CHAPTER XX

November 11th.

I wrote Judith a long letter last night, urging her to disregard the

forfeited claims of her husband and to join her life definitely with

mine. I was cynical enough to feel that if such a proceeding annoyed

the Rev. Rupert Mainwaring it would serve him right. The fact of a man’s

finding religion and abjuring sack does not in itself exculpate him from

wrongs which he has inflicted on his fellow-creatures in unregenerate

days. Mainwaring deserved some punishment of which he seemed to have had

remarkably little; for, mind you, his sack-cloth and ashes at Hoxton,

although sincerely worn, are not much of a punishment to a man in his

exalted mood. Now, on the contrary, Judith deserved compensation, such

as I alone was prepared to offer her in spite of conventional morality

and the feelings of the Rev. Rupert Mainwaring. Indeed, it seemed to

be the only way of saving Judith from being worried out of her life by

frantic appeals to embrace both himself and Primitive Christianity.

Her position was that of Andromeda. Mine that of an unheroic Perseus,

destined to deliver her from the monster--the monster whose lair is a

little tin mission church in Hoxton.

I wrote the letter in one of those periods of semi-vitality when the

pulses of emotion throb weakly, and sensitiveness is dulled. To-day

I have felt differently. My nerves have been restrung. Something

ironically vulgar, sordidly tragic has seemed to creep into my relations

with Judith.

To my great surprise Judith brought her answer in person this evening.

It is the first time she has entered my house; and her first words, as

she looked all around her with a wistful smile referred to the fact.

“It is almost just as I have pictured it--and I have pictured it--do you

know how often?”

She was calmer, if not happier. The haggard expression had given place

to one of resignation. I wheeled an arm-chair close to the fire, for she

was cold, and she sank into it with a sigh of weariness. I knelt beside

her. She drew off her gloves and put one hand on my head in the old way.

The touch brought me great comfort. I thought that we had reached the

quiet haven at last.

“So you have come to me, Judith,” I whispered.

“I have come, dear,” she said, “to tell you that I can’t come.”

My heart sank.

“Why?” I asked.

We fenced a little. She gave half reasons, womanlike, of which I proved

the inadequacy. I recapitulated the arguments I had used in my letter.

She met them with hints and vague allusions. At last she cut the knot.

“I am going back to my husband.”

I rose to my feet and echud the words. She repeated them in a tone so

mournfully distinct, that they had the finality of a death-knell. I had

nothing to say.

“Before we part I must make my peace with you, Marcus,” she said. “I

have suddenly developed a conscience. I always had the germs of it.”

“You were always the best and dearest woman in the world,” I cried.

“And I betrayed you, dear. That letter from Pasquale told me about his

flight with Carlotta. I lied to you--but I was in a state bordering on

madness.”

I rested my elbow on the mantel-piece and looked down on her. She

appeared so sweet and fragile, like a piece of Dresden china, incapable

of base actions. As I did not speak she went on: “I did not mean to play

into Pasquale’s hands, Marcus. Heaven knows I didn’t--but I did play

into them. Do you remember that awful night and our talk the next

morning? I asked you not to see her all day--to mourn our dead love. I

knew you would keep your promise. You are a man of sensitive honour. If

all men were like you, the world would be a beautiful place.”

“It would go to smash in a few weeks through universal incompetence,” I

murmured, with some bitterness.

“There would be no meanness and treachery and despicable underhand

doings. Marcus, you must forgive me--I was a desperate woman fighting

for my life’s happiness. I thought I would try one forlorn hope. I kept

you out of the way and came up here to see Carlotta. Don’t interrupt me,

Marcus; let me finish. I happened to meet her a hundred yards down the

road, and we went into the Regent’s Park. We sat down and I told her

about ourselves, and my love for you, and asked her to give you up. I

don’t believe she understood, Marcus. She laughed and threw stones at a

little dog. I recovered my senses and left her there and went home sick

with shame and humiliation. I knew Pasquale was in love with her, for he

had told me so the night before, and asked me how the marriage could be

stopped. He didn’t believe in your announcement to Hamdi Effendi. But I

never mentioned Pasquale to Carlotta, or hinted there might be another

than you. I was loyal so far, Marcus. And two or three days afterwards

came Pasquale’s letter. And I waited for you, in a fearful joy. I knew

you would come to me--and I was mad enough to think that time would

heal--that you would forget--that we could have the dear past again--and

I would teach you to love me. But then, suddenly, without a word of

warning--it has always been his way--appeared my husband. After that,

you came with your offer of shelter and comfort--and you seemed like the

angel of the flaming vengeance. For I had wronged you, dear--robbed you

of your happiness. If I hadn’t prepared her mind for leaving you, she

would never have run away. If I had not done this, or if on the other

hand you loved me, Marcus, I should perhaps have looked at things

differently. I am beginning to believe in God and to see his hand in

it all. I couldn’t come and live with you as your wife, Marcus. Things

stronger even than my love for you forbid it. Our life together would

not be the sweet and gracious thing it has always been to me. We have

come to the parting of the ways. I must follow my husband.”

I knew she spoke rightly. When she is not swept away to hysterical

action by her temperament, she has a perception exquisitely keen into

the heart of truth.

“The parting of the ways?” said I. “Yes; but can’t you rest at the

cross-roads? Can’t you lead your present life--your husband and myself,

both, just your friends?”

“Rupert has need of me,” she replied very quickly. “He is a man in

torment of soul. He has gone to this extreme of religious fanaticism

because he is still uncertain of himself. We had another long talk

to-day. I may help him.”

“Does he deserve the sacrifice of your life?”

She did not take up my question directly; but sat for a few minutes with

her chin on her hand looking into the fire.

“He is a man of evil passions,” she resumed, at last. “Drink and women

mainly dragged him down. I knew the hell of it during the short time of

our married life. If he falls away now, he believes he is damned to all

eternity. He believes in the material torture--flames and devils and

pitchforks--of damned souls. He says in me alone lies his salvation. I

must go. If the tin church gets too awful, I shall run over to Delphine

Carrere for a week to steady my nerves.”

What could I say? The abomination of desolation lay around about me.

I might have prated to her of my needs, wrung her heart with the

piteousness of my appeal. _Cui bono?_ _I_ can’t whine to women--or to

men either, for the matter of that. When I am by myself I can curse and

swear, play Termagant and rehearse an extravaganza out-Heroding all

the Herods that ever Heroded. But before others--no. I believe my

great-grandfather, before he qualified for his baronetcy, was a

gentleman.

“But on these occasions,” said I, “you will avoid a sequestered and

meditative self.”

Her laugh got choked by a sob.

“Do you remember that? It is not so long ago--and yet it seems many,

many years.”

We moralised generally, after the way of humans, who desire to postpone

a moment of anguished speech. She made the tour of my book-shelves. Many

of the books she had borrowed, and she recognised them as old friends.

“Is that where Benvenuto Cellini has always lived?”

“Yes,” said I, running my hand along the row. “He is in his century,

among his companions. He would be unhappy anywhere else.”

“And the History--how far has it gone?”

I showed her the pile of finished manuscript, of which she glanced at a

few pages. She put it down hurriedly and turned away.

“I can’t see to read, just now, Marcus.”

Then she paused in front of her own photograph, the only one now on the

mantel-piece.

“Will you give me that back?”

“Why should I?” I asked.

“I would rather--I should not like you to burn it.”

“Burn it? All I have left of you?”

She turned swimming eyes on me.

“You are good, Marcus--after what I have told you--you do not feel

bitterly against me?”

“For what? For being quixotic? For going to martyrdom for an ideal?”

“You did not listen when I spoke about Carlotta?”

“Oh, my dear!” said I.

And now she has gone. We kissed at parting--a kiss of remembrance and

renunciation. Shall we ever meet again?

Darkness gathers round me, and I am tired, tired, and I would that I

could sleep like Rip Van Winkle, and awake an old man, with an old man’s

passionless resignation; or better, awake not at all. Such poor fools as

I are better dead.

I look back and see all my philosophy refuted, all my prim little

opinions lying prone like dolls with the sawdust knocked out of them.

All these years I have been judging Judith with an ignorance as cruel as

it has been complacent. Verily I have been the fag end of wisdom. So I

forbear to judge her now.

If I had loved Judith with the great passion of a man’s love for woman,

not all the converted rascals in Christendom could have come between us.

And her seeing Carlotta--poor woman--what does it matter? What did she

say about Carlotta? “She laughed and threw stones at a little dog.”

Oh, my God!

November 12th

This way madness lies. I will leave the house in charge of Stenson and

Antoinette and go abroad. Something has put Verona into my head. One

place is as good as another, so long as it is not this house--this house

of death and madness and crime--and Verona is in Italy, where I have

always found peace.

I will confess my madness. This book is a record of my morals--the

finished version of the farce the high gods have called on meto play. I

thought last night the curtain was rung down. I was wrong. Listen, and

laugh as I do--if you can.

I fixed myself to work to-day. After all, I am not an idler. I earn my

right to live. When I publish my History the world will be the richer by

_something_, poor though it may be. I vow I have been more greatly,

more nobly employed of late years, than I was when I earned my living

at school-slavery teaching to children the most useless, the most

disastrous, the most soul-cramping branch of knowledge wherewith

pedagogues in their insensate folly have crippled the minds and

blasted the lives of thousands of their fellow-creatures--elementary

mathematics. There is no more reason for any human being on God’s

earth to be acquainted with the Binomial Theorem or the Solution of

Triangles--unless he is a professional scientist, when he can begin

to specialise in mathematics at the same age as the lawyer begins to

specialise in law or the surgeon in anatomy--than for him to be an

expert in Choctaw, the Cabala or the Book of Mormon. I look back with

feelings of shame and degradation to the days when, for the sake of a

crust of bread, I prostituted my intelligence to wasting the precious

hours of impressionable childhood, which could have been filled with

so many beautiful and meaningful things, over this utterly futile and

inhuman subject. It trains the mind--it teaches boys to think, they say.

It doesn’t. In reality it is a cut and dried subject easy to fit into a

school curriculum. Its sacrosanctity saves educationalists an enormous

amount of trouble, and its chief use is to enable mindless young men

from the universities to make a dishonest living by teaching it to

others, who in their turn may teach it to a future generation.

I am mad to-night--why have I indulged in this diatribe against

mathematics? I must find some vent, I suppose. I see now. I was

saying that I earned my right to live, that I am not an idler. I cling

strenuously to the claim. A man cannot command respect, even his own, by

the mere reason of his _vie sentimentale_. And, after what I have done

to-day, I must force my claim to the respect which on other grounds I

have forfeited.

I spent, then, my day in unremitting toil. But this evening the horrible

craving for her came over me. Such a little thing brought it about.

Antoinette, who disapproves of the amorphous British lumps of sugar, has

found some emporium where she can buy the regular parallelopiped of

the Continent, and these she provides for my afterdinner coffee.

