George Lauristonhurried out of the church, and turned towards his home still in the heat of a first impulse of passionate anger against Madame di Valdestillas and Mr. Smith for inciting his wife to deceive him; but as he walked and reason began to form a crust over the still flowing stream of passion, he resolved that he would not reproach his wife with this new concealment until he had accused her instigators, and learnt from them the meaning of it. With this decision fresh made, he forbore to enter his house until he should have recovered enough equanimity not to repel his wife by a fresh aspect of suspicion, and he was in the act of turning back within a few feet of the door, when a hansom drove up and Lord Florencecourt jumped out of it.
Catching sight of George, he paid the cabman, and came up to him with a face in which the younger man fancied he perceived less of constraint and more of the old frank friendliness than he had seen there since his marriage. In fact, the Colonel felt that the first of the barriers between them, that of concealment, was now broken down, and he began to breast his difficulties more manfully with the certainty that he was “in for it.”
“I came down by the next train, George,” he said simply; “I thought when that infernal black woman let out on me, we had better come to an understanding at once and have done with it.”
“Much better, I should think, Lord Florencecourt,” said Lauriston rather bitterly. “It would have been better if Nouna and I had been fairly dealt with from the first, and not forced to begin our life together in this smothering fog of mystery, deceived a little bit by everybody, and obliged to get every scrap of knowledge about our own circumstances by fighting for it.”
The Colonel dug his stick into the ground and avoided meeting his eyes. “You have heard Sundran’s story, I suppose?”
“Not yet.”
“Well, well, it’s not all my fault,” said he. “An indiscretion involving a lady now, you know, er—moving in society—you see, one has not only oneself to consider.”
His manner had suddenly become confused, incoherent, tentative, utterly unlike his usual soldierly abruptness. He seemed to be drawing back from his first open and friendly impulse, and to be more anxious for some exposition of his companion’s sentiments than for an opportunity of expressing his own. George was quite ready to take up the challenge.
“An indiscretion, Colonel! It seems to have been a serious one. My wife signed her name at our wedding as Nouna Kilmorna.”
The Colonel started, taken quite off his guard.
“The d——l she did!” After a pause, he added: “Then, by Jove, she must know—— Oh, these women, these women, there’s no making a contract with them! They wriggle out of the terms of it like eels.”
“You are speaking of her mother?”
“Yes, confound her!”
The veteran’s philosophy, which he was fond of putting at the service of his friends, failed him at such a crisis as this, and left him at the mercy of the very commonest of all resources—interjectional expletives. But they did not serve the purpose of the simple explanation his hearer wanted.
“Things seem to point to a contract there is no wriggling out of,” Lauriston suggested, as respectfully as the nature of the hint allowed.
The Colonel looked at George, and saw that he was at bay.
“Perhaps I had better have made a clean breast of it before,” he admitted grimly; “only it’s one of those deuced awkward things a man always shunts as long as he can. I did go through a form of marriage with the—the lady’s mother.”
“With Madame di Valdestillas?”
“Oh, ah, yes, with Madame di Valdestillas. Of course she—she wasn’t Madame di Valdestillas then. She was a little half-bred Indian gipsy.”
George looked cold. The light tone Lord Florencecourt now seemed inclined to take, was not, all things considered, in the best taste.
“She was your wife, then?” he said.
The Colonel answered by a slight convulsion of the top vertebræ of his spine, to admit as little of the accusation as possible.
“Did you divorce her?” he asked, rather puzzled.
“Well, I don’t know whether a divorce out there would be held quite regular over here. There’s the difficulty, you see.”
From which George gathered in a flash of astonishment that the austere and respectable viscount had, when the chain of his first matrimonial alliance grew irksome, troubled no court of law to regain his liberty.
“You understand,” continued the Colonel, meeting his companion’s eyes full for the first time, “that it is quite as much to the lady’s interest as to mine that the affair should not become common gossip.”
“To the mother’s interest, perhaps, not to the daughter’s,” said George coldly.
“How does she suffer? She is received everywhere, made a fuss with, treated as a lion, as if she were descended from the skies. Would it improve her position for it to be known that her mother had been divorced, legally or illegally? What better provision could I, a poor man, make for her than I do, if she were my acknowledged legitimate daughter?”
“Provision!”
“Yes, I allow her a thousand a year, supposed to have been left her. Why not? She is under no obligation, and I——”
“—Will be relieved from the charge for the future. I guessed something of it this morning, of course, and was only anxious to know how much we owed you.”
“Owed me! It is not a debt. I acknowledge, I am the first to acknowledge, the claims of my own child, especially now she is your wife.”
“Oh, I acknowledge the claims too. It is only my pride that makes me waive them on behalf of my wife. Until I know all the circumstances of the case I prefer to stand independently.”
“Why, what further circumstances do you want to know?”
“There are two more versions of the story I must hear before I can understand all its bearings. You understand, Colonel, that where a woman is concerned, the man’s view of the question is not enough to judge by. I must hear Sundran and Madame di Valdestillas.”
“Hear every hag in —— if you please,” said the Colonel irritably. “Only I warn you it is foolish behaviour rattling the bones of decently buried skeletons.”
“If it were only an old scandal I shouldn’t care,” said George with a deepening of the collected gravity he had shown all through the conversation. “But you must see, Colonel, that the whole course of our lives depends on the following into its corners of this wretched story. My wife and I, starting quietly in a humdrum way, a pair of very poor town-mice, suddenly find ourselves in a Tom Tiddler’s ground, and are bidden not to trouble ourselves how we came there, or why we are inundated with invitations, and our eccentricities treated as delightful innovations, when a few weeks before they would have been ‘bad style.’ It isn’t in human nature not to ask why.”
“Why can’t you take my explanation and be satisfied?”
