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Updated: June 26, 2025
I find on my writing-table a letter addressed in a round childish hand. It is from Carlotta, who for the last fortnight has been staying in Cornwall with the McMurrays. I have known few fortnights so long. In a ridiculous schoolboy way I have been counting the days to her return the day after to-morrow. The letter begins: "Seer Marcous dear." The spelling is a little jest between us.
How vividly familiar it was, and yet how agonisingly strange! "Where is Polyphemus?" she asked. "Dead," said I. "Oh-h! How did poor Polyphemus die?" "He was smitten by Destiny at the end of the last act of a farcical tragedy." The ghost of a "hou!" came from Carlotta. She composed herself immediately. "I often used to think of Polyphemus and Seer Marcous and Antoinette," she said, musingly.
"Everything else was at the Mont de Piete the pawnshop and they would not keep me any longer at the pension. I owed them for three weeks, and then they lent me money to buy my ticket to London. I said Seer Marcous would pay them back. So I came home." "But where where is Pasquale?" I asked. "He went five, six months ago. He gave me some money and said he would send some more.
"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.
I used to sit by her side while she talked unwearyingly of him. He was a thing of infinite perfections. He had such a lot of hair. "She won't believe, sir," said the nurse, "that it will all drop off and a new crop come." "Oh-h!" said Carlotta. "It can't be so cruel. For it is my hair see, Seer Marcous, darling; isn't it just my hair?" It was her great solicitude that the boy should resemble her.
I resumed my seat with a sigh. It would have been boorish to turn her out. "This is much nicer than Alexandretta, isn't it?" said Pasquale familiarly. "And Sir Marcus is an improvement on Hamdi Effendi." "Oh, yes. Seer Marcous lets me do whatever I like," said Carlotta. "I'm shot if I do," I exclaimed.
The streets have grown more familiar, and the traffic does not make her head ache. She asks me the ingenuous questions of a child of ten. The tall guardsmen we passed particularly aroused her enthusiasm. She had never seen anything so beautiful. I asked her if she would like me to buy one and give it her to play with. "Oh, would you, Seer Marcous?" she exclaimed, seizing my hand rapturously.
I opened it to behold Carlotta, in a glow of wondering delight, brandishing a silver-backed brush in one hand and the hand-mirror in the other. "Oh, my darling Seer Marcous! For me? All that for me?" "No. It is for Antoinette," said I. "Oh-h!" She laughed and pulled me by the arm into her room and shut the door. "Oh, everything is beautiful, beautiful, and I shall die if I do not kiss you."
"And yet, Carlotta," said I bitterly, "you would go back to him if he sent for you?" She sprang forward and gripped me by the arm I was sitting quite close to her and her face wore the terror-stricken expression of a child frightened with bogies. "Go back? After what he has done to me? You would not send me back? Seer Marcous, darling, you will keep me with you? I will be good, good, good.
She reflected for a few moments; then put her arms round my neck and continued her reflections. "He shall be Marcus another Marcus Ordeyne. Then perhaps some day he will be 'Seer Marcous' like you." "Do you mean when I die?" I asked. "Oh, not for years and years and years!" she cried, tightening her clasp in alarm. "But the child lives longer than the father. It is fate.
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