Nouna, who was playing at packing, having been busy for twenty minutes with a delicate Sèvres tea-pot and some yards of tissue paper, let the china fall from her hands at these words, in a torrent of indignation. She scarcely glanced at the broken fragments on the floor, as she burst forth with great haughtiness in the high-flown language she habitually used when her passions were roused:
“Indeed! Does then the wife of this miserable little wooden soldier think the granddaughter of a Maharajah unworthy to bear the light of her eyes? We will see, we will see. Perhaps she is a little too imperious; there may be powers in the earth greater than hers! I will write to my mother, who has never yet failed to fulfil my wishes, and I will tell her to search if she can find means to humble this proud lady of the fens, so that she may sue to me to receive me in her house, heathen, foreigner, though I am!”
And with a superb gesture Nouna signified her contempt for the ironical laughter her husband could not restrain.
“Oh, little empress,” he said, good-humouredly, “you will have to learn that all magicians have limits, and that even a mother so devoted as yours can’t carry out all the freaks that enter into one little feminine head. The very king of the black art could not move Lady Florencecourt!”
“The king! Perhaps not, because he is a foolish male thing,” retorted Nouna coldly, “but what my mother wills to do she does, and I trust her.”
And she would not suffer any further word on the subject.
George was in the depths of his heart not without a little anxiety about this Norfolk visit. Unconventionality is so much more unconventional in the country, where every trifling detail in which a man differs from his neighbours is nodded over far and wide as a sign of mental aberration, while in the case of a woman it is held to warrant even graver doubts. Nouna herself was in the highest spirits at the prospect; delightful as life in London was, a change after five weeks of her new home was more delightful still. She had had made for the occasion a varied assortment of dainty white frocks, of the kind that charm men by their simplicity, and women by their costliness, and a white costume with fine lines of red and gold, for yachting on the broads, which might have carried off the palm at Cowes. Nouna had the instinct of dress, a regal instinct which revelled in combinations and contrasts, in forms and folds, which everyday English women might admire or marvel at, but copied at their peril. She travelled down, the day being cool, in a Spanish cloak of mouse-grey velvet, lined with ivory silk, and fastened with clasps of smoked pearl and silver. On her head she wore a cap of the same colours. The milliner, an artist spoiled by ministering to a long course of puppets, was aghast at the order, and suggested that it would make Mrs. Lauriston look, well—er—brown. Nouna replied, with a great sweep of the eyelashes, that she was brown, and she should be sorry to look anything else. And indeed her beauty was seen to great advantage in this original setting, and its tints might pleasantly have suggested to the fanciful brown woods in the haze of a grey October day.
They reached Gorleth, the nearest railway-station to Maple Lodge, at half-past four. Sir Henry and his daughter Cicely were on the platform, Cicely in a short grey riding habit, looking in this practical garment a thousand times handsomer and more captivating than she had done in her most brilliant ball-dress, according to the wont of her countrywomen, who, from the royal ladies downwards, never look worse than when dressed solely with the view to charm.
Let it be acknowledged once for all: the Englishwoman, to her credit be it said, is a riding animal, a walking animal, a boating animal, a cooking animal, a creature fond of hard work and hard play, full of energy and capabilities for better things than the piano-strumming and Oxford local cramming which are now drummed into her so diligently. But her social qualities are so poor as to be scarce worth cultivation unless some better methods be discovered than those now in vogue. Her dancing is more vigorous than graceful, her conversation is inane, her deportment in full dress uneasy and deplorable, and her manner at social gatherings where no active muscular exertion is required of her, dull and constrained. Ten girls are handsome and attractive in a boat or on the tennis-ground to one who at an “at-home” or a dance is passable enough to make a man want an introduction. The metropolis has the pick of the market, if the term may be allowed, in marriageable maidens as in flowers and fruit. But all alike lose their freshest, greatest charm when they are plucked from their natural setting of country green.
George had an inkling of this truth as he helped his tiny wife out of the railway carriage, amidst the stares of a crowd of country market-folk, who gaped as they would have done if a regulation fairy, gauze wings, wand and all, had suddenly descended down the wide chimney on to their cottage hearth. He should love and admire her whatever she did, but he wanted her to sway the sceptre of conquest over all these friends at Willingham and Maple Lodge, and his heart ached with fear lest a breath of disapproval should touch her, lest she should appear to any disadvantage under such new conditions.