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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Arrow of Gold, by Joseph Conrad
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: The Arrow of Gold
+       a story between two notes
+
+
+Author: Joseph Conrad
+
+
+
+Release Date: August 3, 2009  [eBook #1083]
+[This file last updated December 27, 2010]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ARROW OF GOLD***
+
+
+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 cafe, 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
+Dona 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 Dona 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
+Dona 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 Cannebiere, and the jest: "If Paris had a Cannebiere 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 cafes 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 cafe, 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 cafe 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 "_Tres 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 naufrage_."
+
+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 Cannebiere 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 cafe.
+
+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 cafe 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 cafe 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 Doree--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 naive 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 cafe; 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 Americain_, _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
+Cannebiere.  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 Dona 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 Allegre 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 Valliere," 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, Dona 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 Valliere
+. . . who had a big mouth."
+
+I felt moved to make myself heard.
+
+"Did you know La Valliere, 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 a l'autre va,
+   Tra la la.
+
+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 Dona 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
+Allegre 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 Allegre 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 Dona
+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 Allegre'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-a-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 Allegre 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 Diaphaneite, if there is such a word.  Ah!  This is the last
+expression of modernity!'  She puts up suddenly her face-a-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!'  Allegre 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.  Allegre,
+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 Allegre 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 Allegre 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 Allegre 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 Allegre mounted on
+a dark brown powerful weight carrier; and on the other by one of
+Allegre'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
+Allee 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 (Allegre 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 Allegre
+so close.  Allegre 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.  Allegre 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 Dona 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 Allegre 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 Allegre 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.  Allegre 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 Allegre was away.  But
+Allegre'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 Allegre'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 Allegre's exclusive Pavilion: the Dona Rita of
+their respectful addresses, manifest and mysterious, like an object of
+art from some unknown period; the Dona Rita of the initiated Paris.  Dona
+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 Dona 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 Allegre 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 Allegre, 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 Allegre 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 Allegre's common
+history is a journey to Italy, and then to Corsica.  You know Allegre 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 Dona 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.  Dona 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.
+
+"Dona 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 Dona 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 Allegre
+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 Allegre 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 Allegre.  You would be astonished to
+hear the names of people, of real personalities in the world, who, not to
+mince matters, owed money to Allegre.  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 Allegre 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
+Allegre.  He passes on.  All at once he wheels his fantastic animal round
+and comes trotting after them.  With the merest casual '_Bonjour_,
+Allegre' 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.  Dona 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, Allegre, 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?' Allegre'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.
+
+"Allegre 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 Allegre'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 Allegre 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: "_Americain_, _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 Allegre 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.  Allegre 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 Allegre 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. . ."
+
+"Allegre 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
+Dona Rita was not a woman about whom the newspapers insert little
+paragraphs.  But Allegre 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 Allegre's death some shabby journalist (smart
+creature) hit upon the notion of alluding to her as the heiress of Mr.
+Allegre.  'The heiress of Mr. Allegre has taken up her residence again
+amongst the treasures of art in that Pavilion so well known to the elite
+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. Allegre 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 Dona 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 Dona 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. Allegre.  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. Allegre.  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 Allegre'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 Dona 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, Dona 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 tete_, 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.
+Allegre 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 Hotel 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 Cannebiere.  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 Hotel 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 '_Americain_, _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 Dona 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 Allegre'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
+Allegre'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 Dona 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.  Dona 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 Dona 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 Dona
+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 Dona 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 Dona 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
+Allegre 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 Allegre
+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 Dona 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.  Dona 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 "_chere 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 Dona 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 mere_ 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
+Allegre 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 chere_.  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 Dona 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 Dona 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
+Dona 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 Dona 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.  Dona 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 Allegre 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 Allegre 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 Allegre 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 Allegre 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, _pate dure_, not _pate 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
+Allegre 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
+Allegre, 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 Dona 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
+cafe on the quay, a certain Madame Leonore, a woman of thirty-five with
+an open Roman face and intelligent black eyes, had captivated his heart
+years ago.  In that cafe with our heads close together over a marble
+table, Dominic and I held an earnest and endless confabulation while
+Madame Leonore, 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 cafe 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
+Leonore 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
+Dona 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 Leonore, since the little cafe 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 Allegre'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 Allegre'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 Allegre 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 Dona 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 tete-a-tete 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, Dona 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, Senor," 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, Dona 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.  Dona 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 Dona 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 Senora 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 Dona 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 Allegre 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 Allegre, 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.
+
+Dona Rita said to me once with humorous resignation: "You know, it
+appears that one must have a name.  That's what Henry Allegre's man of
+business told me.  He was quite impatient with me about it.  But my name,
+_amigo_, Henry Allegre 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 Allegre.  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 Jose 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, Senora!'
+Senora!  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 Allegre 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. Allegre 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, but our intercourse
+is, at any rate on her side, as of a frozen nun with some great lady.
+But I believe she really knows how to make men comfortable.  Upon my word
+I think she likes to look after men.  They don't seem to be such great
+sinners as women are.  I think you could do worse than take up your
+quarters at number 10.  She will no doubt develop a saintly sort of
+affection for you, too."
+
+I don't know that the prospect of becoming a favourite of Dona Rita's
+peasant sister was very fascinating to me.  If I went to live very
+willingly at No. 10 it was because everything connected with Dona Rita
+had for me a peculiar fascination.  She had only passed through the house
+once as far as I knew; but it was enough.  She was one of those beings
+that leave a trace.  I am not unreasonable--I mean for those that knew
+her.  That is, I suppose, because she was so unforgettable.  Let us
+remember the tragedy of Azzolati the ruthless, the ridiculous financier
+with a criminal soul (or shall we say heart) and facile tears.  No
+wonder, then, that for me, who may flatter myself without undue vanity
+with being much finer than that grotesque international intriguer, the
+mere knowledge that Dona Rita had passed through the very rooms in which
+I was going to live between the strenuous times of the sea-expeditions,
+was enough to fill my inner being with a great content.  Her glance, her
+darkly brilliant blue glance, had run over the walls of that room which
+most likely would be mine to slumber in.  Behind me, somewhere near the
+door, Therese, the peasant sister, said in a funnily compassionate tone
+and in an amazingly landlady-of-a-boarding-house spirit of false
+persuasiveness:
+
+"You will be very comfortable here, Senor.  It is so peaceful here in the
+street.  Sometimes one may think oneself in a village.  It's only a
+hundred and twenty-five francs for the friends of the King.  And I shall
+take such good care of you that your very heart will be able to rest."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+
+Dona Rita was curious to know how I got on with her peasant sister and
+all I could say in return for that inquiry was that the peasant sister
+was in her own way amiable.  At this she clicked her tongue amusingly and
+repeated a remark she had made before: "She likes young men.  The younger
+the better."  The mere thought of those two women being sisters aroused
+one's wonder.  Physically they were altogether of different design.  It
+was also the difference between living tissue of glowing loveliness with
+a divine breath, and a hard hollow figure of baked clay.
+
+Indeed Therese did somehow resemble an achievement, wonderful enough in
+its way, in unglazed earthenware.  The only gleam perhaps that one could
+find on her was that of her teeth, which one used to get between her dull
+lips unexpectedly, startlingly, and a little inexplicably, because it was
+never associated with a smile.  She smiled with compressed mouth.  It was
+indeed difficult to conceive of those two birds coming from the same
+nest.  And yet . . . Contrary to what generally happens, it was when one
+saw those two women together that one lost all belief in the possibility
+of their relationship near or far.  It extended even to their common
+humanity.  One, as it were, doubted it.  If one of the two was
+representative, then the other was either something more or less than
+human.  One wondered whether these two women belonged to the same scheme
+of creation.  One was secretly amazed to see them standing together,
+speaking to each other, having words in common, understanding each other.
+And yet! . . . Our psychological sense is the crudest of all; we don't
+know, we don't perceive how superficial we are.  The simplest shades
+escape us, the secret of changes, of relations.  No, upon the whole, the
+only feature (and yet with enormous differences) which Therese had in
+common with her sister, as I told Dona Rita, was amiability.
+
+"For, you know, you are a most amiable person yourself," I went on.
+"It's one of your characteristics, of course much more precious than in
+other people.  You transmute the commonest traits into gold of your own;
+but after all there are no new names.  You are amiable.  You were most
+amiable to me when I first saw you."
+
+"Really.  I was not aware.  Not specially . . . "
+
+"I had never the presumption to think that it was special.  Moreover, my
+head was in a whirl.  I was lost in astonishment first of all at what I
+had been listening to all night.  Your history, you know, a wonderful
+tale with a flavour of wine in it and wreathed in clouds, with that
+amazing decapitated, mutilated dummy of a woman lurking in a corner, and
+with Blunt's smile gleaming through a fog, the fog in my eyes, from
+Mills' pipe, you know.  I was feeling quite inanimate as to body and
+frightfully stimulated as to mind all the time.  I had never heard
+anything like that talk about you before.  Of course I wasn't sleepy, but
+still I am not used to do altogether without sleep like Blunt . . ."
+
+"Kept awake all night listening to my story!"  She marvelled.
+
+"Yes.  You don't think I am complaining, do you?  I wouldn't have missed
+it for the world.  Blunt in a ragged old jacket and a white tie and that
+incisive polite voice of his seemed strange and weird.  It seemed as
+though he were inventing it all rather angrily.  I had doubts as to your
+existence."
+
+"Mr. Blunt is very much interested in my story."
+
+"Anybody would be," I said.  "I was.  I didn't sleep a wink.  I was
+expecting to see you soon--and even then I had my doubts."
+
+"As to my existence?"
+
+"It wasn't exactly that, though of course I couldn't tell that you
+weren't a product of Captain Blunt's sleeplessness.  He seemed to dread
+exceedingly to be left alone and your story might have been a device to
+detain us . . ."
+
+"He hasn't enough imagination for that," she said.
+
+"It didn't occur to me.  But there was Mills, who apparently believed in
+your existence.  I could trust Mills.  My doubts were about the
+propriety.  I couldn't see any good reason for being taken to see you.
+Strange that it should be my connection with the sea which brought me
+here to the Villa."
+
+"Unexpected perhaps."
+
+"No.  I mean particularly strange and significant."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"Because my friends are in the habit of telling me (and each other) that
+the sea is my only love.  They were always chaffing me because they
+couldn't see or guess in my life at any woman, open or secret. . ."
+
+"And is that really so?" she inquired negligently.
+
+"Why, yes.  I don't mean to say that I am like an innocent shepherd in
+one of those interminable stories of the eighteenth century.  But I don't
+throw the word love about indiscriminately.  It may be all true about the
+sea; but some people would say that they love sausages."
+
+"You are horrible."
+
+"I am surprised."
+
+"I mean your choice of words."
+
+"And you have never uttered a word yet that didn't change into a pearl as
+it dropped from your lips.  At least not before me."
+
+She glanced down deliberately and said, "This is better.  But I don't see
+any of them on the floor."
+
+"It's you who are horrible in the implications of your language.  Don't
+see any on the floor!  Haven't I caught up and treasured them all in my
+heart?  I am not the animal from which sausages are made."
+
+She looked at me suavely and then with the sweetest possible smile
+breathed out the word: "No."
+
+And we both laughed very loud.  O! days of innocence!  On this occasion
+we parted from each other on a light-hearted note.  But already I had
+acquired the conviction that there was nothing more lovable in the world
+than that woman; nothing more life-giving, inspiring, and illuminating
+than the emanation of her charm.  I meant it absolutely--not excepting
+the light of the sun.
+
+From this there was only one step further to take.  The step into a
+conscious surrender; the open perception that this charm, warming like a
+flame, was also all-revealing like a great light; giving new depth to
+shades, new brilliance to colours, an amazing vividness to all sensations
+and vitality to all thoughts: so that all that had been lived before
+seemed to have been lived in a drab world and with a languid pulse.
+
+A great revelation this.  I don't mean to say it was soul-shaking.  The
+soul was already a captive before doubt, anguish, or dismay could touch
+its surrender and its exaltation.  But all the same the revelation turned
+many things into dust; and, amongst others, the sense of the careless
+freedom of my life.  If that life ever had any purpose or any aim outside
+itself I would have said that it threw a shadow across its path.  But it
+hadn't.  There had been no path.  But there was a shadow, the inseparable
+companion of all light.  No illumination can sweep all mystery out of the
+world.  After the departed darkness the shadows remain, more mysterious
+because as if more enduring; and one feels a dread of them from which one
+was free before.  What if they were to be victorious at the last?  They,
+or what perhaps lurks in them: fear, deception, desire, disillusion--all
+silent at first before the song of triumphant love vibrating in the
+light.  Yes.  Silent.  Even desire itself!  All silent.  But not for
+long!
+
+This was, I think, before the third expedition.  Yes, it must have been
+the third, for I remember that it was boldly planned and that it was
+carried out without a hitch.  The tentative period was over; all our
+arrangements had been perfected.  There was, so to speak, always an
+unfailing smoke on the hill and an unfailing lantern on the shore.  Our
+friends, mostly bought for hard cash and therefore valuable, had acquired
+confidence in us.  This, they seemed to say, is no unfathomable roguery
+of penniless adventurers.  This is but the reckless enterprise of men of
+wealth and sense and needn't be inquired into.  The young _caballero_ has
+got real gold pieces in the belt he wears next his skin; and the man with
+the heavy moustaches and unbelieving eyes is indeed very much of a man.
+They gave to Dominic all their respect and to me a great show of
+deference; for I had all the money, while they thought that Dominic had
+all the sense.  That judgment was not exactly correct.  I had my share of
+judgment and audacity which surprises me now that the years have chilled
+the blood without dimming the memory.  I remember going about the
+business with light-hearted, clear-headed recklessness which, according
+as its decisions were sudden or considered, made Dominic draw his breath
+through his clenched teeth, or look hard at me before he gave me either a
+slight nod of assent or a sarcastic "Oh, certainly"--just as the humour
+of the moment prompted him.
+
+One night as we were lying on a bit of dry sand under the lee of a rock,
+side by side, watching the light of our little vessel dancing away at sea
+in the windy distance, Dominic spoke suddenly to me.
+
+"I suppose Alphonso and Carlos, Carlos and Alphonso, they are nothing to
+you, together or separately?"
+
+I said: "Dominic, if they were both to vanish from the earth together or
+separately it would make no difference to my feelings."
+
+He remarked: "Just so.  A man mourns only for his friends.  I suppose
+they are no more friends to you than they are to me.  Those Carlists make
+a great consumption of cartridges.  That is well.  But why should we do
+all those mad things that you will insist on us doing till my hair," he
+pursued with grave, mocking exaggeration, "till my hair tries to stand up
+on my head? and all for that Carlos, let God and the devil each guard his
+own, for that Majesty as they call him, but after all a man like another
+and--no friend."
+
+"Yes, why?" I murmured, feeling my body nestled at ease in the sand.
+
+It was very dark under the overhanging rock on that night of clouds and
+of wind that died and rose and died again.  Dominic's voice was heard
+speaking low between the short gusts.
+
+"Friend of the Senora, eh?"
+
+"That's what the world says, Dominic."
+
+"Half of what the world says are lies," he pronounced dogmatically.  "For
+all his majesty he may be a good enough man.  Yet he is only a king in
+the mountains and to-morrow he may be no more than you.  Still a woman
+like that--one, somehow, would grudge her to a better king.  She ought to
+be set up on a high pillar for people that walk on the ground to raise
+their eyes up to.  But you are otherwise, you gentlemen.  You, for
+instance, Monsieur, you wouldn't want to see her set up on a pillar."
+
+"That sort of thing, Dominic," I said, "that sort of thing, you
+understand me, ought to be done early."
+
+He was silent for a time.  And then his manly voice was heard in the
+shadow of the rock.
+
+"I see well enough what you mean.  I spoke of the multitude, that only
+raise their eyes.  But for kings and suchlike that is not enough.  Well,
+no heart need despair; for there is not a woman that wouldn't at some
+time or other get down from her pillar for no bigger bribe perhaps than
+just a flower which is fresh to-day and withered to-morrow.  And then,
+what's the good of asking how long any woman has been up there?  There is
+a true saying that lips that have been kissed do not lose their
+freshness."
+
+I don't know what answer I could have made.  I imagine Dominic thought
+himself unanswerable.  As a matter of fact, before I could speak, a voice
+came to us down the face of the rock crying secretly, "Ola, down there!
+All is safe ashore."
+
+It was the boy who used to hang about the stable of a muleteer's inn in a
+little shallow valley with a shallow little stream in it, and where we
+had been hiding most of the day before coming down to the shore.  We both
+started to our feet and Dominic said, "A good boy that.  You didn't hear
+him either come or go above our heads.  Don't reward him with more than
+one peseta, Senor, whatever he does.  If you were to give him two he
+would go mad at the sight of so much wealth and throw up his job at the
+Fonda, where he is so useful to run errands, in that way he has of
+skimming along the paths without displacing a stone."
+
+Meantime he was busying himself with striking a fire to set alight a
+small heap of dry sticks he had made ready beforehand on that spot which
+in all the circuit of the Bay was perfectly screened from observation
+from the land side.
+
+The clear flame shooting up revealed him in the black cloak with a hood
+of a Mediterranean sailor.  His eyes watched the dancing dim light to
+seaward.  And he talked the while.
+
+"The only fault you have, Senor, is being too generous with your money.
+In this world you must give sparingly.  The only things you may deal out
+without counting, in this life of ours which is but a little fight and a
+little love, is blows to your enemy and kisses to a woman. . . . Ah! here
+they are coming in."
+
+I noticed the dancing light in the dark west much closer to the shore
+now.  Its motion had altered.  It swayed slowly as it ran towards us,
+and, suddenly, the darker shadow as of a great pointed wing appeared
+gliding in the night.  Under it a human voice shouted something
+confidently.
+
+"_Bueno_," muttered Dominic.  From some receptacle I didn't see he poured
+a lot of water on the blaze, like a magician at the end of a successful
+incantation that had called out a shadow and a voice from the immense
+space of the sea.  And his hooded figure vanished from my sight in a
+great hiss and the warm feel of ascending steam.
+
+"That's all over," he said, "and now we go back for more work, more toil,
+more trouble, more exertion with hands and feet, for hours and hours.
+And all the time the head turned over the shoulder, too."
+
+We were climbing a precipitous path sufficiently dangerous in the dark,
+Dominic, more familiar with it, going first and I scrambling close behind
+in order that I might grab at his cloak if I chanced to slip or miss my
+footing.  I remonstrated against this arrangement as we stopped to rest.
+I had no doubt I would grab at his cloak if I felt myself falling.  I
+couldn't help doing that.  But I would probably only drag him down with
+me.
+
+With one hand grasping a shadowy bush above his head he growled that all
+this was possible, but that it was all in the bargain, and urged me
+onwards.
+
+When we got on to the level that man whose even breathing no exertion, no
+danger, no fear or anger could disturb, remarked as we strode side by
+side:
+
+"I will say this for us, that we are carrying out all this deadly
+foolishness as conscientiously as though the eyes of the Senora were on
+us all the time.  And as to risk, I suppose we take more than she would
+approve of, I fancy, if she ever gave a moment's thought to us out here.
+Now, for instance, in the next half hour, we may come any moment on three
+carabineers who would let off their pieces without asking questions.
+Even your way of flinging money about cannot make safety for men set on
+defying a whole big country for the sake of--what is it exactly?--the
+blue eyes, or the white arms of the Senora."
+
+He kept his voice equably low.  It was a lonely spot and but for a vague
+shape of a dwarf tree here and there we had only the flying clouds for
+company.  Very far off a tiny light twinkled a little way up the seaward
+shoulder of an invisible mountain.  Dominic moved on.
+
+"Fancy yourself lying here, on this wild spot, with a leg smashed by a
+shot or perhaps with a bullet in your side.  It might happen.  A star
+might fall.  I have watched stars falling in scores on clear nights in
+the Atlantic.  And it was nothing.  The flash of a pinch of gunpowder in
+your face may be a bigger matter.  Yet somehow it's pleasant as we
+stumble in the dark to think of our Senora in that long room with a shiny
+floor and all that lot of glass at the end, sitting on that divan, you
+call it, covered with carpets as if expecting a king indeed.  And very
+still . . ."
+
+He remembered her--whose image could not be dismissed.
+
+I laid my hand on his shoulder.
+
+"That light on the mountain side flickers exceedingly, Dominic.  Are we
+in the path?"
+
+He addressed me then in French, which was between us the language of more
+formal moments.
+
+"_Prenez mon bras_, _monsieur_.  Take a firm hold, or I will have you
+stumbling again and falling into one of those beastly holes, with a good
+chance to crack your head.  And there is no need to take offence.  For,
+speaking with all respect, why should you, and I with you, be here on
+this lonely spot, barking our shins in the dark on the way to a
+confounded flickering light where there will be no other supper but a
+piece of a stale sausage and a draught of leathery wine out of a stinking
+skin.  Pah!"
+
+I had good hold of his arm.  Suddenly he dropped the formal French and
+pronounced in his inflexible voice:
+
+"For a pair of white arms, Senor.  _Bueno_."
+
+He could understand.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+
+On our return from that expedition we came gliding into the old harbour
+so late that Dominic and I, making for the cafe kept by Madame Leonore,
+found it empty of customers, except for two rather sinister fellows
+playing cards together at a corner table near the door.  The first thing
+done by Madame Leonore was to put her hands on Dominic's shoulders and
+look at arm's length into the eyes of that man of audacious deeds and
+wild stratagems who smiled straight at her from under his heavy and, at
+that time, uncurled moustaches.
+
+Indeed we didn't present a neat appearance, our faces unshaven, with the
+traces of dried salt sprays on our smarting skins and the sleeplessness
+of full forty hours filming our eyes.  At least it was so with me who saw
+as through a mist Madame Leonore moving with her mature nonchalant grace,
+setting before us wine and glasses with a faint swish of her ample black
+skirt.  Under the elaborate structure of black hair her jet-black eyes
+sparkled like good-humoured stars and even I could see that she was
+tremendously excited at having this lawless wanderer Dominic within her
+reach and as it were in her power.  Presently she sat down by us, touched
+lightly Dominic's curly head silvered on the temples (she couldn't really
+help it), gazed at me for a while with a quizzical smile, observed that I
+looked very tired, and asked Dominic whether for all that I was likely to
+sleep soundly to-night.
+
+"I don't know," said Dominic, "He's young.  And there is always the
+chance of dreams."
+
+"What do you men dream of in those little barques of yours tossing for
+months on the water?"
+
+"Mostly of nothing," said Dominic.  "But it has happened to me to dream
+of furious fights."
+
+"And of furious loves, too, no doubt," she caught him up in a mocking
+voice.
+
+"No, that's for the waking hours," Dominic drawled, basking sleepily with
+his head between his hands in her ardent gaze.  "The waking hours are
+longer."
+
+"They must be, at sea," she said, never taking her eyes off him.  "But I
+suppose you do talk of your loves sometimes."
+
+"You may be sure, Madame Leonore," I interjected, noticing the hoarseness
+of my voice, "that you at any rate are talked about a lot at sea."
+
+"I am not so sure of that now.  There is that strange lady from the Prado
+that you took him to see, Signorino.  She went to his head like a glass
+of wine into a tender youngster's.  He is such a child, and I suppose
+that I am another.  Shame to confess it, the other morning I got a friend
+to look after the cafe for a couple of hours, wrapped up my head, and
+walked out there to the other end of the town. . . . Look at these two
+sitting up!  And I thought they were so sleepy and tired, the poor
+fellows!"
+
+She kept our curiosity in suspense for a moment.
+
+"Well, I have seen your marvel, Dominic," she continued in a calm voice.
+"She came flying out of the gate on horseback and it would have been all
+I would have seen of her if--and this is for you, Signorino--if she
+hadn't pulled up in the main alley to wait for a very good-looking
+cavalier.  He had his moustaches so, and his teeth were very white when
+he smiled at her.  But his eyes are too deep in his head for my taste.  I
+didn't like it.  It reminded me of a certain very severe priest who used
+to come to our village when I was young; younger even than your marvel,
+Dominic."
+
+"It was no priest in disguise, Madame Leonore," I said, amused by her
+expression of disgust.  "That's an American."
+
+"Ah!  _Un Americano_!  Well, never mind him.  It was her that I went to
+see."
+
+"What!  Walked to the other end of the town to see Dona Rita!"  Dominic
+addressed her in a low bantering tone.  "Why, you were always telling me
+you couldn't walk further than the end of the quay to save your life--or
+even mine, you said."
+
+"Well, I did; and I walked back again and between the two walks I had a
+good look.  And you may be sure--that will surprise you both--that on the
+way back--oh, Santa Madre, wasn't it a long way, too--I wasn't thinking
+of any man at sea or on shore in that connection."
+
+"No.  And you were not thinking of yourself, either, I suppose," I said.
+Speaking was a matter of great effort for me, whether I was too tired or
+too sleepy, I can't tell.  "No, you were not thinking of yourself.  You
+were thinking of a woman, though."
+
+"_Si_.  As much a woman as any of us that ever breathed in the world.
+Yes, of her!  Of that very one!  You see, we women are not like you men,
+indifferent to each other unless by some exception.  Men say we are
+always against one another but that's only men's conceit.  What can she
+be to me?  I am not afraid of the big child here," and she tapped
+Dominic's forearm on which he rested his head with a fascinated stare.
+"With us two it is for life and death, and I am rather pleased that there
+is something yet in him that can catch fire on occasion.  I would have
+thought less of him if he hadn't been able to get out of hand a little,
+for something really fine.  As for you, Signorino," she turned on me with
+an unexpected and sarcastic sally, "I am not in love with you yet."  She
+changed her tone from sarcasm to a soft and even dreamy note.  "A head
+like a gem," went on that woman born in some by-street of Rome, and a
+plaything for years of God knows what obscure fates.  "Yes, Dominic!
+_Antica_.  I haven't been haunted by a face since--since I was sixteen
+years old.  It was the face of a young cavalier in the street.  He was on
+horseback, too.  He never looked at me, I never saw him again, and I
+loved him for--for days and days and days.  That was the sort of face he
+had.  And her face is of the same sort.  She had a man's hat, too, on her
+head.  So high!"
+
+"A man's hat on her head," remarked with profound displeasure Dominic, to
+whom this wonder, at least, of all the wonders of the earth, was
+apparently unknown.
+
+"_Si_.  And her face has haunted me.  Not so long as that other but more
+touchingly because I am no longer sixteen and this is a woman.  Yes, I
+did think of her, I myself was once that age and I, too, had a face of my
+own to show to the world, though not so superb.  And I, too, didn't know
+why I had come into the world any more than she does."
+
+"And now you know," Dominic growled softly, with his head still between
+his hands.
+
+She looked at him for a long time, opened her lips but in the end only
+sighed lightly.
+
+"And what do you know of her, you who have seen her so well as to be
+haunted by her face?" I asked.
+
+I wouldn't have been surprised if she had answered me with another sigh.
+For she seemed only to be thinking of herself and looked not in my
+direction.  But suddenly she roused up.
+
+"Of her?" she repeated in a louder voice.  "Why should I talk of another
+woman?  And then she is a great lady."
+
+At this I could not repress a smile which she detected at once.
+
+"Isn't she?  Well, no, perhaps she isn't; but you may be sure of one
+thing, that she is both flesh and shadow more than any one that I have
+seen.  Keep that well in your mind: She is for no man!  She would be
+vanishing out of their hands like water that cannot be held."
+
+I caught my breath.  "Inconstant," I whispered.
+
+"I don't say that.  Maybe too proud, too wilful, too full of pity.
+Signorino, you don't know much about women.  And you may learn something
+yet or you may not; but what you learn from her you will never forget."
+
+"Not to be held," I murmured; and she whom the quayside called Madame
+Leonore closed her outstretched hand before my face and opened it at once
+to show its emptiness in illustration of her expressed opinion.  Dominic
+never moved.
+
+I wished good-night to these two and left the cafe for the fresh air and
+the dark spaciousness of the quays augmented by all the width of the old
+Port where between the trails of light the shadows of heavy hulls
+appeared very black, merging their outlines in a great confusion.  I left
+behind me the end of the Cannebiere, a wide vista of tall houses and
+much-lighted pavements losing itself in the distance with an extinction
+of both shapes and lights.  I slunk past it with only a side glance and
+sought the dimness of quiet streets away from the centre of the usual
+night gaieties of the town.  The dress I wore was just that of a sailor
+come ashore from some coaster, a thick blue woollen shirt or rather a
+sort of jumper with a knitted cap like a tam-o'-shanter worn very much on
+one side and with a red tuft of wool in the centre.  This was even the
+reason why I had lingered so long in the cafe.  I didn't want to be
+recognized in the streets in that costume and still less to be seen
+entering the house in the street of the Consuls.  At that hour when the
+performances were over and all the sensible citizens in their beds I
+didn't hesitate to cross the Place of the Opera.  It was dark, the
+audience had already dispersed.  The rare passers-by I met hurrying on
+their last affairs of the day paid no attention to me at all.  The street
+of the Consuls I expected to find empty, as usual at that time of the
+night.  But as I turned a corner into it I overtook three people who must
+have belonged to the locality.  To me, somehow, they appeared strange.
+Two girls in dark cloaks walked ahead of a tall man in a top hat.  I
+slowed down, not wishing to pass them by, the more so that the door of
+the house was only a few yards distant.  But to my intense surprise those
+people stopped at it and the man in the top hat, producing a latchkey,
+let his two companions through, followed them, and with a heavy slam cut
+himself off from my astonished self and the rest of mankind.
+
+In the stupid way people have I stood and meditated on the sight, before
+it occurred to me that this was the most useless thing to do.  After
+waiting a little longer to let the others get away from the hall I
+entered in my turn.  The small gas-jet seemed not to have been touched
+ever since that distant night when Mills and I trod the black-and-white
+marble hall for the first time on the heels of Captain Blunt--who lived
+by his sword.  And in the dimness and solitude which kept no more trace
+of the three strangers than if they had been the merest ghosts I seemed
+to hear the ghostly murmur, "_Americain_, _Catholique et gentilhomme_.
+_Amer. . . _"  Unseen by human eye I ran up the flight of steps swiftly
+and on the first floor stepped into my sitting-room of which the door was
+open . . . "_et gentilhomme_."  I tugged at the bell pull and somewhere
+down below a bell rang as unexpected for Therese as a call from a ghost.
+
+I had no notion whether Therese could hear me.  I seemed to remember that
+she slept in any bed that happened to be vacant.  For all I knew she
+might have been asleep in mine.  As I had no matches on me I waited for a
+while in the dark.  The house was perfectly still.  Suddenly without the
+slightest preliminary sound light fell into the room and Therese stood in
+the open door with a candlestick in her hand.
+
+She had on her peasant brown skirt.  The rest of her was concealed in a
+black shawl which covered her head, her shoulders, arms, and elbows
+completely, down to her waist.  The hand holding the candle protruded
+from that envelope which the other invisible hand clasped together under
+her very chin.  And her face looked like a face in a painting.  She said
+at once:
+
+"You startled me, my young Monsieur."
+
+She addressed me most frequently in that way as though she liked the very
+word "young."  Her manner was certainly peasant-like with a sort of
+plaint in the voice, while the face was that of a serving Sister in some
+small and rustic convent.
+
+"I meant to do it," I said.  "I am a very bad person."
+
+"The young are always full of fun," she said as if she were gloating over
+the idea.  "It is very pleasant."
+
+"But you are very brave," I chaffed her, "for you didn't expect a ring,
+and after all it might have been the devil who pulled the bell."
+
+"It might have been.  But a poor girl like me is not afraid of the devil.
+I have a pure heart.  I have been to confession last evening.  No.  But
+it might have been an assassin that pulled the bell ready to kill a poor
+harmless woman.  This is a very lonely street.  What could prevent you to
+kill me now and then walk out again free as air?"
+
+While she was talking like this she had lighted the gas and with the last
+words she glided through the bedroom door leaving me thunderstruck at the
+unexpected character of her thoughts.
+
+I couldn't know that there had been during my absence a case of atrocious
+murder which had affected the imagination of the whole town; and though
+Therese did not read the papers (which she imagined to be full of
+impieties and immoralities invented by godless men) yet if she spoke at
+all with her kind, which she must have done at least in shops, she could
+not have helped hearing of it.  It seems that for some days people could
+talk of nothing else.  She returned gliding from the bedroom hermetically
+sealed in her black shawl just as she had gone in, with the protruding
+hand holding the lighted candle and relieved my perplexity as to her
+morbid turn of mind by telling me something of the murder story in a
+strange tone of indifference even while referring to its most horrible
+features.  "That's what carnal sin (_peche de chair_) leads to," she
+commented severely and passed her tongue over her thin lips.  "And then
+the devil furnishes the occasion."
+
+"I can't imagine the devil inciting me to murder you, Therese," I said,
+"and I didn't like that ready way you took me for an example, as it were.
+I suppose pretty near every lodger might be a potential murderer, but I
+expected to be made an exception."
+
+With the candle held a little below her face, with that face of one tone
+and without relief she looked more than ever as though she had come out
+of an old, cracked, smoky painting, the subject of which was altogether
+beyond human conception.  And she only compressed her lips.
+
+"All right," I said, making myself comfortable on a sofa after pulling
+off my boots.  "I suppose any one is liable to commit murder all of a
+sudden.  Well, have you got many murderers in the house?"
+
+"Yes," she said, "it's pretty good.  Upstairs and downstairs," she
+sighed.  "God sees to it."
+
+"And by the by, who is that grey-headed murderer in a tall hat whom I saw
+shepherding two girls into this house?"
+
+She put on a candid air in which one could detect a little of her peasant
+cunning.
+
+"Oh, yes.  They are two dancing girls at the Opera, sisters, as different
+from each other as I and our poor Rita.  But they are both virtuous and
+that gentleman, their father, is very severe with them.  Very severe
+indeed, poor motherless things.  And it seems to be such a sinful
+occupation."
+
+"I bet you make them pay a big rent, Therese.  With an occupation like
+that . . ."
+
+She looked at me with eyes of invincible innocence and began to glide
+towards the door, so smoothly that the flame of the candle hardly swayed.
+"Good-night," she murmured.
+
+"Good-night, Mademoiselle."
+
+Then in the very doorway she turned right round as a marionette would
+turn.
+
+"Oh, you ought to know, my dear young Monsieur, that Mr. Blunt, the dear
+handsome man, has arrived from Navarre three days ago or more.  Oh," she
+added with a priceless air of compunction, "he is such a charming
+gentleman."
+
+And the door shut after her.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+
+That night I passed in a state, mostly open-eyed, I believe, but always
+on the border between dreams and waking.  The only thing absolutely
+absent from it was the feeling of rest.  The usual sufferings of a youth
+in love had nothing to do with it.  I could leave her, go away from her,
+remain away from her, without an added pang or any augmented
+consciousness of that torturing sentiment of distance so acute that often
+it ends by wearing itself out in a few days.  Far or near was all one to
+me, as if one could never get any further but also never any nearer to
+her secret: the state like that of some strange wild faiths that get hold
+of mankind with the cruel mystic grip of unattainable perfection, robbing
+them of both liberty and felicity on earth.  A faith presents one with
+some hope, though.  But I had no hope, and not even desire as a thing
+outside myself, that would come and go, exhaust or excite.  It was in me
+just like life was in me; that life of which a popular saying affirms
+that "it is sweet."  For the general wisdom of mankind will always stop
+short on the limit of the formidable.
+
+What is best in a state of brimful, equable suffering is that it does
+away with the gnawings of petty sensations.  Too far gone to be sensible
+to hope and desire I was spared the inferior pangs of elation and
+impatience.  Hours with her or hours without her were all alike, all in
+her possession!  But still there are shades and I will admit that the
+hours of that morning were perhaps a little more difficult to get through
+than the others.  I had sent word of my arrival of course.  I had written
+a note.  I had rung the bell.  Therese had appeared herself in her brown
+garb and as monachal as ever.  I had said to her:
+
+"Have this sent off at once."
+
+She had gazed at the addressed envelope, smiled (I was looking up at her
+from my desk), and at last took it up with an effort of sanctimonious
+repugnance.  But she remained with it in her hand looking at me as though
+she were piously gloating over something she could read in my face.
+
+"Oh, that Rita, that Rita," she murmured.  "And you, too!  Why are you
+trying, you, too, like the others, to stand between her and the mercy of
+God?  What's the good of all this to you?  And you such a nice, dear,
+young gentleman.  For no earthly good only making all the kind saints in
+heaven angry, and our mother ashamed in her place amongst the blessed."
+
+"Mademoiselle Therese," I said, "_vous etes folle_."
+
+I believed she was crazy.  She was cunning, too.  I added an imperious:
+"_Allez_," and with a strange docility she glided out without another
+word.  All I had to do then was to get dressed and wait till eleven
+o'clock.
+
+The hour struck at last.  If I could have plunged into a light wave and
+been transported instantaneously to Dona Rita's door it would no doubt
+have saved me an infinity of pangs too complex for analysis; but as this
+was impossible I elected to walk from end to end of that long way.  My
+emotions and sensations were childlike and chaotic inasmuch that they
+were very intense and primitive, and that I lay very helpless in their
+unrelaxing grasp.  If one could have kept a record of one's physical
+sensations it would have been a fine collection of absurdities and
+contradictions.  Hardly touching the ground and yet leaden-footed; with a
+sinking heart and an excited brain; hot and trembling with a secret
+faintness, and yet as firm as a rock and with a sort of indifference to
+it all, I did reach the door which was frightfully like any other
+commonplace door, but at the same time had a fateful character: a few
+planks put together--and an awful symbol; not to be approached without
+awe--and yet coming open in the ordinary way to the ring of the bell.
+
+It came open.  Oh, yes, very much as usual.  But in the ordinary course
+of events the first sight in the hall should have been the back of the
+ubiquitous, busy, silent maid hurrying off and already distant.  But not
+at all!  She actually waited for me to enter.  I was extremely taken
+aback and I believe spoke to her for the first time in my life.
+
+"_Bonjour_, Rose."
+
+She dropped her dark eyelids over those eyes that ought to have been
+lustrous but were not, as if somebody had breathed on them the first
+thing in the morning.  She was a girl without smiles.  She shut the door
+after me, and not only did that but in the incredible idleness of that
+morning she, who had never a moment to spare, started helping me off with
+my overcoat.  It was positively embarrassing from its novelty.  While
+busying herself with those trifles she murmured without any marked
+intention:
+
+"Captain Blunt is with Madame."
+
+This didn't exactly surprise me.  I knew he had come up to town; I only
+happened to have forgotten his existence for the moment.  I looked at the
+girl also without any particular intention.  But she arrested my movement
+towards the dining-room door by a low, hurried, if perfectly unemotional
+appeal:
+
+"Monsieur George!"
+
+That of course was not my name.  It served me then as it will serve for
+this story.  In all sorts of strange places I was alluded to as "that
+young gentleman they call Monsieur George."  Orders came from "Monsieur
+George" to men who nodded knowingly.  Events pivoted about "Monsieur
+George."  I haven't the slightest doubt that in the dark and tortuous
+streets of the old Town there were fingers pointed at my back: there goes
+"Monsieur George."  I had been introduced discreetly to several
+considerable persons as "Monsieur George."  I had learned to answer to
+the name quite naturally; and to simplify matters I was also "Monsieur
+George" in the street of the Consuls and in the Villa on the Prado.  I
+verily believe that at that time I had the feeling that the name of
+George really belonged to me.  I waited for what the girl had to say.  I
+had to wait some time, though during that silence she gave no sign of
+distress or agitation.  It was for her obviously a moment of reflection.
+Her lips were compressed a little in a characteristic, capable manner.  I
+looked at her with a friendliness I really felt towards her slight,
+unattractive, and dependable person.
+
+"Well," I said at last, rather amused by this mental hesitation.  I never
+took it for anything else.  I was sure it was not distrust.  She
+appreciated men and things and events solely in relation to Dona Rita's
+welfare and safety.  And as to that I believed myself above suspicion.
+At last she spoke.
+
+"Madame is not happy."  This information was given to me not emotionally
+but as it were officially.  It hadn't even a tone of warning.  A mere
+statement.  Without waiting to see the effect she opened the dining-room
+door, not to announce my name in the usual way but to go in and shut it
+behind her.  In that short moment I heard no voices inside.  Not a sound
+reached me while the door remained shut; but in a few seconds it came
+open again and Rose stood aside to let me pass.
+
+Then I heard something: Dona Rita's voice raised a little on an impatient
+note (a very, very rare thing) finishing some phrase of protest with the
+words " . . . Of no consequence."
+
+I heard them as I would have heard any other words, for she had that kind
+of voice which carries a long distance.  But the maid's statement
+occupied all my mind.  "_Madame n'est pas heureuse_."  It had a dreadful
+precision . . . "Not happy . . ."  This unhappiness had almost a concrete
+form--something resembling a horrid bat.  I was tired, excited, and
+generally overwrought.  My head felt empty.  What were the appearances of
+unhappiness?  I was still naive enough to associate them with tears,
+lamentations, extraordinary attitudes of the body and some sort of facial
+distortion, all very dreadful to behold.  I didn't know what I should
+see; but in what I did see there was nothing startling, at any rate from
+that nursery point of view which apparently I had not yet outgrown.
+
+With immense relief the apprehensive child within me beheld Captain Blunt
+warming his back at the more distant of the two fireplaces; and as to
+Dona Rita there was nothing extraordinary in her attitude either, except
+perhaps that her hair was all loose about her shoulders.  I hadn't the
+slightest doubt they had been riding together that morning, but she, with
+her impatience of all costume (and yet she could dress herself admirably
+and wore her dresses triumphantly), had divested herself of her riding
+habit and sat cross-legged enfolded in that ample blue robe like a young
+savage chieftain in a blanket.  It covered her very feet.  And before the
+normal fixity of her enigmatical eyes the smoke of the cigarette ascended
+ceremonially, straight up, in a slender spiral.
+
+"How are you," was the greeting of Captain Blunt with the usual smile
+which would have been more amiable if his teeth hadn't been, just then,
+clenched quite so tight.  How he managed to force his voice through that
+shining barrier I could never understand.  Dona Rita tapped the couch
+engagingly by her side but I sat down instead in the armchair nearly
+opposite her, which, I imagine, must have been just vacated by Blunt.
+She inquired with that particular gleam of the eyes in which there was
+something immemorial and gay:
+
+"Well?"
+
+"Perfect success."
+
+"I could hug you."
+
+At any time her lips moved very little but in this instance the intense
+whisper of these words seemed to form itself right in my very heart; not
+as a conveyed sound but as an imparted emotion vibrating there with an
+awful intimacy of delight.  And yet it left my heart heavy.
+
+"Oh, yes, for joy," I said bitterly but very low; "for your Royalist,
+Legitimist, joy."  Then with that trick of very precise politeness which
+I must have caught from Mr. Blunt I added:
+
+"I don't want to be embraced--for the King."
+
+And I might have stopped there.  But I didn't.  With a perversity which
+should be forgiven to those who suffer night and day and are as if drunk
+with an exalted unhappiness, I went on: "For the sake of an old cast-off
+glove; for I suppose a disdained love is not much more than a soiled,
+flabby thing that finds itself on a private rubbish heap because it has
+missed the fire."
+
+She listened to me unreadable, unmoved, narrowed eyes, closed lips,
+slightly flushed face, as if carved six thousand years ago in order to
+fix for ever that something secret and obscure which is in all women.