Absent-mindedly I dipped the edge of the piece of sugar into the liquid,

before dropping it, and watched the brown moisture rise through the

white crystals. Then I remembered. It was an invariable practice of

Carlotta’s. She would keep the lump in the coffee to saturation-point

between her fingers, and then hastily put it into her mouth, so that it

should not crumble to pieces on the way. If it did, there would be much

laughter and wiping of skirts; and there would be a search through my

dinner-jacket pockets for a handkerchief to dry the pink tips of

her fingers. She called the dripping lump a canard, like the French

children. It was such a trivial thing; but it brought back with a rush

all the thousand dainty, foolish, captivating intimacies that made up

the maddening charm of Carlotta.

Yes, I am aware that there is no language spoken under heaven that can

fitly express the doting folly of a man who can be driven mad by a piece

of sugar soaked in coffee. There is a ghastly French phrase not to be

found in Lamartine, Chateaubriand, or any of the polite sentimentalists

_avoir les sangs tournes de quelqu’un_. It is so with me. _J’ai les

sangs tournes d’elle_. Somebody has said something somewhere about the

passion of a man of forty. It must have to do with the French phrase.

I pushed my coffee aside untasted, and buried my head in my hands,

longing, longing; eating my heart out for her. The hours passed. When

the servants were abed, I stole upstairs to her room, left as it was on

the night when Antoinette, hoping against hope, had prepared it for her

reception. I broke down. Heaven knows what I did.

I returned to the drawing-room filled with the blind rage that makes

a man curse God and wish that he could die. The fire was black, and I

mechanically took up the poker to stir it. A tempest of impotent anger

shook my soul. I saw things red before my eyes. I had an execrable lust

to kill. I was alone amid a multitude of gibbering fiends. As I stooped

before the grate I felt something scrabble my shoulders. I leapt back

with a shriek, and saw standing on the mantel-shelf a black, one-eyed

thing regarding me with an expression of infinite malice. Before I knew

what I had done, I had brought the iron down, with all my force, upon

its skull, and it had fallen dead at my feet.

_Finis coronat opus._

November 22d.

Verona:--I have abandoned the “History of Renaissance Morals.” The

dog’s-eared MS. and the dusty pile of notes I have shot into a lumber

heap in a corner of this room, where I sit and shiver by a little stove.

It is immense, marble, cold, comfortless, suggestive of “the vasty halls

of death.” I have been here a week to-day. I thought I should find rest.

I should breathe the atmosphere of Italy again. I should ease my heart

among the masterworks of Girolamo dai Libri and Cavazzola, and, in

the presence of the blue castellated mountains they loved to paint,

my spirit would even be as theirs. In this old-world city, I fondly

imagined, I should forget the Regent’s Park, and attune my mind to the

life that once filled its narrow streets.

But nothing have I found save solitude. I stood to-day before the

mutilated fresco of Morone, my rapture of six years ago, and hated

it with unreasoning hatred. The Madonna belied the wreath-supported

inscription above her head, _“Miseratrix virginum Regina nostri

miserere,”_ and greeted me with a pitiless simper. The unidentified

martyr on the left stared straight in front of him with callous

indifference, and St. Roch looked aggravatingly plump for all his

ostentatious plague-spot. The picture was worse than meaningless. It was

insulting. It drove me out of the Public Gallery. Outside a grey mist

veiled the hills and a fine penetrating rain was falling. I crept home,

and for the fiftieth time since I have been here, opened my “History of

Renaissance Morals.” I threw it, with a final curse, into the corner.

I loathe it. I care not a fig for the Renaissance or its morals. I count

its people but a pestilent herd of daubers, rhymers, cutthroats, and

courtesans. Their _hubris_ has lost its glamour of beauty and has

coarsened into vulgar insolence. They offend me by their riotous

swagger, their insistence on the animal joy of living; chiefly by their

perpetual reminiscence of Pasquale.

Yet once they interested me greatly, filling with music and with colour

the grey void of my life. Whence has come the change?

In myself. To myself I have become a subject of excruciating interest.

To myself I am a vastly more picturesque personage than any debonair

hooligan of quattro-cento Verona. He has faded into the dullest (and

most offensive) dog of a ghost. I only exist. This sounds like the

colossal vanity of Bedlam. Heaven knows it is not. If you are racked

with toothache from ear to ear, from crown to chin, and from eyeball

to cerebellum, is not the whole universe concentrated in that head of

yours? Are you not to yourself in that hour of torture the most vitally

important of created beings? And no one blames you for it. Let me

therefore be without blame in my hour of moral toothache.

In the days gone by I was the victim of a singular hallucination. I

flattered myself on being the one individual in the world not summoned

to play his part in the comedy of Life. I sat alone in the great

auditorium like the mad king of Bavaria, watching with little zest what

seemed but a sorry spectacle. I thought myself secure in my solitary

stall. But I had not counted on the high gods who crowd shadowy into the

silent seats and are jealous of a mortal in their midst. Without warning

was I wrested from my place, hurled onto the stage, and before my

dazzled eyes could accustom themselves to the footlights, I found

myself enmeshed in intolerable drama. I was unprepared. I knew my part

imperfectly. I missed my cues. I had the blighting self-consciousness

of the amateur. And yet the idiot mummery was intensely real. Amid the

laughter of the silent shadowy gods I thought to flee from the stage.

I came to Verona and find I am still acting my part. I have always been

acting. I have been acting since I was born. The reason of our being

is to amuse the high gods with our histrionics. The earth itself is the

stage, and the starry ether the infinite auditorium.

The high gods have granted to their troupe of mimes one boon. Each has

it in his power to make the final exit at any moment. For myself I feel

that moment is at hand. One last soliloquy, and then like the pagliacco

I can say with a sigh, _“La commedia e finita_--the play is played out,”

and the rest will be silence. At all events I will tell my own story. My

“History of Renaissance Morals” can lie in its corner and rot, whilst I

shall concern myself with a far more vital theme--The Morals of Marcus

Ordeyne. The rough entries in my diary have been a habit of many futile

years; but they have never sufficed for self-expression. I have not

needed it till now. But now, with Judith and Carlotta gone from me, my

one friend, Pasquale, cut for ever from my life, even the sympathetic

Polyphemus driven into eternity by my murderous hand, I feel the

irresistible craving to express myself fully and finally for the first

and last time of my life. It will be my swan song. What becomes of it

afterwards I care not.

And when the last word is written, I shall go to the Pinacoteca and

stand again before the Morone fresco, and if the _Miseratrix Virginum

Regina_ still simpers at me, I shall take it as a sign and a token. I

shall return to this marble cavern and make my final exit. It will

be theatrically artistic--that I vow and declare--which no doubt will

afford immense pleasure to the high gods in their gallery.

PART II

CHAPTER XXI

It is some two years since I stood for the second time in the Pinacoteca

of Verona and sought to read my fate in the simpering countenance

of Morone’s _Miseratrix Virginum Regina_. I met what might have been

expected by a person of any sense--the self-same expression on the

painted face as I had angrily found there two months before when I began

to write the foregoing pages. But as I had no sense at all in those days

I accepted the poor battered Madonna’s lack of sympathy for a sign and a

token, went home, and prepared for dissolution.

Two years ago! It is only for the last few months that I have been able

to look back on that nightmare of a time in Verona with philosophic

equanimity. And this morning is the first occasion on which I have felt

that dispassionate attitude towards a past self which enables a man to

set down without the heartache the memories of days that are gone. I sit

upon the flat roof of this house in Mogador on the Morocco coast, shaded

by an awning from the bright African sun which glints in myriad sparkles

on the sea visible beyond the house-tops. The atmosphere last night was

somewhat heavy with the languorous, indescribable, and unforgettable

smell of the East; but the morning is deliciously wind-swept by the

Atlantic breeze, and the air tastes sweet. And it is clear, dazzlingly

clear. The white square houses and the cupolas of the mosques stand

out sharp against a sky of intense, ungradated blue. I am away from the

centre of the busy sea-port and the noise of its streets thronged with

grain-laden camels and shouting drivers and picturesque, quarrelling,

squabbling, haggling Moors and Jews and desert Arabs, and I am enveloped

in the peace of the infinite azure. Besides, yesterday afternoon, as

I rode back to Mogador, across the tongue of desert which separates it

from the Palm Tree House, and the town rose on the horizon, a dream city

of pure snow set in the clear sunset amethyst against the still, pale

lapis lazuli of the bay--something happened. And yesterday evening more

happened still.

Two years ago, then, I faced in Verona the dissolution of my ineffectual

existence. I could see no reason for living. My theory of myself in my

relation to the cosmos had been upset by practical phenomena. No other

theory based on surer grounds presented itself. But what about life,

said I, without a theory? Already it was life without a purpose, without

work, without friends, without Judith and without Carlotta. I could not

endure it without even a theory to console me. Beings do exist devoid of

loves or theories. But of such, I thought, are the beasts that perish.

I reflected further. Supposing, on extended investigation, I found a new

theory. How far would it profit me? How far could I trust it not to lead

me through another series of fantastic emotions and futile endeavours

to the sublime climax of murdering a one-eyed cat? Self-abomination and

contempt smote me as I thought of poor Polyphemus stretched dead on the

hearthrug, and myself standing over him, sane, stupid, and remorseful,

with the poker in my hand.

I walked up and down the vast cold room of the marble palazzo, arraying

before me in overwhelming numbers the arguments for selfdestruction. On

a table in the middle of the room stood a phial of prussic acid which I

had procured long before in London, it being a conviction of mine that

every man ought to have ready to hand a sure means of exit from the

world. I paused many times in front of the little blue phial. One lift

of the hand, one toss of the head, and all would be over. At last I

extracted the cork, and the faint smell of almonds reached my nostrils.

I recorked the phial and lit a cigarette. This I threw away half smoked

and again approached the table of death. I began to feel a strong

natural disinclination to swallow the stuff. “This,” said I, “is sheer

animal cowardice.” I again uncorked the phial. A new phase of the matter

appeared to me. “It is the act of a craven to shirk the responsibilities

of life. Can you be such a meanspirited creature as not even to have

the courage to live?” “No,” said I, “I have a valiant spirit,” and I

set down the bottle. “Bah,” whispered the familiar imp of suicide at my

elbow. “You are just afraid to die.” I took up the bottle again. But the

other taunter had an argument equally strong, and once more I put the

phial uncorked on the table.

Thus between two cowardices, one of which I must choose, stood I, like

the ass of Buridan. I lit another cigarette and excogitated the problem.

I smoked two cigarettes, walking up and down that vast, chill apartment,

while the air grew sickly sweet with the smell of almonds, which

intensified the physical repugnance the first faint odour had

occasioned. I began to shiver with cold. The stove had burned out before

I entered, and I had not considered it worth while to have it filled for

the few minutes that would remain to me to live. I had not reckoned on

the ass’s bundles of cowardice.

“I may as well be warm,” thought I, “while I prove to my complete

satisfaction that it is more cowardly to live than to die. There is no

very great hurry.”

I caught up a travelling-rug with which I had tried to soften the

asperities of an imitation Louis XV couch, and throwing it over my

shoulders, resumed my pilgrimage. I soon lost myself in the problem and

did not notice a corner of the rug gradually slipping down towards the

floor.

