CHAPTER XXVII.
In the excitement of a battle, when each man deals blows for his life, maddened by the clash of sabres, the roar of cannon, fierce cries, and ghastly sights, he gives and receives wounds of which he takes no account, absorbed in the struggle to beat the enemy back; so George, fighting for something dearer than his own safety, forgot his humiliation at Mr. Gurton’s hands, forgot his own outburst of passion and the rash act which followed, and still thought of nothing but Nouna’s wild, terror-struck face, and of the next effort he should make to remove the cause of her fear. The fellow-clerk, to whom he was now going to apply, was going out of town for the night; if he should have started already, there would be nothing to do but to telegraph to Lord Florencecourt and, while waiting for the help he would be sure to send immediately, to let the huissiers carry off what they would as security. This was a terrible contingency, on account of the shock it might give to Nouna; it had to be faced, however, for, on arriving at the lodging of his fellow-clerk, George learned that he had been gone half an hour.
It was not until his last hope of getting immediate help had thus disappeared that George, returning quickly towards his home, remembered what had happened in the office, and realised that by an assault upon his chief, which Mr. Gurton would probably describe as unprovoked, he had lost his situation, and perhaps got himself into a worse scrape still, for he had not waited to find out whether Mr. Gurton had been injured by the fall. George thought he would call at the bank and make inquiries, but on arriving at the corner of the street in which the building stood, he saw that a large and excited crowd had already collected, in spite of the rain, about the doors, and that some gendarmes were pressing the people back.
“I suppose the boy rushed out, shrieking ‘Murder!’ and brought up the whole neighbourhood,” thought George. “I hope to heaven he’s not seriously hurt.”
A sudden chill seized him and his heart seemed to become encased in stone. When a heavy man falls, striking his head on the way to the ground—oh, but nonsense, he should have seen, have known what he had done; he should have realised—What? George left a blank there which he could not fill. The possibility suggested by the sight of that swaying, excited mob, thronging, gesticulating fifty yards in front of him, with morbidly eager faces all upturned towards the windows of the first floor, where the bank was established, was too ghastly, too awful. He tried to laugh at himself for entertaining an idea so fanciful, so ridiculous, but the crowd fascinated him; he could not turn away without—Ah, yes, by going nearer, by joining the stream of people that was still flowing rapidly in that direction, he might learn what sort of a story they had got hold of. The murmurs grew louder as he got deeper and deeper in the throng, until, when he was well wedged in a feverishly eager phalanx of horror-mongers against whom the few gendarmes present were altogether powerless, his curiosity was satisfied to the full, for the story bandied from mouth to mouth was very definite indeed. A foreigner—English or German, it was not certain which, had had a quarrel with his employer, some said about a woman, some said about money, and had murdered him and escaped. Every version of the tale, however they might differ as to other details, contained the two last items—the murder and the escape of the murderer. George stayed deliberately, looked mechanically up at the windows with the rest of the crowd, and gathering in every different turn of the story, with strained keenness of hearing, hoping desperately to hear some one, brighter-witted and better-informed than the rest, contradict the spreading report and mock at the exaggerations of the herd. The moments dragged on; they were expecting a force of gendarmes, and the excitement increased. George, unable to move in the dense mass, was in a state of frenzied defiance of the crowd’s surmises, when a quick turn of every head to the left, and hoarse cry “Les voilà, les voilà,” told him that the police were coming, and the next instant he was being borne off, a helpless unit in the surging crowd as it retreated before the advancing gendarmes. Struggling to work his way out of the crush of people when free movement became possible, George stumbled against one of the gendarmes who had been waiting for assistance to disperse the mob. He was a slim man, scarcely of middle height, and it was he, and not the stalwart young Englishman, who suffered in the collision, staggering a step or two with an oath. But George shrank back with a great shock. If that ugly rumour should have any touch of truth, then his relation to the little slim man was already that of the hare to the hound, and the start would not be long delayed.
He was free from the crowd now, and was hurrying home sick at heart and giddy of brain, trying to realise the possibility he could no longer shirk. If Mr. Gurton were dead, he—George Lauriston—was a murderer. That would be quite clear to any judge and jury; George saw that, with the apparently passionless clearness with which one vivid idea can strike the mind in a state of white-hot excitement. He felt no shock at the act, but only at the consequences, not as they affected himself, but as they touched Nouna. George was not the man to waste emotion over the exit from the world of a man who, if he had had fifty more years of life, would only have used them to add to his record of evil; he had certainly never wished or intended to send him out of it, but, always excepting those ugly consequences, he as certainly did not wish him back. The whole matter presented itself to him only in one light: if the hideous rumour were true, he must leave his wife; what then would become of her? It was to him as if his very heart was pierced and quivering under the point of this torturing thought. He was not troubled by any imaginings of what might be his own fate; his whole soul being merely a storehouse for his devotion to his wife, as his body was a shield to protect and a tool to work for her, there would be nothing left to him worth a man’s thought if she were taken away. Taken away! Taken away! The very words as they passed through his brain turned him coward; the clank of his own boots on the stones of the street frightened him, and he turned round with the starting eyes and parted lips of the fugitive, to make sure that he was not already pursued, that before he could see his wife’s face again he would not be caught.
