“Don’t take it like that,” said she nervously, almost as much moved as he, and impelled by his strong feeling to be more impressed than she had been at first with her own surmise. “I only suggested—it came into my head—I don’t know anything about it.”
“Oh, well, you shouldn’t say things like that, you know, Ella, even in fun. The mere suggestion gives one such an awful shock. It’s like cold water down one’s back,” said he, trying to laugh.
“I didn’t mean it, indeed,” said she, quite unable to take a jesting tone. “As if one would say a thing like that in earnest! I never guessed you would think twice about a foolish speech like that!”
But they both felt uncomfortable; and both were glad when George, noticing that Dicky Wood was standing near anxious to get a word with the jolly nice girl Ella, but much too diffident to come forward at the risk of intruding unwelcomely upon a tête-à-tête, drew him into their group by asking if he had been in Norfolk before.
And so both George and Ella were able to shuffle off the burden of a conversation which had grown decidedly difficult to keep up, and the memory of which made a slight constraint between them, on the man’s side especially, for two or three days.
Nouna, to her husband’s great comfort and gladness, was behaving beautifully, and putting new life by her gaiety into the whole household, the younger members of which, in spite of Ella’s intelligence and her sisters’ beauty, were a little wanting in those electric high spirits which, in the routine of a quiet country-house, are as sunshine to the crops. The day after their arrival was Sunday, and the morning church-going had been a fiery ordeal for George, not from religious indifference, but from the misgiving that if Nouna could not keep from smiling in the course of a well-conducted service in a West End church, she would certainly be carried out in convulsions from the Willingham place of worship, where the school children, summer and winter, sniffed through the service in a distressing chorus, while the loud-voiced clerk’s eccentric English rang through the building, drowning the old vicar’s feeble voice; and where the vicar’s wife, a strong-minded lady, whose district-visiting was a sort of assize, had been known to “pull up” her reverend husband publicly from her pew immediately below the pulpit when, as not infrequently happened, he turned over two leaves of his sermon instead of one, and went quietly on as if nothing had happened. “Turned over two leaves? Bless me, so I have!” he would murmur, and rectify his mistake with a tranquil nod.
So George had put his wife through a very severe drill before starting, and had strictly forbidden her so much as to sneeze without his permission. She had a narrow escape at the offertory, when one of the churchwardens, with a lively remembrance of the artifices of his own youth, shovelled a penny into the fingers of each of his offspring with one hand, while he presented the plate menacingly with the other. But glancing up at her husband and perceiving a frown of acute terror on his face, she contrived to choke in silence; and the day was gained.
On the following Monday too, when the dreaded Lady Florencecourt fulfilled her threat of calling and proved equal to her reputation for unamiability, the young wife was, as she triumphantly averred afterwards, “very good.” The county censor proved to be a fair, florid woman of middle height, rather stout, and with features so commonplace that, without the saving shield of her title, they would have been called common. She had arrogant and capricious manners, an oily self-satisfied voice, and an ill word for everybody. Whenever her husband, who accompanied her on this occasion, ventured to make a remark, she turned to look at him with a resigned air, as if she were used to being made a martyr at the stake of his imbecility. She examined Nouna from head to foot through a gold double eyeglass, as if the young wife had been a charity-girl convicted of misconduct, and made no remark to her except to ask her if she was interested in the Zenana Missions, to which Nouna replied rather haughtily that Indian ladies were no more in need of missionaries than English ones: after which thrust and counter-thrust it may be imagined that the conversation languished, and that later in the day George had great difficulty in persuading his wife not to break off their engagement to go to Willingham. She said it would just spoil the end of their visit to the Millards, for one of whom she had begun to feel a real affection. This was the sharp-tongued Ella, whose intelligence she had the wit to recognise, and whose smart sayings amused her.
It was on the evening of a day in the course of which this oddly-assorted pair of friends had been a good deal together that George, on going up stairs to his room after a last cigar with his host, found his wife, not as usual fast asleep like a child, but perched upon the bed in the attitude of a Hindoo idol, with a big book open on her crossed knees, and her eyes fixed upon the nearest candle.
“Hallo!” said he, “what’s the matter?”