The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne Part 4

"And all this time," I said, half an hour later, "you haven't told me where you are going."

"Paris. To stay with Delphine Carrere."

"I thought you said you wanted solitude."

I have met Delphine Carrere--_brave femme_ if ever there was one, and the loyalest soul in the world, the only one of Judith's early women friends who has totally ignored the fact of the Sacred Cap of Good Repute having been thrown over the windmills (indeed who knows whether dear, golden-hearted Delphine herself could conscientiously write the magic initials S.C.G.R. after her name?); but Delphine has never struck me as a person in whose dwelling one could find conventual seclusion.

Judith, however, explained.

"Delphine will be painting all day, and dissipating all night. I can't possibly disturb her in her studio, for she has to work tremendously hard--and I'm decidedly not going to dissipate with her. So I shall have my days and nights to my sequestered and meditative self."

I said nothing: but all the same I am tolerably certain that Judith, being Judith, will enjoy prodigious merrymaking in Paris. She is absolutely sincere in her intentions--the earth holds no sincerer woman--but she is a self-deceiver. Her about-to-be-sequestered and meditative self was at that moment sitting on the arm of a chair and smoking a cigarette, with undisguised relish of the good things of this life. The blue smoke wreathing itself amid her fair hair resembled, so I told her in the relaxed intellectual frame of mind of the contented man, incense mounting through the nimbus of a saint. She affected solicitude lest the life-blood of my intelligence should be pouring out through my cut finger. No, I am convinced that the _recueillement_ (that beautiful French word for which we have no English equivalent, meaning the gathering of the soul together within itself) of the rue Boissy d'Anglais is the very happiest delusion wherewith Judith has. .h.i.therto deluded herself. I am glad, exceedingly glad. Her temperament--I have got reconciled to her affliction--craves the gaiety which London denies her.

"And when are you going?" I asked.

"To-morrow."

"To-morrow?"

"Why not? I wired Delphine this morning. I had to go out to get something for lunch (my conviction, it appears, was right), and I thought I might as well take an omnibus to Charing Cross and send a telegram."

"But when are you going to pack?"

"I did that last night. I didn't get to bed till four this morning. I only made up my mind after you had gone," she added, in antic.i.p.ation of a possible question.

It is better that we are not married. These sudden resolutions would throw my existence out of gear. My moral upheaval would be that of a hen in front of a motor-car. When I go abroad, I like at least a fortnight to think of it. One has to attune one's mind to new conditions, to map out the pleasant scheme of days, to savour in antic.i.p.ation the delights that stand there, awaiting one's tasting, either in the mystery of the unknown or in the welcoming light of familiarity. I love the transition that can be so subtly gradated by the spirit between one scene and another. The man who awakens one fine morning in his London residence, scratches his head, and says, "What shall I do to-day? By Jove! I'll start for Timbuctoo!" is to me an incomprehensible, incomplete being. He lacks an aesthetic sense.

I did not dare tell Judith she lacked an aesthetic sense. I might just as well have accused her of stealing silver spoons. I said I should miss her (which I certainly shall), and promised to write to her once a week.

"And you," said I, "will have heaps of time to write me the History of a Sequestered and Meditative Self--meanwhile, let us go out somewhere and dine."

When I got home, I found a card on my hall-table. "Mr. Sebastian Pasquale."

I am sorry I missed Pasquale. I haven't seen him for two or three years.

He is a fascinating youth, a study in reversion. I will ask him to dinner here some day soon. It will be quieter than at the club.

CHAPTER III

May 24th.

Something has happened. Something fantastic, inconceivable. I am in a condition to be surprised at nothing. If a witch on a broomstick rode in through my open window and lectured me on quaternions, I should accept her visit as a normal occurrence.

I have spent hours walking up and down this book-lined room, wondering whether the universe or I were mad. Sometimes I laughed, for the thing is sheerly ridiculous. Sometimes I cursed at the impertinence of the thing in happening at all. Once I stumbled over a volume of Muratori lying on the floor, and I kicked it across the room. Then I took it up, and wept over the loosened binding.

The question is: What on earth am I to do? Why has Judith chosen this particular time to shut up her flat and sequester herself in Paris?

