Produced by Polly Stratton
THE MORALS OF MARCUS ORDEYNE
by William J. Locke
PART I
CHAPTER I
For reasons which will be given later, I sit down here, in Verona, to
write the history of my extravagant adventure. I shall formulate and
expand the rough notes in my diary which lies open before me, and I
shall begin with a happy afternoon in May, six months ago.
May 20th.
_London_:--To-day is the seventh anniversary of my release from
captivity. I will note it every year in my diary with a sigh of
unutterable thanksgiving. For seven long blessed years have I been
free from the degrading influences of Jones Minor and the First Book of
Euclid. Some men find the modern English boy stimulating, and the old
Egyptian humorous. Such are the born schoolmasters, and schoolmasters,
like poets, _nascuntur non fiunt_. What I was born passes my ingenuity
to fathom. Certainly not a schoolmaster--and my many years of
apprenticeship did not make me one. They only turned me into an
automaton, feared by myself, bantered by my colleagues, and sometimes
good-humouredly tolerated by the boys.
Seven years ago the lawyer’s letter came. The post used to arrive just
before first school. I opened the letter in the class-room and sat down
at my desk, sick with horror. The awful wholesale destruction of my
relatives paralysed me. My form must have seen by my ghastly face that
something had happened, for, contrary to their usual practice, they sat,
thirty of them, in stony silence, waiting for me to begin the lesson. As
far as I remember anything, they waited the whole hour. The lesson over,
I passed along the cloister on my way to my rooms. I overheard one of my
urchins, clattering in front of me, shout to another:
“I’m sure he’s got the sack!”
Turning round he perceived me, and grew as red as a turkey-cock. I
laughed aloud. The boy’s yell was a clarion announcement from the
seventh heaven. I _had got the sack_! _I_ should never teach him
quadratic equations again. I should turn my back forever upon those
hateful walls and still more abominated playing-fields. And I was not
leaving my prison, as I had done once or twice before, in order to
continue my servitude elsewhere. I was free. I could go out into the
sunshine and look my fellow-man in the face, free from the haunting,
demoralising sense of incapacity. I was free. Until that urchin’s shriek
I had not realised it. My teeth chattered with the thrill.
I was fortunately out of school the second hour. I employed most of
it in balancing myself. A perfectly reasonable creature, I visited the
chief. He was a chubby, rotund man, with a circular body and a circular
visage, and he wore great circular gold spectacles. He looked like a
figure in the Third Book of Euclid. But his eyes sparkled like bits of
glass in the sun.
“Well, Ordeyne?” he inquired, looking up from letters to parents.
“I have come to ask you to accept my resignation,” said I. “I would like
you to release me at once.”
“Come, come, things are not as bad as all that,” said he, kindly.
I looked stupidly at him for a moment.
“Of course I know you’ve got one or two troublesome forms,” he
continued.
Then I winced. His conjecture hurt me horribly.
“Oh, it’s nothing to do with my incompetence,” I interrupted.
“What is it, then?”
“My grandfather, two uncles, two nephews and a valet were drowned a day
or two ago in the Mediterranean,” I answered, calmly.
I have since been struck by the crudity of this announcement. It took my
chief’s breath away.
“I deeply sympathise with you,” he said at last.
“Thank you,” said I.
“A terrible catastrophe. No wonder it has upset you. Horrible! Six
living human beings! Three generations of men!”
“That’s just it,” said I. “Three generations of my family swept away,
leaving me now at the head of it.”
At this moment the chief’s wife came into the library with the morning
paper in her hand. On seeing me she rushed forward.
“Have you had bad news?”
“Yes. Is it in the paper?”
“I was coming to show my husband. The name is an uncommon one. I
wondered if they might be relatives of yours.”
I bowed acquiescence. The chief looked at the paragraph below his wife’s
indicating thumb, then he looked at me as if I, too, had suffered a
seachange.
“I had no idea--” he said. “Why, now--now you are Sir Marcus Ordeyne!”
