“Paris!” He had scarcely uttered the word when she repeated it like a shout of triumph, and springing up from the floor, snatched a lace-bordered and embroidered sheet which was lying on a little white porcelain stove in one corner of the room, and wrapping it round her with one dexterous sweeping movement, slipped off her bathing-dress like a loose skin from underneath it, and flinging herself on to the sofa beside her husband, put a transformed and glowing face up to his, as she whispered in a tone of rapture: “Then I don’t mind anything—anything, for I shall see mamma!”
With an uncontrollable impulse George drew himself away from her and started to his feet. He felt sick, and a film gathered before his eyes, preventing him from finding the handle of the door, which he sought with cold, clammy fingers.
“George!” said a low voice behind him. He scarcely heard, scarcely recognised it, and made no answer.
“George!” A little hand found its way to his throat, and was laid against his neck.
His arms fell down listlessly, and as he stood still and felt that he was touched by clinging fingers, and heard Nouna’s voice in its most caressing tones, his sight came again; he looked down and put his hands on his wife’s shoulder.
“Why are you going away, George? Why are you going away?”
“I don’t feel well, dearest.”
“Well, sit by me, and I will take your head in my lap and nurse you.”
She led him gently back to the sofa. But presently, when she had curled herself up in a corner of it, and making him lie full length had pillowed his head upon her breast, and administered kisses andeau de Colognealternately with great lavishness, she peered into his face with a new inspiration, and said mysteriously:
“You are not ill—you are unhappy.”
He protested he was only grieving at the change in their fortunes for her sake.
Nouna laughed gently. “I was silly,” she said, “and wicked. In the first moments of surprise one does not know what one says. I don’t mind at all. I would rather be poor in Paris than rich in London.”
He shivered, though Nouna, with some tact, believing he was jealous, had not mentioned her mother again. But she examined his face attentively, and saw that the drawn, hopeless look remained. After a few moments she slipped her shoulder away very tenderly from beneath his head, which she transferred to a cushion; and George heard the door softly shut after her as she went out. He called to her, but she took no notice, and he supposed she had gone to dress. But in a few minutes the ghost-like figure glided in again, looking just the same, and came to where he was now sitting upright on the sofa.
“There!” she said triumphantly, and she put her jewellery, piece by piece, down to a little gold bar brooch which he had given her before their marriage, into her husband’s pockets. “You can go and sell them this minute if you like. You see I don’t mind a bit. Not—a—bit,” she repeated deliberately, and then looked into his face to see whether this willing act of self-sacrifice had brought him consolation.
George smiled at her and told her she was a good child; but his smile was still very sad, and the hand which he placed on her shoulder trembled. Then Nouna, who was sitting on the rug at his feet, began to cry quietly; their usual mutual position was reversed; it was she who now wanted to get nearer to him, and did not know how. A strange deadness seemed to have come over him, so that he did not notice even her tears. He was indeed arranging his plans for their departure from England, with some distrust of his wife’s fortitude at the end. At last, when amazement at this singular state of affairs had dried her eyes, and she had sat mournfully staring at her husband in utter silence for some minutes, a light broke upon her face, and she sprang up suddenly into a kneeling position. Joining her hands together above his knees like a child and looking out instinctively at the glimpse of darkening sky visible between the leaves of the plants in her little window conservatory, she said with all the solemnity and timidity of a person who is undertaking for the first time an arduous responsibility:
“Pray God to comfort my husband George, if I cannot.”
This startled George and broke him up altogether, reserve and fortitude and manly dignity and all. He snatched her up in his arms with such impetuous haste that her slippers flew off and exposed little pink toes to the air, and enfolding her in a hug that went nigh to stopping her breath, burst into sobs like a hungry and beaten child.
ToGeorge Lauriston’s infinite surprise and comfort, his young wife, instead of dealing him fresh wounds in his misfortune by lamentations over their altered lot, fell quite naturally into the woman’s part of helpmeet, and eased the wrench of breaking from his old career by an unwavering brightness and sweetness which woke in him the fairest hopes of what their life together might yet be. On the other hand, this sudden change from winsome wilfulness to still more winsome womanliness could not fail to rouse in him some anxiety as to its cause. Had she received any communication from her mother, either through the hateful Rahas or some other channel? Her secretive nature made it difficult to discover the truth on such points.
“Why are you so kind to me now, little woman?” he asked her two days after the memorable return from Norfolk, when their preparations for departure were already half made.
“Kind! Wasn’t I always kind to you?” she asked, not quite evasively, yet with more understanding than she affected to have.
“Yes, but not quite in the same sweet way.”
“Ah ha! It’s the pictures and the music and the sermons you’ve taken me to beginning to have an effect at last,” she said, not flippantly, for though she laughed her eyes began to glisten.
George was touched, but greatly puzzled.
“Have you heard anything from Sundran since she left?” asked he carelessly, after allowing an interval to elapse so that the question might appear to have no connection with what had gone before.
“No,” said Nouna; then, after a pause, she looked up at her husband mysteriously. “Do you know what I think?”
“Well!”
“I believe she has managed, how I don’t know, to find her way back to mamma. I’ve been thinking it over a great deal, and I fancy when she found out the Colonel,”—(she lowered her voice)—“she thought she ought to let mamma know where to find him.” And Nouna finished with a slow emphatic nod of her small head.
“That’s a very clever suggestion,” said George, who indeed had reason to think so. He felt relieved, for Nouna’s want of candour had never gone the length of deliberately planned deceit, and he decided upon the strength of this short dialogue that she had heard nothing.
The real reason of his wife’s altered conduct was not likely to occur to him. Coming of a race which places the one sex in such complete subjection to the other that confidence between them is impossible, she possessed, together with that cautious over-reticence which is the weapon of the weak, its correlative virtue—a delicate tact which avoided a sensitive place discreetly, and made no attempt to lay bare a wound which her lord wished to conceal. Something had happened to make George unhappy—this kind husband who had cherished her so tenderly, who had denied her no proof of his affection. Her woman’s heart was deeply touched; if she had any curiosity it could wait for its satisfaction until by and by when he was better; in the meantime she would be loyally good to him, even to the extent of checking her secret sobs over the parting with the plants and perfumes and knick-knacks which had grown into her frivolity-loving heart.
George got the bank appointment, through the efforts of Lord Florencecourt, who told him he had had a close race with a connection of the man who was to be manager of the Paris branch.
“He’s a disagreeable man, the manager, Mr. Gurton,” said the Colonel. “I hope you’ll get on all right with him. The young fellow he wanted to get in is a lad he calls his nephew, but by all accounts he is what nephews have a trick of turning out to be. Gurton is rather savage over the disappointment; fortunately I was able to prove that the lad is not so steady as he might be.”
“Thank you, Colonel. It’s very good of you to take so much trouble. I’m sorry about the mysterious nephew. Unless he’s an exceptionally just man, it will make him so ready to find fault with me. And of course I’m quite raw to the work.”
“Oh, I don’t think it’s difficult—mere routine for the most part. My boy, it is a shame for you to be tied to such work.”
“Well, all work is routine; it can’t be worse for that than the army. And then there are prizes. Who knows but I may end my days as a prosperous banker, with an income which would make a General’s mouth water?”
