October 7th.
At Paddington I came upon Sebastian Pasquale lounging about the arrival platform. As I had not seen or heard of him since the end of July I had concluded that he was wandering as usual over the globe. He greeted me effusively, holding out both hands in his foreign fashion.
“My dear old Ordeyne! who would have thought of meeting you here? What wind blows you to Paddington?”
“I expect Carlotta by the Plymouth Express.”
“The fair Carlotta? And how is she? And what is she doing at Plymouth?”
In the middle of my explanation he pulled out his watch.
“By Jove! I must get to the next platform and catch my train to Ealing. I was just killing time about the station. I like seeing a train come in—the gleam and smoke and rush and whirr of the evil-looking thing—and the sudden metamorphosis of its sleek sides into mouths belching forth humanity. I think of Hades. This, by the way, isn’t a bad representation of it—the up-to-date Hades. They’ve got a railway bridge now across the Styx, and Charon has a gold band around his cap, and this might be the arrival platform of the damned souls.”
“You forget,” said I, “that it is the arrival platform of Carlotta.”
He threw back his head and laughed boyishly.
“Well, consider it the Golden Gate terminus of the ‘Earth, Hades and Olympus Railway’ if you like. I’m off on a branch line to meet a beauteous duchessa at Ealing—oh, an authentic one, I assure you.”
“Why should I doubt it?” said I.
Stenson, whom I had brought to look after Carlotta’s luggage, came up and touched his hat.
“Train just signalled, sir.”
Pasquale put out his hand after another glance at his watch.
“I am sorry I cannot wait to greet the fair one. I’ll drop in soon and pay my respects. I am only just back in London, you know.A rivederci.”
He waved me farewell and hurried off. The arrival of the train, the exuberance of Carlotta, the joy of having her sidle up against me once more in the cab while she poured out her story, and the subsequent gaiety of the evening banished Pasquale from my mind. But it is odd that I should have met him at Paddington.
We parted on the landing to dress for dinner. A moment afterwards there was a beating at my door. I opened it to behold Carlotta, in a glow of wondering delight, brandishing a silver-backed brush in one hand and the hand-mirror in the other.
“Oh, my darling Seer Marcous! For me? All that for me?”
“No. It is for Antoinette,” said I.
“Oh-h!”
She laughed and pulled me by the arm into her room and shut the door.
“Oh, everything is beautiful, beautiful, and I shall die if I do not kiss you.”
“You must be kept alive at all hazards,” I laughed; and this time I did not reject her. But it was a child around whom my arms closed. An inner flash, accompanied by a spasm of pain, revealed it, and changed a passionate desire to gentleness.
“There,” said I, after she had released herself and flown to open the drawers of the new toilette table, where lay some odds and ends of jewelry I had purchased for her. “You have been saved from extinction. The next deadly peril is hunger. I give you a quarter of an hour.”
She came down to dinner in a low-necked frock, wearing the necklace and bangle; and, child that she is, in her hand she carried the silver-backed mirror. I believe she has taken it to bed with her, as a seven-year-old does its toy. She certainly kept it by her all the evening and admired herself therein unashamedly like the traditional Lady from the Sea. Once, desiring to show me the ravishing beauty of a turquoise pendant, she bent her neck forward, as I sat, so as to come within reach of my nearsighted eyes (it is a superstition of hers that I am nearly blind without my glasses), and quite naturally slid onto my knee. She has the warm russet complexion that suits her heavy bronze hair, and there is a glow beneath the satin of her neck and arms. And she is fragrant—I recognise it now—of hyacinths. The world can hold nothing more alluring to the senses of man. My fingers that held the turquoise trembled as they chanced to touch her—but she was all unconcerned. Nay, further—she gazed into the mirror—
“It makes me look so white—oh, there was a girl at Bude who had a gold locket—and it lay upon her bones—you could count them. I am glad I have no bones. I am quite soft—feel.”
She clasped my fingers and pressed their tips into the firm young flesh below her throat.
“Yes,” said I, with some huskiness in my voice, “your turquoise can sleep there very pleasantly. See, I will kiss it to bring you good luck.”
She cooed with pleasure. “I don’t think any one kissed the locket of the girl at Bude. She was too thin. And too old; she must have been thirty! Now,” she added, lifting up the locket, “you will kiss the place, too, where it is to lie.”
I looked for a moment into her eyes. Seeing me hesitate, they grew pathetic.
“Oh-h,” she said, reproachfully.
