On the following day, however, he received two visits; the first was from a well-known Parisian barrister, who had been retained for his defence by Clarence Massey, and had come to receive his client’s instructions. The second was from Ella Millard, who was paler, thinner, plainer than ever, and who trembled from head to foot as her hand touched his.
“Ella, my dear girl, you should not have come,” said he, more distressed by her grief than by his own plight; “I can’t understand how Sir Henry and Lady Millard allowed you to come.”
“They didn’t allow me; I just came,” answered Ella in a shaking voice, with a little Americanism she had caught from her mother. “And I’ve given uncle Horace such a talking-to as he never had before, even from my aunt. I only heard about it yesterday; they kept the papers from us; but I’ve made up for lost time since.”
She was neither tender nor gentle; perhaps she could not trust herself to be either. Her eyes wandered quickly from one object to another, never resting upon his for two seconds at a time; upon her face there was a fixed scared look, as if her muscles had been frozen at the moment of some fearful shock. She spoke very rapidly, and scarcely allowed him a chance of answer or comment.
“It is very sweet and kind of——” he began, when she started off again.
“Oh, no, I haven’t been sweet at all; I never am, you know. First I scolded papa and mamma for not letting us know; then, as I told you, I went for uncle Horace; and now I’ve come to finish by an attack upon you. You have been ungrateful and foolish towards us, George; you know we all love——”
Her voice trembled, and she stopped. As for George, the sudden flood of warm sympathy and friendship was too much for him. He took her hand in a vehement grasp, and turned his back upon her.
“And now,” she continued briskly, though her fingers twitched in the clasp of his, “we mustn’t waste time. I didn’t come to make a fool of myself, but to see if there wasn’t something I could do for you. Where is Nouna, George?”
He turned round quickly, and looking straight into her eyes, saw how well she read his heart, and pressed her hands against his breast with passionate gratitude. She drew them hastily away.
“Well, well, tell me what you know, or what you want to know,” she cried, stamping her foot impatiently. “We’ve heard all sorts of stories already, of course.”
“What stories? Yes, yes, tell me, tell me everything.”
“Oh, that she ran away from you, and that was why you quarrelled with the man.”
“And what did you think?”
“I said it was nonsense. People always think that a little lively woman who talks fast and has playful ways must be a perfect fool, but I told them Nouna had quite sense enough to know that she had a good husband, and that if she had already left off loving you it was because you had beaten her—which I did not believe.”
“Ella, you’re a—a—brick.”
“That is to say I’m a hard little thing made for use, and not for ornament. I see,” said she quite saucily. “Well, now tell me what has become of her.”
“I—don’t—know,” said George slowly, with such laboured utterance that Ella grew instantly very serious, guessing the gravity of his fears. “If you—if you could find her—”
Suddenly he gave way, and, dropping on to a chair, hid his face in his hands. There was a little pause, during which Ella stood so motionless that he might have fancied himself alone; then he felt her hands on his head, not with a hesitating timid touch, but with the firm pressure of fingers that seemed to act as conductors of the human strength and kindliness that lay in her own heart.
“Tell me all you fancy, or all you fear, George. I wormed everything out of my poor uncle Horace last night, so you may speak to me quite freely. Do you think she has gone back to her mother?”
The mere mention of this suggestion in a matter-of-fact tone, without any affectation of shrinking, or horror, conveyed a vague sense of comfort. It implied that this was the most likely course to have been taken, and also the most to be desired. He looked up and fixed his eyes on hers with the hopeful confidence of a child towards the stranger who lets it out of the dark cupboard where it has been shut up for punishment.
“She was taken away by a trick, just before I was arrested. The man who did it was a wretch who has been in the pay of—of her mother, and who was in love with her himself. Ella, can you understand?”
She shivered; the look of agony in his eyes was too horrible to be borne. She wrenched her right hand from his and brought it sharply down on his shoulder.
“Look here!” she said earnestly, “you are torturing yourself without cause; I am sure of it. I am a woman, and I can feel what a woman would do. Nouna is sharp and bright, and even cunning upon occasion. She would not be ten minutes in that man’s society without knowing that she must be on her guard; I suppose he promised to take her to her mother; then depend upon it she would never let him rest until he had done so.”
“Ah, but you don’t know all, Ella. Her mother hates me——”
“—— quarrelled with you, and threatened all sorts of awful things, I know; uncle Horace told me. But George, you silly old George, don’t you know that after all she’s hermother, and do you really believe that when Nouna came to her, flinging her arms about her, worshipping her, and looking upon her as her refuge, her safety—remember that!—that she would, or could undo all the work of her life, and use now to make her daughter miserable means which she would not use before to make her, according tohernotions, happy?”
George’s face grew lighter; he looked up out of the window and then turned again to the girl.
“Certainly—as you put it—it seems possible—”
“Of course it is possible, probable, and I will stake my word—true. You men are good creatures, but you can’t reason. Now I will write direct to the mother——”
“My dear Ella, I don’t think you must do that. Ask Lady Mill——”
“Nonsense. Don’t be old-maidish. To-morrow you shall hear something—something good, I earnestly believe.”
“Ella, you are killing me,” said George in a stifled voice. “If you knew—what it is—after these awful days—and nights—to hear——”
“A human voice again? I know,” said she, speaking more hurriedly than ever to hide the breaks that would come in her clear tones. “Only don’t trouble, don’t worry yourself. Clarence Massey—bless him!—has been crawling on the ground for me to walk upon him ever since he found I—I—I was coming to—to see you. His grandfather is just dead, and he has come into £4,000 a year, and he wants to bribe all the prison officials with annuities to let you escape. We caught the barrister outside when he left you, and when he said they could not bring it in—the worst——” here her voice gave way, “there was not evidence enough, we could both have kissed him, George; I’m sure we could.”
She had talked herself out of breath, and was obliged to stop, panting and agitated through all her hectic liveliness. George himself was speechless and could do nothing but wring her hands, so she went on again after a moment’s pause.
“You mustn’t expect to get off altogether, I’m afraid. I dare not speak about this much, because it is so dreadful to us all—everybody. But you must keep a good heart, for you have friends as deep as the sea and as firm as the rocks, George; and as for your little wife, why she shall live among us like a qu—queen in exile until her lord comes back again to make her ha—happy.”
The warder had been clicking the keys outside for some minutes; he now gently opened the door and gave a respectful cough. George seized the girl’s hands and pressed upon them kisses that left red marks on the pale flesh before he could let her go.
“God bless you, Ella,” he whispered hoarsely, “you have saved my heart from breaking.”
The next moment the door shut upon her, but the radiance shed upon the bare walls by the pure sweet woman illumined them still.
