CHAPTER XXIII.
Chloris White was one of those utterly corrupt, abandoned and dangerous women in whom certain noble and loveable qualities flourish with a rank and prolific luxuriance impossible in colder and better balanced natures. She had liked George Lauriston from the first, with the impulsive yet not altogether undiscriminating liking of a woman clever enough, while knowing the worse side of men thoroughly, to understand that there is a better and to work upon that also when it suited her purpose. When chance threw the young officer in her daughter’s way, she spared no pains both by her own investigations and those of Rahas, in whom she found an agent ready to her hand—subtle, secretive, and not above bribes—to find out whether Lauriston as a son-in-law would satisfy her affection and her ambition for Nouna. Every report proved satisfactory; there was nothing against him but his poverty; and as Chloris White, at three-and-thirty still in the height of her vogue, helped herself with both hands to the savings of centuries and revelled in the spoils of city and county, there was no reason to make that an insuperable obstacle. For this half-bred Indian woman was born ambitious, and was determined that in her child should be fulfilled such aspirations as she had failed to realise in her own person.
The illegitimate daughter of an Indian Maharanee and an English government official, Lakshmi—for that was Chloris White’s real name—had been born with the germs of marvellous beauty and ungovernable passions, both of which developed until at fifteen, when she became, by various artful ruses, the wife of a deeply-enamoured young officer, who was even at the time ashamed enough of his marriage to wed the little witch under an assumed name—she was the most fascinating little fury in the Presidency. Though her husband had well-founded suspicions of her infidelity, she was clever enough to prevent his obtaining proofs of it, and at last, despairing of getting free in a more legal manner of this burden upon his life, a half savage wife, ignorant, vicious and violent, he left her when his regiment returned to England, leaving such provision as he, then a poor lieutenant, could afford for her and his child, a girl only a few weeks old, whose paternity he affected to doubt. Four years passed, during which he heard no more of either of them. The poor lieutenant became, by unexpected deaths, heir to a title; he wanted to marry. Detectives, set to work both in England and in India, could find no trace either of mother or child. Finally, the husband decided that they must have gone down in the whirlpool, as such a woman would be most likely to do. He risked the venture and married. For years more no rumour of the lost wife troubled him, until, when he was Viscount Florencecourt, Colonel of his regiment, and father of two boys for whom he would have died, a horrible phantom rose, conjured up by a letter from the solicitors Messrs. Smith and Angelo, who made known to him that his wife, Lady Florencecourt, had arrived in England. He tried silence, denial; but the wild Lakshmi had grown into a remarkably capable woman, and her lawyers were furnished with ample proofs that the lady now leading a notorious life in London and the little dare-devil imp whom the young lieutenant married seventeen years ago, were one and the same person. She had ferreted him out, hunted him down.
Lord Florencecourt submitted; he would consent to anything, if she would only hold her peace. At first Lakshmi was merciful, contenting herself with a warning that his daughter had claims upon him to which he would have to give ear by and by. Then, having heard of Lady Florencecourt’s pearls, Lakshmi demanded them for a wedding gift to his daughter. It was at this point that he saw Nouna by accident in the barrack-yard at Hounslow, and the fact was sprung upon him that this daughter of whom he was in vague dread was already the wife of his favourite officer. The next blows followed quickly: he must allow a thousand a year towards the support of the young couple, must cause his “exclusive” sister to call upon them, must induce Lady Florencecourt to receive them. The wretched man had fulfilled every command, unable to console himself even with the reflection that these troubles were undeserved. At last, fearing that Lady Florencecourt’s rudeness to Nouna, whom she suspected of being his daughter, would bring down upon them the last, worst punishment, he had to confess the whole story, and purchase her civility to young Mrs. Lauriston at the price of such a course of lectures, curtain and otherwise, as the mind of man recoils from considering.
