CHAPTER XXVIII.
A night, and a day, and a night, and a day, and again a night passed during which time George heard nothing more of his ministering angel or her promised comfort. Then on the second day his door opened, and a lady to see him was announced. The few instants which elapsed before she appeared were more intensely exciting to him than the pause before the judge pronounces sentence is to the prisoner. It was not Ella; she would have been in like a sparrow before the announcement was well out of the warder’s mouth. His suspense did not last a half-minute. With slow and hesitating steps a woman entered, oddly dressed in garments that were obviously never intended to be worn together; a shabby old grey flannel dressing-gown with scraps of torn lace trailing along the floor behind her, an opera-cloak of light brown satin embroidered in gold thread bordered with sable-tails and fastened by a brooch of sapphires, a battered black bonnet and a lace veil as thick as a mask, formed a costume so grotesque that at the first moment George failed to recognise in the odd figure the luxurious and once daintily dressed Chloris White. The change in her, when she took off her veil as the warder retreated, was even more striking: it appalled George, who had not had enough experience of women of her class and their dismal vagaries to understand this ghastly but common metamorphosis of the beauty of one day to the hag of the next. He had thought in the glare of the sunlight, that afternoon when he had carried her off to the boat, that the liberal daubing of pink and white and black made her beautiful face hideous; now, as she sat, heedless of her appearance, in the full light of the little barred window, her face as innocent of paint as his own, though not so clean, looked, in its withered yellowness, with its sunken eyes and vicious furrows, so inexpressibly uncanny and revolting, that he was forced to acknowledge the wisdom of a practice which disguised in some measure the ugly traces of base thoughts and foul deeds. He had seen her first in all the pride of her vogue, of her success in the career she had chosen; now he saw her in the alternate mood of a degradation, a self-abandonment, a wretchedness, which mocked the possessor of treasures which would have made an art-museum rich, and of jewels and furs which now only served, the former to enhance the weird hideousness of her sallow skin, the latter to emphasise the slovenliness of her attire.
She seemed ill at ease and frightened: the daughter of an English gentleman and an Indian princess, her wayward course of life had reduced her native grace and dignity to mere accidents of mood, and a check or a disappointment made her destitute of either. George was horror-struck, and could not speak, but stood waiting for her to explain the object of her visit. From the moment of her entrance, he had forgotten her connection with Nouna; he was brought back to startled recollection by her first words, which were spoken in a querulous, tearful voice.
“Well, you have sent to ask me where is your wife. It is I who come to ask where is my child?”
“Nouna!” exclaimed George in a low voice. “You do not know where she is?”
“No. You have spoilt her for her mother, you have made her look down upon me, fear me. And what have you done for her yourself? What has she become through you? How have you kept your fine promises to me? You were too proud to take my money; it was too base for your fine fingers to touch; she was to be rich, and honoured, and happy through you! And what happens? What happens, I say?” Her excitement was increasing as she talked, until the low tones he had admired in her voice became shrill and nasal, and the great brown eyes, which had looked languishing and seductive when she raised and lowered them artfully between thick fringes of long black lashes, now flamed and flashed in her dry, parched skin like fires in a desert. “You fling away all your chances, you go to work as a common clerk, you make her—my daughter, my beautiful daughter—live like a dressmaker in two wretched rooms, and then you let her be carried off from you under your very nose, so that she comes back to me ill, miserable, her beauty spoilt, her heart breaking—the wife of a criminal.”
In the course of her violent speech this woman had wrung his heart again and again, not by her reproaches, but by the pictures she had called up of Nouna. What had the poor child learnt about her mother? How had she borne it? She had been shocked, disgusted, so he gathered. Poor little thing, poor little thing! And what had she learnt about him? So his thoughts ran in a running commentary, and when Chloris White stopped, moaning to herself in bitter scorn and anger, he had to clear his throat again and again before he could speak.
“Then she is with you?” he said at last huskily.
The woman raised her head in fierce petulance.
“No, no, no, I tell you. She is not with me—she has left me, and I don’t know where she has gone.”
A great river of pain, mingled with which ran one tiny current of sweet sad pleasure, seemed to rush through the heart of the stricken young husband at the image these words called up before him, of the poor little wife coming for refuge into her mother’s home, gathering some inkling of the terrible truth that her idol was not all she had believed, and shrinking as her husband would have had her do, as her mother fancied she would not do, from the luxury that bore a taint, creeping out into the world again, perhaps to come back to Paris alone in search of himself.