He was wet from head to foot and trembling like a leaf by the time he got inside the gate-way of the house. Everything was quiet; as he glanced at the wife of the concierge, sewing behind the glass door of her little room, at the children playing in the yard, at the cat curled up on the stairs, he rebuked himself for his folly in taking a wild mob-rumour for a truth, and comforted by the homely, every-day aspect the house seemed to wear, he ran up the stairs and let himself into the top flat with a lightening heart. At any rate he was sure of one thing: if the worst came to the worst, they could not take him now without one more long look at his darling. In the terrible, searing excitement of the last hour, all George’s habitual self-control had given way, and the great passion of his life, which was always burning steadily in the depths of his heart, leapt up in towers of flame, showing luridly every weak spot in his nature. Like the sailor who bursts open the spirit-stores when the ship is past saving, George sprang across the sitting-room with a fierce yearning for his wife’s lips, with words more eloquent, caresses more tender, than any he had ever yet showered upon her, ready for one last interview which was to sum up all the happiness they had enjoyed together, to stamp upon her heart and mind, once and for ever, the memory of the man who had held her as the jewel of his soul, who set no value on his own life without her.
He opened the bedroom door with clammy, trembling hands. Was he blinded by the rushing blood in his brain, or dazed by the sudden change from the lamp-light in the hall to the murky dimness of the fading daylight? Or was Nouna really not there? He crossed the floor to the bed, calling to her hoarsely by name, and hunting with his hands over every inch of the tumbled quilt where she had lain that afternoon. He went out on to the balcony, walking from end to end of it with his hand along the wet and slippery railing, feeling for her all the way, as if unable to trust to the senses of sight and sound. Then he returned to the sitting-room and still groping in the dusk, gave forth a loud cry that made the roof ring.
“Nouna! Nouna!”
The door opened slowly; but as he rushed towards it he met only Madame Barbier, the landlady, who, scared and shivering, tried to retreat. But George caught her by the wrists and forced her to answer him.
“Where is my wife?”
“Oh, monsieur, monsieur, don’t you know? Have you missed her? Don’t look like that, or I cannot, I will not answer you, monsieur; you frighten me; it is not my fault, I have done nothing, nothing at all.”
George put his hand to his head with a muttered curse on the woman’s torturing idiotcy, and then forced himself to speak to her calmly.
“My dear madame, surely you can see I don’t want to frighten you. But for God’s sake speak out.”
Slowly, hesitatingly, paralysed by a sudden fear that the news she had would prove even more disquieting than suspense, she spoke.
“When you were gone, monsieur, and the huissiers were still here”—George started; he had forgotten the huissiers, and their disappearance had not troubled him—“a gentleman called, monsieur, saying he was a friend of yours, and he asked for you; and when I said you were out he said he would see madame. She came out to see him, monsieur, and shrieked when she met him; I know, monsieur, because I followed her into the room after helping her to dress, and she told me to stay.”
George held himself as still as stone, afraid of stopping the recital.
“A dark-skinned man,” he said, not questioningly.
“Yes, monsieur. Madame wished to retire, but he would not allow it. I gathered that he said the mother of madame was waiting to see her, and that you, monsieur, were with her, and that she had sent money to get monsieur and madame out of their little difficulty. So he paid the men and got a receipt from them, and they left. And madame put on her things and went away with him in a fiacre. And I am sure, monsieur, that if I had supposed you would have any objection——”
George let her hand drop.
“When did they go?” he asked in a strangled whisper.
“Not long after you, monsieur. I am sure I thought every moment that you would be back together. But, ah! monsieur is ill! Can I not assist you? Some eau de vie——”
George had reeled into a chair and was breathing heavily. This last shock brought no pang; something began clicking and whirring in his head, and he thought he felt a hard, cold substance pressing closer and closer to his neck till he could not breathe, but began to choke and to gurgle, tearing with both hands at his throat to get the tightening grip away.
“Ah, the knife! the knife!” he burst out hoarsely, as he staggered up on to his feet with starting eyes and labouring breath. “Take her away! take her away! Don’t let her see me!”