+Not the gross immobility of a Sphinx proposing roadside riddles but the
+finer immobility, almost sacred, of a fateful figure seated at the very
+source of the passions that have moved men from the dawn of ages.
+
+Captain Blunt, with his elbow on the high mantelpiece, had turned away a
+little from us and his attitude expressed excellently the detachment of a
+man who does not want to hear.  As a matter of fact, I don't suppose he
+could have heard.  He was too far away, our voices were too contained.
+Moreover, he didn't want to hear.  There could be no doubt about it; but
+she addressed him unexpectedly.
+
+"As I was saying to you, Don Juan, I have the greatest difficulty in
+getting myself, I won't say understood, but simply believed."
+
+No pose of detachment could avail against the warm waves of that voice.
+He had to hear.  After a moment he altered his position as it were
+reluctantly, to answer her.
+
+"That's a difficulty that women generally have."
+
+"Yet I have always spoken the truth."
+
+"All women speak the truth," said Blunt imperturbably.  And this annoyed
+her.
+
+"Where are the men I have deceived?" she cried.
+
+"Yes, where?" said Blunt in a tone of alacrity as though he had been
+ready to go out and look for them outside.
+
+"No!  But show me one.  I say--where is he?"
+
+He threw his affectation of detachment to the winds, moved his shoulders
+slightly, very slightly, made a step nearer to the couch, and looked down
+on her with an expression of amused courtesy.
+
+"Oh, I don't know.  Probably nowhere.  But if such a man could be found I
+am certain he would turn out a very stupid person.  You can't be expected
+to furnish every one who approaches you with a mind.  To expect that
+would be too much, even from you who know how to work wonders at such
+little cost to yourself."
+
+"To myself," she repeated in a loud tone.
+
+"Why this indignation?  I am simply taking your word for it."
+
+"Such little cost!" she exclaimed under her breath.
+
+"I mean to your person."
+
+"Oh, yes," she murmured, glanced down, as it were upon herself, then
+added very low: "This body."
+
+"Well, it is you," said Blunt with visibly contained irritation.  "You
+don't pretend it's somebody else's.  It can't be.  You haven't borrowed
+it. . . . It fits you too well," he ended between his teeth.
+
+"You take pleasure in tormenting yourself," she remonstrated, suddenly
+placated; "and I would be sorry for you if I didn't think it's the mere
+revolt of your pride.  And you know you are indulging your pride at my
+expense.  As to the rest of it, as to my living, acting, working wonders
+at a little cost. . . . it has all but killed me morally.  Do you hear?
+Killed."
+
+"Oh, you are not dead yet," he muttered,
+
+"No," she said with gentle patience.  "There is still some feeling left
+in me; and if it is any satisfaction to you to know it, you may be
+certain that I shall be conscious of the last stab."
+
+He remained silent for a while and then with a polite smile and a
+movement of the head in my direction he warned her.
+
+"Our audience will get bored."
+
+"I am perfectly aware that Monsieur George is here, and that he has been
+breathing a very different atmosphere from what he gets in this room.
+Don't you find this room extremely confined?" she asked me.
+
+The room was very large but it is a fact that I felt oppressed at that
+moment.  This mysterious quarrel between those two people, revealing
+something more close in their intercourse than I had ever before
+suspected, made me so profoundly unhappy that I didn't even attempt to
+answer.  And she continued:
+
+"More space.  More air.  Give me air, air."  She seized the embroidered
+edges of her blue robe under her white throat and made as if to tear them
+apart, to fling it open on her breast, recklessly, before our eyes.  We
+both remained perfectly still.  Her hands dropped nervelessly by her
+side.  "I envy you, Monsieur George.  If I am to go under I should prefer
+to be drowned in the sea with the wind on my face.  What luck, to feel
+nothing less than all the world closing over one's head!"
+
+A short silence ensued before Mr. Blunt's drawing-room voice was heard
+with playful familiarity.
+
+"I have often asked myself whether you weren't really a very ambitious
+person, Dona Rita."
+
+"And I ask myself whether you have any heart."  She was looking straight
+at him and he gratified her with the usual cold white flash of his even
+teeth before he answered.
+
+"Asking yourself?  That means that you are really asking me.  But why do
+it so publicly?  I mean it.  One single, detached presence is enough to
+make a public.  One alone.  Why not wait till he returns to those regions
+of space and air--from which he came."
+
+His particular trick of speaking of any third person as of a lay figure
+was exasperating.  Yet at the moment I did not know how to resent it,
+but, in any case, Dona Rita would not have given me time.  Without a
+moment's hesitation she cried out:
+
+"I only wish he could take me out there with him."
+
+For a moment Mr. Blunt's face became as still as a mask and then instead
+of an angry it assumed an indulgent expression.  As to me I had a rapid
+vision of Dominic's astonishment, awe, and sarcasm which was always as
+tolerant as it is possible for sarcasm to be.  But what a charming,
+gentle, gay, and fearless companion she would have made!  I believed in
+her fearlessness in any adventure that would interest her.  It would be a
+new occasion for me, a new viewpoint for that faculty of admiration she
+had awakened in me at sight--at first sight--before she opened her
+lips--before she ever turned her eyes on me.  She would have to wear some
+sort of sailor costume, a blue woollen shirt open at the throat. . . .
+Dominic's hooded cloak would envelop her amply, and her face under the
+black hood would have a luminous quality, adolescent charm, and an
+enigmatic expression.  The confined space of the little vessel's
+quarterdeck would lend itself to her cross-legged attitudes, and the blue
+sea would balance gently her characteristic immobility that seemed to
+hide thoughts as old and profound as itself.  As restless, too--perhaps.
+
+But the picture I had in my eye, coloured and simple like an illustration
+to a nursery-book tale of two venturesome children's escapade, was what
+fascinated me most.  Indeed I felt that we two were like children under
+the gaze of a man of the world--who lived by his sword.  And I said
+recklessly:
+
+"Yes, you ought to come along with us for a trip.  You would see a lot of
+things for yourself."
+
+Mr. Blunt's expression had grown even more indulgent if that were
+possible.  Yet there was something ineradicably ambiguous about that man.
+I did not like the indefinable tone in which he observed:
+
+"You are perfectly reckless in what you say, Dona Rita.  It has become a
+habit with you of late."
+
+"While with you reserve is a second nature, Don Juan."
+
+This was uttered with the gentlest, almost tender, irony.  Mr. Blunt
+waited a while before he said:
+
+"Certainly. . . . Would you have liked me to be otherwise?"
+
+She extended her hand to him on a sudden impulse.
+
+"Forgive me!  I may have been unjust, and you may only have been loyal.
+The falseness is not in us.  The fault is in life itself, I suppose.  I
+have been always frank with you."
+
+"And I obedient," he said, bowing low over her hand.  He turned away,
+paused to look at me for some time and finally gave me the correct sort
+of nod.  But he said nothing and went out, or rather lounged out with his
+worldly manner of perfect ease under all conceivable circumstances.  With
+her head lowered Dona Rita watched him till he actually shut the door
+behind him.  I was facing her and only heard the door close.
+
+"Don't stare at me," were the first words she said.
+
+It was difficult to obey that request.  I didn't know exactly where to
+look, while I sat facing her.  So I got up, vaguely full of goodwill,
+prepared even to move off as far as the window, when she commanded:
+
+"Don't turn your back on me."
+
+I chose to understand it symbolically.
+
+"You know very well I could never do that.  I couldn't.  Not even if I
+wanted to."  And I added: "It's too late now."
+
+"Well, then, sit down.  Sit down on this couch."
+
+I sat down on the couch.  Unwillingly?  Yes.  I was at that stage when
+all her words, all her gestures, all her silences were a heavy trial to
+me, put a stress on my resolution, on that fidelity to myself and to her
+which lay like a leaden weight on my untried heart.  But I didn't sit
+down very far away from her, though that soft and billowy couch was big
+enough, God knows!  No, not very far from her.  Self-control, dignity,
+hopelessness itself, have their limits.  The halo of her tawny hair
+stirred as I let myself drop by her side.  Whereupon she flung one arm
+round my neck, leaned her temple against my shoulder and began to sob;
+but that I could only guess from her slight, convulsive movements because
+in our relative positions I could only see the mass of her tawny hair
+brushed back, yet with a halo of escaped hair which as I bent my head
+over her tickled my lips, my cheek, in a maddening manner.
+
+We sat like two venturesome children in an illustration to a tale, scared
+by their adventure.  But not for long.  As I instinctively, yet timidly,
+sought for her other hand I felt a tear strike the back of mine, big and
+heavy as if fallen from a great height.  It was too much for me.  I must
+have given a nervous start.  At once I heard a murmur: "You had better go
+away now."
+
+I withdrew myself gently from under the light weight of her head, from
+this unspeakable bliss and inconceivable misery, and had the absurd
+impression of leaving her suspended in the air.  And I moved away on
+tiptoe.
+
+Like an inspired blind man led by Providence I found my way out of the
+room but really I saw nothing, till in the hall the maid appeared by
+enchantment before me holding up my overcoat.  I let her help me into it.
+And then (again as if by enchantment) she had my hat in her hand.
+
+"No.  Madame isn't happy," I whispered to her distractedly.
+
+She let me take my hat out of her hand and while I was putting it on my
+head I heard an austere whisper:
+
+"Madame should listen to her heart."
+
+Austere is not the word; it was almost freezing, this unexpected,
+dispassionate rustle of words.  I had to repress a shudder, and as coldly
+as herself I murmured:
+
+"She has done that once too often."
+
+Rose was standing very close to me and I caught distinctly the note of
+scorn in her indulgent compassion.
+
+"Oh, that! . . . Madame is like a child."  It was impossible to get the
+bearing of that utterance from that girl who, as Dona Rita herself had
+told me, was the most taciturn of human beings; and yet of all human
+beings the one nearest to herself.  I seized her head in my hands and
+turning up her face I looked straight down into her black eyes which
+should have been lustrous.  Like a piece of glass breathed upon they
+reflected no light, revealed no depths, and under my ardent gaze remained
+tarnished, misty, unconscious.
+
+"Will Monsieur kindly let me go.  Monsieur shouldn't play the child,
+either."  (I let her go.)  "Madame could have the world at her feet.
+Indeed she has it there only she doesn't care for it."
+
+How talkative she was, this maid with unsealed lips!  For some reason or
+other this last statement of hers brought me immense comfort.
+
+"Yes?" I whispered breathlessly.
+
+"Yes!  But in that case what's the use of living in fear and torment?"
+she went on, revealing a little more of herself to my astonishment.  She
+opened the door for me and added:
+
+"Those that don't care to stoop ought at least make themselves happy."
+
+I turned in the very doorway: "There is something which prevents that?" I
+suggested.
+
+"To be sure there is.  _Bonjour_, Monsieur."
+
+
+
+
+PART FOUR
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+
+"Such a charming lady in a grey silk dress and a hand as white as snow.
+She looked at me through such funny glasses on the end of a long handle.
+A very great lady but her voice was as kind as the voice of a saint.  I
+have never seen anything like that.  She made me feel so timid."
+
+The voice uttering these words was the voice of Therese and I looked at
+her from a bed draped heavily in brown silk curtains fantastically looped
+up from ceiling to floor.  The glow of a sunshiny day was toned down by
+closed jalousies to a mere transparency of darkness.  In this thin medium
+Therese's form appeared flat, without detail, as if cut out of black
+paper.  It glided towards the window and with a click and a scrape let in
+the full flood of light which smote my aching eyeballs painfully.
+
+In truth all that night had been the abomination of desolation to me.
+After wrestling with my thoughts, if the acute consciousness of a woman's
+existence may be called a thought, I had apparently dropped off to sleep
+only to go on wrestling with a nightmare, a senseless and terrifying
+dream of being in bonds which, even after waking, made me feel powerless
+in all my limbs.  I lay still, suffering acutely from a renewed sense of
+existence, unable to lift an arm, and wondering why I was not at sea, how
+long I had slept, how long Therese had been talking before her voice had
+reached me in that purgatory of hopeless longing and unanswerable
+questions to which I was condemned.
+
+It was Therese's habit to begin talking directly she entered the room
+with the tray of morning coffee.  This was her method for waking me up.
+I generally regained the consciousness of the external world on some
+pious phrase asserting the spiritual comfort of early mass, or on angry
+lamentations about the unconscionable rapacity of the dealers in fish and
+vegetables; for after mass it was Therese's practice to do the marketing
+for the house.  As a matter of fact the necessity of having to pay, to
+actually give money to people, infuriated the pious Therese.  But the
+matter of this morning's speech was so extraordinary that it might have
+been the prolongation of a nightmare: a man in bonds having to listen to
+weird and unaccountable speeches against which, he doesn't know why, his
+very soul revolts.
+
+In sober truth my soul remained in revolt though I was convinced that I
+was no longer dreaming.  I watched Therese coming away from the window
+with that helpless dread a man bound hand and foot may be excused to
+feel.  For in such a situation even the absurd may appear ominous.  She
+came up close to the bed and folding her hands meekly in front of her
+turned her eyes up to the ceiling.
+
+"If I had been her daughter she couldn't have spoken more softly to me,"
+she said sentimentally.
+
+I made a great effort to speak.
+
+"Mademoiselle Therese, you are raving."
+
+"She addressed me as Mademoiselle, too, so nicely.  I was struck with
+veneration for her white hair but her face, believe me, my dear young
+Monsieur, has not so many wrinkles as mine."
+
+She compressed her lips with an angry glance at me as if I could help her
+wrinkles, then she sighed.
+
+"God sends wrinkles, but what is our face?" she digressed in a tone of
+great humility.  "We shall have glorious faces in Paradise.  But meantime
+God has permitted me to preserve a smooth heart."
+
+"Are you going to keep on like this much longer?" I fairly shouted at
+her.  "What are you talking about?"
+
+"I am talking about the sweet old lady who came in a carriage.  Not a
+fiacre.  I can tell a fiacre.  In a little carriage shut in with glass
+all in front.  I suppose she is very rich.  The carriage was very shiny
+outside and all beautiful grey stuff inside.  I opened the door to her
+myself.  She got out slowly like a queen.  I was struck all of a heap.
+Such a shiny beautiful little carriage.  There were blue silk tassels
+inside, beautiful silk tassels."
+
+Obviously Therese had been very much impressed by a brougham, though she
+didn't know the name for it.  Of all the town she knew nothing but the
+streets which led to a neighbouring church frequented only by the poorer
+classes and the humble quarter around, where she did her marketing.
+Besides, she was accustomed to glide along the walls with her eyes cast
+down; for her natural boldness would never show itself through that
+nun-like mien except when bargaining, if only on a matter of threepence.
+Such a turn-out had never been presented to her notice before.  The
+traffic in the street of the Consuls was mostly pedestrian and far from
+fashionable.  And anyhow Therese never looked out of the window.  She
+lurked in the depths of the house like some kind of spider that shuns
+attention.  She used to dart at one from some dark recesses which I never
+explored.
+
+Yet it seemed to me that she exaggerated her raptures for some reason or
+other.  With her it was very difficult to distinguish between craft and
+innocence.
+
+"Do you mean to say," I asked suspiciously, "that an old lady wants to
+hire an apartment here?  I hope you told her there was no room, because,
+you know, this house is not exactly the thing for venerable old ladies."
+
+"Don't make me angry, my dear young Monsieur.  I have been to confession
+this morning.  Aren't you comfortable?  Isn't the house appointed richly
+enough for anybody?"
+
+That girl with a peasant-nun's face had never seen the inside of a house
+other than some half-ruined _caserio_ in her native hills.
+
+I pointed out to her that this was not a matter of splendour or comfort
+but of "convenances."  She pricked up her ears at that word which
+probably she had never heard before; but with woman's uncanny intuition I
+believe she understood perfectly what I meant.  Her air of saintly
+patience became so pronounced that with my own poor intuition I perceived
+that she was raging at me inwardly.  Her weather-tanned complexion,
+already affected by her confined life, took on an extraordinary clayey
+aspect which reminded me of a strange head painted by El Greco which my
+friend Prax had hung on one of his walls and used to rail at; yet not
+without a certain respect.
+
+Therese, with her hands still meekly folded about her waist, had mastered
+the feelings of anger so unbecoming to a person whose sins had been
+absolved only about three hours before, and asked me with an insinuating
+softness whether she wasn't an honest girl enough to look after any old
+lady belonging to a world which after all was sinful.  She reminded me
+that she had kept house ever since she was "so high" for her uncle the
+priest: a man well-known for his saintliness in a large district
+extending even beyond Pampeluna.  The character of a house depended upon
+the person who ruled it.  She didn't know what impenitent wretches had
+been breathing within these walls in the time of that godless and wicked
+man who had planted every seed of perdition in "our Rita's" ill-disposed
+heart.  But he was dead and she, Therese, knew for certain that
+wickedness perished utterly, because of God's anger (_la colere du bon
+Dieu_).  She would have no hesitation in receiving a bishop, if need be,
+since "our, Rita," with her poor, wretched, unbelieving heart, had
+nothing more to do with the house.
+
+All this came out of her like an unctuous trickle of some acrid oil.  The
+low, voluble delivery was enough by itself to compel my attention.
+
+"You think you know your sister's heart," I asked.
+
+She made small eyes at me to discover if I was angry.  She seemed to have
+an invincible faith in the virtuous dispositions of young men.  And as I
+had spoken in measured tones and hadn't got red in the face she let
+herself go.
+
+"Black, my dear young Monsieur.  Black.  I always knew it.  Uncle, poor
+saintly man, was too holy to take notice of anything.  He was too busy
+with his thoughts to listen to anything I had to say to him.  For
+instance as to her shamelessness.  She was always ready to run half naked
+about the hills. . . "
+
+"Yes.  After your goats.  All day long.  Why didn't you mend her frocks?"
+
+"Oh, you know about the goats.  My dear young Monsieur, I could never
+tell when she would fling over her pretended sweetness and put her tongue
+out at me.  Did she tell you about a boy, the son of pious and rich
+parents, whom she tried to lead astray into the wildness of thoughts like
+her own, till the poor dear child drove her off because she outraged his
+modesty?  I saw him often with his parents at Sunday mass.  The grace of
+God preserved him and made him quite a gentleman in Paris.  Perhaps it
+will touch Rita's heart, too, some day.  But she was awful then.  When I
+wouldn't listen to her complaints she would say: 'All right, sister, I
+would just as soon go clothed in rain and wind.'  And such a bag of
+bones, too, like the picture of a devil's imp.  Ah, my dear young
+Monsieur, you don't know how wicked her heart is.  You aren't bad enough
+for that yourself.  I don't believe you are evil at all in your innocent
+little heart.  I never heard you jeer at holy things.  You are only
+thoughtless.  For instance, I have never seen you make the sign of the
+cross in the morning.  Why don't you make a practice of crossing yourself
+directly you open your eyes.  It's a very good thing.  It keeps Satan off
+for the day."
+
+She proffered that advice in a most matter-of-fact tone as if it were a
+precaution against a cold, compressed her lips, then returning to her
+fixed idea, "But the house is mine," she insisted very quietly with an
+accent which made me feel that Satan himself would never manage to tear
+it out of her hands.
+
+"And so I told the great lady in grey.  I told her that my sister had
+given it to me and that surely God would not let her take it away again."
+
+"You told that grey-headed lady, an utter stranger!  You are getting more
+crazy every day.  You have neither good sense nor good feeling,
+Mademoiselle Therese, let me tell you.  Do you talk about your sister to
+the butcher and the greengrocer, too?  A downright savage would have more
+restraint.  What's your object?  What do you expect from it?  What
+pleasure do you get from it?  Do you think you please God by abusing your
+sister?  What do you think you are?"
+
+"A poor lone girl amongst a lot of wicked people.  Do you think I wanted
+to go forth amongst those abominations? it's that poor sinful Rita that
+wouldn't let me be where I was, serving a holy man, next door to a
+church, and sure of my share of Paradise.  I simply obeyed my uncle.
+It's he who told me to go forth and attempt to save her soul, bring her
+back to us, to a virtuous life.  But what would be the good of that?  She
+is given over to worldly, carnal thoughts.  Of course we are a good
+family and my uncle is a great man in the country, but where is the
+reputable farmer or God-fearing man of that kind that would dare to bring
+such a girl into his house to his mother and sisters.  No, let her give
+her ill-gotten wealth up to the deserving and devote the rest of her life
+to repentance."
+
+She uttered these righteous reflections and presented this programme for
+the salvation of her sister's soul in a reasonable convinced tone which
+was enough to give goose flesh to one all over.
+
+"Mademoiselle Therese," I said, "you are nothing less than a monster."
+
+She received that true expression of my opinion as though I had given her
+a sweet of a particularly delicious kind.  She liked to be abused.  It
+pleased her to be called names.  I did let her have that satisfaction to
+her heart's content.  At last I stopped because I could do no more,
+unless I got out of bed to beat her.  I have a vague notion that she
+would have liked that, too, but I didn't try.  After I had stopped she
+waited a little before she raised her downcast eyes.
+
+"You are a dear, ignorant, flighty young gentleman," she said.  "Nobody
+can tell what a cross my sister is to me except the good priest in the
+church where I go every day."
+
+"And the mysterious lady in grey," I suggested sarcastically.
+
+"Such a person might have guessed it," answered Therese, seriously, "but
+I told her nothing except that this house had been given me in full
+property by our Rita.  And I wouldn't have done that if she hadn't spoken
+to me of my sister first.  I can't tell too many people about that.  One
+can't trust Rita.  I know she doesn't fear God but perhaps human respect
+may keep her from taking this house back from me.  If she doesn't want me
+to talk about her to people why doesn't she give me a properly stamped
+piece of paper for it?"
+
+She said all this rapidly in one breath and at the end had a sort of
+anxious gasp which gave me the opportunity to voice my surprise.  It was
+immense.
+
+"That lady, the strange lady, spoke to you of your sister first!" I
+cried.
+
+"The lady asked me, after she had been in a little time, whether really
+this house belonged to Madame de Lastaola.  She had been so sweet and
+kind and condescending that I did not mind humiliating my spirit before
+such a good Christian.  I told her that I didn't know how the poor sinner
+in her mad blindness called herself, but that this house had been given
+to me truly enough by my sister.  She raised her eyebrows at that but she
+looked at me at the same time so kindly, as much as to say, 'Don't trust
+much to that, my dear girl,' that I couldn't help taking up her hand,
+soft as down, and kissing it.  She took it away pretty quick but she was
+not offended.  But she only said, 'That's very generous on your sister's
+part,' in a way that made me run cold all over.  I suppose all the world
+knows our Rita for a shameless girl.  It was then that the lady took up
+those glasses on a long gold handle and looked at me through them till I
+felt very much abashed.  She said to me, 'There is nothing to be unhappy
+about.  Madame de Lastaola is a very remarkable person who has done many
+surprising things.  She is not to be judged like other people and as far
+as I know she has never wronged a single human being. . . .'  That put
+heart into me, I can tell you; and the lady told me then not to disturb
+her son.  She would wait till he woke up.  She knew he was a bad sleeper.
+I said to her: 'Why, I can hear the dear sweet gentleman this moment
+having his bath in the fencing-room,' and I took her into the studio.
+They are there now and they are going to have their lunch together at
+twelve o'clock."
+
+"Why on earth didn't you tell me at first that the lady was Mrs. Blunt?"
+
+"Didn't I?  I thought I did," she said innocently.  I felt a sudden
+desire to get out of that house, to fly from the reinforced Blunt element
+which was to me so oppressive.
+
+"I want to get up and dress, Mademoiselle Therese," I said.
+
+She gave a slight start and without looking at me again glided out of the
+room, the many folds of her brown skirt remaining undisturbed as she
+moved.
+
+I looked at my watch; it was ten o'clock.  Therese had been late with my
+coffee.  The delay was clearly caused by the unexpected arrival of Mr.
+Blunt's mother, which might or might not have been expected by her son.
+The existence of those Blunts made me feel uncomfortable in a peculiar
+way as though they had been the denizens of another planet with a subtly
+different point of view and something in the intelligence which was bound
+to remain unknown to me.  It caused in me a feeling of inferiority which
+I intensely disliked.  This did not arise from the actual fact that those
+people originated in another continent.  I had met Americans before.  And
+the Blunts were Americans.  But so little!  That was the trouble.
+Captain Blunt might have been a Frenchman as far as languages, tones, and
+manners went.  But you could not have mistaken him for one. . . . Why?
+You couldn't tell.  It was something indefinite.  It occurred to me while
+I was towelling hard my hair, face, and the back of my neck, that I could
+not meet J. K. Blunt on equal terms in any relation of life except
+perhaps arms in hand, and in preference with pistols, which are less
+intimate, acting at a distance--but arms of some sort.  For physically
+his life, which could be taken away from him, was exactly like mine, held
+on the same terms and of the same vanishing quality.
+
+I would have smiled at my absurdity if all, even the most intimate,
+vestige of gaiety had not been crushed out of my heart by the intolerable
+weight of my love for Rita.  It crushed, it overshadowed, too, it was
+immense.  If there were any smiles in the world (which I didn't believe)
+I could not have seen them.  Love for Rita . . . if it was love, I asked
+myself despairingly, while I brushed my hair before a glass.  It did not
+seem to have any sort of beginning as far as I could remember.  A thing
+the origin of which you cannot trace cannot be seriously considered.  It
+is an illusion.  Or perhaps mine was a physical state, some sort of
+disease akin to melancholia which is a form of insanity?  The only
+moments of relief I could remember were when she and I would start
+squabbling like two passionate infants in a nursery, over anything under
+heaven, over a phrase, a word sometimes, in the great light of the glass
+rotunda, disregarding the quiet entrances and exits of the ever-active
+Rose, in great bursts of voices and peals of laughter. . . .
+
+I felt tears come into my eyes at the memory of her laughter, the true
+memory of the senses almost more penetrating than the reality itself.  It
+haunted me.  All that appertained to her haunted me with the same awful
+intimacy, her whole form in the familiar pose, her very substance in its
+colour and texture, her eyes, her lips, the gleam of her teeth, the tawny
+mist of her hair, the smoothness of her forehead, the faint scent that
+she used, the very shape, feel, and warmth of her high-heeled slipper
+that would sometimes in the heat of the discussion drop on the floor with
+a crash, and which I would (always in the heat of the discussion) pick up
+and toss back on the couch without ceasing to argue.  And besides being
+haunted by what was Rita on earth I was haunted also by her waywardness,
+her gentleness and her flame, by that which the high gods called Rita
+when speaking of her amongst themselves.  Oh, yes, certainly I was
+haunted by her but so was her sister Therese--who was crazy.  It proved
+nothing.  As to her tears, since I had not caused them, they only aroused
+my indignation.  To put her head on my shoulder, to weep these strange
+tears, was nothing short of an outrageous liberty.  It was a mere
+emotional trick.  She would have just as soon leaned her head against the
+over-mantel of one of those tall, red granite chimney-pieces in order to
+weep comfortably.  And then when she had no longer any need of support
+she dispensed with it by simply telling me to go away.  How convenient!
+The request had sounded pathetic, almost sacredly so, but then it might
+have been the exhibition of the coolest possible impudence.  With her one
+could not tell.  Sorrow, indifference, tears, smiles, all with her seemed
+to have a hidden meaning.  Nothing could be trusted. . . Heavens!  Am I
+as crazy as Therese I asked myself with a passing chill of fear, while
+occupied in equalizing the ends of my neck-tie.
+
+I felt suddenly that "this sort of thing" would kill me.  The definition
+of the cause was vague, but the thought itself was no mere morbid
+artificiality of sentiment but a genuine conviction.  "That sort of
+thing" was what I would have to die from.  It wouldn't be from the
+innumerable doubts.  Any sort of certitude would be also deadly.  It
+wouldn't be from a stab--a kiss would kill me as surely.  It would not be
+from a frown or from any particular word or any particular act--but from
+having to bear them all, together and in succession--from having to live
+with "that sort of thing."  About the time I finished with my neck-tie I
+had done with life too.  I absolutely did not care because I couldn't
+tell whether, mentally and physically, from the roots of my hair to the
+soles of my feet--whether I was more weary or unhappy.
+
+And now my toilet was finished, my occupation was gone.  An immense
+distress descended upon me.  It has been observed that the routine of
+daily life, that arbitrary system of trifles, is a great moral support.
+But my toilet was finished, I had nothing more to do of those things
+consecrated by usage and which leave you no option.  The exercise of any
+kind of volition by a man whose consciousness is reduced to the sensation
+that he is being killed by "that sort of thing" cannot be anything but
+mere trifling with death, an insincere pose before himself.  I wasn't
+capable of it.  It was then that I discovered that being killed by "that
+sort of thing," I mean the absolute conviction of it, was, so to speak,
+nothing in itself.  The horrible part was the waiting.  That was the
+cruelty, the tragedy, the bitterness of it.  "Why the devil don't I drop
+dead now?" I asked myself peevishly, taking a clean handkerchief out of
+the drawer and stuffing it in my pocket.
+
+This was absolutely the last thing, the last ceremony of an imperative
+rite.  I was abandoned to myself now and it was terrible.  Generally I
+used to go out, walk down to the port, take a look at the craft I loved
+with a sentiment that was extremely complex, being mixed up with the
+image of a woman; perhaps go on board, not because there was anything for
+me to do there but just for nothing, for happiness, simply as a man will
+sit contented in the companionship of the beloved object.  For lunch I
+had the choice of two places, one Bohemian, the other select, even
+aristocratic, where I had still my reserved table in the _petit salon_,
+up the white staircase.  In both places I had friends who treated my
+erratic appearances with discretion, in one case tinged with respect, in
+the other with a certain amused tolerance.  I owed this tolerance to the
+most careless, the most confirmed of those Bohemians (his beard had
+streaks of grey amongst its many other tints) who, once bringing his
+heavy hand down on my shoulder, took my defence against the charge of
+being disloyal and even foreign to that milieu of earnest visions taking
+beautiful and revolutionary shapes in the smoke of pipes, in the jingle
+of glasses.
+
+"That fellow (_ce garcon_) is a primitive nature, but he may be an artist
+in a sense.  He has broken away from his conventions.  He is trying to
+put a special vibration and his own notion of colour into his life; and
+perhaps even to give it a modelling according to his own ideas.  And for
+all you know he may be on the track of a masterpiece; but observe: if it
+happens to be one nobody will see it.  It can be only for himself.  And
+even he won't be able to see it in its completeness except on his
+death-bed.  There is something fine in that."
+
+I had blushed with pleasure; such fine ideas had never entered my head.
+But there was something fine. . . . How far all this seemed!  How mute
+and how still!  What a phantom he was, that man with a beard of at least
+seven tones of brown.  And those shades of the other kind such as
+Baptiste with the shaven diplomatic face, the _maitre d'hotel_ in charge
+of the _petit salon_, taking my hat and stick from me with a deferential
+remark: "Monsieur is not very often seen nowadays."  And those other
+well-groomed heads raised and nodding at my passage--"_Bonjour_."
+"_Bonjour_"--following me with interested eyes; these young X.s and Z.s,
+low-toned, markedly discreet, lounging up to my table on their way out
+with murmurs: "Are you well?"--"Will one see you anywhere this
+evening?"--not from curiosity, God forbid, but just from friendliness;
+and passing on almost without waiting for an answer.  What had I to do
+with them, this elegant dust, these moulds of provincial fashion?
+
+I also often lunched with Dona Rita without invitation.  But that was now
+unthinkable.  What had I to do with a woman who allowed somebody else to
+make her cry and then with an amazing lack of good feeling did her
+offensive weeping on my shoulder?  Obviously I could have nothing to do
+with her.  My five minutes' meditation in the middle of the bedroom came
+to an end without even a sigh.  The dead don't sigh, and for all
+practical purposes I was that, except for the final consummation, the
+growing cold, the _rigor mortis_--that blessed state!  With measured
+steps I crossed the landing to my sitting-room.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+
+The windows of that room gave out on the street of the Consuls which as
+usual was silent.  And the house itself below me and above me was
+soundless, perfectly still.  In general the house was quiet, dumbly
+quiet, without resonances of any sort, something like what one would
+imagine the interior of a convent would be.  I suppose it was very
+solidly built.  Yet that morning I missed in the stillness that feeling
+of security and peace which ought to have been associated with it.  It
+is, I believe, generally admitted that the dead are glad to be at rest.
+But I wasn't at rest.  What was wrong with that silence?  There was
+something incongruous in that peace.  What was it that had got into that
+stillness?  Suddenly I remembered: the mother of Captain Blunt.
+
+Why had she come all the way from Paris?  And why should I bother my head
+about it?  H'm--the Blunt atmosphere, the reinforced Blunt vibration
+stealing through the walls, through the thick walls and the almost more
+solid stillness.  Nothing to me, of course--the movements of Mme. Blunt,
+_mere_.  It was maternal affection which had brought her south by either
+the evening or morning Rapide, to take anxious stock of the ravages of
+that insomnia.  Very good thing, insomnia, for a cavalry officer
+perpetually on outpost duty, a real godsend, so to speak; but on leave a
+truly devilish condition to be in.
+
+The above sequence of thoughts was entirely unsympathetic and it was
+followed by a feeling of satisfaction that I, at any rate, was not
+suffering from insomnia.  I could always sleep in the end.  In the end.
+Escape into a nightmare.  Wouldn't he revel in that if he could!  But
+that wasn't for him.  He had to toss about open-eyed all night and get up
+weary, weary.  But oh, wasn't I weary, too, waiting for a sleep without
+dreams.
+
+I heard the door behind me open.  I had been standing with my face to the
+window and, I declare, not knowing what I was looking at across the
+road--the Desert of Sahara or a wall of bricks, a landscape of rivers and
+forests or only the Consulate of Paraguay.  But I had been thinking,
+apparently, of Mr. Blunt with such intensity that when I saw him enter
+the room it didn't really make much difference.  When I turned about the
+door behind him was already shut.  He advanced towards me, correct,
+supple, hollow-eyed, and smiling; and as to his costume ready to go out
+except for the old shooting jacket which he must have affectioned
+particularly, for he never lost any time in getting into it at every
+opportunity.  Its material was some tweed mixture; it had gone
+inconceivably shabby, it was shrunk from old age, it was ragged at the
+elbows; but any one could see at a glance that it had been made in London
+by a celebrated tailor, by a distinguished specialist.  Blunt came
+towards me in all the elegance of his slimness and affirming in every
+line of his face and body, in the correct set of his shoulders and the
+careless freedom of his movements, the superiority, the inexpressible
+superiority, the unconscious, the unmarked, the not-to-be-described, and
+even not-to-be-caught, superiority of the naturally born and the
+perfectly finished man of the world, over the simple young man.  He was
+smiling, easy, correct, perfectly delightful, fit to kill.
+
+He had come to ask me, if I had no other engagement, to lunch with him
+and his mother in about an hour's time.  He did it in a most _degage_
+tone.  His mother had given him a surprise.  The completest . . . The
+foundation of his mother's psychology was her delightful unexpectedness.
+She could never let things be (this in a peculiar tone which he checked
+at once) and he really would take it very kindly of me if I came to break
+the tete-a-tete for a while (that is if I had no other engagement.  Flash
+of teeth).  His mother was exquisitely and tenderly absurd.  She had
+taken it into her head that his health was endangered in some way.  And
+when she took anything into her head . . . Perhaps I might find something
+to say which would reassure her.  His mother had two long conversations
+with Mills on his passage through Paris and had heard of me (I knew how
+that thick man could speak of people, he interjected ambiguously) and his
+mother, with an insatiable curiosity for anything that was rare (filially
+humorous accent here and a softer flash of teeth), was very anxious to
+have me presented to her (courteous intonation, but no teeth).  He hoped
+I wouldn't mind if she treated me a little as an "interesting young man."
+His mother had never got over her seventeenth year, and the manner of the
+spoilt beauty of at least three counties at the back of the Carolinas.
+That again got overlaid by the _sans-facon_ of a _grande dame_ of the
+Second Empire.
+
+I accepted the invitation with a worldly grin and a perfectly just
+intonation, because I really didn't care what I did.  I only wondered
+vaguely why that fellow required all the air in the room for himself.
+There did not seem enough left to go down my throat.  I didn't say that I
+would come with pleasure or that I would be delighted, but I said that I
+would come.  He seemed to forget his tongue in his head, put his hands in
+his pockets and moved about vaguely.  "I am a little nervous this
+morning," he said in French, stopping short and looking me straight in
+the eyes.  His own were deep sunk, dark, fatal.  I asked with some
+malice, that no one could have detected in my intonation, "How's that
+sleeplessness?"
+
+He muttered through his teeth, "_Mal_.  _Je ne dors plus_."  He moved off
+to stand at the window with his back to the room.  I sat down on a sofa
+that was there and put my feet up, and silence took possession of the
+room.
+
+"Isn't this street ridiculous?" said Blunt suddenly, and crossing the
+room rapidly waved his hand to me, "_A bientot donc_," and was gone.  He
+had seared himself into my mind.  I did not understand him nor his mother
+then; which made them more impressive; but I have discovered since that
+those two figures required no mystery to make them memorable.  Of course
+it isn't every day that one meets a mother that lives by her wits and a
+son that lives by his sword, but there was a perfect finish about their
+ambiguous personalities which is not to be met twice in a life-time.  I
+shall never forget that grey dress with ample skirts and long corsage yet
+with infinite style, the ancient as if ghostly beauty of outlines, the
+black lace, the silver hair, the harmonious, restrained movements of
+those white, soft hands like the hands of a queen--or an abbess; and in
+the general fresh effect of her person the brilliant eyes like two stars
+with the calm reposeful way they had of moving on and off one, as if
+nothing in the world had the right to veil itself before their once
+sovereign beauty.  Captain Blunt with smiling formality introduced me by
+name, adding with a certain relaxation of the formal tone the comment:
+"The Monsieur George! whose fame you tell me has reached even Paris."
+Mrs. Blunt's reception of me, glance, tones, even to the attitude of the
+admirably corseted figure, was most friendly, approaching the limit of
+half-familiarity.  I had the feeling that I was beholding in her a
+captured ideal.  No common experience!  But I didn't care.  It was very
+lucky perhaps for me that in a way I was like a very sick man who has yet
+preserved all his lucidity.  I was not even wondering to myself at what
+on earth I was doing there.  She breathed out: "_Comme c'est
+romantique_," at large to the dusty studio as it were; then pointing to a
+chair at her right hand, and bending slightly towards me she said:
+
+"I have heard this name murmured by pretty lips in more than one royalist
+salon."
+
+I didn't say anything to that ingratiating speech.  I had only an odd
+thought that she could not have had such a figure, nothing like it, when
+she was seventeen and wore snowy muslin dresses on the family plantation
+in South Carolina, in pre-abolition days.
+
+"You won't mind, I am sure, if an old woman whose heart is still young
+elects to call you by it," she declared.
+
+"Certainly, Madame.  It will be more romantic," I assented with a
+respectful bow.
+
+She dropped a calm: "Yes--there is nothing like romance while one is
+young.  So I will call you Monsieur George," she paused and then added,
+"I could never get old," in a matter-of-fact final tone as one would
+remark, "I could never learn to swim," and I had the presence of mind to
+say in a tone to match, "_C'est evident_, Madame."  It was evident.  She
+couldn't get old; and across the table her thirty-year-old son who
+couldn't get sleep sat listening with courteous detachment and the
+narrowest possible line of white underlining his silky black moustache.
+
+"Your services are immensely appreciated," she said with an amusing touch
+of importance as of a great official lady.  "Immensely appreciated by
+people in a position to understand the great significance of the Carlist
+movement in the South.  There it has to combat anarchism, too.  I who
+have lived through the Commune . . ."
+
+Therese came in with a dish, and for the rest of the lunch the
+conversation so well begun drifted amongst the most appalling inanities
+of the religious-royalist-legitimist order.  The ears of all the Bourbons
+in the world must have been burning.  Mrs. Blunt seemed to have come into
+personal contact with a good many of them and the marvellous insipidity
+of her recollections was astonishing to my inexperience.  I looked at her
+from time to time thinking: She has seen slavery, she has seen the
+Commune, she knows two continents, she has seen a civil war, the glory of
+the Second Empire, the horrors of two sieges; she has been in contact
+with marked personalities, with great events, she has lived on her
+wealth, on her personality, and there she is with her plumage unruffled,
+as glossy as ever, unable to get old:--a sort of Phoenix free from the
+slightest signs of ashes and dust, all complacent amongst those inanities
+as if there had been nothing else in the world.  In my youthful haste I
+asked myself what sort of airy soul she had.
+
+At last Therese put a dish of fruit on the table, a small collection of
+oranges, raisins, and nuts.  No doubt she had bought that lot very cheap
+and it did not look at all inviting.  Captain Blunt jumped up.  "My
+mother can't stand tobacco smoke.  Will you keep her company, _mon cher_,
+while I take a turn with a cigar in that ridiculous garden.  The brougham
+from the hotel will be here very soon."
+
+He left us in the white flash of an apologetic grin.  Almost directly he
+reappeared, visible from head to foot through the glass side of the
+studio, pacing up and down the central path of that "ridiculous" garden:
+for its elegance and its air of good breeding the most remarkable figure
+that I have ever seen before or since.  He had changed his coat.  Madame
+Blunt _mere_ lowered the long-handled glasses through which she had been
+contemplating him with an appraising, absorbed expression which had
+nothing maternal in it.  But what she said to me was:
+
+"You understand my anxieties while he is campaigning with the King."
+
+She had spoken in French and she had used the expression "_mes transes_"
+but for all the rest, intonation, bearing, solemnity, she might have been
+referring to one of the Bourbons.  I am sure that not a single one of
+them looked half as aristocratic as her son.
+
+"I understand perfectly, Madame.  But then that life is so romantic."
+
+"Hundreds of young men belonging to a certain sphere are doing that," she
+said very distinctly, "only their case is different.  They have their
+positions, their families to go back to; but we are different.  We are
+exiles, except of course for the ideals, the kindred spirit, the
+friendships of old standing we have in France.  Should my son come out
+unscathed he has no one but me and I have no one but him.  I have to
+think of his life.  Mr. Mills (what a distinguished mind that is!) has
+reassured me as to my son's health.  But he sleeps very badly, doesn't
+he?"
+
+I murmured something affirmative in a doubtful tone and she remarked
+quaintly, with a certain curtness, "It's so unnecessary, this worry!  The
+unfortunate position of an exile has its advantages.  At a certain height
+of social position (wealth has got nothing to do with it, we have been
+ruined in a most righteous cause), at a certain established height one
+can disregard narrow prejudices.  You see examples in the aristocracies
+of all the countries.  A chivalrous young American may offer his life for
+a remote ideal which yet may belong to his familial tradition.  We, in
+our great country, have every sort of tradition.  But a young man of good
+connections and distinguished relations must settle down some day,
+dispose of his life."
+
+"No doubt, Madame," I said, raising my eyes to the figure
+outside--"_Americain_, _Catholique et gentilhomme_"--walking up and down
+the path with a cigar which he was not smoking.  "For myself, I don't
+know anything about those necessities.  I have broken away for ever from
+those things."
+
+"Yes, Mr. Mills talked to me about you.  What a golden heart that is.
+His sympathies are infinite."
+
+I thought suddenly of Mills pronouncing on Mme. Blunt, whatever his text
+on me might have been: "She lives by her wits."  Was she exercising her
+wits on me for some purpose of her own?  And I observed coldly:
+
+"I really know your son so very little."