A night, and a day, and a night, and a day, and again a night passed during which time George heard nothing more of his ministering angel or her promised comfort. Then on the second day his door opened, and a lady to see him was announced. The few instants which elapsed before she appeared were more intensely exciting to him than the pause before the judge pronounces sentence is to the prisoner. It was not Ella; she would have been in like a sparrow before the announcement was well out of the warder’s mouth. His suspense did not last a half-minute. With slow and hesitating steps a woman entered, oddly dressed in garments that were obviously never intended to be worn together; a shabby old grey flannel dressing-gown with scraps of torn lace trailing along the floor behind her, an opera-cloak of light brown satin embroidered in gold thread bordered with sable-tails and fastened by a brooch of sapphires, a battered black bonnet and a lace veil as thick as a mask, formed a costume so grotesque that at the first moment George failed to recognise in the odd figure the luxurious and once daintily dressed Chloris White. The change in her, when she took off her veil as the warder retreated, was even more striking: it appalled George, who had not had enough experience of women of her class and their dismal vagaries to understand this ghastly but common metamorphosis of the beauty of one day to the hag of the next. He had thought in the glare of the sunlight, that afternoon when he had carried her off to the boat, that the liberal daubing of pink and white and black made her beautiful face hideous; now, as she sat, heedless of her appearance, in the full light of the little barred window, her face as innocent of paint as his own, though not so clean, looked, in its withered yellowness, with its sunken eyes and vicious furrows, so inexpressibly uncanny and revolting, that he was forced to acknowledge the wisdom of a practice which disguised in some measure the ugly traces of base thoughts and foul deeds. He had seen her first in all the pride of her vogue, of her success in the career she had chosen; now he saw her in the alternate mood of a degradation, a self-abandonment, a wretchedness, which mocked the possessor of treasures which would have made an art-museum rich, and of jewels and furs which now only served, the former to enhance the weird hideousness of her sallow skin, the latter to emphasise the slovenliness of her attire.
She seemed ill at ease and frightened: the daughter of an English gentleman and an Indian princess, her wayward course of life had reduced her native grace and dignity to mere accidents of mood, and a check or a disappointment made her destitute of either. George was horror-struck, and could not speak, but stood waiting for her to explain the object of her visit. From the moment of her entrance, he had forgotten her connection with Nouna; he was brought back to startled recollection by her first words, which were spoken in a querulous, tearful voice.
“Well, you have sent to ask me where is your wife. It is I who come to ask where is my child?”
“Nouna!” exclaimed George in a low voice. “You do not know where she is?”
“No. You have spoilt her for her mother, you have made her look down upon me, fear me. And what have you done for her yourself? What has she become through you? How have you kept your fine promises to me? You were too proud to take my money; it was too base for your fine fingers to touch; she was to be rich, and honoured, and happy through you! And what happens? What happens, I say?” Her excitement was increasing as she talked, until the low tones he had admired in her voice became shrill and nasal, and the great brown eyes, which had looked languishing and seductive when she raised and lowered them artfully between thick fringes of long black lashes, now flamed and flashed in her dry, parched skin like fires in a desert. “You fling away all your chances, you go to work as a common clerk, you make her—my daughter,mybeautiful daughter—live like a dressmaker in two wretched rooms, and then you let her be carried off from you under your very nose, so that she comes back to me ill, miserable, her beauty spoilt, her heart breaking—the wife of a criminal.”
In the course of her violent speech this woman had wrung his heart again and again, not by her reproaches, but by the pictures she had called up of Nouna. What had the poor child learnt about her mother? How had she borne it? She had been shocked, disgusted, so he gathered. Poor little thing, poor little thing! And what had she learnt about him? So his thoughts ran in a running commentary, and when Chloris White stopped, moaning to herself in bitter scorn and anger, he had to clear his throat again and again before he could speak.
“Then she is with you?” he said at last huskily.
The woman raised her head in fierce petulance.
“No, no, no, I tell you. She is not with me—she has left me, and I don’t know where she has gone.”
A great river of pain, mingled with which ran one tiny current of sweet sad pleasure, seemed to rush through the heart of the stricken young husband at the image these words called up before him, of the poor little wife coming for refuge into her mother’s home, gathering some inkling of the terrible truth that her idol was not all she had believed, and shrinking as her husband would have had her do, as her mother fancied she would not do, from the luxury that bore a taint, creeping out into the world again, perhaps to come back to Paris alone in search of himself.
“You don’t know where she has gone!” he repeated in a softer voice, for he recognised genuine human feeling in the woman’s tones.
“No, I tell you.”
“When did she leave you?”
“Two days ago. I have hunted for her ever since; I came to Paris to look for her. Then a lady, a Miss Millard, one of Lord Florencecourt’s nieces—one ofmynieces,” she added defiantly, “telegraphed to my house in London, and the telegram was forwarded to me here; you wanted to know whether Nouna was with me, she said. She is not with me, she is lost, wandering about in the world by herself, ill, out of her mind, perhaps. Are you satisfied? See what your education has done for her, see the grand result of your virtuous principles. She would have been safe in my house and happy, and could have been as good as she pleased, I never prevented her, I never should have prevented her. But you have touched her with your own infernal cursed coldness and idiotcy, and nothing would please her. During the two days she was with me, it was nothing but: ‘When is George coming? Do you think George will come by the next train?’ You haven’t even made her good either, for when I offered to take her to church, she wouldn’t go with me, but let me go alone. You have spoilt her life, you have killed her.”
She burst into a passion of tears. George paid no attention to her, but walked up and down, torturing himself by imagining what could have become of his wife, and wondering when Ella would come again, that he might consult the bright-brained girl as to the next step to take to find her. He was deeply anxious to know all that had passed between Nouna and her mother and Rahas, but he almost despaired of learning anything from the hysterical creature before him. Gradually, however, Chloris White seemed to wake to the fact that she was being ignored, and she tried to recover some calm and a semblance of dignity.
“What have you to say for yourself? Don’t you understand what you have to answer for?” she asked with asperity.
George stopped short in his walk up and down the narrow space at his command, and looked at her with a troubled face, but in his voice there was a quiet and biting contempt as he replied—
“I have to answer for having fostered what was best in her nature till she was strong enough to resist all the temptations your wicked folly could suggest, that’s all.”
And he began to walk up and down again. Chloris White sprang from her chair and stopped him by a violent grip of his arm.
“How dare you say such things to me, you, who are the cause of it all!”
George removed her hand from his arm and looked down at her sternly.
“Madam, you are talking nonsense,” he said; “your daughter was perfectly happy with me; you set a mischievous rascal to work to get us into difficulties, to entice her away from me; and it is through no fault of yours that the scoundrel didn’t succeed in ruining her as he has done me. When you came in here just now you seemed human enough to be ashamed of yourself, and I said nothing to you. Now that you have overcome your shame, I have overcome my forbearance, and I tell you plainly you are the most corrupt, depraved and vile creature I ever met, and it would be better for Nouna to take shelter in a workhouse than in your home. Now you had better go, I cannot bear the sight of you.”
The contemptuous brutality with which he shot these rough words at her and then turned away proved a far more effective mode of treatment than the courteous composure he had shown at the beginning of the interview; for self-restraint is a quality little understood or practised by women of her class and their companions. She at once became submissive and apologetic, rose and walked meekly towards the door.
“I am sorry I intruded upon you; I thought you would like to hear what I knew about your wife; I will go.”
George was immediately shocked at his own savagery, and without approaching or looking at her said he had not meant to be rude, his temper was not improved by confinement, and he should be very glad if she would tell him something—anything, only she must tell him nothing but the truth.
“Yes, yes, I will tell you the truth indeed,” she said humbly, clasping her hands with restless impulsiveness, and recognising, with the shrewdness of long practice in the arts of pleasing men, that to relate bare facts was her best chance with this one. “She came to me five days ago—in the early morning—to my house in London. It was the day after she left you. The person who brought her——”
“Rahas?” interrupted George sharply.
