CHAPTER X.
The next morning, before he was up, George Lauriston was surprised by an apparition in a dressing-gown, with a black eye and a strip of sticking-plaister across its upper lip. It proved to be Clarence Massey, who came up to his bedside to offer to smoke the pipe of peace while yet the soft influence of slumber might be supposed to mollify any desire for vengeance which might haply be still burning in his comrade’s breast. As a matter of fact, George had, before retiring to rest the night before, regretted his violence to the little Irish lad, and was ready to meet him more than half-way. So that when Massey humbly made a clean breast of the trick he had played, valiantly omitting all mention of Dicky Wood’s share in it, and apologised for his intrusion into Lauriston’s quarters the evening before, the latter held out his hand from the bed and told him not to think any more about it.
“I’m awfully sorry I was so rough with you, old chap,” said he. “It was all a misunderstanding from beginning to end. Nouna is so young, and knows so little of the world, that she hasn’t dignity enough yet to awe an Irishman. She’ll know better when she’s married; and if you don’t come to our wedding, at least you must be the first to congratulate us afterwards, Massey, since it was you who brought about our first meeting.”
But Massey’s jaw had dropped.
“Wedding! You don’t really mean you’re going to marry her, Lauriston!” he cried in too evident consternation.
“Certainly I mean it; why not?” said George, very quietly, though he had suddenly grown thoroughly awake.
“Oh, no reason, of course. I beg your pardon. I was only surprised because we hadn’t heard anything about it, you know.”
“There is no reason why the whole regiment should know all one’s affairs,” said George quickly. “And look here, Massey, don’t go and talk about it, there’s a good fellow. You know very well how they all begin to croak if a man marries young, and as I don’t want my wife to meet any of them before it’s necessary, I’d rather they didn’t even hear of it till we’ve had time to look about us,” ended George, who had a nervous dread of the effect the neighbourhood of a pretty woman who was somebody else’s wife had upon several of his fellow-officers.
Massey nodded intelligently two or three times in the course of this speech, but at the end of it he hum’d and ha’d rather dubiously and at last spoke out.
“Well, you see, Lauriston, of course I won’t say a word, but the fact is something about it has got to the Colonel’s ears already.”
“What!” cried George, jumping up.
“Yes. You see, when you deposited me on the floor of the corridor outside here last night, neither you nor I took the matter in the quiet and gentlemanly manner we ought to have done. In fact, we made such a row that rumours of it came to the Colonel’s ears, and hearing your name and mine mixed up in it, he sent for me and asked me about it. And—and you see, Laurie, old chap, I didn’t know all you have just told me, and—”
“By Heaven!” said George in a low voice, “you made him think—”
“I give you my word, old man, I didn’t make him think anything. But I couldn’t help what he did think. When he heard there was a girl mixed up in it—a sort of creole, I think I said—he went off like soda-water in hot weather, and there was no getting a word in edgeways after that. He asked me finally what the d— I was standing there for like a moonstruck idiot, or a stuck pig, or a something I didn’t exactly catch. For as soon as he showed by his first words that my presence was no longer soothing, I saluted and scuttled away, as one express journey through the air in the course of an evening is enough for anybody. I believe he sent up to your rooms, but you had gone out by that time.”
George listened to this account very gloomily, as the Colonel was the very last person he wished to know anything about his marriage until it was an accomplished fact. He dreaded a summons from Lord Florencecourt; for the next three days he felt a nervous quaking of the heart whenever he was in the neighbourhood of the autocratic little officer. But for some unexplained reason he was not called upon to give an account of himself, and instead, the Colonel seemed to mark his displeasure by the much more welcome means of cold reserve towards him.
In the meantime George had a busy day of it. He dismissed Massey pledged to secrecy on the subject of the marriage and likewise to eternal friendship with himself, called on Nouna, whom he found reconciled to her new abode by means of a kitten and a preliminary lesson in the art of shelling peas. He then went up to the City, saw Mr. Angelo, told him enough of the occurrences of the preceding evening to show him how needful it was that the young girl should find immediately some more efficient protector than the somnolent and stolid Mrs. Ellis, and declared his wish to marry her at once. Mr. Angelo concurred perfectly in all that he said, and only made one stipulation, namely, that George should wait until Madame di Valdestillas’s consent could be got to this decisive step.