I know I am a fool. I know that Pasquale would have hurled his sarcasms at me. I know that the whole of her deliciousness was mine for the taking—mine for ever and ever. If I had loved her less passionately I would have kissed her young throat lightly with a jest. But to have kissed her thus with such longing as mine behind my lips would have been an outrage.
I lifted her to her feet, and rose and turned away, laughing unsteadily.
“No, my dear,” said I, “that would be—unsuitable.”
The bathos of the word made me laugh louder. Carlotta, aware that a joke was in the air, joined in my mirth, and her laughter rang fresh.
“What is the suitable way of kissing?”
I took her hand and saluted it in an eighteenth century manner.
“This,” said I.
“Oh-h,” said Carlotta. “That is so dull.” She caught up Polyphemus and buried her face in his fur. “That’s the way I should like to be kissed.”
“The man you love, my dear,” said I, “will doubtless do it.”
She made a little grimace.
“Oh, then, I shall have to wait such a long time.”
“You needn’t,” said I, taking her hands again and speaking very seriously. “Can’t you learn to love a man, give him your whole heart and all your best and sweetest thoughts?”
“I would marry any nice man if you gave me to him,” she answered.
“It would not matter who he was? Anyone would do?”
“Why, of course,” said Carlotta.
“And any one wanting to marry you could kiss you as you kissed Polyphemus.”
“Oh-h, he would have to be nice—not like Mustapha.”
I turned away with a sigh and lit a cigarette, while Carlotta curled herself up on the sofa and inspected her face and necklace in the silver mirror. In a moment she was talking to the cat, who had jumped on her lap and with arched back was rubbing himself against her.
Soon the touch of sadness was lost in the happy sight of her and the happy thought that my house was no longer left to me desolate. We laughed away the evening.
But now, sitting alone, I feel empty of soul; like a man stricken with fierce hunger who, expecting food in a certain place, finds nothing but a few delicate cakes that mock his craving.
October 14th.
A week has passed. I have spent it chiefly in trying to win her love.
Is she, after all, only a child, and is this love of mine but a monstrous passion?
What is to be done? Life is beginning to be a torture. If I send her away, I shall eat my heart out. If she stays, fuel is but added to the fire. Her caressing ways will drive me mad. To repulse her were brutal—she loves to be fondled; she can scarcely speak to me without touching me, leaning over me, thus filling me with the sense of her. She treats me with an affectionate child’s innocence, as if I were sexless. My happiest time with her is spent in public places, restaurants, and theatres where her unclouded pleasure is reflected in my heart.
I am letting her take music lessons with Herr Stuer, who lives close by in the Avenue Road. Perhaps music may help in her development.
October 21st.
To please her I am accustoming myself to this out-of-door life, which once I despised so cordially. Pasquale has joined us two or three times. Last night he gave a dinner in Carlotta’s honour at the Continental. The ladies of the party have asked her to go to see them. She must have some society, I suppose, and I must go with her. They belong to the half smart set, eager to conceal beneath a show of raffishness their plentiful lack of intellect and their fundamental bourgeois respectability. In spite of Pasquale’s brilliance and Carlotta’s rapturous enjoyment I sat mumchance and depressed, out of my element.
My work is at a standstill, and Carlotta is my life. I fear I am deteriorating.
On Judith, whom I have seen once or twice since Carlotta’s return, I called this afternoon. She is unhappy. Although I have not confessed to my thraldom, her woman’s wit, I feel sure, has penetrated to the heart of my mystery. There has been no deep emotion in our intercourse. Its foundation has been real friendship sweetened with pleasant sentimentality. And yet jealousy of Carlotta consumes her. Heramour propreis deeply wounded. She makes me feel as if I had played the part of a brute. But O Judith, my dear, I have only been a man. “The same thing,” I fancy I hear her answer. But no. I have never loved a woman, my dear, in all my life before, and as I made no secret of it, I am guiltless of anything like betrayal. In due season I will tell you frankly of the new love; but how can I tell you now? How could I tell any human being?
I imagine myself as Panurge, taking counsel with a Pantagruelian friend. “I am in love with Carlotta and desire to marry her.” “Then marry her,” says Pantagruel. “But she does not love me.” “Then don’t marry,” says Pantagruel. “But nay,” urges poor Panurge, “she would marry me according to any rite, civil or ecclesiastical, to-morrow.”“Mariez-vous doncques de par dieu,”replies Pantagruel. “But I should be a villain to take advantage of her innocence and submission.” “Then don’t marry.” “But I can’t live without her,” says Panurge, desperately. “I am as a man bewitched. If I don’t marry her I shall waste away with longing.” “Then marry her in God’s name!” says Pantagruel. And I am no wiser by his counsel, and I have paraded the complication of my folly before mocking eyes.
