“Rolled round in earth’s diurnal courseWith rocks and stones and trees.”
November 3d.
Antoinette came up this morning with a large cardboard box addressed to Carlotta. The messenger who brought it was waiting downstairs.
“I came to Monsieur to know whether I should send it back,” said Antoinette, on the verge of tears.
“No,” said I, “leave it here.”
From the furrier’s label, I saw that the box contained some furs I had ordered for Carlotta a fortnight ago—she shivered so, poor child, in this wintry climate.
“But, Monsieur,” began Antoinette, “the poor angel—”
“May want it in heaven,” said I.
The good woman stared.
“We’ll be like the ancient Egyptians, Antoinette,” I explained, “who placed food and wine and raiment and costly offerings in the tombs of the departed, so that their shades could come and enjoy them for all eternity. We’ll have to make believe, Antoinette, that this is a tomb, for one can’t rear a pyramid in London, though it is a desert sufficiently vast; and the little second floor room is the inner sanctuary where the body lies in silence embalmed with sweet spices and swathed in endless bands of linen.”
“But Mademoiselle is not dead?” cried Antoinette, with a shiver. “How can Monsieur talk of such things? It makes me fear, the way Monsieur speaks.”
“It makes me fear, too, Antoinette,” said I, gravely.
When she had gone I took the box of furs upstairs and laid it unopened on Carlotta’s bed and came away, relocking the door behind me.
November 9th.
I have formed a great resolution. I have devoted the week to the envisagement of things, and while I lay awake last night the solution came to me as something final and irrevocable. Mistrusting the counsels of the night, when the brain is unduly excited by nervous insomnia, I have applied the test of a day’s cold reason.
I have broken a woman’s heart. I have spurned the passionate love of a woman who has been near and dear to me; a woman of great nature; a woman of subtle brain who has been my chosen companion, my equal partner in any intellectual path I chose to tread; a sensitive lady, with all the graciousness of soul that term conveys. Heaven knows what a woman can see in me to love. I look in the glass at my bony, hawk-like face, on which the stamp of futility seems eternally set, and I am seized with a prodigious wonder; but the fact remains that to me unlovely and unworthy has been given that thing without price, a woman’s love. I remember Pasquale laughing merrily at this valuation. He said the love of women was as cheap as dirt, and the only use for it was to make mud pies. The damned cynical villain! “Always reflect,” said he, on another occasion, “that although a man may be as ugly as sin, the probability is that he is just as pleasant. Beauties will find hitherto unsuspected amenities in Beasts till the end of time.” But I am such a poor and sorry Beast, without the chance of a transformation; a commonplace Beast, dull and didactic; a besotted, purblind, despicable Beast! Yet Judith loved me. Instead of thanking on my knees the high gods for the boon conferred, I rejected it, and went mad for craving of the infinitely lesser glory of Carlotta’s baby lips and gold-bronze hair. I have broken Judith’s heart. I will expiate the crime I have committed.
Expiate the crime! The realisation of the meaning of the words covers me with shame. As if what I propose will be a sorry penance! That is the danger of a man thinking, as I have always done, in metaphors. It has given me my loose, indirect views of life, of myself, of those around me. If I had advice to offer to a young man, I should say: “Learn to think straight.” Expiate, indeed! I will go to her and make confession. I will tell her that awful loneliness is crushing my soul. I will kneel before her and beseech her of her great woman’s goodness to give me her love again, and to be my helpmeet and my companion who will be cherished with all that there is of loyalty in me to her life’s end. She will pity me a little, for I have suffered, and I will pity her tenderly, in deep sincerity, and our life together will be based on that all-understanding which signifies all-forgiveness. And it shall be a real life together. I used to smile, in a superior way, at her dread of solitude. Heaven forgive me. I did not then know its terrors. It comforted for the first few benumbed days, but now it is gathering around me like a mysterious and appalling force. I crave the human presence in my home. I need the woman’s presence in my heart.
