The Arrow of Gold: A Story Between Two Notes
by Joseph Conrad · English · Gutenberg #1083 · 610,171 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: The Arrow of Gold: A Story Between Two Notes
Author: Joseph Conrad
Release date: October 1, 1997 [eBook #1083]
Most recently updated: January 2, 2012
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1083
Credits: Transcribed from the 1921 T. Fisher Unwin by David Price
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ARROW OF GOLD: A STORY BETWEEN TWO NOTES ***
Transcribed from the 1921 T. Fisher Unwin by David Price, email
ccx074@pglaf.org
THE
ARROW OF GOLD
A STORY BETWEEN TWO NOTES
BY
JOSEPH CONRAD
Celui qui n’a connu que des hommes
polis et raisonnables, ou ne connait pas
l’homme, ou ne le connait qu’a demi.
CARACTERES.
* * * * *
T. FISHER UNWIN, LTD.
LONDON: ADELPHI TERRACE
* * * * *
_First published_ _August_ 1919
_Reprinted_ _December_ 1919
_Reprinted_ _October_ 1921
* * * * *
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
* * * * *
TO
RICHARD CURLE
* * * * *
FIRST NOTE
The pages which follow have been extracted from a pile of manuscript
which was apparently meant for the eye of one woman only. She seems to
have been the writer’s childhood’s friend. They had parted as children,
or very little more than children. Years passed. Then something
recalled to the woman the companion of her young days and she wrote to
him: “I have been hearing of you lately. I know where life has brought
you. You certainly selected your own road. But to us, left behind, it
always looked as if you had struck out into a pathless desert. We always
regarded you as a person that must be given up for lost. But you have
turned up again; and though we may never see each other, my memory
welcomes you and I confess to you I should like to know the incidents on
the road which has led you to where you are now.”
And he answers her: “I believe you are the only one now alive who
remembers me as a child. I have heard of you from time to time, but I
wonder what sort of person you are now. Perhaps if I did know I wouldn’t
dare put pen to paper. But I don’t know. I only remember that we were
great chums. In fact, I chummed with you even more than with your
brothers. But I am like the pigeon that went away in the fable of the
Two Pigeons. If I once start to tell you I would want you to feel that
you have been there yourself. I may overtax your patience with the story
of my life so different from yours, not only in all the facts but
altogether in spirit. You may not understand. You may even be shocked.
I say all this to myself; but I know I shall succumb! I have a distinct
recollection that in the old days, when you were about fifteen, you
always could make me do whatever you liked.”
He succumbed. He begins his story for her with the minute narration of
this adventure which took about twelve months to develop. In the form in
which it is presented here it has been pruned of all allusions to their
common past, of all asides, disquisitions, and explanations addressed
directly to the friend of his childhood. And even as it is the whole
thing is of considerable length. It seems that he had not only a memory
but that he also knew how to remember. But as to that opinions may
differ.
This, his first great adventure, as he calls it, begins in Marseilles.
It ends there, too. Yet it might have happened anywhere. This does not
mean that the people concerned could have come together in pure space.
The locality had a definite importance. As to the time, it is easily
fixed by the events at about the middle years of the seventies, when Don
Carlos de Bourbon, encouraged by the general reaction of all Europe
against the excesses of communistic Republicanism, made his attempt for
the throne of Spain, arms in hand, amongst the hills and gorges of
Guipuzcoa. It is perhaps the last instance of a Pretender’s adventure
for a Crown that History will have to record with the usual grave moral
disapproval tinged by a shamefaced regret for the departing romance.
Historians are very much like other people.
However, History has nothing to do with this tale. Neither is the moral
justification or condemnation of conduct aimed at here. If anything it
is perhaps a little sympathy that the writer expects for his buried
youth, as he lives it over again at the end of his insignificant course
on this earth. Strange person—yet perhaps not so very different from
ourselves.
A few words as to certain facts may be added.
It may seem that he was plunged very abruptly into this long adventure.
But from certain passages (suppressed here because mixed up with
irrelevant matter) it appears clearly that at the time of the meeting in
the café, Mills had already gathered, in various quarters, a definite
view of the eager youth who had been introduced to him in that
ultra-legitimist salon. What Mills had learned represented him as a
young gentleman who had arrived furnished with proper credentials and who
apparently was doing his best to waste his life in an eccentric fashion,
with a bohemian set (one poet, at least, emerged out of it later) on one
side, and on the other making friends with the people of the Old Town,
pilots, coasters, sailors, workers of all sorts. He pretended rather
absurdly to be a seaman himself and was already credited with an
ill-defined and vaguely illegal enterprise in the Gulf of Mexico. At
once it occurred to Mills that this eccentric youngster was the very
person for what the legitimist sympathizers had very much at heart just
then: to organize a supply by sea of arms and ammunition to the Carlist
detachments in the South. It was precisely to confer on that matter with
Doña Rita that Captain Blunt had been despatched from Headquarters.
Mills got in touch with Blunt at once and put the suggestion before him.
The Captain thought this the very thing. As a matter of fact, on that
evening of Carnival, those two, Mills and Blunt, had been actually
looking everywhere for our man. They had decided that he should be drawn
into the affair if it could be done. Blunt naturally wanted to see him
first. He must have estimated him a promising person, but, from another
point of view, not dangerous. Thus lightly was the notorious (and at the
same time mysterious) Monsieur George brought into the world; out of the
contact of two minds which did not give a single thought to his flesh and
blood.
Their purpose explains the intimate tone given to their first
conversation and the sudden introduction of Doña Rita’s history. Mills,
of course, wanted to hear all about it. As to Captain Blunt—I suspect
that, at the time, he was thinking of nothing else. In addition it was
Doña Rita who would have to do the persuading; for, after all, such an
enterprise with its ugly and desperate risks was not a trifle to put
before a man—however young.
It cannot be denied that Mills seems to have acted somewhat
unscrupulously. He himself appears to have had some doubt about it, at a
given moment, as they were driving to the Prado. But perhaps Mills, with
his penetration, understood very well the nature he was dealing with. He
might even have envied it. But it’s not my business to excuse Mills. As
to him whom we may regard as Mills’ victim it is obvious that he has
never harboured a single reproachful thought. For him Mills is not to be
criticized. A remarkable instance of the great power of mere
individuality over the young.
PART ONE
CHAPTER I
Certain streets have an atmosphere of their own, a sort of universal fame
and the particular affection of their citizens. One of such streets is
the Cannebière, and the jest: “If Paris had a Cannebière it would be a
little Marseilles” is the jocular expression of municipal pride. I, too,
I have been under the spell. For me it has been a street leading into
the unknown.
There was a part of it where one could see as many as five big cafés in a
resplendent row. That evening I strolled into one of them. It was by no
means full. It looked deserted, in fact, festal and overlighted, but
cheerful. The wonderful street was distinctly cold (it was an evening of
carnival), I was very idle, and I was feeling a little lonely. So I went
in and sat down.
The carnival time was drawing to an end. Everybody, high and low, was
anxious to have the last fling. Companies of masks with linked arms and
whooping like red Indians swept the streets in crazy rushes while gusts
of cold mistral swayed the gas lights as far as the eye could reach.
There was a touch of bedlam in all this.
Perhaps it was that which made me feel lonely, since I was neither
masked, nor disguised, nor yelling, nor in any other way in harmony with
the bedlam element of life. But I was not sad. I was merely in a state
of sobriety. I had just returned from my second West Indies voyage. My
eyes were still full of tropical splendour, my memory of my experiences,
lawful and lawless, which had their charm and their thrill; for they had
startled me a little and had amused me considerably. But they had left
me untouched. Indeed they were other men’s adventures, not mine. Except
for a little habit of responsibility which I had acquired they had not
matured me. I was as young as before. Inconceivably young—still
beautifully unthinking—infinitely receptive.
You may believe that I was not thinking of Don Carlos and his fight for a
kingdom. Why should I? You don’t want to think of things which you meet
every day in the newspapers and in conversation. I had paid some calls
since my return and most of my acquaintance were legitimists and
intensely interested in the events of the frontier of Spain, for
political, religious, or romantic reasons. But I was not interested.
Apparently I was not romantic enough. Or was it that I was even more
romantic than all those good people? The affair seemed to me
commonplace. That man was attending to his business of a Pretender.
On the front page of the illustrated paper I saw lying on a table near
me, he looked picturesque enough, seated on a boulder, a big strong man
with a square-cut beard, his hands resting on the hilt of a cavalry
sabre—and all around him a landscape of savage mountains. He caught my
eye on that spiritedly composed woodcut. (There were no inane
snapshot-reproductions in those days.) It was the obvious romance for
the use of royalists but it arrested my attention.
Just then some masks from outside invaded the café, dancing hand in hand
in a single file led by a burly man with a cardboard nose. He gambolled
in wildly and behind him twenty others perhaps, mostly Pierrots and
Pierrettes holding each other by the hand and winding in and out between
the chairs and tables: eyes shining in the holes of cardboard faces,
breasts panting; but all preserving a mysterious silence.
They were people of the poorer sort (white calico with red spots,
costumes), but amongst them there was a girl in a black dress sewn over
with gold half moons, very high in the neck and very short in the skirt.
Most of the ordinary clients of the café didn’t even look up from their
games or papers. I, being alone and idle, stared abstractedly. The girl
costumed as Night wore a small black velvet mask, what is called in
French a “_loup_.” What made her daintiness join that obviously rough
lot I can’t imagine. Her uncovered mouth and chin suggested refined
prettiness.
They filed past my table; the Night noticed perhaps my fixed gaze and
throwing her body forward out of the wriggling chain shot out at me a
slender tongue like a pink dart. I was not prepared for this, not even
to the extent of an appreciative “_Très foli_,” before she wriggled and
hopped away. But having been thus distinguished I could do no less than
follow her with my eyes to the door where the chain of hands being broken
all the masks were trying to get out at once. Two gentlemen coming in
out of the street stood arrested in the crush. The Night (it must have
been her idiosyncrasy) put her tongue out at them, too. The taller of
the two (he was in evening clothes under a light wide-open overcoat) with
great presence of mind chucked her under the chin, giving me the view at
the same time of a flash of white teeth in his dark, lean face. The
other man was very different; fair, with smooth, ruddy cheeks and burly
shoulders. He was wearing a grey suit, obviously bought ready-made, for
it seemed too tight for his powerful frame.
That man was not altogether a stranger to me. For the last week or so I
had been rather on the look-out for him in all the public places where in
a provincial town men may expect to meet each other. I saw him for the
first time (wearing that same grey ready-made suit) in a legitimist
drawing-room where, clearly, he was an object of interest, especially to
the women. I had caught his name as Monsieur Mills. The lady who had
introduced me took the earliest opportunity to murmur into my ear: “A
relation of Lord X.” (_Un proche parent de Lord X_.) And then she
added, casting up her eyes: “A good friend of the King.” Meaning Don
Carlos of course.
I looked at the _proche parent_; not on account of the parentage but
marvelling at his air of ease in that cumbrous body and in such tight
clothes, too. But presently the same lady informed me further: “He has
come here amongst us _un naufragé_.”
I became then really interested. I had never seen a shipwrecked person
before. All the boyishness in me was aroused. I considered a shipwreck
as an unavoidable event sooner or later in my future.
Meantime the man thus distinguished in my eyes glanced quietly about and
never spoke unless addressed directly by one of the ladies present.
There were more than a dozen people in that drawing-room, mostly women
eating fine pastry and talking passionately. It might have been a
Carlist committee meeting of a particularly fatuous character. Even my
youth and inexperience were aware of that. And I was by a long way the
youngest person in the room. That quiet Monsieur Mills intimidated me a
little by his age (I suppose he was thirty-five), his massive
tranquillity, his clear, watchful eyes. But the temptation was too
great—and I addressed him impulsively on the subject of that shipwreck.
He turned his big fair face towards me with surprise in his keen glance,
which (as though he had seen through me in an instant and found nothing
objectionable) changed subtly into friendliness. On the matter of the
shipwreck he did not say much. He only told me that it had not occurred
in the Mediterranean, but on the other side of Southern France—in the Bay
of Biscay. “But this is hardly the place to enter on a story of that
kind,” he observed, looking round at the room with a faint smile as
attractive as the rest of his rustic but well-bred personality.
I expressed my regret. I should have liked to hear all about it. To
this he said that it was not a secret and that perhaps next time we met. . .
“But where can we meet?” I cried. “I don’t come often to this house, you
know.”
“Where? Why on the Cannebière to be sure. Everybody meets everybody
else at least once a day on the pavement opposite the _Bourse_.”
This was absolutely true. But though I looked for him on each succeeding
day he was nowhere to be seen at the usual times. The companions of my
idle hours (and all my hours were idle just then) noticed my
preoccupation and chaffed me about it in a rather obvious way. They
wanted to know whether she, whom I expected to see, was dark or fair;
whether that fascination which kept me on tenterhooks of expectation was
one of my aristocrats or one of my marine beauties: for they knew I had a
footing in both these—shall we say circles? As to themselves they were
the bohemian circle, not very wide—half a dozen of us led by a sculptor
whom we called Prax for short. My own nick-name was “Young Ulysses.”
I liked it.
But chaff or no chaff they would have been surprised to see me leave them
for the burly and sympathetic Mills. I was ready to drop any easy
company of equals to approach that interesting man with every mental
deference. It was not precisely because of that shipwreck. He attracted
and interested me the more because he was not to be seen. The fear that
he might have departed suddenly for England—(or for Spain)—caused me a
sort of ridiculous depression as though I had missed a unique
opportunity. And it was a joyful reaction which emboldened me to signal
to him with a raised arm across that café.
I was abashed immediately afterwards, when I saw him advance towards my
table with his friend. The latter was eminently elegant. He was exactly
like one of those figures one can see of a fine May evening in the
neighbourhood of the Opera-house in Paris. Very Parisian indeed. And
yet he struck me as not so perfectly French as he ought to have been, as
if one’s nationality were an accomplishment with varying degrees of
excellence. As to Mills, he was perfectly insular. There could be no
doubt about him. They were both smiling faintly at me. The burly Mills
attended to the introduction: “Captain Blunt.”
We shook hands. The name didn’t tell me much. What surprised me was
that Mills should have remembered mine so well. I don’t want to boast of
my modesty but it seemed to me that two or three days was more than
enough for a man like Mills to forget my very existence. As to the
Captain, I was struck on closer view by the perfect correctness of his
personality. Clothes, slight figure, clear-cut, thin, sun-tanned face,
pose, all this was so good that it was saved from the danger of banality
only by the mobile black eyes of a keenness that one doesn’t meet every
day in the south of France and still less in Italy. Another thing was
that, viewed as an officer in mufti, he did not look sufficiently
professional. That imperfection was interesting, too.
You may think that I am subtilizing my impressions on purpose, but you
may take it from a man who has lived a rough, a very rough life, that it
is the subtleties of personalities, and contacts, and events, that count
for interest and memory—and pretty well nothing else. This—you see—is
the last evening of that part of my life in which I did not know that
woman. These are like the last hours of a previous existence. It isn’t
my fault that they are associated with nothing better at the decisive
moment than the banal splendours of a gilded café and the bedlamite yells
of carnival in the street.
We three, however (almost complete strangers to each other), had assumed
attitudes of serious amiability round our table. A waiter approached for
orders and it was then, in relation to my order for coffee, that the
absolutely first thing I learned of Captain Blunt was the fact that he
was a sufferer from insomnia. In his immovable way Mills began charging
his pipe. I felt extremely embarrassed all at once, but became
positively annoyed when I saw our Prax enter the café in a sort of
mediaeval costume very much like what Faust wears in the third act. I
have no doubt it was meant for a purely operatic Faust. A light mantle
floated from his shoulders. He strode theatrically up to our table and
addressing me as “Young Ulysses” proposed I should go outside on the
fields of asphalt and help him gather a few marguerites to decorate a
truly infernal supper which was being organized across the road at the
Maison Dorée—upstairs. With expostulatory shakes of the head and
indignant glances I called his attention to the fact that I was not
alone. He stepped back a pace as if astonished by the discovery, took
off his plumed velvet toque with a low obeisance so that the feathers
swept the floor, and swaggered off the stage with his left hand resting
on the hilt of the property dagger at his belt.
Meantime the well-connected but rustic Mills had been busy lighting his
briar and the distinguished Captain sat smiling to himself. I was
horribly vexed and apologized for that intrusion, saying that the fellow
was a future great sculptor and perfectly harmless; but he had been
swallowing lots of night air which had got into his head apparently.
Mills peered at me with his friendly but awfully searching blue eyes
through the cloud of smoke he had wreathed about his big head. The slim,
dark Captain’s smile took on an amiable expression. Might he know why I
was addressed as “Young Ulysses” by my friend? and immediately he added
the remark with urbane playfulness that Ulysses was an astute person.
Mills did not give me time for a reply. He struck in: “That old Greek
was famed as a wanderer—the first historical seaman.” He waved his pipe
vaguely at me.
“Ah! _Vraiment_!” The polite Captain seemed incredulous and as if
weary. “Are you a seaman? In what sense, pray?” We were talking French
and he used the term _homme de mer_.
Again Mills interfered quietly. “In the same sense in which you are a
military man.” (_Homme de guerre_.)
It was then that I heard Captain Blunt produce one of his striking
declarations. He had two of them, and this was the first.
“I live by my sword.”
It was said in an extraordinary dandified manner which in conjunction
with the matter made me forget my tongue in my head. I could only stare
at him. He added more naturally: “2nd Reg. Castille, Cavalry.” Then
with marked stress in Spanish, “_En las filas legitimas_.”
Mills was heard, unmoved, like Jove in his cloud: “He’s on leave here.”
“Of course I don’t shout that fact on the housetops,” the Captain
addressed me pointedly, “any more than our friend his shipwreck
adventure. We must not strain the toleration of the French authorities
too much! It wouldn’t be correct—and not very safe either.”
I became suddenly extremely delighted with my company. A man who “lived
by his sword,” before my eyes, close at my elbow! So such people did
exist in the world yet! I had not been born too late! And across the
table with his air of watchful, unmoved benevolence, enough in itself to
arouse one’s interest, there was the man with the story of a shipwreck
that mustn’t be shouted on housetops. Why?
I understood very well why, when he told me that he had joined in the
Clyde a small steamer chartered by a relative of his, “a very wealthy
man,” he observed (probably Lord X, I thought), to carry arms and other
supplies to the Carlist army. And it was not a shipwreck in the ordinary
sense. Everything went perfectly well to the last moment when suddenly
the _Numancia_ (a Republican ironclad) had appeared and chased them
ashore on the French coast below Bayonne. In a few words, but with
evident appreciation of the adventure, Mills described to us how he swam
to the beach clad simply in a money belt and a pair of trousers. Shells
were falling all round till a tiny French gunboat came out of Bayonne and
shooed the _Numancia_ away out of territorial waters.
He was very amusing and I was fascinated by the mental picture of that
tranquil man rolling in the surf and emerging breathless, in the costume
you know, on the fair land of France, in the character of a smuggler of
war material. However, they had never arrested or expelled him, since he
was there before my eyes. But how and why did he get so far from the
scene of his sea adventure was an interesting question. And I put it to
him with most naïve indiscretion which did not shock him visibly. He
told me that the ship being only stranded, not sunk, the contraband cargo
aboard was doubtless in good condition. The French custom-house men were
guarding the wreck. If their vigilance could be—h’m—removed by some
means, or even merely reduced, a lot of these rifles and cartridges could
be taken off quietly at night by certain Spanish fishing boats. In fact,
salved for the Carlists, after all. He thought it could be done. . . .
I said with professional gravity that given a few perfectly quiet nights
(rare on that coast) it could certainly be done.
Mr. Mills was not afraid of the elements. It was the highly inconvenient
zeal of the French custom-house people that had to be dealt with in some
way.
“Heavens!” I cried, astonished. “You can’t bribe the French Customs.
This isn’t a South-American republic.”
“Is it a republic?” he murmured, very absorbed in smoking his wooden
pipe.
“Well, isn’t it?”
He murmured again, “Oh, so little.” At this I laughed, and a faintly
humorous expression passed over Mills’ face. No. Bribes were out of the
question, he admitted. But there were many legitimist sympathies in
Paris. A proper person could set them in motion and a mere hint from
high quarters to the officials on the spot not to worry over-much about
that wreck. . . .
What was most amusing was the cool, reasonable tone of this amazing
project. Mr. Blunt sat by very detached, his eyes roamed here and there
all over the café; and it was while looking upward at the pink foot of a
fleshy and very much foreshortened goddess of some sort depicted on the
ceiling in an enormous composition in the Italian style that he let fall
casually the words, “She will manage it for you quite easily.”
