CHAPTER XXIV.
Throughout the journey back to town from Richmond there was, after that brief caress, scarcely more communication between George and his wife than if they had been strangers. Nouna, surprised in a flagrant act of disobedience, was disposed, by the very leniency with which she had been treated, to look upon her husband’s reserve as ominous; while he on his own side was too much absorbed in considering what steps he ought next to take to dispel her fears of punishment by so much as a few gentle words.
The fact was that George, who, like other reserved people of strong feelings, could only control the expression of those feelings, when strongly excited, by mounting over himself the strictest guard, wore on this occasion an unconscious panoply of sternness which was far more alarming to the impressionable Nouna than the most passionate outpouring of invective could have been. As the hansom they had taken from Waterloo Station drove up to the door of their house, and George flung the doors open with a sudden impulsive movement forward as if he would have sprung out without waiting for the driver to pull up, he was recalled to a consciousness of his wife’s presence by a frightened moan at his elbow, and looking round hastily, he saw her huddled up in the corner watching him with eyes full of fear. The sight startled him horribly, for the discovery of the evening had poisoned his mind with evil knowledge and rank suspicions.
“What is the matter? Why are you looking frightened?” he asked with a constrained look and tone which seemed to the frightened creature both fierce and harsh.
Nouna drew a long, shivering breath and did not answer, her eyes moving with the helpless, agonised expression of a field-mouse imprisoned for a few moments in human hands. Not in the least understanding the effect his manner had upon her, Lauriston’s suspicions suddenly took form as he remembered the presence of Rahas at Thames Lawn. As a matter of fact Nouna was entirely ignorant that either the Oriental merchant or Sundran was at the house she had just visited with the harmlessly quixotic intention of pleading for Dicky Wood. But Lauriston could not know that, could scarcely at that moment have believed his wife’s oath if she had sworn the truth. He turned sharply round in his seat to get a full view of her face, and she, scared out of all self-control, uttered a little shriek. He did not touch her, he did not attempt to reassure her; with a heavy, hopeless sigh he turned away, took off his hat, and passed his hand over his forehead. They had reached home, the footman was advancing from the open door; George noticed with disgust that the man must have witnessed the little scene. He got out and held out his hand to his wife, who rejected it and hung back until he quietly gave place to the servant, and walked to meet the Colonel, the sight of whom on the pathway a short distance from the house, had been the cause of his start forward in the hansom.
As the two men met they exchanged eager, anxious glances.
“Well!” said the Colonel shortly.
Lauriston, who looked haggard, white, and shaken, waited for him to speak further.
“What has—she done?”
Unwilling so much as to mention the name of the woman he reluctantly acknowledged as his daughter, Lord Florencecourt glanced towards the house she had just entered to indicate whom he meant.
“Done! What has she done? God knows.”
“Well, what do you suspect? You can speak out to me; I am not sensitive now. Has she done—the worst? You looked at her as if you could have killed her. I saw as you passed.”
Poor George stared at him in consternation.
“I looked—at my wife—as if I could have—killed her!” he repeated stupidly.
“Yes, by Jove, you did.”
George said nothing more for a few moments, being altogether shocked to learn that he could become unconsciously the most repulsive of tyrants to the very creature whom, in all the wreck of his life and his hopes, he unswervingly and with a new smarting fervour, adored.
“I suppose,” he said at last, “I’m going off my head. I swear I hadn’t the least idea there was anything unusual in my manner. Poor little thing!” he murmured abstractedly, while the Colonel continued to regard him very curiously.
George turned instinctively towards his home, and glanced through the trees at the windows of his wife’s room with a great yearning in his whole face. The Colonel put his arm briskly through the young man’s, and tried to lead him towards the nearest gate. They had wandered into Kensington Gardens.
“Come and dine with me at the Wellington Club. I’ve called twice at your place since I left you, and have been hovering about ever since on the look-out for you. Come—a glass of Rudesheimer——”
George drew back. “No, thanks, Colonel; I can’t come to-night. I must go back to my wife. You see—leaving her like that——”
He stammered and stopped. The Colonel considered him again attentively.
“You’ve not been telling her anything of our talk this afternoon, have you?” he asked, with a shade of contempt. “I cannot understand that craze of a newly-married man to be babbling of all his affairs to his wife. I should as soon think of consulting a new hunter as to an investment in Consols.”
“I have told her nothing.”
“Then what is the matter with you? You look more upset than you did this afternoon.”
“I have seen Nouna’s mother.”
The Colonel’s jaw dropped, and his irritability suddenly disappeared.
“Madame di—di Valdestillas?” he said in a subdued, tentative tone.