“Because it goes such a very little way. It explains why we receive one thousand a year, when we are getting and spending five thousand; why you treat Nouna with secret liberality, but not why you show her open dislike. Above all it explains your relation with Madame di Valdestillas, but not your objection to my seeing her.”
The Colonel, who had been fidgeting uneasily with his cane, grew suddenly still.
“If you see her,” he said slowly after a pause, “she’ll consider the contract broken, and she’ll ruin every man jack of us; and you and your wife may say good-bye to domestic felicity as well as I and mine. Be warned, George; you’d better leave things as they are, for both our sakes.”
“I can’t,” said Lauriston, who felt that a chill had come upon spirits and senses at the Colonel’s homely but forcible warning. “No man can blunder on like this in the dark and be satisfied. Whatever I find out, it sha’n’t hurt you more than I can help, Colonel.”
He added something about Nouna’s waiting for him to take her out, anxious to get away. But the Colonel, who seemed loth to part with him, turned back when they had shaken hands at his initiative, and said:—
“Madame di Valdestillas is abroad, is she not?”
“So I have been told. But in the mesh of lies they have entangled me with, I shouldn’t like to answer for the truth of it.”
“Look here, if you will leave this to me, I’ll write to her lawyers and arrange a meeting for you and me at the same time. And we’ll talk to her together.”
“Thanks, Colonel. But I can’t wait for that; and I’m not going to trust to the lawyers this time.”
“But if she is abroad?”
“If!”
This terse reply seemed to disconcert Lord Florencecourt, who left him without further protest or comment, and made straight for the park. George went back to his own house and inquired if Sundran had returned. On learning that she had not, he went up stairs in search of his wife, but was told she had gone out soon after he himself left the house. Her husband was not to wait for her to dinner, as she had gone to see Mrs. Ellis and might stay to tea with her.
Though this freak was perfectly consistent with Nouna’s capricious character, George was just in the mood to regard the message with vague suspicions of some trick. However, as he did not know Mrs. Ellis’s address, he had no means of following her, and seeing that it was already nearly six o’clock, he started off at once for Mary Street. The door of No. 36 was opened by a young servant, apparently new to the place, who told him, in answer to his inquiries, that a black woman had come there that afternoon to see Mr. Rahas, adding that after staying a very short time she had gone away again in the cab which brought her, Mr. Rahas himself putting her in, giving the direction to the cabman, and at the last moment jumping in after her.
“I suppose you don’t remember what the direction was?”
The girl was a cockney, and scented backsheesh. She nodded with much shrewdness. George put his hand to his pocket.
“Waterloo station—side for Richmond,” she said promptly.
Richmond! George remembered the address given by Captain Pascoe in his note. It might be only a coincidence, but a coincidence when one is on the track of a mystery becomes either a guiding or a misguiding light.
He asked, as he dropped a half-crown into the girl’s hand, whether Mr. Rahas had returned home, but it was not with the intention of settling accounts with him then. On learning therefore that he had not come back yet, George simply went away and got as quickly as he could to Waterloo.
Thoughts of Lord Florencecourt, Madame di Valdestillas, and the haze of inconsequent romance which seemed to surround their conduct to their daughter faded before a fiery fear that this untamable sun-child to whom he had given all his heart had been led into some trap by Rahas; for George suddenly remembered that, as he did not know Captain Pascoe’s handwriting, the signature might have been merely a blind. Ridiculously unlikely as the supposition was, the unhappy young husband could think of no less fantastic explanation of the facts; no reasoning could have dissolved his belief that it was to Thames Lawn, Richmond, that her sudden journey had been taken, and his only comfort was in knowing that he had followed her up so quickly that his arrival there could scarcely fail to be within less than an hour of hers.
At Richmond he darted out of the station and jumped into a fly.
“Thames Lawn. Drive as fast as you can,” he said.
The driver, instead of starting, turned, after the manner of his kind, to debate.
“Thames Lawn!” he repeated, reflectively. “Don’t know it, sir. Who lives there?”
“I—I don’t know the name of the people who have it now,” said George.
He was on the point of jumping out of the fly to make inquiries in the station, when another driver joined in the discussion.
“Thames Lawn!” cried he, “why it’s the place where they foreign swells live that gives the big parties. Prince and Princess Wesenstein. That’s the place. Where you drove the young gent that give you half a sovereign.”
“Oh—ah—yes,” said the other, and touching his hat to his fare with a nod to signify that it was all right, he gathered up the reins and started.
A foreign prince and princess who gave big parties! To even an intelligent Englishman the idea suggested by these words was more consistent with his suspicions of some grave villainy than the mention of an English lady and gentleman would have been. Yet the munificent and showy hospitality implied in the brief description did not agree with his fears of an ambush. A drive through the narrow High Street, filled with the overflowing, lively crowd of a bright summer evening, brought him in a few minutes to the lodge-gates of Thames Lawn. George left his fly waiting outside, and made inquiries at the lodge. The Prince and Princess were at home, the lodge-keeper said, but there was no gentleman of the name of Rahas staying with them that he knew of. There were often gentlemen with foreign names staying there, as his highness himself was a foreign gentleman.
“Has he a very dark complexion?” asked George, with a new doubt in his mind.
“No, he’s as fair as any Englishman, like most Germans,” said the lodge-keeper, rather superciliously, with for the first time a suspicious expression in his dull British grey eyes. “There’s a dark gentleman visiting there this afternoon,” he added, after a few moments’ consideration, during which he had carefully taken stock of his questioner, and perhaps satisfied himself that he was not “after the spoons.”
“Oh, was he alone or with a lady?” asked George, with careful carelessness.
“Well, sir, he was with a walking bundle of white tea-cloths,” said the lodge-keeper, rendered more sympathetic by the chance of airing his own humour.