“Every Carlist agent in Bayonne assured me of that,” said Mr. Mills. “I
would have gone straight to Paris only I was told she had fled here for a
rest; tired, discontented. Not a very encouraging report.”
“These flights are well known,” muttered Mr. Blunt. “You shall see her
all right.”
“Yes. They told me that you . . . ”
I broke in: “You mean to say that you expect a woman to arrange that sort
of thing for you?”
“A trifle, for her,” Mr. Blunt remarked indifferently. “At that sort of
thing women are best. They have less scruples.”
“More audacity,” interjected Mr. Mills almost in a whisper.
Mr. Blunt kept quiet for a moment, then: “You see,” he addressed me in a
most refined tone, “a mere man may suddenly find himself being kicked
down the stairs.”
I don’t know why I should have felt shocked by that statement. It could
not be because it was untrue. The other did not give me time to offer
any remark. He inquired with extreme politeness what did I know of South
American republics? I confessed that I knew very little of them.
Wandering about the Gulf of Mexico I had a look-in here and there; and
amongst others I had a few days in Haiti which was of course unique,
being a negro republic. On this Captain Blunt began to talk of negroes
at large. He talked of them with knowledge, intelligence, and a sort of
contemptuous affection. He generalized, he particularized about the
blacks; he told anecdotes. I was interested, a little incredulous, and
considerably surprised. What could this man with such a boulevardier
exterior that he looked positively like, an exile in a provincial town,
and with his drawing-room manner—what could he know of negroes?
Mills, sitting silent with his air of watchful intelligence, seemed to
read my thoughts, waved his pipe slightly and explained: “The Captain is
from South Carolina.”
“Oh,” I murmured, and then after the slightest of pauses I heard the
second of Mr. J. K. Blunt’s declarations.
“Yes,” he said. “_Je suis Américain_, _catholique et gentil-homme_,” in
a tone contrasting so strongly with the smile, which, as it were,
underlined the uttered words, that I was at a loss whether to return the
smile in kind or acknowledge the words with a grave little bow. Of
course I did neither and there fell on us an odd, equivocal silence. It
marked our final abandonment of the French language. I was the one to
speak first, proposing that my companions should sup with me, not across
the way, which would be riotous with more than one “infernal” supper, but
in another much more select establishment in a side street away from the
Cannebière. It flattered my vanity a little to be able to say that I had
a corner table always reserved in the Salon des Palmiers, otherwise Salon
Blanc, where the atmosphere was legitimist and extremely decorous
besides—even in Carnival time. “Nine tenths of the people there,” I
said, “would be of your political opinions, if that’s an inducement.
Come along. Let’s be festive,” I encouraged them.
I didn’t feel particularly festive. What I wanted was to remain in my
company and break an inexplicable feeling of constraint of which I was
aware. Mills looked at me steadily with a faint, kind smile.
“No,” said Blunt. “Why should we go there? They will be only turning us
out in the small hours, to go home and face insomnia. Can you imagine
anything more disgusting?”
He was smiling all the time, but his deep-set eyes did not lend
themselves to the expression of whimsical politeness which he tried to
achieve. He had another suggestion to offer. Why shouldn’t we adjourn
to his rooms? He had there materials for a dish of his own invention for
which he was famous all along the line of the Royal Cavalry outposts, and
he would cook it for us. There were also a few bottles of some white
wine, quite possible, which we could drink out of Venetian cut-glass
goblets. A _bivouac_ feast, in fact. And he wouldn’t turn us out in the
small hours. Not he. He couldn’t sleep.
Need I say I was fascinated by the idea? Well, yes. But somehow I
hesitated and looked towards Mills, so much my senior. He got up without
a word. This was decisive; for no obscure premonition, and of something
indefinite at that, could stand against the example of his tranquil
personality.
CHAPTER II
The street in which Mr. Blunt lived presented itself to our eyes, narrow,
silent, empty, and dark, but with enough gas-lamps in it to disclose its
most striking feature: a quantity of flag-poles sticking out above many
of its closed portals. It was the street of Consuls and I remarked to
Mr. Blunt that coming out in the morning he could survey the flags of all
nations almost—except his own. (The U. S. consulate was on the other
side of the town.) He mumbled through his teeth that he took good care
to keep clear of his own consulate.
“Are you afraid of the consul’s dog?” I asked jocularly. The consul’s
dog weighed about a pound and a half and was known to the whole town as
exhibited on the consular fore-arm in all places, at all hours, but
mainly at the hour of the fashionable promenade on the Prado.
But I felt my jest misplaced when Mills growled low in my ear: “They are
all Yankees there.”
I murmured a confused “Of course.”
Books are nothing. I discovered that I had never been aware before that
the Civil War in America was not printed matter but a fact only about ten
years old. Of course. He was a South Carolinian gentleman. I was a
little ashamed of my want of tact. Meantime, looking like the
conventional conception of a fashionable reveller, with his opera-hat
pushed off his forehead, Captain Blunt was having some slight difficulty
with his latch-key; for the house before which we had stopped was not one
of those many-storied houses that made up the greater part of the street.
It had only one row of windows above the ground floor. Dead walls
abutting on to it indicated that it had a garden. Its dark front
presented no marked architectural character, and in the flickering light
of a street lamp it looked a little as though it had gone down in the
world. The greater then was my surprise to enter a hall paved in black
and white marble and in its dimness appearing of palatial proportions.
Mr. Blunt did not turn up the small solitary gas-jet, but led the way
across the black and white pavement past the end of the staircase, past a
door of gleaming dark wood with a heavy bronze handle. It gave access to
his rooms he said; but he took us straight on to the studio at the end of
the passage.
It was rather a small place tacked on in the manner of a lean-to to the
garden side of the house. A large lamp was burning brightly there. The
floor was of mere flag-stones but the few rugs scattered about though
extremely worn were very costly. There was also there a beautiful sofa
upholstered in pink figured silk, an enormous divan with many cushions,
some splendid arm-chairs of various shapes (but all very shabby), a round
table, and in the midst of these fine things a small common iron stove.
Somebody must have been attending it lately, for the fire roared and the
warmth of the place was very grateful after the bone-searching cold
blasts of mistral outside.
Mills without a word flung himself on the divan and, propped on his arm,
gazed thoughtfully at a distant corner where in the shadow of a
monumental carved wardrobe an articulated dummy without head or hands but
with beautifully shaped limbs composed in a shrinking attitude, seemed to
be embarrassed by his stare.
As we sat enjoying the _bivouac_ hospitality (the dish was really
excellent and our host in a shabby grey jacket still looked the
accomplished man-about-town) my eyes kept on straying towards that
corner. Blunt noticed this and remarked that I seemed to be attracted by
the Empress.
“It’s disagreeable,” I said. “It seems to lurk there like a shy skeleton
at the feast. But why do you give the name of Empress to that dummy?”
“Because it sat for days and days in the robes of a Byzantine Empress to
a painter. . . I wonder where he discovered these priceless stuffs. . .
You knew him, I believe?”
Mills lowered his head slowly, then tossed down his throat some wine out
of a Venetian goblet.
“This house is full of costly objects. So are all his other houses, so
is his place in Paris—that mysterious Pavilion hidden away in Passy
somewhere.”
Mills knew the Pavilion. The wine had, I suppose, loosened his tongue.
Blunt, too, lost something of his reserve. From their talk I gathered
the notion of an eccentric personality, a man of great wealth, not so
much solitary as difficult of access, a collector of fine things, a
painter known only to very few people and not at all to the public
market. But as meantime I had been emptying my Venetian goblet with a
certain regularity (the amount of heat given out by that iron stove was
amazing; it parched one’s throat, and the straw-coloured wine didn’t seem
much stronger than so much pleasantly flavoured water) the voices and the
impressions they conveyed acquired something fantastic to my mind.
Suddenly I perceived that Mills was sitting in his shirt-sleeves. I had
not noticed him taking off his coat. Blunt had unbuttoned his shabby
jacket, exposing a lot of starched shirt-front with the white tie under
his dark shaved chin. He had a strange air of insolence—or so it seemed
to me. I addressed him much louder than I intended really.
“Did you know that extraordinary man?”
“To know him personally one had to be either very distinguished or very
lucky. Mr. Mills here . . .”
“Yes, I have been lucky,” Mills struck in. “It was my cousin who was
distinguished. That’s how I managed to enter his house in Paris—it was
called the Pavilion—twice.”
“And saw Doña Rita twice, too?” asked Blunt with an indefinite smile and
a marked emphasis. Mills was also emphatic in his reply but with a
serious face.
“I am not an easy enthusiast where women are concerned, but she was
without doubt the most admirable find of his amongst all the priceless
items he had accumulated in that house—the most admirable. . . ”
“Ah! But, you see, of all the objects there she was the only one that
was alive,” pointed out Blunt with the slightest possible flavour of
sarcasm.
“Immensely so,” affirmed Mills. “Not because she was restless, indeed
she hardly ever moved from that couch between the windows—you know.”
“No. I don’t know. I’ve never been in there,” announced Blunt with that
flash of white teeth so strangely without any character of its own that
it was merely disturbing.
“But she radiated life,” continued Mills. “She had plenty of it, and it
had a quality. My cousin and Henry Allègre had a lot to say to each
other and so I was free to talk to her. At the second visit we were like
old friends, which was absurd considering that all the chances were that
we would never meet again in this world or in the next. I am not
meddling with theology but it seems to me that in the Elysian fields
she’ll have her place in a very special company.”
All this in a sympathetic voice and in his unmoved manner. Blunt
produced another disturbing white flash and muttered:
“I should say mixed.” Then louder: “As for instance . . . ”
“As for instance Cleopatra,” answered Mills quietly. He added after a
pause: “Who was not exactly pretty.”
“I should have thought rather a La Vallière,” Blunt dropped with an
indifference of which one did not know what to make. He may have begun
to be bored with the subject. But it may have been put on, for the whole
personality was not clearly definable. I, however, was not indifferent.
A woman is always an interesting subject and I was thoroughly awake to
that interest. Mills pondered for a while with a sort of dispassionate
benevolence, at last:
“Yes, Doña Rita as far as I know her is so varied in her simplicity that
even that is possible,” he said. “Yes. A romantic resigned La Vallière
. . . who had a big mouth.”
I felt moved to make myself heard.
“Did you know La Vallière, too?” I asked impertinently.
Mills only smiled at me. “No. I am not quite so old as that,” he said.
“But it’s not very difficult to know facts of that kind about a
historical personage. There were some ribald verses made at the time,
and Louis XIV was congratulated on the possession—I really don’t remember
how it goes—on the possession of:
“. . . de ce bec amoureux
Qui d’une oreille à l’autre va,
Tra là là.
or something of the sort. It needn’t be from ear to ear, but it’s a fact
that a big mouth is often a sign of a certain generosity of mind and
feeling. Young man, beware of women with small mouths. Beware of the
others, too, of course; but a small mouth is a fatal sign. Well, the
royalist sympathizers can’t charge Doña Rita with any lack of generosity
from what I hear. Why should I judge her? I have known her for, say,
six hours altogether. It was enough to feel the seduction of her native
intelligence and of her splendid physique. And all that was brought home
to me so quickly,” he concluded, “because she had what some Frenchman has
called the ‘terrible gift of familiarity’.”
Blunt had been listening moodily. He nodded assent.
“Yes!” Mills’ thoughts were still dwelling in the past. “And when
saying good-bye she could put in an instant an immense distance between
herself and you. A slight stiffening of that perfect figure, a change of
the physiognomy: it was like being dismissed by a person born in the
purple. Even if she did offer you her hand—as she did to me—it was as if
across a broad river. Trick of manner or a bit of truth peeping out?
Perhaps she’s really one of those inaccessible beings. What do you
think, Blunt?”
It was a direct question which for some reason (as if my range of
sensitiveness had been increased already) displeased or rather disturbed
me strangely. Blunt seemed not to have heard it. But after a while he
turned to me.
“That thick man,” he said in a tone of perfect urbanity, “is as fine as a
needle. All these statements about the seduction and then this final
doubt expressed after only two visits which could not have included more
than six hours altogether and this some three years ago! But it is Henry
Allègre that you should ask this question, Mr. Mills.”
“I haven’t the secret of raising the dead,” answered Mills good
humouredly. “And if I had I would hesitate. It would seem such a
liberty to take with a person one had known so slightly in life.”
“And yet Henry Allègre is the only person to ask about her, after all
this uninterrupted companionship of years, ever since he discovered her;
all the time, every breathing moment of it, till, literally, his very
last breath. I don’t mean to say she nursed him. He had his
confidential man for that. He couldn’t bear women about his person. But
then apparently he couldn’t bear this one out of his sight. She’s the
only woman who ever sat to him, for he would never suffer a model inside
his house. That’s why the ‘Girl in the Hat’ and the ‘Byzantine Empress’
have that family air, though neither of them is really a likeness of Doña
Rita. . . You know my mother?”
Mills inclined his body slightly and a fugitive smile vanished from his
lips. Blunt’s eyes were fastened on the very centre of his empty plate.
“Then perhaps you know my mother’s artistic and literary associations,”
Blunt went on in a subtly changed tone. “My mother has been writing
verse since she was a girl of fifteen. She’s still writing verse. She’s
still fifteen—a spoiled girl of genius. So she requested one of her poet
friends—no less than Versoy himself—to arrange for a visit to Henry
Allègre’s house. At first he thought he hadn’t heard aright. You must
know that for my mother a man that doesn’t jump out of his skin for any
woman’s caprice is not chivalrous. But perhaps you do know? . . .”
Mills shook his head with an amused air. Blunt, who had raised his eyes
from his plate to look at him, started afresh with great deliberation.
“She gives no peace to herself or her friends. My mother’s exquisitely
absurd. You understand that all these painters, poets, art collectors
(and dealers in bric-à-brac, he interjected through his teeth) of my
mother are not in my way; but Versoy lives more like a man of the world.
One day I met him at the fencing school. He was furious. He asked me to
tell my mother that this was the last effort of his chivalry. The jobs
she gave him to do were too difficult. But I daresay he had been pleased
enough to show the influence he had in that quarter. He knew my mother
would tell the world’s wife all about it. He’s a spiteful, gingery
little wretch. The top of his head shines like a billiard ball. I
believe he polishes it every morning with a cloth. Of course they didn’t
get further than the big drawing-room on the first floor, an enormous
drawing-room with three pairs of columns in the middle. The double doors
on the top of the staircase had been thrown wide open, as if for a visit
from royalty. You can picture to yourself my mother, with her white hair
done in some 18th century fashion and her sparkling black eyes,
penetrating into those splendours attended by a sort of bald-headed,
vexed squirrel—and Henry Allègre coming forward to meet them like a
severe prince with the face of a tombstone Crusader, big white hands,
muffled silken voice, half-shut eyes, as if looking down at them from a
balcony. You remember that trick of his, Mills?”
Mills emitted an enormous cloud of smoke out of his distended cheeks.
“I daresay he was furious, too,” Blunt continued dispassionately. “But
he was extremely civil. He showed her all the ‘treasures’ in the room,
ivories, enamels, miniatures, all sorts of monstrosities from Japan, from
India, from Timbuctoo . . . for all I know. . . He pushed his
condescension so far as to have the ‘Girl in the Hat’ brought down into
the drawing-room—half length, unframed. They put her on a chair for my
mother to look at. The ‘Byzantine Empress’ was already there, hung on
the end wall—full length, gold frame weighing half a ton. My mother
first overwhelms the ‘Master’ with thanks, and then absorbs herself in
the adoration of the ‘Girl in the Hat.’ Then she sighs out: ‘It should
be called Diaphanéité, if there is such a word. Ah! This is the last
expression of modernity!’ She puts up suddenly her face-à-main and looks
towards the end wall. ‘And that—Byzantium itself! Who was she, this
sullen and beautiful Empress?’
“‘The one I had in my mind was Theodosia!’ Allègre consented to answer.
‘Originally a slave girl—from somewhere.’
“My mother can be marvellously indiscreet when the whim takes her. She
finds nothing better to do than to ask the ‘Master’ why he took his
inspiration for those two faces from the same model. No doubt she was
proud of her discerning eye. It was really clever of her. Allègre,
however, looked on it as a colossal impertinence; but he answered in his
silkiest tones:
“‘Perhaps it is because I saw in that woman something of the women of all
time.’
“My mother might have guessed that she was on thin ice there. She is
extremely intelligent. Moreover, she ought to have known. But women can
be miraculously dense sometimes. So she exclaims, ‘Then she is a
wonder!’ And with some notion of being complimentary goes on to say that
only the eyes of the discoverer of so many wonders of art could have
discovered something so marvellous in life. I suppose Allègre lost his
temper altogether then; or perhaps he only wanted to pay my mother out,
for all these ‘Masters’ she had been throwing at his head for the last
two hours. He insinuates with the utmost politeness:
“‘As you are honouring my poor collection with a visit you may like to
judge for yourself as to the inspiration of these two pictures. She is
upstairs changing her dress after our morning ride. But she wouldn’t be
very long. She might be a little surprised at first to be called down
like this, but with a few words of preparation and purely as a matter of
art . . .’
“There were never two people more taken aback. Versoy himself confesses
that he dropped his tall hat with a crash. I am a dutiful son, I hope,
but I must say I should have liked to have seen the retreat down the
great staircase. Ha! Ha! Ha!”
He laughed most undutifully and then his face twitched grimly.
“That implacable brute Allègre followed them down ceremoniously and put
my mother into the fiacre at the door with the greatest deference. He
didn’t open his lips though, and made a great bow as the fiacre drove
away. My mother didn’t recover from her consternation for three days. I
lunch with her almost daily and I couldn’t imagine what was the matter.
Then one day . . .”
He glanced round the table, jumped up and with a word of excuse left the
studio by a small door in a corner. This startled me into the
consciousness that I had been as if I had not existed for these two men.
With his elbows propped on the table Mills had his hands in front of his
face clasping the pipe from which he extracted now and then a puff of
smoke, staring stolidly across the room.
I was moved to ask in a whisper:
“Do you know him well?”
“I don’t know what he is driving at,” he answered drily. “But as to his
mother she is not as volatile as all that. I suspect it was business.
It may have been a deep plot to get a picture out of Allègre for
somebody. My cousin as likely as not. Or simply to discover what he
had. The Blunts lost all their property and in Paris there are various
ways of making a little money, without actually breaking anything. Not
even the law. And Mrs. Blunt really had a position once—in the days of
the Second Empire—and so. . .”
I listened open-mouthed to these things into which my West-Indian
experiences could not have given me an insight. But Mills checked
himself and ended in a changed tone.
“It’s not easy to know what she would be at, either, in any given
instance. For the rest, spotlessly honourable. A delightful,
aristocratic old lady. Only poor.”
A bump at the door silenced him and immediately Mr. John Blunt, Captain
of Cavalry in the Army of Legitimity, first-rate cook (as to one dish at
least), and generous host, entered clutching the necks of four more
bottles between the fingers of his hand.
“I stumbled and nearly smashed the lot,” he remarked casually. But even
I, with all my innocence, never for a moment believed he had stumbled
accidentally. During the uncorking and the filling up of glasses a
profound silence reigned; but neither of us took it seriously—any more
than his stumble.
“One day,” he went on again in that curiously flavoured voice of his, “my
mother took a heroic decision and made up her mind to get up in the
middle of the night. You must understand my mother’s phraseology. It
meant that she would be up and dressed by nine o’clock. This time it was
not Versoy that was commanded for attendance, but I. You may imagine how
delighted I was. . . .”
It was very plain to me that Blunt was addressing himself exclusively to
Mills: Mills the mind, even more than Mills the man. It was as if Mills
represented something initiated and to be reckoned with. I, of course,
could have no such pretensions. If I represented anything it was a
perfect freshness of sensations and a refreshing ignorance, not so much
of what life may give one (as to that I had some ideas at least) but of
what it really contains. I knew very well that I was utterly
insignificant in these men’s eyes. Yet my attention was not checked by
that knowledge. It’s true they were talking of a woman, but I was yet at
the age when this subject by itself is not of overwhelming interest. My
imagination would have been more stimulated probably by the adventures
and fortunes of a man. What kept my interest from flagging was Mr. Blunt
himself. The play of the white gleams of his smile round the suspicion
of grimness of his tone fascinated me like a moral incongruity.
So at the age when one sleeps well indeed but does feel sometimes as if
the need of sleep were a mere weakness of a distant old age, I kept
easily awake; and in my freshness I was kept amused by the contrast of
personalities, of the disclosed facts and moral outlook with the rough
initiations of my West-Indian experience. And all these things were
dominated by a feminine figure which to my imagination had only a
floating outline, now invested with the grace of girlhood, now with the
prestige of a woman; and indistinct in both these characters. For these
two men had _seen_ her, while to me she was only being “presented,”
elusively, in vanishing words, in the shifting tones of an unfamiliar
voice.
