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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Arrow of Gold, by Joseph Conrad
+
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+
+Title: The Arrow of Gold
+
+Author: Joseph Conrad
+
+Release Date: October, 1997  [EBook #1083]
+[This file was first posted on October 29, 1997]
+[Most recently updated: June 28, 2003]
+
+Edition: 10
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: US-ASCII
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, THE ARROW OF GOLD ***
+
+
+
+
+Transcribed by David Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
+
+
+
+
+THE ARROW OF GOLD--A STORY BETWEEN TWO NOTES
+
+
+
+
+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 ball 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 fellows 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 how 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 peeking 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 woman 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 gentilhomne.  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 verify 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 example!"
+
+"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 eciov 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?
+
+
+
+
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+<h2>
+<a href="#startoftext">The Arrow of Gold, by Joseph Conrad</a>
+</h2>
+<pre>
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Arrow of Gold, by Joseph Conrad
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+Title: The Arrow of Gold
+
+Author: Joseph Conrad
+
+Release Date: October, 1997  [EBook #1083]
+[This file was first posted on October 29, 1997]
+[Most recently updated: June 28, 2003]
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+</pre>
+<p><a name="startoftext"></a></p>
+<p>Transcribed by David Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines3"><br /><br /><br /></div>
+<h1>THE ARROW OF GOLD&mdash;A STORY BETWEEN TWO NOTES</h1>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines3"><br /><br /><br /></div>
+<h2>FIRST NOTE</h2>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>The pages which follow have been extracted from a pile of manuscript
+which was apparently meant for the eye of one woman only.&nbsp; She
+seems to have been the writer&rsquo;s childhood&rsquo;s friend.&nbsp;
+They had parted as children, or very little more than children.&nbsp;
+Years passed.&nbsp; Then something recalled to the woman the companion
+of her young days and she wrote to him: &ldquo;I have been hearing of
+you lately.&nbsp; I know where life has brought you.&nbsp; You certainly
+selected your own road.&nbsp; But to us, left behind, it always looked
+as if you had struck out into a pathless desert.&nbsp; We always regarded
+you as a person that must be given up for lost.&nbsp; 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.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>And he answers her: &ldquo;I believe you are the only one now alive
+who remembers me as a child.&nbsp; I have heard of you from time to
+time, but I wonder what sort of person you are now.&nbsp; Perhaps if
+I did know I wouldn&rsquo;t dare put pen to paper.&nbsp; But I don&rsquo;t
+know.&nbsp; I only remember that we were great chums.&nbsp; In fact,
+I chummed with you even more than with your brothers.&nbsp; But I am
+like the pigeon that went away in the fable of the Two Pigeons.&nbsp;
+If I once start to tell you I would want you to feel that you have been
+there yourself.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; You may not understand.&nbsp; You may even be shocked.&nbsp;
+I say all this to myself; but I know I shall succumb!&nbsp; I have a
+distinct recollection that in the old days, when you were about fifteen,
+you always could make me do whatever you liked.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He succumbed.&nbsp; He begins his story for her with the minute narration
+of this adventure which took about twelve months to develop.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; And even as
+it is the whole thing is of considerable length.&nbsp; It seems that
+he had not only a memory but that he also knew how to remember.&nbsp;
+But as to that opinions may differ.</p>
+<p>This, his first great adventure, as he calls it, begins in Marseilles.&nbsp;
+It ends there, too.&nbsp; Yet it might have happened anywhere.&nbsp;
+This does not mean that the people concerned could have come together
+in pure space.&nbsp; The locality had a definite importance.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; It is perhaps the last instance
+of a Pretender&rsquo;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.&nbsp; Historians are very much like
+other people.</p>
+<p>However, History has nothing to do with this tale.&nbsp; Neither
+is the moral justification or condemnation of conduct aimed at here.&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp; Strange person&mdash;yet perhaps not so
+very different from ourselves.</p>
+<p>A few words as to certain facts may be added.</p>
+<p>It may seem that he was plunged very abruptly into this long adventure.&nbsp;
+But from certain passages (suppressed here because mixed up with irrelevant
+matter) it appears clearly that at the time of the meeting in the caf&eacute;,
+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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; It was precisely to confer on that matter with Do&ntilde;a
+Rita that Captain Blunt had been despatched from Headquarters.</p>
+<p>Mills got in touch with Blunt at once and put the suggestion before
+him.&nbsp; The Captain thought this the very thing.&nbsp; As a matter
+of fact, on that evening of Carnival, those two, Mills and Blunt, had
+been actually looking everywhere for our man.&nbsp; They had decided
+that he should be drawn into the affair if it could be done.&nbsp; Blunt
+naturally wanted to see him first.&nbsp; He must have estimated him
+a promising person, but, from another point of view, not dangerous.&nbsp;
+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.</p>
+<p>Their purpose explains the intimate tone given to their first conversation
+and the sudden introduction of Do&ntilde;a Rita&rsquo;s history.&nbsp;
+Mills, of course, wanted to hear all about it.&nbsp; As to Captain Blunt&mdash;I
+suspect that, at the time, he was thinking of nothing else.&nbsp; In
+addition it was Do&ntilde;a 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&mdash;however young.</p>
+<p>It cannot be denied that Mills seems to have acted somewhat unscrupulously.&nbsp;
+He himself appears to have had some doubt about it, at a given moment,
+as they were driving to the Prado.&nbsp; But perhaps Mills, with his
+penetration, understood very well the nature he was dealing with.&nbsp;
+He might even have envied it.&nbsp; But it&rsquo;s not my business to
+excuse Mills.&nbsp; As to him whom we may regard as Mills&rsquo; victim
+it is obvious that he has never harboured a single reproachful thought.&nbsp;
+For him Mills is not to be criticized.&nbsp; A remarkable instance of
+the great power of mere individuality over the young.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines3"><br /><br /><br /></div>
+<h2>PART ONE</h2>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines3"><br /><br /><br /></div>
+<h3>CHAPTER I</h3>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>Certain streets have an atmosphere of their own, a sort of universal
+fame and the particular affection of their citizens.&nbsp; One of such
+streets is the Cannebi&egrave;re, and the jest: &ldquo;If Paris had
+a Cannebi&egrave;re it would be a little Marseilles&rdquo; is the jocular
+expression of municipal pride.&nbsp; I, too, I have been under the spell.&nbsp;
+For me it has been a street leading into the unknown.</p>
+<p>There was a part of it where one could see as many as five big caf&eacute;s
+in a resplendent row.&nbsp; That evening I strolled into one of them.&nbsp;
+It was by no means full.&nbsp; It looked deserted, in fact, festal and
+overlighted, but cheerful.&nbsp; The wonderful street was distinctly
+cold (it was an evening of carnival), I was very idle, and I was feeling
+a little lonely.&nbsp; So I went in and sat down.</p>
+<p>The carnival time was drawing to an end.&nbsp; Everybody, high and
+low, was anxious to have the last fling.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; There was a touch of bedlam in all this.</p>
+<p>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.&nbsp; But I was not sad.&nbsp; I was
+merely in a state of sobriety.&nbsp; I had just returned from my second
+West Indies voyage.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; But they had left me untouched.&nbsp; Indeed they
+were other men&rsquo;s adventures, not mine.&nbsp; Except for a little
+habit of responsibility which I had acquired they had not matured me.&nbsp;
+I was as young as before.&nbsp; Inconceivably young&mdash;still beautifully
+unthinking&mdash;infinitely receptive.</p>
+<p>You may believe that I was not thinking of Don Carlos and his fight
+for a kingdom.&nbsp; Why should I?&nbsp; You don&rsquo;t want to think
+of things which you meet every day in the newspapers and in conversation.&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp; But I was
+not interested.&nbsp; Apparently I was not romantic enough.&nbsp; Or
+was it that I was even more romantic than all those good people?&nbsp;
+The affair seemed to me commonplace.&nbsp; That man was attending to
+his business of a Pretender.</p>
+<p>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&mdash;and all around him a landscape of savage mountains.&nbsp;
+He caught my eye on that spiritedly composed woodcut.&nbsp; (There were
+no inane snapshot-reproductions in those days.)&nbsp; It was the obvious
+romance for the use of royalists but it arrested my attention.</p>
+<p>Just then some masks from outside invaded the caf&eacute;, dancing
+hand in hand in a single file led by a burly man with a cardboard nose.&nbsp;
+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.</p>
+<p>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.&nbsp;
+Most of the ordinary clients of the caf&eacute; didn&rsquo;t even look
+up from their games or papers.&nbsp; I, being alone and idle, stared
+abstractedly.&nbsp; The girl costumed as Night wore a small black velvet
+mask, what is called in French a &ldquo;<i>loup</i>.&rdquo;&nbsp; What
+made her daintiness join that obviously rough lot I can&rsquo;t imagine.&nbsp;
+Her uncovered mouth and chin suggested refined prettiness.</p>
+<p>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.&nbsp; I was not prepared for this,
+not even to the extent of an appreciative &ldquo;<i>Tr&egrave;s foli</i>,&rdquo;
+before she wriggled and hopped away.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; Two gentlemen coming in out of the street stood arrested
+in the crush.&nbsp; The Night (it must have been her idiosyncrasy) put
+her tongue out at them, too.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; The other man
+was very different; fair, with smooth, ruddy cheeks and burly shoulders.&nbsp;
+He was wearing a grey suit, obviously bought ready-made, for it seemed
+too tight for his powerful frame.</p>
+<p>That man was not altogether a stranger to me.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp; I had caught his name as Monsieur Mills.&nbsp;
+The lady who had introduced me took the earliest opportunity to murmur
+into my ear: &ldquo;A relation of Lord X.&rdquo;&nbsp; (<i>Un proche
+parent de Lord X</i>.)&nbsp; And then she added, casting up her eyes:
+&ldquo;A good friend of the King.&rdquo;&nbsp; Meaning Don Carlos of
+course.</p>
+<p>I looked at the <i>proche parent</i>; not on account of the parentage
+but marvelling at his air of ease in that cumbrous body and in such
+tight clothes, too.&nbsp; But presently the same lady informed me further:
+&ldquo;He has come here amongst us <i>un naufrag&eacute;</i>.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>I became then really interested.&nbsp; I had never seen a shipwrecked
+person before.&nbsp; All the boyishness in me was aroused.&nbsp; I considered
+a shipwreck as an unavoidable event sooner or later in my future.</p>
+<p>Meantime the man thus distinguished in my eyes glanced quietly about
+and never spoke unless addressed directly by one of the ladies present.&nbsp;
+There were more than a dozen people in that drawing-room, mostly women
+eating fine pastry and talking passionately.&nbsp; It might have been
+a Carlist committee meeting of a particularly fatuous character.&nbsp;
+Even my youth and inexperience were aware of that.&nbsp; And I was by
+a long way the youngest person in the room.&nbsp; That quiet Monsieur
+Mills intimidated me a little by his age (I suppose he was thirty-five),
+his massive tranquillity, his clear, watchful eyes.&nbsp; But the temptation
+was too great&mdash;and I addressed him impulsively on the subject of
+that shipwreck.</p>
+<p>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.&nbsp; On the
+matter of the shipwreck he did not say much.&nbsp; He only told me that
+it had not occurred in the Mediterranean, but on the other side of Southern
+France&mdash;in the Bay of Biscay.&nbsp; &ldquo;But this is hardly the
+place to enter on a story of that kind,&rdquo; he observed, looking
+round at the room with a faint smile as attractive as the rest of his
+rustic but well-bred personality.</p>
+<p>I expressed my regret.&nbsp; I should have liked to hear all about
+it.&nbsp; To this he said that it was not a secret and that perhaps
+next time we met. . .</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But where can we meet?&rdquo; I cried.&nbsp; &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t
+come often to this house, you know.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Where?&nbsp; Why on the Cannebi&egrave;re to be sure.&nbsp;
+Everybody meets everybody else at least once a day on the pavement opposite
+the <i>Bourse</i>.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>This was absolutely true.&nbsp; But though I looked for him on each
+succeeding day he was nowhere to be seen at the usual times.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp;
+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&mdash;shall we say circles?&nbsp; As to
+themselves they were the bohemian circle, not very wide&mdash;half a
+dozen of us led by a sculptor whom we called Prax for short.&nbsp; My
+own nick-name was &ldquo;Young Ulysses.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>I liked it.</p>
+<p>But chaff or no chaff they would have been surprised to see me leave
+them for the burly and sympathetic Mills.&nbsp; I was ready to drop
+any easy company of equals to approach that interesting man with every
+mental deference.&nbsp; It was not precisely because of that shipwreck.&nbsp;
+He attracted and interested me the more because he was not to be seen.&nbsp;
+The fear that he might have departed suddenly for England&mdash;(or
+for Spain)&mdash;caused me a sort of ridiculous depression as though
+I had missed a unique opportunity.&nbsp; And it was a joyful reaction
+which emboldened me to signal to him with a raised arm across that caf&eacute;.</p>
+<p>I was abashed immediately afterwards, when I saw him advance towards
+my table with his friend.&nbsp; The latter was eminently elegant.&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp; Very Parisian
+indeed.&nbsp; And yet he struck me as not so perfectly French as he
+ought to have been, as if one&rsquo;s nationality were an accomplishment
+with varying degrees of excellence.&nbsp; As to Mills, he was perfectly
+insular.&nbsp; There could be no doubt about him.&nbsp; They were both
+smiling faintly at me.&nbsp; The burly Mills attended to the introduction:
+&ldquo;Captain Blunt.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>We shook hands.&nbsp; The name didn&rsquo;t tell me much.&nbsp; What
+surprised me was that Mills should have remembered mine so well.&nbsp;
+I don&rsquo;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.&nbsp; As to the Captain, I was struck on closer view