“You are sure,” said George, with a great heart-leap, “that the lady was dressed in white, and not in grey, with a grey cap?”
“No, sir; no lady in grey has been here to-day. I can count the ladies as comes here,” he added, with just meaning enough to give the young husband an impulse of thankfulness that he had forestalled his wife.
He thanked the man and made his way through a winding avenue of lime and chestnut trees to a grass-plot studded with flower-beds and surrounded by a circular drive leading to a large, square-built brick house, which seemed to rise out of a bank of laurels and other shrubs lightened by clusters of rhododendrons. The portico was smothered with creepers, which were carefully trained to extend over the walls. Long trails of still green Virginia creeper swung backwards and forwards in the air above a thick mass of geraniums of various colour that were banked up round the pillars of the entrance. The door was open, showing at the end of a wide hall a sloping lawn and a glimpse of the river. As George rang the bell, a gust of wind blew into his face the petals of overblown roses from stands of flowers that lined the hall, with perfumes of pungent sandal and sickly sweet exotics. A footman in a striking livery of purple and gold, whom the lowness of the roof of the hall magnified into a giant, appeared at once in answer to the bell, and without coming to be questioned, lifted a gorgeous crimson and silver curtain with heavy fringes that rustled as it was raised, and stood aside, inviting the visitor to enter.
George crossed the hall, with an involuntary thought, as he glanced up at the rich colours of the painted ceiling, and brushed close to a cluster of delicate flowers unknown to him, that shook fairy bells in the stirred air, of the vivid pleasure this luxurious extravagance of scents and hues would give to Nouna.
“I wish to see Mr. Rahas, who called here this afternoon,” said George to the servant, pausing at the entrance of the room which, the first glance told him, confirmed the impression given by the hall.
“I will see, sir. I think Mr. Rahas is on the lawn,” answered the man, still holding up the curtain in invitation to the visitor to pass under it.
After a second’s hesitation George went in. The room was long and low, with French windows opening on to a verandah, from which the lawn ran down to the river. The walls were painted in eighteenth century fashion but in the nineteenth century spirit. Grey pools fringed with delicate bulrushes, astride on whose bent heads sat gauze-winged elves; a smooth summer sea with the phantom ship of Vanderdecken crossing the sun’s path like a shred of mist; a siren asleep under the sea with a feathery pink sea-anemone for pillow, the sunlight shining down through the green water so that you looked and saw the baleful maid and looked again and lost her. All these pale fairy pictures, which emerged at intervals out of a fleecy background of cloud and tree, gave place as the eye travelled round the walls to deeper-hued representations of less ethereal romance. A golden-haired Guinevere, with blue unholy eyes and loose mouth red with kisses, looks lingeringly out of her window in the dawn to where among the grey trees of the distance the gleam of a helmet makes a faint spark of silver light. A furnace-eyed, cynical Vivien, with passionate triumph fanning the glow of her swarthy evil beauty, glides up in the gathering darkness among overhanging cypresses from where, an undistinguishable heap, lies the insensible body of the conquered Merlin. A tiny brown-skinned, lithe-limbed Cleopatra, clad in chains of coins and little else, crouches submissive and seductive before Cæsar, raising long black eyes, twinkling with a thousand meanings, to the conqueror’s face, while the black soldier-slave stands in the background, still holding the mattress in which he has brought his queen hidden, and casting furtive, fearful looks at the world-famous pair.
George shuddered: Cleopatra was like Nouna. He cast only a hasty glance at the other pictures, noting the last, a scene drawn from the most moving of modern romances, where Manon Lescaut, bewitching in her little frills and flounces of butterfly Parisian finery, descends upon young Des Grieux in his sombre Abbé’s gown, and wins him, with smiles and tears and caresses, to her for ever.
These wall-paintings were all by well-known artists, and they stamped the room with a magnificent individuality. The mantelpiece was of white marble, carved by an eminent Italian sculptor, whose taste ran much to Cupids. The hangings of the room were pearl-white satin, and the furniture, in the slender eighteenth century style, was white wood covered with the same material. Tall white wood cabinets, also lined with the satin, filled the spaces right and left of the mantelpiece. Both were filled with old china, a Sybarite’s collection, which contained no piece unique without being beautiful, or beautiful without being unique. Handsomely-bound books, of the kind which are written to be illustrated, lay on the tables among Venetian decanters and bowls of cut flowers. The floor was of polished wood, cool to the feet. In the verandah outside were low lounging chairs and a table with champagne-cup.
After a hasty survey of the room George walked to one of the windows. Mr. Rahas was in the garden, he thought, the servant had said. But there was no sign of him on the lawn or under the trees that bordered it on each side as far as the river’s brink. As George looked out, and put one foot on the tesselated floor of the verandah to get a wider view, he heard a sound of a chair scraping the pavement, and then his own name called. He turned round and saw Dicky Wood peeping up, flushed, amazed and excited, from under a Japanese umbrella which he was holding over himself as he lay in a hammock between two of the verandah pillars. In a moment George’s eyes were opened as he noticed the free-and-easy manner in which the lad was enjoying himself, in a light suit, a cigar in his mouth, his tie hanging loose, and observed the consternation on his face. It was the home of Chloris White, and Nouna, with her usual wild wilfulness, had stuck to her project of visiting this royalty of the half-world, and begging Chloris to relax her hold on Dicky. The coming of Rahas and Sundran remained unaccounted for; but George for the moment did not trouble about that; he was thanking Heaven it was no worse.
Such a great light of relief broke over his face that Dicky, who had tumbled out of the hammock in a shamefaced manner, and with as much celerity as if it had been his Colonel who confronted him, took courage to say:
“I—I didn’t expect to see you here, Lauriston.”
