I could see the unconscionable Don Juan instinctively preen himself peac.o.c.k fashion.
"I am going to marry Seer Marcous," said Carlotta, calmly.
She made this announcement not as a jest, not as a wish, but as the commonplace statement of a fact. There was a moment of stupefied silence. Pasquale who had just struck a match to light a cigarette stared at me and let the flame burn his fingers. I stared at Carlotta, speechless. The colossal impudence of it!
"I am sorry to contradict you," said I, at last, with some acidity, "but you are going to do no such thing."
"I am not going to marry you?"
"Certainly not."
"Oh!" said Carlotta, in a tone of disappointment.
Pasquale rose, brought his heels together, put his hand on his heart and made her a low bow.
"Will you have me instead of this stray bit of Stonehenge?"
"Very well," said Carlotta.
I seized Pasquale by the arm. "For goodness sake, don"t jest with her!
She has about as much sense of humour as a prehistoric cave-dweller.
She thinks you have made her a serious offer of marriage." He made her another bow.
"You hear what Sir Granite says? He forbids our union. If I married you without his consent, he would flay me alive, dip me in boiling oil and read me aloud his History of Renaissance Morals. So I"m afraid it is no good."
"Then I mustn"t marry him either?" asked Carlotta, looking at me.
"No!" I cried, "you are not going to marry anybody. You seem to have hymenomania. People don"t marry in this casual way in England. They think over it for a couple of years and then they come together in a sober, G.o.d-fearing, respectable manner."
"They marry at leisure and repent in haste," interposed Pasquale.
"Precisely," said I.
"What we call a marriage-bed repentance," said Pasquale.
"I told you this poor child had no sense of humour," I objected.
"You might as well kill yourself as marry without it."
"You are not going to marry anybody, Carlotta," said I, "until you can see a joke."
"What is a joke?" inquired Carlotta.
"Mr. Pasquale asked you to marry him. He didn"t mean it. That was a joke. It was enormously funny, and you should have laughed."
"Then I must laugh when any one asks me to marry him?"
"As loud as you can," said I.
"You are so strange in England," sighed Carlotta.
I smiled, for I did not want to make her unhappy, and I spoke to her intelligibly.
"Well, well, when you have quite learned all the English ways, I"ll try and find you a nice husband. Now you had better go to bed."
She retired, quite consoled. When the door closed behind her, Pasquale shook his head at me.
"Wasted! Criminally wasted!"
"What?"
"That," he answered, pointing to the door. "That bundle of bewildering fascination."
"That," said I, "is an horrible infliction which only my cultivated sense of altruism enables me to tolerate."
"Her name ought to be Margarita."
"Why?" I asked.
"_Ante porcos_," said he.
Certainly Pasquale has a pretty wit and I admire it as I admire most of his brilliant qualities, but I fail to see the aptness of this last gibe. At the club this afternoon I picked up an entertaining French novel called _En felons des Perles_. On the ill.u.s.trated cover was a row of undraped damsels sitting in oyster-sh.e.l.ls, and the text of the book went to show how it was the hero"s ambition to make a rosary of these pearls. Now I am a dull pig. Why? Because I do not add Carlotta to my rosary. I never heard such a monstrous thing in my life. To begin with, I have no rosary.
I wish I had not read that French novel. I wish I had not gone downstairs to hunt for its seventeenth century ancestor. I wish I had given Pasquale dinner at the club.
It is all the fault of Antoinette. Why can"t she cook in a middle-cla.s.s, unedifying way? All this comes from having in the house a woman whose soul is in the stew-pot.
CHAPTER VII
July 1st.
She has been now over five weeks under my roof, and I have put off the evil day of explaining her to Judith; and Judith returns to-morrow.
I know it is odd for a philosophic bachelor to maintain in his establishment a young and detached female of prepossessing appearance.
For the oddity I care not two pins. _Io son" io_. But the question that exercises me occasionally is: In what category are my relations with Carlotta to be cla.s.sified? I do not regard her as a daughter; still less as a sister: not even as a deceased wife"s sister. For a secretary she is too abysmally ignorant, too grotesquely incapable. What she knows would be made to kick the beam against the erudition of a guinea-pig.
Yet she must be cla.s.sified somehow. I must allude to her as something.
At present she fills the place in the house of a pretty (and expensive) Persian cat; and like a cat she has made herself serenely at home.
A governess, a fat-checked girl, who I am afraid takes too humorous a view of the position, comes of mornings to instruct Carlotta in the rudiments of education. When engaging Miss Griggs, I told her she must be patient, firm and, above all, strong-minded. She replied that she made a professional specialty of these qualities, one of her present pupils being a young lady of the Alhambra ballet who desires the particular shade of cultivation that will match a new brougham. She teaches Carlotta to spell, to hold a knife and fork, and corrects such erroneous opinions as that the sky is an inverted bowl over a nice flat earth, and that the sun, moon, and stars are a sort of electric light installation, put into the cosmos to illuminate Alexandretta and the Regent"s Park. Her religious instruction I myself shall attend to, when she is sufficiently advanced to understand my teaching. At present she is a Mohammedan, if she is anything, and believes firmly in Allah. I consider that a working Theism is quite enough for a young woman in her position to go on with. In the afternoon she walks out with Antoinette.
Once she stole forth by herself, enjoyed herself hugely for a short time, got lost, and was brought back thoroughly frightened by a policeman. I wonder what the policeman thought of her? The rest of the day she looks at picture-books and works embroidery. She is making an elaborate bed-spread which will give her harmless occupation for a couple of years.
For an hour every evening, when I am at home, she comes into the drawing-room and drinks coffee with me and listens to my improving conversation. I take this opportunity to rebuke her for faults committed during the day, or to commend her for especial good behaviour. I also supplement the instruction in things in general that is given her by the excellent Miss Griggs. Oddly enough I am beginning to look forward to these evening hours. She is so docile, so good-humoured, so spontaneous.
If she has a pain in her stomach, she says so with the most engaging frankness. Sometimes I think of her only, in Pasquale"s words, as a bundle of fascination, and forget that she has no soul. Nearly always, however, something happens to remind me. She loves me to tell her stories. The other night I solemnly related the history of Cinderella.