+by the perfect correctness of his personality.&nbsp; 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&rsquo;t meet every day in the south
+of France and still less in Italy.&nbsp; Another thing was that, viewed
+as an officer in mufti, he did not look sufficiently professional.&nbsp;
+That imperfection was interesting, too.</p>
+<p>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&mdash;and pretty well nothing else.&nbsp;
+This&mdash;you see&mdash;is the last evening of that part of my life
+in which I did not know that woman.&nbsp; These are like the last hours
+of a previous existence.&nbsp; It isn&rsquo;t my fault that they are
+associated with nothing better at the decisive moment than the banal
+splendours of a gilded caf&eacute; and the bedlamite yells of carnival
+in the street.</p>
+<p>We three, however (almost complete strangers to each other), had
+assumed attitudes of serious amiability round our table.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; In his immovable way Mills
+began charging his pipe.&nbsp; I felt extremely embarrassed all at once,
+but became positively annoyed when I saw our Prax enter the caf&eacute;
+in a sort of mediaeval costume very much like what Faust wears in the
+third act.&nbsp; I have no doubt it was meant for a purely operatic
+Faust.&nbsp; A light mantle floated from his shoulders.&nbsp; He strode
+theatrically up to our table and addressing me as &ldquo;Young Ulysses&rdquo;
+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 Dor&eacute;e&mdash;upstairs.&nbsp;
+With expostulatory shakes of the head and indignant glances I called
+his attention to the fact that I was not alone.&nbsp; 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.</p>
+<p>Meantime the well-connected but rustic Mills had been busy lighting
+his briar and the distinguished Captain sat smiling to himself.&nbsp;
+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.</p>
+<p>Mills peered at me with his friendly but awfully searching blue eyes
+through the cloud of smoke he had wreathed about his big head.&nbsp;
+The slim, dark Captain&rsquo;s smile took on an amiable expression.&nbsp;
+Might he know why I was addressed as &ldquo;Young Ulysses&rdquo; by
+my friend? and immediately he added the remark with urbane playfulness
+that Ulysses was an astute person.&nbsp; Mills did not give me time
+for a reply.&nbsp; He struck in: &ldquo;That old Greek was famed as
+a wanderer&mdash;the first historical seaman.&rdquo;&nbsp; He waved
+his pipe vaguely at me.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Ah!&nbsp; <i>Vraiment</i>!&rdquo;&nbsp; The polite Captain
+seemed incredulous and as if weary.&nbsp; &ldquo;Are you a seaman?&nbsp;
+In what sense, pray?&rdquo;&nbsp; We were talking French and he used
+the term <i>homme de mer.</i></p>
+<p>Again Mills interfered quietly.&nbsp; &ldquo;In the same sense in
+which you are a military man.&rdquo;&nbsp; (<i>Homme de guerre</i>.)</p>
+<p>It was then that I heard Captain Blunt produce one of his striking
+declarations.&nbsp; He had two of them, and this was the first.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I live by my sword.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>It was said in an extraordinary dandified manner which in conjunction
+with the matter made me forget my tongue in my head.&nbsp; I could only
+stare at him.&nbsp; He added more naturally: &ldquo;2nd Reg.&nbsp; Castille,
+Cavalry.&rdquo;&nbsp; Then with marked stress in Spanish, &ldquo;<i>En
+las filas legitimas</i>.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Mills was heard, unmoved, like Jove in his cloud: &ldquo;He&rsquo;s
+on leave here.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Of course I don&rsquo;t shout that fact on the housetops,&rdquo;
+the Captain addressed me pointedly, &ldquo;any more than our friend
+his shipwreck adventure.&nbsp; We must not strain the toleration of
+the French authorities too much!&nbsp; It wouldn&rsquo;t be correct&mdash;and
+not very safe either.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>I became suddenly extremely delighted with my company.&nbsp; A man
+who &ldquo;lived by his sword,&rdquo; before my eyes, close at my elbow!&nbsp;
+So such people did exist in the world yet!&nbsp; I had not been born
+too late!&nbsp; And across the table with his air of watchful, unmoved
+benevolence, enough in itself to arouse one&rsquo;s interest, there
+was the man with the story of a shipwreck that mustn&rsquo;t be shouted
+on housetops.&nbsp; Why?</p>
+<p>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, &ldquo;a very
+wealthy man,&rdquo; he observed (probably Lord X, I thought), to carry
+arms and other supplies to the Carlist army.&nbsp; And it was not a
+shipwreck in the ordinary sense.&nbsp; Everything went perfectly well
+to the last moment when suddenly the <i>Numancia</i> (a Republican ironclad)
+had appeared and chased them ashore on the French coast below Bayonne.&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp; Shells were falling all round till a tiny
+French gunboat came out of Bayonne and shooed the <i>Numancia</i> away
+out of territorial waters.</p>
+<p>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.&nbsp; However, they had never arrested or
+expelled him, since he was there before my eyes.&nbsp; But how and why
+did he get so far from the scene of his sea adventure was an interesting
+question.&nbsp; And I put it to him with most na&iuml;ve indiscretion
+which did not shock him visibly.&nbsp; He told me that the ship being
+only stranded, not sunk, the contraband cargo aboard was doubtless in
+good condition.&nbsp; The French custom-house men were guarding the
+wreck.&nbsp; If their vigilance could be&mdash;h&rsquo;m&mdash;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.&nbsp;
+In fact, salved for the Carlists, after all.&nbsp; He thought it could
+be done. . . .</p>
+<p>I said with professional gravity that given a few perfectly quiet
+nights (rare on that coast) it could certainly be done.</p>
+<p>Mr. Mills was not afraid of the elements.&nbsp; It was the highly
+inconvenient zeal of the French custom-house people that had to be dealt
+with in some way.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Heavens!&rdquo; I cried, astonished.&nbsp; &ldquo;You can&rsquo;t
+bribe the French Customs.&nbsp; This isn&rsquo;t a South-American republic.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Is it a republic?&rdquo; he murmured, very absorbed in smoking
+his wooden pipe.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well, isn&rsquo;t it?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He murmured again, &ldquo;Oh, so little.&rdquo;&nbsp; At this I laughed,
+and a faintly humorous expression passed over Mills&rsquo; face.&nbsp;
+No.&nbsp; Bribes were out of the question, he admitted.&nbsp; But there
+were many legitimist sympathies in Paris.&nbsp; 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. . . .</p>
+<p>What was most amusing was the cool, reasonable tone of this amazing
+project.&nbsp; Mr. Blunt sat by very detached, his eyes roamed here
+and there all over the caf&eacute;; 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, &ldquo;She will manage
+it for you quite easily.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Every Carlist agent in Bayonne assured me of that,&rdquo;
+said Mr. Mills.&nbsp; &ldquo;I would have gone straight to Paris only
+I was told she had fled here for a rest; tired, discontented.&nbsp;
+Not a very encouraging report.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;These flights are well known,&rdquo; muttered Mr. Blunt.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;You shall see her all right.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes.&nbsp; They told me that you . . . &rdquo;</p>
+<p>I broke in: &ldquo;You mean to say that you expect a woman to arrange
+that sort of thing for you?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;A trifle, for her,&rdquo; Mr. Blunt remarked indifferently.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;At that sort of thing women are best.&nbsp; They have less scruples.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;More audacity,&rdquo; interjected Mr. Mills almost in a whisper.</p>
+<p>Mr. Blunt kept quiet for a moment, then: &ldquo;You see,&rdquo; he
+addressed me in a most refined tone, &ldquo;a mere man may suddenly
+find himself being kicked down the stairs.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>I don&rsquo;t know why I should have felt shocked by that statement.&nbsp;
+It could not be because it was untrue.&nbsp; The other did not give
+me time to offer any remark.&nbsp; He inquired with extreme politeness
+what did I know of South American republics?&nbsp; I confessed that
+I knew very little of them.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; On
+this Captain Blunt began to talk of negroes at large.&nbsp; He talked
+of them with knowledge, intelligence, and a sort of contemptuous affection.&nbsp;
+He generalized, he particularized about the blacks; he told anecdotes.&nbsp;
+I was interested, a little incredulous, and considerably surprised.&nbsp;
+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&mdash;what could he know of negroes?</p>
+<p>Mills, sitting silent with his air of watchful intelligence, seemed
+to read my thoughts, waved his pipe slightly and explained: &ldquo;The
+Captain is from South Carolina.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh,&rdquo; I murmured, and then after the slightest of pauses
+I heard the second of Mr. J. K. Blunt&rsquo;s declarations.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; he said.&nbsp; <i>&ldquo;Je suis Am&eacute;ricain,
+catholique et gentil</i>-<i>homme</i>,&rdquo; 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.&nbsp; Of course I did neither and
+there fell on us an odd, equivocal silence.&nbsp; It marked our final
+abandonment of the French language.&nbsp; 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 &ldquo;infernal&rdquo; supper,
+but in another much more select establishment in a side street away
+from the Cannebi&egrave;re.&nbsp; 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&mdash;even in Carnival time.&nbsp; &ldquo;Nine
+tenths of the people there,&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;would be of your political
+opinions, if that&rsquo;s an inducement.&nbsp; Come along.&nbsp; Let&rsquo;s
+be festive,&rdquo; I encouraged them.</p>
+<p>I didn&rsquo;t feel particularly festive.&nbsp; What I wanted was
+to remain in my company and break an inexplicable feeling of constraint
+of which I was aware.&nbsp; Mills looked at me steadily with a faint,
+kind smile.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No,&rdquo; said Blunt.&nbsp; &ldquo;Why should we go there?&nbsp;
+They will be only turning us out in the small hours, to go home and
+face insomnia.&nbsp; Can you imagine anything more disgusting?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>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.&nbsp;
+He had another suggestion to offer.&nbsp; Why shouldn&rsquo;t we adjourn
+to his rooms?&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; There were also a few bottles of
+some white wine, quite possible, which we could drink out of Venetian
+cut-glass goblets.&nbsp; A <i>bivouac</i> feast, in fact.&nbsp; And
+he wouldn&rsquo;t turn us out in the small hours.&nbsp; Not he.&nbsp;
+He couldn&rsquo;t sleep.</p>
+<p>Need I say I was fascinated by the idea?&nbsp; Well, yes.&nbsp; But
+somehow I hesitated and looked towards Mills, so much my senior.&nbsp;
+He got up without a word.&nbsp; This was decisive; for no obscure premonition,
+and of something indefinite at that, could stand against the example
+of his tranquil personality.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h3>CHAPTER II</h3>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>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.&nbsp; 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&mdash;except his own.&nbsp; (The
+U. S. consulate was on the other side of the town.)&nbsp; He mumbled
+through his teeth that he took good care to keep clear of his own consulate.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Are you afraid of the consul&rsquo;s dog?&rdquo; I asked jocularly.&nbsp;
+The consul&rsquo;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.</p>
+<p>But I felt my jest misplaced when Mills growled low in my ear: &ldquo;They
+are all Yankees there.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>I murmured a confused &ldquo;Of course.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Books are nothing.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; Of course.&nbsp; He was a South Carolinian
+gentleman.&nbsp; I was a little ashamed of my want of tact.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; It had only one row of windows
+above the ground floor.&nbsp; Dead walls abutting on to it indicated
+that it had a garden.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; The greater then
+was my surprise to enter a hall paved in black and white marble and
+in its dimness appearing of palatial proportions.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; It gave access to his rooms
+he said; but he took us straight on to the studio at the end of the
+passage.</p>
+<p>It was rather a small place tacked on in the manner of a lean-to
+to the garden side of the house.&nbsp; A large lamp was burning brightly
+there.&nbsp; The floor was of mere flag-stones but the few rugs scattered
+about though extremely worn were very costly.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>As we sat enjoying the <i>bivouac</i> 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.&nbsp;
+Blunt noticed this and remarked that I seemed to be attracted by the
+Empress.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It&rsquo;s disagreeable,&rdquo; I said.&nbsp; &ldquo;It seems
+to lurk there like a shy skeleton at the feast.&nbsp; But why do you
+give the name of Empress to that dummy?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;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?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Mills lowered his head slowly, then tossed down his throat some wine
+out of a Venetian goblet.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;This house is full of costly objects.&nbsp; So are all his
+other houses, so is his place in Paris&mdash;that mysterious Pavilion
+hidden away in Passy somewhere.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Mills knew the Pavilion.&nbsp; The wine had, I suppose, loosened
+his tongue.&nbsp; Blunt, too, lost something of his reserve.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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&rsquo;s throat, and the straw-coloured
+wine didn&rsquo;t seem much stronger than so much pleasantly flavoured
+water) the voices and the impressions they conveyed acquired something
+fantastic to my mind.&nbsp; Suddenly I perceived that Mills was sitting
+in his shirt-sleeves.&nbsp; I had not noticed him taking off his coat.&nbsp;
+Blunt had unbuttoned his shabby jacket, exposing a lot of starched shirt-front
+with the white tie under his dark shaved chin.&nbsp; He had a strange
+air of insolence&mdash;or so it seemed to me.&nbsp; I addressed him
+much louder than I intended really.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Did you know that extraordinary man?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;To know him personally one had to be either very distinguished
+or very lucky.&nbsp; Mr. Mills here . . .&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes, I have been lucky,&rdquo; Mills struck in.&nbsp; &ldquo;It
+was my cousin who was distinguished.&nbsp; That&rsquo;s how I managed
+to enter his house in Paris&mdash;it was called the Pavilion&mdash;twice.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And saw Do&ntilde;a Rita twice, too?&rdquo; asked Blunt with
+an indefinite smile and a marked emphasis.&nbsp; Mills was also emphatic
+in his reply but with a serious face.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;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&mdash;the most admirable.