“I suppose not,” said George shortly, with less moral indignation than irritation with this fool for being the cause of the horrible uneasiness to which he had been a prey. “I haven’t much taste for the fruit that grows on the high road.”
Dicky, who was not a philosophical admirer, grew red and angry.
“I won’t hear a word against Chloris—I mean the Princess—even from you, Lauriston,” he began, holding himself very erect.
George put his hand on the young fellow’s shoulder. He was not two years older than the young scapegrace, but the prestige of his reserved character gave him authority.
“I didn’t come here to quarrel with you, laddie,” he said gravely. “When you find what did bring me, you won’t be so loud. Tell me, why do you call her the ‘Princess?’ Who’s the Prince?”
His thoughts ran again on Rahas.
Dicky glanced round the lawn.
“He isn’t about now,” he said carelessly. “He’s a little dried-up German with dyed hair and moustache; seventy, if he’s a day.”
“Did you ever meet here a man named Rahas?”
“Rahas! Oh, yes. He’s a sort of commission agent, who gets any Indian thing you want, from a pound of Assam tea to an elephant. Why, you know him, of course; for he lived in the same house with Mrs. Lauriston before you married her,” rattled on Dicky, encouraged by George’s lenity.
“Does he ever speak of her—my wife?”
“No, he won’t. I began to chaff him once; only a harmless word or two,” he went on hastily, seeing a change in his companion’s face, “And he—well, he got all sorts of dark colours, and his eyes spat fire. I think he once went in for being a sort of rival, you know—at least, I mean before you knew her.”
“Have you seen him to-day?”
“Yes, I think he’s talking to Chl—the Princess—now somewhere. No, by Jove, here she is.”
From where they were standing in the verandah they could hear the rustle of the silver fringe, and the tipity-tap of high-heeled shoes on the polished floor. She was a little woman, this famous personage, though it was only by comparison that you could discover the fact; for she bore herself with the easy dignity of a queen, and before he saw more of her than a golden head and a robe of buttercup silk peeping between draperies of black lace, he knew without debate that he had seen so much grace of movement in no English woman, and only in one who was not English. As she advanced through the long room in a very leisurely manner, a couple of spaniels playing about her feet, a painted fan in her hands, he found that he was waiting for her near approach with something stronger than curiosity. First his involuntary admiration of her carriage was changed suddenly, without warning or definite thought, into a sick disgust that grew, with the next few steps she took, into horror equally without cause, without explanation. Then his blood stood still, hot and fiery, in his veins, and seemed to be scorching his body, as the horror became in a moment a definite, devilish dread, so ghastly that the mind refused it as a thought, and the lips were paralysed and could give it no vent. When at last she reached the open window, and the mild evening light showed him her face without disguise, he saw nothing but the outline he had seen in silhouette against the window in his own house on the day he and Nouna entered it.
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.
Chloris Whitewas 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.
Therefore, with head bent like a penitent Magdalen, so meek that the harshest could not spurn her, she drew back as it in shame, and addressed him in a low murmuring voice of an indescribably vibrating quality, sweet, deep-toned, and penetrating as the sound-waves of an organ through quiet aisles. The voice, like the face, shook George with an unspeakable horror. For in every glance, in every tone, he saw a sickening, awful likeness to the young wife he worshipped, and in the power this depraved woman exercised over half the fools of the day, his unhealthily excited fancy saw a hideous burlesque of the undue dominion Nouna had already got over him. He listened without looking at her at first, until the irresistibly melting tones made it impossible to forbear meeting her eyes in the searching demand to know whether the face would belie the words.
“You will not let me touch you, the husband of my own child. I do not blame you. I can even say I am sorry you have come, since to meet me has given you pain. I am not proud for myself, I am only proud for my child—my children. While I kept myself apart from you for your happiness, my soul, all that is best and truest in me, was with you. You are my judge, my son, but remember that.”
Even the high-flown speech was like Nouna in her serious moods. George glanced at her. Her eyes, to which the rest of her face, beautiful as it was, seemed in moments of excitement only a sort of unnoticed setting, were like liquid fire.
“I am no judge, madam,” he said, “and I thank God for bringing me here to-day.”
Her expression changed; evidently she had prepared herself for an outburst of anger, and was less able to cope with a masculine quietness.
“You are glad you came to-day?” she faltered, not knowing what this might portend, for her visitor gave no sign of working himself up to a good, warming height of indignation.
“Yes. You would have let me go on for months living like a skunk.”
The Magdalen look gave place at once to a vindictive tightening of the lips and narrowing of the eyes.
“You are not satisfied with what I have done for you?”
“No, madam.”
“Why, what would you have?”
“I would have had you let me know the truth. I deserved it.”
“But you would have objected to my daughter’s having the fortune which made her happy.”
“If you knew I should object, you had the less right to deceive me.”
He was not going to prate about his honour to this creature; he did not even think she would understand him, but he was mistaken. Now that she saw what tone he was going to take she adjusted hers to meet him, and became cool and haughty.
“My daughter’s nurse, Sundran, came to me to-day to tell me where to find the husband who deserted me when I was no more than a child; she thought, poor woman, I did not know. I gathered that her recognition did not surprise you.”
“Well, madam.”
“Will it satisfy you to have your wife acknowledged as the Honourable Nouna Kilmorna, only daughter of Lord Florencecourt?”
“No, madam. Nouna is my wife, that is enough for me. I only want you to understand that she must be content to live for a few years like a poor officer’s wife, some day she shall have as much rank and position as she could wish.”
“Oh, that would be charming for you; but Nouna! Do you think she is the sort of girl to be happy by herself in stuffy lodgings while you are amusing yourself ‘getting on’? Come, you know better. If she couldn’t be contented like that during her honeymoon, do you think she could now?”
