The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne Part 20

"Well, my dear," said I. "What do you think of my young savage from Asia Minor?"

Judith laughed--I am sure not naturally.

"Is that all you wanted to say to me?"

She withdrew her hand, and tidied her hair in the mirror of the overmantel.

"I think she is a most uninteresting young woman. I am disappointed.

I had antic.i.p.ated something original. I had looked forward to some amus.e.m.e.nt. But, really, my dear Marcus, she is _bete a pleurer_--weepingly stupid."

"She certainly can weep," said I.

"Oh, can she?" said Judith, as if the announcement threw some light on Carlotta's character. "And when she cries, I suppose you, like a man, give in and let her have her own way?" And Judith laughed again.

"My dear Judith," said I; "you have no idea of the wholesome discipline at Lingfield Terrace."

Suddenly with one of her disconcerting changes of front, she turned and caught me by the coat-lappels.

"Marcus dear, I have been so lonely this week. When are you coming to see me?"

"We'll have a whole day out on Sunday," said I.

As I walked down the stairs with Carlotta, I reflected that Judith had not accounted for the red spots.

"I like her," said Carlotta. "She is a nice old lady."

"Old lady! What on earth do you mean?" I was indeed startled. "She is a young woman."

"Pouf!" cried Carlotta. "She is forty."

"She is no such thing," I cried. "She is years younger than I."

"She would not tell me."

"You asked her age?"

"Oh, ye-es," said Carlotta. "I was very polite. I first asked if she was married. She said yes. Then I asked how her husband was. She said she didn't know. That was funny. Why does she not know, Seer Marcous?"

"Never mind," said I, "go on telling me how polite you were."

"I asked how many children she had. She said she had none. I said it was a pity. And then I said, 'I am eighteen years old and I want to marry quite soon and have children. How old are you?' And she would not tell me. I said, 'You must be the same age as my mamma, if she were alive.'

I said other things, about her husband, which I forget. Oh, I was very polite."

She smiled up at me in quest of approbation. I checked a horrified rebuke when I reflected that, according to the etiquette of the harem, she had been "very polite." But my poor Judith! Every artless question had been a knife thrust in a sensitive spot. Her husband: the handsome blackguard who had lured her into the divorce court, married her, and after two unhappy years had left her broken; children: they would have kept her life sweet, and did I not know how she had yearned for them?

Her age: it is only the very happily married woman who snaps her fingers at the approach of forty, and even she does so with a disquieting sense of bravado. And the sweet insolence of youth says: "I am eighteen: how old are you?"

My poor Judith! Once more, on our walk home, I discoursed to Carlotta on the differences between East and West.

"Seer Marcous," said Carlotta this evening at dinner--"I have decided now that she shall dine regularly with me; it is undoubtedly agreeable to see her pretty face on the opposite side of the table and listen to her irresponsible chatter: chatter which I keep within the bounds of decorum when Stenson is present, so as to save his susceptibilities, by the simple device, agreed upon between us (to her great delight) of scratching the side of my somewhat prominent nose--Seer Marcous, why does Mrs. Mainwaring keep your picture in her bedroom?"

I am glad Stenson happened to be out of the room. His absence saved the flaying of my nasal organ. I explained that it was the custom in England for ladies to collect the photographs of their men friends, and use them misguidedly for purposes of decoration.

"But this," said Carlotta, opening out her arms in an exaggerated way, "is such a big one."

"Ah, that," I answered, "is because I am very beautiful."

Carlotta shrieked with laughter. The exquisite comicality of the jest occasioned bubbling comments of mirth during the rest of the meal, and her original indiscreet question was happily forgotten.

CHAPTER X

10th July.

Judith and I have had our day in the country. We know a wayside station, on a certain line of railway, about an hour and a half from town, where we can alight, find eggs and bacon at the village inn and hayricks in a solitary meadow, and where we can chew the cud of these delights with the cattle in well-wooded pastures. Judith has a pa.s.sion for eggs and bacon and hayricks. My own rapture in their presence is tempered by the philosophic calm of my disposition. She wore a cotton dress of a forget-me-not blue which suits her pale colouring. She looked quite pretty. When I told her so she blushed like a girl. I was glad to see her in gay humour again. Of late months she has been subject to moodiness, emotional variability, which has somewhat ruffled the smooth surface of our companions.h.i.+p. But to-day there has been no trace of "temperament." She has shown herself the pleasant, witty Judith she knows I like her to be, with a touch of coquetry thrown in on her own account. She even spoke amiably of Carlotta. I have not had so thoroughly enjoyable a day with Judith for a long time.

