CHAPTER XV.
Even in the intoxication of the first few days of married life, George Lauriston had not forgotten his resentment against Rahas, in whom he could not fail to see a subtle enemy to his domestic happiness. On the morning after his marriage he had called at the house in Mary Street, and was not at all surprised to be told by the servant that Mr. Rahas had gone away. He insisted on seeing the elder merchant Fanah, who, however, only confirmed the woman’s statement by saying that his nephew had gone to France on business of the firm. It flashed through George’s mind that this sudden journey abroad might be with the object of visiting Nouna’s mother, with whom it was plain the young merchant had some rather mysterious undertaking; but the next moment he rejected this idea, being more inclined to the opinion that the Countess, for some unknown reason, was anxious to have it believed that she was further off than in truth she was.
He next went up to Messrs. Smith and Angelo’s offices, saw the elder partner and laid before him a vigorous remonstrance with Madame di Valdestillas for employing a foreign scoundrel (as George did not scruple to call Rahas) who dared not show his face to the husband, as her messenger to a young wife. The old lawyer listened as passively as usual, and recommended the indignant young officer to write to the Countess on the subject.
“And if you will take a word of advice,” ended the old lawyer, his eyes travelling slowly round the sepulchral office as he rubbed his glasses, “write temperately, much more temperately than you have spoken to me. The Condesa is a very passionate woman, and while she is all generosity and sweetness to those she honours with her regard, she is liable to be offended if she is not approached in the right way.”
“I don’t care whether she is offended or not,” burst out George, with all the righteous passion of outraged marital dignity, “and her generosity and sweetness are nothing to me. She seems to have a very odd idea of what a husband should be—” At this point Mr. Smith, who was smiling blandly in a corner of the office, drew his mouth in suddenly, with a sort of gasp of horror, which he smothered as his partner’s eyes, without any appearance of hurry or any particular expression in them, rested for a moment on his face. George meanwhile went on without pause,—“if she thinks he will stand any interference between his wife and himself. She has done her best to ruin her daughter by her fantastic bringing up——”
“Oh, hush! hush!” interposed Mr. Angelo, while his sensitive partner absolutely writhed as if it were he himself who was being thus scathingly censured.
George continued: “But she is quite mistaken if she thinks she can treat her in the same way now. Nouna is my wife, and if I catch any other messenger, black, or white, or grey, humbugging about trying to see her without my knowledge, I’ll horsewhip him within an inch of his life, if he were sent by fifty mothers!”
A curious incident occurred at this point. There was an instant’s perfect silence in the room. George was standing with his back to the door of Mr. Angelo’s private office. No sound was audible but the nervous scraping of Mr. Smith’s feet on the carpet, and a subdued clearing of the throat from Mr. Angelo. The young husband was too passionately excited to take note of either face, and both partners kept their eyes carefully lowered as if they heard the outburst under protest. Yet in the pause, without any conscious reason, George turned suddenly and saw against the glass upper panel of the door, the outline of a woman’s bonnet, with a small plume of feathers on the left side. He turned again immediately and faced the lawyers with an entire change of manner. Feeling a strong conviction now that he had a larger and a more important audience than he had imagined, with a flash of self-command he controlled his anger, and spoke in a firm, clear, earnest voice, each word ringing out as if he were giving a solemn command.
“Perhaps,” he said, “I am judging too harshly. I mustn’t blame any one for loving unwisely; I haven’t yet shown that I can love wisely myself. But I wish Madame di Valdestillas to know—I beg you to let her know—that I have taken upon myself, with all solemnity before God, the duty she was not herself able to fulfil, of cherishing Nouna and shielding her with the influence of a home. I ask you also to beg her not to send Nouna any more costly presents, like the diamonds Rahas brought; they only make the poor child long for a chance to show them off, and it will be years and years before I can put her in a position to wear them without being ridiculous. I’m sure if Madame di Valdestillas were to know that, she loves her child much too well not to see that I am right.”