She was being presented to me now in the Bois de Boulogne at the early
hour of the ultra-fashionable world (so I understood), on a light bay
“bit of blood” attended on the off side by that Henry Allègre mounted on
a dark brown powerful weight carrier; and on the other by one of
Allègre’s acquaintances (the man had no real friends), distinguished
frequenters of that mysterious Pavilion. And so that side of the frame
in which that woman appeared to one down the perspective of the great
Allée was not permanent. That morning when Mr. Blunt had to escort his
mother there for the gratification of her irresistible curiosity (of
which he highly disapproved) there appeared in succession, at that
woman’s or girl’s bridle-hand, a cavalry general in red breeches, on whom
she was smiling; a rising politician in a grey suit, who talked to her
with great animation but left her side abruptly to join a personage in a
red fez and mounted on a white horse; and then, some time afterwards, the
vexed Mr. Blunt and his indiscreet mother (though I really couldn’t see
where the harm was) had one more chance of a good stare. The third party
that time was the Royal Pretender (Allègre had been painting his portrait
lately), whose hearty, sonorous laugh was heard long before the mounted
trio came riding very slowly abreast of the Blunts. There was colour in
the girl’s face. She was not laughing. Her expression was serious and
her eyes thoughtfully downcast. Blunt admitted that on that occasion the
charm, brilliance, and force of her personality was adequately framed
between those magnificently mounted, paladin-like attendants, one older
than the other but the two composing together admirably in the different
stages of their manhood. Mr. Blunt had never before seen Henry Allègre
so close. Allègre was riding nearest to the path on which Blunt was
dutifully giving his arm to his mother (they had got out of their fiacre)
and wondering if that confounded fellow would have the impudence to take
off his hat. But he did not. Perhaps he didn’t notice. Allègre was not
a man of wandering glances. There were silver hairs in his beard but he
looked as solid as a statue. Less than three months afterwards he was
gone.
“What was it?” asked Mills, who had not changed his pose for a very long
time.
“Oh, an accident. But he lingered. They were on their way to Corsica.
A yearly pilgrimage. Sentimental perhaps. It was to Corsica that he
carried her off—I mean first of all.”
There was the slightest contraction of Mr. Blunt’s facial muscles. Very
slight; but I, staring at the narrator after the manner of all simple
souls, noticed it; the twitch of a pain which surely must have been
mental. There was also a suggestion of effort before he went on: “I
suppose you know how he got hold of her?” in a tone of ease which was
astonishingly ill-assumed for such a worldly, self-controlled,
drawing-room person.
Mills changed his attitude to look at him fixedly for a moment. Then he
leaned back in his chair and with interest—I don’t mean curiosity, I mean
interest: “Does anybody know besides the two parties concerned?” he
asked, with something as it were renewed (or was it refreshed?) in his
unmoved quietness. “I ask because one has never heard any tales. I
remember one evening in a restaurant seeing a man come in with a lady—a
beautiful lady—very particularly beautiful, as though she had been stolen
out of Mahomet’s paradise. With Doña Rita it can’t be anything as
definite as that. But speaking of her in the same strain, I’ve always
felt that she looked as though Allègre had caught her in the precincts of
some temple . . . in the mountains.”
I was delighted. I had never heard before a woman spoken about in that
way, a real live woman that is, not a woman in a book. For this was no
poetry and yet it seemed to put her in the category of visions. And I
would have lost myself in it if Mr. Blunt had not, most unexpectedly,
addressed himself to me.
“I told you that man was as fine as a needle.”
And then to Mills: “Out of a temple? We know what that means.” His dark
eyes flashed: “And must it be really in the mountains?” he added.
“Or in a desert,” conceded Mills, “if you prefer that. There have been
temples in deserts, you know.”
Blunt had calmed down suddenly and assumed a nonchalant pose.
“As a matter of fact, Henry Allègre caught her very early one morning in
his own old garden full of thrushes and other small birds. She was
sitting on a stone, a fragment of some old balustrade, with her feet in
the damp grass, and reading a tattered book of some kind. She had on a
short, black, two-penny frock (_une petite robe de deux sous_) and there
was a hole in one of her stockings. She raised her eyes and saw him
looking down at her thoughtfully over that ambrosian beard of his, like
Jove at a mortal. They exchanged a good long stare, for at first she was
too startled to move; and then he murmured, “_Restez donc_.” She lowered
her eyes again on her book and after a while heard him walk away on the
path. Her heart thumped while she listened to the little birds filling
the air with their noise. She was not frightened. I am telling you this
positively because she has told me the tale herself. What better
authority can you have . . .?” Blunt paused.
“That’s true. She’s not the sort of person to lie about her own
sensations,” murmured Mills above his clasped hands.
“Nothing can escape his penetration,” Blunt remarked to me with that
equivocal urbanity which made me always feel uncomfortable on Mills’
account. “Positively nothing.” He turned to Mills again. “After some
minutes of immobility—she told me—she arose from her stone and walked
slowly on the track of that apparition. Allègre was nowhere to be seen
by that time. Under the gateway of the extremely ugly tenement house,
which hides the Pavilion and the garden from the street, the wife of the
porter was waiting with her arms akimbo. At once she cried out to Rita:
‘You were caught by our gentleman.’
“As a matter of fact, that old woman, being a friend of Rita’s aunt,
allowed the girl to come into the garden whenever Allègre was away. But
Allègre’s goings and comings were sudden and unannounced; and that
morning, Rita, crossing the narrow, thronged street, had slipped in
through the gateway in ignorance of Allègre’s return and unseen by the
porter’s wife.
“The child, she was but little more than that then, expressed her regret
of having perhaps got the kind porter’s wife into trouble.
“The old woman said with a peculiar smile: ‘Your face is not of the sort
that gets other people into trouble. My gentleman wasn’t angry. He says
you may come in any morning you like.’
“Rita, without saying anything to this, crossed the street back again to
the warehouse full of oranges where she spent most of her waking hours.
Her dreaming, empty, idle, thoughtless, unperturbed hours, she calls
them. She crossed the street with a hole in her stocking. She had a
hole in her stocking not because her uncle and aunt were poor (they had
around them never less than eight thousand oranges, mostly in cases) but
because she was then careless and untidy and totally unconscious of her
personal appearance. She told me herself that she was not even conscious
then of her personal existence. She was a mere adjunct in the twilight
life of her aunt, a Frenchwoman, and her uncle, the orange merchant, a
Basque peasant, to whom her other uncle, the great man of the family, the
priest of some parish in the hills near Tolosa, had sent her up at the
age of thirteen or thereabouts for safe keeping. She is of peasant
stock, you know. This is the true origin of the ‘Girl in the Hat’ and of
the ‘Byzantine Empress’ which excited my dear mother so much; of the
mysterious girl that the privileged personalities great in art, in
letters, in politics, or simply in the world, could see on the big sofa
during the gatherings in Allègre’s exclusive Pavilion: the Doña Rita of
their respectful addresses, manifest and mysterious, like an object of
art from some unknown period; the Doña Rita of the initiated Paris. Doña
Rita and nothing more—unique and indefinable.” He stopped with a
disagreeable smile.
“And of peasant stock?” I exclaimed in the strangely conscious silence
that fell between Mills and Blunt.
“Oh! All these Basques have been ennobled by Don Sanche II,” said
Captain Blunt moodily. “You see coats of arms carved over the doorways
of the most miserable _caserios_. As far as that goes she’s Doña Rita
right enough whatever else she is or is not in herself or in the eyes of
others. In your eyes, for instance, Mills. Eh?”
For a time Mills preserved that conscious silence.
“Why think about it at all?” he murmured coldly at last. “A strange bird
is hatched sometimes in a nest in an unaccountable way and then the fate
of such a bird is bound to be ill-defined, uncertain, questionable. And
so that is how Henry Allègre saw her first? And what happened next?”
“What happened next?” repeated Mr. Blunt, with an affected surprise in
his tone. “Is it necessary to ask that question? If you had asked _how_
the next happened. . . But as you may imagine she hasn’t told me
anything about that. She didn’t,” he continued with polite sarcasm,
“enlarge upon the facts. That confounded Allègre, with his impudent
assumption of princely airs, must have (I shouldn’t wonder) made the fact
of his notice appear as a sort of favour dropped from Olympus. I really
can’t tell how the minds and the imaginations of such aunts and uncles
are affected by such rare visitations. Mythology may give us a hint.
There is the story of Danae, for instance.”
“There is,” remarked Mills calmly, “but I don’t remember any aunt or
uncle in that connection.”
“And there are also certain stories of the discovery and acquisition of
some unique objects of art. The sly approaches, the astute negotiations,
the lying and the circumventing . . . for the love of beauty, you know.”
With his dark face and with the perpetual smiles playing about his
grimness, Mr. Blunt appeared to me positively satanic. Mills’ hand was
toying absently with an empty glass. Again they had forgotten my
existence altogether.
“I don’t know how an object of art would feel,” went on Blunt, in an
unexpectedly grating voice, which, however, recovered its tone
immediately. “I don’t know. But I do know that Rita herself was not a
Danae, never, not at any time of her life. She didn’t mind the holes in
her stockings. She wouldn’t mind holes in her stockings now. . . That is
if she manages to keep any stockings at all,” he added, with a sort of
suppressed fury so funnily unexpected that I would have burst into a
laugh if I hadn’t been lost in astonishment of the simplest kind.
“No—really!” There was a flash of interest from the quiet Mills.
“Yes, really,” Blunt nodded and knitted his brows very devilishly
indeed. “She may yet be left without a single pair of stockings.”
“The world’s a thief,” declared Mills, with the utmost composure. “It
wouldn’t mind robbing a lonely traveller.”
“He is so subtle.” Blunt remembered my existence for the purpose of that
remark and as usual it made me very uncomfortable. “Perfectly true. A
lonely traveller. They are all in the scramble from the lowest to the
highest. Heavens! What a gang! There was even an Archbishop in it.”
“_Vous plaisantez_,” said Mills, but without any marked show of
incredulity.
“I joke very seldom,” Blunt protested earnestly. “That’s why I haven’t
mentioned His Majesty—whom God preserve. That would have been an
exaggeration. . . However, the end is not yet. We were talking about the
beginning. I have heard that some dealers in fine objects, quite
mercenary people of course (my mother has an experience in that world),
show sometimes an astonishing reluctance to part with some specimens,
even at a good price. It must be very funny. It’s just possible that
the uncle and the aunt have been rolling in tears on the floor, amongst
their oranges, or beating their heads against the walls from rage and
despair. But I doubt it. And in any case Allègre is not the sort of
person that gets into any vulgar trouble. And it’s just possible that
those people stood open-mouthed at all that magnificence. They weren’t
poor, you know; therefore it wasn’t incumbent on them to be honest. They
are still there in the old respectable warehouse, I understand. They
have kept their position in their _quartier_, I believe. But they didn’t
keep their niece. It might have been an act of sacrifice! For I seem to
remember hearing that after attending for a while some school round the
corner the child had been set to keep the books of that orange business.
However it might have been, the first fact in Rita’s and Allègre’s common
history is a journey to Italy, and then to Corsica. You know Allègre had
a house in Corsica somewhere. She has it now as she has everything he
ever had; and that Corsican palace is the portion that will stick the
longest to Doña Rita, I imagine. Who would want to buy a place like
that? I suppose nobody would take it for a gift. The fellow was having
houses built all over the place. This very house where we are sitting
belonged to him. Doña Rita has given it to her sister, I understand. Or
at any rate the sister runs it. She is my landlady . . .”
“Her sister here!” I exclaimed. “Her sister!”
Blunt turned to me politely, but only for a long mute gaze. His eyes
were in deep shadow and it struck me for the first time then that there
was something fatal in that man’s aspect as soon as he fell silent. I
think the effect was purely physical, but in consequence whatever he said
seemed inadequate and as if produced by a commonplace, if uneasy, soul.
“Doña Rita brought her down from her mountains on purpose. She is asleep
somewhere in this house, in one of the vacant rooms. She lets them, you
know, at extortionate prices, that is, if people will pay them, for she
is easily intimidated. You see, she has never seen such an enormous town
before in her life, nor yet so many strange people. She has been keeping
house for the uncle-priest in some mountain gorge for years and years.
It’s extraordinary he should have let her go. There is something
mysterious there, some reason or other. It’s either theology or Family.
The saintly uncle in his wild parish would know nothing of any other
reasons. She wears a rosary at her waist. Directly she had seen some
real money she developed a love of it. If you stay with me long enough,
and I hope you will (I really can’t sleep), you will see her going out to
mass at half-past six; but there is nothing remarkable in her; just a
peasant woman of thirty-four or so. A rustic nun. . . .”
I may as well say at once that we didn’t stay as long as that. It was
not that morning that I saw for the first time Therese of the whispering
lips and downcast eyes slipping out to an early mass from the house of
iniquity into the early winter murk of the city of perdition, in a world
steeped in sin. No. It was not on that morning that I saw Doña Rita’s
incredible sister with her brown, dry face, her gliding motion, and her
really nun-like dress, with a black handkerchief enfolding her head
tightly, with the two pointed ends hanging down her back. Yes, nun-like
enough. And yet not altogether. People would have turned round after
her if those dartings out to the half-past six mass hadn’t been the only
occasion on which she ventured into the impious streets. She was
frightened of the streets, but in a particular way, not as if of a danger
but as if of a contamination. Yet she didn’t fly back to her mountains
because at bottom she had an indomitable character, a peasant tenacity of
purpose, predatory instincts. . . .
No, we didn’t remain long enough with Mr. Blunt to see even as much as
her back glide out of the house on her prayerful errand. She was
prayerful. She was terrible. Her one-idead peasant mind was as
inaccessible as a closed iron safe. She was fatal. . . It’s perfectly
ridiculous to confess that they all seem fatal to me now; but writing to
you like this in all sincerity I don’t mind appearing ridiculous. I
suppose fatality must be expressed, embodied, like other forces of this
earth; and if so why not in such people as well as in other more glorious
or more frightful figures?
We remained, however, long enough to let Mr. Blunt’s half-hidden acrimony
develop itself or prey on itself in further talk about the man Allègre
and the girl Rita. Mr. Blunt, still addressing Mills with that story,
passed on to what he called the second act, the disclosure, with, what he
called, the characteristic Allègre impudence—which surpassed the
impudence of kings, millionaires, or tramps, by many degrees—the
revelation of Rita’s existence to the world at large. It wasn’t a very
large world, but then it was most choicely composed. How is one to
describe it shortly? In a sentence it was the world that rides in the
morning in the Bois.
In something less than a year and a half from the time he found her
sitting on a broken fragment of stone work buried in the grass of his
wild garden, full of thrushes, starlings, and other innocent creatures of
the air, he had given her amongst other accomplishments the art of
sitting admirably on a horse, and directly they returned to Paris he took
her out with him for their first morning ride.
“I leave you to judge of the sensation,” continued Mr. Blunt, with a
faint grimace, as though the words had an acrid taste in his mouth. “And
the consternation,” he added venomously. “Many of those men on that
great morning had some one of their womankind with them. But their hats
had to go off all the same, especially the hats of the fellows who were
under some sort of obligation to Allègre. You would be astonished to
hear the names of people, of real personalities in the world, who, not to
mince matters, owed money to Allègre. And I don’t mean in the world of
art only. In the first rout of the surprise some story of an adopted
daughter was set abroad hastily, I believe. You know ‘adopted’ with a
peculiar accent on the word—and it was plausible enough. I have been
told that at that time she looked extremely youthful by his side, I mean
extremely youthful in expression, in the eyes, in the smile. She must
have been . . .”
Blunt pulled himself up short, but not so short as not to let the
confused murmur of the word “adorable” reach our attentive ears.
The heavy Mills made a slight movement in his chair. The effect on me
was more inward, a strange emotion which left me perfectly still; and for
the moment of silence Blunt looked more fatal than ever.
“I understand it didn’t last very long,” he addressed us politely again.
“And no wonder! The sort of talk she would have heard during that first
springtime in Paris would have put an impress on a much less receptive
personality; for of course Allègre didn’t close his doors to his friends
and this new apparition was not of the sort to make them keep away.
After that first morning she always had somebody to ride at her bridle
hand. Old Doyen, the sculptor, was the first to approach them. At that
age a man may venture on anything. He rides a strange animal like a
circus horse. Rita had spotted him out of the corner of her eye as he
passed them, putting up his enormous paw in a still more enormous glove,
airily, you know, like this” (Blunt waved his hand above his head), “to
Allègre. He passes on. All at once he wheels his fantastic animal round
and comes trotting after them. With the merest casual ‘_Bonjour_,
Allègre’ he ranges close to her on the other side and addresses her, hat
in hand, in that booming voice of his like a deferential roar of the sea
very far away. His articulation is not good, and the first words she
really made out were ‘I am an old sculptor. . . Of course there is that
habit. . . But I can see you through all that. . . ’
He put his hat on very much on one side. ‘I am a great sculptor of
women,’ he declared. ‘I gave up my life to them, poor unfortunate
creatures, the most beautiful, the wealthiest, the most loved. . . Two
generations of them. . . Just look at me full in the eyes, _mon enfant_.’
“They stared at each other. Doña Rita confessed to me that the old
fellow made her heart beat with such force that she couldn’t manage to
smile at him. And she saw his eyes run full of tears. He wiped them
simply with the back of his hand and went on booming faintly. ‘Thought
so. You are enough to make one cry. I thought my artist’s life was
finished, and here you come along from devil knows where with this young
friend of mine, who isn’t a bad smearer of canvases—but it’s marble and
bronze that you want. . . I shall finish my artist’s life with your face;
but I shall want a bit of those shoulders, too. . . You hear, Allègre, I
must have a bit of her shoulders, too. I can see through the cloth that
they are divine. If they aren’t divine I will eat my hat. Yes, I will
do your head and then—_nunc dimittis_.’
“These were the first words with which the world greeted her, or should I
say civilization did; already both her native mountains and the cavern of
oranges belonged to a prehistoric age. ‘Why don’t you ask him to come
this afternoon?’ Allègre’s voice suggested gently. ‘He knows the way to
the house.’
“The old man said with extraordinary fervour, ‘Oh, yes I will,’ pulled up
his horse and they went on. She told me that she could feel her
heart-beats for a long time. The remote power of that voice, those old
eyes full of tears, that noble and ruined face, had affected her
extraordinarily she said. But perhaps what affected her was the shadow,
the still living shadow of a great passion in the man’s heart.
“Allègre remarked to her calmly: ‘He has been a little mad all his
life.’”
CHAPTER III
Mills lowered the hands holding the extinct and even cold pipe before his
big face.
“H’m, shoot an arrow into that old man’s heart like this? But was there
anything done?”
“A terra-cotta bust, I believe. Good? I don’t know. I rather think
it’s in this house. A lot of things have been sent down from Paris here,
when she gave up the Pavilion. When she goes up now she stays in hotels,
you know. I imagine it is locked up in one of these things,” went on
Blunt, pointing towards the end of the studio where amongst the
monumental presses of dark oak lurked the shy dummy which had worn the
stiff robes of the Byzantine Empress and the amazing hat of the “Girl,”
rakishly. I wondered whether that dummy had travelled from Paris, too,
and whether with or without its head. Perhaps that head had been left
behind, having rolled into a corner of some empty room in the dismantled
Pavilion. I represented it to myself very lonely, without features, like
a turnip, with a mere peg sticking out where the neck should have been.
And Mr. Blunt was talking on.
“There are treasures behind these locked doors, brocades, old jewels,
unframed pictures, bronzes, chinoiseries, Japoneries.”
He growled as much as a man of his accomplished manner and voice could
growl. “I don’t suppose she gave away all that to her sister, but I
shouldn’t be surprised if that timid rustic didn’t lay a claim to the lot
for the love of God and the good of the Church. . .
“And held on with her teeth, too,” he added graphically.
Mills’ face remained grave. Very grave. I was amused at those little
venomous outbreaks of the fatal Mr. Blunt. Again I knew myself utterly
forgotten. But I didn’t feel dull and I didn’t even feel sleepy. That
last strikes me as strange at this distance of time, in regard of my
tender years and of the depressing hour which precedes the dawn. We had
been drinking that straw-coloured wine, too, I won’t say like water
(nobody would have drunk water like that) but, well . . . and the haze of
tobacco smoke was like the blue mist of great distances seen in dreams.
