CHAPTER XXIII
Behold Carlotta again installed in my house which she regarded as
her home. Heaven forbid that I should sow any doubt thereof in
her mind.
I had learned perhaps one lesson: the meaning of love. The love
that is desire alone, though sung in all romance of all the ages,
is of the brute nature and is doomed to perish. The love that
pardons, endures through wrong, contents itself in abnegation, is
of the imperishable things that draw weak man a little nearer to
the angels. When Carlotta wept upon my shoulder during those few
first moments of her return I knew that all resentment was gone
from my heart, that it would have been a poor, ignoble thing.
Had she come back to me leprous of body and abominable of spirit,
it would not have mattered. I would have forgiven her, loved
her, cherished her just the same. It was a question, not of
reason, not of human pity, not of quixotism; not of any argument
or sentiment for which I could be responsible. I was helpless,
obeying a reflex action of the soul.
The days passed tranquilly. In spite of pain I felt an odd
happiness. I had nothing selfishly to hope for. Perhaps I had
aged five years in one, and I viewed life differently. It was
enough for me that she had come home, to the haven where no harm
could befall her. She was my appointed task, even as her husband
was Judith's. I recognised in myself the man with the one
talent. The deep wisdom of the parable can be taken to inmost
heart for comfort only by men of little destinies. With infinite
love and patience to mould Carlotta into a sweet, good woman, a
wise mother of the child that was to be--that was the inglorious
task which Providence had set me to accomplish. In its
proportion to the aggregate of human effort it was infinitesimal.
But who shall say that it was not worth the doing? Save writing
a useless book, in what other sphere of sublunar energy could I
have been effectual? I did not thus analyse my attitude at the
time; the man who does so is a poser, a mime to his own audience;
but looking back, I think I was guided by some such unformulated
considerations.
Although my hermit mania was in itself radically cured, yet I
altered nothing in my relations with the outside world. I wrote
to Judith a brief account of what had occurred and received from
her a sympathetic answer. My reading among the Mystics and
Thaumaturgists put me on the track of Arabic. I found that
Carlotta knew enough of the language to give me elementary
instruction, and thus the whirligig of time brought in its
revenge by constituting me her pupil, to our joint edification.
After a while the unhappiness of the past seemed to have faded
from her mind. She spoke little of Paris, less of the dull
pension, and never of Pasquale. She bore towards him an animal's
silent animosity against a human being who has done it an
unforgettable injury. On the other hand, as I have since
discovered, she was slowly developing, and had begun to realise
that in giving herself light-heartedly to a man whom she did not
love, she had committed a crime against her sex, for which she
had paid a heavy penalty: a sentiment, however, which did not
mitigate her resentment against him. Often I saw her sitting
with knitted brows, her needlework idle on her lap, evidently
unravelling some complicated problem; presently she would either
shake her head sadly as if the intellectual process were too hard
for her and resume her needle, or if she happened to catch my
glance, she would start, smile reassuringly at me, and apply
herself with exaggerated zeal to her work. These fits of
abstraction were not those of a woman speculating on mysteries of
the near future. Such Carlotta also indulged in, and they were
easy to recognise, by the dreaminess of her eyes and the faint
smile flickering about her lips. The moods of knitted brows were
periods of soul-travail, and I wondered what they would bring
forth.
One afternoon I came home and found her weeping over a book.
When I bent down to see what she was reading--she had acquired a
taste for novels during the dull pension time in Paris--she
caught my head with both hands.
"Oh, Seer Marcous, do you think they ought to make me wear a
great 'A'?"
"What do you mean?" I asked.
"Like Hester Prynne--see."
She showed me Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Scarlet Letter."
"What made you take this out of the shelves?"
"The title," she replied, simply. "I am so fond of red things;
but I should not like that great red 'A'."
"Those were days," said I, "when people thought they could only
be good by being very cruel."
"They would have been more cruel if Hester had not loved the
minister," said Carlotta, looking at me wistfully.
"My dear little girl," said I, seeing whither her thoughts were
tending, "do not bother your brain with psychological problems."
"What are--?" began Carlotta.
I pinched the question, as it were, out of her cheek and smiled
and took away the book.
"They are a dreadful disease my little girl has been afflicted
with for some time. When you sit and wrinkle your forehead like
this," and I scowled forbiddingly, whereat Carlotta laughed, "you
are suffering from acute psychological problem."
"Then I am thinking," said Carlotta, reflectively.
