“You don’t understand these people,” said George, disgusted by her shameless cynicism, but resolved to go through with the contest, and to make the best terms he could. “She has made friends among them now, real friends. When they hear she has lost her fortune they will simply try to make up for the loss by inviting her more, making more fuss with her than ever.”
Chloris White shook her head contemptuously.
“Poor gentility,” she said, “that depends on the broken dainties cast to it by its betters—for betters in money are betters in everything—is worse off than the frank poverty that lives on offal. Now poverty in any shape is loathsome, and it shall not come near my daughter. Fortune with honour is the best possible thing, but fortune without honour is the next best, infinitely better in Nouna’s case than any amount of love in garrets. You see I am acting on principle. If you insist—and I see by your English bulldog face you mean to insist (it is a trick of your country, and of no use with a woman) in refusing my daughter the fortune she is entitled to, I shall encourage the suit—the secret suit—of a lover who will be more compliant.”
She took a cigarette-case from the table beside her, and striking a wax match on a tiny box that jingled among other objects from a châtelaine at her side, she lit a cigarette, and puffing a long spiral cloud into the air above her, watched it disperse and fade with much apparent interest.
To George she had become, in the course of the last few moments, no longer a beautiful, depraved human creature with one fair spot in her nature that had to be touched, but a slimy noisome thing to be shaken off as quickly as possible and avoided for ever. He looked at her steadily, so steadily indeed that she turned her head on one side, and shot at him an oblique glance, in preference to bearing the full brunt of a gaze of such mortifying disgust and contempt. Then, bowing to her very coldly, he said he was afraid he had intruded upon her too long, and seeing a few steps off the open door by which he could pass through to the front of the house without re-entering the drawing-room, he was retreating towards it, when a voice in the hall struck upon the hearing both of him and of Chloris at the same time, causing her to start up from her lounging attitude with a bound of thirsty triumph, crushing all his cold armour of pride and laying bare in a moment the wounded passionate heart it had hidden.
He sprang forward, panting, feverish, imploring, like a weak boy at her mercy, held her wrists, looked down into her face with eyes that let light into the recesses of passion within him.
“For God’s sake spare her, don’t let her see you, Nouna—she has come to see Chloris White, the devil’s part of you, about young Wood. Don’t see her. Remember, she is your child and my wife. Show the angel’s side once more. Be true to your own soul. Listen. You are your child’s religion. While she worships you, while she holds you the ideal of all that is pure and lovely, the spirit of good in you is kept alive by her devotion. If you cast yourself down from that altar you kill in yourself everything that is not vile, base, devilish; you ruin the mind you and I have watched over and kept pure; you throw yourself and her into an endless hell. You are a woman—you will have pity.”
He poured out these words in a hot lava-torrent of passionate emotion which surprised and moved the woman to whom sensations were the breath of life. However, she was not conquered; she looked up in his face and said with languid insolence:
“So! One can make fire out of wood at last! Well, you should have woke up sooner. I intend to see my daughter.”
George heard the patter of Nouna’s steps on the polished floor of the room within. With one rapid glance at the window, which was some few feet further down the verandah than the spot where he stood, and without one word or sound to warn her of his intention, he snatched Chloris up in his arms, and ran across the lawn towards the river in a slanting direction away from the window, to a spot where he saw a couple of boats moored to the bank. Utterly taken by surprise, and as instinctively submissive as her sex usually are to a masculine coup of this kind, Chloris White scarcely uttered a faint exclamation until, seeing the direction of their course, she asked, coolly: