CHAPTER IV.
At the table was sitting a matronly lady in black, with a stodgy and inexpressive face. She was writing letters at a neat little morocco desk; and on the entrance of her pupil followed by a good-looking but perfectly unknown gentleman, she drew herself up from her occupation, and rubbed her nose with her ivory-handled pen in evident dismay.
“Dear me!” she ejaculated softly, in tones of abject consternation, “who has she picked up now?”
Before the elder lady had time to give any other indication of the manner in which she intended to receive the stranger, the young girl flung her uninjured arm from behind round the neck of her less impulsive fellow-woman, and cried:
“Mammy Ellis, you see—you see I was right. This is the gentleman who saved me from being burnt. He has come to say he is sorry.”
And with this introduction, uttered in a tone of the utmost triumph, she made a step back, as if she expected that a full and uninterrupted view of him would remove all lingering doubts as to the perfect eligibility of her new acquaintance.
It was rather embarrassing certainly. For the elderly lady, who had risen from her chair and was taking a good look at the midnight intruder, continued to glare at him with cold British stolidity, and Lauriston had none of the aplomb given by a long and varied course of flirtations.
“I am afraid, madam,” he began humbly, and with a good deal of hesitation, “that you—that you will not forgive my—er—my appearance here, I mean my last appearance, in fact my first appearance.” He paused to gather an idea to go on with, and continued his explanation more calmly, taking care, with all the signs of conscious guilt, to avoid the lady’s stony eye. “A comrade of mine (his name is Massey—we are lieutenants in the same regiment, ——th Hussars) gave me the address ‘36, Mary Street, West,’ as that of his brother, who is an old friend of mine. He told me to go right in and up to the first floor. Of course I must have come to the wrong Mary Street, but I knew of no other, drove straight here, and carrying out my instructions, had the misfortune, as you know, to intrude upon this young lady, with the unhappy consequence of waking her and causing the accident. I cannot express my regret. I have been ashamed to call. I would bring my friend to back me up if I thought you would believe him more than me. But you would not. I am a gentleman, madam, an officer. I hope you will believe me.”
Whether the eloquence of this speech would have been strong enough to melt the rigid lady is unknown. But there is magic to feminine ears in the word “officer”; and as the young fellow brought his explanation to an end with much brusque fervour, she softened visibly, and glanced from him to her charge in a wavering and uncertain manner.
“Well, really I don’t know,” she began vaguely, when the girl cut her short, slipping her slim hand between her guardian’s plump arm and matronly figure, and resting her head, gently tilted back, on the lady’s breast in wheedling and seductive fashion.
“Yes, yes, you do know, Mammy Ellis, you know your own husband was an officer—you’re always telling us so, and you’re only being dignified for fun, and you must shake hands with this gentleman and thank him for saving your little Nouna from having her arm burnt off.”
Thus adjured, Mrs. Ellis, still doubtfully murmuring and of rather distressful visage, did end by holding out a crumby hand, which George Lauriston shook with reverence and gratitude. He had got his cue now, and he at once made respectful inquiries about the husband, was fortunate enough to be able to tell the widow certain details concerning the regiment to which he had belonged, and soon succeeded in obtaining the lady’s confidence to such an extent that she entertained him with a long and minute account of the late officer’s distinguished though bloodless services to his country, and of the niggardliness of an ungrateful government to the hero’s family.
George was becomingly overwhelmed with indignation, though the monotony of the narrator’s delivery, the pleasant atmosphere of the half-darkened room, the window of which was shaded with thick blinds, and the sight of Miss Nouna stretched comfortably in an American well-cushioned chair, waving a palm-leaf lazily to keep the flies off, and looking at him half shyly, half mischievously from behind it through long black eyelashes, all tended to lull him into a drowsy state, in which he half imagined himself to be in some tropical country where passions spring up in a day to a fervour never felt in foggy England, where life flows on without energy or effort, and where woman, instead of being the modest partner of our joys and sorrows, is the passionate, voluptuous and irresponsible source of them.