We shall live together then as man and wife, in defiance of the world. Let the moralists blame us. We shall not care. It will make little social difference to Judith, and as for myself, have I not already inflicted public outrage on society? does not my Aunt Jessica regard me as a wringer of the public conscience, and does not my Cousin Rosalie mention me with a shudder of horror in her tepid prayers? If I really give them cause for reprobation they will be neither wiser, nor better, nor sorrier. And if the baronetcy flickers out in unseemly odour, I for one shall know that the odour is sweeter than that wherein it was lighted, when my great-grandfather earned the radiance by services rendered at Brighton to His Royal Highness the Prince Regent. This is the only way in which I can make Judith reparation, the only way in which I can find comfort. We shall travel. Italy, beloved of Judith, is calling me. Probably Florence will be our settled home. I shall give up this house of madness. The clean sweet love of Judith will purify my heart of this poisonous passion, and in the end there will be peace.
I have taken Carlotta’s photograph from its frame and cast it into the fire, thus burning her for her witchcraft. I watched the flames leap and curl. The last look she gave me before they licked away her face had its infinite allurement, its devilish sorcery so intensified in the fierce yellow light, that the yearning for her clutched me by the throat and shook me through all my being.
But it is over now. I have done with Carlotta. If she thinks I am going to sit and let the wind which comes over Primrose Hill drive me mad like Gastibelza,l’homme a la carabine, in Victor Hugo’s poem, she is vastly mistaken. From this hour henceforth I swear she is nothing to me; I will eat and sleep and laugh as if she had never existed. Polyphemus, curled up in Carlotta’s old place on the sofa, regards me with his sardonic eye. He is an evil, incredulous, mocking beast, who a few centuries ago would have been burned with his late mistress.
I am sane and happier now that I have come to my irrevocable determination.
To-morrow I go to Judith.
November 10th.
I had to ring twice before Judith’s servant opened the flat door.
“Mrs. Mainwaring is engaged just at present, Sir Marcus.”
“Ask her if I can come in and wait, as I have something of importance to say to her.”
She left me standing in the passage, a thing that had never before occurred to me in Judith’s establishment, and presently returned with her answer. Would I mind waiting in the dining-room? I entered. The table was littered with sheets of her statistical work and odd bits of silk’ and lining. A type-writer stood at one end and a sewing-machine at the other. On the writing-desk by the window, in the midst of a mass of letters and account-books, rested a large bowl filled with magnificent blooms of white and yellow chrysanthemums. A volume of Dante lay open face downwards on the corner. It did my heart good to see this untidiness, so characteristic of Judith, so familiar, so intimate. She had taken her trouble bravely, I reflected. The ordinary daily task had not been left undone. Through all she had preserved her valiant sanity. I felt rebuked for my own loss of self-control.
I was about to turn away from the litter of the desk, when my eye caught sight of an envelope bearing a French stamp and addressed in Pasquale’s unmistakable handwriting. As there seemed to be a letter inside, I did not take it up to examine it more closely. The glance was enough to assure me that it came from Pasquale. Why should he be corresponding with Judith? I walked away puzzled. Was it a justification, a confession, a plea to her as my friend to obtain my forgiveness? If there is one thing more irritating than another it is to light accidentally upon a mystery affecting oneself in a friend’s correspondence. One can no more probe deeply into it than one can steal the friend’s spoons. It seems an indiscretion to have noticed it, an unpardonable impertinence to subject it to conjecture. In spite of my abhorring the impulse of curiosity, the sweeping, flaunting, swaggering handwriting of Pasquale worried me.
Judith came in, looking much as she had done on the occasion of my last visit, worn and anxious, with a strange expression in her eyes.
“I am sorry to have kept you waiting,” she said, extending a lifeless hand.
I raised it to my lips.
“I would have gladly waited all day to see you, Judith,” I said.
“Really?”
She laughed in an odd way.
“And idle speech from me to you at the present time would be an outrage,” I answered. “I have passed through much since I saw you last.”
“So have I,” said Judith. “More than you imagine. Well,” she continued as I bowed my head accepting the rebuke, “what have you got so important to tell me?”
“Much,” said I. “In the first place you must be aware of what has happened, for I can’t help seeing there a letter from Pasquale.”
She glanced swiftly at the desk and back again at me.
“Yes,” she replied, “he is in Paris.”
I was amazed at her nonchalance.
“Has he told you nothing?”
“Perhaps Sir Marcus Ordeyne would like to see his letter,” she said, ironically.
“You know perfectly well that I would not read it,” said I.
