Florence Warden

“ Nouna loved her husband as a bee loves the flowers, or a kitten the warmth of the sun. He was the prince she had waited for to take her out of the dull twilight of life with Mrs. Ellis and music-lessons; and although, in the modest nest which was all he could yet make for her, there were missing many of the elements upon which she had counted in her imaginary paradise, yet who knew what glories might not be in store for her in the rapidly approaching time when George would be a General and wear a cocked hat? ”

“ 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. ”

“ I do not blame you. I can even say I am sorry you have come, since to meet me has given you pain. I am not proud for myself, I am only proud for my child—my children. While I kept myself apart from you for your happiness, my soul, all that is best and truest in me, was with you. You are my judge, my son, but remember that.”
Even the high-flown speech was like Nouna in her serious moods. George glanced at her. Her eyes, to which the rest of her face, beautiful as it was, seemed in moments of excitement only a sort of unnoticed setting, were like liquid fire. ”

“ In the 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. ”

“ George was puzzled and disappointed. Arguing from his personal experience, in which the ecstatic dreams and timid caresses of the lover had been but a weak prelude to the ardent and demonstrative tenderness of the young husband, he had taken it for granted that those pretty, capricious outbursts of girlish passion, which had charmed him so much by their piquant unusualness, would develop under the sunshine of happy matrimony into a rich growth of steady affection, coloured by the tropical glow which seemed to belong to her individuality, and cherished and fed by his own devotion. ”

“ We are merchants, not shopmen; we have for our customers the chiefs of your great bazaars, the heads of your most renowned London houses. If an English nobleman wants a carpet such as emperors might tread upon, or a millionaire of Manchester seeks a priceless cabinet of carved ivory, delicate as lace, fragile as a fairy’s fingers, it is to us that their agents come, to Rahas and Fanah, who are here merely obscure tradesmen known to a few, but in our country (and all Asia is our country, overrun by our agents, swarming with our depôts) merchant-nobles, the guests and the friends of kings. ”

“ Clarence Massey, the humble companion whom he displaced at Ella’s side, having been attracted to Ella by the devotion with which she had worked for his friend George Lauriston, had raised up an altar to her in his most affectionate and warm heart, on which, figuratively speaking, he burned incense all day long. Whenever and wherever she would let him, he followed like a dog, bearing her snappish fits with beautiful meekness, accepting any remarks she liked to throw to him, as precious pearls to be treasured in his memory; gentle, loyal, and devoted always. ”

“ The young girl was still watching him narrowly.
“Are you often—so?” she asked, with a pause before the last word, and a mysterious emphasis upon it.
“What do you mean, Nouna?”
“So full of anger that your face grows all white and grey, and your mouth like a straight line, and you look as if you would kill the person that offends you.”
And she shuddered and drew away from him again. George took one of her hands very gently in his.
“No, Nouna, I am very seldom angry like that. It is only when any one does something which seems to me very wrong.” ”

“ The tiny little hall; the box-like drawing-room to the right, with high glass cupboards on each side of the fireplace containing apostle spoons, old china bowls, fragments of quartz and the like; the bare-looking dining-room to the left, furnished as plainly as a school-room, and even the bake-house which led out from it, all enchanted her by their novelty; while the bedroom up stairs, ten feet square, into which she was shown, put the climax to this deliciously new experience, and made her feel, as she expressed herself to her husband, “that she wished she had married a farmer.” ”

“ Only a woman can drive another woman out of a man’s head. Ella, no one has ever crept so near to my heart as you. Will you come right in?”
If she had not cared for him so much, she would have said yes. But the tenderness she had long secretly felt, without owning it to herself, for the handsome young officer, made her timid. If she were to marry him, she, with the fierce depths of unsuspected passion she felt stirring at her heart, would adore him, would be at his mercy, bereft of the shield of sarcasm and reserve with which she could hide her weakness now. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It was not until the passion-fire began to fade in Nouna’s eyes, and she slid languidly down from his neck, and drawing his arms about her so as to support her best in the position she chose, nestled against him with closing eyes, while a long sigh of perfect and complete happiness rose to her parted lips, seemed to quiver along her form, and then died slowly away, that his doubts and fears surged up again in the midst of his own intoxication of pleasure, and, with difficulty steadying himself to the task, he framed a form of words in which to resume his interrogatory. ”

“ I am not like your English girls—the girls at the school, who always know what they are going to do. Something comes up here,”—and she put her hands over her heart—“and then it mounts up there,”—joining her fingers over her head—“and says, ‘Nouna, love; Nouna, hate; Nouna, be sweet and gentle;’ or ‘Nouna, be proud and distant.’ And I go just as the little voice guides. Well, that is not English!”
“You are impulsive, darling, that’s all. If you love me truly, the little voice will always tell you to do what I wish.” ”

