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.



CHAPTER XX

November 11th.

I wrote Judith a long letter last night, urging her to disregard the forfeited claims of her husband and to join her life definitely with mine. I was cynical enough to feel that if such a proceeding annoyed the Rev. Rupert Mainwaring it would serve him right. The fact of a man's finding religion and abjuring sack does not in itself exculpate him from wrongs which he has inflicted on his fellow-creatures in unregenerate days. Mainwaring deserved some punishment of which he seemed to have had remarkably little; for, mind you, his sack-cloth and ashes at Hoxton, although sincerely worn, are not much of a punishment to a man in his exalted mood. Now, on the contrary, Judith deserved compensation, such as I alone was prepared to offer her in spite of conventional morality and the feelings of the Rev. Rupert Mainwaring. Indeed, it seemed to be the only way of saving Judith from being worried out of her life by frantic appeals to embrace both himself and Primitive Christianity. Her position was that of Andromeda. Mine that of an unheroic Perseus, destined to deliver her from the monster—the monster whose lair is a little tin mission church in Hoxton.

I wrote the letter in one of those periods of semi-vitality when the pulses of emotion throb weakly, and sensitiveness is dulled. To-day I have felt differently. My nerves have been restrung. Something ironically vulgar, sordidly tragic has seemed to creep into my relations with Judith.

To my great surprise Judith brought her answer in person this evening. It is the first time she has entered my house; and her first words, as she looked all around her with a wistful smile referred to the fact.

"It is almost just as I have pictured it—and I have pictured it—do you know how often?"

She was calmer, if not happier. The haggard expression had given place to one of resignation. I wheeled an arm-chair close to the fire, for she was cold, and she sank into it with a sigh of weariness. I knelt beside her. She drew off her gloves and put one hand on my head in the old way. The touch brought me great comfort. I thought that we had reached the quiet haven at last.

"So you have come to me, Judith," I whispered.

"I have come, dear," she said, "to tell you that I can't come."

My heart sank.

"Why?" I asked.

We fenced a little. She gave half reasons, womanlike, of which I proved the inadequacy. I recapitulated the arguments I had used in my letter. She met them with hints and vague allusions. At last she cut the knot.

"I am going back to my husband."

I rose to my feet and echud the words. She repeated them in a tone so mournfully distinct, that they had the finality of a death-knell. I had nothing to say.

"Before we part I must make my peace with you, Marcus," she said. "I have suddenly developed a conscience. I always had the germs of it."

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

"And I betrayed you, dear. That letter from Pasquale told me about his flight with Carlotta. I lied to you—but I was in a state bordering on madness."

I rested my elbow on the mantel-piece and looked down on her. She appeared so sweet and fragile, like a piece of Dresden china, incapable of base actions. As I did not speak she went on: "I did not mean to play into Pasquale's hands, Marcus. Heaven knows I didn't—but I did play into them. Do you remember that awful night and our talk the next morning? I asked you not to see her all day—to mourn our dead love. I knew you would keep your promise. You are a man of sensitive honour. If all men were like you, the world would be a beautiful place."

"It would go to smash in a few weeks through universal incompetence," I murmured, with some bitterness.

"There would be no meanness and treachery and despicable underhand doings. Marcus, you must forgive me—I was a desperate woman fighting for my life's happiness. I thought I would try one forlorn hope. I kept you out of the way and came up here to see Carlotta. Don't interrupt me, Marcus; let me finish. I happened to meet her a hundred yards down the road, and we went into the Regent's Park. We sat down and I told her about ourselves, and my love for you, and asked her to give you up. I don't believe she understood, Marcus. She laughed and threw stones at a little dog. I recovered my senses and left her there and went home sick with shame and humiliation. I knew Pasquale was in love with her, for he had told me so the night before, and asked me how the marriage could be stopped. He didn't believe in your announcement to Hamdi Effendi. But I never mentioned Pasquale to Carlotta, or hinted there might be another than you. I was loyal so far, Marcus. And two or three days afterwards came Pasquale's letter. And I waited for you, in a fearful joy. I knew you would come to me—and I was mad enough to think that time would heal—that you would forget—that we could have the dear past again—and I would teach you to love me. But then, suddenly, without a word of warning—it has always been his way—appeared my husband. After that, you came with your offer of shelter and comfort—and you seemed like the angel of the flaming vengeance. For I had wronged you, dear—robbed you of your happiness. If I hadn't prepared her mind for leaving you, she would never have run away. If I had not done this, or if on the other hand you loved me, Marcus, I should perhaps have looked at things differently. I am beginning to believe in God and to see his hand in it all. I couldn't come and live with you as your wife, Marcus. Things stronger even than my love for you forbid it. Our life together would not be the sweet and gracious thing it has always been to me. We have come to the parting of the ways. I must follow my husband."

I knew she spoke rightly. When she is not swept away to hysterical action by her temperament, she has a perception exquisitely keen into the heart of truth.

"The parting of the ways?" said I. "Yes; but can't you rest at the cross-roads? Can't you lead your present life—your husband and myself, both, just your friends?"

"Rupert has need of me," she replied very quickly. "He is a man in torment of soul. He has gone to this extreme of religious fanaticism because he is still uncertain of himself. We had another long talk to-day. I may help him."

"Does he deserve the sacrifice of your life?"

She did not take up my question directly; but sat for a few minutes with her chin on her hand looking into the fire.

"He is a man of evil passions," she resumed, at last. "Drink and women mainly dragged him down. I knew the hell of it during the short time of our married life. If he falls away now, he believes he is damned to all eternity. He believes in the material torture—flames and devils and pitchforks—of damned souls. He says in me alone lies his salvation. I must go. If the tin church gets too awful, I shall run over to Delphine Carrere for a week to steady my nerves."

What could I say? The abomination of desolation lay around about me. I might have prated to her of my needs, wrung her heart with the piteousness of my appeal. Cui bono? I can't whine to women—or to men either, for the matter of that. When I am by myself I can curse and swear, play Termagant and rehearse an extravaganza out-Heroding all the Herods that ever Heroded. But before others—no. I believe my great-grandfather, before he qualified for his baronetcy, was a gentleman.

"But on these occasions," said I, "you will avoid a sequestered and meditative self."

Her laugh got choked by a sob.

"Do you remember that? It is not so long ago—and yet it seems many, many years."

We moralised generally, after the way of humans, who desire to postpone a moment of anguished speech. She made the tour of my book-shelves. Many of the books she had borrowed, and she recognised them as old friends.

"Is that where Benvenuto Cellini has always lived?"

"Yes," said I, running my hand along the row. "He is in his century, among his companions. He would be unhappy anywhere else."

"And the History—how far has it gone?"

I showed her the pile of finished manuscript, of which she glanced at a few pages. She put it down hurriedly and turned away.

"I can't see to read, just now, Marcus."

Then she paused in front of her own photograph, the only one now on the mantel-piece.

"Will you give me that back?"

"Why should I?" I asked.

"I would rather—I should not like you to burn it."

"Burn it? All I have left of you?"

She turned swimming eyes on me.

"You are good, Marcus—after what I have told you—you do not feel bitterly against me?"

"For what? For being quixotic? For going to martyrdom for an ideal?"

"You did not listen when I spoke about Carlotta?"

"Oh, my dear!" said I.

And now she has gone. We kissed at parting—a kiss of remembrance and renunciation. Shall we ever meet again?

Darkness gathers round me, and I am tired, tired, and I would that I could sleep like Rip Van Winkle, and awake an old man, with an old man's passionless resignation; or better, awake not at all. Such poor fools as I are better dead.

I look back and see all my philosophy refuted, all my prim little opinions lying prone like dolls with the sawdust knocked out of them. All these years I have been judging Judith with an ignorance as cruel as it has been complacent. Verily I have been the fag end of wisdom. So I forbear to judge her now.

If I had loved Judith with the great passion of a man's love for woman, not all the converted rascals in Christendom could have come between us.

And her seeing Carlotta—poor woman—what does it matter? What did she say about Carlotta? "She laughed and threw stones at a little dog."

Oh, my God!

November 12th

This way madness lies. I will leave the house in charge of Stenson and Antoinette and go abroad. Something has put Verona into my head. One place is as good as another, so long as it is not this house—this house of death and madness and crime—and Verona is in Italy, where I have always found peace.

I will confess my madness. This book is a record of my morals—the finished version of the farce the high gods have called on meto play. I thought last night the curtain was rung down. I was wrong. Listen, and laugh as I do—if you can.

I fixed myself to work to-day. After all, I am not an idler. I earn my right to live. When I publish my History the world will be the richer by something, poor though it may be. I vow I have been more greatly, more nobly employed of late years, than I was when I earned my living at school-slavery teaching to children the most useless, the most disastrous, the most soul-cramping branch of knowledge wherewith pedagogues in their insensate folly have crippled the minds and blasted the lives of thousands of their fellow-creatures—elementary mathematics. There is no more reason for any human being on God's earth to be acquainted with the Binomial Theorem or the Solution of Triangles—unless he is a professional scientist, when he can begin to specialise in mathematics at the same age as the lawyer begins to specialise in law or the surgeon in anatomy—than for him to be an expert in Choctaw, the Cabala or the Book of Mormon. I look back with feelings of shame and degradation to the days when, for the sake of a crust of bread, I prostituted my intelligence to wasting the precious hours of impressionable childhood, which could have been filled with so many beautiful and meaningful things, over this utterly futile and inhuman subject. It trains the mind—it teaches boys to think, they say. It doesn't. In reality it is a cut and dried subject easy to fit into a school curriculum. Its sacrosanctity saves educationalists an enormous amount of trouble, and its chief use is to enable mindless young men from the universities to make a dishonest living by teaching it to others, who in their turn may teach it to a future generation.