Judith laughed again, and rolled her handkerchief into a little ball between her nervous fingers.
“Forgive me,” she said. “I like to see thegrand seigneurin you now and then. It puts me in mind of happier days. But about Pasquale—the only thing he tells me is that he is not able to execute a commission for me. He told me on the night he drove me home that he was going to Paris, and I asked him to get me some cosmetic. Carmine Badouin, if you want to know. I have got to rouge now before I am fit to be seen in the street. I am quite frank about it.”
“Then you know nothing of Carlotta?” I cried.
“Carlotta?”
“She eloped with that double-dyed, damned, infernal villain, the day after I saw you.”
Judith looked at me for a moment, then closed her eyes and turned her head away, resting her hand on the table. My indignation waxed hot against the scoundrel. How dare he write casual letters to Judith about Carmine Badouin with his treachery on his conscience? I know the terms of flippant grace in which the knave couched this precious epistle. And I could see Carlotta reading over his shoulder and clapping her hands and cooing: “Oh, that is so funny!”
When I had told Judith the outlines of the story, pacing up and down the little room while she remained motionless by the table, she put out her hand to me, and in a low voice, and with still averted eyes said that she was sorry, deeply sorry. Her tone rang so true and loyal that my heart throbbed with quick appreciation of her high nature, and I wrung her outstretched hand.
“God bless you, Judith,” I cried, fervently. “Bless you for your sweet sympathy. Be sorry for me only as for a man who has passed through the horrors of delirium. But for me as I stand before you now, I ask you not to be sorry. I have come to bring you, if I can, dear Judith, a measure of gladness, perhaps of happiness.”
She wrenched herself free from me, and a terrified cry of “Marcus!” checked my dithyrambic appeal. She shrank away so that a great corner of the dining-table separated us, and she stared at me as though my words hats been the affrighting utterance of a madman.
“Marcus! What do you mean?” she cried, with an unnatural shrillness in her voice.
“I mean,” said I, “I mean—I mean that ‘crushed by three days’ pressure, my three days’ love lies slain.’ Time has withered him at the root. I have buried him deep in unconsecrated ground, like a vampire, with a stake through his heart. And I have come back to you, Judith, humbly to crave your forgiveness and your love—to tell you I have changed, dear—to offer you all I have in the world if you will but take it—to give you my life, my daily, hourly devotion. My God!” I cried, “don’t you believe me?”
She still stared at me in a frightened way, leaning heavier on the table. Her lips twitched before they could frame the words,
“Yes, I believe you. You have never lied to me.”
“Then in the name of love and heaven,” I cried, “why do you look at me like that?”
She trembled, evidently suppressing something with intense effort, whether bitter laughter, indignation or a passionate outburst I could not tell.
“You ask why?” she said, unsteadily. “Because you seem like the angel of the flaming vengeance.”
At these astounding words it was my turn to look amazed.
“Vengeance?” I echud. “What wrong have you done me or any living creature? Come, my dear,” and I moved nearer by seating myself on the corner of the table, close to the type-writer, and leaning towards her, “let us look at this thing soberly. If ever a man had need of woman I have need of you. I can live alone no longer. We must share one home henceforth together. We can snap our fingers at the world, you and I. If you have anything to say against the proposal, let us discuss it calmly.”
Judith’s slender figure vibrated like a cord strung to breaking-point. Her voice vibrated.
“Yes, let us discuss it calmly. But not here. The sight of you sitting in the middle of my life, between the sewing-machine and the type-writer, is getting on my nerves. Let us go into the drawing-room. There is an atmosphere of calm there—” her voice quavered in a queer little choke—“of sabbatical calm.”
I slid quickly from the table and put my arm round her waist.
“Tell me, Judith, what is amiss with you.”
She broke away from me roughly, thrusting me back.
“Nothing. A woman’s nothing, if you understand what that means. Come into the drawing-room.”
I opened the door; she passed out and I followed her along the passage. She preceded me into the drawing-room, and I stayed for a moment to close the door, fumbling with the handle which has been loose for some months. When I turned and had made a couple of steps forward, I halted involuntarily under the shock of a considerable surprise.