October 23d.
I perceive that the young man of the idiot metaphor was gifted with piercing acumen. Beneath the Jaquesian melancholy of my temperament he diagnosed the potentiality of canine rabidness. No rational being is afflicted with this grotesque concentration of idea, this fierce hot fury waxing in intensity day by day.
I must consult a brain specialist.
October 25th.
I went to Judith this afternoon, more to prove the loyalty of my friendship than to seek comfort from her society. Over tea we discussed the weather and books and her statistical work. It was dull, but unembarrassing. The grey twilight crept into the room and there was a pause in our talk. She broke it by asking, without looking at me:
“When are we to have an evening together again?”
“Whenever you like, my dear Judith.”
“To-morrow?”
“I am afraid not to-morrow,” said I.
“Are you doing anything so very particular?”
“I have arranged to take Carlotta to the Empire.”
“Oh,” said Judith shortly, and I was left uncomfortable for another spell of silence.
“It would be very kind, Marcus, to ask me to accompany you,” she said at last.
“Carlotta and myself?”
“Why not?”
“My question arose from the stupidity of surprise,” said I. “I thought you disliked Carlotta.”
“By no means. I should be glad to make her further acquaintance. Any one that interests you must also be interesting to me.”
“In that case,” said I, “your coming will give us both the greatest possible pleasure.”
“I haven’t had a merry evening for ever so long.”
“We will dine somewhere first and have supper afterwards. The whole gamut of merriment. Toute la lyre. And you shall have,” I added, “some of your favourite Veuve Cliquot.”
“It will be charming,” said Judith, politely.
In fact, politeness has been the dominant note of her attitude to-day, a sober restraint of manner such as she would adopt when rather tired towards an ordinary acquaintance. Has she reconciled herself to the inevitable and taken this Empire frolic as a graceful method of showing it? I should like to believe so, but the course is scarcely consistent with that motor of illogic which she is pleased to call her temperament. I am puzzled.
Her smile as we parted sent a chill through me, being the smile of a mask instead of a woman’s face; and it was not the face of Judith. I don’t anticipate much merriment tomorrow evening.
At Carlotta’s suggestion, I have sent a line to Pasquale to ask him to join us. His gay wit will lend to the entertainment a specious air of revelry which Carlotta will take as genuine.
I have often thought lately of the hopeless passion of Alfonso the Magnanimous of Naples, as set forth by Pope Pius II in his Commentaries; for I am beginning to take a morbid interest in the unhappy love affairs of other men and to institute comparisons. If they have lived through the torment, why should not I? But Alfonso sighed for Lucrezia d’Alagna, a beautiful chaste statue of ice who loved him; whereas I crave the warm-blooded thing that is mine for the taking, but no more loves me than she loves the policeman who salutes her on his beat. I cannot take her. Something stronger than my passion opposes an adamantine barrier. I love her with my soul as well as with my body, and my soul cries out for the soul that the Almighty forgot when endowing her with entity.
This evening a letter from the Editor of The Quarterly Review. It would give him great pleasure if I would contribute a Renaissance article, taking as my text a German, a Russian, and an English attempt to whitewash the Borgia family. Six months ago the compliment would have filled me with gratification. To-day what to me are the whitewashed Borgias or the solemn denizens of the Athenaeum reading-room who will slumber over my account of the blameless poisonings of this amiable family? They are vanity and vexation of a spirit already sore at ease.
As I write the door creaks. I look up. Behold Carlotta in hastily slipped on dressing-gown, open in front, her hair streaming loose to her waist, her bare feet flashing pink beneath her night-dress.
“Oh, Seer Marcous, darling, I am so frightened!”
She ran forward and caught the lappels of my coat as I rose from my chair.
“What is the matter?”
“There is a mouse in my bed.”
Polyphemus saved the situation by jumping from the sofa and rubbing his back against her feet.
“Take the cat and tell him to kill it,” said I, “and go back to bed at once.”
I must have spoken roughly, for she regarded me with her great eyes full of innocent reproach.
“There, take up the cat and go,” I repeated. “You mustn’t come down here looking like that.”
“I thought I looked very pretty,” said Carlotta, moving a step nearer.
I sat down at my writing-table and fixed my eyes on my paper.
“You are like a Houri that has been sent away from Paradise for misbehaviour,” I said.
She laughed her curious cooing laugh.
“Hou!Seer Marcous is shocked!” And she ran, away, rubbing Polyphemus’s nose against her face.