+
+"Oh, _voyons_," she protested.  "I am aware that you are very much
+younger, but the similitudes of opinions, origins and perhaps at bottom,
+faintly, of character, of chivalrous devotion--no, you must be able to
+understand him in a measure.  He is infinitely scrupulous and recklessly
+brave."
+
+I listened deferentially to the end yet with every nerve in my body
+tingling in hostile response to the Blunt vibration, which seemed to have
+got into my very hair.
+
+"I am convinced of it, Madame.  I have even heard of your son's bravery.
+It's extremely natural in a man who, in his own words, 'lives by his
+sword.'"
+
+She suddenly departed from her almost inhuman perfection, betrayed
+"nerves" like a common mortal, of course very slightly, but in her it
+meant more than a blaze of fury from a vessel of inferior clay.  Her
+admirable little foot, marvellously shod in a black shoe, tapped the
+floor irritably.  But even in that display there was something
+exquisitely delicate.  The very anger in her voice was silvery, as it
+were, and more like the petulance of a seventeen-year-old beauty.
+
+"What nonsense!  A Blunt doesn't hire himself."
+
+"Some princely families," I said, "were founded by men who have done that
+very thing.  The great Condottieri, you know."
+
+It was in an almost tempestuous tone that she made me observe that we
+were not living in the fifteenth century.  She gave me also to understand
+with some spirit that there was no question here of founding a family.
+Her son was very far from being the first of the name.  His importance
+lay rather in being the last of a race which had totally perished, she
+added in a completely drawing-room tone, "in our Civil War."
+
+She had mastered her irritation and through the glass side of the room
+sent a wistful smile to his address, but I noticed the yet unextinguished
+anger in her eyes full of fire under her beautiful white eyebrows.  For
+she was growing old!  Oh, yes, she was growing old, and secretly weary,
+and perhaps desperate.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+
+Without caring much about it I was conscious of sudden illumination.  I
+said to myself confidently that these two people had been quarrelling all
+the morning.  I had discovered the secret of my invitation to that lunch.
+They did not care to face the strain of some obstinate, inconclusive
+discussion for fear, maybe, of it ending in a serious quarrel.  And so
+they had agreed that I should be fetched downstairs to create a
+diversion.  I cannot say I felt annoyed.  I didn't care.  My perspicacity
+did not please me either.  I wished they had left me alone--but nothing
+mattered.  They must have been in their superiority accustomed to make
+use of people, without compunction.  From necessity, too.  She
+especially.  She lived by her wits.  The silence had grown so marked that
+I had at last to raise my eyes; and the first thing I observed was that
+Captain Blunt was no longer to be seen in the garden.  Must have gone
+indoors.  Would rejoin us in a moment.  Then I would leave mother and son
+to themselves.
+
+The next thing I noticed was that a great mellowness had descended upon
+the mother of the last of his race.  But these terms, irritation,
+mellowness, appeared gross when applied to her.  It is impossible to give
+an idea of the refinement and subtlety of all her transformations.  She
+smiled faintly at me.
+
+"But all this is beside the point.  The real point is that my son, like
+all fine natures, is a being of strange contradictions which the trials
+of life have not yet reconciled in him.  With me it is a little
+different.  The trials fell mainly to my share--and of course I have
+lived longer.  And then men are much more complex than women, much more
+difficult, too.  And you, Monsieur George?  Are you complex, with
+unexpected resistances and difficulties in your _etre intime_--your inner
+self?  I wonder now . . ."
+
+The Blunt atmosphere seemed to vibrate all over my skin.  I disregarded
+the symptom.  "Madame," I said, "I have never tried to find out what sort
+of being I am."
+
+"Ah, that's very wrong.  We ought to reflect on what manner of beings we
+are.  Of course we are all sinners.  My John is a sinner like the
+others," she declared further, with a sort of proud tenderness as though
+our common lot must have felt honoured and to a certain extent purified
+by this condescending recognition.
+
+"You are too young perhaps as yet . . . But as to my John," she broke
+off, leaning her elbow on the table and supporting her head on her old,
+impeccably shaped, white fore-arm emerging from a lot of precious, still
+older, lace trimming the short sleeve.  "The trouble is that he suffers
+from a profound discord between the necessary reactions to life and even
+the impulses of nature and the lofty idealism of his feelings; I may say,
+of his principles.  I assure you that he won't even let his heart speak
+uncontradicted."
+
+I am sure I don't know what particular devil looks after the associations
+of memory, and I can't even imagine the shock which it would have been
+for Mrs. Blunt to learn that the words issuing from her lips had awakened
+in me the visual perception of a dark-skinned, hard-driven lady's maid
+with tarnished eyes; even of the tireless Rose handing me my hat while
+breathing out the enigmatic words: "Madame should listen to her heart."
+A wave from the atmosphere of another house rolled in, overwhelming and
+fiery, seductive and cruel, through the Blunt vibration, bursting through
+it as through tissue paper and filling my heart with sweet murmurs and
+distracting images, till it seemed to break, leaving an empty stillness
+in my breast.
+
+After that for a long time I heard Mme. Blunt _mere_ talking with extreme
+fluency and I even caught the individual words, but I could not in the
+revulsion of my feelings get hold of the sense.  She talked apparently of
+life in general, of its difficulties, moral and physical, of its
+surprising turns, of its unexpected contacts, of the choice and rare
+personalities that drift on it as if on the sea; of the distinction that
+letters and art gave to it, the nobility and consolations there are in
+aesthetics, of the privileges they confer on individuals and (this was
+the first connected statement I caught) that Mills agreed with her in the
+general point of view as to the inner worth of individualities and in the
+particular instance of it on which she had opened to him her innermost
+heart.  Mills had a universal mind.  His sympathy was universal, too.  He
+had that large comprehension--oh, not cynical, not at all cynical, in
+fact rather tender--which was found in its perfection only in some rare,
+very rare Englishmen.  The dear creature was romantic, too.  Of course he
+was reserved in his speech but she understood Mills perfectly.  Mills
+apparently liked me very much.
+
+It was time for me to say something.  There was a challenge in the
+reposeful black eyes resting upon my face.  I murmured that I was very
+glad to hear it.  She waited a little, then uttered meaningly, "Mr. Mills
+is a little bit uneasy about you."
+
+"It's very good of him," I said.  And indeed I thought that it was very
+good of him, though I did ask myself vaguely in my dulled brain why he
+should be uneasy.
+
+Somehow it didn't occur to me to ask Mrs. Blunt.  Whether she had
+expected me to do so or not I don't know but after a while she changed
+the pose she had kept so long and folded her wonderfully preserved white
+arms.  She looked a perfect picture in silver and grey, with touches of
+black here and there.  Still I said nothing more in my dull misery.  She
+waited a little longer, then she woke me up with a crash.  It was as if
+the house had fallen, and yet she had only asked me:
+
+"I believe you are received on very friendly terms by Madame de Lastaola
+on account of your common exertions for the cause.  Very good friends,
+are you not?"
+
+"You mean Rita," I said stupidly, but I felt stupid, like a man who wakes
+up only to be hit on the head.
+
+"Oh, Rita," she repeated with unexpected acidity, which somehow made me
+feel guilty of an incredible breach of good manners.  "H'm, Rita. . . .
+Oh, well, let it be Rita--for the present.  Though why she should be
+deprived of her name in conversation about her, really I don't
+understand.  Unless a very special intimacy . . ."
+
+She was distinctly annoyed.  I said sulkily, "It isn't her name."
+
+"It is her choice, I understand, which seems almost a better title to
+recognition on the part of the world.  It didn't strike you so before?
+Well, it seems to me that choice has got more right to be respected than
+heredity or law.  Moreover, Mme. de Lastaola," she continued in an
+insinuating voice, "that most rare and fascinating young woman is, as a
+friend like you cannot deny, outside legality altogether.  Even in that
+she is an exceptional creature.  For she is exceptional--you agree?"
+
+I had gone dumb, I could only stare at her.
+
+"Oh, I see, you agree.  No friend of hers could deny."
+
+"Madame," I burst out, "I don't know where a question of friendship comes
+in here with a person whom you yourself call so exceptional.  I really
+don't know how she looks upon me.  Our intercourse is of course very
+close and confidential.  Is that also talked about in Paris?"
+
+"Not at all, not in the least," said Mrs. Blunt, easy, equable, but with
+her calm, sparkling eyes holding me in angry subjection.  "Nothing of the
+sort is being talked about.  The references to Mme. de Lastaola are in a
+very different tone, I can assure you, thanks to her discretion in
+remaining here.  And, I must say, thanks to the discreet efforts of her
+friends.  I am also a friend of Mme. de Lastaola, you must know.  Oh, no,
+I have never spoken to her in my life and have seen her only twice, I
+believe.  I wrote to her though, that I admit.  She or rather the image
+of her has come into my life, into that part of it where art and letters
+reign undisputed like a sort of religion of beauty to which I have been
+faithful through all the vicissitudes of my existence.  Yes, I did write
+to her and I have been preoccupied with her for a long time.  It arose
+from a picture, from two pictures and also from a phrase pronounced by a
+man, who in the science of life and in the perception of aesthetic truth
+had no equal in the world of culture.  He said that there was something
+in her of the women of all time.  I suppose he meant the inheritance of
+all the gifts that make up an irresistible fascination--a great
+personality.  Such women are not born often.  Most of them lack
+opportunities.  They never develop.  They end obscurely.  Here and there
+one survives to make her mark even in history. . . . And even that is not
+a very enviable fate.  They are at another pole from the so-called
+dangerous women who are merely coquettes.  A coquette has got to work for
+her success.  The others have nothing to do but simply exist.  You
+perceive the view I take of the difference?"
+
+I perceived the view.  I said to myself that nothing in the world could
+be more aristocratic.  This was the slave-owning woman who had never
+worked, even if she had been reduced to live by her wits.  She was a
+wonderful old woman.  She made me dumb.  She held me fascinated by the
+well-bred attitude, something sublimely aloof in her air of wisdom.
+
+I just simply let myself go admiring her as though I had been a mere
+slave of aesthetics: the perfect grace, the amazing poise of that
+venerable head, the assured as if royal--yes, royal even flow of the
+voice. . . . But what was it she was talking about now?  These were no
+longer considerations about fatal women.  She was talking about her son
+again.  My interest turned into mere bitterness of contemptuous
+attention.  For I couldn't withhold it though I tried to let the stuff go
+by.  Educated in the most aristocratic college in Paris . . . at eighteen
+. . . call of duty . . . with General Lee to the very last cruel minute
+. . . after that catastrophe end of the world--return to France--to old
+friendships, infinite kindness--but a life hollow, without occupation
+. . . Then 1870--and chivalrous response to adopted country's call and again
+emptiness, the chafing of a proud spirit without aim and handicapped not
+exactly by poverty but by lack of fortune.  And she, the mother, having
+to look on at this wasting of a most accomplished man, of a most
+chivalrous nature that practically had no future before it.
+
+"You understand me well, Monsieur George.  A nature like this!  It is the
+most refined cruelty of fate to look at.  I don't know whether I suffered
+more in times of war or in times of peace.  You understand?"
+
+I bowed my head in silence.  What I couldn't understand was why he
+delayed so long in joining us again.  Unless he had had enough of his
+mother?  I thought without any great resentment that I was being
+victimized; but then it occurred to me that the cause of his absence was
+quite simple.  I was familiar enough with his habits by this time to know
+that he often managed to snatch an hour's sleep or so during the day.  He
+had gone and thrown himself on his bed.
+
+"I admire him exceedingly," Mrs. Blunt was saying in a tone which was not
+at all maternal.  "His distinction, his fastidiousness, the earnest
+warmth of his heart.  I know him well.  I assure you that I would never
+have dared to suggest," she continued with an extraordinary haughtiness
+of attitude and tone that aroused my attention, "I would never have dared
+to put before him my views of the extraordinary merits and the uncertain
+fate of the exquisite woman of whom we speak, if I had not been certain
+that, partly by my fault, I admit, his attention has been attracted to
+her and his--his--his heart engaged."
+
+It was as if some one had poured a bucket of cold water over my head.  I
+woke up with a great shudder to the acute perception of my own feelings
+and of that aristocrat's incredible purpose.  How it could have
+germinated, grown and matured in that exclusive soil was inconceivable.
+She had been inciting her son all the time to undertake wonderful salvage
+work by annexing the heiress of Henry Allegre--the woman and the fortune.
+
+There must have been an amazed incredulity in my eyes, to which her own
+responded by an unflinching black brilliance which suddenly seemed to
+develop a scorching quality even to the point of making me feel extremely
+thirsty all of a sudden.  For a time my tongue literally clove to the
+roof of my mouth.  I don't know whether it was an illusion but it seemed
+to me that Mrs. Blunt had nodded at me twice as if to say: "You are
+right, that's so."  I made an effort to speak but it was very poor.  If
+she did hear me it was because she must have been on the watch for the
+faintest sound.
+
+"His heart engaged.  Like two hundred others, or two thousand, all
+around," I mumbled.
+
+"Altogether different.  And it's no disparagement to a woman surely.  Of
+course her great fortune protects her in a certain measure."
+
+"Does it?" I faltered out and that time I really doubt whether she heard
+me.  Her aspect in my eyes had changed.  Her purpose being disclosed, her
+well-bred ease appeared sinister, her aristocratic repose a treacherous
+device, her venerable graciousness a mask of unbounded contempt for all
+human beings whatever.  She was a terrible old woman with those straight,
+white wolfish eye-brows.  How blind I had been!  Those eyebrows alone
+ought to have been enough to give her away.  Yet they were as beautifully
+smooth as her voice when she admitted: "That protection naturally is only
+partial.  There is the danger of her own self, poor girl.  She requires
+guidance."
+
+I marvelled at the villainy of my tone as I spoke, but it was only
+assumed.
+
+"I don't think she has done badly for herself, so far," I forced myself
+to say.  "I suppose you know that she began life by herding the village
+goats."
+
+In the course of that phrase I noticed her wince just the least bit.  Oh,
+yes, she winced; but at the end of it she smiled easily.
+
+"No, I didn't know.  So she told you her story!  Oh, well, I suppose you
+are very good friends.  A goatherd--really?  In the fairy tale I believe
+the girl that marries the prince is--what is it?--a _gardeuse d'oies_.
+And what a thing to drag out against a woman.  One might just as soon
+reproach any of them for coming unclothed into the world.  They all do,
+you know.  And then they become--what you will discover when you have
+lived longer, Monsieur George--for the most part futile creatures,
+without any sense of truth and beauty, drudges of all sorts, or else
+dolls to dress.  In a word--ordinary."
+
+The implication of scorn in her tranquil manner was immense.  It seemed
+to condemn all those that were not born in the Blunt connection.  It was
+the perfect pride of Republican aristocracy, which has no gradations and
+knows no limit, and, as if created by the grace of God, thinks it
+ennobles everything it touches: people, ideas, even passing tastes!
+
+"How many of them," pursued Mrs. Blunt, "have had the good fortune, the
+leisure to develop their intelligence and their beauty in aesthetic
+conditions as this charming woman had?  Not one in a million.  Perhaps
+not one in an age."
+
+"The heiress of Henry Allegre," I murmured.
+
+"Precisely.  But John wouldn't be marrying the heiress of Henry Allegre."
+
+It was the first time that the frank word, the clear idea, came into the
+conversation and it made me feel ill with a sort of enraged faintness.
+
+"No," I said.  "It would be Mme. de Lastaola then."
+
+"Mme. la Comtesse de Lastaola as soon as she likes after the success of
+this war."
+
+"And you believe in its success?"
+
+"Do you?"
+
+"Not for a moment," I declared, and was surprised to see her look
+pleased.
+
+She was an aristocrat to the tips of her fingers; she really didn't care
+for anybody.  She had passed through the Empire, she had lived through a
+siege, had rubbed shoulders with the Commune, had seen everything, no
+doubt, of what men are capable in the pursuit of their desires or in the
+extremity of their distress, for love, for money, and even for honour;
+and in her precarious connection with the very highest spheres she had
+kept her own honourability unscathed while she had lost all her
+prejudices.  She was above all that.  Perhaps "the world" was the only
+thing that could have the slightest checking influence; but when I
+ventured to say something about the view it might take of such an
+alliance she looked at me for a moment with visible surprise.
+
+"My dear Monsieur George, I have lived in the great world all my life.
+It's the best that there is, but that's only because there is nothing
+merely decent anywhere.  It will accept anything, forgive anything,
+forget anything in a few days.  And after all who will he be marrying?  A
+charming, clever, rich and altogether uncommon woman.  What did the world
+hear of her?  Nothing.  The little it saw of her was in the Bois for a
+few hours every year, riding by the side of a man of unique distinction
+and of exclusive tastes, devoted to the cult of aesthetic impressions; a
+man of whom, as far as aspect, manner, and behaviour goes, she might have
+been the daughter.  I have seen her myself.  I went on purpose.  I was
+immensely struck.  I was even moved.  Yes.  She might have been--except
+for that something radiant in her that marked her apart from all the
+other daughters of men.  The few remarkable personalities that count in
+society and who were admitted into Henry Allegre's Pavilion treated her
+with punctilious reserve.  I know that, I have made enquiries.  I know
+she sat there amongst them like a marvellous child, and for the rest what
+can they say about her?  That when abandoned to herself by the death of
+Allegre she has made a mistake?  I think that any woman ought to be
+allowed one mistake in her life.  The worst they can say of her is that
+she discovered it, that she had sent away a man in love directly she
+found out that his love was not worth having; that she had told him to go
+and look for his crown, and that, after dismissing him she had remained
+generously faithful to his cause, in her person and fortune.  And this,
+you will allow, is rather uncommon upon the whole."
+
+"You make her out very magnificent,"  I murmured, looking down upon the
+floor.
+
+"Isn't she?" exclaimed the aristocratic Mrs. Blunt, with an almost
+youthful ingenuousness, and in those black eyes which looked at me so
+calmly there was a flash of the Southern beauty, still naive and
+romantic, as if altogether untouched by experience.  "I don't think there
+is a single grain of vulgarity in all her enchanting person.  Neither is
+there in my son.  I suppose you won't deny that he is uncommon."  She
+paused.
+
+"Absolutely," I said in a perfectly conventional tone, I was now on my
+mettle that she should not discover what there was humanly common in my
+nature.  She took my answer at her own valuation and was satisfied.
+
+"They can't fail to understand each other on the very highest level of
+idealistic perceptions.  Can you imagine my John thrown away on some
+enamoured white goose out of a stuffy old salon?  Why, she couldn't even
+begin to understand what he feels or what he needs."
+
+"Yes," I said impenetrably, "he is not easy to understand."
+
+"I have reason to think," she said with a suppressed smile, "that he has
+a certain power over women.  Of course I don't know anything about his
+intimate life but a whisper or two have reached me, like that, floating
+in the air, and I could hardly suppose that he would find an exceptional
+resistance in that quarter of all others.  But I should like to know the
+exact degree."
+
+I disregarded an annoying tendency to feel dizzy that came over me and
+was very careful in managing my voice.
+
+"May I ask, Madame, why you are telling me all this?"
+
+"For two reasons," she condescended graciously.  "First of all because
+Mr. Mills told me that you were much more mature than one would expect.
+In fact you look much younger than I was prepared for."
+
+"Madame," I interrupted her, "I may have a certain capacity for action
+and for responsibility, but as to the regions into which this very
+unexpected conversation has taken me I am a great novice.  They are
+outside my interest.  I have had no experience."
+
+"Don't make yourself out so hopeless," she said in a spoilt-beauty tone.
+"You have your intuitions.  At any rate you have a pair of eyes.  You are
+everlastingly over there, so I understand.  Surely you have seen how far
+they are . . ."
+
+I interrupted again and this time bitterly, but always in a tone of
+polite enquiry:
+
+"You think her facile, Madame?"
+
+She looked offended.  "I think her most fastidious.  It is my son who is
+in question here."
+
+And I understood then that she looked on her son as irresistible.  For my
+part I was just beginning to think that it would be impossible for me to
+wait for his return.  I figured him to myself lying dressed on his bed
+sleeping like a stone.  But there was no denying that the mother was
+holding me with an awful, tortured interest.  Twice Therese had opened
+the door, had put her small head in and drawn it back like a tortoise.
+But for some time I had lost the sense of us two being quite alone in the
+studio.  I had perceived the familiar dummy in its corner but it lay now
+on the floor as if Therese had knocked it down angrily with a broom for a
+heathen idol.  It lay there prostrate, handless, without its head,
+pathetic, like the mangled victim of a crime.
+
+"John is fastidious, too," began Mrs. Blunt again.  "Of course you
+wouldn't suppose anything vulgar in his resistances to a very real
+sentiment.  One has got to understand his psychology.  He can't leave
+himself in peace.  He is exquisitely absurd."
+
+I recognized the phrase.  Mother and son talked of each other in
+identical terms.  But perhaps "exquisitely absurd" was the Blunt family
+saying?  There are such sayings in families and generally there is some
+truth in them.  Perhaps this old woman was simply absurd.  She continued:
+
+"We had a most painful discussion all this morning.  He is angry with me
+for suggesting the very thing his whole being desires.  I don't feel
+guilty.  It's he who is tormenting himself with his infinite
+scrupulosity."
+
+"Ah," I said, looking at the mangled dummy like the model of some
+atrocious murder.  "Ah, the fortune.  But that can be left alone."
+
+"What nonsense!  How is it possible?  It isn't contained in a bag, you
+can't throw it into the sea.  And moreover, it isn't her fault.  I am
+astonished that you should have thought of that vulgar hypocrisy.  No, it
+isn't her fortune that cheeks my son; it's something much more subtle.
+Not so much her history as her position.  He is absurd.  It isn't what
+has happened in her life.  It's her very freedom that makes him torment
+himself and her, too--as far as I can understand."
+
+I suppressed a groan and said to myself that I must really get away from
+there.
+
+Mrs. Blunt was fairly launched now.
+
+"For all his superiority he is a man of the world and shares to a certain
+extent its current opinions.  He has no power over her.  She intimidates
+him.  He wishes he had never set eyes on her.  Once or twice this morning
+he looked at me as if he could find it in his heart to hate his old
+mother.  There is no doubt about it--he loves her, Monsieur George.  He
+loves her, this poor, luckless, perfect _homme du monde_."
+
+The silence lasted for some time and then I heard a murmur: "It's a
+matter of the utmost delicacy between two beings so sensitive, so proud.
+It has to be managed."
+
+I found myself suddenly on my feet and saying with the utmost politeness
+that I had to beg her permission to leave her alone as I had an
+engagement; but she motioned me simply to sit down--and I sat down again.
+
+"I told you I had a request to make," she said.  "I have understood from
+Mr. Mills that you have been to the West Indies, that you have some
+interests there."
+
+I was astounded.  "Interests!  I certainly have been there," I said, "but
+. . ."
+
+She caught me up.  "Then why not go there again?  I am speaking to you
+frankly because . . ."
+
+"But, Madame, I am engaged in this affair with Dona Rita, even if I had
+any interests elsewhere.  I won't tell you about the importance of my
+work.  I didn't suspect it but you brought the news of it to me, and so I
+needn't point it out to you."
+
+And now we were frankly arguing with each other.
+
+"But where will it lead you in the end?  You have all your life before
+you, all your plans, prospects, perhaps dreams, at any rate your own
+tastes and all your life-time before you.  And would you sacrifice all
+this to--the Pretender?  A mere figure for the front page of illustrated
+papers."'
+
+"I never think of him,"  I said curtly, "but I suppose Dona Rita's
+feelings, instincts, call it what you like--or only her chivalrous
+fidelity to her mistakes--"
+
+"Dona Rita's presence here in this town, her withdrawal from the possible
+complications of her life in Paris has produced an excellent effect on my
+son.  It simplifies infinite difficulties, I mean moral as well as
+material.  It's extremely to the advantage of her dignity, of her future,
+and of her peace of mind.  But I am thinking, of course, mainly of my
+son.  He is most exacting."
+
+I felt extremely sick at heart.  "And so I am to drop everything and
+vanish," I said, rising from my chair again.  And this time Mrs. Blunt
+got up, too, with a lofty and inflexible manner but she didn't dismiss me
+yet.
+
+"Yes," she said distinctly.  "All this, my dear Monsieur George, is such
+an accident.  What have you got to do here?  You look to me like somebody
+who would find adventures wherever he went as interesting and perhaps
+less dangerous than this one."
+
+She slurred over the word dangerous but I picked it up.
+
+"What do you know of its dangers, Madame, may I ask?"  But she did not
+condescend to hear.
+
+"And then you, too, have your chivalrous feelings," she went on,
+unswerving, distinct, and tranquil.  "You are not absurd.  But my son is.
+He would shut her up in a convent for a time if he could."
+
+"He isn't the only one," I muttered.
+
+"Indeed!" she was startled, then lower, "Yes.  That woman must be the
+centre of all sorts of passions," she mused audibly.  "But what have you
+got to do with all this?  It's nothing to you."
+
+She waited for me to speak.
+
+"Exactly, Madame," I said, "and therefore I don't see why I should
+concern myself in all this one way or another."
+
+"No," she assented with a weary air, "except that you might ask yourself
+what is the good of tormenting a man of noble feelings, however absurd.
+His Southern blood makes him very violent sometimes.  I fear--"  And then
+for the first time during this conversation, for the first time since I
+left Dona Rita the day before, for the first time I laughed.
+
+"Do you mean to hint, Madame, that Southern gentlemen are dead shots?  I
+am aware of that--from novels."
+
+I spoke looking her straight in the face and I made that exquisite,
+aristocratic old woman positively blink by my directness.  There was a
+faint flush on her delicate old cheeks but she didn't move a muscle of
+her face.  I made her a most respectful bow and went out of the studio.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+
+Through the great arched window of the hall I saw the hotel brougham
+waiting at the door.  On passing the door of the front room (it was
+originally meant for a drawing-room but a bed for Blunt was put in there)
+I banged with my fist on the panel and shouted: "I am obliged to go out.
+Your mother's carriage is at the door."  I didn't think he was asleep.
+My view now was that he was aware beforehand of the subject of the
+conversation, and if so I did not wish to appear as if I had slunk away
+from him after the interview.  But I didn't stop--I didn't want to see
+him--and before he could answer I was already half way up the stairs
+running noiselessly up the thick carpet which also covered the floor of
+the landing.  Therefore opening the door of my sitting-room quickly I
+caught by surprise the person who was in there watching the street half
+concealed by the window curtain.  It was a woman.  A totally unexpected
+woman.  A perfect stranger.  She came away quickly to meet me.  Her face
+was veiled and she was dressed in a dark walking costume and a very
+simple form of hat.  She murmured: "I had an idea that Monsieur was in
+the house," raising a gloved hand to lift her veil.  It was Rose and she
+gave me a shock.  I had never seen her before but with her little black
+silk apron and a white cap with ribbons on her head.  This outdoor dress
+was like a disguise.  I asked anxiously:
+
+"What has happened to Madame?"
+
+"Nothing.  I have a letter," she murmured, and I saw it appear between
+the fingers of her extended hand, in a very white envelope which I tore
+open impatiently.  It consisted of a few lines only.  It began abruptly:
+
+"If you are gone to sea then I can't forgive you for not sending the
+usual word at the last moment.  If you are not gone why don't you come?
+Why did you leave me yesterday?  You leave me crying--I who haven't cried
+for years and years, and you haven't the sense to come back within the
+hour, within twenty hours!  This conduct is idiotic"--and a sprawling
+signature of the four magic letters at the bottom.
+
+While I was putting the letter in my pocket the girl said in an earnest
+undertone: "I don't like to leave Madame by herself for any length of
+time."
+
+"How long have you been in my room?" I asked.
+
+"The time seemed long.  I hope Monsieur won't mind the liberty.  I sat
+for a little in the hall but then it struck me I might be seen.  In fact,
+Madame told me not to be seen if I could help it."
+
+"Why did she tell you that?"
+
+"I permitted myself to suggest that to Madame.  It might have given a
+false impression.  Madame is frank and open like the day but it won't do
+with everybody.  There are people who would put a wrong construction on
+anything.  Madame's sister told me Monsieur was out."
+
+"And you didn't believe her?"
+
+"_Non_, Monsieur.  I have lived with Madame's sister for nearly a week
+when she first came into this house.  She wanted me to leave the message,
+but I said I would wait a little.  Then I sat down in the big porter's
+chair in the hall and after a while, everything being very quiet, I stole
+up here.  I know the disposition of the apartments.  I reckoned Madame's
+sister would think that I got tired of waiting and let myself out."
+
+"And you have been amusing yourself watching the street ever since?"
+
+"The time seemed long," she answered evasively.  "An empty _coupe_ came
+to the door about an hour ago and it's still waiting," she added, looking
+at me inquisitively.
+
+"It seems strange."
+
+"There are some dancing girls staying in the house," I said negligently.
+"Did you leave Madame alone?"
+
+"There's the gardener and his wife in the house."
+
+"Those people keep at the back.  Is Madame alone?  That's what I want to
+know."
+
+"Monsieur forgets that I have been three hours away; but I assure
+Monsieur that here in this town it's perfectly safe for Madame to be
+alone."
+
+"And wouldn't it be anywhere else?  It's the first I hear of it."
+
+"In Paris, in our apartments in the hotel, it's all right, too; but in
+the Pavilion, for instance, I wouldn't leave Madame by herself, not for
+half an hour."
+
+"What is there in the Pavilion?" I asked.
+
+"It's a sort of feeling I have," she murmured reluctantly . . . "Oh!
+There's that _coupe_ going away."
+
+She made a movement towards the window but checked herself.  I hadn't
+moved.  The rattle of wheels on the cobble-stones died out almost at
+once.
+
+"Will Monsieur write an answer?" Rose suggested after a short silence.
+
+"Hardly worth while," I said.  "I will be there very soon after you.
+Meantime, please tell Madame from me that I am not anxious to see any
+more tears.  Tell her this just like that, you understand.  I will take
+the risk of not being received."
+
+She dropped her eyes, said: "_Oui_, Monsieur," and at my suggestion
+waited, holding the door of the room half open, till I went downstairs to
+see the road clear.
+
+It was a kind of deaf-and-dumb house.  The black-and-white hall was empty
+and everything was perfectly still.  Blunt himself had no doubt gone away
+with his mother in the brougham, but as to the others, the dancing girls,
+Therese, or anybody else that its walls may have contained, they might
+have been all murdering each other in perfect assurance that the house
+would not betray them by indulging in any unseemly murmurs.  I emitted a
+low whistle which didn't seem to travel in that peculiar atmosphere more
+than two feet away from my lips, but all the same Rose came tripping down
+the stairs at once.  With just a nod to my whisper: "Take a fiacre," she
+glided out and I shut the door noiselessly behind her.
+
+The next time I saw her she was opening the door of the house on the
+Prado to me, with her cap and the little black silk apron on, and with
+that marked personality of her own, which had been concealed so perfectly
+in the dowdy walking dress, very much to the fore.
+
+"I have given Madame the message," she said in her contained voice,
+swinging the door wide open.  Then after relieving me of my hat and coat
+she announced me with the simple words: "_Voila_ Monsieur," and hurried
+away.  Directly I appeared Dona Rita, away there on the couch, passed the
+tips of her fingers over her eyes and holding her hands up palms outwards
+on each side of her head, shouted to me down the whole length of the
+room: "The dry season has set in."  I glanced at the pink tips of her
+fingers perfunctorily and then drew back.  She let her hands fall
+negligently as if she had no use for them any more and put on a serious
+expression.
+
+"So it seems," I said, sitting down opposite her.  "For how long, I
+wonder."
+
+"For years and years.  One gets so little encouragement.  First you bolt
+away from my tears, then you send an impertinent message, and then when
+you come at last you pretend to behave respectfully, though you don't
+know how to do it.  You should sit much nearer the edge of the chair and
+hold yourself very stiff, and make it quite clear that you don't know
+what to do with your hands."
+
+All this in a fascinating voice with a ripple of badinage that seemed to
+play upon the sober surface of her thoughts.  Then seeing that I did not
+answer she altered the note a bit.
+
+"_Amigo_ George," she said, "I take the trouble to send for you and here
+I am before you, talking to you and you say nothing."
+
+"What am I to say?"
+
+"How can I tell?  You might say a thousand things.  You might, for
+instance, tell me that you were sorry for my tears."
+
+"I might also tell you a thousand lies.  What do I know about your tears?
+I am not a susceptible idiot.  It all depends upon the cause.  There are
+tears of quiet happiness.  Peeling onions also will bring tears."
+
+"Oh, you are not susceptible," she flew out at me.  "But you are an idiot
+all the same."
+
+"Is it to tell me this that you have written to me to come?" I asked with
+a certain animation.
+
+"Yes.  And if you had as much sense as the talking parrot I owned once
+you would have read between the lines that all I wanted you here for was
+to tell you what I think of you."
+
+"Well, tell me what you think of me."
+
+"I would in a moment if I could be half as impertinent as you are."
+
+"What unexpected modesty," I said.
+
+"These, I suppose, are your sea manners."
+
+"I wouldn't put up with half that nonsense from anybody at sea.  Don't
+you remember you told me yourself to go away?  What was I to do?"
+
+"How stupid you are.  I don't mean that you pretend.  You really are.  Do
+you understand what I say?  I will spell it for you.  S-t-u-p-i-d.  Ah,
+now I feel better.  Oh, _amigo_ George, my dear fellow-conspirator for
+the king--the king.  Such a king!  _Vive le Roi_!  Come, why don't you
+shout _Vive le Roi_, too?"
+
+"I am not your parrot," I said.
+
+"No, he never sulked.  He was a charming, good-mannered bird, accustomed
+to the best society, whereas you, I suppose, are nothing but a heartless
+vagabond like myself."
+
+"I daresay you are, but I suppose nobody had the insolence to tell you
+that to your face."
+
+"Well, very nearly.  It was what it amounted to.  I am not stupid.  There
+is no need to spell out simple words for me.  It just came out.  Don Juan
+struggled desperately to keep the truth in.  It was most pathetic.  And
+yet he couldn't help himself.  He talked very much like a parrot."
+
+"Of the best society," I suggested.
+
+"Yes, the most honourable of parrots.  I don't like parrot-talk.  It
+sounds so uncanny.  Had I lived in the Middle Ages I am certain I would
+have believed that a talking bird must be possessed by the devil.  I am
+sure Therese would believe that now.  My own sister!  She would cross
+herself many times and simply quake with terror."
+
+"But you were not terrified," I said.  "May I ask when that interesting
+communication took place?"
+
+"Yesterday, just before you blundered in here of all days in the year.  I
+was sorry for him."
+
+"Why tell me this?  I couldn't help noticing it.  I regretted I hadn't my
+umbrella with me."
+
+"Those unforgiven tears!  Oh, you simple soul!  Don't you know that
+people never cry for anybody but themselves? . . . _Amigo_ George, tell
+me--what are we doing in this world?"
+
+"Do you mean all the people, everybody?"
+
+"No, only people like you and me.  Simple people, in this world which is
+eaten up with charlatanism of all sorts so that even we, the simple,
+don't know any longer how to trust each other."
+
+"Don't we?  Then why don't you trust him?  You are dying to do so, don't
+you know?"
+
+She dropped her chin on her breast and from under her straight eyebrows
+the deep blue eyes remained fixed on me, impersonally, as if without
+thought.
+
+"What have you been doing since you left me yesterday?" she asked.
+
+"The first thing I remember I abused your sister horribly this morning."
+
+"And how did she take it?"
+
+"Like a warm shower in spring.  She drank it all in and unfolded her
+petals."
+
+"What poetical expressions he uses!  That girl is more perverted than one
+would think possible, considering what she is and whence she came.  It's
+true that I, too, come from the same spot."
+
+"She is slightly crazy.  I am a great favourite with her.  I don't say
+this to boast."
+
+"It must be very comforting."
+
+"Yes, it has cheered me immensely.  Then after a morning of delightful
+musings on one thing and another I went to lunch with a charming lady and
+spent most of the afternoon talking with her."
+
+Dona Rita raised her head.
+
+"A lady!  Women seem such mysterious creatures to me.  I don't know them.
+Did you abuse her?  Did she--how did you say that?--unfold her petals,
+too?  Was she really and truly . . .?"
+
+"She is simply perfection in her way and the conversation was by no means
+banal.  I fancy that if your late parrot had heard it, he would have
+fallen off his perch.  For after all, in that Allegre Pavilion, my dear
+Rita, you were but a crowd of glorified _bourgeois_."
+
+She was beautifully animated now.  In her motionless blue eyes like
+melted sapphires, around those red lips that almost without moving could
+breathe enchanting sounds into the world, there was a play of light, that
+mysterious ripple of gaiety that seemed always to run and faintly quiver
+under her skin even in her gravest moods; just as in her rare moments of
+gaiety its warmth and radiance seemed to come to one through infinite
+sadness, like the sunlight of our life hiding the invincible darkness in
+which the universe must work out its impenetrable destiny.
+
+"Now I think of it! . . . Perhaps that's the reason I never could feel
+perfectly serious while they were demolishing the world about my ears.  I
+fancy now that I could tell beforehand what each of them was going to
+say.  They were repeating the same words over and over again, those great
+clever men, very much like parrots who also seem to know what they say.
+That doesn't apply to the master of the house, who never talked much.  He
+sat there mostly silent and looming up three sizes bigger than any of
+them."
+
+"The ruler of the aviary," I muttered viciously.
+
+"It annoys you that I should talk of that time?" she asked in a tender
+voice.  "Well, I won't, except for once to say that you must not make a
+mistake: in that aviary he was the man.  I know because he used to talk
+to me afterwards sometimes.  Strange!  For six years he seemed to carry
+all the world and me with it in his hand. . . . "
+
+"He dominates you yet," I shouted.
+
+She shook her head innocently as a child would do.
+
+"No, no.  You brought him into the conversation yourself.  You think of
+him much more than I do."  Her voice drooped sadly to a hopeless note.
+"I hardly ever do.  He is not the sort of person to merely flit through
+one's mind and so I have no time.  Look.  I had eleven letters this
+morning and there were also five telegrams before midday, which have
+tangled up everything.  I am quite frightened."
+
+And she explained to me that one of them--the long one on the top of the
+pile, on the table over there--seemed to contain ugly inferences directed
+at herself in a menacing way.  She begged me to read it and see what I
+could make of it.
+
+I knew enough of the general situation to see at a glance that she had
+misunderstood it thoroughly and even amazingly.  I proved it to her very
+quickly.  But her mistake was so ingenious in its wrongheadedness and
+arose so obviously from the distraction of an acute mind, that I couldn't
+help looking at her admiringly.
+
+"Rita," I said, "you are a marvellous idiot."
+
+"Am I?  Imbecile," she retorted with an enchanting smile of relief.  "But
+perhaps it only seems so to you in contrast with the lady so perfect in
+her way.  What is her way?"
+
+"Her way, I should say, lies somewhere between her sixtieth and
+seventieth year, and I have walked tete-a-tete with her for some little
+distance this afternoon."
+
+"Heavens," she whispered, thunderstruck.  "And meantime I had the son
+here.  He arrived about five minutes after Rose left with that note for
+you," she went on in a tone of awe.  "As a matter of fact, Rose saw him
+across the street but she thought she had better go on to you."
+
+"I am furious with myself for not having guessed that much," I said
+bitterly.  "I suppose you got him out of the house about five minutes
+after you heard I was coming here.  Rose ought to have turned back when
+she saw him on his way to cheer your solitude.  That girl is stupid after
+all, though she has got a certain amount of low cunning which no doubt is
+very useful at times."
+
+"I forbid you to talk like this about Rose.  I won't have it.  Rose is
+not to be abused before me."
+
+"I only mean to say that she failed in this instance to read your mind,
+that's all."
+
+"This is, without exception, the most unintelligent thing you have said
+ever since I have known you.  You may understand a lot about running
+contraband and about the minds of a certain class of people, but as to
+Rose's mind let me tell you that in comparison with hers yours is
+absolutely infantile, my adventurous friend.  It would be contemptible if
+it weren't so--what shall I call it?--babyish.  You ought to be slapped
+and put to bed."  There was an extraordinary earnestness in her tone and
+when she ceased I listened yet to the seductive inflexions of her voice,
+that no matter in what mood she spoke seemed only fit for tenderness and
+love.  And I thought suddenly of Azzolati being ordered to take himself
+off from her presence for ever, in that voice the very anger of which
+seemed to twine itself gently round one's heart.  No wonder the poor
+wretch could not forget the scene and couldn't restrain his tears on the
+plain of Rambouillet.  My moods of resentment against Rita, hot as they
+were, had no more duration than a blaze of straw.  So I only said:
+
+"Much _you_ know about the management of children."  The corners of her
+lips stirred quaintly; her animosity, especially when provoked by a
+personal attack upon herself, was always tinged by a sort of wistful
+humour of the most disarming kind.
+
+"Come, _amigo_ George, let us leave poor Rose alone.  You had better tell
+me what you heard from the lips of the charming old lady.  Perfection,
+isn't she?  I have never seen her in my life, though she says she has
+seen me several times.  But she has written to me on three separate
+occasions and every time I answered her as if I were writing to a queen.
+_Amigo_ George, how does one write to a queen?  How should a goatherd
+that could have been mistress of a king, how should she write to an old
+queen from very far away; from over the sea?"
+
+"I will ask you as I have asked the old queen: why do you tell me all
+this, Dona Rita?"
+
+"To discover what's in your mind," she said, a little impatiently.
+
+"If you don't know that yet!" I exclaimed under my breath.
+
+"No, not in your mind.  Can any one ever tell what is in a man's mind?
+But I see you won't tell."
+
+"What's the good?  You have written to her before, I understand.  Do you
+think of continuing the correspondence?"
+
+"Who knows?" she said in a profound tone.  "She is the only woman that
+ever wrote to me.  I returned her three letters to her with my last
+answer, explaining humbly that I preferred her to burn them herself.  And
+I thought that would be the end of it.  But an occasion may still arise."
+
+"Oh, if an occasion arises," I said, trying to control my rage, "you may
+be able to begin your letter by the words '_Chere Maman_.'"
+
+The cigarette box, which she had taken up without removing her eyes from
+me, flew out of her hand and opening in mid-air scattered cigarettes for
+quite a surprising distance all over the room.  I got up at once and
+wandered off picking them up industriously.  Dona Rita's voice behind me
+said indifferently:
+
+"Don't trouble, I will ring for Rose."
+
+"No need," I growled, without turning my head, "I can find my hat in the
+hall by myself, after I've finished picking up . . . "
+
+"Bear!"
+
+I returned with the box and placed it on the divan near her.  She sat
+cross-legged, leaning back on her arms, in the blue shimmer of her
+embroidered robe and with the tawny halo of her unruly hair about her
+face which she raised to mine with an air of resignation.
+
+"George, my friend," she said, "we have no manners."
+
+"You would never have made a career at court, Dona Rita," I observed.
+"You are too impulsive."
+
+"This is not bad manners, that's sheer insolence.  This has happened to
+you before.  If it happens again, as I can't be expected to wrestle with
+a savage and desperate smuggler single-handed, I will go upstairs and
+lock myself in my room till you leave the house.  Why did you say this to
+me?"
+
+"Oh, just for nothing, out of a full heart."
