"Is it a suitable song?"
"Kim bilir--who knows?" said Carlotta.
She began a melancholy, crooning, guttural ditty; but broke off suddenly.
"Oh! but it is stupid. Like the Turkish dancing. Oh, everything in Alexandretta was stupid! Sometimes I think I have never seen Alexandretta--or Ayesha--or Hamdi. I think I always am with you."
This must be so, as of late she has spoken little of her harem life; she talks chiefly of the small daily happenings, and already we have a store of common interests. The present is her whole existence; the past but a confused dream. The odd part of the matter is that she regards her position with me as a perfectly natural one. No stray kitten adopted by a kind family could have less sense of obligation, or a greater faith in the serene ordering of the cosmos for its own private and peculiar comfort. When I asked her a while ago what she would have done had I left her on the bench in the Embankment Gardens, she shrugged her shoulders and answered, as she had done before, that either she would have died or some other nice gentleman would have taken care of her.
"Do you think nice gentlemen go about London looking for homeless little girls?" I asked on that occasion.
"All gentlemen like beautiful girls," she replied, which brought us to an old argument.
This afternoon, however, we did not argue. The day forbade it. I lay with my head on Carlotta"s lap, looking up into the deep blue, and feeling a most curious sensation of positive happiness. My att.i.tude towards life has. .h.i.therto been negative. I have avoided more than I have sought. I have not drunk deep of life because I have been unathirst. To me--
"To stand aloof and view the fight Is all the pleasure of the game."
My interest even in Judith has been of a detached nature. I have been like Faust. I might have said:
_"Werd" ich zum Augenblicke sagen Werweile doch! Du bist so schon!_
Then may the devil take me and do what he likes with me!"
I have never had the least inclination to apostrophise the moment in this fashion and request it to tarry on account of its exceeding charm.
Never until this afternoon, when the deep summer enchantment of the turquoise day was itself ensorcelised by the witchery of a girl"s springtide.
"You have three, four, five--oh, such a lot of grey hairs," said Carlotta, looking down on my reclining head.
"Many people have grey hair at twenty," said I.
"But I have none."
"You are not yet twenty, Carlotta."
"Do you think I will have them then? Oh, it would be dreadful. No one would care to have me."
"And I? Am I thus the object of every one"s disregard?"
"Oh, you--you are a man. It is right for a man. It makes him look wise.
His wife says, "Behold, my husband has grey hair. He has wisdom. If I am not good he will beat me. So I must obey him.""
"She wouldn"t run off with a good-for-nothing scamp of two-and-twenty?"
"Oh, no-o," said Carlotta. "She would not be so wicked."
"I am glad," said I, "that you think a sense of conjugal duty is an ineradicable element of female nature. But suppose she fell in love with the young scamp?"
"Men fall in love," she replied sagely. "Women only fall in love in stories--Turkish stories. They love their husbands."
"You amaze me," said I.
"Ye-es," said Carlotta.
"But in England, a man wants a woman to love him before he marries her."
"How can she?" asked Carlotta.
This was a staggering question.
"I don"t know," said I, "but she dus."
"Then before I marry a man in England I must love him? But I shall die without a husband!"
"I don"t think so," said I.
"I must begin soon," said Carlotta, with a laugh.
A sinuous motion of her serpentine young body enabled her to bend her face down to mine.
"Shall I love Seer Marcous? But how shall I know when I am in love?"
"When you appreciate the exceeding impropriety of discussing the matter with your humble servant," I replied.
"When a girl is in love she does not speak about it?"
"No, my dear. She lets concealment like a worm i" the bud feed on her damask cheek."
"Then she gets ugly?"
"That"s it," I answered. "You keep on looking in the gla.s.s, and when you perceive you are hideous then you"ll know you are in love."
"But when I am so ugly you will not want me," she objected. "So it is no use falling in love with you."
"You have a more logical mind than I imagined," said I.
"What is a logical mind?" asked Carlotta.
"It is the antiseptic which destroys the bacilli of unreason whereby true happiness is vivified."
"I do not understand," she said.
"I should be vastly surprised if you did," I laughed.
"Would you like me to marry and go away and leave you?" asked Carlotta, after a long pause.
"I suppose," I said with a sigh, "that some tin-pot knight will drive up one of these days to the castle in a hansom-cab and carry off my princess."
"Then you"ll be sorry?"