“I have not the least doubt of her consent, Mr. Lauriston,” said he. “And as I learnt yesterday, by telegraphing to her last address, that she and her husband are now in Paris, on their way to Spa, you will not have long to wait for her answer. She is accustomed to act a good deal by my advice, and I will say about you enough to turn the scale. She has great faith in my judgment, as she may well have where she is concerned, for, although some of her actions may seem eccentric to us methodical Europeans, she has a most generous and noble nature, and she can always command whatever knowledge and service my partner and I can put at her disposal. But I could not allow this hasty marriage to take place without her full consent. To begin with, it would not be legal, as her daughter is not yet sixteen.”
There was nothing for George Lauriston to do therefore, but to wait, and in the meantime to write a long and earnest letter to the Countess, which he entrusted to her lawyers, without troubling further for her address. During the next two days he spent a great deal of his time with Nouna, whom he took to the South Kensington Museum and to the Zoological Gardens, first stopping with her at different shops in Regent Street, where he provided her with boots, gloves and a hat. She gave a great deal of trouble in all the shops, being quite unable to fix her attention on the subject in hand in her delight at being able to run about and examine all the pretty things; but she charmed the attendants, both men and girls, who allowed her to try on every scarf and bonnet and wrap that suited her fancy, and brought her a cup of tea, when, on hearing two of the girls speak about going to tea, she made a request for one. When, however, her exuberance of spirits had calmed down a little, she chose without an instant’s hesitation the bonnet which suited her best, a puckered ivory-silk hood-like headgear, meant for a child, a pair of long silk gloves of the same shade, which she gathered up in wrinkles on her arms, and a china crape shawl that matched exactly with them, which she arranged most picturesquely about her shoulders, after flinging down on the ground the beaded mantle she had previously worn.
This proceeding, which caused George some consternation, she accomplished with a series of delighted chuckles.
“Ah, ah! That’s the thing Mammy Ellis got for me! I wish she could see it now,” she murmured, casting a look of scorn and hatred at the rejected garment, which was of the kind middle-aged ladies call “handsome” and “lady-like.” And when one of the smiling assistants picked it up and asked for her address that she might send it home, she shook her head disdainfully and said they could keep it, she did not want it sent home. But George, with a serious face, mindful of the expense of ladies’ dress, which began to seem unsuspectedly appalling, said she might be cold presently, and insisted on carrying the prickly bristling mantle, which he regarded with all reverence as having been worn by her, over his arm.
It seemed to him monstrous that the bill for these few trifling things should have come to three pounds fifteen shillings and elevenpence halfpenny—a sum which, when paid, left him scarcely enough for her boots and the cabs to and from the Zoo. For she chose her foot-gear in the same half-royal, half-mad way, turning over a pile of boots and shoes with quick fingers, and running round to inspect the contents of the show-cases until she discovered a pair of tiny, thin walking-shoes with slender, tapering heels, which stood all by themselves under glass in the middle of the shop. She was told they were only for show, and too small for wear.
“But they are large enough for me,” she said, thrusting forward a small, velvet-shod foot imperiously. “I will not wear ugly shoes because your Englishwomen have ugly feet.”
And nothing would satisfy her but to try them on, when, to the surprise of the shopkeeper and the consternation of the unhappy purse-bearer, they proved to fit her perfectly and in every respect to suit her taste. She performed a little fancy dance before the glass to demonstrate their beauty and the fact that they were easy, and George brought down his fortune to a couple of half-crowns and some coppers by the act of paying for them.
“Weren’t there any boots then among the things I brought from Mary Street this morning, Nouna?” he asked diffidently.
“Oh yes, a few old ploughmen’s things—‘strong walking-boots,’ as Mrs. Ellis calls them,” said she carelessly; “but of course I could not come out with you in those. You know Mrs. Ellis never will take me with her to buy my things. This is the very first time I have ever bought anything for myself, and oh! I do like it.”