For her husband Lakshmi had no mercy. He had treated her badly, the first and the last man who had ever had a chance of doing so, and the power she now held over him she used with the cruelty of a nature in its depths half savage still. But for this young fellow, who had treated her child with quixotic honour and delicacy which she, of all women, knew how to appreciate, she felt, when the awful discovery of her identity stunned him into momentary idiotcy in her presence, an impulse of pity and tenderness almost as strong as any she had ever felt for the daughter whom Chloris with all her faults adored. Lauriston’s good looks also, his muscular figure and healthy, sun-browned face added considerably in her sensual eyes to the attraction his chivalrous character gave him. As he still leant back against the wooden support of the verandah, staring not at her but over her head in a struggle to get back his wits and realise the nature of the blow which had stunned him, Chloris White came forward and laid her hands winningly upon his shoulders with a pretty maternal air of compassion, which was the sincere expression of a kindly impulse tempered by an ever-present professional sense of the picturesque and moving. Her touch, the glance down at her face which it compelled him to give, brought remembrance back in a flood and filled him with loathing so overwhelming that he affected to stagger back inadvertently from the inadequate support on which he was leaning. Respect for women dies hard in men of decent lives, and George would not have had even this abandoned woman know the horror and disgust she excited in him. She had kept her child pure, he must remember that; but all the stories he had heard of her unequalled rapacity and depravity rushed into his mind with the lightning rapidity of thought in moments of intense excitement, and gained a horribly fascinating force of likelihood as, by the light of all he knew about her, he examined the face of Lord Florencecourt’s wife.
Chloris White was still at thirty-three a woman of surprising beauty, of small, lithe, youthful figure, and face far surpassing her daughter’s in perfection of feature. But the daring process of changing her hair from raven black to a subdued golden tint had rendered necessary a change of complexion which gave a weird prominence to her long, black-fringed eyes, and helped to stamp the countenance with the unmistakable impress of evil. There was in her beauty none of the essential coldness of the English types, whose worst representatives lure for the most part at the outset by an appearance of straightforward innocence in the gaze of confiding blue or grey eyes. She was a glowing spark from the forge of Evil, burning, searing, daringly brilliant and unmistakable, whose allurement appealed directly to the viler side of men; her attractions were the poisonous charms of stagnant waters and forest swamps, of venomous reptiles that hang or creep in sinuous curves where vegetation is rankest, where no breeze penetrates to disperse the fumes of damp and decay: her beauty was the beauty of corruption.
George Lauriston was not the man to remain long the prey of vain imaginings; almost as soon as he recovered full use of his mind after the first stunning shock, he was entirely himself again, understanding that a contest between them was inevitable, and deciding as rapidly what were to be his chief weapons. His first impulse had been to avoid a discussion, by withdrawing at once without an explanation, resigning his commission, and emigrating with Nouna to the uttermost parts of the earth. But close upon this idea had followed the certainty that this spoilt creature, baffled in her ambition for her child, would use the means of compensating herself offered by her hold over the Colonel, and by proclaiming and proving herself to be the real Lady Florencecourt, bring ruin to the family. Chloris also prepared herself for a struggle. She knew that the cynical philosophy which would quietly accept a daughter and a fortune from hands such as hers, was not to be found in company with the virtues for which she had chosen her son-in-law.
Therefore, with head bent like a penitent Magdalen, so meek that the harshest could not spurn her, she drew back as it in shame, and addressed him in a low murmuring voice of an indescribably vibrating quality, sweet, deep-toned, and penetrating as the sound-waves of an organ through quiet aisles. The voice, like the face, shook George with an unspeakable horror. For in every glance, in every tone, he saw a sickening, awful likeness to the young wife he worshipped, and in the power this depraved woman exercised over half the fools of the day, his unhealthily excited fancy saw a hideous burlesque of the undue dominion Nouna had already got over him. He listened without looking at her at first, until the irresistibly melting tones made it impossible to forbear meeting her eyes in the searching demand to know whether the face would belie the words.
“You will not let me touch you, the husband of my own child. I do not blame you. I can even say I am sorry you have come, since to meet me has given you pain. I am not proud for myself, I am only proud for my child—my children. While I kept myself apart from you for your happiness, my soul, all that is best and truest in me, was with you. You are my judge, my son, but remember that.”
Even the high-flown speech was like Nouna in her serious moods. George glanced at her. Her eyes, to which the rest of her face, beautiful as it was, seemed in moments of excitement only a sort of unnoticed setting, were like liquid fire.
“I am no judge, madam,” he said, “and I thank God for bringing me here to-day.”
Her expression changed; evidently she had prepared herself for an outburst of anger, and was less able to cope with a masculine quietness.
“You are glad you came to-day?” she faltered, not knowing what this might portend, for her visitor gave no sign of working himself up to a good, warming height of indignation.
