CHAPTER XXII.
George Lauriston hurried out of the church, and turned towards his home still in the heat of a first impulse of passionate anger against Madame di Valdestillas and Mr. Smith for inciting his wife to deceive him; but as he walked and reason began to form a crust over the still flowing stream of passion, he resolved that he would not reproach his wife with this new concealment until he had accused her instigators, and learnt from them the meaning of it. With this decision fresh made, he forbore to enter his house until he should have recovered enough equanimity not to repel his wife by a fresh aspect of suspicion, and he was in the act of turning back within a few feet of the door, when a hansom drove up and Lord Florencecourt jumped out of it.
Catching sight of George, he paid the cabman, and came up to him with a face in which the younger man fancied he perceived less of constraint and more of the old frank friendliness than he had seen there since his marriage. In fact, the Colonel felt that the first of the barriers between them, that of concealment, was now broken down, and he began to breast his difficulties more manfully with the certainty that he was “in for it.”
“I came down by the next train, George,” he said simply; “I thought when that infernal black woman let out on me, we had better come to an understanding at once and have done with it.”
“Much better, I should think, Lord Florencecourt,” said Lauriston rather bitterly. “It would have been better if Nouna and I had been fairly dealt with from the first, and not forced to begin our life together in this smothering fog of mystery, deceived a little bit by everybody, and obliged to get every scrap of knowledge about our own circumstances by fighting for it.”
The Colonel dug his stick into the ground and avoided meeting his eyes. “You have heard Sundran’s story, I suppose?”
“Not yet.”
“Well, well, it’s not all my fault,” said he. “An indiscretion involving a lady now, you know, er—moving in society—you see, one has not only oneself to consider.”
His manner had suddenly become confused, incoherent, tentative, utterly unlike his usual soldierly abruptness. He seemed to be drawing back from his first open and friendly impulse, and to be more anxious for some exposition of his companion’s sentiments than for an opportunity of expressing his own. George was quite ready to take up the challenge.
“An indiscretion, Colonel! It seems to have been a serious one. My wife signed her name at our wedding as Nouna Kilmorna.”
The Colonel started, taken quite off his guard.
“The d——l she did!” After a pause, he added: “Then, by Jove, she must know—— Oh, these women, these women, there’s no making a contract with them! They wriggle out of the terms of it like eels.”
“You are speaking of her mother?”
“Yes, confound her!”
The veteran’s philosophy, which he was fond of putting at the service of his friends, failed him at such a crisis as this, and left him at the mercy of the very commonest of all resources—interjectional expletives. But they did not serve the purpose of the simple explanation his hearer wanted.
“Things seem to point to a contract there is no wriggling out of,” Lauriston suggested, as respectfully as the nature of the hint allowed.
The Colonel looked at George, and saw that he was at bay.
“Perhaps I had better have made a clean breast of it before,” he admitted grimly; “only it’s one of those deuced awkward things a man always shunts as long as he can. I did go through a form of marriage with the—the lady’s mother.”
“With Madame di Valdestillas?”
“Oh, ah, yes, with Madame di Valdestillas. Of course she—she wasn’t Madame di Valdestillas then. She was a little half-bred Indian gipsy.”
George looked cold. The light tone Lord Florencecourt now seemed inclined to take, was not, all things considered, in the best taste.
“She was your wife, then?” he said.
The Colonel answered by a slight convulsion of the top vertebræ of his spine, to admit as little of the accusation as possible.
“Did you divorce her?” he asked, rather puzzled.
“Well, I don’t know whether a divorce out there would be held quite regular over here. There’s the difficulty, you see.”
From which George gathered in a flash of astonishment that the austere and respectable viscount had, when the chain of his first matrimonial alliance grew irksome, troubled no court of law to regain his liberty.
“You understand,” continued the Colonel, meeting his companion’s eyes full for the first time, “that it is quite as much to the lady’s interest as to mine that the affair should not become common gossip.”
“To the mother’s interest, perhaps, not to the daughter’s,” said George coldly.
“How does she suffer? She is received everywhere, made a fuss with, treated as a lion, as if she were descended from the skies. Would it improve her position for it to be known that her mother had been divorced, legally or illegally? What better provision could I, a poor man, make for her than I do, if she were my acknowledged legitimate daughter?”