Between the Colonel’s hearty friendship and help on the one hand, and Nouna’s unexpected and discreet sympathy on the other, Lauriston was beginning to realise that the worst stains of the degradation he had felt so keenly might in time be wiped out, and in this reaction he was inclined at first to lose remembrance of Chloris White’s threats, and to look upon the smallness of his means as the present difficulty which would need the sternest grappling with. He could not bear the thought of plunging his wife straight from the unbridled extravagance and luxury which she had lately enjoyed with so keen a zest to an existence more meagre than that which had palled upon her so soon in the first days of their marriage. That she was preparing with great fortitude for such a plunge was proved to him the day before they started. She was rather silent and abstracted at dinner that evening, and when it was over she walked with a listless and melancholy tread into the quaint drawing-rooms, the shelves and brackets of which George found were bare of their load of fantastic trifles. Fans, screens, mirrors, ivory carvings, all had disappeared; only half a dozen small porcelain vases, filled with fresh flowers that morning, remained.
“You’ve been packing up, I see, busy little woman,” said George, trying to speak cheerfully, as he stood with his arm round her in the room which already began to wear a desolate look, as if the soul had died out of it.
“No, not packing, only making a list of them. Here it is. I thought they could pack them up themselves after we were gone,” she said, sadly.
By “they” she indicated with a shudder the mysterious enemies who were driving forth her and her husband from their beautiful home, and forcing them to make horrid things called inventories of her little Turkish tables, and the soft sofas on which she had been so fond of resting, and the big oak bookcase which was the pride of George’s heart. She held out two or three half-sheets of her husband’s foolscap paper, closely scribbled on both sides with her spidery, illegible writing.
“What’s this?” asked George, running his eyes over it and reading aloud at random. “ ‘One pair of pink garters with silver clasps, and with a little knob come off the clasp of one!’ ” He turned to the next page and read: “ ‘Two fans with pearl handles and one with tortoiseshell which I have never used. Except once’ ” was screwed into the space above as an afterthought. George picked out another item. “ ‘A hand-mirror that makes you look pretty, as if you had a crown on, for the top is a silver coronet.’ ” Further on the entries grew fuller and more eloquent, as if the very description of the beauty of her treasures had become a labour of love. “ ‘Two lovely embroidered dresses, one pale blue silk, all over little silver birds with their little wings spread out as if they were flying in the sky. The other is pink with white roses and lilies, very nearly as pretty as the other one, and besides it is less worn.’ ” Even her velvet slippers, each pair described with loving minuteness, were faithfully put down.
“They are all there; I haven’t kept back anything, indeed,” explained Nouna in great haste, as George, after reading somenaïveentries in silence, turned his back upon her, a proceeding which seemed to her ominous. “I’ve only kept just the things I had before we came here.”
But then he put his arms round her quite suddenly, and held her close to him as he said:
“And who do you think will be able to get into those little doll’s garments of yours if you leave them behind? The frocks might do for babies’ gowns, certainly, and the red velvet slippers might be hung upside down for watch-pockets, but they will never find grown-up people small enough to wear them, my word for it!”
Nouna twisted her left shoulder up to her uneasily, and a little haughtily; she had considered the drawing up of this list as a very business-like proceeding, and now she was being laughed at for it. Her husband saw this in time to kiss away the gathering frown. His own taste would have preferred the sacrifice of the dainty though now most inappropriate wardrobe; but he knew that during long hours of the day he should have to be away from his wife, and as experience had taught him that she could find more entertainment in an embroidered sash than in the whole literature of the English language, and that moreover her moral qualities could shine out strongly upon occasion in spite of this unorthodox taste, he decided that she should have the solace in exile of all her private treasures except the jewels, which he intended to despatch to Chloris White at the moment of leaving England.
“You think I mind giving these things up!” Nouna said superbly. “But I am not a child; they are nothing to me.”
Nevertheless, when her husband told her he would help her to pack them up, as they were of no use to any one but her, she leapt about the room for joy, and rushed off to take advantage of the permission in a state of frantic excitement.
They got away safely from England within a week of the fateful visit to “Thames Lawn,” all difficulties being smoothed away by the co-operation of the Colonel who, while he made no effort to see his daughter again, did everything in his power to help her and her husband to get away quickly and quietly. They prided themselves on managing everything very neatly, and both men hoped that the young husband and wife would be able to get lost, not only to the world, but to the vicious and vindictive Chloris White, even without the adoption of a feigned name, which the Colonel advised, but which Lauriston declined to resort to.
“If they made up their minds to find me, Nouna’s peculiar beauty would be clue enough to track me by to the end of the world,” said he. “I have done nothing to disgrace my name, and it’s one of my deepest wishes to make my wife so proud of it that she will forget that she ever had any other.”
They started in the early morning from Charing Cross, Lord Florencecourt meeting them at the station to see them off. The greeting between father and daughter was a curious one. Nouna, whose prejudice against the Colonel had hitherto found vent in avoidance or in sauciness, now received him with a low bow and humble touch of the hand of decorous respect, while in her lowered eyes hatred of the man who had abandoned her mother struggled with her strong native sense of the majesty of a father. The Colonel’s manner, on the other hand, was nervous and jerky. He was grieved to lose Lauriston, delighted to lose his daughter, and haunted by a dread of what his demon-wife might take it into her head to do now she was foiled in her cherished ambition for her child. He had brought a beautiful basket of roses for Mrs. Lauriston, and he insisted on paying for their tickets himself, to save poor Nouna what he thought might be the shock of travelling second-class. When, as the train started, Nouna saw that, on shaking hands with her husband, the Colonel’s eyes grew moist and kindly, she relented, and leaning far out of the carriage window, bestowed upon her amazed and unwilling father a kiss which, being justified only by that relationship which he was trying so hard to conceal, was scarcely less unwelcome than a charge of grapeshot.
The train was out of sight before he recovered a degree of serenity, which was shaken immediately afterwards by a glimpse he caught, as he was leaving the station, of a tall, lean man wearing a red fez, who came out by a different door, and crossing the inclosure in front with quick strides, was lost to his sight among the crowd in the Strand. Although George had not informed him of all he feared from Rahas, he had told him enough about this dark-skinned agent of Chloris White’s to make the Colonel suspect that with all their care they had not succeeded in evading her evil vigilance. At first he thought he would warn George, but reflecting how common foreign headgear of all sorts is in London, he decided that he had not enough grounds for disturbing so soon the poor fellow’s sense of security.
With their arrival in Paris began the third era in the married life of George and his wife. Nouna’s delight in the bright city was so great that at first the fact of having to live in two small rooms on the fourth floor of a house in a narrow street off the Boulevard Poissonnière was of no account compared with the knowledge of the pleasures that lay outside, the walks along the lighted boulevards in the evening before the shops were shut, the expeditions in a tramcar to the Bois de Boulogne or Saint Cloud, above all the Sunday trips upon the Seine on a steamer, all joys within the reach of a most modest purse, were delirious excitements to her susceptible temperament, in the first ecstasy of which the handsome house at Kensington, the tropical plants, the supper parties, even the services of her servant Sundran, were for the time forgotten. On one memorable Sunday they indulged in a drive round the Bois in afiacre, and in ices at the littlechâletrestaurant opposite the cascade, where the lower middle-class brides come in all their bravery of white satin and long veil and orange-blossom wreath, looking coquettish, happy, and at ease in the unaccustomed attire which an English girl of the same class wears with such shamefaced awkwardness. To Nouna that day gave a glimpse of Paradise: thefiacrewas more comfortable than her victoria in London had been, Hyde Park could not compare with the Bois, the passers-by amused, the ice intoxicated her. When the sunshine had faded into twilight, and they had driven back home through the lighted streets, she climbed up the long flights of stairs, still in a silent ecstasy, and sat down in a little low chair George had bought for her, seeing nothing in the gloom but moving carriages, and small trees growing thickly round a lake that glittered in sunshine, and pretty mockchâletsand a ridiculous little waterfall that fell from nothing into nowhere.