The apartment, though far smaller, more commonplace and less gorgeous than the room which he had seen on his first visit, helped the illusion. Tall narrow glasses from floor to ceiling on each side of the door, reflected a long, two-tiered stand full of large-leaved hothouse plants which ran the whole length of the windowed-wall of the room. Half-a-dozen of these plants were little orange trees, their round yellow fruit giving pretty touches of colour to the dark green mass, while the white blossoms gave forth a faint, sweet perfume. The glass over the mantelpiece was draped with dark tapestry curtains, caught up here and there on each side by palm-leaf and peacock fans, of the kind with which a freak of fashion has lately made us all familiar. The curtains came down to the ground, while the deep valance which hung from the mantelpiece over the empty fireplace was caught up in the middle by a bronze statuette of a Hindoo girl, whose right arm held high above her head a shaded lamp. A pair of black Persian kittens were curled up asleep on a cushion at the feet of the statue. A harp stood in one corner, and a guitar lay on a chair. The rest of the room did not harmonise with these fantastic arrangements. The best had been done to conceal a bilious “high art” carpet by means of handsome rugs, and the table was beautified by an embroidered cover; but the chairs and side-board breathed forth legends of no more interesting locality than the Tottenham Court Road, and the walls were made hideous by an obtrusive and yet melancholy paper.
George Lauriston noted all these things, and his curiosity about this queer little household grew more intense. Who was this fascinating young girl? Why was she living in this dingy corner of London with the garrulous middle-aged lady who must evidently find her impulsive charge “a handful”? The buzz of Mrs. Ellis’s tedious monologue began at last to madden him, and he followed the young girl with eager eyes as she slid off her chair and rang the bell.
“I’m thirsty, Mammy Ellis,” she explained. Then, tired of silence, she swooped down upon the table, thrust the pen her governess had been using again into the astonished lady’s hand and said, coaxingly but imperatively: “Write—write to mamma. This gentleman does not wish to interrupt you. I will entertain him. Tell her what you think of him. And then I will read the letter, and see if it may go.”
Mrs. Ellis laughed gently, and obeyed with a protest. Evidently that was the usual order of things between them. Nouna improvised herself a low seat beside the plants by piling on the floor the cushions from her American chair, then she crossed her hands round one knee, and looked up at Lauriston.
“You have not told us your name,” said she diffidently.
“Nouna,” protested the lady from the table.
“Don’t you want to tell us your name?”
“Certainly. George Lauriston.”
“That is a pretty name. Mine is Nouna.”
“Nouna! That is not an English name.”
“Of course not. It is an Indian name. Do you like Indians?”
“I have only known one West Indian lady.”
“West Indian! That is not Indian at all. I come from the land of the Rajahs. My grandmother was a Maharanee. She was the most beautiful woman in all India, and she wore chains of diamonds round her neck that flashed and sparkled like a thousand suns, and she lived in a marble palace that was called the Palace of Palms, where the floors glittered with gold, and soft music came like wind through the halls, and a great tall tower with a minaret and a spire rose up into the sky over the room where she slept, to tell all the world that there was the spot where the Lady of the Seven Stars was resting. And she had a thousand slaves who knelt and bowed themselves to the earth when she spoke to them, and her palanquin was all of ebony-wood inlaid with pearl, and it was hung with silver fringe, and the inside was satin, the colour of the opening roses; and she travelled on an elephant whose trappings were of gold. Ah, that is the beautiful land; where the sun is scorching hot on the fields, and shines bright and glorious, and throws golden darts through the chinks of the blinds. And yet there the ladies of high rank—like my grandmother and my mother and I, lie still and cool in their apartments, or step down soft-footed into their marble baths where no hot glare can reach them, only the sense that it is warm and bright outside. Oh, that is the place to live in, to be happy in. How could my mother leave it to come to a land like this!”
She had worked herself up as she sang the praises of her own country to a pitch of glowing excitement, which changed suddenly to an almost heartbroken wail with her last words. Mrs. Ellis looked up from the table reprovingly.
“You forget, Nouna, that India is a heathen country, and that your grandmother probably never had the chance of seeing so much as a single missionary, and seems to have been very ignorant of her higher duties.”