+. . &rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Ah!&nbsp; But, you see, of all the objects there she was the
+only one that was alive,&rdquo; pointed out Blunt with the slightest
+possible flavour of sarcasm.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Immensely so,&rdquo; affirmed Mills.&nbsp; &ldquo;Not because
+she was restless, indeed she hardly ever moved from that couch between
+the windows&mdash;you know.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No.&nbsp; I don&rsquo;t know.&nbsp; I&rsquo;ve never been
+in there,&rdquo; announced Blunt with that flash of white teeth so strangely
+without any character of its own that it was merely disturbing.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But she radiated life,&rdquo; continued Mills.&nbsp; &ldquo;She
+had plenty of it, and it had a quality.&nbsp; My cousin and Henry All&egrave;gre
+had a lot to say to each other and so I was free to talk to her.&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp; I am not meddling with theology but it seems to
+me that in the Elysian fields she&rsquo;ll have her place in a very
+special company.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>All this in a sympathetic voice and in his unmoved manner.&nbsp;
+Blunt produced another disturbing white flash and muttered:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I should say mixed.&rdquo;&nbsp; Then louder: &ldquo;As for
+instance . . . &rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;As for instance Cleopatra,&rdquo; answered Mills quietly.&nbsp;
+He added after a pause: &ldquo;Who was not exactly pretty.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I should have thought rather a La Valli&egrave;re,&rdquo;
+Blunt dropped with an indifference of which one did not know what to
+make.&nbsp; He may have begun to be bored with the subject.&nbsp; But
+it may have been put on, for the whole personality was not clearly definable.&nbsp;
+I, however, was not indifferent.&nbsp; A woman is always an interesting
+subject and I was thoroughly awake to that interest.&nbsp; Mills pondered
+for a while with a sort of dispassionate benevolence, at last:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes, Do&ntilde;a Rita as far as I know her is so varied in
+her simplicity that even that is possible,&rdquo; he said.&nbsp; &ldquo;Yes.&nbsp;
+A romantic resigned La Valli&egrave;re . . . who had a big mouth.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>I felt moved to make myself heard.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Did you know La Valli&egrave;re, too?&rdquo; I asked impertinently.</p>
+<p>Mills only smiled at me.&nbsp; &ldquo;No.&nbsp; I am not quite so
+old as that,&rdquo; he said.&nbsp; &ldquo;But it&rsquo;s not very difficult
+to know facts of that kind about a historical personage.&nbsp; There
+were some ribald verses made at the time, and Louis XIV was congratulated
+on the possession&mdash;I really don&rsquo;t remember how it goes&mdash;on
+the possession of:</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
+<p>&ldquo;. . . de ce bec amoureux<br />Qui d&rsquo;une oreille &agrave;
+l&rsquo;autre va,<br />Tra l&agrave; l&agrave;.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
+<p>or something of the sort.&nbsp; It needn&rsquo;t be from ear to ear,
+but it&rsquo;s a fact that a big mouth is often a sign of a certain
+generosity of mind and feeling.&nbsp; Young man, beware of women with
+small mouths.&nbsp; Beware of the others, too, of course; but a small
+mouth is a fatal sign.&nbsp; Well, the royalist sympathizers can&rsquo;t
+charge Do&ntilde;a Rita with any lack of generosity from what I hear.&nbsp;
+Why should I judge her?&nbsp; I have known her for, say, six hours altogether.&nbsp;
+It was enough to feel the seduction of her native intelligence and of
+her splendid physique.&nbsp; And all that was brought home to me so
+quickly,&rdquo; he concluded, &ldquo;because she had what some Frenchman
+has called the &lsquo;terrible gift of familiarity&rsquo;.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Blunt had been listening moodily.&nbsp; He nodded assent.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes!&rdquo;&nbsp; Mills&rsquo; thoughts were still dwelling
+in the past.&nbsp; &ldquo;And when saying good-bye she could put in
+an instant an immense distance between herself and you.&nbsp; A slight
+stiffening of that perfect figure, a change of the physiognomy: it was
+like being dismissed by a person born in the purple.&nbsp; Even if she
+did offer you her hand&mdash;as she did to me&mdash;it was as if across
+a broad river.&nbsp; Trick of manner or a bit of truth peeping out?&nbsp;
+Perhaps she&rsquo;s really one of those inaccessible beings.&nbsp; What
+do you think, Blunt?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>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.&nbsp; Blunt seemed not to have heard it.&nbsp; But after
+a while he turned to me.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;That thick man,&rdquo; he said in a tone of perfect urbanity,
+&ldquo;is as fine as a needle.&nbsp; 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!&nbsp; But it is Henry All&egrave;gre that you
+should ask this question, Mr. Mills.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I haven&rsquo;t the secret of raising the dead,&rdquo; answered
+Mills good humouredly.&nbsp; &ldquo;And if I had I would hesitate.&nbsp;
+It would seem such a liberty to take with a person one had known so
+slightly in life.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And yet Henry All&egrave;gre 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.&nbsp; I don&rsquo;t mean to say she
+nursed him.&nbsp; He had his confidential man for that.&nbsp; He couldn&rsquo;t
+bear women about his person.&nbsp; But then apparently he couldn&rsquo;t
+bear this one out of his sight.&nbsp; She&rsquo;s the only woman who
+ever sat to him, for he would never suffer a model inside his house.&nbsp;
+That&rsquo;s why the &lsquo;Girl in the Hat&rsquo; and the &lsquo;Byzantine
+Empress&rsquo; have that family air, though neither of them is really
+a likeness of Do&ntilde;a Rita. . . You know my mother?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Mills inclined his body slightly and a fugitive smile vanished from
+his lips.&nbsp; Blunt&rsquo;s eyes were fastened on the very centre
+of his empty plate.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Then perhaps you know my mother&rsquo;s artistic and literary
+associations,&rdquo; Blunt went on in a subtly changed tone.&nbsp; &ldquo;My
+mother has been writing verse since she was a girl of fifteen.&nbsp;
+She&rsquo;s still writing verse.&nbsp; She&rsquo;s still fifteen&mdash;a
+spoiled girl of genius.&nbsp; So she requested one of her poet friends&mdash;no
+less than Versoy himself&mdash;to arrange for a visit to Henry All&egrave;gre&rsquo;s
+house.&nbsp; At first he thought he hadn&rsquo;t heard aright.&nbsp;
+You must know that for my mother a man that doesn&rsquo;t jump out of
+his skin for any woman&rsquo;s caprice is not chivalrous.&nbsp; But
+perhaps you do know? . . .&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Mills shook his head with an amused air.&nbsp; Blunt, who had raised
+his eyes from his plate to look at him, started afresh with great deliberation.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;She gives no peace to herself or her friends.&nbsp; My mother&rsquo;s
+exquisitely absurd.&nbsp; You understand that all these painters, poets,
+art collectors (and dealers in bric-&agrave;-brac, he interjected through
+his teeth) of my mother are not in my way; but Versoy lives more like
+a man of the world.&nbsp; One day I met him at the fencing school.&nbsp;
+He was furious.&nbsp; He asked me to tell my mother that this was the
+last effort of his chivalry.&nbsp; The jobs she gave him to do were
+too difficult.&nbsp; But I daresay he had been pleased enough to show
+the influence he had in that quarter.&nbsp; He knew my mother would
+tell the world&rsquo;s wife all about it.&nbsp; He&rsquo;s a spiteful,
+gingery little wretch.&nbsp; The top of his head shines like a billiard
+ball.&nbsp; I believe he polishes it every morning with a cloth.&nbsp;
+Of course they didn&rsquo;t get further than the big drawing-room on
+the first floor, an enormous drawing-room with three pairs of columns
+in the middle.&nbsp; The double doors on the top of the staircase had
+been thrown wide open, as if for a visit from royalty.&nbsp; 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&mdash;and
+Henry All&egrave;gre 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.&nbsp;
+You remember that trick of his, Mills?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Mills emitted an enormous cloud of smoke out of his distended cheeks.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I daresay he was furious, too,&rdquo;&nbsp; Blunt continued
+dispassionately.&nbsp; &ldquo;But he was extremely civil.&nbsp; He showed
+her all the &lsquo;treasures&rsquo; 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 &lsquo;Girl in the Hat&rsquo; brought down into the drawing-room&mdash;half
+length, unframed.&nbsp; They put her on a chair for my mother to look
+at.&nbsp; The &lsquo;Byzantine Empress&rsquo; was already there, hung
+on the end wall&mdash;full length, gold frame weighing half a ton.&nbsp;
+My mother first overwhelms the &lsquo;Master&rsquo; with thanks, and
+then absorbs herself in the adoration of the &lsquo;Girl in the Hat.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+Then she sighs out: &lsquo;It should be called Diaphan&eacute;it&eacute;,
+if there is such a word.&nbsp; Ah!&nbsp; This is the last expression
+of modernity!&rsquo;&nbsp; She puts up suddenly her face-&agrave;-main
+and looks towards the end wall.&nbsp; &lsquo;And that&mdash;Byzantium
+itself!&nbsp; Who was she, this sullen and beautiful Empress?&rsquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;&lsquo;The one I had in my mind was Theodosia!&rsquo;&nbsp;
+All&egrave;gre consented to answer.&nbsp; &lsquo;Originally a slave
+girl&mdash;from somewhere.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;My mother can be marvellously indiscreet when the whim takes
+her.&nbsp; She finds nothing better to do than to ask the &lsquo;Master&rsquo;
+why he took his inspiration for those two faces from the same model.&nbsp;
+No doubt she was proud of her discerning eye.&nbsp; It was really clever
+of her.&nbsp; All&egrave;gre, however, looked on it as a colossal impertinence;
+but he answered in his silkiest tones:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;&lsquo;Perhaps it is because I saw in that woman something
+of the women of all time.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;My mother might have guessed that she was on thin ice there.&nbsp;
+She is extremely intelligent.&nbsp; Moreover, she ought to have known.&nbsp;
+But women can be miraculously dense sometimes.&nbsp; So she exclaims,
+&lsquo;Then she is a wonder!&rsquo;&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; I suppose All&egrave;gre lost his temper altogether then;
+or perhaps he only wanted to pay my mother out, for all these &lsquo;Masters&rsquo;
+she had been throwing at his head for the last two hours.&nbsp; He insinuates
+with the utmost politeness:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;&lsquo;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.&nbsp; She is upstairs changing her dress after our morning
+ride.&nbsp; But she wouldn&rsquo;t be very long.&nbsp; 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 . . .&rsquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;There were never two people more taken aback.&nbsp; Versoy
+himself confesses that he dropped his tall hat with a crash.&nbsp; I
+am a dutiful son, I hope, but I must say I should have liked to have
+seen the retreat down the great staircase.&nbsp; Ha!&nbsp; Ha!&nbsp;
+Ha!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He laughed most undutifully and then his face twitched grimly.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;That implacable brute All&egrave;gre followed them down ceremoniously
+and put my mother into the fiacre at the door with the greatest deference.&nbsp;
