“You might have knocked me down with a feather, as the housemaids say, when Ella told me about it just now, and said I was to hold my tongue about it till it was announced,” said Sir Henry, while the other two girls lifted up their gentle voices and clamoured questions about the bride.
George glanced gratefully at Ella while he answered as much as he could, thanked Lady Millard for her invitation, was overruled when he pleaded that his wife was too young and too much of a hoyden to pay visits until she had sobered down a little, and looked anxiously at the Colonel, who had received the announcement in dead silence, and refused to offer the smallest comment. Nobody but himself and Ella knew how very recent his wedding had been, so George found it impossible to break away from them until four o’clock, when, much to his vexation, the Colonel left too. The elder man read the expression on the face of the younger, and he said, in a cold voice, as he kept pace with him on the broad pavement of the square:
“I am not going to trouble you either with reproaches or warnings: it is too late. But I am going to give you two words of advice. You are young, ardent, generous-blooded; you are in dangers that I can understand. It is plain that you have married for love, and love only, in the hottest and most reckless way, some little jade whose face has bewitched you. Well, listen. Don’t begin by worshipping her as a goddess, or you will end by having to propitiate her as a devil. Live two lives; one with her, all sweetness and softness and silliness, using up all the superfluous sentiment and folly we are all burdened with, in kisses and sighs at her footstool: but once shut yourself into your study, or shut her up in her drawing-room with her pug dog and her needles and snips of canvas and wool, forget her, brace yourself up to what you have always looked upon as the serious interests of your life, lock her pretty face and her pretty prattle right up in your heart, and keep your mind and your soul free from the sickly contamination. When you are with her, think of nothing but her; when you are away from her, think of anything else. Never mind what she does while you’re away. If there’s any harm in her, it would come out if you kept her under glass, while she’s a thousand times less likely to get into mischief if she respects you as her master and superior, instead of despising you as her slave. Remember a man can never be the equal of a woman. If you only admit the possibility, it is war between you until the one or the other has come off conqueror.”
He ceased speaking abruptly, and they walked on a few moments in silence.
At last Lauriston said: “That system might do for a philosopher, Colonel, but it will not suit the every-day Englishman.”
“I should not recommend it to the every-day Englishman. I recommend it to you because I wish to save Her Majesty a good officer with a heart and a brain, both of which, for any purpose outside the mere physical functions of existence, are imperilled by your marriage. How do you suppose that I, without some such rule of conduct, should have got even where I am, weighted with Lady Florencecourt?”
“Ah, Lady Florencecourt!” exclaimed George hastily and deprecatingly, forgetting ordinary civility in horror at this comparison between Nouna and a lady who was, without perhaps any clearly specified reason, the bogey of all her acquaintance.
The Colonel was not at all annoyed; he gave a little quick shake of the head, and burst out with abrupt vehemence—
“By Jove, Lady Florencecourt’s an angel of light compared to——” Suddenly, without any warning, he pulled himself up short, and added after a second’s pause, in a milder and more reserved tone—“compared to some of the specimens I have known.”
Lauriston glanced at him in surprise. He would have rather liked to know something about the “specimen” or “specimens” who had made the fiery little Colonel a woman-hater, and caused that obnoxious woman, Lady Florencecourt, to appear an ideal wife in his eyes. But the elder man’s burst of confidence was over. He proceeded to ask in a dry tone—“You have quite made up your mind to treat my advice as advice is usually treated, I suppose?”