CHAPTER XX.
When the time came for them to finish their stay in Norfolk by the dreaded three days at Willingham, neither George nor Nouna made any secret of the fact that they felt the coming visit to be a severe ordeal. Undoubtedly it would be a cruelly abrupt change from the cheerful homeliness of the Lodge, to the penitential atmosphere in which the household of Lady Florencecourt passed their days. So notorious was the character of the gracious châtelaine that Willingham Hall was commonly known in the neighbourhood as the House of Correction, a title to which the severely simple style of its architecture gave no very flat denial. Willingham Church stood in the grounds belonging to the Hall, so that Nouna had had an opportunity of shuddering at the sombre dreariness of the mansion even before the return call she had made with Lady Millard and Cicely, on which occasion she had sat almost mute on a high-backed chair, looking as insignificant and unhappy as a starved mouse, thinking that Lady Florencecourt’s light eyes looked like the glass marbles with which she played at solitaire, and what a good model her face would be for one of those indiarubber heads that children squeeze up into grotesque grimaces.
She cried at parting with the Millards, like a little girl sent to school for the first time. Sir Henry, with his simple good humour; Lady Millard, with her quiet manners, and the quick black eyes whose flashing keenness and sympathy showed the burning soul of the New World flickering in uneasy brightness among the glowing embers of the Old; Cicely and Charlotte, fair, kind creatures, who filled up the pauses gracefully, the one by merely smiling, the other by a gentle rain of chatter which she had been taught to think a fascinating social accomplishment; and, above all, Ella, of the sallow face, the sharp tongue, and the warm heart, were a group to live pleasantly in the memory, and to make the approaching encounter with the unamiable hosts of Willingham more disagreeable by contrast. It added to poor Nouna’s forlornness in these circumstances that her husband absolutely forbade her taking Sundran with her, as, although he was very anxious for an accidental meeting between Lord Florencecourt and the Indian woman, he felt that he could not force upon his host the presence of a person to whom, if only as the result of a prejudice, he had a strong aversion.
Lady Florencecourt sent a lumbering old family travelling carriage, with powdered footmen and bewigged coachmen, to bring Mr. and Mrs. Lauriston to the Hall. Nouna rather liked this old-world state, which, as her education had embraced the experiences of Paul Clifford and Martin Blakeborough of “The King’s Mail,” stimulated her imagination. She crammed her little fingers tightly into her husband’s hand as they entered the long straight drive, with a deep grass border on each side flanked by tall trees, which led up to Willingham Hall.
“Keep up your spirits, George,” she quavered, as the carriage drew up at the imposing front door. “There aren’t any spikes to get over if we have to run away.”
And she entered the hall with the air of a prisoner who hopes he’ll get off because he’s such a little one. They were shown up to their room at once, and when they came down to the drawing-rooms, which were a succession of vast wildernesses, with all the defects of apartments too large for the human atoms who lived in them, they found, to Nouna’s great relief, that not only was the great Mr. Birch there already, but he had brought with him a real live daughter, a girl about twenty, who seemed just as much relieved by the sight of a young face as Nouna herself was. Lord Florencecourt was there, looking as if he had been kept in against his will from the society of his boys; and Lady Florencecourt, who made it a boast that she never interrupted her charitable work for anybody, worked away at certain hideous convict-like garments, which she was knitting in very coarse scrubby gray wool for the unlucky poor, while she held forth on the ingratitude of the “masses,” the vicious extravagance of the “classes,” and the shortcomings of everybody all round; while Mr. Birch, who was a bald-headed man with a great expanse of knobby forehead, which was in itself a tower of strength to his party, agreed with everything—perhaps a habit he had contracted at Westminster.
The two younger ladies drew instinctively nearer and nearer each other, until they were close enough to grow confidential, and to enter upon a strictly defensive alliance. By the time Lord Florencecourt suggested an excursion through the grounds to see the ruins of an old Norman church which had been built at the same period as the one still standing, and within a stone’s throw of it, adversity had made Nouna and Miss Birch inseparable as love-birds. Before the evening was over, little Mrs. Lauriston had reason to congratulate herself on having found such an ally. For her acid hostess treated her with only the barest possible show of civility, and Lord Florencecourt, while making a determined effort to be more courteous, betrayed in his eyes such a rooted and cold dislike that Nouna, with her strong sensitiveness to every shade of feeling in the people with whom she came in contact, shrank into herself and was completely miserable, casting forlorn glances across the table at her husband, who felt scarcely happier than she, but in whom was growing stronger every moment the determination to learn the reason of an invitation which had evidently sprung from no spontaneous wish either of host or hostess. Two other guests had joined the party before dinner, an elderly couple named Admiral and Mrs. Bohun, very old friends of Lord Florencecourt’s. Neither added much to the liveliness of the circle, but whether from native dulness or through Lady Florencecourt’s peculiar gift of causing the people about her to show always at their worst in her society, did not appear. At all events, when the ladies left the room at dessert, Nouna was so much overcome by the dire prospect before her that she slipped round to her husband, and hissed into his ear, in a doleful and not altogether inaudible whisper:
“Don’t be long, or you won’t find me alive!”
She had not under-estimated the relaxation of the drawing-room. Throughout the length of the suite of cold-looking apartments wax-lights flickered weakly in numbers wholly inadequate to the size of the rooms. The piano had been opened, and Lady Florencecourt invited the younger ladies to play; as Miss Birch hesitated, with not unnatural diffidence before such an audience, Nouna rushed recklessly into the breach, regardless of the fact that she was a totally incompetent performer.
“I knew she’d go back to her knitting, and that’s in the furthest room,” she volunteered in explanation, as the elder ladies sailed away.