Why did my lawyers appoint this particular morning for me to sign their silly doc.u.ments? Why did I turn up three hours late? Why did I walk down the Thames Embankment? And why, oh, why, did I seat myself on a bench in the gardens below the terrace of the National Liberal Club?

Yesterday was one of the most peaceful and happy days of my existence. I worked contentedly at my history; I gossiped with Antoinette who came to demand permission to keep a cat.

"What kind of a cat?" I asked.

"Perhaps Monsieur does not like cats?" she inquired, anxiously.

"The cat was worshipped as a G.o.d by the ancient Egyptians," I remarked.

"But this one, Monsieur," she said in breathless rea.s.surance, "has only one eye."

I would sooner talk to Antoinette than the tutorial staff of Girton. If she woke up one morning and found she had a mind she would think it a disease.

In the afternoon I strolled into Regent's Park and meeting the McMurray's nine-year-old son in charge of the housemaid, around whom seemed to be hovering a sheepish individual in a bowler hat, I took him off to the Zoological Gardens. On the way he told me, with great glee, that his German governess was in bed with an awful sore throat; that he wasn't doing any lessons; that the sheepish hoverer was Milly's young man, and that the silly way they went on was enough to make one sick.

When he had fed everything feedable and ridden everything ridable, I drove him to the Wellington Road and deposited him with his parents. I love a couple of hours with a child when it is thoroughly happy and on its best behaviour. And the enjoyment is enhanced by the feeling of utter thankfulness that he is not my child, but somebody else's.

In the evening I read and meditated on the happiness of my lot.

The years of school drudgery have already lost their sharp edge of remembered definition, and sometimes I wonder whether it is I who lived through them. I had not a care in the world, not a want that I could not gratify. I thought of Judith. I thought of Sebastian Pasquale. I amused myself by seeking a Renaissance type of which he must be the reincarnation. I fixed upon young Olgiati, one of the a.s.sa.s.sins of Gian Galeazzo Sforza. Of the many hundreds of British youths who pa.s.sed before my eyes during my slavery, he is the only one who has sought me out in his manhood. And strange to say we had only a few months together, during my first year's apprenticeship to the dismal craft, he being in the sixth form, and but three or four years younger than I. He was the maddest, oddest, most diabolical and most unpopular boy in the school. The staff, to whom the conventional must of necessity be always the Divine, loathed him. I alone took to the creature. I think now that my quaint pa.s.sion for the cinquecento Italian must have had something to do with my attraction. In externals he is as English as I am, having been brought up in England by an English mother, but there are thousands of Hindoos who are more British than he. The McMurrays were telling me dreadful stories about him this afternoon. Sighing after an obdurate Viennese dancer, he had lured her coachman into helpless intoxication, had invested himself in the domestic's livery, and had driven off with the lady in the darkness after the performance to the outskirts of the town. What happened exactly, the McMurrays did not know; but there was the devil to pay in Vienna. And yet this inconsequent libertine did the following before my own eyes. We were walking down Piccadilly together one afternoon in the hard winter of 1894. It was a black frost, agonizingly cold. A shivering wretch held out matches for sale. His hideous red toes protruded through his boots. "My G.o.d, my G.o.d!" cried Pasquale, "I can't stand this!" He jumped into a crawling hansom, tore off his own boots, flung them to the petrified beggar and drove home in his stocking-feet. I stood on the curb and, with mingled feelings, watched the recipient, amid an interested group of bystanders, match the small shapely sole against his huge foot, and with a grin tuck the boots under his arm and march away with them to the nearest p.a.w.nbroker. If Pasquale had been an equally compa.s.sionate Briton, he would have stopped to think, and have tossed the man a sovereign. _But he didn't stop to think._ That was my cinquecento Pasquale. And I loved him for it.

I went to bed last night, as I have indicated, the most contented of created beings. I awoke this morning with no greater ruffle on my consciousness than the appointment with my lawyers. The sun shone. A thrush sang l.u.s.tily in the big elm opposite my bedroom windows. The tree, laughed and shook out its finery at me like a woman, saying: "See how green I am, after Sunday's rain." Antoinette's one eyed black cat (a hideous beast) met me in the hall and arching its back welcomed me affably to its new residence. And on my breakfast-table I found a copy of the first edition of Cristoforo da Costa's "_Elogi delle Donne Ill.u.s.tri_," a book which, in great diffidence, I had asked Lord Carnforth, a perfect stranger, to allow me the privilege of consulting in his library, and which Lord Carnforth, with a scholar's splendid courtesy, had sent me to use at my convenience.

