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"Just as that philosophical old stick, Sir Marcus Ordeyne, dus from this sort of thing," said Pasquale. And he fished from the side of his chair, and held up by the tip of a monstrous heel, the most audacious, high-instepped, red satin slipper I ever saw. I eyed the thing with profound disgust. I would have given a hundred pounds for it to have vanished.
As I sat out in our garden in Bailleul one evening at the end of April reading "The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne," three aeroplanes like great birds volplaned slowly down from the clouds coming home to roost until they were within 100 feet of the ground, just clearing the house tops as they dropped into their nesting ground on the other side of the town. I could see the pilots quite plainly.
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.
"You stole that from Heine," said I, when the enraptured creature had gone, "and you gave it out to Antoinette as if it were your own." "My good Ordeyne," said he, "did you ever hear of a man giving anything authentic to a woman?" "You know much more about the matter than I do," I replied, and Pasquale laughed.
"What are things of the spirit?" "The things, my dear," said I, "that you are beginning to understand." I bent down and kissed the child as it lay on her lap. "Poor little Marcus Ordeyne," I said. "My poor quaintly fathered little son, I'm afraid there is much trouble ahead of you, but I'll do my best to help you through it." "Bless you, dear," said Carlotta, softly. I looked at her in wonder.
Sweet, wine-loving Judith! How many times did I picture her sitting pinched and wistful in the little tin mission church at Hoxton! Had I, Marcus Ordeyne, condemned her to that penitentiary? Who can hold the balance of morals so truly as to decide? At last I received a letter from her on the anniversary of our parting. She had found salvation in a strange thing which she called duty.
We walked stolidly on, I glaring in front of me and Carlotta weeping. The malice of things arranged that ne. neighbouring chair should be vacant, and that the path should be unusually crowded. I had the satisfaction of hearing a young fellow say to a girl: "He? That's Ordeyne came into the baronetcy mad as a dingo dog." I was giving myself a fine advertisement.
Is it in the paper?" "I was coming to show my husband. The name is an uncommon one. I wondered if they might be relatives of yours." I bowed acquiescence. The chief looked at the paragraph below his wife's indicating thumb, then he looked at me as if I, too, had suffered a seachange. "I had no idea " he said. "Why, now now you are Sir Marcus Ordeyne!"
I could read his inferences from Judith's observations, and I could tell what she wanted him to infer. I seem to have worn my sensory system outside instead of inside my skin this evening. "Ordeyne," said he, "you are a pig, and the great-grandfather of pigs " "Foul" cried Carlotta, seizing on an intelligible point of the conversation. "Why didn't you present me to Mrs. Mainwaring in 1894?
Presently Pasquale who had been talking travel with Judith appealed to me. "What year was it, Ordeyne, that I came home from Abyssinia?" "I forget," said I. "I only remember you presenting me with that hideous thing hanging in my passage, which you called a dulcimer." "Gage d'amour?" smiled Judith. Pasquale laughed and twirled his swaggering moustache.
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