The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne Part 47

"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 b.u.t.terfly 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 d.u.c.h.essa 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 a.s.sociation 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 d.a.m.ned 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, ign.o.ble 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 pa.s.sed 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 a.n.a.lyse my att.i.tude 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 const.i.tuting 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 s.e.x, 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 rea.s.suringly 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 t.i.tle," she replied, simply. "I am so fond of red things; but I should not like that great red 'A'."