“You don’t know where she has gone!” he repeated in a softer voice, for he recognised genuine human feeling in the woman’s tones.
“No, I tell you.”
“When did she leave you?”
“Two days ago. I have hunted for her ever since; I came to Paris to look for her. Then a lady, a Miss Millard, one of Lord Florencecourt’s nieces—one of my nieces,” she added defiantly, “telegraphed to my house in London, and the telegram was forwarded to me here; you wanted to know whether Nouna was with me, she said. She is not with me, she is lost, wandering about in the world by herself, ill, out of her mind, perhaps. Are you satisfied? See what your education has done for her, see the grand result of your virtuous principles. She would have been safe in my house and happy, and could have been as good as she pleased, I never prevented her, I never should have prevented her. But you have touched her with your own infernal cursed coldness and idiotcy, and nothing would please her. During the two days she was with me, it was nothing but: ‘When is George coming? Do you think George will come by the next train?’ You haven’t even made her good either, for when I offered to take her to church, she wouldn’t go with me, but let me go alone. You have spoilt her life, you have killed her.”
She burst into a passion of tears. George paid no attention to her, but walked up and down, torturing himself by imagining what could have become of his wife, and wondering when Ella would come again, that he might consult the bright-brained girl as to the next step to take to find her. He was deeply anxious to know all that had passed between Nouna and her mother and Rahas, but he almost despaired of learning anything from the hysterical creature before him. Gradually, however, Chloris White seemed to wake to the fact that she was being ignored, and she tried to recover some calm and a semblance of dignity.
“What have you to say for yourself? Don’t you understand what you have to answer for?” she asked with asperity.
George stopped short in his walk up and down the narrow space at his command, and looked at her with a troubled face, but in his voice there was a quiet and biting contempt as he replied—
“I have to answer for having fostered what was best in her nature till she was strong enough to resist all the temptations your wicked folly could suggest, that’s all.”
And he began to walk up and down again. Chloris White sprang from her chair and stopped him by a violent grip of his arm.
“How dare you say such things to me, you, who are the cause of it all!”
George removed her hand from his arm and looked down at her sternly.
“Madam, you are talking nonsense,” he said; “your daughter was perfectly happy with me; you set a mischievous rascal to work to get us into difficulties, to entice her away from me; and it is through no fault of yours that the scoundrel didn’t succeed in ruining her as he has done me. When you came in here just now you seemed human enough to be ashamed of yourself, and I said nothing to you. Now that you have overcome your shame, I have overcome my forbearance, and I tell you plainly you are the most corrupt, depraved and vile creature I ever met, and it would be better for Nouna to take shelter in a workhouse than in your home. Now you had better go, I cannot bear the sight of you.”
The contemptuous brutality with which he shot these rough words at her and then turned away proved a far more effective mode of treatment than the courteous composure he had shown at the beginning of the interview; for self-restraint is a quality little understood or practised by women of her class and their companions. She at once became submissive and apologetic, rose and walked meekly towards the door.
“I am sorry I intruded upon you; I thought you would like to hear what I knew about your wife; I will go.”
George was immediately shocked at his own savagery, and without approaching or looking at her said he had not meant to be rude, his temper was not improved by confinement, and he should be very glad if she would tell him something—anything, only she must tell him nothing but the truth.
“Yes, yes, I will tell you the truth indeed,” she said humbly, clasping her hands with restless impulsiveness, and recognising, with the shrewdness of long practice in the arts of pleasing men, that to relate bare facts was her best chance with this one. “She came to me five days ago—in the early morning—to my house in London. It was the day after she left you. The person who brought her——”
“Rahas?” interrupted George sharply.
“Yes, Rahas—had told her (I assure you he was not acting by my authority)——”
“Go on, go on.”
“Rahas had told her that you had come to me—that I was in Paris, that I was ready to help you (indeed, I should have been, I assure you).”
George moved again brusquely, and Chloris hastened back to the facts.
“He took her to an hotel, but Nouna mistrusted him, and insisted on remaining in the fiacre while he went in to see if I was there. When he had gone in she jumped out of the cab, made inquiries of the proprietress, and found I had never been to the hotel at all. (You understand, Mr. Lauriston, that all this was without my sanction?)”
“Perfectly,” said George, with the best accent of sincerity he could muster.
