“Only for his address, that we might invite him,” said Nouna, looking frightened.
“But how could you write without knowing it?”
“He was going to change it, I knew. He is at Scarborough now.”
George said no more, and tossed the letter into the wastepaper basket. Nouna, whose eagerness to change her shoes had disappeared, stood considering her husband, whose reticence she could not understand. She had braced herself up to meet a long interrogatory, and the simple silence made her think that something worse was in store for her.
“Haven’t you anything more to say to me?” she asked at last, with her head on one side in a helpless, birdwitted manner.
“Yes, dear, I have a great deal more to say to you,” burst out poor George, gliding from his chair down on to his knees before her, clasping his arms round her waist, and looking up into the beautiful mask of the spirit it was so hard to reach, so impossible to impress. “Why won’t you be quite open and frank with me, when it’s all I ask of you? When I tell you it hurts me so much for you to keep back a trifle from me that a whole evening’s pretty caresses from you can’t take out the sting of it? Can’t you see, dearest, that nobody in the world loves you so much as I, or would do as much for you? Why do you encourage these fellows to think you can ever want services from them, when you know that the man in whose bosom you lie every night lives only in your life, and for your happiness? What do you want of me that I won’t do? Why won’t you open your little heart wide to me, as you do your arms? Don’t you love me, Nouna? Don’t you love me?”
His encircling arms trembled with the passion that surged in him, and the slender little form he held was swayed by the convulsive movement of his body. These appeals of her husband to something within her of which she had but a dim consciousness, bewildered and distressed a creature accustomed to live fully and happily in the day’s emotions, beautifully unconscious of higher duties, higher claims. She was, however, moved to a soft sensation of pity for this big, kind, splendid companion whose passionate affection was, after all, the kingly crown of all her joys; and she put little tender arms round his neck in the belief that these mad frenzies after something intangible were signs of a disorder peculiar to man, of which that dangerous symptom jealousy was the chief feature.
“Of course I love you, George, my dear old beautiful darling elephant,” she said, with the soothing accent of an affection which was indeed perfectly genuine.
And she kissed the waves of his hair with such a winning abandonment of herself to the pleasure his touch afforded her, and dropped down into his breast with such a seductive air of meek submission to his will in every act and thought, that George was carried away from his doubts, away from his questionings, as he had been a hundred times before, and so she strengthened her empire over him in the interview which had at the outset appeared to threaten it.
It was not until he had left her, and was on his way to the church, that a momentary gloom fell on the glow into which the magic of her charm had cast him. She had been very sweet, but she had given no word of explanation of that strange request to Captain Pascoe, a man of a character so well known, that it was gall to George to think he had in his possession so much as a line of his wife’s handwriting. With an effort he put the matter aside in his mind, not without the unpleasant reflection that, after all his efforts at art-education, the primitive and impracticable methods of the harem were those best calculated to keep the husband of the little dark-skinned enchantress in security.