+He didn&rsquo;t open his lips though, and made a great bow as the fiacre
+drove away.&nbsp; My mother didn&rsquo;t recover from her consternation
+for three days.&nbsp; I lunch with her almost daily and I couldn&rsquo;t
+imagine what was the matter.&nbsp; Then one day . . .&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He glanced round the table, jumped up and with a word of excuse left
+the studio by a small door in a corner.&nbsp; This startled me into
+the consciousness that I had been as if I had not existed for these
+two men.&nbsp; 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.</p>
+<p>I was moved to ask in a whisper:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Do you know him well?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know what he is driving at,&rdquo; he answered
+drily.&nbsp; &ldquo;But as to his mother she is not as volatile as all
+that.&nbsp; I suspect it was business.&nbsp; It may have been a deep
+plot to get a picture out of All&egrave;gre for somebody.&nbsp; My cousin
+as likely as not.&nbsp; Or simply to discover what he had.&nbsp; The
+Blunts lost all their property and in Paris there are various ways of
+making a little money, without actually breaking anything.&nbsp; Not
+even the law.&nbsp; And Mrs. Blunt really had a position once&mdash;in
+the days of the Second Empire&mdash;and so. . .&rdquo;</p>
+<p>I listened open-mouthed to these things into which my West-Indian
+experiences could not have given me an insight.&nbsp; But Mills checked
+himself and ended in a changed tone.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It&rsquo;s not easy to know what she would be at, either,
+in any given instance.&nbsp; For the rest, spotlessly honourable.&nbsp;
+A delightful, aristocratic old lady.&nbsp; Only poor.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I stumbled and nearly smashed the lot,&rdquo; he remarked
+casually.&nbsp; But even I, with all my innocence, never for a moment
+believed he had stumbled accidentally.&nbsp; During the uncorking and
+the filling up of glasses a profound silence reigned; but neither of
+us took it seriously&mdash;any more than his stumble.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;One day,&rdquo; he went on again in that curiously flavoured
+voice of his, &ldquo;my mother took a heroic decision and made up her
+mind to get up in the middle of the night.&nbsp; You must understand
+my mother&rsquo;s phraseology.&nbsp; It meant that she would be up and
+dressed by nine o&rsquo;clock.&nbsp; This time it was not Versoy that
+was commanded for attendance, but I.&nbsp; You may imagine how delighted
+I was. . . .&rdquo;</p>
+<p>It was very plain to me that Blunt was addressing himself exclusively
+to Mills: Mills the mind, even more than Mills the man.&nbsp; It was
+as if Mills represented something initiated and to be reckoned with.&nbsp;
+I, of course, could have no such pretensions.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; I knew very well that I
+was utterly insignificant in these men&rsquo;s eyes.&nbsp; Yet my attention
+was not checked by that knowledge.&nbsp; It&rsquo;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.&nbsp; My imagination would have been more
+stimulated probably by the adventures and fortunes of a man.&nbsp; What
+kept my interest from flagging was Mr. Blunt himself.&nbsp; The play
+of the white gleams of his smile round the suspicion of grimness of
+his tone fascinated me like a moral incongruity.</p>
+<p>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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp;
+For these two men had <i>seen</i> her, while to me she was only being
+&ldquo;presented,&rdquo; elusively, in vanishing words, in the shifting
+tones of an unfamiliar voice.</p>
+<p>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 &ldquo;bit of blood&rdquo; attended on the off side by that Henry
+All&egrave;gre mounted on a dark brown powerful weight carrier; and
+on the other by one of All&egrave;gre&rsquo;s acquaintances (the man
+had no real friends), distinguished frequenters of that mysterious Pavilion.&nbsp;
+And so that side of the frame in which that woman appeared to one down
+the perspective of the great All&eacute;e was not permanent.&nbsp; 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&rsquo;s or girl&rsquo;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&rsquo;t see where
+the harm was) had one more chance of a good stare.&nbsp; The third party
+that time was the Royal Pretender (All&egrave;gre 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.&nbsp;
+There was colour in the girl&rsquo;s face.&nbsp; She was not laughing.&nbsp;
+Her expression was serious and her eyes thoughtfully downcast.&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp;
+Mr. Blunt had never before seen Henry All&egrave;gre so close.&nbsp;
+All&egrave;gre 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.&nbsp; But he did not.&nbsp; Perhaps he didn&rsquo;t notice.&nbsp;
+All&egrave;gre was not a man of wandering glances.&nbsp; There were
+silver hairs in his beard but he looked as solid as a statue.&nbsp;
+Less than three months afterwards he was gone.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What was it?&rdquo; asked Mills, who had not changed his pose
+for a very long time.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, an accident.&nbsp; But he lingered.&nbsp; They were on
+their way to Corsica.&nbsp; A yearly pilgrimage.&nbsp; Sentimental perhaps.&nbsp;
+It was to Corsica that he carried her off&mdash;I mean first of all.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>There was the slightest contraction of Mr. Blunt&rsquo;s facial muscles.&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp; There was also a suggestion of effort before he went
+on: &ldquo;I suppose you know how he got hold of her?&rdquo; in a tone
+of ease which was astonishingly ill-assumed for such a worldly, self-controlled,
+drawing-room person.</p>
+<p>Mills changed his attitude to look at him fixedly for a moment.&nbsp;
+Then he leaned back in his chair and with interest&mdash;I don&rsquo;t
+mean curiosity, I mean interest: &ldquo;Does anybody know besides the
+two parties concerned?&rdquo; he asked, with something as it were renewed
+(or was it refreshed?) in his unmoved quietness.&nbsp; &ldquo;I ask
+because one has never heard any tales.&nbsp; I remember one evening
+in a restaurant seeing a man come in with a lady&mdash;a beautiful lady&mdash;very
+particularly beautiful, as though she had been stolen out of Mahomet&rsquo;s
+paradise.&nbsp; With Do&ntilde;a Rita it can&rsquo;t be anything as
+definite as that.&nbsp; But speaking of her in the same strain, I&rsquo;ve
+always felt that she looked as though All&egrave;gre had caught her
+in the precincts of some temple . . . in the mountains.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>I was delighted.&nbsp; I had never heard before a woman spoken about
+in that way, a real live woman that is, not a woman in a book.&nbsp;
+For this was no poetry and yet it seemed to put her in the category
+of visions.&nbsp; And I would have lost myself in it if Mr. Blunt had
+not, most unexpectedly, addressed himself to me.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I told you that man was as fine as a needle.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>And then to Mills: &ldquo;Out of a temple?&nbsp; We know what that
+means.&rdquo;&nbsp; His dark eyes flashed: &ldquo;And must it be really
+in the mountains?&rdquo; he added.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Or in a desert,&rdquo; conceded Mills, &ldquo;if you prefer
+that.&nbsp; There have been temples in deserts, you know.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Blunt had calmed down suddenly and assumed a nonchalant pose.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;As a matter of fact, Henry All&egrave;gre caught her very
+early one morning in his own old garden full of thrushes and other small
+birds.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; She had on a short, black, two-penny frock (<i>une petite
+robe de</i> <i>deux sous</i>) and there was a hole in one of her stockings.&nbsp;
+She raised her eyes and saw him looking down at her thoughtfully over
+that ambrosian beard of his, like Jove at a mortal.&nbsp; They exchanged
+a good long stare, for at first she was too startled to move; and then
+he murmured, &ldquo;<i>Restez donc</i>.&rdquo;&nbsp; She lowered her
+eyes again on her book and after a while heard him walk away on the
+path.&nbsp; Her heart thumped while she listened to the little birds
+filling the air with their noise.&nbsp; She was not frightened.&nbsp;
+I am telling you this positively because she has told me the tale herself.&nbsp;
+What better authority can you have . . .?&rdquo; Blunt paused.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;That&rsquo;s true.&nbsp; She&rsquo;s not the sort of person
+to lie about her own sensations,&rdquo; murmured Mills above his clasped
+hands.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Nothing can escape his penetration,&rdquo; Blunt remarked
+to me with that equivocal urbanity which made me always feel uncomfortable
+on Mills&rsquo; account.&nbsp; &ldquo;Positively nothing.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+He turned to Mills again.&nbsp; &ldquo;After some minutes of immobility&mdash;she
+told me&mdash;she arose from her stone and walked slowly on the track
+of that apparition.&nbsp; All&egrave;gre was nowhere to be seen by that
+time.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; At once she cried
+out to Rita: &lsquo;You were caught by our gentleman.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;As a matter of fact, that old woman, being a friend of Rita&rsquo;s
+aunt, allowed the girl to come into the garden whenever All&egrave;gre
+was away.&nbsp; But All&egrave;gre&rsquo;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 All&egrave;gre&rsquo;s
+return and unseen by the porter&rsquo;s wife.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;The child, she was but little more than that then, expressed
+her regret of having perhaps got the kind porter&rsquo;s wife into trouble.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;The old woman said with a peculiar smile: &lsquo;Your face
+is not of the sort that gets other people into trouble.&nbsp; My gentleman
+wasn&rsquo;t angry.&nbsp; He says you may come in any morning you like.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;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.&nbsp; Her dreaming, empty, idle, thoughtless, unperturbed
+hours, she calls them.&nbsp; She crossed the street with a hole in her
+stocking.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; She told me
+herself that she was not even conscious then of her personal existence.&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp; She is of peasant stock, you know.&nbsp; This
+is the true origin of the &lsquo;Girl in the Hat&rsquo; and of the &lsquo;Byzantine
+Empress&rsquo; 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 All&egrave;gre&rsquo;s exclusive Pavilion: the Do&ntilde;a
+Rita of their respectful addresses, manifest and mysterious, like an
+object of art from some unknown period; the Do&ntilde;a Rita of the
+initiated Paris.&nbsp; Do&ntilde;a Rita and nothing more&mdash;unique
+and indefinable.&rdquo;&nbsp; He stopped with a disagreeable smile.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And of peasant stock?&rdquo; I exclaimed in the strangely
+conscious silence that fell between Mills and Blunt.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh!&nbsp; All these Basques have been ennobled by Don Sanche
+II,&rdquo; said Captain Blunt moodily.&nbsp; &ldquo;You see coats of
+arms carved over the doorways of the most miserable <i>caserios</i>.&nbsp;
+As far as that goes she&rsquo;s Do&ntilde;a Rita right enough whatever
+else she is or is not in herself or in the eyes of others.&nbsp; In
+your eyes, for instance, Mills.&nbsp; Eh?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>For a time Mills preserved that conscious silence.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Why think about it at all?&rdquo; he murmured coldly at last.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;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.&nbsp; And so that is how Henry All&egrave;gre saw her