George paused, keeping quite still. For a moment there was no sound at all, and both the lawyers refrained from looking at him. At last with a gentle cough, to intimate that he had well weighed this speech and that he expected as much weight to be given to his answer, Mr. Angelo answered:
“I quite understand the integrity of your motives, Mr. Lauriston, and I believe I may answer for it that the Condesa di Valdestillas, when I have laid your arguments before her, will respect them as fully as I do. But I believe it is not now premature for me to confess that circumstances may arise which will make it not only possible, but desirable that Mrs. Lauriston should grow accustomed to the wearing of jewels suitable to a lady not only of position, but of wealth.” George looked steadily at him, in some perplexity. “The fact is, Mr. Lauriston,” and Mr. Angelo’s eyes travelled round the room and then rested for a moment in dull and fish-like impenetrability on the young man’s face before they continued their circuit, “that Madame di Valdestillas’s first husband left property to a considerable amount which he willed to his wife, but with the condition that if she married again it should go to their daughter. Now Madame di Valdestillas, as you are aware, has married again, and the property would thus have fallen to Mrs. Lauriston without question if it had not been for one circumstance. Some relatives of the late Captain Weston’s have propounded a later will, benefiting them to the exclusion of his wife and daughter. Now we have the strongest reasons for believing the will thus suddenly sprung upon us to be a forgery; but until the trial, which is to take place shortly, we cannot be absolutely sure of our case. In the meantime the Countess thought it better not too soon to hold out expectations which might never be realized. It is quite on my own responsibility therefore, that I have made this communication to you. It will explain what would certainly otherwise seem rather mysterious conduct with regard to the present of jewels to her daughter.”
“It seems to me rather mysterious still,” said George shortly and uneasily. This network of strange occurrences and explanations that seemed to him quite as strange, perplexed the straightforward young soldier. “I’m not such a fool as not to value money, but frankly I’d rather be without a great deal than think my wife had a fortune which would make her independent of me. In any case I ought to have been told the whole position of things before I married her.”
He took up his hat and after very few more words left the office, on all points less satisfied than when he entered it. He hated humbug, and this foreign Countess’s playing with him, even if it arose from nothing but a woman’s love of little mysteries, was exceedingly distasteful to him. He had acted in the promptest and most upright way towards Nouna, such as might have convinced any reasonable person of his integrity, yet in no respect had he met with corresponding frankness on her side. If he had been told before of the young girl’s possibly brilliant prospects, it would have changed many things for him; now that the suggestion was suddenly sprung upon him late in the day, he found that he could not adjust himself to the notion of Nouna rich, distracted in the first flush of the honeymoon by the startling news that she was a wealthy woman, with a host of luxurious pleasures at her command outside such simpler, more domestic happiness as her husband could give her. And he resolved that, as she did not know of the sensational prospect that might open before her, he would himself say nothing about it, but would wait until the will case was tried, and the matter finally settled in one way or the other.
George Lauriston, having held himself till now rather markedly aloof from the influence of feminine fascination, was now expiating his neglect in daily tightening bondage at the feet of the most irresistible little tyrant that ever captivated a man’s senses and wormed her way into his heart, none the less that he saw daily with increasing clearness how much more he was giving her than she was giving, or perhaps could give, to him. George was puzzled and disappointed. Arguing from his personal experience, in which the ecstatic dreams and timid caresses of the lover had been but a weak prelude to the ardent and demonstrative tenderness of the young husband, he had taken it for granted that those pretty, capricious outbursts of girlish passion, which had charmed him so much by their piquant unusualness, would develop under the sunshine of happy matrimony into a rich growth of steady affection, coloured by the tropical glow which seemed to belong to her individuality, and cherished and fed by his own devotion. It almost seemed sometimes as if marriage had had the effect of checking her spontaneous effusiveness, as if she was rather afraid of the violent demonstrations which any encouragement would bring down upon her. Now George, at three-and-twenty, could scarcely be expected to be much of a philosopher; and finding in his own case that true love was indeed all-absorbing, he saw no reason for doubting the common belief that true love must always be so. Only at a much later stage of experience does one understand that into that vaguely described state of being “in love” enter many questions of race, complexion, age, sex, and circumstances, which produce as many varieties of that condition as there are men and women who pass through it. So he fell ignorantly into the mistake of thinking that he had not yet succeeded in wholly winning his wife’s heart, and greatly tormented both himself and her by laborious and importunate efforts to obtain what was, as a matter of fact, safely in his possession.
