"They are friends of mine."
Then came the eternal question.
"Is she married, the young one?"
"Miss Griggs," said I, "kindly instil into Carlotta"s mind the fact that no young English woman ever thinks about marriage until she is actually engaged, and then her thoughts do not go beyond the wedding."
"But is she?" persisted Carlotta.
"I wish to heaven she was," I laughed, imprudently, "for then she would not come and spoil my morning"s work."
"Oh, she wants to marry you," said Carlotta.
"Miss Griggs," said I, "Carlotta will resume her studies," and I went upstairs, sighing for the beautiful tower with a lift outside.
July 14th.
Pasquale came in about nine o"clock, and found us playing cards.
He is a bird of pa.s.sage with no fixed abode. Some weeks ago he gave up his chambers in St. James"s, and went to live with an actor friend, a gra.s.s-widower, who has a house in the St. John"s Wood Road close by. Why Pasquale, who loves the palpitating centres of existence, should choose to rusticate in this semi-arcadian district, I cannot imagine. He says he can think better in St. John"s Wood.
Pasquale think! As well might a salmon declare it could sing better in a pond! The consequence of his propinquity, however, has been that he has dropped in several times lately on his way home, but generally at a later hour.
"Oh, please don"t move and spoil the picture," he cried. "Oh, you idyllic pair! And what are you playing? Cribbage! If I had been challenged to guess the game you would have selected for your after-dinner entertainment, I should have sworn to cribbage!"
"An excellent game," said I. Indeed, it is the only game that I remember. I dislike cards. They bore me to death. So dus chess. People love to call them intellectual pastimes; but, surely, if a man wants exercise for his intellect, there are enough problems in this complicated universe for him to worry his brains over, with more profit to himself and the world. And as for the pastime--I consider that when two or more intelligent people sit down to play cards they are insulting one another"s powers of conversation. These remarks do not apply to my game with Carlotta, who is a child, and has to be amused. She has picked up cribbage with remarkable quickness, and although this is only the third evening we have played, she was getting the better of me when Pasquale appeared.
I repeated my statement. Cribbage certainly was an excellent game.
Pasquale laughed.
"Of course it is. A venerable pastime. Darby and Joan have played it of evenings for the last thousand years. Please go on."
But Carlotta threw her cards on the table and herself on the sofa and said she would prefer to hear Pasquale talk.
"He says such funny things."
Then she jumped from the sofa and handed him the box of chocolates that is never far from her side. How lithe her movements are!
"Pasquale says you were his schoolmaster, and used to beat him with a big stick," she remarked, turning her head toward me, while Pasquale helped himself to a sweet.
He was clumsy in his selection, and the box slipped from Carlotta"s hand and the contents rolled upon the floor. They both went on hands and knees to pick them up, and there was much laughing and whispering.
It is curious that I cannot recall Pasquale having alluded, in Carlotta"s presence, to our early days. It was on my tongue to ask when he committed the mendacity--for in that school not only did the a.s.sistant masters not have the power of the cane, but Pasquale, being in the sixth form at the time I joined, was exempt from corporal punishment--when they both rose flushed from their grovelling beneath the table, and some merry remark from Pasquale put the question out of my head.
All this is unimportant. The main result of Pasquale"s visit this evening is a discovery.
Now, is it, after all, a discovery, or only the non-moral intellect"s sinister attribution of motives?
"A baby in long clothes would have seen through it," said Pasquale.
"Lord bless you, if I were in your position I would go on board that yacht, I"d make violent love to every female there, like the gentleman in Mr. Wycherley"s comedy, I"d fill a salmon fly-book with samples of their hair, I"d make them hate one another like poison, and at the end of the voyage I"d announce my engagement to Carlotta, and when they all came to the wedding I"d make the fly-book the most conspicuous of wedding presents on the table, from the bridegroom to the bride. By George! I"d cure them of the taste for man-hunting!"
I wonder what impelled me to tell Pasquale of the proposed yachting cruise? We sat smoking by the open window, long after Carlotta had been sent to bed, and looking at a full moon sailing over the tops of the trees in the park; enveloped in that sensuous atmosphere of a warm summer night which induces a languor in the body and in the will. On such a night as this young Lorenzo, if he happens to have Jessica by his side, makes a confounded idiot of himself, to his life"s undoing; and on such a night as this a reserved philosopher commits the folly of discussing his private affairs with a Sebastian Pasquale.
But if he is correct in his surmise, I am much beholden to the relaxing influences of the night. I have been warned of perils that encompa.s.s me: perils that would infest the base and insidiously scale the sides of the most inaccessible tower that man could build on the edge of the Regent"s Park. A woman with a Matrimonial Purpose would be quite capable of gaining access by balloon to my turret window. Is it not my Aunt Jessica"s design melodramatically to abduct me in a yacht?
"Once aboard the pirate lugger, and the man is ours!" she cries.
But the man is not coming aboard the pirate lugger. He is going to keep as far as he possibly can from the sh.o.r.e. Neither is he to be lured into bringing his lovely Mohammedan ward with him, as an evidence of good faith and unimpeachable morals. They can regard her as a Mohammedan ward or a houri or a Princess of Babylon, just as they choose.
Pasquale must be right. A hundred remembered incidents go to prove it. I recollect now that Judith has rallied me on my obtuseness.
