“By Jove!” he said to himself, trying to laugh, and finding with surprise that he was quite cold, and that his teeth were chattering, “here’s a pretty face for a bridegroom. If I were to give Nouna, my poor little Nouna, my first kiss with lips as blue as that,” and he peered at himself mockingly close to the glass, “she’d think she’d married a corpse.”
And he pulled himself together, drew down the ends of his moustache, and rearranged his light satin tie, telling himself that he had been a fool to chase the fellow at all instead of going straight to Nouna to learn whether the wretch had really called and attempted to annoy her. But a blight had fallen upon his ecstatic happiness, and he broke off in an attempt to sing as he ran up stairs to the first floor.
As he went he heard voices, which ceased suddenly when his footsteps sounded on the landing; then there was a slight rustling, and a noise as of something thrown over in a hurry. He considered a moment, and then, the key of the bedroom door being on the outside, he quietly turned it in the lock before entering the sitting-room.
Theapartments George Lauriston had taken for his wife were two bright and pleasantly furnished rooms, not large, but sufficiently lofty, with no aggressive blue glass or china ornaments, crochet antimacassars, or other cherished relics of the professional landlady. There was a piano, not likely to be much of a resource, perhaps, to the player with “an ear”: there was a handsome carved oak book-case, carefully locked, which contained, sandwiched in with old-fashioned trashy gift-books and much futile evangelical literature, some tempting back volumes of theCornhillandBlackwood, and a beautifully preserved set of Scott’s novels. The mantelpiece was draped with an inexpensive but harmonious imitation of tapestry, the worn places on the carpet were covered with unlined goat-skins, there was the inevitable sideboard with doors thatwouldnot keep closed without a neat little wedge of newspaper, there were modern spindle-legged, handsomely covered chairs, and a plush-hung table, and there was a big, broad, luxurious Chesterfield settee, which had evidently been bought a bargain because it was inconveniently large, and on which Lauriston had again and again, during the last few days, pictured the ease-loving Nouna reclining. To add to the attractions of her new home for his bride, George had taken care to fill every available corner with flowers—mignonette and geraniums in pots on the sill of the two windows, cut roses and carnations, sweetpeas and purple and golden heartsease—crammed into every vase and glass the landlady could spare.
On the table he had caused to be spread a wedding-breakfast such as Oberon might have served to Titania. For this great human goose would have shrunk from the suggestion that a healthy girl of sixteen can generally eat anything, and lots of it; and that rounds of bread and butter cut pretty thick, a plentiful helping of dried haddock, or a couple of eggs and a rasher of bacon, all washed down with immoderate draughts of weak tea, will form an acceptable meal at nine in the morning to our fairest maids, and that your delicate appetite—alas, that it should be so!—is generally the result of sickly health. Piled high in the centre was a pyramid of giant strawberries, and round about were plates with French pastry, bonbons, game sandwiches thin as wafers, bananas, limes and a pineapple; the whole guarded by a white porcelain elephant, out of whose houdah small ferns were growing in an unlikely manner. This last introduction was a happy thought of Lauriston’s, and was supposed to remind his bride gracefully of the land of her birth.
He had been extravagant certainly; what churl would not be for his wedding day? But what happiness those preparations had given him! How he had frowningly scrutinised the rooms, to be quite sure that no single corner presented a less pleasing appearance than could by any possible ingenuity be given to it! How, in imagination, he had followed her with his eyes as she tripped through the rooms in her bird-like way, stopping to hover over the flowers, to eat a strawberry, to draw aside the curtains and peep out from her new nest into the street! How he had stood at the door of the bedchamber as in a sanctuary, with his heart full of a wish, devout as a prayer, that the child-woman who was coming to his arms might know no sorrow from which a strong man’s love could save her!
And now by some shadowy calamity that he did not yet understand, it was all changed, the sweet home-coming was spoilt, and he stood before his newly-made wife with no absorbing tenderness in his eyes, but with anxiety, suspicion, and fear struggling under the mask of apparent sternness, which was the outward sign of his efforts at self-control.
Nouna was alone, lying on the couch as he had so often by anticipation pictured her. She was curled up prettily enough, her head back upon the side, which was soft enough to serve for a cushion. The drapery of her arms was drawn carefully down, but the left hand, with its tiny gold ring, was placed proudlyen évidenceagainst her white sash. She looked flushed, shy, and rather frightened, and gave a little nervous laugh and a timid smile as he came in, which would have enchanted him but for the unexplained sights and sounds which had preceded his entrance.
“Who was that with you, Nouna?” he asked gently enough, but without coming nearer to her than the door, which he had just shut.
“With me!” she exclaimed, raising her eyebrows very innocently.
“Yes, dear. I heard some one scuffling about in here and talking just as I came in. Now, Nouna, my darling, why don’t you tell me?” he asked very softly, coming a step nearer.
But she curled herself up in the corner of the couch, and looked up at him like a marmoset who has broken a Dresden cup—for a marmoset knows Dresden, and prefers it as a plaything to the ordinary breakfast china.
“Don’t look like that. You frighten me,” she said in a low voice, with an inclination divided between weeping and running away.
George came and knelt by her, but as she shrank back he did not offer to touch her.
“Listen to me, little one. I am not angry, only sorry you will not tell me what I ask. Who was the woman I heard talking to you just now? Was it your mother?”
“Mamma! Oh, no, no, no,” said she with a convincing accent of astonishment. “I tell you there wasn’t anybody; I was singing to myself,” she added with less appearance of sincerity.
George drew back deeply wounded, and looking more stern than he guessed. In the silence between them he heard the rattle of the lock in the next room, and the shaking of the door. He walked up to the folding-doors which led into the bedroom, while Nouna turned her head to watch him anxiously. Crouching down on the other side of the bed, with more of the appearance of an animal than ever now that she was foiled in her attempt to escape, was the Indian servant Sundran.
“Get up,” said George shortly. “No one is going to hurt you. What are you doing here?”
“I was doing no harm, sahib. I came to see my pretty missee, Missee Nouna, my own foster-child that I nurse and love. She send for me, sahib, she send for me; she lonely without me. Sahib, let me stay. I will serve you, only for food to keep me alive if you let me stay.”
She was passionately in earnest, and without rising from her knees she dragged herself to him and tried to kiss his feet. George evaded the unwelcome embrace. He couldn’t bear this woman, and the thought that Nouna could really have missed her unwholesome prattle enough to send for her clandestinely on her wedding day gave him deep pain. He could scarcely help being touched by her animal-like devotion, but to allow her to remain in Nouna’s service now that the latter was his wife and was to begin her nobler education under his influence and guidance, was on every account not to be thought of.
“You never thought of staying, Sundran. You were trying to get away without my seeing you, encouraging my wife to deceive me on her very wedding day. How can you expect me to keep near her such a wicked adviser as that?”
“Sahib, I did not know you would be good to me. I thought you would be cruel and hard and fierce, as the English sahibs are sometimes. Oh, I have known them! But you are good, you are noble; you will not separate the sweet young lady who is the light of my eyes from her poor old Sundran.”