I wonder if the Devil, having grown infirm, is mixing up his centuries and mistaking me for a mediaeval saint? Paphnutius for instance, who was visited by such a seductress. What is the legend? To get rid of her he burns off his hand, whereupon she falls dead. He prays and she returns to life and becomes a nun. No, Messer Diavolo, I am not Paphnutius. I will not maim myself, nor do I want Carlotta to fall dead; and I cannot pray and effect a pietistic resurrection. I am simply a fool of a modern man tempted out of his wits, who scarce knows what it is that he speaks or writes.
I am not superstitious, but I feel myself to-night on the brink of some disaster. I walk restlessly about the room. On the mantel-piece are three photographs in silver frames: Judith, Carlotta, Pasquale. That which is of mockery in the spirit of each seems to-night to be hovering round the portraits and to be making sport of me. An autumn gale is howling among the trees outside, like a legion of lost souls. Listen. Messer Diavolo himself might be riding by with a whoop of derision.
October 26th.
I knew something would happen. Messer Diavolo does not ride whooping to no purpose by the windows of people whom he desires to torment; nor does he inspire photographs for nothing with an active spirit of mockery.
We dined at the Trocadero. Carlotta loves the band and the buzz of Babel and the heavy scents and the clatter and the tumult and the glare of light; otherwise I should have chosen a discreeter hostelry where the footfalls of the waiting-men were noiseless and the walls in quiet shadow, where there was nothing but the mellow talk of friends to distract the mind from the consideration of exquisite flavours. But in these palaces of clashing splendour, the stunned brain fails to receive impressions from the glossopharyngeal nerve, and one eats unthinkingly like a dog. But this matters little to Carlotta. Perhaps when I was nineteen it mattered little to me. And to-night, also, it mattered little, for my mind was preoccupied and a dinner with Lucullus would have been savourless.
If the Psalmist cried, “What is man that Thou art mindful of him?” what cry had he at the back of his head to utter concerning woman? Did he leave her to be implicitly dealt with by Charles Darwin in his “Theory of Sexual Selection”? Or did he in the good old oriental way regard her as unimportant in the eyes of the Deity? If the latter, he was a purblind prophet and missed the very fount of human tears.
When I looked at Judith, I was smitten with a great pain. She had not looked so young, so fresh, so fragilely fair for many months. She wore a dress of corn-flower blue that deepened the violet of her eyes. In the mass of flax hued thistle-down that is her hair a blue argus butterfly completed the chord of colour. There was the faintest tinge of pink in her cheek applied with delicate art. Her dress seemed made of unsubstantial dream stuff—I believe they call it chiffon—and it covered her bosom and arms like the spray of a fairy sea. She had the air of an impalpable Undine, a creation of sea-foam and sea-flower; an exquisite suggestion of the ethereal which floated beauty, as it were, into her face. I know little of women, save what these past few grievous months have taught me; but I know that hours of anxious thought and desperate hope lay behind this effect of fragile loveliness. The wit of woman could not have rendered a woman’s body a greater contrast to that of her rival; and with infinite subtlety she had imbued the contrast with the deeper significance of rare and spiritual things. I know this was so. I know it was a challenge, a defiance, an ordeal by combat; and the knowledge hurt me, so that I felt like a Dathan or Abiram who had laid hand on the Ark of the Covenant (for the soul of a woman, by heaven! is a holy thing), and I wished that the earth could open and swallow me up.
We sat down to table in the middle of the great room—a quiet corner on the balcony away from the band is not to Carlotta’s taste—like any conventional party of four, and at first talked of indifferent matters. Conciergerie dinner-parties in the Terror always began with a discussion of the latest cure for megrims, or the most fashionable cut of a panier. Presently Pasquale who had been talking travel with Judith appealed to me.
“What year was it, Ordeyne, that I came home from Abyssinia?”
“I forget,” said I. “I only remember you presenting me with that hideous thing hanging in my passage, which you called a dulcimer.”
“Gage d’amour?”smiled Judith.
Pasquale laughed and twirled his swaggering moustache.
“I did get it from a damsel, and that is why I called it a dulcimer, but she didn’t sing of Mount Abora. I wish I could remember the year.”
“I think it was in 1894,” said Judith quietly.
Pasquale, who had been completely unaware of Judith’s existence until half an hour before, could not repress a stare of polite surprise.
“I believe you are right. In fact, you are. But how can you tell?”
“Through the kindness of Sir Marcus,” replied Judith graciously, “you are a very old acquaintance. I could write you off-hand a nice little obituary notice with all the adventures—well, I will not say complete—but with all the dates accurate, I assure you. I have a head for that sort of thing.”
