CHAPTER XVIII.
George Lauriston’s gloomy forebodings at the entire change in their manner of life brought about by Nouna’s becoming a comparatively rich woman, were not, in the first few weeks at least, fulfilled. The new way of living pleased the volatile child-woman much better than the old; and as she was never happy or miserable by halves, her joy in her good fortune was so strong as to be infectious; it was impossible to live in the neighbourhood of her full sensuous delight in existence without catching some of its radiance; and George, while ashamed of the weakness which made him take the colour of his life from hers, when he had meant in the most orthodox way to make her tastes and feelings accord with his own, found a fierce and ever-strengthening pleasure in the intoxicating love-draughts his passion afforded him, until his ambition, which perhaps had been none of the highest, began to sleep, and thought and principle to grow languid under the enervating influence of the question: What good in heaven or earth is worth the striving for, when this, the most absorbing soul or sense can imagine, is close to my hand, at my lips? And so, as in all encounters of the affections, the greater love was at the mercy of the less; and George, telling himself that time and experience would develop in her all those other qualities which his own efforts had failed to draw out, but which, being part of his conception of the ideal woman, must lie dormant somewhere in the queen of his heart, gave himself up to adoration of those excellences in her which had been already demonstrated; and they lived through those hot summer weeks in happiness, which caused the one first awake in the morning to touch the other softly, doubtingly, to make sure that their life of dream-like joy was a reality still.
George had had, of course, to indulge the cravings of Nouna’s sociability, and to submit to the entertaining of visitors, and to the establishment of an institution which in its beginnings rather shocked him. Nouna, finding that the social day began late, readily understood that this necessitated “stealing a few hours from the night,” and she accordingly encouraged such of her husband’s friends as met with her approval, to “come and smoke a cigar with George after dinner.” As this invitation was invariably accepted, and as the entertainment always included a perfectly served little supper, under the famous golden silk ceiling, Mrs. Lauriston’s “midnight parties” soon began to be talked about, and to afford a nice little scandal to be worried by all the women who were jealous of the little lady’s rapid and surprising success. Even when with August the dead season sets in, there are always men detained in town by business or caprice, and Nouna found no falling off in attendance at these receptions, so consonant with masculine tastes and habits, and there was a general outcry of aggrieved bachelordom—bachelordom in its wide sense, including those who had attained a more complete form of existence, but still wallowed in the unworthy habits of the less honourable state—when the time came for Mr. and Mrs. Lauriston to start for Norfolk.
Lord Florencecourt, who was already at Willingham, had asked George, with an assumed carelessness which the latter was too well-informed to misinterpret, whether they intended to take “that hideous black woman,” whose ugliness, he declared, had nearly made the rest of his hair turn white the only time he saw her, with them to Norfolk. George said no, but he was not sorry when, later, Nouna insisted upon Sundran’s accompanying them, as he had a lurking wish to see what the effect would be if the woman were to confront the Colonel. Nouna had scoffed at the notion of his being insane, and on learning that his marriage might possibly have had an effect on his mind, she expressed great curiosity to see this formidable wife.
George laughed rather mischievously.
“I’m afraid you’ll have to forego that pleasure, Nouna,” he said, shaking his head. “I heard from Ella Millard the other day that Lady Florencecourt is so much shocked by what she has heard about you and your wicked heathen ways, that she has quarrelled with her brother, Sir Henry, about their invitation to you, and has refused to visit them while you are at the Lodge!”
Nouna, who was playing at packing, having been busy for twenty minutes with a delicate Sèvres tea-pot and some yards of tissue paper, let the china fall from her hands at these words, in a torrent of indignation. She scarcely glanced at the broken fragments on the floor, as she burst forth with great haughtiness in the high-flown language she habitually used when her passions were roused:
“Indeed! Does then the wife of this miserable little wooden soldier think the granddaughter of a Maharajah unworthy to bear the light of her eyes? We will see, we will see. Perhaps she is a little too imperious; there may be powers in the earth greater than hers! I will write to my mother, who has never yet failed to fulfil my wishes, and I will tell her to search if she can find means to humble this proud lady of the fens, so that she may sue to me to receive me in her house, heathen, foreigner, though I am!”
And with a superb gesture Nouna signified her contempt for the ironical laughter her husband could not restrain.
