CHAPTER XXV.
To George Lauriston’s infinite surprise and comfort, his young wife, instead of dealing him fresh wounds in his misfortune by lamentations over their altered lot, fell quite naturally into the woman’s part of helpmeet, and eased the wrench of breaking from his old career by an unwavering brightness and sweetness which woke in him the fairest hopes of what their life together might yet be. On the other hand, this sudden change from winsome wilfulness to still more winsome womanliness could not fail to rouse in him some anxiety as to its cause. Had she received any communication from her mother, either through the hateful Rahas or some other channel? Her secretive nature made it difficult to discover the truth on such points.
“Why are you so kind to me now, little woman?” he asked her two days after the memorable return from Norfolk, when their preparations for departure were already half made.
“Kind! Wasn’t I always kind to you?” she asked, not quite evasively, yet with more understanding than she affected to have.
“Yes, but not quite in the same sweet way.”
“Ah ha! It’s the pictures and the music and the sermons you’ve taken me to beginning to have an effect at last,” she said, not flippantly, for though she laughed her eyes began to glisten.
George was touched, but greatly puzzled.
“Have you heard anything from Sundran since she left?” asked he carelessly, after allowing an interval to elapse so that the question might appear to have no connection with what had gone before.
“No,” said Nouna; then, after a pause, she looked up at her husband mysteriously. “Do you know what I think?”
“Well!”
“I believe she has managed, how I don’t know, to find her way back to mamma. I’ve been thinking it over a great deal, and I fancy when she found out the Colonel,”—(she lowered her voice)—“she thought she ought to let mamma know where to find him.” And Nouna finished with a slow emphatic nod of her small head.
“That’s a very clever suggestion,” said George, who indeed had reason to think so. He felt relieved, for Nouna’s want of candour had never gone the length of deliberately planned deceit, and he decided upon the strength of this short dialogue that she had heard nothing.
The real reason of his wife’s altered conduct was not likely to occur to him. Coming of a race which places the one sex in such complete subjection to the other that confidence between them is impossible, she possessed, together with that cautious over-reticence which is the weapon of the weak, its correlative virtue—a delicate tact which avoided a sensitive place discreetly, and made no attempt to lay bare a wound which her lord wished to conceal. Something had happened to make George unhappy—this kind husband who had cherished her so tenderly, who had denied her no proof of his affection. Her woman’s heart was deeply touched; if she had any curiosity it could wait for its satisfaction until by and by when he was better; in the meantime she would be loyally good to him, even to the extent of checking her secret sobs over the parting with the plants and perfumes and knick-knacks which had grown into her frivolity-loving heart.
George got the bank appointment, through the efforts of Lord Florencecourt, who told him he had had a close race with a connection of the man who was to be manager of the Paris branch.
“He’s a disagreeable man, the manager, Mr. Gurton,” said the Colonel. “I hope you’ll get on all right with him. The young fellow he wanted to get in is a lad he calls his nephew, but by all accounts he is what nephews have a trick of turning out to be. Gurton is rather savage over the disappointment; fortunately I was able to prove that the lad is not so steady as he might be.”
“Thank you, Colonel. It’s very good of you to take so much trouble. I’m sorry about the mysterious nephew. Unless he’s an exceptionally just man, it will make him so ready to find fault with me. And of course I’m quite raw to the work.”
“Oh, I don’t think it’s difficult—mere routine for the most part. My boy, it is a shame for you to be tied to such work.”
“Well, all work is routine; it can’t be worse for that than the army. And then there are prizes. Who knows but I may end my days as a prosperous banker, with an income which would make a General’s mouth water?”
Between the Colonel’s hearty friendship and help on the one hand, and Nouna’s unexpected and discreet sympathy on the other, Lauriston was beginning to realise that the worst stains of the degradation he had felt so keenly might in time be wiped out, and in this reaction he was inclined at first to lose remembrance of Chloris White’s threats, and to look upon the smallness of his means as the present difficulty which would need the sternest grappling with. He could not bear the thought of plunging his wife straight from the unbridled extravagance and luxury which she had lately enjoyed with so keen a zest to an existence more meagre than that which had palled upon her so soon in the first days of their marriage. That she was preparing with great fortitude for such a plunge was proved to him the day before they started. She was rather silent and abstracted at dinner that evening, and when it was over she walked with a listless and melancholy tread into the quaint drawing-rooms, the shelves and brackets of which George found were bare of their load of fantastic trifles. Fans, screens, mirrors, ivory carvings, all had disappeared; only half a dozen small porcelain vases, filled with fresh flowers that morning, remained.
“You’ve been packing up, I see, busy little woman,” said George, trying to speak cheerfully, as he stood with his arm round her in the room which already began to wear a desolate look, as if the soul had died out of it.