“I’ll do it!” I cried at last, making a sudden dive towards the table.

But the ironical corner of the rug had reached the ground. I stepped on

it, tripped, and instinctively caught the table to steady myself. The

table, a rickety gueridon, overbalanced, and away rolled my uncorked

phial of prussic acid and fell into a hundred pieces on the tessellated

floor.

“_Solvitur_,” said I, grimly, “_ambulando_.”

Looking back now, I am inclined to treat myself tenderly. Whether I

should have drunk the poison, if the accident had not occurred, I

cannot say. At the moment of my rush I intended to do so. After the

catastrophe, which I attributed to the curse of ineffectuality that

pursued me, I must confess that I was glad. Not that life looked more

attractive than before, but that the decision had been taken out of my

hands. I could not go about the shops of Verona buying prussic acid

or revolvers or metres of stout rope. And my razors (without Stenson’s

care) were benignantly blunt, and I would not condescend to braces.

I groaned and pished and pshawed, but as it was written that I was to

live, I resigned myself to a barren and theoryless existence.

After a day or two the vital instinct asserted itself more strongly. I

became inspired by an illuminating revelation. I had a preliminary aim

in life. I would go out into the world in search of a theory. When found

I would apply it to the regulation of the score and a half years during

which I might possibly expect to remain on this planet. I must take my

chances of it leading me to the corpse of another Polyphemus.

As it struck me I should not find my theory in Italy, I packed up my

belongings and hastened from Verona. At Naples I picked up a Messageries

Maritimes steamer and began a circular tour in the Levant. At

Alexandretta I went ashore, and inquired my way to the dwelling of the

Prefect of Police. I did not call on Hamdi Effendi. But I wandered round

the walls and wondered in a moody, heart-achey way where it was that

Carlotta sat when Harry came along and whistled her like a tame falcon

to his arm. It was a white palace of a house with a closed balcony

supported on rude corbels and tightly shuttered. At the back spread

a large garden surrounded by the famous wall. There was no doubt that

Hamdi was a wealthy personage, and that Carlotta’s nurture had been as

gentle as that of any lady in Syria. But the place wherein Carlotta’s

childhood had been sheltered had an air of impenetrable mystery. I stood

baffled before it, as I had stood so often before Carlotta’s soul. The

result of this portion of my search was the discovery, not of a new

theory, but of an old pain. I went back to the ship in a despondent

mood, and caused deep distress to one of the gentlest creatures I have

ever met. He was a lean, elderly German, who no matter what the occasion

or what the temperature wore a long, tight-buttoned frock-coat, a narrow

black tie, and a little bluish-grey felt hat adorned with a partridge’s

feather which gave him an air of forlorn rakishness. His name was Doctor

Anastasius Dose, and he spent a blameless life in travelling up and

down the world, on behalf of a Leipsic firm of which he was a member,

in search of rare and curious books. For there are copies of books which

have a well-known pedigree like famous jewels, and whose acquisition,

a matter of infinite tact, gives rise, I was told by Herr Dose, to

the most exquisite thrill known to man. He brought me on that morose

afternoon a copy of the “Synonima,” in Italian and French, of St.

Fliscus, printed by Simon Magniagus of Milan in 1480, and opened the

vellum covers with careful fingers.

“In all the assemblage of human atoms that inhabit this vessel,” said

he, “there is but one who is imbued with reverence for the past and

a sense of the preciousness of the unique. I need not tell you, Herr

Baronet, who are a scholar, that of this book only two copies exist in

this ink-sodden universe. One is in the University Library of Bologna;

the other is before your eyes. It is also the only book known to have

been printed by Magniagus. See the beautiful, small Roman type--a

masterpiece. Ach, Herr Baronet! to have accomplished one such work in

a lifetime, and then to sit among the blessed saints and look down on

earth and know that the two sole copies in existence are cherished by

the elect, what a reward, what eternal happiness!”

I turned over the pages. The faint perfume of mouldy lore ascended and

I remembered the smell of the “Histoire des Uscoques” in the Embankment

Gardens.

“The _odor di femina_ in the nostrils of the scholar,” said I.

“_Famina?_ Woman?” he cried, scandalised.

“Yes, my friend,” said I. “All things sublunar can be translated into

terms of woman. St. Fliscus wrote because he hadn’t a wife; Simon

Magniagus stopped printing because he got married and devoted his

existence to reproducing himself instead of St. Fliscus.”

“Ach, that is very interesting,” said he. “Could you tell me the date of

Magniagus’s marriage?”

“I never heard of him till this moment, my dear Herr Doctor. But depend

upon it, he was either married or was going to be married, and she ran

away from him and left him without the heart to print for posterity, and

when he took his seat among the saints she said she was so glad; he was

a stupid old ink-sodden fellow!”

He departed sorrowingly from the deck, clasping the precious volume to

his heart. Allusive or discursive speech scared him like indecency; and

I had used his gem but as a peg whereon flauntingly to hang it. It took

me three days to tame him and to induce him to show me another of his

treasures, recently acquired in Athens. Ioannes Georgius Godelmann’s

_Tractate de Lamiis_, printed by Nicholas Bassaeus of Frankfurt. I read

him Keats’s poem about the young lady of Corinth, of which he had never

heard. His mental attitude towards it was the indulgent one of an old

diplomatist towards a child’s woolly lamb. For him literature had never

existed and printing ended in the year 1600. But I was sorry when he

left me at Constantinople, where he counted on striking the track of a

Bohemian herbal, printed at Prague, and never more to be read by any of

the sons of man. In the summer he was going book-hunting in Iceland. By

chance I have learned since that he died there. Peace to his ashes! For

aught I could see he dwelt in a mild stupor of happiness, absorbed in

the intoxication of a tremulous pursuit. I wondered whether his soul

contained that antidote--the _odor di femina_. Perhaps he met it at

Reykjavic and he died of dismay.

I thought that my landing at Alexandretta was alone responsible for

the continuance of my dotage, and hoped that fresh scenes would banish

Carlotta’s distracting image. But no, it was one of the many vain

reflections on which I based a false philosophy. Whether in Beyrout, or

the land of the “sweet singer of Persephone,” or Alexandria, or on the

Cannebiere of Marseilles, or in the queer half-Orient of Algiers whither

a restless pursuit of the Identical led me, or in Lisbon, or in the

mountainous republic of Andorre, where I hoped to find primitive wisdom

and to shape a theory from first principles, and whence I was ironically

driven by fleas--whether on land or sea, in cities or in solitudes, the

vanished hand harped on my heartstrings and the voice that was still (as

far as I was concerned) cooed its dove-notes into my ears.

I remember overhearing myself described on a steamboat by a pretty

American girl of sixteen, as “a quaint gentle old guy who talks awful

rot which no one can understand, and is all the time thinking about

something else.” My sudden emergence from the companion-way, where I

was lighting a cigarette, brought red confusion into the young person’s

cheeks.

“How old do you think I am?” I asked.

“Oh, about sixty,” quoth the damsel.

“I’m glad I’m quaint and gentle, even though I do talk rot,” said I.

With the resourcefulness of her nation she linked her arm in mine and

started a confidential walk up and down the deck.

“You are just a dear,” she remarked.

She could not have said more to Anastasius Dose had he been there;

as far as I can recollect he must just then have been dying of the

Inevitable in Iceland. Perhaps the few months had brought me to resemble

him. Instinctively I put my hand to my head to reassure myself that I

was not wearing a rakish little soft felt hat with a partridge-feather,

and I reflected with some complacency that my rimless pince-nez did not

give me the owlish appearance produced by Anastasius Dose’s great round,

iron-rimmed goggles. From such crumbs of vanity are we sometimes reduced

to take comfort.

“I just want to know what you are,” said my young American friend.

Shall I confess my attraction? She brought a dim suggestion of Carlotta.

She had Carlotta’s colouring and Carlotta’s candour. But there the

resemblance stopped. The grey matter of her brain had been distilled

from the air of Wall Street, and there were precious few things between

earth and sky of which she hadn’t prescience.

“I’m a broken-down philosopher,” said I.

“Oh, that’s nothing. So is everybody as soon as they get sense. What

did you make your money in?”

“I’ve not made any money,” I answered, meekly.

“I thought all people who were knighted in your country had made piles

of money.”

“Knighted!” I exclaimed. “What on earth do you think a quaint old guy

like myself could possibly have done to get knighted?”

“Then you’re a baronet,” she said, severely.

“I assure you it is not my fault.”

“I thought all baronets were wicked. They are in the novels. Somehow you

don’t look like a baronet. You ought to have a black moustache and an

eyeglass and smoke a cigar and sneer. But, say, how do you fill up the

time if you do nothing to make money?”

“I am going through the world,” said I, “on an adventurous quest, like a

knight--or a baronet, if you will--of the Round Table. I am in quest of

a Theory of Life.”

“I guess I was born with it,” cried young New York.

“I guess I’ll die without finding it,” said I.

London again. My quiet house. Antoinette and Stenson. The well-ordered

routine of comfort. My books. The dog’s-eared manuscript of the “History

of Renaissance Morals,” unpacked by Stenson and hid in its usual place

on the writing-table. Nothing changed, yet everything utterly different.

A growing distaste for the forced acquaintanceships of travel and a

craving for home brought me back. Save perhaps in health I had profited

little by my journeyings. My bodily shell formed part of strange

landscapes and occurred in fortuitous gatherings of men, but my heart

was all the time in my Mausoleum by the Regent’s Park. I was drawn

thither by a force almost magnetic, irresistible. My two domestics

welcomed me home, but no one else. Only my lawyers knew of my arrival.

With them alone had I corresponded during the many months of my absence.

Stay; I did write one letter to Mrs. McMurray while I was at Verona,

in reply to an enquiry as to what had become of Carlotta and myself.

I answered courteously but briefly that Carlotta had run away with

Pasquale and that I should be abroad for an indefinite period. But not

even a letter from my lawyers awaited me. I thought somewhat wistfully

that I would willingly have paid six and eight pence for it. But the

feeling was momentary.

Then began a queer, untroubled life. Without definite resolve I became

a recluse, living forlornly from day to day. Like a bat I avoided the

outer sunshine and took my melancholy walks at night. I had a pride in

cherishing the habit of solitude. Were it not that I entertained a real

dislike of roots and water and the damp and manifold discomforts of

a cave, with which form of habitat the ministrations of Stenson and

Antoinette would have been inconsistent, I should have gone forth into

the nearest approach to a Thebaid I could discover. I was, in fact,

touched by the mild mania of the hermit. My club I never entered. A line

drawn from east to west, a tangent at the lowest point of the Zoological

Gardens formed the southern boundary of my wanderings. Once I spied

in the distance that very kind soul, Mrs. McMurray, and rushed into a

providential omnibus, so as to avoid recognition. My History remained

untouched. The glamour of the Renaissance had vanished. For occupation I

read the Neo-Platonists, Thaumaturgy, Demonology and the like, which

I had always found a fascinating although futile study. I regretted my

bowing acquaintance with modern science, which forbade my setting up

a laboratory with alembics and magic crystals wherewith to conduct

experiments for the finding of the Elixir Vitae and the Philosopher’s

Stone.