I am mad to-night—why have I indulged in this diatribe against mathematics? I must find some vent, I suppose. I see now. I was saying that I earned my right to live, that I am not an idler. I cling strenuously to the claim. A man cannot command respect, even his own, by the mere reason of his vie sentimentale. And, after what I have done to-day, I must force my claim to the respect which on other grounds I have forfeited.

I spent, then, my day in unremitting toil. But this evening the horrible craving for her came over me. Such a little thing brought it about. Antoinette, who disapproves of the amorphous British lumps of sugar, has found some emporium where she can buy the regular parallelopiped of the Continent, and these she provides for my afterdinner coffee. Absent-mindedly I dipped the edge of the piece of sugar into the liquid, before dropping it, and watched the brown moisture rise through the white crystals. Then I remembered. It was an invariable practice of Carlotta's. She would keep the lump in the coffee to saturation-point between her fingers, and then hastily put it into her mouth, so that it should not crumble to pieces on the way. If it did, there would be much laughter and wiping of skirts; and there would be a search through my dinner-jacket pockets for a handkerchief to dry the pink tips of her fingers. She called the dripping lump a canard, like the French children. It was such a trivial thing; but it brought back with a rush all the thousand dainty, foolish, captivating intimacies that made up the maddening charm of Carlotta.

Yes, I am aware that there is no language spoken under heaven that can fitly express the doting folly of a man who can be driven mad by a piece of sugar soaked in coffee. There is a ghastly French phrase not to be found in Lamartine, Chateaubriand, or any of the polite sentimentalists avoir les sangs tournes de quelqu'un. It is so with me. J'ai les sangs tournes d'elle. Somebody has said something somewhere about the passion of a man of forty. It must have to do with the French phrase.

I pushed my coffee aside untasted, and buried my head in my hands, longing, longing; eating my heart out for her. The hours passed. When the servants were abed, I stole upstairs to her room, left as it was on the night when Antoinette, hoping against hope, had prepared it for her reception. I broke down. Heaven knows what I did.

I returned to the drawing-room filled with the blind rage that makes a man curse God and wish that he could die. The fire was black, and I mechanically took up the poker to stir it. A tempest of impotent anger shook my soul. I saw things red before my eyes. I had an execrable lust to kill. I was alone amid a multitude of gibbering fiends. As I stooped before the grate I felt something scrabble my shoulders. I leapt back with a shriek, and saw standing on the mantel-shelf a black, one-eyed thing regarding me with an expression of infinite malice. Before I knew what I had done, I had brought the iron down, with all my force, upon its skull, and it had fallen dead at my feet.

Finis coronat opus.

November 22d.

Verona:—I have abandoned the "History of Renaissance Morals." The dog's-eared MS. and the dusty pile of notes I have shot into a lumber heap in a corner of this room, where I sit and shiver by a little stove. It is immense, marble, cold, comfortless, suggestive of "the vasty halls of death." I have been here a week to-day. I thought I should find rest. I should breathe the atmosphere of Italy again. I should ease my heart among the masterworks of Girolamo dai Libri and Cavazzola, and, in the presence of the blue castellated mountains they loved to paint, my spirit would even be as theirs. In this old-world city, I fondly imagined, I should forget the Regent's Park, and attune my mind to the life that once filled its narrow streets.

But nothing have I found save solitude. I stood to-day before the mutilated fresco of Morone, my rapture of six years ago, and hated it with unreasoning hatred. The Madonna belied the wreath-supported inscription above her head, "Miseratrix virginum Regina nostri miserere," and greeted me with a pitiless simper. The unidentified martyr on the left stared straight in front of him with callous indifference, and St. Roch looked aggravatingly plump for all his ostentatious plague-spot. The picture was worse than meaningless. It was insulting. It drove me out of the Public Gallery. Outside a grey mist veiled the hills and a fine penetrating rain was falling. I crept home, and for the fiftieth time since I have been here, opened my "History of Renaissance Morals." I threw it, with a final curse, into the corner.

I loathe it. I care not a fig for the Renaissance or its morals. I count its people but a pestilent herd of daubers, rhymers, cutthroats, and courtesans. Their hubris has lost its glamour of beauty and has coarsened into vulgar insolence. They offend me by their riotous swagger, their insistence on the animal joy of living; chiefly by their perpetual reminiscence of Pasquale.

Yet once they interested me greatly, filling with music and with colour the grey void of my life. Whence has come the change?

In myself. To myself I have become a subject of excruciating interest. To myself I am a vastly more picturesque personage than any debonair hooligan of quattro-cento Verona. He has faded into the dullest (and most offensive) dog of a ghost. I only exist. This sounds like the colossal vanity of Bedlam. Heaven knows it is not. If you are racked with toothache from ear to ear, from crown to chin, and from eyeball to cerebellum, is not the whole universe concentrated in that head of yours? Are you not to yourself in that hour of torture the most vitally important of created beings? And no one blames you for it. Let me therefore be without blame in my hour of moral toothache.

In the days gone by I was the victim of a singular hallucination. I flattered myself on being the one individual in the world not summoned to play his part in the comedy of Life. I sat alone in the great auditorium like the mad king of Bavaria, watching with little zest what seemed but a sorry spectacle. I thought myself secure in my solitary stall. But I had not counted on the high gods who crowd shadowy into the silent seats and are jealous of a mortal in their midst. Without warning was I wrested from my place, hurled onto the stage, and before my dazzled eyes could accustom themselves to the footlights, I found myself enmeshed in intolerable drama. I was unprepared. I knew my part imperfectly. I missed my cues. I had the blighting self-consciousness of the amateur. And yet the idiot mummery was intensely real. Amid the laughter of the silent shadowy gods I thought to flee from the stage. I came to Verona and find I am still acting my part. I have always been acting. I have been acting since I was born. The reason of our being is to amuse the high gods with our histrionics. The earth itself is the stage, and the starry ether the infinite auditorium.

The high gods have granted to their troupe of mimes one boon. Each has it in his power to make the final exit at any moment. For myself I feel that moment is at hand. One last soliloquy, and then like the pagliacco I can say with a sigh, "La commedia e finita—the play is played out," and the rest will be silence. At all events I will tell my own story. My "History of Renaissance Morals" can lie in its corner and rot, whilst I shall concern myself with a far more vital theme—The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne. The rough entries in my diary have been a habit of many futile years; but they have never sufficed for self-expression. I have not needed it till now. But now, with Judith and Carlotta gone from me, my one friend, Pasquale, cut for ever from my life, even the sympathetic Polyphemus driven into eternity by my murderous hand, I feel the irresistible craving to express myself fully and finally for the first and last time of my life. It will be my swan song. What becomes of it afterwards I care not.

And when the last word is written, I shall go to the Pinacoteca and stand again before the Morone fresco, and if the Miseratrix Virginum Regina still simpers at me, I shall take it as a sign and a token. I shall return to this marble cavern and make my final exit. It will be theatrically artistic—that I vow and declare—which no doubt will afford immense pleasure to the high gods in their gallery.



PART II



CHAPTER XXI

It is some two years since I stood for the second time in the Pinacoteca of Verona and sought to read my fate in the simpering countenance of Morone's Miseratrix Virginum Regina. I met what might have been expected by a person of any sense—the self-same expression on the painted face as I had angrily found there two months before when I began to write the foregoing pages. But as I had no sense at all in those days I accepted the poor battered Madonna's lack of sympathy for a sign and a token, went home, and prepared for dissolution.

Two years ago! It is only for the last few months that I have been able to look back on that nightmare of a time in Verona with philosophic equanimity. And this morning is the first occasion on which I have felt that dispassionate attitude towards a past self which enables a man to set down without the heartache the memories of days that are gone. I sit upon the flat roof of this house in Mogador on the Morocco coast, shaded by an awning from the bright African sun which glints in myriad sparkles on the sea visible beyond the house-tops. The atmosphere last night was somewhat heavy with the languorous, indescribable, and unforgettable smell of the East; but the morning is deliciously wind-swept by the Atlantic breeze, and the air tastes sweet. And it is clear, dazzlingly clear. The white square houses and the cupolas of the mosques stand out sharp against a sky of intense, ungradated blue. I am away from the centre of the busy sea-port and the noise of its streets thronged with grain-laden camels and shouting drivers and picturesque, quarrelling, squabbling, haggling Moors and Jews and desert Arabs, and I am enveloped in the peace of the infinite azure. Besides, yesterday afternoon, as I rode back to Mogador, across the tongue of desert which separates it from the Palm Tree House, and the town rose on the horizon, a dream city of pure snow set in the clear sunset amethyst against the still, pale lapis lazuli of the bay—something happened. And yesterday evening more happened still.

Two years ago, then, I faced in Verona the dissolution of my ineffectual existence. I could see no reason for living. My theory of myself in my relation to the cosmos had been upset by practical phenomena. No other theory based on surer grounds presented itself. But what about life, said I, without a theory? Already it was life without a purpose, without work, without friends, without Judith and without Carlotta. I could not endure it without even a theory to console me. Beings do exist devoid of loves or theories. But of such, I thought, are the beasts that perish. I reflected further. Supposing, on extended investigation, I found a new theory. How far would it profit me? How far could I trust it not to lead me through another series of fantastic emotions and futile endeavours to the sublime climax of murdering a one-eyed cat? Self-abomination and contempt smote me as I thought of poor Polyphemus stretched dead on the hearthrug, and myself standing over him, sane, stupid, and remorseful, with the poker in my hand.

I walked up and down the vast cold room of the marble palazzo, arraying before me in overwhelming numbers the arguments for selfdestruction. On a table in the middle of the room stood a phial of prussic acid which I had procured long before in London, it being a conviction of mine that every man ought to have ready to hand a sure means of exit from the world. I paused many times in front of the little blue phial. One lift of the hand, one toss of the head, and all would be over. At last I extracted the cork, and the faint smell of almonds reached my nostrils. I recorked the phial and lit a cigarette. This I threw away half smoked and again approached the table of death. I began to feel a strong natural disinclination to swallow the stuff. "This," said I, "is sheer animal cowardice." I again uncorked the phial. A new phase of the matter appeared to me. "It is the act of a craven to shirk the responsibilities of life. Can you be such a meanspirited creature as not even to have the courage to live?" "No," said I, "I have a valiant spirit," and I set down the bottle. "Bah," whispered the familiar imp of suicide at my elbow. "You are just afraid to die." I took up the bottle again. But the other taunter had an argument equally strong, and once more I put the phial uncorked on the table.

Thus between two cowardices, one of which I must choose, stood I, like the ass of Buridan. I lit another cigarette and excogitated the problem. I smoked two cigarettes, walking up and down that vast, chill apartment, while the air grew sickly sweet with the smell of almonds, which intensified the physical repugnance the first faint odour had occasioned. I began to shiver with cold. The stove had burned out before I entered, and I had not considered it worth while to have it filled for the few minutes that would remain to me to live. I had not reckoned on the ass's bundles of cowardice.

"I may as well be warm," thought I, "while I prove to my complete satisfaction that it is more cowardly to live than to die. There is no very great hurry."

I caught up a travelling-rug with which I had tried to soften the asperities of an imitation Louis XV couch, and throwing it over my shoulders, resumed my pilgrimage. I soon lost myself in the problem and did not notice a corner of the rug gradually slipping down towards the floor.

"I'll do it!" I cried at last, making a sudden dive towards the table. But the ironical corner of the rug had reached the ground. I stepped on it, tripped, and instinctively caught the table to steady myself. The table, a rickety gueridon, overbalanced, and away rolled my uncorked phial of prussic acid and fell into a hundred pieces on the tessellated floor.

"Solvitur," said I, grimly, "ambulando."

Looking back now, I am inclined to treat myself tenderly. Whether I should have drunk the poison, if the accident had not occurred, I cannot say. At the moment of my rush I intended to do so. After the catastrophe, which I attributed to the curse of ineffectuality that pursued me, I must confess that I was glad. Not that life looked more attractive than before, but that the decision had been taken out of my hands. I could not go about the shops of Verona buying prussic acid or revolvers or metres of stout rope. And my razors (without Stenson's care) were benignantly blunt, and I would not condescend to braces. I groaned and pished and pshawed, but as it was written that I was to live, I resigned myself to a barren and theoryless existence.

After a day or two the vital instinct asserted itself more strongly. I became inspired by an illuminating revelation. I had a preliminary aim in life. I would go out into the world in search of a theory. When found I would apply it to the regulation of the score and a half years during which I might possibly expect to remain on this planet. I must take my chances of it leading me to the corpse of another Polyphemus.

As it struck me I should not find my theory in Italy, I packed up my belongings and hastened from Verona. At Naples I picked up a Messageries Maritimes steamer and began a circular tour in the Levant. At Alexandretta I went ashore, and inquired my way to the dwelling of the Prefect of Police. I did not call on Hamdi Effendi. But I wandered round the walls and wondered in a moody, heart-achey way where it was that Carlotta sat when Harry came along and whistled her like a tame falcon to his arm. It was a white palace of a house with a closed balcony supported on rude corbels and tightly shuttered. At the back spread a large garden surrounded by the famous wall. There was no doubt that Hamdi was a wealthy personage, and that Carlotta's nurture had been as gentle as that of any lady in Syria. But the place wherein Carlotta's childhood had been sheltered had an air of impenetrable mystery. I stood baffled before it, as I had stood so often before Carlotta's soul. The result of this portion of my search was the discovery, not of a new theory, but of an old pain. I went back to the ship in a despondent mood, and caused deep distress to one of the gentlest creatures I have ever met. He was a lean, elderly German, who no matter what the occasion or what the temperature wore a long, tight-buttoned frock-coat, a narrow black tie, and a little bluish-grey felt hat adorned with a partridge's feather which gave him an air of forlorn rakishness. His name was Doctor Anastasius Dose, and he spent a blameless life in travelling up and down the world, on behalf of a Leipsic firm of which he was a member, in search of rare and curious books. For there are copies of books which have a well-known pedigree like famous jewels, and whose acquisition, a matter of infinite tact, gives rise, I was told by Herr Dose, to the most exquisite thrill known to man. He brought me on that morose afternoon a copy of the "Synonima," in Italian and French, of St. Fliscus, printed by Simon Magniagus of Milan in 1480, and opened the vellum covers with careful fingers.

"In all the assemblage of human atoms that inhabit this vessel," said he, "there is but one who is imbued with reverence for the past and a sense of the preciousness of the unique. I need not tell you, Herr Baronet, who are a scholar, that of this book only two copies exist in this ink-sodden universe. One is in the University Library of Bologna; the other is before your eyes. It is also the only book known to have been printed by Magniagus. See the beautiful, small Roman type—a masterpiece. Ach, Herr Baronet! to have accomplished one such work in a lifetime, and then to sit among the blessed saints and look down on earth and know that the two sole copies in existence are cherished by the elect, what a reward, what eternal happiness!"

I turned over the pages. The faint perfume of mouldy lore ascended and I remembered the smell of the "Histoire des Uscoques" in the Embankment Gardens.

"The odor di femina in the nostrils of the scholar," said I.

"Famina? Woman?" he cried, scandalised.

"Yes, my friend," said I. "All things sublunar can be translated into terms of woman. St. Fliscus wrote because he hadn't a wife; Simon Magniagus stopped printing because he got married and devoted his existence to reproducing himself instead of St. Fliscus."

"Ach, that is very interesting," said he. "Could you tell me the date of Magniagus's marriage?"

"I never heard of him till this moment, my dear Herr Doctor. But depend upon it, he was either married or was going to be married, and she ran away from him and left him without the heart to print for posterity, and when he took his seat among the saints she said she was so glad; he was a stupid old ink-sodden fellow!"

He departed sorrowingly from the deck, clasping the precious volume to his heart. Allusive or discursive speech scared him like indecency; and I had used his gem but as a peg whereon flauntingly to hang it. It took me three days to tame him and to induce him to show me another of his treasures, recently acquired in Athens. Ioannes Georgius Godelmann's Tractate de Lamiis, printed by Nicholas Bassaeus of Frankfurt. I read him Keats's poem about the young lady of Corinth, of which he had never heard. His mental attitude towards it was the indulgent one of an old diplomatist towards a child's woolly lamb. For him literature had never existed and printing ended in the year 1600. But I was sorry when he left me at Constantinople, where he counted on striking the track of a Bohemian herbal, printed at Prague, and never more to be read by any of the sons of man. In the summer he was going book-hunting in Iceland. By chance I have learned since that he died there. Peace to his ashes! For aught I could see he dwelt in a mild stupor of happiness, absorbed in the intoxication of a tremulous pursuit. I wondered whether his soul contained that antidote—the odor di femina. Perhaps he met it at Reykjavic and he died of dismay.

I thought that my landing at Alexandretta was alone responsible for the continuance of my dotage, and hoped that fresh scenes would banish Carlotta's distracting image. But no, it was one of the many vain reflections on which I based a false philosophy. Whether in Beyrout, or the land of the "sweet singer of Persephone," or Alexandria, or on the Cannebiere of Marseilles, or in the queer half-Orient of Algiers whither a restless pursuit of the Identical led me, or in Lisbon, or in the mountainous republic of Andorre, where I hoped to find primitive wisdom and to shape a theory from first principles, and whence I was ironically driven by fleas—whether on land or sea, in cities or in solitudes, the vanished hand harped on my heartstrings and the voice that was still (as far as I was concerned) cooed its dove-notes into my ears.

I remember overhearing myself described on a steamboat by a pretty American girl of sixteen, as "a quaint gentle old guy who talks awful rot which no one can understand, and is all the time thinking about something else." My sudden emergence from the companion-way, where I was lighting a cigarette, brought red confusion into the young person's cheeks.

"How old do you think I am?" I asked.

