Books: The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne
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William J. Locke >> The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne
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"Ach, that is very interesting," said he. "Could you tell me the
date of Magniagus's marriage?"
"I never heard of him till this moment, my dear Herr Doctor. But
depend upon it, he was either married or was going to be married,
and she ran away from him and left him without the heart to print
for posterity, and when he took his seat among the saints she
said she was so glad; he was a stupid old ink-sodden fellow!"
He departed sorrowingly from the deck, clasping the precious
volume to his heart. Allusive or discursive speech scared him
like indecency; and I had used his gem but as a peg whereon
flauntingly to hang it. It took me three days to tame him and to
induce him to show me another of his treasures, recently acquired
in Athens. Ioannes Georgius Godelmann's _Tractate de Lamiis_,
printed by Nicholas Bassaeus of Frankfurt. I read him Keats's
poem about the young lady of Corinth, of which he had never heard.
His mental attitude towards it was the indulgent one of an old
diplomatist towards a child's woolly lamb. For him literature
had never existed and printing ended in the year 1600. But I was
sorry when he left me at Constantinople, where he counted on
striking the track of a Bohemian herbal, printed at Prague, and
never more to be read by any of the sons of man. In the summer
he was going book-hunting in Iceland. By chance I have learned
since that he died there. Peace to his ashes! For aught I could
see he dwelt in a mild stupor of happiness, absorbed in the
intoxication of a tremulous pursuit. I wondered whether his soul
contained that antidote--the _odor di femina_. Perhaps he met it
at Reykjavic and he died of dismay.
I thought that my landing at Alexandretta was alone responsible
for the continuance of my dotage, and hoped that fresh scenes
would banish Carlotta's distracting image. But no, it was one of
the many vain reflections on which I based a false philosophy.
Whether in Beyrout, or the land of the "sweet singer of
Persephone," or Alexandria, or on the Cannebiere of Marseilles,
or in the queer half-Orient of Algiers whither a restless pursuit
of the Identical led me, or in Lisbon, or in the mountainous
republic of Andorre, where I hoped to find primitive wisdom and
to shape a theory from first principles, and whence I was
ironically driven by fleas--whether on land or sea, in cities or
in solitudes, the vanished hand harped on my heartstrings and
the voice that was still (as far as I was concerned) cooed its
dove-notes into my ears.
I remember overhearing myself described on a steamboat by a
pretty American girl of sixteen, as "a quaint gentle old guy who
talks awful rot which no one can understand, and is all the time
thinking about something else." My sudden emergence from the
companion-way, where I was lighting a cigarette, brought red
confusion into the young person's cheeks.
"How old do you think I am?" I asked.
"Oh, about sixty," quoth the damsel.
"I'm glad I'm quaint and gentle, even though I do talk rot," said
I.
With the resourcefulness of her nation she linked her arm in mine
and started a confidential walk up and down the deck.
"You are just a dear," she remarked.
She could not have said more to Anastasius Dose had he been
there; as far as I can recollect he must just then have been
dying of the Inevitable in Iceland. Perhaps the few months had
brought me to resemble him. Instinctively I put my hand to my
head to reassure myself that I was not wearing a rakish little
soft felt hat with a partridge-feather, and I reflected with some
complacency that my rimless pince-nez did not give me the owlish
appearance produced by Anastasius Dose's great round, iron-rimmed
goggles. From such crumbs of vanity are we sometimes reduced to
take comfort.
"I just want to know what you are," said my young American friend.
Shall I confess my attraction? She brought a dim suggestion of
Carlotta. She had Carlotta's colouring and Carlotta's candour.
But there the resemblance stopped. The grey matter of her brain
had been distilled from the air of Wall Street, and there were
precious few things between earth and sky of which she hadn't
prescience.
"I'm a broken-down philosopher," said I.
" Oh, that's nothing. So is everybody as soon as they get sense.
What did you make your money in?"
"I've not made any money," I answered, meekly.
"I thought all people who were knighted in your country had made
piles of money."
"Knighted!" I exclaimed. "What on earth do you think a quaint
old guy like myself could possibly have done to get knighted?"
"Then you're a baronet," she said, severely.
"I assure you it is not my fault."
"I thought all baronets were wicked. They are in the novels.
Somehow you don't look like a baronet. You ought to have a black
moustache and an eyeglass and smoke a cigar and sneer. But, say,
how do you fill up the time if you do nothing to make money?"