“There are no duties out there,” sighed Nouna, with a most plaintive look into the dream-distance from her black eyes; “at least for the high-caste women. You have only to live, and love, and grow old, and die, and nothing to learn but what you breathe in from the flowers and the sweet scents, and love-songs to please your lord the prince.”
Mrs. Ellis looked scandalised.
“Dear me, Nouna,” she bleated out nervously, “you really don’t know what you are talking about. You never talked like this before. I don’t know what Mr. Lauriston will think!”
Mr. Lauriston thought the look of passionate yearning in the young eyes inexpressibly fascinating, but he did not say so, merely murmuring something about the allowance to be made for a tropical temperament. And, Nouna being reduced by the interruption to a silent trance of regret, the conversation became an intermittent duologue between the other two until tea was brought in. The manner in which this was served displayed the same inconsistencies as the furniture of the room. Sundran, Nouna’s ayah, in her native dress, placed upon the table an ordinary black and battered tray, on which stood a chased silver-gilt tea-service of quaint design, cups, saucers, and plates of a common English pattern, and tiny silver-gilt tea-spoons with heart-shaped bowls and delicately enamelled dark-blue handles. A great watermelon lay among vine-leaves in a shallow silver dish.
Mrs. Ellis laid aside her writing materials and poured out the tea, but she could not forget the young girl’s alarming outburst.
“I’m sure, Nouna, I don’t know what the Countess would say if she could hear you, so very particular as she is about your religious education. I am afraid I have given way to you too much; I ought never to have let Mr. Rahas fit up that room for you; it fills your head with all sorts of heathen notions, not fit for a Christian young English lady.”
“Mamma always lets me have my Indian things about me, and sends me Indian dresses, and she said herself I might have just one room without the horrid stiff European chairs and tables,” said Nouna, her voice taking a particularly sweet and tender inflection at the word “Mamma.” “But I’m going to give it up; I’ve told Mr. Rahas I don’t want it, and I’ve pulled down half the things. I will not accept gifts from one I despise.”
Springing in a moment from languor into life, she put her cup down on the table and went to the door.
“Come and see what I have done,” said she, beckoning to the young Englishman, her eyes dancing with mischief.
“Really, Nouna, I must say you are very ungrateful,” said Mrs. Ellis in despairing tones. “Mr. Rahas is always most considerate and gentlemanly, and when you said you longed for an Indian room he put it so prettily, asking whether he might fit up one large sitting-room as a show-room for his things; and then never showing anybody up into it! I really think you ought——”
But Nouna had flown out of the room, and she was haranguing only Lauriston, who had risen obediently at the young girl’s imperious gesture, but did not like to leave the elder lady alone so unceremoniously.
“She is a wilful little thing,” he said smiling.
“Oh, Mr. Lauriston, what we English people call wilfulness is lamb-like docility compared to that girl’s! She’s like an eel, like quicksilver, like a will-o’-the-wisp.”
“Or a sunbeam,” suggested he.
“Ah, of course, you’re a young man, you think her charming; and so, I believe, at the bottom of my heart, do I. But give me a good, sensible, solid, matter-of-fact English girl to look after, rather than this creature who is shaking with passion one moment, flashing her teeth, stamping her foot; and the next suffocating you, and crushing up your bonnet with kisses. As if kisses could cure the headaches her wild fits give me, or as if you could squeeze resentment out of a person, as you do water out of a sponge!”
“Has she been in your charge long?”
“Ever since she left school, six months ago,” said Mrs. Ellis with a sigh. “Her mother, one of the kindest and most charming women I have ever met, with all the high-bred ease that nothing will give to Nouna, wished her to have finishing lessons in music and dancing and languages in London. Music!” ejaculated the poor lady in a contemptuous manner. “Nothing would ever induce her to learn the piano, as every well-educated English girl should do. At school, after her first lesson, she crept down stairs at night, and undid all the strings of the instrument; so that had to be given up. I believe she wanted to learn the tom-tom, or some hideous Indian thing with jam-pot covers at each end, and they had to compromise by teaching her the harp and the guitar. Then languages! They only managed to get her to study French by telling her it was one of the dialects of India. As to dancing, that came to her like magic, from a waltz to a kind of wild dance of her own, more like the leaps and bounds of a young animal than the decorous movements of a young lady! I dare not think what the Countess would say if she could see her.”