"Oh, about sixty," quoth the damsel.

"I'm glad I'm quaint and gentle, even though I do talk rot," said I.

With the resourcefulness of her nation she linked her arm in mine and started a confidential walk up and down the deck.

"You are just a dear," she remarked.

She could not have said more to Anastasius Dose had he been there; as far as I can recollect he must just then have been dying of the Inevitable in Iceland. Perhaps the few months had brought me to resemble him. Instinctively I put my hand to my head to reassure myself that I was not wearing a rakish little soft felt hat with a partridge-feather, and I reflected with some complacency that my rimless pince-nez did not give me the owlish appearance produced by Anastasius Dose's great round, iron-rimmed goggles. From such crumbs of vanity are we sometimes reduced to take comfort.

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

Shall I confess my attraction? She brought a dim suggestion of Carlotta. She had Carlotta's colouring and Carlotta's candour. But there the resemblance stopped. The grey matter of her brain had been distilled from the air of Wall Street, and there were precious few things between earth and sky of which she hadn't prescience.

"I'm a broken-down philosopher," said I.

"Oh, that's nothing. So is everybody as soon as they get sense. What did you make your money in?"

"I've not made any money," I answered, meekly.

"I thought all people who were knighted in your country had made piles of money."

"Knighted!" I exclaimed. "What on earth do you think a quaint old guy like myself could possibly have done to get knighted?"

"Then you're a baronet," she said, severely.

"I assure you it is not my fault."

"I thought all baronets were wicked. They are in the novels. Somehow you don't look like a baronet. You ought to have a black moustache and an eyeglass and smoke a cigar and sneer. But, say, how do you fill up the time if you do nothing to make money?"

"I am going through the world," said I, "on an adventurous quest, like a knight—or a baronet, if you will—of the Round Table. I am in quest of a Theory of Life."

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

"I guess I'll die without finding it," said I.

London again. My quiet house. Antoinette and Stenson. The well-ordered routine of comfort. My books. The dog's-eared manuscript of the "History of Renaissance Morals," unpacked by Stenson and hid in its usual place on the writing-table. Nothing changed, yet everything utterly different.

A growing distaste for the forced acquaintanceships of travel and a craving for home brought me back. Save perhaps in health I had profited little by my journeyings. My bodily shell formed part of strange landscapes and occurred in fortuitous gatherings of men, but my heart was all the time in my Mausoleum by the Regent's Park. I was drawn thither by a force almost magnetic, irresistible. My two domestics welcomed me home, but no one else. Only my lawyers knew of my arrival. With them alone had I corresponded during the many months of my absence. Stay; I did write one letter to Mrs. McMurray while I was at Verona, in reply to an enquiry as to what had become of Carlotta and myself. I answered courteously but briefly that Carlotta had run away with Pasquale and that I should be abroad for an indefinite period. But not even a letter from my lawyers awaited me. I thought somewhat wistfully that I would willingly have paid six and eight pence for it. But the feeling was momentary.

Then began a queer, untroubled life. Without definite resolve I became a recluse, living forlornly from day to day. Like a bat I avoided the outer sunshine and took my melancholy walks at night. I had a pride in cherishing the habit of solitude. Were it not that I entertained a real dislike of roots and water and the damp and manifold discomforts of a cave, with which form of habitat the ministrations of Stenson and Antoinette would have been inconsistent, I should have gone forth into the nearest approach to a Thebaid I could discover. I was, in fact, touched by the mild mania of the hermit. My club I never entered. A line drawn from east to west, a tangent at the lowest point of the Zoological Gardens formed the southern boundary of my wanderings. Once I spied in the distance that very kind soul, Mrs. McMurray, and rushed into a providential omnibus, so as to avoid recognition. My History remained untouched. The glamour of the Renaissance had vanished. For occupation I read the Neo-Platonists, Thaumaturgy, Demonology and the like, which I had always found a fascinating although futile study. I regretted my bowing acquaintance with modern science, which forbade my setting up a laboratory with alembics and magic crystals wherewith to conduct experiments for the finding of the Elixir Vitae and the Philosopher's Stone.

I seldom read the newspapers. I had an idea, like an eminent personage of the period, that a sort of war was going on, but it failed to interest me greatly. I shrank from the noise of it.

"Monsieur," said Antoinette, "will get ill if he does not go out into the sunshine."

"Monsieur," said I, "regards the sunshine as an impertinent intrusion into a soul that loves the twilight."

If I had made the same remark to an Englishwoman, she would have pitied me for a poor, half-witted gentleman. But Antoinette has her nation's instinctive appreciation of soul-states, and her sympathy was none the less comprehending when she shook her head mournfully and said that it was bad for the stomach.

"My good Antoinette," I remarked, harking back in my mind to a speculation of other days, "if you go on worrying me in this manner about my stomach, I will build a tower forty feet high in the back garden, and live on top, and have my meals sent up by a lift, and never come down again."

"Monsieur might as well be in Paradise," said Antoinette.

"Ah," said I. And I thought of the bottle of prussic acid with mingled sentiments.

All through these many months I had Judith dwelling, a pale ghost, in the back of my mind. We had parted so finally that correspondence between us had seemed impertinent. But although I had not written to her, no small part of the infinite sadness that had fallen upon my life was the shadow of her destiny. Sweet, wine-loving Judith! How many times did I picture her sitting pinched and wistful in the little tin mission church at Hoxton! Had I, Marcus Ordeyne, condemned her to that penitentiary? Who can hold the balance of morals so truly as to decide?

At last I received a letter from her on the anniversary of our parting. She had found salvation in a strange thing which she called duty. "I am fulfilling an appointed task," she wrote, "and the measure of my success is the measure of my happiness. I am bringing consolation to a wayward and tormented spirit. A year has swept aside the petty feminine vanities, the opera-glasses, so to speak, through which a woman complacently views her influence over a man, and it has cleared my vision. A year has proved beyond mortal question that without me this wayward and tormented spirit would fail. I hold in my hands the very soul of a man. What more dare a woman ask of the high gods? You see I use your metaphors still. Dearest of all dear friends, do not pity me. Beyond all the fires of love through which one passes there is the star of Duty, and happy the individual who can live in its serenity."

This was astonishingly like the Theory of Life which I set out from Verona to seek, and which had hitherto eluded me. It was not very new, or subtle, or inspiring. But that is the way of things. No matter through what realms of the fantastic you may travel, you arrive inevitably at the commonplace.



CHAPTER XXII

I answered Judith's letter. After the long silence it seemed, at first, strange to write to her; but soon I found myself opening my heart as I had never done before to man or woman. The fact that, accident aside, we were never to meet again, drew the spiritual elements in us nearer together, and the tone of her letter loosened the bonds of my natural reserve. I told her of my past year of life, of the locked memorial chamber upstairs, of the madness through which I had passed, of my weary pursuit of the Theory, and of my attitude towards her solution of the problem. Having written the letter I felt comforted, knowing that Judith would understand.

I finished it about six o'clock one afternoon, and shrinking from giving it to Stenson to post, as it was the first private letter I had written since my arrival in London, I took it myself to the pillar-box. The fresh air reproached me for the unreasonable indoor life I had been leading, and invited me to remain outside. It was already dark. An early touch of frost in the November air rendered it exhilarating. I walked along the decorous, residential roads of St. John's Wood feeling less remote from my kind, more in sympathy with the humdrum dramas in progress behind the rows of lighted windows. Now and then a garden gate opened and a man in evening dress, and a woman, a vague, dainty mass of satin and frills and fur, emerged, stood for a moment in the shaft of light cast by the open hall-door beyond, which framed the white-capped and aproned parlour-maid, and entering a waiting hansom, drove off into the darkness whither my speculative fancy followed them. Now and then silhouettes appeared upon the window-blinds, especially on the upper floors, for it was the dressing hour and the cares of the day were being thrown aside with the workaday garments. In one house, standing far back from the road, the drawing-room curtains had not been drawn. As I passed, I saw a man tossing up a delighted child in his arms, and the mother standing by. Ay de mi! A commonplace of ten thousand homes, when the man returns from his toil. Yet it moved me. To earn one's bread; to perpetuate one's species; to create duties and responsibilities; to meet them like a brave man; to put the new generation upon the right path; to look back upon it all and say, "I have fulfilled my functions," and pass forth quietly into the eternal laboratory—is not that Life in its truth and its essence? And the reward? The commonplace. The welcome of wife and children—and the tossing of a crowing babe in one's arms. And I had missed it all, lived outside it all. I had spoken blasphemously in my besotted ignorance of these sacred common things, and verily I had my recompense in a desolate home and a life of about as much use to humanity as that of St. Simeon Stylites on top of his pillar.

So I walked along the streets on the track of the wisdom which Judith had revealed to me, and I seemed to be on the point of reaching it when I arrived at my own door.

"But what the deuce shall I do with it when I get it?" I said, as I let myself in with my latch-key.

I had just put my stick in the stand and was taking off my overcoat, when the door of the room next the diningroom opened, and Antoinette rushed out upon me.

"Oh, Monsieur, Monsieur!" she cried, wringing her hands. "Oh, Monsieur! How shall I tell you?"

The good soul broke into sobbing and weeping.

"What is the matter, Antoinette?" Z asked.

