CHAPTER XX.
When the time came for them to finish their stay in Norfolk by the dreaded three days at Willingham, neither George nor Nouna made any secret of the fact that they felt the coming visit to be a severe ordeal. Undoubtedly it would be a cruelly abrupt change from the cheerful homeliness of the Lodge, to the penitential atmosphere in which the household of Lady Florencecourt passed their days. So notorious was the character of the gracious châtelaine that Willingham Hall was commonly known in the neighbourhood as the House of Correction, a title to which the severely simple style of its architecture gave no very flat denial. Willingham Church stood in the grounds belonging to the Hall, so that Nouna had had an opportunity of shuddering at the sombre dreariness of the mansion even before the return call she had made with Lady Millard and Cicely, on which occasion she had sat almost mute on a high-backed chair, looking as insignificant and unhappy as a starved mouse, thinking that Lady Florencecourt’s light eyes looked like the glass marbles with which she played at solitaire, and what a good model her face would be for one of those indiarubber heads that children squeeze up into grotesque grimaces.
She cried at parting with the Millards, like a little girl sent to school for the first time. Sir Henry, with his simple good humour; Lady Millard, with her quiet manners, and the quick black eyes whose flashing keenness and sympathy showed the burning soul of the New World flickering in uneasy brightness among the glowing embers of the Old; Cicely and Charlotte, fair, kind creatures, who filled up the pauses gracefully, the one by merely smiling, the other by a gentle rain of chatter which she had been taught to think a fascinating social accomplishment; and, above all, Ella, of the sallow face, the sharp tongue, and the warm heart, were a group to live pleasantly in the memory, and to make the approaching encounter with the unamiable hosts of Willingham more disagreeable by contrast. It added to poor Nouna’s forlornness in these circumstances that her husband absolutely forbade her taking Sundran with her, as, although he was very anxious for an accidental meeting between Lord Florencecourt and the Indian woman, he felt that he could not force upon his host the presence of a person to whom, if only as the result of a prejudice, he had a strong aversion.
Lady Florencecourt sent a lumbering old family travelling carriage, with powdered footmen and bewigged coachmen, to bring Mr. and Mrs. Lauriston to the Hall. Nouna rather liked this old-world state, which, as her education had embraced the experiences of Paul Clifford and Martin Blakeborough of “The King’s Mail,” stimulated her imagination. She crammed her little fingers tightly into her husband’s hand as they entered the long straight drive, with a deep grass border on each side flanked by tall trees, which led up to Willingham Hall.
“Keep up your spirits, George,” she quavered, as the carriage drew up at the imposing front door. “There aren’t any spikes to get over if we have to run away.”
And she entered the hall with the air of a prisoner who hopes he’ll get off because he’s such a little one. They were shown up to their room at once, and when they came down to the drawing-rooms, which were a succession of vast wildernesses, with all the defects of apartments too large for the human atoms who lived in them, they found, to Nouna’s great relief, that not only was the great Mr. Birch there already, but he had brought with him a real live daughter, a girl about twenty, who seemed just as much relieved by the sight of a young face as Nouna herself was. Lord Florencecourt was there, looking as if he had been kept in against his will from the society of his boys; and Lady Florencecourt, who made it a boast that she never interrupted her charitable work for anybody, worked away at certain hideous convict-like garments, which she was knitting in very coarse scrubby gray wool for the unlucky poor, while she held forth on the ingratitude of the “masses,” the vicious extravagance of the “classes,” and the shortcomings of everybody all round; while Mr. Birch, who was a bald-headed man with a great expanse of knobby forehead, which was in itself a tower of strength to his party, agreed with everything—perhaps a habit he had contracted at Westminster.