Yes, that old sculptor was the first who joined them in the sight of all
Paris. It was that old glory that opened the series of companions of
those morning rides; a series which extended through three successive
Parisian spring-times and comprised a famous physiologist, a fellow who
seemed to hint that mankind could be made immortal or at least
everlastingly old; a fashionable philosopher and psychologist who used to
lecture to enormous audiences of women with his tongue in his cheek (but
never permitted himself anything of the kind when talking to Rita); that
surly dandy Cabanel (but he only once, from mere vanity), and everybody
else at all distinguished including also a celebrated person who turned
out later to be a swindler. But he was really a genius. . . All this
according to Mr. Blunt, who gave us all those details with a sort of
languid zest covering a secret irritation.
“Apart from that, you know,” went on Mr. Blunt, “all she knew of the
world of men and women (I mean till Allègre’s death) was what she had
seen of it from the saddle two hours every morning during four months of
the year or so. Absolutely all, with Allègre self-denyingly on her right
hand, with that impenetrable air of guardianship. Don’t touch! He
didn’t like his treasures to be touched unless he actually put some
unique object into your hands with a sort of triumphant murmur, ‘Look
close at that.’ Of course I only have heard all this. I am much too
small a person, you understand, to even . . .”
He flashed his white teeth at us most agreeably, but the upper part of
his face, the shadowed setting of his eyes, and the slight drawing in of
his eyebrows gave a fatal suggestion. I thought suddenly of the
definition he applied to himself: “_Américain_, _catholique et
gentil-homme_” completed by that startling “I live by my sword” uttered
in a light drawing-room tone tinged by a flavour of mockery lighter even
than air.
He insisted to us that the first and only time he had seen Allègre a
little close was that morning in the Bois with his mother. His Majesty
(whom God preserve), then not even an active Pretender, flanked the girl,
still a girl, on the other side, the usual companion for a month past or
so. Allègre had suddenly taken it into his head to paint his portrait.
A sort of intimacy had sprung up. Mrs. Blunt’s remark was that of the
two striking horsemen Allègre looked the more kingly.
“The son of a confounded millionaire soap-boiler,” commented Mr. Blunt
through his clenched teeth. “A man absolutely without parentage.
Without a single relation in the world. Just a freak.”
“That explains why he could leave all his fortune to her,” said Mills.
“The will, I believe,” said Mr. Blunt moodily, “was written on a half
sheet of paper, with his device of an Assyrian bull at the head. What
the devil did he mean by it? Anyway it was the last time that she
surveyed the world of men and women from the saddle. Less than three
months later. . .”
“Allègre died and. . . ” murmured Mills in an interested manner.
“And she had to dismount,” broke in Mr. Blunt grimly. “Dismount right
into the middle of it. Down to the very ground, you understand. I
suppose you can guess what that would mean. She didn’t know what to do
with herself. She had never been on the ground. She . . . ”
“Aha!” said Mills.
“Even eh! eh! if you like,” retorted Mr. Blunt, in an unrefined tone,
that made me open my eyes, which were well opened before, still wider.
He turned to me with that horrible trick of his of commenting upon Mills
as though that quiet man whom I admired, whom I trusted, and for whom I
had already something resembling affection had been as much of a dummy as
that other one lurking in the shadows, pitiful and headless in its
attitude of alarmed chastity.
“Nothing escapes his penetration. He can perceive a haystack at an
enormous distance when he is interested.”
I thought this was going rather too far, even to the borders of
vulgarity; but Mills remained untroubled and only reached for his tobacco
pouch.
“But that’s nothing to my mother’s interest. She can never see a
haystack, therefore she is always so surprised and excited. Of course
Doña Rita was not a woman about whom the newspapers insert little
paragraphs. But Allègre was the sort of man. A lot came out in print
about him and a lot was talked in the world about her; and at once my
dear mother perceived a haystack and naturally became unreasonably
absorbed in it. I thought her interest would wear out. But it didn’t.
She had received a shock and had received an impression by means of that
girl. My mother has never been treated with impertinence before, and the
aesthetic impression must have been of extraordinary strength. I must
suppose that it amounted to a sort of moral revolution, I can’t account
for her proceedings in any other way. When Rita turned up in Paris a
year and a half after Allègre’s death some shabby journalist (smart
creature) hit upon the notion of alluding to her as the heiress of Mr.
Allègre. ‘The heiress of Mr. Allègre has taken up her residence again
amongst the treasures of art in that Pavilion so well known to the élite
of the artistic, scientific, and political world, not to speak of the
members of aristocratic and even royal families. . . ’ You know the sort
of thing. It appeared first in the _Figaro_, I believe. And then at the
end a little phrase: ‘She is alone.’ She was in a fair way of becoming a
celebrity of a sort. Daily little allusions and that sort of thing.
Heaven only knows who stopped it. There was a rush of ‘old friends’ into
that garden, enough to scare all the little birds away. I suppose one or
several of them, having influence with the press, did it. But the gossip
didn’t stop, and the name stuck, too, since it conveyed a very certain
and very significant sort of fact, and of course the Venetian episode was
talked about in the houses frequented by my mother. It was talked about
from a royalist point of view with a kind of respect. It was even said
that the inspiration and the resolution of the war going on now over the
Pyrenees had come out from that head. . . Some of them talked as if she
were the guardian angel of Legitimacy. You know what royalist gush is
like.”
Mr. Blunt’s face expressed sarcastic disgust. Mills moved his head the
least little bit. Apparently he knew.
“Well, speaking with all possible respect, it seems to have affected my
mother’s brain. I was already with the royal army and of course there
could be no question of regular postal communications with France. My
mother hears or overhears somewhere that the heiress of Mr. Allègre is
contemplating a secret journey. All the noble Salons were full of
chatter about that secret naturally. So she sits down and pens an
autograph: ‘Madame, Informed that you are proceeding to the place on
which the hopes of all the right thinking people are fixed, I trust to
your womanly sympathy with a mother’s anxious feelings, etc., etc.,’ and
ending with a request to take messages to me and bring news of me. . .
The coolness of my mother!”
Most unexpectedly Mills was heard murmuring a question which seemed to me
very odd.
“I wonder how your mother addressed that note?”
A moment of silence ensued.
“Hardly in the newspaper style, I should think,” retorted Mr. Blunt, with
one of his grins that made me doubt the stability of his feelings and the
consistency of his outlook in regard to his whole tale. “My mother’s
maid took it in a fiacre very late one evening to the Pavilion and
brought an answer scrawled on a scrap of paper: ‘Write your messages at
once’ and signed with a big capital R. So my mother sat down again to
her charming writing desk and the maid made another journey in a fiacre
just before midnight; and ten days later or so I got a letter thrust into
my hand at the _avanzadas_ just as I was about to start on a night
patrol, together with a note asking me to call on the writer so that she
might allay my mother’s anxieties by telling her how I looked.
“It was signed R only, but I guessed at once and nearly fell off my horse
with surprise.”
“You mean to say that Doña Rita was actually at the Royal Headquarters
lately?” exclaimed Mills, with evident surprise. “Why,
we—everybody—thought that all this affair was over and done with.”
“Absolutely. Nothing in the world could be more done with than that
episode. Of course the rooms in the hotel at Tolosa were retained for
her by an order from Royal Headquarters. Two garret-rooms, the place was
so full of all sorts of court people; but I can assure you that for the
three days she was there she never put her head outside the door.
General Mongroviejo called on her officially from the King. A general,
not anybody of the household, you see. That’s a distinct shade of the
present relation. He stayed just five minutes. Some personage from the
Foreign department at Headquarters was closeted for about a couple of
hours. That was of course business. Then two officers from the staff
came together with some explanations or instructions to her. Then Baron
H., a fellow with a pretty wife, who had made so many sacrifices for the
cause, raised a great to-do about seeing her and she consented to receive
him for a moment. They say he was very much frightened by her arrival,
but after the interview went away all smiles. Who else? Yes, the
Archbishop came. Half an hour. This is more than is necessary to give a
blessing, and I can’t conceive what else he had to give her. But I am
sure he got something out of her. Two peasants from the upper valley
were sent for by military authorities and she saw them, too. That friar
who hangs about the court has been in and out several times. Well, and
lastly, I myself. I got leave from the outposts. That was the first
time I talked to her. I would have gone that evening back to the
regiment, but the friar met me in the corridor and informed me that I
would be ordered to escort that most loyal and noble lady back to the
French frontier as a personal mission of the highest honour. I was
inclined to laugh at him. He himself is a cheery and jovial person and
he laughed with me quite readily—but I got the order before dark all
right. It was rather a job, as the Alphonsists were attacking the right
flank of our whole front and there was some considerable disorder there.
I mounted her on a mule and her maid on another. We spent one night in a
ruined old tower occupied by some of our infantry and got away at
daybreak under the Alphonsist shells. The maid nearly died of fright and
one of the troopers with us was wounded. To smuggle her back across the
frontier was another job but it wasn’t my job. It wouldn’t have done for
her to appear in sight of French frontier posts in the company of Carlist
uniforms. She seems to have a fearless streak in her nature. At one
time as we were climbing a slope absolutely exposed to artillery fire I
asked her on purpose, being provoked by the way she looked about at the
scenery, ‘A little emotion, eh?’ And she answered me in a low voice:
‘Oh, yes! I am moved. I used to run about these hills when I was
little.’ And note, just then the trooper close behind us had been
wounded by a shell fragment. He was swearing awfully and fighting with
his horse. The shells were falling around us about two to the minute.
“Luckily the Alphonsist shells are not much better than our own. But
women are funny. I was afraid the maid would jump down and clear out
amongst the rocks, in which case we should have had to dismount and catch
her. But she didn’t do that; she sat perfectly still on her mule and
shrieked. Just simply shrieked. Ultimately we came to a curiously
shaped rock at the end of a short wooded valley. It was very still there
and the sunshine was brilliant. I said to Doña Rita: ‘We will have to
part in a few minutes. I understand that my mission ends at this rock.’
And she said: ‘I know this rock well. This is my country.’
“Then she thanked me for bringing her there and presently three peasants
appeared, waiting for us, two youths and one shaven old man, with a thin
nose like a sword blade and perfectly round eyes, a character well known
to the whole Carlist army. The two youths stopped under the trees at a
distance, but the old fellow came quite close up and gazed at her,
screwing up his eyes as if looking at the sun. Then he raised his arm
very slowly and took his red _boina_ off his bald head. I watched her
smiling at him all the time. I daresay she knew him as well as she knew
the old rock. Very old rock. The rock of ages—and the aged
man—landmarks of her youth. Then the mules started walking smartly
forward, with the three peasants striding alongside of them, and vanished
between the trees. These fellows were most likely sent out by her uncle
the Cura.
“It was a peaceful scene, the morning light, the bit of open country
framed in steep stony slopes, a high peak or two in the distance, the
thin smoke of some invisible _caserios_, rising straight up here and
there. Far away behind us the guns had ceased and the echoes in the
gorges had died out. I never knew what peace meant before. . .
“Nor since,” muttered Mr. Blunt after a pause and then went on. “The
little stone church of her uncle, the holy man of the family, might have
been round the corner of the next spur of the nearest hill. I dismounted
to bandage the shoulder of my trooper. It was only a nasty long scratch.
While I was busy about it a bell began to ring in the distance. The
sound fell deliciously on the ear, clear like the morning light. But it
stopped all at once. You know how a distant bell stops suddenly. I
never knew before what stillness meant. While I was wondering at it the
fellow holding our horses was moved to uplift his voice. He was a
Spaniard, not a Basque, and he trolled out in Castilian that song you
know,
“‘Oh bells of my native village,
I am going away . . . good-bye!’
He had a good voice. When the last note had floated away I remounted,
but there was a charm in the spot, something particular and individual
because while we were looking at it before turning our horses’ heads away
the singer said: ‘I wonder what is the name of this place,’ and the other
man remarked: ‘Why, there is no village here,’ and the first one
insisted: ‘No, I mean this spot, this very place.’ The wounded trooper
decided that it had no name probably. But he was wrong. It had a name.
The hill, or the rock, or the wood, or the whole had a name. I heard of
it by chance later. It was—Lastaola.”
A cloud of tobacco smoke from Mills’ pipe drove between my head and the
head of Mr. Blunt, who, strange to say, yawned slightly. It seemed to me
an obvious affectation on the part of that man of perfect manners, and,
moreover, suffering from distressing insomnia.
“This is how we first met and how we first parted,” he said in a weary,
indifferent tone. “It’s quite possible that she did see her uncle on the
way. It’s perhaps on this occasion that she got her sister to come out
of the wilderness. I have no doubt she had a pass from the French
Government giving her the completest freedom of action. She must have
got it in Paris before leaving.”
Mr. Blunt broke out into worldly, slightly cynical smiles.
“She can get anything she likes in Paris. She could get a whole army
over the frontier if she liked. She could get herself admitted into the
Foreign Office at one o’clock in the morning if it so pleased her. Doors
fly open before the heiress of Mr. Allègre. She has inherited the old
friends, the old connections . . . Of course, if she were a toothless old
woman . . . But, you see, she isn’t. The ushers in all the ministries
bow down to the ground therefore, and voices from the innermost sanctums
take on an eager tone when they say, ‘_Faites entrer_.’ My mother knows
something about it. She has followed her career with the greatest
attention. And Rita herself is not even surprised. She accomplishes
most extraordinary things, as naturally as buying a pair of gloves.
People in the shops are very polite and people in the world are like
people in the shops. What did she know of the world? She had seen it
only from the saddle. Oh, she will get your cargo released for you all
right. How will she do it? . . Well, when it’s done—you follow me,
Mills?—when it’s done she will hardly know herself.”
“It’s hardly possible that she shouldn’t be aware,” Mills pronounced
calmly.
“No, she isn’t an idiot,” admitted Mr. Blunt, in the same matter-of-fact
voice. “But she confessed to myself only the other day that she suffered
from a sense of unreality. I told her that at any rate she had her own
feelings surely. And she said to me: Yes, there was one of them at least
about which she had no doubt; and you will never guess what it was.
Don’t try. I happen to know, because we are pretty good friends.”
At that moment we all changed our attitude slightly. Mills’ staring eyes
moved for a glance towards Blunt, I, who was occupying the divan, raised
myself on the cushions a little and Mr. Blunt, with half a turn, put his
elbow on the table.
“I asked her what it was. I don’t see,” went on Mr. Blunt, with a
perfectly horrible gentleness, “why I should have shown particular
consideration to the heiress of Mr. Allègre. I don’t mean to that
particular mood of hers. It was the mood of weariness. And so she told
me. It’s fear. I will say it once again: Fear. . . .”
He added after a pause, “There can be not the slightest doubt of her
courage. But she distinctly uttered the word fear.”
There was under the table the noise of Mills stretching his legs.
“A person of imagination,” he began, “a young, virgin intelligence,
steeped for nearly five years in the talk of Allègre’s studio, where
every hard truth had been cracked and every belief had been worried into
shreds. They were like a lot of intellectual dogs, you know . . .”
“Yes, yes, of course,” Blunt interrupted hastily, “the intellectual
personality altogether adrift, a soul without a home . . . but I, who am
neither very fine nor very deep, I am convinced that the fear is
material.”
“Because she confessed to it being that?” insinuated Mills.
“No, because she didn’t,” contradicted Blunt, with an angry frown and in
an extremely suave voice. “In fact, she bit her tongue. And considering
what good friends we are (under fire together and all that) I conclude
that there is nothing there to boast of. Neither is my friendship, as a
matter of fact.”
Mills’ face was the very perfection of indifference. But I who was
looking at him, in my innocence, to discover what it all might mean, I
had a notion that it was perhaps a shade too perfect.
“My leave is a farce,” Captain Blunt burst out, with a most unexpected
exasperation. “As an officer of Don Carlos, I have no more standing than
a bandit. I ought to have been interned in those filthy old barracks in
Avignon a long time ago. . . Why am I not? Because Doña Rita exists and
for no other reason on earth. Of course it’s known that I am about. She
has only to whisper over the wires to the Minister of the Interior, ‘Put
that bird in a cage for me,’ and the thing would be done without any more
formalities than that. . . Sad world this,” he commented in a changed
tone. “Nowadays a gentleman who lives by his sword is exposed to that
sort of thing.”
It was then for the first time I heard Mr. Mills laugh. It was a deep,
pleasant, kindly note, not very loud and altogether free from that
quality of derision that spoils so many laughs and gives away the secret
hardness of hearts. But neither was it a very joyous laugh.
“But the truth of the matter is that I am ‘_en mission_,’” continued
Captain Blunt. “I have been instructed to settle some things, to set
other things going, and, by my instructions, Doña Rita is to be the
intermediary for all those objects. And why? Because every bald head in
this Republican Government gets pink at the top whenever her dress
rustles outside the door. They bow with immense deference when the door
opens, but the bow conceals a smirk because of those Venetian days. That
confounded Versoy shoved his nose into that business; he says
accidentally. He saw them together on the Lido and (those writing
fellows are horrible) he wrote what he calls a vignette (I suppose
accidentally, too) under that very title. There was in it a Prince and a
lady and a big dog. He described how the Prince on landing from the
gondola emptied his purse into the hands of a picturesque old beggar,
while the lady, a little way off, stood gazing back at Venice with the
dog romantically stretched at her feet. One of Versoy’s beautiful prose
vignettes in a great daily that has a literary column. But some other
papers that didn’t care a cent for literature rehashed the mere fact.
And that’s the sort of fact that impresses your political man, especially
if the lady is, well, such as she is . . .”
He paused. His dark eyes flashed fatally, away from us, in the direction
of the shy dummy; and then he went on with cultivated cynicism.
“So she rushes down here. Overdone, weary, rest for her nerves.
Nonsense. I assure you she has no more nerves than I have.”
I don’t know how he meant it, but at that moment, slim and elegant, he
seemed a mere bundle of nerves himself, with the flitting expressions on
his thin, well-bred face, with the restlessness of his meagre brown hands
amongst the objects on the table. With some pipe ash amongst a little
spilt wine his forefinger traced a capital R. Then he looked into an
empty glass profoundly. I have a notion that I sat there staring and
listening like a yokel at a play. Mills’ pipe was lying quite a foot
away in front of him, empty, cold. Perhaps he had no more tobacco. Mr.
Blunt assumed his dandified air—nervously.
“Of course her movements are commented on in the most exclusive
drawing-rooms and also in other places, also exclusive, but where the
gossip takes on another tone. There they are probably saying that she
has got a ‘_coup de coeur_’ for some one. Whereas I think she is utterly
incapable of that sort of thing. That Venetian affair, the beginning of
it and the end of it, was nothing but a _coup de tête_, and all those
activities in which I am involved, as you see (by order of Headquarters,
ha, ha, ha!), are nothing but that, all this connection, all this
intimacy into which I have dropped . . . Not to speak of my mother, who
is delightful, but as irresponsible as one of those crazy princesses that
shock their Royal families. . . ”
He seemed to bite his tongue and I observed that Mills’ eyes seemed to
have grown wider than I had ever seen them before. In that tranquil face
it was a great play of feature. “An intimacy,” began Mr. Blunt, with an
extremely refined grimness of tone, “an intimacy with the heiress of Mr.
Allègre on the part of . . . on my part, well, it isn’t exactly . . .
it’s open . . . well, I leave it to you, what does it look like?”
“Is there anybody looking on?” Mills let fall, gently, through his kindly
lips.
“Not actually, perhaps, at this moment. But I don’t need to tell a man
of the world, like you, that such things cannot remain unseen. And that
they are, well, compromising, because of the mere fact of the fortune.”
Mills got on his feet, looked for his jacket and after getting into it
made himself heard while he looked for his hat.
“Whereas the woman herself is, so to speak, priceless.”
Mr. Blunt muttered the word “Obviously.”
By then we were all on our feet. The iron stove glowed no longer and the
lamp, surrounded by empty bottles and empty glasses, had grown dimmer.
I know that I had a great shiver on getting away from the cushions of the
divan.
“We will meet again in a few hours,” said Mr. Blunt.
“Don’t forget to come,” he said, addressing me. “Oh, yes, do. Have no
scruples. I am authorized to make invitations.”
He must have noticed my shyness, my surprise, my embarrassment. And
indeed I didn’t know what to say.
“I assure you there isn’t anything incorrect in your coming,” he
insisted, with the greatest civility. “You will be introduced by two
good friends, Mills and myself. Surely you are not afraid of a very
charming woman. . . .”
I was not afraid, but my head swam a little and I only looked at him
mutely.
“Lunch precisely at midday. Mills will bring you along. I am sorry you
two are going. I shall throw myself on the bed for an hour or two, but I
am sure I won’t sleep.”
He accompanied us along the passage into the black-and-white hall, where
the low gas flame glimmered forlornly. When he opened the front door the
cold blast of the mistral rushing down the street of the Consuls made me
shiver to the very marrow of my bones.