"Monsieur must not be angry. Monsieur is good like the Bon Dieu. But it will give pain to Monsieur."

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

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

"Monsieur-she has come back!"

I grew faint for a moment as from a blow over the heart. Antoinette raised her great tear-stained face.

"Monsieur must not drive her away."

I pushed her gently aside and entered the little room which I had furnished once as her boudoir.

On the couch sat Carlotta, white and pinched and poorly clad. At first I was only conscious of her great brown eyes fixed upon me, the dog-like appeal of our first meeting intensified to heart-breaking piteousness. On seeing me she did not rise, but cowered as if I would strike her. I looked at her, unable to speak. Antoinette stood sobbing in the doorway.

"Well?" said I, at last.

"I have come home," said Carlotta.

"You have been away a long time," said I.

"Ye-es," said Carlotta.

"Why have you come?" I asked.

"I had no money," said Carlotta, with her expressive gesture of upturned palms. "I had nothing but that." She pointed to a tiny travelling bag. "Everything else was at the Mont de Piete—the pawnshop—and they would not keep me any longer at the pension. I owed them for three weeks, and then they lent me money to buy my ticket to London. I said Seer Marcous would pay them back. So I came home."

"But where—where is Pasquale?" I asked.

"He went five, six months ago. He gave me some money and said he would send some more. But he did not send any. He went to South Africa. He said there was a war and he wanted to fight, and he said he was sick of me. Oh, he was very unkind," she cried with the quiver of her baby lips. "I wish I had never seen him."

"Are you married?"

"No," said Carlotta.

"Damn him!" said I, between my teeth.

"He was going to marry me, but then he said it did not matter in Paris. At first he was so nice, but after a little—oh, Seer Marcous dear, he was so cruel."

There was a short silence. Antoinette wept by the door, uttering little half-audible exclamations "la pauvre petite, le cher ange!"

Carlotta regarded me wistfully. I saw a new look of suffering in her eyes. For myself I felt numb with pain.

"What kind of a pension were you living in?" I asked, unutterable horrors coming into my head.

"It was a French family, an old lady and two old daughters, and one fat German professor. Pasquale put me there. It was very respectable," she added, with a wan smile, "and so dull. Madame Champet would scarcely let me go into the street by myself."

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

Carlotta unpinned her old straw hat, quite a different garment from the dainty head-wear she delighted in a year before, and threw it on the couch beside her. A tress of her glorious bronze hair fell loose across her forehead, adding to the woebegone expression of her face. She rose, and as she did so I seemed to notice a curious change in her. She came to me with extended hands.

"Seer Marcous—" she whispered.

I took her hands in mine.

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

"I was wicked. And I was a little fool," said Carlotta.

I sighed, released her, walked a bit apart. There was a blubber from the egregious old woman in the threshold.

"Oh, Monsieur is not going to drive her away."

I turned upon her.

"Instead of standing there weeping like a fountain and doing nothing, why aren't you getting Mademoiselle's room ready for her?"

"Because Monsieur has the key," wailed Antoinette.

"That's true," said I.

Then I reflected on the futility of converting bedchambers into mausoleums for the living. The room shut up for a year would not be habitable. It would be damp and inch-deep in dust.

"Mademoiselle shall sleep in my room to-night," I said, "and Stenson can make me up a bed and put what I want here. Go and arrange it with him."

Antoinette departed. I turned to Carlotta.

"Are you very tired, my child?"

"Oh, yes—so tired."

"Why didn't you write, so that things could have been got ready for you?"

"I don't know. I was too unhappy. Seer Marcous—" she said after a little pause and then stopped.

"Yes?"

"I am going to have a baby."

She said it in the old, childlike way, oblivious of difference of sex; with her little foreign insistence on the final consonants. I glanced hurriedly at her. The fact was obvious. She stood with her hands helplessly outspread. The pathos of her would have wrung the heart of a devil.

"Thank God, you've come home," said I, huskily.

She began to cry softly. I put my arm round her shoulders, and comforted her. She sobbed out incoherent things. She wished she had never seen Pasquale. I was good. She would stay with me always. She would never run away again.

I took her upstairs, and opened the door of her room with the key that I had carried for a year on my bunch, and turned on the electric light.

"See what are still usable of your old things," said I, "and I will send Antoinette up to you."

She looked around her, somewhat puzzled.

"Why should I sleep in your room when this one is ready for me—my night dress—even the hot water?"

"My dear," said I, "that hot water was put for you a year ago. It must be cold now."

"And my red slippers—and my dressing-gown!" she cried, quaveringly.

Then sinking in a heap on the floor beside the dusty bed, she burst into a passion of tears.

I stole away and sent Antoinette to minister to her.

A year before I had raved and ranted, deeming life intolerable and cursing the high gods; I suffered then, it is true; but I hope I may never again go through the suffering of that first night of Carlotta's return. Even now I can close my eyes and feel the icy grip on my heart.

She came down to dinner about an hour later, dressed in a pink wrapper, one of the last things she had bought, which Antoinette (as she explained to excuse her delay) had been airing before the fire. She sat opposite me, in her old place, penitent, subdued, yet not shy or ill at ease. Stenson waited on us, grave and imperturbable as if we had put back the clock of time a twelvemonth. The only covert reference he made to the event was to murmur discreetly in my ear:

"I have brought up a bottle of the Pommery, Sir Marcus, in the hope you would drink some."

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

Carlotta allowed him to fill her glass. She sipped the wine, and declared that it did her good. She was no longer a teetotaller, she explained. Once she drank too much, and the next day had a headache.

"Why should one have a headache?"

"Nemesis," said I.

"What is Nemesis?"

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

"I do not understand."

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

"Where is Polyphemus?" she asked.

"Dead," said I.

"Oh-h! How did poor Polyphemus die?"

"He was smitten by Destiny at the end of the last act of a farcical tragedy."

The ghost of a "hou!" came from Carlotta. She composed herself immediately.

"I often used to think of Polyphemus and Seer Marcous and Antoinette," she said, musingly. "And then I wished I was back. I have been very wicked."

She put her elbows on the table, and framing her face with her hands looked at me, and shook her head.

"Oh, you are good! Oh, you are good!"

"Go on with your dinner, my child," said I, "and wonder at the genius of Antoinette who has managed to cook it and look after you at the same time."

She obeyed meekly. I watched her eat. She was famished. I learned that she had had nothing since the early morning coffee and roll. In spite of pain, I was curiously flattered by her return. I represented something to her, after all—even though the instinct of the prodigal cat had driven her hither. I am sure it had never crossed her mind that my doors might be shut against her. Her first words were, "I have come home." The first thing she did when we went into the drawing-room after dinner was to fondle my hand and lay it against her cheek and say, with a deep sigh:

"I am so happy."

However shallow her butterfly nature was, these things came from its depths. No man can help feeling pleased at a child's or an animal's implicit trust in him. And the pleasure is of the purest. He feels that unreasoning intuition has penetrated to some latent germ of good in his nature, and for the moment he is disarmed of evil. Carlotta, then, came blindly to what was best in me. In her thoughts she sandwiched me between the cat and the cook: well, in most sandwiches the mid-ingredient is the most essential.

She curled herself up in the familiar sofa-corner, and as it was a chilly night I sent for a wrap which I threw over her limbs.

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

"And I have my dear Carlotta," said I.

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

Pasquale had made love to her from the very first minute of their acquaintance—even while I was hunting for the L'Histoire Comique de Francion. He had met her many times unknown to me. They had corresponded, her letters being addressed to a little stationer's shop close by. She did not love him. Of that I have an absolute conviction. But he was young, he was handsome, he had the libertine's air and manner. She was docile. And she was ever positively truthful. If I had questioned her she would have confessed frankly. But I never questioned, as I never suspected. I wondered sometimes at her readiness in quoting him. I noticed odd coincidences; but I was too ineffectual to draw inferences from phenomena. His appearance on the Paddington platform was prearranged; his duchessa at Ealing a myth.

Apparently he had dallied with his fancy. The fruit was his any day for the plucking. Perhaps a rudimentary sentiment of loyalty towards me restrained him. Who can tell? The night of our meeting with Hamdi brought the crisis. The Turk's threats had alarmed both Carlotta and myself. It was necessary for him to strike at once. He saw her the next day—would to heaven I had remained at home!—told her I was marrying her to save her from Hamdi. I loved the other woman. He would save her equally well from Hamdi. The other woman met her soon after parting from Pasquale and besought her to give me up. She did not know what to do. Poor child, how should she have known? On the previous evening I had told her she was to marry me. She was ready to obey. She went to bed thinking that she was to marry me. In the morning she went for her music lesson. Pasquale was waiting for her. They walked for some distance down the road. He hailed a cab and drove away with her.

"He said he loved me," said Carlotta, "and he kissed me, and he told me I must go away with him to Paris and marry him. And I felt all weak, like that—" she dropped her arms helplessly in an expressive gesture, "and so what could I do?"

"Didn't you think, Carlotta, that I might be sorry—perhaps unhappy?" I asked as gently as I could.

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

"Did you believe him?"

"That's why I said I have been very wicked," Carlotta answered, simply.