And he fell to the floor in a fit, just as a loud knocking began on the outer door of the flat.
When he came to himself he was in the tender hands of the police. They treated him very civilly however, told him they could wait while he changed his clothes, which had been soaked through and through by the heavy rain, and caused George, who was too much exhausted in mind and body to feel even his uncertainty about his wife except as a dull pain, to think kindly of the French allowance for “extenuating circumstances.” He was quite broken down, and, regardless of the shivering fits which seized him in rapid succession, was ready to go with them at once, only asking on what charge he was arrested. On learning that it was for murderous assault, he seemed scarcely enough master of himself to feel relieved that it was no worse; and when they added that it might be changed to a graver one if the injured man, who had been taken to a hospital, should die before the trial, George merely nodded without any sign of vivid interest. Indeed, if he had had complete command of his feelings and his wits, he would not have cared two straws whether Mr. Gurton lived or died. The sentence George had incurred would certainly at the best be a term of imprisonment, at the end of which, whether the period were long or short, Nouna would be as effectually lost to him as if he were already dead.
George Lauriston was of the highly nervous, imaginative temperament to which ambition, hope, devotion are as the springs of life; when these were stopped or dried up, he became at once the withered husk of a man, a helpless log, not chafing at his confinement, not resigning himself to it, but living through the dull days like a brute, without emotion, almost without thought, weighed down by a leaden depression which threatened to end in the most fearful of all madness—a haunted melancholy. He learned without interest on the second day after his arrest that Mr. Gurton was dead. His formal appearance before the magistrate did him an unrecognised good, by rousing him out of his torpor into a strong sense of shame which bit into his very bones. To appear before a crowd, among whom were some of his Paris acquaintances, a prisoner, a social wreck, with every hope blighted, every honest ambition killed, was an ordeal for which he had to summon all his shaken manliness for one last gallant effort to show a stubborn face to fate. There was a worse experience before him. When he was brought into court to be formally committed for trial, the first faces he saw were those of Dicky Wood and Clarence Massey, the latter of whom wept like a child in open court, and was threatened with ejection for his repeated offers of bail to the extent of every penny he possessed. Lord Florencecourt was not present. It gave George a shock to hear that the charge against him was murder; the presence of his old comrades seemed to emphasise the gravity of the case, which he realised for the first time since his arrest. When asked if he had anything to say, he answered: “I am not guilty. I reserve my defence,” and remained stoically erect and grave while he was formally committed for trial and removed from the court.
On the following day, however, he received two visits; the first was from a well-known Parisian barrister, who had been retained for his defence by Clarence Massey, and had come to receive his client’s instructions. The second was from Ella Millard, who was paler, thinner, plainer than ever, and who trembled from head to foot as her hand touched his.
“Ella, my dear girl, you should not have come,” said he, more distressed by her grief than by his own plight; “I can’t understand how Sir Henry and Lady Millard allowed you to come.”
“They didn’t allow me; I just came,” answered Ella in a shaking voice, with a little Americanism she had caught from her mother. “And I’ve given uncle Horace such a talking-to as he never had before, even from my aunt. I only heard about it yesterday; they kept the papers from us; but I’ve made up for lost time since.”
She was neither tender nor gentle; perhaps she could not trust herself to be either. Her eyes wandered quickly from one object to another, never resting upon his for two seconds at a time; upon her face there was a fixed scared look, as if her muscles had been frozen at the moment of some fearful shock. She spoke very rapidly, and scarcely allowed him a chance of answer or comment.
“It is very sweet and kind of——” he began, when she started off again.
“Oh, no, I haven’t been sweet at all; I never am, you know. First I scolded papa and mamma for not letting us know; then, as I told you, I went for uncle Horace; and now I’ve come to finish by an attack upon you. You have been ungrateful and foolish towards us, George; you know we all love——”
Her voice trembled, and she stopped. As for George, the sudden flood of warm sympathy and friendship was too much for him. He took her hand in a vehement grasp, and turned his back upon her.
“And now,” she continued briskly, though her fingers twitched in the clasp of his, “we mustn’t waste time. I didn’t come to make a fool of myself, but to see if there wasn’t something I could do for you. Where is Nouna, George?”
He turned round quickly, and looking straight into her eyes, saw how well she read his heart, and pressed her hands against his breast with passionate gratitude. She drew them hastily away.
“Well, well, tell me what you know, or what you want to know,” she cried, stamping her foot impatiently. “We’ve heard all sorts of stories already, of course.”
“What stories? Yes, yes, tell me, tell me everything.”