Mills and I exchanged but a few words as we walked down towards the
centre of the town. In the chill tempestuous dawn he strolled along
musingly, disregarding the discomfort of the cold, the depressing
influence of the hour, the desolation of the empty streets in which the
dry dust rose in whirls in front of us, behind us, flew upon us from the
side streets. The masks had gone home and our footsteps echoed on the
flagstones with unequal sound as of men without purpose, without hope.
“I suppose you will come,” said Mills suddenly.
“I really don’t know,” I said.
“Don’t you? Well, remember I am not trying to persuade you; but I am
staying at the Hôtel de Louvre and I shall leave there at a quarter to
twelve for that lunch. At a quarter to twelve, not a minute later. I
suppose you can sleep?”
I laughed.
“Charming age, yours,” said Mills, as we came out on the quays. Already
dim figures of the workers moved in the biting dawn and the masted forms
of ships were coming out dimly, as far as the eye could reach down the
old harbour.
“Well,” Mills began again, “you may oversleep yourself.”
This suggestion was made in a cheerful tone, just as we shook hands at
the lower end of the Cannebière. He looked very burly as he walked away
from me. I went on towards my lodgings. My head was very full of
confused images, but I was really too tired to think.
PART TWO
CHAPTER I
Sometimes I wonder yet whether Mills wished me to oversleep myself or
not: that is, whether he really took sufficient interest to care. His
uniform kindliness of manner made it impossible for me to tell. And I
can hardly remember my own feelings. Did I care? The whole recollection
of that time of my life has such a peculiar quality that the beginning
and the end of it are merged in one sensation of profound emotion,
continuous and overpowering, containing the extremes of exultation, full
of careless joy and of an invincible sadness—like a day-dream. The sense
of all this having been gone through as if in one great rush of
imagination is all the stronger in the distance of time, because it had
something of that quality even then: of fate unprovoked, of events that
didn’t cast any shadow before.
Not that those events were in the least extraordinary. They were, in
truth, commonplace. What to my backward glance seems startling and a
little awful is their punctualness and inevitability. Mills was
punctual. Exactly at a quarter to twelve he appeared under the lofty
portal of the Hôtel de Louvre, with his fresh face, his ill-fitting grey
suit, and enveloped in his own sympathetic atmosphere.
How could I have avoided him? To this day I have a shadowy conviction of
his inherent distinction of mind and heart, far beyond any man I have
ever met since. He was unavoidable: and of course I never tried to avoid
him. The first sight on which his eyes fell was a victoria pulled up
before the hotel door, in which I sat with no sentiment I can remember
now but that of some slight shyness. He got in without a moment’s
hesitation, his friendly glance took me in from head to foot and (such
was his peculiar gift) gave me a pleasurable sensation.
After we had gone a little way I couldn’t help saying to him with a
bashful laugh: “You know, it seems very extraordinary that I should be
driving out with you like this.”
He turned to look at me and in his kind voice:
“You will find everything extremely simple,” he said. “So simple that
you will be quite able to hold your own. I suppose you know that the
world is selfish, I mean the majority of the people in it, often
unconsciously I must admit, and especially people with a mission, with a
fixed idea, with some fantastic object in view, or even with only some
fantastic illusion. That doesn’t mean that they have no scruples. And I
don’t know that at this moment I myself am not one of them.”
“That, of course, I can’t say,” I retorted.
“I haven’t seen her for years,” he said, “and in comparison with what she
was then she must be very grown up by now. From what we heard from Mr.
Blunt she had experiences which would have matured her more than they
would teach her. There are of course people that are not teachable. I
don’t know that she is one of them. But as to maturity that’s quite
another thing. Capacity for suffering is developed in every human being
worthy of the name.”
“Captain Blunt doesn’t seem to be a very happy person,” I said. “He
seems to have a grudge against everybody. People make him wince. The
things they do, the things they say. He must be awfully mature.”
Mills gave me a sidelong look. It met mine of the same character and we
both smiled without openly looking at each other. At the end of the Rue
de Rome the violent chilly breath of the mistral enveloped the victoria
in a great widening of brilliant sunshine without heat. We turned to the
right, circling at a stately pace about the rather mean obelisk which
stands at the entrance to the Prado.
“I don’t know whether you are mature or not,” said Mills humorously.
“But I think you will do. You . . . ”
“Tell me,” I interrupted, “what is really Captain Blunt’s position
there?”
And I nodded at the alley of the Prado opening before us between the rows
of the perfectly leafless trees.
“Thoroughly false, I should think. It doesn’t accord either with his
illusions or his pretensions, or even with the real position he has in
the world. And so what between his mother and the General Headquarters
and the state of his own feelings he. . . ”
“He is in love with her,” I interrupted again.
“That wouldn’t make it any easier. I’m not at all sure of that. But if
so it can’t be a very idealistic sentiment. All the warmth of his
idealism is concentrated upon a certain ‘_Américain_, _Catholique et
gentil-homme_. . . ’”
The smile which for a moment dwelt on his lips was not unkind.
“At the same time he has a very good grip of the material conditions that
surround, as it were, the situation.”
“What do you mean? That Doña Rita” (the name came strangely familiar to
my tongue) “is rich, that she has a fortune of her own?”
“Yes, a fortune,” said Mills. “But it was Allègre’s fortune before. . .
And then there is Blunt’s fortune: he lives by his sword. And there is
the fortune of his mother, I assure you a perfectly charming, clever, and
most aristocratic old lady, with the most distinguished connections. I
really mean it. She doesn’t live by her sword. She . . . she lives by
her wits. I have a notion that those two dislike each other heartily at
times. . . Here we are.”
The victoria stopped in the side alley, bordered by the low walls of
private grounds. We got out before a wrought-iron gateway which stood
half open and walked up a circular drive to the door of a large villa of
a neglected appearance. The mistral howled in the sunshine, shaking the
bare bushes quite furiously. And everything was bright and hard, the air
was hard, the light was hard, the ground under our feet was hard.
The door at which Mills rang came open almost at once. The maid who
opened it was short, dark, and slightly pockmarked. For the rest, an
obvious “_femme-de-chambre_,” and very busy. She said quickly, “Madame
has just returned from her ride,” and went up the stairs leaving us to
shut the front door ourselves.
The staircase had a crimson carpet. Mr. Blunt appeared from somewhere in
the hall. He was in riding breeches and a black coat with ample square
skirts. This get-up suited him but it also changed him extremely by
doing away with the effect of flexible slimness he produced in his
evening clothes. He looked to me not at all himself but rather like a
brother of the man who had been talking to us the night before. He
carried about him a delicate perfume of scented soap. He gave us a flash
of his white teeth and said:
“It’s a perfect nuisance. We have just dismounted. I will have to lunch
as I am. A lifelong habit of beginning her day on horseback. She
pretends she is unwell unless she does. I daresay, when one thinks there
has been hardly a day for five or six years that she didn’t begin with a
ride. That’s the reason she is always rushing away from Paris where she
can’t go out in the morning alone. Here, of course, it’s different. And
as I, too, am a stranger here I can go out with her. Not that I
particularly care to do it.”
These last words were addressed to Mills specially, with the addition of
a mumbled remark: “It’s a confounded position.” Then calmly to me with a
swift smile: “We have been talking of you this morning. You are expected
with impatience.”
“Thank you very much,” I said, “but I can’t help asking myself what I am
doing here.”
The upward cast in the eyes of Mills who was facing the staircase made us
both, Blunt and I, turn round. The woman of whom I had heard so much, in
a sort of way in which I had never heard a woman spoken of before, was
coming down the stairs, and my first sensation was that of profound
astonishment at this evidence that she did really exist. And even then
the visual impression was more of colour in a picture than of the forms
of actual life. She was wearing a wrapper, a sort of dressing-gown of
pale blue silk embroidered with black and gold designs round the neck and
down the front, lapped round her and held together by a broad belt of the
same material. Her slippers were of the same colour, with black bows at
the instep. The white stairs, the deep crimson of the carpet, and the
light blue of the dress made an effective combination of colour to set
off the delicate carnation of that face, which, after the first glance
given to the whole person, drew irresistibly your gaze to itself by an
indefinable quality of charm beyond all analysis and made you think of
remote races, of strange generations, of the faces of women sculptured on
immemorial monuments and of those lying unsung in their tombs. While she
moved downwards from step to step with slightly lowered eyes there
flashed upon me suddenly the recollection of words heard at night, of
Allègre’s words about her, of there being in her “something of the women
of all time.”
At the last step she raised her eyelids, treated us to an exhibition of
teeth as dazzling as Mr. Blunt’s and looking even stronger; and indeed,
as she approached us she brought home to our hearts (but after all I am
speaking only for myself) a vivid sense of her physical perfection in
beauty of limb and balance of nerves, and not so much of grace, probably,
as of absolute harmony.
She said to us, “I am sorry I kept you waiting.” Her voice was low
pitched, penetrating, and of the most seductive gentleness. She offered
her hand to Mills very frankly as to an old friend. Within the
extraordinarily wide sleeve, lined with black silk, I could see the arm,
very white, with a pearly gleam in the shadow. But to me she extended
her hand with a slight stiffening, as it were a recoil of her person,
combined with an extremely straight glance. It was a finely shaped,
capable hand. I bowed over it, and we just touched fingers. I did not
look then at her face.
Next moment she caught sight of some envelopes lying on the round
marble-topped table in the middle of the hall. She seized one of them
with a wonderfully quick, almost feline, movement and tore it open,
saying to us, “Excuse me, I must . . . Do go into the dining-room.
Captain Blunt, show the way.”
Her widened eyes stared at the paper. Mr. Blunt threw one of the doors
open, but before we passed through it we heard a petulant exclamation
accompanied by childlike stamping with both feet and ending in a laugh
which had in it a note of contempt.
The door closed behind us; we had been abandoned by Mr. Blunt. He had
remained on the other side, possibly to soothe. The room in which we
found ourselves was long like a gallery and ended in a rotunda with many
windows. It was long enough for two fireplaces of red polished granite.
A table laid out for four occupied very little space. The floor inlaid
in two kinds of wood in a bizarre pattern was highly waxed, reflecting
objects like still water.
Before very long Doña Rita and Blunt rejoined us and we sat down around
the table; but before we could begin to talk a dramatically sudden ring
at the front door stilled our incipient animation. Doña Rita looked at
us all in turn, with surprise and, as it were, with suspicion. “How did
he know I was here?” she whispered after looking at the card which was
brought to her. She passed it to Blunt, who passed it to Mills, who
made a faint grimace, dropped it on the table-cloth, and only whispered
to me, “A journalist from Paris.”
“He has run me to earth,” said Doña Rita. “One would bargain for peace
against hard cash if these fellows weren’t always ready to snatch at
one’s very soul with the other hand. It frightens me.”
Her voice floated mysterious and penetrating from her lips, which moved
very little. Mills was watching her with sympathetic curiosity. Mr.
Blunt muttered: “Better not make the brute angry.” For a moment Doña
Rita’s face, with its narrow eyes, its wide brow, and high cheek bones,
became very still; then her colour was a little heightened. “Oh,” she
said softly, “let him come in. He would be really dangerous if he had a
mind—you know,” she said to Mills.
The person who had provoked all those remarks and as much hesitation as
though he had been some sort of wild beast astonished me on being
admitted, first by the beauty of his white head of hair and then by his
paternal aspect and the innocent simplicity of his manner. They laid a
cover for him between Mills and Doña Rita, who quite openly removed the
envelopes she had brought with her, to the other side of her plate. As
openly the man’s round china-blue eyes followed them in an attempt to
make out the handwriting of the addresses.
He seemed to know, at least slightly, both Mills and Blunt. To me he
gave a stare of stupid surprise. He addressed our hostess.
“Resting? Rest is a very good thing. Upon my word, I thought I would
find you alone. But you have too much sense. Neither man nor woman has
been created to live alone. . . .” After this opening he had all the
talk to himself. It was left to him pointedly, and I verily believe that
I was the only one who showed an appearance of interest. I couldn’t help
it. The others, including Mills, sat like a lot of deaf and dumb people.
No. It was even something more detached. They sat rather like a very
superior lot of waxworks, with the fixed but indetermined facial
expression and with that odd air wax figures have of being aware of their
existence being but a sham.
I was the exception; and nothing could have marked better my status of a
stranger, the completest possible stranger in the moral region in which
those people lived, moved, enjoying or suffering their incomprehensible
emotions. I was as much of a stranger as the most hopeless castaway
stumbling in the dark upon a hut of natives and finding them in the grip
of some situation appertaining to the mentalities, prejudices, and
problems of an undiscovered country—of a country of which he had not even
had one single clear glimpse before.
It was even worse in a way. It ought to have been more disconcerting.
For, pursuing the image of the cast-away blundering upon the
complications of an unknown scheme of life, it was I, the castaway, who
was the savage, the simple innocent child of nature. Those people were
obviously more civilized than I was. They had more rites, more
ceremonies, more complexity in their sensations, more knowledge of evil,
more varied meanings to the subtle phrases of their language. Naturally!
I was still so young! And yet I assure you, that just then I lost all
sense of inferiority. And why? Of course the carelessness and the
ignorance of youth had something to do with that. But there was
something else besides. Looking at Doña Rita, her head leaning on her
hand, with her dark lashes lowered on the slightly flushed cheek, I felt
no longer alone in my youth. That woman of whom I had heard these things
I have set down with all the exactness of unfailing memory, that woman
was revealed to me young, younger than anybody I had ever seen, as young
as myself (and my sensation of my youth was then very acute); revealed
with something peculiarly intimate in the conviction, as if she were
young exactly in the same way in which I felt myself young; and that
therefore no misunderstanding between us was possible and there could be
nothing more for us to know about each other. Of course this sensation
was momentary, but it was illuminating; it was a light which could not
last, but it left no darkness behind. On the contrary, it seemed to have
kindled magically somewhere within me a glow of assurance, of
unaccountable confidence in myself: a warm, steady, and eager sensation
of my individual life beginning for good there, on that spot, in that
sense of solidarity, in that seduction.
CHAPTER II
For this, properly speaking wonderful, reason I was the only one of the
company who could listen without constraint to the unbidden guest with
that fine head of white hair, so beautifully kept, so magnificently
waved, so artistically arranged that respect could not be felt for it any
more than for a very expensive wig in the window of a hair-dresser. In
fact, I had an inclination to smile at it. This proves how unconstrained
I felt. My mind was perfectly at liberty; and so of all the eyes in that
room mine was the only pair able to look about in easy freedom. All the
other listeners’ eyes were cast down, including Mills’ eyes, but that I
am sure was only because of his perfect and delicate sympathy. He could
not have been concerned otherwise.
The intruder devoured the cutlets—if they were cutlets. Notwithstanding
my perfect liberty of mind I was not aware of what we were eating. I
have a notion that the lunch was a mere show, except of course for the
man with the white hair, who was really hungry and who, besides, must
have had the pleasant sense of dominating the situation. He stooped over
his plate and worked his jaw deliberately while his blue eyes rolled
incessantly; but as a matter of fact he never looked openly at any one of
us. Whenever he laid down his knife and fork he would throw himself back
and start retailing in a light tone some Parisian gossip about prominent
people.
He talked first about a certain politician of mark. His “dear Rita” knew
him. His costume dated back to ’48, he was made of wood and parchment
and still swathed his neck in a white cloth; and even his wife had never
been seen in a low-necked dress. Not once in her life. She was buttoned
up to the chin like her husband. Well, that man had confessed to him
that when he was engaged in political controversy, not on a matter of
principle but on some special measure in debate, he felt ready to kill
everybody.
He interrupted himself for a comment. “I am something like that myself.
I believe it’s a purely professional feeling. Carry one’s point whatever
it is. Normally I couldn’t kill a fly. My sensibility is too acute for
that. My heart is too tender also. Much too tender. I am a Republican.
I am a Red. As to all our present masters and governors, all those
people you are trying to turn round your little finger, they are all
horrible Royalists in disguise. They are plotting the ruin of all the
institutions to which I am devoted. But I have never tried to spoil your
little game, Rita. After all, it’s but a little game. You know very
well that two or three fearless articles, something in my style, you
know, would soon put a stop to all that underhand backing of your king.
I am calling him king because I want to be polite to you. He is an
adventurer, a blood-thirsty, murderous adventurer, for me, and nothing
else. Look here, my dear child, what are you knocking yourself about
for? For the sake of that bandit? _Allons donc_! A pupil of Henry
Allègre can have no illusions of that sort about any man. And such a
pupil, too! Ah, the good old days in the Pavilion! Don’t think I claim
any particular intimacy. It was just enough to enable me to offer my
services to you, Rita, when our poor friend died. I found myself handy
and so I came. It so happened that I was the first. You remember, Rita?
What made it possible for everybody to get on with our poor dear Allègre
was his complete, equable, and impartial contempt for all mankind. There
is nothing in that against the purest democratic principles; but that
you, Rita, should elect to throw so much of your life away for the sake
of a Royal adventurer, it really knocks me over. For you don’t love him.
You never loved him, you know.”
He made a snatch at her hand, absolutely pulled it away from under her
head (it was quite startling) and retaining it in his grasp, proceeded to
a paternal patting of the most impudent kind. She let him go on with
apparent insensibility. Meanwhile his eyes strayed round the table over
our faces. It was very trying. The stupidity of that wandering stare
had a paralysing power. He talked at large with husky familiarity.
“Here I come, expecting to find a good sensible girl who had seen at last
the vanity of all those things; half-light in the rooms; surrounded by
the works of her favourite poets, and all that sort of thing. I say to
myself: I must just run in and see the dear wise child, and encourage her
in her good resolutions. . . And I fall into the middle of an _intime_
lunch-party. For I suppose it is _intime_. Eh? Very? H’m, yes . . . ”
He was really appalling. Again his wandering stare went round the table,
with an expression incredibly incongruous with the words. It was as
though he had borrowed those eyes from some idiot for the purpose of that
visit. He still held Doña Rita’s hand, and, now and then, patted it.
“It’s discouraging,” he cooed. “And I believe not one of you here is a
Frenchman. I don’t know what you are all about. It’s beyond me. But if
we were a Republic—you know I am an old Jacobin, sans-culotte and
terrorist—if this were a real Republic with the Convention sitting and a
Committee of Public Safety attending to national business, you would all
get your heads cut off. Ha, ha . . . I am joking, ha, ha! . . . and
serve you right, too. Don’t mind my little joke.”
While he was still laughing he released her hand and she leaned her head
on it again without haste. She had never looked at him once.
During the rather humiliating silence that ensued he got a leather cigar
case like a small valise out of his pocket, opened it and looked with
critical interest at the six cigars it contained. The tireless
_femme-de-chambre_ set down a tray with coffee cups on the table. We
each (glad, I suppose, of something to do) took one, but he, to begin
with, sniffed at his. Doña Rita continued leaning on her elbow, her lips
closed in a reposeful expression of peculiar sweetness. There was
nothing drooping in her attitude. Her face with the delicate carnation
of a rose and downcast eyes was as if veiled in firm immobility and was
so appealing that I had an insane impulse to walk round and kiss the
forearm on which it was leaning; that strong, well-shaped forearm,
gleaming not like marble but with a living and warm splendour. So
familiar had I become already with her in my thoughts! Of course I
didn’t do anything of the sort. It was nothing uncontrollable, it was
but a tender longing of a most respectful and purely sentimental kind. I
performed the act in my thought quietly, almost solemnly, while the
creature with the silver hair leaned back in his chair, puffing at his
cigar, and began to speak again.
It was all apparently very innocent talk. He informed his “dear Rita”
that he was really on his way to Monte Carlo. A lifelong habit of his at
this time of the year; but he was ready to run back to Paris if he could
do anything for his “_chère enfant_,” run back for a day, for two days,
for three days, for any time; miss Monte Carlo this year altogether, if
he could be of the slightest use and save her going herself. For
instance he could see to it that proper watch was kept over the Pavilion
stuffed with all these art treasures. What was going to happen to all
those things? . . . Making herself heard for the first time Doña Rita
murmured without moving that she had made arrangements with the police to
have it properly watched. And I was enchanted by the almost
imperceptible play of her lips.
But the anxious creature was not reassured. He pointed out that things
had been stolen out of the Louvre, which was, he dared say, even better
watched. And there was that marvellous cabinet on the landing, black
lacquer with silver herons, which alone would repay a couple of burglars.
A wheelbarrow, some old sacking, and they could trundle it off under
people’s noses.
“Have you thought it all out?” she asked in a cold whisper, while we
three sat smoking to give ourselves a countenance (it was certainly no
enjoyment) and wondering what we would hear next.
No, he had not. But he confessed that for years and years he had been in
love with that cabinet. And anyhow what was going to happen to the
things? The world was greatly exercised by that problem. He turned
slightly his beautifully groomed white head so as to address Mr. Blunt
directly.
“I had the pleasure of meeting your mother lately.”