“Yes, Rahas—had told her (I assure you he was not acting by my authority)——”
“Go on, go on.”
“Rahas had told her that you had come to me—that I was in Paris, that I was ready to help you (indeed, I should have been, I assure you).”
George moved again brusquely, and Chloris hastened back to the facts.
“He took her to an hotel, but Nouna mistrusted him, and insisted on remaining in thefiacrewhile he went in to see if I was there. When he had gone in she jumped out of the cab, made inquiries of the proprietress, and found I had never been to the hotel at all. (You understand, Mr. Lauriston, that all this was without my sanction?)”
“Perfectly,” said George, with the best accent of sincerity he could muster.
“She was going to drive back home when Rahas ran out of the hotel, told her the fact was I was ill in England, was dying to see her, and had sent him to bring her over by a trick, since I knew her husband would not let her come. Nouna was worked upon so much by this, that, as they had driven to the Gare du Nord, and were just in time for the Calais train, she decided on the impulse of the moment to come, but insisted on travelling in the ladies’ compartment of the train, and in the ladies’ cabin on board, so that he saw very little of her on the journey, until they got to Charing Cross, where she got into a hansom by herself, and refused to come into my house until Sundran went out to reassure her. Apparently, Mr. Lauriston, marriage had not increased her trust in human nature.”
“It has taught her to discriminate, madam.”
“I was not up. She was taken into my boudoir, and I dressed and went to see her. She was standing just inside the door, waiting; she was flushed, and trembling, and so weak with fatigue and excitement that she almost fell into my arms. But then—”
Chloris stopped. Something in these vivid memories was keenly painful to her.
“She knew—you were her mother?” said George in a low voice.
Chloris, who had related her story standing so that he could only see her side-face, turned the full gaze of her black eyes upon him defiantly.
“Well, take what pride in it you like, she drew back from my arms, and looked at me, and the colour went out of her face, and left her quite white, with dark rings under her eyes, and she asked, in a weak whisper: ‘Are you really my mother?’ Perhaps I looked angry and spoke harshly; I thought of you, and how you had poisoned her mind against me, and she ran to the door with a wild, scared face, and cried: ‘George! Where is George?’ And she glanced round the room like a caged bird, and fell down crying on to the floor. So I left her, for I saw you had taken her from me altogether, and Sundran went to her and made her bathe and rest, and she wrote out a telegram to you, and fell asleep crying. When I saw her again she was quite meek and subdued, and sat with me very quietly, not talking, but looking at me with wondering, inquiring eyes that haunt me. For I tell you I have loved my child, and it was hard to find that she had no heart left for me. Then I was sorry that I—sorry that she had come; and when I learnt what had happened to you, I was angry, furiously angry with Rahas, and I would not let him come near the house, and I did not know what to do with the child. She could not be happy with me—you had spoilt her for that. I gave her a beautiful dress I had had made, and she said: ‘I will wear it when George comes.’ She would not meet my friends, and I did not press her; she did just as she liked, and took walks with Sundran instead of driving with me. And on the third morning she was gone. Her bed had not been slept in, and the footman said she had gone out late the night before. She left a note thanking me for being kind, and saying she could not rest till she saw her husband again. Then I came over here to look for her, for I love her, and I love her no less for her not loving me. I went to the rooms where you stayed, but she had not been there, and all I found of her there was this.”
She handed to George two telegrams, both addressed to himself. They had been opened by Chloris. Both were from Nouna. One had been sent from Dover on her journey. It said:
“I have gone to see mamma, who is ill. She will help us. Come at once, or I shall think you are angry.”
“I have gone to see mamma, who is ill. She will help us. Come at once, or I shall think you are angry.”
The second was sent from London, and contained these words:
“Come to me quickly, I am frightened and ill. Start at once. I hear your voice calling to me, and I have not money enough to come.”
“Come to me quickly, I am frightened and ill. Start at once. I hear your voice calling to me, and I have not money enough to come.”
As George read these words his sight failed him, and a great sob shook his whole frame. Chloris tried to take back the two scraps of flimsy paper, but he thrust them into his breast.
“No, they are mine,” he said in a broken voice.
She shrugged her shoulders.
“As you like,” said she in a hard tone. “After all I have a better consolation than you have.”
George looked at her inquiringly.
“I was born ambitious,” she continued, “as the unlucky daughter of a princess had a right to be. I centred my ambition unselfishly on my daughter; you and she frustrated me. Well, I can still be Viscountess Florencecourt—and I will.”
George pulled himself together to make a good fight for his old friend. This devil-may-care creature, who was beginning to find the oft-tried excitements fail, was just in the mood to plunge head foremost into the delights of starting a new and sensational scandal. George took care to speak with the greatest calmness.
“I don’t think you will, though, when you think about it. You are too clever.”
“I am too clever to fail to do so, I flatter myself.”
“You are quite clever enough, madam, to convince every separate person you talk to of the justice of your claim, but with the general public, with society, the bar, the bench, all reason, sympathy, and probably law, would be against you. I don’t think you could get a firm of standing to take up your case.”
“Don’t you?” said Chloris, raising her eyebrows incredulously, while her face assumed an expression of deep cunning. “And what if I assure you that I have prepared for this contingency bymakinga firm of standing ready to my hand?”
George suddenly remembered the utter and rather inexplicable devotion to her interests shown by Messrs. Smith and Angelo, and listened with curiosity as she went on:
“Four years ago a son of old Angelo’s went mad about me, and robbed his father to make me handsome presents. The old man was dreadfully cut up. I learnt the facts, and knowing the reputation of the firm was good, I earned the eternal gratitude of the father by throwing over the son, and making restitution to the extent of some four thousand pounds. Do you understand?”
“I see that you have gained a solicitor devoted to your interests; but I maintain that it would be directly against your interest to put pressure on the Colonel. I know him; I know that he would resist your claim with such influence to back him as even you could not stand against; and I know on the other hand”—George lowered his voice, and spoke with slow significance—“that if you are content to let things remain as they are, he will be quite ready to makeprivateredress by making such provision for you, when you choose to ask for it, as even the daughter of a princess would not refuse.”
Chloris was interested to the extent of evidently occupying herself with a mental calculation.
“Askfor it! I couldclaimit!” she said defiantly.
“But as a claim it would not be allowed.”
Chloris shrugged her shoulders, but she was impressed. She knew that her charms had passed their zenith, and a handsome provision for the future was not to be despised. George was satisfied with the impression he had made, and extremely anxious to be rid of her. In fact they both felt glad that the reappearance of the warder now brought to a close a visit which had been prompted by no very kindly feeling. At the last Chloris seemed to feel this, and she lingered at the door to say, in a voice that had some womanly kindliness and some self-reproach in it:
“I am sorry I came, for I have done you no good. I was thinking of nothing but my child—my disappointment. Forgive me. I am not bad all through, and I thank you for what you have done for her. We can feel for each other now, you and I, different as we are: we have both lost her. If I have had any hand in bringing you here, forgive me, for my life is broken too.”