George had no doubt of that: she was absolutely trembling with joyous excitement. But Mrs. Ellis’s judgment seemed to him a less mean thing than it had seemed before. The girl was so happy, however, that it was impossible not to sympathise a little with her pleasure; and when they left the shop and got again into the hansom, and she said, with an ardent squeeze of his hand, “Oh, I do like shopping with you! I’ll go shopping with you whenever you like!” he felt a passionate longing to gather the little butterfly thing up into his arms; and instead of telling her that about a week of this indulgence would land him in the Bankruptcy Court, he told her in a husky whisper that he would have some work in a few days, and when the money for it came she should have it to do what she liked with, “and every penny I can ever earn in all my life, my darling,” he added close to her ear. Whereupon she was with difficulty restrained from embracing him opposite Peter Robinson’s.
This was the day they went to the Zoo, where Nouna, looking quaintly lovely in her hastily-chosen toilette, skipped and frolicked about so that George felt like her grandfather, fed the big bear with buns until even he refused to climb up his pole for them any longer, and excited a mild “sensation” in the school-children and quiet visitors. Not one cage, not one path among the Gardens, would she leave unvisited. George might go home if he pleased—she could find her way back; but she would drink her pleasure to the dregs, ride the elephant and the camels, lunch frugally and hastily at the little restaurant, give nuts to the monkeys and biscuits to the Wapiti deer, pat the seals and shudder at the serpents, till the sun went down and it was time for the closing of the Gardens. By that time the new shoes had begun to feel a little stiff, the white gloves to look more than a little soiled, and at last poor tired Nouna burst into tears on discovering a long rent in the pretty crape shawl.
“It was that nasty monkey, the one with the long ta-a-il,” she sobbed. “Oh, George, isn’t there time to go back and beat him?”
“No, I’m afraid not, darling,” said George, rearranging the shawl as best he could to hide the slit. “And he didn’t know any better, poor thing.”
“But I ought to know better than to be such a baby,” said she suddenly, with great solemnity, stopping her tears. “I shall be different when I’m married,” she went on, very earnestly, “for married women never cry, do they? They have something else to do. I’m afraid I shall not make a very good wife at first, George,” she said, giving herself up to the subject with as much intensity as she had just devoted to the animals, though her voice was tired now and her footsteps very slow. “I was talking it over with Miss Glass this morning, and she told me many things which I meant to write down, only I forgot: how I must find out what you like and what you dislike; she says many a husband’s love is lost by little things such as forgetting pickles, and giving him hare without—without—I don’t remember what. But I’ll ask her again. I mean to be a good wife, much better than people think, and please mamma—and—let me rest a little.”
It was a long way across the park to the nearest point where they could get a cab, and although George half carried her for the greater part of the distance, she fell into his arms with a little exhausted, sobbing cry when at last they got into a hansom, and before they had driven half a mile she was fast asleep. He sat looking down at the red, parted lips, the soft young cheeks, the sweeping eyelashes that defined the voluptuous curve of her long eyelids, with the thoughtfulness of the guardian mingling with the yearning tenderness of the lover. During the long, bright day he had just spent with her it had begun to dawn upon him that some of his dreams of an ideal marriage with this fascinating, tiresome, irresponsible child-woman were very unsubstantial things. If her frivolity were to be improved away, it would take with it a great deal of her charm, if not of her beauty; while underneath all her light-hearted caprice and infectious gaiety, the strongest, stormiest passions would peep out sometimes for a moment and give strange warnings of the tyranny she might exercise over a nature that had not strength and suppleness enough to control hers. Yet for all this, he loved her more than before, while he dreaded the empire she would make a hard struggle to get over him. All the passion of his nature he was holding in leash, feeling that he scarcely yet knew its force, that it was gathering strength with every moment of restraint. Would he be this woman’s ruler and husband, or would he marry her only to be her slave?