She went on with her story—an old, miserable, detestable, execrable story. At first all went merrily. Then she fell ill in Paris. It was her first acquaintance with the northern winter. Her throat proved to be delicate and she was laid up with bronchitis. To men of Pasquale's type, a woman ill is of no more use than a spavined horse or a broken-down motor-car. More than that, she becomes an infernal nuisance. It was in his temperament to perform sporadic acts of fantastic chivalry. It appealed to something romantic, theatrical, in his facile nature. But to devote himself to a woman in sickness—that was different. The fifteenth century Italian hated like the devil continued association with pain. He would have thrown his boots to a beggar, but he would have danced in his palace over the dungeons where his brother rotted in obscurity.

So poor Carlotta was neglected, and began to eat the bread of disillusion. When she got well, there was a faint recrudescence of affection. Has not this story been written a million miserable times? Why should I rend my heart again by retelling it? Wild rages, jealousies, quarrels, tears—

"And then one day he said, 'You damned little fool, I am sick to death of you,' and he went away, and I never saw him again. He wrote and he sent his valet to put me in the pension."

"And yet, Carlotta," said I bitterly, "you would go back to him if he sent for you?"

She sprang forward and gripped me by the arm—I was sitting quite close to her—and her face wore the terror-stricken expression of a child frightened with bogies.

"Go back? After what he has done to me? You would not send me back? Seer Marcous, darling, you will keep me with you? I will be good, good, good. But go back to Pasquale? Oh, no-o-o!"

She fell back in her sofa-corner, and fixed her great, deep imploring eyes on me.

"My dear," said I, "you know this is your home as long as ever you choose to stay in it—but—" and I stroked her hair gently—"if he comes back when your child is born—his child—"

She drew herself up superbly.

"It is my child—my very, very own," cried Carlotta. "It is mine, mine—and I shall not allow any one to touch it—" and then her face softened—"except Seer Marcous."



CHAPTER XXIII

Behold Carlotta again installed in my house which she regarded as her home. Heaven forbid that I should sow any doubt thereof in her mind.

I had learned perhaps one lesson: the meaning of love. The love that is desire alone, though sung in all romance of all the ages, is of the brute nature and is doomed to perish. The love that pardons, endures through wrong, contents itself in abnegation, is of the imperishable things that draw weak man a little nearer to the angels. When Carlotta wept upon my shoulder during those few first moments of her return I knew that all resentment was gone from my heart, that it would have been a poor, ignoble thing. Had she come back to me leprous of body and abominable of spirit, it would not have mattered. I would have forgiven her, loved her, cherished her just the same. It was a question, not of reason, not of human pity, not of quixotism; not of any argument or sentiment for which I could be responsible. I was helpless, obeying a reflex action of the soul.

The days passed tranquilly. In spite of pain I felt an odd happiness. I had nothing selfishly to hope for. Perhaps I had aged five years in one, and I viewed life differently. It was enough for me that she had come home, to the haven where no harm could befall her. She was my appointed task, even as her husband was Judith's. I recognised in myself the man with the one talent. The deep wisdom of the parable can be taken to inmost heart for comfort only by men of little destinies. With infinite love and patience to mould Carlotta into a sweet, good woman, a wise mother of the child that was to be—that was the inglorious task which Providence had set me to accomplish. In its proportion to the aggregate of human effort it was infinitesimal. But who shall say that it was not worth the doing? Save writing a useless book, in what other sphere of sublunar energy could I have been effectual? I did not thus analyse my attitude at the time; the man who does so is a poser, a mime to his own audience; but looking back, I think I was guided by some such unformulated considerations.

Although my hermit mania was in itself radically cured, yet I altered nothing in my relations with the outside world. I wrote to Judith a brief account of what had occurred and received from her a sympathetic answer. My reading among the Mystics and Thaumaturgists put me on the track of Arabic. I found that Carlotta knew enough of the language to give me elementary instruction, and thus the whirligig of time brought in its revenge by constituting me her pupil, to our joint edification.

After a while the unhappiness of the past seemed to have faded from her mind. She spoke little of Paris, less of the dull pension, and never of Pasquale. She bore towards him an animal's silent animosity against a human being who has done it an unforgettable injury. On the other hand, as I have since discovered, she was slowly developing, and had begun to realise that in giving herself light-heartedly to a man whom she did not love, she had committed a crime against her sex, for which she had paid a heavy penalty: a sentiment, however, which did not mitigate her resentment against him. Often I saw her sitting with knitted brows, her needlework idle on her lap, evidently unravelling some complicated problem; presently she would either shake her head sadly as if the intellectual process were too hard for her and resume her needle, or if she happened to catch my glance, she would start, smile reassuringly at me, and apply herself with exaggerated zeal to her work. These fits of abstraction were not those of a woman speculating on mysteries of the near future. Such Carlotta also indulged in, and they were easy to recognise, by the dreaminess of her eyes and the faint smile flickering about her lips. The moods of knitted brows were periods of soul-travail, and I wondered what they would bring forth.

One afternoon I came home and found her weeping over a book. When I bent down to see what she was reading—she had acquired a taste for novels during the dull pension time in Paris—she caught my head with both hands.

"Oh, Seer Marcous, do you think they ought to make me wear a great 'A'?"

"What do you mean?" I asked.

"Like Hester Prynne—see."

She showed me Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Scarlet Letter."

"What made you take this out of the shelves?"

"The title," she replied, simply. "I am so fond of red things; but I should not like that great red 'A'."

"Those were days," said I, "when people thought they could only be good by being very cruel."

"They would have been more cruel if Hester had not loved the minister," said Carlotta, looking at me wistfully.

"My dear little girl," said I, seeing whither her thoughts were tending, "do not bother your brain with psychological problems."

"What are—?" began Carlotta.

I pinched the question, as it were, out of her cheek and smiled and took away the book.

"They are a dreadful disease my little girl has been afflicted with for some time. When you sit and wrinkle your forehead like this," and I scowled forbiddingly, whereat Carlotta laughed, "you are suffering from acute psychological problem."

"Then I am thinking," said Carlotta, reflectively.

"Don't think too much, dear, just now," said I. "It is best for you to be happy and calm and contented. Otherwise I'll have to tell the doctor, and he'll give you the blackest and nastiest physic you have ever tasted."

"To cure me of a what-you-call-it problem?"

"Yes," said I, emphatically.

"Hou!" laughed Carlotta in a superior way, "physic can't cure that."

"You are relying on an exploded fallacy immortalised in a hackneyed Shakespearian quotation," I remarked.

"Go on," said Carlotta, encouragingly.

"What do you mean?" I asked, taken aback.

"Oh, you darling Seer Marcous," cried Carlotta. "It is so lovely to hear you talk!"

So I went on talking, and the distress occasioned by the "Scarlet Letter" was forgotten.

I have mentioned Carlotta's needlework. This was undertaken at the sapient instigation of Antoinette, who in her turn, I am sure, neglected the ladle for the scissors, and cast many of her duties upon the silent but sympathetic Stenson. Carlotta herself delighted in these preparations. She was never happier than when curled up on the sofa, a box of chocolates by her side, her work-basket frothing over, like a great dish of oeufs a la neige, with lawn or mull or what-not, and (I verily believe to complete her content) my ungainly figure and hatchet-face within her purview. She would eat and sew industriously. Sometimes she would press too hard on a sweetmeat and with a little cry would hold up a sticky finger and thumb.

"Look," she would say, puckering up her face.

And to save from soilure the dainty fabric she was working at, I would rise and wipe her fingers with my handkerchief; whereupon she would coo out the sweetest "thank you," in the world, and perhaps hold up a diminutive garment.

"Isn't it pretty?"

"Yes, my dear," I would say, and I would turn aside wondering at the exquisite refinements of pain that men were sometimes called upon to bear.

At last the time came. I sat up all night in a torture of suspense, having got it into my foolish head that Carlotta might die. The doctor came upon me at six in the morning sitting half frozen at the bottom of the stairs. When he gave me his cheery news he seemed to develop from a middle-aged, commonplace man into a radiant archangel.

I met Antoinette soon afterwards, busy, important, exultant. She nevertheless graciously accorded me a brief interview.

"And to think, Monsieur," she exclaimed, as if the crowning triumph of a million ions of evolution had at, last been attained, "to think that it is a boy!"

"You would have been just as pleased if it had been a girl," said I.

She shook her wise, fat head. "Women ca ne vaut pas grand' chose."

Let it be remembered that "women are of no great account" is a sentiment expressed, not by me, but by Antoinette. But all the same I soon found myself a cipher in the house, where the triumvirate of the negligible sex, Antoinette, the nurse and Carlotta, reigned despotically.

To write much of Carlotta's happiness would be to treat of sacred things at which I can only guess. She dwelt in rapture. The joy and meaning of the universe were concentrated in the tiny bundle of pink flesh that lay on her bosom. I used to sit by her side while she talked unwearyingly of him. He was a thing of infinite perfections. He had such a lot of hair.

"She won't believe, sir," said the nurse, "that it will all drop off and a new crop come."

"Oh-h!" said Carlotta. "It can't be so cruel. For it is my hair—see, Seer Marcous, darling; isn't it just my hair?"

It was her great solicitude that the boy should resemble her.

"I don't know about his nose," she remarked critically. "There is so little of it yet and it is so soft—feel how soft it is. But his eyes are brown like mine, and his mouth—now look, aren't they just the same?"