Nouna loved her husband as a bee loves the flowers, or a kitten the warmth of the sun. He was the prince she had waited for to take her out of the dull twilight of life with Mrs. Ellis and music-lessons; and although, in the modest nest which was all he could yet make for her, there were missing many of the elements upon which she had counted in her imaginary paradise, yet who knew what glories might not be in store for her in the rapidly approaching time when George would be a General and wear a cocked hat? And in the meantime he was the handsomest man in the world, and kinder and sweeter than anybody had ever been to her; though when she looked into his eyes and sighed with voluptuous delight at the lights in them, and at their colour and brilliancy, in truth she read in them little more than any dog can read in the eyes of his master, and she alternated her moods of passionate satisfaction in her new toy with moods in which she openly wished that she were not yet married to him, so that she might have all the novelty and excitement of the wedding over again.
And George, who in his efforts to resist the temptation of becoming a mere slave to this little princess’s caprices, ran a risk of becoming a later and worse Mr. Barlow, decided that, in the shallow education she had received, the intellectual and spiritual sides of her nature had been too much neglected, and set about remedying these omissions in a furiously energetic manner. He was beset by many interesting difficulties. To begin with: what pursuit could be imagined so pleasant and at the same time so improving as reading for filling up the hours during which he was forced to be absent from her? But Nouna lightly, firmly, and persistently refused to read one line even of a judiciously chosen novel, although George had taken care to tempt her by a set of beautifully bound volumes by a lady writer who took a decorously vague and colourless view of life through Anglican-Catholic spectacles. She would look out of window by the hour, lie on the sofa listening to the songs and tales of Sundran, whom George hated himself for his weakness in not dismissing, even catch flies on the window-panes and give them to the cat, anything rather than open a book. She would, indeed, permit George to read to her, lying curled up in his arms and hearing for the most part without comment, unless he chose poetry. In this region she showed marked preferences and prejudices. Shakspeare, she averred, made her head ache, with the exception of certain chosen passages, which she would hear again and again, strung together in odd fashion. She was never tired of the love-scenes in Romeo and Juliet, but she would not permit the intervening scenes to be read, preferring a short summary in George’s own words to fill up the blanks thus made in the story. Othello she would suffer in the same way, and King Lear, The Merchant of Venice, and The Taming of the Shrew; and she was never tired of the description of the death of Ophelia. The Idylls of the King she preferred for the most part without the poetry, but she learned by heart The Lady of Shalott, The Moated Grange, and other pieces which presented ladies in a picturesque and romantic light. Some portions of Hiawatha had a strong fascination for her, and as, again and again, George read to her the account of the death of Minne-haha, he would feel her arms tighten round his neck, and hear her breath come short with intense interest and emotion close to his ear.
“Would you feel like that if I died?” she asked abruptly one evening, laying her hand across the page when he had read to the end.
“My child, my child, don’t ask me,” whispered George, overcome and thrown off his balance by a sudden realisation of the strong hold this little fragile woman-creature had got upon his whole nature, of the paralysing dead blank her absence would now make in his life. “I don’t think, my wife, that I should live long after you,” he said in a grave, deep voice, laying his right hand upon her shoulder, and tightening the clasp of his left arm round her waist.
“Really? Would you die too, like the people in poetry?” she asked, delighted, rubbing her round young cheek against his in appreciation of the appropriateness of his answer. But then, examining him at her leisure, a doubt crossed her mind, and as she spanned the muscles of his arm with her little fingers she shook her head. “A man is so strong, so wise, and has so much more to do in the world than a woman, that I think he could not die off just when it pleased him,” she said thoughtfully. “There are always Nounas in the world, I think, just like flies and flowers, and silly useless things like that. If one goes, one knows it must go, and one does not miss it. And a man sees that, and he says, ‘Ah, it is a pity!’ and then he goes on living, and the grass grows up on the grave, and he forgets. After all it was only a little flower, only a little fly. And so while we are alive we must just be sweet, we must just fly about and buzz, for when the little grave is made we don’t leave any trace. That is what I think,” ended Nouna with a half-grave, half-playful nod.
But George could not take the speech playfully at all. This light but resolute refusal to take herself in earnest, which he ascribed to the paralysing influence of Eastern traditions, was the great barrier to all higher communion between them than that of caresses. By the expression of his face Nouna scented the sermon from afar, and as he opened his mouth to speak, she thrust her hand between his lips as a gag, and continued, laughing:
“Don’t look like that. I won’t hear what you have to say. You may be very wise, but I must be listened to sometimes. Now, I won’t let you speak unless you promise to leave off reading and sing to me.”