I seldom read the newspapers. I had an idea, like an eminent personage

of the period, that a sort of war was going on, but it failed to

interest me greatly. I shrank from the noise of it.

“Monsieur,” said Antoinette, “will get ill if he does not go out into

the sunshine.”

“Monsieur,” said I, “regards the sunshine as an impertinent intrusion

into a soul that loves the twilight.”

If I had made the same remark to an Englishwoman, she would have pitied

me for a poor, half-witted gentleman. But Antoinette has her nation’s

instinctive appreciation of soul-states, and her sympathy was none the

less comprehending when she shook her head mournfully and said that it

was bad for the stomach.

“My good Antoinette,” I remarked, harking back in my mind to a

speculation of other days, “if you go on worrying me in this manner

about my stomach, I will build a tower forty feet high in the back

garden, and live on top, and have my meals sent up by a lift, and never

come down again.”

“Monsieur might as well be in Paradise,” said Antoinette.

“Ah,” said I. And I thought of the bottle of prussic acid with mingled

sentiments.

All through these many months I had Judith dwelling, a pale ghost,

in the back of my mind. We had parted so finally that correspondence

between us had seemed impertinent. But although I had not written to

her, no small part of the infinite sadness that had fallen upon my life

was the shadow of her destiny. Sweet, wine-loving Judith! How many times

did I picture her sitting pinched and wistful in the little tin

mission church at Hoxton! Had I, Marcus Ordeyne, condemned her to that

penitentiary? Who can hold the balance of morals so truly as to decide?

At last I received a letter from her on the anniversary of our parting.

She had found salvation in a strange thing which she called duty. “I am

fulfilling an appointed task,” she wrote, “and the measure of my success

is the measure of my happiness. I am bringing consolation to a wayward

and tormented spirit. A year has swept aside the petty feminine

vanities, the opera-glasses, so to speak, through which a woman

complacently views her influence over a man, and it has cleared my

vision. A year has proved beyond mortal question that without me this

wayward and tormented spirit would fail. I hold in my hands the very

soul of a man. What more dare a woman ask of the high gods? You see I

use your metaphors still. Dearest of all dear friends, do not pity me.

Beyond all the fires of love through which one passes there is the star

of Duty, and happy the individual who can live in its serenity.”

This was astonishingly like the Theory of Life which I set out from

Verona to seek, and which had hitherto eluded me. It was not very

new, or subtle, or inspiring. But that is the way of things. No

matter through what realms of the fantastic you may travel, you arrive

inevitably at the commonplace.

CHAPTER XXII

I answered Judith’s letter. After the long silence it seemed, at first,

strange to write to her; but soon I found myself opening my heart as I

had never done before to man or woman. The fact that, accident aside,

we were never to meet again, drew the spiritual elements in us nearer

together, and the tone of her letter loosened the bonds of my natural

reserve. I told her of my past year of life, of the locked memorial

chamber upstairs, of the madness through which I had passed, of my weary

pursuit of the Theory, and of my attitude towards her solution of the

problem. Having written the letter I felt comforted, knowing that Judith

would understand.

I finished it about six o’clock one afternoon, and shrinking from giving

it to Stenson to post, as it was the first private letter I had written

since my arrival in London, I took it myself to the pillar-box. The

fresh air reproached me for the unreasonable indoor life I had been

leading, and invited me to remain outside. It was already dark. An early

touch of frost in the November air rendered it exhilarating. I walked

along the decorous, residential roads of St. John’s Wood feeling

less remote from my kind, more in sympathy with the humdrum dramas in

progress behind the rows of lighted windows. Now and then a garden gate

opened and a man in evening dress, and a woman, a vague, dainty mass of

satin and frills and fur, emerged, stood for a moment in the shaft of

light cast by the open hall-door beyond, which framed the white-capped

and aproned parlour-maid, and entering a waiting hansom, drove off into

the darkness whither my speculative fancy followed them. Now and then

silhouettes appeared upon the window-blinds, especially on the upper

floors, for it was the dressing hour and the cares of the day were being

thrown aside with the workaday garments. In one house, standing far

back from the road, the drawing-room curtains had not been drawn. As I

passed, I saw a man tossing up a delighted child in his arms, and the

mother standing by. _Ay de mi!_ A commonplace of ten thousand homes,

when the man returns from his toil. Yet it moved me. To earn

one’s bread; to perpetuate one’s species; to create duties and

responsibilities; to meet them like a brave man; to put the new

generation upon the right path; to look back upon it all and say, “I

have fulfilled my functions,” and pass forth quietly into the eternal

laboratory--is not that Life in its truth and its essence? And the

reward? The commonplace. The welcome of wife and children--and the

tossing of a crowing babe in one’s arms. And I had missed it all, lived

outside it all. I had spoken blasphemously in my besotted ignorance of

these sacred common things, and verily I had my recompense in a desolate

home and a life of about as much use to humanity as that of St. Simeon

Stylites on top of his pillar.

So I walked along the streets on the track of the wisdom which Judith

had revealed to me, and I seemed to be on the point of reaching it when

I arrived at my own door.

“But what the deuce shall I do with it when I get it?” I said, as I let

myself in with my latch-key.

I had just put my stick in the stand and was taking off my overcoat,

when the door of the room next the diningroom opened, and Antoinette

rushed out upon me.

“Oh, Monsieur, Monsieur!” she cried, wringing her hands. “Oh, Monsieur!

How shall I tell you?”

The good soul broke into sobbing and weeping.

“What is the matter, Antoinette?” Z asked.

“Monsieur must not be angry. Monsieur is good like the Bon Dieu. But it

will give pain to Monsieur.”

“But what is it?” I cried, mystified. “Have you spoiled the dinner?”

I was a million miles from any anticipation of her answer.

_“Monsieur-she has come back!”_

I grew faint for a moment as from a blow over the heart. Antoinette

raised her great tear-stained face.

“Monsieur must not drive her away.”

I pushed her gently aside and entered the little room which I had

furnished once as her boudoir.

On the couch sat Carlotta, white and pinched and poorly clad. At first

I was only conscious of her great brown eyes fixed upon me, the dog-like

appeal of our first meeting intensified to heart-breaking piteousness.

On seeing me she did not rise, but cowered as if I would strike her. I

looked at her, unable to speak. Antoinette stood sobbing in the doorway.

“Well?” said I, at last.

“I have come home,” said Carlotta.

“You have been away a long time,” said I.

“Ye-es,” said Carlotta.

“Why have you come?” I asked.

“I had no money,” said Carlotta, with her expressive gesture of upturned

palms. “I had nothing but that.” She pointed to a tiny travelling bag.

“Everything else was at the Mont de Piete--the pawnshop--and they would

not keep me any longer at the pension. I owed them for three weeks, and

then they lent me money to buy my ticket to London. I said Seer Marcous

would pay them back. So I came home.”

“But where--where is Pasquale?” I asked.

“He went five, six months ago. He gave me some money and said he would

send some more. But he did not send any. He went to South Africa. He

said there was a war and he wanted to fight, and he said he was sick of

me. Oh, he was very unkind,” she cried with the quiver of her baby lips.

“I wish I had never seen him.”

“Are you married?”

“No,” said Carlotta.

“Damn him!” said I, between my teeth.

“He was going to marry me, but then he said it did not matter in Paris.

At first he was so nice, but after a little--oh, Seer Marcous dear, he

was so cruel.”

There was a short silence. Antoinette wept by the door, uttering little

half-audible exclamations _“la pauvre petite, le cher ange!”_

Carlotta regarded me wistfully. I saw a new look of suffering in her

eyes. For myself I felt numb with pain.

“What kind of a pension were you living in?” I asked, unutterable

horrors coming into my head.

“It was a French family, an old lady and two old daughters, and one fat

German professor. Pasquale put me there. It was very respectable,” she

added, with a wan smile, “and so dull. Madame Champet would scarcely let

me go into the street by myself.”

“Thank heaven you did not fall into worse hands,” said I.

Carlotta unpinned her old straw hat, quite a different garment from the

dainty head-wear she delighted in a year before, and threw it on the

couch beside her. A tress of her glorious bronze hair fell loose across

her forehead, adding to the woebegone expression of her face. She rose,

and as she did so I seemed to notice a curious change in her. She came

to me with extended hands.

“Seer Marcous--” she whispered.

I took her hands in mine.

“Oh, my dear,” said I, “why did you leave me?”

“I was wicked. And I was a little fool,” said Carlotta.

I sighed, released her, walked a bit apart. There was a blubber from the

egregious old woman in the threshold.

“Oh, Monsieur is not going to drive her away.”

I turned upon her.

“Instead of standing there weeping like a fountain and doing nothing,

why aren’t you getting Mademoiselle’s room ready for her?”

“Because Monsieur has the key,” wailed Antoinette.

“That’s true,” said I.

Then I reflected on the futility of converting bedchambers into

mausoleums for the living. The room shut up for a year would not be

habitable. It would be damp and inch-deep in dust.

“Mademoiselle shall sleep in my room to-night,” I said, “and Stenson can

make me up a bed and put what I want here. Go and arrange it with him.”

Antoinette departed. I turned to Carlotta.

“Are you very tired, my child?”

“Oh, yes--so tired.”

“Why didn’t you write, so that things could have been got ready for

you?”

“I don’t know. I was too unhappy. Seer Marcous--” she said after a

little pause and then stopped.

“Yes?”

“I am going to have a baby.”

She said it in the old, childlike way, oblivious of difference of sex;

with her little foreign insistence on the final consonants. I glanced

hurriedly at her. The fact was obvious. She stood with her hands

helplessly outspread. The pathos of her would have wrung the heart of a

devil.

“Thank God, you’ve come home,” said I, huskily.

She began to cry softly. I put my arm round her shoulders, and comforted

her. She sobbed out incoherent things. She wished she had never seen

Pasquale. I was good. She would stay with me always. She would never run

away again.

I took her upstairs, and opened the door of her room with the key that I

had carried for a year on my bunch, and turned on the electric light.

“See what are still usable of your old things,” said I, “and I will send

Antoinette up to you.”

She looked around her, somewhat puzzled.

“Why should I sleep in your room when this one is ready for me--my night

dress--even the hot water?”

“My dear,” said I, “that hot water was put for you a year ago. It must

be cold now.”

“And my red slippers--and my dressing-gown!” she cried, quaveringly.

Then sinking in a heap on the floor beside the dusty bed, she burst into

a passion of tears.

I stole away and sent Antoinette to minister to her.

A year before I had raved and ranted, deeming life intolerable and

cursing the high gods; I suffered then, it is true; but I hope I may

never again go through the suffering of that first night of Carlotta’s

return. Even now I can close my eyes and feel the icy grip on my heart.

She came down to dinner about an hour later, dressed in a pink wrapper,

one of the last things she had bought, which Antoinette (as she

explained to excuse her delay) had been airing before the fire. She sat

opposite me, in her old place, penitent, subdued, yet not shy or ill

at ease. Stenson waited on us, grave and imperturbable as if we had put

back the clock of time a twelvemonth. The only covert reference he made

to the event was to murmur discreetly in my ear:

“I have brought up a bottle of the Pommery, Sir Marcus, in the hope you

would drink some.”