“It sounds idiotic, doesn’t it?” said I, with a smile. “But I suppose I
-am.”
And so came my release from captivity. I was profoundly affected by the
awful disaster, but it would be sheer hypocrisy if I said that I felt
personal grief. I knew none of the dead, of whom I verily believe the
valet was the worthiest man. My grandfather and uncles had ignored
my existence. Not a helping hand had they stretched out to my widowed
mother in her poverty, when one kindly touch would have meant all.
They do not seem to have been a lovable race, the Ordeynes. What my
father, the youngest son, was like, I have no idea, as he died when
I was two years old, but my mother, who was somewhat stern and
puritanical, spoke of him very much as she would have spoken of the
prophet Joel, had he been a personal acquaintance.
Seven years to-day have I been a free man.
Feeling at peace with all the world I called this afternoon on my Aunt
Jessica, Mrs. Ordeyne, who has borne me no malice for stepping into the
place that should have been the inheritance of her husband and of her
son. Rather has she devised to adopt me, to guide my ambitions and to
point out my duties as the head of the house. If I refuse to be adopted,
avoid ambitions and disclaim duties, the fault lies not with her
good-will. She is a well-preserved worldly woman of fifty-five, and
having begun to dye her hair in the peroxide of hydrogen era has not
the curiosity to abandon the practice and see what colour will result.
I wish I could like her. I can’t. She purrs. Some day I feel she will
scratch. She received me graciously.
“My dear Marcus. At last! Didn’t you know I have been in town ever since
Easter?”
“No,” said I. “I am afraid I didn’t.” Which was true. “Why didn’t you
tell me?”
“I would have asked you to dinner, but you will never come. As for
At Home cards I never dream of sending them to you. It is a waste of
precious half-penny stamps.”
“You might have written me a nice little letter about nothing at all,” I
suggested.
“For you to say ‘What is that woman worrying me with her silly letters
for?’ I know what you men are.” She looked arch.
This is precisely what I should have said. As I am not an inventive
liar, I could only smile feebly. I am never at my ease with Aunt
Jessica. I am not the kind of person to afford her entertainment. I do
not belong to her world of opulence, and if even I desired it, which the
gods forbid, my means would not enable me to make the necessary display.
My uncle, thinking to retrieve the fallen fortunes of the title, amassed
enormous wealth as a company promoter, while I, on whom the title has
descended, am perfectly contented with its fallen fortunes. I have
scarcely a thought or taste in common with my aunt. In fact, I must bore
her exceedingly. Yet she hides her boredom beneath a radiant countenance
and leads me to understand that my society gives her inexpressible joy.
I wonder why.
She is always be-guide-philosopher-and-friending me. I resent it. A man
of forty does not need the counsels of an elderly woman destitute of
intellect. I believe there are some women who are firmly convinced that
their sheer sex has imbued them with all the qualities of genius. To-day
my aunt tackled me on the subject of marriage. I ought to marry. I asked
why. It appeared it was every man’s duty.
“From what point of view?” I asked. “The mere propagation of the human
race, or the providing of a superfluous young woman with a means of
livelihood? If it is the former, then, in my opinion, there are too
many people in the world already; and if the latter, I’m afraid I’m not
sufficiently altruistic.”
“You are so _funny!_” laughed my aunt.
I was not aware of being the least bit funny.
“But, seriously,” she continued, “you _must_ marry.” She is a woman who
has an irritating way of speaking in Italics. “Are you aware that if you
have no son the title will become extinct?”
“And if it does,” I cried, “who on this earth will care a
half-penny-bun?”
I am growing tired of the title. At first it was rather amusing. Now
it appears it is registered in Heaven’s chancery and hedged about with
divine ordinances. Only the other day an unknown parson requested me to
open a church bazaar, and I gathered he had received his instructions
direct from the Almighty.
“Why, every one would care,” exclaimed my aunt, genuinely shocked. “It
would be monstrous. You owe it to your descendants as well as to your
ancestors. Besides,” she added, with apparent irrelevance, “a man in
your position ought to live up to it.”