+first?&nbsp; And what happened next?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What happened next?&rdquo; repeated Mr. Blunt, with an affected
+surprise in his tone.&nbsp; &ldquo;Is it necessary to ask that question?&nbsp;
+If you had asked <i>how</i> the next happened. . .&nbsp; But as you
+may imagine she hasn&rsquo;t told me anything about that.&nbsp; She
+didn&rsquo;t,&rdquo; he continued with polite sarcasm, &ldquo;enlarge
+upon the facts.&nbsp; That confounded All&egrave;gre, with his impudent
+assumption of princely airs, must have (I shouldn&rsquo;t wonder) made
+the fact of his notice appear as a sort of favour dropped from Olympus.&nbsp;
+I really can&rsquo;t tell how the minds and the imaginations of such
+aunts and uncles are affected by such rare visitations.&nbsp; Mythology
+may give us a hint.&nbsp; There is the story of Danae, for instance.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&nbsp;&ldquo;There is,&rdquo; remarked Mills calmly, &ldquo;but I
+don&rsquo;t remember any aunt or uncle in that connection.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And there are also certain stories of the discovery and acquisition
+of some unique objects of art.&nbsp; The sly approaches, the astute
+negotiations, the lying and the circumventing . . . for the love of
+beauty, you know.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>With his dark face and with the perpetual smiles playing about his
+grimness, Mr. Blunt appeared to me positively satanic.&nbsp; Mills&rsquo;
+hand was toying absently with an empty glass.&nbsp; Again they had forgotten
+my existence altogether.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know how an object of art would feel,&rdquo;
+went on Blunt, in an unexpectedly grating voice, which, however, recovered
+its tone immediately.&nbsp; &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know.&nbsp; But I do
+know that Rita herself was not a Danae, never, not at any time of her
+life.&nbsp; She didn&rsquo;t mind the holes in her stockings.&nbsp;
+She wouldn&rsquo;t mind holes in her stockings now. . . That is if she
+manages to keep any stockings at all,&rdquo; he added, with a sort of
+suppressed fury so funnily unexpected that I would have burst into a
+laugh if I hadn&rsquo;t been lost in astonishment of the simplest kind.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No&mdash;really!&rdquo;&nbsp; There was a flash of interest
+from the quiet Mills.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes, really,&rdquo;&nbsp; Blunt nodded and knitted his brows
+very devilishly indeed.&nbsp; &ldquo;She may yet be left without a single
+pair of stockings.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;The world&rsquo;s a thief,&rdquo; declared Mills, with the
+utmost composure.&nbsp; &ldquo;It wouldn&rsquo;t mind robbing a lonely
+traveller.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;He is so subtle.&rdquo;&nbsp; Blunt remembered my existence
+for the purpose of that remark and as usual it made me very uncomfortable.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;Perfectly true.&nbsp; A lonely traveller.&nbsp; They are all
+in the scramble from the lowest to the highest.&nbsp; Heavens!&nbsp;
+What a gang!&nbsp; There was even an Archbishop in it.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;<i>Vous plaisantez</i>,&rdquo; said Mills, but without any
+marked show of incredulity.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I joke very seldom,&rdquo; Blunt protested earnestly.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;That&rsquo;s why I haven&rsquo;t mentioned His Majesty&mdash;whom
+God preserve.&nbsp; That would have been an exaggeration. . . However,
+the end is not yet.&nbsp; We were talking about the beginning.&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp; It must be very funny.&nbsp; It&rsquo;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.&nbsp; But I doubt it.&nbsp; And in any case All&egrave;gre
+is not the sort of person that gets into any vulgar trouble.&nbsp; And
+it&rsquo;s just possible that those people stood open-mouthed at all
+that magnificence.&nbsp; They weren&rsquo;t poor, you know; therefore
+it wasn&rsquo;t incumbent on them to be honest.&nbsp; They are still
+there in the old respectable warehouse, I understand.&nbsp; They have
+kept their position in their <i>quartier</i>, I believe.&nbsp; But they
+didn&rsquo;t keep their niece.&nbsp; It might have been an act of sacrifice!&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp; However it might have been, the first fact
+in Rita&rsquo;s and All&egrave;gre&rsquo;s common history is a journey
+to Italy, and then to Corsica.&nbsp; You know All&egrave;gre had a house
+in Corsica somewhere.&nbsp; She has it now as she has everything he
+ever had; and that Corsican palace is the portion that will stick the
+longest to Do&ntilde;a Rita, I imagine.&nbsp; Who would want to buy
+a place like that?&nbsp; I suppose nobody would take it for a gift.&nbsp;
+The fellow was having houses built all over the place.&nbsp; This very
+house where we are sitting belonged to him.&nbsp; Do&ntilde;a Rita has
+given it to her sister, I understand.&nbsp; Or at any rate the sister
+runs it.&nbsp; She is my landlady . . .&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Her sister here!&rdquo; I exclaimed.&nbsp; &ldquo;Her sister!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Blunt turned to me politely, but only for a long mute gaze.&nbsp;
+His eyes were in deep shadow and it struck me for the first time then
+that there was something fatal in that man&rsquo;s aspect as soon as
+he fell silent.&nbsp; 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.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Do&ntilde;a Rita brought her down from her mountains on purpose.&nbsp;
+She is asleep somewhere in this house, in one of the vacant rooms.&nbsp;
+She lets them, you know, at extortionate prices, that is, if people
+will pay them, for she is easily intimidated.&nbsp; You see, she has
+never seen such an enormous town before in her life, nor yet so many
+strange people.&nbsp; She has been keeping house for the uncle-priest
+in some mountain gorge for years and years.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s extraordinary
+he should have let her go.&nbsp; There is something mysterious there,
+some reason or other.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s either theology or Family.&nbsp;
+The saintly uncle in his wild parish would know nothing of any other
+reasons.&nbsp; She wears a rosary at her waist.&nbsp; Directly she had
+seen some real money she developed a love of it.&nbsp; If you stay with
+me long enough, and I hope you will (I really can&rsquo;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.&nbsp;
+A rustic nun. . . .&rdquo;</p>
+<p>I may as well say at once that we didn&rsquo;t stay as long as that.&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp; No.&nbsp; It was not on that morning
+that I saw Do&ntilde;a Rita&rsquo;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.&nbsp; Yes, nun-like enough.&nbsp; And yet
+not altogether.&nbsp; People would have turned round after her if those
+dartings out to the half-past six mass hadn&rsquo;t been the only occasion
+on which she ventured into the impious streets.&nbsp; She was frightened
+of the streets, but in a particular way, not as if of a danger but as
+if of a contamination.&nbsp; Yet she didn&rsquo;t fly back to her mountains
+because at bottom she had an indomitable character, a peasant tenacity
+of purpose, predatory instincts. . . .</p>
+<p>No, we didn&rsquo;t remain long enough with Mr. Blunt to see even
+as much as her back glide out of the house on her prayerful errand.&nbsp;
+She was prayerful.&nbsp; She was terrible.&nbsp; Her one-idead peasant
+mind was as inaccessible as a closed iron safe.&nbsp; She was fatal.
+. . It&rsquo;s perfectly ridiculous to confess that they all seem fatal
+to me now; but writing to you like this in all sincerity I don&rsquo;t
+mind appearing ridiculous.&nbsp; 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?</p>
+<p>We remained, however, long enough to let Mr. Blunt&rsquo;s half-hidden
+acrimony develop itself or prey on itself in further talk about the
+man All&egrave;gre and the girl Rita.&nbsp; 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 All&egrave;gre
+impudence&mdash;which surpassed the impudence of kings, millionaires,
+or tramps, by many degrees&mdash;the revelation of Rita&rsquo;s existence
+to the world at large.&nbsp; It wasn&rsquo;t a very large world, but
+then it was most choicely composed.&nbsp; How is one to describe it
+shortly?&nbsp; In a sentence it was the world that rides in the morning
+in the Bois.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I leave you to judge of the sensation,&rdquo; continued Mr.
+Blunt, with a faint grimace, as though the words had an acrid taste
+in his mouth.&nbsp; &ldquo;And the consternation,&rdquo; he added venomously.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;Many of those men on that great morning had some one of their
+womankind with them.&nbsp; But their hats had to go off all the same,
+especially the hats of the fellows who were under some sort of obligation
+to All&egrave;gre.&nbsp; You would be astonished to hear the names of
+people, of real personalities in the world, who, not to mince matters,
+owed money to All&egrave;gre.&nbsp; And I don&rsquo;t mean in the world
+of art only.&nbsp; In the first rout of the surprise some story of an
+adopted daughter was set abroad hastily, I believe.&nbsp; You know &lsquo;adopted&rsquo;
+with a peculiar accent on the word&mdash;and it was plausible enough.&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp; She must have been . . .&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Blunt pulled himself up short, but not so short as not to let the
+confused murmur of the word &ldquo;adorable&rdquo; reach our attentive
+ears.</p>
+<p>The heavy Mills made a slight movement in his chair.&nbsp; 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.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I understand it didn&rsquo;t last very long,&rdquo; he addressed
+us politely again.&nbsp; &ldquo;And no wonder!&nbsp; 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 All&egrave;gre
+didn&rsquo;t close his doors to his friends and this new apparition
+was not of the sort to make them keep away.&nbsp; After that first morning
+she always had somebody to ride at her bridle hand.&nbsp; Old Doyen,
+the sculptor, was the first to approach them.&nbsp; At that age a man
+may venture on anything.&nbsp; He rides a strange animal like a circus
+horse.&nbsp; 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&rdquo; (Blunt waved his hand above his head),
+&ldquo;to All&egrave;gre.&nbsp; He passes on.&nbsp; All at once he wheels
+his fantastic animal round and comes trotting after them.&nbsp; With
+the merest casual &lsquo;<i>Bonjour</i>, All&egrave;gre&rsquo; 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.&nbsp;
+His articulation is not good, and the first words she really made out
+were &lsquo;I am an old sculptor. . . Of course there is that habit.
+. . But I can see you through all that. . . &rsquo;</p>
+<p>He put his hat on very much on one side.&nbsp; &lsquo;I am a great
+sculptor of women,&rsquo; he declared.&nbsp; &lsquo;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, <i>mon enfant</i>.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;They stared at each other.&nbsp; Do&ntilde;a Rita confessed
+to me that the old fellow made her heart beat with such force that she
+couldn&rsquo;t manage to smile at him.&nbsp; And she saw his eyes run
+full of tears.&nbsp; He wiped them simply with the back of his hand
+and went on booming faintly.&nbsp; &lsquo;Thought so.&nbsp; You are
+enough to make one cry.&nbsp; I thought my artist&rsquo;s life was finished,
+and here you come along from devil knows where with this young friend
+of mine, who isn&rsquo;t a bad smearer of canvases&mdash;but it&rsquo;s
+marble and bronze that you want. . . I shall finish my artist&rsquo;s
+life with your face; but I shall want a bit of those shoulders, too.