The two younger ladies drew instinctively nearer and nearer each other, until they were close enough to grow confidential, and to enter upon a strictly defensive alliance. By the time Lord Florencecourt suggested an excursion through the grounds to see the ruins of an old Norman church which had been built at the same period as the one still standing, and within a stone’s throw of it, adversity had made Nouna and Miss Birch inseparable as love-birds. Before the evening was over, little Mrs. Lauriston had reason to congratulate herself on having found such an ally. For her acid hostess treated her with only the barest possible show of civility, and Lord Florencecourt, while making a determined effort to be more courteous, betrayed in his eyes such a rooted and cold dislike that Nouna, with her strong sensitiveness to every shade of feeling in the people with whom she came in contact, shrank into herself and was completely miserable, casting forlorn glances across the table at her husband, who felt scarcely happier than she, but in whom was growing stronger every moment the determination to learn the reason of an invitation which had evidently sprung from no spontaneous wish either of host or hostess. Two other guests had joined the party before dinner, an elderly couple named Admiral and Mrs. Bohun, very old friends of Lord Florencecourt’s. Neither added much to the liveliness of the circle, but whether from native dulness or through Lady Florencecourt’s peculiar gift of causing the people about her to show always at their worst in her society, did not appear. At all events, when the ladies left the room at dessert, Nouna was so much overcome by the dire prospect before her that she slipped round to her husband, and hissed into his ear, in a doleful and not altogether inaudible whisper:
“Don’t be long, or you won’t find me alive!”
She had not under-estimated the relaxation of the drawing-room. Throughout the length of the suite of cold-looking apartments wax-lights flickered weakly in numbers wholly inadequate to the size of the rooms. The piano had been opened, and Lady Florencecourt invited the younger ladies to play; as Miss Birch hesitated, with not unnatural diffidence before such an audience, Nouna rushed recklessly into the breach, regardless of the fact that she was a totally incompetent performer.
“I knew she’d go back to her knitting, and that’s in the furthest room,” she volunteered in explanation, as the elder ladies sailed away.
But the astounding badness of her performance soon brought Lady Florencecourt back, not indeed so much to criticise as to find out whether the curious sounds the instrument was giving forth were not the result of an excursion of her Blenheim spaniel along the keys.
“Is that Indian music, Mrs. Lauriston? Something that is usually played to an accompaniment of tom-toms?” asked Lady Florencecourt, holding up her glasses, not, however, before she had ascertained that she was listening to a mangled version of “Auld Robin Gray.”
“Yes, it’s an ‘Invocation to a Witch,’ ” answered Nouna imperturbably. “It ends like this, all the tom-toms together,” and she put her arms down upon the piano with a crash.
Her face was perfectly grave, but she began to feel the promptings of a wicked imp within her, urging her to rebel against this most unwarrantable discipline to which she was being subjected. Mrs. Bohun had followed her hostess, and as Nouna rose abruptly from the piano, the old lady said gently:
“You mustn’t be offended by my saying so, but it seems impossible to realise that you are a married woman. You must have been married while you were still in short frocks!”
Nouna, who wore an elaborate dinner-dress of emerald-green velvet, with loose folds of Nile green silk falling straight from her neck to her feet, was for a moment rather crestfallen to find how little dignity a train could give.
“Ye-es,” she said reluctantly. “But I wear long ones now. And I’m sixteen.”
Mrs. Bohun smiled. “That is very young for the responsibilities of a wife.”
“I haven’t any responsibilities,” answered Nouna quickly. “My mother gives me an allowance—or at least the lawyers do; at any rate, I have one.”
“But isn’t that a responsibility?” asked the old lady, much amused.
“Oh, no. I just spend it, and then mamma has the responsibility of sending me some more.”
Neither Mrs. Bohun nor Miss Birch could keep her countenance at this naïve disclosure, but its effect upon Lady Florencecourt was to make her grow grimmer than ever.
“I’m sure it’s a very nice thing to have such a good mamma,” said Mrs. Bohun indulgently. “Don’t you think so, Clarissa?”
“Undoubtedly.”
The tone in which Lady Florencecourt gave this short answer, caused Nouna to look up at her.
“Do you know my mother?” she asked abruptly.
“I have not that honour,” answered Lady Florencecourt, many degrees below zero.