The poor creature’s eyes were indeed full of passionate tears, and George, who was no more proof than the majority of his sex against that form of argument in a woman, said gruffly:
“Nonsense, I tell you it’s impossible. But you can go down stairs and get them to give you some tea if you like, and afterwards you shall see your mistress again. But mind, if you ever attempt these underhand tricks again, you shall never set eyes on her as long as you live.”
She seemed a little comforted, and murmured broken, humble thanks as she got up and dried her eyes on a corner of the white garment which served her as shawl and head-dress. Then George went through the next room, Nouna still watching him in the same attitude as before, and unlocking the bedroom door, let the woman out. As soon as he had seen her get to the bottom of the stairs he re-locked the bedroom door and put the key in his pocket to prevent her hiding herself there again, and went back to his bride in a very chastened mood. This first experience of matrimony was certainly disillusionising. He must get to the bottom of the whole business at once, that was certain; but how was he to begin? It was too cruel to have to ply this little creature whom he loved with questions instead of kisses. He sat down by the table, keeping his eyes resolutely fixed upon the china elephant.
“When did you send for Sundran, Nouna?” he asked huskily.
“To-da—ay.”
There was a mournful little break of her voice upon the last syllable, which was almost too much for him. He took a strawberry from the dish, which now held only three or four, to keep his hands from twitching, and swallowed it ferociously, as his mouth was dry and parched.
“Who brought her here?”
No answer.
“Well, dear?”
She began to sob. George swallowed more strawberries, stalks and all, but found small relief in them.
“It was Rahas who brought her,” said George, trying to be as gentle as possible.
More sobs, so that the unfortunate inquisitor had to get up, walk with a martial tread to the window, and say his next words with his back to her.
“When did he come? What did he come for, Nouna?”
The tears were in George’s eyes too by this time.
“Answer me, answer me, child,” cried he in a frenzy as she began to moan miserably.
Her quick ears caught the breaking sound in his voice, and suddenly ceasing in her signs of grief she called aloud:
“Come and ask mehere, and I’ll tell you anything!”
He turned round. She was holding out her arms. George gave a great cry.
“Nouna, my wife, my wife!”
The next moment she was crushed up against his breast.
When out of the intoxication of that first embrace George drifted slowly back to a dim consciousness of earthly things, it came upon him with a sudden sobering shock that there was something new and unaccounted for in the appearance of his bride. For on the little slender arm that encircled his neck with the clinging, vibrating pressure of an absorbing passion, shone and glittered close under his eyes a sparkling mass of precious stones. He drew away from her suddenly, and seizing both her arms almost roughly, pushed up the half transparent sleeves and looked from the one to the other in stupefaction, while Nouna laughed aloud in exuberant, luxurious happiness.
“Where did you get these?” he asked in bewilderment even stronger than his anxiety.
George had but a scant and careless acquaintance with the contents of jewellers’ windows, and his circle of diamond-bedecked duchesses was less than limited. But there was a quiet self-sufficiency about the way in which those white transparent stones allowed themselves to be looked upon as unobtrusive modest things, and then, at a turn of Nouna’s wrist, flashed dazzling rays into his eyes, which told him that these pretty ornaments were not like the innocent and harmless mock jewels in the silver-gilt bracelets that Nouna had been allowed to deck herself out with in Mary Street, but were that bane of the husband—diamonds. What the value of the jewels she was wearing might be he did not even guess; but he could not doubt that the seven bracelets she had on her arms, and a glittering diamond lizard three inches long, with rubies for eyes, which fastened her sash where that morning there had been only a simple pin, and a necklace of large pearls that encircled her throat, had cost more than four or five years of his pay. He looked at them with a very grave and doubtful face, with as much mistrust and misliking as if they had been poisonous insects.
“Ha, ha!” cried Nouna, raising her arms and turning them about that the jewels might flash and sparkle the more in the rays of the afternoon sun struggling through the blinds. “Where did I get them? You must guess that.”
She was for the moment too much absorbed in the delight of watching the changing lights on her trinkets to notice the discontent in his face. Glancing then merrily at him to direct his attention to the play of the sunlight upon the stones, she let her arms fall as she noted his expression.
“Don’t you like to see me wear pretty things?” she asked plaintively; then, as he did not at once answer, she turned petulantly away from him, and threw herself face downwards full-length upon the couch. “It is true what Rahas says,” she cried passionately, “that an Englishman likes jewels on every woman but his wife, that he would rather she should appear ugly in his own eyes than pretty in anybody else’s, that he calls her a goddess to reconcile her to leading the—the—life of a do—og!”
All this she poured out parrot-like amid sobs and floods of tears, while George remained on his knees beside her, and listened as quietly as a statue. Like other open and generous natures with an element of strength in them, he could be as merciful towards the frank confession of weakness as he was hard in the face of deception. He thought Rahas had worked on her by means of her love of finery, and by dark warnings against the husband of whom she had as yet had no experience, and stifling all impulses of rage against the author of the evil, who was absent and could not now be dealt with, he at once set about arriving at a more complete knowledge of what had taken place between his young wife and the wily Oriental. Sitting on the edge of the couch he put his arms round Nouna, drew her to him, and calmed her outburst of tearful petulance with tender, yearning caresses, so fond, so warm, with such depths of almost paternal protectiveness toning down and mingling with the ardent passion of the lover, that her fitful nature was soothed in a very few moments, and her arms made instinctively for his neck again as a baby turns to its mother’s breast, and the tears dried on her cheeks as she began to smile up confidingly into his face.
“Now, little wife, tell me,” he whispered, looking down into her eyes with the steady fire of a man’s noblest, strongest love, before which a woman’s weak fears and suspicions could not but melt and wither, “do you believe I want to make your life unhappy? Do you think I shall be hard and cruel to you, and deprive you of anything that can please you? Look up, look up, and tell me if you think so!”
She looked up, transformed by the love-touch, the love-speech, into a little spirit of fire and light, burning into his heart and flesh with an irresistible, intoxicating strength of feverish, though fitful passion. As her lips pressed his, as her fingers glided with slow, voluptuous touch till they ruffled his curly hair and clasped each other behind his head, he forgot his intention, forgot his suspicious fears, enthralled by the bliss of possession of the first woman he had ever loved and longed for. It was not until the passion-fire began to fade in Nouna’s eyes, and she slid languidly down from his neck, and drawing his arms about her so as to support her best in the position she chose, nestled against him with closing eyes, while a long sigh of perfect and complete happiness rose to her parted lips, seemed to quiver along her form, and then died slowly away, that his doubts and fears surged up again in the midst of his own intoxication of pleasure, and, with difficulty steadying himself to the task, he framed a form of words in which to resume his interrogatory.
“Listen, Nouna,” he said, with an inevitable touch of hardness in his effort at self-control; “I want you to tell me all that happened after you drove off with Mr. Angelo from the church-door to-day.”
“Oh!” she exclaimed in a long wail of weary disgust at the obtrusive inquiry, “you don’t want to worry me about thatnow, do you? I’ll tell you all about it some other time.”
