The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne Part 51

"Shall we ever get there?" she asked, pointing ahead with the hand that held the reins.

"To Mogador? Yes, I hope so," I answered with a laugh. I thought she was tired.

"No, not Mogador. The dream-city--where every one wants to get."

"You have travelled far, my dear," said I, "to hanker now after dream-cities and the unattainable. I knew a little girl once who would have asked: 'What is a dream-city?"

"She doesn't ask now because she knows," replied Carlotta. "No. We shall never get there. It looks as if we were riding straight into it--but when we get close, it will just be Mogador."

"Aren't you happy, Carlotta?" I asked.

"Are you, Seer Marcous?"

"I? I am a philosopher, my child, and a happy philosopher would be a _lusus naturae_, a freak, a subject for a Barnum & Bailey Show. If they caught him they would put him between the hairy man and the living skeleton."

"I suppose I'm getting to be a philosopher, too," said Carlotta, "and I hate it! Sometimes I think I hate everything and everybody--save you, Seer Marcous, darling. It's wicked of me. I must have been born wicked.

But I used to be happy. I never wanted to go to dream-cities. I was just like a cat. Like Polyphemus. Do you remember Polyphemus?"

"Yes," said I. And then set off my balance by this strange conversation with Carlotta, I added: "I killed him."

She turned a startled face to me.

"You killed him? Why?"

"He laughed at me because I was unhappy," said I.

"Through me?"

"Yes; through you. But that's neither here nor there. We were not discussing the death of Polyphemus. We were talking about being philosophers, and you said that as a philosopher you hated everything and everybody except me. Why do you exclude me, Carlotta?"

We were riding so near together that my leg rubbed her saddle-girth.

I looked hard at her. She turned away her head and put the pantomime parasol between us. I heard a little choking sob.

"Let us get off--and sit down a little--I want to cry.

"The end of all feminine philosophy," I said, somewhat brutally. "No.

It's getting late. That's only Mogador in front of us. Let us go to it."

Carlotta shifted her parasol quickly.

"What has happened to you, Seer Marcous? You have never spoken to me like that before."

"The very deuce seems to have happened," said I, angrily--though why I should have felt angry, heaven only knows. "First you turn yourself into a Royal Academy picture with that unspeakable umbrella of yours and the trumpery blue sky and sunshine, and make my sentimental soul ache; and then you--"

"It's a very pretty umbrella," said Carlotta, looking upwards at it demurely.

"Give it to me," I said.

She yielded it with her usual docility. I cast it upon the desert. Being open it gave one or two silly rebounds, then lay still. Carlotta reined up her mule.

"Oh-h!" she said, in her old way.

I dismounted hurriedly, and helped her down and pa.s.sed my arm through the two bridles.

"My dear child," said I, "what is the meaning of all this? Here we have been living for months the most tranquil and unruffled existence, and now suddenly you begin to talk about dream-cities and the impossibility of getting there, and I turn angry and heave parasols about Africa. What is the meaning of it?"

The most extraordinary part of it was that I should be treating Carlotta as a grown-up woman, after the fashion of the hero of a modern French novel. Perhaps I was younger than I thought.

She kept her eyes fixed downward.

"Why are you angry with me?" she asked in a low voice.

"I haven't the remotest idea," said I.

She lifted her eyelids slowly--oh, very, very slowly, glanced quiveringly at me, while the shadow of a smile fluttered round her lips.

I verily believe the baggage exulted in her feminine heart. I turned away, leading the two animals, and picked up the parasol which I closed and restored to her.

"I thought you wanted to cry," I remarked.

"I can't," said Carlotta, plaintively.

"And you won't tell me why you exclude me from your universal hatred?"

Carlotta dug up the sand with the point of her foot. The sight of it recalled the row of pink toes thrust unashamedly before my eyes on the second day of her arrival in London. An old hope, an old fear, an old struggle renewed themselves. She was more adorably beautiful even than the Carlotta of the pink tus, and spiritually she was reborn. I heard her whisper:

"I can't."

Now I had sworn to myself all the oaths that a man can swear that I should be Carlotta's grandfather to the end of time. Hitherto I had felt the part. Now suddenly grey beard and slippered pantaloons are cast aside and I am young again with a glow in my heart which beats fast at her beauty. I shut my teeth.

"No," said I to myself. "The curtain shall not rise on that farcical tragedy again."

I threw the reins on the neck of Carlotta's mule, which with its companion had been regarding us with bland stupidity.

"I think we had better ride on, Carlotta," I said. "Mount."

She meekly gave me her little foot and I hoisted her into the saddle.

We did not exchange a word till we reached Mogador. But each of us felt that something had happened.

At dinner we met as usual. Carlotta spoke somewhat feverishly of our travels, and asked me numberless questions, betraying an unprecedented thirst for information. I never gave her historical instruction with less zest.

After the meal we went onto the flat roof. Carlotta poured out my coffee at the small table beside the long Madeira cane chair which was my accustomed seat. The starlit night was blue and languorous. From some cafe came the monotonous strains of Moorish music, the harsh strings and harsh men's voices softened by the distance. Carlotta took my coffee-cup when I had finished and set it down in her granddaughterly way. Then she stood in front of me.

"Won't you make a little room for me on your chair, Seer Marcous, darling?"

I shifted my feet from the foot-rest and she sat down. I may observe that I was not, in oriental bashawdom, occupying the one and only chair on the housetop.

"Tell me about the stars," she said.