George held out his hand. Not that he believed much in the permanency of the capricious creature’s grief, but that it was impossible for him to refuse pardon to any one who asked for it sincerely. She kissed his fingers passionately, to his great discomfiture; for not only had he a Briton’s natural objection to demonstrations of this sort, but his clemency towards the woman who had done her utmost to cause the wreck of his life was only the result of a surface sentiment of pity which thinly covered a very much deeper feeling of disgust and resentment, and when the door closed behind her he shook himself like a dog, with an impulse to get free from the very air which she had breathed.
George had no more visits, except from his advocate, for the next two days; but on the third he received a note from the Colonel, dated from England, and written in a perturbed and rather constrained tone, containing a backward shot at his foolishness in marrying a girl of whom he knew nothing, some sincere condolences and regrets at his situation, and a useful expression of fear that he, the Colonel, was “in for it now.” On the whole, the possibility that Chloris White would now turn her attention entirely to him seemed to have swamped Lord Florencecourt’s kindliness, and George wrote him the following answer not without some bitter feelings:
“Dear Lord Florencecourt,“I thank you very much for the kind things you say. But as for my marriage, which you deplore as the beginning of the mess I am in, I assure you I am just in the same mind about it as I was at the time when I gave my name to the forlorn little creature whose natural guardians had left her at the mercy of they didn’t care who. I don’t stand so well in the world now as I did then, but I think I am no worse a man for having loved something better than my ambition, and taught my wife to love something better than her trinkets. I have done my best to secure her nearest male relation from annoyance, and I think I have succeeded; I hope that this circumstance will induce him to make every effort to find her and take care of her, if his instinct does not. I pray you, with the solemn prayer of a man who may be dead to the world, to persuade him to this. If I were satisfied about her, they might do what they liked to me and welcome.“Yours very sincerely,“George Lauriston.”
“Dear Lord Florencecourt,
“I thank you very much for the kind things you say. But as for my marriage, which you deplore as the beginning of the mess I am in, I assure you I am just in the same mind about it as I was at the time when I gave my name to the forlorn little creature whose natural guardians had left her at the mercy of they didn’t care who. I don’t stand so well in the world now as I did then, but I think I am no worse a man for having loved something better than my ambition, and taught my wife to love something better than her trinkets. I have done my best to secure her nearest male relation from annoyance, and I think I have succeeded; I hope that this circumstance will induce him to make every effort to find her and take care of her, if his instinct does not. I pray you, with the solemn prayer of a man who may be dead to the world, to persuade him to this. If I were satisfied about her, they might do what they liked to me and welcome.
“Yours very sincerely,
“George Lauriston.”
Within a fortnight of Chloris White’s visit George, ill and feverish from neglected cold and reduced to a state of almost imbecile disquietude not for himself, but for the wife of whose fate no one could, or no one dared to give him tidings, was examined by the judge, according to French law, and brought up for trial. The proceedings produced in him not even a languid appearance of interest; accusation and defence seemed to his worn-out weary brain only a long monotonous buzz of unmeaning words, and when the verdict was pronounced, he did not know whether it was more or less severe than he had expected.
He was acquitted of the charge of wilful murder, but found guilty of homicide, and sentenced to five years’ penal servitude.
George repeated the words to himself, trying to realise them. But all he knew was that he was thankful the trial was over.
Itis well for the wounded spirit when the body falls sick in sympathy, and the piercing thoughts become blunted into vague fancies, and the heavy load of doubt and despair falls off with the responsibilities of sane and sound existence.
George Lauriston, who had been unconsciously sickening ever since the day when he was arrested, and, stupefied by misery, had gone off to prison in clothes which had been saturated with the rain, was, on the day after his conviction, too ill to stand; his skin was hot and dry, his eyes were glazed and dull, and his limbs racked with pains. The surgeon, on being sent for to see him, ordered his immediate removal to the hospital, where for three weeks he was laid up with a sharp attack of rheumatic fever. He recovered very slowly, but as this is a common case with sick prisoners, who not unnaturally prefer the relaxed discipline and better food of the hospital ward to the monotonous life and meagre fare which awaits them on their convalescence, he received no special attention on that account, and as soon as he was declared fit to be removed, he was consigned to Toulon with a batch of other convicts destined, like himself, for work in the dockyards. He was visited in his illness by Ella Millard, but he was unable either to recognise her, or to learn from her lips the painful tidings that every effort to find his wife had proved fruitless. He started on his miserable journey, therefore, without one parting word to cherish during the long months which must elapse before he could see a friend’s face again, and knowing nothing of the efforts that were being made on his behalf.
The New World energy which poor little Lady Millard had used only to force herself into the same mould as her husband’s less vivacious compatriots, had blossomed out in her youngest daughter to a quality of the highest order, capable, on occasion, of transforming the plain, unobtrusive girl into something like a heroine. Ella was convinced that the sentence passed upon George Lauriston was unduly severe, and further, that if carried out it would kill him; therefore she put forth all her powers of perseverance and resource in the endeavour to get it mitigated. To her uncle, Lord Florencecourt, and her aunt Lady Crediton, both of whom were persons of influence, she did not allow one moment’s rest until, through the English ambassador at Paris, she had obtained a hearing of the French Minister of the Interior. In this, however, she did not succeed until the following spring, by which time her poor friend’s release by surer means seemed to be drawing near.
Before the winter was more than half through George believed that he was dying. The authorities of the prison thought so too, and out of compassion for the “bel Anglais,” whose athletic form, distinction of movement and manner, and the old thoroughness and absorption with which he did whatever work he had to do, had gained him the same sort of reputation among the lowest of mankind that he had formerly held among the highest, they shortened the preliminary term of confinement within the walls, and put him with the workers in the dockyard, in the hope that the open air, nipping and keen as it was in these winter days, might restore the failing vigour of his frame, and check a hacking cough which made even the warders shrug their shoulders and mutter “pauvre diable!” as they walked up and down the echoing stone corridors in the frosty nights of the early year.
March had come, with bitter winds and no sign of the winter’s breaking, when George Lauriston was sent, as one of a small gang of convicts, to repair a breach in the harbour made during a storm the day before. There was some hard and hazardous work involved, a portion of the structure having been rendered unsafe by the tearing away, by the action of the waves, of the outer piles placed to break their force. Glad of the excitement, however, and of the nearer approach to their kind of the outer world which the walk to and from the harbour afforded, the gang of convicts, picked out of the smartest and best-conducted men, went to this novel work with more alacrity than usual. The weather was still rough; the waves, of a troubled greenish-brown colour, were crested with white, and the wind drove the drizzling sleet straight from the north.
In spite of the fierce gusts of wind, of the clouds of saturating spray which broke up against the wall of the harbour and fell with a patter and a hiss on to the stone, on the first day that the convicts worked there, a small, slender woman, poorly dressed, who fought the wind with difficulty and caught her breath with deep-drawn, struggling sobs as if the exertion hurt her, crept slowly along the outer side of the slippery pier through the dense sea-showers, until she was within a few feet of the warder who walked, with fixed bayonet, up and down, guarding the convicts on the land side. The warder stopped, and asked her rather brusquely what she wanted.
“Nothing; I only want to get as near as I can to the sea. It’s good for me,” she answered fluently, but in a foreigner’s French.
