CHAPTER XVIII
November 1st.
Five days ago the blow fell, and I am only now recovering; only now awakening to the horrible pain of it.
I have gone about like a man in a dream. Blurred visages of men with far-away voices have saluted me at the club. Innumerable lines of print which my eyes have scanned have been dest.i.tute of meaning. I have forced myself to the mechanical task of copying piles of rough notes for my History; I have been able to bring thereto not an atom of intelligence; popes, princes, painters are a category of disa.s.sociated names, less evocative of ideas than the columns in the Post Office London Directory.
I have stared stupidly into the fire or at the dripping branches of the trees opposite my windows. I have walked the streets in dull misery. I have sought solace in the Zoological Gardens.
There is a kindly brown bear who pleads humanly for buns, and her I have fed into a sort of friendship. I stand vacantly in front of the cage finding in the beast an odd companionable sympathy. She turns her head on one side, regards me with melting brown eyes, and squatting on her haunches thrusts her paws beseechingly through the bars. Just so did Carlotta beseech and plead. I have bemused myself with gnostic and metempsychosic speculations. Carlotta as an ordinary human being with an immortal soul did not exist, and what I had known and loved was but a simulacrum of female form containing an elemental spirit doomed to be ever seeking a fresh habitat. It was but the lingering ghost of the humanised sh.e.l.l of air that was seen at Victoria station. The fateful spirit, untrammelled by the conventions of men and actuated by destinies unintelligible to mortal mind, had informed the carca.s.s of this little brown bear, which looks at me so strangely, so coaxingly, with Carlotta"s eyes and Carlotta"s gestures. I asked her yesterday to come back to me. I said that the house was empty; that the rooms ached for the want of her. I pleaded so pa.s.sionately and the eyes before me so melted that I thought her heart was touched. But in the midst of it all another visitor came up and the creature uttered a whining plaint and put out her paw for buns--by which token I felt indeed that it was Carlotta.
I have accepted the blow silently. As yet I have told no one. I have made no inquiries. When a man is betrayed by his best friend and deserted by the woman he loves, time and solitude are the only comforters. Besides, to whom should I go for comfort? I have lived too remote from my kind, and my kind heeds me not.
Not a line has reached me from Carlotta. She has gone out of my life as lightly and as remorselessly as she went out of Hamdi Effendi"s; as she went, for aught she knew, out of that of the unhappy boy who lured her from Alexandretta. If she heard I was dead, I wonder whether she would say: "I am so glad!"
Whether the flight was planned between them, or whether Pasquale waylaid her on her way to the Avenue Road and then and there proposed that she should accompany him, I do not know. It matters very little. She is gone. That is the one awful fact that signifies. No explanations, pleas for forgiveness could make me suffer less. Were she different I might find it in my heart to hate her. This I cannot do. How can one hate a thing devoid of heart and soul? But one can love it--G.o.d knows how blindly. So I have locked the door of Carlotta"s room and the key is in my possession. It shall not be touched. It shall remain just as she left it--and I shall mourn for her as for one dead.
For Pasquale--if I were of his own reversionary type, I should follow him half across Europe till we met, and then one of us would kill the other. In one respect he resembles Carlotta. He is dest.i.tute of the moral sense. How else to solve the enigma? How else to reconcile his flamboyant chivalry towards the consumptive washer-woman with the black treachery towards me, in which even at that very moment his mind must have been steeped? I knew that he had betrayed many, that where women were concerned no considerations of honour or friendship had stood between him and his desires; but I believed--for what reason save my own egregious vanity, I know not--that for me he had a peculiar regard.
I believed that it was an idiosyncrasy of this wolf to look upon my sheepfold as sacred from his depredations. I was ashamed of any doubts that crossed my mind as to his loyalty, and did not hesitate to thrust my lamb between his jaws. And while he was giving the lie direct to my faith, I, poor fool, in my despair was seeking madly for his aid in the deliverance of my darling from the power of the dog.
I have felt I owe Hamdi Effendi an apology; for it is well that, in the midst of this buffoon tragedy I find myself playing, I should observe occasionally the decencies of conduct. But, on the other hand, was he not amply repaid for moral injury by the pure joy he must have felt while torturing me with his banter? For all the deeper suffering, I am conscious of writhing under lacerated vanity when I think of that grotesque and humiliating blunder in the Hotel Metropole.
November 2d.
I have received news of the death of old Simon McQuhatty. In my few lucid moments of late I had been thinking of seeking his kindly presence. Now Gossip Death has taken him out across the moor. Now, dear old pagan, he is
"Rolled round in earth"s diurnal course With rocks and stones and trees."
November 3d.
Antoinette came up this morning with a large cardboard box addressed to Carlotta. The messenger who brought it was waiting downstairs.
"I came to Monsieur to know whether I should send it back," said Antoinette, on the verge of tears.
"No," said I, "leave it here."
From the furrier"s label, I saw that the box contained some furs I had ordered for Carlotta a fortnight ago--she shivered so, poor child, in this wintry climate.
"But, Monsieur," began Antoinette, "the poor angel--"
"May want it in heaven," said I.
The good woman stared.