+. . You hear, All&egrave;gre, I must have a bit of her shoulders, too.&nbsp;
+I can see through the cloth that they are divine.&nbsp; If they aren&rsquo;t
+divine I will eat my hat.&nbsp; Yes, I will do your head and then&mdash;<i>nunc
+dimittis</i>.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;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.&nbsp; &lsquo;Why
+don&rsquo;t you ask him to come this afternoon?&rsquo; All&egrave;gre&rsquo;s
+voice suggested gently.&nbsp; &lsquo;He knows the way to the house.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;The old man said with extraordinary fervour, &lsquo;Oh, yes
+I will,&rsquo; pulled up his horse and they went on.&nbsp; She told
+me that she could feel her heart-beats for a long time.&nbsp; The remote
+power of that voice, those old eyes full of tears, that noble and ruined
+face, had affected her extraordinarily she said.&nbsp; But perhaps what
+affected her was the shadow, the still living shadow of a great passion
+in the man&rsquo;s heart.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;All&egrave;gre remarked to her calmly: &lsquo;He has been
+a little mad all his life.&rsquo;&rdquo;</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h3>CHAPTER III</h3>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>Mills lowered the hands holding the extinct and even cold pipe before
+his big face.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;H&rsquo;m, shoot an arrow into that old man&rsquo;s heart
+like this?&nbsp; But was there anything done?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;A terra-cotta bust, I believe.&nbsp; Good?&nbsp; I don&rsquo;t
+know.&nbsp; I rather think it&rsquo;s in this house.&nbsp; A lot of
+things have been sent down from Paris here, when she gave up the Pavilion.&nbsp;
+When she goes up now she stays in hotels, you know.&nbsp; I imagine
+it is locked up in one of these things,&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;Girl,&rdquo; rakishly.&nbsp;
+I wondered whether that dummy had travelled from Paris, too, and whether
+with or without its head.&nbsp; Perhaps that head had been left behind,
+having rolled into a corner of some empty room in the dismantled Pavilion.&nbsp;
+I represented it to myself very lonely, without features, like a turnip,
+with a mere peg sticking out where the neck should have been.&nbsp;
+And Mr. Blunt was talking on.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;There are treasures behind these locked doors, brocades, old
+jewels, unframed pictures, bronzes, chinoiseries, Japoneries.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He growled as much as a man of his accomplished manner and voice
+could growl.&nbsp; &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t suppose she gave away all that
+to her sister, but I shouldn&rsquo;t be surprised if that timid rustic
+didn&rsquo;t lay a claim to the lot for the love of God and the good
+of the Church. . .</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And held on with her teeth, too,&rdquo; he added graphically.</p>
+<p>Mills&rsquo; face remained grave.&nbsp; Very grave.&nbsp; I was amused
+at those little venomous outbreaks of the fatal Mr. Blunt.&nbsp; Again
+I knew myself utterly forgotten.&nbsp; But I didn&rsquo;t feel dull
+and I didn&rsquo;t even feel sleepy.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; We had been drinking that straw-coloured
+wine, too, I won&rsquo;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.</p>
+<p>Yes, that old sculptor was the first who joined them in the sight
+of all Paris.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Apart from that, you know,&rdquo; went on Mr. Blunt, &ldquo;all
+she knew of the world of men and women (I mean till All&egrave;gre&rsquo;s
+death) was what she had seen of it from the saddle two hours every morning
+during four months of the year or so.&nbsp; Absolutely all, with All&egrave;gre
+self-denyingly on her right hand, with that impenetrable air of guardianship.&nbsp;
+Don&rsquo;t touch!&nbsp; He didn&rsquo;t like his treasures to be touched
+unless he actually put some unique object into your hands with a sort
+of triumphant murmur, &lsquo;Look close at that.&rsquo;&nbsp; Of course
+I only have heard all this.&nbsp; I am much too small a person, you
+understand, to even . . .&rdquo;</p>
+<p>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.&nbsp; I thought suddenly
+of the definition he applied to himself: &ldquo;<i>Am&eacute;ricain,
+catholique et gentil</i>-<i>homme</i>&rdquo; completed by that startling
+&ldquo;I live by my sword&rdquo; uttered in a light drawing-room tone
+tinged by a flavour of mockery lighter even than air.</p>
+<p>He insisted to us that the first and only time he had seen All&egrave;gre
+a little close was that morning in the Bois with his mother.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; All&egrave;gre had suddenly taken it into his
+head to paint his portrait.&nbsp; A sort of intimacy had sprung up.&nbsp;
+Mrs. Blunt&rsquo;s remark was that of the two striking horsemen All&egrave;gre
+looked the more kingly.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;The son of a confounded millionaire soap-boiler,&rdquo; commented
+Mr. Blunt through his clenched teeth.&nbsp; &ldquo;A man absolutely
+without parentage.&nbsp; Without a single relation in the world.&nbsp;
+Just a freak.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;That explains why he could leave all his fortune to her,&rdquo;
+said Mills.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;The will, I believe,&rdquo; said Mr. Blunt moodily, &ldquo;was
+written on a half sheet of paper, with his device of an Assyrian bull
+at the head.&nbsp; What the devil did he mean by it?&nbsp; Anyway it
+was the last time that she surveyed the world of men and women from
+the saddle.&nbsp; Less than three months later. . .&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;All&egrave;gre died and. . . &rdquo; murmured Mills in an
+interested manner.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And she had to dismount,&rdquo; broke in Mr. Blunt grimly.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;Dismount right into the middle of it.&nbsp; Down to the very
+ground, you understand.&nbsp; I suppose you can guess what that would
+mean.&nbsp; She didn&rsquo;t know what to do with herself.&nbsp; She
+had never been on the ground.&nbsp; She . . . &rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Aha!&rdquo; said Mills.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Even eh! eh! if you like,&rdquo; retorted Mr. Blunt, in an
+unrefined tone, that made me open my eyes, which were well opened before,
+still wider.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Nothing escapes his penetration.&nbsp; He can perceive a haystack
+at an enormous distance when he is interested.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But that&rsquo;s nothing to my mother&rsquo;s interest.&nbsp;
+She can never see a haystack, therefore she is always so surprised and
+excited.&nbsp; Of course Do&ntilde;a Rita was not a woman about whom
+the newspapers insert little paragraphs.&nbsp; But All&egrave;gre was
+the sort of man.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; I
+thought her interest would wear out.&nbsp; But it didn&rsquo;t.&nbsp;
+She had received a shock and had received an impression by means of
+that girl.&nbsp; My mother has never been treated with impertinence
+before, and the aesthetic impression must have been of extraordinary
+strength.&nbsp; I must suppose that it amounted to a sort of moral revolution,
+I can&rsquo;t account for her proceedings in any other way.&nbsp; When
+Rita turned up in Paris a year and a half after All&egrave;gre&rsquo;s
+death some shabby journalist (smart creature) hit upon the notion of
+alluding to her as the heiress of Mr. All&egrave;gre.&nbsp; &lsquo;The
+heiress of Mr. All&egrave;gre has taken up her residence again amongst
+the treasures of art in that Pavilion so well known to the &eacute;lite
+of the artistic, scientific, and political world, not to speak of the
+members of aristocratic and even royal families. . . &rsquo;&nbsp; You
+know the sort of thing.&nbsp; It appeared first in the <i>Figaro</i>,
+I believe.&nbsp; And then at the end a little phrase: &lsquo;She is
+alone.&rsquo;&nbsp; She was in a fair way of becoming a celebrity of
+a sort.&nbsp; Daily little allusions and that sort of thing.&nbsp; Heaven
+only knows who stopped it.&nbsp; There was a rush of &lsquo;old friends&rsquo;
+into that garden, enough to scare all the little birds away.&nbsp; I
+suppose one or several of them, having influence with the press, did
+it.&nbsp; But the gossip didn&rsquo;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.&nbsp; It was talked about from a royalist point of view
+with a kind of respect.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; You know what royalist gush is like.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Mr. Blunt&rsquo;s face expressed sarcastic disgust.&nbsp; Mills moved
+his head the least little bit.&nbsp; Apparently he knew.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well, speaking with all possible respect, it seems to have
+affected my mother&rsquo;s brain.&nbsp; I was already with the royal
+army and of course there could be no question of regular postal communications
+with France.&nbsp; My mother hears or overhears somewhere that the heiress
+of Mr. All&egrave;gre is contemplating a secret journey.&nbsp; All the
+noble Salons were full of chatter about that secret naturally.&nbsp;
+So she sits down and pens an autograph: &lsquo;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&rsquo;s
+anxious feelings, etc., etc.,&rsquo; and ending with a request to take
+messages to me and bring news of me. . . The coolness of my mother!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Most unexpectedly Mills was heard murmuring a question which seemed
+to me very odd.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I wonder how your mother addressed that note?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>A moment of silence ensued.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Hardly in the newspaper style, I should think,&rdquo; 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.&nbsp; &ldquo;My mother&rsquo;s maid took it in a fiacre very late
+one evening to the Pavilion and brought an answer scrawled on a scrap
+of paper: &lsquo;Write your messages at once&rsquo; and signed with
+a big capital R.&nbsp; 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 <i>avanzadas</i>
+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&rsquo;s
+anxieties by telling her how I looked.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It was signed R only, but I guessed at once and nearly fell
+off my horse with surprise.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You mean to say that Do&ntilde;a Rita was actually at the
+Royal Headquarters lately?&rdquo; exclaimed Mills, with evident surprise.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;Why, we&mdash;everybody&mdash;thought that all this affair was
+over and done with.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Absolutely.&nbsp; Nothing in the world could be more done
+with than that episode.&nbsp; Of course the rooms in the hotel at Tolosa
+were retained for her by an order from Royal Headquarters.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; General Mongroviejo called on her officially
+from the King.&nbsp; A general, not anybody of the household, you see.&nbsp;
+That&rsquo;s a distinct shade of the present relation.&nbsp; He stayed
+just five minutes.&nbsp; Some personage from the Foreign department
+at Headquarters was closeted for about a couple of hours.&nbsp; That
+was of course business.&nbsp; Then two officers from the staff came
+together with some explanations or instructions to her.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; They say he was very much frightened
+by her arrival, but after the interview went away all smiles.&nbsp;
+Who else?&nbsp; Yes, the Archbishop came.&nbsp; Half an hour.&nbsp;
+This is more than is necessary to give a blessing, and I can&rsquo;t
+conceive what else he had to give her.&nbsp; But I am sure he got something
+out of her.&nbsp; Two peasants from the upper valley were sent for by
+military authorities and she saw them, too.&nbsp; That friar who hangs
+about the court has been in and out several times.&nbsp; Well, and lastly,
+I myself.&nbsp; I got leave from the outposts.&nbsp; That was the first
+time I talked to her.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp;
+I was inclined to laugh at him.&nbsp; He himself is a cheery and jovial
+person and he laughed with me quite readily&mdash;but I got the order
+before dark all right.&nbsp; It was rather a job, as the Alphonsists
+were attacking the right flank of our whole front and there was some
+considerable disorder there.&nbsp; I mounted her on a mule and her maid
+on another.&nbsp; We spent one night in a ruined old tower occupied
+by some of our infantry and got away at daybreak under the Alphonsist
+shells.&nbsp; The maid nearly died of fright and one of the troopers
+with us was wounded.&nbsp; To smuggle her back across the frontier was
+another job but it wasn&rsquo;t my job.&nbsp; It wouldn&rsquo;t have
+done for her to appear in sight of French frontier posts in the company
+of Carlist uniforms.&nbsp; She seems to have a fearless streak in her
+nature.&nbsp; 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, &lsquo;A little emotion, eh?&rsquo;&nbsp;
+And she answered me in a low voice: &lsquo;Oh, yes!&nbsp; I am moved.&nbsp;
+I used to run about these hills when I was little.&rsquo;&nbsp; And
+note, just then the trooper close behind us had been wounded by a shell
+fragment.&nbsp; He was swearing awfully and fighting with his horse.&nbsp;
+The shells were falling around us about two to the minute.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Luckily the Alphonsist shells are not much better than our
+own.&nbsp; But women are funny.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; But she didn&rsquo;t do that; she sat
+perfectly still on her mule and shrieked.&nbsp; Just simply shrieked.&nbsp;
+Ultimately we came to a curiously shaped rock at the end of a short
+wooded valley.&nbsp; It was very still there and the sunshine was brilliant.&nbsp;
+I said to Do&ntilde;a Rita: &lsquo;We will have to part in a few minutes.&nbsp;
+I understand that my mission ends at this rock.&rsquo;&nbsp; And she
+said: &lsquo;I know this rock well.&nbsp; This is my country.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; Then
+he raised his arm very slowly and took his red <i>boina</i> off his
+bald head.&nbsp; I watched her smiling at him all the time.&nbsp; I
+daresay she knew him as well as she knew the old rock.&nbsp; Very old
+rock.&nbsp; The rock of ages&mdash;and the aged man&mdash;landmarks
+of her youth.&nbsp; Then the mules started walking smartly forward,
+with the three peasants striding alongside of them, and vanished between
+the trees.&nbsp; These fellows were most likely sent out by her uncle
+the Cura.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;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 <i>caserios</i>, rising straight up
+here and there.&nbsp; Far away behind us the guns had ceased and the
+echoes in the gorges had died out.&nbsp; I never knew what peace meant
+before. . .</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Nor since,&rdquo; muttered Mr. Blunt after a pause and then
+went on.&nbsp; &ldquo;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.&nbsp; I dismounted to bandage the shoulder of my
+trooper.&nbsp; It was only a nasty long scratch.&nbsp; While I was busy
+about it a bell began to ring in the distance.&nbsp; The sound fell
+deliciously on the ear, clear like the morning light.&nbsp; But it stopped
+all at once.&nbsp; You know how a distant bell stops suddenly.&nbsp;
+I never knew before what stillness meant.&nbsp; While I was wondering
+at it the fellow holding our horses was moved to uplift his voice.&nbsp;
+He was a Spaniard, not a Basque, and he trolled out in Castilian that
+song you know,</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
+<p>&ldquo;&lsquo;Oh bells of my native village,<br />I am going away
+. . . good-bye!&rsquo;</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
+<p>He had a good voice.&nbsp; 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&rsquo;
+heads away the singer said: &lsquo;I wonder what is the name of this
+place,&rsquo; and the other man remarked: &lsquo;Why, there is no village
+here,&rsquo; and the first one insisted: &lsquo;No, I mean this spot,
+this very place.&rsquo;&nbsp; The wounded trooper decided that it had
+no name probably.&nbsp; But he was wrong.&nbsp; It had a name.&nbsp;
+The hill, or the rock, or the wood, or the whole had a name.&nbsp; I
+heard of it by chance later.&nbsp; It was&mdash;Lastaola.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>A cloud of tobacco smoke from Mills&rsquo; pipe drove between my
+head and the head of Mr. Blunt, who, strange to say, yawned slightly.&nbsp;
+It seemed to me an obvious affectation on the part of that man of perfect
+manners, and, moreover, suffering from distressing insomnia.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;This is how we first met and how we first parted,&rdquo; he
+said in a weary, indifferent tone.&nbsp; &ldquo;It&rsquo;s quite possible
+that she did see her uncle on the way.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s perhaps on this
+occasion that she got her sister to come out of the wilderness.&nbsp;
+I have no doubt she had a pass from the French Government giving her
+the completest freedom of action.&nbsp; She must have got it in Paris
+before leaving.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Mr. Blunt broke out into worldly, slightly cynical smiles.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;She can get anything she likes in Paris.&nbsp; She could get
+a whole army over the frontier if she liked.&nbsp; She could get herself
+admitted into the Foreign Office at one o&rsquo;clock in the morning
+if it so pleased her.&nbsp; Doors fly open before the heiress of Mr.
