The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne Part 46

"d.a.m.n 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 pet.i.te, 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 s.e.x; 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 G.o.d, 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 pa.s.sion 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 G.o.ds; 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 gla.s.s. 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!