“Yes. You would have let me go on for months living like a skunk.”
The Magdalen look gave place at once to a vindictive tightening of the lips and narrowing of the eyes.
“You are not satisfied with what I have done for you?”
“No, madam.”
“Why, what would you have?”
“I would have had you let me know the truth. I deserved it.”
“But you would have objected to my daughter’s having the fortune which made her happy.”
“If you knew I should object, you had the less right to deceive me.”
He was not going to prate about his honour to this creature; he did not even think she would understand him, but he was mistaken. Now that she saw what tone he was going to take she adjusted hers to meet him, and became cool and haughty.
“My daughter’s nurse, Sundran, came to me to-day to tell me where to find the husband who deserted me when I was no more than a child; she thought, poor woman, I did not know. I gathered that her recognition did not surprise you.”
“Well, madam.”
“Will it satisfy you to have your wife acknowledged as the Honourable Nouna Kilmorna, only daughter of Lord Florencecourt?”
“No, madam. Nouna is my wife, that is enough for me. I only want you to understand that she must be content to live for a few years like a poor officer’s wife, some day she shall have as much rank and position as she could wish.”
“Oh, that would be charming for you; but Nouna! Do you think she is the sort of girl to be happy by herself in stuffy lodgings while you are amusing yourself ‘getting on’? Come, you know better. If she couldn’t be contented like that during her honeymoon, do you think she could now?”
The bitterness of this thrust, to which experience had given a barbed point, made him wince.
“She is only a child,” said he; “feeling my love about her day by day, she will learn to be happy in that, as you would have been if your husband had been all your heart wanted,” he added, as a happy thought.
But Chloris White only laughed, having the coarse cynical honesty of her kind. “Do you really believe that?” she said. “Well, you are wrong. In my case, because no one man could ever have been to me all my heart wanted; in Nouna’s case, because she is, disguise it what way you like, her mother’s child. Give her jewels, new gowns, gaiety, luxury, and you may hold what room there is in her heart for a man; shut her in two rooms, restrict her to one frock for each of the seasons, and you will see, if you don’t know, just how much happiness your love is able to give her. I tell you she must have pleasure, pleasure, pleasure; and if you won’t let her accept it openly, passing through your hands as a gift from you, I’ll let her have it secretly through somebody else’s.”
A spirit of evil seemed to flash a hideous lightning across her handsome face as she uttered this threat. George was horrorstruck.
“You don’t mean what you say,” he said, catching his breath. “You, who were noble enough to keep apart from your child for her sake! You would not destroy your own work now!”
“I would destroy anything when I’m worked up to it,” she said coolly. “Listen, Mr. Lauriston. The world makes distinctions as to the ways in which money is made; but it makes none as to the way in which it is spent; that can and does confer nothing but honour. Well, that part of the business is all I ask of you. As to the way I get it, why many a man of your trade might think himself blessed if he got his with so clear a conscience. There are no villages burned to give me a cocked hat, nor towns plundered that I may build a villa. My money’s my own, to do what I like with, and I choose to give it to my children to make them a position in the world. Nobody knows where it comes from, and nobody need know; and you can call it your wife’s money, not yours, if you are so particular. But she must and shall have it. Money is not made by looking at it by me more than by anybody else. I’ve worked for a fortune to give my daughter, because I mean her to have the best of everything in this world. I’m ready even never to see her except by a trick, but I won’t have my work foiled just at the last by any squeamish folly on your part; if you won’t have wife and fortune together, you shall have neither, I swear.”
“You don’t seem to understand, madam, that your control over your daughter ceased when she became my wife.”
“Did it?” retorted Chloris White, with scornful emphasis. “Well, you can entertain that opinion, if it comforts you, for a few days longer. But don’t depend too much on your legal rights when you are dealing with a person who lives outside the law.”
“I can trust your love for Nouna to conquer any impulse you might have to do her harm through me,” said George, a bull-dog defiance rising in him and affecting the tone in which he uttered these sufficiently pacific words.
“You can trust me to keep her from having her life ruined by any man’s pig-headedness,” said Chloris, throwing herself into a long cane lounging chair with much spirit in voice and attitude. “Do you think I brought up Nouna virtuously to secure her happiness?” she asked mockingly. “No, I meant her to be happy in spite of it. I meant her to enjoy all the honours of the great world, and all the luxury of the other one; I meant her to become what she has become, a society pet, a society lion, by the very ways and manners which in me are Bohemian, shocking, impossible. Oh! They are easily gulled, those feather-brained ladies of the ‘best’ society. However, it is ‘the best,’ and so I mean my daughter to keep there.”