I was touched, for the good fellow had no other way of showing his

solicitude.

Carlotta allowed him to fill her glass. She sipped the wine, and

declared that it did her good. She was no longer a teetotaller, she

explained. Once she drank too much, and the next day had a headache.

“Why should one have a headache?”

“Nemesis,” said I.

“What is Nemesis?”

I found myself answering her question in the old half-jesting way. And

in her old way she replied:

“I do not understand.”

How vividly familiar it was, and yet how agonisingly strange!

“Where is Polyphemus?” she asked.

“Dead,” said I.

“Oh-h! How did poor Polyphemus die?”

“He was smitten by Destiny at the end of the last act of a farcical

tragedy.”

The ghost of a “_hou!_” came from Carlotta. She composed herself

immediately.

“I often used to think of Polyphemus and Seer Marcous and Antoinette,”

she said, musingly. “And then I wished I was back. I have been very

wicked.”

She put her elbows on the table, and framing her face with her hands

looked at me, and shook her head.

“Oh, you are good! Oh, you are good!”

“Go on with your dinner, my child,” said I, “and wonder at the genius

of Antoinette who has managed to cook it and look after you at the same

time.”

She obeyed meekly. I watched her eat. She was famished. I learned that

she had had nothing since the early morning coffee and roll. In spite of

pain, I was curiously flattered by her return. I represented _something_

to her, after all--even though the instinct of the prodigal cat had

driven her hither. I am sure it had never crossed her mind that my doors

might be shut against her. Her first words were, “I have come home.” The

first thing she did when we went into the drawing-room after dinner

was to fondle my hand and lay it against her cheek and say, with a deep

sigh:

“I am so happy.”

However shallow her butterfly nature was, these things came from its

depths. No man can help feeling pleased at a child’s or an animal’s

implicit trust in him. And the pleasure is of the purest. He feels that

unreasoning intuition has penetrated to some latent germ of good in his

nature, and for the moment he is disarmed of evil. Carlotta, then,

came blindly to what was best in me. In her thoughts she sandwiched

me between the cat and the cook: well, in most sandwiches the

mid-ingredient is the most essential.

She curled herself up in the familiar sofa-corner, and as it was a

chilly night I sent for a wrap which I threw over her limbs.

“See, I have the dear red slippers,” she remarked, arching her instep.

“And I have my dear Carlotta,” said I.

I drew my chair near her, and gradually I learned all the unhappy story.

Pasquale had made love to her from the very first minute of their

acquaintance--even while I was hunting for the _L’Histoire Comique

de Francion_. He had met her many times unknown to me. They had

corresponded, her letters being addressed to a little stationer’s shop

close by. She did not love him. Of that I have an absolute conviction.

But he was young, he was handsome, he had the libertine’s air and

manner. She was docile. And she was ever positively truthful. If I had

questioned her she would have confessed frankly. But I never questioned,

as I never suspected. I wondered sometimes at her readiness in quoting

him. I noticed odd coincidences; but I was too ineffectual to draw

inferences from phenomena. His appearance on the Paddington platform was

prearranged; his duchessa at Ealing a myth.

Apparently he had dallied with his fancy. The fruit was his any day

for the plucking. Perhaps a rudimentary sentiment of loyalty towards

me restrained him. Who can tell? The night of our meeting with Hamdi

brought the crisis. The Turk’s threats had alarmed both Carlotta and

myself. It was necessary for him to strike at once. He saw her the next

day--would to heaven I had remained at home!--told her I was marrying

her to save her from Hamdi. I loved the other woman. He would save her

equally well from Hamdi. The other woman met her soon after parting from

Pasquale and besought her to give me up. She did not know what to do.

Poor child, how should she have known? On the previous evening I had

told her she was to marry me. She was ready to obey. She went to bed

thinking that she was to marry me. In the morning she went for her music

lesson. Pasquale was waiting for her. They walked for some distance down

the road. He hailed a cab and drove away with her.

“He said he loved me,” said Carlotta, “and he kissed me, and he told

me I must go away with him to Paris and marry him. And I felt all weak,

like that--” she dropped her arms helplessly in an expressive gesture,

“and so what could I do?”

“Didn’t you think, Carlotta, that I might be sorry--perhaps unhappy?” I

asked as gently as I could.

“He said you would be quite happy with the other woman.”

“Did you believe him?”

“That’s why I said I have been very wicked,” Carlotta answered, simply.

She went on with her story--an old, miserable, detestable, execrable

story. At first all went merrily. Then she fell ill in Paris. It was

her first acquaintance with the northern winter. Her throat proved to be

delicate and she was laid up with bronchitis. To men of Pasquale’s type,

a woman ill is of no more use than a spavined horse or a broken-down

motor-car. More than that, she becomes an infernal nuisance. It was

in his temperament to perform sporadic acts of fantastic chivalry. It

appealed to something romantic, theatrical, in his facile nature. But to

devote himself to a woman in sickness--that was different. The fifteenth

century Italian hated like the devil continued association with pain. He

would have thrown his boots to a beggar, but he would have danced in his

palace over the dungeons where his brother rotted in obscurity.

So poor Carlotta was neglected, and began to eat the bread of

disillusion. When she got well, there was a faint recrudescence of

affection. Has not this story been written a million miserable

times? Why should I rend my heart again by retelling it? Wild rages,

jealousies, quarrels, tears--

“And then one day he said, ‘You damned little fool, I am sick to death

of you,’ and he went away, and I never saw him again. He wrote and he

sent his valet to put me in the pension.”

“And yet, Carlotta,” said I bitterly, “you would go back to him if he

sent for you?”

She sprang forward and gripped me by the arm--I was sitting quite close

to her--and her face wore the terror-stricken expression of a child

frightened with bogies.

“Go back? After what he has done to me? You would not send me back? Seer

Marcous, darling, you will keep me with you? I will be good, good, good.

But go back to Pasquale? Oh, no-o-o!”

She fell back in her sofa-corner, and fixed her great, deep imploring

eyes on me.

“My dear,” said I, “you know this is your home as long as ever you

choose to stay in it--but--” and I stroked her hair gently--“if he

comes back when your child is born--his child--”

She drew herself up superbly.

“It is my child--my very, very own,” cried Carlotta. “It is mine,

mine--and I shall not allow any one to touch it--” and then her face

softened--“except Seer Marcous.”

CHAPTER XXIII

Behold Carlotta again installed in my house which she regarded as her

home. Heaven forbid that I should sow any doubt thereof in her mind.

I had learned perhaps one lesson: the meaning of love. The love that

is desire alone, though sung in all romance of all the ages, is of the

brute nature and is doomed to perish. The love that pardons, endures

through wrong, contents itself in abnegation, is of the imperishable

things that draw weak man a little nearer to the angels. When Carlotta

wept upon my shoulder during those few first moments of her return I

knew that all resentment was gone from my heart, that it would have

been a poor, ignoble thing. Had she come back to me leprous of body and

abominable of spirit, it would not have mattered. I would have forgiven

her, loved her, cherished her just the same. It was a question, not

of reason, not of human pity, not of quixotism; not of any argument or

sentiment for which I could be responsible. I was helpless, obeying a

reflex action of the soul.

The days passed tranquilly. In spite of pain I felt an odd happiness. I

had nothing selfishly to hope for. Perhaps I had aged five years in one,

and I viewed life differently. It was enough for me that she had come

home, to the haven where no harm could befall her. She was my appointed

task, even as her husband was Judith’s. I recognised in myself the man

with the one talent. The deep wisdom of the parable can be taken to

inmost heart for comfort only by men of little destinies. With infinite

love and patience to mould Carlotta into a sweet, good woman, a wise

mother of the child that was to be--that was the inglorious task which

Providence had set me to accomplish. In its proportion to the aggregate

of human effort it was infinitesimal. But who shall say that it was not

worth the doing? Save writing a useless book, in what other sphere of

sublunar energy could I have been effectual? I did not thus analyse my

attitude at the time; the man who does so is a poser, a mime to his

own audience; but looking back, I think I was guided by some such

unformulated considerations.

Although my hermit mania was in itself radically cured, yet I altered

nothing in my relations with the outside world. I wrote to Judith a

brief account of what had occurred and received from her a sympathetic

answer. My reading among the Mystics and Thaumaturgists put me on the

track of Arabic. I found that Carlotta knew enough of the language to

give me elementary instruction, and thus the whirligig of time brought

in its revenge by constituting me her pupil, to our joint edification.

After a while the unhappiness of the past seemed to have faded from her

mind. She spoke little of Paris, less of the dull pension, and never of

Pasquale. She bore towards him an animal’s silent animosity against a

human being who has done it an unforgettable injury. On the other hand,

as I have since discovered, she was slowly developing, and had begun to

realise that in giving herself light-heartedly to a man whom she did not

love, she had committed a crime against her sex, for which she had

paid a heavy penalty: a sentiment, however, which did not mitigate her

resentment against him. Often I saw her sitting with knitted brows,

her needlework idle on her lap, evidently unravelling some complicated

problem; presently she would either shake her head sadly as if the

intellectual process were too hard for her and resume her needle, or if

she happened to catch my glance, she would start, smile reassuringly at

me, and apply herself with exaggerated zeal to her work. These fits of

abstraction were not those of a woman speculating on mysteries of the

near future. Such Carlotta also indulged in, and they were easy to

recognise, by the dreaminess of her eyes and the faint smile flickering

about her lips. The moods of knitted brows were periods of soul-travail,

and I wondered what they would bring forth.

One afternoon I came home and found her weeping over a book. When I bent

down to see what she was reading--she had acquired a taste for novels

during the dull pension time in Paris--she caught my head with both

hands.

“Oh, Seer Marcous, do you think they ought to make me wear a great ‘A’?”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Like Hester Prynne--see.”

She showed me Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Scarlet Letter.”

“What made you take this out of the shelves?”

“The title,” she replied, simply. “I am so fond of red things; but I

should not like that great red ‘A’.”

“Those were days,” said I, “when people thought they could only be good

by being very cruel.”

“They would have been more cruel if Hester had not loved the minister,”

said Carlotta, looking at me wistfully.

“My dear little girl,” said I, seeing whither her thoughts were tending,

“do not bother your brain with psychological problems.”

“What are--?” began Carlotta.

I pinched the question, as it were, out of her cheek and smiled and took

away the book.

“They are a dreadful disease my little girl has been afflicted with

for some time. When you sit and wrinkle your forehead like this,” and I

scowled forbiddingly, whereat Carlotta laughed, “you are suffering from

acute psychological problem.”

“Then I am thinking,” said Carlotta, reflectively.

“Don’t think too much, dear, just now,” said I. “It is best for you to

be happy and calm and contented. Otherwise I’ll have to tell the doctor,

and he’ll give you the blackest and nastiest physic you have ever

tasted.”

“To cure me of a what-you-call-it problem?”