And as she looked ill enough for every breath she drew to be already numbered, and fixed her eyes yearningly on the horizon as if no nearer object was of moment to her, he let her stay. But each time that his back was turned on his walk she was up like a hare, in spite of her evident weakness, eagerly scanning the workers in their coarse grey uniforms, searching, searching, until at last, at her third scrutiny, she discovered the man she wanted. It was George Lauriston. He was working with a will, pickaxe in hand, his feet now in, now out of the water, his back towards her, his arms rising at regular intervals, as he dealt blow after blow at the solid masonry. She did not cry out as she recognised him; she did not even try to attract his attention; but fell back into her former position and retained it unchanged through two or three turns and returns of the warder up and down. The one glance had intoxicated her; she doubted her own powers of self-restraint, that gave her the blessed privilege of seeing him, her own husband, in the flesh, after those long dark months of absence when he had come to her only in dreams.
After a little while she noted, sitting crouched under the wall, out of sight of the convicts, that the blows of the pickaxe had ceased. If for a few moments he was resting, he might, if God would be kind, turn this way, see her, meet her gaze with his, give her one short kiss of the eyes that she might carry home and nurse in her memory through the long nights when she lay awake thinking of him. She waited, scarcely drawing breath, till the warder turned again. She had ten full seconds for her venture. Scudding over the great stones like a lapwing she reached the breach again, and looked over. A cry rose from her heart, but she stifled it as, through spray, rain, mist, the wind-driven rain cutting her tender face like stones, the waves shooting up great geysers of white foam close to her, she met the look that through long weeks of illness she had hungered for.
“Nouna!” cried George, with a hoarse shout that the waves drowned with their thunder.
Finger on lip she sped back in a moment, leaving him dazed, stupefied, half believing, half hoping the figure he had seen was only a vision of his imagination. For could that little pinched, wasted face, in which the great brown eyes stood out weirdly, be the bonny bride whose beauty had seemed to him almost supernatural? He set to work again mechanically, hardly knowing what he did; but when the short day began to draw in, and a veil of inky clouds to bring a shroud-like shadow over the sea, and the warders gave the word to cease work and muster for the march back to the prison, he saw the little weird face again, read the short sad message of unwavering love and weary longing in her great passion-bright eyes, and resisting, with one supreme effort of the old soldierly habit of discipline, the dangerous temptation to risk everything and break the ranks for an embrace, which his failing health told him would certainly be the last, he marched on with the rest, and left her to creep—benumbed with cold and wet to the skin, but feverishly happy in the knowledge that she had seen him again—back to her home to live on the hope of another such meagre meeting.
The next day was wild, stormy, and bitterly cold, with a driving north-east wind, and intermittent snow-showers. But when the convicts were marched down to the harbour, Nouna was already there, crouching—a small, inert bundle of grey waterproof—under the shelter of a pile of huge stones, watching for her husband’s coming with hungry eyes. When the tramp, tramp, upon the flags told her the gang was approaching she peeped out cautiously, and then, afraid lest in her desire to escape the notice of any one but George, she should escape his also, she rose, crept out a few paces from her shelter, and turned her face boldly towards the advancing men. George was in the front rank to-day; in the morning light, which beat full upon his face, she saw him well, saw a terrible change in him; even while he, on his side, noted more fully the transformation in the little fairy princess who had taken his whole nature by storm less than a year ago—from a lovely unthinking child into a sick and desolate woman. How could he think, as he looked at her, that there was anything but loss in a change which rent his very heart, and moved him as no allurement of her beauty, no wile of her sensuous coquetry had ever done? In spite of the educational enthusiasm he had spent upon his sixteen-year-old bride, in spite of his genuine anxiety to surround her with elevating and spiritualising influences, it thus happened that when at last the spirit instead of the senses shone out of her yearning eyes, it gave him no gladness, but rather a deep regret, and instead of thanking heaven for waking the soul he had in vain longed to reach, he cursed his own fate that he had brought about this change in the woman for whom he was at all times ready to die.
He did not pass very near to her, for the little creature was cowed and shy, afraid of bringing some punishment upon him by any sign of intelligence. He tried to speak to her, tried to tell her not to wait there, exposed to the bitter wind and the lightly falling snow; but his voice was hoarse and broken, nothing escaped his lips but guttural sounds, which did not even reach her ears. So that when, after a couple of hours’ work upon the rough stones of the pier, he again came in sight of his wife, crouching in the same place, watching patiently for another brief sight of him, he took, to save her from the risks her fragile frame was running, a resolve, the execution of which cut him like a knife. He went up to the warder and said:
“That is my wife. She will die of cold if she stays. Please speak to her gently.”
George saw, as he turned to go back to his work, the poor child’s white frightened face as the warder addressed her. Slowly, with one long straining gaze, as if she would draw her loved one into her arms by the passionate force of her yearning eyes, she turned, and George saw her hurry away down the pier as fast as her chilled limbs would let her: and he felt that the little retreating figure which soon became a mere speck against grey sky, grey sea, grey stone, had carried away the last shred of human hope and human feeling that prison life and failing health had left in his breast.
Next day, which was the last of the work in the harbour, Nouna was not on the pier; but as George took his place with the rest he found, roughly cut with a knife or some other sharp instrument in one of the large stones, the letters filled in with red chalk, these words:
“I have been quite good all the time. Good-bye. N.”
It was his wife’s last message to him. George knelt down and put his lips upon the stone. He had forgotten that he was not alone, but if he had remembered, it would have made no difference. The waves might wear out next tide the feebly scrawled marks which perhaps no eye but his could decipher, or the words might be read by every man, woman and child in the town—it was all the same to him now; they were engraved upon his own heart, a complete, a holy answer to every doubt which had ever troubled him, to every aspiration he had ever had for the young life he had bound to his own. Love and sorrow had sanctified her; there was no danger for his darling now.
The man, on the other hand, had only his worst feelings intensified by misfortune which he could not but look upon as unmerited. George’s love for his wife remained as strong as ever, but it was now the one soft spot in a nature rapidly hardening under the influence of a struggle with fortune in which he had been signally worsted. In the long hours of the night, when his cough kept him awake even though he was tired out by a hard day’s labour, he brooded over the wrongs he had suffered, until the canker of disappointment ate into his heart and bred there a burning, murderous wish for revenge: not upon the French law which had condemned him, as he maintained, unjustly—that was impersonal, intangible, a windmill to fight; not upon the Colonel, who had faltered in his friendship; not upon Chloris, whose mischievous caprice had set in motion the force which had indirectly destroyed him; but a man’s indignant righteous revenge upon the rascal who had tried from his very wedding-day to come between him and his wife. George began to feel that it was even more for the sake of finding Rahas than of meeting Nouna again that he yearned with a sick man’s longing to live until the time of his release, and prayed for strength to drag on an existence which with its hopelessness and its morbid cravings for the savage excitement of vengeance, was an infernal torment which told, by its intensity, on his waning strength.