Mr. Blunt took his time to raise his eyebrows and flash his teeth at him
before he dropped negligently, “I can’t imagine where you could have met
my mother.”
“Why, at Bing’s, the curio-dealer,” said the other with an air of the
heaviest possible stupidity. And yet there was something in these few
words which seemed to imply that if Mr. Blunt was looking for trouble he
would certainly get it. “Bing was bowing her out of his shop, but he was
so angry about something that he was quite rude even to me afterwards. I
don’t think it’s very good for _Madame votre mère_ to quarrel with Bing.
He is a Parisian personality. He’s quite a power in his sphere. All
these fellows’ nerves are upset from worry as to what will happen to the
Allègre collection. And no wonder they are nervous. A big art event
hangs on your lips, my dear, great Rita. And by the way, you too ought
to remember that it isn’t wise to quarrel with people. What have you
done to that poor Azzolati? Did you really tell him to get out and never
come near you again, or something awful like that? I don’t doubt that he
was of use to you or to your king. A man who gets invitations to shoot
with the President at Rambouillet! I saw him only the other evening; I
heard he had been winning immensely at cards; but he looked perfectly
wretched, the poor fellow. He complained of your conduct—oh, very much!
He told me you had been perfectly brutal with him. He said to me: ‘I am
no good for anything, _mon cher_. The other day at Rambouillet, whenever
I had a hare at the end of my gun I would think of her cruel words and my
eyes would run full of tears. I missed every shot’ . . . You are not fit
for diplomatic work, you know, _ma chère_. You are a mere child at it.
When you want a middle-aged gentleman to do anything for you, you don’t
begin by reducing him to tears. I should have thought any woman would
have known that much. A nun would have known that much. What do you
say? Shall I run back to Paris and make it up for you with Azzolati?”
He waited for her answer. The compression of his thin lips was full of
significance. I was surprised to see our hostess shake her head
negatively the least bit, for indeed by her pose, by the thoughtful
immobility of her face she seemed to be a thousand miles away from us
all, lost in an infinite reverie.
He gave it up. “Well, I must be off. The express for Nice passes at
four o’clock. I will be away about three weeks and then you shall see me
again. Unless I strike a run of bad luck and get cleaned out, in which
case you shall see me before then.”
He turned to Mills suddenly.
“Will your cousin come south this year, to that beautiful villa of his at
Cannes?”
Mills hardly deigned to answer that he didn’t know anything about his
cousin’s movements.
“A _grand seigneur_ combined with a great connoisseur,” opined the other
heavily. His mouth had gone slack and he looked a perfect and grotesque
imbecile under his wig-like crop of white hair. Positively I thought he
would begin to slobber. But he attacked Blunt next.
“Are you on your way down, too? A little flutter. . . It seems to me you
haven’t been seen in your usual Paris haunts of late. Where have you
been all this time?”
“Don’t you know where I have been?” said Mr. Blunt with great precision.
“No, I only ferret out things that may be of some use to me,” was the
unexpected reply, uttered with an air of perfect vacancy and swallowed by
Mr. Blunt in blank silence.
At last he made ready to rise from the table. “Think over what I have
said, my dear Rita.”
“It’s all over and done with,” was Doña Rita’s answer, in a louder tone
than I had ever heard her use before. It thrilled me while she
continued: “I mean, this thinking.” She was back from the remoteness of
her meditation, very much so indeed. She rose and moved away from the
table, inviting by a sign the other to follow her; which he did at once,
yet slowly and as it were warily.
It was a conference in the recess of a window. We three remained seated
round the table from which the dark maid was removing the cups and the
plates with brusque movements. I gazed frankly at Doña Rita’s profile,
irregular, animated, and fascinating in an undefinable way, at her
well-shaped head with the hair twisted high up and apparently held in its
place by a gold arrow with a jewelled shaft. We couldn’t hear what she
said, but the movement of her lips and the play of her features were full
of charm, full of interest, expressing both audacity and gentleness. She
spoke with fire without raising her voice. The man listened
round-shouldered, but seeming much too stupid to understand. I could see
now and then that he was speaking, but he was inaudible. At one moment
Doña Rita turned her head to the room and called out to the maid, “Give
me my hand-bag off the sofa.”
At this the other was heard plainly, “No, no,” and then a little lower,
“You have no tact, Rita. . . .” Then came her argument in a low,
penetrating voice which I caught, “Why not? Between such old friends.”
However, she waved away the hand-bag, he calmed down, and their voices
sank again. Presently I saw him raise her hand to his lips, while with
her back to the room she continued to contemplate out of the window the
bare and untidy garden. At last he went out of the room, throwing to the
table an airy “_Bonjour, bonjour_,” which was not acknowledged by any of
us three.
CHAPTER III
Mills got up and approached the figure at the window. To my extreme
surprise, Mr. Blunt, after a moment of obviously painful hesitation,
hastened out after the man with the white hair.
In consequence of these movements I was left to myself and I began to be
uncomfortably conscious of it when Doña Rita, near the window, addressed
me in a raised voice.
“We have no confidences to exchange, Mr. Mills and I.”
I took this for an encouragement to join them. They were both looking at
me. Doña Rita added, “Mr. Mills and I are friends from old times, you
know.”
Bathed in the softened reflection of the sunshine, which did not fall
directly into the room, standing very straight with her arms down, before
Mills, and with a faint smile directed to me, she looked extremely young,
and yet mature. There was even, for a moment, a slight dimple in her
cheek.
“How old, I wonder?” I said, with an answering smile.
“Oh, for ages, for ages,” she exclaimed hastily, frowning a little, then
she went on addressing herself to Mills, apparently in continuation of
what she was saying before.
. . . “This man’s is an extreme case, and yet perhaps it isn’t the
worst. But that’s the sort of thing. I have no account to render to
anybody, but I don’t want to be dragged along all the gutters where that
man picks up his living.”
She had thrown her head back a little but there was no scorn, no angry
flash under the dark-lashed eyelids. The words did not ring. I was
struck for the first time by the even, mysterious quality of her voice.
“Will you let me suggest,” said Mills, with a grave, kindly face, “that
being what you are, you have nothing to fear?”
“And perhaps nothing to lose,” she went on without bitterness. “No. It
isn’t fear. It’s a sort of dread. You must remember that no nun could
have had a more protected life. Henry Allègre had his greatness. When
he faced the world he also masked it. He was big enough for that. He
filled the whole field of vision for me.”
“You found that enough?” asked Mills.
“Why ask now?” she remonstrated. “The truth—the truth is that I never
asked myself. Enough or not there was no room for anything else. He was
the shadow and the light and the form and the voice. He would have it
so. The morning he died they came to call me at four o’clock. I ran
into his room bare-footed. He recognized me and whispered, ‘You are
flawless.’ I was very frightened. He seemed to think, and then said
very plainly, ‘Such is my character. I am like that.’ These were the
last words he spoke. I hardly noticed them then. I was thinking that he
was lying in a very uncomfortable position and I asked him if I should
lift him up a little higher on the pillows. You know I am very strong.
I could have done it. I had done it before. He raised his hand off the
blanket just enough to make a sign that he didn’t want to be touched. It
was the last gesture he made. I hung over him and then—and then I nearly
ran out of the house just as I was, in my night-gown. I think if I had
been dressed I would have run out of the garden, into the street—run away
altogether. I had never seen death. I may say I had never heard of it.
I wanted to run from it.”
She paused for a long, quiet breath. The harmonized sweetness and daring
of her face was made pathetic by her downcast eyes.
“_Fuir la mort_,” she repeated, meditatively, in her mysterious voice.
Mills’ big head had a little movement, nothing more. Her glance glided
for a moment towards me like a friendly recognition of my right to be
there, before she began again.
“My life might have been described as looking at mankind from a
fourth-floor window for years. When the end came it was like falling out
of a balcony into the street. It was as sudden as that. Once I remember
somebody was telling us in the Pavilion a tale about a girl who jumped
down from a fourth-floor window. . . For love, I believe,” she
interjected very quickly, “and came to no harm. Her guardian angel must
have slipped his wings under her just in time. He must have. But as to
me, all I know is that I didn’t break anything—not even my heart. Don’t
be shocked, Mr. Mills. It’s very likely that you don’t understand.”
“Very likely,” Mills assented, unmoved. “But don’t be too sure of that.”
“Henry Allègre had the highest opinion of your intelligence,” she said
unexpectedly and with evident seriousness. “But all this is only to tell
you that when he was gone I found myself down there unhurt, but dazed,
bewildered, not sufficiently stunned. It so happened that that creature
was somewhere in the neighbourhood. How he found out. . . But it’s his
business to find out things. And he knows, too, how to worm his way in
anywhere. Indeed, in the first days he was useful and somehow he made it
look as if Heaven itself had sent him. In my distress I thought I could
never sufficiently repay. . . Well, I have been paying ever since.”
“What do you mean?” asked Mills softly. “In hard cash?”
“Oh, it’s really so little,” she said. “I told you it wasn’t the worst
case. I stayed on in that house from which I nearly ran away in my
nightgown. I stayed on because I didn’t know what to do next. He
vanished as he had come on the track of something else, I suppose. You
know he really has got to get his living some way or other. But don’t
think I was deserted. On the contrary. People were coming and going,
all sorts of people that Henry Allègre used to know—or had refused to
know. I had a sensation of plotting and intriguing around me, all the
time. I was feeling morally bruised, sore all over, when, one day, Don
Rafael de Villarel sent in his card. A grandee. I didn’t know him, but,
as you are aware, there was hardly a personality of mark or position that
hasn’t been talked about in the Pavilion before me. Of him I had only
heard that he was a very austere and pious person, always at Mass, and
that sort of thing. I saw a frail little man with a long, yellow face
and sunken fanatical eyes, an Inquisitor, an unfrocked monk. One missed
a rosary from his thin fingers. He gazed at me terribly and I couldn’t
imagine what he might want. I waited for him to pull out a crucifix and
sentence me to the stake there and then. But no; he dropped his eyes and
in a cold, righteous sort of voice informed me that he had called on
behalf of the prince—he called him His Majesty. I was amazed by the
change. I wondered now why he didn’t slip his hands into the sleeves of
his coat, you know, as begging Friars do when they come for a
subscription. He explained that the Prince asked for permission to call
and offer me his condolences in person. We had seen a lot of him our
last two months in Paris that year. Henry Allègre had taken a fancy to
paint his portrait. He used to ride with us nearly every morning.
Almost without thinking I said I should be pleased. Don Rafael was
shocked at my want of formality, but bowed to me in silence, very much as
a monk bows, from the waist. If he had only crossed his hands flat on
his chest it would have been perfect. Then, I don’t know why, something
moved me to make him a deep curtsy as he backed out of the room, leaving
me suddenly impressed, not only with him but with myself too. I had my
door closed to everybody else that afternoon and the Prince came with a
very proper sorrowful face, but five minutes after he got into the room
he was laughing as usual, made the whole little house ring with it. You
know his big, irresistible laugh. . . .”
“No,” said Mills, a little abruptly, “I have never seen him.”
“No,” she said, surprised, “and yet you . . . ”
“I understand,” interrupted Mills. “All this is purely accidental. You
must know that I am a solitary man of books but with a secret taste for
adventure which somehow came out; surprising even me.”
She listened with that enigmatic, still, under the eyelids glance, and a
friendly turn of the head.
“I know you for a frank and loyal gentleman. . . Adventure—and books?
Ah, the books! Haven’t I turned stacks of them over! Haven’t I? . . .”
“Yes,” murmured Mills. “That’s what one does.”
She put out her hand and laid it lightly on Mills’ sleeve.
“Listen, I don’t need to justify myself, but if I had known a single
woman in the world, if I had only had the opportunity to observe a single
one of them, I would have been perhaps on my guard. But you know I
hadn’t. The only woman I had anything to do with was myself, and they
say that one can’t know oneself. It never entered my head to be on my
guard against his warmth and his terrible obviousness. You and he were
the only two, infinitely different, people, who didn’t approach me as if
I had been a precious object in a collection, an ivory carving or a piece
of Chinese porcelain. That’s why I have kept you in my memory so well.
Oh! you were not obvious! As to him—I soon learned to regret I was not
some object, some beautiful, carved object of bone or bronze; a rare
piece of porcelain, _pâte dure_, not _pâte tendre_. A pretty specimen.”
“Rare, yes. Even unique,” said Mills, looking at her steadily with a
smile. “But don’t try to depreciate yourself. You were never pretty.
You are not pretty. You are worse.”
Her narrow eyes had a mischievous gleam. “Do you find such sayings in
your books?” she asked.
“As a matter of fact I have,” said Mills, with a little laugh, “found
this one in a book. It was a woman who said that of herself. A woman
far from common, who died some few years ago. She was an actress. A
great artist.”
“A great! . . . Lucky person! She had that refuge, that garment, while I
stand here with nothing to protect me from evil fame; a naked temperament
for any wind to blow upon. Yes, greatness in art is a protection. I
wonder if there would have been anything in me if I had tried? But Henry
Allègre would never let me try. He told me that whatever I could achieve
would never be good enough for what I was. The perfection of flattery!
Was it that he thought I had not talent of any sort? It’s possible. He
would know. I’ve had the idea since that he was jealous. He wasn’t
jealous of mankind any more than he was afraid of thieves for his
collection; but he may have been jealous of what he could see in me, of
some passion that could be aroused. But if so he never repented. I
shall never forget his last words. He saw me standing beside his bed,
defenceless, symbolic and forlorn, and all he found to say was, ‘Well, I
am like that.’”
I forgot myself in watching her. I had never seen anybody speak with
less play of facial muscles. In the fullness of its life her face
preserved a sort of immobility. The words seemed to form themselves,
fiery or pathetic, in the air, outside her lips. Their design was hardly
disturbed; a design of sweetness, gravity, and force as if born from the
inspiration of some artist; for I had never seen anything to come up to
it in nature before or since.
All this was part of the enchantment she cast over me; and I seemed to
notice that Mills had the aspect of a man under a spell. If he too was a
captive then I had no reason to feel ashamed of my surrender.
“And you know,” she began again abruptly, “that I have been accustomed to
all the forms of respect.”
“That’s true,” murmured Mills, as if involuntarily.
“Well, yes,” she reaffirmed. “My instinct may have told me that my only
protection was obscurity, but I didn’t know how and where to find it.
Oh, yes, I had that instinct . . . But there were other instincts and
. . . How am I to tell you? I didn’t know how to be on guard against myself,
either. Not a soul to speak to, or to get a warning from. Some woman
soul that would have known, in which perhaps I could have seen my own
reflection. I assure you the only woman that ever addressed me directly,
and that was in writing, was . . . ”
She glanced aside, saw Mr. Blunt returning from the hall and added
rapidly in a lowered voice,
“His mother.”
The bright, mechanical smile of Mr. Blunt gleamed at us right down the
room, but he didn’t, as it were, follow it in his body. He swerved to
the nearest of the two big fireplaces and finding some cigarettes on the
mantelpiece remained leaning on his elbow in the warmth of the bright
wood fire. I noticed then a bit of mute play. The heiress of Henry
Allègre, who could secure neither obscurity nor any other alleviation to
that invidious position, looked as if she would speak to Blunt from a
distance; but in a moment the confident eagerness of her face died out as
if killed by a sudden thought. I didn’t know then her shrinking from all
falsehood and evasion; her dread of insincerity and disloyalty of every
kind. But even then I felt that at the very last moment her being had
recoiled before some shadow of a suspicion. And it occurred to me, too,
to wonder what sort of business Mr. Blunt could have had to transact with
our odious visitor, of a nature so urgent as to make him run out after
him into the hall? Unless to beat him a little with one of the sticks
that were to be found there? White hair so much like an expensive wig
could not be considered a serious protection. But it couldn’t have been
that. The transaction, whatever it was, had been much too quiet. I must
say that none of us had looked out of the window and that I didn’t know
when the man did go or if he was gone at all. As a matter of fact he was
already far away; and I may just as well say here that I never saw him
again in my life. His passage across my field of vision was like that of
other figures of that time: not to be forgotten, a little fantastic,
infinitely enlightening for my contempt, darkening for my memory which
struggles still with the clear lights and the ugly shadows of those
unforgotten days.
CHAPTER IV
It was past four o’clock before I left the house, together with Mills.
Mr. Blunt, still in his riding costume, escorted us to the very door. He
asked us to send him the first fiacre we met on our way to town. “It’s
impossible to walk in this get-up through the streets,” he remarked, with
his brilliant smile.
At this point I propose to transcribe some notes I made at the time in
little black books which I have hunted up in the litter of the past; very
cheap, common little note-books that by the lapse of years have acquired
a touching dimness of aspect, the frayed, worn-out dignity of documents.
Expression on paper has never been my forte. My life had been a thing of
outward manifestations. I never had been secret or even systematically
taciturn about my simple occupations which might have been foolish but
had never required either caution or mystery. But in those four hours
since midday a complete change had come over me. For good or evil I left
that house committed to an enterprise that could not be talked about;
which would have appeared to many senseless and perhaps ridiculous, but
was certainly full of risks, and, apart from that, commanded discretion
on the ground of simple loyalty. It would not only close my lips but it
would to a certain extent cut me off from my usual haunts and from the
society of my friends; especially of the light-hearted, young,
harum-scarum kind. This was unavoidable. It was because I felt myself
thrown back upon my own thoughts and forbidden to seek relief amongst
other lives—it was perhaps only for that reason at first I started an
irregular, fragmentary record of my days.
I made these notes not so much to preserve the memory (one cared not for
any to-morrow then) but to help me to keep a better hold of the
actuality. I scribbled them on shore and I scribbled them on the sea;
and in both cases they are concerned not only with the nature of the
facts but with the intensity of my sensations. It may be, too, that I
learned to love the sea for itself only at that time. Woman and the sea
revealed themselves to me together, as it were: two mistresses of life’s
values. The illimitable greatness of the one, the unfathomable seduction
of the other working their immemorial spells from generation to
generation fell upon my heart at last: a common fortune, an unforgettable
memory of the sea’s formless might and of the sovereign charm in that
woman’s form wherein there seemed to beat the pulse of divinity rather
than blood.
I begin here with the notes written at the end of that very day.
—Parted with Mills on the quay. We had walked side by side in absolute
silence. The fact is he is too old for me to talk to him freely. For
all his sympathy and seriousness I don’t know what note to strike and I
am not at all certain what he thinks of all this. As we shook hands at
parting, I asked him how much longer he expected to stay. And he
answered me that it depended on R. She was making arrangements for him
to cross the frontier. He wanted to see the very ground on which the
Principle of Legitimacy was actually asserting itself arms in hand. It
sounded to my positive mind the most fantastic thing in the world, this
elimination of personalities from what seemed but the merest political,
dynastic adventure. So it wasn’t Doña Rita, it wasn’t Blunt, it wasn’t
the Pretender with his big infectious laugh, it wasn’t all that lot of
politicians, archbishops, and generals, of monks, guerrilleros, and
smugglers by sea and land, of dubious agents and shady speculators and
undoubted swindlers, who were pushing their fortunes at the risk of their
precious skins. No. It was the Legitimist Principle asserting itself!
Well, I would accept the view but with one reservation. All the others
might have been merged into the idea, but I, the latest recruit, I would
not be merged in the Legitimist Principle. Mine was an act of
independent assertion. Never before had I felt so intensely aware of my
personality. But I said nothing of that to Mills. I only told him I
thought we had better not be seen very often together in the streets. He
agreed. Hearty handshake. Looked affectionately after his broad back.
It never occurred to him to turn his head. What was I in comparison with
the Principle of Legitimacy?
Late that night I went in search of Dominic. That Mediterranean sailor
was just the man I wanted. He had a great experience of all unlawful
things that can be done on the seas and he brought to the practice of
them much wisdom and audacity. That I didn’t know where he lived was
nothing since I knew where he loved. The proprietor of a small, quiet
café on the quay, a certain Madame Léonore, a woman of thirty-five with
an open Roman face and intelligent black eyes, had captivated his heart
years ago. In that café with our heads close together over a marble
table, Dominic and I held an earnest and endless confabulation while
Madame Léonore, rustling a black silk skirt, with gold earrings, with her
raven hair elaborately dressed and something nonchalant in her movements,
would take occasion, in passing to and fro, to rest her hand for a moment
on Dominic’s shoulder. Later when the little café had emptied itself of
its habitual customers, mostly people connected with the work of ships
and cargoes, she came quietly to sit at our table and looking at me very
hard with her black, sparkling eyes asked Dominic familiarly what had
happened to his Signorino. It was her name for me. I was Dominic’s
Signorino. She knew me by no other; and our connection has always been
somewhat of a riddle to her. She said that I was somehow changed since
she saw me last. In her rich voice she urged Dominic only to look at my
eyes. I must have had some piece of luck come to me either in love or at
cards, she bantered. But Dominic answered half in scorn that I was not
of the sort that runs after that kind of luck. He stated generally that
there were some young gentlemen very clever in inventing new ways of
getting rid of their time and their money. However, if they needed a
sensible man to help them he had no objection himself to lend a hand.