“She was going to drive back home when Rahas ran out of the hotel, told her the fact was I was ill in England, was dying to see her, and had sent him to bring her over by a trick, since I knew her husband would not let her come. Nouna was worked upon so much by this, that, as they had driven to the Gare du Nord, and were just in time for the Calais train, she decided on the impulse of the moment to come, but insisted on travelling in the ladies’ compartment of the train, and in the ladies’ cabin on board, so that he saw very little of her on the journey, until they got to Charing Cross, where she got into a hansom by herself, and refused to come into my house until Sundran went out to reassure her. Apparently, Mr. Lauriston, marriage had not increased her trust in human nature.”
“It has taught her to discriminate, madam.”
“I was not up. She was taken into my boudoir, and I dressed and went to see her. She was standing just inside the door, waiting; she was flushed, and trembling, and so weak with fatigue and excitement that she almost fell into my arms. But then—”
Chloris stopped. Something in these vivid memories was keenly painful to her.
“She knew—you were her mother?” said George in a low voice.
Chloris, who had related her story standing so that he could only see her side-face, turned the full gaze of her black eyes upon him defiantly.
“Well, take what pride in it you like, she drew back from my arms, and looked at me, and the colour went out of her face, and left her quite white, with dark rings under her eyes, and she asked, in a weak whisper: ‘Are you really my mother?’ Perhaps I looked angry and spoke harshly; I thought of you, and how you had poisoned her mind against me, and she ran to the door with a wild, scared face, and cried: ‘George! Where is George?’ And she glanced round the room like a caged bird, and fell down crying on to the floor. So I left her, for I saw you had taken her from me altogether, and Sundran went to her and made her bathe and rest, and she wrote out a telegram to you, and fell asleep crying. When I saw her again she was quite meek and subdued, and sat with me very quietly, not talking, but looking at me with wondering, inquiring eyes that haunt me. For I tell you I have loved my child, and it was hard to find that she had no heart left for me. Then I was sorry that I—sorry that she had come; and when I learnt what had happened to you, I was angry, furiously angry with Rahas, and I would not let him come near the house, and I did not know what to do with the child. She could not be happy with me—you had spoilt her for that. I gave her a beautiful dress I had had made, and she said: ‘I will wear it when George comes.’ She would not meet my friends, and I did not press her; she did just as she liked, and took walks with Sundran instead of driving with me. And on the third morning she was gone. Her bed had not been slept in, and the footman said she had gone out late the night before. She left a note thanking me for being kind, and saying she could not rest till she saw her husband again. Then I came over here to look for her, for I love her, and I love her no less for her not loving me. I went to the rooms where you stayed, but she had not been there, and all I found of her there was this.”
She handed to George two telegrams, both addressed to himself. They had been opened by Chloris. Both were from Nouna. One had been sent from Dover on her journey. It said:
“I have gone to see mamma, who is ill. She will help us. Come at once, or I shall think you are angry.”
The second was sent from London, and contained these words:
“Come to me quickly, I am frightened and ill. Start at once. I hear your voice calling to me, and I have not money enough to come.”
As George read these words his sight failed him, and a great sob shook his whole frame. Chloris tried to take back the two scraps of flimsy paper, but he thrust them into his breast.
“No, they are mine,” he said in a broken voice.
She shrugged her shoulders.
“As you like,” said she in a hard tone. “After all I have a better consolation than you have.”
George looked at her inquiringly.
“I was born ambitious,” she continued, “as the unlucky daughter of a princess had a right to be. I centred my ambition unselfishly on my daughter; you and she frustrated me. Well, I can still be Viscountess Florencecourt—and I will.”
George pulled himself together to make a good fight for his old friend. This devil-may-care creature, who was beginning to find the oft-tried excitements fail, was just in the mood to plunge head foremost into the delights of starting a new and sensational scandal. George took care to speak with the greatest calmness.
“I don’t think you will, though, when you think about it. You are too clever.”
“I am too clever to fail to do so, I flatter myself.”
“You are quite clever enough, madam, to convince every separate person you talk to of the justice of your claim, but with the general public, with society, the bar, the bench, all reason, sympathy, and probably law, would be against you. I don’t think you could get a firm of standing to take up your case.”
“Don’t you?” said Chloris, raising her eyebrows incredulously, while her face assumed an expression of deep cunning. “And what if I assure you that I have prepared for this contingency by making a firm of standing ready to my hand?”