He tried to shake off these morbid thoughts, and to reassure himself by looking steadfastly on the beautiful little face that in a few days was to be his own: but he found no comfort there. Capacity for emotion, for passion, he read clearly enough, but of thought or higher feeling no trace. He grew hot, began to be haunted by Rahas’s horrible words: “The women of the East have no souls,” until in a passion of indignation with himself and almost with her he woke her up by a hastily snatched kiss, which, tired as she was, she received with her usual demonstrative responsiveness: and then she insisted on entertaining him with Indian love-songs in a native patois, taught her by Sundran, which she crooned in a low, unequal, but rather sweet voice close to his ear for the rest of the way to Miss Glass’s house, where he left her scarcely wide awake enough to bid him good night.
This was his last day of suspense, for on the following morning George received a long letter forwarded by Messrs. Smith and Angelo, and dated simply from “Paris,” in the thin, pointed feminine handwriting of the last generation. This was the letter:—
“My dear Mr. Lauriston,
“I begin in this way without the formal ‘Dear Sir’ because, although I do not know you personally, those things which I have heard about you, the simple and manly letter I have received from you, have touched my heart and made me feel as I should feel towards the man who asks to become the husband of my daughter. I am in a strange case, Mr. Lauriston—a passionately loving mother kept apart from her child by a paramount duty. I love Nouna as the plant loves the sun; ask her to show you my letters, ask her what she remembers of me, and you will find that no woman among your English friends loves her children as I love my child, nor fulfils every wish of her daughter’s as I do Nouna’s. When you are her husband—for I wish you to become her husband, you are noble-hearted and honourable, and you will take care of her—you will find that her absent mother has a share in all her memories. Her girl’s treasures are all presents sent by me, her prayer-book is marked by my hand, the very clothes in which she will be married to you were partly made by me. Don’t forget this, don’t forget that the innocence and purity you reverence in her are the result of my care. I could not have kept her mind so child-like if she had been always travelling about from country to country as I must do with my husband, who is an invalid. I think she has suffered no harm since she left school. Mrs. Ellis is a good and pious woman who respects me and loves Nouna. As for the Eastern gentleman Rahas, of whom you speak harshly, Nouna and Mrs. Ellis have written to me very openly about him, and I have also received a very respectful explanatory letter from the gentleman himself, and I have come to the conclusion that your dislike to him is probably the result of misunderstanding. I hope and believe this. I am writing fully to you because I wish you to understand and respect the motives of my conduct, that you may look upon me as a mother to you as well as to Nouna, who will pray for the one as for the other, and who hopes at some not far distant time to see you both together. I yearn for that time to come; I am lonely without my child—without my children. I entreat you to look upon Mr. Angelo as my representative in all things; what he wishes I wish, what he sanctions I sanction. I beg that you will leave all matters connected with your marriage in his hands; I have also written to this effect to Nouna. Whatever he tells you to do, do, in the fullest assurance that it is what I wish. He is an old and trusted friend. It is the manner in which he has written of you that makes me write to you like this. He knows that the dearest wish of my heart for many years has been to marry my daughter to an honourable gentleman of good family and position, able to introduce her into the very best society, as I should have done myself if it had not been for the unfortunate delicacy of my husband the Count. May God bless you both is the earnest desire and prayer of
“Your loving mother (per avance),
“Lakshmi di Valdestillas.
“P.S.—I particularly wish that my daughter may be presented at Court as early as possible next season. I regret very much that it is too late for the last drawing-room this year. I will try to be in London for the occasion, but my movements are altogether dependent on the Count’s state of health.”
George Lauriston put this letter down, after reading it through to the end, in a state of paralysing bewilderment. “Position!” “Very best society!” “Presented at Court!” What on earth had he said in his letter to her to cause her to make such a ghastly mistake? For some moments he was too much absorbed by his dismay to notice that an enclosure from Mr. Angelo lay in the envelope that had contained Madame di Valdestillas’ letter. This was the note:—
“George Lauriston, Esq.,
“Dear Sir,
“We shall be glad if you can make it convenient to come with Miss Nouna Weston to our office as quickly as possible on receipt of this,
“We are, dear sir, yours faithfully,
“Smith and Angelo.”
An hour and a half later George and Nouna were in a hansom, driving towards the City as fast as a good horse could take them.