“Perhaps,” he said, “I am judging too harshly. I mustn’t blame any one for loving unwisely; I haven’t yet shown that I can love wisely myself. But I wish Madame di Valdestillas to know—I beg you to let her know—that I have taken upon myself, with all solemnity before God, the duty she was not herself able to fulfil, of cherishing Nouna and shielding her with the influence of a home. I ask you also to beg her not to send Nouna any more costly presents, like the diamonds Rahas brought; they only make the poor child long for a chance to show them off, and it will be years and years before I can put her in a position to wear them without being ridiculous. I’m sure if Madame di Valdestillas were to know that, she loves her child much too well not to see that I am right.”
George paused, keeping quite still. For a moment there was no sound at all, and both the lawyers refrained from looking at him. At last with a gentle cough, to intimate that he had well weighed this speech and that he expected as much weight to be given to his answer, Mr. Angelo answered:
“I quite understand the integrity of your motives, Mr. Lauriston, and I believe I may answer for it that the Condesa di Valdestillas, when I have laid your arguments before her, will respect them as fully as I do. But I believe it is not now premature for me to confess that circumstances may arise which will make it not only possible, but desirable that Mrs. Lauriston should grow accustomed to the wearing of jewels suitable to a lady not only of position, but of wealth.” George looked steadily at him, in some perplexity. “The fact is, Mr. Lauriston,” and Mr. Angelo’s eyes travelled round the room and then rested for a moment in dull and fish-like impenetrability on the young man’s face before they continued their circuit, “that Madame di Valdestillas’s first husband left property to a considerable amount which he willed to his wife, but with the condition that if she married again it should go to their daughter. Now Madame di Valdestillas, as you are aware, has married again, and the property would thus have fallen to Mrs. Lauriston without question if it had not been for one circumstance. Some relatives of the late Captain Weston’s have propounded a later will, benefiting them to the exclusion of his wife and daughter. Now we have the strongest reasons for believing the will thus suddenly sprung upon us to be a forgery; but until the trial, which is to take place shortly, we cannot be absolutely sure of our case. In the meantime the Countess thought it better not too soon to hold out expectations which might never be realized. It is quite on my own responsibility therefore, that I have made this communication to you. It will explain what would certainly otherwise seem rather mysterious conduct with regard to the present of jewels to her daughter.”
“It seems to me rather mysterious still,” said George shortly and uneasily. This network of strange occurrences and explanations that seemed to him quite as strange, perplexed the straightforward young soldier. “I’m not such a fool as not to value money, but frankly I’d rather be without a great deal than think my wife had a fortune which would make her independent of me. In any case I ought to have been told the whole position of things before I married her.”
He took up his hat and after very few more words left the office, on all points less satisfied than when he entered it. He hated humbug, and this foreign Countess’s playing with him, even if it arose from nothing but a woman’s love of little mysteries, was exceedingly distasteful to him. He had acted in the promptest and most upright way towards Nouna, such as might have convinced any reasonable person of his integrity, yet in no respect had he met with corresponding frankness on her side. If he had been told before of the young girl’s possibly brilliant prospects, it would have changed many things for him; now that the suggestion was suddenly sprung upon him late in the day, he found that he could not adjust himself to the notion of Nouna rich, distracted in the first flush of the honeymoon by the startling news that she was a wealthy woman, with a host of luxurious pleasures at her command outside such simpler, more domestic happiness as her husband could give her. And he resolved that, as she did not know of the sensational prospect that might open before her, he would himself say nothing about it, but would wait until the will case was tried, and the matter finally settled in one way or the other.