“Yes,” I cried, desiring to turn the conversation. “Don’t tell Mrs. Mainwaring anything you wish forgotten. Facts are her passion. She writes wonderful articles full of figures that make your head spin, and publishes them in the popular magazines over the signature of Willoughby the statistician. Allow me to present to you a statistical ghost.”
But Pasquale’s subtle Italian brain was paying but half attention to me. I could read his inferences from Judith’s observations, and I could tell what she wanted him to infer. I seem to have worn my sensory system outside instead of inside my skin this evening.
“Ordeyne,” said he, “you are a pig, and the great-grandfather of pigs—”
“Foul” cried Carlotta, seizing on an intelligible point of the conversation.
“Why didn’t you present me to Mrs. Mainwaring in 1894? I declare I have thought myself allied to that man for twenty years in bonds of the most intimate friendship, and he has never so much as mentioned you to me.”
“Seer Marcous says that Pasquale is a bad lot,” remarked Carlotta, with an air of sapience, after a sip of orangeade, a revolting beverage which she loves to drink at her meals.
Pasquale threw back his handsome head and laughed again like the chartered libertine he is, and Judith smiled.
“‘Out of the mouths of babes, etc.,’” said I, apologetically.
“In all seriousness,” said Pasquale to Judith, “I had no idea that any one was such a close friend of Ordeyne’s.”
Judith turned to me, with a graceful gesture of her shoulders.
“I think we have been close friends, Marcus?”
“Oh, ye-es,” broke in Carlotta. “Mrs. Mainwaring has the picture of Seer Marcous in her bedroom, and there is the picture of Mrs. Mainwaring in our drawing-room. You have not seen it? But yes. You have not recognised it, Pasquale? Mrs. Mainwaring is so pretty tonight. Much prettier than the photograph. Yes, you are so pretty. I would like to put you on the mantel-piece as an ornament instead of the picture.”
“May I be allowed to endorse Carlotta’s sentiment of appreciation?” I said, with a view to covering her indiscretion, for I saw a flash of conjecture in Pasquale’s eyes and a sudden spot of real red in Judith’s cheeks. She had evidently desired to suggest an old claim on my regard, but to have it based on such intimate details as the enshrining of my photograph was not to her fancy.
“I am vastly beholden to you both,” said Judith, who has a graceful way of receiving compliments. “But,” turning to Pasquale, “we have travelled far from Abyssinia.”
“To Sir Marcus’s mantel-piece. Suppose we stay there.”
“There is you and me and Mrs. Mainwaring,” said the literal Carlotta, “and I am the big one in the middle. It was made big—big,” she added, extending her arms in her exaggerating way. “I was wearing this dress.”
“Mr. Pasquale and I will have to enlarge our frames, Marcus,” said Judith, “or we shall be jealous. We shall have to make common cause together.”
“We will declare an inoffensive alliance,” laughed Pasquale.
“Offensive if you like,” said Judith.
It may have been some effect of the glitter of lights, but I vow I saw a swift interchange of glances. Pasquale immediately turned to Carlotta with a jesting remark, and Judith engaged me in conversation on our old days in Rome. Suddenly she swerved from the topic, and leaning forward, indicated our companions with an imperceptible motion of her head.
“Don’t you think,” she said in a low voice, “they are a well-matched pair? Both young and picturesque; it would solve many things.”
I glanced round. Carlotta, elbow on the table and chin in hand, was looking deep into Pasquale’s eyes, just as she has looked into mine. Her lips had the half-sensuous, half-childish pout provocative of kisses.
“Do, and I will love you,” I heard her say.
Oh, those dove-notes, those melting eyes, those lips! Oh, the horrible fool passion that burns out my soul and brain and reduces me to rave like a lovelorn early Victorian tailor! Which was worse I know not—the spasm of jealousy or the spasm of self-contempt that followed it. At that moment the music ceased suddenly on a loud crashing chord.
The moment seemed to be magnetic to all but Carlotta, who was enjoying herself prodigiously. Our three personalities appeared to vibrate rudely one against the other. I was conscious that Judith read me, that Pasquale read Judith, that again something telegraphic passed between them. The waiter offered me partridge. Pasquale quickly turned from Carlotta to his left-hand neighbour.
“I think we ought to drink Faust’s health, don’t you?”
I started. Had I not myself traced the analogy?
“Faust?” queried Judith at a loss.