The bitterness of this thrust, to which experience had given a barbed point, made him wince.
“She is only a child,” said he; “feeling my love about her day by day, she will learn to be happy in that, as you would have been if your husband had been all your heart wanted,” he added, as a happy thought.
But Chloris White only laughed, having the coarse cynical honesty of her kind. “Do you really believe that?” she said. “Well, you are wrong. In my case, because no one man could ever have been to me all my heart wanted; in Nouna’s case, because she is, disguise it what way you like, her mother’s child. Give her jewels, new gowns, gaiety, luxury, and you may hold what room there is in her heart for a man; shut her in two rooms, restrict her to one frock for each of the seasons, and you will see, if you don’t know, just how much happiness your love is able to give her. I tell you she must have pleasure, pleasure, pleasure; and if you won’t let her accept it openly, passing through your hands as a gift from you, I’ll let her have it secretly through somebody else’s.”
A spirit of evil seemed to flash a hideous lightning across her handsome face as she uttered this threat. George was horrorstruck.
“You don’t mean what you say,” he said, catching his breath. “You, who were noble enough to keep apart from your child for her sake! You would not destroy your own work now!”
“I would destroy anything when I’m worked up to it,” she said coolly. “Listen, Mr. Lauriston. The world makes distinctions as to the ways in which money is made; but it makes none as to the way in which it is spent; that can and does confer nothing but honour. Well, that part of the business is all I ask of you. As to the way I get it, why many a man of your trade might think himself blessed if he got his with so clear a conscience. There are no villages burned to give me a cocked hat, nor towns plundered that I may build a villa. My money’s my own, to do what I like with, and I choose to give it to my children to make them a position in the world. Nobody knows where it comes from, and nobody need know; and you can call it your wife’s money, not yours, if you are so particular. But she must and shall have it. Money is not made by looking at it by me more than by anybody else. I’ve worked for a fortune to give my daughter, because I mean her to have the best of everything in this world. I’m ready even never to see her except by a trick, but I won’t have my work foiled just at the last by any squeamish folly on your part; if you won’t have wife and fortune together, you shall have neither, I swear.”
“You don’t seem to understand, madam, that your control over your daughter ceased when she became my wife.”
“Did it?” retorted Chloris White, with scornful emphasis. “Well, you can entertain that opinion, if it comforts you, for a few days longer. But don’t depend too much on your legal rights when you are dealing with a person who lives outside the law.”
“I can trust your love for Nouna to conquer any impulse you might have to do her harm through me,” said George, a bull-dog defiance rising in him and affecting the tone in which he uttered these sufficiently pacific words.
“You can trust me to keep her from having her life ruined by any man’s pig-headedness,” said Chloris, throwing herself into a long cane lounging chair with much spirit in voice and attitude. “Do you think I brought up Nouna virtuously to secure her happiness?” she asked mockingly. “No, I meant her to be happy in spite of it. I meant her to enjoy all the honours of the great world, and all the luxury of the other one; I meant her to become what she has become, a society pet, a society lion, by the very ways and manners which in me are Bohemian, shocking, impossible. Oh! They are easily gulled, those feather-brained ladies of the ‘best’ society. However, it is ‘the best,’ and so I mean my daughter to keep there.”
“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 achâtelaineat 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 masculinecoupof this kind, Chloris White scarcely uttered a faint exclamation until, seeing the direction of their course, she asked, coolly:
“Are you going to drown me?”
“No. Though it’s what you deserve,” he panted briefly. And reaching the boats, he got into the nearest, a solidly built skiff, put Chloris down on the cushioned seat in the stern, pushed the boat off, and paddled her easily with the tide to the shadow of the trees, so that Nouna, if she came to the window, might not see them.
“What do you expect to gain by this astonishing stratagem?” asked Chloris.
“I intend to prevent you seeing Nouna until she has got clear of the house.”
“In the meantime young Wood will have met her, she will have found out that Chloris White is at home, and will have made up her mind to wait until she does see me.”
George made no answer. He was indeed considering what step he should next take. Luckily for him his silence, which was really the result of want of resource, impressed Chloris White differently. She was not used to being thwarted and treated as a person of small account, and she grew impatient and fretful at being made a fool of. To be forced to sit, with a complexion adapted for the half-light of the verandah and the lamps of the dinner table, in the full yellow glare of the evening sun, hatless, with no becoming sunshade to throw a soft shadow over her face, exposed without any of the clever artifices of her treasury to the disillusionised stare of the pleasure-crews that rowed past, was an ordeal which subdued the haughty security of this queen of an artificial realm more surely than innocent George could have guessed. She looked up at him, blinking in the unaccustomed strong daylight, with a malignant expression of spiteful hatred, and then looked over the boat-side into the shallow water, cowering miserably before the combined forces of blunt, coarse, overmastering nature, and blunt, coarse, overmastering man.
“Well, you have got your way this once—make the most of it,” she said bitterly. “Let me get back on the bank; the sun makes my head ache.”
“You will let her go without seeing her?” said George, utterly unconscious in the earnest realities that were occupying him, of the frivolous details which had gained his victory, and suspicious of her good faith.
“Yes, yes, yes, I tell you. She can go and you can go—the sooner the better. I am worn out with your coarse violence; I must go to my room and lie down.”
George paddled slowly back to where there was a pathway among the trees. An inkling of the truth broke upon him as he compared the superb disdain and contemptuous coolness with which this woman had treated him in the verandah with the broken-spirited petulance she showed now. He became rather ashamed of his stratagem, and helped the humbled woman to land very gently, with lowered eyes, feeling for the first time a spark of human kinship with her in this little exhibition of unamiable nature. “I am sorry if I have been rough,” said he humbly. “You see I have been much disturbed to-day.”