“Provision!”
“Yes, I allow her a thousand a year, supposed to have been left her. Why not? She is under no obligation, and I——”
“—Will be relieved from the charge for the future. I guessed something of it this morning, of course, and was only anxious to know how much we owed you.”
“Owed me! It is not a debt. I acknowledge, I am the first to acknowledge, the claims of my own child, especially now she is your wife.”
“Oh, I acknowledge the claims too. It is only my pride that makes me waive them on behalf of my wife. Until I know all the circumstances of the case I prefer to stand independently.”
“Why, what further circumstances do you want to know?”
“There are two more versions of the story I must hear before I can understand all its bearings. You understand, Colonel, that where a woman is concerned, the man’s view of the question is not enough to judge by. I must hear Sundran and Madame di Valdestillas.”
“Hear every hag in —— if you please,” said the Colonel irritably. “Only I warn you it is foolish behaviour rattling the bones of decently buried skeletons.”
“If it were only an old scandal I shouldn’t care,” said George with a deepening of the collected gravity he had shown all through the conversation. “But you must see, Colonel, that the whole course of our lives depends on the following into its corners of this wretched story. My wife and I, starting quietly in a humdrum way, a pair of very poor town-mice, suddenly find ourselves in a Tom Tiddler’s ground, and are bidden not to trouble ourselves how we came there, or why we are inundated with invitations, and our eccentricities treated as delightful innovations, when a few weeks before they would have been ‘bad style.’ It isn’t in human nature not to ask why.”
“Why can’t you take my explanation and be satisfied?”
“Because it goes such a very little way. It explains why we receive one thousand a year, when we are getting and spending five thousand; why you treat Nouna with secret liberality, but not why you show her open dislike. Above all it explains your relation with Madame di Valdestillas, but not your objection to my seeing her.”
The Colonel, who had been fidgeting uneasily with his cane, grew suddenly still.
“If you see her,” he said slowly after a pause, “she’ll consider the contract broken, and she’ll ruin every man jack of us; and you and your wife may say good-bye to domestic felicity as well as I and mine. Be warned, George; you’d better leave things as they are, for both our sakes.”
“I can’t,” said Lauriston, who felt that a chill had come upon spirits and senses at the Colonel’s homely but forcible warning. “No man can blunder on like this in the dark and be satisfied. Whatever I find out, it sha’n’t hurt you more than I can help, Colonel.”
He added something about Nouna’s waiting for him to take her out, anxious to get away. But the Colonel, who seemed loth to part with him, turned back when they had shaken hands at his initiative, and said:—
“Madame di Valdestillas is abroad, is she not?”
“So I have been told. But in the mesh of lies they have entangled me with, I shouldn’t like to answer for the truth of it.”
“Look here, if you will leave this to me, I’ll write to her lawyers and arrange a meeting for you and me at the same time. And we’ll talk to her together.”
“Thanks, Colonel. But I can’t wait for that; and I’m not going to trust to the lawyers this time.”
“But if she is abroad?”
“If!”
This terse reply seemed to disconcert Lord Florencecourt, who left him without further protest or comment, and made straight for the park. George went back to his own house and inquired if Sundran had returned. On learning that she had not, he went up stairs in search of his wife, but was told she had gone out soon after he himself left the house. Her husband was not to wait for her to dinner, as she had gone to see Mrs. Ellis and might stay to tea with her.
Though this freak was perfectly consistent with Nouna’s capricious character, George was just in the mood to regard the message with vague suspicions of some trick. However, as he did not know Mrs. Ellis’s address, he had no means of following her, and seeing that it was already nearly six o’clock, he started off at once for Mary Street. The door of No. 36 was opened by a young servant, apparently new to the place, who told him, in answer to his inquiries, that a black woman had come there that afternoon to see Mr. Rahas, adding that after staying a very short time she had gone away again in the cab which brought her, Mr. Rahas himself putting her in, giving the direction to the cabman, and at the last moment jumping in after her.
“I suppose you don’t remember what the direction was?”
The girl was a cockney, and scented backsheesh. She nodded with much shrewdness. George put his hand to his pocket.