“Oh, little empress,” he said, good-humouredly, “you will have to learn that all magicians have limits, and that even a mother so devoted as yours can’t carry out all the freaks that enter into one little feminine head. The very king of the black art could not move Lady Florencecourt!”
“The king! Perhaps not, because he is a foolish male thing,” retorted Nouna coldly, “but what my mother wills to do she does, and I trust her.”
And she would not suffer any further word on the subject.
George was in the depths of his heart not without a little anxiety about this Norfolk visit. Unconventionality is so much more unconventional in the country, where every trifling detail in which a man differs from his neighbours is nodded over far and wide as a sign of mental aberration, while in the case of a woman it is held to warrant even graver doubts. Nouna herself was in the highest spirits at the prospect; delightful as life in London was, a change after five weeks of her new home was more delightful still. She had had made for the occasion a varied assortment of dainty white frocks, of the kind that charm men by their simplicity, and women by their costliness, and a white costume with fine lines of red and gold, for yachting on the broads, which might have carried off the palm at Cowes. Nouna had the instinct of dress, a regal instinct which revelled in combinations and contrasts, in forms and folds, which everyday English women might admire or marvel at, but copied at their peril. She travelled down, the day being cool, in a Spanish cloak of mouse-grey velvet, lined with ivory silk, and fastened with clasps of smoked pearl and silver. On her head she wore a cap of the same colours. The milliner, an artist spoiled by ministering to a long course of puppets, was aghast at the order, and suggested that it would make Mrs. Lauriston look, well—er—brown. Nouna replied, with a great sweep of the eyelashes, that she was brown, and she should be sorry to look anything else. And indeed her beauty was seen to great advantage in this original setting, and its tints might pleasantly have suggested to the fanciful brown woods in the haze of a grey October day.
They reached Gorleth, the nearest railway-station to Maple Lodge, at half-past four. Sir Henry and his daughter Cicely were on the platform, Cicely in a short grey riding habit, looking in this practical garment a thousand times handsomer and more captivating than she had done in her most brilliant ball-dress, according to the wont of her countrywomen, who, from the royal ladies downwards, never look worse than when dressed solely with the view to charm.
Let it be acknowledged once for all: the Englishwoman, to her credit be it said, is a riding animal, a walking animal, a boating animal, a cooking animal, a creature fond of hard work and hard play, full of energy and capabilities for better things than the piano-strumming and Oxford local cramming which are now drummed into her so diligently. But her social qualities are so poor as to be scarce worth cultivation unless some better methods be discovered than those now in vogue. Her dancing is more vigorous than graceful, her conversation is inane, her deportment in full dress uneasy and deplorable, and her manner at social gatherings where no active muscular exertion is required of her, dull and constrained. Ten girls are handsome and attractive in a boat or on the tennis-ground to one who at an “at-home” or a dance is passable enough to make a man want an introduction. The metropolis has the pick of the market, if the term may be allowed, in marriageable maidens as in flowers and fruit. But all alike lose their freshest, greatest charm when they are plucked from their natural setting of country green.
George had an inkling of this truth as he helped his tiny wife out of the railway carriage, amidst the stares of a crowd of country market-folk, who gaped as they would have done if a regulation fairy, gauze wings, wand and all, had suddenly descended down the wide chimney on to their cottage hearth. He should love and admire her whatever she did, but he wanted her to sway the sceptre of conquest over all these friends at Willingham and Maple Lodge, and his heart ached with fear lest a breath of disapproval should touch her, lest she should appear to any disadvantage under such new conditions.
She herself, happily, was tormented by no such fear. She ran up to Sir Henry, who was dressed in a vile suit of coarse mustard-coloured stuff, a common little hat on his head, and a broad smile of recovered bliss on his face, looking as no self-respecting farmer among his tenants would have dared to look, and rejoicing in his escape from town and tight clothes.
“Why, you little town-mouse,” he said, laughing good-humouredly as he looked down on the tiny lady, “I don’t know how you will live down here. We shall have to feed you on butterflies’ wings and dew-drops; I should think a mouthful of plain roast beef would kill you.”
“Oh no, it wouldn’t, Sir Henry,” cried Nouna, distressed and offended by these doubts cast on her accomplishments. “I eat a great deal, don’t I, George?”
“Well, more than one would expect, to look at you,” admitted her husband, remembering the fiasco of the wedding breakfast.
“Besides,” said Nouna astutely, “everything that one eats comes from the country. The town produces nothing but soot; perhaps you think I live upon that, and that’s what made me half a black woman.”
