"If I gave you a cheque for 100," said I, "do you think you could get her what she wants, to go on with?"
"A hundred pounds!" The little lady uttered a delighted gasp and I thought she would have kissed me. McMurray brought his sledgehammer of a hand down on my shoulder.
"Man!" he roared. "Do you know what you are doing--casting a respectable wife and mother of a family loose among London drapery shops with a hundred pounds in her pocket? Do you think she will henceforward give a thought to her home or husband? Do you want to ruin my domestic peace, drive me to drink, and wreck my household?"
"If you do that again," said I, rubbing my shoulder, "I"ll give her two hundred."
When I returned Carlotta was sitting, Turkish fashion, on a sofa, smoking a cigarette (to which she had helped herself out of my box) and turning over the pages of a book. This sign of literary taste surprised me. But I soon found it was the second volume of my _edition de luxe_ of Louandre"s _Les Arts Somptuaires_, to whose place on the shelves sheer feminine instinct must have guided her. I announced Mrs. McMurray"s proposed visit. She jumped to her feet, ravished at the prospect, and sent my beautiful book (it is bound in tree-calf and contains a couple of hundred exquisitely coloured plates) flying onto the floor. I picked it up tenderly, and laid it on my writing-table.
"Carlotta," said I, "the first thing you have to learn here is that books in England are more precious than babies in Alexandretta. If you pitch them about in this fashion you will murder them and I shall have you hanged."
This checked her sumptuary excitement. It gave her food for reflection, and she stood humbly penitent, while I went further into the subject of clothes.
"In fact," I concluded, "you will be dressed like a lady." She opened the book at a gaudy picture, "_France, XVI(ieme) Siecle--Saltimbanque et Bohemmienne_," and pointed to the female mountebank. This young person wore a bright green tunic, bordered with gold and finished off at the elbows and waist with red, over an undergown of flaring pink, the sleeves of which reached her wrist; she was crowned with red and white carnations stuck in ivy.
"I will get a dress like that," said Carlotta.
I wondered how far Mrs. McMurray possessed the colour-sense, and I trembled. I tried to explain gently to Carlotta the undesirability of such a costume for outdoor wear in London; but with tastes there is no disputing, and I saw that she was but half-convinced. She will require training in aesthetics.
She is very submissive. I said, "Run away now to Antoinette," and she went with the cheerfulness of a child. I must rig up a sitting-room for her, as I cannot have her in here. Also for the present she must take her meals in her own apartments. I cannot shock the admirable Stenson by sitting down at table with her in that improper peignoir. Besides, as Antoinette informs me, the poor lamb eats meat with her fingers, after the fashion of the East. I know what that is, having once been present at an Egyptian dinner-party in Cairo, and pulled reeking lumps of flesh out of the leg of mutton. Ugh! But as she has probably not sat down to a meal with a man in her life, her banishment from my table will not hurt her feelings. She must, however, be trained in Christian table-manners, as well as in aesthetics; also in a great many other things.
Mrs. McMurray arrived with a tape-measure, a pencil, and a notebook.
"First," she announced, "I will measure her all over. Then I will go out and procure her a set of out-door garments, and tomorrow we will spend the whole livelong day in the shops. Do you mind if I use part of the 100 for the hire of a private brougham?"
"Have a coach and six, my dear Mrs. McMurray," I said. "It will doubtless please Carlotta better."
I summoned Carlotta and performed the ceremony of introduction. To my surprise she was perfectly at her ease and with the greatest courtesy of manner invited the visitor to accompany her to her own apartments.
When Mrs. McMurray returned to the drawing-room she wore an expression that can only be described as indescribable.
"What, my dear Sir Marcus, do you think is to be the ultimate destiny of that young person?"
"She shall learn type-writing," said I, suddenly inspired, "and make a fair copy of my Renaissance Morals."
"She would make a very fair copy indeed of Renaissance Morals," returned the lady, dryly.
"Is she so very dreadful?" I asked in alarm. "The peignoir, I know--"
"Perhaps that has something to do with it."
"Then, for heaven"s sake," said I, "dress her in drabs and greys and subfusc browns. Cut off her hair and give her a row of b.u.t.tons down the back."
My friend"s eyes sparkled.
"I am going," said she, "to have the day of my life tomorrow."
Carlotta had already gone to sleep, so Antoinette informed me, when the results of Mrs. McMurray"s shopping came home. I am glad she has early habits. It appears she has spent a happy and fully occupied afternoon over a pile of French ill.u.s.trated comic papers in the possession of my excellent housekeeper.
I wonder whether it is quite judicious to make French comic papers her initiation into the ideas of Western civilisation. Into this I must inquire. I must also talk seriously to her with a view to her ultimate destiny. But as my view would be distorted by the red dressing-gown, I shall wait until she is decently clad. I think I shall have to set apart certain hours of the day for instructive conversation with Carlotta.
I shall have to develop her mind, of which she distinctly has the rudiments. For the rest of the day she must provide entertainment out of her own resources. This her oriental habits of seclusion will render an easy task, for I will wager that Hamdi Effendi did not concern himself greatly as to the way in which the ladies of his harem filled up their time. And now I come to think of it, he certainly did not allow Carlotta to sprawl about his own private and particular drawing-room. I will not westernise her too rapidly. The Turkish educational system has its merits.