Quite unmoved this time by her hostess’s frigidity, Nouna mused a few moments with her eyes fixed on the lady’s face. Then she said slowly:
“I believe Lord Florencecourt knows mamma though——”
She stopped short, bewildered by the sudden change these few words brought about in the placid, self-satisfied countenance. Then, as there was a moment’s awkward pause, she went on hurriedly—“At least, I know mamma has an old portrait—one of those old-fashioned dark things with glass over them, that is like him. I knew when I met him first at the barracks that I had seen his face somewhere, and when I thought, I remembered the picture.”
Now Nouna had begun to speak in all innocence, but when she noticed that her words had some magical power of discomposing the woman who had been discourteous to her, she mischievously slackened her tone, and watched the effect with much interest. Lady Florencecourt’s square heavy face was not capable of any very vivid or varied expression when her usual stolid self-complacency had been frightened out of it. But the lower features quivered slightly, and a vixenish look, which boded ill for her husband’s peace during their next tête-à-tête, brought a spark of angry brightness into her light eyes. Her next speech, and the tone in which it was uttered, gave the same impression.
“Very possibly,” she said in a voice which implied an offensive doubt. “Of course, my husband, when he was a subaltern in India, gave his portrait right and left to all sorts of persons, as young men will do.”
“In India! He has been in India! Oh, then that accounts for it. He must have met my mother there. I’ll ask him.”
And as the voices of the gentlemen were heard in the hall, Nouna prepared for a spring at the door. Lady Florencecourt laid a heavy hand peremptorily on her arm.
“No,” she said in a suddenly subdued voice, retaining her hold on the fragile wrist, and looking down into the little creature’s eyes with some entreaty and even fear in her own. “Don’t tease Lord Florencecourt about it now. I—I want to talk to you.”
She drew Nouna with her towards an ottoman, and invited Mrs. Bohun to join them.
“I quite agree with you, Harriet; it is a wonderful thing in these days to have a mamma to appeal to,” she continued, in a kind of grudgingly gracious tone. “Mrs. Lauriston is quite the only person I know who is not suffering from this horrible depression in everything. I don’t know whether you have heard”—and she lowered her voice to a confidential murmur—“that my husband wants to get rid of Willingham. All the tenants are asking for twenty-five per cent. reduction on their rent, and as you see, Lord Florencecourt has given up the shooting this year. Even I have had to make some sacrifices, and to dispose of part of my jewellery.”
Nouna was touched. Such a misfortune as this appealed to her imagination, and this most unexpected, uncalled-for candour disarmed her antagonism.
“Your jewellery! Oh, how dreadful!” she cried with deep sympathy. “I think I could bear anything but that.”
She glanced down at one of the diamond bracelets her mother had sent her on her wedding-day, and hugged the little arm that bore it close to her breast. Mrs. Bohun sympathised less sensationally.
“Dear me!” she said gently. “Not your pearls, I hope, Clarissa?”
“Yes, my necklace; the double row with the dragon clasp.”
“Dragon clasp!” repeated Nouna quickly.
“Yes, it had a very uncommon clasp: a dragon in diamonds, with ruby eyes.”
Nouna stared at her with open mouth, in a manner which would have excited remark in anybody but this eccentric little person; but she offered no further observation, although she remained seated near the elderly ladies, considering Lady Florencecourt’s face with deep interest, until the boys came in for a dull half-hour in the drawing-room. To them the lively little lady was an unexpected blessing. By the time the butler marched in with a huge Bible and Prayer-book, Nouna was sitting on a sofa, with Regie leaning over her shoulder and Bertie’s arms round her neck, to the great scandal of Lady Florencecourt, who regarded her sons rather as a handsome present she had made to their father than with any more vulgarly maternal feeling, and who would have been shocked at such a breach of filial respect as a spontaneous hug.