George nodded a promise, unable to resist her, and there was an end to the higher education for that evening.
The second string to the young husband’s educational bow was art, in whose refining and ennobling influence he believed dutifully, though without much practical sense of it. He took her to concerts in which she found no acute pleasure, declaring that sitting still so long in one narrow chair tired her, and that she would rather hear him play and sing to her at home. He took her to picture galleries, which would have been a rather penitential exercise for him by himself, but from which he thought her more delicately organized feminine temperament might derive some benefit, “taking it in through the pores” as it were, as boys absorb a love and longing for the hunting-field from the sight of their father’s scarlet coat and hunting crop. Now this experiment had more interesting results. The first place he took her to was the Royal Academy, where she examined the pictures in a dazed silence, which George hoped was reflective admiration; but when they returned home she confessed simply that she did not want to see any more pictures. In the National Gallery, on the other hand, where George took her rather apologetically, with a sort of feeling that this was too “advanced” for her present state of art knowledge, Nouna, at first sight of the frames inclined to be restive, began speedily to show an odd and unexpected pleasure, which deepened before certain Gainsboroughs into childish delight.
“I should like the gentleman who painted that lady to paint me,” she said, when she had gazed long and lovingly at one graceful bygone beauty.
George explained the difficulties in the way of her wish, but was highly pleased with the orthodoxy of her taste.
Later experiences, however, gave a shock to this feeling. The National Gallery having effected her reconciliation with pictorial art, Nouna was praiseworthily anxious to learn more of it, and insisted on visiting every exhibition in London. It then gradually became manifest that she had a marked preference for the works of Continental painters, from the lively delineator of Parisian types of character to the works of the daring artist who presents the figures of sacred history with strong limelight effects.
“They make me see things, and they make me feel things,” was all the explanation she could give of the instinctive preferences of her sensuous and poetical temperament.
Even this was not so distressing as her making exceptions to her indifference to English art in the persons of two artists whom George had always been accustomed to consider legitimate butts for satire. The beautiful, mournful women, with clinging draperies, looking out of the canvas with sadly questioning eyes, imaginative conceptions of an artist who has founded a school plentifully lacking in genius, filled Nouna with grave pleasure, and caused her to turn to George in eager demand for sympathy.
“Eh? Do you like them?” said he, surprised. “Why he’s the man who started the æsthetic craze; all the women took to starving themselves, and to going about like bundles of limp rags, to look like the gaunt creatures in his pictures.”
“That was silly,” said Nouna promptly. “The women in the pictures mean something, and they don’t care how they look; a woman who just dressed herself up like them would mean nothing, and would care only for how she looked.”
George thought this rather a smart criticism, and forgave her peculiar taste on the strength of it; still, he believed himself to be quite on the safe side when he said, taking her arm to point out a picture on the opposite wall by another artist:
“You won’t want me to admire that smudge, I hope, Nouna?”
She remained silent, considering it, and then said gravely:—
“It isn’t a smudge, it’s a lady.”
“Well, do you like it?”
“I like her better than the babies, and ladies, and cows, and mountains in the Royal Academy.”
“But it takes half an hour to find out what it is.”
“That’s better than making you wish it wasn’t there.”
After that George gave her up, and began to perceive that it would need a critic more apt than he was to deal aright with her perverse but intelligent ignorance.
His third means of developing what was noblest in his wife’s character was, of course, religion. George was not religious himself, but it seemed a shocking thing for a woman not to be so, and still more for her to lie under the suspicion of practising the rites of an occult pagan faith. So he took her to church, where she shook with laughter at the curate’s appearance and voice, and yawned, and played with her husband’s fingers during the sermon.
“Oh, George, how clever it was of you not to laugh at the little man in white!” she cried, with a burst of laughter, at the church-door, when she had hurried down the aisle with indecorous haste. “Now I’ve been once to please you, you won’t make me go again, will you? It reminds me so dreadfully of the horrid Sundays at school.”
“Well, but don’t you like being in the church where we were married, darling?” he asked gently.
“Oh, but I can remember I’m married to you without going in again,” she answered laughing.
And so gradually this desultory musical and religious education dwindled down to visits to Westminster Abbey and the opera; nor could George succeed satisfactorily in establishing in her mind a proper sense of the difference there is between these two kinds of entertainment.