+
+"If your heart is full of things like that, then my dear friend, you had
+better take it out and give it to the crows.  No! you said that for the
+pleasure of appearing terrible.  And you see you are not terrible at all,
+you are rather amusing.  Go on, continue to be amusing.  Tell me
+something of what you heard from the lips of that aristocratic old lady
+who thinks that all men are equal and entitled to the pursuit of
+happiness."
+
+"I hardly remember now.  I heard something about the unworthiness of
+certain white geese out of stuffy drawing-rooms.  It sounds mad, but the
+lady knows exactly what she wants.  I also heard your praises sung.  I
+sat there like a fool not knowing what to say."
+
+"Why?  You might have joined in the singing."
+
+"I didn't feel in the humour, because, don't you see, I had been
+incidentally given to understand that I was an insignificant and
+superfluous person who had better get out of the way of serious people."
+
+"Ah, _par exemple_!"
+
+"In a sense, you know, it was flattering; but for the moment it made me
+feel as if I had been offered a pot of mustard to sniff."
+
+She nodded with an amused air of understanding and I could see that she
+was interested.  "Anything more?" she asked, with a flash of radiant
+eagerness in all her person and bending slightly forward towards me.
+
+"Oh, it's hardly worth mentioning.  It was a sort of threat wrapped up, I
+believe, in genuine anxiety as to what might happen to my youthful
+insignificance.  If I hadn't been rather on the alert just then I
+wouldn't even have perceived the meaning.  But really an allusion to 'hot
+Southern blood' I could have only one meaning.  Of course I laughed at
+it, but only '_pour l'honneur_' and to show I understood perfectly.  In
+reality it left me completely indifferent."
+
+Dona Rita looked very serious for a minute.
+
+"Indifferent to the whole conversation?"
+
+I looked at her angrily.
+
+"To the whole . . . You see I got up rather out of sorts this morning.
+Unrefreshed, you know.  As if tired of life."
+
+The liquid blue in her eyes remained directed at me without any
+expression except that of its usual mysterious immobility, but all her
+face took on a sad and thoughtful cast.  Then as if she had made up her
+mind under the pressure of necessity:
+
+"Listen, _amigo_," she said, "I have suffered domination and it didn't
+crush me because I have been strong enough to live with it; I have known
+caprice, you may call it folly if you like, and it left me unharmed
+because I was great enough not to be captured by anything that wasn't
+really worthy of me.  My dear, it went down like a house of cards before
+my breath.  There is something in me that will not be dazzled by any sort
+of prestige in this world, worthy or unworthy.  I am telling you this
+because you are younger than myself."
+
+"If you want me to say that there is nothing petty or mean about you,
+Dona Rita, then I do say it."
+
+She nodded at me with an air of accepting the rendered justice and went
+on with the utmost simplicity.
+
+"And what is it that is coming to me now with all the airs of virtue?
+All the lawful conventions are coming to me, all the glamours of
+respectability!  And nobody can say that I have made as much as the
+slightest little sign to them.  Not so much as lifting my little finger.
+I suppose you know that?"
+
+"I don't know.  I do not doubt your sincerity in anything you say.  I am
+ready to believe.  You are not one of those who have to work."
+
+"Have to work--what do you mean?"
+
+"It's a phrase I have heard.  What I meant was that it isn't necessary
+for you to make any signs."
+
+She seemed to meditate over this for a while.
+
+"Don't be so sure of that," she said, with a flash of mischief, which
+made her voice sound more melancholy than before.  "I am not so sure
+myself," she continued with a curious, vanishing, intonation of despair.
+"I don't know the truth about myself because I never had an opportunity
+to compare myself to anything in the world.  I have been offered mock
+adulation, treated with mock reserve or with mock devotion, I have been
+fawned upon with an appalling earnestness of purpose, I can tell you; but
+these later honours, my dear, came to me in the shape of a very loyal and
+very scrupulous gentleman.  For he is all that.  And as a matter of fact
+I was touched."
+
+"I know.  Even to tears," I said provokingly.  But she wasn't provoked,
+she only shook her head in negation (which was absurd) and pursued the
+trend of her spoken thoughts.
+
+"That was yesterday," she said.  "And yesterday he was extremely correct
+and very full of extreme self-esteem which expressed itself in the
+exaggerated delicacy with which he talked.  But I know him in all his
+moods.  I have known him even playful.  I didn't listen to him.  I was
+thinking of something else.  Of things that were neither correct nor
+playful and that had to be looked at steadily with all the best that was
+in me.  And that was why, in the end--I cried--yesterday."
+
+"I saw it yesterday and I had the weakness of being moved by those tears
+for a time."
+
+"If you want to make me cry again I warn you you won't succeed."
+
+"No, I know.  He has been here to-day and the dry season has set in."
+
+"Yes, he has been here.  I assure you it was perfectly unexpected.
+Yesterday he was railing at the world at large, at me who certainly have
+not made it, at himself and even at his mother.  All this rather in
+parrot language, in the words of tradition and morality as understood by
+the members of that exclusive club to which he belongs.  And yet when I
+thought that all this, those poor hackneyed words, expressed a sincere
+passion I could have found in my heart to be sorry for him.  But he ended
+by telling me that one couldn't believe a single word I said, or
+something like that.  You were here then, you heard it yourself."
+
+"And it cut you to the quick," I said.  "It made you depart from your
+dignity to the point of weeping on any shoulder that happened to be
+there.  And considering that it was some more parrot talk after all (men
+have been saying that sort of thing to women from the beginning of the
+world) this sensibility seems to me childish."
+
+"What perspicacity," she observed, with an indulgent, mocking smile, then
+changed her tone.  "Therefore he wasn't expected to-day when he turned
+up, whereas you, who were expected, remained subject to the charms of
+conversation in that studio.  It never occurred to you . . . did it?  No!
+What had become of your perspicacity?"
+
+"I tell you I was weary of life," I said in a passion.
+
+She had another faint smile of a fugitive and unrelated kind as if she
+had been thinking of far-off things, then roused herself to grave
+animation.
+
+"He came in full of smiling playfulness.  How well I know that mood!
+Such self-command has its beauty; but it's no great help for a man with
+such fateful eyes.  I could see he was moved in his correct, restrained
+way, and in his own way, too, he tried to move me with something that
+would be very simple.  He told me that ever since we became friends, we
+two, he had not an hour of continuous sleep, unless perhaps when coming
+back dead-tired from outpost duty, and that he longed to get back to it
+and yet hadn't the courage to tear himself away from here.  He was as
+simple as that.  He's a _tres galant homme_ of absolute probity, even
+with himself.  I said to him: The trouble is, Don Juan, that it isn't
+love but mistrust that keeps you in torment.  I might have said jealousy,
+but I didn't like to use that word.  A parrot would have added that I had
+given him no right to be jealous.  But I am no parrot.  I recognized the
+rights of his passion which I could very well see.  He is jealous.  He is
+not jealous of my past or of the future; but he is jealously mistrustful
+of me, of what I am, of my very soul.  He believes in a soul in the same
+way Therese does, as something that can be touched with grace or go to
+perdition; and he doesn't want to be damned with me before his own
+judgment seat.  He is a most noble and loyal gentleman, but I have my own
+Basque peasant soul and don't want to think that every time he goes away
+from my feet--yes, _mon cher_, on this carpet, look for the marks of
+scorching--that he goes away feeling tempted to brush the dust off his
+moral sleeve.  That!  Never!"
+
+With brusque movements she took a cigarette out of the box, held it in
+her fingers for a moment, then dropped it unconsciously.
+
+"And then, I don't love him," she uttered slowly as if speaking to
+herself and at the same time watching the very quality of that thought.
+"I never did.  At first he fascinated me with his fatal aspect and his
+cold society smiles.  But I have looked into those eyes too often.  There
+are too many disdains in this aristocratic republican without a home.
+His fate may be cruel, but it will always be commonplace.  While he sat
+there trying in a worldly tone to explain to me the problems, the
+scruples, of his suffering honour, I could see right into his heart and I
+was sorry for him.  I was sorry enough for him to feel that if he had
+suddenly taken me by the throat and strangled me slowly, _avec delices_,
+I could forgive him while I choked.  How correct he was!  But bitterness
+against me peeped out of every second phrase.  At last I raised my hand
+and said to him, 'Enough.'  I believe he was shocked by my plebeian
+abruptness but he was too polite to show it.  His conventions will always
+stand in the way of his nature.  I told him that everything that had been
+said and done during the last seven or eight months was inexplicable
+unless on the assumption that he was in love with me,--and yet in
+everything there was an implication that he couldn't forgive me my very
+existence.  I did ask him whether he didn't think that it was absurd on
+his part . . . "
+
+"Didn't you say that it was exquisitely absurd?" I asked.
+
+"Exquisitely! . . . " Dona Rita was surprised at my question.  "No.  Why
+should I say that?"
+
+"It would have reconciled him to your abruptness.  It's their family
+expression.  It would have come with a familiar sound and would have been
+less offensive."
+
+"Offensive," Dona Rita repeated earnestly.  "I don't think he was
+offended; he suffered in another way, but I didn't care for that.  It was
+I that had become offended in the end, without spite, you understand, but
+past bearing.  I didn't spare him.  I told him plainly that to want a
+woman formed in mind and body, mistress of herself, free in her choice,
+independent in her thoughts; to love her apparently for what she is and
+at the same time to demand from her the candour and the innocence that
+could be only a shocking pretence; to know her such as life had made her
+and at the same time to despise her secretly for every touch with which
+her life had fashioned her--that was neither generous nor high minded; it
+was positively frantic.  He got up and went away to lean against the
+mantelpiece, there, on his elbow and with his head in his hand.  You have
+no idea of the charm and the distinction of his pose.  I couldn't help
+admiring him: the expression, the grace, the fatal suggestion of his
+immobility.  Oh, yes, I am sensible to aesthetic impressions, I have been
+educated to believe that there is a soul in them."
+
+With that enigmatic, under the eyebrows glance fixed on me she laughed
+her deep contralto laugh without mirth but also without irony, and
+profoundly moving by the mere purity of the sound.
+
+"I suspect he was never so disgusted and appalled in his life.  His
+self-command is the most admirable worldly thing I have ever seen.  What
+made it beautiful was that one could feel in it a tragic suggestion as in
+a great work of art."
+
+She paused with an inscrutable smile that a great painter might have put
+on the face of some symbolic figure for the speculation and wonder of
+many generations.  I said:
+
+"I always thought that love for you could work great wonders.  And now I
+am certain."
+
+"Are you trying to be ironic?" she said sadly and very much as a child
+might have spoken.
+
+"I don't know," I answered in a tone of the same simplicity.  "I find it
+very difficult to be generous."
+
+"I, too," she said with a sort of funny eagerness.  "I didn't treat him
+very generously.  Only I didn't say much more.  I found I didn't care
+what I said--and it would have been like throwing insults at a beautiful
+composition.  He was well inspired not to move.  It has spared him some
+disagreeable truths and perhaps I would even have said more than the
+truth.  I am not fair.  I am no more fair than other people.  I would
+have been harsh.  My very admiration was making me more angry.  It's
+ridiculous to say of a man got up in correct tailor clothes, but there
+was a funereal grace in his attitude so that he might have been
+reproduced in marble on a monument to some woman in one of those
+atrocious Campo Santos: the bourgeois conception of an aristocratic
+mourning lover.  When I came to that conclusion I became glad that I was
+angry or else I would have laughed right out before him."
+
+"I have heard a woman say once, a woman of the people--do you hear me,
+Dona Rita?--therefore deserving your attention, that one should never
+laugh at love."
+
+"My dear," she said gently, "I have been taught to laugh at most things
+by a man who never laughed himself; but it's true that he never spoke of
+love to me, love as a subject that is.  So perhaps . . . But why?"
+
+"Because (but maybe that old woman was crazy), because, she said, there
+was death in the mockery of love."
+
+Dona Rita moved slightly her beautiful shoulders and went on:
+
+"I am glad, then, I didn't laugh.  And I am also glad I said nothing
+more.  I was feeling so little generous that if I had known something
+then of his mother's allusion to 'white geese' I would have advised him
+to get one of them and lead it away on a beautiful blue ribbon.  Mrs.
+Blunt was wrong, you know, to be so scornful.  A white goose is exactly
+what her son wants.  But look how badly the world is arranged.  Such
+white birds cannot be got for nothing and he has not enough money even to
+buy a ribbon.  Who knows!  Maybe it was this which gave that tragic
+quality to his pose by the mantelpiece over there.  Yes, that was it.
+Though no doubt I didn't see it then.  As he didn't offer to move after I
+had done speaking I became quite unaffectedly sorry and advised him very
+gently to dismiss me from his mind definitely.  He moved forward then and
+said to me in his usual voice and with his usual smile that it would have
+been excellent advice but unfortunately I was one of those women who
+can't be dismissed at will.  And as I shook my head he insisted rather
+darkly: 'Oh, yes, Dona Rita, it is so.  Cherish no illusions about that
+fact.'  It sounded so threatening that in my surprise I didn't even
+acknowledge his parting bow.  He went out of that false situation like a
+wounded man retreating after a fight.  No, I have nothing to reproach
+myself with.  I did nothing.  I led him into nothing.  Whatever illusions
+have passed through my head I kept my distance, and he was so loyal to
+what he seemed to think the redeeming proprieties of the situation that
+he has gone from me for good without so much as kissing the tips of my
+fingers.  He must have felt like a man who had betrayed himself for
+nothing.  It's horrible.  It's the fault of that enormous fortune of
+mine, and I wish with all my heart that I could give it to him; for he
+couldn't help his hatred of the thing that is: and as to his love, which
+is just as real, well--could I have rushed away from him to shut myself
+up in a convent?  Could I?  After all I have a right to my share of
+daylight."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+
+I took my eyes from her face and became aware that dusk was beginning to
+steal into the room.  How strange it seemed.  Except for the glazed
+rotunda part its long walls, divided into narrow panels separated by an
+order of flat pilasters, presented, depicted on a black background and in
+vivid colours, slender women with butterfly wings and lean youths with
+narrow birds' wings.  The effect was supposed to be Pompeiian and Rita
+and I had often laughed at the delirious fancy of some enriched
+shopkeeper.  But still it was a display of fancy, a sign of grace; but at
+that moment these figures appeared to me weird and intrusive and
+strangely alive in their attenuated grace of unearthly beings concealing
+a power to see and hear.
+
+Without words, without gestures, Dona Rita was heard again.  "It may have
+been as near coming to pass as this."  She showed me the breadth of her
+little finger nail.  "Yes, as near as that.  Why?  How?  Just like that,
+for nothing.  Because it had come up.  Because a wild notion had entered
+a practical old woman's head.  Yes.  And the best of it is that I have
+nothing to complain of.  Had I surrendered I would have been perfectly
+safe with these two.  It is they or rather he who couldn't trust me, or
+rather that something which I express, which I stand for.  Mills would
+never tell me what it was.  Perhaps he didn't know exactly himself.  He
+said it was something like genius.  My genius!  Oh, I am not conscious of
+it, believe me, I am not conscious of it.  But if I were I wouldn't pluck
+it out and cast it away.  I am ashamed of nothing, of nothing!  Don't be
+stupid enough to think that I have the slightest regret.  There is no
+regret.  First of all because I am I--and then because . . . My dear,
+believe me, I have had a horrible time of it myself lately."
+
+This seemed to be the last word.  Outwardly quiet, all the time, it was
+only then that she became composed enough to light an enormous cigarette
+of the same pattern as those made specially for the king--_por el Rey_!
+After a time, tipping the ash into the bowl on her left hand, she asked
+me in a friendly, almost tender, tone:
+
+"What are you thinking of, _amigo_?"
+
+"I was thinking of your immense generosity.  You want to give a crown to
+one man, a fortune to another.  That is very fine.  But I suppose there
+is a limit to your generosity somewhere."
+
+"I don't see why there should be any limit--to fine intentions!  Yes, one
+would like to pay ransom and be done with it all."
+
+"That's the feeling of a captive; and yet somehow I can't think of you as
+ever having been anybody's captive."
+
+"You do display some wonderful insight sometimes.  My dear, I begin to
+suspect that men are rather conceited about their powers.  They think
+they dominate us.  Even exceptional men will think that; men too great
+for mere vanity, men like Henry Allegre for instance, who by his
+consistent and serene detachment was certainly fit to dominate all sorts
+of people.  Yet for the most part they can only do it because women
+choose more or less consciously to let them do so.  Henry Allegre, if any
+man, might have been certain of his own power; and yet, look: I was a
+chit of a girl, I was sitting with a book where I had no business to be,
+in his own garden, when he suddenly came upon me, an ignorant girl of
+seventeen, a most uninviting creature with a tousled head, in an old
+black frock and shabby boots.  I could have run away.  I was perfectly
+capable of it.  But I stayed looking up at him and--in the end it was HE
+who went away and it was I who stayed."
+
+"Consciously?" I murmured.
+
+"Consciously?  You may just as well ask my shadow that lay so still by me
+on the young grass in that morning sunshine.  I never knew before how
+still I could keep.  It wasn't the stillness of terror.  I remained,
+knowing perfectly well that if I ran he was not the man to run after me.
+I remember perfectly his deep-toned, politely indifferent '_Restez
+donc_.'  He was mistaken.  Already then I hadn't the slightest intention
+to move.  And if you ask me again how far conscious all this was the
+nearest answer I can make you is this: that I remained on purpose, but I
+didn't know for what purpose I remained.  Really, that couldn't be
+expected. . . . Why do you sigh like this?  Would you have preferred me
+to be idiotically innocent or abominably wise?"
+
+"These are not the questions that trouble me," I said.  "If I sighed it
+is because I am weary."
+
+"And getting stiff, too, I should say, in this Pompeiian armchair.  You
+had better get out of it and sit on this couch as you always used to do.
+That, at any rate, is not Pompeiian.  You have been growing of late
+extremely formal, I don't know why.  If it is a pose then for goodness'
+sake drop it.  Are you going to model yourself on Captain Blunt?  You
+couldn't, you know.  You are too young."
+
+"I don't want to model myself on anybody," I said.  "And anyway Blunt is
+too romantic; and, moreover, he has been and is yet in love with you--a
+thing that requires some style, an attitude, something of which I am
+altogether incapable."
+
+"You know it isn't so stupid, this what you have just said.  Yes, there
+is something in this."
+
+"I am not stupid," I protested, without much heat.
+
+"Oh, yes, you are.  You don't know the world enough to judge.  You don't
+know how wise men can be.  Owls are nothing to them.  Why do you try to
+look like an owl?  There are thousands and thousands of them waiting for
+me outside the door: the staring, hissing beasts.  You don't know what a
+relief of mental ease and intimacy you have been to me in the frankness
+of gestures and speeches and thoughts, sane or insane, that we have been
+throwing at each other.  I have known nothing of this in my life but with
+you.  There had always been some fear, some constraint, lurking in the
+background behind everybody, everybody--except you, my friend."
+
+"An unmannerly, Arcadian state of affairs.  I am glad you like it.
+Perhaps it's because you were intelligent enough to perceive that I was
+not in love with you in any sort of style."
+
+"No, you were always your own self, unwise and reckless and with
+something in it kindred to mine, if I may say so without offence."
+
+"You may say anything without offence.  But has it never occurred to your
+sagacity that I just, simply, loved you?"
+
+"Just--simply," she repeated in a wistful tone.
+
+"You didn't want to trouble your head about it, is that it?"
+
+"My poor head.  From your tone one might think you yearned to cut it off.
+No, my dear, I have made up my mind not to lose my head."
+
+"You would be astonished to know how little I care for your mind."
+
+"Would I?  Come and sit on the couch all the same," she said after a
+moment of hesitation.  Then, as I did not move at once, she added with
+indifference: "You may sit as far away as you like, it's big enough,
+goodness knows."
+
+The light was ebbing slowly out of the rotunda and to my bodily eyes she
+was beginning to grow shadowy.  I sat down on the couch and for a long
+time no word passed between us.  We made no movement.  We did not even
+turn towards each other.  All I was conscious of was the softness of the
+seat which seemed somehow to cause a relaxation of my stern mood, I won't
+say against my will but without any will on my part.  Another thing I was
+conscious of, strangely enough, was the enormous brass bowl for cigarette
+ends.  Quietly, with the least possible action, Dona Rita moved it to the
+other side of her motionless person.  Slowly, the fantastic women with
+butterflies' wings and the slender-limbed youths with the gorgeous
+pinions on their shoulders were vanishing into their black backgrounds
+with an effect of silent discretion, leaving us to ourselves.
+
+I felt suddenly extremely exhausted, absolutely overcome with fatigue
+since I had moved; as if to sit on that Pompeiian chair had been a task
+almost beyond human strength, a sort of labour that must end in collapse.
+I fought against it for a moment and then my resistance gave way.  Not
+all at once but as if yielding to an irresistible pressure (for I was not
+conscious of any irresistible attraction) I found myself with my head
+resting, with a weight I felt must be crushing, on Dona Rita's shoulder
+which yet did not give way, did not flinch at all.  A faint scent of
+violets filled the tragic emptiness of my head and it seemed impossible
+to me that I should not cry from sheer weakness.  But I remained
+dry-eyed.  I only felt myself slipping lower and lower and I caught her
+round the waist clinging to her not from any intention but purely by
+instinct.  All that time she hadn't stirred.  There was only the slight
+movement of her breathing that showed her to be alive; and with closed
+eyes I imagined her to be lost in thought, removed by an incredible
+meditation while I clung to her, to an immense distance from the earth.
+The distance must have been immense because the silence was so perfect,
+the feeling as if of eternal stillness.  I had a distinct impression of
+being in contact with an infinity that had the slightest possible rise
+and fall, was pervaded by a warm, delicate scent of violets and through
+which came a hand from somewhere to rest lightly on my head.  Presently
+my ear caught the faint and regular pulsation of her heart, firm and
+quick, infinitely touching in its persistent mystery, disclosing itself
+into my very ear--and my felicity became complete.
+
+It was a dreamlike state combined with a dreamlike sense of insecurity.
+Then in that warm and scented infinity, or eternity, in which I rested
+lost in bliss but ready for any catastrophe, I heard the distant, hardly
+audible, and fit to strike terror into the heart, ringing of a bell.  At
+this sound the greatness of spaces departed.  I felt the world close
+about me; the world of darkened walls, of very deep grey dusk against the
+panes, and I asked in a pained voice:
+
+"Why did you ring, Rita?"
+
+There was a bell rope within reach of her hand.  I had not felt her move,
+but she said very low:
+
+"I rang for the lights."
+
+"You didn't want the lights."
+
+"It was time," she whispered secretly.
+
+Somewhere within the house a door slammed.  I got away from her feeling
+small and weak as if the best part of me had been torn away and
+irretrievably lost.  Rose must have been somewhere near the door.
+
+"It's abominable," I murmured to the still, idol-like shadow on the
+couch.
+
+The answer was a hurried, nervous whisper: "I tell you it was time.  I
+rang because I had no strength to push you away."
+
+I suffered a moment of giddiness before the door opened, light streamed
+in, and Rose entered, preceding a man in a green baize apron whom I had
+never seen, carrying on an enormous tray three Argand lamps fitted into
+vases of Pompeiian form.  Rose distributed them over the room.  In the
+flood of soft light the winged youths and the butterfly women reappeared
+on the panels, affected, gorgeous, callously unconscious of anything
+having happened during their absence.  Rose attended to the lamp on the
+nearest mantelpiece, then turned about and asked in a confident
+undertone.
+
+"_Monsieur dine_?"
+
+I had lost myself with my elbows on my knees and my head in my hands, but
+I heard the words distinctly.  I heard also the silence which ensued.  I
+sat up and took the responsibility of the answer on myself.
+
+"Impossible.  I am going to sea this evening."
+
+This was perfectly true only I had totally forgotten it till then.  For
+the last two days my being was no longer composed of memories but
+exclusively of sensations of the most absorbing, disturbing, exhausting
+nature.  I was like a man who has been buffeted by the sea or by a mob
+till he loses all hold on the world in the misery of his helplessness.
+But now I was recovering.  And naturally the first thing I remembered was
+the fact that I was going to sea.
+
+"You have heard, Rose," Dona Rita said at last with some impatience.
+
+The girl waited a moment longer before she said:
+
+"Oh, yes!  There is a man waiting for Monsieur in the hall.  A seaman."
+
+It could be no one but Dominic.  It dawned upon me that since the evening
+of our return I had not been near him or the ship, which was completely
+unusual, unheard of, and well calculated to startle Dominic.
+
+"I have seen him before," continued Rose, "and as he told me he has been
+pursuing Monsieur all the afternoon and didn't like to go away without
+seeing Monsieur for a moment, I proposed to him to wait in the hall till
+Monsieur was at liberty."
+
+I said: "Very well," and with a sudden resumption of her extremely busy,
+not-a-moment-to-lose manner Rose departed from the room.  I lingered in
+an imaginary world full of tender light, of unheard-of colours, with a
+mad riot of flowers and an inconceivable happiness under the sky arched
+above its yawning precipices, while a feeling of awe enveloped me like
+its own proper atmosphere.  But everything vanished at the sound of Dona
+Rita's loud whisper full of boundless dismay, such as to make one's hair
+stir on one's head.
+
+"_Mon Dieu_!  And what is going to happen now?"
+
+She got down from the couch and walked to a window.  When the lights had
+been brought into the room all the panes had turned inky black; for the
+night had come and the garden was full of tall bushes and trees screening
+off the gas lamps of the main alley of the Prado.  Whatever the question
+meant she was not likely to see an answer to it outside.  But her whisper
+had offended me, had hurt something infinitely deep, infinitely subtle
+and infinitely clear-eyed in my nature.  I said after her from the couch
+on which I had remained, "Don't lose your composure.  You will always
+have some sort of bell at hand."
+
+I saw her shrug her uncovered shoulders impatiently.  Her forehead was
+against the very blackness of the panes; pulled upward from the
+beautiful, strong nape of her neck, the twisted mass of her tawny hair
+was held high upon her head by the arrow of gold.
+
+"You set up for being unforgiving," she said without anger.
+
+I sprang to my feet while she turned about and came towards me bravely,
+with a wistful smile on her bold, adolescent face.
+
+"It seems to me," she went on in a voice like a wave of love itself,
+"that one should try to understand before one sets up for being
+unforgiving.  Forgiveness is a very fine word.  It is a fine invocation."
+
+"There are other fine words in the language such as fascination,
+fidelity, also frivolity; and as for invocations there are plenty of
+them, too; for instance: alas, heaven help me."
+
+We stood very close together, her narrow eyes were as enigmatic as ever,
+but that face, which, like some ideal conception of art, was incapable of
+anything like untruth and grimace, expressed by some mysterious means
+such a depth of infinite patience that I felt profoundly ashamed of
+myself.
+
+"This thing is beyond words altogether," I said.  "Beyond forgiveness,
+beyond forgetting, beyond anger or jealousy. . . . There is nothing
+between us two that could make us act together."
+
+"Then we must fall back perhaps on something within us, that--you admit
+it?--we have in common."
+
+"Don't be childish," I said.  "You give one with a perpetual and intense
+freshness feelings and sensations that are as old as the world itself,
+and you imagine that your enchantment can be broken off anywhere, at any
+time!  But it can't be broken.  And forgetfulness, like everything else,
+can only come from you.  It's an impossible situation to stand up
+against."
+
+She listened with slightly parted lips as if to catch some further
+resonances.
+
+"There is a sort of generous ardour about you," she said, "which I don't
+really understand.  No, I don't know it.  Believe me, it is not of myself
+I am thinking.  And you--you are going out to-night to make another
+landing."
+
+"Yes, it is a fact that before many hours I will be sailing away from you
+to try my luck once more."
+
+"Your wonderful luck," she breathed out.
+
+"Oh, yes, I am wonderfully lucky.  Unless the luck really is yours--in
+having found somebody like me, who cares at the same time so much and so
+little for what you have at heart."
+
+"What time will you be leaving the harbour?" she asked.
+
+"Some time between midnight and daybreak.  Our men may be a little late
+in joining, but certainly we will be gone before the first streak of
+light."
+
+"What freedom!" she murmured enviously.  "It's something I shall never
+know. . . ."
+
+"Freedom!" I protested.  "I am a slave to my word.  There will be a
+siring of carts and mules on a certain part of the coast, and a most
+ruffianly lot of men, men you understand, men with wives and children and
+sweethearts, who from the very moment they start on a trip risk a bullet
+in the head at any moment, but who have a perfect conviction that I will
+never fail them.  That's my freedom.  I wonder what they would think if
+they knew of your existence."
+
+"I don't exist," she said.
+
+"That's easy to say.  But I will go as if you didn't exist--yet only
+because you do exist.  You exist in me.  I don't know where I end and you
+begin.  You have got into my heart and into my veins and into my brain."
+
+"Take this fancy out and trample it down in the dust," she said in a tone
+of timid entreaty.
+
+"Heroically," I suggested with the sarcasm of despair.
+
+"Well, yes, heroically," she said; and there passed between us dim
+smiles, I have no doubt of the most touching imbecility on earth.  We
+were standing by then in the middle of the room with its vivid colours on
+a black background, with its multitude of winged figures with pale limbs,
+with hair like halos or flames, all strangely tense in their strained,
+decorative attitudes.  Dona Rita made a step towards me, and as I
+attempted to seize her hand she flung her arms round my neck.  I felt
+their strength drawing me towards her and by a sort of blind and
+desperate effort I resisted.  And all the time she was repeating with
+nervous insistence:
+
+"But it is true that you will go.  You will surely.  Not because of those
+people but because of me.  You will go away because you feel you must."
+
+With every word urging me to get away, her clasp tightened, she hugged my
+head closer to her breast.  I submitted, knowing well that I could free
+myself by one more effort which it was in my power to make.  But before I
+made it, in a sort of desperation, I pressed a long kiss into the hollow
+of her throat.  And lo--there was no need for any effort.  With a stifled
+cry of surprise her arms fell off me as if she had been shot.  I must
+have been giddy, and perhaps we both were giddy, but the next thing I
+knew there was a good foot of space between us in the peaceful glow of
+the ground-glass globes, in the everlasting stillness of the winged
+figures.  Something in the quality of her exclamation, something utterly
+unexpected, something I had never heard before, and also the way she was
+looking at me with a sort of incredulous, concentrated attention,
+disconcerted me exceedingly.  I knew perfectly well what I had done and
+yet I felt that I didn't understand what had happened.  I became suddenly
+abashed and I muttered that I had better go and dismiss that poor
+Dominic.  She made no answer, gave no sign.  She stood there lost in a
+vision--or was it a sensation?--of the most absorbing kind.  I hurried
+out into the hall, shamefaced, as if I were making my escape while she
+wasn't looking.  And yet I felt her looking fixedly at me, with a sort of
+stupefaction on her features--in her whole attitude--as though she had
+never even heard of such a thing as a kiss in her life.
+
+A dim lamp (of Pompeiian form) hanging on a long chain left the hall
+practically dark.  Dominic, advancing towards me from a distant corner,
+was but a little more opaque shadow than the others.  He had expected me
+on board every moment till about three o'clock, but as I didn't turn up
+and gave no sign of life in any other way he started on his hunt.  He
+sought news of me from the _garcons_ at the various cafes, from the
+_cochers de fiacre_ in front of the Exchange, from the tobacconist lady
+at the counter of the fashionable _Debit de Tabac_, from the old man who
+sold papers outside the _cercle_, and from the flower-girl at the door of
+the fashionable restaurant where I had my table.  That young woman, whose
+business name was Irma, had come on duty about mid-day.  She said to
+Dominic: "I think I've seen all his friends this morning but I haven't
+seen him for a week.  What has become of him?"
+
+"That's exactly what I want to know," Dominic replied in a fury and then
+went back to the harbour on the chance that I might have called either on
+board or at Madame Leonore's cafe.
+
+I expressed to him my surprise that he should fuss about me like an old
+hen over a chick.  It wasn't like him at all.  And he said that "_en
+effet_" it was Madame Leonore who wouldn't give him any peace.  He hoped
+I wouldn't mind, it was best to humour women in little things; and so he
+started off again, made straight for the street of the Consuls, was told
+there that I wasn't at home but the woman of the house looked so funny
+that he didn't know what to make of it.  Therefore, after some
+hesitation, he took the liberty to inquire at this house, too, and being
+told that I couldn't be disturbed, had made up his mind not to go on
+board without actually setting his eyes on me and hearing from my own
+lips that nothing was changed as to sailing orders.
+
+"There is nothing changed, Dominic," I said.
+
+"No change of any sort?" he insisted, looking very sombre and speaking
+gloomily from under his black moustaches in the dim glow of the alabaster
+lamp hanging above his head.  He peered at me in an extraordinary manner
+as if he wanted to make sure that I had all my limbs about me.  I asked
+him to call for my bag at the other house, on his way to the harbour, and
+he departed reassured, not, however, without remarking ironically that
+ever since she saw that American cavalier Madame Leonore was not easy in
+her mind about me.
+
+As I stood alone in the hall, without a sound of any sort, Rose appeared
+before me.
+
+"Monsieur will dine after all," she whispered calmly.
+
+"My good girl, I am going to sea to-night."
+
+"What am I going to do with Madame?" she murmured to herself.  "She will
+insist on returning to Paris."
+
+"Oh, have you heard of it?"
+
+"I never get more than two hours' notice," she said.  "But I know how it
+will be," her voice lost its calmness.  "I can look after Madame up to a
+certain point but I cannot be altogether responsible.  There is a
+dangerous person who is everlastingly trying to see Madame alone.  I have
+managed to keep him off several times but there is a beastly old
+journalist who is encouraging him in his attempts, and I daren't even
+speak to Madame about it."
+
+"What sort of person do you mean?"
+
+"Why, a man," she said scornfully.
+
+I snatched up my coat and hat.
+
+"Aren't there dozens of them?"
+
+"Oh!  But this one is dangerous.  Madame must have given him a hold on
+her in some way.  I ought not to talk like this about Madame and I
+wouldn't to anybody but Monsieur.  I am always on the watch, but what is
+a poor girl to do? . . . Isn't Monsieur going back to Madame?"
+
+"No, I am not going back.  Not this time."  A mist seemed to fall before
+my eyes.  I could hardly see the girl standing by the closed door of the
+Pempeiian room with extended hand, as if turned to stone.  But my voice
+was firm enough.  "Not this time," I repeated, and became aware of the
+great noise of the wind amongst the trees, with the lashing of a rain
+squall against the door.
+
+"Perhaps some other time," I added.
+
+I heard her say twice to herself: "_Mon Dieu_!  _Mon_, _Dieu_!" and then
+a dismayed: "What can Monsieur expect me to do?"  But I had to appear
+insensible to her distress and that not altogether because, in fact, I
+had no option but to go away.  I remember also a distinct wilfulness in
+my attitude and something half-contemptuous in my words as I laid my hand
+on the knob of the front door.
+
+"You will tell Madame that I am gone.  It will please her.  Tell her that
+I am gone--heroically."
+
+Rose had come up close to me.  She met my words by a despairing outward
+movement of her hands as though she were giving everything up.
+
+"I see it clearly now that Madame has no friends," she declared with such
+a force of restrained bitterness that it nearly made me pause.  But the
+very obscurity of actuating motives drove me on and I stepped out through
+the doorway muttering: "Everything is as Madame wishes it."
+
+She shot at me a swift: "You should resist," of an extraordinary
+intensity, but I strode on down the path.  Then Rose's schooled temper
+gave way at last and I heard her angry voice screaming after me furiously
+through the wind and rain: "No!  Madame has no friends.  Not one!"
+
+
+
+
+PART FIVE
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+
+That night I didn't get on board till just before midnight and Dominic
+could not conceal his relief at having me safely there.  Why he should
+have been so uneasy it was impossible to say but at the time I had a sort
+of impression that my inner destruction (it was nothing less) had
+affected my appearance, that my doom was as it were written on my face.
+I was a mere receptacle for dust and ashes, a living testimony to the
+vanity of all things.  My very thoughts were like a ghostly rustle of
+dead leaves.  But we had an extremely successful trip, and for most of
+the time Dominic displayed an unwonted jocularity of a dry and biting
+kind with which, he maintained, he had been infected by no other person
+than myself.  As, with all his force of character, he was very responsive
+to the moods of those he liked I have no doubt he spoke the truth.  But I
+know nothing about it.  The observer, more or less alert, whom each of us
+carries in his own consciousness, failed me altogether, had turned away
+his face in sheer horror, or else had fainted from the strain.  And thus
+I had to live alone, unobserved even by myself.
+
+But the trip had been successful.  We re-entered the harbour very quietly
+as usual and when our craft had been moored unostentatiously amongst the
+plebeian stone-carriers, Dominic, whose grim joviality had subsided in
+the last twenty-four hours of our homeward run, abandoned me to myself as
+though indeed I had been a doomed man.  He only stuck his head for a
+moment into our little cuddy where I was changing my clothes and being
+told in answer to his question that I had no special orders to give went
+ashore without waiting for me.
+
+Generally we used to step on the quay together and I never failed to
+enter for a moment Madame Leonore's cafe.  But this time when I got on
+the quay Dominic was nowhere to be seen.  What was it?
+Abandonment--discretion--or had he quarrelled with his Leonore before
+leaving on the trip?
+
+My way led me past the cafe and through the glass panes I saw that he was
+already there.  On the other side of the little marble table Madame
+Leonore, leaning with mature grace on her elbow, was listening to him
+absorbed.  Then I passed on and--what would you have!--I ended by making
+my way into the street of the Consuls.  I had nowhere else to go.  There
+were my things in the apartment on the first floor.  I couldn't bear the
+thought of meeting anybody I knew.
+
+The feeble gas flame in the hall was still there, on duty, as though it
+had never been turned off since I last crossed the hall at half-past
+eleven in the evening to go to the harbour.  The small flame had watched
+me letting myself out; and now, exactly of the same size, the poor little
+tongue of light (there was something wrong with that burner) watched me
+letting myself in, as indeed it had done many times before.  Generally
+the impression was that of entering an untenanted house, but this time
+before I could reach the foot of the stairs Therese glided out of the
+passage leading into the studio.  After the usual exclamations she
+assured me that everything was ready for me upstairs, had been for days,
+and offered to get me something to eat at once.  I accepted and said I
+would be down in the studio in half an hour.  I found her there by the
+side of the laid table ready for conversation.  She began by telling
+me--the dear, poor young Monsieur--in a sort of plaintive chant, that
+there were no letters for me, no letters of any kind, no letters from
+anybody.  Glances of absolutely terrifying tenderness mingled with
+flashes of cunning swept over me from head to foot while I tried to eat.
+
+"Are you giving me Captain Blunt's wine to drink?" I asked, noting the
+straw-coloured liquid in my glass.
+
+She screwed up her mouth as if she had a twinge of toothache and assured
+me that the wine belonged to the house.  I would have to pay her for it.
+As far as personal feelings go, Blunt, who addressed her always with
+polite seriousness, was not a favourite with her.  The "charming, brave
+Monsieur" was now fighting for the King and religion against the impious
+Liberals.  He went away the very morning after I had left and, oh! she
+remembered, he had asked her before going away whether I was still in the
+house.  Wanted probably to say good-bye to me, shake my hand, the dear,
+polite Monsieur.
+
+I let her run on in dread expectation of what she would say next but she
+stuck to the subject of Blunt for some time longer.  He had written to
+her once about some of his things which he wanted her to send to Paris to
+his mother's address; but she was going to do nothing of the kind.  She
+announced this with a pious smile; and in answer to my questions I
+discovered that it was a stratagem to make Captain Blunt return to the
+house.
+
+"You will get yourself into trouble with the police, Mademoiselle
+Therese, if you go on like that," I said.  But she was as obstinate as a
+mule and assured me with the utmost confidence that many people would be
+ready to defend a poor honest girl.  There was something behind this
+attitude which I could not fathom.  Suddenly she fetched a deep sigh.
+
+"Our Rita, too, will end by coming to her sister."
+
+The name for which I had been waiting deprived me of speech for the
+moment.  The poor mad sinner had rushed off to some of her wickednesses
+in Paris.  Did I know?  No?  How could she tell whether I did know or
+not?  Well!  I had hardly left the house, so to speak, when Rita was down
+with her maid behaving as if the house did really still belong to her
+. . .
+
+"What time was it?" I managed to ask.  And with the words my life itself
+was being forced out through my lips.  But Therese, not noticing anything
+strange about me, said it was something like half-past seven in the
+morning.  The "poor sinner" was all in black as if she were going to
+church (except for her expression, which was enough to shock any honest
+person), and after ordering her with frightful menaces not to let anybody
+know she was in the house she rushed upstairs and locked herself up in my
+bedroom, while "that French creature" (whom she seemed to love more than
+her own sister) went into my salon and hid herself behind the window
+curtain.
+
+I had recovered sufficiently to ask in a quiet natural voice whether Dona
+Rita and Captain Blunt had seen each other.  Apparently they had not seen
+each other.  The polite captain had looked so stern while packing up his
+kit that Therese dared not speak to him at all.  And he was in a hurry,
+too.  He had to see his dear mother off to Paris before his own
+departure.  Very stern.  But he shook her hand with a very nice bow.
+
+Therese elevated her right hand for me to see.  It was broad and short
+with blunt fingers, as usual.  The pressure of Captain Blunt's handshake
+had not altered its unlovely shape.
+
+"What was the good of telling him that our Rita was here?" went on
+Therese.  "I would have been ashamed of her coming here and behaving as
+if the house belonged to her!  I had already said some prayers at his
+intention at the half-past six mass, the brave gentleman.  That maid of
+my sister Rita was upstairs watching him drive away with her evil eyes,
+but I made a sign of the cross after the fiacre, and then I went upstairs
+and banged at your door, my dear kind young Monsieur, and shouted to Rita
+that she had no right to lock herself in any of my _locataires_' rooms.
+At last she opened it--and what do you think?  All her hair was loose
+over her shoulders.  I suppose it all came down when she flung her hat on
+your bed.  I noticed when she arrived that her hair wasn't done properly.
+She used your brushes to do it up again in front of your glass."
+
+"Wait a moment," I said, and jumped up, upsetting my wine to run upstairs
+as fast as I could.  I lighted the gas, all the three jets in the middle
+of the room, the jet by the bedside and two others flanking the
+dressing-table.  I had been struck by the wild hope of finding a trace of
+Rita's passage, a sign or something.  I pulled out all the drawers
+violently, thinking that perhaps she had hidden there a scrap of paper, a
+note.  It was perfectly mad.  Of course there was no chance of that.
+Therese would have seen to it.  I picked up one after another all the
+various objects on the dressing-table.  On laying my hands on the brushes
+I had a profound emotion, and with misty eyes I examined them
+meticulously with the new hope of finding one of Rita's tawny hairs
+entangled amongst the bristles by a miraculous chance.  But Therese would
+have done away with that chance, too.  There was nothing to be seen,
+though I held them up to the light with a beating heart.  It was written
+that not even that trace of her passage on the earth should remain with
+me; not to help but, as it were, to soothe the memory.  Then I lighted a
+cigarette and came downstairs slowly.  My unhappiness became dulled, as
+the grief of those who mourn for the dead gets dulled in the overwhelming
+sensation that everything is over, that a part of themselves is lost
+beyond recall taking with it all the savour of life.
+
+I discovered Therese still on the very same spot of the floor, her hands
+folded over each other and facing my empty chair before which the spilled
+wine had soaked a large portion of the table-cloth.  She hadn't moved at
+all.  She hadn't even picked up the overturned glass.  But directly I
+appeared she began to speak in an ingratiating voice.
