CHAPTER XIX.
At dinner at Maple Lodge on the evening of their arrival, George Lauriston and his wife met the gentle Dicky Wood, who had come down the day before, and spent the afternoon riding with the son of Sir Henry’s steward. Nouna was much pleased by this compliance with her wishes, and showed her appreciation of it by flirting very prettily at dinner with the young guardsman. Later in the evening she held in the verandah a little court, and chanted them some half-wild, half-monotonous Indian songs in a tiny thread of sweet voice, with some plaintive low notes that lived in the memory. And George, who was standing with Ella some yards away from the rest of the group, felt thrilled through and through by the weird melodies, and liked to fancy that in these native songs of hers the soul-voice, that, in the tumultuous life of emotions and sensations in which she found her happiness, had small opportunity to be heard, forced up its little note and promised a richer fulness of melody by and by.
It was not by the man’s choice, but the girl’s, that he and Ella found themselves together. At the present time there was only one woman in Lauriston’s world, and in his absorption in his wife the ungrateful fellow was incapable even of feeling his old friendly pleasure in Ella’s society. Her interest in him, on the other hand, as is the way with that splendid institution for the comfort and consolation of man—plain women, had grown tenfold stronger since he had lowered himself to the usual dead level of his foolish sex, by marrying through his eyes. To Ella this downfall was quite tragic; she had thought and hoped so much for him; he had feeling, sense, ambition, was, in fact, not the mere beautifully turned out figure-head of a man who, under various disguises of light or dark complexion, slim or heavy build, was continually saying to her the same commonplaces, betraying to her the same idea-less vacuity, at dinner, ball, and garden-party. Yet here he was, bound for life, and by his own choice, to a beautiful pet animal, with all the fascinating ways of a kitten, who could gambol and scratch, and bask in warmth and shiver in cold, and whom nevertheless he undoubtedly worshipped. Ella, whose mind was of an intellectual cast, and in whom the passions had as yet only developed in an ardent but hazy adoration of dead-and-gone heroes, very naturally underrated the strength of one side of a man’s nature, and was cast down when the creature whose sympathetic comprehension of her highest aspirations had made her raise him to a demi-god proved to be in truth only a very man. She fancied, poor child, that he showed deterioration already; when she reminded him at dinner that she had not yet returned a book of Emerson’s he had lent her, George laughed carelessly, and said he had forgotten all about it.
“Don’t you remember you particularly advised me to read the articles on ‘Goethe’ and ‘Napoleon’?” she asked rather acidly.
“Oh, yes, they’re very good,” said he, with a man’s irritating frivolity, smiling at his wife, who was shutting one eye and holding her glass of claret up to the light, in imitation of an elderly connoisseur, for the amusement of Dicky. Then, perceiving in a pause that he had offended Ella, he hastened to say penitently: “I haven’t done much reading lately; but you have, I suppose; you are always so good.”
“I don’t read because I am good, but because I like it,” she answered coldly.
And George, reflecting on the oddity of Ella’s trying to improve him as he had tried to improve Nouna, had taken the snub meekly as a bolt of retributive providence.
But when she got an opportunity of speech with him alone in the verandah, in a rather melancholy and remorseful frame of mind, she “had her say” after her sex’s fashion.
“One mustn’t expect you to be the same person that you were three months ago, George,” she began, with a very humble, deprecating manner. “Otherwise I would ask you why we don’t hear of your coming to the front as a writer, as we heard then there was a probability of your doing.”
George laughed with the same maddening indifference to his deterioration, and asked if he might smoke. With a cigarette between his lips, flourishing before her eyes the privilege of a man, he felt more of a man’s commanding position.
“I haven’t come to the front,” said he, “because I haven’t made any steps at all, either forward, backward, or in any direction. I’ve been lazy, Ella, miserably, culpably lazy, and if my great thoughts have not yet stirred the world, it is no doubt only because they have not been committed to paper.”
“Oh, if you are satisfied, of course that is everything. Ambition, I see, is not the great, never pausing, never ceasing motive-power that we poor foolish women are taught to believe; it is a pretty whim, to be taken up alternately with a fit of smoking, or mountain-climbing, as we girls change about between tennis and tatting.”
“Not quite, Ella,” said George, doing her the justice to grow serious when he saw how deeply and unselfishly she was in earnest. “Ambition does not die for lying a short time hidden by other feelings; and surely even if it loses a little of its bitter keenness, it gains by being no longer wholly selfish.”
“A beautiful answer, at least. And no doubt contentment is better than ambition.”