Nouna, who found nothing very exhilarating in the assembled company after the departure of the boys, seized the very first opportunity to retire, and was up stairs before anybody else. When her husband followed a little later, he found the door of the room wide open, the candles flickering and guttering in the draught, but no Nouna. Her jewel-case was open on the dressing-table, and the contents were scattered about in reckless disorder, a bracelet lying on the floor, a diamond earring glistening on the top of a high-heeled boot, a couple of rings embedded in a hairbrush. George looked into the dressing-room, and then went back into the corridor, where he heard a long way off the rattling of the Fiji shells on his wife’s dress. He drew back into the room, and received her in his arms as she rushed through the door like a whirlwind. She gave a little cry when he caught her.
“Where have you been?” he asked.
“Where have I been? Oh, nowhere; only speaking to Lady Florencecourt’s maid.”
“What about?”
“Nothing. I wish you had let me bring Sundran; I can’t do my own hair.”
“Why, it isn’t much longer than a boy’s. I might as well say I couldn’t do mine. I’ll be your maid to-night.”
She made no objection, but quietly tilted up her chin as an intimation that he might unfasten her frock for her, with such an unusual air of reflective absorption that he stopped in the midst of his careful but clumsy ministrations to ask her what she was thinking about.
“Nothing,” said she, as her glance fell on her scattered trinkets.
“What have you been doing with your jewellery?” And he picked up some of the ill-used treasures and piled them up in the velvet tray. “Why, where’s the pearl necklace that you keep on the top?”
He saw a slight but rapid change in her face which convinced him that he was, as the children say at hide and seek, “warm.”
“Have you lost it? Is that the trouble?” he asked kindly.
“There’s no trouble. I left it at home,” she answered with so much vivacity and mendacious promptitude that George saw it would be of no use to ask more questions.
On the following morning, however, his curiosity was appeased in an unexpected and startling manner. As soon as he appeared at the breakfast-table, he was conscious of a decided change for the worse in the already chilly and depressing atmosphere. If Lady Florencecourt had been cool, her husband constrained, the day before, the lady was an icicle, her lord a statue this morning. Lord Florencecourt avoided him, would not meet his eyes, and absolutely—so it seemed to George—slunk out of the way of Nouna altogether; while his wife maintained all through breakfast such a frigid attitude to both the young couple, that George was boiling with indignation before the meal was ended, and contrived to meet his hostess alone within a few minutes of the break-up of the party. He had some difficulty in keeping the anger he felt from bursting through the formal speeches in which he told her of an unexpected summons which would force him and his wife to curtail their visit and return to town that very morning.
“As soon as you please, Mr. Lauriston,” said Lady Florencecourt, icily. “And as I may not have another opportunity of seeing your wife alone, perhaps you will be kind enough to return this to her”—she handed George a small parcel, through a torn corner of which peeped the pearls he supposed Nouna to have lost—“and to inform her that though, like other ladies, I am forced to submit to be robbed by my husband to deck out another woman, I am not reduced to receiving back my own jewels from her hands when she has done with them.”
George looked at her very steadily, and gave no sign of the tempest within him except the trembling of his hands.
“I will give this packet, not to my wife, but to your husband, madam,” said he in a very low voice. At that moment Lord Florencecourt’s footsteps were heard outside the door, and George added: “I shall not have to wait for an opportunity.”
Upon the first sound of her husband’s tread, the lady had visibly quailed, in spite of her Amazonian reputation: as he entered the room, and with a searching glance seemed to take in at once the chief features of the situation, she made an attempt to walk majestically to the door.
“Stop,” said he, raising his hand a very little way; “I want to speak to you. Mr. Lauriston,” he went on, turning formally to the young man, who noticed that his nervousness of the morning had given place to a look of steady determination, “if my wife has had the folly and bad taste to insult you, I apologise for her, and beg that you will take no steps consequent upon her impertinence until you have first had an interview with me.”
“I shall be glad to have that interview as soon as possible, Lord Florencecourt, as I must leave your house this morning.”
