His own house! Great heavens, no. This woman’s house; bought with the foul earnings of her infamous calling!
For Nouna’s mother was Chloris White.
As he realised this, face to face with her, George reeled back against one of the supports of the verandah, and burst into a stupid idiot’s laugh. The whole foundation on which heart and brain were busy building for a life’s work and a life’s happiness, had sunk beneath his feet and swept all into a hideous, yawning pit of ruin. And so for a moment the brain gave way and the horrible pain was dulled, while Chloris White, recognising her son-in-law with a shock, dismissed the enamoured Dicky on some futile errand, and gave all her attention to the unexpected and disastrously unwelcome visitor.
CHAPTER XXIII.
Chloris White was one of those utterly corrupt, abandoned and dangerous women in whom certain noble and loveable qualities flourish with a rank and prolific luxuriance impossible in colder and better balanced natures. She had liked George Lauriston from the first, with the impulsive yet not altogether undiscriminating liking of a woman clever enough, while knowing the worse side of men thoroughly, to understand that there is a better and to work upon that also when it suited her purpose. When chance threw the young officer in her daughter’s way, she spared no pains both by her own investigations and those of Rahas, in whom she found an agent ready to her hand—subtle, secretive, and not above bribes—to find out whether Lauriston as a son-in-law would satisfy her affection and her ambition for Nouna. Every report proved satisfactory; there was nothing against him but his poverty; and as Chloris White, at three-and-thirty still in the height of her vogue, helped herself with both hands to the savings of centuries and revelled in the spoils of city and county, there was no reason to make that an insuperable obstacle. For this half-bred Indian woman was born ambitious, and was determined that in her child should be fulfilled such aspirations as she had failed to realise in her own person.
The illegitimate daughter of an Indian Maharanee and an English government official, Lakshmi—for that was Chloris White’s real name—had been born with the germs of marvellous beauty and ungovernable passions, both of which developed until at fifteen, when she became, by various artful ruses, the wife of a deeply-enamoured young officer, who was even at the time ashamed enough of his marriage to wed the little witch under an assumed name—she was the most fascinating little fury in the Presidency. Though her husband had well-founded suspicions of her infidelity, she was clever enough to prevent his obtaining proofs of it, and at last, despairing of getting free in a more legal manner of this burden upon his life, a half savage wife, ignorant, vicious and violent, he left her when his regiment returned to England, leaving such provision as he, then a poor lieutenant, could afford for her and his child, a girl only a few weeks old, whose paternity he affected to doubt. Four years passed, during which he heard no more of either of them. The poor lieutenant became, by unexpected deaths, heir to a title; he wanted to marry. Detectives, set to work both in England and in India, could find no trace either of mother or child. Finally, the husband decided that they must have gone down in the whirlpool, as such a woman would be most likely to do. He risked the venture and married. For years more no rumour of the lost wife troubled him, until, when he was Viscount Florencecourt, Colonel of his regiment, and father of two boys for whom he would have died, a horrible phantom rose, conjured up by a letter from the solicitors Messrs. Smith and Angelo, who made known to him that his wife, Lady Florencecourt, had arrived in England. He tried silence, denial; but the wild Lakshmi had grown into a remarkably capable woman, and her lawyers were furnished with ample proofs that the lady now leading a notorious life in London and the little dare-devil imp whom the young lieutenant married seventeen years ago, were one and the same person. She had ferreted him out, hunted him down.
Lord Florencecourt submitted; he would consent to anything, if she would only hold her peace. At first Lakshmi was merciful, contenting herself with a warning that his daughter had claims upon him to which he would have to give ear by and by. Then, having heard of Lady Florencecourt’s pearls, Lakshmi demanded them for a wedding gift to his daughter. It was at this point that he saw Nouna by accident in the barrack-yard at Hounslow, and the fact was sprung upon him that this daughter of whom he was in vague dread was already the wife of his favourite officer. The next blows followed quickly: he must allow a thousand a year towards the support of the young couple, must cause his “exclusive” sister to call upon them, must induce Lady Florencecourt to receive them. The wretched man had fulfilled every command, unable to console himself even with the reflection that these troubles were undeserved. At last, fearing that Lady Florencecourt’s rudeness to Nouna, whom she suspected of being his daughter, would bring down upon them the last, worst punishment, he had to confess the whole story, and purchase her civility to young Mrs. Lauriston at the price of such a course of lectures, curtain and otherwise, as the mind of man recoils from considering.
For her husband Lakshmi had no mercy. He had treated her badly, the first and the last man who had ever had a chance of doing so, and the power she now held over him she used with the cruelty of a nature in its depths half savage still. But for this young fellow, who had treated her child with quixotic honour and delicacy which she, of all women, knew how to appreciate, she felt, when the awful discovery of her identity stunned him into momentary idiotcy in her presence, an impulse of pity and tenderness almost as strong as any she had ever felt for the daughter whom Chloris with all her faults adored. Lauriston’s good looks also, his muscular figure and healthy, sun-browned face added considerably in her sensual eyes to the attraction his chivalrous character gave him. As he still leant back against the wooden support of the verandah, staring not at her but over her head in a struggle to get back his wits and realise the nature of the blow which had stunned him, Chloris White came forward and laid her hands winningly upon his shoulders with a pretty maternal air of compassion, which was the sincere expression of a kindly impulse tempered by an ever-present professional sense of the picturesque and moving. Her touch, the glance down at her face which it compelled him to give, brought remembrance back in a flood and filled him with loathing so overwhelming that he affected to stagger back inadvertently from the inadequate support on which he was leaning. Respect for women dies hard in men of decent lives, and George would not have had even this abandoned woman know the horror and disgust she excited in him. She had kept her child pure, he must remember that; but all the stories he had heard of her unequalled rapacity and depravity rushed into his mind with the lightning rapidity of thought in moments of intense excitement, and gained a horribly fascinating force of likelihood as, by the light of all he knew about her, he examined the face of Lord Florencecourt’s wife.
Chloris White was still at thirty-three a woman of surprising beauty, of small, lithe, youthful figure, and face far surpassing her daughter’s in perfection of feature. But the daring process of changing her hair from raven black to a subdued golden tint had rendered necessary a change of complexion which gave a weird prominence to her long, black-fringed eyes, and helped to stamp the countenance with the unmistakable impress of evil. There was in her beauty none of the essential coldness of the English types, whose worst representatives lure for the most part at the outset by an appearance of straightforward innocence in the gaze of confiding blue or grey eyes. She was a glowing spark from the forge of Evil, burning, searing, daringly brilliant and unmistakable, whose allurement appealed directly to the viler side of men; her attractions were the poisonous charms of stagnant waters and forest swamps, of venomous reptiles that hang or creep in sinuous curves where vegetation is rankest, where no breeze penetrates to disperse the fumes of damp and decay: her beauty was the beauty of corruption.
George Lauriston was not the man to remain long the prey of vain imaginings; almost as soon as he recovered full use of his mind after the first stunning shock, he was entirely himself again, understanding that a contest between them was inevitable, and deciding as rapidly what were to be his chief weapons. His first impulse had been to avoid a discussion, by withdrawing at once without an explanation, resigning his commission, and emigrating with Nouna to the uttermost parts of the earth. But close upon this idea had followed the certainty that this spoilt creature, baffled in her ambition for her child, would use the means of compensating herself offered by her hold over the Colonel, and by proclaiming and proving herself to be the real Lady Florencecourt, bring ruin to the family. Chloris also prepared herself for a struggle. She knew that the cynical philosophy which would quietly accept a daughter and a fortune from hands such as hers, was not to be found in company with the virtues for which she had chosen her son-in-law.