“Yes,” said I, emphatically.

“_Hou!_” laughed Carlotta in a superior way, “physic can’t cure that.”

“You are relying on an exploded fallacy immortalised in a hackneyed

Shakespearian quotation,” I remarked.

“Go on,” said Carlotta, encouragingly.

“What do you mean?” I asked, taken aback.

“Oh, you darling Seer Marcous,” cried Carlotta. “It is so lovely to hear

you talk!”

So I went on talking, and the distress occasioned by the “Scarlet

Letter” was forgotten.

I have mentioned Carlotta’s needlework. This was undertaken at the

sapient instigation of Antoinette, who in her turn, I am sure, neglected

the ladle for the scissors, and cast many of her duties upon the

silent but sympathetic Stenson. Carlotta herself delighted in these

preparations. She was never happier than when curled up on the sofa,

a box of chocolates by her side, her work-basket frothing over, like a

great dish of _oeufs a la neige_, with lawn or mull or what-not, and

(I verily believe to complete her content) my ungainly figure and

hatchet-face within her purview. She would eat and sew industriously.

Sometimes she would press too hard on a sweetmeat and with a little cry

would hold up a sticky finger and thumb.

“Look,” she would say, puckering up her face.

And to save from soilure the dainty fabric she was working at, I would

rise and wipe her fingers with my handkerchief; whereupon she would

coo out the sweetest “thank you,” in the world, and perhaps hold up a

diminutive garment.

“Isn’t it pretty?”

“Yes, my dear,” I would say, and I would turn aside wondering at the

exquisite refinements of pain that men were sometimes called upon to

bear.

At last the time came. I sat up all night in a torture of suspense,

having got it into my foolish head that Carlotta might die. The doctor

came upon me at six in the morning sitting half frozen at the bottom of

the stairs. When he gave me his cheery news he seemed to develop from a

middle-aged, commonplace man into a radiant archangel.

I met Antoinette soon afterwards, busy, important, exultant. She

nevertheless graciously accorded me a brief interview.

“And to think, Monsieur,” she exclaimed, as if the crowning triumph of a

million ions of evolution had at, last been attained, “to think that it

is a boy!”

“You would have been just as pleased if it had been a girl,” said I.

She shook her wise, fat head. “Women _ca ne vaut pas grand’ chose._”

Let it be remembered that “women are of no great account” is a sentiment

expressed, not by me, but by Antoinette. But all the same I soon found

myself a cipher in the house, where the triumvirate of the negligible

sex, Antoinette, the nurse and Carlotta, reigned despotically.

To write much of Carlotta’s happiness would be to treat of sacred things

at which I can only guess. She dwelt in rapture. The joy and meaning of

the universe were concentrated in the tiny bundle of pink flesh that lay

on her bosom. I used to sit by her side while she talked unwearyingly of

him. He was a thing of infinite perfections. He had such a lot of hair.

“She won’t believe, sir,” said the nurse, “that it will all drop off and

a new crop come.”

“Oh-h!” said Carlotta. “It can’t be so cruel. For it is my hair--see,

Seer Marcous, darling; isn’t it just my hair?”

It was her great solicitude that the boy should resemble her.

“I don’t know about his nose,” she remarked critically. “There is so

little of it yet and it is so soft--feel how soft it is. But his eyes

are brown like mine, and his mouth--now look, aren’t they just the

same?”

She put her cheek next to the child’s and invited me to compare the two

adjacent baby mouths. They were, of a truth, very much alike.

She was jealous of the baby, desirous of having it always with her to

tend and fondle, impatient of the nurse and Antoinette. It was a thing

so intensely hers that she resented other hands touching it. Oddly

enough, of me she made an exception. Nothing delighted her more than to

put the little creature into my awkward and nervous arms, and watch me

carry it about the room. I think she wanted to give me something, and

this share in the babe was the most precious gift she could devise.

Of Pasquale she continued to say nothing. In her intense joy of

motherhood he seemed to have become the dim creature of a dream. I had

registered the birth without consulting her--in the legal names of the

parents.

“What are you going to call him, Carlotta?” I asked one day.

“_Mon petit chou._ That’s what Antoinette says. It’s a beautiful name.”

“There are many points in calling an infant one’s little cabbage,” I

admitted, “but soon he’ll grow up to be as old as I am, and--” I sighed,

“who would call me their _petit chow_?”

Carlotta laughed.

“That is true. We shall have to find a name.” She reflected for a few

moments; then put her arms round my neck and continued her reflections.

“He shall be Marcus--another Marcus Ordeyne. Then perhaps some day he

will be ‘Seer Marcous’ like you.”

“Do you mean when I die?” I asked.

“Oh, not for years and years and years!” she cried, tightening her clasp

in alarm. “But the child lives longer than the father. It is fate. He

will live longer than I.”

“Let us hope so, dear,” I answered. “But it is just because I am not his

father that he can’t be Sir Marcus when I die. He can have my name; but

my title--”

“Who will have it?”

“No one.”

“It will die too?”

“It will be quite dead.”

“You are his father, you know, _really_,” she whispered.

“The law of England takes no count, unfortunately, of things of the

spirit,” said I.

“What are things of the spirit?”

“The things, my dear,” said I, “that you are beginning to understand.” I

bent down and kissed the child as it lay on her lap. “Poor little Marcus

Ordeyne,” I said. “My poor quaintly fathered little son, I’m afraid

there is much trouble ahead of you, but I’ll do my best to help you

through it.”

“Bless you, dear,” said Carlotta, softly.

I looked at her in wonder. She had spoken for the first time like a

grown woman--like a woman with a soul.

A few weeks later.

We were sitting at breakfast. The morning newspaper contained the

account of a battle and the lists of British officers killed. I scanned

as usual the melancholy columns, when a name among the dead caught my

eye--and I stared at it stupidly. Pasquale was dead, killed outright

by a Boer bullet. The wild, bright life was ended. It seemed a horrible

thing, and, much as he had wronged me, my first sentiment was one of

dismay. He was too gallant and beautiful a creature for death.

Carlotta poured out my tea and came round with the cup which she

deposited by my side. To prevent her peeping over my shoulder at the

paper, as she usually did, I laid it on the table; but her quick eye had

already read the great headlines.

“Great Battle. British officers killed. Oh, let me see, Seer Marcous.”

“No, dear,” said I. “Go and eat your breakfast.”

She looked at me strangely. I tried to smile; but as I am an incompetent

actor my grimace was a proclamation of disingenuousness.

“Why shouldn’t I read it?” she asked, quickly.

“Because I say you mustn’t, Carlotta.”

She continued to look at me. She had suddenly grown pale. I stirred my

tea and made a pretence of sipping it.

“Go on with your breakfast, my child,” I repeated.

“There is something--something about him in the paper,” said Carlotta.

“He is a British officer.”

In the face of her intuition further concealment appeared useless.

Besides, sooner or later she would have to know.

“He is a British officer no longer, dear,” said I.

“Is he dead?”

My mind flew back to an evening long ago--long, long ago it seemed--when

another newspaper had told of another death, and my ears caught the echo

of the identical question that had then fallen from her lips. I dreaded

lest she should say again, “I am so glad.”

I beckoned her to my side, and pointing with my finger to the name

watched her face anxiously. She read, stared for a bit in front of her

and turned to me with a piteous look. I drew her to me, and she laid her

face against my shoulder.

“I don’t know why I’m crying, Seer Marcous, dear,” she said, after a

while.

I made her drink some of my tea, but she would eat nothing, and

presently she went upstairs. She had not said that she was glad. She had

wept and not known the reason for her tears. I railed at myself for my

doubts of her.

She was subdued and thoughtful all the day. In the evening, instead of

curling herself up in the sofa-corner among the cushions, she sat on

a stool by my feet as I read, one hand supporting her chin, the other

resting on my knee.

“I am glad he was a brave man,” she said at last, alluding to Pasquale

for the first time since the morning. “I like brave men.”

“_Dulce et decorum est._ He died for his country,” said I.

“It does not hurt me now so much to think of him,” said Carlotta.

I could not help feeling a miserable pang of jealousy at Pasquale’s

posthumous rehabilitation as a hero in Carlotta’s heart. Yet, was it not

natural? Was it not the way of women? I saw myself far remote from her,

and though she never spoke of him again I divined that her thoughts

dwelt not untenderly on his memory. I was absurd, I know. But I had

begun almost to believe in my make-believe paternity, and I was jealous

of the rightful claims of the dead man.

And yet had he lived he might have come back one day with his conquering

air and his irresistible laugh, and carried them both away from me. In

sparing me this crowning humiliation I thanked the high gods.

But never to this day has she mentioned his name again.

CHAPTER XXIV

How shall I set down that which happened not long afterwards?

The death of a baby is so commonplace, so unimportant. Few reasoning

people, viewing the matter in the abstract, can do otherwise than

rejoice that a human being is saved from the weariness of the tired

years that make up life. For who shall disprove the pessimist’s

assertion that it is better not to have been born than to come into the

world, and that it is better to die than to live? But those from whom

the single hope of their existence is ravished find little consolation

in reason. Grief is the most intensely egotistical of emotions. I have

lost all that makes life beautiful to me. Is not that enough for the

stricken soul?

To Carlotta it meant a passage through the valley of the shadow. To me,

at first, it meant the life of Carlotta, and then a blank in my newly

ordered scheme of things. The curse of ineffectuality still pursued

me. I had allotted to myself my humble task--the development of the new

generation in the form of Carlotta’s boy, and even that small usefulness

was I denied by Fate.

A chill, a touch of croup, an agonised watching, and the tiny thing lay

dead. Antoinette and I had to drag it stone cold from Carlotta’s bosom.

I alone carried it to burial. The little white coffin rested on the

opposite seat of the hired brougham, and on it was a bunch of white

flowers given by Antoinette. In the cemetery chapel another fragment of

humanity awaited sepulture, and the funeral service was read over both

bodies. I stood alone by the little white coffin. A crowd of mourners

were grouped beside the black one. I glanced at the inscription as

I passed: “Jane Elliot, in the eighty-sixth year of her age.” The

officiant referred in the service to “our dear brother and sister, here

departed.” It was either an awful jest or an awful verity.

My “quaintly fathered little son” had small need of my help through the

troubles of his life. His mother needed all that I could give. Without

me she would have died. That I verily believe. I was her solitary

plank in the welter wherein she would have been submerged. She clung to

me--literally clung to me. I sat for hours with her grasp upon me. To

feel assured of my physical presence alone seemed to bring her calm.

Recent as are those sleepless days and nights, their memory is all

confused. The light burning dimly in the familiar chamber which I had

once sealed up as a tomb; the shadows on the wall; the fevered face

and great hollow eyes of Carlotta against the pillows; her little hand

clutching mine in desperation; the soft tread of the nurse, that is all

I remember. And when she recovered her wits and grew sane, although for

a long time she spoke little, and scarcely noticed me otherwise,

she claimed me by her side. She was still dazed by the misery of her

darkness. It was only then that I realised the part the child had

played in her development. Her nature had been stirred to the quick; the

capacity for emotion had been awakened. She had left me without a qualm.