The genuine black woman, Sundran, was meanwhile creating a great sensation; so that, to save her from the rustic wit, which made up in blunt obtrusiveness what it lacked in point, she was packed with her mistress inside the Millards’ one-horse brougham, which, like all their surroundings in their country retreat, was almost ostentatiously modest and even shabby. George was content enough to share the coachman’s seat.
“I thought the maid would sit outside; I hadn’t reckoned upon your bringing a lady of so striking a complexion, George,” said Sir Henry apologetically. “The old carriage is such a lumbering concern that I thought the brougham would be quicker, and there’s a cart for the luggage.”
George laughed. “If I had my choice I’d go on the cart,” said he. “I am yet unspoiled by my promotion to matrimony.”
It was a pleasant drive over the flat country, too marshy to be dry and burnt up even in summer. Sir Henry and his pretty daughter kept pace with the carriage, and flung breezy commonplaces at their guests with smiling, healthy faces that made their conversational efforts more than brilliant. Nouna peeped out like a little bird at the flat green fields and the pollard willows with an expression which seemed to say that she had quite fathomed the hidden humour of the whole thing.
“I like the country,” she called to Cicely with an exhaustive nod, as if she had lived in and loved the fields for years.
And at sight of the Lodge itself she grew rapturous.
Sir Henry Millard’s modest country residence was nothing more than a fair-sized one-storied white cottage, close to the road, from which it was separated only by a little garden just big enough to contain a semicircular drive, a small half-moon lawn, and two side-beds full of roses. A stone-paved verandah ran the whole length of the house, and a hammock swung between two of the supports of the green roof, in what would have been glaring publicity if there had ever been any public to speak of on the quiet road in front. It would have been rather a pretty little place if Sir Henry, to meet the requirements of his family, had not preferred enlarging it by adding at the back various hideous red brick wings and outbuildings of his own designing, to the more reasonable course of taking a larger house. The pleasure of conceiving and superintending these original “improvements” had indeed, while it lasted, been the most unalloyed joy of Sir Henry’s simple life; to worry the architect, who had had to be called in at the last to put a restraining check on Sir Henry’s inspirations, which threatened to dispense with the vulgar adjuncts of passages and staircases; to test the building materials, samples of which lay about the sitting-rooms for days; above all, to do a little amateur bricklaying during the workmen’s dinner hour—were joys the mere memory of which thrilled him more than any recollection of his honeymoon.
Whatever the architectural defects of the house might be, Nouna had nothing but admiration for it. The tiny little hall; the box-like drawing-room to the right, with high glass cupboards on each side of the fireplace containing apostle spoons, old china bowls, fragments of quartz and the like; the bare-looking dining-room to the left, furnished as plainly as a school-room, and even the bake-house which led out from it, all enchanted her by their novelty; while the bedroom up stairs, ten feet square, into which she was shown, put the climax to this deliciously new experience, and made her feel, as she expressed herself to her husband, “that she wished she had married a farmer.”
To George’s delight she ran down stairs within twenty minutes of her arrival in the simplest of white muslin frocks, with a wonderful scarlet and gold sash. But he had no time to congratulate her on her good sense in dressing so appropriately before she was off, in a huge garden-hat taken with instinctive knowledge of what was most becoming from a collection in the hall, to see the farmyard—Sir Henry’s pride. They made an odd pair—the broad-shouldered, solid-looking country gentleman, in his rough suit, and the small airily-clad person who varied her progress by occasional ecstatic bounds in the air, which made the ends of her sash swirl in the breeze like the wings of some gorgeous butterfly. George and the girls, with Lady Millard, followed much more sedately. When, after due admiration of cows and horses, pigs and poultry, they all returned to the verandah, fresh objects of interest presented themselves in a pretty group of riders at that moment climbing the hill upon which the lodge stood.
“Uncle Horace!” cried the girls, as Nouna recognised in the eldest of the party Lord Florencecourt. He was accompanied by two pretty boys of about eight and ten on ponies which they already managed as if boy and pony had been one creature.
“How Horace worships those boys!” muttered Sir Henry enviously.
Charlotte had run down to open the gate, and there was much clatter of lively greeting. Lord Florencecourt, though he seemed happier down here with his children than he had been in town, showed his old constraint with Nouna. It was therefore with great surprise not only to the young husband and wife, but to their host and his family that they learnt the object of his visit.