“Our friend Faust opposite me,” said Pasquale, raising his champagne glass. “Hasn’t he been transformed from the lean and elderly bookworm into the gay, young gallant about the town? Once one could scarcely drag him from his cell to the quietest of dinners, and now—has he told you of his dissipations this past month, Mrs. Mainwaring?”
Judith smiled. “Have you been Mephistopheles?”
“What is Mephistopheles?” asked Carlotta.
“The devil,” said Pasquale, “who made Sir Marcus young again.”
“Oh, that’s me,” cried Carlotta, clapping her hands. “He does not read in big books any longer. Oh, I was so frightened when I first came.” (I must say she hid her terrors pretty effectually.) “He was so wise, and always reading and writing, and I thought he was fifty. And now he is not wise at all, and he said two, three days ago I had made him twenty-five.”
“If you go on at the rate you have begun, my dear,” Judith remarked in her most charming manner, “in another year you will have brought him down to long clothes and a feeding-bottle.”
Carlotta thought this very funny and laughed joyously. I laughed too, out of courtesy, at Judith’s bitter sarcasm, and turned the conversation, but Pasquale was not to be baulked of his toast.
“Here’s to our dear friend Faust; may he grow younger and younger every day.”
We clinked glasses. Judith sighed when the performance was concluded.
“That is one of the many advantages of being a man. If you do sell your soul to the devil you can see that you get proper payment. A woman is paid in promissory notes, which are dishonoured when they fall due.”
I contested the proposition. The irony of this peculiarly painful revel lay in the air of gaiety it seemed necessary to maintain. A miserable business is civilisation!
“Did you ever hear of a woman getting youth out of such a bargain?” she retorted with some vehemence.
“As women systematically underpay cabmen,” said I, “so do they try to underpay the devil; and he is one too many for them.”
“I am afraid,” said Pasquale, “that the old days of shrewd bargains are over. There is a glut in the soul-market and they only fetch the price of old bones.”
“He is talking foolish things that I do not understand,” said Carlotta, putting her hand on my arm.
“It is called sham cynicism, my dear,” said I, “and we all ought to be ashamed of ourselves.”
“What do you like best to talk about?” Judith asked sweetly.
“Myself. And so does everybody,” replied Carlotta.
We laughed, and for a time talk ceased to be allusive. But later, over our coffee, while the band was playing loudly some new American march, and Carlotta and Pasquale were laughing together, Judith drew near me.
“You did not answer my question about those two, Marcus.”
My fingers trembled as I lit a fresh cigarette.
“He is not a man to whom any woman’s destiny should be entrusted.”
“And is she a woman on whom a man should stake his life’s happiness?”
“God knows,” said I, setting my teeth.
It was not an enjoyable dinner-party. I longed for the evening to be over, to have Carlotta safe back with me at home. I felt a curious dread of the Empire.
We arrived there towards the end of the first ballet. Carlotta, as soon as she had taken her seat, leaned both elbows on the front of the box and surrendered her senses to the stage. Pasquale talked to Judith. Wishing for a few moments alone I left the box and sauntered moodily along the promenade behind the First Circle. The occupants were either leaning over the partitions and watching the spectacle or sitting with drink before them at the little marble tables at the back. The gaudy, gilded, tobacco-smoke and humanity-filled theatre seemed to be unreal, the stage but a phantom cloud effect. I wondered why I, a creature from the concrete world, was there. I had an insane impulse to fly from it all, to go out into the streets, and wander, wander for ever, away from the world. I was walking along the promenade, lost in this lunacy, when I stumbled against a fellow-promenader and the shock brought me to my senses. It was an elderly, obese Oriental wearing a red fez. He had a long nose and small, crafty eyes, and was deeply pitted with smallpox. I made profuse apologies and he accepted them with suavity. It then occurring to me that I was he having in a discourteous and abjectly absurd manner, I made my way back to the box. I drew a chair to Judith’s side.
“You are giving me a captivating evening,” she said, with a smile.
“Whom are you captivating?” I asked, idly jesting. “Pasquale?”
“You are cruel,” whispered Judith, with a flicker of her eyelids.
I flushed, ashamed, not having weighed the significance of my words. All I could say was: “I beg your pardon,” whereat Judith laughed mirthlessly. I relapsed into silence. Turn followed turn on the stage. While the curtain was lowered Carlotta sank back with a little sigh of enjoyment, and nodded brightly at me.
“Do you remember,” she said, turning to me, at a fresh fall of the curtain, “when you brought me first? I said I should like to live here. Wasn’t I silly?”
She turned again, then suddenly rose to her feet and staggered back to the back of the box, pointing outward, with an expression of wild terror on her face.
“Hamdi—he’s down there—he saw me.”