“You don’t understand these people,” said George, disgusted by her shameless cynicism, but resolved to go through with the contest, and to make the best terms he could. “She has made friends among them now, real friends. When they hear she has lost her fortune they will simply try to make up for the loss by inviting her more, making more fuss with her than ever.”
Chloris White shook her head contemptuously.
“Poor gentility,” she said, “that depends on the broken dainties cast to it by its betters—for betters in money are betters in everything—is worse off than the frank poverty that lives on offal. Now poverty in any shape is loathsome, and it shall not come near my daughter. Fortune with honour is the best possible thing, but fortune without honour is the next best, infinitely better in Nouna’s case than any amount of love in garrets. You see I am acting on principle. If you insist—and I see by your English bulldog face you mean to insist (it is a trick of your country, and of no use with a woman) in refusing my daughter the fortune she is entitled to, I shall encourage the suit—the secret suit—of a lover who will be more compliant.”
She took a cigarette-case from the table beside her, and striking a wax match on a tiny box that jingled among other objects from a châtelaine at her side, she lit a cigarette, and puffing a long spiral cloud into the air above her, watched it disperse and fade with much apparent interest.
To George she had become, in the course of the last few moments, no longer a beautiful, depraved human creature with one fair spot in her nature that had to be touched, but a slimy noisome thing to be shaken off as quickly as possible and avoided for ever. He looked at her steadily, so steadily indeed that she turned her head on one side, and shot at him an oblique glance, in preference to bearing the full brunt of a gaze of such mortifying disgust and contempt. Then, bowing to her very coldly, he said he was afraid he had intruded upon her too long, and seeing a few steps off the open door by which he could pass through to the front of the house without re-entering the drawing-room, he was retreating towards it, when a voice in the hall struck upon the hearing both of him and of Chloris at the same time, causing her to start up from her lounging attitude with a bound of thirsty triumph, crushing all his cold armour of pride and laying bare in a moment the wounded passionate heart it had hidden.
He sprang forward, panting, feverish, imploring, like a weak boy at her mercy, held her wrists, looked down into her face with eyes that let light into the recesses of passion within him.
“For God’s sake spare her, don’t let her see you, Nouna—she has come to see Chloris White, the devil’s part of you, about young Wood. Don’t see her. Remember, she is your child and my wife. Show the angel’s side once more. Be true to your own soul. Listen. You are your child’s religion. While she worships you, while she holds you the ideal of all that is pure and lovely, the spirit of good in you is kept alive by her devotion. If you cast yourself down from that altar you kill in yourself everything that is not vile, base, devilish; you ruin the mind you and I have watched over and kept pure; you throw yourself and her into an endless hell. You are a woman—you will have pity.”
He poured out these words in a hot lava-torrent of passionate emotion which surprised and moved the woman to whom sensations were the breath of life. However, she was not conquered; she looked up in his face and said with languid insolence:
“So! One can make fire out of wood at last! Well, you should have woke up sooner. I intend to see my daughter.”
George heard the patter of Nouna’s steps on the polished floor of the room within. With one rapid glance at the window, which was some few feet further down the verandah than the spot where he stood, and without one word or sound to warn her of his intention, he snatched Chloris up in his arms, and ran across the lawn towards the river in a slanting direction away from the window, to a spot where he saw a couple of boats moored to the bank. Utterly taken by surprise, and as instinctively submissive as her sex usually are to a masculine coup of this kind, Chloris White scarcely uttered a faint exclamation until, seeing the direction of their course, she asked, coolly:
“Are you going to drown me?”
“No. Though it’s what you deserve,” he panted briefly. And reaching the boats, he got into the nearest, a solidly built skiff, put Chloris down on the cushioned seat in the stern, pushed the boat off, and paddled her easily with the tide to the shadow of the trees, so that Nouna, if she came to the window, might not see them.
“What do you expect to gain by this astonishing stratagem?” asked Chloris.
“I intend to prevent you seeing Nouna until she has got clear of the house.”