Dominic’s general scorn for the beliefs, and activities, and abilities of
upper-class people covered the Principle of Legitimacy amply; but he
could not resist the opportunity to exercise his special faculties in a
field he knew of old. He had been a desperate smuggler in his younger
days. We settled the purchase of a fast sailing craft. Agreed that it
must be a balancelle and something altogether out of the common. He knew
of one suitable but she was in Corsica. Offered to start for Bastia by
mail-boat in the morning. All the time the handsome and mature Madame
Léonore sat by, smiling faintly, amused at her great man joining like
this in a frolic of boys. She said the last words of that evening: “You
men never grow up,” touching lightly the grey hair above his temple.
A fortnight later.
. . . In the afternoon to the Prado. Beautiful day. At the moment of
ringing at the door a strong emotion of an anxious kind. Why? Down the
length of the dining-room in the rotunda part full of afternoon light
Doña R., sitting cross-legged on the divan in the attitude of a very old
idol or a very young child and surrounded by many cushions, waves her
hand from afar pleasantly surprised, exclaiming: “What! Back already!”
I give her all the details and we talk for two hours across a large brass
bowl containing a little water placed between us, lighting cigarettes and
dropping them, innumerable, puffed at, yet untasted in the overwhelming
interest of the conversation. Found her very quick in taking the points
and very intelligent in her suggestions. All formality soon vanished
between us and before very long I discovered myself sitting cross-legged,
too, while I held forth on the qualities of different Mediterranean
sailing craft and on the romantic qualifications of Dominic for the task.
I believe I gave her the whole history of the man, mentioning even the
existence of Madame Léonore, since the little café would have to be the
headquarters of the marine part of the plot.
She murmured, “_Ah_! _Une belle Romaine_,” thoughtfully. She told me
that she liked to hear people of that sort spoken of in terms of our
common humanity. She observed also that she wished to see Dominic some
day; to set her eyes for once on a man who could be absolutely depended
on. She wanted to know whether he had engaged himself in this adventure
solely for my sake.
I said that no doubt it was partly that. We had been very close
associates in the West Indies from where we had returned together, and he
had a notion that I could be depended on, too. But mainly, I suppose, it
was from taste. And there was in him also a fine carelessness as to what
he did and a love of venturesome enterprise.
“And you,” she said. “Is it carelessness, too?”
“In a measure,” I said. “Within limits.”
“And very soon you will get tired.”
“When I do I will tell you. But I may also get frightened. I suppose
you know there are risks, I mean apart from the risk of life.”
“As for instance,” she said.
“For instance, being captured, tried, and sentenced to what they call
‘the galleys,’ in Ceuta.”
“And all this from that love for . . .”
“Not for Legitimacy,” I interrupted the inquiry lightly. “But what’s the
use asking such questions? It’s like asking the veiled figure of fate.
It doesn’t know its own mind nor its own heart. It has no heart. But
what if I were to start asking you—who have a heart and are not veiled to
my sight?” She dropped her charming adolescent head, so firm in
modelling, so gentle in expression. Her uncovered neck was round like
the shaft of a column. She wore the same wrapper of thick blue silk. At
that time she seemed to live either in her riding habit or in that
wrapper folded tightly round her and open low to a point in front.
Because of the absence of all trimming round the neck and from the deep
view of her bare arms in the wide sleeve this garment seemed to be put
directly on her skin and gave one the impression of one’s nearness to her
body which would have been troubling but for the perfect unconsciousness
of her manner. That day she carried no barbarous arrow in her hair. It
was parted on one side, brushed back severely, and tied with a black
ribbon, without any bronze mist about her forehead or temple. This
smoothness added to the many varieties of her expression also that of
child-like innocence.
Great progress in our intimacy brought about unconsciously by our
enthusiastic interest in the matter of our discourse and, in the moments
of silence, by the sympathetic current of our thoughts. And this rapidly
growing familiarity (truly, she had a terrible gift for it) had all the
varieties of earnestness: serious, excited, ardent, and even gay. She
laughed in contralto; but her laugh was never very long; and when it had
ceased, the silence of the room with the light dying in all its many
windows seemed to lie about me warmed by its vibration.
As I was preparing to take my leave after a longish pause into which we
had fallen as into a vague dream, she came out of it with a start and a
quiet sigh. She said, “I had forgotten myself.” I took her hand and was
raising it naturally, without premeditation, when I felt suddenly the arm
to which it belonged become insensible, passive, like a stuffed limb, and
the whole woman go inanimate all over! Brusquely I dropped the hand
before it reached my lips; and it was so lifeless that it fell heavily on
to the divan.
I remained standing before her. She raised to me not her eyes but her
whole face, inquisitively—perhaps in appeal.
“No! This isn’t good enough for me,” I said.
The last of the light gleamed in her long enigmatic eyes as if they were
precious enamel in that shadowy head which in its immobility suggested a
creation of a distant past: immortal art, not transient life. Her voice
had a profound quietness. She excused herself.
“It’s only habit—or instinct—or what you like. I have had to practise
that in self-defence lest I should be tempted sometimes to cut the arm
off.”
I remembered the way she had abandoned this very arm and hand to the
white-haired ruffian. It rendered me gloomy and idiotically obstinate.
“Very ingenious. But this sort of thing is of no use to me,” I declared.
“Make it up,” suggested her mysterious voice, while her shadowy figure
remained unmoved, indifferent amongst the cushions.
I didn’t stir either. I refused in the same low tone.
“No. Not before you give it to me yourself some day.”
“Yes—some day,” she repeated in a breath in which there was no irony but
rather hesitation, reluctance what did I know?
I walked away from the house in a curious state of gloomy satisfaction
with myself.
* * * * *
And this is the last extract. A month afterwards.
—This afternoon going up to the Villa I was for the first time
accompanied in my way by some misgivings. To-morrow I sail.
First trip and therefore in the nature of a trial trip; and I can’t
overcome a certain gnawing emotion, for it is a trip that _mustn’t_ fail.
In that sort of enterprise there is no room for mistakes. Of all the
individuals engaged in it will every one be intelligent enough, faithful
enough, bold enough? Looking upon them as a whole it seems impossible;
but as each has got only a limited part to play they may be found
sufficient each for his particular trust. And will they be all punctual,
I wonder? An enterprise that hangs on the punctuality of many people, no
matter how well disposed and even heroic, hangs on a thread. This I have
perceived to be also the greatest of Dominic’s concerns. He, too,
wonders. And when he breathes his doubts the smile lurking under the
dark curl of his moustaches is not reassuring.
But there is also something exciting in such speculations and the road to
the Villa seemed to me shorter than ever before.
Let in by the silent, ever-active, dark lady’s maid, who is always on the
spot and always on the way somewhere else, opening the door with one
hand, while she passes on, turning on one for a moment her quick, black
eyes, which just miss being lustrous, as if some one had breathed on them
lightly.
On entering the long room I perceive Mills established in an armchair
which he had dragged in front of the divan. I do the same to another and
there we sit side by side facing R., tenderly amiable yet somehow distant
among her cushions, with an immemorial seriousness in her long, shaded
eyes and her fugitive smile hovering about but never settling on her
lips. Mills, who is just back from over the frontier, must have been
asking R. whether she had been worried again by her devoted friend with
the white hair. At least I concluded so because I found them talking of
the heart-broken Azzolati. And after having answered their greetings I
sit and listen to Rita addressing Mills earnestly.
“No, I assure you Azzolati had done nothing to me. I knew him. He was a
frequent visitor at the Pavilion, though I, personally, never talked with
him very much in Henry Allègre’s lifetime. Other men were more
interesting, and he himself was rather reserved in his manner to me. He
was an international politician and financier—a nobody. He, like many
others, was admitted only to feed and amuse Henry Allègre’s scorn of the
world, which was insatiable—I tell you.”
“Yes,” said Mills. “I can imagine.”
“But I know. Often when we were alone Henry Allègre used to pour it into
my ears. If ever anybody saw mankind stripped of its clothes as the
child sees the king in the German fairy tale, it’s I! Into my ears! A
child’s! Too young to die of fright. Certainly not old enough to
understand—or even to believe. But then his arm was about me. I used to
laugh, sometimes. Laugh! At this destruction—at these ruins!”
“Yes,” said Mills, very steady before her fire. “But you have at your
service the everlasting charm of life; you are a part of the
indestructible.”
“Am I? . . . But there is no arm about me now. The laugh! Where is my
laugh? Give me back my laugh. . . .”
And she laughed a little on a low note. I don’t know about Mills, but
the subdued shadowy vibration of it echoed in my breast which felt empty
for a moment and like a large space that makes one giddy.
“The laugh is gone out of my heart, which at any rate used to feel
protected. That feeling’s gone, too. And I myself will have to die some
day.”
“Certainly,” said Mills in an unaltered voice. “As to this body you . .
.”
“Oh, yes! Thanks. It’s a very poor jest. Change from body to body as
travellers used to change horses at post houses. I’ve heard of this
before. . . .”
“I’ve no doubt you have,” Mills put on a submissive air. “But are we to
hear any more about Azzolati?”
“You shall. Listen. I had heard that he was invited to shoot at
Rambouillet—a quiet party, not one of these great shoots. I hear a lot
of things. I wanted to have a certain information, also certain hints
conveyed to a diplomatic personage who was to be there, too. A personage
that would never let me get in touch with him though I had tried many
times.”
“Incredible!” mocked Mills solemnly.
“The personage mistrusts his own susceptibility. Born cautious,”
explained Doña Rita crisply with the slightest possible quiver of her
lips. “Suddenly I had the inspiration to make use of Azzolati, who had
been reminding me by a constant stream of messages that he was an old
friend. I never took any notice of those pathetic appeals before. But
in this emergency I sat down and wrote a note asking him to come and dine
with me in my hotel. I suppose you know I don’t live in the Pavilion. I
can’t bear the Pavilion now. When I have to go there I begin to feel
after an hour or so that it is haunted. I seem to catch sight of
somebody I know behind columns, passing through doorways, vanishing here
and there. I hear light footsteps behind closed doors. . . My own!”
Her eyes, her half-parted lips, remained fixed till Mills suggested
softly, “Yes, but Azzolati.”
Her rigidity vanished like a flake of snow in the sunshine. “Oh!
Azzolati. It was a most solemn affair. It had occurred to me to make a
very elaborate toilet. It was most successful. Azzolati looked
positively scared for a moment as though he had got into the wrong suite
of rooms. He had never before seen me _en toilette_, you understand. In
the old days once out of my riding habit I would never dress. I draped
myself, you remember, Monsieur Mills. To go about like that suited my
indolence, my longing to feel free in my body, as at that time when I
used to herd goats. . . But never mind. My aim was to impress Azzolati.
I wanted to talk to him seriously.”
There was something whimsical in the quick beat of her eyelids and in the
subtle quiver of her lips. “And behold! the same notion had occurred to
Azzolati. Imagine that for this tête-à-tête dinner the creature had got
himself up as if for a reception at court. He displayed a brochette of
all sorts of decorations on the lapel of his _frac_ and had a broad
ribbon of some order across his shirt front. An orange ribbon.
Bavarian, I should say. Great Roman Catholic, Azzolati. It was always
his ambition to be the banker of all the Bourbons in the world. The last
remnants of his hair were dyed jet black and the ends of his moustache
were like knitting needles. He was disposed to be as soft as wax in my
hands. Unfortunately I had had some irritating interviews during the
day. I was keeping down sudden impulses to smash a glass, throw a plate
on the floor, do something violent to relieve my feelings. His
submissive attitude made me still more nervous. He was ready to do
anything in the world for me providing that I would promise him that he
would never find my door shut against him as long as he lived. You
understand the impudence of it, don’t you? And his tone was positively
abject, too. I snapped back at him that I had no door, that I was a
nomad. He bowed ironically till his nose nearly touched his plate but
begged me to remember that to his personal knowledge I had four houses of
my own about the world. And you know this made me feel a homeless
outcast more than ever—like a little dog lost in the street—not knowing
where to go. I was ready to cry and there the creature sat in front of
me with an imbecile smile as much as to say ‘here is a poser for you.
. . .’ I gnashed my teeth at him. Quietly, you know . . . I suppose you two
think that I am stupid.”
She paused as if expecting an answer but we made no sound and she
continued with a remark.
“I have days like that. Often one must listen to false protestations,
empty words, strings of lies all day long, so that in the evening one is
not fit for anything, not even for truth if it comes in one’s way. That
idiot treated me to a piece of brazen sincerity which I couldn’t stand.
First of all he began to take me into his confidence; he boasted of his
great affairs, then started groaning about his overstrained life which
left him no time for the amenities of existence, for beauty, or
sentiment, or any sort of ease of heart. His heart! He wanted me to
sympathize with his sorrows. Of course I ought to have listened. One
must pay for service. Only I was nervous and tired. He bored me. I
told him at last that I was surprised that a man of such immense wealth
should still keep on going like this reaching for more and more. I
suppose he must have been sipping a good deal of wine while we talked and
all at once he let out an atrocity which was too much for me. He had
been moaning and sentimentalizing but then suddenly he showed me his
fangs. ‘No,’ he cries, ‘you can’t imagine what a satisfaction it is to
feel all that penniless, beggarly lot of the dear, honest, meritorious
poor wriggling and slobbering under one’s boots.’ You may tell me that
he is a contemptible animal anyhow, but you should have heard the tone!
I felt my bare arms go cold like ice. A moment before I had been hot and
faint with sheer boredom. I jumped up from the table, rang for Rose, and
told her to bring me my fur cloak. He remained in his chair leering at
me curiously. When I had the fur on my shoulders and the girl had gone
out of the room I gave him the surprise of his life. ‘Take yourself off
instantly,’ I said. ‘Go trample on the poor if you like but never dare
speak to me again.’ At this he leaned his head on his arm and sat so
long at the table shading his eyes with his hand that I had to ask,
calmly—you know—whether he wanted me to have him turned out into the
corridor. He fetched an enormous sigh. ‘I have only tried to be honest
with you, Rita.’ But by the time he got to the door he had regained some
of his impudence. ‘You know how to trample on a poor fellow, too,’ he
said. ‘But I don’t mind being made to wriggle under your pretty shoes,
Rita. I forgive you. I thought you were free from all vulgar
sentimentalism and that you had a more independent mind. I was mistaken
in you, that’s all.’ With that he pretends to dash a tear from his
eye-crocodile!—-and goes out, leaving me in my fur by the blazing fire, my
teeth going like castanets. . . Did you ever hear of anything so stupid
as this affair?” she concluded in a tone of extreme candour and a
profound unreadable stare that went far beyond us both. And the
stillness of her lips was so perfect directly she ceased speaking that I
wondered whether all this had come through them or only had formed itself
in my mind.
Presently she continued as if speaking for herself only.
“It’s like taking the lids off boxes and seeing ugly toads staring at
you. In every one. Every one. That’s what it is having to do with men
more than mere—Good-morning—Good evening. And if you try to avoid
meddling with their lids, some of them will take them off themselves.
And they don’t even know, they don’t even suspect what they are showing
you. Certain confidences—they don’t see it—are the bitterest kind of
insult. I suppose Azzolati imagines himself a noble beast of prey. Just
as some others imagine themselves to be most delicate, noble, and refined
gentlemen. And as likely as not they would trade on a woman’s
troubles—and in the end make nothing of that either. Idiots!”
The utter absence of all anger in this spoken meditation gave it a
character of touching simplicity. And as if it had been truly only a
meditation we conducted ourselves as though we had not heard it. Mills
began to speak of his experiences during his visit to the army of the
Legitimist King. And I discovered in his speeches that this man of books
could be graphic and picturesque. His admiration for the devotion and
bravery of the army was combined with the greatest distaste for what he
had seen of the way its great qualities were misused. In the conduct of
this great enterprise he had seen a deplorable levity of outlook, a fatal
lack of decision, an absence of any reasoned plan.
He shook his head.
“I feel that you of all people, Doña Rita, ought to be told the truth. I
don’t know exactly what you have at stake.”
She was rosy like some impassive statue in a desert in the flush of the
dawn.
“Not my heart,” she said quietly. “You must believe that.”
“I do. Perhaps it would have been better if you. . . ”
“No, _Monsieur le Philosophe_. It would not have been better. Don’t
make that serious face at me,” she went on with tenderness in a playful
note, as if tenderness had been her inheritance of all time and
playfulness the very fibre of her being. “I suppose you think that a
woman who has acted as I did and has not staked her heart on it is . . .
How do you know to what the heart responds as it beats from day to day?”
“I wouldn’t judge you. What am I before the knowledge you were born to?
You are as old as the world.”
She accepted this with a smile. I who was innocently watching them was
amazed to discover how much a fleeting thing like that could hold of
seduction without the help of any other feature and with that unchanging
glance.
“With me it is _pun d’onor_. To my first independent friend.”
“You were soon parted,” ventured Mills, while I sat still under a sense
of oppression.
“Don’t think for a moment that I have been scared off,” she said. “It is
they who were frightened. I suppose you heard a lot of Headquarters
gossip?”
“Oh, yes,” Mills said meaningly. “The fair and the dark are succeeding
each other like leaves blown in the wind dancing in and out. I suppose
you have noticed that leaves blown in the wind have a look of happiness.”
“Yes,” she said, “that sort of leaf is dead. Then why shouldn’t it look
happy? And so I suppose there is no uneasiness, no occasion for fears
amongst the ‘responsibles.’”
“Upon the whole not. Now and then a leaf seems as if it would stick.
There is for instance Madame . . .”
“Oh, I don’t want to know, I understand it all, I am as old as the
world.”
“Yes,” said Mills thoughtfully, “you are not a leaf, you might have been
a tornado yourself.”
“Upon my word,” she said, “there was a time that they thought I could
carry him off, away from them all—beyond them all. Verily, I am not very
proud of their fears. There was nothing reckless there worthy of a great
passion. There was nothing sad there worthy of a great tenderness.”
“And is _this_ the word of the Venetian riddle?” asked Mills, fixing her
with his keen eyes.
“If it pleases you to think so, Señor,” she said indifferently. The
movement of her eyes, their veiled gleam became mischievous when she
asked, “And Don Juan Blunt, have you seen him over there?”
“I fancy he avoided me. Moreover, he is always with his regiment at the
outposts. He is a most valorous captain. I heard some people describe
him as foolhardy.”
“Oh, he needn’t seek death,” she said in an indefinable tone. “I mean as
a refuge. There will be nothing in his life great enough for that.”
“You are angry. You miss him, I believe, Doña Rita.”
“Angry? No! Weary. But of course it’s very inconvenient. I can’t very
well ride out alone. A solitary amazon swallowing the dust and the salt
spray of the Corniche promenade would attract too much attention. And
then I don’t mind you two knowing that I am afraid of going out alone.”
“Afraid?” we both exclaimed together.
“You men are extraordinary. Why do you want me to be courageous? Why
shouldn’t I be afraid? Is it because there is no one in the world to
care what would happen to me?”
There was a deep-down vibration in her tone for the first time. We had
not a word to say. And she added after a long silence:
“There is a very good reason. There is a danger.”
With wonderful insight Mills affirmed at once:
“Something ugly.”
She nodded slightly several times. Then Mills said with conviction:
“Ah! Then it can’t be anything in yourself. And if so . . . ”
I was moved to extravagant advice.
“You should come out with me to sea then. There may be some danger there
but there’s nothing ugly to fear.”
She gave me a startled glance quite unusual with her, more than wonderful
to me; and suddenly as though she had seen me for the first time she
exclaimed in a tone of compunction:
“Oh! And there is this one, too! Why! Oh, why should he run his head
into danger for those things that will all crumble into dust before
long?”
I said: “_You_ won’t crumble into dust.” And Mills chimed in:
“That young enthusiast will always have his sea.”
We were all standing up now. She kept her eyes on me, and repeated with
a sort of whimsical enviousness:
“The sea! The violet sea—and he is longing to rejoin it! . . . At night!
Under the stars! . . . A lovers’ meeting,” she went on, thrilling me from
head to foot with those two words, accompanied by a wistful smile pointed
by a suspicion of mockery. She turned away.
“And you, Monsieur Mills?” she asked.
“I am going back to my books,” he declared with a very serious face. “My
adventure is over.”