Presently she got up and went out on to the broad balcony which, encroaching upon the size of the rooms, was yet the chief charm of this little home under the roof. She had hung one corner of it with curtains, and George had contrived a canvas awning under which, when the weather was fine, she spent most of the hours of his absence. Her husband watched without following her as she leaned upon the rail and looked out at the yellow glow in the west which could still be seen behind the housetops. Suddenly she turned and came back to him. Standing just within the window with her back to the fading light, her face could not be seen; but her voice rang out with a strange vibration as she called to him, holding her arms towards him:
“George, why don’t you come out to me?”
He was with her in a moment, found her trembling and dry-lipped, and tried to persuade her to lie down while he called to the old woman from whom they rented the rooms, to prepare their supper. But Nouna shook her head, and insisted on his remaining with her by the window. Yes, she was tired, she admitted, but she wanted the air; she would go out on the balcony again if he would go with her. As she seemed to desire it, he let her lead him out, all the time keeping her eyes fixed in a remarkable manner immovably on his face.
“Look out,” she said, “at the sky—at the houses—at all you can see.”
He let his gaze pass obediently from her face to the pale-starred sky, the grey-blue of which was merging into the last red rays of the disappearing sunset: to the house-roofs and chimney-pots, of which they had a good though not an extensive view, to the street below, with its little globes of yellow light, and the dark specks which were all he could see of the moving passengers. Then he turned to her curiously.
“Well, little one, I have looked at everything.”
“And you see nothing—nothing strange at all?”
“There’s a tabby cat two roofs off,” said the prosaic male doubtfully.
“No, no,” she interrupted impatiently, still without moving her eyes from his face. “Down below us—on the opposite side—a little to the left—in the black shade.” Her voice had sunk gradually into a whisper. Then she stopped.
“Well, I see nothing.”
“Not at the house where they have a floor shut up?”
George stepped forward and leaned over the rail of the balcony as she had done, Nouna following closely and clinging to his hand. On the opposite side, about three doors down, there was a flat on the third floor which had borne during the first days of their residence in Paris a large board inscribed ‘A louer.’ George saw that the board was gone, and that one of the shutters was thrown back.
“Oh, I see they’ve let it. Well, there’s nothing to be frightened about in that, my child.”
“You don’t notice anything else—anything strange—you don’t see any—person?”
George started, and looked down again with searching eagerness along the line of dead-eyed shuttered windows.
“No, child, there is nobody.”
Nouna heaved a long sigh, and looked timidly down through her husband’s arm.
“No, it’s—gone,” she whispered.
“What is gone, dear? Tell me what you saw,” said George caressingly, as he drew her back into the little sitting-room, where a lamp now shed its soft light over the white table-cloth, and Madame Barbier, who adored the picturesque young English couple, was arranging the supper in a dainty and appetising fashion.
Nouna rubbed her eyes, and clinging to her husband’s arm, let the words of her recital drop from her lips in a slow, hesitating and faltering manner, as if she were fast asleep, and her brain were working sluggishly under the half-paralysing influence of a will stronger than her own.
“I was sitting in here,” she said, “and thinking of all the happiness we have had to-day—the soft air and the warm sun, and your kind eyes upon me, and all the lovely things we saw—the beautiful ladies and the shining water, and the lights among the trees in the Champ Elysées when we came back. And all at once,” her hands tightened their hold upon his sleeve, “I felt that I must get up and go out—there upon the balcony; and I looked out at the sky right in front where it was yellow like flame, and all the pretty pictures of the day I saw quite plainly still in my mind. But then—I don’t know how—I felt my eyes drawn down from the bright sky, and there down below me—to the left, I saw all black gloom, and in it I seemed to see Rahas’ room in Mary Street, with all the pretty toys and bright shawls about just as he used to put them for me to look at. And in the middle Rahas himself, only not kind and gentle as he used to be, but with a wicked cruel face, and burning eyes that frightened me. And I felt afraid, as if I could have screamed. It seemed so strange, for even when he used to look fierce, as he did sometimes, I never minded, and I was never frightened. Was it a dream, George, that I saw? And if it was only a dream, why was I afraid?”
Chiming in so appropriately with his own fears, this vision or fancy of Nouna’s disturbed George a little. He calmed her excitement as well as he could, and found some comfort in the fact that the crafty Oriental had appeared to her, not as the kindly friend he had always professed to be, but as a person inspiring horror. This seemed the more remarkable as George had never mentioned the name of Rahas to his wife since their wedding-day; he came, after a little reflection, to look upon the vision as a proof of the new sympathy which Nouna began to show with his own feelings, and to rejoice in the fact that as the bond between him and his wife grew stronger under the influence of his patient tenderness, the power of any enemy to disturb their happiness was proportionately lessened. This home peace, which was attaching Lauriston to his young wife more strongly every day, was the more grateful to him, as his duties at the Bank were rendered as irksome as possible to him through the prejudice of his chief, Mr. Gurton, who never forgave the rejection of his own candidate for the junior clerk’s post, and who scarcely concealed his wish to find against him some lawful ground of dissatisfaction. This George was careful not to give.
Mr. Gurton was one of those disagreeable brutes who seem to be created as foils to show up the amiability and sweetness of ordinary humanity. He was offensive to his few friends; he was unendurable to the far greater number of people whom nothing but necessity threw in his way. But as a man of business he was clear-headed, shrewd, and enterprising, so exact and penetrating that even if he drank, as his many detractors alleged, there seemed to be no particular reason why he should not, as his business faculties could not be said to be less keen at one time than at another. He hated Lauriston from the first, bullied him on the smallest or on no occasion, and did all in his power to induce the young fellow to throw up his appointment. George took soft words and sour with dogged quietness, and applied himself with all the energy of his character to mastering every detail connected with his new profession, as serenely as if incivility had been his daily bread for years. As a matter of fact, the discourtesy and fault-finding of his chief did not trouble him much; he looked upon Gurton, not without reason, as an ill-bred brute whom one could only turn to account by noting the methods by which he had attained such a splendid dexterity in the management of affairs, and by thus considering him in the light of a noisy machine it was easy to take the sting out of his insults. At the same time this constant friction or avoidance of friction in his business life made home and wife doubly dear and sweet to him.
On the day following Nouna’s strange vision on the balcony, he came home at the usual time, and asked her whether she had had any more “waking dreams.” She answered, reluctantly and shyly, that she had not been on the balcony at all that day. George laughed at her, and told her she should go with him, as the presence of such a coarse creature as a man was a sure preventive of visions. She allowed him to lead her out, being quite brave with the combined forces of husband and sunlight. When they got on the balcony, however, and looked to the left at the house where Nouna had fancied she saw Rahas, a sight met their eyes which, whether a coincidence or not, was strange enough to deepen the unpleasant impression of the evening before.