"We"ll be like the ancient Egyptians, Antoinette," I explained, "who placed food and wine and raiment and costly offerings in the tombs of the departed, so that their shades could come and enjoy them for all eternity. We"ll have to make believe, Antoinette, that this is a tomb, for one can"t rear a pyramid in London, though it is a desert sufficiently vast; and the little second floor room is the inner sanctuary where the body lies in silence embalmed with sweet spices and swathed in endless bands of linen."
"But Mademoiselle is not dead?" cried Antoinette, with a shiver. "How can Monsieur talk of such things? It makes me fear, the way Monsieur speaks."
"It makes me fear, too, Antoinette," said I, gravely.
When she had gone I took the box of furs upstairs and laid it unopened on Carlotta"s bed and came away, relocking the door behind me.
November 9th.
I have formed a great resolution. I have devoted the week to the envisagement of things, and while I lay awake last night the solution came to me as something final and irrevocable. Mistrusting the counsels of the night, when the brain is unduly excited by nervous insomnia, I have applied the test of a day"s cold reason.
I have broken a woman"s heart. I have spurned the pa.s.sionate love of a woman who has been near and dear to me; a woman of great nature; a woman of subtle brain who has been my chosen companion, my equal partner in any intellectual path I chose to tread; a sensitive lady, with all the graciousness of soul that term conveys. Heaven knows what a woman can see in me to love. I look in the gla.s.s at my bony, hawk-like face, on which the stamp of futility seems eternally set, and I am seized with a prodigious wonder; but the fact remains that to me unlovely and unworthy has been given that thing without price, a woman"s love. I remember Pasquale laughing merrily at this valuation. He said the love of women was as cheap as dirt, and the only use for it was to make mud pies. The d.a.m.ned cynical villain! "Always reflect," said he, on another occasion, "that although a man may be as ugly as sin, the probability is that he is just as pleasant. Beauties will find hitherto unsuspected amenities in Beasts till the end of time." But I am such a poor and sorry Beast, without the chance of a transformation; a commonplace Beast, dull and didactic; a besotted, purblind, despicable Beast! Yet Judith loved me.
Instead of thanking on my knees the high G.o.ds for the boon conferred, I rejected it, and went mad for craving of the infinitely lesser glory of Carlotta"s baby lips and gold-bronze hair. I have broken Judith"s heart.
I will expiate the crime I have committed.
Expiate the crime! The realisation of the meaning of the words covers me with shame. As if what I propose will be a sorry penance! That is the danger of a man thinking, as I have always done, in metaphors. It has given me my loose, indirect views of life, of myself, of those around me. If I had advice to offer to a young man, I should say: "Learn to think straight." Expiate, indeed! I will go to her and make confession.
I will tell her that awful loneliness is crushing my soul. I will kneel before her and beseech her of her great woman"s goodness to give me her love again, and to be my helpmeet and my companion who will be cherished with all that there is of loyalty in me to her life"s end. She will pity me a little, for I have suffered, and I will pity her tenderly, in deep sincerity, and our life together will be based on that all-understanding which signifies all-forgiveness. And it shall be a real life together.
I used to smile, in a superior way, at her dread of solitude. Heaven forgive me. I did not then know its terrors. It comforted for the first few benumbed days, but now it is gathering around me like a mysterious and appalling force. I crave the human presence in my home. I need the woman"s presence in my heart.
We shall live together then as man and wife, in defiance of the world.
Let the moralists blame us. We shall not care. It will make little social difference to Judith, and as for myself, have I not already inflicted public outrage on society? does not my Aunt Jessica regard me as a wringer of the public conscience, and does not my Cousin Rosalie mention me with a shudder of horror in her tepid prayers? If I really give them cause for reprobation they will be neither wiser, nor better, nor sorrier. And if the baronetcy flickers out in unseemly odour, I for one shall know that the odour is sweeter than that wherein it was lighted, when my great-grandfather earned the radiance by services rendered at Brighton to His Royal Highness the Prince Regent. This is the only way in which I can make Judith reparation, the only way in which I can find comfort. We shall travel. Italy, beloved of Judith, is calling me. Probably Florence will be our settled home. I shall give up this house of madness. The clean sweet love of Judith will purify my heart of this poisonous pa.s.sion, and in the end there will be peace.
I have taken Carlotta"s photograph from its frame and cast it into the fire, thus burning her for her witchcraft. I watched the flames leap and curl. The last look she gave me before they licked away her face had its infinite allurement, its devilish sorcery so intensified in the fierce yellow light, that the yearning for her clutched me by the throat and shook me through all my being.
But it is over now. I have done with Carlotta. If she thinks I am going to sit and let the wind which comes over Primrose Hill drive me mad like Gastibelza, _l"homme a la carabine_, in Victor Hugo"s poem, she is vastly mistaken. From this hour henceforth I swear she is nothing to me; I will eat and sleep and laugh as if she had never existed. Polyphemus, curled up in Carlotta"s old place on the sofa, regards me with his sardonic eye. He is an evil, incredulous, mocking beast, who a few centuries ago would have been burned with his late mistress.
I am sane and happier now that I have come to my irrevocable determination.
To-morrow I go to Judith.
CHAPTER XIX
November 10th.
I had to ring twice before Judith"s servant opened the flat door.
"Mrs. Mainwaring is engaged just at present, Sir Marcus."