CHAPTER XIX
November 10th.
I had to ring twice before Judith's servant opened the flat door.
"Mrs. Mainwaring is engaged just at present, Sir Marcus."
"Ask her if I can come in and wait, as I have something of
importance to say to her."
She left me standing in the passage, a thing that had never
before occurred to me in Judith's establishment, and presently
returned with her answer. Would I mind waiting in the dining-
room? I entered. The table was littered with sheets of her
statistical work and odd bits of silk' and lining. A type-writer
stood at one end and a sewing-machine at the other. On the
writing-desk by the window, in the midst of a mass of letters and
account-books, rested a large bowl filled with magnificent blooms
of white and yellow chrysanthemums. A volume of Dante lay open
face downwards on the corner. It did my heart good to see this
untidiness, so characteristic of Judith, so familiar, so
intimate. She had taken her trouble bravely, I reflected. The
ordinary daily task had not been left undone. Through all she
had preserved her valiant sanity. I felt rebuked for my own loss
of self-control.
I was about to turn away from the litter of the desk, when my eye
caught sight of an envelope bearing a French stamp and addressed
in Pasquale's unmistakable handwriting. As there seemed to be a
letter inside, I did not take it up to examine it more closely.
The glance was enough to assure me that it came from Pasquale.
Why should he be corresponding with Judith? I walked away
puzzled. Was it a justification, a confession, a plea to her as
my friend to obtain my forgiveness? If there is one thing more
irritating than another it is to light accidentally upon a
mystery affecting oneself in a friend's correspondence. One can
no more probe deeply into it than one can steal the friend's
spoons. It seems an indiscretion to have noticed it, an
unpardonable impertinence to subject it to conjecture. In spite
of my abhorring the impulse of curiosity, the sweeping,
flaunting, swaggering handwriting of Pasquale worried me.
Judith came in, looking much as she had done on the occasion of
my last visit, worn and anxious, with a strange expression in her
eyes.
"I am sorry to have kept you waiting," she said, extending a
lifeless hand.
I raised it to my lips.
"I would have gladly waited all day to see you, Judith," I said.
"Really?"
She laughed in an odd way.
"And idle speech from me to you at the present time would be an
outrage," I answered. "I have passed through much since I saw
you last."
"So have I," said Judith. "More than you imagine. Well," she
continued as I bowed my head accepting the rebuke, "what have you
got so important to tell me?"
"Much," said I. "In the first place you must be aware of what
has happened, for I can't help seeing there a letter from
Pasquale."
She glanced swiftly at the desk and back again at me.
"Yes," she replied, "he is in Paris."
I was amazed at her nonchalance.
"Has he told you nothing?"
"Perhaps Sir Marcus Ordeyne would like to see his letter," she
said, ironically.
"You know perfectly well that I would not read it," said I.
Judith laughed again, and rolled her handkerchief into a little
ball between her nervous fingers.
"Forgive me," she said. "I like to see the _grand seigneur_ in
you now and then. It puts me in mind of happier days. But about
Pasquale--the only thing he tells me is that he is not able to
execute a commission for me. He told me on the night he drove me
home that he was going to Paris, and I asked him to get me some
cosmetic. Carmine Badouin, if you want to know. I have got to
rouge now before I am fit to be seen in the street. I am quite
frank about it."
"Then you know nothing of Carlotta?" I cried.
"Carlotta?"
"She eloped with that double-dyed, damned, infernal villain, the
day after I saw you."
Judith looked at me for a moment, then closed her eyes and turned
her head away, resting her hand on the table. My indignation
waxed hot against the scoundrel. How dare he write casual
letters to Judith about Carmine Badouin with his treachery on his
conscience? I know the terms of flippant grace in which the
knave couched this precious epistle. And I could see Carlotta
reading over his shoulder and clapping her hands and cooing: "Oh,
that is so funny!"