I don't think she set herself deliberately to please me. That I should resent. I know that women in order to please an unsuspecting male will walk weary miles by his side with blisters on their feet and a beatific smile on their faces. But Judith has far too much commonsense.

Another pleasing feature of the day's jaunt has been the absence of the appeal to sentimentality which Judith of late, especially since her return from Paris, has been overfond of making. This idle habit of mind, for such it is in reality, has been arrested by an intellectual interest. One of her great friends is Willoughby, the economic statistician, who in his humorous moments, writes articles for popular magazines, ill.u.s.trated by scale diagrams. He will draw, for instance, a series of men representing the nations of the world, and varying in bulk and stature according to the respective populations; and over against these he will set a series of pigs whose sizes are proportionate to the amount of pork per head eaten by the different nationalities. To these queer minds that live on facts (I myself could as easily thrive on a diet of egg-sh.e.l.ls) this sort of pictorial information is peculiarly fascinating. But Judith, who like most women has a freakish mental as well as physical digestion, delights in knowing how many hogs a cabinet minister will eat during a lifetime, and how much of the earth's surface could be scoured by the world's yearly output of scrubbing-brushes. I don't blame her for it any more than I blame her for a love of radishes, which make me ill; it is not as if she had no wholesome tastes. On the contrary, I commend her. Now, Willoughby, it seems, has found the public appet.i.te so great for these thought-saving boluses of knowledge--unpleasant drugs, as it were, put up into gelatine capsules--that he needs a.s.sistance. He has asked Judith to devil for him, and I have to-day persuaded her to accept his offer. It will be an excellent thing for the dear woman. It will be an absorbing occupation.

It will divert the current of her thoughts from the sentimentality that I deprecate, and provided she does not serve up hard-boiled facts to me at dinner, she will be the pleasanter companion.

The only return to it was when I kissed her at parting.

"That is the first, Marcus, for twelve hours," she said; very sweetly, it is true--but still reproachfully.

But Sacred Name of a Little Good Man! (as the depraved French people say), what is the use of this continuous osculation between rational beings of opposite s.e.xes who set out to enjoy themselves? If only St.

Paul, in the famous pa.s.sage when he says there is a time for this and a time for that, had mentioned kissing, he would have done a great deal of practical good.

July 13th.

To-night, for the first time since I came into the family estates (such as they are), I feel the paralysis of aspiration occasioned by poverty.

If I were very rich, I would buy the two next houses, pull them down and erect on the site a tower forty foot high. At the very top would be one comfortable room to be reached by a lift, and in this room I could have my being, while it listed me, and be secure from all kinds of incursions and interruptions. Antoinette's one-eyed cat could not scratch for admittance; Antoinette herself could not enter under pretext of domestic economics and lure me into profitless gossip; and I could defy Carlotta, who is growing to be as pervasive as the smell of pickles over Crosse & Blackwell's factory. She comes in without knocking, looks at picture-books, sprawls about doing nothing, smokes my best cigarettes, hums tunes which she has picked up from barrel-organs, bends over me to see what I am writing, munching her eternal sweetmeats in my ear, and laughs at me when I tell her she has irremediably broken the thread of my ideas. Of course I might be brutal and turn her out. But somehow I forget to do so, until I realise--too late--the havoc she has made with my work.

I did, however, think, when Miss Griggs mounted guard over Carlotta, and Antoinette and her cat were busied with luncheon cook-pans, that my solitude was unimperilled. I see now there is nothing for it but the tower. And I cannot build the tower; so I am to be henceforward at the mercy of anything feline or feminine that cares to swish its tail or its skirts about my drawing-room.

I was arranging my notes, I had an illuminating inspiration concerning the life of Francois Villon and the contemporary court of Cosmo de'

Medici; I was preparing to fix it in writing when the door opened and Stenson announced:

"Mrs. Ordeyne and Miss Ordeyne."

My Aunt Jessica and Dora came in and my inspiration went out. It hasn't come back yet.

My aunt's apologies and Dora's draperies filled the room. I must forgive the invasion. They knew they were disturbing my work. They hoped I didn't mind.