I sprang to her assistance and put my arm around her.
“Nonsense, dear,” said I.
But Pasquale, looking around the house, cried:
“By Jove! she’s right. I would recognise the old villain a thousand years hence in Tartarus. There he is.”
I left Carlotta, and the first person my eyes rested upon in the stalls was my obese but suave Oriental, regarding the box with an impassive countenance.
“That’s Hamdi Effendi, all right,” said Pasquale.
Carlotta clutched my arms as I joined her at the back of the box.
“Oh, take me away, Seer Marcous, take me away,” she moaned piteously. My poor child was white and shaken with fear. I again put my arm round her.
“No harm can happen to you, dear,” I said, soothingly.
“Oh, darling Seer Marcous, take me home,” cried Carlotta.
“Very well,” said I. I helped her on with her wrap, and apologising to the two others, begged them to remain.
“We’ll all go together,” said Judith quietly.
“And form a body-guard,” laughed Pasquale.
Carlotta clinging to my arm we left the box and slipped through the promenade and down the stairs.
Hamdi Effendi, having anticipated our intention, cut off our retreat in the vestibule. Carlotta shrank nearer to me.
“I beg your pardon, Monsieur, but may I have the pleasure of a few words with you about this young lady?” said he in the urbanest manner and the most execrable French.
“I hardly see the necessity,” said I.
“Pardon me, but this young lady is a Turkish subject and my daughter. My name is Hamdi Effendi, Prefect of Police at Aleppo, and my address in London is the Hotel Metropole.”
“I am charmed to make your acquaintance,” said I. “I have often heard of you from Mademoiselle—but I believe both her father and mother were English, so she is neither your daughter nor a Turkish subject.”
“Ah, that we will see,” rejoined the polite Oriental. He addressed some words rapidly in Turkish to Carlotta, who shudderingly replied in the same language.
“Mademoiselle unfortunately does not consent to accompany me,” he interpreted with a smile. “So I am afraid I will have to take her back without her consent.”
“If you do, Hamdi Effendi,” said Pasquale in a light tone of conversation, but with the ugliest snarl of the lips that I have ever beheld, “I shall most certainly kill you.”
Hamdi turned to him with a polite bow.
“Ah, it is Monsieur Pasquale. I thought I recognised you.”
“You have every reason to do so,” said Pasquale.
“I saved you from prison.”
“You accepted a bribe.”
“For heaven’s sake,” cried Judith, “go on speaking in low voices, or we shall have a scene here.”
One or two idlers hung near with an air of curiosity and the huge beuniformed commissionaire watched us with an uncertain eye. I kept a tight hold of Carlotta and drew her more behind the screen of a palm near which we happened to stand.
“Madame is right,” said Hamdi. “We can discuss this little affair like gentlemen.”
“Then, in the most gentlemanly way in the world,” said Pasquale, “I swear to you that if you touch this young lady, I will kill you.”
“It appears, to be Monsieur,” said the obese Turk with a graceful wave of the hand in my direction, “and not you, who has robbed my home of its treasure, unless,” he added, and I shall always remember the hideous leer of that pulpy-nosed and small-pox pitted face, “unless Monsieur has relieved you of your responsibilities.”
For a moment I was speechless. Pasquale put himself in front of me.
“Steady on, Ordeyne.”
“Sir,” said I, “I found this young lady destitute in the streets of London. She is my wife and therefore a British subject; so you can take yourself and your infamous insinuations to the devil, and the quicker the better.”
“Or there’ll be two of us engaged in the killing,” said Pasquale.
Hamdi again exchanged a few sentences in Turkish with Carlotta, and then smiled upon us with the same unruffled suavity.
“Au revoir, Mesdames et Messieurs.”With a courteous salute he shuffled back towards the stall-entrance.
The tension over, Carlotta broke from me and clutched Pasquale by the arm.
“Oh, kill him, kill him, kill him!” she cried in a passionate whisper.
He freed himself gently and took out a cigarette case.
“Scarcely necessary. He’ll soon die.” And turning to me he added: “Not a sound organ in his body. Besides, it seems to me that if there is any murdering to be done, it’s the business of Sir Marcus.”
“There is going to be no murdering,” said I, profoundly disgusted, “and don’t talk in that revolting way about the wretched man dying.”
I regained possession of Carlotta who, seeing that I was angry, cast a scared glance at me, and became docile as suddenly as she had grown passionate. I turned to Judith.
“Will you ever forgive me—” I began.