For the shutters of the uninhabited third floor were now thrown back, and outside the balcony hung a long strip of white calico with this inscription in broad blue letters: “Bazar Oriental.”
George and Nouna read the words, and looked at each other in troubled amazement.
“I’ll have this cleared up to-night,” thought George to himself.
When, true to his determination, George Lauriston visited the new establishment that evening and insisted on seeing the proprietor, an explanation offered itself which robbed Nouna’s vision of most of the mystery attaching to it. For a dapper little Frenchman, who tried to live up to his obviously assumed business title of Ben Hassan by wearing a scarlet fez and a pair of Turkish slippers, immediately appeared behind the servant who opened the door, and announcing himself with a flourishing bow as the proprietor, thrust into Lauriston’s hand a business card, and begged him to inspect his stock, adding that perhaps Monsieur would do him the honour to inaugurate his business and bring him good luck by purchasing some trifle. George consented. The Oriental bazaar consisted of three rooms fitted up with trestles on which were placed trays full of trumpery, gilt sequin necklaces, cheap scarves, and other so-called Eastern wares, such as may be bought for a very small sum in the smaller shops along the Rue de Rivoli. George bought a little feather hand-screen, obviously an “article de Paris,” and returned to his wife quite satisfied that it was the sight of Monsieur Ben Hassan’s red fez at one of the windows which had conjured up in her excited imagination the ground-floor in Mary Street and its younger occupant.
In order to convince his wife of her mistake, George took her next day to the establishment of Monsieur Ben Hassan, and was pleased to find that the nervous fear which had haunted her since her supposed vision faded away in the amusement of turning over the cheap trinkets and toys around her, as the obsequious proprietor, an active and voluble little Parisian, who would have been invaluable as a showman at a country fair, encouraged her to do. George asked him, to satisfy Nouna, whether he had not had a friend with him on the balcony two evenings before, a foreign gentleman, in whom, he said, he thought he recognised an old acquaintance. Ben Hassan said No, he had been working by himself to prepare his “Bazaar” for opening on the following day, and he had been alone except for the occasional assistance of the servant. He admitted also, with a charmingly candid shrug of the shoulders, that his name of Ben Hassan was assumed, that in private life he was simply Jules Dubois, and that there was no gentleman in the business who came from further East than the Faubourg Saint Antoine.
Nouna, to tell the truth, hardly listened to this explanation. She was at heart still so much a child as to find, in trying on Tunisian earrings at a franc and a half a pair, and gold crescent brooches that could not be warranted to retain their colour a second time of wearing, as much pleasure as she had felt, a few weeks back, in decking herself with her wedding diamonds. Noticing this, the artful Ben Hassan informed the lady that he expected, in the course of a few days, a consignment of Indian jewellery which would be well worthy of Madame’s attention, as it was the most marvellously cheap and beautiful assortment that had ever been seen in France. Nouna’s face glowed with interest, which was repressed for the moment by her husband, who said coldly that Madame did not wear imitation jewellery; a statement which seemed calculated to be received with doubt, as Madame, now hung from head to foot with gilt chains and spangled handkerchiefs, was evidently very well satisfied with herself. However, the tactful Parisian bowed low and apologised, humbly observing that the wares in question were continually mounted, by desire of well-known ladies of the Boulevard Saint Germains, with real gems of the highest value. Nouna divested herself of the trinkets with manifest regret, and was with difficulty persuaded by her husband to buy a string of sandalwood beads instead of the barbaric rows of eye-dazzling brass on which her choice had first fallen. George was rather shocked; a taste for cheap finery in his wife seemed quite a new and startling development. As soon as they got on the stairs outside he said, in a low and puzzled voice:
“You wouldn’t really care to have those gimcrack things, would you, Nouna?”
She wanted to sit down on the stairs and take the paper off her beads: stopping in the act, she looked up at him with a laugh, but yet showing a gleam of serious meaning in her red-brown eyes.
“Why not, if I can’t have real ones?” she said with a note of pathos in her voice. “If I had rich things I should sell them to give you money. But these poor ones I can keep and do you no harm.”
And George had a lump in his throat, as he often had now at innocent speeches like this from his wife, which showed the dawnings of a new womanly sympathy with him side by side with the old childish love of finery and glitter.
She showed, by certain impulsive remarks in the course of the next few days, a deep interest in the “marvellously cheap and beautiful assortment of Indian jewellery,” of which the sham Arabian had spoken; and when, towards the end of the week, Monsieur Ben Hassan called one evening, not, as he assured the young Englishman, with the intention of persuading him to buy the mock gems which he had been informed Madame did not wear, but merely to justify in the eyes of Monsieur the praises which he had lavished on his own wares, Nouna showed so much eagerness to see them that George had not the heart to deny her the pleasure. Ben Hassan proceeded, by the light of the lamp which stood on the table amidst the remnants of the dessert, to unfasten a little flat box which he carried, to take out a layer of cotton-wool, and to display, against the velvet lining, rows of flashing white gems which caused Nouna to cry out with irrepressible admiration and longing.
“I flatter myself,” said the Parisian, laying the box on the table and retreating a few paces with a bow, as if trusting his wares to speak for themselves, “that there is not another firm in France which can produce such a class of jewel for the same price.”
“Yes, yes,” said George hastily, with a shrewd guess that to see these sparkling ornaments hidden away again in the little box and carried off without leaving her so much as a single gem to remember them by, would break Nouna’s heart. “But they are only sham jewels, Monsieur Ben Hassan, and a lady who has had diamonds of her own could not condescend to wear these.”
Nouna, who was leaning over the table, fingering the ornaments delicately, and considering them with the intelligent interest of a connoisseur, glanced up at her husband with a twinkle of demure humour in her eyes, and instantly returned to her amusement with condescension so infinite that it was not to be distinguished from the most extravagant admiration. The astute Ben Hassan saw the look, and bowed again with great humility.
“Monsieur, it is true an imitation is but a poor thing when you know it is an imitation,” he said with shoulders raised and hands outstretched in modest pleading. “But I appeal to Madame, who is evidently a judge, if she would have known these stones from real ones?”
Nouna hesitated, then quietly picked out a pair of diamond solitaire earrings, and held them out under the lamp in her little pink palm.
“I should not have known these from real ones,” she said doubtfully, and she looked up with an inquiring glance into the Parisian’s face.
Ben Hassan drew himself up with much satisfaction.
“You hear, Monsieur,” he said proudly, “Madame would not have known these earrings from real diamonds, and the cost of the pair is only ten francs!”
“Ten francs!” echoed Nouna with incredulous delight.
And as she turned to her husband with a low murmur, “Oh, George!” the paymaster saw that he was doomed. Without further show of resistance he paid the ten francs, and signed to the bowing, smirking Ben Hassan to pack up his traps and take himself off, which the Parisian did, departing with a torrent of high-flown thanks for their patronage and with every appearance of being highly satisfied with the transaction. So contented did he seem indeed, that so soon as the door closed behind him, and Nouna rushed into the bedroom to try on her purchase, George instinctively took stock of all the portable property which had been within the lively Ben Hassan’s reach, to make sure that his ostensible occupation had not been a cover for a predatory one. He had scarcely reassured himself on this point when Nouna rushed in like a radiant little fire-fly, her new ornaments twinkling in her ears, her eyes dancing with mysterious excitement, her dress changed from a simple muslin to a ball-dress of yellow gauzy material in honour of her brilliant bargain. She flitted up to him almost breathlessly, and pulled his head down to her level that she might whisper into his ear a communication which appeared to be of vital importance.