And she flung her arms back over her head, and laughed up at him through the ivory frame in lazy witchery. Finding, however, that he remained firm and would not look down at her, she changed her attitude, and, by a quick, lithe movement, twined herself coaxingly about him. George gave scarcely a sign of the fierce conflict that was going on within him, between the despotic, wickedly used power this little creature was trying to establish over him, and his own manful determination to assume without delay his rightful lordship. For this once he had the mastery, keeping lip and limb under firm control, and disentangling himself from her arms to hold her away from him, he looked steadily, but with a most loving reserve of tenderness in his eyes, into her half-petulant, half-reproachful face.
“Tell me now, darling, and then we’ll kiss all thoughts of it away.”
Whereat she made a spring at him to anticipate the reward. But seeing that, instead of lighting up with the flame she wanted to see in them again, his eyes retained the steady, searching look, which moreover seemed to become more grimly resolute for her evasions, she turned to tearfulness, and without actually crying, moaned out in a most melancholy voice, and with a woman’s natural love of piling on the agony, that he had better kill her, since it was plain he did not love her.
“Come, darling, you know better than that,” said he gently. “But I am your husband, and you must tell me what I wish to know.”
It may be easily imagined that he was becoming madly anxious and suspicious under all these evasions, which seemed to denote that she had something to hide more serious than he supposed. Finding all her artifices useless, and failing in an angry struggle to escape from his arms, she proceeded to unfasten all her bracelets, to tear out her diamond lizard, and after piling them in a heap in her lap, to toss them all with a sudden, violent jerk on to the floor at her husband’s feet.
“There!” said she triumphantly, “will that satisfy you?”
“Not at all,” said George very quietly. “I should have had them off long ago if I had wanted to. Who gave them to you?”
She noticed the increasing sternness of his tone and answered with a sudden quick change to childish fright.
“I had them all the time. Mamma sent them to me weeks ago, by Mr. Angelo,” she added with a rapid inspiration.
Without any sign or word which seemed to her significant enough for a warning, George’s self-restraint gave way, and grasping her shoulders so firmly in his hands that she could not move to right or left, he forced her to meet his eyes, now flaming with anger, with her own.
“Tell me the truth,” he said in a tone she had never heard him use before.
“I dare not, I dare not,” she whispered in terrible, exaggerated fear that took all colour from her face and lips and made her dark skin an ugly ashy grey.
He relaxed his clasp at once, remorseful and ashamed; but his voice was no softer than before. “Who gave you those jewels? Was it Rahas?”
She looked up rapidly, with a convincing ray of relief in her eyes. “Oh, no, no, no. It was mamma, mamma, mamma. They were her wedding present to me.”
George put his hand up to his forehead, and found that it was wet. A great dread had gone from his mind, yet he remained much puzzled.
“Then why couldn’t you tell me so at once?” he asked doubtfully.
“Why, it’s no use hiding it now. Rahas brought them, and he said I was to say I had had them before, because it would make you so angry to know he’d been here.”
He had got at the truth at last, he believed, but he was still far from satisfied.
“Don’t you know, Nouna,” he said more gently, putting his arm round her again, “that you must not see people your husband doesn’t wish you to see?”
“But I couldn’t help it,” cried Nouna, evidently surprised at seeing him calm down so rapidly. “Mr. Angelo didn’t come in, he drove off at once, and when I had been waiting here a little while all by myself there was a knock and I ran down stairs, thinking it must be you. I had been eating strawberries, so I hadn’t seen who it was coming. And it was Rahas, and when I saw him, I said, ‘No, I must not speak to you,’ and I wanted to shut the door. But he would not let me; he said he had a message and something for me from mamma, and he showed me a packet with her handwriting on it. So I said ‘Oh, give it me,’ and he said he must come in and speak to me. And I said I would not see him alone, I would wait till my husband came. Yes, I said ‘my husband,’ I did, just like that,” and she drew herself up and spoke with great dignity. “And the landlady came up just then to answer the door, so I ran back and called to her, ‘Mrs. Lauriston is not at home,’ and I went up stairs and looked through the curtains and saw him go away looking all doubled up, as he does when he is very angry. And I felt afraid, and wished you would come, and I wished I had brought my kitten—I felt so lonely. Oh, it seemed such a long, long time; I began to think you were sorry you had married me and thought you would never come back at all, and I should be a widow, and I couldn’t eat any more strawberries when I thought that. And I pulled out the roses I had fastened in my dress and tore them to pieces. Look!” And she pointed to a spot near the piano, strewn with crimson and lemon-coloured petals. “Then at last a cab drove up and I rushed to the window; and it was Rahas again, but with Sundran. And I was so wretched and lonely that if he had been alone I must have seen him then. And I ran down and let them in and brought them up. And Sundran—oh, how she cried, poor thing, and told me such dreadful stories about English husbands; how they say they love you, and then if you displease them ever so little they throw you down on the floor and run away, and you never see them again; and she begged me to go away with her, and said Rahas would take care we should not starve.”
At this, George, without interrupting her, decided that his former suspicion that Sundran had been bought by Rahas was confirmed, and resolved to stop all further intercourse between his wife and the Indian woman without delay.
Nouna continued, with her eyes full of tears at the remembrance: “Then she knelt at my feet and kissed them while Rahas gave me the diamonds and a little note inside them from mamma, saying they were her wedding present, and I should have a better one by and by if I was happy with my husband. And I thought this strange, and said out loud: ‘What does she mean?’ And when I looked up I saw Rahas staring at me with his eyes just like the coals in a fire. And I don’t know why, but I was frightened, and I was glad Sundran was there—perhaps it’s being married that makes me feel different, for I never felt like that before. And I read the note to the end, and did not say any more, and just then another ring came at the bell, and Rahas started up and rushed out. But it was only your telegram, and he came back—for he had gone up the stairs; and when he found you were not coming back at once, he asked if he might stay a little, and I should not feel so lonely. And I didn’t want him to, I didn’t indeed, but he stayed, and he made Sundran go to the window and watch for your coming.”
George could not resist a savage exclamation below his breath.
Nouna went on: “He made me hate him, for he said I should be very unhappy presently, he was afraid; for Englishmen were hard and cruel, and not loving. And he told me not to tell you he had been here, because you knew he would do anything for me, and perhaps you would strike me. But if I wanted him or wanted my mother, he could always let me see her at any time, and be always ready to do what I wished, as he had always been. And he said I was to forget his words now, if I liked, but was to remember them if I ever felt lonely and desolate. And he said I need not trouble about knowing where he was, for by the sympathy and power he had over me he should always be near just when I wanted him. And I said: ‘What if I tell my husband?’ And he said it would not matter; you would not find him. But I had better not tell you, because you would be so angry with me. And while he was talking Sundran called out that she saw a cab coming, and quickly like an arrow he kissed my hand and went out of the room; and I saw him go down a little street in front just as you came up. There, now I have told you all, all. Kiss me, tell me you are satisfied.”
He kissed her, and put her on his knee, and smoothed her soft dark hair; but he gave himself up to no abandonment of love, and when he spoke it was in a subdued and rather doubtful tone.
“I am not at all satisfied, Nouna, because I think it is a very bad beginning when a wife tries to deceive her husband on her wedding-day. If I hadn’t caught sight of Rahas and heard you talking to Sundran I should have believed what you pleased to tell me about the jewels, and never have guessed that either of them had been here.”