The prison authorities noticed the change in him, and treated him with what little consideration was possible. The old priest, in particular, stirred by the fact that “number 42” was a heretic into giving him something better than the conventional doses of religious advice which he administered to the devotees of “the true Church,” proved a most kind friend to him, and it was with a manner of sincere and warm sympathy that the good father while paying him his usual visit one day in April, let fall at parting a mysterious whisper about good news and good friends who had not forgotten him. The brooding prisoner hardly heeded him. But next morning he was brought up before the governor, and a paper was formally read out to him, in which he was informed that the Minister of the Interior, on having brought under his notice the case of the Englishman, George Lauriston, now undergoing a sentence of penal servitude at Toulon, had come to the conclusion that the said sentence was unduly severe, and that, as the evidence went to show that the crime was unpremeditated, and committed under strong provocation, a short term of imprisonment would have been adequate punishment, and that, in view of the fact that the said George Lauriston had been already at Toulon working as a convict for nearly four months, the Minister had decided to remit the remainder of the allotted term of imprisonment. George listened, but he hardly understood; the governor, in a few kindly words, then told him that he was a free man, that he could go back to his friends.
“Friends!” echoed George in a dull voice.
“Come, you cannot deny that you have friends; it is to some of them that you owe the good news you have just received,” said the governor. “I understand they are in the town waiting to meet you. Sir Henry—something I do not recollect, is the name of the gentleman; and the lady——”
A light broke over George’s face; he spoke some broken words of thanks in a more human voice.
That evening he was a free man, and was holding, dazed and trembling as with palsy, on one side the hand of Sir Henry Millard, on the other that of his daughter Ella.
Georgehad not known until this meeting with his old friends how much ill-health and confinement had pulled him down. He scarcely dared to look at Ella, for there came a lump in his throat whenever his eyes fell on her brave, steadfast face. Sir Henry’s presence was a great relief to them both. The baronet’s comments on the situation was so inapposite, and he had such a strong sense that he was rendered ridiculous by this journey to France to chaperon his daughter in her efforts on behalf of another woman’s husband, that he gave them something to laugh at when they were only too ready to cry. Ella was as practical as ever.
“What are you going to do?” asked she, drawing George aside with her usualbrusqueriewhen the first greetings were over.
“I am going to find Nouna,” said he. “She has been here, and she went away ill a fortnight ago; I have found that out, and that her black servant Sundran was with her. I must start to-night.”
“You are too ill for the journey.”
“I am too ill to stay here. I have some work to do in England besides.”
“What work?”
He did not answer, and there was a pause, during which she considered him attentively.
“George,” she said at last in a low voice, “you are changed. You have lost the ‘good’ look you used to have. The work you speak of is something unworthy of you.”
“It must be something very degrading then; you forget I am a——”
She stopped him imperatively.
“You are my ideal of an Englishman, as honest as any and not so stupid as some. If you hadn’t been unlucky, I should never have told you so, but now that you know what a surpassingly lofty opinion I have of you, I expect you to live up to it.”
“You must let me be human though.”
“That depends. There is good and bad humanity. What do you want to do?”
“I want to—well—I want to—get at that scoundrel Rahas!”
“You may—on one condition.”
“Well?”
“You musn’t lay a hand on him until you have seen Nouna.”
George looked at her wonderingly.
“Tell me why you make that condition.”
Her answer came at once in a full, deep, steady voice, that betrayed even more than her words did.
“Because I know that the sight of a face one loves and has longed to see can extinguish all hatred and anger, everything but happiness; just as your coming to-night has calmed down all my wicked feelings towards my uncle and towards—your poor little wife. I can forgive you for marrying her now—for the first time.”
George was thunderstruck. All the passionate intensity with which the small, plain girl had loved him and longed for his success in life, had compassionated him and worked to retrieve his errors, blazed in her black eyes and seemed to cast a glow over her sallow face. Men are so much accustomed by reason and experience to associate women’s fragility of frame with frivolity of mind, that any sudden discovery of devoted singleness of purpose in one of the soft and foolish sex strikes them into as much distant awe and reverent worshipfulness as a manifestation of godhead in the flesh would do. So that George remained quite silent before Ella, with no inclination to thank her, but a strong impulse to fall on his knees.
After nearly a minute’s silence, she said, in the same deep voice:
“Will you promise me to see her first?”
George looked at her in a sidelong, shamefaced way.
“I will promise anything in the world you like,” he said huskily.
She smiled happily, and taking his hand, made him sit down beside her. The joy of having procured his release had thrown her this evening into an exaltation of feeling which banished her usual awkwardness, and made her unreserved as only a shy person unusually moved can be.
“Remember,” she said, “you have to save yourself up for a journey.” And she turned upon him the motherly look which shines out in the tenderness of all the best women.
Ella was perfectly happy this evening, and had not an atom of jealousy that the thoughts of the man, in whose interest she could forget all scruples of prudery, were bent on another woman. She had done for him what his wife could not do; there was pride enough in that knowledge. There had been from the first so little selfishness in her love that by this time there was none—a not uncommon beauty of character in the plain of person who, expecting nothing, are more than content with a little. So she arranged all the details of the journey, and within a couple of hours she and her father and George were on their way back to England.
They did not reach London until the second morning after their departure from Toulon. George was disgusted and alarmed to find that he could scarcely stand; but he resisted the suggestion that he should take a day’s rest, being afraid that if he once yielded to his bodily weakness, it would be a long time before he was able to get about again. So he left Ella and her father at the hotel where they put up, and drove to Mary Street to learn whether Rahas still lived there. This step he took with Ella’s full knowledge; he should fulfil his promise, he told her, and keep his hands off the Oriental merchant until after he had found Nouna; but he must set about his search in his own way.
No. 36, Mary Street looked the same as ever, except that, during the eleven months which had passed since George first drove up to the door and dashing up the dingy staircase came suddenly upon anArabian Nights’ nook in murky London, the lower windows had acquired a thicker coating of grime, and the board with the names “Rahas and Fanah” had lost its freshness of new paint; the brass vases and lanterns, the Arabian gun, the inlaid table, the Indian figures were still there, and the fact that the firm did not depend upon the chance custom of passers-by was more patent than ever.
George stumbled as he got out of the hansom, and felt, almost without seeing, for the bell. Fatigue, weakness, and the sleeplessness caused by intense excitement had preyed upon his body and stimulated his imagination till on this, the first day of his return to his own country, he was like a man walking in his sleep, and saw faces and heard voices invisible and inaudible to all but him. Nouna, as he saw her first, sleeping like a fairy princess, amidst gorgeous surroundings; the strange doctor, whose warning against the girl’s dangerous charms rang again in his ears; the dark-faced Rahas and his pretensions to occult powers—all these recollections chasing each other through his feverishly excited mind, dulled his faculties to the cold reality of present experience, and when the door was opened by a woman whose face was unknown to him, he stood before her stupidly, without realising that it was he who had summoned her. When she asked him what he wanted, he pulled himself together, and asked if Rahas, the merchant, still lived there.
“Yes, he lives here, but he ain’t here to-day; he’s gone to Plymouth, and won’t be home for a week or so. You can see the old gentleman if you like, or letters are sent to him.”
Plymouth! The name sent an old suggestion into George’s mind. He suddenly remembered that Miss Glass, the old servant of his family who had given Nouna shelter between her leaving Mary Street and her wedding-day, came from Plymouth, where her parents had kept a lodging-house. He had never doubted that he should find Nouna easily, and now he knew in a moment, without further reasoning, that she was at Plymouth, and that Rahas had gone down to see her there. So sure did he feel, that he did not even call at Miss Glass’s house in Filborough Road to make inquiries; but obtaining from the servant at No. 36 the final information that Rahas had not long started, George jumped hastily back into his hansom and drove to Paddington. He found he had just missed the 11.45 train, and there was not another till three o’clock; so he drove to Waterloo, and learning that there was a train at 2.30, he resolved to go by that in order to be on the road as soon as possible, although it arrived no earlier than the three o’clock express from Paddington. This left him time to go back to the Charing Cross Hotel to say good-bye to his friends.