“Do you think,” she suggested solemnly, “that he could have made a mistake, and that they arereal?”
George laughed, and said No, he did not think it at all likely, whereupon she was silent for a little while, and then began again in the same tone, but with much hesitation.
“You know, George, he told me that day we went to his bazaar that he had some real diamonds in his stock, and said that, that——”
“Well, that what?” asked her husband, keeping his voice at a gently subdued pitch, with a intuitive feeling that a confession was coming.
“That if I would call in—some day—by myself—he would show them to me.”
“By yourself!” cried George, all his blood on fire in a moment.
Nouna seemed at once to become a mere terror-struck heap, and her husband saw his fatal mistake.
“Did you go? Did you ever go?” he asked in the softest tones he could produce. But for a few minutes she was too much frightened even to speak, except for a muttered, “No, no, no,” as she shook and shivered. When at last by patient gentleness he had mastered her fear, he extracted from her, little by little, the avowal that she had met Ben Hassan one day outside the door of the house where he lived as she was returning home from her marketing, and that he had persuaded her to go up stairs and see some diamonds he had just received. At the door, however, Nouna declared that she had been frightened by hearing another man’s voice inside, and had refused to go in, and that Ben Hassan had brought out some earrings to show her, and had declared that if she would like to take a pair he would be satisfied with only a small payment to start with, and she could pay off the rest in instalments at her convenience.
“But I was frightened, and would not, and I tossed his hand up with the diamonds, and they fell on the floor and on the stairs, and I ran down and left him, and have never seen him since until this evening,” finished Nouna, hurrying to the end of her confession. “And I know it was wrong to go up, but I didn’t go in. And now I have done all I could by telling you everything. And you can take the earrings back if you like, only don’t be angry with me, because I can’t bear it.”
She burst out crying hysterically, and it was some time before she was calm enough for her husband to be able to ask her one more question. Did she know the voice of the man she heard talking inside the bazaar? At first she professed she did not, but presently she acknowledged, when asked whether it was like the voice of Rahas, that she thought it was. Then George was very sweet to her, and said she mustn’t trouble herself any more about the matter, that she was a very good dear girl to tell him everything, and that it would have been better still if she had told him at first; that she must give up the earrings, as it was evident the man was a treacherous beast who might get them into trouble. He added that she was tired, and must go to bed, and fall asleep as fast as she could, and dream of the real jewels she should have some day if she continued to be the sweet and good little wife she now was. And so, amidst tears from the wife and consoling kisses, the little shining ear-studs were taken out, and George having become by this time a promising lady’s maid, brushed out her curls for her, and tucked her up in bed, as composedly as if nothing in the world had happened to disturb the calm course of their daily life.
But no sooner was his wife thus disposed of than George, saying he must write a letter and take it to the post, went out of the bedroom, closed the door, and after waiting just long enough, as he thought, to make Nouna think, if she was listening, that he had written a letter, he went out and down the stairs. But Nouna had too much native subtlety herself to be easily tricked. As soon as she heard the outer door of the flat close, she leapt out of bed, muffled herself up in a wrapper, and stepped out on to the balcony. She could see that there were lights in the rooms occupied by the Oriental Bazaar, and that the shadows of men passed and repassed quickly on the inner side of the striped blinds. Leaning over the iron railing, she watched in much excitement for her husband’s appearance in the street below. In a very few minutes she heard the wicket-gate in theporte cochéreopen, saw George cross the street, and enter the house where Ben Hassan was established. She could have cried out to him from where she stood, frozen by a great terror lest these men, whom he had gone to punish, should be too strong for him and should do him harm. But then, would they dare, would they be able, even if they dared, to hurt him, the king of men? Little by little the seed sown by patient kindness, by conscientious effort, was moving in the earth and beginning to show itself alive. George was not now merely the handsomest, straightest, gentlest of voice among the men she knew, he was also the one person who never did wrong, who if he was angry proved in the end to have what she acknowledged to be a just cause at the bottom of his anger, whose rather surprising notions of what one ought and ought not to do were at least simple when one came to know him well; and whose opinion was now beginning to have so much weight with her that this evening it had even urged her in the strangest way to break through her habits and make an uncomfortable confession of her own accord. So she reasoned, arguing with herself as he crossed the road whether or not she should try from the height of the fourth floor to attract his attention. It would not be difficult, she felt. The influence she was secure in possessing over him would make him stop and look up at a call of her voice such as would scarcely be heard by the neighbours in the adjoining flats. Suddenly she drew herself erect, a thrill of passionate pride vibrating through her heart, and she laughed aloud and stretched her little hands to the dark sky.
“He does not need my help, for he is one of God’s own sons,” she whispered, and looking up steadily into the eye of night she waited, with heart beating violently, but with head erect in valiant confidence.
He had to get up those long flights of stairs, but he would not be long, she knew. She counted the steps he would take, picturing him with grave, earnest face, wearing that look which, when she had done something of which he disapproved, made her want to slide along against the wall with her head turned away from him. Theentresol, first floor, second floor; surely by this time he must be at the third. She clenched her fingers till the nails made red marks in her soft palms, and strained her eyes in keen staring at the striped blinds. The moving shadows behind them had disappeared. Ben Hassan and Rahas—if it was he—had gone to the door when the sharp ring came at the bell. Nouna held her breath. Surely, surely, she heard sounds from the rooms; yes, yes, a noise of something overturned, and then the lights were put out. The moment after, one of the windows was burst open with a crash, and two people, whose figures she could only see dimly in the darkness, sprang quickly, the one after the other, out on to the balcony, climbed over on to that of the next house, and disappeared through one of the windows. Then there was silence for a time which seemed long to her, and she saw a dim light reappear in the windows of the Oriental Bazaar. She guessed that it was her husband, searching; in a few minutes the light moved, and disappeared. She watched until she saw him reappear in the street below, then she went back into her room, and crept into bed again. When he came softly into the room, holding a candle he had lit in the next room, he crept up to the bedside and shaded the flame to look at her. As he did so, her face quivered, and he touched her forehead lightly with his fingers. The muscles of her mouth instinctively relaxed, and by the thrill that ran through her frame and communicated itself to his he knew that she was awake.
“You are cold, dearest,” he whispered.
She sprang up, wide awake, full of life and love, with the bright blood rushing up into her cheeks, and tender, passion-dark eyes.
“No, no, not now, not now,” she cried incoherently, as she threw her arms about him. “I was cold when I thought you were going to face those wicked men, all through my foolishness. But now you are safe I am warm, warm, and listen, George, I am always going to be good and tell you everything, so that you may never get into danger through me any more.”
But George was frightened, for her feet were cold as marble, and her lips hot and parched, and he sat up a long time beside her, afraid lest her imprudence should have brought on a fever. Next morning she insisted against his will on getting up. She did not feel well and was very fanciful, astonishing him by the announcement that she wanted to go to church. The day being Sunday, the Oriental Bazaar was closed, and there was nothing for George to do but to gratify her desire. He wished, as in duty bound, to take her to the English church; but Nouna was not particular to a creed, and she had set her heart on going to the Madeleine. So, with some scruples of conscience, he took her to High Mass; and as she remained perfectly quiet and attentive during the entire service, he comforted himself with the reflection that, as what he had been taught to call the “errors of Rome” were matters of the deepest ignorance and indifference to her, it was hardly an ethical mistake to let her see religion in an attractive light. When they came out he asked her rather curiously what she thought of it.
