The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne Part 45

"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 ma.n.u.script 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 acquaintances.h.i.+ps of travel and a craving for home brought me back. Save perhaps in health I had profited little by my journeyings. My bodily sh.e.l.l 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 suns.h.i.+ne and took my melancholy walks at night. I had a pride in cheris.h.i.+ng 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 the Renaissance 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 suns.h.i.+ne."

"Monsieur," said I, "regards the suns.h.i.+ne 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-gla.s.ses, 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 G.o.ds? 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 pa.s.ses there is the star of Duty, and happy the individual who can live in its serenity."

This was astonis.h.i.+ngly 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 pa.s.sed, of my weary pursuit of the Theory, and of my att.i.tude 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 ma.s.s 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 ap.r.o.ned 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 pa.s.sed, 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 pa.s.s 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 antic.i.p.ation 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 p.a.w.nshop--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.