She made no answer, being by this time safe on the bank. She gave him—feeling more at ease already in the shade of the trees—one flashing, enigmatical glance which, while it did not betray her thoughts or her feelings towards him very definitely, yet renewed the impression of evil which her feminine helpless querulousness in the boat had for the time laid in abeyance; then she turned, and letting her golden-coloured gown trail after her on the narrow path, she walked away with the free motion from the hip, and graceful, alluring bearing which had come to her with her Eastern blood. But to George she looked, as she got further and further from his sight in the black and dim recesses of the plantation, like a huge, sinuous serpent, with head and upper part raised from the ground, ready to spring at and coil round its victim.
He remembered with a start that her word was not to be relied on, and bringing the boat with a few strokes back to where he had first found it, he jumped ashore, made fast the painter, and crossed the lawn rapidly to the window of the drawing-room. Nouna was there alone, leaning over a low chair, utterly absorbed in the picture of Guinevere at the window. She turned round on hearing footsteps, and screamed at sight of her husband. He sprang across the floor to her; but, struck suddenly with a terribly vivid sense of the likeness between her and the wretched woman he had just left, he felt his first impulse to take her in his arms freeze up, and merely said that she must come home with him. She cast a last lingering look of admiration at the paintings on the walls, and let her husband lead her out through the hall, where she tried to lag behind him with inquisitive glances into all the corners, burying her head among the hot-house flowers in a subdued ecstasy of enjoyment, and altogether showing a manifest reluctance to leave this strange little paradise of delights. They walked down the avenue in silence, except that he told her to make haste, and rebuked her rather sharply for a stealthy glance behind her at the house.
At the lodge-gates the fly in which he had come was waiting. When he had helped her in there came upon him a strong sense that he and she—an ill-assorted pair enough, with many a struggle and a heart-pang in store for them—were all that was left, each to the other, in a mass of tumbled ruins of fair prospects that had been solid and stately that morning. And as she cowered, very silent and subdued, expecting a scolding for her escapade, he put his arms round her, just before the sheltered road where they were driving joined the highway, and pressed a fervent, throbbing kiss on her lips. She returned it demonstratively, according to her wont, and then, as they were close upon the High Street, they had to calm down their exuberance, and he asked:
“What were you thinking about, Nounday?”
“I was thinking how lovely it would be to live in a house like that,” she answerednaïvely.
It was natural enough, and George said so to himself, and would not let himself be tortured by the thought that the innocent remark was significant.
Throughoutthe journey back to town from Richmond there was, after that brief caress, scarcely more communication between George and his wife than if they had been strangers. Nouna, surprised in a flagrant act of disobedience, was disposed, by the very leniency with which she had been treated, to look upon her husband’s reserve as ominous; while he on his own side was too much absorbed in considering what steps he ought next to take to dispel her fears of punishment by so much as a few gentle words.
The fact was that George, who, like other reserved people of strong feelings, could only control the expression of those feelings, when strongly excited, by mounting over himself the strictest guard, wore on this occasion an unconscious panoply of sternness which was far more alarming to the impressionable Nouna than the most passionate outpouring of invective could have been. As the hansom they had taken from Waterloo Station drove up to the door of their house, and George flung the doors open with a sudden impulsive movement forward as if he would have sprung out without waiting for the driver to pull up, he was recalled to a consciousness of his wife’s presence by a frightened moan at his elbow, and looking round hastily, he saw her huddled up in the corner watching him with eyes full of fear. The sight startled him horribly, for the discovery of the evening had poisoned his mind with evil knowledge and rank suspicions.
“What is the matter? Why are you looking frightened?” he asked with a constrained look and tone which seemed to the frightened creature both fierce and harsh.
Nouna drew a long, shivering breath and did not answer, her eyes moving with the helpless, agonised expression of a field-mouse imprisoned for a few moments in human hands. Not in the least understanding the effect his manner had upon her, Lauriston’s suspicions suddenly took form as he remembered the presence of Rahas at Thames Lawn. As a matter of fact Nouna was entirely ignorant that either the Oriental merchant or Sundran was at the house she had just visited with the harmlessly quixotic intention of pleading for Dicky Wood. But Lauriston could not know that, could scarcely at that moment have believed his wife’s oath if she had sworn the truth. He turned sharply round in his seat to get a full view of her face, and she, scared out of all self-control, uttered a little shriek. He did not touch her, he did not attempt to reassure her; with a heavy, hopeless sigh he turned away, took off his hat, and passed his hand over his forehead. They had reached home, the footman was advancing from the open door; George noticed with disgust that the man must have witnessed the little scene. He got out and held out his hand to his wife, who rejected it and hung back until he quietly gave place to the servant, and walked to meet the Colonel, the sight of whom on the pathway a short distance from the house, had been the cause of his start forward in the hansom.
As the two men met they exchanged eager, anxious glances.
“Well!” said the Colonel shortly.
Lauriston, who looked haggard, white, and shaken, waited for him to speak further.
“What has—she done?”
Unwilling so much as to mention the name of the woman he reluctantly acknowledged as his daughter, Lord Florencecourt glanced towards the house she had just entered to indicate whom he meant.
“Done! What has she done? God knows.”
“Well, what do you suspect? You can speak out to me; I am not sensitive now. Has she done—the worst? You looked at her as if you could have killed her. I saw as you passed.”
Poor George stared at him in consternation.
“I looked—at my wife—as if I could have—killed her!” he repeated stupidly.
“Yes, by Jove, you did.”
George said nothing more for a few moments, being altogether shocked to learn that he could become unconsciously the most repulsive of tyrants to the very creature whom, in all the wreck of his life and his hopes, he unswervingly and with a new smarting fervour, adored.