Filled with peace and good-will to all men, like a personification of Christmas in May, I started out this morning to see my lawyers. I reached them at three o'clock, having idled at second-hand bookstalls and lunched on the road. I signed their unintelligible doc.u.ment, and wandered through the Temple Gardens and along the Embankment. When I had pa.s.sed under Hungerford Bridge, it struck me that I was warm, a little leg-weary, and the Victoria Embankment Gardens smiled an invitation to repose. I struck the shady path beneath the terrace of the National Liberal Club, and sat myself down on a comfortable bench. The only other occupant was a female in black. As I take no interest in females in black, I disregarded her presence, and gave myself up to the contemplation, of the trim lawns and flower-beds, the green trees masking the unsightly Surrey side of the river, and the back of the statue of Sir Bartle Frere. A continued survey of the last not making for edification (a statue that turns its back on you being one of the dullest objects made by man), I took from my pocket a brown leather-covered volume which I had fished out of a penny box: "_Suite de l'Histoire du Gouvernement de Venise ou L'Histoire des Uscoques, par le Sieur Houssaie, Amsterdam, MDCCV._" A whole complete scholarly history of a forgotten people for a penny. The Uscoques were originally Dalmatians who settled at Segna on the Adriatic and became the most pestiferous colony of pirates and desperadoes of sixteenth century Europe. I opened the yellow-stained pages and savoured their acrid musty smell. How much learning, thought I, bought with the heart's-blood, how many million hours of fierce intellectual struggle appeal to mankind nowadays but as an odour, an odour of decay, in the nostrils of here and there a casual student. I thought this, and my eye caught, repeated many times, the name of the Frangipani, once lords of Segna. As men, their achievements are wiped out of commonly remembered history; but their name is distilled into a sensuous perfume which perchance may be found in the penny scent fountains of to-day. I was smiling over this quaint olfactory coincidence, and wondering whether any human being alive at that moment had ever read the Sieur Houssaie's book, when a tug at my arm, such as a neglected terrier gives with his paw, brought me back to the workaday world. I turned sharply and met a pair of melting, brown, piteous, imploring dog's eyes, belonging not to a terrier, but to the disregarded female in black.

"Will you please, sir, to tell me what I must do."

I stared. She was not in the least like what my half-conscious glance at the female in black had taken her to be. She was quite young, remarkably good looking. Even at the first instant I was struck by her eyes and the ma.s.s of bronze hair and the twitching of a childish mouth. But she had an untidy, touzled, raffish appearance, due to I knew not what invest.i.ture of disrepute. Her hands--for she wore no gloves--wanted washing.

"What a young girl like yourself must not do," said I, "is to enter into conversation with men in public places."

"Then I shall have to die," she said, forlornly, edging away from my side.

She had the oddest little foreign accent. I looked at her again more critically, and discovered what it was that made her look so disreputable. She was wearing an old black dress many sizes too big for her. Great pleats of it were secured by pins in unexpected places, so that quaint chaos was made of the scheme of decoration--black velvet and bugles--on the bodice. Instinctively I felt that a middle-aged, fat, second-hand-clothes-dealing Jewess had built it many years ago for synagogue wear. On the girlish figure it looked preposterous.

Preposterous too was her head-gear, an amorphous bonnet trimmed in black, with a cheap black feather drooping brokenly.

Her eyes gave me a reproachful glance and turned away again. Then she shrugged her shoulders and sniffed. My mother had a housemaid once who always sniffed like that before beginning to cry. My position was untenable. I could not remain stonily on the seat while this grotesquely attired damsel wept; and for the life of me I could not get up and leave her. She looked at me again. Those swimming, pleading eyes were scarcely human. I capitulated.

"Don't cry. Tell me what I can do for you," I said.

She moved a few inches nearer.

"I want to find Harry," she said; "I have lost him."

"Who's Harry?" I naturally inquired.

"He is to be my husband."

"What's his other name?"