“I do,” said I, “just up to it.”
“Now you are pretending you don’t understand me. You ought to marry
money!”
I smiled and shook my head. I don’t think my aunt likes me to smile
and shake my head, for I saw a flicker in her eyes. “No, my dear aunt;
emphatically no. It would be comfortless. If I kissed it, it would be
cold. If I put my arms round it, it would be full of sharp edges which
would hurt. If I tried to get any emotion out of it, it would only
jingle.”
“What do you want then?”
“Nothing. But if I must--let it be plain flesh and blood.”
“Cannibal!” said my aunt.
We both laughed.
“But you can have plenty of flesh and blood, with money as well, for the
asking,” she insisted; and thereupon my two cousins, Dora and Gwendolen,
entered the drawingroom and interrupted the conversation. They are both
bouncing, fresh-faced girls, in the early twenties. They ride and shoot
and bicycle and golf and dance, and the elder writes little stories for
the magazines. As I do none of these things, I am convinced they regard
me as a poor sort of creature. When they hand me a cup of tea I almost
expect them to pat me on the head and say, “Good dog!” I am long, lean,
stooping, hatchet-faced, hawknosed, near-sighted. I have not the breezy
air of the jolly young stockbrokers they are in the habit of meeting.
They rather alarm me. Moreover, they have managed to rear a colossal
pile of wholly incorrect information on every subject under the sun, and
are addicted to letting chunks of it fall about one’s ears. This stuns
me, rendering conversation difficult.
As I had not seen Dora since her return from Rome, where she had spent
the early spring, I asked, in some trepidation, for her impressions.
Before I could collect myself, I was listening to a lecture on St.
Peter’s. She told me it was built by Michael Angelo. I suggested that
some credit might be given to Bramante, not to speak of Rosellino,
Baldassare Peruzzi and the two San Gallo’s.
“Oh!” said my young lady, with a superb air of omniscience. “It was
all Michael Angelo’s design. _The others only tinkered away at it
afterwards_.”
After receiving this brickbat I took my leave.
To console myself I looked up, during the evening, Michael Angelo’s
noble letter about Bramante.
“One cannot deny,” says he, “that Bramante was as excellent in
architecture as any one has been from the ancients to now. He placed the
first stone of St. Peter’s, not full of confusion, but clear, neat, and
luminous, and isolated all round in such a way that it injured no
part of the palace, and was held to be a beautiful thing, as is still
apparent, in such a way that any one who has departed from the said
order of Bramante, as San Gallo has done, has departed from the truth.”
Michael Angelo did not like San Gallo; neither did he like Bramante-who
was his senior by thirty years-but this makes his appreciation of the
elder’s work all the more generous.
Tinkered away at it, indeed!
May 21st.
I spent all the morning at work by the open window.
I have a small house in Lingfield Terrace, on the north side of the
Regent’s Park, so that my drawing-room, on the first floor, has a
southern aspect. It has been warm and sunny for the past few days, and
the elms and plane-trees across the road are beginning to riot in their
green bravery, as if intoxicated with the golden wine of spring. My
French window is flung wide open, and on the balcony a triangular bit of
sunlight creeps round as the morning advances. My work-table is drawn
up to the window. I am busy over the first section of my “History of
Renaissance Morals,” for which I think my notes are completed. I have a
delicious sense of isolation from the world. Away over those tree-tops
is a faint purpurine pall, and below it lies London, with its strife and
its misery, its wickedness and its vanity. Twenty minutes would take
me into the heart of it. And if I chose I could be as struggling, as
wretched, as much imbued with wickedness and vanity as anybody. I could
gamble on the stock exchange, or play the muddy game of politics, or
hawk my precious title for sale among the young women of London society.
My Aunt Jessica once told me that London was at my feet. I am quite
content that it should stay there. I have much the same nervous dread
of it as I have of an angry sea breaking in surf on the shingle. If I
ventured out in it I should be tossed hither and thither and broken on
the rocks, and I should perish. I prefer to stand aloof and watch. If I
had a little more of daring in my nature I might achieve something. I am
afraid I am but a waster in the world’s factory; but kind Fate, instead
of pitching me on the rubbish-heap, has preserved me, perhaps has set me
under a glass case, in her own museum, as a curiosity. Well, I am happy
in my shelter.