The sole end of all my Aunt Jessica"s manoeuvring is to marry me to Dora, and Dora, like Barkis, is willing. Marry Dora! The thought is a febrifuge, a sudorific! She would be thumping discords on my wornout strings all day long. In a month I should be a writhing madman. I would sooner, infinitely sooner, marry Carlotta. Carlotta is nature; Dora isn"t even art. Why, in the name of men and angels, should I marry Dora?
And why (save to call herself Lady Ordeyne) should she want to marry me? I have not trifled with her virgin affections; and that she is nourishing a romantic pa.s.sion for me of spontaneous growth I decline to believe. For aught I care she can be as inconsolable as Calypso. It will do her good. She can write a little story about it in _The Sirens"
Magazine_.
I am shocked. For all her bouncing ways and animal health and incorrect information, I thought Dora was a nice-minded girl.
Do nice-minded girls hunt husbands?
Good heavens! This looks like the subject of a silly-season correspondence in _The Daily Telegraph_.
CHAPTER XI
July 19th.
_Campsie, N.B._ Hither have I fled from my buccaneering relations. I am seeking shelter in a manse in the midst of a Scotch moor, and the village, half a mile away, is itself five miles from a railway station.
Here I can defy Aunt Jessica.
After my conversation with Pasquale, I pa.s.sed a restless night. My slumbers were haunted by dreams of pirate yachts flying the jolly Roger, on which the skull and crossbones melted grotesquely into a wedding-ring and a true lovers" knot. I awoke to the conviction that so long as the vessel remained on English waters I could find no security in London. I resolved on flight. But whither?
Verily the high G.o.ds must hold me in peculiar favour. The first letter I opened was from old Simon McQuhatty, my present host, a G.o.dfather of my mother, who alone of mortals befriended us in the dark days of long ago.
He was old and infirm, he wrote, and Gossip Death was waiting for him on the moor; but before he went to join him he would like to see Susan"s boy again. I could come whenever I liked. A telegram from Euston before I started would be sufficient notice. I sent Stenson out with a telegram to say I was starting that very day by the two o"clock train, and I wrote a polite letter to my Aunt Jessica informing her of my regret at not being able to accept her kind invitation as I was summoned to Scotland for an indefinite period.
My old friend"s ministry in the Free Kirk of Scotland is drawing to a close; he has lived in this manse, a stone"s throw from his grave, for fifty years, and the approaching change of habitat will cost him nothing. He will still lie at the foot of his beloved hills, and the purple moorland will spread around him for all eternity, and the smell of the gorse and heather will fill his nostrils as he sleeps. He is a bit of a pagan, old McQuhatty, in spite of Calvin and the Shorter Catechism. I should not wonder if he were the original of the story of the minister who prayed for the "puir Deil." He planted a rowan tree by his porch when he was first inducted into the manse, and it has grown up with him and he loves it as if it were a human being. He has had many bonny arguments with it, he says, on points of doctrine, and it has brought comfort to him in times of doubt by shivering its delicate leaves and whispering, "Dinna fash yoursel, McQuhatty. The Lord G.o.d is a sensible body." He declares that the words are articulate, and I suspect that in the depths of his heart he believes that there are tongues in trees and books in the running brooks, just as he is convinced that there is good in everything.
He is a ripe and whimsical scholar, and his talk, even in infirm old age, is marked by a Doric virility which has rendered his companionship for these five days as stimulating as the moorland air. How few men have this gift of discharging intellectual invigoration. Indeed, I only know old McQuhatty who has it, and a sportive Providence has carefully excluded mankind from its benefits for half a century. Stay: it once fostered a genius who arose in Campsie, and sent him strung with tonic to Edinburgh to become a poet. But the poor lad drank whisky for two years without cessation, so that he died, and McQuhatty"s inspiration was wasted. What intellectual stimulus can he afford, for instance, to Sandy McGrath, an elder of the kirk whom I saw coming up the brae on Sunday? An old ram stood in the path and, as obstinate as he, refused to budge. And as they looked dourly at each other, I wondered if the ram were dressed in black broadcloth and McGrath in wool, whether either of their mothers would notice the metamorphosis. Yet my host declares that I see with the eyes of a Southron; that the Scotch peasant when he is not drunk is intellectual, and that there is no occasion on which he is not ready for theological disputation.
"But I dinna mind telling you," he added, "that I"d as lief talk with my rowan tree. It does nae blaze into a conflagration at a comfortable wee bit of false doctrine."
I should love to stay all the summer with my old friend, It seems that only from such a remote solitude can one view things mundane in the right perspective, and in their true proportion. One would see how important or unimportant portent in the cosmos was the agricultural ant"s dream of three millimetres and an aphis compared with the aspirations of the English labourer. One would justly focus the South African millionaire, Sandy McGrath and the ram, and bring them to their real lowest common denominator. One would even be able to gauge the value of a History of Renaissance Morals. The benefits I should derive from a long sojourn are incalculable, but my new responsibilities call me back to London and its refracting and distorting atmosphere. If I had dwelt here for fifty years I should have perceived that Carlotta was but a speck in the whirlwind of human dust whose ultimate destiny was immaterial. As my five days" visit, however, has not advanced me to that pitch of wisdom, I am foolishly concerned in my mind as to her welfare, and anxious to dissolve the triumvirate, Miss Griggs, Stenson, and Antoinette, whom I have entrusted with the reins of government.
A month ago, in similar circ.u.mstances, I should have railed at Fate and anathematised Carlotta from the tip of her pink toes to the gold and bronze glory of her hair. But I am growing more kindly disposed towards Carlotta, and taking a keen interest in her spiritual development.