Next morning, when rest had restored him to a wider interest and
curiosity, George learnt the missing details of his adventure, and the
circumstances which had led to the journey of Rahas.
On finding that the pretext of her mother’s illness, upon which she
had been enticed to England, was a false one, Nouna, who now mentioned
the once loved name with averted eyes, but without any other token of
her suspicions, had felt guilty and uneasy about her husband; and as
she did not hear from him she slipped away one night to find the house
of Miss Glass, of whose kindness to herself and fondness for George
she retained a warm recollection. As she felt ill and had no money, it
was easy to guess how strong must have been the feelings which
prompted her to leave her mother’s house.
“If I could not be with you, I wanted to be with some one who knew you
and was fond of you, and would help me to get back to you, George,”
she explained.
She had trusted to luck to find her way from Eaton Square to
Kensington, and had been too much frightened to ask for direction. At
last however, when she was so tired and despondent that she had sat
down on a doorstep and begun to cry, a policeman had spoken to her,
and on learning that she had no money, that she wanted to get to
Filborough Road, that she was not sure of the number, but that she had
friends there, he asked her whether she thought she could find the
house if she were in the street, and suggested that she should take a
cab, and ask her friends to pay for it. He had then hailed a hansom
and put her into it, she had found the house without much difficulty,
and Miss Glass had taken her in and nursed her carefully through a
long illness which followed her rash adventure.
At this point of her story poor Nouna broke down in tears, reminded of
a disappointment which had cut her to the heart. “And--my baby--never
came after all,” she whispered in a broken voice, with her head hung
down in pathetic shame; “and I thought it was a punishment because I
came away without asking you, and I thought you were offended and
would never forgive me, because when I wrote to Paris to tell you I
was sorry and ill, and begging you to come, I got no answer. For I did
not know you were in prison, Miss Glass would not let me know. It was
not until weeks later, when--my mother found out where I was, and told
me she had seen you, that I knew, and that I said I must come to you.
So they let me go, with Sundran, to Paris; and first they said you
were at Poissy, and I went there and asked to see you, and there they
said perhaps you were at Toulon. So we went to Toulon, and I wrote to
the governor, and he said I could see you in two months. I felt I
could not live all that time, and I was wondering what I could do to
see you, when the great storm came and damaged the harbour, and they
said some of the convicts would repair it. And my heart seemed to give
a great bound, for I felt that my wish had come true like that. So I
crept down to the harbour and slipped quietly along to the place where
the stones were washed away, and waited until I saw you. When the
second day you spoke to the warder-man and told him to send me away, I
did not mind, for I knew by your face you were not angry; so next
morning I wrote a message to you on the stone where you were working,
and Sundran brought me back to England, for I was getting ill again,
and she was afraid I should die there. And Miss Glass said I must go
to the south where it was warm, and she sent me to Plymouth to her
parents, and they are very kind and good to me.”
“And did you let that wretch Rahas come and visit you?” asked George
in a puzzled voice.
“I will tell you. I got a letter from him a few days ago, saying he
was going to France, and if I pleased, he could take a letter from me
to you, and let me see you, if I was anxious, as he used to let me
see--my mother. I had only to say yes, and he would come down to
Plymouth. I hated him for deceiving me and bringing me to England, but
he declared in his letter that was my mother’s doing. And I was so
hungry for some news of you that I wrote Yes, he might come. Then I
could not keep still for impatience: he telegraphed to me to meet the
train he came by, and I went to the station, and when I found he
hadn’t come by it, I described him to the guard, and he said a dark
gentleman like that had left the train two stations before. There’s a
big boy at the house where I’m staying who does whatever I like, and I
had made him come to the station because I was afraid of meeting Rahas
alone. And I told him to take tickets for him and me, and we went back
by the next train to the station where Rahas got out. The porter said
two gentlemen had got out and gone across the fields; and I knew who
the other one was, and I screamed, and told William my husband had
come back. But he said it was a fancy. We walked across the wet fields
in the dark, and I was trembling so that I could scarcely stumble
along, and William carried a lantern, and said I had better go back,
for we were on a wild-goose chase. And when we came down to the wood,
my foot slipped, and I fell on to the grass, and as he stooped to pick
me up, William saw marks on the ground, as if something had been
pulled along over it. He went a little way slowly until I heard him
give a cry, and I ran to him, and--and we found you.”