“Well, that would have been much better, for then you wouldn’t have been worried, and you wouldn’t have made me cry,” said she with conviction.
George had another sudden and vivid perception of the stumbling-blocks that stood in the way of her moral education.
“I would rather, little one,” he said gravely, “pass days full of worry and nights without sleep than think it possible you could tell me a falsehood.”
She looked in his face wonderingly, and then patted his cheek and laughed.
“Well, I don’t want to tell you falsehoods,” she said indifferently, and then paused, having at that moment discovered a new and delightful pastime in brushing up his moustache the wrong way with her finger, and laughing at the effect. “What a beautiful mouth you’ve got!” she exclaimed suddenly, in ardent and sincere admiration. “It’s smaller than mine, I think,” she continued dubiously, and she proceeded gravely to take the measurement of the one against the other, with a wicked look out of her eyes as they came close to his which made George suspect while he yielded to the temptation, that it had been deliberately formed to put an end to a discussion which the little lady found very tedious.
Themoral fibre of a man as deeply in love as George was is not at its strongest on his wedding day.
So he gave up in despair his first lesson in the moral duties, and whispered to her such pretty babble as comes up to the lips of all lovers in the first day of their happiness, and, being perfectly happy and inclined at all issues to be satisfied with his bargain, it was some time before he noticed that his bride’s interest in his love-prattle was growing fainter and fainter, until at last she scarcely gave more, as her share of the conversation, than an occasional nod or a weary little smile.
“Are you tired, dearest?” he asked solicitously, wakening suddenly to a consciousness that all was not well with her, as she began to move restlessly about in his arms, and her eyes roved round the room as if she found it impossible to keep her attention fixed on what he was saying.
“No, no,” she answered hastily, and she clasped her arms round his neck again, but with a distinct subsidence of her first outbursts of spontaneous affection.
George began to be alarmed. Was she tired of him already? Could she, child as she was, find his caresses irksome within ten hours of her wedding? He tried to persuade himself that it was only his fancy which made her small face look drawn and weary in the warm soft light of the afternoon sun, until he noticed some little puckers about her mouth like the premonitory symptoms of a child’s outburst of tears.
“What is it, Nouna, my darling, tell me?” he whispered tenderly.
She shook her head feebly, but then, her steadfastness giving way, she put up her lips to his ear, and murmured in a shamefaced broken voice: “I’m so hungry!”
“Hungry!” he repeated with a great shock.
“Yes,” answered she, beginning to whimper now that the effort was over, and the confession made. “I overslept myself this morning, and had to come away without any breakfast. And I ate all those little tiny sandwiches as soon as I got here, and I’ve had nothing since except stra—awberries!” At this climax of her tale of distress she broke down, and sobbed gently while George picked her up in his arms, and carrying her to the bell, rang violently.
“What would you like, my dearest?” he asked, when the landlady, who was a very superior creature indeed, but who felt that a bride was interesting enough to condone the condescension, appeared in person.
“Oh, some tea, I should like some tea, and—and anything I can have at once!”
“What can my wife have at once?” asked George, with all a young husband’s joy in the words “my wife.”
“Well, sir, would she like a chop? Do you think, ma’am, you could fancy a chop?”
“Oh, yes, Ishouldlike a chop!” cried poor Nouna hungrily, rather to the surprise, even then, of her husband, who was more prepared to hear her ask for the wing of a partridge, or a couple of plovers’ eggs.
Upon reflection, however, it could not but occur to him that even a particularly small and dainty-looking bride may reasonably be expected to need some solid food between the hours of half-past seven in the morning and close upon six in the afternoon, and he lamented his own idiotcy in not making proper provision for this. The landlady, who had taken for granted, on receiving no orders for dinner, that her new lodgers intended to dine out, behaved with great energy on discovering the mistake. Without obliging them to wait very long, she translated “chop” into a very tempting dish of cutlets andpommes sautées, and supplemented that with a tart, sent for hastily from a pastrycook’s, in the enjoyment of which repast Nouna got uproariously happy, and told George that she thought being married was “lovely.” To hear herself called “Mrs. Lauriston” by the landlady who came up ostensibly to apologise, but really to get another look at the little bride, threw her into such ecstasies of delight that she could not answer any question to which those magic words were added. When the pineapple, which she had left untouched because she did not know how to handle it, was placed upon the table, the servant asked what was to be done with “the black woman” who, she said, was becoming very restless and unhappy, and wanted to see “her little missee mistress.”
“Let her come up at once,” said Nouna quickly. Then, as soon as the maid had shut the door, she threw herself into her husband’s arms and began to coax him to let Sundran stay.
To this George objected in the strongest manner; but she begged so hard, she assured him so plaintively that she was not used to waiting on herself, scouting the idea that he could replace her maid, and reminding him with tears in her eyes that he could not refuse her first request after leaving her alone on her wedding day and returning to make her cry as he had done, that the young husband could not steel himself to that most desirable point of obduracy, and, entirely against his will and to his own inward rage, he gave permission for Sundran to remain “for a few days.” It was a pretty and characteristic trait in the wilful young creature that she clung, even in the midst of the novel excitements of her marriage, to the old servant who had loved her and served her since her babyhood; but it could not but cause the young husband pain and even a feeling akin to jealousy to learn that he was not all to her that she just now was to him. He bore the Indian woman’s blessings and thanks as well as he could, when Nouna embraced her and told her that she must love Mr. Lauriston, he was good, not like other Englishmen, and he would let her stay.
“For a few days, until she gets used to managing for herself,” murmured poor George explanatorily.
But the excited woman refused to hear or to heed this provision. He wished Sundran in—India within the next half hour; for Nouna, in whose mind the consciousness that by marrying she had done something irrevocable, not yet fully understood, was just waking a childish dread which made her cling to the old, well-known face with a new tenacity, insisted on retaining the Indian up stairs, and asked her all sorts of affectionate questions concerning “Mammy Ellis,” who, she learned, had been in a great fright about her, but had been comforted by a letter from the Countess, who, she said, had treated her very handsomely. Nouna, whose smiles had been on the borders of tears all day, cried a little at this mention of her mother, and on looking up again after drying her eyes found that Sundran, whether or not acting on a mute suggestion from George, had discreetly retired. Her tears ceased instantly, like those of a naughty little nursery tyrant when “papa” comes in; and George, respecting this sudden shyness of a girl whose heart he knew he had scarcely as yet half conquered, went straight to the piano, opened it, and began to sing snatches of love-songs to a very fair improvised accompaniment by way of paying his court to her in a less obtrusive manner.