“Oh, I liked it very, very much; I shouldn’t mind going to church there every day,” she answered with enthusiasm.
“Why,” said George, “the service isn’t much more beautiful than that at St. ——’s,” and he named an English ritualistic church to which he had twice taken her in London.
“There is a difference,” she said thoughtfully.
“Well, what is it?”
Nouna considered a moment. “You know those friends of yours that you took me to see acting in a piece at Saint George’s Hall?”
“Yes; well?”
“And then I saw the same piece acted at the Court Theatre just before we left London?”
“Yes.”
“Well, the difference is just like that.”
George laughed. “I’ve heard people say something like that before, Nouna.”
“Isn’t it right, then?”
“I don’t know, dear.”
“George, may I be a Roman Catholic if I like?”
“No, Nouna.”
“Why not?”
“You mustn’t choose a religion in a hurry, any more than you may a husband. In both cases, one ought to be enough for a lifetime; and if you once begin to change your mind about either, you never know when to stop.”
“But I had my choice of a husband, and I didn’t of a religion; I had to take what was given me.”
“You would never do for a Catholic, Nouna. They have to confess all their sins, even very little ones that you think nothing of.”
“Well, that’s what you’re always wanting me to do.”
“See then. You shall go to Mass every Sunday and then confess your sins to me, and you will be the very best of Catholics.”
“But, George, George,” she began, almost in a whisper, holding his arm tighter, and looking away over the Place de la Concorde, which they were now crossing, to the trees of the Tuileries, “there are some things—not sins—that one doesn’t—like—to tell—I don’t know why—but they make one think of so many things—that all seem new—and make one feel—like a different person. I suppose a man—never feels like that, but I’m a woman—quite a woman—now, George.”
They walked on without speaking after that, till they got among the trees; then both stopped and looked at each other—shy, for that little whispered suggestion made each appear to the other in a new and sanctified light. The influence of the solemn and impressive Church rites was upon them still, and the bright sun was playing upon their earnest faces through a moving trellis-work of leaves. They had come to a moment which was to be the sweetest in all their lives but one; a moment of perfect confidence, perfect happiness, perfect hope. So they stood quite silently in an ecstasy of contented love, each reading beautiful meanings in the other’s steadfast eyes, each seeing and worshipping, in this moment of exalted human feeling, what was best and most worshipful in the other. They felt so strong, so radiant as they walked home, she leaning upon him and not talking at all, that every evil which had been a burden yesterday and would be a burden to-morrow, became a mere shadow slinking into corners and dwindling into insignificance before the flood of sunshine in their hearts. Chloris White, Rahas, Ben Hassan, and the odious Gurton were mere names to George that day, and even when with the following morning the drudgery and petty annoyances of workaday life began again, he carried in his heart such a spring of sweet human happiness that he received the snubs of his chief as cheerfully as if they had been compliments, and bore with fortitude the discovery that Monsieur Ben Hassan had “gone away for a few days on business,” leaving his premises in the charge of a stolid boy of thirteen or so, who knew nothing definite about his employer’s movements. George therefore kept the earrings in his possession and waited for some claim to be made. It came at the end of a week in the shape of a bill for twelve hundred and fifty francs, ten of which had been paid on account, for a pair of diamond ear-studs supplied to Monsieur Lauriston. George sent back the ear-studs by registered post with a letter threatening Ben Hassan with the police court. In a few days he got back the ear-studs from the post-office, as the person Ben Hassan was not to be found at the address given. George took no further steps until he was summoned before the Civil Tribunal, where he appeared in the full belief that he had only to relate the facts of the case to confound Ben Hassan and lay him open to the charge of perjury. To his great astonishment and indignation, however, Ben Hassan solemnly swore that he had sold the diamonds as real stones, and calling upon George to produce them, challenged any one in the court to assert that it was possible to suppose they could be bought for ten francs. Could the Englishman’s wife assert that she did not know them to be real? George had not dared to bring his wife into court, fearing the effects of the excitement upon her. He weakened his case by asserting emphatically that Ben Hassan was in the pay of a man who wished to ruin him: for he had no proofs to bring forward, and the foreigner’s halting French in which he made the accusation compared so unfavourably with the torrent of eloquence with which the artful Parisian refuted it, that, on Ben Hassan’s refusing to take back the jewels, the magistrate ordered the Englishman to pay the amount claimed, in monthly instalments of five hundred francs.
With the stolid resistance to unpleasant facts characteristic of his nation, George treated this decision with utter contempt, and indeed believed that Ben Hassan would not dare to push the case further. But on arriving home one rainy day early in the following month, he found his apartments occupied by twohuissiers, who were busily employed in dragging out into the hall poor Nouna’s trunks and such furniture as they had bought themselves, which the landlady, anxious to save her own things, was pointing out to them. Nouna, deathly white and shaking from head to foot, was crouching on the sofa, drawing her breath heavily, and watching them with bright and burning eyes. Fear of what the consequences of this scene might be to her sobered George in his first fierce outburst of indignation. She had hardly moved when he came in, only glancing up at him in shame and terror at what she knew to be the result of her own indiscretion. He went up to the sofa and reassured her by the kind, firm, protecting pressure of his hand upon her head, while he asked the men by what authority they were acting. They showed him their warrant; nothing could be more correct. He asked them whether they would desist from their work and remain in the hall outside for half an hour, while he went to a friend to try to raise the money. The men consented at once, and retired while George, soothing his agitated wife as well as he could, carried her into the next room, laid her on the bed, and covering her with a rug, told her not to worry herself, as it would be all right in half an hour, when he would be back again with her, and the men would go away satisfied.
With his hand on the door he looked back yearningly. She was quieter now, but as she leaned on her elbows and watched him with feverish eyes, it seemed to him that her gaze was wandering and unintelligent, and that the real matter-of-fact trouble which was sending him on his unpleasant errand had melted in her excited mind to a dim and horrible dread.
“George, don’t go, don’t go!” rang in his ears as he went down the stairs and out of the house.
Poor George felt that he had never in his life had anything quite so distasteful to do as the task he had before him now of asking a favour of Mr. Gurton. But there was no help for it, and so he put the best face he could upon the matter, got to the bank, where his chief was, he knew, still at this hour to be found, and knocked at the door of his private room.
“Come in,” called out the well-known husky voice.
Mr. Gurton was reading a letter. His face was flushed and his eyes were dull, but he had as much command of himself as usual.
“Oh, it’s you, is it? What do you want?” he asked with the extra shade of surliness which he used towards the people he did not like.
“Yes, sir,” said George. “I am sorry to disturb you after office hours, but it is upon a matter of so much importance to me that I hope you will excuse my coming to you.”
“Well, what is it? Be quick.”
The words, the appeal, stuck in the young man’s throat; but out they must come.
“I am in pressing difficulties, sir; I can’t explain to you how now, but it was through no fault of mine. Just now when I went home I found a couple of men seizing my wife’s things. She is in a delicate state of health, and I am afraid of the shock for her. Will you be so kind as to advance me twenty pounds of my salary? I will write to my friends in England to-night, and I shall have the money next week, and will return it to you at once, if you please. It is a very difficult thing for me to ask, but I hope you won’t refuse me.”