“In the meantime young Wood will have met her, she will have found out that Chloris White is at home, and will have made up her mind to wait until she does see me.”
George made no answer. He was indeed considering what step he should next take. Luckily for him his silence, which was really the result of want of resource, impressed Chloris White differently. She was not used to being thwarted and treated as a person of small account, and she grew impatient and fretful at being made a fool of. To be forced to sit, with a complexion adapted for the half-light of the verandah and the lamps of the dinner table, in the full yellow glare of the evening sun, hatless, with no becoming sunshade to throw a soft shadow over her face, exposed without any of the clever artifices of her treasury to the disillusionised stare of the pleasure-crews that rowed past, was an ordeal which subdued the haughty security of this queen of an artificial realm more surely than innocent George could have guessed. She looked up at him, blinking in the unaccustomed strong daylight, with a malignant expression of spiteful hatred, and then looked over the boat-side into the shallow water, cowering miserably before the combined forces of blunt, coarse, overmastering nature, and blunt, coarse, overmastering man.
“Well, you have got your way this once—make the most of it,” she said bitterly. “Let me get back on the bank; the sun makes my head ache.”
“You will let her go without seeing her?” said George, utterly unconscious in the earnest realities that were occupying him, of the frivolous details which had gained his victory, and suspicious of her good faith.
“Yes, yes, yes, I tell you. She can go and you can go—the sooner the better. I am worn out with your coarse violence; I must go to my room and lie down.”
George paddled slowly back to where there was a pathway among the trees. An inkling of the truth broke upon him as he compared the superb disdain and contemptuous coolness with which this woman had treated him in the verandah with the broken-spirited petulance she showed now. He became rather ashamed of his stratagem, and helped the humbled woman to land very gently, with lowered eyes, feeling for the first time a spark of human kinship with her in this little exhibition of unamiable nature. “I am sorry if I have been rough,” said he humbly. “You see I have been much disturbed to-day.”
She made no answer, being by this time safe on the bank. She gave him—feeling more at ease already in the shade of the trees—one flashing, enigmatical glance which, while it did not betray her thoughts or her feelings towards him very definitely, yet renewed the impression of evil which her feminine helpless querulousness in the boat had for the time laid in abeyance; then she turned, and letting her golden-coloured gown trail after her on the narrow path, she walked away with the free motion from the hip, and graceful, alluring bearing which had come to her with her Eastern blood. But to George she looked, as she got further and further from his sight in the black and dim recesses of the plantation, like a huge, sinuous serpent, with head and upper part raised from the ground, ready to spring at and coil round its victim.
He remembered with a start that her word was not to be relied on, and bringing the boat with a few strokes back to where he had first found it, he jumped ashore, made fast the painter, and crossed the lawn rapidly to the window of the drawing-room. Nouna was there alone, leaning over a low chair, utterly absorbed in the picture of Guinevere at the window. She turned round on hearing footsteps, and screamed at sight of her husband. He sprang across the floor to her; but, struck suddenly with a terribly vivid sense of the likeness between her and the wretched woman he had just left, he felt his first impulse to take her in his arms freeze up, and merely said that she must come home with him. She cast a last lingering look of admiration at the paintings on the walls, and let her husband lead her out through the hall, where she tried to lag behind him with inquisitive glances into all the corners, burying her head among the hot-house flowers in a subdued ecstasy of enjoyment, and altogether showing a manifest reluctance to leave this strange little paradise of delights. They walked down the avenue in silence, except that he told her to make haste, and rebuked her rather sharply for a stealthy glance behind her at the house.
At the lodge-gates the fly in which he had come was waiting. When he had helped her in there came upon him a strong sense that he and she—an ill-assorted pair enough, with many a struggle and a heart-pang in store for them—were all that was left, each to the other, in a mass of tumbled ruins of fair prospects that had been solid and stately that morning. And as she cowered, very silent and subdued, expecting a scolding for her escapade, he put his arms round her, just before the sheltered road where they were driving joined the highway, and pressed a fervent, throbbing kiss on her lips. She returned it demonstratively, according to her wont, and then, as they were close upon the High Street, they had to calm down their exuberance, and he asked:
“What were you thinking about, Nounday?”
“I was thinking how lovely it would be to live in a house like that,” she answered naïvely.
It was natural enough, and George said so to himself, and would not let himself be tortured by the thought that the innocent remark was significant.