The device succeeded admirably. George was by no means a great singer. A respectable baritone voice in a perfect state of non-cultivation is a very common gift among young men; but there was enough passion and poetry awake in his heart to-night for a suggestion of something more interesting than the straightforward bawling of the ordinary singing Englishman to find its way to his lips and vibrate in the notes of “Lady, wake, bright stars are beaming.” It is needless to say that his ears were well open to every sound behind him, and that he felt all the significance of the soft creaking of the casters as Nouna drew her arm-chair, little by little, close up to him, until at last she leaned on the end of the piano by the bass notes and watched his face with a furtive wide-eyed scrutiny which he was careful not to divert by appearing to notice its intensity. Unable to keep his eyes off her face altogether, he took care that the yearning, passionate glances he cast at her should be so rapid as to leave on her mind the impression that they were a result of the intoxication produced by his own song, instead of the song being the result of the intoxication produced by the glances. He saw that she was in a more deeply thoughtful mood than he had yet seen her in during their short acquaintance; and he wanted her to give spontaneous speech to her thoughts, and thus to gain an insight into that mysterious recess of which he knew so little—her mind. At last, when he had come to the last note of the “Ständchen” out of Schubert’sWinterreise, which he sang with more passion, if with less sentiment than an artist would have thrown into the beautiful melody, he turned to her and attempted to embrace her. But she shook him off, saying imperiously:
“Go on. I like it. It helps me to think.”
Perhaps this was scarcely the comment he hoped or expected, but the repulse was passionate, not unsympathetic or chilling; and George laid his hands obediently again on the instrument with only one longing, inspiring look at the lovely, flexible face. Then he sang Beethoven’s “Adelaide,” with a strange effect. For the well-worn song was quite new to Nouna, and as it proceeded it seemed to George that the spirit of the passionate music called to her and found an answering echo, for her long black eyes grew soft and liquid, like water under the trees on a summer night, and when the last word was sung and the last note played, she lifted herself in her chair, and held out her arms in irresistible invitation.
“What does the song make you feel?” he asked, whispering, with his arms round her. He began already rashly to feel assured that the low-minded sensual Rahas was wrong; she must have a soul, since she was so susceptible to fine music; than which conclusion nothing could be more futile, as a more enlarged artistic acquaintance would have proved to him.
“It makes me feel that I love you,” she answered, unconsciously touching the root of many pretty fallacies concerning the noble influence of music on devotion. For if she had been better educated she would have said “it raised her, took her out of herself,” and would have delayed her illustration of the fact that it only raised her far enough to throw her in the arms of the nearest affectionately disposed person.
George felt rather disappointed, having founded his ideas of women upon a ceremonious acquaintance with less ingenuous specimens of the sex. But if she was more unsophisticated than the everyday young ladies he had met, she was certainly more bewitching, and presently the thoughtful mood came over her again, and she looked up into his face with the searching expression that had shone in her eyes when she first came to him at the piano.
“I have been looking at you while you played, and I have been thinking,” she said gravely.
“Well, what did you think?”
“I have been thinking that we shall not be happy.”
George was at heart rather startled. The words echoed too strongly certain misgivings which had from time to time oppressed him in the course of the day for him not to feel that they bore some of the weight of sagacious prediction. But he would not for the world have acknowledged this to her.
“Don’t you love me then, my wife?” he asked slowly, in a voice so sweet, so thrilling, that Nouna listened to the words just as she had done to his singing. “If you do you cannot be anything but happy, for you are the very breath of my life to me; to be with you is happiness enough for me; and just as your body is mine now to cherish and defend, so your very soul shall become a part of mine, and my joy in you shall be your joy, till every pleasure I feel shall thrill through you, and every distinction I win shall make you glow with pride.”
She watched his face with all seriousness as he spoke, and then shook her head.
“I love you,” she said, “but not in your way.”
“You don’t know me yet. A woman’s love grows more slowly than a man’s, more reasonably, perhaps; but you will learn to love me as I wish, you can’t help yourself, I will be so good to you. You are only a child. I can wait.”
“Ah,” she said, half sorrowfully, half amused. “There is where you are wrong. If I were English, I should perhaps be still a child. But I’m not; I’m a woman.” She looked at him steadily, in deep earnest, stopping in her play with her white sash, and shaking her hair free from his touch to impress upon him that he must listen to her with attention. “You think I shall be something different by and by. Perhaps I shall; I never know what I am going to be, or what I am going to do. But I do know I shall never be what you want—always the same, always loving. I never love anybody without hating them too sometimes. Sometimes I hate Sundran, and often Mammy Ellis, and I shall hate you when you frown at me.”
“But I sha’n’t frown at you.”
“Yes, you will. You’ll frown when I long for more jewellery, when I say I hate England and wish I was back in India; and you’ll frown more when I forget that I’m married and laugh and amuse myself just as I used to do.”
“I shouldn’t like you to forget you are my wife, certainly,” said George, troubled for a moment. “But then I won’t give you much chance of forgetting it, my darling.”
The evening ended peacefully after the events and storms of the day, each feeling that they had a better understanding of each other, and yet each acknowledging that they still had much more to learn than they had expected. But that night, long after Nouna, tired out, had gone happily and peacefully to sleep in his arms, George lay awake, and acknowledged mournfully to himself that he had made a bad beginning. He had shown want of self-control over the diamonds and Rahas’s visit, he had shown weakness in letting Sundran stay, and he recognised vividly that the dignity of husband required a very long list of qualities for the proper maintenance of the character. A little more conduct like that of to-day, and the young wife to whom he ought to be as a sun-god, a model of what was right and noble, would begin to despise him, and all would be over. They would sink at once to the level of the ordinary cavilling, cooing young couple whom every new-made husband so heartily contemns. George fell asleep resolved to inaugurate a newrégimeof immaculate firmness and forbearance in the morning.
But how could he have reckoned upon the irresistible charm of a waking woman, fresh after the night’s sleep as an opening rose, all smiles, blushes, babbling girlish confidences, sweet reticences, a creature a thousand times more bewitching, more beautiful, than in his hottest young man’s dreams he had ever imagined a mortal could be? Her loveliness dazzled, intoxicated him; spaces of time which a week before were called hours passed like brief seconds in her society. He tore himself from her side too late: for the first time he was late for parade. On the following morning it was Nouna herself who hurried him off, and he was charmed with this dutiful wifeliness until he was suddenly startled out of all attention to an order from his superior officer by the appearance of his wife, in a white dress and the baby-bonnet he had bought for her, on the parade-ground.
As for the Colonel, the unexpected apparition of this extraordinary little figure had an almost ghastly effect upon him. George saw him glaring at the poor child as if her white drapery had been the flimsy garment of an authentic ghost.
“Who brought that girl here? Tell her she has no business on the parade-ground,” said Lord Florencecourt in an almost brutal tone.
Much incensed, George rode forward with a crimson face, and saluting, said: “Colonel, that lady is my wife.”
He did not notice the rapid movement of curiosity and excitement which his announcement made among such of the other officers as stood near. They had all looked at the girl’s pretty face with surprise and admiration, but the information that she was the wife of a comrade produced upon them much the same effect that the discovery of a fox in an animal they had taken for a rabbit would have on a group of hunting-men.
But George’s attention was wholly absorbed by the strange demeanour of Lord Florencecourt, who seemed to have forgotten all about his marriage, for he started and stared at him with a fierce amazement utterly bewildering to the younger man.
“Your wife!” he echoed in a low voice. And he faced Lauriston with a searching look, which the young lieutenant met steadily.
