He was extremely indignant at this suggestion that he should go into exile just for having pleased himself in the matter of his marriage, which was unmistakably his own affair.
“Would you not if by so doing you could confer a very considerable favour upon one whom you used to be glad to call an old friend?” said the Colonel in the same low voice, and with a strange persistency.
Around them the sounds of laughter and of heated but futile after-dinner discussions, beginning in wine and dying away in cigar-smoke, filled the hot air and rendered their conversation more private and at the same time freer than it could have been if held within closed doors. George looked at the ashy pale face of the prematurely aged officer, and it seemed to him that his own frame shivered as if at touch of some unexpected mystery, some unknown danger. He answered with much feeling:
“Tell me why it is a favour, Colonel. I would do more than this to show I am grateful to you. Only let me understand.”
But the very sympathy in his tones seemed to startle the Colonel, who drew back perceptibly, with a hurried glance straight into George’s eyes. It seemed to the latter, who was now on the alert for significant looks and tones, that at the moment when their eyes met the Colonel took a desperate resolution. At any rate, when he spoke again it was in his usual manner.
“It’s nothing,” he said, waving the subject away with his hand. “Nothing but a passing freak which I beg you will not think of again.”
His tone notified that the discussion was closed, and for the whole of the evening George considered, without finding any satisfactory clue to an explanation, what Lord Florencecourt’s motive could be for so strongly objecting to Nouna’s appearance in the neighbourhood of Willingham. His prejudice against swarthy complexions could scarcely be sufficiently obstinate for him to hope to clear the county of them: but what was the origin of the prejudice?
On returning home George tried to probe the misty memories which the Colonel’s appearance had, on his introduction to Nouna, stirred in her mind. But he could elicit nothing further. Nouna was now showing at times little fits of petulance, born of the absence of violent novelty in her life now that the husband was growing to be quite an article of every-day consumption, as much a matter of course as dry toast at breakfast, and she was not going to be troubled to remember or try to remember faces.
“I dare say I only fancied I ever saw anybody like him,” she said with a little wearied twist of her head and sticking forward of her round chin. “I can’t count every hair on the head of every old gentleman I see.”
And however often he might return to this subject, and in whatever mood she happened to be, George could learn nothing more definite than her first vague impression, which grew even fainter as the meeting faded into the past.