“I don’t know what contentment is, except by seeing it in the faces of cows and pigs. No passion could be stifled by such a tepid feeling as that. I am not contented, I am happy. So will you be some day, and you will let your bright wits rest a little while, and you will understand.”
Understand? No, she felt that was impossible, as she looked down at the big, handsome man sitting on the hammock below her, his eyes bright, not with serene, but with ardent happiness, content to bend all his faculties to the will of a creature whom he must know to be his inferior in every way. She did not wish to understand such a decadence as that.
“Then you will give up all idea of writing?”
“No. I am more anxious to distinguish myself than ever, as things have turned out. A man who suddenly finds himself to be married to a rich wife feels as if he had got off at a false start, and is put at a disadvantage. But so far I own my wife has taken up all my time. You see, she didn’t know she was going to be rich any more than I did, and being hardly more than a child, she wants as much looking after at first as a baby at the edge of a pond.”
“And this is the sort of woman who gets a man’s best love!” thought Ella half bitterly, half disdainfully.
“And of course you choose her friends for her,” suggested Ella, not quite hiding her feeling.
“I can’t quite do that, yet at least,” said George. “Nobody but all of you has got further than acquaintance yet.”
“But of course you are very particular about those acquaintances?”
Decidedly Ella was in her most disagreeable mood to-night.
“I do my best,” said he briefly.
“And of course it’s all nonsense about the smoking-parties, and Captain Pascoe being there nearly every night.”
George felt a shock. Mentioned in that manner, the evening calls of his friends, the admittance among the callers of a man whom he cordially disliked but whom he had no grounds strong enough for insulting, were heavy accusations.
“I see my own friends as freely as I did when I was a bachelor, certainly,” said he, cold in his turn. “Nouna is too sensible to prevent that. As for Captain Pascoe, he has not been in our house more than three times at the outside.”
Ella dared not say more on this subject, even if she had had more to say. She looked out at the swallows, flying low over the young trees of the plantation on the other side of the road, and asked musingly:
“Do you like being rich?”
“It’s not bad for a change,” answered George philosophically.
“I hate it. I always feel with papa, so glad to shake off the big house and the footmen and the feeling that the great human world is surging round without touching you, and to get back to my tiny room where I can almost water the plants in my window without coming in at the door, and to the farm and my pensioners that I take tracts to. They never read them, but it is quite as much a matter of etiquette to leave them as it is to make calls in town, and they are dreadfully insulted if I forget.”
“But you’ve always been well off?”
“Yes, but that doesn’t make any difference. Money rolls together in such ugly fashions. Look at mamma’s. When her father made his millions, thousands of people were ruined. Well, you know, that’s horrible!”
“They chose to speculate, remember. They must have known no lottery has all prizes.”
“It’s hideous to think of, all the same. On the other hand, if your property descends to you by a long line of greedy land-scrapers, you know it has grown in value because other people’s has decreased, and that your tenants have to pinch themselves to make up your handsome rent-roll. And you haven’t even done the wretched work for it that the speculator has done to get his!”
“It’s lucky all capitalists are not so soft-hearted, or there’d be an end to enterprise, which by the by is brother to your god Ambition.”
“Oh, I’m not making preparations for re-organising the universe, only lifting up a little weak mew of discontent with my corner of it. And your wife’s money: is it the result of a robbery of recent date, like ours, or plunder that has been rolling down for generations, like Lord Florencecourt’s?”
“Well, really, I’ve never put it to her trustees in that way, and, now I think of it, why I really don’t know. But as Nouna’s father was a soldier, and there’s very little loot to be got in our days, I expect it has rolled down.”
“And you don’t really care how it was got together?”
“Yes, I do, now I think of it. But to tell you the truth, the lawyers have managed things so easily for us that all we’ve been called upon to do is to spend the money, a very elementary process.”
“What a strange thing!”
“Why? By the by, so it is, when one comes to think about it. It’s altogether contrary to one’s personal and traditional experience of lawyers.”
“When mamma married,” said Ella, pursuing her own train of thought, “her money was tied up and fenced round with as many precautions as if poor dear old papa had been a brigand. He often laughs about it, and says she couldn’t buy a pair of gloves without a power of attorney. So that it really does seem very astonishing.”
“It does,” assented George, who, never before having had experience of money in any but infinitesimal quantities, had been much readier to take things for granted than was this granddaughter of a Chicago millionaire.
“What would you do, George, if you found out it had been made by supplying bad bayonets to the English army, or anything like that?” she asked, half-laughing, but not without a secret wonder whether this easy-got gold would turn out to have unimpeachable antecedents.