When I had told Judith the outlines of the story, pacing up and
down the little room while she remained motionless by the table,
she put out her hand to me, and in a low voice, and with still
averted eyes said that she was sorry, deeply sorry. Her tone
rang so true and loyal that my heart throbbed with quick
appreciation of her high nature, and I wrung her outstretched
hand.
"God bless you, Judith," I cried, fervently. "Bless you for your
sweet sympathy. Be sorry for me only as for a man who has passed
through the horrors of delirium. But for me as I stand before
you now, I ask you not to be sorry. I have come to bring you, if
I can, dear Judith, a measure of gladness, perhaps of happiness."
She wrenched herself free from me, and a terrified cry of
"Marcus!" checked my dithyrambic appeal. She shrank away so that
a great corner of the dining-table separated us, and she stared
at me as though my words hats been the affrighting utterance of a
madman.
"Marcus! What do you mean?" she cried, with an unnatural
shrillness in her voice.
"I mean," said I, "I mean--I mean that 'crushed by three days'
pressure, my three days' love lies slain.' Time has withered him
at the root. I have buried him deep in unconsecrated ground,
like a vampire, with a stake through his heart. And I have come
back to you, Judith, humbly to crave your forgiveness and your
love--to tell you I have changed, dear--to offer you all I have
in the world if you will but take it--to give you my life, my
daily, hourly devotion. My God!" I cried, "don't you believe
me?"
She still stared at me in a frightened way, leaning heavier on
the table. Her lips twitched before they could frame the words
"Yes, I believe you. You have never lied to me."
"Then in the name of love and heaven," I cried, "why do you look
at me like that?"
She trembled, evidently suppressing something with intense
effort, whether bitter laughter, indignation or a passionate
outburst I could not tell.
"You ask why?" she said, unsteadily. "Because you seem like the
angel of the flaming vengeance."
At these astounding words it was my turn to look amazed.
"Vengeance?" I echud. "What wrong have you done me or any living
creature? Come, my dear," and I moved nearer by seating myself
on the corner of the table, close to the type-writer, and leaning
towards her, "let us look at this thing soberly. If ever a man
had need of woman I have need of you. I can live alone no
longer. We must share one home henceforth together. We can snap
our fingers at the world, you and I. If you have anything to say
against the proposal, let us discuss it calmly."
Judith's slender figure vibrated like a cord strung to
breaking-point. Her voice vibrated.
"Yes, let us discuss it calmly. But not here. The sight of you
sitting in the middle of my life, between the sewing-machine and
the type-writer, is getting on my nerves. Let us go into the
drawing-room. There is an atmosphere of calm there--" her voice
quavered in a queer little choke--"of sabbatical calm."
I slid quickly from the table and put my arm round her waist.
"Tell me, Judith, what is amiss with you."
She broke away from me roughly, thrusting me back.
"Nothing. A woman's nothing, if you understand what that means.
Come into the drawing-room."
I opened the door; she passed out and I followed her along the
passage. She preceded me into the drawing-room, and I stayed for
a moment to close the door, fumbling with the handle which has
been loose for some months. When I turned and had made a couple
of steps forward, I halted involuntarily under the shock of a
considerable surprise.
We were not alone. Standing on the hearth-rug, his hands behind
his back, his brows bent on me benevolently was a man in clerical
attire. He looked ostentatiously, exaggeratedly clerical. His
clerical frock-coat was of inordinate length; his boots were
aggravatingly clump-soled; by a very large white tie, masking the
edges of a turned-down collar, he proclaimed himself Evangelical.
An otherwise clean-shaven florid face was adorned with brown
side-whiskers growing rather long. A bald, shiny head topped a
fringe of brown hair.
I stared at this unexpected gentleman for a second or two, and
then, recovering my self-possession, looked enquiringly at
Judith.
"Sir Marcus," she said, "let me introduce my husband, Mr. Rupert
Mainwaring."
Her husband! This benevolent Evangelical parson her husband!
But the brilliant gallant who had dazzled her eyes? The
dissolute scoundrel that had wrecked her life? Where was he?