He hurried out the words, not daring to look at Mr. Gurton, who had risen from his chair and walked over to the fireplace with a tread which in its pompous heaviness told George before he looked up that he had failed. There was a slight pause when he finished speaking, Mr. Gurton rattling his watch-chain and clearing his throat. George raised his eyes, and saw that his chief’s bloated face expressed nothing but complacent satisfaction. Then the devil woke in the lad with such a hungry fury that he turned hastily to the door, afraid of himself. Mr. Gurton, unluckily, could not resist a little play with his fish, and he called him back. George hesitated, and at last turned slowly. Mr. Gurton paused again to find some particularly offensive form of expression, for he thought he saw his opportunity, by insulting the young fellow past endurance, to force him to resign his post, and so make room for his own reputed nephew. He had been put in possession, too, of a damaging fact against George, and here was the occasion made to his hand, to use it.
“I’m sorry for this little misfortune, Lauriston, deuced sorry; not only because it is quite beyond my powers to assist you, but because, you see, it’s so particularly bad for a House that’s just starting, for anything disreputable to be known about itsemployés.”
“Disreputable!” echoed George in a low voice, starting erect. “You have no right to use such a word without knowing the facts, Mr. Gurton.”
“Oh, I know all about the facts, and so does everybody,” said Mr. Gurton with confidential familiarity. “You’ve got an extravagant little madam for your wife, and somebody of course must pay the piper.”
George turned again to leave the room. Mr. Gurton, who was a big, muscular man of six feet two, with two strides reached the door first, admitted a lad with despatches who was waiting outside, and held the door close as he continued:
“You must listen, sir, to what I have to say. You were received in this House simply because we were informed that you were highly connected, and that your social position would be an advantage to the firm. What follows? You go nowhere, you know nobody; you are seen in omnibuses, on penny steamers with a little oddly-dressed girl—”
“Take care; you are speaking of my wife,” said George, in a low tremulous voice which, with his bowed head, gave an utterly wrong impression that he was cowed.
Mr. Gurton put his hands in his pockets.
“Well, sir, and if you choose to marry a courtesan’s daughter whom you picked up in the slums—it is——”
Like a wild beast suddenly loosed George had him by the throat, and with hands to which his mad anger gave a grip of steel, he swayed the man’s huge frame once forward and flung him back with all his force. Gasping, choking, without time to cry out, Mr. Gurton staggered backwards, his head struck against the corner of an iron safe that stood behind him, and he fell heavily to the floor. Lauriston left the frightened errand-boy to pick him up, and rushed out of the room. He had suddenly remembered that there was one more chance; a fellow-clerk who was pretty well off lodged in the Rue Saint Honoré. He made his way in that direction, through the still heavily-falling rain, without another thought of the man he had just left, except a savage wish that he had not humiliated himself by applying to the cur.
But Mr. Gurton remained on the floor of his private room, and neither spoke nor moved.
Inthe excitement of a battle, when each man deals blows for his life, maddened by the clash of sabres, the roar of cannon, fierce cries, and ghastly sights, he gives and receives wounds of which he takes no account, absorbed in the struggle to beat the enemy back; so George, fighting for something dearer than his own safety, forgot his humiliation at Mr. Gurton’s hands, forgot his own outburst of passion and the rash act which followed, and still thought of nothing but Nouna’s wild, terror-struck face, and of the next effort he should make to remove the cause of her fear. The fellow-clerk, to whom he was now going to apply, was going out of town for the night; if he should have started already, there would be nothing to do but to telegraph to Lord Florencecourt and, while waiting for the help he would be sure to send immediately, to let thehuissierscarry off what they would as security. This was a terrible contingency, on account of the shock it might give to Nouna; it had to be faced, however, for, on arriving at the lodging of his fellow-clerk, George learned that he had been gone half an hour.
It was not until his last hope of getting immediate help had thus disappeared that George, returning quickly towards his home, remembered what had happened in the office, and realised that by an assault upon his chief, which Mr. Gurton would probably describe as unprovoked, he had lost his situation, and perhaps got himself into a worse scrape still, for he had not waited to find out whether Mr. Gurton had been injured by the fall. George thought he would call at the bank and make inquiries, but on arriving at the corner of the street in which the building stood, he saw that a large and excited crowd had already collected, in spite of the rain, about the doors, and that somegendarmeswere pressing the people back.
“I suppose the boy rushed out, shrieking ‘Murder!’ and brought up the whole neighbourhood,” thought George. “I hope to heaven he’s not seriously hurt.”
A sudden chill seized him and his heart seemed to become encased in stone. When a heavy man falls, striking his head on the way to the ground—oh, but nonsense, he should have seen, have known what he had done; he should have realised—What? George left a blank there which he could not fill. The possibility suggested by the sight of that swaying, excited mob, thronging, gesticulating fifty yards in front of him, with morbidly eager faces all upturned towards the windows of the first floor, where the bank was established, was too ghastly, too awful. He tried to laugh at himself for entertaining an idea so fanciful, so ridiculous, but the crowd fascinated him; he could not turn away without—Ah, yes, by going nearer, by joining the stream of people that was still flowing rapidly in that direction, he might learn what sort of a story they had got hold of. The murmurs grew louder as he got deeper and deeper in the throng, until, when he was well wedged in a feverishly eager phalanx of horror-mongers against whom the fewgendarmespresent were altogether powerless, his curiosity was satisfied to the full, for the story bandied from mouth to mouth was very definite indeed. A foreigner—English or German, it was not certain which, had had a quarrel with his employer, some said about a woman, some said about money, and had murdered him and escaped. Every version of the tale, however they might differ as to other details, contained the two last items—the murder and the escape of the murderer. George stayed deliberately, looked mechanically up at the windows with the rest of the crowd, and gathering in every different turn of the story, with strained keenness of hearing, hoping desperately to hear some one, brighter-witted and better-informed than the rest, contradict the spreading report and mock at the exaggerations of the herd. The moments dragged on; they were expecting a force ofgendarmes, and the excitement increased. George, unable to move in the dense mass, was in a state of frenzied defiance of the crowd’s surmises, when a quick turn of every head to the left, and hoarse cry “Les voilà, les voilà,” told him that the police were coming, and the next instant he was being borne off, a helpless unit in the surging crowd as it retreated before the advancinggendarmes. Struggling to work his way out of the crush of people when free movement became possible, George stumbled against one of thegendarmeswho had been waiting for assistance to disperse the mob. He was a slim man, scarcely of middle height, and it was he, and not the stalwart young Englishman, who suffered in the collision, staggering a step or two with an oath. But George shrank back with a great shock. If that ugly rumour should have any touch of truth, then his relation to the little slim man was already that of the hare to the hound, and the start would not be long delayed.
