"Those were days," said I, "when people thought they could only be good by being very cruel."
"They would have been more cruel if Hester had not loved the minister,"
said Carlotta, looking at me wistfully.
"My dear little girl," said I, seeing whither her thoughts were tending, "do not bother your brain with psychological problems."
"What are--?" began Carlotta.
I pinched the question, as it were, out of her cheek and smiled and took away the book.
"They are a dreadful disease my little girl has been afflicted with for some time. When you sit and wrinkle your forehead like this," and I scowled forbiddingly, whereat Carlotta laughed, "you are suffering from acute psychological problem."
"Then I am thinking," said Carlotta, reflectively.
"Don"t think too much, dear, just now," said I. "It is best for you to be happy and calm and contented. Otherwise I"ll have to tell the doctor, and he"ll give you the blackest and nastiest physic you have ever tasted."
"To cure me of a what-you-call-it problem?"
"Yes," said I, emphatically.
"_Hou!_" laughed Carlotta in a superior way, "physic can"t cure that."
"You are relying on an exploded fallacy immortalised in a hackneyed Shakespearian quotation," I remarked.
"Go on," said Carlotta, encouragingly.
"What do you mean?" I asked, taken aback.
"Oh, you darling Seer Marcous," cried Carlotta. "It is so lovely to hear you talk!"
So I went on talking, and the distress occasioned by the "Scarlet Letter" was forgotten.
I have mentioned Carlotta"s needlework. This was undertaken at the sapient instigation of Antoinette, who in her turn, I am sure, neglected the ladle for the scissors, and cast many of her duties upon the silent but sympathetic Stenson. Carlotta herself delighted in these preparations. She was never happier than when curled up on the sofa, a box of chocolates by her side, her work-basket frothing over, like a great dish of _oeufs a la neige_, with lawn or mull or what-not, and (I verily believe to complete her content) my ungainly figure and hatchet-face within her purview. She would eat and sew industriously.
Sometimes she would press too hard on a sweetmeat and with a little cry would hold up a sticky finger and thumb.
"Look," she would say, puckering up her face.
And to save from soilure the dainty fabric she was working at, I would rise and wipe her fingers with my handkerchief; whereupon she would coo out the sweetest "thank you," in the world, and perhaps hold up a diminutive garment.
"Isn"t it pretty?"
"Yes, my dear," I would say, and I would turn aside wondering at the exquisite refinements of pain that men were sometimes called upon to bear.
At last the time came. I sat up all night in a torture of suspense, having got it into my foolish head that Carlotta might die. The doctor came upon me at six in the morning sitting half frozen at the bottom of the stairs. When he gave me his cheery news he seemed to develop from a middle-aged, commonplace man into a radiant archangel.
I met Antoinette soon afterwards, busy, important, exultant. She nevertheless graciously accorded me a brief interview.
"And to think, Monsieur," she exclaimed, as if the crowning triumph of a million ions of evolution had at, last been attained, "to think that it is a boy!"
"You would have been just as pleased if it had been a girl," said I.
She shook her wise, fat head. "Women _ca ne vaut pas grand" chose._"
Let it be remembered that "women are of no great account" is a sentiment expressed, not by me, but by Antoinette. But all the same I soon found myself a cipher in the house, where the triumvirate of the negligible s.e.x, Antoinette, the nurse and Carlotta, reigned despotically.
To write much of Carlotta"s happiness would be to treat of sacred things at which I can only guess. She dwelt in rapture. The joy and meaning of the universe were concentrated in the tiny bundle of pink flesh that lay on her bosom. I used to sit by her side while she talked unwearyingly of him. He was a thing of infinite perfections. He had such a lot of hair.
"She won"t believe, sir," said the nurse, "that it will all drop off and a new crop come."
"Oh-h!" said Carlotta. "It can"t be so cruel. For it is my hair--see, Seer Marcous, darling; isn"t it just my hair?"
It was her great solicitude that the boy should resemble her.
"I don"t know about his nose," she remarked critically. "There is so little of it yet and it is so soft--feel how soft it is. But his eyes are brown like mine, and his mouth--now look, aren"t they just the same?"
She put her cheek next to the child"s and invited me to compare the two adjacent baby mouths. They were, of a truth, very much alike.
She was jealous of the baby, desirous of having it always with her to tend and fondle, impatient of the nurse and Antoinette. It was a thing so intensely hers that she resented other hands touching it. Oddly enough, of me she made an exception. Nothing delighted her more than to put the little creature into my awkward and nervous arms, and watch me carry it about the room. I think she wanted to give me something, and this share in the babe was the most precious gift she could devise.
Of Pasquale she continued to say nothing. In her intense joy of motherhood he seemed to have become the dim creature of a dream. I had registered the birth without consulting her--in the legal names of the parents.
"What are you going to call him, Carlotta?" I asked one day.
"_Mon pet.i.t chou._ That"s what Antoinette says. It"s a beautiful name."
"There are many points in calling an infant one"s little cabbage," I admitted, "but soon he"ll grow up to be as old as I am, and--" I sighed, "who would call me their _pet.i.t chow_?"
Carlotta laughed.
"That is true. We shall have to find a name." She reflected for a few moments; then put her arms round my neck and continued her reflections.
"He shall be Marcus--another Marcus Ordeyne. Then perhaps some day he will be "Seer Marcous" like you."
"Do you mean when I die?" I asked.
"Oh, not for years and years and years!" she cried, tightening her clasp in alarm. "But the child lives longer than the father. It is fate. He will live longer than I."
"Let us hope so, dear," I answered. "But it is just because I am not his father that he can"t be Sir Marcus when I die. He can have my name; but my t.i.tle--"
"Who will have it?"
"No one."
"It will die too?"
"It will be quite dead."
"You are his father, you know, _really_," she whispered.