We were not alone. Standing on the hearth-rug, his hands behind his back, his brows bent on me benevolently was a man in clerical attire. He looked ostentatiously, exaggeratedly clerical. His clerical frock-coat was of inordinate length; his boots were aggravatingly clump-soled; by a very large white tie, masking the edges of a turned-down collar, he proclaimed himself Evangelical. An otherwise clean-shaven florid face was adorned with brown side-whiskers growing rather long. A bald, shiny head topped a fringe of brown hair.
I stared at this unexpected gentleman for a second or two, and then, recovering my self-possession, looked enquiringly at Judith.
“Sir Marcus,” she said, “let me introduce my husband, Mr. Rupert Mainwaring.”
Her husband! This benevolent Evangelical parson her husband! But the brilliant gallant who had dazzled her eyes? The dissolute scoundrel that had wrecked her life? Where was he? Dumfounded, I managed to bow politely enough, but my stupefaction was covered by Judith rushing across the room and uttering a strange sound which resolved itself into a shrill, hysterical laugh as she reached the door which she opened and slammed behind her. I heard her scream hysterically in the passage; then the slam of another door; and the silence told me that she had shut herself in her bedroom. Disregarding the new husband’s presence, I rang the bell, and the servant who had left her kitchen on hearing the scream entered immediately.
“Go to your mistress. She is ill,” said I.
The maid hurriedly departed. The parson and I looked at one another.
“I am afraid,” said I, “that my presence is unhappily an intrusion. I hope to make your better acquaintance on another occasion.”
“Oh, please don’t go,” said he, “my wife is only a little upset and will soon recover. I beg that you will excuse her. Besides, I should like to have a talk with you.”
He offered me a chair, my own chair, the comfortable, broad-seated Empire chair I had given Judith as a birthday present years ago, the chair in which I had invariably sat. He did it with the manner of the master of the house, a most courteous gentleman. The situation was fantastic. Some ingenious devil must have conceived it by way of pandering to the after-dinner humour of the high gods. As I sat down I rubbed my eyes. Was this brown-whiskered, bald-headed clerical gentleman real? The rubbing of my eyes dispelled no hallucination. He was flesh and blood and still regarded me urbanely. It was horrible. The desertion of the scoundrelly husband, who I thought was lost somewhere in the cesspool of Europe, was the basis, the sanction of the relations between Judith and myself; and here was this reverend, respectable man apologising for his wife and begging me to be seated in my own chair. The remark of Judith’s that I should find sabbatical calm in the drawing-room occurred to me, and I had to grip the arms of the chair to prevent myself from joining Judith in her hysterics.
The appearance of the husband in his legendary colours of rascality would have been a shock. The sudden scattering of my plans for Judith’s happiness I should have viewed with consternation. But it would have been normal. For him, however, to appear in the guise of an Evangelical clergyman, the very last kind of individual to be associated with Judith, was, I repeat, horribly fantastic.
“I believe, Sir Marcus,” said he, deliberately parting the tails of his exaggerated frock-coat and sitting down near me, “that you are a very great friend of my wife.”
I murmured that I had known Mrs. Mainwaring for some years.
“You are doubtless acquainted with her unhappy history.”
“I have heard her speak of it,” said I.
“You must then share her surprise in seeing me here to-day. I should like to assure you, as representing her friends and society and that sort of thing, as I have assured her, that I have not taken this step without earnest prayer and seeking the counsel of Almighty God.”
I am by no means a bigoted pietist, but to hear a person talk lightly about seeking the counsel of Almighty God jars upon my sense of taste. I stiffened at the sanctimonious tone in which the words were uttered.
“You have without doubt very good reasons for coming back into the circle of her life,” said I.
“The best of all reasons,” he replied, caressing a brown whisker, “namely, that I am a Christian.”
I liked him less and less.
“Is that the reason, may I ask, why you remained away from her all these years?”
“I deserve the scoff,” said he: “Those were days of sin. I deserve every humiliation that can be put upon me. But I have since found the grace of God. I found it at three o’clock in the afternoon on the eighth of January, eighteen hundred and—”
“Never mind the year,” I interrupted.
My gorge rose. The man was a sanctimonious Chadband. He had come with nefarious designs on Judith’s slender capital. I saw knavery in the whites of his upturned eyes.
