The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne. William John Locke

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      “The wall of my house-my father’s house. He was not my father, but he married my mother. I am English.” She announced the fact with a little air of finality.

      “Indeed?” said I.

      “Yes. Father, mother—both English. He was Vice-Consul. He died before I was born. Then his friend Hamdi Effendi took my mother and married her. You see?”

      I confessed I did not. “Where does Harry come in?” I inquired.

      She looked puzzled. “Come in?” she echoed.

      I perceived her knowledge of the English vernacular was limited. I turned my question differently.

      “Oh,” she said with more animation. “He used to pass by the wall, and I talked to him when there was no one looking. He was so pretty—prettier than you,” she paused.

      “Is it possible?” I said, ironically.

      “Oh, yes,” she replied with profound gravity. “He had a moustache, but he was not so long.”

      “Well? You talked to Harry. What then?”

      In her artless way she told me. A refreshing story, as old as the crusades, with the accessories of orthodox tradition; a European disguise, purchased at a slop dealer’s by the precious Harry, a rope, a midnight flitting, a passage taken on board an English ship; the anchor weighed; and the lovers were free on the bounding main. A most refreshing story! I put on a sudden air of sternness, and shot a question at her like a bullet.

      “Are you making all this up, young woman?”

      She started-looked quite scared.

      “You mean I tell lies? But no. It is all true. Why shouldn’t it be true? How else could I have come here?”

      The question was unanswerable. Her story was as preposterous as her garments. But her garments were real enough. I looked long into her great innocent eyes. Yes, she was telling me the truth. She babbled on for a little. I gathered that her step-father, Hamdi Effendi, was a Turkish official. She had spent all her life in the harem from which she had eloped with this pretty young Englishman.

      “And what must I do?” she reiterated.

      I told her to give me time. One is not in the habit of meeting abducted Lights of the Harem in the Embankment Gardens, beneath the National Liberal Club. It was, in fact, a bewildering occurrence. I looked around me. Nothing seemed to have happened during the last ten minutes. A pale young man on the next bench, whom I had noticed when I entered, was reading a dirty pink newspaper. Pigeons and sparrows hopped about unconcernedly. On the file of cabs, just perceptible through the foliage, the cabmen lolled in listless attitudes. Sir Bartle Frere stolidly kept his back to me, not the least interested in this Gilbert a Becket story. I always thought something was wrong with that man’s character.

      What on earth could I tell her to do? The best course was to find the infernal Harry. I asked her how she came to lose him. It appears he escorted her ashore at Southampton, after having scarcely set eyes on her during the voyage, put her into a railway carriage with strict injunctions not to stir until he claimed her, and then disappeared into space.

      “Did he give you your ticket?”

      “No.”

      “What a young blackguard!” I exclaimed.

      “I don’t like him at all,” she said.

      How she managed to elude the ticket collector at Vauxhall I could not exactly discover. Apparently she told him, in her confiding manner, that Harry had it, and when he found no Harry in the train and came back to say so, she turned her dewy imploring eyes on him and the sentimental varlet melted. At Waterloo a man had told her she must get out of the carriage—she had travelled alone in it—and she had meekly obeyed. She had wandered out of the station and across a bridge and had eventually found herself in the Embankment Gardens. Then she had asked me how to find Harry. Really she was ridiculously like Thomas a Becket’s Saracen mother crying in London for Gilbert. And the most ludicrous part of the resemblance was that she did not know the creature’s surname.

      “By the way,” said I, “what is your name?”

      “Carlotta.”

      “Carlotta what?” I asked.

      “I have no other name.”

      “Your father—the Vice-Consul—had one.”

      She wrinkled her young forehead in profound mental effort.

      “Ramsbotham,” she said at last, triumphantly.

      “Now look here, Miss Ramsbotham—no,” I broke off. “Such an appellation is anachronistic, incongruous, and infinitely absurd. I can’t use it. I must take the liberty of addressing you as Carlotta.”

      “But I’ve told you that Carlotta is my name,” she said, in uncomprehending innocence.

      “And mine is Sir Marcus Ordeyne. People call me ‘Sir Marcus.’”

      “Seer Marcous,” said Carlotta.

      She did not seem at all impressed with the fact that she was talking to a member of the baronetage.

      “Quite so,” said I. “Now, Carlotta,” I resumed, “our first plan is to set out in search of Harry. He may have missed his train, and have followed by a later one, and be even now rampaging about Waterloo station. If we hear nothing of him, I will drive you to the Turkish Consulate, give you in charge there, and they will see you safely home to Alexandretta. The good Hamdi Effendi is doubtless distracted, and will welcome you back with open arms.”

      I meant to be urbane and friendly.

      She rose to her feet, grew as white as paper, opened her great eyes, opened her baby mouth, and in the middle of the Embankment Gardens plumped on her knees before me and clasped her hands above her head.

      “For God’s sake get up!” I shrieked, wrenching her back acrobatically to the bench beside me. “You mustn’t do things like that. You’ll have the whole of London running to look at us.”

      Indeed the sight had so far roused the pale young man from his lethargy that he laid his dirty pink paper on his knees. I kept hold of Carlotta’s wrists. She began to moan incoherently.

      “You mustn’t send me back—Hamdi will kill me—oh please don’t send me back—he will make me marry his friend Mustapha—Mustapha has only two teeth—and he is seventy years old—and he has a wife already—I only went with Harry to avoid Mustapha. Hamdi would kill me, he would beat me, he would make me marry Mustapha.”

      That is what I gathered from her utterances. She was frightened out of her wits, even into anticlimax.

      “But the Turkish Consul is your natural protector,” said I.

      “You wouldn’t be so cruel,” she sobbed. The guttural sonority with which she rolled the “r” in “cruel” made the epithet appear one СКАЧАТЬ