They stood like this for some moments, each finding it hard to control his seething anger. The Colonel, as became the elder man and commanding officer, recovered himself first, and told George curtly that, as parade was over, he had better rejoin his wife and lead her off the ground. This suggestion the young man was glad enough to take, and he saluted and rode off without a word, still in a state of hot indignation. The sight of Massey and Dicky Wood standing beside his wife, evidently both doing their best to make themselves agreeable to her, and succeeding to all appearances very well, did not tend to soothe him, and on reaching the spot where they stood, he swung himself off his charger in a most unamiable mood. He had self-command enough left not to reproach her in the presence of his comrades, but the tone in which he said, without taking any notice of them, “Come up to my rooms, Nouna,” and the young wife’s sudden pallor at his words caused the two young fellows to exchange significant looks, which both Lauriston and his wife unluckily saw, expressive of fear that the poor little lady was going to have “a bad time of it.”
At the door of the officers’ quarters they came upon the Colonel, who was looking as uncompromisingly fierce as ever. He examined Nouna from head to foot with a straightforward aggressive scrutiny which made George’s blood boil, while his wife, for her part, stopped short to return his stare with equally simple directness.
“George, who is he?” she asked suddenly in a low eager voice, turning to her husband as he put his arm brusquely within hers to lead her past.
“Lord Florencecourt, the Colonel,” he whispered back, in an important tone, hoping that the officer’s position would impress her sufficiently for her to awake to her want of respect.
But before George could see what effect his words might have, the Colonel himself, who was looking very haggard and grizzly this morning, an object grim enough to arrest any woman’s attention, broke into the whispered conversation with brusque coldness. He had not lost a word of the rapid question and answer, and a slight change passed over his ashen gray face as if the blood were flowing more freely again, as he noted the unconcern with which the lady heard the announcement of his name.
“Pray introduce me to your wife, Lauriston,” he said in such a hard voice that the request became an abrupt command, without taking his eyes from her face for one second. “Perhaps, indeed, we have met before. Mrs. Lauriston seems to know me. In that case I hope she will pardon my short memory.”
“No, I haven’t met you,” said Mrs. Lauriston hastily, looking at him with open aversion and turning to take her husband’s arm as if she considered the hardly-formed acquaintance already too long.
“Then my memory is better than yours, I am sure,” said he, with a ghastly attempt to assume his usual society manner. “What was Mrs. Lauriston’s maiden name?” he asked, turning to the young lieutenant.
“Miss Weston, Nouna Weston,” answered George, with growing curiosity and interest.
The Colonel’s face remained impassive as wood.
“Ah! Any relation to Sir Edward Weston, the architect?”
“Are you, Nouna?”
“I never heard of him,” said the girl, while her eyes remained fixed, with the fascination of repulsion, on the Colonel’s hard, lined face. “My father was Captain Weston, and he died in India; I don’t know anything else.”
“You came here this morning to see your husband drill?”
“Yes.”
“Ah!” The Colonel seemed to be revolving something in his mind, and he looked again at Nouna for a moment doubtfully, as if uncertain whether to ask her another question. However, he refrained from doing so, and only said, still coldly but with a perceptible diminution of harshness: “I must apologise for detaining you, Mrs. Lauriston, but your husband is such an old friend of mine that I could not resist the temptation of making your acquaintance on the first opportunity.”
With a formal salute the Colonel retreated, and George hastened up stairs to his rooms with his wife to take off his uniform. At any other time Nouna would have found great delight in immediately trying on his sash and drawing his sword; but the encounter with the Colonel, while it had one good result in averting her husband’s displeasure with her for following him to the barracks, had damped her spirits in a very marked fashion.
“George, how could you say that the Colonel was nice?” she asked almost before the gentleman in question was out of earshot. “I think he is the most horribly cold, hard man I ever met. It is quite right for him to be a soldier; he looked as if he wished I were the enemy and he could hack at me.”
“Nonsense, child,” said George. “He thought he had met you before, that’s all. And you looked at him in the same way. Are you sure you never saw him until to-day?” he asked curiously; for he had been struck by the puzzled interchange of scrutinizing looks, and was still rather anxiously in the dark as to the circumstances of his wife’s life before he met her.
“Quite sure,” said Nouna slowly, looking straight before her and trying to pierce the gloom of old memories. “I seem to have seen somebody a little like him, I don’t know when and I don’t know where, but I am sure I have never before to-day seen him himself. Why, George, he is too horrid to forget!”
And with a start and a little shiver of dislike, she dismissed the subject and bounded across the room to play like a kitten with the ends of her husband’s sash.
Evenin the intoxication of the first few days of married life, George Lauriston had not forgotten his resentment against Rahas, in whom he could not fail to see a subtle enemy to his domestic happiness. On the morning after his marriage he had called at the house in Mary Street, and was not at all surprised to be told by the servant that Mr. Rahas had gone away. He insisted on seeing the elder merchant Fanah, who, however, only confirmed the woman’s statement by saying that his nephew had gone to France on business of the firm. It flashed through George’s mind that this sudden journey abroad might be with the object of visiting Nouna’s mother, with whom it was plain the young merchant had some rather mysterious undertaking; but the next moment he rejected this idea, being more inclined to the opinion that the Countess, for some unknown reason, was anxious to have it believed that she was further off than in truth she was.
He next went up to Messrs. Smith and Angelo’s offices, saw the elder partner and laid before him a vigorous remonstrance with Madame di Valdestillas for employing a foreign scoundrel (as George did not scruple to call Rahas) who dared not show his face to the husband, as her messenger to a young wife. The old lawyer listened as passively as usual, and recommended the indignant young officer to write to the Countess on the subject.
“And if you will take a word of advice,” ended the old lawyer, his eyes travelling slowly round the sepulchral office as he rubbed his glasses, “write temperately, much more temperately than you have spoken to me. The Condesa is a very passionate woman, and while she is all generosity and sweetness to those she honours with her regard, she is liable to be offended if she is not approached in the right way.”
“I don’t care whether she is offended or not,” burst out George, with all the righteous passion of outraged marital dignity, “and her generosity and sweetness are nothing to me. She seems to have a very odd idea of what a husband should be—” At this point Mr. Smith, who was smiling blandly in a corner of the office, drew his mouth in suddenly, with a sort of gasp of horror, which he smothered as his partner’s eyes, without any appearance of hurry or any particular expression in them, rested for a moment on his face. George meanwhile went on without pause,—“if she thinks he will stand any interference between his wife and himself. She has done her best to ruin her daughter by her fantastic bringing up——”
“Oh, hush! hush!” interposed Mr. Angelo, while his sensitive partner absolutely writhed as if it were he himself who was being thus scathingly censured.
George continued: “But she is quite mistaken if she thinks she can treat her in the same way now. Nouna is my wife, and if I catch any other messenger, black, or white, or grey, humbugging about trying to see her without my knowledge, I’ll horsewhip him within an inch of his life, if he were sent by fifty mothers!”