"I am going through the world," said I, "on an adventurous quest,
like a knight--or a baronet, if you will--of the Round Table. I
am in quest of a Theory of Life."
"I guess I was born with it," cried young New York.
"I guess I'll die without finding it," said I.
London again. My quiet house. Antoinette and Stenson. The
well-ordered routine of comfort. My books. The dog's-eared
manuscript of the "History of Renaissance Morals," unpacked by
Stenson and hid in its usual place on the writing-table. Nothing
changed, yet everything utterly different.
A growing distaste for the forced acquaintanceships of travel and
a craving for home brought me back. Save perhaps in health I had
profited little by my journeyings. My bodily shell formed part
of strange landscapes and occurred in fortuitous gatherings of
men, but my heart was all the time in my Mausoleum by the
Regent's Park. I was drawn thither by a force almost magnetic,
irresistible. My two domestics welcomed me home, but no one
else. Only my lawyers knew of my arrival. With them alone had I
corresponded during the many months of my absence. Stay; I did
write one letter to Mrs. McMurray while I was at Verona, in reply
to an enquiry as to what had become of Carlotta and myself. I
answered courteously but briefly that Carlotta had run away with
Pasquale and that I should be abroad for an indefinite period.
But not even a letter from my lawyers awaited me. I thought
somewhat wistfully that I would willingly have paid six and eight
pence for it. But the feeling was momentary.
Then began a queer, untroubled life. Without definite resolve I
became a recluse, living forlornly from day to day. Like a bat I
avoided the outer sunshine and took my melancholy walks at night.
I had a pride in cherishing the habit of solitude. Were it not
that I entertained a real dislike of roots and water and the damp
and manifold discomforts of a cave, with which form of habitat
the ministrations of Stenson and Antoinette would have been
inconsistent, I should have gone forth into the nearest approach
to a Thebaid I could discover. I was, in fact, touched by the
mild mania of the hermit. My club I never entered. A line drawn
from east to west, a tangent at the lowest point of the
Zoological Gardens formed the southern boundary of my wanderings.
Once I spied in the distance that very kind soul, Mrs. McMurray,
and rushed into a providential omnibus, so as to avoid
recognition. My History remained untouched. The glamour
of theRenaissance had vanished. For occupation I read the
Neo-Platonists, Thaumaturgy, Demonology and the like, which I had
always found a fascinating although futile study. I regretted my
bowing acquaintance with modern science, which forbade my setting
up a laboratory with alembics and magic crystals wherewith to
conduct experiments for the finding of the Elixir Vitae and the
Philosopher's Stone.
I seldom read the newspapers. I had an idea, like an eminent
personage of the period, that a sort of war was going on, but it
failed to interest me greatly. I shrank from the noise of it.
"Monsieur," said Antoinette, "will get ill if he does not go out
into the sunshine."
"Monsieur," said I, "regards the sunshine as an impertinent
intrusion into a soul that loves the twilight."
If I had made the same remark to an Englishwoman, she would have
pitied me for a poor, half-witted gentleman. But Antoinette has
her nation's instinctive appreciation of soul-states, and her
sympathy was none the less comprehending when she shook her head
mournfully and said that it was bad for the stomach.
"My good Antoinette," I remarked, harking back in my mind to a
speculation of other days, "if you go on worrying me in this
manner about my stomach, I will build a tower forty feet high in
the back garden, and live on top, and have my meals sent up by a
lift, and never come down again."
"Monsieur might as well be in Paradise," said Antoinette.
"Ah," said I. And I thought of the bottle of prussic acid with
mingled sentiments.
All through these many months I had Judith dwelling, a pale
ghost, in the back of my mind. We had parted so finally that
correspondence between us had seemed impertinent. But although I
had not written to her, no small part of the infinite sadness
that had fallen upon my life was the shadow of her destiny.
Sweet, wine-loving Judith! How many times did I picture her
sitting pinched and wistful in the little tin mission church at
Hoxton! Had I, Marcus Ordeyne, condemned her to that
penitentiary? Who can hold the balance of morals so truly as to
decide?