“I suppose,” he said at last, “I’m going off my head. I swear I hadn’t the least idea there was anything unusual in my manner. Poor little thing!” he murmured abstractedly, while the Colonel continued to regard him very curiously.
George turned instinctively towards his home, and glanced through the trees at the windows of his wife’s room with a great yearning in his whole face. The Colonel put his arm briskly through the young man’s, and tried to lead him towards the nearest gate. They had wandered into Kensington Gardens.
“Come and dine with me at the Wellington Club. I’ve called twice at your place since I left you, and have been hovering about ever since on the look-out for you. Come—a glass of Rudesheimer——”
George drew back. “No, thanks, Colonel; I can’t come to-night. I must go back to my wife. You see—leaving her like that——”
He stammered and stopped. The Colonel considered him again attentively.
“You’ve not been telling her anything of our talk this afternoon, have you?” he asked, with a shade of contempt. “I cannot understand that craze of a newly-married man to be babbling of all his affairs to his wife. I should as soon think of consulting a new hunter as to an investment in Consols.”
“I have told her nothing.”
“Then what is the matter with you? You look more upset than you did this afternoon.”
“I have seen Nouna’s mother.”
The Colonel’s jaw dropped, and his irritability suddenly disappeared.
“Madame di—di Valdestillas?” he said in a subdued, tentative tone.
“Oh, no; I’ve had my way. There’s an end once for all to all humbug,” answered George bitterly. “I’ve seen Chloris White.”
Then both remained silent for a while. Truly after this there seemed little to be said. At last the Colonel said in a low voice:
“Now, my boy, you see what I’ve had to live through the last few years. You don’t wonder any longer at my opinion of women?”
But George felt no sympathetic softening. He thought that a man should make sure of the death of his first wife before he married a second, and that he should show a little human feeling for his own daughter.
“I don’t wonder either, Colonel, at Chloris White’s opinion of men,” he said drily.
“You think you have a grievance against me, I see.”
“Frankly, I do. Why didn’t you make a clean breast of it when you found it was I who had married your daughter? You might have trusted me, Colonel, as if I had had no tongue; you know that. And you saw me fall into a villainous trap and live on that infamous woman’s money. O God! The thought of it! When just a whisper would have put me right.”
“Well, well, the murder’s out now, and one sees things differently. I knew what your wife’s influence over you was, and I thought if I breathed a word it would get to her ears and set her clamouring for her pitiful title. A man’s a weak thing in a beautiful woman’s hands, as no one knows better than I. I’ll do what I can for you; I’m bound to, and I will. What do you propose to do?”
“Resign my commission, give back every cursed penny I can, and get employment abroad to work off the rest.”
Lord Florencecourt looked up, startled.
“Resign your commission! You mustn’t think of that. The worst’s over now; it is I, not you, who have anything to fear from the devil. Give up your house, of course; I’ll allow you five hundred, six hundred a year. You are quite free from any obligation, for I acknowledge your wife is my daughter, and her mother would force me in any case to contribute to her support. Do you see?”
“Quite. I accept your offer, Colonel, in this way. You shall allow Nouna five hundred a year until we have cleared off every farthing we have spent under a misapprehension. But for the future my wife and I will live on my earnings and what I have besides of my own.”
“But why leave the army?”
“Cowardice, partly. I feel disgraced and beaten down, and I’ve lost heart for the old ambitions. And—I have other reasons. Over here there is a constant risk of Nouna’s meeting——”
He hurried this last sentence, but stopped abruptly in the middle of it.
“You might exchange. Come now, that would solve all difficulties. Nobody would know the style you used to keep here, and you could make a fresh start quietly.”
George considered the proposal for a few seconds, and then shook his head.
“Look here, Colonel, it’s no use denying it; I’m broke—as surely as a man who’s gone to the dogs on his own account; the only difference is that I’ve been thrown to ’em. There’s an awfulness about the thing I’ve been made to do that has bowled me over—pride, self-respect, and all. I shall work round again all right, I’ve no doubt, but I can’t set to it in England or in the army. Help me to get away as fast as I can; it’s the greatest kindness you can do me.”
He had made up his mind past gainsaying. The Colonel was deeply moved, self-reproach adding force to his compassion.
“If you won’t be persuaded,” he began slowly, “I suppose I must help you your own way. How would Paris suit you?”
“Any place would suit me where I could get anything to do. And Paris would be lively for Nouna,” he added, half to himself.
The Colonel would have preferred that Nouna’s name should be left out of the discussion. He continued: “A young American, a connection of Lady Millard’s, who is engaged in a bank here called the ‘London, New York, and Chicago,’ was telling me at their place a few nights ago that the firm intend to start a branch establishment in Paris, for the use chiefly of the English and American colonies. They have an opening for a young man of good birth and address. It’s a wretched thing, I know, for you,” he went on with a change of voice, glancing again regretfully from head to foot of the handsome young soldier.
“Can you get it for me?” asked Lauriston, with a first sign of eagerness.
“I think so, but—the salary is miserable and——”
“What will they give?”
“Something like a hundred and twenty at the outside to begin with. It’s starvation.”
“Not a bit of it. It’s more than my pay.”
“Yes, but your wife!”
“My wife?” George’s face broke with a ray of a smile. “She shall be all right. She is no more than a bird to keep; and we shall live very near the housetops, where she will be at home.”
In fact, the idea of having her all to himself again sprang up a bright little fountain in desolation, unlooked for in his breast. The Colonel pulled his moustache. Nouna, he thought, was the sort of bird to make a very uncomfortable flapping against the bars of any but the most expensive of cages.
“When can I know whether they will give me the berth?” George asked.
“I almost think, from the manner in which they spoke, that what I should say about you would settle it. They are particular as to the stamp of man. You could hear in a week.”