+
+"If you have missed anything of yours upstairs, my dear young Monsieur,
+you mustn't say it's me.  You don't know what our Rita is."
+
+"I wish to goodness," I said, "that she had taken something."
+
+And again I became inordinately agitated as though it were my absolute
+fate to be everlastingly dying and reviving to the tormenting fact of her
+existence.  Perhaps she had taken something?  Anything.  Some small
+object.  I thought suddenly of a Rhenish-stone match-box.  Perhaps it was
+that.  I didn't remember having seen it when upstairs.  I wanted to make
+sure at once.  At once.  But I commanded myself to sit still.
+
+"And she so wealthy," Therese went on.  "Even you with your dear generous
+little heart can do nothing for our Rita.  No man can do anything for
+her--except perhaps one, but she is so evilly disposed towards him that
+she wouldn't even see him, if in the goodness of his forgiving heart he
+were to offer his hand to her.  It's her bad conscience that frightens
+her.  He loves her more than his life, the dear, charitable man."
+
+"You mean some rascal in Paris that I believe persecutes Dona Rita.
+Listen, Mademoiselle Therese, if you know where he hangs out you had
+better let him have word to be careful.  I believe he, too, is mixed up
+in the Carlist intrigue.  Don't you know that your sister can get him
+shut up any day or get him expelled by the police?"
+
+Therese sighed deeply and put on a look of pained virtue.
+
+"Oh, the hardness of her heart.  She tried to be tender with me.  She is
+awful.  I said to her, 'Rita, have you sold your soul to the Devil?' and
+she shouted like a fiend: 'For happiness!  Ha, ha, ha!'  She threw
+herself backwards on that couch in your room and laughed and laughed and
+laughed as if I had been tickling her, and she drummed on the floor with
+the heels of her shoes.  She is possessed.  Oh, my dear innocent young
+Monsieur, you have never seen anything like that.  That wicked girl who
+serves her rushed in with a tiny glass bottle and put it to her nose; but
+I had a mind to run out and fetch the priest from the church where I go
+to early mass.  Such a nice, stout, severe man.  But that false, cheating
+creature (I am sure she is robbing our Rita from morning to night), she
+talked to our Rita very low and quieted her down.  I am sure I don't know
+what she said.  She must be leagued with the devil.  And then she asked
+me if I would go down and make a cup of chocolate for her Madame.
+Madame--that's our Rita.  Madame!  It seems they were going off directly
+to Paris and her Madame had had nothing to eat since the morning of the
+day before.  Fancy me being ordered to make chocolate for our Rita!
+However, the poor thing looked so exhausted and white-faced that I went.
+Ah! the devil can give you an awful shake up if he likes."
+
+Therese fetched another deep sigh and raising her eyes looked at me with
+great attention.  I preserved an inscrutable expression, for I wanted to
+hear all she had to tell me of Rita.  I watched her with the greatest
+anxiety composing her face into a cheerful expression.
+
+"So Dona Rita is gone to Paris?" I asked negligently.
+
+"Yes, my dear Monsieur.  I believe she went straight to the railway
+station from here.  When she first got up from the couch she could hardly
+stand.  But before, while she was drinking the chocolate which I made for
+her, I tried to get her to sign a paper giving over the house to me, but
+she only closed her eyes and begged me to try and be a good sister and
+leave her alone for half an hour.  And she lying there looking as if she
+wouldn't live a day.  But she always hated me."
+
+I said bitterly, "You needn't have worried her like this.  If she had not
+lived for another day you would have had this house and everything else
+besides; a bigger bit than even your wolfish throat can swallow,
+Mademoiselle Therese."
+
+I then said a few more things indicative of my disgust with her rapacity,
+but they were quite inadequate, as I wasn't able to find words strong
+enough to express my real mind.  But it didn't matter really because I
+don't think Therese heard me at all.  She seemed lost in rapt amazement.
+
+"What do you say, my dear Monsieur?  What!  All for me without any sort
+of paper?"
+
+She appeared distracted by my curt: "Yes."  Therese believed in my
+truthfulness.  She believed me implicitly, except when I was telling her
+the truth about herself, mincing no words, when she used to stand
+smilingly bashful as if I were overwhelming her with compliments.  I
+expected her to continue the horrible tale but apparently she had found
+something to think about which checked the flow.  She fetched another
+sigh and muttered:
+
+"Then the law can be just, if it does not require any paper.  After all,
+I am her sister."
+
+"It's very difficult to believe that--at sight," I said roughly.
+
+"Ah, but that I could prove.  There are papers for that."
+
+After this declaration she began to clear the table, preserving a
+thoughtful silence.
+
+I was not very surprised at the news of Dona Rita's departure for Paris.
+It was not necessary to ask myself why she had gone.  I didn't even ask
+myself whether she had left the leased Villa on the Prado for ever.
+Later talking again with Therese, I learned that her sister had given it
+up for the use of the Carlist cause and that some sort of unofficial
+Consul, a Carlist agent of some sort, either was going to live there or
+had already taken possession.  This, Rita herself had told her before her
+departure on that agitated morning spent in the house--in my rooms.  A
+close investigation demonstrated to me that there was nothing missing
+from them.  Even the wretched match-box which I really hoped was gone
+turned up in a drawer after I had, delightedly, given it up.  It was a
+great blow.  She might have taken that at least!  She knew I used to
+carry it about with me constantly while ashore.  She might have taken it!
+Apparently she meant that there should be no bond left even of that kind;
+and yet it was a long time before I gave up visiting and revisiting all
+the corners of all possible receptacles for something that she might have
+left behind on purpose.  It was like the mania of those disordered minds
+who spend their days hunting for a treasure.  I hoped for a forgotten
+hairpin, for some tiny piece of ribbon.  Sometimes at night I reflected
+that such hopes were altogether insensate; but I remember once getting up
+at two in the morning to search for a little cardboard box in the
+bathroom, into which, I remembered, I had not looked before.  Of course
+it was empty; and, anyway, Rita could not possibly have known of its
+existence.  I got back to bed shivering violently, though the night was
+warm, and with a distinct impression that this thing would end by making
+me mad.  It was no longer a question of "this sort of thing" killing me.
+The moral atmosphere of this torture was different.  It would make me
+mad.  And at that thought great shudders ran down my prone body, because,
+once, I had visited a famous lunatic asylum where they had shown me a
+poor wretch who was mad, apparently, because he thought he had been
+abominably fooled by a woman.  They told me that his grievance was quite
+imaginary.  He was a young man with a thin fair beard, huddled up on the
+edge of his bed, hugging himself forlornly; and his incessant and
+lamentable wailing filled the long bare corridor, striking a chill into
+one's heart long before one came to the door of his cell.
+
+And there was no one from whom I could hear, to whom I could speak, with
+whom I could evoke the image of Rita.  Of course I could utter that word
+of four letters to Therese; but Therese for some reason took it into her
+head to avoid all topics connected with her sister.  I felt as if I could
+pull out great handfuls of her hair hidden modestly under the black
+handkerchief of which the ends were sometimes tied under her chin.  But,
+really, I could not have given her any intelligible excuse for that
+outrage.  Moreover, she was very busy from the very top to the very
+bottom of the house, which she persisted in running alone because she
+couldn't make up her mind to part with a few francs every month to a
+servant.  It seemed to me that I was no longer such a favourite with her
+as I used to be.  That, strange to say, was exasperating, too.  It was as
+if some idea, some fruitful notion had killed in her all the softer and
+more humane emotions.  She went about with brooms and dusters wearing an
+air of sanctimonious thoughtfulness.
+
+The man who to a certain extent took my place in Therese's favour was the
+old father of the dancing girls inhabiting the ground floor.  In a tall
+hat and a well-to-do dark blue overcoat he allowed himself to be
+button-holed in the hall by Therese who would talk to him interminably
+with downcast eyes.  He smiled gravely down at her, and meanwhile tried
+to edge towards the front door.  I imagine he didn't put a great value on
+Therese's favour.  Our stay in harbour was prolonged this time and I kept
+indoors like an invalid.  One evening I asked that old man to come in and
+drink and smoke with me in the studio.  He made no difficulties to
+accept, brought his wooden pipe with him, and was very entertaining in a
+pleasant voice.  One couldn't tell whether he was an uncommon person or
+simply a ruffian, but in any case with his white beard he looked quite
+venerable.  Naturally he couldn't give me much of his company as he had
+to look closely after his girls and their admirers; not that the girls
+were unduly frivolous, but of course being very young they had no
+experience.  They were friendly creatures with pleasant, merry voices and
+he was very much devoted to them.  He was a muscular man with a high
+colour and silvery locks curling round his bald pate and over his ears,
+like a _barocco_ apostle.  I had an idea that he had had a lurid past and
+had seen some fighting in his youth.  The admirers of the two girls stood
+in great awe of him, from instinct no doubt, because his behaviour to
+them was friendly and even somewhat obsequious, yet always with a certain
+truculent glint in his eye that made them pause in everything but their
+generosity--which was encouraged.  I sometimes wondered whether those two
+careless, merry hard-working creatures understood the secret moral beauty
+of the situation.
+
+My real company was the dummy in the studio and I can't say it was
+exactly satisfying.  After taking possession of the studio I had raised
+it tenderly, dusted its mangled limbs and insensible, hard-wood bosom,
+and then had propped it up in a corner where it seemed to take on, of
+itself, a shy attitude.  I knew its history.  It was not an ordinary
+dummy.  One day, talking with Dona Rita about her sister, I had told her
+that I thought Therese used to knock it down on purpose with a broom, and
+Dona Rita had laughed very much.  This, she had said, was an instance of
+dislike from mere instinct.  That dummy had been made to measure years
+before.  It had to wear for days and days the Imperial Byzantine robes in
+which Dona Rita sat only once or twice herself; but of course the folds
+and bends of the stuff had to be preserved as in the first sketch.  Dona
+Rita described amusingly how she had to stand in the middle of her room
+while Rose walked around her with a tape measure noting the figures down
+on a small piece of paper which was then sent to the maker, who presently
+returned it with an angry letter stating that those proportions were
+altogether impossible in any woman.  Apparently Rose had muddled them all
+up; and it was a long time before the figure was finished and sent to the
+Pavilion in a long basket to take on itself the robes and the hieratic
+pose of the Empress.  Later, it wore with the same patience the
+marvellous hat of the "Girl in the Hat."  But Dona Rita couldn't
+understand how the poor thing ever found its way to Marseilles minus its
+turnip head.  Probably it came down with the robes and a quantity of
+precious brocades which she herself had sent down from Paris.  The
+knowledge of its origin, the contempt of Captain Blunt's references to
+it, with Therese's shocked dislike of the dummy, invested that summary
+reproduction with a sort of charm, gave me a faint and miserable illusion
+of the original, less artificial than a photograph, less precise, too.
+. . . But it can't be explained.  I felt positively friendly to it as if it
+had been Rita's trusted personal attendant.  I even went so far as to
+discover that it had a sort of grace of its own.  But I never went so far
+as to address set speeches to it where it lurked shyly in its corner, or
+drag it out from there for contemplation.  I left it in peace.  I wasn't
+mad.  I was only convinced that I soon would be.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+
+Notwithstanding my misanthropy I had to see a few people on account of
+all these Royalist affairs which I couldn't very well drop, and in truth
+did not wish to drop.  They were my excuse for remaining in Europe, which
+somehow I had not the strength of mind to leave for the West Indies, or
+elsewhere.  On the other hand, my adventurous pursuit kept me in contact
+with the sea where I found occupation, protection, consolation, the
+mental relief of grappling with concrete problems, the sanity one
+acquires from close contact with simple mankind, a little self-confidence
+born from the dealings with the elemental powers of nature.  I couldn't
+give all that up.  And besides all this was related to Dona Rita.  I had,
+as it were, received it all from her own hand, from that hand the clasp
+of which was as frank as a man's and yet conveyed a unique sensation.
+The very memory of it would go through me like a wave of heat.  It was
+over that hand that we first got into the habit of quarrelling, with the
+irritability of sufferers from some obscure pain and yet half unconscious
+of their disease.  Rita's own spirit hovered over the troubled waters of
+Legitimity.  But as to the sound of the four magic letters of her name I
+was not very likely to hear it fall sweetly on my ear.  For instance, the
+distinguished personality in the world of finance with whom I had to
+confer several times, alluded to the irresistible seduction of the power
+which reigned over my heart and my mind; which had a mysterious and
+unforgettable face, the brilliance of sunshine together with the
+unfathomable splendour of the night as--Madame de Lastaola.  That's how
+that steel-grey man called the greatest mystery of the universe.  When
+uttering that assumed name he would make for himself a guardedly solemn
+and reserved face as though he were afraid lest I should presume to
+smile, lest he himself should venture to smile, and the sacred formality
+of our relations should be outraged beyond mending.
+
+He would refer in a studiously grave tone to Madame de Lastaola's wishes,
+plans, activities, instructions, movements; or picking up a letter from
+the usual litter of paper found on such men's desks, glance at it to
+refresh his memory; and, while the very sight of the handwriting would
+make my lips go dry, would ask me in a bloodless voice whether perchance
+I had "a direct communication from--er--Paris lately."  And there would
+be other maddening circumstances connected with those visits.  He would
+treat me as a serious person having a clear view of certain
+eventualities, while at the very moment my vision could see nothing but
+streaming across the wall at his back, abundant and misty, unearthly and
+adorable, a mass of tawny hair that seemed to have hot sparks tangled in
+it.  Another nuisance was the atmosphere of Royalism, of Legitimacy, that
+pervaded the room, thin as air, intangible, as though no Legitimist of
+flesh and blood had ever existed to the man's mind except perhaps myself.
+He, of course, was just simply a banker, a very distinguished, a very
+influential, and a very impeccable banker.  He persisted also in
+deferring to my judgment and sense with an over-emphasis called out by
+his perpetual surprise at my youth.  Though he had seen me many times (I
+even knew his wife) he could never get over my immature age.  He himself
+was born about fifty years old, all complete, with his iron-grey whiskers
+and his bilious eyes, which he had the habit of frequently closing during
+a conversation.  On one occasion he said to me.  "By the by, the Marquis
+of Villarel is here for a time.  He inquired after you the last time he
+called on me.  May I let him know that you are in town?"
+
+I didn't say anything to that.  The Marquis of Villarel was the Don
+Rafael of Rita's own story.  What had I to do with Spanish grandees?  And
+for that matter what had she, the woman of all time, to do with all the
+villainous or splendid disguises human dust takes upon itself?  All this
+was in the past, and I was acutely aware that for me there was no
+present, no future, nothing but a hollow pain, a vain passion of such
+magnitude that being locked up within my breast it gave me an illusion of
+lonely greatness with my miserable head uplifted amongst the stars.  But
+when I made up my mind (which I did quickly, to be done with it) to call
+on the banker's wife, almost the first thing she said to me was that the
+Marquis de Villarel was "amongst us."  She said it joyously.  If in her
+husband's room at the bank legitimism was a mere unpopulated principle,
+in her salon Legitimacy was nothing but persons.  "_Il m'a cause beaucoup
+de vous_," she said as if there had been a joke in it of which I ought to
+be proud.  I slunk away from her.  I couldn't believe that the grandee
+had talked to her about me.  I had never felt myself part of the great
+Royalist enterprise.  I confess that I was so indifferent to everything,
+so profoundly demoralized, that having once got into that drawing-room I
+hadn't the strength to get away; though I could see perfectly well my
+volatile hostess going from one to another of her acquaintances in order
+to tell them with a little gesture, "Look!  Over there--in that corner.
+That's the notorious Monsieur George."  At last she herself drove me out
+by coming to sit by me vivaciously and going into ecstasies over "_ce
+cher_ Monsieur Mills" and that magnificent Lord X; and ultimately, with a
+perfectly odious snap in the eyes and drop in the voice, dragging in the
+name of Madame de Lastaola and asking me whether I was really so much in
+the confidence of that astonishing person.  "_Vous devez bien regretter
+son depart pour Paris_," she cooed, looking with affected bashfulness at
+her fan. . . . How I got out of the room I really don't know.  There was
+also a staircase.  I did not fall down it head first--that much I am
+certain of; and I also remember that I wandered for a long time about the
+seashore and went home very late, by the way of the Prado, giving in
+passing a fearful glance at the Villa.  It showed not a gleam of light
+through the thin foliage of its trees.
+
+I spent the next day with Dominic on board the little craft watching the
+shipwrights at work on her deck.  From the way they went about their
+business those men must have been perfectly sane; and I felt greatly
+refreshed by my company during the day.  Dominic, too, devoted himself to
+his business, but his taciturnity was sardonic.  Then I dropped in at the
+cafe and Madame Leonore's loud "Eh, Signorino, here you are at last!"
+pleased me by its resonant friendliness.  But I found the sparkle of her
+black eyes as she sat down for a moment opposite me while I was having my
+drink rather difficult to bear.  That man and that woman seemed to know
+something.  What did they know?  At parting she pressed my hand
+significantly.  What did she mean?  But I didn't feel offended by these
+manifestations.  The souls within these people's breasts were not
+volatile in the manner of slightly scented and inflated bladders.
+Neither had they the impervious skins which seem the rule in the fine
+world that wants only to get on.  Somehow they had sensed that there was
+something wrong; and whatever impression they might have formed for
+themselves I had the certitude that it would not be for them a matter of
+grins at my expense.
+
+That day on returning home I found Therese looking out for me, a very
+unusual occurrence of late.  She handed me a card bearing the name of the
+Marquis de Villarel.
+
+"How did you come by this?" I asked.  She turned on at once the tap of
+her volubility and I was not surprised to learn that the grandee had not
+done such an extraordinary thing as to call upon me in person.  A young
+gentleman had brought it.  Such a nice young gentleman, she interjected
+with her piously ghoulish expression.  He was not very tall.  He had a
+very smooth complexion (that woman was incorrigible) and a nice, tiny
+black moustache.  Therese was sure that he must have been an officer _en
+las filas legitimas_.  With that notion in her head she had asked him
+about the welfare of that other model of charm and elegance, Captain
+Blunt.  To her extreme surprise the charming young gentleman with
+beautiful eyes had apparently never heard of Blunt.  But he seemed very
+much interested in his surroundings, looked all round the hall, noted the
+costly wood of the door panels, paid some attention to the silver
+statuette holding up the defective gas burner at the foot of the stairs,
+and, finally, asked whether this was in very truth the house of the most
+excellent Senora Dona Rita de Lastaola.  The question staggered Therese,
+but with great presence of mind she answered the young gentleman that she
+didn't know what excellence there was about it, but that the house was
+her property, having been given to her by her own sister.  At this the
+young gentleman looked both puzzled and angry, turned on his heel, and
+got back into his fiacre.  Why should people be angry with a poor girl
+who had never done a single reprehensible thing in her whole life?
+
+"I suppose our Rita does tell people awful lies about her poor sister."
+She sighed deeply (she had several kinds of sighs and this was the
+hopeless kind) and added reflectively, "Sin on sin, wickedness on
+wickedness!  And the longer she lives the worse it will be.  It would be
+better for our Rita to be dead."
+
+I told "Mademoiselle Therese" that it was really impossible to tell
+whether she was more stupid or atrocious; but I wasn't really very much
+shocked.  These outbursts did not signify anything in Therese.  One got
+used to them.  They were merely the expression of her rapacity and her
+righteousness; so that our conversation ended by my asking her whether
+she had any dinner ready for me that evening.
+
+"What's the good of getting you anything to eat, my dear young Monsieur,"
+she quizzed me tenderly.  "You just only peck like a little bird.  Much
+better let me save the money for you."  It will show the
+super-terrestrial nature of my misery when I say that I was quite
+surprised at Therese's view of my appetite.  Perhaps she was right.  I
+certainly did not know.  I stared hard at her and in the end she admitted
+that the dinner was in fact ready that very moment.
+
+The new young gentleman within Therese's horizon didn't surprise me very
+much.  Villarel would travel with some sort of suite, a couple of
+secretaries at least.  I had heard enough of Carlist headquarters to know
+that the man had been (very likely was still) Captain General of the
+Royal Bodyguard and was a person of great political (and domestic)
+influence at Court.  The card was, under its social form, a mere command
+to present myself before the grandee.  No Royalist devoted by conviction,
+as I must have appeared to him, could have mistaken the meaning.  I put
+the card in my pocket and after dining or not dining--I really don't
+remember--spent the evening smoking in the studio, pursuing thoughts of
+tenderness and grief, visions exalting and cruel.  From time to time I
+looked at the dummy.  I even got up once from the couch on which I had
+been writhing like a worm and walked towards it as if to touch it, but
+refrained, not from sudden shame but from sheer despair.  By and by
+Therese drifted in.  It was then late and, I imagine, she was on her way
+to bed.  She looked the picture of cheerful, rustic innocence and started
+propounding to me a conundrum which began with the words:
+
+"If our Rita were to die before long . . ."
+
+She didn't get any further because I had jumped up and frightened her by
+shouting: "Is she ill?  What has happened?  Have you had a letter?"
+
+She had had a letter.  I didn't ask her to show it to me, though I
+daresay she would have done so.  I had an idea that there was no meaning
+in anything, at least no meaning that mattered.  But the interruption had
+made Therese apparently forget her sinister conundrum.  She observed me
+with her shrewd, unintelligent eyes for a bit, and then with the fatuous
+remark about the Law being just she left me to the horrors of the studio.
+I believe I went to sleep there from sheer exhaustion.  Some time during
+the night I woke up chilled to the bone and in the dark.  These were
+horrors and no mistake.  I dragged myself upstairs to bed past the
+indefatigable statuette holding up the ever-miserable light.  The
+black-and-white hall was like an ice-house.
+
+The main consideration which induced me to call on the Marquis of
+Villarel was the fact that after all I was a discovery of Dona Rita's,
+her own recruit.  My fidelity and steadfastness had been guaranteed by
+her and no one else.  I couldn't bear the idea of her being criticized by
+every empty-headed chatterer belonging to the Cause.  And as, apart from
+that, nothing mattered much, why, then--I would get this over.
+
+But it appeared that I had not reflected sufficiently on all the
+consequences of that step.  First of all the sight of the Villa looking
+shabbily cheerful in the sunshine (but not containing her any longer) was
+so perturbing that I very nearly went away from the gate.  Then when I
+got in after much hesitation--being admitted by the man in the green
+baize apron who recognized me--the thought of entering that room, out of
+which she was gone as completely as if she had been dead, gave me such an
+emotion that I had to steady myself against the table till the faintness
+was past.  Yet I was irritated as at a treason when the man in the baize
+apron instead of letting me into the Pompeiian dining-room crossed the
+hall to another door not at all in the Pompeiian style (more Louis XV
+rather--that Villa was like a _Salade Russe_ of styles) and introduced me
+into a big, light room full of very modern furniture.  The portrait _en
+pied_ of an officer in a sky-blue uniform hung on the end wall.  The
+officer had a small head, a black beard cut square, a robust body, and
+leaned with gauntleted hands on the simple hilt of a straight sword.
+That striking picture dominated a massive mahogany desk, and, in front of
+this desk, a very roomy, tall-backed armchair of dark green velvet.  I
+thought I had been announced into an empty room till glancing along the
+extremely loud carpet I detected a pair of feet under the armchair.
+
+I advanced towards it and discovered a little man, who had made no sound
+or movement till I came into his view, sunk deep in the green velvet.  He
+altered his position slowly and rested his hollow, black, quietly burning
+eyes on my face in prolonged scrutiny.  I detected something comminatory
+in his yellow, emaciated countenance, but I believe now he was simply
+startled by my youth.  I bowed profoundly.  He extended a meagre little
+hand.
+
+"Take a chair, Don Jorge."
+
+He was very small, frail, and thin, but his voice was not languid, though
+he spoke hardly above his breath.  Such was the envelope and the voice of
+the fanatical soul belonging to the Grand-master of Ceremonies and
+Captain General of the Bodyguard at the Headquarters of the Legitimist
+Court, now detached on a special mission.  He was all fidelity,
+inflexibility, and sombre conviction, but like some great saints he had
+very little body to keep all these merits in.
+
+"You are very young," he remarked, to begin with.  "The matters on which
+I desired to converse with you are very grave."
+
+"I was under the impression that your Excellency wished to see me at
+once.  But if your Excellency prefers it I will return in, say, seven
+years' time when I may perhaps be old enough to talk about grave
+matters."
+
+He didn't stir hand or foot and not even the quiver of an eyelid proved
+that he had heard my shockingly unbecoming retort.
+
+"You have been recommended to us by a noble and loyal lady, in whom His
+Majesty--whom God preserve--reposes an entire confidence.  God will
+reward her as she deserves and you, too, Senor, according to the
+disposition you bring to this great work which has the blessing (here he
+crossed himself) of our Holy Mother the Church."
+
+"I suppose your Excellency understands that in all this I am not looking
+for reward of any kind."
+
+At this he made a faint, almost ethereal grimace.
+
+"I was speaking of the spiritual blessing which rewards the service of
+religion and will be of benefit to your soul," he explained with a slight
+touch of acidity.  "The other is perfectly understood and your fidelity
+is taken for granted.  His Majesty--whom God preserve--has been already
+pleased to signify his satisfaction with your services to the most noble
+and loyal Dona Rita by a letter in his own hand."
+
+Perhaps he expected me to acknowledge this announcement in some way,
+speech, or bow, or something, because before my immobility he made a
+slight movement in his chair which smacked of impatience.  "I am afraid,
+Senor, that you are affected by the spirit of scoffing and irreverence
+which pervades this unhappy country of France in which both you and I are
+strangers, I believe.  Are you a young man of that sort?"
+
+"I am a very good gun-runner, your Excellency," I answered quietly.
+
+He bowed his head gravely.  "We are aware.  But I was looking for the
+motives which ought to have their pure source in religion."
+
+"I must confess frankly that I have not reflected on my motives," I said.
+"It is enough for me to know that they are not dishonourable and that
+anybody can see they are not the motives of an adventurer seeking some
+sordid advantage."
+
+He had listened patiently and when he saw that there was nothing more to
+come he ended the discussion.
+
+"Senor, we should reflect upon our motives.  It is salutary for our
+conscience and is recommended (he crossed himself) by our Holy Mother the
+Church.  I have here certain letters from Paris on which I would consult
+your young sagacity which is accredited to us by the most loyal Dona
+Rita."
+
+The sound of that name on his lips was simply odious.  I was convinced
+that this man of forms and ceremonies and fanatical royalism was
+perfectly heartless.  Perhaps he reflected on his motives; but it seemed
+to me that his conscience could be nothing else but a monstrous thing
+which very few actions could disturb appreciably.  Yet for the credit of
+Dona Rita I did not withhold from him my young sagacity.  What he thought
+of it I don't know. The matters we discussed were not of course of high
+policy, though from the point of view of the war in the south they were
+important enough.  We agreed on certain things to be done, and finally,
+always out of regard for Dona Rita's credit, I put myself generally at
+his disposition or of any Carlist agent he would appoint in his place;
+for I did not suppose that he would remain very long in Marseilles.  He
+got out of the chair laboriously, like a sick child might have done.  The
+audience was over but he noticed my eyes wandering to the portrait and he
+said in his measured, breathed-out tones:
+
+"I owe the pleasure of having this admirable work here to the gracious
+attention of Madame de Lastaola, who, knowing my attachment to the royal
+person of my Master, has sent it down from Paris to greet me in this
+house which has been given up for my occupation also through her
+generosity to the Royal Cause.  Unfortunately she, too, is touched by the
+infection of this irreverent and unfaithful age.  But she is young yet.
+She is young."
+
+These last words were pronounced in a strange tone of menace as though he
+were supernaturally aware of some suspended disasters.  With his burning
+eyes he was the image of an Inquisitor with an unconquerable soul in that
+frail body.  But suddenly he dropped his eyelids and the conversation
+finished as characteristically as it had begun: with a slow, dismissing
+inclination of the head and an "Adios, Senor--may God guard you from
+sin."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+
+I must say that for the next three months I threw myself into my unlawful
+trade with a sort of desperation, dogged and hopeless, like a fairly
+decent fellow who takes deliberately to drink.  The business was getting
+dangerous.  The bands in the South were not very well organized, worked
+with no very definite plan, and now were beginning to be pretty closely
+hunted.  The arrangements for the transport of supplies were going to
+pieces; our friends ashore were getting scared; and it was no joke to
+find after a day of skilful dodging that there was no one at the landing
+place and have to go out again with our compromising cargo, to slink and
+lurk about the coast for another week or so, unable to trust anybody and
+looking at every vessel we met with suspicion.  Once we were ambushed by
+a lot of "rascally Carabineers," as Dominic called them, who hid
+themselves among the rocks after disposing a train of mules well in view
+on the seashore.  Luckily, on evidence which I could never understand,
+Dominic detected something suspicious.  Perhaps it was by virtue of some
+sixth sense that men born for unlawful occupations may be gifted with.
+"There is a smell of treachery about this," he remarked suddenly, turning
+at his oar.  (He and I were pulling alone in a little boat to
+reconnoitre.)  I couldn't detect any smell and I regard to this day our
+escape on that occasion as, properly speaking, miraculous.  Surely some
+supernatural power must have struck upwards the barrels of the
+Carabineers' rifles, for they missed us by yards.  And as the Carabineers
+have the reputation of shooting straight, Dominic, after swearing most
+horribly, ascribed our escape to the particular guardian angel that looks
+after crazy young gentlemen.  Dominic believed in angels in a
+conventional way, but laid no claim to having one of his own.  Soon
+afterwards, while sailing quietly at night, we found ourselves suddenly
+near a small coasting vessel, also without lights, which all at once
+treated us to a volley of rifle fire.  Dominic's mighty and inspired
+yell: "_A plat ventre_!" and also an unexpected roll to windward saved
+all our lives.  Nobody got a scratch.  We were past in a moment and in a
+breeze then blowing we had the heels of anything likely to give us chase.
+But an hour afterwards, as we stood side by side peering into the
+darkness, Dominic was heard to mutter through his teeth: "_Le metier se
+gate_."  I, too, had the feeling that the trade, if not altogether
+spoiled, had seen its best days.  But I did not care.  In fact, for my
+purpose it was rather better, a more potent influence; like the stronger
+intoxication of raw spirit.  A volley in the dark after all was not such
+a bad thing.  Only a moment before we had received it, there, in that
+calm night of the sea full of freshness and soft whispers, I had been
+looking at an enchanting turn of a head in a faint light of its own, the
+tawny hair with snared red sparks brushed up from the nape of a white
+neck and held up on high by an arrow of gold feathered with brilliants
+and with ruby gleams all along its shaft.  That jewelled ornament, which
+I remember often telling Rita was of a very Philistinish conception (it
+was in some way connected with a tortoiseshell comb) occupied an undue
+place in my memory, tried to come into some sort of significance even in
+my sleep.  Often I dreamed of her with white limbs shimmering in the
+gloom like a nymph haunting a riot of foliage, and raising a perfect
+round arm to take an arrow of gold out of her hair to throw it at me by
+hand, like a dart.  It came on, a whizzing trail of light, but I always
+woke up before it struck.  Always.  Invariably.  It never had a chance.
+A volley of small arms was much more likely to do the business some
+day--or night.
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+At last came the day when everything slipped out of my grasp.  The little
+vessel, broken and gone like the only toy of a lonely child, the sea
+itself, which had swallowed it, throwing me on shore after a shipwreck
+that instead of a fair fight left in me the memory of a suicide.  It took
+away all that there was in me of independent life, but just failed to
+take me out of the world, which looked then indeed like Another World fit
+for no one else but unrepentant sinners.  Even Dominic failed me, his
+moral entity destroyed by what to him was a most tragic ending of our
+common enterprise.  The lurid swiftness of it all was like a stunning
+thunder-clap--and, one evening, I found myself weary, heartsore, my brain
+still dazed and with awe in my heart entering Marseilles by way of the
+railway station, after many adventures, one more disagreeable than
+another, involving privations, great exertions, a lot of difficulties
+with all sorts of people who looked upon me evidently more as a
+discreditable vagabond deserving the attentions of gendarmes than a
+respectable (if crazy) young gentleman attended by a guardian angel of
+his own.  I must confess that I slunk out of the railway station shunning
+its many lights as if, invariably, failure made an outcast of a man.  I
+hadn't any money in my pocket.  I hadn't even the bundle and the stick of
+a destitute wayfarer.  I was unshaven and unwashed, and my heart was
+faint within me.  My attire was such that I daren't approach the rank of
+fiacres, where indeed I could perceive only two pairs of lamps, of which
+one suddenly drove away while I looked.  The other I gave up to the
+fortunate of this earth.  I didn't believe in my power of persuasion.  I
+had no powers.  I slunk on and on, shivering with cold, through the
+uproarious streets.  Bedlam was loose in them.  It was the time of
+Carnival.
+
+Small objects of no value have the secret of sticking to a man in an
+astonishing way.  I had nearly lost my liberty and even my life, I had
+lost my ship, a money-belt full of gold, I had lost my companions, had
+parted from my friend; my occupation, my only link with life, my touch
+with the sea, my cap and jacket were gone--but a small penknife and a
+latchkey had never parted company with me.  With the latchkey I opened
+the door of refuge.  The hall wore its deaf-and-dumb air, its
+black-and-white stillness.
+
+The sickly gas-jet still struggled bravely with adversity at the end of
+the raised silver arm of the statuette which had kept to a hair's breadth
+its graceful pose on the toes of its left foot; and the staircase lost
+itself in the shadows above.  Therese was parsimonious with the lights.
+To see all this was surprising.  It seemed to me that all the things I
+had known ought to have come down with a crash at the moment of the final
+catastrophe on the Spanish coast.  And there was Therese herself
+descending the stairs, frightened but plucky.  Perhaps she thought that
+she would be murdered this time for certain.  She had a strange,
+unemotional conviction that the house was particularly convenient for a
+crime.  One could never get to the bottom of her wild notions which she
+held with the stolidity of a peasant allied to the outward serenity of a
+nun.  She quaked all over as she came down to her doom, but when she
+recognized me she got such a shock that she sat down suddenly on the
+lowest step.  She did not expect me for another week at least, and,
+besides, she explained, the state I was in made her blood take "one
+turn."
+
+Indeed my plight seemed either to have called out or else repressed her
+true nature.  But who had ever fathomed her nature!  There was none of
+her treacly volubility.  There were none of her "dear young gentlemans"
+and "poor little hearts" and references to sin.  In breathless silence
+she ran about the house getting my room ready, lighting fires and
+gas-jets and even hauling at me to help me up the stairs.  Yes, she did
+lay hands on me for that charitable purpose.  They trembled.  Her pale
+eyes hardly left my face.  "What brought you here like this?" she
+whispered once.
+
+"If I were to tell you, Mademoiselle Therese, you would see there the
+hand of God."
+
+She dropped the extra pillow she was carrying and then nearly fell over
+it.  "Oh, dear heart," she murmured, and ran off to the kitchen.
+
+I sank into bed as into a cloud and Therese reappeared very misty and
+offering me something in a cup.  I believe it was hot milk, and after I
+drank it she took the cup and stood looking at me fixedly.  I managed to
+say with difficulty: "Go away," whereupon she vanished as if by magic
+before the words were fairly out of my mouth.  Immediately afterwards the
+sunlight forced through the slats of the jalousies its diffused glow, and
+Therese was there again as if by magic, saying in a distant voice: "It's
+midday". . . Youth will have its rights.  I had slept like a stone for
+seventeen hours.
+
+I suppose an honourable bankrupt would know such an awakening: the sense
+of catastrophe, the shrinking from the necessity of beginning life again,
+the faint feeling that there are misfortunes which must be paid for by a
+hanging.  In the course of the morning Therese informed me that the
+apartment usually occupied by Mr. Blunt was vacant and added mysteriously
+that she intended to keep it vacant for a time, because she had been
+instructed to do so.  I couldn't imagine why Blunt should wish to return
+to Marseilles.  She told me also that the house was empty except for
+myself and the two dancing girls with their father.  Those people had
+been away for some time as the girls had engagements in some Italian
+summer theatres, but apparently they had secured a re-engagement for the
+winter and were now back.  I let Therese talk because it kept my
+imagination from going to work on subjects which, I had made up my mind,
+were no concern of mine.  But I went out early to perform an unpleasant
+task.  It was only proper that I should let the Carlist agent ensconced
+in the Prado Villa know of the sudden ending of my activities.  It would
+be grave enough news for him, and I did not like to be its bearer for
+reasons which were mainly personal.  I resembled Dominic in so far that
+I, too, disliked failure.
+
+The Marquis of Villarel had of course gone long before.  The man who was
+there was another type of Carlist altogether, and his temperament was
+that of a trader.  He was the chief purveyor of the Legitimist armies, an
+honest broker of stores, and enjoyed a great reputation for cleverness.
+His important task kept him, of course, in France, but his young wife,
+whose beauty and devotion to her King were well known, represented him
+worthily at Headquarters, where his own appearances were extremely rare.
+The dissimilar but united loyalties of those two people had been rewarded
+by the title of baron and the ribbon of some order or other.  The gossip
+of the Legitimist circles appreciated those favours with smiling
+indulgence.  He was the man who had been so distressed and frightened by
+Dona Rita's first visit to Tolosa.  He had an extreme regard for his
+wife.  And in that sphere of clashing arms and unceasing intrigue nobody
+would have smiled then at his agitation if the man himself hadn't been
+somewhat grotesque.
+
+He must have been startled when I sent in my name, for he didn't of
+course expect to see me yet--nobody expected me.  He advanced soft-footed
+down the room.  With his jutting nose, flat-topped skull and sable
+garments he recalled an obese raven, and when he heard of the disaster he
+manifested his astonishment and concern in a most plebeian manner by a
+low and expressive whistle.  I, of course, could not share his
+consternation.  My feelings in that connection were of a different order;
+but I was annoyed at his unintelligent stare.
+
+"I suppose," I said, "you will take it on yourself to advise Dona Rita,
+who is greatly interested in this affair."
+
+"Yes, but I was given to understand that Madame de Lastaola was to leave
+Paris either yesterday or this morning."
+
+It was my turn to stare dumbly before I could manage to ask: "For
+Tolosa?" in a very knowing tone.
+
+Whether it was the droop of his head, play of light, or some other subtle
+cause, his nose seemed to have grown perceptibly longer.
+
+"That, Senor, is the place where the news has got to be conveyed without
+undue delay," he said in an agitated wheeze.  "I could, of course,
+telegraph to our agent in Bayonne who would find a messenger.  But I
+don't like, I don't like!  The Alphonsists have agents, too, who hang
+about the telegraph offices.  It's no use letting the enemy get that
+news."
+
+He was obviously very confused, unhappy, and trying to think of two
+different things at once.
+
+"Sit down, Don George, sit down."  He absolutely forced a cigar on me.
+"I am extremely distressed.  That--I mean Dona Rita is undoubtedly on her
+way to Tolosa.  This is very frightful."
+
+I must say, however, that there was in the man some sense of duty.  He
+mastered his private fears.  After some cogitation he murmured: "There is
+another way of getting the news to Headquarters.  Suppose you write me a
+formal letter just stating the facts, the unfortunate facts, which I will
+be able to forward.  There is an agent of ours, a fellow I have been
+employing for purchasing supplies, a perfectly honest man.  He is coming
+here from the north by the ten o'clock train with some papers for me of a
+confidential nature.  I was rather embarrassed about it.  It wouldn't do
+for him to get into any sort of trouble.  He is not very intelligent.  I
+wonder, Don George, whether you would consent to meet him at the station
+and take care of him generally till to-morrow.  I don't like the idea of
+him going about alone.  Then, to-morrow night, we would send him on to
+Tolosa by the west coast route, with the news; and then he can also call
+on Dona Rita who will no doubt be already there. . . ."  He became again
+distracted all in a moment and actually went so far as to wring his fat
+hands.  "Oh, yes, she will be there!" he exclaimed in most pathetic
+accents.
+
+I was not in the humour to smile at anything, and he must have been
+satisfied with the gravity with which I beheld his extraordinary antics.
+My mind was very far away.  I thought: Why not?  Why shouldn't I also
+write a letter to Dona Rita, telling her that now nothing stood in the
+way of my leaving Europe, because, really, the enterprise couldn't be
+begun again; that things that come to an end can never be begun again.
+The idea--never again--had complete possession of my mind.  I could think
+of nothing else.  Yes, I would write.  The worthy Commissary General of
+the Carlist forces was under the impression that I was looking at him;
+but what I had in my eye was a jumble of butterfly women and winged
+youths and the soft sheen of Argand lamps gleaming on an arrow of gold in
+the hair of a head that seemed to evade my outstretched hand.
+
+"Oh, yes," I said, "I have nothing to do and even nothing to think of
+just now, I will meet your man as he gets off the train at ten o'clock
+to-night.  What's he like?"
+
+"Oh, he has a black moustache and whiskers, and his chin is shaved," said
+the newly-fledged baron cordially.  "A very honest fellow.  I always
+found him very useful.  His name is Jose Ortega."
+
+He was perfectly self-possessed now, and walking soft-footed accompanied
+me to the door of the room.  He shook hands with a melancholy smile.
+"This is a very frightful situation.  My poor wife will be quite
+distracted.  She is such a patriot.  Many thanks, Don George.  You
+relieve me greatly.  The fellow is rather stupid and rather bad-tempered.
+Queer creature, but very honest!  Oh, very honest!"
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+
+It was the last evening of Carnival.  The same masks, the same yells, the
+same mad rushes, the same bedlam of disguised humanity blowing about the
+streets in the great gusts of mistral that seemed to make them dance like
+dead leaves on an earth where all joy is watched by death.
+
+It was exactly twelve months since that other carnival evening when I had
+felt a little weary and a little lonely but at peace with all mankind.
+It must have been--to a day or two.  But on this evening it wasn't merely
+loneliness that I felt.  I felt bereaved with a sense of a complete and
+universal loss in which there was perhaps more resentment than mourning;
+as if the world had not been taken away from me by an august decree but
+filched from my innocence by an underhand fate at the very moment when it
+had disclosed to my passion its warm and generous beauty.  This
+consciousness of universal loss had this advantage that it induced
+something resembling a state of philosophic indifference.  I walked up to
+the railway station caring as little for the cold blasts of wind as
+though I had been going to the scaffold.  The delay of the train did not
+irritate me in the least.  I had finally made up my mind to write a
+letter to Dona Rita; and this "honest fellow" for whom I was waiting
+would take it to her.  He would have no difficulty in Tolosa in finding
+Madame de Lastaola.  The General Headquarters, which was also a Court,
+would be buzzing with comments on her presence.  Most likely that "honest
+fellow" was already known to Dona Rita.  For all I knew he might have
+been her discovery just as I was.  Probably I, too, was regarded as an
+"honest fellow" enough; but stupid--since it was clear that my luck was
+not inexhaustible.  I hoped that while carrying my letter the man would
+not let himself be caught by some Alphonsist guerilla who would, of
+course, shoot him.  But why should he?  I, for instance, had escaped with
+my life from a much more dangerous enterprise than merely passing through
+the frontier line in charge of some trustworthy guide.  I pictured the
+fellow to myself trudging over the stony slopes and scrambling down wild
+ravines with my letter to Dona Rita in his pocket.  It would be such a
+letter of farewell as no lover had ever written, no woman in the world
+had ever read, since the beginning of love on earth.  It would be worthy
+of the woman.  No experience, no memories, no dead traditions of passion
+or language would inspire it.  She herself would be its sole inspiration.