At last I received a letter from her on the anniversary of our
parting. She had found salvation in a strange thing which she
called duty. "I am fulfilling an appointed task," she wrote,
"and the measure of my success is the measure of my happiness. I
am bringing consolation to a wayward and tormented spirit. A
year has swept aside the petty feminine vanities, the opera-
glasses, so to speak, through which a woman complacently views
her influence over a man, and it has cleared my vision. A year
has proved beyond mortal question that without me this wayward
and tormented spirit would fail. I hold in my hands the very
soul of a man. What more dare a woman ask of the high gods? You
see I use your metaphors still. Dearest of all dear friends, do
not pity me. Beyond all the fires of love through which one
passes there is the star of Duty, and happy the individual who
can live in its serenity,"
This was astonishingly like the Theory of Life which I set out
from Verona to seek, and which had hitherto eluded me. It was
not very new, or subtle, or inspiring. But that is the way of
things. No matter through what realms of the fantastic you may
travel, you arrive inevitably at the commonplace.
CHAPTER XXII
I answered Judith's letter. After the long silence it seemed, at
first, strange to write to her; but soon I found myself opening
my heart as I had never done before to man or woman. The fact
that, accident aside, we were never to meet again, drew the
spiritual elements in us nearer together, and the tone of her
letter loosened the bonds of my natural reserve. I told her of
my past year of life, of the locked memorial chamber upstairs, of
the madness through which I had passed, of my weary pursuit of
the Theory, and of my attitude towards her solution of the
problem. Having written the letter I felt comforted, knowing
that Judith would understand.
I finished it about six o'clock one afternoon, and shrinking from
giving it to Stenson to post, as it was the first private letter
I had written since my arrival in London, I took it myself to the
pillar-box. The fresh air reproached me for the unreasonable
indoor life I had been leading, and invited me to remain outside.
It was already dark. An early touch of frost in the November air
rendered it exhilarating. I walked along the decorous,
residential roads of St. John's Wood feeling less remote from my
kind, more in sympathy with the humdrum dramas in progress behind
the rows of lighted windows. Now and then a garden gate opened
and a man in evening dress, and a woman, a vague, dainty mass of
satin and frills and fur, emerged, stood for a moment in the
shaft of light cast by the open hall-door beyond, which framed
the white-capped and aproned parlour-maid, and entering a waiting
hansom, drove off into the darkness whither my speculative fancy
followed them. Now and then silhouettes appeared upon the
window-blinds, especially on the upper floors, for it was the
dressing hour and the cares of the day were being thrown aside
with the workaday garments. In one house, standing far back from
the road, the drawing-room curtains had not been drawn. As I
passed, I saw a man tossing up a delighted child in his arms, and
the mother standing by. _Ay de mi!_ A commonplace of ten
thousand homes, when the man returns from his toil. Yet it moved
me. To earn one's bread; to perpetuate one's species; to create
duties and responsibilities; to meet them like a brave man; to
put the new generation upon the right path; to look back upon it
all and say, "I have fulfilled my functions," and pass forth
quietly into the eternal laboratory--is not that Life in its
truth and its essence? And the reward? The commonplace. The
welcome of wife and children--and the tossing of a crowing babe
in one's arms. And I had missed it all, lived outside it all. I
had spoken blasphemously in my besotted ignorance of these sacred
common things, and verily I had my recompense in a desolate home
and a life of about as much use to humanity as that of St. Simeon
Stylites on top of his pillar.
So I walked along the streets on the track of the wisdom which
Judith had revealed to me, and I seemed to be on the point of
reaching it when I arrived at my own door.
"But what the deuce shall I do with it when I get it?" I said, as
I let myself in with my latch-key.
I had just put my stick in the stand and was taking off my
overcoat, when the door of the room next the diningroom opened,
and Antoinette rushed out upon me.
"Oh, Monsieur, Monsieur!" she cried, wringing her hands. "Oh,
Monsieur! How shall I tell you?"
The good soul broke into sobbing and weeping.
"What is the matter, Antoinette?" Z asked.
"Monsieur must not be angry. Monsieur is good like the Bon Dieu.
But it will give pain to Monsieur."
"But what is it?" I cried, mystified. "Have you spoiled the
dinner?"
I was a million miles from any anticipation of her answer.
_"Monsieur-she has come back!"_
I grew faint for a moment as from a blow over the heart.
Antoinette raised her great tear-stained face.
"Monsieur must not drive her away."
I pushed her gently aside and entered the little room which I had
furnished once as her boudoir.
On the couch sat Carlotta, white and pinched and poorly clad. At
first I was only conscious of her great brown eyes fixed upon me,
the dog-like appeal of our first meeting intensified to
heart-breaking piteousness. On seeing me she did not rise, but
cowered as if I would strike her. I looked at her, unable to
speak. Antoinette stood sobbing in the doorway.