She put her cheek next to the child's and invited me to compare the two adjacent baby mouths. They were, of a truth, very much alike.

She was jealous of the baby, desirous of having it always with her to tend and fondle, impatient of the nurse and Antoinette. It was a thing so intensely hers that she resented other hands touching it. Oddly enough, of me she made an exception. Nothing delighted her more than to put the little creature into my awkward and nervous arms, and watch me carry it about the room. I think she wanted to give me something, and this share in the babe was the most precious gift she could devise.

Of Pasquale she continued to say nothing. In her intense joy of motherhood he seemed to have become the dim creature of a dream. I had registered the birth without consulting her—in the legal names of the parents.

"What are you going to call him, Carlotta?" I asked one day.

"Mon petit chou. That's what Antoinette says. It's a beautiful name."

"There are many points in calling an infant one's little cabbage," I admitted, "but soon he'll grow up to be as old as I am, and—" I sighed, "who would call me their petit chow?"

Carlotta laughed.

"That is true. We shall have to find a name." She reflected for a few moments; then put her arms round my neck and continued her reflections.

"He shall be Marcus—another Marcus Ordeyne. Then perhaps some day he will be 'Seer Marcous' like you."

"Do you mean when I die?" I asked.

"Oh, not for years and years and years!" she cried, tightening her clasp in alarm. "But the child lives longer than the father. It is fate. He will live longer than I."

"Let us hope so, dear," I answered. "But it is just because I am not his father that he can't be Sir Marcus when I die. He can have my name; but my title—"

"Who will have it?"

"No one."

"It will die too?"

"It will be quite dead."

"You are his father, you know, really," she whispered.

"The law of England takes no count, unfortunately, of things of the spirit," said I.

"What are things of the spirit?"

"The things, my dear," said I, "that you are beginning to understand." I bent down and kissed the child as it lay on her lap. "Poor little Marcus Ordeyne," I said. "My poor quaintly fathered little son, I'm afraid there is much trouble ahead of you, but I'll do my best to help you through it."

"Bless you, dear," said Carlotta, softly.

I looked at her in wonder. She had spoken for the first time like a grown woman—like a woman with a soul.

A few weeks later.

We were sitting at breakfast. The morning newspaper contained the account of a battle and the lists of British officers killed. I scanned as usual the melancholy columns, when a name among the dead caught my eye—and I stared at it stupidly. Pasquale was dead, killed outright by a Boer bullet. The wild, bright life was ended. It seemed a horrible thing, and, much as he had wronged me, my first sentiment was one of dismay. He was too gallant and beautiful a creature for death.

Carlotta poured out my tea and came round with the cup which she deposited by my side. To prevent her peeping over my shoulder at the paper, as she usually did, I laid it on the table; but her quick eye had already read the great headlines.

"Great Battle. British officers killed. Oh, let me see, Seer Marcous."

"No, dear," said I. "Go and eat your breakfast."

She looked at me strangely. I tried to smile; but as I am an incompetent actor my grimace was a proclamation of disingenuousness.

"Why shouldn't I read it?" she asked, quickly.

"Because I say you mustn't, Carlotta."

She continued to look at me. She had suddenly grown pale. I stirred my tea and made a pretence of sipping it.

"Go on with your breakfast, my child," I repeated.

"There is something—something about him in the paper," said Carlotta. "He is a British officer."

In the face of her intuition further concealment appeared useless. Besides, sooner or later she would have to know.

"He is a British officer no longer, dear," said I.

"Is he dead?"

My mind flew back to an evening long ago—long, long ago it seemed—when another newspaper had told of another death, and my ears caught the echo of the identical question that had then fallen from her lips. I dreaded lest she should say again, "I am so glad."

I beckoned her to my side, and pointing with my finger to the name watched her face anxiously. She read, stared for a bit in front of her and turned to me with a piteous look. I drew her to me, and she laid her face against my shoulder.

"I don't know why I'm crying, Seer Marcous, dear," she said, after a while.

I made her drink some of my tea, but she would eat nothing, and presently she went upstairs. She had not said that she was glad. She had wept and not known the reason for her tears. I railed at myself for my doubts of her.

She was subdued and thoughtful all the day. In the evening, instead of curling herself up in the sofa-corner among the cushions, she sat on a stool by my feet as I read, one hand supporting her chin, the other resting on my knee.

"I am glad he was a brave man," she said at last, alluding to Pasquale for the first time since the morning. "I like brave men."

"Dulce et decorum est. He died for his country," said I.

"It does not hurt me now so much to think of him," said Carlotta.

I could not help feeling a miserable pang of jealousy at Pasquale's posthumous rehabilitation as a hero in Carlotta's heart. Yet, was it not natural? Was it not the way of women? I saw myself far remote from her, and though she never spoke of him again I divined that her thoughts dwelt not untenderly on his memory. I was absurd, I know. But I had begun almost to believe in my make-believe paternity, and I was jealous of the rightful claims of the dead man.

And yet had he lived he might have come back one day with his conquering air and his irresistible laugh, and carried them both away from me. In sparing me this crowning humiliation I thanked the high gods.

But never to this day has she mentioned his name again.



CHAPTER XXIV

How shall I set down that which happened not long afterwards?

The death of a baby is so commonplace, so unimportant. Few reasoning people, viewing the matter in the abstract, can do otherwise than rejoice that a human being is saved from the weariness of the tired years that make up life. For who shall disprove the pessimist's assertion that it is better not to have been born than to come into the world, and that it is better to die than to live? But those from whom the single hope of their existence is ravished find little consolation in reason. Grief is the most intensely egotistical of emotions. I have lost all that makes life beautiful to me. Is not that enough for the stricken soul?

To Carlotta it meant a passage through the valley of the shadow. To me, at first, it meant the life of Carlotta, and then a blank in my newly ordered scheme of things. The curse of ineffectuality still pursued me. I had allotted to myself my humble task—the development of the new generation in the form of Carlotta's boy, and even that small usefulness was I denied by Fate.

A chill, a touch of croup, an agonised watching, and the tiny thing lay dead. Antoinette and I had to drag it stone cold from Carlotta's bosom. I alone carried it to burial. The little white coffin rested on the opposite seat of the hired brougham, and on it was a bunch of white flowers given by Antoinette. In the cemetery chapel another fragment of humanity awaited sepulture, and the funeral service was read over both bodies. I stood alone by the little white coffin. A crowd of mourners were grouped beside the black one. I glanced at the inscription as I passed: "Jane Elliot, in the eighty-sixth year of her age." The officiant referred in the service to "our dear brother and sister, here departed." It was either an awful jest or an awful verity.

My "quaintly fathered little son" had small need of my help through the troubles of his life. His mother needed all that I could give. Without me she would have died. That I verily believe. I was her solitary plank in the welter wherein she would have been submerged. She clung to me—literally clung to me. I sat for hours with her grasp upon me. To feel assured of my physical presence alone seemed to bring her calm.

Recent as are those sleepless days and nights, their memory is all confused. The light burning dimly in the familiar chamber which I had once sealed up as a tomb; the shadows on the wall; the fevered face and great hollow eyes of Carlotta against the pillows; her little hand clutching mine in desperation; the soft tread of the nurse, that is all I remember. And when she recovered her wits and grew sane, although for a long time she spoke little, and scarcely noticed me otherwise, she claimed me by her side. She was still dazed by the misery of her darkness. It was only then that I realised the part the child had played in her development. Her nature had been stirred to the quick; the capacity for emotion had been awakened. She had left me without a qualm. She had given herself to Pasquale without a glimmer of passion. She had returned to me like a wounded animal seeking its home. For the child alone the passionate human love had sprung flaming from the seed hidden in her soul. And now the child was dead, and the sun had gone from her sky, and she was benumbed with the icy blackness of the world.

Then came a time when her speech was loosened and she talked to me incessantly of the child, until one day she spoke of it as living and clamoured for it, and relapsed into her fever.

At last one morning she awakened from a sound sleep and found me watching; for I had relieved the nurse at six o'clock. She smiled at me for the first time since the child fell sick, and took my hand and kissed it.

"It is like waking into heaven to see your face, Seer Marcous, darling," she whispered.

"I hope heaven is peopled by a better-looking set of fellows," I said.

"Hou!" laughed Carlotta. "Don't you know you are beautiful?"

"You mustn't throw an old jest in my teeth, Carlotta," said I, and I reminded her how she had once screamed with laughter when I had told her I was very beautiful.

Carlotta listened patiently until I had ended, and then she said, with a little sigh:

"You cannot understand, Seer Marcous, darling. I have been thinking of my little baby and the angels—and all the angels are like you."

To cover the embarrassment my modesty underwent, I laughed and drew the picture of myself with long flaxen hair and white wings.

"My angels hadn't got wings," said Carlotta, seriously. "They all wore dressing-gowns. They were real angels. And the one that was most like you brought my baby in his arms for me to kiss; and when he put it on a white cloud to sleep, and took me up in his arms instead and carried me away, away, away through the air, I didn't cry at leaving baby. Wasn't that funny? I snuggled up close to him—like that"—she illustrated the action of "snuggling" beneath the bed-clothes—"and it was so comfy."