+All&egrave;gre.&nbsp; She has inherited the old friends, the old connections
+. . . Of course, if she were a toothless old woman . . . But, you see,
+she isn&rsquo;t.&nbsp; 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, &lsquo;<i>Faites entrer</i>.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+My mother knows something about it.&nbsp; She has followed her career
+with the greatest attention.&nbsp; And Rita herself is not even surprised.&nbsp;
+She accomplishes most extraordinary things, as naturally as buying a
+pair of gloves.&nbsp; People in the shops are very polite and people
+in the world are like people in the shops.&nbsp; What did she know of
+the world?&nbsp; She had seen it only from the saddle.&nbsp; Oh, she
+will get your cargo released for you all right.&nbsp; How will she do
+it? . . Well, when it&rsquo;s done&mdash;you follow me, Mills?&mdash;when
+it&rsquo;s done she will hardly know herself.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It&rsquo;s hardly possible that she shouldn&rsquo;t be aware,&rdquo;
+Mills pronounced calmly.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No, she isn&rsquo;t an idiot,&rdquo; admitted Mr. Blunt, in
+the same matter-of-fact voice.&nbsp; &ldquo;But she confessed to myself
+only the other day that she suffered from a sense of unreality.&nbsp;
+I told her that at any rate she had her own feelings surely.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; Don&rsquo;t
+try.&nbsp; I happen to know, because we are pretty good friends.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>At that moment we all changed our attitude slightly.&nbsp; Mills&rsquo;
+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.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I asked her what it was.&nbsp; I don&rsquo;t see,&rdquo; went
+on Mr. Blunt, with a perfectly horrible gentleness, &ldquo;why I should
+have shown particular consideration to the heiress of Mr. All&egrave;gre.&nbsp;
+I don&rsquo;t mean to that particular mood of hers.&nbsp; It was the
+mood of weariness.&nbsp; And so she told me.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s fear.&nbsp;
+I will say it once again: Fear. . . .&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He added after a pause, &ldquo;There can be not the slightest doubt
+of her courage.&nbsp; But she distinctly uttered the word fear.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>There was under the table the noise of Mills stretching his legs.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;A person of imagination,&rdquo; he began, &ldquo;a young,
+virgin intelligence, steeped for nearly five years in the talk of All&egrave;gre&rsquo;s
+studio, where every hard truth had been cracked and every belief had
+been worried into shreds.&nbsp; They were like a lot of intellectual
+dogs, you know . . .&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes, yes, of course,&rdquo; Blunt interrupted hastily, &ldquo;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.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Because she confessed to it being that?&rdquo; insinuated
+Mills.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No, because she didn&rsquo;t,&rdquo; contradicted Blunt, with
+an angry frown and in an extremely suave voice.&nbsp; &ldquo;In fact,
+she bit her tongue.&nbsp; And considering what good friends we are (under
+fire together and all that) I conclude that there is nothing there to
+boast of.&nbsp; Neither is my friendship, as a matter of fact.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Mills&rsquo; face was the very perfection of indifference.&nbsp;
+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.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;My leave is a farce,&rdquo; Captain Blunt burst out, with
+a most unexpected exasperation.&nbsp; &ldquo;As an officer of Don Carlos,
+I have no more standing than a bandit.&nbsp; I ought to have been interned
+in those filthy old barracks in Avignon a long time ago. . . Why am
+I not?&nbsp; Because Do&ntilde;a Rita exists and for no other reason
+on earth.&nbsp; Of course it&rsquo;s known that I am about.&nbsp; She
+has only to whisper over the wires to the Minister of the Interior,
+&lsquo;Put that bird in a cage for me,&rsquo; and the thing would be
+done without any more formalities than that. . . Sad world this,&rdquo;
+he commented in a changed tone.&nbsp; &ldquo;Nowadays a gentleman who
+lives by his sword is exposed to that sort of thing.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>It was then for the first time I heard Mr. Mills laugh.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; But neither was it a very joyous
+laugh.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But the truth of the matter is that I am &lsquo;<i>en mission</i>,&rsquo;&rdquo;
+continued Captain Blunt.&nbsp; &ldquo;I have been instructed to settle
+some things, to set other things going, and, by my instructions, Do&ntilde;a
+Rita is to be the intermediary for all those objects.&nbsp; And why?&nbsp;
+Because every bald head in this Republican Government gets pink at the
+top whenever her dress rustles outside the door.&nbsp; They bow with
+immense deference when the door opens, but the bow conceals a smirk
+because of those Venetian days.&nbsp; That confounded Versoy shoved
+his nose into that business; he says accidentally.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; There was in it a Prince and a lady and a big dog.&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp; One of Versoy&rsquo;s beautiful prose vignettes
+in a great daily that has a literary column.&nbsp; But some other papers
+that didn&rsquo;t care a cent for literature rehashed the mere fact.&nbsp;
+And that&rsquo;s the sort of fact that impresses your political man,
+especially if the lady is, well, such as she is . . .&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He paused.&nbsp; His dark eyes flashed fatally, away from us, in
+the direction of the shy dummy; and then he went on with cultivated
+cynicism.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;So she rushes down here.&nbsp; Overdone, weary, rest for her
+nerves.&nbsp; Nonsense.&nbsp; I assure you she has no more nerves than
+I have.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>I don&rsquo;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.&nbsp; With some
+pipe ash amongst a little spilt wine his forefinger traced a capital
+R.&nbsp; Then he looked into an empty glass profoundly.&nbsp; I have
+a notion that I sat there staring and listening like a yokel at a play.&nbsp;
+Mills&rsquo; pipe was lying quite a foot away in front of him, empty,
+cold.&nbsp; Perhaps he had no more tobacco.&nbsp; Mr. Blunt assumed
+his dandified air&mdash;nervously.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;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.&nbsp; There they are probably saying that
+she has got a &lsquo;<i>coup de coeur</i>&rsquo; for some one.&nbsp;
+Whereas I think she is utterly incapable of that sort of thing.&nbsp;
+That Venetian affair, the beginning of it and the end of it, was nothing
+but a <i>coup</i> <i>de t&ecirc;te</i>, 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. . . &rdquo;</p>
+<p>He seemed to bite his tongue and I observed that Mills&rsquo; eyes
+seemed to have grown wider than I had ever seen them before.&nbsp; In
+that tranquil face it was a great play of feature.&nbsp; &ldquo;An intimacy,&rdquo;
+began Mr. Blunt, with an extremely refined grimness of tone, &ldquo;an
+intimacy with the heiress of Mr. All&egrave;gre on the part of . . .
+on my part, well, it isn&rsquo;t exactly . . . it&rsquo;s open . . .
+well, I leave it to you, what does it look like?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Is there anybody looking on?&rdquo; Mills let fall, gently,
+through his kindly lips.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Not actually, perhaps, at this moment.&nbsp; But I don&rsquo;t
+need to tell a man of the world, like you, that such things cannot remain
+unseen.&nbsp; And that they are, well, compromising, because of the
+mere fact of the fortune.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Mills got on his feet, looked for his jacket and after getting into
+it made himself heard while he looked for his hat.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Whereas the woman herself is, so to speak, priceless.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Mr. Blunt muttered the word &ldquo;Obviously.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>By then we were all on our feet.&nbsp; The iron stove glowed no longer
+and the lamp, surrounded by empty bottles and empty glasses, had grown
+dimmer.</p>
+<p>I know that I had a great shiver on getting away from the cushions
+of the divan.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;We will meet again in a few hours,&rdquo; said Mr. Blunt.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Don&rsquo;t forget to come,&rdquo; he said, addressing me.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;Oh, yes, do.&nbsp; Have no scruples.&nbsp; I am authorized to
+make invitations.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He must have noticed my shyness, my surprise, my embarrassment.&nbsp;
+And indeed I didn&rsquo;t know what to say.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I assure you there isn&rsquo;t anything incorrect in your
+coming,&rdquo; he insisted, with the greatest civility.&nbsp; &ldquo;You
+will be introduced by two good friends, Mills and myself.&nbsp; Surely
+you are not afraid of a very charming woman. . . .&rdquo;</p>
+<p>I was not afraid, but my head swam a little and I only looked at
+him mutely.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Lunch precisely at midday.&nbsp; Mills will bring you along.&nbsp;
+I am sorry you two are going.&nbsp; I shall throw myself on the bed
+for an hour or two, but I am sure I won&rsquo;t sleep.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He accompanied us along the passage into the black-and-white hall,
+where the low gas flame glimmered forlornly.&nbsp; 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.</p>
+<p>Mills and I exchanged but a few words as we walked down towards the
+centre of the town.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; The masks had gone home and our footsteps
+echoed on the flagstones with unequal sound as of men without purpose,
+without hope.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I suppose you will come,&rdquo; said Mills suddenly.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I really don&rsquo;t know,&rdquo; I said.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Don&rsquo;t you?&nbsp; Well, remember I am not trying to persuade
+you; but I am staying at the H&ocirc;tel de Louvre and I shall leave
+there at a quarter to twelve for that lunch.&nbsp; At a quarter to twelve,
+not a minute later.&nbsp; I suppose you can sleep?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>I laughed.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Charming age, yours,&rdquo; said Mills, as we came out on
+the quays.&nbsp; 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.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well,&rdquo; Mills began again, &ldquo;you may oversleep yourself.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>This suggestion was made in a cheerful tone, just as we shook hands
+at the lower end of the Cannebi&egrave;re.&nbsp; He looked very burly
+as he walked away from me.&nbsp; I went on towards my lodgings.&nbsp;
+My head was very full of confused images, but I was really too tired
+to think.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines3"><br /><br /><br /></div>
+<h2>PART TWO</h2>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines3"><br /><br /><br /></div>
+<h3>CHAPTER I</h3>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>Sometimes I wonder yet whether Mills wished me to oversleep myself
+or not: that is, whether he really took sufficient interest to care.&nbsp;
+His uniform kindliness of manner made it impossible for me to tell.&nbsp;
+And I can hardly remember my own feelings.&nbsp; Did I care?&nbsp; 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&mdash;like
+a day-dream.&nbsp; 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&rsquo;t cast any shadow before.</p>
+<p>Not that those events were in the least extraordinary.&nbsp; They
+were, in truth, commonplace.&nbsp; What to my backward glance seems
+startling and a little awful is their punctualness and inevitability.&nbsp;
+Mills was punctual.&nbsp; Exactly at a quarter to twelve he appeared
+under the lofty portal of the H&ocirc;tel de Louvre, with his fresh
+face, his ill-fitting grey suit, and enveloped in his own sympathetic
+atmosphere.</p>
+<p>How could I have avoided him?&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; He was unavoidable: and of course
+I never tried to avoid him.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp;
+He got in without a moment&rsquo;s hesitation, his friendly glance took
+me in from head to foot and (such was his peculiar gift) gave me a pleasurable
+sensation.</p>
+<p>After we had gone a little way I couldn&rsquo;t help saying to him
+with a bashful laugh: &ldquo;You know, it seems very extraordinary that
+I should be driving out with you like this.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He turned to look at me and in his kind voice:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You will find everything extremely simple,&rdquo; he said.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;So simple that you will be quite able to hold your own.&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp; That doesn&rsquo;t
+mean that they have no scruples.&nbsp; And I don&rsquo;t know that at
+this moment I myself am not one of them.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;That, of course, I can&rsquo;t say,&rdquo; I retorted.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I haven&rsquo;t seen her for years,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;and
+in comparison with what she was then she must be very grown up by now.&nbsp;
+From what we heard from Mr. Blunt she had experiences which would have
+matured her more than they would teach her.&nbsp; There are of course
+people that are not teachable.&nbsp; I don&rsquo;t know that she is
+one of them.&nbsp; But as to maturity that&rsquo;s quite another thing.&nbsp;
+Capacity for suffering is developed in every human being worthy of the
+name.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Captain Blunt doesn&rsquo;t seem to be a very happy person,&rdquo;
+I said.&nbsp; &ldquo;He seems to have a grudge against everybody.&nbsp;
+People make him wince.&nbsp; The things they do, the things they say.&nbsp;
+He must be awfully mature.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Mills gave me a sidelong look.&nbsp; It met mine of the same character
+and we both smiled without openly looking at each other.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp;
+We turned to the right, circling at a stately pace about the rather
+mean obelisk which stands at the entrance to the Prado.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know whether you are mature or not,&rdquo; said
+Mills humorously.&nbsp; &ldquo;But I think you will do.&nbsp; You .