Whether she was frightened by the thought of a possible collision between George in his weakness and the unprincipled Arabian, or whether she was stung by a feeling of jealousy that the time of her generous devotion to him was over, her work done, Ella grew ghastly pale on hearing of his intended journey, and tried to dissuade him from it. When she found him immovable, she endeavoured to induce her father to go with him; but both the men laughed this suggestion to scorn, and the most she could obtain was permission for her and her father to see him off at the station.
George was absorbed, as he stood at the window of the compartment in which he was to travel, by a strong feeling of gratitude towards the young girl on the platform below him, in whose eyes he read a steady, unwavering friendship and affection, free from the advancing and receding tide of passion, without coquetry, without caprice, the noblest love a human creature can give, the one also which in either sex is sure never to have an adequate return. George looked down at her pale face reverently, and tried to find some words to express the overflowing feelings inspired by her goodness to him; but she would not hear. Stepping back from the carriage-door with a blush, she affected to interest herself in the rest of the passengers, when suddenly the flush died away from her face, and she came hastily back. Looking up at George with an expression of strong anxiety, she said in a whisper:
“George, for Heaven’s sake be careful; I believe the man himself is in the next carriage!”
Lauriston, much startled, his face lighting up, tried to open the door: but she stopped him, saying: “Remember—your promise!”
The next moment the train had started, and George, overcome by the rush of feelings evoked by the thought that the man whom he hated was so near to him, sank down into his corner seat in the wet white heat which strong excitement causes to the bodily weak. He hoped that Rahas, if indeed it was he whom Ella had seen, had not caught sight of him; in that case George was sure that he had only to follow the wily Arabian to be taken straight to the house where Nouna was. The journey seemed endless; he fell from time to time into fits of stupor, in which he heard the tramp of the warder through the rattle of the train, and Nouna calling to him in hoarse, broken accents unlike her own, and a rasping voice shrieking out to the beat of the wheels: “Never to meet! Never to meet!” With a start he would find that prison-walls and darkness had melted back into the cushioned carriage and the light of day, and remember in a vague, half-incredulous way that he was on his way to Nouna. Then the train would stop at a station, and he would look out eagerly, furtively, scanning the passengers who got out, searching for the man he wanted. At last, at Salisbury, where the train waited a quarter of an hour, his anxiety was set at rest. Wrapped in a long overcoat, and wearing a travelling-cap pulled low over his eyes, Rahas descended to the platform, walked two or three times up and down with his eyes on the ground as if in deep thought, and got in again without having given one glance at any of the other compartments. George had felt pretty safe from recognition, as he was much altered by illness and the loss of his moustache, and as, moreover, he was believed to be still a prisoner in France. Now he was altogether sure that Rahas was off his guard, and the knowledge gave him confidence. When, therefore, the Oriental merchant left the train at a little station a few miles from Plymouth, George only allowed him time to get through the door before he jumped out after him, and turning up his coat-collar, as the coolness of the evening gave him an excuse for doing, gave up his ticket and followed.
Once out of the station, Rahas, without a glance behind him, struck straight across the fields by a narrow path that led to the distant light of what George supposed must be some little village. It was half-past eight; the showers of an April day had saturated the grass, and a thick damp mist lingered among the trees, most of which as yet had but a thin spring covering. The moon had not yet risen, and George had to hurry after Rahas, fearing in the obscurity to lose sight of him altogether. The numbness which had seized his tired faculties from time to time on the railway journey now again began to creep over him, so that the surprise he would at another time have felt, the questions he would have asked himself as to the merchant’s leaving the train before he came to Plymouth, now merged into a dull confusion of ideas, the most prominent of which was that Rahas was trying to escape him. As the path descended into a little valley dark with trees, and the figure before him, now indistinct against the dark background, disappeared over a stile into the shadows of the copse beyond, this fancy grew stronger and, feeling that his limbs were unsteady with ever-increasing fatigue, which made him hot and wet from head to foot, he broke into a run, reached the stile in his turn, got over it, and stumbling over some unseen obstacle, slipped on the soft, muddy earth, and fell to the ground. The next moment he felt himself seized as he lay on his face, bound with a stout cord that cut into his flesh in his struggles to free himself, and then dragged through brambles and wet grass into the little wood. This last was a slow operation, for George was a big man, and though no longer in the full vigour of his health, he was too heavy for his dead weight to be pulled along with ease. He lay quite still, without uttering a sound, recognising, after a valiant but vain attempt to get free, that he was quite at the mercy of his assailant, he decided that entire passivity was his best chance of escaping such a quieting as would save him all further exertion. The first result of this was that Rahas, when he had continued his slow and tedious progress with his victim for what seemed a long time, stopped and peered into his face closely enough for George to make quite sure of his identity. To his surprise, the Oriental seemed quite relieved to find that he was not dead.
“Ah ha, you know me,” he muttered, as he encountered the shining of living eyes in the gloom. “You are not hurt. That is all right. I do not want to hurt you, be sure of that. I bear you no ill-will.”
“Thank you,” said George quietly. “That is satisfactory as far as it goes; but I should like to know whether this is the manner in which you treat chance acquaintances, for example.”
“No,” answered Rahas, quite simply; “I am forced to this last means of keeping you from the woman whom Heaven, as the planets declare, has given to me, and whom you have ruined by instilling into her your own soul, which is killing her fair body day by day. Do you understand? Her mother has given her to me, is only waiting for me to take her away to give her the dower you, in your proud folly, refused. I have waited long, I have tried many ways, to get what Allah intended for me. Nouna herself, weary of waiting, dying by inches, has at last given me permission to see her. Must I, at the last, with success in my very grasp after a year of waiting, see it wrung from me by the man whose touch has been fatal to this fair flower of the East? No. The will of Allah must be done. There are women enough in the world for you; there is only one for me. Nouna must come to my arms to-night; and for you, after to-night, I am at your disposal in any way you please.”
There was a strange mixture of cupidity, fanaticism and ferocious courage in his speech and manner which struck horror into George’s heart, at the thought that his wife might to-night have to come face to face, without a husband’s protection, with this man. He uttered a loud shout and made a sudden effort to rise, which the Arabian frustrated with a movement as nimble as a hare’s, accompanied by a short laugh.
“Keep still,” he said more harshly, “and keep your shouting until I am out of earshot.”
He made no threat in words, but his tone was so significant that George, to whom danger had restored his full faculties, resolved to save up his lungs. In a business-like manner Rahas then, with his knee on the young man’s chest, assured himself that the cord which bound him was secure, and with a civil and dispassionate “good-night,” to which the Englishman was in no humour to respond, he turned and walked rapidly away; his steps scarcely sounded on the soft, damp earth, and only the crackle of dead branches and the rustle of living ones, growing fainter and fainter until the sounds faded quite away, told George that he was retreating rapidly.