The question gave George a great shock. He jumped up from the hammock across which he had been sitting, with a white face.
“Good heavens, Ella! What makes you say that?” he asked in a low voice, each word sounding as if it were being ground out of him.
“Don’t take it like that,” said she nervously, almost as much moved as he, and impelled by his strong feeling to be more impressed than she had been at first with her own surmise. “I only suggested—it came into my head—I don’t know anything about it.”
“Oh, well, you shouldn’t say things like that, you know, Ella, even in fun. The mere suggestion gives one such an awful shock. It’s like cold water down one’s back,” said he, trying to laugh.
“I didn’t mean it, indeed,” said she, quite unable to take a jesting tone. “As if one would say a thing like that in earnest! I never guessed you would think twice about a foolish speech like that!”
But they both felt uncomfortable; and both were glad when George, noticing that Dicky Wood was standing near anxious to get a word with the jolly nice girl Ella, but much too diffident to come forward at the risk of intruding unwelcomely upon a tête-à-tête, drew him into their group by asking if he had been in Norfolk before.
And so both George and Ella were able to shuffle off the burden of a conversation which had grown decidedly difficult to keep up, and the memory of which made a slight constraint between them, on the man’s side especially, for two or three days.
Nouna, to her husband’s great comfort and gladness, was behaving beautifully, and putting new life by her gaiety into the whole household, the younger members of which, in spite of Ella’s intelligence and her sisters’ beauty, were a little wanting in those electric high spirits which, in the routine of a quiet country-house, are as sunshine to the crops. The day after their arrival was Sunday, and the morning church-going had been a fiery ordeal for George, not from religious indifference, but from the misgiving that if Nouna could not keep from smiling in the course of a well-conducted service in a West End church, she would certainly be carried out in convulsions from the Willingham place of worship, where the school children, summer and winter, sniffed through the service in a distressing chorus, while the loud-voiced clerk’s eccentric English rang through the building, drowning the old vicar’s feeble voice; and where the vicar’s wife, a strong-minded lady, whose district-visiting was a sort of assize, had been known to “pull up” her reverend husband publicly from her pew immediately below the pulpit when, as not infrequently happened, he turned over two leaves of his sermon instead of one, and went quietly on as if nothing had happened. “Turned over two leaves? Bless me, so I have!” he would murmur, and rectify his mistake with a tranquil nod.
So George had put his wife through a very severe drill before starting, and had strictly forbidden her so much as to sneeze without his permission. She had a narrow escape at the offertory, when one of the churchwardens, with a lively remembrance of the artifices of his own youth, shovelled a penny into the fingers of each of his offspring with one hand, while he presented the plate menacingly with the other. But glancing up at her husband and perceiving a frown of acute terror on his face, she contrived to choke in silence; and the day was gained.
On the following Monday too, when the dreaded Lady Florencecourt fulfilled her threat of calling and proved equal to her reputation for unamiability, the young wife was, as she triumphantly averred afterwards, “very good.” The county censor proved to be a fair, florid woman of middle height, rather stout, and with features so commonplace that, without the saving shield of her title, they would have been called common. She had arrogant and capricious manners, an oily self-satisfied voice, and an ill word for everybody. Whenever her husband, who accompanied her on this occasion, ventured to make a remark, she turned to look at him with a resigned air, as if she were used to being made a martyr at the stake of his imbecility. She examined Nouna from head to foot through a gold double eyeglass, as if the young wife had been a charity-girl convicted of misconduct, and made no remark to her except to ask her if she was interested in the Zenana Missions, to which Nouna replied rather haughtily that Indian ladies were no more in need of missionaries than English ones: after which thrust and counter-thrust it may be imagined that the conversation languished, and that later in the day George had great difficulty in persuading his wife not to break off their engagement to go to Willingham. She said it would just spoil the end of their visit to the Millards, for one of whom she had begun to feel a real affection. This was the sharp-tongued Ella, whose intelligence she had the wit to recognise, and whose smart sayings amused her.
It was on the evening of a day in the course of which this oddly-assorted pair of friends had been a good deal together that George, on going up stairs to his room after a last cigar with his host, found his wife, not as usual fast asleep like a child, but perched upon the bed in the attitude of a Hindoo idol, with a big book open on her crossed knees, and her eyes fixed upon the nearest candle.
“Hallo!” said he, “what’s the matter?”
She turned her eyes upon him slowly, with an air of suspicion and curiosity.
“Nothing is the matter,” she said gravely, and turning down a whole half-leaf of the book before her to keep the place, she closed it carefully, and handed it to him with an affectation of solemn indifference. “I have been reading,” she added with decision.