“No, not packing, only making a list of them. Here it is. I thought they could pack them up themselves after we were gone,” she said, sadly.
By “they” she indicated with a shudder the mysterious enemies who were driving forth her and her husband from their beautiful home, and forcing them to make horrid things called inventories of her little Turkish tables, and the soft sofas on which she had been so fond of resting, and the big oak bookcase which was the pride of George’s heart. She held out two or three half-sheets of her husband’s foolscap paper, closely scribbled on both sides with her spidery, illegible writing.
“What’s this?” asked George, running his eyes over it and reading aloud at random. “ ‘One pair of pink garters with silver clasps, and with a little knob come off the clasp of one!’ ” He turned to the next page and read: “ ‘Two fans with pearl handles and one with tortoiseshell which I have never used. Except once’ ” was screwed into the space above as an afterthought. George picked out another item. “ ‘A hand-mirror that makes you look pretty, as if you had a crown on, for the top is a silver coronet.’ ” Further on the entries grew fuller and more eloquent, as if the very description of the beauty of her treasures had become a labour of love. “ ‘Two lovely embroidered dresses, one pale blue silk, all over little silver birds with their little wings spread out as if they were flying in the sky. The other is pink with white roses and lilies, very nearly as pretty as the other one, and besides it is less worn.’ ” Even her velvet slippers, each pair described with loving minuteness, were faithfully put down.
“They are all there; I haven’t kept back anything, indeed,” explained Nouna in great haste, as George, after reading some naïve entries in silence, turned his back upon her, a proceeding which seemed to her ominous. “I’ve only kept just the things I had before we came here.”
But then he put his arms round her quite suddenly, and held her close to him as he said:
“And who do you think will be able to get into those little doll’s garments of yours if you leave them behind? The frocks might do for babies’ gowns, certainly, and the red velvet slippers might be hung upside down for watch-pockets, but they will never find grown-up people small enough to wear them, my word for it!”
Nouna twisted her left shoulder up to her uneasily, and a little haughtily; she had considered the drawing up of this list as a very business-like proceeding, and now she was being laughed at for it. Her husband saw this in time to kiss away the gathering frown. His own taste would have preferred the sacrifice of the dainty though now most inappropriate wardrobe; but he knew that during long hours of the day he should have to be away from his wife, and as experience had taught him that she could find more entertainment in an embroidered sash than in the whole literature of the English language, and that moreover her moral qualities could shine out strongly upon occasion in spite of this unorthodox taste, he decided that she should have the solace in exile of all her private treasures except the jewels, which he intended to despatch to Chloris White at the moment of leaving England.
“You think I mind giving these things up!” Nouna said superbly. “But I am not a child; they are nothing to me.”
Nevertheless, when her husband told her he would help her to pack them up, as they were of no use to any one but her, she leapt about the room for joy, and rushed off to take advantage of the permission in a state of frantic excitement.
They got away safely from England within a week of the fateful visit to “Thames Lawn,” all difficulties being smoothed away by the co-operation of the Colonel who, while he made no effort to see his daughter again, did everything in his power to help her and her husband to get away quickly and quietly. They prided themselves on managing everything very neatly, and both men hoped that the young husband and wife would be able to get lost, not only to the world, but to the vicious and vindictive Chloris White, even without the adoption of a feigned name, which the Colonel advised, but which Lauriston declined to resort to.
“If they made up their minds to find me, Nouna’s peculiar beauty would be clue enough to track me by to the end of the world,” said he. “I have done nothing to disgrace my name, and it’s one of my deepest wishes to make my wife so proud of it that she will forget that she ever had any other.”
They started in the early morning from Charing Cross, Lord Florencecourt meeting them at the station to see them off. The greeting between father and daughter was a curious one. Nouna, whose prejudice against the Colonel had hitherto found vent in avoidance or in sauciness, now received him with a low bow and humble touch of the hand of decorous respect, while in her lowered eyes hatred of the man who had abandoned her mother struggled with her strong native sense of the majesty of a father. The Colonel’s manner, on the other hand, was nervous and jerky. He was grieved to lose Lauriston, delighted to lose his daughter, and haunted by a dread of what his demon-wife might take it into her head to do now she was foiled in her cherished ambition for her child. He had brought a beautiful basket of roses for Mrs. Lauriston, and he insisted on paying for their tickets himself, to save poor Nouna what he thought might be the shock of travelling second-class. When, as the train started, Nouna saw that, on shaking hands with her husband, the Colonel’s eyes grew moist and kindly, she relented, and leaning far out of the carriage window, bestowed upon her amazed and unwilling father a kiss which, being justified only by that relationship which he was trying so hard to conceal, was scarcely less unwelcome than a charge of grapeshot.