Then came a time for the poor fellow when he prayed for death at last. With the rotting leaves of the previous autumn forming a slimy pillow for his head, his body sinking slowly into the damp earth, while a rising wind moaned a low dirge among the surrounding hills and swept over the thinly-leaved branches above his head with a sepulchral “hush!” he felt all the horrors of the grave, all its loneliness, all its impotence, without the one blessing—peace, which we hope for there in spite of the clergy, who are ferocious as regards the next world to counter-balance their meekness in this. The deft Rahas had bound him sailor-fashion, beginning with the middle of the rope; and the knots were immovable as iron; he began to feel cramped and benumbed by the cold, the rising moisture amid the undergrowth of the wood, and the impeded circulation of his blood. Still his head remained hot as fire, his brain reeling in a mad dance of fantastic tortures, until at last frenzy came, and pictures of the past chased each other through his memory, but with a lurid light of horror upon them which distorted his fairest recollections, and turned them into ugly nightmares. Then in turn the pictures faded and his senses began to grow dull, and strange cries to sound in his ears to which he tried to reply; but his voice would not come, and even as his lips moved in this effort, the last gleam of sense left him, and he fell into unconsciousness.
As upon the blackness of night the fair, pure dawn comes gradually, so George, from the stupor of a deadly lethargy, woke by slow degrees to sensations of warmth, and light, and joy; and feeling, before the sense of sight came back to him, a soft touch on his flesh that set him quivering, and a breath against his lips that exhaled the very perfume of love, he fancied in the first moments of a still feebly moving brain, that his prayer had been granted, that he was dead, and in Heaven. Until suddenly there burst upon his ears a wild, joyous cry: “He is breathing! He has come back to me—back, thank God! thank God!”
And his heart leapt up, and an ember of the old fire warmed his veins. Opening his eyes, which were blinded and dazzled still, he whispered huskily, “Nouna, my little wife!” and groped about with weak, trembling arms until she came to him, and lying down by his side, pressed her lips to his with warm, clinging kisses that carried a world of loyalty and love straight from her soul to his. Then, while he felt her soft mouth strained against his, he knew, all dazed and half benumbed as he still was, that a change had come upon her. It was not the restless butterfly kiss of a passionate caprice that she gave him, as in the old days when she would fly from his knee to the window and back again half a dozen times in five minutes; it was not the embrace of sincere but timid affection she had learnt to give him when they lived their struggling life in Paris; it was the seal of patient and faithful love satisfied at last. From that moment he had no questions to ask, no explanations to hear. What did it matter where he was, how he came there, how she came there? But Nouna, drawing her head back to look at him, saw his lips move, and she watched them and listened, holding her breath, to his weak whisper:
“Cold, darkness, pain, and the long windy nights—all over now!”
And he drew her closer to him, and fell asleep.
Nextmorning, when rest had restored him to a wider interest and curiosity, George learnt the missing details of his adventure, and the circumstances which had led to the journey of Rahas.
On finding that the pretext of her mother’s illness, upon which she had been enticed to England, was a false one, Nouna, who now mentioned the once loved name with averted eyes, but without any other token of her suspicions, had felt guilty and uneasy about her husband; and as she did not hear from him she slipped away one night to find the house of Miss Glass, of whose kindness to herself and fondness for George she retained a warm recollection. As she felt ill and had no money, it was easy to guess how strong must have been the feelings which prompted her to leave her mother’s house.
“If I could not be with you, I wanted to be with some one who knew you and was fond of you, and would help me to get back to you, George,” she explained.
She had trusted to luck to find her way from Eaton Square to Kensington, and had been too much frightened to ask for direction. At last however, when she was so tired and despondent that she had sat down on a doorstep and begun to cry, a policeman had spoken to her, and on learning that she had no money, that she wanted to get to Filborough Road, that she was not sure of the number, but that she had friends there, he asked her whether she thought she could find the house if she were in the street, and suggested that she should take a cab, and ask her friends to pay for it. He had then hailed a hansom and put her into it, she had found the house without much difficulty, and Miss Glass had taken her in and nursed her carefully through a long illness which followed her rash adventure.
At this point of her story poor Nouna broke down in tears, reminded of a disappointment which had cut her to the heart. “And—my baby—never came after all,” she whispered in a broken voice, with her head hung down in pathetic shame; “and I thought it was a punishment because I came away without asking you, and I thought you were offended and would never forgive me, because when I wrote to Paris to tell you I was sorry and ill, and begging you to come, I got no answer. For I did not know you were in prison, Miss Glass would not let me know. It was not until weeks later, when—my mother found out where I was, and told me she had seen you, that I knew, and that I said I must come to you. So they let me go, with Sundran, to Paris; and first they said you were at Poissy, and I went there and asked to see you, and there they said perhaps you were at Toulon. So we went to Toulon, and I wrote to the governor, and he said I could see you in two months. I felt I could not live all that time, and I was wondering what I could do to see you, when the great storm came and damaged the harbour, and they said some of the convicts would repair it. And my heart seemed to give a great bound, for I felt that my wish had come true like that. So I crept down to the harbour and slipped quietly along to the place where the stones were washed away, and waited until I saw you. When the second day you spoke to the warder-man and told him to send me away, I did not mind, for I knew by your face you were not angry; so next morning I wrote a message to you on the stone where you were working, and Sundran brought me back to England, for I was getting ill again, and she was afraid I should die there. And Miss Glass said I must go to the south where it was warm, and she sent me to Plymouth to her parents, and they are very kind and good to me.”
“And did you let that wretch Rahas come and visit you?” asked George in a puzzled voice.
“I will tell you. I got a letter from him a few days ago, saying he was going to France, and if I pleased, he could take a letter from me to you, and let me see you, if I was anxious, as he used to let me see—my mother. I had only to say yes, and he would come down to Plymouth. I hated him for deceiving me and bringing me to England, but he declared in his letter that was my mother’s doing. And I was so hungry for some news of you that I wrote Yes, he might come. Then I could not keep still for impatience: he telegraphed to me to meet the train he came by, and I went to the station, and when I found he hadn’t come by it, I described him to the guard, and he said a dark gentleman like that had left the train two stations before. There’s a big boy at the house where I’m staying who does whatever I like, and I had made him come to the station because I was afraid of meeting Rahas alone. And I told him to take tickets for him and me, and we went back by the next train to the station where Rahas got out. The porter said two gentlemen had got out and gone across the fields; and I knew who the other one was, and I screamed, and told William my husband had come back. But he said it was a fancy. We walked across the wet fields in the dark, and I was trembling so that I could scarcely stumble along, and William carried a lantern, and said I had better go back, for we were on a wild-goose chase. And when we came down to the wood, my foot slipped, and I fell on to the grass, and as he stooped to pick me up, William saw marks on the ground, as if something had been pulled along over it. He went a little way slowly until I heard him give a cry, and I ran to him, and—and we found you.”
She could not say more, her voice was suffocated, her lips were shaking. But the whitewashed walls of the room in which he was lying, the hayrick he could see through the window, told George that it was to a farmhouse he had been brought; and there they spent two days, until he was well enough to get up and go with Nouna back to her friends in Plymouth. Then began for them both in the pretty southern town a new and sweeter honeymoon, marred only for each by a secret fear for the other. In the first days of their re-union happiness gave their wasted frames a new vitality which made each feel on the high road to health, but which made to each only the more evident the pale face and heavy breathing of the other.