George looked at the title of the ponderous volume, and observed that it was The Complete Works of Xenophon. He opened it without a smile at the page she had turned down, and remarking that it was about half-way through the volume, said she had got on very well if she had read so much in one evening.
“I skipped a little—the dry parts,” she observed modestly, but in such a tone that it was impossible for George to tell whether she meant to be taken seriously or not.
“Dry!” he exclaimed, raising his eyebrows, “why, he is the very lightest of light reading. Xenophon was the most frivolous man I ever knew; he was at school with me.”
She crawled to the foot of the bed, and stretching over the rail to the dressing-table, on which George had placed the volume, she recovered it with a violent muscular effort, and turned back the leaves to the title-page.
“This book was published in 1823; so you are much older than you told me you were, I see,” she said simply, while George, unable to contain himself longer, burst out into a long laugh, and made a dive at her, which she evaded like a squirrel, still staring at him with unmoved gravity, so that his mirth died away in wonderment and in a rush of tenderness as he perceived the pathos of this futile plunge into the mazes of learning.
As he recovered his gravity the expression of her mobile face also changed; after a moment’s shy silence their eyes met, and each saw the other through a luminous mist.
“What are you crying for?” she asked tremulously; and in a moment flung herself impulsively into his ready arms. “Why didn’t you marry Ella?” was her next question, shot suddenly into his ear in the midst of an incoherent outburst of the passionate tenderness that glowed ever in his heart for her.
“Marry Ella!” said he, feeling a shock of surprise at the remembrance that he had indeed once offered to make the good little blue-stocking his wife. “Why, what makes you ask such a question as that? Are you jealous?”
“Oh, no. But I see that she would have had you, and therefore you were foolish not to have her.”
“Well, I’m afraid it’s too late now, and I shall have to put up with the consequences of my folly,” said he, pressing her tenderly to him.
“That’s just what I thought,” she agreed quite plaintively. “Miss Glass says a good wife must cook, Ella says a good wife must read, but nobody says a good wife must just sing and laugh and amuse herself as I do. And so when you’re tired of kissing me, you will feel you had better not have married me, but only have amused yourself like Dicky Wood—” She paused significantly.
“Dicky Wood!” echoed he sharply.
“—With Chloris White.”
George moved uneasily; he was angry and disturbed.
“You must not say such things—you must not think them. The name of such a woman as that is not fit to pass your lips.”
“But, George,” she argued, looking straight into his eyes with penetrating shrewdness, “if you had not been you, say, if you had been Rahas or Captain Pascoe, I might—”
He stopped the words upon her lips with a great gravity which awed her and kept her very still, very attentive, while he spoke.
“When God throws an innocent girl into the arms of an honest man, Nouna, as you came into mine, she is a sacred gift, received with such reverent love that she must always hold herself holy and pure, and never even let any thought of evil come into her heart, so that she may be the blessing God intended. I was born into the world to protect you and shield you from harm, my darling; and so my love was ready for you at the moment when your innocence might have put you in danger, just as it will be to the end of your life.”
“Supposing you were to die first?” suggested she, not flippantly, but with an awestruck consideration of possibilities.
“A soldier can always last out till his duty’s done,” said George, with quiet conviction.
After this Nouna remained silent a little while, but that her ideas had not been working in quite the desired direction was evident when she next spoke.
“If, as you say, your love will keep me safe and good whatever I do, I needn’t be so particular,” she argued, “and it won’t do me any harm to go and see this Mrs. Chloris White, and ask her to leave poor Dicky alone, and let him meet some one who will be a blessing to him. I want him to marry Ella.”
George was thunderstruck.
“Go and see Chloris White! I’d as soon let you go to the Morgue!”
“But I know I could persuade her to give him up; I know just what I would say, just how I would look. I’ve thought it all over; and surely anything’s better than that he should rush back to her as soon as he gets to town, and undo all the good we’ve done him in the country.”
She spoke with a pretty little matronly air of perfectly sincere benevolence.
“My dear child,” said her husband decisively, laying his hand on her head with his gravest air of authority, “you cannot go; it is out of the question. You must not even mention such a wild idea to any one; they would be horribly shocked. But we’ll keep poor Dicky safe among us by much better means than that, I promise you. So now go to sleep, and don’t ever let such an idea come into your head again.”
She let herself be kissed quite brightly and submissively, and rubbed her cheek against his with affection which might have been taken to argue docility. But her own fantastic notion of helping her friend remained in her mind quite unmoved by her husband’s prohibition.