“Why doesn’t she live with her mother, then, who would surely have more influence over her than any one?”
“You must not blame the Countess,” said Mrs. Ellis, as if he had been guilty of blasphemy. “A more loving mother never lived. You should read the beautiful letters she writes to her daughter. But she has married again; and her husband, the Conde di Valdestillas, a Spanish nobleman much older than herself, is a great invalid, and she is obliged to travel about with him wherever he fancies to go.”
“But surely the daughter ought to be considered as well as the husband.”
“The Countess feels that; and next year, when her daughter’s education will be finished, she intends settling down either in London or in Paris, and introducing the young lady to the world. If I can only keep the girl out of serious mischief so long,” sighed the lady, who seemed delighted to have a confidant; “but really it is too trying. The first thing we do after we have left the school (I was a boarder there, and as Nouna had taken a fancy to me, the Countess requested me to undertake the duties of chaperon) and come to London to look for apartments, is to pass this house on the way from Paddington to the Countess’s lawyers, from whom I draw my salary and Nouna’s allowance. There is a card—‘Apartments, furnished’—in one of the first-floor windows. Nouna catches sight of the Oriental names on the board outside, sees Indian lamps in the windows down stairs, and nothing will satisfy her but to come back to this house and settle here. Then, of course, the younger gentleman, Mr. Rahas, falls in love with her and——”
At this point Mrs. Ellis was interrupted by the flinging open of the door, and Nouna re-appeared, her face distorted with anger, and her eyes flashing with contempt: like an enraged empress she held open the door, keeping her head at a very haughty angle, and disdaining to look at the visitor.
“I know that nothing I can show my guest can have any interest for him,” she said icily; “but yet I think it would have been more courteous to me to disguise that fact.”
She made one step towards her American chair, when Lauriston, with an amused glance at Mrs. Ellis which he might well suppose to be unseen, hastened to the door, and held it open for her with a bow.
“I beg your pardon,” said he humbly, “I am very much interested in whatever you like to show me. But you left the room so suddenly that, before a clumsy man could hope to get up to you, you disappeared like a wave of the sea.”
She looked up at him with a very intelligent and searching expression, and was sufficiently mollified to lead the way out, turning sharply just in time to catch an exchange of glances, amused on the one side, apologetic on the other, between the visitor and her guardian.
She affected not to notice this, however, but opened the door of the next room without speaking, lifted the heavy curtain, ushered him in, and then shut the door and drew the hanging close. Lauriston looked about him in astonishment. The thick blinds, which were plain canvas on the outer, and rose-colour and gold puckered silk on the inner side, were drawn down, and made the room very dark, except for the chinks of sunlight that crept in at the sides. But there was quite enough light left to show what a wreck had been made of the luxurious beauty of the apartment since the night when it had burst on his eyes like a vision of fairyland. The silk and muslin hangings had been half torn from the walls, showing the ugly paper underneath; the spears and weapons had been tossed down on the ground as if they were so much firewood; the sandalwood screen had been folded and pushed into a corner; while of the smaller ornaments—cushions, daggers, Moorish table—a great pile had been made in the middle of the floor, and covered up with the tiger skins turned inside out. Nothing but the plants was respected; she had not had the heart to hurt them. Lauriston could scarcely help laughing; but when he glanced at the girl, and saw that she was standing against the dismantled wall, leaning back with an expression of as much triumph as if she had sacked a city, he felt really rather shocked, and clearing his throat he shook his head at her gravely.
“I did it all,” she said, nodding proudly and glancing round, as if anxious that no detail of the noble work should escape him. “Rahas said that Englishmen were cads, that you were a cad, and so I pulled the things down. Yes, I saw you and Mrs. Ellis laughing at each other, as if I were a silly little thing, and couldn’t do anything; but you see I can.”