George Lauriston, having held himself till now rather markedly aloof from the influence of feminine fascination, was now expiating his neglect in daily tightening bondage at the feet of the most irresistible little tyrant that ever captivated a man’s senses and wormed her way into his heart, none the less that he saw daily with increasing clearness how much more he was giving her than she was giving, or perhaps could give, to him. George was puzzled and disappointed. Arguing from his personal experience, in which the ecstatic dreams and timid caresses of the lover had been but a weak prelude to the ardent and demonstrative tenderness of the young husband, he had taken it for granted that those pretty, capricious outbursts of girlish passion, which had charmed him so much by their piquant unusualness, would develop under the sunshine of happy matrimony into a rich growth of steady affection, coloured by the tropical glow which seemed to belong to her individuality, and cherished and fed by his own devotion. It almost seemed sometimes as if marriage had had the effect of checking her spontaneous effusiveness, as if she was rather afraid of the violent demonstrations which any encouragement would bring down upon her. Now George, at three-and-twenty, could scarcely be expected to be much of a philosopher; and finding in his own case that true love was indeed all-absorbing, he saw no reason for doubting the common belief that true love must always be so. Only at a much later stage of experience does one understand that into that vaguely described state of being “in love” enter many questions of race, complexion, age, sex, and circumstances, which produce as many varieties of that condition as there are men and women who pass through it. So he fell ignorantly into the mistake of thinking that he had not yet succeeded in wholly winning his wife’s heart, and greatly tormented both himself and her by laborious and importunate efforts to obtain what was, as a matter of fact, safely in his possession.
Nouna loved her husband as a bee loves the flowers, or a kitten the warmth of the sun. He was the prince she had waited for to take her out of the dull twilight of life with Mrs. Ellis and music-lessons; and although, in the modest nest which was all he could yet make for her, there were missing many of the elements upon which she had counted in her imaginary paradise, yet who knew what glories might not be in store for her in the rapidly approaching time when George would be a General and wear a cocked hat? And in the meantime he was the handsomest man in the world, and kinder and sweeter than anybody had ever been to her; though when she looked into his eyes and sighed with voluptuous delight at the lights in them, and at their colour and brilliancy, in truth she read in them little more than any dog can read in the eyes of his master, and she alternated her moods of passionate satisfaction in her new toy with moods in which she openly wished that she were not yet married to him, so that she might have all the novelty and excitement of the wedding over again.
And George, who in his efforts to resist the temptation of becoming a mere slave to this little princess’s caprices, ran a risk of becoming a later and worse Mr. Barlow, decided that, in the shallow education she had received, the intellectual and spiritual sides of her nature had been too much neglected, and set about remedying these omissions in a furiously energetic manner. He was beset by many interesting difficulties. To begin with: what pursuit could be imagined so pleasant and at the same time so improving as reading for filling up the hours during which he was forced to be absent from her? But Nouna lightly, firmly, and persistently refused to read one line even of a judiciously chosen novel, although George had taken care to tempt her by a set of beautifully bound volumes by a lady writer who took a decorously vague and colourless view of life through Anglican-Catholic spectacles. She would look out of window by the hour, lie on the sofa listening to the songs and tales of Sundran, whom George hated himself for his weakness in not dismissing, even catch flies on the window-panes and give them to the cat, anything rather than open a book. She would, indeed, permit George to read to her, lying curled up in his arms and hearing for the most part without comment, unless he chose poetry. In this region she showed marked preferences and prejudices. Shakspeare, she averred, made her head ache, with the exception of certain chosen passages, which she would hear again and again, strung together in odd fashion. She was never tired of the love-scenes in Romeo and Juliet, but she would not permit the intervening scenes to be read, preferring a short summary in George’s own words to fill up the blanks thus made in the story. Othello she would suffer in the same way, and King Lear, The Merchant of Venice, and The Taming of the Shrew; and she was never tired of the description of the death of Ophelia. The Idylls of the King she preferred for the most part without the poetry, but she learned by heart The Lady of Shalott, The Moated Grange, and other pieces which presented ladies in a picturesque and romantic light. Some portions of Hiawatha had a strong fascination for her, and as, again and again, George read to her the account of the death of Minne-haha, he would feel her arms tighten round his neck, and hear her breath come short with intense interest and emotion close to his ear.
“Would you feel like that if I died?” she asked abruptly one evening, laying her hand across the page when he had read to the end.
“My child, my child, don’t ask me,” whispered George, overcome and thrown off his balance by a sudden realisation of the strong hold this little fragile woman-creature had got upon his whole nature, of the paralysing dead blank her absence would now make in his life. “I don’t think, my wife, that I should live long after you,” he said in a grave, deep voice, laying his right hand upon her shoulder, and tightening the clasp of his left arm round her waist.