+She would see her own image in it as in a mirror; and perhaps then she
+would understand what it was I was saying farewell to on the very
+threshold of my life.  A breath of vanity passed through my brain.  A
+letter as moving as her mere existence was moving would be something
+unique.  I regretted I was not a poet.
+
+I woke up to a great noise of feet, a sudden influx of people through the
+doors of the platform.  I made out my man's whiskers at once--not that
+they were enormous, but because I had been warned beforehand of their
+existence by the excellent Commissary General.  At first I saw nothing of
+him but his whiskers: they were black and cut somewhat in the shape of a
+shark's fin and so very fine that the least breath of air animated them
+into a sort of playful restlessness.  The man's shoulders were hunched up
+and when he had made his way clear of the throng of passengers I
+perceived him as an unhappy and shivery being.  Obviously he didn't
+expect to be met, because when I murmured an enquiring, "Senor Ortega?"
+into his ear he swerved away from me and nearly dropped a little handbag
+he was carrying.  His complexion was uniformly pale, his mouth was red,
+but not engaging.  His social status was not very definite.  He was
+wearing a dark blue overcoat of no particular cut, his aspect had no
+relief; yet those restless side-whiskers flanking his red mouth and the
+suspicious expression of his black eyes made him noticeable.  This I
+regretted the more because I caught sight of two skulking fellows,
+looking very much like policemen in plain clothes, watching us from a
+corner of the great hall.  I hurried my man into a fiacre.  He had been
+travelling from early morning on cross-country lines and after we got on
+terms a little confessed to being very hungry and cold.  His red lips
+trembled and I noted an underhand, cynical curiosity when he had occasion
+to raise his eyes to my face.  I was in some doubt how to dispose of him
+but as we rolled on at a jog trot I came to the conclusion that the best
+thing to do would be to organize for him a shake-down in the studio.
+Obscure lodging houses are precisely the places most looked after by the
+police, and even the best hotels are bound to keep a register of
+arrivals.  I was very anxious that nothing should stop his projected
+mission of courier to headquarters.  As we passed various street corners
+where the mistral blast struck at us fiercely I could feel him shivering
+by my side.  However, Therese would have lighted the iron stove in the
+studio before retiring for the night, and, anyway, I would have to turn
+her out to make up a bed on the couch.  Service of the King!  I must say
+that she was amiable and didn't seem to mind anything one asked her to
+do.  Thus while the fellow slumbered on the divan I would sit upstairs in
+my room setting down on paper those great words of passion and sorrow
+that seethed in my brain and even must have forced themselves in murmurs
+on to my lips, because the man by my side suddenly asked me: "What did
+you say?"--"Nothing," I answered, very much surprised.  In the shifting
+light of the street lamps he looked the picture of bodily misery with his
+chattering teeth and his whiskers blown back flat over his ears.  But
+somehow he didn't arouse my compassion.  He was swearing to himself, in
+French and Spanish, and I tried to soothe him by the assurance that we
+had not much farther to go.  "I am starving," he remarked acidly, and I
+felt a little compunction.  Clearly, the first thing to do was to feed
+him.  We were then entering the Cannebiere and as I didn't care to show
+myself with him in the fashionable restaurant where a new face (and such
+a face, too) would be remarked, I pulled up the fiacre at the door of the
+Maison Doree.  That was more of a place of general resort where, in the
+multitude of casual patrons, he would pass unnoticed.
+
+For this last night of carnival the big house had decorated all its
+balconies with rows of coloured paper lanterns right up to the roof.  I
+led the way to the grand salon, for as to private rooms they had been all
+retained days before.  There was a great crowd of people in costume, but
+by a piece of good luck we managed to secure a little table in a corner.
+The revellers, intent on their pleasure, paid no attention to us.  Senor
+Ortega trod on my heels and after sitting down opposite me threw an
+ill-natured glance at the festive scene.  It might have been about
+half-past ten, then.
+
+Two glasses of wine he drank one after another did not improve his
+temper.  He only ceased to shiver.  After he had eaten something it must
+have occurred to him that he had no reason to bear me a grudge and he
+tried to assume a civil and even friendly manner.  His mouth, however,
+betrayed an abiding bitterness.  I mean when he smiled.  In repose it was
+a very expressionless mouth, only it was too red to be altogether
+ordinary.  The whole of him was like that: the whiskers too black, the
+hair too shiny, the forehead too white, the eyes too mobile; and he lent
+you his attention with an air of eagerness which made you uncomfortable.
+He seemed to expect you to give yourself away by some unconsidered word
+that he would snap up with delight.  It was that peculiarity that somehow
+put me on my guard.  I had no idea who I was facing across the table and
+as a matter of fact I did not care.  All my impressions were blurred; and
+even the promptings of my instinct were the haziest thing imaginable.
+Now and then I had acute hallucinations of a woman with an arrow of gold
+in her hair.  This caused alternate moments of exaltation and depression
+from which I tried to take refuge in conversation; but Senor Ortega was
+not stimulating.  He was preoccupied with personal matters.  When
+suddenly he asked me whether I knew why he had been called away from his
+work (he had been buying supplies from peasants somewhere in Central
+France), I answered that I didn't know what the reason was originally,
+but I had an idea that the present intention was to make of him a
+courier, bearing certain messages from Baron H. to the Quartel Real in
+Tolosa.
+
+He glared at me like a basilisk.  "And why have I been met like this?" he
+enquired with an air of being prepared to hear a lie.
+
+I explained that it was the Baron's wish, as a matter of prudence and to
+avoid any possible trouble which might arise from enquiries by the
+police.
+
+He took it badly.  "What nonsense."  He was--he said--an employe (for
+several years) of Hernandez Brothers in Paris, an importing firm, and he
+was travelling on their business--as he could prove.  He dived into his
+side pocket and produced a handful of folded papers of all sorts which he
+plunged back again instantly.
+
+And even then I didn't know whom I had there, opposite me, busy now
+devouring a slice of pate de foie gras.  Not in the least.  It never
+entered my head.  How could it?  The Rita that haunted me had no history;
+she was but the principle of life charged with fatality.  Her form was
+only a mirage of desire decoying one step by step into despair.
+
+Senor Ortega gulped down some more wine and suggested I should tell him
+who I was.  "It's only right I should know," he added.
+
+This could not be gainsaid; and to a man connected with the Carlist
+organization the shortest way was to introduce myself as that "Monsieur
+George" of whom he had probably heard.
+
+He leaned far over the table, till his very breast-bone was over the
+edge, as though his eyes had been stilettos and he wanted to drive them
+home into my brain.  It was only much later that I understood how near
+death I had been at that moment.  But the knives on the tablecloth were
+the usual restaurant knives with rounded ends and about as deadly as
+pieces of hoop-iron.  Perhaps in the very gust of his fury he remembered
+what a French restaurant knife is like and something sane within him made
+him give up the sudden project of cutting my heart out where I sat.  For
+it could have been nothing but a sudden impulse.  His settled purpose was
+quite other.  It was not my heart that he was after.  His fingers indeed
+were groping amongst the knife handles by the side of his plate but what
+captivated my attention for a moment were his red lips which were formed
+into an odd, sly, insinuating smile.  Heard!  To be sure he had heard!
+The chief of the great arms smuggling organization!
+
+"Oh!" I said, "that's giving me too much importance."  The person
+responsible and whom I looked upon as chief of all the business was, as
+he might have heard, too, a certain noble and loyal lady.
+
+"I am as noble as she is," he snapped peevishly, and I put him down at
+once as a very offensive beast.  "And as to being loyal, what is that?
+It is being truthful!  It is being faithful!  I know all about her."
+
+I managed to preserve an air of perfect unconcern.  He wasn't a fellow to
+whom one could talk of Dona Rita.
+
+"You are a Basque," I said.
+
+He admitted rather contemptuously that he was a Basque and even then the
+truth did not dawn upon me.  I suppose that with the hidden egoism of a
+lover I was thinking of myself, of myself alone in relation to Dona Rita,
+not of Dona Rita herself.  He, too, obviously.  He said: "I am an
+educated man, but I know her people, all peasants.  There is a sister, an
+uncle, a priest, a peasant, too, and perfectly unenlightened.  One can't
+expect much from a priest (I am a free-thinker of course), but he is
+really too bad, more like a brute beast.  As to all her people, mostly
+dead now, they never were of any account.  There was a little land, but
+they were always working on other people's farms, a barefooted gang, a
+starved lot.  I ought to know because we are distant relations.
+Twentieth cousins or something of the sort.  Yes, I am related to that
+most loyal lady.  And what is she, after all, but a Parisian woman with
+innumerable lovers, as I have been told."
+
+"I don't think your information is very correct," I said, affecting to
+yawn slightly.  "This is mere gossip of the gutter and I am surprised at
+you, who really know nothing about it--"
+
+But the disgusting animal had fallen into a brown study.  The hair of his
+very whiskers was perfectly still.  I had now given up all idea of the
+letter to Rita.  Suddenly he spoke again:
+
+"Women are the origin of all evil.  One should never trust them.  They
+have no honour.  No honour!" he repeated, striking his breast with his
+closed fist on which the knuckles stood out very white.  "I left my
+village many years ago and of course I am perfectly satisfied with my
+position and I don't know why I should trouble my head about this loyal
+lady.  I suppose that's the way women get on in the world."
+
+I felt convinced that he was no proper person to be a messenger to
+headquarters.  He struck me as altogether untrustworthy and perhaps not
+quite sane.  This was confirmed by him saying suddenly with no visible
+connection and as if it had been forced from him by some agonizing
+process: "I was a boy once," and then stopping dead short with a smile.
+He had a smile that frightened one by its association of malice and
+anguish.
+
+"Will you have anything more to eat?" I asked.
+
+He declined dully.  He had had enough.  But he drained the last of a
+bottle into his glass and accepted a cigar which I offered him.  While he
+was lighting it I had a sort of confused impression that he wasn't such a
+stranger to me as I had assumed he was; and yet, on the other hand, I was
+perfectly certain I had never seen him before.  Next moment I felt that I
+could have knocked him down if he hadn't looked so amazingly unhappy,
+while he came out with the astounding question: "Senor, have you ever
+been a lover in your young days?"
+
+"What do you mean?" I asked.  "How old do you think I am?"
+
+"That's true," he said, gazing at me in a way in which the damned gaze
+out of their cauldrons of boiling pitch at some soul walking scot free in
+the place of torment.  "It's true, you don't seem to have anything on
+your mind."  He assumed an air of ease, throwing an arm over the back of
+his chair and blowing the smoke through the gash of his twisted red
+mouth.  "Tell me," he said, "between men, you know, has this--wonderful
+celebrity--what does she call herself?  How long has she been your
+mistress?"
+
+I reflected rapidly that if I knocked him over, chair and all, by a
+sudden blow from the shoulder it would bring about infinite complications
+beginning with a visit to the Commissaire de Police on night-duty, and
+ending in God knows what scandal and disclosures of political kind;
+because there was no telling what, or how much, this outrageous brute
+might choose to say and how many people he might not involve in a most
+undesirable publicity.  He was smoking his cigar with a poignantly
+mocking air and not even looking at me.  One can't hit like that a man
+who isn't even looking at one; and then, just as I was looking at him
+swinging his leg with a caustic smile and stony eyes, I felt sorry for
+the creature.  It was only his body that was there in that chair.  It was
+manifest to me that his soul was absent in some hell of its own.  At that
+moment I attained the knowledge of who it was I had before me.  This was
+the man of whom both Dona Rita and Rose were so much afraid.  It remained
+then for me to look after him for the night and then arrange with Baron
+H. that he should be sent away the very next day--and anywhere but to
+Tolosa.  Yes, evidently, I mustn't lose sight of him.  I proposed in the
+calmest tone that we should go on where he could get his much-needed
+rest.  He rose with alacrity, picked up his little hand-bag, and, walking
+out before me, no doubt looked a very ordinary person to all eyes but
+mine.  It was then past eleven, not much, because we had not been in that
+restaurant quite an hour, but the routine of the town's night-life being
+upset during the Carnival the usual row of fiacres outside the Maison
+Doree was not there; in fact, there were very few carriages about.
+Perhaps the coachmen had assumed Pierrot costumes and were rushing about
+the streets on foot yelling with the rest of the population.  "We will
+have to walk," I said after a while.--"Oh, yes, let us walk," assented
+Senor Ortega, "or I will be frozen here."  It was like a plaint of
+unutterable wretchedness.  I had a fancy that all his natural heat had
+abandoned his limbs and gone to his brain.  It was otherwise with me; my
+head was cool but I didn't find the night really so very cold.  We
+stepped out briskly side by side.  My lucid thinking was, as it were,
+enveloped by the wide shouting of the consecrated Carnival gaiety.  I
+have heard many noises since, but nothing that gave me such an intimate
+impression of the savage instincts hidden in the breast of mankind; these
+yells of festivity suggested agonizing fear, rage of murder, ferocity of
+lust, and the irremediable joylessness of human condition: yet they were
+emitted by people who were convinced that they were amusing themselves
+supremely, traditionally, with the sanction of ages, with the approval of
+their conscience--and no mistake about it whatever!  Our appearance, the
+soberness of our gait made us conspicuous.  Once or twice, by common
+inspiration, masks rushed forward and forming a circle danced round us
+uttering discordant shouts of derision; for we were an outrage to the
+peculiar proprieties of the hour, and besides we were obviously lonely
+and defenceless.  On those occasions there was nothing for it but to
+stand still till the flurry was over.  My companion, however, would stamp
+his feet with rage, and I must admit that I myself regretted not having
+provided for our wearing a couple of false noses, which would have been
+enough to placate the just resentment of those people.  We might have
+also joined in the dance, but for some reason or other it didn't occur to
+us; and I heard once a high, clear woman's voice stigmatizing us for a
+"species of swelled heads" (_espece d'enfles_).  We proceeded sedately,
+my companion muttered with rage, and I was able to resume my thinking.
+It was based on the deep persuasion that the man at my side was insane
+with quite another than Carnivalesque lunacy which comes on at one stated
+time of the year.  He was fundamentally mad, though not perhaps
+completely; which of course made him all the greater, I won't say danger
+but, nuisance.
+
+I remember once a young doctor expounding the theory that most
+catastrophes in family circles, surprising episodes in public affairs and
+disasters in private life, had their origin in the fact that the world
+was full of half-mad people.  He asserted that they were the real
+majority.  When asked whether he considered himself as belonging to the
+majority, he said frankly that he didn't think so; unless the folly of
+voicing this view in a company, so utterly unable to appreciate all its
+horror, could be regarded as the first symptom of his own fate.  We
+shouted down him and his theory, but there is no doubt that it had thrown
+a chill on the gaiety of our gathering.
+
+We had now entered a quieter quarter of the town and Senor Ortega had
+ceased his muttering.  For myself I had not the slightest doubt of my own
+sanity.  It was proved to me by the way I could apply my intelligence to
+the problem of what was to be done with Senor Ortega.  Generally, he was
+unfit to be trusted with any mission whatever.  The unstability of his
+temper was sure to get him into a scrape.  Of course carrying a letter to
+Headquarters was not a very complicated matter; and as to that I would
+have trusted willingly a properly trained dog.  My private letter to Dona
+Rita, the wonderful, the unique letter of farewell, I had given up for
+the present.  Naturally I thought of the Ortega problem mainly in the
+terms of Dona Rita's safety.  Her image presided at every council, at
+every conflict of my mind, and dominated every faculty of my senses.  It
+floated before my eyes, it touched my elbow, it guarded my right side and
+my left side; my ears seemed to catch the sound of her footsteps behind
+me, she enveloped me with passing whiffs of warmth and perfume, with
+filmy touches of the hair on my face.  She penetrated me, my head was
+full of her . . . And his head, too, I thought suddenly with a side
+glance at my companion.  He walked quietly with hunched-up shoulders
+carrying his little hand-bag and he looked the most commonplace figure
+imaginable.
+
+Yes.  There was between us a most horrible fellowship; the association of
+his crazy torture with the sublime suffering of my passion.  We hadn't
+been a quarter of an hour together when that woman had surged up fatally
+between us; between this miserable wretch and myself.  We were haunted by
+the same image.  But I was sane!  I was sane!  Not because I was certain
+that the fellow must not be allowed to go to Tolosa, but because I was
+perfectly alive to the difficulty of stopping him from going there, since
+the decision was absolutely in the hands of Baron H.
+
+If I were to go early in the morning and tell that fat, bilious man:
+"Look here, your Ortega's mad," he would certainly think at once that I
+was, get very frightened, and . . . one couldn't tell what course he
+would take.  He would eliminate me somehow out of the affair.  And yet I
+could not let the fellow proceed to where Dona Rita was, because,
+obviously, he had been molesting her, had filled her with uneasiness and
+even alarm, was an unhappy element and a disturbing influence in her
+life--incredible as the thing appeared!  I couldn't let him go on to make
+himself a worry and a nuisance, drive her out from a town in which she
+wished to be (for whatever reason) and perhaps start some explosive
+scandal.  And that girl Rose seemed to fear something graver even than a
+scandal.  But if I were to explain the matter fully to H. he would simply
+rejoice in his heart.  Nothing would please him more than to have Dona
+Rita driven out of Tolosa.  What a relief from his anxieties (and his
+wife's, too); and if I were to go further, if I even went so far as to
+hint at the fears which Rose had not been able to conceal from me, why
+then--I went on thinking coldly with a stoical rejection of the most
+elementary faith in mankind's rectitude--why then, that accommodating
+husband would simply let the ominous messenger have his chance.  He would
+see there only his natural anxieties being laid to rest for ever.
+Horrible?  Yes.  But I could not take the risk.  In a twelvemonth I had
+travelled a long way in my mistrust of mankind.
+
+We paced on steadily.  I thought: "How on earth am I going to stop you?"
+Had this arisen only a month before, when I had the means at hand and
+Dominic to confide in, I would have simply kidnapped the fellow.  A
+little trip to sea would not have done Senor Ortega any harm; though no
+doubt it would have been abhorrent to his feelings.  But now I had not
+the means.  I couldn't even tell where my poor Dominic was hiding his
+diminished head.
+
+Again I glanced at him sideways.  I was the taller of the two and as it
+happened I met in the light of the street lamp his own stealthy glance
+directed up at me with an agonized expression, an expression that made me
+fancy I could see the man's very soul writhing in his body like an
+impaled worm.  In spite of my utter inexperience I had some notion of the
+images that rushed into his mind at the sight of any man who had
+approached Dona Rita.  It was enough to awaken in any human being a
+movement of horrified compassion; but my pity went out not to him but to
+Dona Rita.  It was for her that I felt sorry; I pitied her for having
+that damned soul on her track.  I pitied her with tenderness and
+indignation, as if this had been both a danger and a dishonour.
+
+I don't mean to say that those thoughts passed through my head
+consciously.  I had only the resultant, settled feeling.  I had, however,
+a thought, too.  It came on me suddenly, and I asked myself with rage and
+astonishment: "Must I then kill that brute?"  There didn't seem to be any
+alternative.  Between him and Dona Rita I couldn't hesitate.  I believe I
+gave a slight laugh of desperation.  The suddenness of this sinister
+conclusion had in it something comic and unbelievable.  It loosened my
+grip on my mental processes.  A Latin tag came into my head about the
+facile descent into the abyss.  I marvelled at its aptness, and also that
+it should have come to me so pat.  But I believe now that it was
+suggested simply by the actual declivity of the street of the Consuls
+which lies on a gentle slope.  We had just turned the corner.  All the
+houses were dark and in a perspective of complete solitude our two
+shadows dodged and wheeled about our feet.
+
+"Here we are," I said.
+
+He was an extraordinarily chilly devil.  When we stopped I could hear his
+teeth chattering again.  I don't know what came over me, I had a sort of
+nervous fit, was incapable of finding my pockets, let alone the latchkey.
+I had the illusion of a narrow streak of light on the wall of the house
+as if it had been cracked.  "I hope we will be able to get in," I
+murmured.
+
+Senor Ortega stood waiting patiently with his handbag, like a rescued
+wayfarer.  "But you live in this house, don't you?" he observed.
+
+"No," I said, without hesitation.  I didn't know how that man would
+behave if he were aware that I was staying under the same roof.  He was
+half mad.  He might want to talk all night, try crazily to invade my
+privacy.  How could I tell?  Moreover, I wasn't so sure that I would
+remain in the house.  I had some notion of going out again and walking up
+and down the street of the Consuls till daylight.  "No, an absent friend
+lets me use . . . I had that latchkey this morning . . . Ah! here it is."
+
+I let him go in first.  The sickly gas flame was there on duty,
+undaunted, waiting for the end of the world to come and put it out.  I
+think that the black-and-white hall surprised Ortega.  I had closed the
+front door without noise and stood for a moment listening, while he
+glanced about furtively.  There were only two other doors in the hall,
+right and left.  Their panels of ebony were decorated with bronze
+applications in the centre.  The one on the left was of course Blunt's
+door.  As the passage leading beyond it was dark at the further end I
+took Senor Ortega by the hand and led him along, unresisting, like a
+child.  For some reason or other I moved on tip-toe and he followed my
+example.  The light and the warmth of the studio impressed him
+favourably; he laid down his little bag, rubbed his hands together, and
+produced a smile of satisfaction; but it was such a smile as a totally
+ruined man would perhaps force on his lips, or a man condemned to a short
+shrift by his doctor.  I begged him to make himself at home and said that
+I would go at once and hunt up the woman of the house who would make him
+up a bed on the big couch there.  He hardly listened to what I said.
+What were all those things to him!  He knew that his destiny was to sleep
+on a bed of thorns, to feed on adders.  But he tried to show a sort of
+polite interest.  He asked: "What is this place?"
+
+"It used to belong to a painter,"  I mumbled.
+
+"Ah, your absent friend," he said, making a wry mouth.  "I detest all
+those artists, and all those writers, and all politicos who are thieves;
+and I would go even farther and higher, laying a curse on all idle lovers
+of women.  You think perhaps I am a Royalist?  No.  If there was anybody
+in heaven or hell to pray to I would pray for a revolution--a red
+revolution everywhere."
+
+"You astonish me," I said, just to say something.
+
+"No!  But there are half a dozen people in the world with whom I would
+like to settle accounts.  One could shoot them like partridges and no
+questions asked.  That's what revolution would mean to me."
+
+"It's a beautifully simple view," I said.  "I imagine you are not the
+only one who holds it; but I really must look after your comforts.  You
+mustn't forget that we have to see Baron H. early to-morrow morning."
+And I went out quietly into the passage wondering in what part of the
+house Therese had elected to sleep that night.  But, lo and behold, when
+I got to the foot of the stairs there was Therese coming down from the
+upper regions in her nightgown, like a sleep-walker.  However, it wasn't
+that, because, before I could exclaim, she vanished off the first floor
+landing like a streak of white mist and without the slightest sound.  Her
+attire made it perfectly clear that she could not have heard us coming
+in.  In fact, she must have been certain that the house was empty,
+because she was as well aware as myself that the Italian girls after
+their work at the opera were going to a masked ball to dance for their
+own amusement, attended of course by their conscientious father.  But
+what thought, need, or sudden impulse had driven Therese out of bed like
+this was something I couldn't conceive.
+
+I didn't call out after her.  I felt sure that she would return.  I went
+up slowly to the first floor and met her coming down again, this time
+carrying a lighted candle.  She had managed to make herself presentable
+in an extraordinarily short time.
+
+"Oh, my dear young Monsieur, you have given me a fright."
+
+"Yes.  And I nearly fainted, too," I said.  "You looked perfectly awful.
+What's the matter with you?  Are you ill?"
+
+She had lighted by then the gas on the landing and I must say that I had
+never seen exactly that manner of face on her before.  She wriggled,
+confused and shifty-eyed, before me; but I ascribed this behaviour to her
+shocked modesty and without troubling myself any more about her feelings
+I informed her that there was a Carlist downstairs who must be put up for
+the night.  Most unexpectedly she betrayed a ridiculous consternation,
+but only for a moment.  Then she assumed at once that I would give him
+hospitality upstairs where there was a camp-bedstead in my dressing-room.
+I said:
+
+"No.  Give him a shake-down in the studio, where he is now.  It's warm in
+there.  And remember! I charge you strictly not to let him know that I
+sleep in this house.  In fact, I don't know myself that I will; I have
+certain matters to attend to this very night.  You will also have to
+serve him his coffee in the morning.  I will take him away before ten
+o'clock."
+
+All this seemed to impress her more than I had expected.  As usual when
+she felt curious, or in some other way excited, she assumed a saintly,
+detached expression, and asked:
+
+"The dear gentleman is your friend, I suppose?"
+
+"I only know he is a Spaniard and a Carlist," I said: "and that ought to
+be enough for you."
+
+Instead of the usual effusive exclamations she murmured: "Dear me, dear
+me," and departed upstairs with the candle to get together a few blankets
+and pillows, I suppose.  As for me I walked quietly downstairs on my way
+to the studio.  I had a curious sensation that I was acting in a
+preordained manner, that life was not at all what I had thought it to be,
+or else that I had been altogether changed sometime during the day, and
+that I was a different person from the man whom I remembered getting out
+of my bed in the morning.
+
+Also feelings had altered all their values.  The words, too, had become
+strange.  It was only the inanimate surroundings that remained what they
+had always been.  For instance the studio. . . .
+
+During my absence Senor Ortega had taken off his coat and I found him as
+it were in the air, sitting in his shirt sleeves on a chair which he had
+taken pains to place in the very middle of the floor.  I repressed an
+absurd impulse to walk round him as though he had been some sort of
+exhibit.  His hands were spread over his knees and he looked perfectly
+insensible.  I don't mean strange, or ghastly, or wooden, but just
+insensible--like an exhibit.  And that effect persisted even after he
+raised his black suspicious eyes to my face.  He lowered them almost at
+once.  It was very mechanical.  I gave him up and became rather concerned
+about myself.  My thought was that I had better get out of that before
+any more queer notions came into my head.  So I only remained long enough
+to tell him that the woman of the house was bringing down some bedding
+and that I hoped that he would have a good night's rest.  And directly I
+spoke it struck me that this was the most extraordinary speech that ever
+was addressed to a figure of that sort.  He, however, did not seem
+startled by it or moved in any way.  He simply said:
+
+"Thank you."
+
+In the darkest part of the long passage outside I met Therese with her
+arms full of pillows and blankets.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+
+Coming out of the bright light of the studio I didn't make out Therese
+very distinctly.  She, however, having groped in dark cupboards, must
+have had her pupils sufficiently dilated to have seen that I had my hat
+on my head.  This has its importance because after what I had said to her
+upstairs it must have convinced her that I was going out on some midnight
+business.  I passed her without a word and heard behind me the door of
+the studio close with an unexpected crash.  It strikes me now that under
+the circumstances I might have without shame gone back to listen at the
+keyhole.  But truth to say the association of events was not so clear in
+my mind as it may be to the reader of this story.  Neither were the exact
+connections of persons present to my mind.  And, besides, one doesn't
+listen at a keyhole but in pursuance of some plan; unless one is
+afflicted by a vulgar and fatuous curiosity.  But that vice is not in my
+character.  As to plan, I had none.  I moved along the passage between
+the dead wall and the black-and-white marble elevation of the staircase
+with hushed footsteps, as though there had been a mortally sick person
+somewhere in the house.  And the only person that could have answered to
+that description was Senor Ortega.  I moved on, stealthy, absorbed,
+undecided; asking myself earnestly: "What on earth am I going to do with
+him?"  That exclusive preoccupation of my mind was as dangerous to Senor
+Ortega as typhoid fever would have been.  It strikes me that this
+comparison is very exact.  People recover from typhoid fever, but
+generally the chance is considered poor.  This was precisely his case.
+His chance was poor; though I had no more animosity towards him than a
+virulent disease has against the victim it lays low.  He really would
+have nothing to reproach me with; he had run up against me, unwittingly,
+as a man enters an infected place, and now he was very ill, very ill
+indeed.  No, I had no plans against him.  I had only the feeling that he
+was in mortal danger.
+
+I believe that men of the most daring character (and I make no claim to
+it) often do shrink from the logical processes of thought.  It is only
+the devil, they say, that loves logic.  But I was not a devil.  I was not
+even a victim of the devil.  It was only that I had given up the
+direction of my intelligence before the problem; or rather that the
+problem had dispossessed my intelligence and reigned in its stead side by
+side with a superstitious awe.  A dreadful order seemed to lurk in the
+darkest shadows of life.  The madness of that Carlist with the soul of a
+Jacobin, the vile fears of Baron H., that excellent organizer of
+supplies, the contact of their two ferocious stupidities, and last, by a
+remote disaster at sea, my love brought into direct contact with the
+situation: all that was enough to make one shudder--not at the chance,
+but at the design.
+
+For it was my love that was called upon to act here, and nothing else.
+And love which elevates us above all safeguards, above restraining
+principles, above all littlenesses of self-possession, yet keeps its feet
+always firmly on earth, remains marvellously practical in its
+suggestions.
+
+I discovered that however much I had imagined I had given up Rita, that
+whatever agonies I had gone through, my hope of her had never been lost.
+Plucked out, stamped down, torn to shreds, it had remained with me
+secret, intact, invincible.  Before the danger of the situation it
+sprang, full of life, up in arms--the undying child of immortal love.
+What incited me was independent of honour and compassion; it was the
+prompting of a love supreme, practical, remorseless in its aim; it was
+the practical thought that no woman need be counted as lost for ever,
+unless she be dead!
+
+This excluded for the moment all considerations of ways and means and
+risks and difficulties.  Its tremendous intensity robbed it of all
+direction and left me adrift in the big black-and-white hall as on a
+silent sea.  It was not, properly speaking, irresolution.  It was merely
+hesitation as to the next immediate step, and that step even of no great
+importance: hesitation merely as to the best way I could spend the rest
+of the night.  I didn't think further forward for many reasons, more or
+less optimistic, but mainly because I have no homicidal vein in my
+composition.  The disposition to gloat over homicide was in that
+miserable creature in the studio, the potential Jacobin; in that
+confounded buyer of agricultural produce, the punctual employe of
+Hernandez Brothers, the jealous wretch with an obscene tongue and an
+imagination of the same kind to drive him mad.  I thought of him without
+pity but also without contempt.  I reflected that there were no means of
+sending a warning to Dona Rita in Tolosa; for of course no postal
+communication existed with the Headquarters.  And moreover what would a
+warning be worth in this particular case, supposing it would reach her,
+that she would believe it, and that she would know what to do?  How could
+I communicate to another that certitude which was in my mind, the more
+absolute because without proofs that one could produce?
+
+The last expression of Rose's distress rang again in my ears: "Madame has
+no friends.  Not one!" and I saw Dona Rita's complete loneliness beset by
+all sorts of insincerities, surrounded by pitfalls; her greatest dangers
+within herself, in her generosity, in her fears, in her courage, too.
+What I had to do first of all was to stop that wretch at all costs.  I
+became aware of a great mistrust of Therese.  I didn't want her to find
+me in the hall, but I was reluctant to go upstairs to my rooms from an
+unreasonable feeling that there I would be too much out of the way; not
+sufficiently on the spot.  There was the alternative of a live-long night
+of watching outside, before the dark front of the house.  It was a most
+distasteful prospect.  And then it occurred to me that Blunt's former
+room would be an extremely good place to keep a watch from.  I knew that
+room.  When Henry Allegre gave the house to Rita in the early days (long
+before he made his will) he had planned a complete renovation and this
+room had been meant for the drawing-room.  Furniture had been made for it
+specially, upholstered in beautiful ribbed stuff, made to order, of dull
+gold colour with a pale blue tracery of arabesques and oval medallions
+enclosing Rita's monogram, repeated on the backs of chairs and sofas, and
+on the heavy curtains reaching from ceiling to floor.  To the same time
+belonged the ebony and bronze doors, the silver statuette at the foot of
+the stairs, the forged iron balustrade reproducing right up the marble
+staircase Rita's decorative monogram in its complicated design.
+Afterwards the work was stopped and the house had fallen into disrepair.
+When Rita devoted it to the Carlist cause a bed was put into that
+drawing-room, just simply the bed.  The room next to that yellow salon
+had been in Allegre's young days fitted as a fencing-room containing also
+a bath, and a complicated system of all sorts of shower and jet
+arrangements, then quite up to date.  That room was very large, lighted
+from the top, and one wall of it was covered by trophies of arms of all
+sorts, a choice collection of cold steel disposed on a background of
+Indian mats and rugs: Blunt used it as a dressing-room.  It communicated
+by a small door with the studio.
+
+I had only to extend my hand and make one step to reach the magnificent
+bronze handle of the ebony door, and if I didn't want to be caught by
+Therese there was no time to lose.  I made the step and extended the
+hand, thinking that it would be just like my luck to find the door
+locked.  But the door came open to my push.  In contrast to the dark hall
+the room was most unexpectedly dazzling to my eyes, as if illuminated _a
+giorno_ for a reception.  No voice came from it, but nothing could have
+stopped me now.  As I turned round to shut the door behind me noiselessly
+I caught sight of a woman's dress on a chair, of other articles of
+apparel scattered about.  The mahogany bed with a piece of light silk
+which Therese found somewhere and used for a counterpane was a
+magnificent combination of white and crimson between the gleaming
+surfaces of dark wood; and the whole room had an air of splendour with
+marble consoles, gilt carvings, long mirrors and a sumptuous Venetian
+lustre depending from the ceiling: a darkling mass of icy pendants
+catching a spark here and there from the candles of an eight-branched
+candelabra standing on a little table near the head of a sofa which had
+been dragged round to face the fireplace.  The faintest possible whiff of
+a familiar perfume made my head swim with its suggestion.
+
+I grabbed the back of the nearest piece of furniture and the splendour of
+marbles and mirrors, of cut crystals and carvings, swung before my eyes
+in the golden mist of walls and draperies round an extremely conspicuous
+pair of black stockings thrown over a music stool which remained
+motionless.  The silence was profound.  It was like being in an enchanted
+place.  Suddenly a voice began to speak, clear, detached, infinitely
+touching in its calm weariness.
+
+"Haven't you tormented me enough to-day?" it said. . . . My head was
+steady now but my heart began to beat violently.  I listened to the end
+without moving, "Can't you make up your mind to leave me alone for
+to-night?"  It pleaded with an accent of charitable scorn.
+
+The penetrating quality of these tones which I had not heard for so many,
+many days made my eyes run full of tears.  I guessed easily that the
+appeal was addressed to the atrocious Therese.  The speaker was concealed
+from me by the high back of the sofa, but her apprehension was perfectly
+justified.  For was it not I who had turned back Therese the pious, the
+insatiable, coming downstairs in her nightgown to torment her sister some
+more?  Mere surprise at Dona Rita's presence in the house was enough to
+paralyze me; but I was also overcome by an enormous sense of relief, by
+the assurance of security for her and for myself.  I didn't even ask
+myself how she came there.  It was enough for me that she was not in
+Tolosa.  I could have smiled at the thought that all I had to do now was
+to hasten the departure of that abominable lunatic--for Tolosa: an easy
+task, almost no task at all.  Yes, I would have smiled, had not I felt
+outraged by the presence of Senor Ortega under the same roof with Dona
+Rita.  The mere fact was repugnant to me, morally revolting; so that I
+should have liked to rush at him and throw him out into the street.  But
+that was not to be done for various reasons.  One of them was pity.  I
+was suddenly at peace with all mankind, with all nature.  I felt as if I
+couldn't hurt a fly.  The intensity of my emotion sealed my lips.  With a
+fearful joy tugging at my heart I moved round the head of the couch
+without a word.
+
+In the wide fireplace on a pile of white ashes the logs had a deep
+crimson glow; and turned towards them Dona Rita reclined on her side
+enveloped in the skins of wild beasts like a charming and savage young
+chieftain before a camp fire.  She never even raised her eyes, giving me
+the opportunity to contemplate mutely that adolescent, delicately
+masculine head, so mysteriously feminine in the power of instant
+seduction, so infinitely suave in its firm design, almost childlike in
+the freshness of detail: altogether ravishing in the inspired strength of
+the modelling.  That precious head reposed in the palm of her hand; the
+face was slightly flushed (with anger perhaps).  She kept her eyes
+obstinately fixed on the pages of a book which she was holding with her
+other hand.  I had the time to lay my infinite adoration at her feet
+whose white insteps gleamed below the dark edge of the fur out of quilted
+blue silk bedroom slippers, embroidered with small pearls.  I had never
+seen them before; I mean the slippers.  The gleam of the insteps, too,
+for that matter.  I lost myself in a feeling of deep content, something
+like a foretaste of a time of felicity which must be quiet or it couldn't
+be eternal.  I had never tasted such perfect quietness before.  It was
+not of this earth.  I had gone far beyond.  It was as if I had reached
+the ultimate wisdom beyond all dreams and all passions.  She was That
+which is to be contemplated to all Infinity.
+
+The perfect stillness and silence made her raise her eyes at last,
+reluctantly, with a hard, defensive expression which I had never seen in
+them before.  And no wonder!  The glance was meant for Therese and
+assumed in self-defence.  For some time its character did not change and
+when it did it turned into a perfectly stony stare of a kind which I also
+had never seen before.  She had never wished so much to be left in peace.
+She had never been so astonished in her life.  She had arrived by the
+evening express only two hours before Senor Ortega, had driven to the
+house, and after having something to eat had become for the rest of the
+evening the helpless prey of her sister who had fawned and scolded and
+wheedled and threatened in a way that outraged all Rita's feelings.
+Seizing this unexpected occasion Therese had displayed a distracting
+versatility of sentiment: rapacity, virtue, piety, spite, and false
+tenderness--while, characteristically enough, she unpacked the
+dressing-bag, helped the sinner to get ready for bed, brushed her hair,
+and finally, as a climax, kissed her hands, partly by surprise and partly
+by violence.  After that she had retired from the field of battle slowly,
+undefeated, still defiant, firing as a last shot the impudent question:
+"Tell me only, have you made your will, Rita?"  To this poor Dona Rita
+with the spirit of opposition strung to the highest pitch answered: "No,
+and I don't mean to"--being under the impression that this was what her
+sister wanted her to do.  There can be no doubt, however, that all
+Therese wanted was the information.
+
+Rita, much too agitated to expect anything but a sleepless night, had not
+the courage to get into bed.  She thought she would remain on the sofa
+before the fire and try to compose herself with a book.  As she had no
+dressing-gown with her she put on her long fur coat over her night-gown,
+threw some logs on the fire, and lay down.  She didn't hear the slightest
+noise of any sort till she heard me shut the door gently.  Quietness of
+movement was one of Therese's accomplishments, and the harassed heiress
+of the Allegre millions naturally thought it was her sister coming again
+to renew the scene.  Her heart sank within her.  In the end she became a
+little frightened at the long silence, and raised her eyes.  She didn't
+believe them for a long time.  She concluded that I was a vision.  In
+fact, the first word which I heard her utter was a low, awed "No," which,
+though I understood its meaning, chilled my blood like an evil omen.
+
+It was then that I spoke.  "Yes," I said, "it's me that you see," and
+made a step forward.  She didn't start; only her other hand flew to the
+edges of the fur coat, gripping them together over her breast.  Observing
+this gesture I sat down in the nearest chair.  The book she had been
+reading slipped with a thump on the floor.
+
+"How is it possible that you should be here?" she said, still in a
+doubting voice.
+
+"I am really here," I said.  "Would you like to touch my hand?"
+
+She didn't move at all; her fingers still clutched the fur coat.
+
+"What has happened?"
+
+"It's a long story, but you may take it from me that all is over.  The
+tie between us is broken.  I don't know that it was ever very close.  It
+was an external thing.  The true misfortune is that I have ever seen
+you."
+
+This last phrase was provoked by an exclamation of sympathy on her part.
+She raised herself on her elbow and looked at me intently.  "All over,"
+she murmured.
+
+"Yes, we had to wreck the little vessel.  It was awful.  I feel like a
+murderer.  But she had to be killed."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"Because I loved her too much.  Don't you know that love and death go
+very close together?"
+
+"I could feel almost happy that it is all over, if you hadn't had to lose
+your love.  Oh, _amigo_ George, it was a safe love for you."
+
+"Yes," I said.  "It was a faithful little vessel.  She would have saved
+us all from any plain danger.  But this was a betrayal.  It was--never
+mind.  All that's past.  The question is what will the next one be."
+
+"Why should it be that?"
+
+"I don't know.  Life seems but a series of betrayals.  There are so many
+kinds of them.  This was a betrayed plan, but one can betray confidence,
+and hope and--desire, and the most sacred . . ."
+
+"But what are you doing here?" she interrupted.
+
+"Oh, yes!  The eternal why.  Till a few hours ago I didn't know what I
+was here for.  And what are you here for?" I asked point blank and with a
+bitterness she disregarded.  She even answered my question quite readily
+with many words out of which I could make very little.  I only learned
+that for at least five mixed reasons, none of which impressed me
+profoundly, Dona Rita had started at a moment's notice from Paris with
+nothing but a dressing-bag, and permitting Rose to go and visit her aged
+parents for two days, and then follow her mistress.  That girl of late
+had looked so perturbed and worried that the sensitive Rita, fearing that
+she was tired of her place, proposed to settle a sum of money on her
+which would have enabled her to devote herself entirely to her aged
+parents.  And did I know what that extraordinary girl said?  She had
+said: "Don't let Madame think that I would be too proud to accept
+anything whatever from her; but I can't even dream of leaving Madame.  I
+believe Madame has no friends.  Not one."  So instead of a large sum of
+money Dona Rita gave the girl a kiss and as she had been worried by
+several people who wanted her to go to Tolosa she bolted down this way
+just to get clear of all those busybodies.  "Hide from them," she went on
+with ardour.  "Yes, I came here to hide," she repeated twice as if
+delighted at last to have hit on that reason among so many others.  "How
+could I tell that you would be here?"  Then with sudden fire which only
+added to the delight with which I had been watching the play of her
+physiognomy she added: "Why did you come into this room?"
+
+She enchanted me.  The ardent modulations of the sound, the slight play
+of the beautiful lips, the still, deep sapphire gleam in those long eyes
+inherited from the dawn of ages and that seemed always to watch
+unimaginable things, that underlying faint ripple of gaiety that played
+under all her moods as though it had been a gift from the high gods moved
+to pity for this lonely mortal, all this within the four walls and
+displayed for me alone gave me the sense of almost intolerable joy.  The
+words didn't matter.  They had to be answered, of course.
+
+"I came in for several reasons.  One of them is that I didn't know you
+were here."
+
+"Therese didn't tell you?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Never talked to you about me?"
+
+I hesitated only for a moment.  "Never," I said.  Then I asked in my
+turn, "Did she tell you I was here?"
+
+"No," she said.
+
+"It's very clear she did not mean us to come together again."
+
+"Neither did I, my dear."
+
+"What do you mean by speaking like this, in this tone, in these words?
+You seem to use them as if they were a sort of formula.  Am I a dear to
+you?  Or is anybody? . . . or everybody? . . ."
+
+She had been for some time raised on her elbow, but then as if something
+had happened to her vitality she sank down till her head rested again on
+the sofa cushion.
+
+"Why do you try to hurt my feelings?" she asked.
+
+"For the same reason for which you call me dear at the end of a sentence
+like that: for want of something more amusing to do.  You don't pretend
+to make me believe that you do it for any sort of reason that a decent
+person would confess to."
