She herself, happily, was tormented by no such fear. She ran up to Sir Henry, who was dressed in a vile suit of coarse mustard-coloured stuff, a common little hat on his head, and a broad smile of recovered bliss on his face, looking as no self-respecting farmer among his tenants would have dared to look, and rejoicing in his escape from town and tight clothes.
“Why, you little town-mouse,” he said, laughing good-humouredly as he looked down on the tiny lady, “I don’t know how you will live down here. We shall have to feed you on butterflies’ wings and dew-drops; I should think a mouthful of plain roast beef would kill you.”
“Oh no, it wouldn’t, Sir Henry,” cried Nouna, distressed and offended by these doubts cast on her accomplishments. “I eat a great deal, don’t I, George?”
“Well, more than one would expect, to look at you,” admitted her husband, remembering the fiasco of the wedding breakfast.
“Besides,” said Nouna astutely, “everything that one eats comes from the country. The town produces nothing but soot; perhaps you think I live upon that, and that’s what made me half a black woman.”
The genuine black woman, Sundran, was meanwhile creating a great sensation; so that, to save her from the rustic wit, which made up in blunt obtrusiveness what it lacked in point, she was packed with her mistress inside the Millards’ one-horse brougham, which, like all their surroundings in their country retreat, was almost ostentatiously modest and even shabby. George was content enough to share the coachman’s seat.
“I thought the maid would sit outside; I hadn’t reckoned upon your bringing a lady of so striking a complexion, George,” said Sir Henry apologetically. “The old carriage is such a lumbering concern that I thought the brougham would be quicker, and there’s a cart for the luggage.”
George laughed. “If I had my choice I’d go on the cart,” said he. “I am yet unspoiled by my promotion to matrimony.”
It was a pleasant drive over the flat country, too marshy to be dry and burnt up even in summer. Sir Henry and his pretty daughter kept pace with the carriage, and flung breezy commonplaces at their guests with smiling, healthy faces that made their conversational efforts more than brilliant. Nouna peeped out like a little bird at the flat green fields and the pollard willows with an expression which seemed to say that she had quite fathomed the hidden humour of the whole thing.
“I like the country,” she called to Cicely with an exhaustive nod, as if she had lived in and loved the fields for years.