“You see I haven’t lost much time in paying my respects, Mrs. Lauriston,” he said, speaking in a lively tone, but with an ill-concealed reluctance to meet her eyes. “Those girls would like to flatter themselves that my visit is for them, but they are all wrong.”
“Never mind, uncle, Regie and Bertie come to see us,” cried Ella, giving a kiss to the youngest boy.
Lord Florencecourt continued: “The fact is, Mrs. Lauriston, we know that you will be so run after down here, that when you have been seen a little there will be no getting hold of you. So my wife sent me to ask you and George to stay with us from Friday to Monday the week after next. Mr. Birch, our member, will be there, and we thought as he has come to the front so much lately you might like to meet him.” Nouna stole a triumphant glance at her husband, and the girls, who were near enough to hear, could not forbear little unseen eyebrow-raisings of astonishment. He went on: “Lady Florencecourt will call upon you on Monday, but she thought it best to send her invitation at once to make sure of you.”
“It is very kind of Lady Florencecourt; I shall like to come very much,” said Nouna, who was brimming over with delight and triumph. “Only I don’t think I could do much to entertain a rising member of Parliament. I can’t talk politics; but perhaps he’d like to learn to make cocked hats out of newspaper, and then he can amuse himself when the other members are making dull speeches.”
“I’m sure he’d like it immensely if you will teach him,” said Lord Florencecourt, with cold civility, which would have damped frivolity less aerial than Nouna’s.
The girls thought Lady Florencecourt must have been bewitched thus to transgress her own well-known rule of ignoring any stranger whose pedigree was not at her fingers’ ends. She had, besides, gone so far as to gibe at her brother for admitting “a loose-mannered young woman of unknown and questionable antecedents”—as she styled young Mrs. Lauriston—into the society of his daughters. And now she was sending a pressing invitation by the mouth of her husband, whose prejudice against the interloper was hardly concealed! Decidedly Nouna had a dash of Eastern magic about her. Meanwhile the young lady herself was troubling her head very little with the problem. She was much struck with the blue eyes and curly dark hair of the younger of the two boys, and bending down to him with her little head perched on one side in the coquettish manner she used alike to man, woman, child or animal, she asked with a smile what his name was.
“Allow me to present him with proper ceremony,” said Ella playfully. “Permit me to introduce you,” gravely to her small cousin, “to Mrs. George Lauriston. Mrs. Lauriston,” turning to the lady, “the Honourable Bertram Kilmorna!”
She had scarcely uttered the last word when Nouna shot up from her bending attitude as if at an electric shock, and fixed her great eyes, wide with bewilderment and surprise, on Lord Florencecourt, who was standing behind Ella and his son, near enough to hear these words and to see their effect.
“Kilmorna!” she repeated in a whisper, still looking full at the Colonel, whose rugged face had grown suddenly rigid and grey. Then, without further ceremony, she ran away to her husband, who was talking to Lady Millard at a little distance.
“George, George!” she said in a tumultuous whisper, her face quivering with excitement, “I don’t want to go to Lady Florencecourt’s; tell him I don’t want to go!”
“Why, what’s this? How has the Colonel offended you?” asked George laughing.
“He hasn’t offended me at all. Only I’ve changed my mind. I know I—I shouldn’t like Lady Florencecourt. I’d rather not go.”
But as George insisted that it was impossible to break an engagement just made, without any reason, she broke from him with an impatient push, and disappeared into the house just before Lord Florencecourt, who had abruptly discovered that he was in a hurry to be off, took his leave. Ella prevented George from fetching his wife out.
“It is only some little caprice of hers,” she said persuasively, not guessing that there was any mystery in the matter, and considering the young bride’s conduct as the result of some girlish freak. “I think she was offended because uncle didn’t introduce the boys to her. She will be all right if you leave her alone a few minutes.”
But George was not unnaturally annoyed at his wife’s rudeness, and he followed her into the little drawing-room, where he found her with her nose flattened against the window, staring at Lord Florencecourt’s retreating figure. She had no explanation to give of her conduct, but persisted in begging him not to take her to Willingham. As he remained firm on this point, and continued to press her for her reasons, she grew mutinous, and at last peace was only made between them on the conditions that she would go to Willingham if he would not tease her with any more questions.
And George had to be content with this arrangement, being above all things anxious to learn the meaning of the miraculous change of front on the part of Lady Florencecourt and her husband.