“Waterloo station—side for Richmond,” she said promptly.
Richmond! George remembered the address given by Captain Pascoe in his note. It might be only a coincidence, but a coincidence when one is on the track of a mystery becomes either a guiding or a misguiding light.
He asked, as he dropped a half-crown into the girl’s hand, whether Mr. Rahas had returned home, but it was not with the intention of settling accounts with him then. On learning therefore that he had not come back yet, George simply went away and got as quickly as he could to Waterloo.
Thoughts of Lord Florencecourt, Madame di Valdestillas, and the haze of inconsequent romance which seemed to surround their conduct to their daughter faded before a fiery fear that this untamable sun-child to whom he had given all his heart had been led into some trap by Rahas; for George suddenly remembered that, as he did not know Captain Pascoe’s handwriting, the signature might have been merely a blind. Ridiculously unlikely as the supposition was, the unhappy young husband could think of no less fantastic explanation of the facts; no reasoning could have dissolved his belief that it was to Thames Lawn, Richmond, that her sudden journey had been taken, and his only comfort was in knowing that he had followed her up so quickly that his arrival there could scarcely fail to be within less than an hour of hers.
At Richmond he darted out of the station and jumped into a fly.
“Thames Lawn. Drive as fast as you can,” he said.
The driver, instead of starting, turned, after the manner of his kind, to debate.
“Thames Lawn!” he repeated, reflectively. “Don’t know it, sir. Who lives there?”
“I—I don’t know the name of the people who have it now,” said George.
He was on the point of jumping out of the fly to make inquiries in the station, when another driver joined in the discussion.
“Thames Lawn!” cried he, “why it’s the place where they foreign swells live that gives the big parties. Prince and Princess Wesenstein. That’s the place. Where you drove the young gent that give you half a sovereign.”
“Oh—ah—yes,” said the other, and touching his hat to his fare with a nod to signify that it was all right, he gathered up the reins and started.
A foreign prince and princess who gave big parties! To even an intelligent Englishman the idea suggested by these words was more consistent with his suspicions of some grave villainy than the mention of an English lady and gentleman would have been. Yet the munificent and showy hospitality implied in the brief description did not agree with his fears of an ambush. A drive through the narrow High Street, filled with the overflowing, lively crowd of a bright summer evening, brought him in a few minutes to the lodge-gates of Thames Lawn. George left his fly waiting outside, and made inquiries at the lodge. The Prince and Princess were at home, the lodge-keeper said, but there was no gentleman of the name of Rahas staying with them that he knew of. There were often gentlemen with foreign names staying there, as his highness himself was a foreign gentleman.
“Has he a very dark complexion?” asked George, with a new doubt in his mind.
“No, he’s as fair as any Englishman, like most Germans,” said the lodge-keeper, rather superciliously, with for the first time a suspicious expression in his dull British grey eyes. “There’s a dark gentleman visiting there this afternoon,” he added, after a few moments’ consideration, during which he had carefully taken stock of his questioner, and perhaps satisfied himself that he was not “after the spoons.”
“Oh, was he alone or with a lady?” asked George, with careful carelessness.
“Well, sir, he was with a walking bundle of white tea-cloths,” said the lodge-keeper, rendered more sympathetic by the chance of airing his own humour.
“You are sure,” said George, with a great heart-leap, “that the lady was dressed in white, and not in grey, with a grey cap?”
“No, sir; no lady in grey has been here to-day. I can count the ladies as comes here,” he added, with just meaning enough to give the young husband an impulse of thankfulness that he had forestalled his wife.
He thanked the man and made his way through a winding avenue of lime and chestnut trees to a grass-plot studded with flower-beds and surrounded by a circular drive leading to a large, square-built brick house, which seemed to rise out of a bank of laurels and other shrubs lightened by clusters of rhododendrons. The portico was smothered with creepers, which were carefully trained to extend over the walls. Long trails of still green Virginia creeper swung backwards and forwards in the air above a thick mass of geraniums of various colour that were banked up round the pillars of the entrance. The door was open, showing at the end of a wide hall a sloping lawn and a glimpse of the river. As George rang the bell, a gust of wind blew into his face the petals of overblown roses from stands of flowers that lined the hall, with perfumes of pungent sandal and sickly sweet exotics. A footman in a striking livery of purple and gold, whom the lowness of the roof of the hall magnified into a giant, appeared at once in answer to the bell, and without coming to be questioned, lifted a gorgeous crimson and silver curtain with heavy fringes that rustled as it was raised, and stood aside, inviting the visitor to enter.