This, in its way is comforting. If only I could accept her as a human creature. But when I think of her callous reception of the tidings of the unhappy boy"s death, my spirit fails me. Such a being would run a carving-knife into you, as you slept, without any compunction, and when you squeaked, she would laugh. Look at her base ingrat.i.tude to the good Hamdi Effendi, who took her in before she was born and has treated her as a daughter all her life. No: her spiritual att.i.tude all through has been that of the ladies who used to visit St. Anthony--in the leisure moments when they were not actively engaged in temptation. I don"t believe her father was an English vice-consul. He was Satan.
I wonder what she told Mrs. McMurray.
I have been thinking over the matter to-night. The good lady was wrong. Whatever were the morals of the Renaissance, personalities were essentially positive. They were devilishly wicked or angelically good.
There was nothing _rosse_, non-moral about the Renaissance Italian.
The women were strongly tempered. I love to believe the story told by Machiavelli and Muratori of Catherine Sforza in the citadel of Forli.
"Surrender or we slay your children which we hold as hostages," cried the besiegers. "Kill them if you like. I can breed more to avenge them."
It is the speech of a giant nature. It awakens something enthusiastic within me; although such a lady would be an undesirable helpmeet for a mild mannered man like myself.
And then again there is Bonna, the woman for whose career I desired to consult the prime authority Cristoforo da Costa. I have been sketching her into my chapter tonight. Here is a peasant girl caught up to his saddle-bow by a condottiere, Brunoro, during some village raid. She fights like a soldier by his side. He is imprisoned in Valencia by Alfonso of Naples, languishes in a dungeon for ten years. And for ten years Bonna goes from court to court in Europe and from prince to prince, across seas and mountains, unwearying, unyielding, with the pa.s.sion of heaven in her heart and the courage of h.e.l.l in her soul, urging and soliciting her man"s release. After ten long years she succeeds. And then they are married. What were her tumultuous feelings as she stood by that altar? The old historian does not say; but the very glory of G.o.d must have flooded her being when, in the silence of the bare church, the little bell tinkled to tell her that the Host was raised, and her love was made blessed for all eternity. And then she goes away with him and fights in the old way by his side for fifteen years. When he is killed, she languishes and dies within the year.
Porcelli sees them in 1455. Brunoro, an old, squinting, paralysed man.
Bonna, a little shrivelled, yellow old woman, with a quiver on her shoulder, a bow in her hand; her grey hair is covered by a helmet and she wears great military boots. The picture is magical. There is infinite pathos in the sight of the two withered, crippled, grotesque forms from which all the glamour of manhood and beauty have departed, and infinite awe in the thought of the holy communion of the unconquerable and pa.s.sionate souls. I wonder it has not come down to us as one of the great love-stories of the world.
Elements such as these sway the Morals of the Renaissance.
But I am taking Mrs. McMurray too seriously; and it is really not a bad idea to have Carlotta taught type-writing.
CHAPTER V
May 26th.
This morning a letter from Judith.
"Do not laugh at me," she writes. "The road to Paris is paved with good intentions. I really could not help it. Delphine put her great arm round my would-be sequestered and meditative self and carried it off bodily, and here it is in the midst of lunches, picture-shows, dinners, suppers, theatres and dances; and if you laugh, you will make me humiliated when I confess that it is thoroughly enjoying itself."
Laugh at her, dear woman? I am only too glad that she can fling her Winter Garment of Repentance into the Fires of Paris Springtide. She has little enough enjoyment in friendless London. Fill your heart with it, my dear, and lay up a store for use in the dull months to come. For my part, however, I am content to be beyond the reach of Delphine"s great arm. I must write to Judith. I shall have to explain Carlotta; but for that I think I shall wait until she becomes a little more explicable.
In dealing with women it is well to employ discrimination. You are never quite sure whether they are not merely simple geese or the most complex of created beings. Perhaps they are such a curious admixture that you cannot tell at a given moment which side, the simple or the complex, you are touching. May not there be the deepest of all allegories in Eve standing midway between the innocent apple and the guileful serpent? I shall have to see more of Carlotta before I can safely explain her to Judith.
At any rate she is no longer attired like an odalisque of the Second Empire, and Mrs. McMurray has saved her from the lamentable errors of taste shown by the female mountebank of sixteenth century France. My excellent friend safely delivered up an exhausted and bewildered charge at half-past seven last evening, a.s.suring me that her task had been easy, and that her antic.i.p.ations of it being the day of her life had been fulfilled. It had been like dressing a doll, she explained, beaming.
An edifying pastime for an adult woman! I did not utter this sentiment, for she would rightly have styled me the most ungrateful of unhung wretches.
Carlotta, then, had followed her about like a perambulatory doll, upon which she had fitted all the finery she could lay her hands on.
Apparently the atmosphere of the great shops had acted on Carlotta like an anaesthetic. She had moved in a sensuous dream of drapery, wherein the choice-impulse was paralysed. The only articles upon which, in an unclouded moment, she had set her heart--and that with a sudden pa.s.sion of covetousness--were a pair of red, high-heeled shoes and a cheap red parasol.
"You have no idea what it means," said Mrs. McMurray, "to buy _everything_ that a woman needs."
I replied that I had a respectful distaste for transcendental philosophy.