sat down on the sofa.
“I frightened you just now, I am afraid, Nouna,” he began in a very
humble voice.
“No-o,” she answered, plucking up spirit as she saw she was safe from
attack.
“I mean, perhaps you thought me cross and--and rough, because I didn’t
talk to you much on the way home.”
“You were cross and rough.”
“Well, I’m very sorry, for I didn’t mean to be. I had had news which
upset me and made me so wretched that I forgot everything else.”
“What news?” she asked very softly, sliding through the water to the
side of the bath nearest to him, and leaning her bare wet arms on the
tiles of the floor. For she began, now that her fright was over, to
see that he was unhappy.
He paused for a few moments to consider how he should best break it to
her. At last it came out, however, with masculine bluntness.
“You know what you would say, Nouna, if you heard that there had been
a mistake--about the money--supposed to be left us, and that we were
as poor as ever again, and had to give up this house and
everything--even your jewels!”
The water all round the poor child began to quiver with little
widening ripples, as she trembled at the shock of this most dire
calamity; even his previous suggestion of it seemed to have had no
effect in softening the blow. As for George, he felt that all the
previous horrors of the miserable day had produced no pang so acute as
the one he now felt, when he had to deal with his own hands the blow
which crushed, for the time at least, all the bright happiness of the
only creature he loved in the world. He sat like a culprit, with
hanging head and loosely clasped hands, too much afraid of breaking
down himself to attempt to soften the gloomy picture by a word of
hope. It was she who broke the silence first.
“My jewels! No, I sha’n’t have to give those up,” she whispered
eagerly, “for they were given me by mamma!”
George looked at her with haggard eyes, noticing that the mere mention
of her mother soothed her, let in a ray of sweet sunshine at once upon
the black-looking prospect.
“But supposing we were so badly in debt that even they had to be
sold!” he suggested in a hoarse voice that he tried in vain to clear.
“Then I should drown myself!” cried Nouna tragically, and she
descended a step lower into the water as if to fulfil the dread
purpose immediately.
“What, Nouna!” cried George, “don’t you think me worth living for? Do
you think, when I’ve lost everything else, you ought to take away just
what would console me for it all? Do you, Nouna?”
She hung her head, and crawling, meek and ashamed like a truant dog,
out of the water, laid herself face downwards on the tiled floor at a
little distance from his feet. But when he stooped towards her she
said, her voice ringing out with passionate sincerity:
“Don’t touch me! Let me lie here till I’m good, and then you may pick
me up and forgive me.”
“But listen. I’ve something else to tell you, something that perhaps
you will like to hear.”
“What is it?” She raised her head and looked up at him.
“We shall be very poor, as I told you, and sha’n’t be able to have a
nice house, or many pretty things. But I’m going to take you to live
in Paris----”
“Paris!” He had scarcely uttered the word when she repeated it like a
shout of triumph, and springing up from the floor, snatched a
lace-bordered and embroidered sheet which was lying on a little white
porcelain stove in one corner of the room, and wrapping it round her
with one dexterous sweeping movement, slipped off her bathing-dress
like a loose skin from underneath it, and flinging herself on to the
sofa beside her husband, put a transformed and glowing face up to his,
as she whispered in a tone of rapture: “Then I don’t mind
anything--anything, for I shall see mamma!”
With an uncontrollable impulse George drew himself away from her and
started to his feet. He felt sick, and a film gathered before his
eyes, preventing him from finding the handle of the door, which he
sought with cold, clammy fingers.
“George!” said a low voice behind him. He scarcely heard, scarcely
recognised it, and made no answer.
“George!” A little hand found its way to his throat, and was laid
against his neck.
His arms fell down listlessly, and as he stood still and felt that he
was touched by clinging fingers, and heard Nouna’s voice in its most
caressing tones, his sight came again; he looked down and put his
hands on his wife’s shoulder.
“Why are you going away, George? Why are you going away?”
“I don’t feel well, dearest.”
“Well, sit by me, and I will take your head in my lap and nurse you.”
She led him gently back to the sofa. But presently, when she had
curled herself up in a corner of it, and making him lie full length
had pillowed his head upon her breast, and administered kisses and
_eau de Cologne_ alternately with great lavishness, she peered into
his face with a new inspiration, and said mysteriously:
“You are not ill--you are unhappy.”
He protested he was only grieving at the change in their fortunes for
her sake.
Nouna laughed gently. “I was silly,” she said, “and wicked. In the
first moments of surprise one does not know what one says. I don’t
mind at all. I would rather be poor in Paris than rich in London.”
He shivered, though Nouna, with some tact, believing he was jealous,
had not mentioned her mother again. But she examined his face
attentively, and saw that the drawn, hopeless look remained. After a
few moments she slipped her shoulder away very tenderly from beneath
his head, which she transferred to a cushion; and George heard the
door softly shut after her as she went out. He called to her, but she
took no notice, and he supposed she had gone to dress. But in a few
minutes the ghost-like figure glided in again, looking just the same,
and came to where he was now sitting upright on the sofa.
“There!” she said triumphantly, and she put her jewellery, piece by
piece, down to a little gold bar brooch which he had given her before
their marriage, into her husband’s pockets. “You can go and sell them
this minute if you like. You see I don’t mind a bit. Not--a--bit,” she
repeated deliberately, and then looked into his face to see whether
this willing act of self-sacrifice had brought him consolation.
George smiled at her and told her she was a good child; but his smile
was still very sad, and the hand which he placed on her shoulder
trembled. Then Nouna, who was sitting on the rug at his feet, began to
cry quietly; their usual mutual position was reversed; it was she who
now wanted to get nearer to him, and did not know how. A strange
deadness seemed to have come over him, so that he did not notice even
her tears. He was indeed arranging his plans for their departure from
England, with some distrust of his wife’s fortitude at the end. At
last, when amazement at this singular state of affairs had dried her
eyes, and she had sat mournfully staring at her husband in utter
silence for some minutes, a light broke upon her face, and she sprang
up suddenly into a kneeling position. Joining her hands together above
his knees like a child and looking out instinctively at the glimpse of
darkening sky visible between the leaves of the plants in her little
window conservatory, she said with all the solemnity and timidity of
a person who is undertaking for the first time an arduous
responsibility:
“Pray God to comfort my husband George, if I cannot.”
This startled George and broke him up altogether, reserve and
fortitude and manly dignity and all. He snatched her up in his arms
with such impetuous haste that her slippers flew off and exposed
little pink toes to the air, and enfolding her in a hug that went nigh
to stopping her breath, burst into sobs like a hungry and beaten
child.