She could not say more, her voice was suffocated, her lips were
shaking. But the whitewashed walls of the room in which he was lying,
the hayrick he could see through the window, told George that it was
to a farmhouse he had been brought; and there they spent two days,
until he was well enough to get up and go with Nouna back to her
friends in Plymouth. Then began for them both in the pretty southern
town a new and sweeter honeymoon, marred only for each by a secret
fear for the other. In the first days of their re-union happiness gave
their wasted frames a new vitality which made each feel on the high
road to health, but which made to each only the more evident the pale
face and heavy breathing of the other.
They were sitting together in the sunlight one May afternoon, the
window wide open, the breeze coming in straight from the sea, drinking
in the joy of each other’s presence as they were never tired of doing,
when George passed his hand slowly down his wife’s cheeks, and
shivered.
“Are you cold?” she asked anxiously, nestling up to him and putting
her little arms round him as if to protect him from the spring air.
“No,” he said in a troubled voice, “I’m all right. But I’m afraid this
place doesn’t suit you, Nouna; you’re getting so thin and white. You
are paler than when I came back.”
Nouna’s face changed; after a moment’s pause she sprang up with her
old vivacity, and running to a looking-glass, gazed at her own
reflection for some minutes, and then crept back to her husband’s side
with a bright light in her eyes. As he looked at her inquiringly, she
drew up the sleeve of his coat as far as she could, very gently, and
then baring her own arm also, laid it beside his, and glanced up into
his face with an odd, tender, yearning expression which, after a
moment’s wonderment, opened his own dull eyes. For a few seconds
neither spoke again. Then he snatched her into his arms and their eyes
held each other’s for some minutes in an ecstasy of relief and
gratitude. George had loved his wife better than his career, better
than his own happiness. Nouna, since the fall of her first idol--her
mother--had turned all her devotion to the husband who had cherished
her so tenderly. Both, therefore, dreaded life without the other a
thousand times worse than death, and when it dawned upon them that
they were not to be parted again, there was no further sorrow possible
for them in this world.
“George,” said Nouna at last, in a broken whisper, “if you had never
met me you would have been much happier, for you would have married
that good Ella and have got on in the world and become a great man.”
“Yes,” said he at once.
“Well, aren’t you sorry?”
“No.”
“Why?”
It was not easy to explain. The sailor, sinking with his ship at
twenty-five, does not in his last moments wish that he had been a
grocer, though if he had he might have gone on contentedly selling tea
and candles for half a century. George, struck down by misfortune in
the prime of his youth, had tasted some of life’s supremest joys, and
the rolling years could give him no delight such as he had felt in
running the whole gamut of an absorbing passion. He hesitated before
he answered her.
“If I had not married you,” he said at last, “you would never have
been poor, you would have had as many lovely dresses and diamonds as
you wanted, and nobody would ever have teased you to tell the truth,
or to do anything you didn’t want to do. And yet you are not sorry you
married me. What’s the reason?”
She curled herself about him. “I don’t know,” she said shyly. “You’ve
made me feel things I didn’t--feel--before.”
“Well, Nouna, and you’ve done the same to me. Are you satisfied?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Then so am I.”
And in this state of placid but languid contentment these two
shipwrecked creatures drifted on day by day, tired out by the buffets
of fortune, and making no effort to escape from the black archer who
seemed to have marked them down. The young come to this stage more
easily than the middle-aged; when their strong passions and eager
desires burn low, quenched suddenly by ill-health or desperate
misfortune, all the busy wheels of the world seem to stand still with
them, and they cry, when they feel that the pulse of life beats
weakly: “This is the end!” While older sufferers, who have shaken Time
by the hand, and know his ways, and have learnt to bear his penalties
patiently, see only the daily work interrupted against their will,
waiting to be taken up again when the storm is over.
There came to Plymouth, when Lauriston and his wife had been a week
there together, a friend who saw something of this, and set her wits
to work, after her custom, to put right what she saw was wrong. Ella
Millard had brought her whole family to the town on the plea that a
fortnight of the Devonshire air would improve her sisters’
complexions, and arm them for the triumphs of the coming season.