"Don't think too much, dear, just now," said I. "It is best for
you to be happy and calm and contented. Otherwise I'll have to
tell the doctor, and he'll give you the blackest and nastiest
physic you have ever tasted."
"To cure me of a what-you-call-it problem?"
"Yes," said I, emphatically.
"_Hou!_" laughed Carlotta in a superior way, "physic can't cure
that."
"You are relying on an exploded fallacy immortalised in a
hackneyed Shakespearian quotation," I remarked.
"Go on," said Carlotta, encouragingly.
"What do you mean?" I asked, taken aback.
"Oh, you darling Seer Marcous," cried Carlotta. "It is so lovely
to hear you talk!"
So I went on talking, and the distress occasioned by the "Scarlet
Letter" was forgotten.
I have mentioned Carlotta's needlework. This was undertaken at
the sapient instigation of Antoinette, who in her turn, I am
sure, neglected the ladle for the scissors, and cast many of her
duties upon the silent but sympathetic Stenson. Carlotta herself
delighted in these preparations. She was never happier than when
curled up on the sofa, a box of chocolates by her side, her work-
basket frothing over, like a great dish of _oeufs a la neige_,
with lawn or mull or what-not, and (I verily believe to complete
her content) my ungainly figure and hatchet-face within her
purview. She would eat and sew industriously. Sometimes she
would press too hard on a sweetmeat and with a little cry would
hold up a sticky finger and thumb.
"Look," she would say, puckering up her face.
And to save from soilure the dainty fabric she was working at, I
would rise and wipe her fingers with my handkerchief; whereupon
she would coo out the sweetest "thank you," in the world, and
perhaps hold up a diminutive garment.
"Isn't it pretty?"
"Yes, my dear," I would say, and I would turn aside wondering at
the exquisite refinements of pain that men were sometimes called
upon to bear.
At last the time came. I sat up all night in a torture of
suspense, having got it into my foolish head that Carlotta might
die. The doctor came upon me at six in the morning sitting half
frozen at the bottom of the stairs. When he gave me his cheery
news he seemed to develop from a middle-aged, commonplace man
into a radiant archangel.
I met Antoinette soon afterwards, busy, important, exultant. She
nevertheless graciously accorded me a brief interview.
"And to think, Monsieur," she exclaimed, as if the crowning
triumph of a million ions of evolution had at, last been
attained, "to think that it is a boy!"
"You would have been just as pleased if it had been a girl," said
I.
She shook her wise, fat head. "Women _ca ne vaut pas grand'
chose._"
Let it be remembered that "women are of no great account" is a
sentiment expressed, not by me, but by Antoinette. But all the
same I soon found myself a cipher in the house, where the
triumvirate of the negligible sex, Antoinette, the nurse and
Carlotta, reigned despotically.
To write much of Carlotta's happiness would be to treat of sacred
things at which I can only guess. She dwelt in rapture. The joy
and meaning of the universe were concentrated in the tiny bundle
of pink flesh that lay on her bosom. I used to sit by her side
while she talked unwearyingly of him. He was a thing of infinite
perfections. He had such a lot of hair.
"She won't believe, sir," said the nurse, "that it will all drop
off and a new crop come."
"Oh-h!" said Carlotta. "It can't be so cruel. For it is my hair
--see, Seer Marcous, darling; isn't it just my hair?"
It was her great solicitude that the boy should resemble her.
"I don't know about his nose," she remarked critically. "There
is so little of it yet and it is so soft--feel how soft it is.
But his eyes are brown like mine, and his mouth--now look, aren't
they just the same?"
She put her cheek next to the child's and invited me to compare
the two adjacent baby mouths. They were, of a truth, very much
alike.
She was jealous of the baby, desirous of having it always with
her to tend and fondle, impatient of the nurse and Antoinette.
It was a thing so intensely hers that she resented other hands
touching it. Oddly enough, of me she made an exception. Nothing
delighted her more than to put the little creature into my
awkward and nervous arms, and watch me carry it about the room.
I think she wanted to give me something, and this share in the
babe was the most precious gift she could devise.
Of Pasquale she continued to say nothing. In her intense joy of
motherhood he seemed to have become the dim creature of a dream.
I had registered the birth without consulting her--in the legal
names of the parents.
"What are you going to call him, Carlotta?" I asked one day.
"_Mon petit chou._ That's what Antoinette says. It's a
beautiful name."