Dumfounded, I managed to bow politely enough, but my stupefaction
was covered by Judith rushing across the room and uttering a
strange sound which resolved itself into a shrill, hysterical
laugh as she reached the door which she opened and slammed behind
her. I heard her scream hysterically in the passage; then the
slam of another door; and the silence told me that she had shut
herself in her bedroom. Disregarding the new husband's presence,
I rang the bell, and the servant who had left her kitchen on
hearing the scream entered immediately.
"Go to your mistress. She is ill," said I.
The maid hurriedly departed. The parson and I looked at one
another.
"I am afraid," said I, "that my presence is unhappily an
intrusion. I hope to make your better acquaintance on another
occasion."
"Oh, please don't go," said he, "my wife is only a little upset
and will soon recover. I beg that you will excuse her. Besides,
I should like to have a talk with you."
He offered me a chair, my own chair, the comfortable, broad-
seated Empire chair I had given Judith as a birthday present
years ago, the chair in which I had invariably sat. He did it
with the manner of the master of the house, a most courteous
gentleman. The situation was fantastic. Some ingenious devil
must have conceived it by way of pandering to the after-dinner
humour of the high gods. As I sat down I rubbed my eyes. Was
this brown-whiskered, bald-headed clerical gentleman real? The
rubbing of my eyes dispelled no hallucination. He was flesh and
blood and still regarded me urbanely. It was horrible. The
desertion of the scoundrelly husband, who I thought was lost
somewhere in the cesspool of Europe, was the basis, the sanction
of the relations between Judith and myself; and here was this
reverend, respectable man apologising for his wife and begging me
to be seated in my own chair. The remark of Judith's that I
should find sabbatical calm in the drawing-room occurred to me,
and I had to grip the arms of the chair to prevent myself from
joining Judith in her hysterics.
The appearance of the husband in his legendary colours of
rascality would have been a shock. The sudden scattering of
my plans for Judith's happiness I should have viewed with
consternation. But it would have been normal. For him, however,
to appear in the guise of an Evangelical clergyman, the very last
kind of individual to be associated with Judith, was, I repeat,
horribly fantastic.
"I believe, Sir Marcus," said he, deliberately parting the tails
of his exaggerated frock-coat and sitting down near me, " that
you are a very great friend of my wife."
I murmured that I had known Mrs. Mainwaring for some years.
"You are doubtless acquainted with her unhappy history."
"I have heard her speak of it," said I.
"You must then share her surprise in seeing me here to-day. I
should like to assure you, as representing her friends and
society and that sort of thing, as I have assured her, that I
have not taken this step without earnest prayer and seeking the
counsel of Almighty God."
I am by no means a bigoted pietist, but to hear a person talk
lightly about seeking the counsel of Almighty God jars upon my
sense of taste. I stiffened at the sanctimonious tone in which
the words were uttered.
"You have without doubt very good reasons for coming back into
the circle of her life," said I.
"The best of all reasons," he replied, caressing a brown whisker,
"namely, that I am a Christian."
I liked him less and less.
"Is that the reason, may I ask, why you remained away from her
all these years?"
"I deserve the scoff," said he: "Those were days of sin. I
deserve every humiliation that can be put upon me. But I have
since found the grace of God. I found it at three o'clock in the
afternoon on the eighth of January, eighteen hundred and--"
"Never mind the year," I interrupted.
My gorge rose. The man was a sanctimonious Chadband. He had
come with nefarious designs on Judith's slender capital. I saw
knavery in the whites of his upturned eyes.
"I should be glad," I continued quickly, "if you would come to
the point of the conversation you desire to have with me. I
presume it concerns Mrs. Mainwaring. She has reconciled herself
to circumstances and has found means to regulate her life with a
certain measure of contentment and comfort until now, when you
suddenly introduce a disturbing factor. You appear to wish to
tell me your reasons for doing so--and I can't see what the grace
of God has to do with it."
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.
CBAPTER 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.