Having gained over her mother, from whom she inherited her own strong
will, the rest yielded like lambs, and within a week of her resolution
to come they were all installed in a house at the upper end of Lockyer
Street, near the Hoe. By Sir Henry and his two eldest daughters, who
all enjoyed a serene animal health, and to whose lymphatic temperament
trials of the nervous system were meaningless words, the wan faces and
languid movements of the Lauristons were looked upon as altogether
fatal signs. But the more discriminating Ella would not give up hope
so easily. It seemed to her contrary to common sense, and to the lofty
qualities she attributed to him that the man who had been her ideal
should allow himself to be snuffed out of life so easily. Afraid to
depend entirely upon her own judgment in such an important matter, she
refrained from setting her scathing little tongue to jibe at him for
the inertness of his mind until she had found some person of authority
to pronounce upon the health of his body. But George had never before
in his life been in need of a doctor, and scouted the idea of seeing
one now; while Nouna, on whose behalf Ella then pleaded, shrank
sensitively from the ordeal of meeting a stranger, and only consented
at last to see the physician whom George had called in to dress her
arm on the memorable evening of his first visit to Mary Street. The
very next day Dr. Bannerman arrived, and had an interview with both
his patients. The entrance of the tall, slightly stooping figure, the
sight of his dark, penetrating face, lean, lined, and impressive as
that of a magician, raised a flush of excitement to Nouna’s face, and
brought back to her husband’s mind a vivid recollection of the
prophecy uttered by the doctor on that May evening. If the sharp eyed
man of science knew all the circumstances that had chequered
Lauriston’s life since he disregarded that warning, he would indeed
think that his sinister prophecy had been amply fulfilled.
The interview was a short one. The doctor affected to have no
recollection of either of his patients until George followed him out
of the room, and stood face to face with him on the landing.
“You remember me, doctor, I suppose,” he said in a rather shamefaced
way.
“Perfectly.”
“The first time you met me you were kind enough to read me a sermon.
You might read me one to more purpose now.”
“More purpose! No. You can read your own sermon now, and I come to my
proper function, that of curing the results of the acts my warning
could not save you from.”
“If you knew the whole story, doctor, you would hardly blame me.”
“I don’t blame you. How can I blame conduct which brings me a patient?
If all men were wise, we poor medicine men might go sweep crossings.”
“But, doctor, if I had been a wiser man I should have been a worse
one.”
“Not necessarily. And it shows no more virtue than wisdom to throw up
the sponge when you are beaten by Fortune at the first round.”
George reddened. “First and last round too, isn’t it, doctor? Come,
tell me honestly how long you give me to live.”
Dr. Bannerman looked at him steadily.
“If you remain mooning about here, hovering along like a moth in the
sunshine, brooding over things which are past and beyond remedy, I
give you a year. If you buckle to, make yourself new interests in
life, start on a new career, and get new air into your lungs and new
thoughts into your brain, I give you any time from ten years to
five-and-twenty.”
George instinctively drew himself up into a more martial attitude.
“And my wife?” he asked with fresh interest and eagerness.
“I give her as long as she has a strong heart and a brave arm to take
care of her.”
The young man turned his eyes away with a new light burning in them.
At last he said with a tremor in his voice:
“You would not deceive us about this, of course, just to keep us
lingering on a little longer?”
“Not a bit of it. You are both suffering from severe shock to the
nervous system, and because each of you thought you were going to lose
the other, neither has had the energy or the desire to pull round. You
besides have a weak lung, and I tell you frankly you would not make
her majesty such a smart young officer again. But a man of your
intelligence must have other resources.”
George saw by the foregoing speech that very little of his history
during the past year was unknown to the doctor. On the whole, this
knowledge made him feel easier.
“I think I could write,” said he reflectively. “I have already given
myself some sort of training for it, and if only all my ideas did not
seem to be locked up somewhere out of my reach, I think I could
express them at least intelligibly.”
“Good,” said Dr. Bannerman. “Then all we have to do is to find the
key. I think I know a friend of yours whom we can consult about that.
You shall hear the result of our conference very shortly. In the
meanwhile, keep up your spirits and keep out of draughts, and English
literature may yet thank your wife for taking you out of the army.”
George shook his hand warmly, and the doctor left the house. Half way
down Lockyer Street he met Ella Millard, who was burning with
impatience to know the result of the interview. As he came up she
hastily dismissed a fair-haired young fellow of three or four and
twenty, who trotted meekly off at once towards the Hoe. She was too
deeply interested in what the doctor had to tell to utter more than
the word “Well!” in a tremulous voice. She thought, however, by the
expression of his face that his news could not be very bad.
“Well!” he repeated after her.
“_Is_ it well?” said she impatiently.
The doctor smiled. “I think so.”
Her face softened. “I thought it could not be the worst; it would have
been too dreadful--and too foolish,” she added sharply.