The train was out of sight before he recovered a degree of serenity, which was shaken immediately afterwards by a glimpse he caught, as he was leaving the station, of a tall, lean man wearing a red fez, who came out by a different door, and crossing the inclosure in front with quick strides, was lost to his sight among the crowd in the Strand. Although George had not informed him of all he feared from Rahas, he had told him enough about this dark-skinned agent of Chloris White’s to make the Colonel suspect that with all their care they had not succeeded in evading her evil vigilance. At first he thought he would warn George, but reflecting how common foreign headgear of all sorts is in London, he decided that he had not enough grounds for disturbing so soon the poor fellow’s sense of security.
With their arrival in Paris began the third era in the married life of George and his wife. Nouna’s delight in the bright city was so great that at first the fact of having to live in two small rooms on the fourth floor of a house in a narrow street off the Boulevard Poissonnière was of no account compared with the knowledge of the pleasures that lay outside, the walks along the lighted boulevards in the evening before the shops were shut, the expeditions in a tramcar to the Bois de Boulogne or Saint Cloud, above all the Sunday trips upon the Seine on a steamer, all joys within the reach of a most modest purse, were delirious excitements to her susceptible temperament, in the first ecstasy of which the handsome house at Kensington, the tropical plants, the supper parties, even the services of her servant Sundran, were for the time forgotten. On one memorable Sunday they indulged in a drive round the Bois in a fiacre, and in ices at the little châlet restaurant opposite the cascade, where the lower middle-class brides come in all their bravery of white satin and long veil and orange-blossom wreath, looking coquettish, happy, and at ease in the unaccustomed attire which an English girl of the same class wears with such shamefaced awkwardness. To Nouna that day gave a glimpse of Paradise: the fiacre was more comfortable than her victoria in London had been, Hyde Park could not compare with the Bois, the passers-by amused, the ice intoxicated her. When the sunshine had faded into twilight, and they had driven back home through the lighted streets, she climbed up the long flights of stairs, still in a silent ecstasy, and sat down in a little low chair George had bought for her, seeing nothing in the gloom but moving carriages, and small trees growing thickly round a lake that glittered in sunshine, and pretty mock châlets and a ridiculous little waterfall that fell from nothing into nowhere.
Presently she got up and went out on to the broad balcony which, encroaching upon the size of the rooms, was yet the chief charm of this little home under the roof. She had hung one corner of it with curtains, and George had contrived a canvas awning under which, when the weather was fine, she spent most of the hours of his absence. Her husband watched without following her as she leaned upon the rail and looked out at the yellow glow in the west which could still be seen behind the housetops. Suddenly she turned and came back to him. Standing just within the window with her back to the fading light, her face could not be seen; but her voice rang out with a strange vibration as she called to him, holding her arms towards him:
“George, why don’t you come out to me?”
He was with her in a moment, found her trembling and dry-lipped, and tried to persuade her to lie down while he called to the old woman from whom they rented the rooms, to prepare their supper. But Nouna shook her head, and insisted on his remaining with her by the window. Yes, she was tired, she admitted, but she wanted the air; she would go out on the balcony again if he would go with her. As she seemed to desire it, he let her lead him out, all the time keeping her eyes fixed in a remarkable manner immovably on his face.
“Look out,” she said, “at the sky—at the houses—at all you can see.”
He let his gaze pass obediently from her face to the pale-starred sky, the grey-blue of which was merging into the last red rays of the disappearing sunset: to the house-roofs and chimney-pots, of which they had a good though not an extensive view, to the street below, with its little globes of yellow light, and the dark specks which were all he could see of the moving passengers. Then he turned to her curiously.
“Well, little one, I have looked at everything.”
“And you see nothing—nothing strange at all?”
“There’s a tabby cat two roofs off,” said the prosaic male doubtfully.
“No, no,” she interrupted impatiently, still without moving her eyes from his face. “Down below us—on the opposite side—a little to the left—in the black shade.” Her voice had sunk gradually into a whisper. Then she stopped.
“Well, I see nothing.”
“Not at the house where they have a floor shut up?”
George stepped forward and leaned over the rail of the balcony as she had done, Nouna following closely and clinging to his hand. On the opposite side, about three doors down, there was a flat on the third floor which had borne during the first days of their residence in Paris a large board inscribed ‘A louer.’ George saw that the board was gone, and that one of the shutters was thrown back.
“Oh, I see they’ve let it. Well, there’s nothing to be frightened about in that, my child.”
“You don’t notice anything else—anything strange—you don’t see any—person?”
George started, and looked down again with searching eagerness along the line of dead-eyed shuttered windows.
“No, child, there is nobody.”