+
+The colour had gone from her face; but a fit of wickedness was on me and
+I pursued, "What are the motives of your speeches?  What prompts your
+actions?  On your own showing your life seems to be a continuous running
+away.  You have just run away from Paris.  Where will you run to-morrow?
+What are you everlastingly running from--or is it that you are running
+after something?  What is it?  A man, a phantom--or some sensation that
+you don't like to own to?"
+
+Truth to say, I was abashed by the silence which was her only answer to
+this sally.  I said to myself that I would not let my natural anger, my
+just fury be disarmed by any assumption of pathos or dignity.  I suppose
+I was really out of my mind and what in the middle ages would have been
+called "possessed" by an evil spirit.  I went on enjoying my own
+villainy.
+
+"Why aren't you in Tolosa?  You ought to be in Tolosa.  Isn't Tolosa the
+proper field for your abilities, for your sympathies, for your
+profusions, for your generosities--the king without a crown, the man
+without a fortune!  But here there is nothing worthy of your talents.
+No, there is no longer anything worth any sort of trouble here.  There
+isn't even that ridiculous Monsieur George.  I understand that the talk
+of the coast from here to Cette is that Monsieur George is drowned.  Upon
+my word I believe he is.  And serve him right, too.  There's Therese, but
+I don't suppose that your love for your sister . . ."
+
+"For goodness' sake don't let her come in and find you here."
+
+Those words recalled me to myself, exorcised the evil spirit by the mere
+enchanting power of the voice.  They were also impressive by their
+suggestion of something practical, utilitarian, and remote from
+sentiment.  The evil spirit left me and I remained taken aback slightly.
+
+"Well," I said, "if you mean that you want me to leave the room I will
+confess to you that I can't very well do it yet.  But I could lock both
+doors if you don't mind that."
+
+"Do what you like as long as you keep her out.  You two together would be
+too much for me to-night.  Why don't you go and lock those doors?  I have
+a feeling she is on the prowl."
+
+I got up at once saying, "I imagine she has gone to bed by this time."  I
+felt absolutely calm and responsible.  I turned the keys one after
+another so gently that I couldn't hear the click of the locks myself.
+This done I recrossed the room with measured steps, with downcast eyes,
+and approaching the couch without raising them from the carpet I sank
+down on my knees and leaned my forehead on its edge.  That penitential
+attitude had but little remorse in it.  I detected no movement and heard
+no sound from her.  In one place a bit of the fur coat touched my cheek
+softly, but no forgiving hand came to rest on my bowed head.  I only
+breathed deeply the faint scent of violets, her own particular fragrance
+enveloping my body, penetrating my very heart with an inconceivable
+intimacy, bringing me closer to her than the closest embrace, and yet so
+subtle that I sensed her existence in me only as a great, glowing,
+indeterminate tenderness, something like the evening light disclosing
+after the white passion of the day infinite depths in the colours of the
+sky and an unsuspected soul of peace in the protean forms of life.  I had
+not known such quietness for months; and I detected in myself an immense
+fatigue, a longing to remain where I was without changing my position to
+the end of time.  Indeed to remain seemed to me a complete solution for
+all the problems that life presents--even as to the very death itself.
+
+Only the unwelcome reflection that this was impossible made me get up at
+last with a sigh of deep grief at the end of the dream.  But I got up
+without despair.  She didn't murmur, she didn't stir.  There was
+something august in the stillness of the room.  It was a strange peace
+which she shared with me in this unexpected shelter full of disorder in
+its neglected splendour.  What troubled me was the sudden, as it were
+material, consciousness of time passing as water flows.  It seemed to me
+that it was only the tenacity of my sentiment that held that woman's
+body, extended and tranquil above the flood.  But when I ventured at last
+to look at her face I saw her flushed, her teeth clenched--it was
+visible--her nostrils dilated, and in her narrow, level-glancing eyes a
+look of inward and frightened ecstasy.  The edges of the fur coat had
+fallen open and I was moved to turn away.  I had the same impression as
+on the evening we parted that something had happened which I did not
+understand; only this time I had not touched her at all.  I really didn't
+understand.  At the slightest whisper I would now have gone out without a
+murmur, as though that emotion had given her the right to be obeyed.  But
+there was no whisper; and for a long time I stood leaning on my arm,
+looking into the fire and feeling distinctly between the four walls of
+that locked room the unchecked time flow past our two stranded
+personalities.
+
+And suddenly she spoke.  She spoke in that voice that was so profoundly
+moving without ever being sad, a little wistful perhaps and always the
+supreme expression of her grace.  She asked as if nothing had happened:
+
+"What are you thinking of, _amigo_?"
+
+I turned about.  She was lying on her side, tranquil above the smooth
+flow of time, again closely wrapped up in her fur, her head resting on
+the old-gold sofa cushion bearing like everything else in that room the
+decoratively enlaced letters of her monogram; her face a little pale now,
+with the crimson lobe of her ear under the tawny mist of her loose hair,
+the lips a little parted, and her glance of melted sapphire level and
+motionless, darkened by fatigue.
+
+"Can I think of anything but you?" I murmured, taking a seat near the
+foot of the couch.  "Or rather it isn't thinking, it is more like the
+consciousness of you always being present in me, complete to the last
+hair, to the faintest shade of expression, and that not only when we are
+apart but when we are together, alone, as close as this.  I see you now
+lying on this couch but that is only the insensible phantom of the real
+you that is in me.  And it is the easier for me to feel this because that
+image which others see and call by your name--how am I to know that it is
+anything else but an enchanting mist?  You have always eluded me except
+in one or two moments which seem still more dream-like than the rest.
+Since I came into this room you have done nothing to destroy my
+conviction of your unreality apart from myself.  You haven't offered me
+your hand to touch.  Is it because you suspect that apart from me you are
+but a mere phantom, and that you fear to put it to the test?"
+
+One of her hands was under the fur and the other under her cheek.  She
+made no sound.  She didn't offer to stir.  She didn't move her eyes, not
+even after I had added after waiting for a while,
+
+"Just what I expected.  You are a cold illusion."
+
+She smiled mysteriously, right away from me, straight at the fire, and
+that was all.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+
+I had a momentary suspicion that I had said something stupid.  Her smile
+amongst many other things seemed to have meant that, too.  And I answered
+it with a certain resignation:
+
+"Well, I don't know that you are so much mist.  I remember once hanging
+on to you like a drowning man . . . But perhaps I had better not speak of
+this.  It wasn't so very long ago, and you may . . . "
+
+"I don't mind.  Well . . ."
+
+"Well, I have kept an impression of great solidity.  I'll admit that.  A
+woman of granite."
+
+"A doctor once told me that I was made to last for ever," she said.
+
+"But essentially it's the same thing," I went on.  "Granite, too, is
+insensible."
+
+I watched her profile against the pillow and there came on her face an
+expression I knew well when with an indignation full of suppressed
+laughter she used to throw at me the word "Imbecile."  I expected it to
+come, but it didn't come.  I must say, though, that I was swimmy in my
+head and now and then had a noise as of the sea in my ears, so I might
+not have heard it.  The woman of granite, built to last for ever,
+continued to look at the glowing logs which made a sort of fiery ruin on
+the white pile of ashes.  "I will tell you how it is," I said.  "When I
+have you before my eyes there is such a projection of my whole being
+towards you that I fail to see you distinctly.  It was like that from the
+beginning.  I may say that I never saw you distinctly till after we had
+parted and I thought you had gone from my sight for ever.  It was then
+that you took body in my imagination and that my mind seized on a
+definite form of you for all its adorations--for its profanations, too.
+Don't imagine me grovelling in spiritual abasement before a mere image.
+I got a grip on you that nothing can shake now."
+
+"Don't speak like this," she said.  "It's too much for me.  And there is
+a whole long night before us."
+
+"You don't think that I dealt with you sentimentally enough perhaps?  But
+the sentiment was there; as clear a flame as ever burned on earth from
+the most remote ages before that eternal thing which is in you, which is
+your heirloom.  And is it my fault that what I had to give was real
+flame, and not a mystic's incense?  It is neither your fault nor mine.
+And now whatever we say to each other at night or in daylight, that
+sentiment must be taken for granted.  It will be there on the day I
+die--when you won't be there."
+
+She continued to look fixedly at the red embers; and from her lips that
+hardly moved came the quietest possible whisper: "Nothing would be easier
+than to die for you."
+
+"Really," I cried.  "And you expect me perhaps after this to kiss your
+feet in a transport of gratitude while I hug the pride of your words to
+my breast.  But as it happens there is nothing in me but contempt for
+this sublime declaration.  How dare you offer me this charlatanism of
+passion?  What has it got to do between you and me who are the only two
+beings in the world that may safely say that we have no need of shams
+between ourselves?  Is it possible that you are a charlatan at heart?
+Not from egoism, I admit, but from some sort of fear.  Yet, should you be
+sincere, then--listen well to me--I would never forgive you.  I would
+visit your grave every day to curse you for an evil thing."
+
+"Evil thing," she echoed softly.
+
+"Would you prefer to be a sham--that one could forget?"
+
+"You will never forget me," she said in the same tone at the glowing
+embers.  "Evil or good.  But, my dear, I feel neither an evil nor a sham.
+I have got to be what I am, and that, _amigo_, is not so easy; because I
+may be simple, but like all those on whom there is no peace I am not One.
+No, I am not One!"
+
+"You are all the women in the world," I whispered bending over her.  She
+didn't seem to be aware of anything and only spoke--always to the glow.
+
+"If I were that I would say: God help them then.  But that would be more
+appropriate for Therese.  For me, I can only give them my infinite
+compassion.  I have too much reverence in me to invoke the name of a God
+of whom clever men have robbed me a long time ago.  How could I help it?
+For the talk was clever and--and I had a mind.  And I am also, as Therese
+says, naturally sinful.  Yes, my dear, I may be naturally wicked but I am
+not evil and I could die for you."
+
+"You!" I said.  "You are afraid to die."
+
+"Yes.  But not for you."
+
+The whole structure of glowing logs fell down, raising a small turmoil of
+white ashes and sparks.  The tiny crash seemed to wake her up thoroughly.
+She turned her head upon the cushion to look at me.
+
+"It's a very extraordinary thing, we two coming together like this," she
+said with conviction.  "You coming in without knowing I was here and then
+telling me that you can't very well go out of the room.  That sounds
+funny.  I wouldn't have been angry if you had said that you wouldn't.  It
+would have hurt me.  But nobody ever paid much attention to my feelings.
+Why do you smile like this?"
+
+"At a thought.  Without any charlatanism of passion I am able to tell you
+of something to match your devotion.  I was not afraid for your sake to
+come within a hair's breadth of what to all the world would have been a
+squalid crime.  Note that you and I are persons of honour.  And there
+might have been a criminal trial at the end of it for me.  Perhaps the
+scaffold."
+
+"Do you say these horrors to make me tremble?"
+
+"Oh, you needn't tremble.  There shall be no crime.  I need not risk the
+scaffold, since now you are safe.  But I entered this room meditating
+resolutely on the ways of murder, calculating possibilities and chances
+without the slightest compunction.  It's all over now.  It was all over
+directly I saw you here, but it had been so near that I shudder yet."
+
+She must have been very startled because for a time she couldn't speak.
+Then in a faint voice:
+
+"For me!  For me!" she faltered out twice.
+
+"For you--or for myself?  Yet it couldn't have been selfish.  What would
+it have been to me that you remained in the world?  I never expected to
+see you again.  I even composed a most beautiful letter of farewell.
+Such a letter as no woman had ever received."
+
+Instantly she shot out a hand towards me.  The edges of the fur cloak
+fell apart.  A wave of the faintest possible scent floated into my
+nostrils.
+
+"Let me have it," she said imperiously.
+
+"You can't have it.  It's all in my head.  No woman will read it.  I
+suspect it was something that could never have been written.  But what a
+farewell!  And now I suppose we shall say good-bye without even a
+handshake.  But you are safe!  Only I must ask you not to come out of
+this room till I tell you you may."
+
+I was extremely anxious that Senor Ortega should never even catch a
+glimpse of Dona Rita, never guess how near he had been to her.  I was
+extremely anxious the fellow should depart for Tolosa and get shot in a
+ravine; or go to the Devil in his own way, as long as he lost the track
+of Dona Rita completely.  He then, probably, would get mad and get shut
+up, or else get cured, forget all about it, and devote himself to his
+vocation, whatever it was--keep a shop and grow fat.  All this flashed
+through my mind in an instant and while I was still dazzled by those
+comforting images, the voice of Dona Rita pulled me up with a jerk.
+
+"You mean not out of the house?"
+
+"No, I mean not out of this room," I said with some embarrassment.
+
+"What do you mean?  Is there something in the house then?  This is most
+extraordinary!  Stay in this room?  And you, too, it seems?  Are you also
+afraid for yourself?"
+
+"I can't even give you an idea how afraid I was.  I am not so much now.
+But you know very well, Dona Rita, that I never carry any sort of weapon
+in my pocket."
+
+"Why don't you, then?" she asked in a flash of scorn which bewitched me
+so completely for an instant that I couldn't even smile at it.
+
+"Because if I am unconventionalized I am an old European," I murmured
+gently.  "No, _Excellentissima_, I shall go through life without as much
+as a switch in my hand.  It's no use you being angry.  Adapting to this
+great moment some words you've heard before: I am like that.  Such is my
+character!"
+
+Dona Rita frankly stared at me--a most unusual expression for her to
+have.  Suddenly she sat up.
+
+"Don George," she said with lovely animation, "I insist upon knowing who
+is in my house."
+
+"You insist! . . . But Therese says it is _her_ house."
+
+Had there been anything handy, such as a cigarette box, for instance, it
+would have gone sailing through the air spouting cigarettes as it went.
+Rosy all over, cheeks, neck, shoulders, she seemed lighted up softly from
+inside like a beautiful transparency.  But she didn't raise her voice.
+
+"You and Therese have sworn my ruin.  If you don't tell me what you mean
+I will go outside and shout up the stairs to make her come down.  I know
+there is no one but the three of us in the house."
+
+"Yes, three; but not counting my Jacobin.  There is a Jacobin in the
+house."
+
+"A Jac . . .!  Oh, George, is this the time to jest?" she began in
+persuasive tones when a faint but peculiar noise stilled her lips as
+though they had been suddenly frozen.  She became quiet all over
+instantly.  I, on the contrary, made an involuntary movement before I,
+too, became as still as death.  We strained our ears; but that peculiar
+metallic rattle had been so slight and the silence now was so perfect
+that it was very difficult to believe one's senses.  Dona Rita looked
+inquisitively at me.  I gave her a slight nod.  We remained looking into
+each other's eyes while we listened and listened till the silence became
+unbearable.  Dona Rita whispered composedly: "Did you hear?"
+
+"I am asking myself . . . I almost think I didn't."
+
+"Don't shuffle with me.  It was a scraping noise."
+
+"Something fell."
+
+"Something!  What thing?  What are the things that fall by themselves?
+Who is that man of whom you spoke?  Is there a man?"
+
+"No doubt about it whatever.  I brought him here myself."
+
+"What for?"
+
+"Why shouldn't I have a Jacobin of my own?  Haven't you one, too?  But
+mine is a different problem from that white-haired humbug of yours.  He
+is a genuine article.  There must be plenty like him about.  He has
+scores to settle with half a dozen people, he says, and he clamours for
+revolutions to give him a chance."
+
+"But why did you bring him here?"
+
+"I don't know--from sudden affection . . . "
+
+All this passed in such low tones that we seemed to make out the words
+more by watching each other's lips than through our sense of hearing.
+Man is a strange animal.  I didn't care what I said.  All I wanted was to
+keep her in her pose, excited and still, sitting up with her hair loose,
+softly glowing, the dark brown fur making a wonderful contrast with the
+white lace on her breast.  All I was thinking of was that she was
+adorable and too lovely for words!  I cared for nothing but that
+sublimely aesthetic impression.  It summed up all life, all joy, all
+poetry!  It had a divine strain.  I am certain that I was not in my right
+mind.  I suppose I was not quite sane.  I am convinced that at that
+moment of the four people in the house it was Dona Rita who upon the
+whole was the most sane.  She observed my face and I am sure she read
+there something of my inward exaltation.  She knew what to do.  In the
+softest possible tone and hardly above her breath she commanded: "George,
+come to yourself."
+
+Her gentleness had the effect of evening light.  I was soothed.  Her
+confidence in her own power touched me profoundly.  I suppose my love was
+too great for madness to get hold of me.  I can't say that I passed to a
+complete calm, but I became slightly ashamed of myself.  I whispered:
+
+"No, it was not from affection, it was for the love of you that I brought
+him here.  That imbecile H. was going to send him to Tolosa."
+
+"That Jacobin!" Dona Rita was immensely surprised, as she might well have
+been.  Then resigned to the incomprehensible: "Yes," she breathed out,
+"what did you do with him?"
+
+"I put him to bed in the studio."
+
+How lovely she was with the effort of close attention depicted in the
+turn of her head and in her whole face honestly trying to approve.  "And
+then?" she inquired.
+
+"Then I came in here to face calmly the necessity of doing away with a
+human life.  I didn't shirk it for a moment.  That's what a short
+twelvemonth has brought me to.  Don't think I am reproaching you, O blind
+force!  You are justified because you _are_.  Whatever had to happen you
+would not even have heard of it."
+
+Horror darkened her marvellous radiance.  Then her face became utterly
+blank with the tremendous effort to understand.  Absolute silence reigned
+in the house.  It seemed to me that everything had been said now that
+mattered in the world; and that the world itself had reached its ultimate
+stage, had reached its appointed end of an eternal, phantom-like silence.
+Suddenly Dona Rita raised a warning finger.  I had heard nothing and
+shook my head; but she nodded hers and murmured excitedly,
+
+"Yes, yes, in the fencing-room, as before."
+
+In the same way I answered her: "Impossible!  The door is locked and
+Therese has the key."  She asked then in the most cautious manner,
+
+"Have you seen Therese to-night?"
+
+"Yes," I confessed without misgiving.  "I left her making up the fellow's
+bed when I came in here."
+
+"The bed of the Jacobin?" she said in a peculiar tone as if she were
+humouring a lunatic.
+
+"I think I had better tell you he is a Spaniard--that he seems to know
+you from early days. . . ."  I glanced at her face, it was extremely
+tense, apprehensive.  For myself I had no longer any doubt as to the man
+and I hoped she would reach the correct conclusion herself.  But I
+believe she was too distracted and worried to think consecutively.  She
+only seemed to feel some terror in the air.  In very pity I bent down and
+whispered carefully near her ear, "His name is Ortega."
+
+I expected some effect from that name but I never expected what happened.
+With the sudden, free, spontaneous agility of a young animal she leaped
+off the sofa, leaving her slippers behind, and in one bound reached
+almost the middle of the room.  The vigour, the instinctive precision of
+that spring, were something amazing.  I just escaped being knocked over.
+She landed lightly on her bare feet with a perfect balance, without the
+slightest suspicion of swaying in her instant immobility.  It lasted less
+than a second, then she spun round distractedly and darted at the first
+door she could see.  My own agility was just enough to enable me to grip
+the back of the fur coat and then catch her round the body before she
+could wriggle herself out of the sleeves.  She was muttering all the
+time, "No, no, no."  She abandoned herself to me just for an instant
+during which I got her back to the middle of the room.  There she
+attempted to free herself and I let her go at once.  With her face very
+close to mine, but apparently not knowing what she was looking at she
+repeated again twice, "No--No," with an intonation which might well have
+brought dampness to my eyes but which only made me regret that I didn't
+kill the honest Ortega at sight.  Suddenly Dona Rita swung round and
+seizing her loose hair with both hands started twisting it up before one
+of the sumptuous mirrors.  The wide fur sleeves slipped down her white
+arms.  In a brusque movement like a downward stab she transfixed the
+whole mass of tawny glints and sparks with the arrow of gold which she
+perceived lying there, before her, on the marble console.  Then she
+sprang away from the glass muttering feverishly, "Out--out--out of this
+house," and trying with an awful, senseless stare to dodge past me who
+had put myself in her way with open arms.  At last I managed to seize her
+by the shoulders and in the extremity of my distress I shook her roughly.
+If she hadn't quieted down then I believe my heart would have broken.  I
+spluttered right into her face: "I won't let you.  Here you stay."  She
+seemed to recognize me at last, and suddenly still, perfectly firm on her
+white feet, she let her arms fall and, from an abyss of desolation,
+whispered, "O! George!  No!  No!  Not Ortega."
+
+There was a passion of mature grief in this tone of appeal.  And yet she
+remained as touching and helpless as a distressed child.  It had all the
+simplicity and depth of a child's emotion.  It tugged at one's
+heart-strings in the same direct way.  But what could one do?  How could
+one soothe her?  It was impossible to pat her on the head, take her on
+the knee, give her a chocolate or show her a picture-book.  I found
+myself absolutely without resource.  Completely at a loss.
+
+"Yes, Ortega.  Well, what of it?" I whispered with immense assurance.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+
+My brain was in a whirl.  I am safe to say that at this precise moment
+there was nobody completely sane in the house.  Setting apart Therese and
+Ortega, both in the grip of unspeakable passions, all the moral economy
+of Dona Rita had gone to pieces.  Everything was gone except her strong
+sense of life with all its implied menaces.  The woman was a mere chaos
+of sensations and vitality.  I, too, suffered most from inability to get
+hold of some fundamental thought.  The one on which I could best build
+some hopes was the thought that, of course, Ortega did not know anything.
+I whispered this into the ear of Dona Rita, into her precious, her
+beautifully shaped ear.
+
+But she shook her head, very much like an inconsolable child and very
+much with a child's complete pessimism she murmured, "Therese has told
+him."
+
+The words, "Oh, nonsense," never passed my lips, because I could not
+cheat myself into denying that there had been a noise; and that the noise
+was in the fencing-room.  I knew that room.  There was nothing there that
+by the wildest stretch of imagination could be conceived as falling with
+that particular sound.  There was a table with a tall strip of
+looking-glass above it at one end; but since Blunt took away his
+campaigning kit there was no small object of any sort on the console or
+anywhere else that could have been jarred off in some mysterious manner.
+Along one of the walls there was the whole complicated apparatus of solid
+brass pipes, and quite close to it an enormous bath sunk into the floor.
+The greatest part of the room along its whole length was covered with
+matting and had nothing else but a long, narrow leather-upholstered bench
+fixed to the wall.  And that was all.  And the door leading to the studio
+was locked.  And Therese had the key.  And it flashed on my mind,
+independently of Dona Rita's pessimism, by the force of personal
+conviction, that, of course, Therese would tell him.  I beheld the whole
+succession of events perfectly connected and tending to that particular
+conclusion.  Therese would tell him!  I could see the contrasted heads of
+those two formidable lunatics close together in a dark mist of whispers
+compounded of greed, piety, and jealousy, plotting in a sense of perfect
+security as if under the very wing of Providence.  So at least Therese
+would think.  She could not be but under the impression that
+(providentially) I had been called out for the rest of the night.
+
+And now there was one sane person in the house, for I had regained
+complete command of my thoughts.  Working in a logical succession of
+images they showed me at last as clearly as a picture on a wall, Therese
+pressing with fervour the key into the fevered palm of the rich,
+prestigious, virtuous cousin, so that he should go and urge his
+self-sacrificing offer to Rita, and gain merit before Him whose Eye sees
+all the actions of men.  And this image of those two with the key in the
+studio seemed to me a most monstrous conception of fanaticism, of a
+perfectly horrible aberration.  For who could mistake the state that made
+Jose Ortega the figure he was, inspiring both pity and fear?  I could not
+deny that I understood, not the full extent but the exact nature of his
+suffering.  Young as I was I had solved for myself that grotesque and
+sombre personality.  His contact with me, the personal contact with (as
+he thought) one of the actual lovers of that woman who brought to him as
+a boy the curse of the gods, had tipped over the trembling scales.  No
+doubt I was very near death in the "grand salon" of the Maison Doree,
+only that his torture had gone too far.  It seemed to me that I ought to
+have heard his very soul scream while we were seated at supper.  But in a
+moment he had ceased to care for me.  I was nothing.  To the crazy
+exaggeration of his jealousy I was but one amongst a hundred thousand.
+What was my death?  Nothing.  All mankind had possessed that woman.  I
+knew what his wooing of her would be: Mine--or Dead.
+
+All this ought to have had the clearness of noon-day, even to the veriest
+idiot that ever lived; and Therese was, properly speaking, exactly that.
+An idiot.  A one-ideaed creature.  Only the idea was complex; therefore
+it was impossible really to say what she wasn't capable of.  This was
+what made her obscure processes so awful.  She had at times the most
+amazing perceptions.  Who could tell where her simplicity ended and her
+cunning began?  She had also the faculty of never forgetting any fact
+bearing upon her one idea; and I remembered now that the conversation
+with me about the will had produced on her an indelible impression of the
+Law's surprising justice.  Recalling her naive admiration of the "just"
+law that required no "paper" from a sister, I saw her casting loose the
+raging fate with a sanctimonious air.  And Therese would naturally give
+the key of the fencing-room to her dear, virtuous, grateful,
+disinterested cousin, to that damned soul with delicate whiskers, because
+she would think it just possible that Rita might have locked the door
+leading front her room into the hall; whereas there was no earthly
+reason, not the slightest likelihood, that she would bother about the
+other.  Righteousness demanded that the erring sister should be taken
+unawares.
+
+All the above is the analysis of one short moment.  Images are to words
+like light to sound--incomparably swifter.  And all this was really one
+flash of light through my mind.  A comforting thought succeeded it: that
+both doors were locked and that really there was no danger.
+
+However, there had been that noise--the why and the how of it?  Of course
+in the dark he might have fallen into the bath, but that wouldn't have
+been a faint noise.  It wouldn't have been a rattle.  There was
+absolutely nothing he could knock over.  He might have dropped a
+candle-stick if Therese had left him her own.  That was possible, but
+then those thick mats--and then, anyway, why should he drop it? and, hang
+it all, why shouldn't he have gone straight on and tried the door?  I had
+suddenly a sickening vision of the fellow crouching at the key-hole,
+listening, listening, listening, for some movement or sigh of the sleeper
+he was ready to tear away from the world, alive or dead.  I had a
+conviction that he was still listening.  Why?  Goodness knows!  He may
+have been only gloating over the assurance that the night was long and
+that he had all these hours to himself.
+
+I was pretty certain that he could have heard nothing of our whispers,
+the room was too big for that and the door too solid.  I hadn't the same
+confidence in the efficiency of the lock.  Still I . . . Guarding my lips
+with my hand I urged Dona Rita to go back to the sofa.  She wouldn't
+answer me and when I got hold of her arm I discovered that she wouldn't
+move.  She had taken root in that thick-pile Aubusson carpet; and she was
+so rigidly still all over that the brilliant stones in the shaft of the
+arrow of gold, with the six candles at the head of the sofa blazing full
+on them, emitted no sparkle.
+
+I was extremely anxious that she shouldn't betray herself.  I reasoned,
+save the mark, as a psychologist.  I had no doubt that the man knew of
+her being there; but he only knew it by hearsay.  And that was bad
+enough.  I could not help feeling that if he obtained some evidence for
+his senses by any sort of noise, voice, or movement, his madness would
+gain strength enough to burst the lock.  I was rather ridiculously
+worried about the locks.  A horrid mistrust of the whole house possessed
+me.  I saw it in the light of a deadly trap.  I had no weapon, I couldn't
+say whether he had one or not.  I wasn't afraid of a struggle as far as
+I, myself, was concerned, but I was afraid of it for Dona Rita.  To be
+rolling at her feet, locked in a literally tooth-and-nail struggle with
+Ortega would have been odious.  I wanted to spare her feelings, just as I
+would have been anxious to save from any contact with mud the feet of
+that goatherd of the mountains with a symbolic face.  I looked at her
+face.  For immobility it might have been a carving.  I wished I knew how
+to deal with that embodied mystery, to influence it, to manage it.  Oh,
+how I longed for the gift of authority!  In addition, since I had become
+completely sane, all my scruples against laying hold of her had returned.
+I felt shy and embarrassed.  My eyes were fixed on the bronze handle of
+the fencing-room door as if it were something alive.  I braced myself up
+against the moment when it would move.  This was what was going to happen
+next.  It would move very gently.  My heart began to thump.  But I was
+prepared to keep myself as still as death and I hoped Dona Rita would
+have sense enough to do the same.  I stole another glance at her face and
+at that moment I heard the word: "Beloved!" form itself in the still air
+of the room, weak, distinct, piteous, like the last request of the dying.
+
+With great presence of mind I whispered into Dona Rita's ear: "Perfect
+silence!" and was overjoyed to discover that she had heard me, understood
+me; that she even had command over her rigid lips.  She answered me in a
+breath (our cheeks were nearly touching): "Take me out of this house."
+
+I glanced at all her clothing scattered about the room and hissed
+forcibly the warning "Perfect immobility"; noticing with relief that she
+didn't offer to move, though animation was returning to her and her lips
+had remained parted in an awful, unintended effect of a smile.  And I
+don't know whether I was pleased when she, who was not to be touched,
+gripped my wrist suddenly.  It had the air of being done on purpose
+because almost instantly another: "Beloved!" louder, more agonized if
+possible, got into the room and, yes, went home to my heart.  It was
+followed without any transition, preparation, or warning, by a positively
+bellowed: "Speak, perjured beast!" which I felt pass in a thrill right
+through Dona Rita like an electric shock, leaving her as motionless as
+before.
+
+Till he shook the door handle, which he did immediately afterwards, I
+wasn't certain through which door he had spoken.  The two doors (in
+different walls) were rather near each other.  It was as I expected.  He
+was in the fencing-room, thoroughly aroused, his senses on the alert to
+catch the slightest sound.  A situation not to be trifled with.  Leaving
+the room was for us out of the question.  It was quite possible for him
+to dash round into the hall before we could get clear of the front door.
+As to making a bolt of it upstairs there was the same objection; and to
+allow ourselves to be chased all over the empty house by this maniac
+would have been mere folly.  There was no advantage in locking ourselves
+up anywhere upstairs where the original doors and locks were much
+lighter.  No, true safety was in absolute stillness and silence, so that
+even his rage should be brought to doubt at last and die expended, or
+choke him before it died; I didn't care which.
+
+For me to go out and meet him would have been stupid.  Now I was certain
+that he was armed.  I had remembered the wall in the fencing-room
+decorated with trophies of cold steel in all the civilized and savage
+forms; sheaves of assegais, in the guise of columns and grouped between
+them stars and suns of choppers, swords, knives; from Italy, from
+Damascus, from Abyssinia, from the ends of the world.  Ortega had only to
+make his barbarous choice.  I suppose he had got up on the bench, and
+fumbling about amongst them must have brought one down, which, falling,
+had produced that rattling noise.  But in any case to go to meet him
+would have been folly, because, after all, I might have been overpowered
+(even with bare hands) and then Dona Rita would have been left utterly
+defenceless.
+
+"He will speak," came to me the ghostly, terrified murmur of her voice.
+"Take me out of the house before he begins to speak."
+
+"Keep still," I whispered.  "He will soon get tired of this."
+
+"You don't know him."
+
+"Oh, yes, I do.  Been with him two hours."
+
+At this she let go my wrist and covered her face with her hands
+passionately.  When she dropped them she had the look of one morally
+crushed.
+
+"What did he say to you?"
+
+"He raved."
+
+"Listen to me.  It was all true!"
+
+"I daresay, but what of that?"
+
+These ghostly words passed between us hardly louder than thoughts; but
+after my last answer she ceased and gave me a searching stare, then drew
+in a long breath.  The voice on the other side of the door burst out with
+an impassioned request for a little pity, just a little, and went on
+begging for a few words, for two words, for one word--one poor little
+word.  Then it gave up, then repeated once more, "Say you are there,
+Rita, Say one word, just one word.  Say 'yes.'  Come!  Just one little
+yes."
+
+"You see," I said.  She only lowered her eyelids over the anxious glance
+she had turned on me.
+
+For a minute we could have had the illusion that he had stolen away,
+unheard, on the thick mats.  But I don't think that either of us was
+deceived.  The voice returned, stammering words without connection,
+pausing and faltering, till suddenly steadied it soared into impassioned
+entreaty, sank to low, harsh tones, voluble, lofty sometimes and
+sometimes abject.  When it paused it left us looking profoundly at each
+other.
+
+"It's almost comic," I whispered.
+
+"Yes.  One could laugh," she assented, with a sort of sinister
+conviction.  Never had I seen her look exactly like that, for an instant
+another, an incredible Rita!  "Haven't I laughed at him innumerable
+times?" she added in a sombre whisper.
+
+He was muttering to himself out there, and unexpectedly shouted: "What?"
+as though he had fancied he had heard something.  He waited a while
+before he started up again with a loud: "Speak up, Queen of the goats,
+with your goat tricks. . ."  All was still for a time, then came a most
+awful bang on the door.  He must have stepped back a pace to hurl himself
+bodily against the panels.  The whole house seemed to shake.  He repeated
+that performance once more, and then varied it by a prolonged drumming
+with his fists.  It _was_ comic.  But I felt myself struggling mentally
+with an invading gloom as though I were no longer sure of myself.
+
+"Take me out," whispered Dona Rita feverishly, "take me out of this house
+before it is too late."
+
+"You will have to stand it," I answered.
+
+"So be it; but then you must go away yourself.  Go now, before it is too
+late."
+
+I didn't condescend to answer this.  The drumming on the panels stopped
+and the absurd thunder of it died out in the house.  I don't know why
+precisely then I had the acute vision of the red mouth of Jose Ortega
+wriggling with rage between his funny whiskers.  He began afresh but in a
+tired tone:
+
+"Do you expect a fellow to forget your tricks, you wicked little devil?
+Haven't you ever seen me dodging about to get a sight of you amongst
+those pretty gentlemen, on horseback, like a princess, with pure cheeks
+like a carved saint?  I wonder I didn't throw stones at you, I wonder I
+didn't run after you shouting the tale--curse my timidity!  But I daresay
+they knew as much as I did.  More.  All the new tricks--if that were
+possible."
+
+While he was making this uproar, Dona Rita put her fingers in her ears
+and then suddenly changed her mind and clapped her hands over my ears.
+Instinctively I disengaged my head but she persisted.  We had a short
+tussle without moving from the spot, and suddenly I had my head free, and
+there was complete silence.  He had screamed himself out of breath, but
+Dona Rita muttering: "Too late, too late," got her hands away from my
+grip and slipping altogether out of her fur coat seized some garment
+lying on a chair near by (I think it was her skirt), with the intention
+of dressing herself, I imagine, and rushing out of the house.  Determined
+to prevent this, but indeed without thinking very much what I was doing,
+I got hold of her arm.  That struggle was silent, too; but I used the
+least force possible and she managed to give me an unexpected push.
+Stepping back to save myself from falling I overturned the little table,
+bearing the six-branched candlestick.  It hit the floor, rebounded with a
+dull ring on the carpet, and by the time it came to a rest every single
+candle was out.  He on the other side of the door naturally heard the
+noise and greeted it with a triumphant screech: "Aha!  I've managed to
+wake you up," the very savagery of which had a laughable effect.  I felt
+the weight of Dona Rita grow on my arm and thought it best to let her
+sink on the floor, wishing to be free in my movements and really afraid
+that now he had actually heard a noise he would infallibly burst the
+door.  But he didn't even thump it.  He seemed to have exhausted himself
+in that scream.  There was no other light in the room but the darkened
+glow of the embers and I could hardly make out amongst the shadows of
+furniture Dona Rita sunk on her knees in a penitential and despairing
+attitude.  Before this collapse I, who had been wrestling desperately
+with her a moment before, felt that I dare not touch her.  This emotion,
+too, I could not understand; this abandonment of herself, this
+conscience-stricken humility.  A humbly imploring request to open the
+door came from the other side.  Ortega kept on repeating: "Open the door,
+open the door," in such an amazing variety of intonations, imperative,
+whining, persuasive, insinuating, and even unexpectedly jocose, that I
+really stood there smiling to myself, yet with a gloomy and uneasy heart.
+Then he remarked, parenthetically as it were, "Oh, you know how to
+torment a man, you brown-skinned, lean, grinning, dishevelled imp, you.
+And mark," he expounded further, in a curiously doctoral tone--"you are
+in all your limbs hateful: your eyes are hateful and your mouth is
+hateful, and your hair is hateful, and your body is cold and vicious like
+a snake--and altogether you are perdition."
+
+This statement was astonishingly deliberate.  He drew a moaning breath
+after it and uttered in a heart-rending tone, "You know, Rita, that I
+cannot live without you.  I haven't lived.  I am not living now.  This
+isn't life.  Come, Rita, you can't take a boy's soul away and then let
+him grow up and go about the world, poor devil, while you go amongst the
+rich from one pair of arms to another, showing all your best tricks.  But
+I will forgive you if you only open the door," he ended in an inflated
+tone: "You remember how you swore time after time to be my wife.  You are
+more fit to be Satan's wife but I don't mind.  You shall be my wife!"
+
+A sound near the floor made me bend down hastily with a stern: "Don't
+laugh," for in his grotesque, almost burlesque discourses there seemed to
+me to be truth, passion, and horror enough to move a mountain.
+
+Suddenly suspicion seized him out there.  With perfectly farcical
+unexpectedness he yelled shrilly: "Oh, you deceitful wretch!  You won't
+escape me!  I will have you. . . ."
+
+And in a manner of speaking he vanished.  Of course I couldn't see him
+but somehow that was the impression.  I had hardly time to receive it
+when crash! . . . he was already at the other door.  I suppose he thought
+that his prey was escaping him.  His swiftness was amazing, almost
+inconceivable, more like the effect of a trick or of a mechanism.  The
+thump on the door was awful as if he had not been able to stop himself in
+time.  The shock seemed enough to stun an elephant.  It was really funny.
+And after the crash there was a moment of silence as if he were
+recovering himself.  The next thing was a low grunt, and at once he
+picked up the thread of his fixed idea.
+
+"You will have to be my wife.  I have no shame.  You swore you would be
+and so you will have to be."  Stifled low sounds made me bend down again
+to the kneeling form, white in the flush of the dark red glow.  "For
+goodness' sake don't," I whispered down.  She was struggling with an
+appalling fit of merriment, repeating to herself, "Yes, every day, for
+two months.  Sixty times at least, sixty times at least."  Her voice was
+rising high.  She was struggling against laughter, but when I tried to
+put my hand over her lips I felt her face wet with tears.  She turned it
+this way and that, eluding my hand with repressed low, little moans.  I
+lost my caution and said, "Be quiet," so sharply as to startle myself
+(and her, too) into expectant stillness.
+
+Ortega's voice in the hall asked distinctly: "Eh?  What's this?" and then
+he kept still on his side listening, but he must have thought that his
+ears had deceived him.  He was getting tired, too.  He was keeping quiet
+out there--resting.  Presently he sighed deeply; then in a harsh
+melancholy tone he started again.
+
+"My love, my soul, my life, do speak to me.  What am I that you should
+take so much trouble to pretend that you aren't there?  Do speak to me,"
+he repeated tremulously, following this mechanical appeal with a string
+of extravagantly endearing names, some of them quite childish, which all
+of a sudden stopped dead; and then after a pause there came a distinct,
+unutterably weary: "What shall I do now?" as though he were speaking to
+himself.
+
+I shuddered to hear rising from the floor, by my side, a vibrating,
+scornful: "Do!  Why, slink off home looking over your shoulder as you
+used to years ago when I had done with you--all but the laughter."
+
+"Rita," I murmured, appalled.  He must have been struck dumb for a
+moment.  Then, goodness only knows why, in his dismay or rage he was
+moved to speak in French with a most ridiculous accent.
+
+"So you have found your tongue at last--_Catin_!  You were that from the
+cradle.  Don't you remember how . . ."
+
+Dona Rita sprang to her feet at my side with a loud cry, "No, George,
+no," which bewildered me completely.  The suddenness, the loudness of it
+made the ensuing silence on both sides of the door perfectly awful.  It
+seemed to me that if I didn't resist with all my might something in me
+would die on the instant.  In the straight, falling folds of the
+night-dress she looked cold like a block of marble; while I, too, was
+turned into stone by the terrific clamour in the hall.
+
+"Therese, Therese," yelled Ortega.  "She has got a man in there."  He ran
+to the foot of the stairs and screamed again, "Therese, Therese!  There
+is a man with her.  A man!  Come down, you miserable, starved peasant,
+come down and see."
+
+I don't know where Therese was but I am sure that this voice reached her,
+terrible, as if clamouring to heaven, and with a shrill over-note which
+made me certain that if she was in bed the only thing she would think of
+doing would be to put her head under the bed-clothes.  With a final yell:
+"Come down and see," he flew back at the door of the room and started
+shaking it violently.
+
+It was a double door, very tall, and there must have been a lot of things
+loose about its fittings, bolts, latches, and all those brass
+applications with broken screws, because it rattled, it clattered, it
+jingled; and produced also the sound as of thunder rolling in the big,
+empty hall.  It was deafening, distressing, and vaguely alarming as if it
+could bring the house down.  At the same time the futility of it had, it
+cannot be denied, a comic effect.  The very magnitude of the racket he
+raised was funny.  But he couldn't keep up that violent exertion
+continuously, and when he stopped to rest we could hear him shouting to
+himself in vengeful tones.  He saw it all!  He had been decoyed there!
+(Rattle, rattle, rattle.)  He had been decoyed into that town, he
+screamed, getting more and more excited by the noise he made himself, in
+order to be exposed to this!  (Rattle, rattle.)  By this shameless
+"_Catin_! _Catin_! _Catin_!"
+
+He started at the door again with superhuman vigour.  Behind me I heard
+Dona Rita laughing softly, statuesque, turned all dark in the fading
+glow.  I called out to her quite openly, "Do keep your self-control."
+And she called back to me in a clear voice: "Oh, my dear, will you ever
+consent to speak to me after all this?  But don't ask for the impossible.
+He was born to be laughed at."
+
+"Yes," I cried.  "But don't let yourself go."
+
+I don't know whether Ortega heard us.  He was exerting then his utmost
+strength of lung against the infamous plot to expose him to the derision
+of the fiendish associates of that obscene woman! . . . Then he began
+another interlude upon the door, so sustained and strong that I had the
+thought that this was growing absurdly impossible, that either the
+plaster would begin to fall off the ceiling or he would drop dead next
+moment, out there.
+
+He stopped, uttered a few curses at the door, and seemed calmer from
+sheer exhaustion.
+
+"This story will be all over the world," we heard him begin.  "Deceived,
+decoyed, inveighed, in order to be made a laughing-stock before the most
+debased of all mankind, that woman and her associates."  This was really
+a meditation.  And then he screamed: "I will kill you all."  Once more he
+started worrying the door but it was a startlingly feeble effort which he
+abandoned almost at once.  He must have been at the end of his strength.
+Dona Rita from the middle of the room asked me recklessly loud: "Tell me!
+Wasn't he born to be laughed at?"  I didn't answer her.  I was so near
+the door that I thought I ought to hear him panting there.  He was
+terrifying, but he was not serious.  He was at the end of his strength,
+of his breath, of every kind of endurance, but I did not know it.  He was
+done up, finished; but perhaps he did not know it himself.  How still he
+was!  Just as I began to wonder at it, I heard him distinctly give a slap
+to his forehead.  "I see it all!" he cried.  "That miserable, canting
+peasant-woman upstairs has arranged it all.  No doubt she consulted her
+priests.  I must regain my self-respect.  Let her die first."  I heard
+him make a dash for the foot of the stairs.  I was appalled; yet to think
+of Therese being hoisted with her own petard was like a turn of affairs
+in a farce.  A very ferocious farce.  Instinctively I unlocked the door.