But the sight of her face froze me. It was white and hard and haggard, and the lips were drawn into a thin line, and the delicate colour she had put upon her cheeks stood out in ghastly contrast. Her dress, like the foam of a summer sea, mocked the winter in her face.
“There is nothing to forgive,” she said, smiling icily. “I came for a variety entertainment and I have not been disappointed. Good-bye. Perhaps Mr. Pasquale will be so kind as to put me into a cab.”
“I will drive you home, if you will allow me,” said Pasquale.
We separated, shaking hands as if nothing had happened, as perfunctorily as if we had been the most distant of acquaintances.
On our way back we spoke very little. Carlotta nestled close against me, seeking the shelter of my arm. She cried, I don’t know why, but it seemed to afford comfort. I kissed her lips and her hair.
At home, I drew the sofa near the fire—it has been a raw night and she feels the cold like a tropical plant—and sat down by her side.
“Did you hear what I said to Hamdi Effendi—that you were my wife?”
“But that was only a lie,” she answered in her plain idiom.
My petting and soothing together with the sense of home security and a cup of French chocolate prepared by Antoinette, who, astonished at our early return and seeing her darling in distress, had hastened to provide culinary consolation, had restored her wonted serenity of demeanour. Polyphemus also purred reassuringly upon her lap.
“It was a lie this evening,” said I, “but in a few days I hope it will be true.”
“You are going to marry me?” she asked, suddenly sitting erect and looking at me rather bewildered.
“If you will have me, Carlotta.”
“I will do what Seer Marcous tells me,” she answered. “Will you marry me to-morrow?”
“I think it hardly possible, my dear,” I answered. “But I shall lose no time, I assure you. Once you are my wife neither Hamdi Effendi nor the Sultan of Turkey can claim you. No one can take an Englishman’s wife away from him.”
“Hamdi is a devil,” said Carlotta.
“We can laugh at him,” said I.
“Did you ever see such an ugly mug?”
Where she gets her occasional bits of slang from I do not know; but her little foreign staccato pronunciation gives them unusual quaintness. I laughed, and Carlotta, throwing Polyphemus off her lap, laughed too, and sidled up against me. The cat regarded us for a moment with a disgusted eye, then stretched himself as if he had quitted Carlotta of his own accord, and walked away in a state of dignified boredom.
“Hamdi is like a pig and an elephant and a great fat turkey,” said Carlotta.
“If all the world were beautiful,” I exclaimed, “such a thing as our appreciation of beauty would not exist. I should not even be aware that my Carlotta was beautiful.”
She put her hands on my knees in her impulsive way, and bending forward looked at me delightedly.
“Oh, you do think so?”
“You are the loveliest and most intoxicating creature on the earth, Carlotta.”
“Now I am sure, sure, sure,” she cried, enraptured. “You have never said it before, Seer Marcous darling, and I must kiss you.”
I checked her with my hands on her soft shoulders.
“Only if you promise to marry me.”
“Of course,” said Carlotta.
She said it as thoughtlessly and light-heartedly as if I had asked her to come out for a walk. Again I felt the odd spasm of pain. In my late madness I had often pictured the scene: how I should hold her throbbing beauty in my arms, my senses clouded with the fragrance of her, and how, in burning words, I should pour out the litany of my passion. But to the gods it seemed otherwise. No Quaker maiden’s betrothal kiss was chaster. Cold grew the fever in my veins and the litany died on my lips.
Who and what is she whom I love? There have been days when her eyes have carried in their depths the allurements of a sorceress, when her limbs have woven Venusberg enchantments which it has taken all my strength to withstand. But tonight, when I take the greatest step and claim her as mine till our lives’ end, she yields with the complaisance of an ignorant child and raises up between us the barrier of her innocence. When shall I learn the soul of her?
Well,jacta est alea. The events of to-night have precipitated our destiny. In all probability Hamdi is powerless to take her from my protection, and this marriage is unnecessary as a safeguard. I have no notion of the international law on such points—but at any rate it will make the assurance of her safety absolute. No power on earth can take her from me. Great Heaven! The thought of her gone forever out of my life brings the cold sweat to my forehead. Without her, child, enchantress, changeling that she is, how could I face existence?
I shall have my heart’s desire. Why, I should be athrill with the joy and the flame of youth! I should laugh and sing! I should perform the happy antics of love’s exuberance! I should be transported to the realms where the fairy tales end!
Instead, I sit before a dying fire, as I sat last night, and am oppressed with the sense of tragedy. It was not altogether Carlotta’s innocence that formed the barrier between us. That which rendered it impassable was Judith’s white face.
Judith’s white face will haunt my dreams to-night.