“I should be glad,” I continued quickly, “if you would come to the point of the conversation you desire to have with me. I presume it concerns Mrs. Mainwaring. She has reconciled herself to circumstances and has found means to regulate her life with a certain measure of contentment and comfort until now, when you suddenly introduce a disturbing factor. You appear to wish to tell me your reasons for doing so—and I can’t see what the grace of God has to do with it.”
He sprang to his feet and shot out both hands in the awkward gesture of an inspired English prophet.
“But it has everything to do with it! It is the beginning and end, core and kernel, root and branch of the matter. It is the grace of God that checked me in the full career of my wickedness. It is the grace of God that has lighted my path ever since to holier things. It is the grace of God that has changed me from what I was to what I am. It is the grace of God that has brought me here to ask pardon on my knees of the woman I have wronged. The grace of God and of his son our Lord Jesus Christ, which came upon me in a great light on that January afternoon even as it did upon Saul of Tarsus. The grace of God has everything to do with it.”
“Mr. Mainwaring,” said I, “such talk is either blasphemous or—”
He did not allow me to state the alternative, but caught up the word in a great cry.
“Blasphemous! Why, man alive! for what are you taking me? Do you think this is some unholy jest? Can’t you see that I am in deadly earnest? Come and see me where I live—” he caught me by the arm, as if he would drag me away then and there, “among the poor in Hoxton. You scarcely know where Hoxton is—I didn’t when I was a man of ease like yourself—that wilderness of grey despair where the sun of the world scarcely shines, let alone the Light of God. Come and see for yourself, man, whether I am lying!”
Then it dawned upon me that the man had been talking from innermost depths, that he was almost terrifyingly sincere.
“I must ask you to pardon me,” said I, “for appearing to doubt your good faith. You must attribute it to my entire unfamiliarity with the terms of Evangelical piety.”
He looked at me queerly for a moment, and then, in the quiet tones of a man of the world, said, smiling pleasantly:
“Very many years ago I had the pleasure of knowing your grandfather, the late baronet. May I say that you remind me of him?”
I have never heard an apology more gracefully and tactfully accepted. For an unregenerate second he had become the gallant Rupert Mainwaring again, and showed me wherein might lie his attraction.
“Pray be seated,” said he, more gravely, “and allow me to explain.”
He unfolded his story. It was well, said he, that an outsider (I an outsider in that familiar room!) should hear it. I was at liberty to make it public. Indeed, publicity was what he earnestly craved. As far as my memory serves me, for my wits were whirling as I listened, the following is an epitome of his narrative:
He had been a man of sin—not only in the vague ecclesiastical sense, but in downright, practical earnest. He had committed every imaginable crime, save the odd few that lead to penal servitude and the gallows. He drank, he betrayed women, he cheated at cards, he had an evil reputation on the turf. His companions were chosen from the harlotry and knavery of the civilised world. He had lured Judith from her first husband, thus breaking his heart, poor man, so that he died soon after. He had married Judith, and had deserted her for a barmaid whom in her turn he had abandoned. He wallowed, to use his own expression, in the trough of iniquity. He was, as I had always understood, about as choice a blackguard as it would be possible to meet outside a gaol. One day a pretty girl, whom he had been following in the street, unwittingly enticed him into a revivalist meeting. He described that meeting so vividly that had my stupefied mind been capable of fresh emotions, I too might have been converted at second hand by the revivalist preacher. He repeated parts of the sermon, rose to his feet, waved his arms, thundered out the commonplaces of Salvation Army Christianity, as if he had made an amazing theological discovery. It was pathetic. It was ludicrous. It was also inconceivably painful. At last he mopped his forehead and shiny head.
“Before that meeting was over I was on my knees praying beside the girl whom I had designed to ruin. I went into the streets a converted man, filled with the grace of God. I resolved to devote my life to saving souls for Christ. My old habits of sin fell away from me like a garment. I studied for the ministry. I am now in deacon’s orders, and I am the incumbent of a little tin mission church in Hoxton. God moves in a mysterious way, Sir Marcus.”
“He is generally credited with doing so,” said I, stupidly.