A curious incident occurred at this point. There was an instant’s perfect silence in the room. George was standing with his back to the door of Mr. Angelo’s private office. No sound was audible but the nervous scraping of Mr. Smith’s feet on the carpet, and a subdued clearing of the throat from Mr. Angelo. The young husband was too passionately excited to take note of either face, and both partners kept their eyes carefully lowered as if they heard the outburst under protest. Yet in the pause, without any conscious reason, George turned suddenly and saw against the glass upper panel of the door, the outline of a woman’s bonnet, with a small plume of feathers on the left side. He turned again immediately and faced the lawyers with an entire change of manner. Feeling a strong conviction now that he had a larger and a more important audience than he had imagined, with a flash of self-command he controlled his anger, and spoke in a firm, clear, earnest voice, each word ringing out as if he were giving a solemn command.
“Perhaps,” he said, “I am judging too harshly. I mustn’t blame any one for loving unwisely; I haven’t yet shown that I can love wisely myself. But I wish Madame di Valdestillas to know—I beg you to let her know—that I have taken upon myself, with all solemnity before God, the duty she was not herself able to fulfil, of cherishing Nouna and shielding her with the influence of a home. I ask you also to beg her not to send Nouna any more costly presents, like the diamonds Rahas brought; they only make the poor child long for a chance to show them off, and it will be years and years before I can put her in a position to wear them without being ridiculous. I’m sure if Madame di Valdestillas were to know that, she loves her child much too well not to see that I am right.”
George paused, keeping quite still. For a moment there was no sound at all, and both the lawyers refrained from looking at him. At last with a gentle cough, to intimate that he had well weighed this speech and that he expected as much weight to be given to his answer, Mr. Angelo answered:
“I quite understand the integrity of your motives, Mr. Lauriston, and I believe I may answer for it that the Condesa di Valdestillas, when I have laid your arguments before her, will respect them as fully as I do. But I believe it is not now premature for me to confess that circumstances may arise which will make it not only possible, but desirable that Mrs. Lauriston should grow accustomed to the wearing of jewels suitable to a lady not only of position, but of wealth.” George looked steadily at him, in some perplexity. “The fact is, Mr. Lauriston,” and Mr. Angelo’s eyes travelled round the room and then rested for a moment in dull and fish-like impenetrability on the young man’s face before they continued their circuit, “that Madame di Valdestillas’s first husband left property to a considerable amount which he willed to his wife, but with the condition that if she married again it should go to their daughter. Now Madame di Valdestillas, as you are aware, has married again, and the property would thus have fallen to Mrs. Lauriston without question if it had not been for one circumstance. Some relatives of the late Captain Weston’s have propounded a later will, benefiting them to the exclusion of his wife and daughter. Now we have the strongest reasons for believing the will thus suddenly sprung upon us to be a forgery; but until the trial, which is to take place shortly, we cannot be absolutely sure of our case. In the meantime the Countess thought it better not too soon to hold out expectations which might never be realized. It is quite on my own responsibility therefore, that I have made this communication to you. It will explain what would certainly otherwise seem rather mysterious conduct with regard to the present of jewels to her daughter.”
“It seems to me rather mysterious still,” said George shortly and uneasily. This network of strange occurrences and explanations that seemed to him quite as strange, perplexed the straightforward young soldier. “I’m not such a fool as not to value money, but frankly I’d rather be without a great deal than think my wife had a fortune which would make her independent of me. In any case I ought to have been told the whole position of things before I married her.”
He took up his hat and after very few more words left the office, on all points less satisfied than when he entered it. He hated humbug, and this foreign Countess’s playing with him, even if it arose from nothing but a woman’s love of little mysteries, was exceedingly distasteful to him. He had acted in the promptest and most upright way towards Nouna, such as might have convinced any reasonable person of his integrity, yet in no respect had he met with corresponding frankness on her side. If he had been told before of the young girl’s possibly brilliant prospects, it would have changed many things for him; now that the suggestion was suddenly sprung upon him late in the day, he found that he could not adjust himself to the notion of Nouna rich, distracted in the first flush of the honeymoon by the startling news that she was a wealthy woman, with a host of luxurious pleasures at her command outside such simpler, more domestic happiness as her husband could give her. And he resolved that, as she did not know of the sensational prospect that might open before her, he would himself say nothing about it, but would wait until the will case was tried, and the matter finally settled in one way or the other.
George Lauriston, having held himself till now rather markedly aloof from the influence of feminine fascination, was now expiating his neglect in daily tightening bondage at the feet of the most irresistible little tyrant that ever captivated a man’s senses and wormed her way into his heart, none the less that he saw daily with increasing clearness how much more he was giving her than she was giving, or perhaps could give, to him. George was puzzled and disappointed. Arguing from his personal experience, in which the ecstatic dreams and timid caresses of the lover had been but a weak prelude to the ardent and demonstrative tenderness of the young husband, he had taken it for granted that those pretty, capricious outbursts of girlish passion, which had charmed him so much by their piquant unusualness, would develop under the sunshine of happy matrimony into a rich growth of steady affection, coloured by the tropical glow which seemed to belong to her individuality, and cherished and fed by his own devotion. It almost seemed sometimes as if marriage had had the effect of checking her spontaneous effusiveness, as if she was rather afraid of the violent demonstrations which any encouragement would bring down upon her. Now George, at three-and-twenty, could scarcely be expected to be much of a philosopher; and finding in his own case that true love was indeed all-absorbing, he saw no reason for doubting the common belief that true love must always be so. Only at a much later stage of experience does one understand that into that vaguely described state of being “in love” enter many questions of race, complexion, age, sex, and circumstances, which produce as many varieties of that condition as there are men and women who pass through it. So he fell ignorantly into the mistake of thinking that he had not yet succeeded in wholly winning his wife’s heart, and greatly tormented both himself and her by laborious and importunate efforts to obtain what was, as a matter of fact, safely in his possession.
Nouna loved her husband as a bee loves the flowers, or a kitten the warmth of the sun. He was the prince she had waited for to take her out of the dull twilight of life with Mrs. Ellis and music-lessons; and although, in the modest nest which was all he could yet make for her, there were missing many of the elements upon which she had counted in her imaginary paradise, yet who knew what glories might not be in store for her in the rapidly approaching time when George would be a General and wear a cocked hat? And in the meantime he was the handsomest man in the world, and kinder and sweeter than anybody had ever been to her; though when she looked into his eyes and sighed with voluptuous delight at the lights in them, and at their colour and brilliancy, in truth she read in them little more than any dog can read in the eyes of his master, and she alternated her moods of passionate satisfaction in her new toy with moods in which she openly wished that she were not yet married to him, so that she might have all the novelty and excitement of the wedding over again.