I was interrupted in my writing by the entrance of my cook and
housekeeper, Antoinette. She was sorry to disturb me, but did Monsieur
like sorrel? She was preparing some _veau a l’oseille_ for lunch, and
Stenson (my man) had informed her that it was disgusting stuff and that
Monsieur would not eat it.
“Antoinette,” said I, “go and inform Stenson that as he looks after
my outside so do you look after my inside, and that I have implicit
confidence in both of you in your respective spheres of action.”
“But does Monsieur like sorrel?” Antoinette inquired, anxiously.
“I adore it even,” said I, and Antoinette made her exit in triumph.
What a reverential care French women have for the insides of their
masters! At times it is pathetic. Before now, I have thrown dainty
morsels which I could not eat into the fire, so as to avoid hurting
Antoinette’s feelings.
I came across her three years ago in a tiny hostelry in a tiny town
in the Loire district. She cooked the dinner and conversed about it
afterwards so touchingly that we soon became united in bonds of the
closest affection. Suddenly some money was stolen; Antoinette, accused,
was dismissed without notice. I had a shrewd suspicion of the thief--a
suspicion which was afterwards completely justified--and indignantly
championed Antoinette’s cause.
But Antoinette, coming from a village some eighty miles away, was a
stranger and an alien. I was her only friend. It ended in my inviting
her to come to England, the land of the free and the refuge of the
downtrodden and oppressed, and become my housekeeper. She accepted, with
smiles and tears. And they were great big smiles, that went into creases
all over her fat red face, forming runnels for the great big tears which
dropped off at unexpected angles. She was alone in the world. Her only
son had died during his military service in Madagascar. Although her man
was dead, the law would not regard her as a widow because she had never
been married, and therefore refused to exempt her only son. “_On ne
peut-etre Jeune qu’une fois, n’est-ce pas, Monsieur?_” she said, in
extenuation of her early fault.
“And Jean-Marie,” she added, “was as brave a fellow and as devoted a son
as if I had been married by the Saint-Pere himself.”
I waved my hand in deprecation and told her it did not matter in the
least. The della Scalas, supreme lords of Verona for many generations,
were every man jack of them so parented. Even William the Conqueror--
“_Tiens_,” cried Antoinette, consoled, “and he became Emperor of
Germany--he and Bismarck!”
Antoinette’s historical sense is rudimentary. I have not tried since to
develop it.
When I brought my victim of foreign tyranny to Lingfield Terrace,
Stenson, I believe, nearly fainted. He is the correctest of English
valets, and his only vice, I believe, is the accordion, on which
he plays jaunty hymn-tunes when I am out of the house. When he had
recovered he asked me, respectfully, how they were to understand each
other. I explained that he would either have to learn French or teach
Antoinette English. What they have done, I gather, is to invent a
nightmare of a _lingua franca_ in which they appear to hold amicable
converse. Now and again they have differences of opinion, as to-day,
over my taste for _veau a l’oseille_; but, on the whole, their relations
are harmonious, and she keeps him in a good-humour: Naturally, she feeds
the brute.
The duty-impulse, stimulated by my call yesterday on one aunt by
marriage, led my footsteps this afternoon to the house of the other,
Mrs. Ralph Ordeyne. She is of a different type from her sister-in-law,
being a devout Roman Catholic, and since the terrible affliction of two
years ago has concerned herself more deeply than ever in the affairs of
her religion. She lives in a gloomy little house in a sunless Kensington
by-street. Only my Cousin Rosalie was at home. She gave me tea made with
tepid water and talked about the Earl’s Court Exhibition, which she had
not visited, and a new novel, of which she had vaguely heard. I tried in
vain to infuse some life into the conversation. I don’t believe she is
interested in anything. She even spoke lukewarmly of Farm Street.