“How soon can I get away, Colonel?”
“As soon as you like; I’ll see that it’s all right.”
“Thanks. I want to wind up all my affairs here quietly, and slip away at any moment when I have arranged for the payment of the debts we have incurred.”
“You can make me security for those. And, by the by, I can give you some good introductions in Paris.”
“Many thanks, Colonel, but it would only be prolonging the social death-struggle. One can only die game to society on—on the income we shall have.”
“Don’t you think, for your wife’s sake, you are wrong in resolving to be so independent? How will you keep her amused?”
“Oh, that won’t be difficult in Paris. The very air is more exhilarating than here, and she is just the person to appreciate its pleasures.”
“But the pleasures ladies love are no cheaper there than here, remember.”
Lauriston would not be cheated out of the rags of comfort he had collected for himself, and Lord Florencecourt was obliged to leave him without even discovering how small the income was to which the young fellow was trusting. The money he had inherited from his aunt—all he had to depend on besides what his own work could produce—brought him in only a little over a hundred a year; and he had even been obliged to encroach upon next year’s income in the early days of his marriage, when it seemed easier to trust to the literary work he had been promised for the future than to refuse his new-made wife the pretty trifles she set her heart upon. Now the idea of making money by writing again occurred to him, and pricked him to instant action with the thought that something might still be made of life if Nouna could only be induced to be happy in her changed circumstances. This was Lauriston’s weak side. He knew that if Chloris White chose to be as bad as her word, and to excite Rahas’s evil thirst for Nouna’s beauty, he should have to enter into a conflict with a stealthy and unscrupulous enemy, the thought of whose underhand weapons filled him with fury and loathing. He must get away with his wife at once, as secretly as he could, trusting that the mother might overpower the fiend in Chloris, and induce her to leave her child safe in the care of a man whom she must at least respect. In the meantime the change in their circumstances must be made known to Nouna without delay.
George returned to the big house which was so detestably impregnated with the thought of Chloris and her vilely earned money, and inquiring for his wife, learnt that she was in her bath. This was with Nouna by no means the perfunctory daily ceremony of Europeans, but was a luxurious pleasure in which she spent many hours of the hot summer days, having had a room fitted up to recall, as far as possible, her dim half-imagined memories of the cool inner courts of an Indian palace. George knocked at the door and Nouna, recognising the tread, in a timid and uncertain voice bade him come in. The room was paved and wainscoted with tiles; the bath, a large one six feet square, but only three deep, was sunk into the floor with two steps down into the water on all the sides, the whole being lined with sea-green tiles that gave a pretty tint to the water. A lamp hung in brass chains from the ceiling; a long mirror reaching down to the ground occupied the middle of the wall. A sofa, a rug, a table with fruit and coffee, and a little window conservatory with thin lace curtains before it, were all the rest of the furniture. Nouna, in a blue and white cotton garment which was no great encumbrance, was peering up from the corner of the bath furthest from the door like a frightened water-nix. As George came over to her, she made straight for the opposite corner, and seeing that she did not mean to be approached nearer, he moved away from the bath and sat down on the sofa.
“I frightened you just now, I am afraid, Nouna,” he began in a very humble voice.
“No-o,” she answered, plucking up spirit as she saw she was safe from attack.
“I mean, perhaps you thought me cross and—and rough, because I didn’t talk to you much on the way home.”
“You were cross and rough.”
“Well, I’m very sorry, for I didn’t mean to be. I had had news which upset me and made me so wretched that I forgot everything else.”
“What news?” she asked very softly, sliding through the water to the side of the bath nearest to him, and leaning her bare wet arms on the tiles of the floor. For she began, now that her fright was over, to see that he was unhappy.
He paused for a few moments to consider how he should best break it to her. At last it came out, however, with masculine bluntness.
“You know what you would say, Nouna, if you heard that there had been a mistake—about the money—supposed to be left us, and that we were as poor as ever again, and had to give up this house and everything—even your jewels!”
The water all round the poor child began to quiver with little widening ripples, as she trembled at the shock of this most dire calamity; even his previous suggestion of it seemed to have had no effect in softening the blow. As for George, he felt that all the previous horrors of the miserable day had produced no pang so acute as the one he now felt, when he had to deal with his own hands the blow which crushed, for the time at least, all the bright happiness of the only creature he loved in the world. He sat like a culprit, with hanging head and loosely clasped hands, too much afraid of breaking down himself to attempt to soften the gloomy picture by a word of hope. It was she who broke the silence first.
“My jewels! No, I sha’n’t have to give those up,” she whispered eagerly, “for they were given me by mamma!”
George looked at her with haggard eyes, noticing that the mere mention of her mother soothed her, let in a ray of sweet sunshine at once upon the black-looking prospect.
“But supposing we were so badly in debt that even they had to be sold!” he suggested in a hoarse voice that he tried in vain to clear.
“Then I should drown myself!” cried Nouna tragically, and she descended a step lower into the water as if to fulfil the dread purpose immediately.
“What, Nouna!” cried George, “don’t you think me worth living for? Do you think, when I’ve lost everything else, you ought to take away just what would console me for it all? Do you, Nouna?”
She hung her head, and crawling, meek and ashamed like a truant dog, out of the water, laid herself face downwards on the tiled floor at a little distance from his feet. But when he stooped towards her she said, her voice ringing out with passionate sincerity:
“Don’t touch me! Let me lie here till I’m good, and then you may pick me up and forgive me.”
“But listen. I’ve something else to tell you, something that perhaps you will like to hear.”
“What is it?” She raised her head and looked up at him.
“We shall be very poor, as I told you, and sha’n’t be able to have a nice house, or many pretty things. But I’m going to take you to live in Paris——”