And George, who in his efforts to resist the temptation of becoming a mere slave to this little princess’s caprices, ran a risk of becoming a later and worse Mr. Barlow, decided that, in the shallow education she had received, the intellectual and spiritual sides of her nature had been too much neglected, and set about remedying these omissions in a furiously energetic manner. He was beset by many interesting difficulties. To begin with: what pursuit could be imagined so pleasant and at the same time so improving as reading for filling up the hours during which he was forced to be absent from her? But Nouna lightly, firmly, and persistently refused to read one line even of a judiciously chosen novel, although George had taken care to tempt her by a set of beautifully bound volumes by a lady writer who took a decorously vague and colourless view of life through Anglican-Catholic spectacles. She would look out of window by the hour, lie on the sofa listening to the songs and tales of Sundran, whom George hated himself for his weakness in not dismissing, even catch flies on the window-panes and give them to the cat, anything rather than open a book. She would, indeed, permit George to read to her, lying curled up in his arms and hearing for the most part without comment, unless he chose poetry. In this region she showed marked preferences and prejudices. Shakspeare, she averred, made her head ache, with the exception of certain chosen passages, which she would hear again and again, strung together in odd fashion. She was never tired of the love-scenes inRomeo and Juliet, but she would not permit the intervening scenes to be read, preferring a short summary in George’s own words to fill up the blanks thus made in the story.Othelloshe would suffer in the same way, andKing Lear,The Merchant of Venice, andThe Taming of the Shrew; and she was never tired of the description of the death of Ophelia. TheIdylls of the Kingshe preferred for the most part without the poetry, but she learned by heartThe Lady of Shalott,The Moated Grange, and other pieces which presented ladies in a picturesque and romantic light. Some portions ofHiawathahad a strong fascination for her, and as, again and again, George read to her the account of the death of Minne-haha, he would feel her arms tighten round his neck, and hear her breath come short with intense interest and emotion close to his ear.
“Would you feel like that if I died?” she asked abruptly one evening, laying her hand across the page when he had read to the end.
“My child, my child, don’t ask me,” whispered George, overcome and thrown off his balance by a sudden realisation of the strong hold this little fragile woman-creature had got upon his whole nature, of the paralysing dead blank her absence would now make in his life. “I don’t think, my wife, that I should live long after you,” he said in a grave, deep voice, laying his right hand upon her shoulder, and tightening the clasp of his left arm round her waist.
“Really? Would you die too, like the people in poetry?” she asked, delighted, rubbing her round young cheek against his in appreciation of the appropriateness of his answer. But then, examining him at her leisure, a doubt crossed her mind, and as she spanned the muscles of his arm with her little fingers she shook her head. “A man is so strong, so wise, and has so much more to do in the world than a woman, that I think he could not die off just when it pleased him,” she said thoughtfully. “There are always Nounas in the world, I think, just like flies and flowers, and silly useless things like that. If one goes, one knows it must go, and one does not miss it. And a man sees that, and he says, ‘Ah, it is a pity!’ and then he goes on living, and the grass grows up on the grave, and he forgets. After all it was only a little flower, only a little fly. And so while we are alive we must just be sweet, we must just fly about and buzz, for when the little grave is made we don’t leave any trace. That is what I think,” ended Nouna with a half-grave, half-playful nod.
But George could not take the speech playfully at all. This light but resolute refusal to take herself in earnest, which he ascribed to the paralysing influence of Eastern traditions, was the great barrier to all higher communion between them than that of caresses. By the expression of his face Nouna scented the sermon from afar, and as he opened his mouth to speak, she thrust her hand between his lips as a gag, and continued, laughing:
“Don’t look like that. I won’t hear what you have to say. You may be very wise, but I must be listened to sometimes. Now, I won’t let you speak unless you promise to leave off reading and sing to me.”
George nodded a promise, unable to resist her, and there was an end to the higher education for that evening.
The second string to the young husband’s educational bow was art, in whose refining and ennobling influence he believed dutifully, though without much practical sense of it. He took her to concerts in which she found no acute pleasure, declaring that sitting still so long in one narrow chair tired her, and that she would rather hear him play and sing to her at home. He took her to picture galleries, which would have been a rather penitential exercise for him by himself, but from which he thought her more delicately organized feminine temperament might derive some benefit, “taking it in through the pores” as it were, as boys absorb a love and longing for the hunting-field from the sight of their father’s scarlet coat and hunting crop. Now this experiment had more interesting results. The first place he took her to was the Royal Academy, where she examined the pictures in a dazed silence, which George hoped was reflective admiration; but when they returned home she confessed simply that she did not want to see any more pictures. In the National Gallery, on the other hand, where George took her rather apologetically, with a sort of feeling that this was too “advanced” for her present state of art knowledge, Nouna, at first sight of the frames inclined to be restive, began speedily to show an odd and unexpected pleasure, which deepened before certain Gainsboroughs into childish delight.
“I should like the gentleman who painted that lady to paint me,” she said, when she had gazed long and lovingly at one graceful bygone beauty.
George explained the difficulties in the way of her wish, but was highly pleased with the orthodoxy of her taste.
Later experiences, however, gave a shock to this feeling. The National Gallery having effected her reconciliation with pictorial art, Nouna was praiseworthily anxious to learn more of it, and insisted on visiting every exhibition in London. It then gradually became manifest that she had a marked preference for the works of Continental painters, from the lively delineator of Parisian types of character to the works of the daring artist who presents the figures of sacred history with strong limelight effects.
“They make me see things, and they make me feel things,” was all the explanation she could give of the instinctive preferences of her sensuous and poetical temperament.
Even this was not so distressing as her making exceptions to her indifference to English art in the persons of two artists whom George had always been accustomed to consider legitimate butts for satire. The beautiful, mournful women, with clinging draperies, looking out of the canvas with sadly questioning eyes, imaginative conceptions of an artist who has founded a school plentifully lacking in genius, filled Nouna with grave pleasure, and caused her to turn to George in eager demand for sympathy.
“Eh? Do you like them?” said he, surprised. “Why he’s the man who started the æsthetic craze; all the women took to starving themselves, and to going about like bundles of limp rags, to look like the gaunt creatures in his pictures.”
“That was silly,” said Nouna promptly. “The women in the pictures mean something, and they don’t care how they look; a woman who just dressed herself up like them would mean nothing, and would care only for how she looked.”
George thought this rather a smart criticism, and forgave her peculiar taste on the strength of it; still, he believed himself to be quite on the safe side when he said, taking her arm to point out a picture on the opposite wall by another artist:
“You won’t want me to admire that smudge, I hope, Nouna?”
She remained silent, considering it, and then said gravely:—
“It isn’t a smudge, it’s a lady.”
“Well, do you like it?”
“I like her better than the babies, and ladies, and cows, and mountains in the Royal Academy.”
“But it takes half an hour to find out what it is.”
“That’s better than making you wish it wasn’t there.”
After that George gave her up, and began to perceive that it would need a critic more apt than he was to deal aright with her perverse but intelligent ignorance.
His third means of developing what was noblest in his wife’s character was, of course, religion. George was not religious himself, but it seemed a shocking thing for a woman not to be so, and still more for her to lie under the suspicion of practising the rites of an occult pagan faith. So he took her to church, where she shook with laughter at the curate’s appearance and voice, and yawned, and played with her husband’s fingers during the sermon.
“Oh, George, how clever it was of you not to laugh at the little man in white!” she cried, with a burst of laughter, at the church-door, when she had hurried down the aisle with indecorous haste. “Now I’ve been once to please you, you won’t make me go again, will you? It reminds me so dreadfully of the horrid Sundays at school.”
“Well, but don’t you like being in the church where we were married, darling?” he asked gently.
“Oh, but I can remember I’m married to you without going in again,” she answered laughing.
And so gradually this desultory musical and religious education dwindled down to visits to Westminster Abbey and the opera; nor could George succeed satisfactorily in establishing in her mind a proper sense of the difference there is between these two kinds of entertainment.