“Oh, no; I’ve had my way. There’s an end once for all to all humbug,” answered George bitterly. “I’ve seen Chloris White.”
Then both remained silent for a while. Truly after this there seemed little to be said. At last the Colonel said in a low voice:
“Now, my boy, you see what I’ve had to live through the last few years. You don’t wonder any longer at my opinion of women?”
But George felt no sympathetic softening. He thought that a man should make sure of the death of his first wife before he married a second, and that he should show a little human feeling for his own daughter.
“I don’t wonder either, Colonel, at Chloris White’s opinion of men,” he said drily.
“You think you have a grievance against me, I see.”
“Frankly, I do. Why didn’t you make a clean breast of it when you found it was I who had married your daughter? You might have trusted me, Colonel, as if I had had no tongue; you know that. And you saw me fall into a villainous trap and live on that infamous woman’s money. O God! The thought of it! When just a whisper would have put me right.”
“Well, well, the murder’s out now, and one sees things differently. I knew what your wife’s influence over you was, and I thought if I breathed a word it would get to her ears and set her clamouring for her pitiful title. A man’s a weak thing in a beautiful woman’s hands, as no one knows better than I. I’ll do what I can for you; I’m bound to, and I will. What do you propose to do?”
“Resign my commission, give back every cursed penny I can, and get employment abroad to work off the rest.”
Lord Florencecourt looked up, startled.
“Resign your commission! You mustn’t think of that. The worst’s over now; it is I, not you, who have anything to fear from the devil. Give up your house, of course; I’ll allow you five hundred, six hundred a year. You are quite free from any obligation, for I acknowledge your wife is my daughter, and her mother would force me in any case to contribute to her support. Do you see?”
“Quite. I accept your offer, Colonel, in this way. You shall allow Nouna five hundred a year until we have cleared off every farthing we have spent under a misapprehension. But for the future my wife and I will live on my earnings and what I have besides of my own.”
“But why leave the army?”
“Cowardice, partly. I feel disgraced and beaten down, and I’ve lost heart for the old ambitions. And—I have other reasons. Over here there is a constant risk of Nouna’s meeting——”
He hurried this last sentence, but stopped abruptly in the middle of it.
“You might exchange. Come now, that would solve all difficulties. Nobody would know the style you used to keep here, and you could make a fresh start quietly.”
George considered the proposal for a few seconds, and then shook his head.
“Look here, Colonel, it’s no use denying it; I’m broke—as surely as a man who’s gone to the dogs on his own account; the only difference is that I’ve been thrown to ’em. There’s an awfulness about the thing I’ve been made to do that has bowled me over—pride, self-respect, and all. I shall work round again all right, I’ve no doubt, but I can’t set to it in England or in the army. Help me to get away as fast as I can; it’s the greatest kindness you can do me.”
He had made up his mind past gainsaying. The Colonel was deeply moved, self-reproach adding force to his compassion.
“If you won’t be persuaded,” he began slowly, “I suppose I must help you your own way. How would Paris suit you?”
“Any place would suit me where I could get anything to do. And Paris would be lively for Nouna,” he added, half to himself.
The Colonel would have preferred that Nouna’s name should be left out of the discussion. He continued: “A young American, a connection of Lady Millard’s, who is engaged in a bank here called the ‘London, New York, and Chicago,’ was telling me at their place a few nights ago that the firm intend to start a branch establishment in Paris, for the use chiefly of the English and American colonies. They have an opening for a young man of good birth and address. It’s a wretched thing, I know, for you,” he went on with a change of voice, glancing again regretfully from head to foot of the handsome young soldier.
“Can you get it for me?” asked Lauriston, with a first sign of eagerness.
“I think so, but—the salary is miserable and——”
“What will they give?”
“Something like a hundred and twenty at the outside to begin with. It’s starvation.”
“Not a bit of it. It’s more than my pay.”
“Yes, but your wife!”
“My wife?” George’s face broke with a ray of a smile. “She shall be all right. She is no more than a bird to keep; and we shall live very near the housetops, where she will be at home.”
In fact, the idea of having her all to himself again sprang up a bright little fountain in desolation, unlooked for in his breast. The Colonel pulled his moustache. Nouna, he thought, was the sort of bird to make a very uncomfortable flapping against the bars of any but the most expensive of cages.
“When can I know whether they will give me the berth?” George asked.
“I almost think, from the manner in which they spoke, that what I should say about you would settle it. They are particular as to the stamp of man. You could hear in a week.”
“How soon can I get away, Colonel?”
“As soon as you like; I’ll see that it’s all right.”
“Thanks. I want to wind up all my affairs here quietly, and slip away at any moment when I have arranged for the payment of the debts we have incurred.”