He was free from the crowd now, and was hurrying home sick at heart and giddy of brain, trying to realise the possibility he could no longer shirk. If Mr. Gurton were dead, he—George Lauriston—was a murderer. That would be quite clear to any judge and jury; George saw that, with the apparently passionless clearness with which one vivid idea can strike the mind in a state of white-hot excitement. He felt no shock at the act, but only at the consequences, not as they affected himself, but as they touched Nouna. George was not the man to waste emotion over the exit from the world of a man who, if he had had fifty more years of life, would only have used them to add to his record of evil; he had certainly never wished or intended to send him out of it, but, always excepting those ugly consequences, he as certainly did not wish him back. The whole matter presented itself to him only in one light: if the hideous rumour were true, he must leave his wife; what then would become of her? It was to him as if his very heart was pierced and quivering under the point of this torturing thought. He was not troubled by any imaginings of what might be his own fate; his whole soul being merely a storehouse for his devotion to his wife, as his body was a shield to protect and a tool to work for her, there would be nothing left to him worth a man’s thought if she were taken away. Taken away! Taken away! The very words as they passed through his brain turned him coward; the clank of his own boots on the stones of the street frightened him, and he turned round with the starting eyes and parted lips of the fugitive, to make sure that he was not already pursued, that before he could see his wife’s face again he would not be caught.
He was wet from head to foot and trembling like a leaf by the time he got inside the gate-way of the house. Everything was quiet; as he glanced at the wife of theconcierge, sewing behind the glass door of her little room, at the children playing in the yard, at the cat curled up on the stairs, he rebuked himself for his folly in taking a wild mob-rumour for a truth, and comforted by the homely, every-day aspect the house seemed to wear, he ran up the stairs and let himself into the top flat with a lightening heart. At any rate he was sure of one thing: if the worst came to the worst, they could not take him now without one more long look at his darling. In the terrible, searing excitement of the last hour, all George’s habitual self-control had given way, and the great passion of his life, which was always burning steadily in the depths of his heart, leapt up in towers of flame, showing luridly every weak spot in his nature. Like the sailor who bursts open the spirit-stores when the ship is past saving, George sprang across the sitting-room with a fierce yearning for his wife’s lips, with words more eloquent, caresses more tender, than any he had ever yet showered upon her, ready for one last interview which was to sum up all the happiness they had enjoyed together, to stamp upon her heart and mind, once and for ever, the memory of the man who had held her as the jewel of his soul, who set no value on his own life without her.
He opened the bedroom door with clammy, trembling hands. Was he blinded by the rushing blood in his brain, or dazed by the sudden change from the lamp-light in the hall to the murky dimness of the fading daylight? Or was Nouna really not there? He crossed the floor to the bed, calling to her hoarsely by name, and hunting with his hands over every inch of the tumbled quilt where she had lain that afternoon. He went out on to the balcony, walking from end to end of it with his hand along the wet and slippery railing, feeling for her all the way, as if unable to trust to the senses of sight and sound. Then he returned to the sitting-room and still groping in the dusk, gave forth a loud cry that made the roof ring.
“Nouna! Nouna!”
The door opened slowly; but as he rushed towards it he met only Madame Barbier, the landlady, who, scared and shivering, tried to retreat. But George caught her by the wrists and forced her to answer him.
“Where is my wife?”
“Oh, monsieur, monsieur, don’t you know? Have you missed her? Don’t look like that, or I cannot, I will not answer you, monsieur; you frighten me; it is not my fault, I have done nothing, nothing at all.”
George put his hand to his head with a muttered curse on the woman’s torturing idiotcy, and then forced himself to speak to her calmly.
“My dear madame, surely you can see I don’t want to frighten you. But for God’s sake speak out.”
Slowly, hesitatingly, paralysed by a sudden fear that the news she had would prove even more disquieting than suspense, she spoke.
“When you were gone, monsieur, and thehuissierswere still here”—George started; he had forgotten thehuissiers, and their disappearance had not troubled him—“a gentleman called, monsieur, saying he was a friend of yours, and he asked for you; and when I said you were out he said he would see madame. She came out to see him, monsieur, and shrieked when she met him; I know, monsieur, because I followed her into the room after helping her to dress, and she told me to stay.”
George held himself as still as stone, afraid of stopping the recital.
“A dark-skinned man,” he said, not questioningly.
“Yes, monsieur. Madame wished to retire, but he would not allow it. I gathered that he said the mother of madame was waiting to see her, and that you, monsieur, were with her, and that she had sent money to get monsieur and madame out of their little difficulty. So he paid the men and got a receipt from them, and they left. And madame put on her things and went away with him in afiacre. And I am sure, monsieur, that if I had supposed you would have any objection——”
George let her hand drop.
“When did they go?” he asked in a strangled whisper.
“Not long after you, monsieur. I am sure I thought every moment that you would be back together. But, ah! monsieur is ill! Can I not assist you? Someeau de vie——”
George had reeled into a chair and was breathing heavily. This last shock brought no pang; something began clicking and whirring in his head, and he thought he felt a hard, cold substance pressing closer and closer to his neck till he could not breathe, but began to choke and to gurgle, tearing with both hands at his throat to get the tightening grip away.
“Ah, the knife! the knife!” he burst out hoarsely, as he staggered up on to his feet with starting eyes and labouring breath. “Take her away! take her away! Don’t let her see me!”
And he fell to the floor in a fit, just as a loud knocking began on the outer door of the flat.
When he came to himself he was in the tender hands of the police. They treated him very civilly however, told him they could wait while he changed his clothes, which had been soaked through and through by the heavy rain, and caused George, who was too much exhausted in mind and body to feel even his uncertainty about his wife except as a dull pain, to think kindly of the French allowance for “extenuating circumstances.” He was quite broken down, and, regardless of the shivering fits which seized him in rapid succession, was ready to go with them at once, only asking on what charge he was arrested. On learning that it was for murderous assault, he seemed scarcely enough master of himself to feel relieved that it was no worse; and when they added that it might be changed to a graver one if the injured man, who had been taken to a hospital, should die before the trial, George merely nodded without any sign of vivid interest. Indeed, if he had had complete command of his feelings and his wits, he would not have cared two straws whether Mr. Gurton lived or died. The sentence George had incurred would certainly at the best be a term of imprisonment, at the end of which, whether the period were long or short, Nouna would be as effectually lost to him as if he were already dead.
George Lauriston was of the highly nervous, imaginative temperament to which ambition, hope, devotion are as the springs of life; when these were stopped or dried up, he became at once the withered husk of a man, a helpless log, not chafing at his confinement, not resigning himself to it, but living through the dull days like a brute, without emotion, almost without thought, weighed down by a leaden depression which threatened to end in the most fearful of all madness—a haunted melancholy. He learned without interest on the second day after his arrest that Mr. Gurton was dead. His formal appearance before the magistrate did him an unrecognised good, by rousing him out of his torpor into a strong sense of shame which bit into his very bones. To appear before a crowd, among whom were some of his Paris acquaintances, a prisoner, a social wreck, with every hope blighted, every honest ambition killed, was an ordeal for which he had to summon all his shaken manliness for one last gallant effort to show a stubborn face to fate. There was a worse experience before him. When he was brought into court to be formally committed for trial, the first faces he saw were those of Dicky Wood and Clarence Massey, the latter of whom wept like a child in open court, and was threatened with ejection for his repeated offers of bail to the extent of every penny he possessed. Lord Florencecourt was not present. It gave George a shock to hear that the charge against him was murder; the presence of his old comrades seemed to emphasise the gravity of the case, which he realised for the first time since his arrest. When asked if he had anything to say, he answered: “I am not guilty. I reserve my defence,” and remained stoically erect and grave while he was formally committed for trial and removed from the court.