+Dona Rita's contralto laugh rang out loud, bitter, and contemptuous; and
+I heard Ortega's distracted screaming as if under torture.  "It hurts!
+It hurts!  It hurts!"  I hesitated just an instant, half a second, no
+more, but before I could open the door wide there was in the hall a short
+groan and the sound of a heavy fall.
+
+The sight of Ortega lying on his back at the foot of the stairs arrested
+me in the doorway.  One of his legs was drawn up, the other extended
+fully, his foot very near the pedestal of the silver statuette holding
+the feeble and tenacious gleam which made the shadows so heavy in that
+hall.  One of his arms lay across his breast.  The other arm was extended
+full length on the white-and-black pavement with the hand palm upwards
+and the fingers rigidly spread out.  The shadow of the lowest step
+slanted across his face but one whisker and part of his chin could be
+made out.  He appeared strangely flattened.  He didn't move at all.  He
+was in his shirt-sleeves.  I felt an extreme distaste for that sight.
+The characteristic sound of a key worrying in the lock stole into my
+ears.  I couldn't locate it but I didn't attend much to that at first.  I
+was engaged in watching Senor Ortega.  But for his raised leg he clung so
+flat to the floor and had taken on himself such a distorted shape that he
+might have been the mere shadow of Senor Ortega.  It was rather
+fascinating to see him so quiet at the end of all that fury, clamour,
+passion, and uproar.  Surely there was never anything so still in the
+world as this Ortega.  I had a bizarre notion that he was not to be
+disturbed.
+
+A noise like the rattling of chain links, a small grind and click
+exploded in the stillness of the hall and a voice began to swear in
+Italian.  These surprising sounds were quite welcome, they recalled me to
+myself, and I perceived they came from the front door which seemed pushed
+a little ajar.  Was somebody trying to get in?  I had no objection, I
+went to the door and said: "Wait a moment, it's on the chain."  The deep
+voice on the other side said: "What an extraordinary thing," and I
+assented mentally.  It was extraordinary.  The chain was never put up,
+but Therese was a thorough sort of person, and on this night she had put
+it up to keep no one out except myself.  It was the old Italian and his
+daughters returning from the ball who were trying to get in.
+
+Suddenly I became intensely alive to the whole situation.  I bounded
+back, closed the door of Blunt's room, and the next moment was speaking
+to the Italian.  "A little patience."  My hands trembled but I managed to
+take down the chain and as I allowed the door to swing open a little more
+I put myself in his way.  He was burly, venerable, a little indignant,
+and full of thanks.  Behind him his two girls, in short-skirted costumes,
+white stockings, and low shoes, their heads powdered and earrings
+sparkling in their ears, huddled together behind their father, wrapped up
+in their light mantles.  One had kept her little black mask on her face,
+the other held hers in her hand.
+
+The Italian was surprised at my blocking the way and remarked pleasantly,
+"It's cold outside, Signor."  I said, "Yes," and added in a hurried
+whisper: "There is a dead man in the hall."  He didn't say a single word
+but put me aside a little, projected his body in for one searching
+glance.  "Your daughters," I murmured.  He said kindly, "_Va bene_, _va
+bene_."  And then to them, "Come in, girls."
+
+There is nothing like dealing with a man who has had a long past of
+out-of-the-way experiences.  The skill with which he rounded up and drove
+the girls across the hall, paternal and irresistible, venerable and
+reassuring, was a sight to see.  They had no time for more than one
+scared look over the shoulder.  He hustled them in and locked them up
+safely in their part of the house, then crossed the hall with a quick,
+practical stride.  When near Senor Ortega he trod short just in time and
+said: "In truth, blood"; then selecting the place, knelt down by the body
+in his tall hat and respectable overcoat, his white beard giving him
+immense authority somehow.  "But--this man is not dead," he exclaimed,
+looking up at me.  With profound sagacity, inherent as it were in his
+great beard, he never took the trouble to put any questions to me and
+seemed certain that I had nothing to do with the ghastly sight.  "He
+managed to give himself an enormous gash in his side," was his calm
+remark.  "And what a weapon!" he exclaimed, getting it out from under the
+body.  It was an Abyssinian or Nubian production of a bizarre shape; the
+clumsiest thing imaginable, partaking of a sickle and a chopper with a
+sharp edge and a pointed end.  A mere cruel-looking curio of
+inconceivable clumsiness to European eyes.
+
+The old man let it drop with amused disdain.  "You had better take hold
+of his legs," he decided without appeal.  I certainly had no inclination
+to argue.  When we lifted him up the head of Senor Ortega fell back
+desolately, making an awful, defenceless display of his large, white
+throat.
+
+We found the lamp burning in the studio and the bed made up on the couch
+on which we deposited our burden.  My venerable friend jerked the upper
+sheet away at once and started tearing it into strips.
+
+"You may leave him to me," said that efficient sage, "but the doctor is
+your affair.  If you don't want this business to make a noise you will
+have to find a discreet man."
+
+He was most benevolently interested in all the proceedings.  He remarked
+with a patriarchal smile as he tore the sheet noisily: "You had better
+not lose any time."  I didn't lose any time.  I crammed into the next
+hour an astonishing amount of bodily activity.  Without more words I flew
+out bare-headed into the last night of Carnival.  Luckily I was certain
+of the right sort of doctor.  He was an iron-grey man of forty and of a
+stout habit of body but who was able to put on a spurt.  In the cold,
+dark, and deserted by-streets, he ran with earnest, and ponderous
+footsteps, which echoed loudly in the cold night air, while I skimmed
+along the ground a pace or two in front of him.  It was only on arriving
+at the house that I perceived that I had left the front door wide open.
+All the town, every evil in the world could have entered the
+black-and-white hall.  But I had no time to meditate upon my imprudence.
+The doctor and I worked in silence for nearly an hour and it was only
+then while he was washing his hands in the fencing-room that he asked:
+
+"What was he up to, that imbecile?"
+
+"Oh, he was examining this curiosity," I said.
+
+"Oh, yes, and it accidentally went off," said the doctor, looking
+contemptuously at the Nubian knife I had thrown on the table.  Then while
+wiping his hands: "I would bet there is a woman somewhere under this; but
+that of course does not affect the nature of the wound.  I hope this
+blood-letting will do him good."
+
+"Nothing will do him any good," I said.
+
+"Curious house this," went on the doctor, "It belongs to a curious sort
+of woman, too.  I happened to see her once or twice.  I shouldn't wonder
+if she were to raise considerable trouble in the track of her pretty feet
+as she goes along.  I believe you know her well."
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Curious people in the house, too.  There was a Carlist officer here, a
+lean, tall, dark man, who couldn't sleep.  He consulted me once.  Do you
+know what became of him?"
+
+"No."
+
+The doctor had finished wiping his hands and flung the towel far away.
+
+"Considerable nervous over-strain.  Seemed to have a restless brain.  Not
+a good thing, that.  For the rest a perfect gentleman.  And this Spaniard
+here, do you know him?"
+
+"Enough not to care what happens to him," I said, "except for the trouble
+he might cause to the Carlist sympathizers here, should the police get
+hold of this affair."
+
+"Well, then, he must take his chance in the seclusion of that
+conservatory sort of place where you have put him.  I'll try to find
+somebody we can trust to look after him.  Meantime, I will leave the case
+to you."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+
+Directly I had shut the door after the doctor I started shouting for
+Therese.  "Come down at once, you wretched hypocrite," I yelled at the
+foot of the stairs in a sort of frenzy as though I had been a second
+Ortega.  Not even an echo answered me; but all of a sudden a small flame
+flickered descending from the upper darkness and Therese appeared on the
+first floor landing carrying a lighted candle in front of a livid, hard
+face, closed against remorse, compassion, or mercy by the meanness of her
+righteousness and of her rapacious instincts.  She was fully dressed in
+that abominable brown stuff with motionless folds, and as I watched her
+coming down step by step she might have been made of wood.  I stepped
+back and pointed my finger at the darkness of the passage leading to the
+studio.  She passed within a foot of me, her pale eyes staring straight
+ahead, her face still with disappointment and fury.  Yet it is only my
+surmise.  She might have been made thus inhuman by the force of an
+invisible purpose.  I waited a moment, then, stealthily, with extreme
+caution, I opened the door of the so-called Captain Blunt's room.
+
+The glow of embers was all but out.  It was cold and dark in there; but
+before I closed the door behind me the dim light from the hall showed me
+Dona Rita standing on the very same spot where I had left her, statuesque
+in her night-dress.  Even after I shut the door she loomed up enormous,
+indistinctly rigid and inanimate.  I picked up the candelabra, groped for
+a candle all over the carpet, found one, and lighted it.  All that time
+Dona Rita didn't stir.  When I turned towards her she seemed to be slowly
+awakening from a trance.  She was deathly pale and by contrast the
+melted, sapphire-blue of her eyes looked black as coal.  They moved a
+little in my direction, incurious, recognizing me slowly.  But when they
+had recognized me completely she raised her hands and hid her face in
+them.  A whole minute or more passed.  Then I said in a low tone: "Look
+at me," and she let them fall slowly as if accepting the inevitable.
+
+"Shall I make up the fire?" . . . I waited.  "Do you hear me?"  She made
+no sound and with the tip of my finger I touched her bare shoulder.  But
+for its elasticity it might have been frozen.  At once I looked round for
+the fur coat; it seemed to me that there was not a moment to lose if she
+was to be saved, as though we had been lost on an Arctic plain.  I had to
+put her arms into the sleeves, myself, one after another.  They were
+cold, lifeless, but flexible.  Then I moved in front of her and buttoned
+the thing close round her throat.  To do that I had actually to raise her
+chin with my finger, and it sank slowly down again.  I buttoned all the
+other buttons right down to the ground.  It was a very long and splendid
+fur.  Before rising from my kneeling position I felt her feet.  Mere ice.
+The intimacy of this sort of attendance helped the growth of my
+authority.  "Lie down," I murmured, "I shall pile on you every blanket I
+can find here," but she only shook her head.
+
+Not even in the days when she ran "shrill as a cicada and thin as a
+match" through the chill mists of her native mountains could she ever
+have felt so cold, so wretched, and so desolate.  Her very soul, her
+grave, indignant, and fantastic soul, seemed to drowse like an exhausted
+traveller surrendering himself to the sleep of death.  But when I asked
+her again to lie down she managed to answer me, "Not in this room."  The
+dumb spell was broken.  She turned her head from side to side, but oh!
+how cold she was!  It seemed to come out of her, numbing me, too; and the
+very diamonds on the arrow of gold sparkled like hoar frost in the light
+of the one candle.
+
+"Not in this room; not here," she protested, with that peculiar suavity
+of tone which made her voice unforgettable, irresistible, no matter what
+she said.  "Not after all this!  I couldn't close my eyes in this place.
+It's full of corruption and ugliness all round, in me, too, everywhere
+except in your heart, which has nothing to do where I breathe.  And here
+you may leave me.  But wherever you go remember that I am not evil, I am
+not evil."
+
+I said: "I don't intend to leave you here.  There is my room upstairs.
+You have been in it before."
+
+"Oh, you have heard of that," she whispered.  The beginning of a wan
+smile vanished from her lips.
+
+"I also think you can't stay in this room; and, surely, you needn't
+hesitate . . ."
+
+"No.  It doesn't matter now.  He has killed me.  Rita is dead."
+
+While we exchanged these words I had retrieved the quilted, blue slippers
+and had put them on her feet.  She was very tractable.  Then taking her
+by the arm I led her towards the door.
+
+"He has killed me," she repeated in a sigh.  "The little joy that was in
+me."
+
+"He has tried to kill himself out there in the hall," I said.  She put
+back like a frightened child but she couldn't be dragged on as a child
+can be.
+
+I assured her that the man was no longer there but she only repeated, "I
+can't get through the hall.  I can't walk.  I can't . . ."
+
+"Well," I said, flinging the door open and seizing her suddenly in my
+arms, "if you can't walk then you shall be carried," and I lifted her
+from the ground so abruptly that she could not help catching me round the
+neck as any child almost will do instinctively when you pick it up.
+
+I ought really to have put those blue slippers in my pocket.  One dropped
+off at the bottom of the stairs as I was stepping over an
+unpleasant-looking mess on the marble pavement, and the other was lost a
+little way up the flight when, for some reason (perhaps from a sense of
+insecurity), she began to struggle.  Though I had an odd sense of being
+engaged in a sort of nursery adventure she was no child to carry.  I
+could just do it.  But not if she chose to struggle.  I set her down
+hastily and only supported her round the waist for the rest of the way.
+My room, of course, was perfectly dark but I led her straight to the sofa
+at once and let her fall on it.  Then as if I had in sober truth rescued
+her from an Alpine height or an Arctic floe, I busied myself with nothing
+but lighting the gas and starting the fire.  I didn't even pause to lock
+my door.  All the time I was aware of her presence behind me, nay, of
+something deeper and more my own--of her existence itself--of a small
+blue flame, blue like her eyes, flickering and clear within her frozen
+body.  When I turned to her she was sitting very stiff and upright, with
+her feet posed hieratically on the carpet and her head emerging out of
+the ample fur collar, such as a gem-like flower above the rim of a dark
+vase.  I tore the blankets and the pillows off my bed and piled them up
+in readiness in a great heap on the floor near the couch.  My reason for
+this was that the room was large, too large for the fireplace, and the
+couch was nearest to the fire.  She gave no sign but one of her wistful
+attempts at a smile.  In a most business-like way I took the arrow out of
+her hair and laid it on the centre table.  The tawny mass fell loose at
+once about her shoulders and made her look even more desolate than
+before.  But there was an invincible need of gaiety in her heart.  She
+said funnily, looking at the arrow sparkling in the gas light:
+
+"Ah!  That poor philistinish ornament!"
+
+An echo of our early days, not more innocent but so much more youthful,
+was in her tone; and we both, as if touched with poignant regret, looked
+at each other with enlightened eyes.
+
+"Yes," I said, "how far away all this is.  And you wouldn't leave even
+that object behind when you came last in here.  Perhaps it is for that
+reason it haunted me--mostly at night.  I dreamed of you sometimes as a
+huntress nymph gleaming white through the foliage and throwing this arrow
+like a dart straight at my heart.  But it never reached it.  It always
+fell at my feet as I woke up.  The huntress never meant to strike down
+that particular quarry."
+
+"The huntress was wild but she was not evil.  And she was no nymph, but
+only a goatherd girl.  Dream of her no more, my dear."
+
+I had the strength of mind to make a sign of assent and busied myself
+arranging a couple of pillows at one end of the sofa.  "Upon my soul,
+goatherd, you are not responsible," I said.  "You are not!  Lay down that
+uneasy head," I continued, forcing a half-playful note into my immense
+sadness, "that has even dreamed of a crown--but not for itself."
+
+She lay down quietly.  I covered her up, looked once into her eyes and
+felt the restlessness of fatigue over-power me so that I wanted to
+stagger out, walk straight before me, stagger on and on till I dropped.
+In the end I lost myself in thought.  I woke with a start to her voice
+saying positively:
+
+"No.  Not even in this room.  I can't close my eyes.  Impossible.  I have
+a horror of myself.  That voice in my ears.  All true.  All true."
+
+She was sitting up, two masses of tawny hair fell on each side of her
+tense face.  I threw away the pillows from which she had risen and sat
+down behind her on the couch.  "Perhaps like this," I suggested, drawing
+her head gently on my breast.  She didn't resist, she didn't even sigh,
+she didn't look at me or attempt to settle herself in any way.  It was I
+who settled her after taking up a position which I thought I should be
+able to keep for hours--for ages.  After a time I grew composed enough to
+become aware of the ticking of the clock, even to take pleasure in it.
+The beat recorded the moments of her rest, while I sat, keeping as still
+as if my life depended upon it with my eyes fixed idly on the arrow of
+gold gleaming and glittering dimly on the table under the lowered
+gas-jet.  And presently my breathing fell into the quiet rhythm of the
+sleep which descended on her at last.  My thought was that now nothing
+mattered in the world because I had the world safe resting in my arms--or
+was it in my heart?
+
+Suddenly my heart seemed torn in two within my breast and half of my
+breath knocked out of me.  It was a tumultuous awakening.  The day had
+come.  Dona Rita had opened her eyes, found herself in my arms, and
+instantly had flung herself out of them with one sudden effort.  I saw
+her already standing in the filtered sunshine of the closed shutters,
+with all the childlike horror and shame of that night vibrating afresh in
+the awakened body of the woman.
+
+"Daylight," she whispered in an appalled voice.  "Don't look at me,
+George.  I can't face daylight.  No--not with you.  Before we set eyes on
+each other all that past was like nothing.  I had crushed it all in my
+new pride.  Nothing could touch the Rita whose hand was kissed by you.
+But now!  Never in daylight."
+
+I sat there stupid with surprise and grief.  This was no longer the
+adventure of venturesome children in a nursery-book.  A grown man's
+bitterness, informed, suspicious, resembling hatred, welled out of my
+heart.
+
+"All this means that you are going to desert me again?" I said with
+contempt.  "All right.  I won't throw stones after you . . . Are you
+going, then?"
+
+She lowered her head slowly with a backward gesture of her arm as if to
+keep me off, for I had sprung to my feet all at once as if mad.
+
+"Then go quickly," I said.  "You are afraid of living flesh and blood.
+What are you running after?  Honesty, as you say, or some distinguished
+carcass to feed your vanity on?  I know how cold you can be--and yet
+live.  What have I done to you?  You go to sleep in my arms, wake up and
+go away.  Is it to impress me?  Charlatanism of character, my dear."
+
+She stepped forward on her bare feet as firm on that floor which seemed
+to heave up and down before my eyes as she had ever been--goatherd child
+leaping on the rocks of her native hills which she was never to see
+again.  I snatched the arrow of gold from the table and threw it after
+her.
+
+"Don't forget this thing," I cried, "you would never forgive yourself for
+leaving it behind."
+
+It struck the back of the fur coat and fell on the floor behind her.  She
+never looked round.  She walked to the door, opened it without haste, and
+on the landing in the diffused light from the ground-glass skylight there
+appeared, rigid, like an implacable and obscure fate, the awful
+Therese--waiting for her sister.  The heavy ends of a big black shawl
+thrown over her head hung massively in biblical folds.  With a faint cry
+of dismay Dona Rita stopped just within my room.
+
+The two women faced each other for a few moments silently.  Therese spoke
+first.  There was no austerity in her tone.  Her voice was as usual,
+pertinacious, unfeeling, with a slight plaint in it; terrible in its
+unchanged purpose.
+
+"I have been standing here before this door all night," she said.  "I
+don't know how I lived through it.  I thought I would die a hundred times
+for shame.  So that's how you are spending your time?  You are worse than
+shameless.  But God may still forgive you.  You have a soul.  You are my
+sister.  I will never abandon you--till you die."
+
+"What is it?" Dona Rita was heard wistfully, "my soul or this house that
+you won't abandon."
+
+"Come out and bow your head in humiliation.  I am your sister and I shall
+help you to pray to God and all the Saints.  Come away from that poor
+young gentleman who like all the others can have nothing but contempt and
+disgust for you in his heart.  Come and hide your head where no one will
+reproach you--but I, your sister.  Come out and beat your breast: come,
+poor Sinner, and let me kiss you, for you are my sister!"
+
+While Therese was speaking Dona Rita stepped back a pace and as the other
+moved forward still extending the hand of sisterly love, she slammed the
+door in Therese's face.  "You abominable girl!" she cried fiercely.  Then
+she turned about and walked towards me who had not moved.  I felt hardly
+alive but for the cruel pain that possessed my whole being.  On the way
+she stooped to pick up the arrow of gold and then moved on quicker,
+holding it out to me in her open palm.
+
+"You thought I wouldn't give it to you.  _Amigo_, I wanted nothing so
+much as to give it to you.  And now, perhaps--you will take it."
+
+"Not without the woman," I said sombrely.
+
+"Take it," she said.  "I haven't the courage to deliver myself up to
+Therese.  No.  Not even for your sake.  Don't you think I have been
+miserable enough yet?"
+
+I snatched the arrow out of her hand then and ridiculously pressed it to
+my breast; but as I opened my lips she who knew what was struggling for
+utterance in my heart cried in a ringing tone:
+
+"Speak no words of love, George!  Not yet.  Not in this house of ill-luck
+and falsehood.  Not within a hundred miles of this house, where they came
+clinging to me all profaned from the mouth of that man.  Haven't you
+heard them--the horrible things?  And what can words have to do between
+you and me?"
+
+Her hands were stretched out imploringly, I said, childishly
+disconcerted:
+
+"But, Rita, how can I help using words of love to you?  They come of
+themselves on my lips!"
+
+"They come!  Ah!  But I shall seal your lips with the thing itself," she
+said.  "Like this. . . "
+
+
+
+
+SECOND NOTE
+
+
+The narrative of our man goes on for some six months more, from this, the
+last night of the Carnival season up to and beyond the season of roses.
+The tone of it is much less of exultation than might have been expected.
+Love as is well known having nothing to do with reason, being insensible
+to forebodings and even blind to evidence, the surrender of those two
+beings to a precarious bliss has nothing very astonishing in itself; and
+its portrayal, as he attempts it, lacks dramatic interest.  The
+sentimental interest could only have a fascination for readers themselves
+actually in love.  The response of a reader depends on the mood of the
+moment, so much so that a book may seem extremely interesting when read
+late at night, but might appear merely a lot of vapid verbiage in the
+morning.  My conviction is that the mood in which the continuation of his
+story would appear sympathetic is very rare.  This consideration has
+induced me to suppress it--all but the actual facts which round up the
+previous events and satisfy such curiosity as might have been aroused by
+the foregoing narrative.
+
+It is to be remarked that this period is characterized more by a deep and
+joyous tenderness than by sheer passion.  All fierceness of spirit seems
+to have burnt itself out in their preliminary hesitations and struggles
+against each other and themselves.  Whether love in its entirety has,
+speaking generally, the same elementary meaning for women as for men, is
+very doubtful.  Civilization has been at work there.  But the fact is
+that those two display, in every phase of discovery and response, an
+exact accord.  Both show themselves amazingly ingenuous in the practice
+of sentiment.  I believe that those who know women won't be surprised to
+hear me say that she was as new to love as he was.  During their retreat
+in the region of the Maritime Alps, in a small house built of dry stones
+and embowered with roses, they appear all through to be less like
+released lovers than as companions who had found out each other's fitness
+in a specially intense way.  Upon the whole, I think that there must be
+some truth in his insistence of there having always been something
+childlike in their relation.  In the unreserved and instant sharing of
+all thoughts, all impressions, all sensations, we see the naiveness of a
+children's foolhardy adventure.  This unreserved expressed for him the
+whole truth of the situation.  With her it may have been different.  It
+might have been assumed; yet nobody is altogether a comedian; and even
+comedians themselves have got to believe in the part they play.  Of the
+two she appears much the more assured and confident.  But if in this she
+was a comedienne then it was but a great achievement of her ineradicable
+honesty.  Having once renounced her honourable scruples she took good
+care that he should taste no flavour of misgivings in the cup.  Being
+older it was she who imparted its character to the situation.  As to the
+man if he had any superiority of his own it was simply the superiority of
+him who loves with the greater self-surrender.
+
+This is what appears from the pages I have discreetly suppressed--partly
+out of regard for the pages themselves.  In every, even terrestrial,
+mystery there is as it were a sacred core.  A sustained commentary on
+love is not fit for every eye.  A universal experience is exactly the
+sort of thing which is most difficult to appraise justly in a particular
+instance.
+
+How this particular instance affected Rose, who was the only companion of
+the two hermits in their rose-embowered hut of stones, I regret not to be
+able to report; but I will venture to say that for reasons on which I
+need not enlarge, the girl could not have been very reassured by what she
+saw.  It seems to me that her devotion could never be appeased; for the
+conviction must have been growing on her that, no matter what happened,
+Madame could never have any friends.  It may be that Dona Rita had given
+her a glimpse of the unavoidable end, and that the girl's tarnished eyes
+masked a certain amount of apprehensive, helpless desolation.
+
+What meantime was becoming of the fortune of Henry Allegre is another
+curious question.  We have been told that it was too big to be tied up in
+a sack and thrown into the sea.  That part of it represented by the
+fabulous collections was still being protected by the police.  But for
+the rest, it may be assumed that its power and significance were lost to
+an interested world for something like six months.  What is certain is
+that the late Henry Allegre's man of affairs found himself comparatively
+idle.  The holiday must have done much good to his harassed brain.  He
+had received a note from Dona Rita saying that she had gone into retreat
+and that she did not mean to send him her address, not being in the
+humour to be worried with letters on any subject whatever.  "It's enough
+for you"--she wrote--"to know that I am alive."  Later, at irregular
+intervals, he received scraps of paper bearing the stamps of various post
+offices and containing the simple statement: "I am still alive," signed
+with an enormous, flourished exuberant R.  I imagine Rose had to travel
+some distances by rail to post those messages.  A thick veil of secrecy
+had been lowered between the world and the lovers; yet even this veil
+turned out not altogether impenetrable.
+
+He--it would be convenient to call him Monsieur George to the end--shared
+with Dona Rita her perfect detachment from all mundane affairs; but he
+had to make two short visits to Marseilles.  The first was prompted by
+his loyal affection for Dominic.  He wanted to discover what had happened
+or was happening to Dominic and to find out whether he could do something
+for that man.  But Dominic was not the sort of person for whom one can do
+much.  Monsieur George did not even see him.  It looked uncommonly as if
+Dominic's heart were broken.  Monsieur George remained concealed for
+twenty-four hours in the very house in which Madame Leonore had her cafe.
+He spent most of that time in conversing with Madame Leonore about
+Dominic.  She was distressed, but her mind was made up.  That
+bright-eyed, nonchalant, and passionate woman was making arrangements to
+dispose of her cafe before departing to join Dominic.  She would not say
+where.  Having ascertained that his assistance was not required Monsieur
+George, in his own words, "managed to sneak out of the town without being
+seen by a single soul that mattered."
+
+The second occasion was very prosaic and shockingly incongruous with the
+super-mundane colouring of these days.  He had neither the fortune of
+Henry Allegre nor a man of affairs of his own.  But some rent had to be
+paid to somebody for the stone hut and Rose could not go marketing in the
+tiny hamlet at the foot of the hill without a little money.  There came a
+time when Monsieur George had to descend from the heights of his love in
+order, in his own words, "to get a supply of cash."  As he had
+disappeared very suddenly and completely for a time from the eyes of
+mankind it was necessary that he should show himself and sign some
+papers.  That business was transacted in the office of the banker
+mentioned in the story.  Monsieur George wished to avoid seeing the man
+himself but in this he did not succeed.  The interview was short.  The
+banker naturally asked no questions, made no allusions to persons and
+events, and didn't even mention the great Legitimist Principle which
+presented to him now no interest whatever.  But for the moment all the
+world was talking of the Carlist enterprise.  It had collapsed utterly,
+leaving behind, as usual, a large crop of recriminations, charges of
+incompetency and treachery, and a certain amount of scandalous gossip.
+The banker (his wife's salon had been very Carlist indeed) declared that
+he had never believed in the success of the cause.  "You are well out of
+it," he remarked with a chilly smile to Monsieur George.  The latter
+merely observed that he had been very little "in it" as a matter of fact,
+and that he was quite indifferent to the whole affair.
+
+"You left a few of your feathers in it, nevertheless," the banker
+concluded with a wooden face and with the curtness of a man who knows.
+
+Monsieur George ought to have taken the very next train out of the town
+but he yielded to the temptation to discover what had happened to the
+house in the street of the Consuls after he and Dona Rita had stolen out
+of it like two scared yet jubilant children.  All he discovered was a
+strange, fat woman, a sort of virago, who had, apparently, been put in as
+a caretaker by the man of affairs.  She made some difficulties to admit
+that she had been in charge for the last four months; ever since the
+person who was there before had eloped with some Spaniard who had been
+lying in the house ill with fever for more than six weeks.  No, she never
+saw the person.  Neither had she seen the Spaniard.  She had only heard
+the talk of the street.  Of course she didn't know where these people had
+gone.  She manifested some impatience to get rid of Monsieur George and
+even attempted to push him towards the door.  It was, he says, a very
+funny experience.  He noticed the feeble flame of the gas-jet in the hall
+still waiting for extinction in the general collapse of the world.
+
+Then he decided to have a bit of dinner at the Restaurant de la Gare
+where he felt pretty certain he would not meet any of his friends.  He
+could not have asked Madame Leonore for hospitality because Madame
+Leonore had gone away already.  His acquaintances were not the sort of
+people likely to happen casually into a restaurant of that kind and
+moreover he took the precaution to seat himself at a small table so as to
+face the wall.  Yet before long he felt a hand laid gently on his
+shoulder, and, looking up, saw one of his acquaintances, a member of the
+Royalist club, a young man of a very cheerful disposition but whose face
+looked down at him with a grave and anxious expression.
+
+Monsieur George was far from delighted.  His surprise was extreme when in
+the course of the first phrases exchanged with him he learned that this
+acquaintance had come to the station with the hope of finding him there.
+
+"You haven't been seen for some time," he said.  "You were perhaps
+somewhere where the news from the world couldn't reach you?  There have
+been many changes amongst our friends and amongst people one used to hear
+of so much.  There is Madame de Lastaola for instance, who seems to have
+vanished from the world which was so much interested in her.  You have no
+idea where she may be now?"
+
+Monsieur George remarked grumpily that he couldn't say.
+
+The other tried to appear at ease.  Tongues were wagging about it in
+Paris.  There was a sort of international financier, a fellow with an
+Italian name, a shady personality, who had been looking for her all over
+Europe and talked in clubs--astonishing how such fellows get into the
+best clubs--oh! Azzolati was his name.  But perhaps what a fellow like
+that said did not matter.  The funniest thing was that there was no man
+of any position in the world who had disappeared at the same time.  A
+friend in Paris wrote to him that a certain well-known journalist had
+rushed South to investigate the mystery but had returned no wiser than he
+went.
+
+Monsieur George remarked more unamiably than before that he really could
+not help all that.
+
+"No," said the other with extreme gentleness, "only of all the people
+more or less connected with the Carlist affair you are the only one that
+had also disappeared before the final collapse."
+
+"What!" cried Monsieur George.
+
+"Just so," said the other meaningly.  "You know that all my people like
+you very much, though they hold various opinions as to your discretion.
+Only the other day Jane, you know my married sister, and I were talking
+about you.  She was extremely distressed.  I assured her that you must be
+very far away or very deeply buried somewhere not to have given a sign of
+life under this provocation."
+
+Naturally Monsieur George wanted to know what it was all about; and the
+other appeared greatly relieved.
+
+"I was sure you couldn't have heard.  I don't want to be indiscreet, I
+don't want to ask you where you were.  It came to my ears that you had
+been seen at the bank to-day and I made a special effort to lay hold of
+you before you vanished again; for, after all, we have been always good
+friends and all our lot here liked you very much.  Listen.  You know a
+certain Captain Blunt, don't you?"
+
+Monsieur George owned to knowing Captain Blunt but only very slightly.
+His friend then informed him that this Captain Blunt was apparently well
+acquainted with Madame de Lastaola, or, at any rate, pretended to be.  He
+was an honourable man, a member of a good club, he was very Parisian in a
+way, and all this, he continued, made all the worse that of which he was
+under the painful necessity of warning Monsieur George.  This Blunt on
+three distinct occasions when the name of Madame de Lastaola came up in
+conversation in a mixed company of men had expressed his regret that she
+should have become the prey of a young adventurer who was exploiting her
+shamelessly.  He talked like a man certain of his facts and as he
+mentioned names . . .
+
+"In fact," the young man burst out excitedly, "it is your name that he
+mentions.  And in order to fix the exact personality he always takes care
+to add that you are that young fellow who was known as Monsieur George
+all over the South amongst the initiated Carlists."
+
+How Blunt had got enough information to base that atrocious calumny upon,
+Monsieur George couldn't imagine.  But there it was.  He kept silent in
+his indignation till his friend murmured, "I expect you will want him to
+know that you are here."
+
+"Yes," said Monsieur George, "and I hope you will consent to act for me
+altogether.  First of all, pray, let him know by wire that I am waiting
+for him.  This will be enough to fetch him down here, I can assure you.
+You may ask him also to bring two friends with him.  I don't intend this
+to be an affair for Parisian journalists to write paragraphs about."
+
+"Yes.  That sort of thing must be stopped at once," the other admitted.
+He assented to Monsieur George's request that the meeting should be
+arranged for at his elder brother's country place where the family stayed
+very seldom.  There was a most convenient walled garden there.  And then
+Monsieur George caught his train promising to be back on the fourth day
+and leaving all further arrangements to his friend.  He prided himself on
+his impenetrability before Dona Rita; on the happiness without a shadow
+of those four days.  However, Dona Rita must have had the intuition of
+there being something in the wind, because on the evening of the very
+same day on which he left her again on some pretence or other, she was
+already ensconced in the house in the street of the Consuls, with the
+trustworthy Rose scouting all over the town to gain information.
+
+Of the proceedings in the walled garden there is no need to speak in
+detail.  They were conventionally correct, but an earnestness of purpose
+which could be felt in the very air lifted the business above the common
+run of affairs of honour.  One bit of byplay unnoticed by the seconds,
+very busy for the moment with their arrangements, must be mentioned.
+Disregarding the severe rules of conduct in such cases Monsieur George
+approached his adversary and addressed him directly.
+
+"Captain Blunt," he said, "the result of this meeting may go against me.
+In that case you will recognize publicly that you were wrong.  For you
+are wrong and you know it.  May I trust your honour?"
+
+In answer to that appeal Captain Blunt, always correct, didn't open his
+lips but only made a little bow.  For the rest he was perfectly ruthless.
+If he was utterly incapable of being carried away by love there was
+nothing equivocal about his jealousy.  Such psychology is not very rare
+and really from the point of view of the combat itself one cannot very
+well blame him.  What happened was this.  Monsieur George fired on the
+word and, whether luck or skill, managed to hit Captain Blunt in the
+upper part of the arm which was holding the pistol.  That gentleman's arm
+dropped powerless by his side.  But he did not drop his weapon.  There
+was nothing equivocal about his determination.  With the greatest
+deliberation he reached with his left hand for his pistol and taking
+careful aim shot Monsieur George through the left side of his breast.
+One may imagine the consternation of the four seconds and the activity of
+the two surgeons in the confined, drowsy heat of that walled garden.  It
+was within an easy drive of the town and as Monsieur George was being
+conveyed there at a walking pace a little brougham coming from the
+opposite direction pulled up at the side of the road.  A thickly veiled
+woman's head looked out of the window, took in the state of affairs at a
+glance, and called out in a firm voice: "Follow my carriage."  The
+brougham turning round took the lead.  Long before this convoy reached
+the town another carriage containing four gentlemen (of whom one was
+leaning back languidly with his arm in a sling) whisked past and vanished
+ahead in a cloud of white, Provencal dust.  And this is the last
+appearance of Captain Blunt in Monsieur George's narrative.  Of course he
+was only told of it later.  At the time he was not in a condition to
+notice things.  Its interest in his surroundings remained of a hazy and
+nightmarish kind for many days together.  From time to time he had the
+impression that he was in a room strangely familiar to him, that he had
+unsatisfactory visions of Dona Rita, to whom he tried to speak as if
+nothing had happened, but that she always put her hand on his mouth to
+prevent him and then spoke to him herself in a very strange voice which
+sometimes resembled the voice of Rose.  The face, too, sometimes
+resembled the face of Rose.  There were also one or two men's faces which
+he seemed to know well enough though he didn't recall their names.  He
+could have done so with a slight effort, but it would have been too much
+trouble.  Then came a time when the hallucinations of Dona Rita and the
+faithful Rose left him altogether.  Next came a period, perhaps a year,
+or perhaps an hour, during which he seemed to dream all through his past
+life.  He felt no apprehension, he didn't try to speculate as to the
+future.  He felt that all possible conclusions were out of his power, and
+therefore he was indifferent to everything.  He was like that dream's
+disinterested spectator who doesn't know what is going to happen next.
+Suddenly for the first time in his life he had the soul-satisfying
+consciousness of floating off into deep slumber.
+
+When he woke up after an hour, or a day, or a month, there was dusk in
+the room; but he recognized it perfectly.  It was his apartment in Dona
+Rita's house; those were the familiar surroundings in which he had so
+often told himself that he must either die or go mad.  But now he felt
+perfectly clear-headed and the full sensation of being alive came all
+over him, languidly delicious.  The greatest beauty of it was that there
+was no need to move.  This gave him a sort of moral satisfaction.  Then
+the first thought independent of personal sensations came into his head.
+He wondered when Therese would come in and begin talking.  He saw vaguely
+a human figure in the room but that was a man.  He was speaking in a
+deadened voice which had yet a preternatural distinctness.
+
+"This is the second case I have had in this house, and I am sure that
+directly or indirectly it was connected with that woman.  She will go on
+like this leaving a track behind her and then some day there will be
+really a corpse.  This young fellow might have been it."
+
+"In this case, Doctor," said another voice, "one can't blame the woman
+very much.  I assure you she made a very determined fight."
+
+"What do you mean?  That she didn't want to. . . "
+
+"Yes.  A very good fight.  I heard all about it.  It is easy to blame
+her, but, as she asked me despairingly, could she go through life veiled
+from head to foot or go out of it altogether into a convent?  No, she
+isn't guilty.  She is simply--what she is."
+
+"And what's that?"
+
+"Very much of a woman.  Perhaps a little more at the mercy of
+contradictory impulses than other women.  But that's not her fault.  I
+really think she has been very honest."
+
+The voices sank suddenly to a still lower murmur and presently the shape
+of the man went out of the room.  Monsieur George heard distinctly the
+door open and shut.  Then he spoke for the first time, discovering, with
+a particular pleasure, that it was quite easy to speak.  He was even
+under the impression that he had shouted:
+
+"Who is here?"
+
+From the shadow of the room (he recognized at once the characteristic
+outlines of the bulky shape) Mills advanced to the side of the bed.  Dona
+Rita had telegraphed to him on the day of the duel and the man of books,
+leaving his retreat, had come as fast as boats and trains could carry him
+South.  For, as he said later to Monsieur George, he had become fully
+awake to his part of responsibility.  And he added: "It was not of you
+alone that I was thinking."  But the very first question that Monsieur
+George put to him was:
+
+"How long is it since I saw you last?"
+
+"Something like ten months," answered Mills' kindly voice.
+
+"Ah!  Is Therese outside the door?  She stood there all night, you know."
+
+"Yes, I heard of it.  She is hundreds of miles away now."
+
+"Well, then, ask Rita to come in."
+
+"I can't do that, my dear boy," said Mills with affectionate gentleness.
+He hesitated a moment.  "Dona Rita went away yesterday," he said softly.
+
+"Went away?  Why?" asked Monsieur George.
+
+"Because, I am thankful to say, your life is no longer in danger.  And I
+have told you that she is gone because, strange as it may seem, I believe
+you can stand this news better now than later when you get stronger."
+
+It must be believed that Mills was right.  Monsieur George fell asleep
+before he could feel any pang at that intelligence.  A sort of confused
+surprise was in his mind but nothing else, and then his eyes closed.  The
+awakening was another matter.  But that, too, Mills had foreseen.  For
+days he attended the bedside patiently letting the man in the bed talk to
+him of Dona Rita but saying little himself; till one day he was asked
+pointedly whether she had ever talked to him openly.  And then he said
+that she had, on more than one occasion.  "She told me amongst other
+things," Mills said, "if this is any satisfaction to you to know, that
+till she met you she knew nothing of love.  That you were to her in more
+senses than one a complete revelation."
+
+"And then she went away.  Ran away from the revelation," said the man in
+the bed bitterly.
+
+"What's the good of being angry?" remonstrated Mills, gently.  "You know
+that this world is not a world for lovers, not even for such lovers as
+you two who have nothing to do with the world as it is.  No, a world of
+lovers would be impossible.  It would be a mere ruin of lives which seem
+to be meant for something else.  What this something is, I don't know;
+and I am certain," he said with playful compassion, "that she and you
+will never find out."
+
+A few days later they were again talking of Dona Rita Mills said:
+
+"Before she left the house she gave me that arrow she used to wear in her
+hair to hand over to you as a keepsake and also to prevent you, she said,
+from dreaming of her.  This message sounds rather cryptic."
+
+"Oh, I understand perfectly," said Monsieur George.  "Don't give me the
+thing now.  Leave it somewhere where I can find it some day when I am
+alone.  But when you write to her you may tell her that now at
+last--surer than Mr. Blunt's bullet--the arrow has found its mark.  There
+will be no more dreaming.  Tell her.  She will understand."
+
+"I don't even know where she is," murmured Mills.
+
+"No, but her man of affairs knows. . . . Tell me, Mills, what will become
+of her?"
+
+"She will be wasted," said Mills sadly.  "She is a most unfortunate
+creature.  Not even poverty could save her now.  She cannot go back to
+her goats.  Yet who can tell?  She may find something in life.  She may!
+It won't be love.  She has sacrificed that chance to the integrity of
+your life--heroically.  Do you remember telling her once that you meant
+to live your life integrally--oh, you lawless young pedant!  Well, she is
+gone; but you may be sure that whatever she finds now in life it will not
+be peace.  You understand me?  Not even in a convent."
+
+"She was supremely lovable," said the wounded man, speaking of her as if
+she were lying dead already on his oppressed heart.
+
+"And elusive," struck in Mills in a low voice.  "Some of them are like
+that.  She will never change.  Amid all the shames and shadows of that
+life there will always lie the ray of her perfect honesty.  I don't know
+about your honesty, but yours will be the easier lot.  You will always
+have your . . . other love--you pig-headed enthusiast of the sea."
+
+"Then let me go to it," cried the enthusiast.  "Let me go to it."
+
+He went to it as soon as he had strength enough to feel the crushing
+weight of his loss (or his gain) fully, and discovered that he could bear
+it without flinching.  After this discovery he was fit to face anything.
+He tells his correspondent that if he had been more romantic he would
+never have looked at any other woman.  But on the contrary.  No face
+worthy of attention escaped him.  He looked at them all; and each
+reminded him of Dona Rita, either by some profound resemblance or by the
+startling force of contrast.
+
+The faithful austerity of the sea protected him from the rumours that fly
+on the tongues of men.  He never heard of her.  Even the echoes of the
+sale of the great Allegre collection failed to reach him.  And that event
+must have made noise enough in the world.  But he never heard.  He does
+not know.  Then, years later, he was deprived even of the arrow.  It was
+lost to him in a stormy catastrophe; and he confesses that next day he
+stood on a rocky, wind-assaulted shore, looking at the seas raging over
+the very spot of his loss and thought that it was well.  It was not a
+thing that one could leave behind one for strange hands--for the cold
+eyes of ignorance.  Like the old King of Thule with the gold goblet of
+his mistress he would have had to cast it into the sea, before he died.
+He says he smiled at the romantic notion.  But what else could he have
+done with it?
+
+
+
+
+***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ARROW OF GOLD***
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