"Well?" said I, at last.
"I have come home," said Carlotta.
"You have been away a long time," said I.
"Ye-es," said Carlotta.
"Why have you come?" I asked.
"I had no money," said Carlotta, with her expressive gesture of
upturned palms. "I had nothing but that." She pointed to a tiny
travelling bag. "Everything else was at the Mont de Piete--the
pawnshop--and they would not keep me any longer at the pension.
I owed them for three weeks, and then they lent me money to buy
my ticket to London. I said Seer Marcous would pay them back.
So I came home."
"But where--where is Pasquale?" I asked.
"He went five, six months ago. He gave me some money and said he
would send some more. But he did not send any. He went to South
Africa. He said there was a war and he wanted to fight, and he
said he was sick of me. Oh, he was very unkind," she cried with
the quiver of her baby lips. "I wish I had never seen him."
"Are you married?"
"No," said Carlotta.
"Damn him!" said I, between my teeth.
"He was going to marry me, but then he said it did not matter in
Paris. At first he was so nice, but after a little--oh, Seer
Marcous dear, he was so cruel."
There was a short silence. Antoinette wept by the door, uttering
little half-audible exclamations _"la pauvre petite, le cher
ange!"_
Carlotta regarded me wistfully. I saw a new look of suffering in
her eyes. For myself I felt numb with pain.
"What kind of a pension were you living in?" I asked, unutterable
horrors coming into my head.
"It was a French family, an old lady and two old daughters, and
one fat German professor. Pasquale put me there. It was very
respectable," she added, with a wan smile, "and so dull. Madame
Champet would scarcely let me go into the street by myself."
"Thank heaven you did not fall into worse hands," said I.
Carlotta unpinned her old straw hat, quite a different garment
from the dainty head-wear she delighted in a year before, and
threw it on the couch beside her. A tress of her glorious bronze
hair fell loose across her forehead, adding to the woebegone
expression of her face. She rose, and as she did so I seemed to
notice a curious change in her. She came to me with extended
hands.
"Seer Marcous--" she whispered.
I took her hands in mine.
"Oh, my dear," said I, "why did you leave me?"
"I was wicked. And I was a little fool," said Carlotta.
I sighed, released her, walked a bit apart. There was a blubber
from the egregious old woman in the threshold.
"Oh, Monsieur is not going to drive her away."
I turned upon her.
"Instead of standing there weeping like a fountain and doing
nothing, why aren't you getting Mademoiselle's room ready for
her?"
"Because Monsieur has the key," wailed Antoinette.
"That's true," said I.
Then I reflected on the futility of converting bedchambers into
mausoleums for the living. The room shut up for a year would not
be habitable. It would be damp and inch-deep in dust.
"Mademoiselle shall sleep in my room to-night," I said, "and
Stenson can make me up a bed and put what I want here. Go and
arrange it with him."
Antoinette departed. I turned to Carlotta.
"Are you very tired, my child?"
"Oh, yes--so tired."
"Why didn't you write, so that things could have been got ready
for you?"
"I don't know. I was too unhappy. Seer "Marcous--" she said
after a little pause and then stopped.
"Yes?"
"I am going to have a baby."
She said it in the old, childlike way, oblivious of difference of
sex; with her little foreign insistence on the final consonants.
I glanced hurriedly at her. The fact was obvious. She stood
with her hands helplessly outspread. The pathos of her would
have wrung the heart of a devil.
"Thank God, you've come home," said I, huskily.
She began to cry softly. I put my arm round her shoulders, and
comforted her. She sobbed out incoherent things. She wished she
had never seen Pasquale. I was good. She would stay with me
always. She would never run away again.
I took her upstairs, and opened the door of her room with the key
that I had carried for a year on my bunch, and turned on the
electric light.
"See what are still usable of your old things," said I, "and I
will send Antoinette up to you."
She looked around her, somewhat puzzled.
"Why should I sleep in your room when this one is ready for me--
my night dress--even the hot water?"
"My dear," said I, "that hot water was put for you a year ago.
It must be cold now."
"And my red slippers--and my dressing-gown!" she cried,
quaveringly.
Then sinking in a heap on the floor beside the dusty bed, she
burst into a passion of tears.
I stole away and sent Antoinette to minister to her.
A year before I had raved and ranted, deeming life intolerable
and cursing the high gods; I suffered then, it is true; but I
hope I may never again go through the suffering of that first
night of Carlotta's return. Even now I can close my eyes and
feel the icy grip on my heart.