The pale sunshine of a fine February morning filtered into the room from behind the curtains. I turned off the dimmed electric lamp and let full daylight into the room.

"Oh!" cried Carlotta, turning to the window, "how lovely the good sun is! It is more like heaven than ever. Do you know," she added, mysteriously, "just before I woke it was all dark, and I had lost my angels and I was looking for them."

I counselled her sagely to look for no more members of the Hierarchy en deshabille, but to content herself with the humbler denizens of this planet. She pressed my hand.

"I'll try to be contented, Seer Marcous, darling."

She did her best, poor child, when I was by; but I heard that often she would sit by a little pile of garments and take them up one by one and cry her heart out—so that though she quickly recovered, her cheeks remained wan and drawn, and pain lingered in her eyes. The weather changed to fog and damp and she spent the days crouching by the fire, sometimes not stirring a muscle for an hour together. Her favourite seat was the fender-stool in the drawing-room. Her own boudoir downstairs, where she used to receive instruction from the excellent Miss Griggs, she scarcely entered.

She broke one of these fits suddenly and called me by her own pet version of my name. I looked up from the writing-table where I was studying the Arabic grammar.

"Yes?"

"I have been thinking—oh, thinking, thinking so long. I've been thinking that you must love me very much."

"Yes, Carlotta," said I, with a half smile. "I suppose I do."

"As much as I loved my baby," she said, seriously,

"I used to love you in a different way, perhaps."

"And now?"

"Perhaps in the same sort of way, Carlotta."

"I loved my baby because it was mine," she remarked, looking at the flames through one hand's delicate fingers. "I wanted to do everything for him and didn't want him to do anything for me. I would have died for him. It is so strange. Yes, I think you must love me like that, Seer Marcous. Why?"

"Because when I found you in the Embankment Gardens nearly two years ago you were about as helpless as your little baby," I replied, somewhat disingenuously.

Carlotta gave me a quick glance.

"You thought me then what you call an infernal nuisance. Oh, I know now. I have grown wise. But you were always good. You looked good when you sat on the seat. You were reading a dirty little book."

"L'Histoire des Uscoques," I murmured. How far away it seemed.

There was a pause. I regarded her for a moment or two. She was sunk again in serious reflection. I sighed—at the general dismalness of life, I suppose—and resumed my Arabic.

"Seer Marcous."

"Yes?"

"Why didn't you drive me away when I came back?"

I shut up the Arabic grammar and went and sat beside her on the fenderstool.

"My dear little girl—what a question! How could I drive you away from your own home?"

She flashed a queer, scared look at me, then at the fire, then at me again and then burst out crying, her head and arms on her knees.

I muttered a man's words of awkward comfort, saying something about the baby.

"It isn't baby I'm crying about," sobbed Carlotta. "It's me! And it's you! And it's all the things I'm beginning to understand."

I patted her head and lit a cigarette and wandered about the room, rather puzzled by Carlotta's psychological development, and yet stirred by a faint thrill at her recognition of my affection. At the same time the sad "too late, too late," was knelled in my ears, and I thought of the might-have-been, and rode the merry-go-round of regret's banalities. I had grown old. Passion had died. Hope—the hope of hearing the patter of a child's feet about my house, the hope of pride in a quasi-paternity, of handing on, vicariously though it were, the torch of life—hope was dead and it was buried in a little white coffin. Only a great, quiet love remained. I was a tired old man, and Carlotta was to me an infinitely loved sister—or daughter—or granddaughter even—so old did I feel. And when I raised her from the fender-stool, and kissed the tears from her eyes, it was as grandfatherly a kiss as had ever been given in this world.

The same old problem again. What the deuce to do with Carlotta? Yet not quite the same: rather, what the deuce to do with Carlotta and myself? In our strange relationship we were inextricably bound together.

First, she needed sunshine—instead of the forlorn bleakness of an English spring—and a change from this house of pain and death. And then I, too, felt the need of wider horizons. London had grown to be a nightmare city which I never entered. Its restless ambitions were not mine. Its pleasures pleased me not. With not five of its five million inhabitants dared I speak heart to heart. Judith had gone out of my life. My aunts and cousins regarded me as beyond the moral pale. Mrs. McMurray was still unaware of my return to England. I confess to shabby treatment of my kind friend. I know she would have flown to aid Carlotta in her troubles; but would she have understood Carlotta? Reasoning now I am convinced that she would: in those days I did not reason. I shrank like a snail into its shell. The simile is commonplace; but so was I—the most commonplace human snail that ever occupied a commonplace ten-roomed shell. And now the house and its useless books and its million-fold more useless manuscript "History of Renaissance Morals," all its sombre memories and its haunting ghosts of ineffectualities, became an unwholesome prison in which I was wasting away a feeble existence. I resolved to quit it, to leave my books, to abjure Renaissance morals, and to go forth with Carlotta into the wilderness and the sunshine, there to fulfil whatever destiny the high gods should decree.



CHAPTER XXV

Again I sit on the housetop in Mogador on the Morocco coast, where a month ago I began to write these latter pages. Time has passed quickly since that day.

I said then that on the previous afternoon something had happened. It was something which I might have foreseen, which, in fact, with my habit of putting the telescope to my blind eye, I obstinately had refused to foresee. During our wanderings I had watched the flowering of her splendid beauty as she drank in health from the glow of her own Orient. I had noted the widening of her intellect, the quickening of her sympathies. I had been conscious of the expansion of her soul in the great silences when the stars flamed over the infinite sea of sand. But a growing wistfulness that was no longer the old doglike pleading of her glorious eyes, a gathering sadness that was not an aftermath of grief for the child that had gone—into this, if I did remark it, I did not choose to inquire. Instead, I continued my study of Arabic and cultivated the acquaintance of a learned Moor whose conversation afforded—and still affords—me peculiar pleasure. One of these days I shall make a book of his Table-talk. But now I have to tell of Carlotta.

She accepted with alacrity my proposal that morning to ride over to the Palm Tree House for luncheon, as we had done several times before. To please me, I think, she had resolutely overcome her natural indolence. So much so that she had come to love the nomad life of steamers and caravans, and had grown restless, eager for fresh scenes, craving new impressions. It was I who had cried a halt at Mogador where this furnished house to let, belonging to a German merchant absent in Europe, tempted me to rest awhile. I am not so young as Carlotta, and I awakened to the fact of a circumambient universe so many years ago that I have grown slumberous. Carlotta, if left to herself, would have gone on riding camels through Africa to the end of time. She had changed in many essentials. Instead of regarding me as an amiable purveyor of sweetmeats and other necessaries of life to which by the grace of her being Carlotta she was entitled, she treated me with human affection and sympathy, keeping her own wants in the background, anxious only to anticipate mine. But she still loved sweetmeats and would eat horrible Moorish messes with an avidity only equalled by my repugnance. She was still the same Carlotta. On the other hand again, she had of late abandoned her caressing habits. If she laid her hand on my arm, she did it timorously—whereat I would laugh and she would grow confused. Once she had driven me to frenzy with her fondling. Those days had passed. I told myself that I was as old as the sphinx we had moralised over in Egypt.

We lunched, then, at the Palm Tree House and rode back in the cool of the afternoon to Mogador. We were alone, as we knew the path across the tongue of desert, and had no need of a guide and the rabble of sore-eyed urchins who, like their attendant flies, infest the tourist on his journeyings. On our right the desert rose to meet a near horizon; on our left sandhills and boulders cut off the view; ahead the shimmering line beyond which the sea and city lay. We were enveloped by solitude and stillness. In the clear African air objects detached themselves against the sky with startling definition.

I had unconsciously ridden a bit ahead of Carlotta, thinking my own thoughts, and sighing as a man often does sigh, for the vague unattainable which is happiness. Suddenly I missed her by my side, and turning round saw a sight that made my heart beat with its sheer beauty. It was only Carlotta on her barbarically betrapped and besaddled mule. But it was Carlotta glorified in colour. She held above her head a cotton parasol, which she had bought to her delight and my disgust in Mogador; an impossible thing, all deep cherry reds and yellows; a hateful thing made for a pantomime—or for this African afternoon. Outspread and luminous in the white sunlight its cherry reds and yellows floated like translucences of wine above Carlotta's bronze hair crowned by a white sun hat, her warm flesh-tints, and the dazzling white of her surah silk blouse; the whole picture cut out vivid against the indigo of the sky. It was a radiant vision. I stared openmouthed, smitten with the pang that sudden and transient loveliness can sometimes deal, as Carlotta approached, her figure swaying with the jog of her barbaric beast. Her eyes were fixed on mine. She halted, and for a moment we looked at one another; and in those wonderful eyes I saw for the first time a beautiful sadness, a spiritual appeal. The moment passed. We started again, side by side, neither speaking. I did not look at her, conscious of a vague trouble. Things that I had thought dead stirred in my heart.

Presently like a dawn of infinite delicacy rose the city before us. Its fairy minarets and towers gleamed first white in an atmosphere of pale amethyst toning through shades of green to the blue of the zenith. And the lazy sea lay at the city's foot a pavement of lapis lazuli. But all was faint, unreal. Far, far away a group of palms caught opalescent reflections. A slight breeze had sprung up, raising minute particles of sand which caused the elfland on the horizon to quiver like a mirage.