“That is just what I told him. Oh! I was very hard with him; I thought
he wanted it. He has had an awful time of it lately, and the poor boy
hardly knows even yet whether he is on his head or his heels. But it
is quite time now that he made an effort to pull himself together. I
gave him a good talking to, I can tell you.”
Her look seemed to implore mercy, but she said nothing. He continued:
“They ought to go away. He thinks he could write, and I should
encourage him to try.”
“And--his wife?” she asked, with a scarcely perceptible diminution of
interest.
“There is nothing organically wrong with her at all. She will be
herself again before him, and then help his recovery.”
“_Help_ him! Do you think so?” asked Ella doubtfully.
“Yes.”
“I thought you told me, that when you first saw her she produced on
you a very different impression.”
“So she did. But then--she was a very different woman.”
Ella’s mouth twitched rather scornfully. She thought that the weird
prettiness of Nouna’s little wasted face had bewitched even this
middle-aged doctor.
“She is scarcely even yet an ideal companion for a man of intellect,”
she said with a slight touch of her worst, most priggish manner.
“H’m, I don’t know,” said the doctor. “Your man of intellect is
generally a man of something else besides; and the housekeeper-wife
and the blue-stocking wife both frequently leave as much to be desired
as--well, say, the flower-wife, if once the flower learns to turn to
the sun, as, I think, little Mrs. Lauriston has done.”
“She is fond of him,” agreed Ella rather grudgingly.
“And what more does he ask of her?”
“Nothing more now; but will it be always so?”
“Who can tell? But love on both sides is a good matrimonial
foundation. Have they any money?”
“Enough to live upon as quietly as they are doing now.”
“Ah! but they want something more than that. He ought to move about,
to travel, and she ought to be tempted back to interest in life with
some of the pretty things she is so fond of. Haven’t they any
relations who could manage that?”
Ella’s face brightened with a little smile as she nodded assent. “I
think the relations can be found,” she said.
Apparently the doctor thought he had put the suggestion into good
hands, for he looked at her very good-humouredly as he held out his
hand and bade her good-bye.
“The gentleman who was dismissed for me will be wishing me all the
nauseous draughts I ever prescribed,” said he drily.
Ella grew superbly disdainful.
“Oh no,” she cried with haughty emphasis. “He is only a silly young
fellow who was a fellow-officer of Mr. Lauriston’s, and who is so fond
of him that he has come down here on purpose to see him, although he
puts off doing so from day to day for fear of waking in him
recollections which might distress him.”
The doctor was more than satisfied with this elaborate explanation.
“I dare say he manages to fill up his time agreeably enough--in this
pleasant neighbourhood,” said he gravely.
And he raised his hat and left her before she had time to utter
another protest.
Now, quite unintentionally, Dr. Bannerman had done a very ill turn to
a most harmless and kindly fellow-mortal. Clarence Massey, the humble
companion whom he displaced at Ella’s side, having been attracted to
Ella by the devotion with which she had worked for his friend George
Lauriston, had raised up an altar to her in his most affectionate and
warm heart, on which, figuratively speaking, he burned incense all day
long. Whenever and wherever she would let him, he followed like a dog,
bearing her snappish fits with beautiful meekness, accepting any
remarks she liked to throw to him, as precious pearls to be treasured
in his memory; gentle, loyal, and devoted always. Ella, who had begun
by laughing at him, had been thawed by his distracted anxiety and
misery over George Lauriston’s misfortunes, until from tolerating she
had begun to like him. And now, just as she was getting so amiable to
him that he had begun to entertain hopes which he had the sense and
modesty to think extravagant, this light suggestion on the part of a
stranger chilled her into anger at the thought that any one should
think her capable of a serious thought for so unintellectual a person
as Clarence Massey.
She had promised, on Doctor Bannerman’s approach, to rejoin Clarence
on the Hoe; but it was with the step of an offended empress that the
plain little girl met this well-provided young fellow, on whom a dozen
mammas of marriageable daughters now fixed longing eyes.
“Well, what does he say?” asked Clarence, afraid from the expression
of her face that the report was bad.
She told him briefly and coldly the substance of the doctor’s opinion,
but without any hint of his last suggestion except the vague
information that the pair had better go abroad. Then she walked
briskly on in the direction of the Fort, and to Clarence’s meek
request for permission to accompany her, she gave the most brusque,
most chilling answer that he could “do as he pleased.” Of course he
pleased to go, and when they got on to the narrow footpath which is
only wide enough for one, he followed with tears in his eyes at the
change in her, wondering what in the world had happened to make her so
unkind to him. Meanwhile, however, an idea had come into her busy
little head which helped the effect of the spring air in restoring her
to good humour; so that when she stopped to look reflectively out to
sea and caught sight of his disconsolate face, she smiled at him with
mingled mercy and majesty and asked him why he looked so miserable.