“Each one to his love,” she bantered us gently. “Didn’t I love books,
too, at one time! They seemed to contain all wisdom and hold a magic
power, too. Tell me, Monsieur Mills, have you found amongst them in some
black-letter volume the power of foretelling a poor mortal’s destiny, the
power to look into the future? Anybody’s future . . .” Mills shook his
head. . . “What, not even mine?” she coaxed as if she really believed in
a magic power to be found in books.
Mills shook his head again. “No, I have not the power,” he said. “I am
no more a great magician, than you are a poor mortal. You have your
ancient spells. You are as old as the world. Of us two it’s you that
are more fit to foretell the future of the poor mortals on whom you
happen to cast your eyes.”
At these words she cast her eyes down and in the moment of deep silence I
watched the slight rising and falling of her breast. Then Mills
pronounced distinctly: “Good-bye, old Enchantress.”
They shook hands cordially. “Good-bye, poor Magician,” she said.
Mills made as if to speak but seemed to think better of it. Doña Rita
returned my distant bow with a slight, charmingly ceremonious inclination
of her body.
“_Bon voyage_ and a happy return,” she said formally.
I was following Mills through the door when I heard her voice behind us
raised in recall:
“Oh, a moment . . . I forgot . . .”
I turned round. The call was for me, and I walked slowly back wondering
what she could have forgotten. She waited in the middle of the room with
lowered head, with a mute gleam in her deep blue eyes. When I was near
enough she extended to me without a word her bare white arm and suddenly
pressed the back of her hand against my lips. I was too startled to
seize it with rapture. It detached itself from my lips and fell slowly
by her side. We had made it up and there was nothing to say. She turned
away to the window and I hurried out of the room.
PART THREE
CHAPTER I
It was on our return from that first trip that I took Dominic up to the
Villa to be presented to Doña Rita. If she wanted to look on the
embodiment of fidelity, resource, and courage, she could behold it all in
that man. Apparently she was not disappointed. Neither was Dominic
disappointed. During the half-hour’s interview they got into touch with
each other in a wonderful way as if they had some common and secret
standpoint in life. Maybe it was their common lawlessness, and their
knowledge of things as old as the world. Her seduction, his
recklessness, were both simple, masterful and, in a sense, worthy of each
other.
Dominic was, I won’t say awed by this interview. No woman could awe
Dominic. But he was, as it were, rendered thoughtful by it, like a man
who had not so much an experience as a sort of revelation vouchsafed to
him. Later, at sea, he used to refer to La Señora in a particular tone
and I knew that henceforth his devotion was not for me alone. And I
understood the inevitability of it extremely well. As to Doña Rita she,
after Dominic left the room, had turned to me with animation and said:
“But he is perfect, this man.” Afterwards she often asked after him and
used to refer to him in conversation. More than once she said to me:
“One would like to put the care of one’s personal safety into the hands
of that man. He looks as if he simply couldn’t fail one.” I admitted
that this was very true, especially at sea. Dominic couldn’t fail. But
at the same time I rather chaffed Rita on her preoccupation as to
personal safety that so often cropped up in her talk.
“One would think you were a crowned head in a revolutionary world,” I
used to tell her.
“That would be different. One would be standing then for something,
either worth or not worth dying for. One could even run away then and be
done with it. But I can’t run away unless I got out of my skin and left
that behind. Don’t you understand? You are very stupid . . .” But she
had the grace to add, “On purpose.”
I don’t know about the on purpose. I am not certain about the stupidity.
Her words bewildered one often and bewilderment is a sort of stupidity.
I remedied it by simply disregarding the sense of what she said. The
sound was there and also her poignant heart-gripping presence giving
occupation enough to one’s faculties. In the power of those things over
one there was mystery enough. It was more absorbing than the mere
obscurity of her speeches. But I daresay she couldn’t understand that.
Hence, at times, the amusing outbreaks of temper in word and gesture that
only strengthened the natural, the invincible force of the spell.
Sometimes the brass bowl would get upset or the cigarette box would fly
up, dropping a shower of cigarettes on the floor. We would pick them up,
re-establish everything, and fall into a long silence, so close that the
sound of the first word would come with all the pain of a separation.
It was at that time, too, that she suggested I should take up my quarters
in her house in the street of the Consuls. There were certain advantages
in that move. In my present abode my sudden absences might have been in
the long run subject to comment. On the other hand, the house in the
street of Consuls was a known out-post of Legitimacy. But then it was
covered by the occult influence of her who was referred to in
confidential talks, secret communications, and discreet whispers of
Royalist salons as: “Madame de Lastaola.”
That was the name which the heiress of Henry Allègre had decided to adopt
when, according to her own expression, she had found herself precipitated
at a moment’s notice into the crowd of mankind. It is strange how the
death of Henry Allègre, which certainly the poor man had not planned,
acquired in my view the character of a heartless desertion. It gave one
a glimpse of amazing egoism in a sentiment to which one could hardly give
a name, a mysterious appropriation of one human being by another as if in
defiance of unexpressed things and for an unheard-of satisfaction of an
inconceivable pride. If he had hated her he could not have flung that
enormous fortune more brutally at her head. And his unrepentant death
seemed to lift for a moment the curtain on something lofty and sinister
like an Olympian’s caprice.
Doña Rita said to me once with humorous resignation: “You know, it
appears that one must have a name. That’s what Henry Allègre’s man of
business told me. He was quite impatient with me about it. But my name,
_amigo_, Henry Allègre had taken from me like all the rest of what I had
been once. All that is buried with him in his grave. It wouldn’t have
been true. That is how I felt about it. So I took that one.” She
whispered to herself: “Lastaola,” not as if to test the sound but as if
in a dream.
To this day I am not quite certain whether it was the name of any human
habitation, a lonely _caserio_ with a half-effaced carving of a coat of
arms over its door, or of some hamlet at the dead end of a ravine with a
stony slope at the back. It might have been a hill for all I know or
perhaps a stream. A wood, or perhaps a combination of all these: just a
bit of the earth’s surface. Once I asked her where exactly it was
situated and she answered, waving her hand cavalierly at the dead wall of
the room: “Oh, over there.” I thought that this was all that I was going
to hear but she added moodily, “I used to take my goats there, a dozen or
so of them, for the day. From after my uncle had said his Mass till the
ringing of the evening bell.”
I saw suddenly the lonely spot, sketched for me some time ago by a few
words from Mr. Blunt, populated by the agile, bearded beasts with cynical
heads, and a little misty figure dark in the sunlight with a halo of
dishevelled rust-coloured hair about its head.
The epithet of rust-coloured comes from her. It was really tawny. Once
or twice in my hearing she had referred to “my rust-coloured hair” with
laughing vexation. Even then it was unruly, abhorring the restraints of
civilization, and often in the heat of a dispute getting into the eyes of
Madame de Lastaola, the possessor of coveted art treasures, the heiress
of Henry Allègre. She proceeded in a reminiscent mood, with a faint
flash of gaiety all over her face, except her dark blue eyes that moved
so seldom out of their fixed scrutiny of things invisible to other human
beings.
“The goats were very good. We clambered amongst the stones together.
They beat me at that game. I used to catch my hair in the bushes.”
“Your rust-coloured hair,” I whispered.
“Yes, it was always this colour. And I used to leave bits of my frock on
thorns here and there. It was pretty thin, I can tell you. There wasn’t
much at that time between my skin and the blue of the sky. My legs were
as sunburnt as my face; but really I didn’t tan very much. I had plenty
of freckles though. There were no looking-glasses in the Presbytery but
uncle had a piece not bigger than my two hands for his shaving. One
Sunday I crept into his room and had a peep at myself. And wasn’t I
startled to see my own eyes looking at me! But it was fascinating, too.
I was about eleven years old then, and I was very friendly with the
goats, and I was as shrill as a cicada and as slender as a match.
Heavens! When I overhear myself speaking sometimes, or look at my limbs,
it doesn’t seem to be possible. And yet it is the same one. I do
remember every single goat. They were very clever. Goats are no trouble
really; they don’t scatter much. Mine never did even if I had to hide
myself out of their sight for ever so long.”
It was but natural to ask her why she wanted to hide, and she uttered
vaguely what was rather a comment on my question:
“It was like fate.” But I chose to take it otherwise, teasingly, because
we were often like a pair of children.
“Oh, really,” I said, “you talk like a pagan. What could you know of
fate at that time? What was it like? Did it come down from Heaven?”
“Don’t be stupid. It used to come along a cart-track that was there and
it looked like a boy. Wasn’t he a little devil though. You understand,
I couldn’t know that. He was a wealthy cousin of mine. Round there we
are all related, all cousins—as in Brittany. He wasn’t much bigger than
myself but he was older, just a boy in blue breeches and with good shoes
on his feet, which of course interested and impressed me. He yelled to
me from below, I screamed to him from above, he came up and sat down near
me on a stone, never said a word, let me look at him for half an hour
before he condescended to ask me who I was. And the airs he gave
himself! He quite intimidated me sitting there perfectly dumb. I
remember trying to hide my bare feet under the edge of my skirt as I sat
below him on the ground.
“_C’est comique_, _eh_!” she interrupted herself to comment in a
melancholy tone. I looked at her sympathetically and she went on:
“He was the only son from a rich farmhouse two miles down the slope. In
winter they used to send him to school at Tolosa. He had an enormous
opinion of himself; he was going to keep a shop in a town by and by and
he was about the most dissatisfied creature I have ever seen. He had an
unhappy mouth and unhappy eyes and he was always wretched about
something: about the treatment he received, about being kept in the
country and chained to work. He was moaning and complaining and
threatening all the world, including his father and mother. He used to
curse God, yes, that boy, sitting there on a piece of rock like a
wretched little Prometheus with a sparrow pecking at his miserable little
liver. And the grand scenery of mountains all round, ha, ha, ha!”
She laughed in contralto: a penetrating sound with something generous in
it; not infectious, but in others provoking a smile.
“Of course I, poor little animal, I didn’t know what to make of it, and I
was even a little frightened. But at first because of his miserable eyes
I was sorry for him, almost as much as if he had been a sick goat. But,
frightened or sorry, I don’t know how it is, I always wanted to laugh at
him, too, I mean from the very first day when he let me admire him for
half an hour. Yes, even then I had to put my hand over my mouth more
than once for the sake of good manners, you understand. And yet, you
know, I was never a laughing child.
“One day he came up and sat down very dignified a little bit away from me
and told me he had been thrashed for wandering in the hills.
“‘To be with me?’ I asked. And he said: ‘To be with you! No. My people
don’t know what I do.’ I can’t tell why, but I was annoyed. So instead
of raising a clamour of pity over him, which I suppose he expected me to
do, I asked him if the thrashing hurt very much. He got up, he had a
switch in his hand, and walked up to me, saying, ‘I will soon show you.’
I went stiff with fright; but instead of slashing at me he dropped down
by my side and kissed me on the cheek. Then he did it again, and by that
time I was gone dead all over and he could have done what he liked with
the corpse but he left off suddenly and then I came to life again and I
bolted away. Not very far. I couldn’t leave the goats altogether. He
chased me round and about the rocks, but of course I was too quick for
him in his nice town boots. When he got tired of that game he started
throwing stones. After that he made my life very lively for me.
Sometimes he used to come on me unawares and then I had to sit still and
listen to his miserable ravings, because he would catch me round the
waist and hold me very tight. And yet, I often felt inclined to laugh.
But if I caught sight of him at a distance and tried to dodge out of the
way he would start stoning me into a shelter I knew of and then sit
outside with a heap of stones at hand so that I daren’t show the end of
my nose for hours. He would sit there and rave and abuse me till I would
burst into a crazy laugh in my hole; and then I could see him through the
leaves rolling on the ground and biting his fists with rage. Didn’t he
hate me! At the same time I was often terrified. I am convinced now
that if I had started crying he would have rushed in and perhaps
strangled me there. Then as the sun was about to set he would make me
swear that I would marry him when I was grown up. ‘Swear, you little
wretched beggar,’ he would yell to me. And I would swear. I was hungry,
and I didn’t want to be made black and blue all over with stones. Oh, I
swore ever so many times to be his wife. Thirty times a month for two
months. I couldn’t help myself. It was no use complaining to my sister
Therese. When I showed her my bruises and tried to tell her a little
about my trouble she was quite scandalized. She called me a sinful girl,
a shameless creature. I assure you it puzzled my head so that, between
Therese my sister and José the boy, I lived in a state of idiocy almost.
But luckily at the end of the two months they sent him away from home for
good. Curious story to happen to a goatherd living all her days out
under God’s eye, as my uncle the Cura might have said. My sister Therese
was keeping house in the Presbytery. She’s a terrible person.”
“I have heard of your sister Therese,” I said.
“Oh, you have! Of my big sister Therese, six, ten years older than
myself perhaps? She just comes a little above my shoulder, but then I
was always a long thing. I never knew my mother. I don’t even know how
she looked. There are no paintings or photographs in our farmhouses
amongst the hills. I haven’t even heard her described to me. I believe
I was never good enough to be told these things. Therese decided that I
was a lump of wickedness, and now she believes that I will lose my soul
altogether unless I take some steps to save it. Well, I have no
particular taste that way. I suppose it is annoying to have a sister
going fast to eternal perdition, but there are compensations. The
funniest thing is that it’s Therese, I believe, who managed to keep me
out of the Presbytery when I went out of my way to look in on them on my
return from my visit to the _Quartel Real_ last year. I couldn’t have
stayed much more than half an hour with them anyway, but still I would
have liked to get over the old doorstep. I am certain that Therese
persuaded my uncle to go out and meet me at the bottom of the hill. I
saw the old man a long way off and I understood how it was. I dismounted
at once and met him on foot. We had half an hour together walking up and
down the road. He is a peasant priest, he didn’t know how to treat me.
And of course I was uncomfortable, too. There wasn’t a single goat about
to keep me in countenance. I ought to have embraced him. I was always
fond of the stern, simple old man. But he drew himself up when I
approached him and actually took off his hat to me. So simple as that!
I bowed my head and asked for his blessing. And he said ‘I would never
refuse a blessing to a good Legitimist.’ So stern as that! And when I
think that I was perhaps the only girl of the family or in the whole
world that he ever in his priest’s life patted on the head! When I think
of that I . . . I believe at that moment I was as wretched as he was
himself. I handed him an envelope with a big red seal which quite
startled him. I had asked the Marquis de Villarel to give me a few words
for him, because my uncle has a great influence in his district; and the
Marquis penned with his own hand some compliments and an inquiry about
the spirit of the population. My uncle read the letter, looked up at me
with an air of mournful awe, and begged me to tell his excellency that
the people were all for God, their lawful King and their old privileges.
I said to him then, after he had asked me about the health of His Majesty
in an awfully gloomy tone—I said then: ‘There is only one thing that
remains for me to do, uncle, and that is to give you two pounds of the
very best snuff I have brought here for you.’ What else could I have got
for the poor old man? I had no trunks with me. I had to leave behind a
spare pair of shoes in the hotel to make room in my little bag for that
snuff. And fancy! That old priest absolutely pushed the parcel away. I
could have thrown it at his head; but I thought suddenly of that hard,
prayerful life, knowing nothing of any ease or pleasure in the world,
absolutely nothing but a pinch of snuff now and then. I remembered how
wretched he used to be when he lacked a copper or two to get some snuff
with. My face was hot with indignation, but before I could fly out at
him I remembered how simple he was. So I said with great dignity that as
the present came from the King and as he wouldn’t receive it from my hand
there was nothing else for me to do but to throw it into the brook; and I
made as if I were going to do it, too. He shouted: ‘Stay, unhappy girl!
Is it really from His Majesty, whom God preserve?’ I said
contemptuously, ‘Of course.’ He looked at me with great pity in his
eyes, sighed deeply, and took the little tin from my hand. I suppose he
imagined me in my abandoned way wheedling the necessary cash out of the
King for the purchase of that snuff. You can’t imagine how simple he is.
Nothing was easier than to deceive him; but don’t imagine I deceived him
from the vainglory of a mere sinner. I lied to the dear man, simply
because I couldn’t bear the idea of him being deprived of the only
gratification his big, ascetic, gaunt body ever knew on earth. As I
mounted my mule to go away he murmured coldly: ‘God guard you, Señora!’
Señora! What sternness! We were off a little way already when his heart
softened and he shouted after me in a terrible voice: ‘The road to Heaven
is repentance!’ And then, after a silence, again the great shout
‘Repentance!’ thundered after me. Was that sternness or simplicity, I
wonder? Or a mere unmeaning superstition, a mechanical thing? If there
lives anybody completely honest in this world, surely it must be my
uncle. And yet—who knows?
“Would you guess what was the next thing I did? Directly I got over the
frontier I wrote from Bayonne asking the old man to send me out my sister
here. I said it was for the service of the King. You see, I had thought
suddenly of that house of mine in which you once spent the night talking
with Mr. Mills and Don Juan Blunt. I thought it would do extremely well
for Carlist officers coming this way on leave or on a mission. In hotels
they might have been molested, but I knew that I could get protection for
my house. Just a word from the ministry in Paris to the Prefect. But I
wanted a woman to manage it for me. And where was I to find a
trustworthy woman? How was I to know one when I saw her? I don’t know
how to talk to women. Of course my Rose would have done for me that or
anything else; but what could I have done myself without her? She has
looked after me from the first. It was Henry Allègre who got her for me
eight years ago. I don’t know whether he meant it for a kindness but
she’s the only human being on whom I can lean. She knows . . . What
doesn’t she know about me! She has never failed to do the right thing
for me unasked. I couldn’t part with her. And I couldn’t think of
anybody else but my sister.
“After all it was somebody belonging to me. But it seemed the wildest
idea. Yet she came at once. Of course I took care to send her some
money. She likes money. As to my uncle there is nothing that he
wouldn’t have given up for the service of the King. Rose went to meet
her at the railway station. She told me afterwards that there had been
no need for me to be anxious about her recognizing Mademoiselle Therese.
There was nobody else in the train that could be mistaken for her. I
should think not! She had made for herself a dress of some brown stuff
like a nun’s habit and had a crooked stick and carried all her belongings
tied up in a handkerchief. She looked like a pilgrim to a saint’s
shrine. Rose took her to the house. She asked when she saw it: ‘And
does this big place really belong to our Rita?’ My maid of course said
that it was mine. ‘And how long did our Rita live here?’—‘Madame has
never seen it unless perhaps the outside, as far as I know. I believe
Mr. Allègre lived here for some time when he was a young man.’—‘The
sinner that’s dead?’—‘Just so,’ says Rose. You know nothing ever
startles Rose. ‘Well, his sins are gone with him,’ said my sister, and
began to make herself at home.
“Rose was going to stop with her for a week but on the third day she was
back with me with the remark that Mlle. Therese knew her way about very
well already and preferred to be left to herself. Some little time
afterwards I went to see that sister of mine. The first thing she said
to me, ‘I wouldn’t have recognized you, Rita,’ and I said, ‘What a funny
dress you have, Therese, more fit for the portress of a convent than for
this house.’—‘Yes,’ she said, ‘and unless you give this house to me,
Rita, I will go back to our country. I will have nothing to do with your
life, Rita. Your life is no secret for me.’
“I was going from room to room and Therese was following me. ‘I don’t
know that my life is a secret to anybody,’ I said to her, ‘but how do you
know anything about it?’ And then she told me that it was through a
cousin of ours, that horrid wretch of a boy, you know. He had finished
his schooling and was a clerk in a Spanish commercial house of some kind,
in Paris, and apparently had made it his business to write home whatever
he could hear about me or ferret out from those relations of mine with
whom I lived as a girl. I got suddenly very furious. I raged up and
down the room (we were alone upstairs), and Therese scuttled away from me
as far as the door. I heard her say to herself, ‘It’s the evil spirit in
her that makes her like this.’ She was absolutely convinced of that.
She made the sign of the cross in the air to protect herself. I was
quite astounded. And then I really couldn’t help myself. I burst into a
laugh. I laughed and laughed; I really couldn’t stop till Therese ran
away. I went downstairs still laughing and found her in the hall with
her face to the wall and her fingers in her ears kneeling in a corner. I
had to pull her out by the shoulders from there. I don’t think she was
frightened; she was only shocked. But I don’t suppose her heart is
desperately bad, because when I dropped into a chair feeling very tired
she came and knelt in front of me and put her arms round my waist and
entreated me to cast off from me my evil ways with the help of saints and
priests. Quite a little programme for a reformed sinner. I got away at
last. I left her sunk on her heels before the empty chair looking after
me. ‘I pray for you every night and morning, Rita,’ she said.—‘Oh, yes.
I know you are a good sister,’ I said to her. I was letting myself out
when she called after me, ‘And what about this house, Rita?’ I said to
her, ‘Oh, you may keep it till the day I reform and enter a convent.’
The last I saw of her she was still on her knees looking after me with
her mouth open. I have seen her since several times,
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