George crossed the hall, with an involuntary thought, as he glanced up at the rich colours of the painted ceiling, and brushed close to a cluster of delicate flowers unknown to him, that shook fairy bells in the stirred air, of the vivid pleasure this luxurious extravagance of scents and hues would give to Nouna.
“I wish to see Mr. Rahas, who called here this afternoon,” said George to the servant, pausing at the entrance of the room which, the first glance told him, confirmed the impression given by the hall.
“I will see, sir. I think Mr. Rahas is on the lawn,” answered the man, still holding up the curtain in invitation to the visitor to pass under it.
After a second’s hesitation George went in. The room was long and low, with French windows opening on to a verandah, from which the lawn ran down to the river. The walls were painted in eighteenth century fashion but in the nineteenth century spirit. Grey pools fringed with delicate bulrushes, astride on whose bent heads sat gauze-winged elves; a smooth summer sea with the phantom ship of Vanderdecken crossing the sun’s path like a shred of mist; a siren asleep under the sea with a feathery pink sea-anemone for pillow, the sunlight shining down through the green water so that you looked and saw the baleful maid and looked again and lost her. All these pale fairy pictures, which emerged at intervals out of a fleecy background of cloud and tree, gave place as the eye travelled round the walls to deeper-hued representations of less ethereal romance. A golden-haired Guinevere, with blue unholy eyes and loose mouth red with kisses, looks lingeringly out of her window in the dawn to where among the grey trees of the distance the gleam of a helmet makes a faint spark of silver light. A furnace-eyed, cynical Vivien, with passionate triumph fanning the glow of her swarthy evil beauty, glides up in the gathering darkness among overhanging cypresses from where, an undistinguishable heap, lies the insensible body of the conquered Merlin. A tiny brown-skinned, lithe-limbed Cleopatra, clad in chains of coins and little else, crouches submissive and seductive before Cæsar, raising long black eyes, twinkling with a thousand meanings, to the conqueror’s face, while the black soldier-slave stands in the background, still holding the mattress in which he has brought his queen hidden, and casting furtive, fearful looks at the world-famous pair.
George shuddered: Cleopatra was like Nouna. He cast only a hasty glance at the other pictures, noting the last, a scene drawn from the most moving of modern romances, where Manon Lescaut, bewitching in her little frills and flounces of butterfly Parisian finery, descends upon young Des Grieux in his sombre Abbé’s gown, and wins him, with smiles and tears and caresses, to her for ever.
These wall-paintings were all by well-known artists, and they stamped the room with a magnificent individuality. The mantelpiece was of white marble, carved by an eminent Italian sculptor, whose taste ran much to Cupids. The hangings of the room were pearl-white satin, and the furniture, in the slender eighteenth century style, was white wood covered with the same material. Tall white wood cabinets, also lined with the satin, filled the spaces right and left of the mantelpiece. Both were filled with old china, a Sybarite’s collection, which contained no piece unique without being beautiful, or beautiful without being unique. Handsomely-bound books, of the kind which are written to be illustrated, lay on the tables among Venetian decanters and bowls of cut flowers. The floor was of polished wood, cool to the feet. In the verandah outside were low lounging chairs and a table with champagne-cup.
After a hasty survey of the room George walked to one of the windows. Mr. Rahas was in the garden, he thought, the servant had said. But there was no sign of him on the lawn or under the trees that bordered it on each side as far as the river’s brink. As George looked out, and put one foot on the tesselated floor of the verandah to get a wider view, he heard a sound of a chair scraping the pavement, and then his own name called. He turned round and saw Dicky Wood peeping up, flushed, amazed and excited, from under a Japanese umbrella which he was holding over himself as he lay in a hammock between two of the verandah pillars. In a moment George’s eyes were opened as he noticed the free-and-easy manner in which the lad was enjoying himself, in a light suit, a cigar in his mouth, his tie hanging loose, and observed the consternation on his face. It was the home of Chloris White, and Nouna, with her usual wild wilfulness, had stuck to her project of visiting this royalty of the half-world, and begging Chloris to relax her hold on Dicky. The coming of Rahas and Sundran remained unaccounted for; but George for the moment did not trouble about that; he was thanking Heaven it was no worse.