Nouna heaved a long sigh, and looked timidly down through her husband’s arm.
“No, it’s—gone,” she whispered.
“What is gone, dear? Tell me what you saw,” said George caressingly, as he drew her back into the little sitting-room, where a lamp now shed its soft light over the white table-cloth, and Madame Barbier, who adored the picturesque young English couple, was arranging the supper in a dainty and appetising fashion.
Nouna rubbed her eyes, and clinging to her husband’s arm, let the words of her recital drop from her lips in a slow, hesitating and faltering manner, as if she were fast asleep, and her brain were working sluggishly under the half-paralysing influence of a will stronger than her own.
“I was sitting in here,” she said, “and thinking of all the happiness we have had to-day—the soft air and the warm sun, and your kind eyes upon me, and all the lovely things we saw—the beautiful ladies and the shining water, and the lights among the trees in the Champ Elysées when we came back. And all at once,” her hands tightened their hold upon his sleeve, “I felt that I must get up and go out—there upon the balcony; and I looked out at the sky right in front where it was yellow like flame, and all the pretty pictures of the day I saw quite plainly still in my mind. But then—I don’t know how—I felt my eyes drawn down from the bright sky, and there down below me—to the left, I saw all black gloom, and in it I seemed to see Rahas’ room in Mary Street, with all the pretty toys and bright shawls about just as he used to put them for me to look at. And in the middle Rahas himself, only not kind and gentle as he used to be, but with a wicked cruel face, and burning eyes that frightened me. And I felt afraid, as if I could have screamed. It seemed so strange, for even when he used to look fierce, as he did sometimes, I never minded, and I was never frightened. Was it a dream, George, that I saw? And if it was only a dream, why was I afraid?”
Chiming in so appropriately with his own fears, this vision or fancy of Nouna’s disturbed George a little. He calmed her excitement as well as he could, and found some comfort in the fact that the crafty Oriental had appeared to her, not as the kindly friend he had always professed to be, but as a person inspiring horror. This seemed the more remarkable as George had never mentioned the name of Rahas to his wife since their wedding-day; he came, after a little reflection, to look upon the vision as a proof of the new sympathy which Nouna began to show with his own feelings, and to rejoice in the fact that as the bond between him and his wife grew stronger under the influence of his patient tenderness, the power of any enemy to disturb their happiness was proportionately lessened. This home peace, which was attaching Lauriston to his young wife more strongly every day, was the more grateful to him, as his duties at the Bank were rendered as irksome as possible to him through the prejudice of his chief, Mr. Gurton, who never forgave the rejection of his own candidate for the junior clerk’s post, and who scarcely concealed his wish to find against him some lawful ground of dissatisfaction. This George was careful not to give.
Mr. Gurton was one of those disagreeable brutes who seem to be created as foils to show up the amiability and sweetness of ordinary humanity. He was offensive to his few friends; he was unendurable to the far greater number of people whom nothing but necessity threw in his way. But as a man of business he was clear-headed, shrewd, and enterprising, so exact and penetrating that even if he drank, as his many detractors alleged, there seemed to be no particular reason why he should not, as his business faculties could not be said to be less keen at one time than at another. He hated Lauriston from the first, bullied him on the smallest or on no occasion, and did all in his power to induce the young fellow to throw up his appointment. George took soft words and sour with dogged quietness, and applied himself with all the energy of his character to mastering every detail connected with his new profession, as serenely as if incivility had been his daily bread for years. As a matter of fact, the discourtesy and fault-finding of his chief did not trouble him much; he looked upon Gurton, not without reason, as an ill-bred brute whom one could only turn to account by noting the methods by which he had attained such a splendid dexterity in the management of affairs, and by thus considering him in the light of a noisy machine it was easy to take the sting out of his insults. At the same time this constant friction or avoidance of friction in his business life made home and wife doubly dear and sweet to him.
On the day following Nouna’s strange vision on the balcony, he came home at the usual time, and asked her whether she had had any more “waking dreams.” She answered, reluctantly and shyly, that she had not been on the balcony at all that day. George laughed at her, and told her she should go with him, as the presence of such a coarse creature as a man was a sure preventive of visions. She allowed him to lead her out, being quite brave with the combined forces of husband and sunlight. When they got on the balcony, however, and looked to the left at the house where Nouna had fancied she saw Rahas, a sight met their eyes which, whether a coincidence or not, was strange enough to deepen the unpleasant impression of the evening before.
For the shutters of the uninhabited third floor were now thrown back, and outside the balcony hung a long strip of white calico with this inscription in broad blue letters: “Bazar Oriental.”
George and Nouna read the words, and looked at each other in troubled amazement.
“I’ll have this cleared up to-night,” thought George to himself.