“I’m not miserable now,” said he, brightening up at once. “It was only
that I was afraid you didn’t want me.”
Ella grew prim again.
“It is very kind of you to come,” said she.
“Ella, don’t say that. How can you say that, when you know very well
how happy it makes me to be with you!”
“Happy! How absurd! I wish, Clarence, you wouldn’t say such ridiculous
things.”
“But, Ella, why is it ridiculous? It’s true, you know it’s true. You
know very well I would follow you to the end of the world if you’d let
me, that I’d do anything you wanted me to, that I’m never so happy as
when I’m with you. Well, why is it ridiculous to say what is true and
what you know?”
“But I don’t want to know it,” said Ella sharply. “If I had thought
you would ever talk to me in such a silly way I would never have let
you come out with me. When I’m thinking about serious things, too!”
“Can’t you see that this is serious to me?”
“It’s only all the more ridiculous. You must either promise never to
talk such nonsense to me again, or you must give up the walks.”
“Very well, then, I must give up the walks,” said Clarence resignedly,
“for I can’t make the promise.”
And he walked away over the rough grass, and began to look out to sea
on his own account. Ella, in spite of the “serious things” which had
occupied her thoughts, was forced to turn her attention to this
importunate and foolish person close at hand, and she did so with a
much graver countenance than was her wont in matters relating to him.
The fact was that this unexpected threat of withdrawing his despised
attentions woke her suddenly to the fact that she should miss them.
Ella discovered all at once that she was not so insensible as she had
imagined to the ordinary feminine pleasure in the possession of a
devoted slave. Even a Clarence who occasionally talked nonsense would
be better than no Clarence at all. Some expression of these
conclusions found its way to her face, for the crestfallen swain was
emboldened by her glance to draw near her again. She said no kind word
however, and he was afraid that further pleading at the moment might
be injudicious, so they stood very quietly side by side until Ella
broke out vehemently:
“I wish I had twenty thousand pounds!”
The wish and the fiery manner in which it was uttered took Clarence so
completely by surprise that instead of assuring her that she had only
to say the word, and he would lay that sum at her feet, as perhaps she
had expected of the impulsive little Irishman, he only said simply:
“What for?”
“To throw into the sea,” was her surprising answer.
He laughed, supposing that this was a faint sort of joke.
“I mean it,” she added gravely. “I can get five thousand pounds of my
fortune from papa, but I want twenty thousand more.”
“But what a strange use for it; you are not in earnest about that!”
“Oh, yes, but I am.”
“Well, if anybody were to offer you twenty thousand pounds, what would
you say to--him?”
“I should say, Thank you.”
“Prettily?”
Ella paused. He was bending his head to look into her eyes, and
putting into that word a great deal of impertinent meaning. Then she
flashed up into his face a grand glance full of magnificent
haughtiness.
“Of course, because I am not handsome, you think I ought to jump at
you!”
“Oh, no, I don’t. But whether you jump at me or away from me, you
shall have the twenty thousand pounds.”
“What, without knowing what I am going to do with it?”
“You said you wanted it to throw into the sea.”
“Oh, yes, yes, so I do. But supposing I were to throw it to another
man--a _merman_, for example?”
Clarence winced. “Whatever you do is right, Ella,” he said, at last.
“You can throw it to whoever or whatever you like.”
“When can I have it?”
“I shall have to go up to town. I can raise it by next week.”
Ella put her hand on his arm impulsively.
“You’re a good fellow,” she said, in a very sweet voice.
And Clarence, who had never had such a mark of her favour before, felt
all on fire, and wished he dared to hold her fingers where they had so
unexpectedly placed themselves. But the overwhelming reverence he felt
for this small girl taught him discretion, and you might have thought,
by the stiffness with which he held himself under her touch, that a
wasp had settled upon him, and that he was afraid to move for fear of
provoking it to sting. But they walked back together to the Hoe in a
very amicable manner, Clarence feeling that luck had helped him to
make a splendid move, and Ella wondering whether by the acceptance of
twenty thousand pounds from a man she could be considered in any way
to have compromised herself.