It was harder than ever not either to burst out laughing, or to catch her and kiss her like a spoilt child; but Lauriston resisted both temptations, and said seriously:
“I think it was very silly and very ungrateful of you.”
She brought her head down to a less aggressive angle, and stared at him in surprise. He quite expected another outburst of anger, but none came. She only said “Oh!” reflectively in a soft undertone.
“He has been very kind to you, has he not, this Rahas?”
“Ye—es, he has been kind,” slowly, thoughtfully, and reluctantly. “He wants”—she laughed shyly—“to marry me!”
“Oh!” Lauriston was disconcerted. A sudden flash of jealousy, acute and unmistakable, flamed up in his heart at the intelligence, communicated with this provoking coquetry. “You are going to marry him then?” he said rashly, on the impulse of the moment, unable to hide from her sharp eyes an expression of pique.
By quite impalpable changes of tone and attitude, she grew upon the instant a hundred times more seductive, more bewitching.
“Marry him!” She moved her hand to her head languidly. “I don’t know. One ought to marry the person one loves best—in England, ought one not?”
“Certainly,” assented Lauriston, wondering at the power this mere child possessed of moving him, an altogether unsusceptible mortal, as he flattered himself, to impulses of passion.
“Then I must wait a little longer and be sure,” she said, twisting her head upon her neck with the daring, instinctive coquetry of a girl of five.
“You would rather have a—a—an Oriental like this Rahas, wouldn’t you?” he said in a low voice, his tone bearing more meaning than he wished.
“I don’t know,” she said, and stooping, she picked up a string of beads from among the débris on the floor.
He had come a step nearer to her, and as she stooped, by accident or design—with such a coquette one could not say which—she stumbled upon a rug and fell forward against him. He seized her with a gasp, and held her as she looked up with a laughing, provoking, irresistible face. She felt him shiver as he withdrew from her with such suddenness that she, leaning upon his arm, almost staggered.
“What is the matter?” she asked, as he drew out his watch with fingers so unsteady that he detached the chain.
“I—I beg your pardon,” he stammered, “but I have a most desperately important appointment with—with my colonel, in fact, which I shall miss if I don’t fly in the most unceremonious manner.”
Her face changed. A glow, not of anger, but of passionate disappointment, flushed her face, and the tears welled up into her eyes. Lauriston grew very hot, and, all in a fever of excitement, wondered at this.
“When will you come again?” she asked breathlessly, raising her beautiful face with parted red lips. “You will not come again. Ah, I know you, you cold Englishman, you will forget me, forget the poor little girl whom you saw in flames. Oh, no; you must not!” With another passionate change, her face grew tender and caressing, as she cooed out the pleading words like music to his unwilling ears. “Promise you will come again within a week. No, no, a promise won’t do,” as Lauriston, glad to be let off so easily, opened his mouth. “Swear, swear that you will come here again—within a week.”
“But—”
“You shall not go till you have sworn.”
The little tigress, with one spring towards the door, locked it and drew out the key; with another, she had reached the nearest window.
“No, no, don’t. I swear!” cried Lauriston, who saw with stupefaction that she had raised the blind, and was about to throw the key from the open window.
She turned round, tossed the key in the air, and caught it in her hand with a laugh of triumph.
“Now,” she said, “I know you must come. For an English gentleman always keeps his word.”
She raised the curtain before the door, and put the key in the lock; before she turned it she twisted herself back towards the young fellow and said:
“Kiss me!”
He could not hesitate. If she would flirt it was not his fault. He put his arm round the lithe, bending waist, and pressed a passionate kiss on her red lips.
“Now I know you will come again,” she whispered as she let him out.
When Lauriston had taken a decorous leave of the innocent guardian in the next room, and found himself once more in the street, he was inclined to think that he had changed his identity. Some new power, horrible in its strength, seemed to have fastened upon him, and to twist and turn him like an osier. He walked on quickly and firmly, trying to recall his old, calmer self.
“I will keep my oath and go there again,” he said to himself with clenched teeth. “But by all I hold sacred, I won’t see that demon-girl again. Heaven help the man who may ever trust his happiness in her hands!”