“You can make me security for those. And, by the by, I can give you some good introductions in Paris.”
“Many thanks, Colonel, but it would only be prolonging the social death-struggle. One can only die game to society on—on the income we shall have.”
“Don’t you think, for your wife’s sake, you are wrong in resolving to be so independent? How will you keep her amused?”
“Oh, that won’t be difficult in Paris. The very air is more exhilarating than here, and she is just the person to appreciate its pleasures.”
“But the pleasures ladies love are no cheaper there than here, remember.”
Lauriston would not be cheated out of the rags of comfort he had collected for himself, and Lord Florencecourt was obliged to leave him without even discovering how small the income was to which the young fellow was trusting. The money he had inherited from his aunt—all he had to depend on besides what his own work could produce—brought him in only a little over a hundred a year; and he had even been obliged to encroach upon next year’s income in the early days of his marriage, when it seemed easier to trust to the literary work he had been promised for the future than to refuse his new-made wife the pretty trifles she set her heart upon. Now the idea of making money by writing again occurred to him, and pricked him to instant action with the thought that something might still be made of life if Nouna could only be induced to be happy in her changed circumstances. This was Lauriston’s weak side. He knew that if Chloris White chose to be as bad as her word, and to excite Rahas’s evil thirst for Nouna’s beauty, he should have to enter into a conflict with a stealthy and unscrupulous enemy, the thought of whose underhand weapons filled him with fury and loathing. He must get away with his wife at once, as secretly as he could, trusting that the mother might overpower the fiend in Chloris, and induce her to leave her child safe in the care of a man whom she must at least respect. In the meantime the change in their circumstances must be made known to Nouna without delay.
George returned to the big house which was so detestably impregnated with the thought of Chloris and her vilely earned money, and inquiring for his wife, learnt that she was in her bath. This was with Nouna by no means the perfunctory daily ceremony of Europeans, but was a luxurious pleasure in which she spent many hours of the hot summer days, having had a room fitted up to recall, as far as possible, her dim half-imagined memories of the cool inner courts of an Indian palace. George knocked at the door and Nouna, recognising the tread, in a timid and uncertain voice bade him come in. The room was paved and wainscoted with tiles; the bath, a large one six feet square, but only three deep, was sunk into the floor with two steps down into the water on all the sides, the whole being lined with sea-green tiles that gave a pretty tint to the water. A lamp hung in brass chains from the ceiling; a long mirror reaching down to the ground occupied the middle of the wall. A sofa, a rug, a table with fruit and coffee, and a little window conservatory with thin lace curtains before it, were all the rest of the furniture. Nouna, in a blue and white cotton garment which was no great encumbrance, was peering up from the corner of the bath furthest from the door like a frightened water-nix. As George came over to her, she made straight for the opposite corner, and seeing that she did not mean to be approached nearer, he moved away from the bath and sat down on the sofa.
“I frightened you just now, I am afraid, Nouna,” he began in a very humble voice.
“No-o,” she answered, plucking up spirit as she saw she was safe from attack.
“I mean, perhaps you thought me cross and—and rough, because I didn’t talk to you much on the way home.”
“You were cross and rough.”
“Well, I’m very sorry, for I didn’t mean to be. I had had news which upset me and made me so wretched that I forgot everything else.”
“What news?” she asked very softly, sliding through the water to the side of the bath nearest to him, and leaning her bare wet arms on the tiles of the floor. For she began, now that her fright was over, to see that he was unhappy.
He paused for a few moments to consider how he should best break it to her. At last it came out, however, with masculine bluntness.
“You know what you would say, Nouna, if you heard that there had been a mistake—about the money—supposed to be left us, and that we were as poor as ever again, and had to give up this house and everything—even your jewels!”
The water all round the poor child began to quiver with little widening ripples, as she trembled at the shock of this most dire calamity; even his previous suggestion of it seemed to have had no effect in softening the blow. As for George, he felt that all the previous horrors of the miserable day had produced no pang so acute as the one he now felt, when he had to deal with his own hands the blow which crushed, for the time at least, all the bright happiness of the only creature he loved in the world. He sat like a culprit, with hanging head and loosely clasped hands, too much afraid of breaking down himself to attempt to soften the gloomy picture by a word of hope. It was she who broke the silence first.
“My jewels! No, I sha’n’t have to give those up,” she whispered eagerly, “for they were given me by mamma!”
George looked at her with haggard eyes, noticing that the mere mention of her mother soothed her, let in a ray of sweet sunshine at once upon the black-looking prospect.
“But supposing we were so badly in debt that even they had to be sold!” he suggested in a hoarse voice that he tried in vain to clear.