“ As he realised this, face to face with her, George reeled back against one of the supports of the verandah, and burst into a stupid idiot’s laugh. The whole foundation on which heart and brain were busy building for a life’s work and a life’s happiness, had sunk beneath his feet and swept all into a hideous, yawning pit of ruin. And so for a moment the brain gave way and the horrible pain was dulled, while Chloris White, recognising her son-in-law with a shock, dismissed the enamoured Dicky on some futile errand, and gave all her attention to the unexpected and disastrously unwelcome visitor. ”

“ One does not turn one’s strength against one’s friends.”
“That is true,” said George, touched by the girl’s tone. “Ella, why won’t you marry me? Only two women in all my life have ever woke any strong feeling in me: until this evening I could have said ‘only one’—a little wild girl whose influence I dread, though I have only met her twice. You will think me a weak fool, perhaps, but a woman, however clever she may be, cannot in such a case judge a man. There are influences at work in a man’s coarser nature that no sweet and innocent girl could understand. ”

“ Willingham Church stood in the grounds belonging to the Hall, so that Nouna had had an opportunity of shuddering at the sombre dreariness of the mansion even before the return call she had made with Lady Millard and Cicely, on which occasion she had sat almost mute on a high-backed chair, looking as insignificant and unhappy as a starved mouse, thinking that Lady Florencecourt’s light eyes looked like the glass marbles with which she played at solitaire, and what a good model her face would be for one of those indiarubber heads that children squeeze up into grotesque grimaces. ”

“ For God’s sake spare her, don’t let her see you, Nouna—she has come to see Chloris White, the devil’s part of you, about young Wood. Don’t see her. Remember, she is your child and my wife. Show the angel’s side once more. Be true to your own soul. Listen. You are your child’s religion. While she worships you, while she holds you the ideal of all that is pure and lovely, the spirit of good in you is kept alive by her devotion. If you cast yourself down from that altar you kill in yourself everything that is not vile, base, devilish ”

“ Lauriston—a passionately loving mother kept apart from her child by a paramount duty. I love Nouna as the plant loves the sun; ask her to show you my letters, ask her what she remembers of me, and you will find that no woman among your English friends loves her children as I love my child, nor fulfils every wish of her daughter’s as I do Nouna’s. When you are her husband—for I wish you to become her husband, you are noble-hearted and honourable, and you will take care of her—you will find that her absent mother has a share in all her memories. ”

“ He knew that if Chloris White chose to be as bad as her word, and to excite Rahas’s evil thirst for Nouna’s beauty, he should have to enter into a conflict with a stealthy and unscrupulous enemy, the thought of whose underhand weapons filled him with fury and loathing. He must get away with his wife at once, as secretly as he could, trusting that the mother might overpower the fiend in Chloris, and induce her to leave her child safe in the care of a man whom she must at least respect. In the meantime the change in their circumstances must be made known to Nouna without delay. ”

“ George 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 whole of this most unexpected scene formed only a hazy and harmonious background in George Lauriston’s eyes; for in front of him on the divan, between the two trellised windows, lay a creature so bewitchingly unlike anything of flesh and blood he had ever seen or dreamed of, that the young Englishman felt his brain swim, and held his breath with a great fear lest the dazzling vision before him should melt away, with the scents and the soft lights and the rustle of the night air in the hanging draperies, into the drizzling rain and the damp and the darkness of the street outside. ”

“ Lauriston, what we English people call wilfulness is lamb-like docility compared to that girl’s! She’s like an eel, like quicksilver, like a will-o’-the-wisp.”
“Or a sunbeam,” suggested he.
“Ah, of course, you’re a young man, you think her charming; and so, I believe, at the bottom of my heart, do I. But give me a good, sensible, solid, matter-of-fact English girl to look after, rather than this creature who is shaking with passion one moment, flashing her teeth, stamping her foot; and the next suffocating you, and crushing up your bonnet with kisses. ”

“ Then he snatched her into his arms and their eyes held each other’s for some minutes in an ecstasy of relief and gratitude. George had loved his wife better than his career, better than his own happiness. Nouna, since the fall of her first idol—her mother—had turned all her devotion to the husband who had cherished her so tenderly. Both, therefore, dreaded life without the other a thousand times worse than death, and when it dawned upon them that they were not to be parted again, there was no further sorrow possible for them in this world. ”

“ Lauriston sat upright in his chair, consciously struggling against the charm which was ensnaring his senses. “What you call rest,” he said earnestly, “is a temporary torpor necessary to you, a warmer-blooded race, and is the natural reaction from your passionate moods, in which you are all fire. But for us, a colder nation, what you call rest is a dangerous soothing of the mind and stimulating of the senses, an enslaving pleasure to be avoided by those who have a battle to fight, and much to win. The only wholesome rest for us is dead, dreamless sleep.” ”

“ Ambition, I see, is not the great, never pausing, never ceasing motive-power that we poor foolish women are taught to believe; it is a pretty whim, to be taken up alternately with a fit of smoking, or mountain-climbing, as we girls change about between tennis and tatting.”
“Not quite, Ella,” said George, doing her the justice to grow serious when he saw how deeply and unselfishly she was in earnest. “Ambition does not die for lying a short time hidden by other feelings; and surely even if it loses a little of its bitter keenness, it gains by being no longer wholly selfish.” ”

