The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne Part 50

"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 embarra.s.sment 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 ill.u.s.trated 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 ba.n.a.lities.

I had grown old. Pa.s.sion 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 sh.e.l.l. The simile is commonplace; but so was I--the most commonplace human snail that ever occupied a commonplace ten-roomed sh.e.l.l. And now the house and its useless books and its million-fold more useless ma.n.u.script "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 G.o.ds 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 pa.s.sed 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 circ.u.mambient 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 ent.i.tled, she treated me with human affection and sympathy, keeping her own wants in the background, anxious only to antic.i.p.ate 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 pa.s.sed.

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 pa.s.sed. 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.

"It is a dream-city," said I, in admiration.

Carlotta did not reply. I thought she had not heard. We jogged on a little in silence. At last she drew very close to me.