"There are many points in calling an infant one's little
cabbage," I admitted, "but soon he'll grow up to be as old as I
am, and--" I sighed, "who would call me their _petit chow_?"
Carlotta laughed.
"That is true. We shall have to find a name." She reflected for
a few moments; then put her arms round my neck and continued her
reflections.
"He shall be Marcus--another Marcus Ordeyne. Then perhaps some
day he will be 'Seer Marcous' like you."
"Do you mean when I die?" I asked.
"Oh, not for years and years and years!" she cried, tightening
her clasp in alarm. "But the child lives longer than the father.
It is fate. He will live longer than I."
"Let us hope so, dear," I answered. "But it is just because I am
not his father that he can't be Sir Marcus when I die. He can
have my name; but my title--"
"Who will have it?"
"No one."
"It will die too?"
"It will be quite dead."
"You are his father, you know, _really_," she whispered.
"The law of England takes no count, unfortunately, of things of
the spirit," said I.
"What are things of the spirit?"
"The things, my dear," said I, "that you are beginning to
understand." I bent down and kissed the child as it lay on her
lap. "Poor little Marcus Ordeyne," I said. "My poor quaintly
fathered little son, I'm afraid there is much trouble ahead of
you, but I'll do my best to help you through it."
"Bless you, dear," said Carlotta, softly.
I looked at her in wonder. She had spoken for the first time
like a grown woman--like a woman with a soul.
A few weeks later.
We were sitting at breakfast. The morning newspaper contained
the account of a battle and the lists of British officers killed.
I scanned as usual the melancholy columns, when a name among the
dead caught my eye--and I stared at it stupidly. Pasquale was
dead, killed outright by a Boer bullet. The wild, bright life was
ended. It seemed a horrible thing, and, much as he had wronged
me, my first sentiment was one of dismay. He was too gallant and
beautiful a creature for death.
Carlotta poured out my tea and came round with the cup which she
deposited by my side. To prevent her peeping over my shoulder at
the paper, as she usually did, I laid it on the table; but her
quick eye had already read the great headlines.
"Great Battle. British officers killed. Oh, let me see, Seer
Marcous."
"No, dear," said I. "Go and eat your breakfast."
She looked at me strangely. I tried to smile; but as I am an
incompetent actor my grimace was a proclamation of
disingenuousness.
"Why shouldn't I read it?" she asked, quickly.
"Because I say you mustn't, Carlotta."
She continued to look at me. She had suddenly grown pale. I
stirred my tea and made a pretence of sipping it.
"Go on with your breakfast, my child," I repeated.
"There is something--something about him in the paper," said
Carlotta. "He is a British officer."
In the face of her intuition further concealment appeared
useless. Besides, sooner or later she would have to know.
"He is a British officer no longer, dear," said I.
"Is he dead?"
My mind flew back to an evening long ago--long, long ago it
seemed
--when another newspaper had told of another death, and my ears
caught the echo of the identical question that had then fallen
from her lips. I dreaded lest she should say again, "I am so
glad."
I beckoned her to my side, and pointing with my finger to the
name watched her face anxiously. She read, stared for a bit in
front of her and turned to me with a piteous look. I drew her to
me, and she laid her face against my shoulder.
"I don't know why I'm crying, Seer Marcous, dear," she said,
after a while.
I made her drink some of my tea, but she would eat nothing, and
presently she went upstairs. She had not said that she was glad.
She had wept and not known the reason for her tears. I railed at
myself for my doubts of her.
She was subdued and thoughtful all the day. In the evening,
instead of curling herself up in the sofa-corner among the
cushions, she sat on a stool by my feet as I read, one hand
supporting her chin, the other resting on my knee.
"I am glad he was a brave man," she said at last, alluding to
Pasquale for the first time since the morning. "I like brave
men."
"_Dulce et decorum est._ He died for his country," said I.
"It does not hurt me now so much to think of him," said Carlotta.
I could not help feeling a miserable pang of jealousy at
Pasquale's posthumous rehabilitation as a hero in Carlotta's
heart. Yet, was it not natural? Was it not the way of women? I
saw myself far remote from her, and though she never spoke of him
again I divined that her thoughts dwelt not untenderly on his
memory. I was absurd, I know. But I had begun almost to believe
in my make-believe paternity, and I was jealous of the rightful
claims of the dead man.
And yet had he lived he might have come back one day with his
conquering air and his irresistible laugh, and carried them both
away from me. In sparing me this crowning humiliation I thanked
the high gods.
But never to this day has she mentioned his name again.