She came down to dinner about an hour later, dressed in a pink
wrapper, one of the last things she had bought, which Antoinette
(as she explained to excuse her delay) had been airing before the
fire. She sat opposite me, in her old place, penitent, subdued,
yet not shy or ill at ease. Stenson waited on us, grave and
imperturbable as if we had put back the clock of time a
twelvemonth. The only covert reference he made to the event was
to murmur discreetly in my ear:
"I have brought up a bottle of the Pommery, Sir Marcus, in the
hope you would drink some."
I was touched, for the good fellow had no other way of showing
his solicitude.
Carlotta allowed him to fill her glass. She sipped the wine, and
declared that it did her good. She was no longer a teetotaller,
she explained. Once she drank too much, and the next day had a
headache.
"Why should one have a headache?"
"Nemesis," said I.
"What is Nemesis?"
I found myself answering her question in the old half-jesting
way. And in her old way she replied:
"I do not understand."
How vividly familiar it was, and yet how agonisingly strange!
"Where is Polyphemus?" she asked.
"Dead," said I.
"Oh-h! How did poor Polyphemus die?"
"He was smitten by Destiny at the end of the last act of a
farcical tragedy."
The ghost of a "_hou!_" came from Carlotta. She composed herself
immediately.
"I often used to think of Polyphemus and Seer Marcous and
Antoinette," she said, musingly. "And then I wished I was back.
I have been very wicked."
She put her elbows on the table, and framing her face with her
hands looked at me, and shook her head.
"Oh, you are good! Oh, you are good!"
"Go on with your dinner, my child," said I, "and wonder at the
genius of Antoinette who has managed to cook it and look after
you at the same time."
She obeyed meekly. I watched her eat. She was famished. I
learned that she had had nothing since the early morning coffee
and roll. In spite of pain, I was curiously flattered by her
return. I represented _something_ to her, after all--even though
the instinct of the prodigal cat had driven her hither. I am
sure it had never crossed her mind that my doors might be shut
against her. Her first words were, "I have come home." The
first thing she did when we went into the drawing-room after
dinner was to fondle my hand and lay it against her cheek and
say, with a deep sigh:
"I am so happy."
However shallow her butterfly nature was, these things came from
its depths. No man can help feeling pleased at a child's or an
animal's implicit trust in him. And the pleasure is of the
purest. He feels that unreasoning intuition has penetrated to
some latent germ of good in his nature, and for the moment he is
disarmed of evil. Carlotta, then, came blindly to what was best
in me. In her thoughts she sandwiched me between the cat and the
cook: well, in most sandwiches the mid-ingredient is the most
essential.
She curled herself up in the familiar sofa-corner, and as it was
a chilly night I sent for a wrap which I threw over her limbs.
"See, I have the dear red slippers," she remarked, arching her
instep.
"And I have my dear Carlotta," said I.
I drew my chair near her, and gradually I learned all the unhappy
story.
Pasquale had made love to her from the very first minute of their
acquaintance--even while I was hunting for the _L'Histoire
Comique de Francion_. He had met her many times unknown to me.
They had corresponded, her letters being addressed to a little
stationer's shop close by. She did not love him. Of that I have
an absolute conviction. But he was young, he was handsome, he
had the libertine's air and manner. She was docile. And she was
ever positively truthful. If I had questioned her she would have
confessed frankly. But I never questioned, as I never suspected.
I wondered sometimes at her readiness in quoting him. I noticed
odd coincidences; but I was too ineffectual to draw inferences
from phenomena. His appearance on the Paddington platform was
prearranged; his duchessa at Ealing a myth.
Apparently he had dallied with his fancy. The fruit was his any
day for the plucking. Perhaps a rudimentary sentiment of loyalty
towards me restrained him. Who can tell? The night of our
meeting with Hamdi brought the crisis. The Turk's threats had
alarmed both Carlotta and myself. It was necessary for him to
strike at once. He saw her the next day--would to heaven I had
remained at home!--told her I was marrying her to save her from
Hamdi. I loved the other woman. He would save her equally well
from Hamdi. The other woman met her soon after parting from
Pasquale and besought her to give me up. She did not know what
to do. Poor child, how should she have known? On the previous
evening I had told her she was to marry me. She was ready to
obey. She went to bed thinking that she was to marry me. In the
morning she went for her music lesson. Pasquale was waiting for
her. They walked for some distance down the road. He hailed a
cab and drove away with her.
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