She had given herself to Pasquale without a glimmer of passion. She had

returned to me like a wounded animal seeking its home. For the child

alone the passionate human love had sprung flaming from the seed hidden

in her soul. And now the child was dead, and the sun had gone from her

sky, and she was benumbed with the icy blackness of the world.

Then came a time when her speech was loosened and she talked to me

incessantly of the child, until one day she spoke of it as living and

clamoured for it, and relapsed into her fever.

At last one morning she awakened from a sound sleep and found me

watching; for I had relieved the nurse at six o’clock. She smiled at

me for the first time since the child fell sick, and took my hand and

kissed it.

“It is like waking into heaven to see your face, Seer Marcous, darling,”

she whispered.

“I hope heaven is peopled by a better-looking set of fellows,” I said.

“_Hou!_” laughed Carlotta. “Don’t you know you are beautiful?”

“You mustn’t throw an old jest in my teeth, Carlotta,” said I, and I

reminded her how she had once screamed with laughter when I had told her

I was very beautiful.

Carlotta listened patiently until I had ended, and then she said, with a

little sigh:

“You cannot understand, Seer Marcous, darling. I have been thinking of

my little baby and the angels--and all the angels are like you.”

To cover the embarrassment my modesty underwent, I laughed and drew the

picture of myself with long flaxen hair and white wings.

“My angels hadn’t got wings,” said Carlotta, seriously. “They all wore

dressing-gowns. They were real angels. And the one that was most like

you brought my baby in his arms for me to kiss; and when he put it on a

white cloud to sleep, and took me up in his arms instead and carried me

away, away, away through the air, I didn’t cry at leaving baby. Wasn’t

that funny? I snuggled up close to him--like that”--she illustrated the

action of “snuggling” beneath the bed-clothes--“and it was so comfy.”

The pale sunshine of a fine February morning filtered into the room from

behind the curtains. I turned off the dimmed electric lamp and let full

daylight into the room.

“Oh!” cried Carlotta, turning to the window, “how lovely the good

sun is! It is more like heaven than ever. Do you know,” she added,

mysteriously, “just before I woke it was all dark, and I had lost my

angels and I was looking for them.”

I counselled her sagely to look for no more members of the Hierarchy _en

deshabille_, but to content herself with the humbler denizens of this

planet. She pressed my hand.

“I’ll try to be contented, Seer Marcous, darling.”

She did her best, poor child, when I was by; but I heard that often she

would sit by a little pile of garments and take them up one by one and

cry her heart out--so that though she quickly recovered, her cheeks

remained wan and drawn, and pain lingered in her eyes. The weather

changed to fog and damp and she spent the days crouching by the fire,

sometimes not stirring a muscle for an hour together. Her favourite seat

was the fender-stool in the drawing-room. Her own boudoir downstairs,

where she used to receive instruction from the excellent Miss Griggs,

she scarcely entered.

She broke one of these fits suddenly and called me by her own pet

version of my name. I looked up from the writing-table where I was

studying the Arabic grammar.

“Yes?”

“I have been thinking--oh, thinking, thinking so long. I’ve been

thinking that you must love me very much.”

“Yes, Carlotta,” said I, with a half smile. “I suppose I do.”

“As much as I loved my baby,” she said, seriously,

“I used to love you in a different way, perhaps.”

“And now?”

“Perhaps in the same sort of way, Carlotta.”

“I loved my baby because it was mine,” she remarked, looking at the

flames through one hand’s delicate fingers. “I wanted to do everything

for him and didn’t want him to do anything for me. I would have died

for him. It is so strange. Yes, I think you must love me like that, Seer

Marcous. Why?”

“Because when I found you in the Embankment Gardens nearly two years

ago you were about as helpless as your little baby,” I replied, somewhat

disingenuously.

Carlotta gave me a quick glance.

“You thought me then what you call an infernal nuisance. Oh, I know now.

I have grown wise. But you were always good. You looked good when you

sat on the seat. You were reading a dirty little book.”

“_L’Histoire des Uscoques,_” I murmured. How far away it seemed.

There was a pause. I regarded her for a moment or two. She was sunk

again in serious reflection. I sighed--at the general dismalness of

life, I suppose--and resumed my Arabic.

“Seer Marcous.”

“Yes?”

“Why didn’t you drive me away when I came back?”

I shut up the Arabic grammar and went and sat beside her on the

fenderstool.

“My dear little girl--what a question! How could I drive you away from

your own home?”

She flashed a queer, scared look at me, then at the fire, then at me

again and then burst out crying, her head and arms on her knees.

I muttered a man’s words of awkward comfort, saying something about the

baby.

“It isn’t baby I’m crying about,” sobbed Carlotta. “It’s me! And it’s

you! And it’s all the things I’m beginning to understand.”

I patted her head and lit a cigarette and wandered about the room,

rather puzzled by Carlotta’s psychological development, and yet stirred

by a faint thrill at her recognition of my affection. At the same time

the sad “too late, too late,” was knelled in my ears, and I thought of

the might-have-been, and rode the merry-go-round of regret’s banalities.

I had grown old. Passion had died. Hope--the hope of hearing the

patter of a child’s feet about my house, the hope of pride in a

quasi-paternity, of handing on, vicariously though it were, the torch of

life--hope was dead and it was buried in a little white coffin. Only a

great, quiet love remained. I was a tired old man, and Carlotta was to

me an infinitely loved sister--or daughter--or granddaughter even--so

old did I feel. And when I raised her from the fender-stool, and kissed

the tears from her eyes, it was as grandfatherly a kiss as had ever been

given in this world.

The same old problem again. What the deuce to do with Carlotta? Yet not

quite the same: rather, what the deuce to do with Carlotta and myself?

In our strange relationship we were inextricably bound together.

First, she needed sunshine--instead of the forlorn bleakness of an

English spring--and a change from this house of pain and death. And

then I, too, felt the need of wider horizons. London had grown to be a

nightmare city which I never entered. Its restless ambitions were not

mine. Its pleasures pleased me not. With not five of its five million

inhabitants dared I speak heart to heart. Judith had gone out of my

life. My aunts and cousins regarded me as beyond the moral pale. Mrs.

McMurray was still unaware of my return to England. I confess to shabby

treatment of my kind friend. I know she would have flown to aid Carlotta

in her troubles; but would she have understood Carlotta? Reasoning now

I am convinced that she would: in those days I did not reason. I shrank

like a snail into its shell. The simile is commonplace; but so was

I--the most commonplace human snail that ever occupied a commonplace

ten-roomed shell. And now the house and its useless books and its

million-fold more useless manuscript “History of Renaissance Morals,”

all its sombre memories and its haunting ghosts of ineffectualities,

became an unwholesome prison in which I was wasting away a feeble

existence. I resolved to quit it, to leave my books, to abjure

Renaissance morals, and to go forth with Carlotta into the wilderness

and the sunshine, there to fulfil whatever destiny the high gods should

decree.

CHAPTER XXV

Again I sit on the housetop in Mogador on the Morocco coast, where a

month ago I began to write these latter pages. Time has passed quickly

since that day.

I said then that on the previous afternoon something had happened. It

was something which I might have foreseen, which, in fact, with my habit

of putting the telescope to my blind eye, I obstinately had refused

to foresee. During our wanderings I had watched the flowering of her

splendid beauty as she drank in health from the glow of her own Orient.

I had noted the widening of her intellect, the quickening of her

sympathies. I had been conscious of the expansion of her soul in the

great silences when the stars flamed over the infinite sea of sand. But

a growing wistfulness that was no longer the old doglike pleading of her

glorious eyes, a gathering sadness that was not an aftermath of grief

for the child that had gone--into this, if I did remark it, I did

not choose to inquire. Instead, I continued my study of Arabic and

cultivated the acquaintance of a learned Moor whose conversation

afforded--and still affords--me peculiar pleasure. One of these days I

shall make a book of his Table-talk. But now I have to tell of Carlotta.

She accepted with alacrity my proposal that morning to ride over to the

Palm Tree House for luncheon, as we had done several times before. To

please me, I think, she had resolutely overcome her natural indolence.

So much so that she had come to love the nomad life of steamers and

caravans, and had grown restless, eager for fresh scenes, craving

new impressions. It was I who had cried a halt at Mogador where this

furnished house to let, belonging to a German merchant absent in Europe,

tempted me to rest awhile. I am not so young as Carlotta, and I awakened

to the fact of a circumambient universe so many years ago that I have

grown slumberous. Carlotta, if left to herself, would have gone on

riding camels through Africa to the end of time. She had changed in many

essentials. Instead of regarding me as an amiable purveyor of sweetmeats

and other necessaries of life to which by the grace of her being

Carlotta she was entitled, she treated me with human affection and

sympathy, keeping her own wants in the background, anxious only to

anticipate mine. But she still loved sweetmeats and would eat horrible

Moorish messes with an avidity only equalled by my repugnance. She

was still the same Carlotta. On the other hand again, she had of late

abandoned her caressing habits. If she laid her hand on my arm, she did

it timorously--whereat I would laugh and she would grow confused. Once

she had driven me to frenzy with her fondling. Those days had passed.

I told myself that I was as old as the sphinx we had moralised over in

Egypt.

We lunched, then, at the Palm Tree House and rode back in the cool of

the afternoon to Mogador. We were alone, as we knew the path across the

tongue of desert, and had no need of a guide and the rabble of sore-eyed

urchins who, like their attendant flies, infest the tourist on his

journeyings. On our right the desert rose to meet a near horizon; on our

left sandhills and boulders cut off the view; ahead the shimmering line

beyond which the sea and city lay. We were enveloped by solitude and

stillness. In the clear African air objects detached themselves against

the sky with startling definition.

I had unconsciously ridden a bit ahead of Carlotta, thinking my

own thoughts, and sighing as a man often does sigh, for the vague

unattainable which is happiness. Suddenly I missed her by my side, and

turning round saw a sight that made my heart beat with its sheer beauty.

It was only Carlotta on her barbarically betrapped and besaddled mule.

But it was Carlotta glorified in colour. She held above her head a

cotton parasol, which she had bought to her delight and my disgust

in Mogador; an impossible thing, all deep cherry reds and yellows;

a hateful thing made for a pantomime--or for this African afternoon.

Outspread and luminous in the white sunlight its cherry reds and yellows

floated like translucences of wine above Carlotta’s bronze hair crowned

by a white sun hat, her warm flesh-tints, and the dazzling white of her

surah silk blouse; the whole picture cut out vivid against the indigo of

the sky. It was a radiant vision. I stared openmouthed, smitten with

the pang that sudden and transient loveliness can sometimes deal, as

Carlotta approached, her figure swaying with the jog of her barbaric

beast. Her eyes were fixed on mine. She halted, and for a moment we

looked at one another; and in those wonderful eyes I saw for the first

time a beautiful sadness, a spiritual appeal. The moment passed. We

started again, side by side, neither speaking. I did not look at her,

conscious of a vague trouble. Things that I had thought dead stirred in

my heart.

