How shall I set down that which happened not long afterwards?
The death of a baby is so commonplace, so unimportant. Few reasoning people, viewing the matter in the abstract, can do otherwise than rejoice that a human being is saved from the weariness of the tired years that make up life. For who shall disprove the pessimist’s assertion that it is better not to have been born than to come into the world, and that it is better to die than to live? But those from whom the single hope of their existence is ravished find little consolation in reason. Grief is the most intensely egotistical of emotions. I have lost all that makes life beautiful to me. Is not that enough for the stricken soul?
To Carlotta it meant a passage through the valley of the shadow. To me, at first, it meant the life of Carlotta, and then a blank in my newly ordered scheme of things. The curse of ineffectuality still pursued me. I had allotted to myself my humble task—the development of the new generation in the form of Carlotta’s boy, and even that small usefulness was I denied by Fate.
A chill, a touch of croup, an agonised watching, and the tiny thing lay dead. Antoinette and I had to drag it stone cold from Carlotta’s bosom. I alone carried it to burial. The little white coffin rested on the opposite seat of the hired brougham, and on it was a bunch of white flowers given by Antoinette. In the cemetery chapel another fragment of humanity awaited sepulture, and the funeral service was read over both bodies. I stood alone by the little white coffin. A crowd of mourners were grouped beside the black one. I glanced at the inscription as I passed: “Jane Elliot, in the eighty-sixth year of her age.” The officiant referred in the service to “our dear brother and sister, here departed.” It was either an awful jest or an awful verity.
My “quaintly fathered little son” had small need of my help through the troubles of his life. His mother needed all that I could give. Without me she would have died. That I verily believe. I was her solitary plank in the welter wherein she would have been submerged. She clung to me—literally clung to me. I sat for hours with her grasp upon me. To feel assured of my physical presence alone seemed to bring her calm.
Recent as are those sleepless days and nights, their memory is all confused. The light burning dimly in the familiar chamber which I had once sealed up as a tomb; the shadows on the wall; the fevered face and great hollow eyes of Carlotta against the pillows; her little hand clutching mine in desperation; the soft tread of the nurse, that is all I remember. And when she recovered her wits and grew sane, although for a long time she spoke little, and scarcely noticed me otherwise, she claimed me by her side. She was still dazed by the misery of her darkness. It was only then that I realised the part the child had played in her development. Her nature had been stirred to the quick; the capacity for emotion had been awakened. She had left me without a qualm. She had given herself to Pasquale without a glimmer of passion. She had returned to me like a wounded animal seeking its home. For the child alone the passionate human love had sprung flaming from the seed hidden in her soul. And now the child was dead, and the sun had gone from her sky, and she was benumbed with the icy blackness of the world.
Then came a time when her speech was loosened and she talked to me incessantly of the child, until one day she spoke of it as living and clamoured for it, and relapsed into her fever.
At last one morning she awakened from a sound sleep and found me watching; for I had relieved the nurse at six o’clock. She smiled at me for the first time since the child fell sick, and took my hand and kissed it.
“It is like waking into heaven to see your face, Seer Marcous, darling,” she whispered.
“I hope heaven is peopled by a better-looking set of fellows,” I said.
“Hou!” laughed Carlotta. “Don’t you know you are beautiful?”
“You mustn’t throw an old jest in my teeth, Carlotta,” said I, and I reminded her how she had once screamed with laughter when I had told her I was very beautiful.
Carlotta listened patiently until I had ended, and then she said, with a little sigh:
“You cannot understand, Seer Marcous, darling. I have been thinking of my little baby and the angels—and all the angels are like you.”
To cover the embarrassment my modesty underwent, I laughed and drew the picture of myself with long flaxen hair and white wings.
“My angels hadn’t got wings,” said Carlotta, seriously. “They all wore dressing-gowns. They were real angels. And the one that was most like you brought my baby in his arms for me to kiss; and when he put it on a white cloud to sleep, and took me up in his arms instead and carried me away, away, away through the air, I didn’t cry at leaving baby. Wasn’t that funny? I snuggled up close to him—like that”—she illustrated the action of “snuggling” beneath the bed-clothes—“and it was so comfy.”
The pale sunshine of a fine February morning filtered into the room from behind the curtains. I turned off the dimmed electric lamp and let full daylight into the room.
“Oh!” cried Carlotta, turning to the window, “how lovely the good sun is! It is more like heaven than ever. Do you know,” she added, mysteriously, “just before I woke it was all dark, and I had lost my angels and I was looking for them.”
I counselled her sagely to look for no more members of the Hierarchy en deshabille, but to content herself with the humbler denizens of this planet. She pressed my hand.