“In five minutes, if you like. In the meantime, if you wish to ask questions about that infernal gewgaw,” and he looked savagely at the necklace, which George had torn from its covering, “I will tell you at once I did not give it to your wife, as Lady Florencecourt persists in imagining, but I sold it to a dealer without the least idea what was to become of it. Are you satisfied?”
“As to your share in the matter, my lord, perfectly.”
“As for my wife, she shall apologise to you herself.”
“There is no need for any apology,” said George, without condescending to look in the direction of the lady. “I am quite satisfied with your explanation.”
He left the husband and wife together, and finding Nouna, who was in a state of tearful anger against the dragon, he helped her to pack her trunk, and then filled and fastened his own portmanteau. These tasks were scarcely finished when Lady Florencecourt, pale, trembling, meek as a startled lamb, her eyes red with violent crying, her whole manner so utterly subdued and abject as to make one doubt her identity, knocked at the door, and finding them engaged in packing, begged them most earnestly to forget her impatience of the morning and to stay, as they had intended, until the Monday. Poor Nouna was so much affected by the evident distress of this haughty personage, that she burst into tears and put her arms round her, assuring her that she had not noticed any impatience at all, and that she would be glad to stay. But George, whose masculine nature was not so easily melted, persisted quietly but firmly that they were obliged to return to London at once. Whereupon Lady Florencecourt extracted a promise from Nouna that she would come to dinner as soon as they should all return to town.
“Oh yes,” said Nouna readily, “I want to see the dear boys again; I always like boys, but I never liked any so well as Regie and Bertie.”
At these words Lady Florencecourt fell a-trembling again most unaccountably, and she soon withdrew to order the carriage to take her guests to the station.
It was a most uncomfortable leave-taking. In spite of her importunities, Nouna could not see the boys again; Lady Florencecourt was as much too humbly cordial as she had before been too loftily cold; and Lord Florencecourt, who accompanied them to the station, hid a painful nervousness under his usual shield of impenetrable reserve. At the station, however, a little incident occurred which laid bare his defences in an untoward manner.
In an honourable determination not to lead Lord Florencecourt into any meeting with the Indian woman which could bear the appearance of a trap, George had ordered Sundran to return to town at once, and to get everything ready for her mistress’s return on Monday. But Sundran had lost the train, and had to put off her journey; so that she was in the station on Saturday morning, waiting to go by the very train in which her master and mistress so hastily decided to travel. She was waiting on the platform, a limp bundle of white clothes, too proud to take shelter in the waiting-room from curious glances, but flashing looks of grand contempt around her with her black eyes, when she caught sight of her young mistress in the doorway, and hastened up to her with a low cry of loving welcome. The train was coming up, and as it was market day, there was a bustling and mildly-excited crowd on the platform, jostling one another with baskets, and chivying to madness the solitary porter. In the confusion Lord Florencecourt was for a few moments separated from his departing guests, whom he rejoined just as Nouna had mounted into an empty compartment, and was handing her sunshade to Sundran, who was standing on the doorstep. George stood on the platform, much excited; as soon as he caught sight of Lord Florencecourt, for whom the crowd made way with respectful recognition, he told Sundran sharply that he had got a seat for her, and she must come to it at once. She stepped down, and he put his hand on her arm, and made her turn her back to Lord Florencecourt, and run. In doing so she dropped Nouna’s sunshade. Before George could prevent her she had stopped, wheeled round to pick it up, and seen the Colonel face to face.
With a hoarse and guttural cry she drew herself upright, pointing at him with a lean, dark finger.
“Captain Weston!” she hissed out fiercely, while her black eyes flashed, and her fingers clenched as if she would have flown at his throat.
Lord Florencecourt saw her; over his rugged features a dull flush spread, dying again quickly; he raised his hat mechanically, not looking at Nouna; and without any change in the fixed expression of dead reserve he had worn all the morning, turned and made his way through the yielding crowd out of the station. George bundled Sundran into a carriage, and went back to his wife just in time to jump in as the train started.
A quick, shy glance at her face told him she had heard the Indian woman’s words.