The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne Part 52

I knew what she meant. She loved the old Greek myths; their poetry, obscured though it was through my matter-of-fact prose, appealed to her young imagination. She was pa.s.sing through an exquisite phase of development.

I scanned the heavens for a text and found one in the Pleiades. And I told her how these were seven daughters of Atlas and Pleione who herself was the daughter of the Sea, and how they were all pure maidens, save one, and were the companions of Artemis; how Orion the hunter, who was afterwards slain by Artemis and whose three-starred girdle gleamed up there in the sky, pursued them with evil intent, and how they prayed the G.o.ds for deliverance and were changed into the everlasting stars; and, lastly, how the one who was not a maiden, for she loved a mortal, shrank away from her sisters through shame and was invisible to the eye of man.

"She was ashamed," said Carlotta in a low voice, "because she loved some one afterwards, one of the G.o.ds, who would not look at her because she had given herself to a mortal. A woman then has a fire here"--she clasped her hands to her bosom--"and wishes she could burn away to nothing, nothing, just to air, and become invisible."

She was rising hurriedly on the last word, but I brought my hands down on her shoulders.

"Carlotta, my child," said I, "what do you mean?"

She seized my wrists and struggling to rise, panted out in desperation:

"You are one of the G.o.ds, and I wish I were changed into an invisible star."

"I don't," said I, huskily.

By main force I drew her to me and our lips met. She yielded, and this time the whole soul of Carlotta came to me in the kiss.

"It's beautiful to snuggle up against you again," said my ever direct Carlotta, after a while. "I haven't done it--oh, for such a long time."

She sighed contentedly. "Seer Marcous--"

"You must call me Marcus now," said I, somewhat fatuously.

She shook her head as it lay on my shoulder. "No. You are Marcus--or Sir Marcus--to everybody. To me you are always Seer Marcous. Seer Marcous, darling," she half whispered after a pause. "Once I did not know the difference between a G.o.d and a mortal. It was only that morning when I woke up--"

"You took me for a saint in a dressing-gown," said I.

"It's the same thing," she retorted. And then taking up her parable, she told me in her artless way the inner history of her heart since that morning; but what she said is sacred. Also, a man feels himself to be a pitiful dog of a G.o.d when a woman relates how she came to establish him on her High Altar.

Later we struck a lighter vein and spoke of the present, the enchantment of the hour, the scented air, the African stars.

"It seems, my dear," said I, "that we have got to Nephelococcygia after all."

"What is Nephelococcygia?" asked Carlotta.

I relented. "It's a base Aristophanic libel on our dream-city," said I.

Thus out of evil has come good; out of pain has grown happiness; out of horror has sprung an everlasting love. Many a man will say that in all my relations with Carlotta I have comported myself as a fool, and that my marriage is the crowning folly. Well, I pretend not unto wisdom.

Wisdom would have married me to five thousand a year, a position in fashionable society, my Cousin Dora and premature old age antecedent to eternal destruction. I hold that my salvation has lain the way of folly.

Again, it may be urged against me that I have squandered my life, that with all my learning, such as it is, I have achieved nothing. I once thought so. I boasted of it in my diary when I complacently styled myself a waster in Earth's factory. Oh, that diary! Let me here solemnly retract and abjure every crude and idiot opinion and reflection of life set forth in that frenetic record! I regard myself not as a waster--I remember a pa.s.sage in Epictetus treating of the ways of Providence:

"For what else can I do, a lame old man, than sing hymns to G.o.d? If then I were a nightingale I would do the part of a nightingale: if I were a swan, I would do like a swan. But now I am a rational creature and I ought to praise G.o.d; this is my work, I do it, nor will I desert this post so long as I am allowed to keep it; and I exhort you to join in this same song."

No, I am neither nightingale nor swan, and cannot add, as they do, to the beauty of the earth. The lame old man has his limitations; but within them, he can, by cleaving to his post and praising G.o.d, fulfil his destiny.

Carlotta coming onto the housetop to summon me to lunch looks over my shoulder as I write these words.

"But you are not a lame old man!" she cries in indignation. "You are the youngest and strongest and cleverest man in the world!"

"What am I to do with these miraculous gifts?" I ask, laughing.

"You are to become famous," she says, with conviction.

"Very well, my dear. We will have to go to some new land where attaining fame is easier for a beginner than in London; and we'll send for Antoinette and Stenson to help us."

"That will be very nice," she observes.

So I am to become famous. _Ce que femme veut, Dieu le veut_. And Carlotta has got a soul of her own now and means to make the most of it. It will lead me upward somewhere. But whether I am to be king of New Babylon or Prime Minister of New Zealand or lawgiver to a Polynesian tribe is a secret as yet hidden in the lap of the G.o.ds, whence Carlotta doubtless will s.n.a.t.c.h it in her own good time.

"You are writing a lot of rubbish," says Carlotta.

"And a little truth. The mixture is Life," I answer.