“I’ll try to be contented, Seer Marcous, darling.”
She did her best, poor child, when I was by; but I heard that often she would sit by a little pile of garments and take them up one by one and cry her heart out—so that though she quickly recovered, her cheeks remained wan and drawn, and pain lingered in her eyes. The weather changed to fog and damp and she spent the days crouching by the fire, sometimes not stirring a muscle for an hour together. Her favourite seat was the fender-stool in the drawing-room. Her own boudoir downstairs, where she used to receive instruction from the excellent Miss Griggs, she scarcely entered.
She broke one of these fits suddenly and called me by her own pet version of my name. I looked up from the writing-table where I was studying the Arabic grammar.
“Yes?”
“I have been thinking—oh, thinking, thinking so long. I’ve been thinking that you must love me very much.”
“Yes, Carlotta,” said I, with a half smile. “I suppose I do.”
“As much as I loved my baby,” she said, seriously,
“I used to love you in a different way, perhaps.”
“And now?”
“Perhaps in the same sort of way, Carlotta.”
“I loved my baby because it was mine,” she remarked, looking at the flames through one hand’s delicate fingers. “I wanted to do everything for him and didn’t want him to do anything for me. I would have died for him. It is so strange. Yes, I think you must love me like that, Seer Marcous. Why?”
“Because when I found you in the Embankment Gardens nearly two years ago you were about as helpless as your little baby,” I replied, somewhat disingenuously.
Carlotta gave me a quick glance.
“You thought me then what you call an infernal nuisance. Oh, I know now. I have grown wise. But you were always good. You looked good when you sat on the seat. You were reading a dirty little book.”
“L’Histoire des Uscoques,” I murmured. How far away it seemed.
There was a pause. I regarded her for a moment or two. She was sunk again in serious reflection. I sighed—at the general dismalness of life, I suppose—and resumed my Arabic.
“Seer Marcous.”
“Yes?”
“Why didn’t you drive me away when I came back?”
I shut up the Arabic grammar and went and sat beside her on the fenderstool.
“My dear little girl—what a question! How could I drive you away from your own home?”
She flashed a queer, scared look at me, then at the fire, then at me again and then burst out crying, her head and arms on her knees.
I muttered a man’s words of awkward comfort, saying something about the baby.
“It isn’t baby I’m crying about,” sobbed Carlotta. “It’s me! And it’s you! And it’s all the things I’m beginning to understand.”
I patted her head and lit a cigarette and wandered about the room, rather puzzled by Carlotta’s psychological development, and yet stirred by a faint thrill at her recognition of my affection. At the same time the sad “too late, too late,” was knelled in my ears, and I thought of the might-have-been, and rode the merry-go-round of regret’s banalities. I had grown old. Passion had died. Hope—the hope of hearing the patter of a child’s feet about my house, the hope of pride in a quasi-paternity, of handing on, vicariously though it were, the torch of life—hope was dead and it was buried in a little white coffin. Only a great, quiet love remained. I was a tired old man, and Carlotta was to me an infinitely loved sister—or daughter—or granddaughter even—so old did I feel. And when I raised her from the fender-stool, and kissed the tears from her eyes, it was as grandfatherly a kiss as had ever been given in this world.
The same old problem again. What the deuce to do with Carlotta? Yet not quite the same: rather, what the deuce to do with Carlotta and myself? In our strange relationship we were inextricably bound together.
First, she needed sunshine—instead of the forlorn bleakness of an English spring—and a change from this house of pain and death. And then I, too, felt the need of wider horizons. London had grown to be a nightmare city which I never entered. Its restless ambitions were not mine. Its pleasures pleased me not. With not five of its five million inhabitants dared I speak heart to heart. Judith had gone out of my life. My aunts and cousins regarded me as beyond the moral pale. Mrs. McMurray was still unaware of my return to England. I confess to shabby treatment of my kind friend. I know she would have flown to aid Carlotta in her troubles; but would she have understood Carlotta? Reasoning now I am convinced that she would: in those days I did not reason. I shrank like a snail into its shell. The simile is commonplace; but so was I—the most commonplace human snail that ever occupied a commonplace ten-roomed shell. And now the house and its useless books and its million-fold more useless manuscript “History of Renaissance Morals,” all its sombre memories and its haunting ghosts of ineffectualities, became an unwholesome prison in which I was wasting away a feeble existence. I resolved to quit it, to leave my books, to abjure Renaissance morals, and to go forth with Carlotta into the wilderness and the sunshine, there to fulfil whatever destiny the high gods should decree.
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