“Then I should drown myself!” cried Nouna tragically, and she descended a step lower into the water as if to fulfil the dread purpose immediately.
“What, Nouna!” cried George, “don’t you think me worth living for? Do you think, when I’ve lost everything else, you ought to take away just what would console me for it all? Do you, Nouna?”
She hung her head, and crawling, meek and ashamed like a truant dog, out of the water, laid herself face downwards on the tiled floor at a little distance from his feet. But when he stooped towards her she said, her voice ringing out with passionate sincerity:
“Don’t touch me! Let me lie here till I’m good, and then you may pick me up and forgive me.”
“But listen. I’ve something else to tell you, something that perhaps you will like to hear.”
“What is it?” She raised her head and looked up at him.
“We shall be very poor, as I told you, and sha’n’t be able to have a nice house, or many pretty things. But I’m going to take you to live in Paris——”
“Paris!” He had scarcely uttered the word when she repeated it like a shout of triumph, and springing up from the floor, snatched a lace-bordered and embroidered sheet which was lying on a little white porcelain stove in one corner of the room, and wrapping it round her with one dexterous sweeping movement, slipped off her bathing-dress like a loose skin from underneath it, and flinging herself on to the sofa beside her husband, put a transformed and glowing face up to his, as she whispered in a tone of rapture: “Then I don’t mind anything—anything, for I shall see mamma!”
With an uncontrollable impulse George drew himself away from her and started to his feet. He felt sick, and a film gathered before his eyes, preventing him from finding the handle of the door, which he sought with cold, clammy fingers.
“George!” said a low voice behind him. He scarcely heard, scarcely recognised it, and made no answer.
“George!” A little hand found its way to his throat, and was laid against his neck.
His arms fell down listlessly, and as he stood still and felt that he was touched by clinging fingers, and heard Nouna’s voice in its most caressing tones, his sight came again; he looked down and put his hands on his wife’s shoulder.
“Why are you going away, George? Why are you going away?”
“I don’t feel well, dearest.”
“Well, sit by me, and I will take your head in my lap and nurse you.”
She led him gently back to the sofa. But presently, when she had curled herself up in a corner of it, and making him lie full length had pillowed his head upon her breast, and administered kisses and eau de Cologne alternately with great lavishness, she peered into his face with a new inspiration, and said mysteriously:
“You are not ill—you are unhappy.”
He protested he was only grieving at the change in their fortunes for her sake.
Nouna laughed gently. “I was silly,” she said, “and wicked. In the first moments of surprise one does not know what one says. I don’t mind at all. I would rather be poor in Paris than rich in London.”
He shivered, though Nouna, with some tact, believing he was jealous, had not mentioned her mother again. But she examined his face attentively, and saw that the drawn, hopeless look remained. After a few moments she slipped her shoulder away very tenderly from beneath his head, which she transferred to a cushion; and George heard the door softly shut after her as she went out. He called to her, but she took no notice, and he supposed she had gone to dress. But in a few minutes the ghost-like figure glided in again, looking just the same, and came to where he was now sitting upright on the sofa.
“There!” she said triumphantly, and she put her jewellery, piece by piece, down to a little gold bar brooch which he had given her before their marriage, into her husband’s pockets. “You can go and sell them this minute if you like. You see I don’t mind a bit. Not—a—bit,” she repeated deliberately, and then looked into his face to see whether this willing act of self-sacrifice had brought him consolation.
George smiled at her and told her she was a good child; but his smile was still very sad, and the hand which he placed on her shoulder trembled. Then Nouna, who was sitting on the rug at his feet, began to cry quietly; their usual mutual position was reversed; it was she who now wanted to get nearer to him, and did not know how. A strange deadness seemed to have come over him, so that he did not notice even her tears. He was indeed arranging his plans for their departure from England, with some distrust of his wife’s fortitude at the end. At last, when amazement at this singular state of affairs had dried her eyes, and she had sat mournfully staring at her husband in utter silence for some minutes, a light broke upon her face, and she sprang up suddenly into a kneeling position. Joining her hands together above his knees like a child and looking out instinctively at the glimpse of darkening sky visible between the leaves of the plants in her little window conservatory, she said with all the solemnity and timidity of a person who is undertaking for the first time an arduous responsibility:
“Pray God to comfort my husband George, if I cannot.”
This startled George and broke him up altogether, reserve and fortitude and manly dignity and all. He snatched her up in his arms with such impetuous haste that her slippers flew off and exposed little pink toes to the air, and enfolding her in a hug that went nigh to stopping her breath, burst into sobs like a hungry and beaten child.