“Oh, that she ran away from you, and that was why you quarrelled with the man.”
“And what did you think?”
“I said it was nonsense. People always think that a little lively woman who talks fast and has playful ways must be a perfect fool, but I told them Nouna had quite sense enough to know that she had a good husband, and that if she had already left off loving you it was because you had beaten her—which I did not believe.”
“Ella, you’re a—a—brick.”
“That is to say I’m a hard little thing made for use, and not for ornament. I see,” said she quite saucily. “Well, now tell me what has become of her.”
“I—don’t—know,” said George slowly, with such laboured utterance that Ella grew instantly very serious, guessing the gravity of his fears. “If you—if you could find her—”
Suddenly he gave way, and, dropping on to a chair, hid his face in his hands. There was a little pause, during which Ella stood so motionless that he might have fancied himself alone; then he felt her hands on his head, not with a hesitating timid touch, but with the firm pressure of fingers that seemed to act as conductors of the human strength and kindliness that lay in her own heart.
“Tell me all you fancy, or all you fear, George. I wormed everything out of my poor uncle Horace last night, so you may speak to me quite freely. Do you think she has gone back to her mother?”
The mere mention of this suggestion in a matter-of-fact tone, without any affectation of shrinking, or horror, conveyed a vague sense of comfort. It implied that this was the most likely course to have been taken, and also the most to be desired. He looked up and fixed his eyes on hers with the hopeful confidence of a child towards the stranger who lets it out of the dark cupboard where it has been shut up for punishment.
“She was taken away by a trick, just before I was arrested. The man who did it was a wretch who has been in the pay of—of her mother, and who was in love with her himself. Ella, can you understand?”
She shivered; the look of agony in his eyes was too horrible to be borne. She wrenched her right hand from his and brought it sharply down on his shoulder.
“Look here!” she said earnestly, “you are torturing yourself without cause; I am sure of it. I am a woman, and I can feel what a woman would do. Nouna is sharp and bright, and even cunning upon occasion. She would not be ten minutes in that man’s society without knowing that she must be on her guard; I suppose he promised to take her to her mother; then depend upon it she would never let him rest until he had done so.”
“Ah, but you don’t know all, Ella. Her mother hates me——”
“—— quarrelled with you, and threatened all sorts of awful things, I know; uncle Horace told me. But George, you silly old George, don’t you know that after all she’s her mother, and do you really believe that when Nouna came to her, flinging her arms about her, worshipping her, and looking upon her as her refuge, her safety—remember that!—that she would, or could undo all the work of her life, and use now to make her daughter miserable means which she would not use before to make her, according to her notions, happy?”
George’s face grew lighter; he looked up out of the window and then turned again to the girl.
“Certainly—as you put it—it seems possible—”
“Of course it is possible, probable, and I will stake my word—true. You men are good creatures, but you can’t reason. Now I will write direct to the mother——”
“My dear Ella, I don’t think you must do that. Ask Lady Mill——”
“Nonsense. Don’t be old-maidish. To-morrow you shall hear something—something good, I earnestly believe.”
“Ella, you are killing me,” said George in a stifled voice. “If you knew—what it is—after these awful days—and nights—to hear——”
“A human voice again? I know,” said she, speaking more hurriedly than ever to hide the breaks that would come in her clear tones. “Only don’t trouble, don’t worry yourself. Clarence Massey—bless him!—has been crawling on the ground for me to walk upon him ever since he found I—I—I was coming to—to see you. His grandfather is just dead, and he has come into £4,000 a year, and he wants to bribe all the prison officials with annuities to let you escape. We caught the barrister outside when he left you, and when he said they could not bring it in—the worst——” here her voice gave way, “there was not evidence enough, we could both have kissed him, George; I’m sure we could.”
She had talked herself out of breath, and was obliged to stop, panting and agitated through all her hectic liveliness. George himself was speechless and could do nothing but wring her hands, so she went on again after a moment’s pause.
“You mustn’t expect to get off altogether, I’m afraid. I dare not speak about this much, because it is so dreadful to us all—everybody. But you must keep a good heart, for you have friends as deep as the sea and as firm as the rocks, George; and as for your little wife, why she shall live among us like a qu—queen in exile until her lord comes back again to make her ha—happy.”
The warder had been clicking the keys outside for some minutes; he now gently opened the door and gave a respectful cough. George seized the girl’s hands and pressed upon them kisses that left red marks on the pale flesh before he could let her go.
“God bless you, Ella,” he whispered hoarsely, “you have saved my heart from breaking.”
The next moment the door shut upon her, but the radiance shed upon the bare walls by the pure sweet woman illumined them still.