“You are doubtless wondering, Sir Marcus,” he went on, “why I placed such a long interval between my awakening and my communicating with my wife. I set myself a period of probation. I desired to be assured of God’s will. It was essential that I should test my strength of purpose, and my power of making a life’s atonement, as far as the things of this world are concerned, for the wrongs I have inflicted on her. I have come now to offer her a Christian home.”
I looked at him open-mouthed.
“Do you expect Judith to go and live with you as your wife, in Hoxton?” I asked, bluntly.
“Why not? She is my wife.”
I rose and walked about the room in agitation. Somehow such a contingency had not entered my bewildered head.
“Why not, Sir Marcus?” he repeated.
“Because Judith isn’t that kind of woman at all,” I said, desperately. “She doesn’t like Hoxton, and would be as much out of place in a tin-mission church as I should be in a cavalry charge.”
“God will see to her fitness,” said he, gravely. “To him all things are easy.”
“But she has considerable philosophic doubt as to his personal existence,” I cried.
He smiled prophetically and waved away her doubt with a gesture.
“I have no fears on that score,” he observed.
“But it is preposterous,” I objected once more, changing my ground; “Judith craves the arrears of gaiety and laughter which your conduct caused life to leave owing to her. She loves bright dresses, cigarettes, and wine and the things that are anathema in an Evangelical household.”
“My wife will find the gaiety and laughter of holiness,” replied the fanatic. “She will not be stinted of money to dress herself with becoming modesty; and as for alcohol and tobacco, no one knows better than myself how easy it is to give them up.”
“You seem as merciless in your virtues as you were in your vices,” said I.
“I have to bring souls to Christ,” he answered.
“That doesn’t appear to be the way,” I retorted, “to bring them.”
“Pray remember, Sir Marcus,” said he, bending his brows upon me, “that I did not ask you for suggestions as to the conduct of my ministry.”
“The general methods you adopt in the case of your congregation,” said I, “are matters of perfect indifference to me. But I cannot see Judith imprisoned for life in a tin church without a protest. Your proposal reminds me of the Siennese who owed a victorious general more than they could possibly repay. The legend goes that they hanged him, in order to make him a saint after his death by way of reward. I object to this sort of canonisation of Judith. And she will object, too. You seem to leave her out of account altogether. She is mistress of her own actions. She has a will of her own. She is not going to give up her comfortable flat off the Tottenham Court Road in order to dwell in Hoxton. She won’t go back to you under your conditions.”
He smiled indulgently and held out his hand to signify that the interview was over.
“She will, Sir Marcus.”
Was there ever such a Torquemada of a creature? I respect religion. I respect this man’s intense conviction of the reality of his conversion. I can respect even the long frock coat and the long brown whiskers, which in the case of so dashing a worldling as Rupert Mainwaring were a deliberate and daily mortification of the flesh. But I hold in shuddering detestation “the thumb-screw and the rack for the glory of the Lord,” which he cheerfully contemplated applying to Judith.
“Why on earth can’t you let the poor woman alone?” I asked, ignoring his hand.
“I am doing my duty to God and to her,” said he.
“With the result that you have driven her into hysterics.”
“She’ll get over them,” said he.
“I wish you good-day,” said I. “We might talk together for a thousand years without understanding each other.”
“Pardon me,” he retorted, with the utmost urbanity. “I understand you perfectly.”
He accompanied me to the dining-room where I had left my hat and umbrella, and to the flat door which he politely opened. When it shut behind me I felt inclined to batter it open again and to take Judith by main force from under his nose. But I suppose I am pusillanimous. I found myself in the street brandishing my umbrella like a flaming sword and vowing to perform all sorts of Paladin exploits, which I knew in my heart were futile.
I hailed an omnibus in the Tottenham Court Road, and clambered to the top, though a slight drizzle was falling. Why I did it I have not the remotest idea, for I abhor those locomotive engines of exquisite discomfort. I had no preconceived notion of destination. It was a moving thing that would carry me away from the Tottenham Court Road, away from the Rev. Rupert Mainwaring, away from myself. I was the solitary occupant of the omnibus roof. The rain fell, softly, persistently, soakingly. I laughed aloud.
I recognised the predestined irony of things that at every corner checks the course of the ineffectual man.
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?Ican’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 bysomething, 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 hisvie 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 sentimentalistsavoir 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. Theirhubrishas 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 theMiseratrix Virginum Reginastill 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.