I pity her intensely. She is thin, thirty, colourless, bosomless. I
should say she was passionless--a predestined spinster. She has never
drunk hot tea or lived in the sun or laughed a hearty laugh. I remember
once, at my wit’s end for talk, telling her the old story of Theodore
Hook accosting a pompous stranger on the street with the polite request
that he might know whether he was anybody in particular. She said,
without a smile, “Yes, it was astonishing how rude some people could
be.”
And her godfathers and godmothers gave her the name of Rosalie. Mine
might just as well have called me Hercules or Puck.
She told me that her mother intended to ask me to dine with them one
evening next week. When was I free? I chose Thursday. Oddly enough I
enjoy dining there, although we are on the most formal terms, not having
got beyond the “Sir Marcus” and “Mrs. Ordeyne.” But both mother and
daughter are finely bred gentlewomen, and one meets few, oh, very, very
few among the ladies of to-day.
I reached home about six and found a telegram awaiting me.
“_Sorry can’t give you dinner. Cook in an impossible condition. Come
later._ Judith.”
I must confess to a sigh of relief. I am fond of Judith and sorry
for her domestic infelicities, though why she should maintain that
alcoholized wretch in her kitchen passes my comprehension. If there is
one thing women do not understand it is the selection, the ordering, and
the treatment of domestic servants. The mere man manages much better.
But, that aside, Antoinette has spoiled me for Judith’s cook’s cookery.
I breathed a little sigh of content and summoned Stenson to inform him
that I would dine at home.
A great package of books from a second-hand bookseller arrived during
dinner. Among them were the nine volumes of Pietro Gianone’s _Istoria
Civile del Regno di Napoli_, a copy of which I ought to have possessed
long ago. It is dedicated to the “Most Puissant and Felicitous Prince
Charles VI, the Great, by God crowned Emperor of the Romans, King of
Germany, Spain, Naples, Hungary, Bohemia, Sicily, _etcetera_.” Is there
a living soul in God’s universe who has a spark of admiration for this
most puissant and most felicitous monarch crowned by God Emperor
and King of the greater part of Europe (and docked of most of
his pretensions by the Treaty of Utrecht)? We only remember the
forcible-feeble person by his Pragmatic Sanction, and otherwise his
personality has left in history not the remotest trace. And yet, on
the 12th February, 1723, a profoundly erudite, subtle, and picturesque
historian grovels before the man and subscribes himself “Of your Holy
Caesarean and Catholic Majesty the most humble and most devoted and most
obsequious vassal and slave Pietro Gianone.” What ruthless judgments
posterity passes on once enormous reputations! In Gianone’s admirable
introduction we hear of “_il celebre Arthur Duck, il quale oltro a’ con
confini della sua Inghilterra volle in altri a piu lontani Paesi andav
rintracciando l’uso a l’autorita delle romane leggi ne’ nuovi domini de’
Principi cristiani; e di quelle di ciascheduna Nazione volle ancora aver
conto: le ricerco nella vicina Scozia, e nell’ Ibernia; trapasso nella
Francia, e nella Spagna; in Germania, in Italia, a nel nostro Regno
ancora: si stese in oltre in Polonia, Boemia, in Ungheria, Danimarca,
nella Svezia, ed in piu remote parti_.” A devil of a fellow this
celebrated English Arthur Duck, who besides writing a learned treatise
_De Usu et Auth. Jur. Civ. Rom. in Dominiis Principum Christianorum_,
was a knight, a member of Parliament, chancellor of the diocese of
London, and a master in chancery. Gianone flattens himself out for a
couple of pages before this prodigy whom he lovingly calls _Ariuro_, as
who should say Raffaelo or Giordano; and now, where in the hearts of men
lingers Sir Arthur Duck? For one thing he had a bad name. Our English
sense of humour revolts from making a popular hero of a man called Duck.
Yet we made one of Drake. But there was something masculine about the
latter: in fact, everything.
I am afraid it was rather late when I got to Judith.