George suddenly remembered the utter and rather inexplicable devotion to her interests shown by Messrs. Smith and Angelo, and listened with curiosity as she went on:
“Four years ago a son of old Angelo’s went mad about me, and robbed his father to make me handsome presents. The old man was dreadfully cut up. I learnt the facts, and knowing the reputation of the firm was good, I earned the eternal gratitude of the father by throwing over the son, and making restitution to the extent of some four thousand pounds. Do you understand?”
“I see that you have gained a solicitor devoted to your interests; but I maintain that it would be directly against your interest to put pressure on the Colonel. I know him; I know that he would resist your claim with such influence to back him as even you could not stand against; and I know on the other hand”—George lowered his voice, and spoke with slow significance—“that if you are content to let things remain as they are, he will be quite ready to make private redress by making such provision for you, when you choose to ask for it, as even the daughter of a princess would not refuse.”
Chloris was interested to the extent of evidently occupying herself with a mental calculation.
“Ask for it! I could claim it!” she said defiantly.
“But as a claim it would not be allowed.”
Chloris shrugged her shoulders, but she was impressed. She knew that her charms had passed their zenith, and a handsome provision for the future was not to be despised. George was satisfied with the impression he had made, and extremely anxious to be rid of her. In fact they both felt glad that the reappearance of the warder now brought to a close a visit which had been prompted by no very kindly feeling. At the last Chloris seemed to feel this, and she lingered at the door to say, in a voice that had some womanly kindliness and some self-reproach in it:
“I am sorry I came, for I have done you no good. I was thinking of nothing but my child—my disappointment. Forgive me. I am not bad all through, and I thank you for what you have done for her. We can feel for each other now, you and I, different as we are: we have both lost her. If I have had any hand in bringing you here, forgive me, for my life is broken too.”
George held out his hand. Not that he believed much in the permanency of the capricious creature’s grief, but that it was impossible for him to refuse pardon to any one who asked for it sincerely. She kissed his fingers passionately, to his great discomfiture; for not only had he a Briton’s natural objection to demonstrations of this sort, but his clemency towards the woman who had done her utmost to cause the wreck of his life was only the result of a surface sentiment of pity which thinly covered a very much deeper feeling of disgust and resentment, and when the door closed behind her he shook himself like a dog, with an impulse to get free from the very air which she had breathed.
George had no more visits, except from his advocate, for the next two days; but on the third he received a note from the Colonel, dated from England, and written in a perturbed and rather constrained tone, containing a backward shot at his foolishness in marrying a girl of whom he knew nothing, some sincere condolences and regrets at his situation, and a useful expression of fear that he, the Colonel, was “in for it now.” On the whole, the possibility that Chloris White would now turn her attention entirely to him seemed to have swamped Lord Florencecourt’s kindliness, and George wrote him the following answer not without some bitter feelings:
“Dear Lord Florencecourt,
“I thank you very much for the kind things you say. But as for my marriage, which you deplore as the beginning of the mess I am in, I assure you I am just in the same mind about it as I was at the time when I gave my name to the forlorn little creature whose natural guardians had left her at the mercy of they didn’t care who. I don’t stand so well in the world now as I did then, but I think I am no worse a man for having loved something better than my ambition, and taught my wife to love something better than her trinkets. I have done my best to secure her nearest male relation from annoyance, and I think I have succeeded; I hope that this circumstance will induce him to make every effort to find her and take care of her, if his instinct does not. I pray you, with the solemn prayer of a man who may be dead to the world, to persuade him to this. If I were satisfied about her, they might do what they liked to me and welcome.
“Yours very sincerely,
“George Lauriston.”
Within a fortnight of Chloris White’s visit George, ill and feverish from neglected cold and reduced to a state of almost imbecile disquietude not for himself, but for the wife of whose fate no one could, or no one dared to give him tidings, was examined by the judge, according to French law, and brought up for trial. The proceedings produced in him not even a languid appearance of interest; accusation and defence seemed to his worn-out weary brain only a long monotonous buzz of unmeaning words, and when the verdict was pronounced, he did not know whether it was more or less severe than he had expected.
He was acquitted of the charge of wilful murder, but found guilty of homicide, and sentenced to five years’ penal servitude.
George repeated the words to himself, trying to realise them. But all he knew was that he was thankful the trial was over.