“ To Lauriston, who had been accustomed, from a lofty standpoint of ambition and devotion to duty, to look down upon love as a gentle pastime which would amuse and occupy him when the first pangs of his hungry desire for distinction should be satisfied, the sudden revelation of some of its keen delights was an experience full of novel excitement and charm. True at least to one principle while so much was suffered to go by the board, he did not for one moment waver in his resolution to marry Nouna. ”

“ She thought that the weird prettiness of Nouna’s little wasted face had bewitched even this middle-aged doctor.
“She is scarcely even yet an ideal companion for a man of intellect,” she said with a slight touch of her worst, most priggish manner.
“H’m, I don’t know,” said the doctor. “Your man of intellect is generally a man of something else besides; and the housekeeper-wife and the blue-stocking wife both frequently leave as much to be desired as—well, say, the flower-wife, if once the flower learns to turn to the sun, as, I think, little Mrs. Lauriston has done.” ”

“ 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. ”

“ I was born into the world to protect you and shield you from harm, my darling; and so my love was ready for you at the moment when your innocence might have put you in danger, just as it will be to the end of your life.”
“Supposing you were to die first?” suggested she, not flippantly, but with an awestruck consideration of possibilities.
“A soldier can always last out till his duty’s done,” said George, with quiet conviction.
After this Nouna remained silent a little while, but that her ideas had not been working in quite the desired direction was evident when she next spoke. ”

“ In the uprooting and tempestuous state of mind into which the red-hot romance of his marriage had plunged him, it was with a pang of yearning towards the sincere and steadfast old friend that he saw him depart disappointed, if not angry. But no man of three-and-twenty can trouble himself deeply about one of his own sex when he is on his way to a passionately adored bride; and a minute later George was in a hansom on his way to —— Street, in an ecstasy of anticipation that left no room for a doubt or a fear. ”

“ They would sink at once to the level of the ordinary cavilling, cooing young couple whom every new-made husband so heartily contemns. George fell asleep resolved to inaugurate a new régime of immaculate firmness and forbearance in the morning.
But how could he have reckoned upon the irresistible charm of a waking woman, fresh after the night’s sleep as an opening rose, all smiles, blushes, babbling girlish confidences, sweet reticences, a creature a thousand times more bewitching, more beautiful, than in his hottest young man’s dreams he had ever imagined a mortal could be? ”

“ She retreated a few paces and showed her teeth at him like an angry ape; then twirling her lamp twice round her head with some muttered, inarticulate words, as if she were repeating an incantation, she turned her back upon him and slunk stealthily up stairs like a wild animal thwarted in a search for its young.
George left the house with shuddering thankfulness that Nouna had escaped from her perilous associations. “Marriage, thank heaven,” thought he, “works such changes in a woman that it will drive them all out of her head and fill her heart and mind with new thoughts and feelings.” ”

“ He came back, knelt before her, and looked into her face.
“In England, Nouna,” he said very gently, “when a man wants a wife, he chooses a girl whom he believes to be so good, so true, so noble that he couldn’t possibly think she would do anything that wasn’t right. And he loves her with all his heart, and never thinks of anybody but her, and spends all his time trying to make her happy. So he never thinks about such a dreadful thing as her deceiving him, because, you see, she couldn’t, unless she was very wicked, treat a man badly when he was so good to her.” ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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?” ”

“ I can never give you a palace, Nouna, or elephants with golden trappings; if I can ever buy you diamonds it will not be till you are too old to care for them; and you will only have one slave. But you will be a queen to me, my darling, as long as our lives last; and I will get on and make my name famous, so that you shall not envy the proudest maharanee in India, you shall be so happy as the good true wife of a plain English gentleman.”
“Wife!” repeated Nouna wonderingly, raising her head from his shoulder to peer into his eyes. “That is what mamma always says. ”

“ What good in heaven or earth is worth the striving for, when this, the most absorbing soul or sense can imagine, is close to my hand, at my lips? And so, as in all encounters of the affections, the greater love was at the mercy of the less; and George, telling himself that time and experience would develop in her all those other qualities which his own efforts had failed to draw out, but which, being part of his conception of the ideal woman, must lie dormant somewhere in the queen of his heart, gave himself up to adoration of those excellences in her which had been already demonstrated ”

“ In a burst of most deep, most loyal tenderness, he lifted her up in his arms, and curled her slender limbs about him, and held her like a cherished pet lamb against his breast.
“My darling,” he whispered in her ear—a little shell-like ear of rose and ivory tints—“I shall speak to you always as a man speaks to the creature that lives in his heart, whom he loves, whom he trusts, whom he worships. And you, Nouna, must be good and gentle, and grow up into a sweet, noble woman for me, so that my love for you may make me better. ”