Such a great light of relief broke over his face that Dicky, who had tumbled out of the hammock in a shamefaced manner, and with as much celerity as if it had been his Colonel who confronted him, took courage to say:
“I—I didn’t expect to see you here, Lauriston.”
“I suppose not,” said George shortly, with less moral indignation than irritation with this fool for being the cause of the horrible uneasiness to which he had been a prey. “I haven’t much taste for the fruit that grows on the high road.”
Dicky, who was not a philosophical admirer, grew red and angry.
“I won’t hear a word against Chloris—I mean the Princess—even from you, Lauriston,” he began, holding himself very erect.
George put his hand on the young fellow’s shoulder. He was not two years older than the young scapegrace, but the prestige of his reserved character gave him authority.
“I didn’t come here to quarrel with you, laddie,” he said gravely. “When you find what did bring me, you won’t be so loud. Tell me, why do you call her the ‘Princess?’ Who’s the Prince?”
His thoughts ran again on Rahas.
Dicky glanced round the lawn.
“He isn’t about now,” he said carelessly. “He’s a little dried-up German with dyed hair and moustache; seventy, if he’s a day.”
“Did you ever meet here a man named Rahas?”
“Rahas! Oh, yes. He’s a sort of commission agent, who gets any Indian thing you want, from a pound of Assam tea to an elephant. Why, you know him, of course; for he lived in the same house with Mrs. Lauriston before you married her,” rattled on Dicky, encouraged by George’s lenity.
“Does he ever speak of her—my wife?”
“No, he won’t. I began to chaff him once; only a harmless word or two,” he went on hastily, seeing a change in his companion’s face, “And he—well, he got all sorts of dark colours, and his eyes spat fire. I think he once went in for being a sort of rival, you know—at least, I mean before you knew her.”
“Have you seen him to-day?”
“Yes, I think he’s talking to Chl—the Princess—now somewhere. No, by Jove, here she is.”
From where they were standing in the verandah they could hear the rustle of the silver fringe, and the tipity-tap of high-heeled shoes on the polished floor. She was a little woman, this famous personage, though it was only by comparison that you could discover the fact; for she bore herself with the easy dignity of a queen, and before he saw more of her than a golden head and a robe of buttercup silk peeping between draperies of black lace, he knew without debate that he had seen so much grace of movement in no English woman, and only in one who was not English. As she advanced through the long room in a very leisurely manner, a couple of spaniels playing about her feet, a painted fan in her hands, he found that he was waiting for her near approach with something stronger than curiosity. First his involuntary admiration of her carriage was changed suddenly, without warning or definite thought, into a sick disgust that grew, with the next few steps she took, into horror equally without cause, without explanation. Then his blood stood still, hot and fiery, in his veins, and seemed to be scorching his body, as the horror became in a moment a definite, devilish dread, so ghastly that the mind refused it as a thought, and the lips were paralysed and could give it no vent. When at last she reached the open window, and the mild evening light showed him her face without disguise, he saw nothing but the outline he had seen in silhouette against the window in his own house on the day he and Nouna entered it.
His own house! Great heavens, no. This woman’s house; bought with the foul earnings of her infamous calling!
For Nouna’s mother was Chloris White.
As he realised this, face to face with her, George reeled back against one of the supports of the verandah, and burst into a stupid idiot’s laugh. The whole foundation on which heart and brain were busy building for a life’s work and a life’s happiness, had sunk beneath his feet and swept all into a hideous, yawning pit of ruin. And so for a moment the brain gave way and the horrible pain was dulled, while Chloris White, recognising her son-in-law with a shock, dismissed the enamoured Dicky on some futile errand, and gave all her attention to the unexpected and disastrously unwelcome visitor.