Presently like a dawn of infinite delicacy rose the city before us. Its

fairy minarets and towers gleamed first white in an atmosphere of pale

amethyst toning through shades of green to the blue of the zenith. And

the lazy sea lay at the city’s foot a pavement of lapis lazuli. But

all was faint, unreal. Far, far away a group of palms caught opalescent

reflections. A slight breeze had sprung up, raising minute particles of

sand which caused the elfland on the horizon to quiver like a mirage.

“It is a dream-city,” said I, in admiration.

Carlotta did not reply. I thought she had not heard. We jogged on a

little in silence. At last she drew very close to me.

“Shall we ever get there?” she asked, pointing ahead with the hand that

held the reins.

“To Mogador? Yes, I hope so,” I answered with a laugh. I thought she was

tired.

“No, not Mogador. The dream-city--where every one wants to get.”

“You have travelled far, my dear,” said I, “to hanker now after

dream-cities and the unattainable. I knew a little girl once who would

have asked: ‘What is a dream-city?”

“She doesn’t ask now because she knows,” replied Carlotta. “No. We shall

never get there. It looks as if we were riding straight into it--but

when we get close, it will just be Mogador.”

“Aren’t you happy, Carlotta?” I asked.

“Are you, Seer Marcous?”

“I? I am a philosopher, my child, and a happy philosopher would be a

_lusus naturae_, a freak, a subject for a Barnum & Bailey Show. If

they caught him they would put him between the hairy man and the living

skeleton.”

“I suppose I’m getting to be a philosopher, too,” said Carlotta, “and

I hate it! Sometimes I think I hate everything and everybody--save you,

Seer Marcous, darling. It’s wicked of me. I must have been born wicked.

But I used to be happy. I never wanted to go to dream-cities. I was just

like a cat. Like Polyphemus. Do you remember Polyphemus?”

“Yes,” said I. And then set off my balance by this strange conversation

with Carlotta, I added: “I killed him.”

She turned a startled face to me.

“You killed him? Why?”

“He laughed at me because I was unhappy,” said I.

“Through me?”

“Yes; through you. But that’s neither here nor there. We were not

discussing the death of Polyphemus. We were talking about being

philosophers, and you said that as a philosopher you hated everything

and everybody except me. Why do you exclude me, Carlotta?”

We were riding so near together that my leg rubbed her saddle-girth.

I looked hard at her. She turned away her head and put the pantomime

parasol between us. I heard a little choking sob.

“Let us get off--and sit down a little--I want to cry.

“The end of all feminine philosophy,” I said, somewhat brutally. “No.

It’s getting late. That’s only Mogador in front of us. Let us go to it.”

Carlotta shifted her parasol quickly.

“What has happened to you, Seer Marcous? You have never spoken to me

like that before.”

“The very deuce seems to have happened,” said I, angrily--though why I

should have felt angry, heaven only knows. “First you turn yourself into

a Royal Academy picture with that unspeakable umbrella of yours and the

trumpery blue sky and sunshine, and make my sentimental soul ache; and

then you--”

“It’s a very pretty umbrella,” said Carlotta, looking upwards at it

demurely.

“Give it to me,” I said.

She yielded it with her usual docility. I cast it upon the desert. Being

open it gave one or two silly rebounds, then lay still. Carlotta reined

up her mule.

“Oh-h!” she said, in her old way.

I dismounted hurriedly, and helped her down and passed my arm through

the two bridles.

“My dear child,” said I, “what is the meaning of all this? Here we have

been living for months the most tranquil and unruffled existence, and

now suddenly you begin to talk about dream-cities and the impossibility

of getting there, and I turn angry and heave parasols about Africa. What

is the meaning of it?”

The most extraordinary part of it was that I should be treating Carlotta

as a grown-up woman, after the fashion of the hero of a modern French

novel. Perhaps I was younger than I thought.

She kept her eyes fixed downward.

“Why are you angry with me?” she asked in a low voice.

“I haven’t the remotest idea,” said I.

She lifted her eyelids slowly--oh, very, very slowly, glanced

quiveringly at me, while the shadow of a smile fluttered round her lips.

I verily believe the baggage exulted in her feminine heart. I turned

away, leading the two animals, and picked up the parasol which I closed

and restored to her.

“I thought you wanted to cry,” I remarked.

“I can’t,” said Carlotta, plaintively.

“And you won’t tell me why you exclude me from your universal hatred?”

Carlotta dug up the sand with the point of her foot. The sight of it

recalled the row of pink toes thrust unashamedly before my eyes on the

second day of her arrival in London. An old hope, an old fear, an old

struggle renewed themselves. She was more adorably beautiful even than

the Carlotta of the pink tus, and spiritually she was reborn. I heard

her whisper:

“I can’t.”

Now I had sworn to myself all the oaths that a man can swear that I

should be Carlotta’s grandfather to the end of time. Hitherto I had

felt the part. Now suddenly grey beard and slippered pantaloons are cast

aside and I am young again with a glow in my heart which beats fast at

her beauty. I shut my teeth.

“No,” said I to myself. “The curtain shall not rise on that farcical

tragedy again.”

I threw the reins on the neck of Carlotta’s mule, which with its

companion had been regarding us with bland stupidity.

“I think we had better ride on, Carlotta,” I said. “Mount.”

She meekly gave me her little foot and I hoisted her into the saddle.

We did not exchange a word till we reached Mogador. But each of us felt

that something had happened.

At dinner we met as usual. Carlotta spoke somewhat feverishly of our

travels, and asked me numberless questions, betraying an unprecedented

thirst for information. I never gave her historical instruction with

less zest.

After the meal we went onto the flat roof. Carlotta poured out my coffee

at the small table beside the long Madeira cane chair which was my

accustomed seat. The starlit night was blue and languorous. From some

cafe came the monotonous strains of Moorish music, the harsh strings and

harsh men’s voices softened by the distance. Carlotta took my coffee-cup

when I had finished and set it down in her granddaughterly way. Then she

stood in front of me.

“Won’t you make a little room for me on your chair, Seer Marcous,

darling?”

I shifted my feet from the foot-rest and she sat down. I may observe

that I was not, in oriental bashawdom, occupying the one and only chair

on the housetop.

“Tell me about the stars,” she said.

I knew what she meant. She loved the old Greek myths; their poetry,

obscured though it was through my matter-of-fact prose, appealed to

her young imagination. She was passing through an exquisite phase of

development.

I scanned the heavens for a text and found one in the Pleiades. And I

told her how these were seven daughters of Atlas and Pleione who herself

was the daughter of the Sea, and how they were all pure maidens, save

one, and were the companions of Artemis; how Orion the hunter, who was

afterwards slain by Artemis and whose three-starred girdle gleamed up

there in the sky, pursued them with evil intent, and how they prayed the

gods for deliverance and were changed into the everlasting stars; and,

lastly, how the one who was not a maiden, for she loved a mortal, shrank

away from her sisters through shame and was invisible to the eye of man.

“She was ashamed,” said Carlotta in a low voice, “because she loved some

one afterwards, one of the gods, who would not look at her because

she had given herself to a mortal. A woman then has a fire here”--she

clasped her hands to her bosom--“and wishes she could burn away to

nothing, nothing, just to air, and become invisible.”

She was rising hurriedly on the last word, but I brought my hands down

on her shoulders.

“Carlotta, my child,” said I, “what do you mean?”

She seized my wrists and struggling to rise, panted out in desperation:

“You are one of the gods, and I wish I were changed into an invisible

star.”

“I don’t,” said I, huskily.

By main force I drew her to me and our lips met. She yielded, and this

time the whole soul of Carlotta came to me in the kiss.

“It’s beautiful to snuggle up against you again,” said my ever direct

Carlotta, after a while. “I haven’t done it--oh, for such a long time.”

She sighed contentedly. “Seer Marcous--”

“You must call me Marcus now,” said I, somewhat fatuously.

She shook her head as it lay on my shoulder. “No. You are Marcus--or Sir

Marcus--to everybody. To me you are always Seer Marcous. Seer Marcous,

darling,” she half whispered after a pause. “Once I did not know the

difference between a god and a mortal. It was only that morning when I

woke up--”

“You took me for a saint in a dressing-gown,” said I.

“It’s the same thing,” she retorted. And then taking up her parable,

she told me in her artless way the inner history of her heart since that

morning; but what she said is sacred. Also, a man feels himself to be a

pitiful dog of a god when a woman relates how she came to establish him

on her High Altar.

Later we struck a lighter vein and spoke of the present, the enchantment

of the hour, the scented air, the African stars.

“It seems, my dear,” said I, “that we have got to Nephelococcygia after

all.”

“What is Nephelococcygia?” asked Carlotta.

I relented. “It’s a base Aristophanic libel on our dream-city,” said I.

Thus out of evil has come good; out of pain has grown happiness; out of

horror has sprung an everlasting love. Many a man will say that in all

my relations with Carlotta I have comported myself as a fool, and that

my marriage is the crowning folly. Well, I pretend not unto wisdom.

Wisdom would have married me to five thousand a year, a position in

fashionable society, my Cousin Dora and premature old age antecedent to

eternal destruction. I hold that my salvation has lain the way of folly.

Again, it may be urged against me that I have squandered my life, that

with all my learning, such as it is, I have achieved nothing. I once

thought so. I boasted of it in my diary when I complacently styled

myself a waster in Earth’s factory. Oh, that diary! Let me here solemnly

retract and abjure every crude and idiot opinion and reflection of life

set forth in that frenetic record! I regard myself not as a waster--I

remember a passage in Epictetus treating of the ways of Providence:

“For what else can I do, a lame old man, than sing hymns to God? If then

I were a nightingale I would do the part of a nightingale: if I were

a swan, I would do like a swan. But now I am a rational creature and I

ought to praise God; this is my work, I do it, nor will I desert this

post so long as I am allowed to keep it; and I exhort you to join in

this same song.”

No, I am neither nightingale nor swan, and cannot add, as they do,

to the beauty of the earth. The lame old man has his limitations; but

within them, he can, by cleaving to his post and praising God, fulfil

his destiny.

Carlotta coming onto the housetop to summon me to lunch looks over my

shoulder as I write these words.

“But you are not a lame old man!” she cries in indignation. “You are the

youngest and strongest and cleverest man in the world!”

“What am I to do with these miraculous gifts?” I ask, laughing.

“You are to become famous,” she says, with conviction.

“Very well, my dear. We will have to go to some new land where attaining

fame is easier for a beginner than in London; and we’ll send for

Antoinette and Stenson to help us.”

“That will be very nice,” she observes.

So I am to become famous. _Ce que femme veut, Dieu le veut_. And

Carlotta has got a soul of her own now and means to make the most of

it. It will lead me upward somewhere. But whether I am to be king of

New Babylon or Prime Minister of New Zealand or lawgiver to a Polynesian

tribe is a secret as yet hidden in the lap of the gods, whence Carlotta

doubtless will snatch it in her own good time.

“You are writing a lot of rubbish,” says Carlotta.

“And a little truth. The mixture is Life,” I answer.

End of Project Gutenberg’s The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne, by William J. Locke