+. . &rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Tell me,&rdquo; I interrupted, &ldquo;what is really Captain
+Blunt&rsquo;s position there?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>And I nodded at the alley of the Prado opening before us between
+the rows of the perfectly leafless trees.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Thoroughly false, I should think.&nbsp; It doesn&rsquo;t accord
+either with his illusions or his pretensions, or even with the real
+position he has in the world.&nbsp; And so what between his mother and
+the General Headquarters and the state of his own feelings he. . . &rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;He is in love with her,&rdquo; I interrupted again.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;That wouldn&rsquo;t make it any easier.&nbsp; I&rsquo;m not
+at all sure of that.&nbsp; But if so it can&rsquo;t be a very idealistic
+sentiment.&nbsp; All the warmth of his idealism is concentrated upon
+a certain &lsquo;<i>Am&eacute;ricain, Catholique et gentil-homme</i>.
+. . &rsquo;&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The smile which for a moment dwelt on his lips was not unkind.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;At the same time he has a very good grip of the material conditions
+that surround, as it were, the situation.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What do you mean?&nbsp; That Do&ntilde;a Rita&rdquo; (the
+name came strangely familiar to my tongue) &ldquo;is rich, that she
+has a fortune of her own?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes, a fortune,&rdquo; said Mills.&nbsp; &ldquo;But it was
+All&egrave;gre&rsquo;s fortune before. . . And then there is Blunt&rsquo;s
+fortune: he lives by his sword.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; I really mean
+it.&nbsp; She doesn&rsquo;t live by her sword.&nbsp; She . . . she lives
+by her wits.&nbsp; I have a notion that those two dislike each other
+heartily at times. . . Here we are.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The victoria stopped in the side alley, bordered by the low walls
+of private grounds.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; The mistral howled in the sunshine,
+shaking the bare bushes quite furiously.&nbsp; And everything was bright
+and hard, the air was hard, the light was hard, the ground under our
+feet was hard.</p>
+<p>The door at which Mills rang came open almost at once.&nbsp; The
+maid who opened it was short, dark, and slightly pockmarked.&nbsp; For
+the rest, an obvious &ldquo;<i>femme-de-chambre</i>,&rdquo; and very
+busy.&nbsp; She said quickly, &ldquo;Madame has just returned from her
+ride,&rdquo; and went up the stairs leaving us to shut the front door
+ourselves.</p>
+<p>The staircase had a crimson carpet.&nbsp; Mr. Blunt appeared from
+somewhere in the hall.&nbsp; He was in riding breeches and a black coat
+with ample square skirts.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; He carried about him a delicate perfume of scented
+soap.&nbsp; He gave us a flash of his white teeth and said:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It&rsquo;s a perfect nuisance.&nbsp; We have just dismounted.&nbsp;
+I will have to lunch as I am.&nbsp; A lifelong habit of beginning her
+day on horseback.&nbsp; She pretends she is unwell unless she does.&nbsp;
+I daresay, when one thinks there has been hardly a day for five or six
+years that she didn&rsquo;t begin with a ride.&nbsp; That&rsquo;s the
+reason she is always rushing away from Paris where she can&rsquo;t go
+out in the morning alone.&nbsp; Here, of course, it&rsquo;s different.&nbsp;
+And as I, too, am a stranger here I can go out with her.&nbsp; Not that
+I particularly care to do it.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>These last words were addressed to Mills specially, with the addition
+of a mumbled remark: &ldquo;It&rsquo;s a confounded position.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+Then calmly to me with a swift smile: &ldquo;We have been talking of
+you this morning.&nbsp; You are expected with impatience.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Thank you very much,&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;but I can&rsquo;t
+help asking myself what I am doing here.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The upward cast in the eyes of Mills who was facing the staircase
+made us both, Blunt and I, turn round.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp;
+And even then the visual impression was more of colour in a picture
+than of the forms of actual life.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; Her slippers were
+of the same colour, with black bows at the instep.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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 All&egrave;gre&rsquo;s words
+about her, of there being in her &ldquo;something of the women of all
+time.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>At the last step she raised her eyelids, treated us to an exhibition
+of teeth as dazzling as Mr. Blunt&rsquo;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.</p>
+<p>She said to us, &ldquo;I am sorry I kept you waiting.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+Her voice was low pitched, penetrating, and of the most seductive gentleness.&nbsp;
+She offered her hand to Mills very frankly as to an old friend.&nbsp;
+Within the extraordinarily wide sleeve, lined with black silk, I could
+see the arm, very white, with a pearly gleam in the shadow.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; It
+was a finely shaped, capable hand.&nbsp; I bowed over it, and we just
+touched fingers.&nbsp; I did not look then at her face.</p>
+<p>Next moment she caught sight of some envelopes lying on the round
+marble-topped table in the middle of the hall.&nbsp; She seized one
+of them with a wonderfully quick, almost feline, movement and tore it
+open, saying to us, &ldquo;Excuse me, I must . . . Do go into the dining-room.&nbsp;
+Captain Blunt, show the way.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Her widened eyes stared at the paper.&nbsp; 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.</p>
+<p>The door closed behind us; we had been abandoned by Mr. Blunt.&nbsp;
+He had remained on the other side, possibly to soothe.&nbsp; The room
+in which we found ourselves was long like a gallery and ended in a rotunda
+with many windows.&nbsp; It was long enough for two fireplaces of red
+polished granite.&nbsp; A table laid out for four occupied very little
+space.&nbsp; The floor inlaid in two kinds of wood in a bizarre pattern
+was highly waxed, reflecting objects like still water.</p>
+<p>Before very long Do&ntilde;a 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.&nbsp;
+Do&ntilde;a Rita looked at us all in turn, with surprise and, as it
+were, with suspicion.&nbsp; &ldquo;How did he know I was here?&rdquo;
+she whispered after looking at the card which was brought to her.&nbsp;
+ 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, &ldquo;A journalist
+from Paris.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;He has run me to earth,&rdquo; said Do&ntilde;a Rita.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;One would bargain for peace against hard cash if these fellows
+weren&rsquo;t always ready to snatch at one&rsquo;s very soul with the
+other hand.&nbsp; It frightens me.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Her voice floated mysterious and penetrating from her lips, which
+moved very little.&nbsp; Mills was watching her with sympathetic curiosity.&nbsp;
+Mr. Blunt muttered: &ldquo;Better not make the brute angry.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+For a moment Do&ntilde;a Rita&rsquo;s face, with its narrow eyes, its
+wide brow, and high cheek bones, became very still; then her colour
+was a little heightened.&nbsp; &ldquo;Oh,&rdquo; she said softly, &ldquo;let
+him come in.&nbsp; He would be really dangerous if he had a mind&mdash;you
+know,&rdquo; she said to Mills.</p>
+<p>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.&nbsp;
+They laid a cover for him between Mills and Do&ntilde;a Rita, who quite
+openly removed the envelopes she had brought with her, to the other
+side of her plate.&nbsp; As openly the man&rsquo;s round china-blue
+eyes followed them in an attempt to make out the handwriting of the
+addresses.</p>
+<p>He seemed to know, at least slightly, both Mills and Blunt.&nbsp;
+To me he gave a stare of stupid surprise.&nbsp; He addressed our hostess.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Resting?&nbsp; Rest is a very good thing.&nbsp; Upon my word,
+I thought I would find you alone.&nbsp; But you have too much sense.&nbsp;
+Neither man nor woman has been created to live alone. . . .&rdquo;&nbsp;
+After this opening he had all the talk to himself.&nbsp; It was left
+to him pointedly, and I verily believe that I was the only one who showed
+an appearance of interest.&nbsp; I couldn&rsquo;t help it.&nbsp; The
+others, including Mills, sat like a lot of deaf and dumb people.&nbsp;
+No.&nbsp; It was even something more detached.&nbsp; 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.</p>
+<p>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.&nbsp; 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&mdash;of a country of which
+he had not even had one single clear glimpse before.</p>
+<p>It was even worse in a way.&nbsp; It ought to have been more disconcerting.&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp; Those people were obviously
+more civilized than I was.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; Naturally!&nbsp;
+I was still so young!&nbsp; And yet I assure you, that just then I lost
+all sense of inferiority.&nbsp; And why?&nbsp; Of course the carelessness
+and the ignorance of youth had something to do with that.&nbsp; But
+there was something else besides.&nbsp; Looking at Do&ntilde;a 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; Of course this sensation was momentary, but it was
+illuminating; it was a light which could not last, but it left no darkness
+behind.&nbsp; 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.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h3>CHAPTER II</h3>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>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.&nbsp;
+In fact, I had an inclination to smile at it.&nbsp; This proves how
+unconstrained I felt.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; All the other listeners&rsquo; eyes were cast
+down, including Mills&rsquo; eyes, but that I am sure was only because
+of his perfect and delicate sympathy.&nbsp; He could not have been concerned
+otherwise.</p>
+<p>The intruder devoured the cutlets&mdash;if they were cutlets.&nbsp;
+Notwithstanding my perfect liberty of mind I was not aware of what we
+were eating.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp; 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.</p>
+<p>He talked first about a certain politician of mark.&nbsp; His &ldquo;dear
+Rita&rdquo; knew him.&nbsp; His costume dated back to &rsquo;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.&nbsp;
+Not once in her life.&nbsp; She was buttoned up to the chin like her
+husband.&nbsp; 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.</p>
+<p>He interrupted himself for a comment.&nbsp; &ldquo;I am something
+like that myself.&nbsp; I believe it&rsquo;s a purely professional feeling.&nbsp;
+Carry one&rsquo;s point whatever it is.&nbsp; Normally I couldn&rsquo;t
+kill a fly.&nbsp; My sensibility is too acute for that.&nbsp; My heart
+is too tender also.&nbsp; Much too tender.&nbsp; I am a Republican.&nbsp;
+I am a Red.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; They are plotting the ruin of
+all the institutions to which I am devoted.&nbsp; But I have never tried
+to spoil your little game, Rita.&nbsp; After all, it&rsquo;s but a little
+game.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; I am calling him king because I want to
+be polite to you.&nbsp; He is an adventurer, a blood-thirsty, murderous
+adventurer, for me, and nothing else.&nbsp; Look here, my dear child,
+what are you knocking yourself about for?&nbsp; For the sake of that
+bandit?&nbsp; <i>Allons donc</i>!&nbsp; A pupil of Henry All&egrave;gre
+can have no illusions of that sort about any man.&nbsp; And such a pupil,
+too!&nbsp; Ah, the good old days in the Pavilion!&nbsp; Don&rsquo;t
+think I claim any particular intimacy.&nbsp; It was just enough to enable
+me to offer my services to you, Rita, when our poor friend died.&nbsp;
+I found myself handy and so I came.&nbsp; It so happened that I was
+the first.&nbsp; You remember, Rita?&nbsp; What made it possible for
+everybody to get on with our poor dear All&egrave;gre was his complete,
+equable, and impartial contempt for all mankind.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; For you don&rsquo;t love
+him.&nbsp; You never loved him, you know.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>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.&nbsp; She let him go
+on with apparent insensibility.&nbsp; Meanwhile his eyes strayed round
+the table over our faces.&nbsp; It was very trying.&nbsp; The stupidity
+of that wandering stare had a paralysing power.&nbsp; He talked at large
+with husky familiarity.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;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.&nbsp; 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 <i>intime</i> lunch-party.&nbsp; For I suppose it is
+<i>intime</i>.&nbsp; Eh?&nbsp; Very?&nbsp; H&rsquo;m, yes . . . &rdquo;</p>
+<p>He was really appalling.&nbsp; Again his wandering stare went round
+the table, with an expression incredibly incongruous with the words.&nbsp;
+It was as though he had borrowed those eyes from some idiot for the
+purpose of that visit.&nbsp; He still held Do&ntilde;a Rita&rsquo;s
+hand, and, now and then, patted it.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It&rsquo;s discouraging,&rdquo; he cooed.&nbsp; &ldquo;And
+I believe not one of you here is a Frenchman.&nbsp; I don&rsquo;t know
+what you are all about.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s beyond me.&nbsp; But if we
+were a Republic&mdash;you know I am an old Jacobin, sans-culotte and
+terrorist&mdash;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.&nbsp; Ha, ha . . . I am joking, ha,
+ha! . . . and serve you right, too.&nbsp; Don&rsquo;t mind my little
+joke.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>While he was still laughing he released her hand and she leaned her
+head on it again without haste.&nbsp; She had never looked at him once.</p>
+<p>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.&nbsp; The tireless
+<i>femme-de-chambre</i> set down a tray with coffee cups on the table.&nbsp;
+We each (glad, I suppose, of something to do) took one, but he, to begin
+with, sniffed at his.&nbsp; Do&ntilde;a Rita continued leaning on her
+elbow, her lips closed in a reposeful expression of peculiar sweetness.&nbsp;
+There was nothing drooping in her attitude.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp;
+So familiar had I become already with her in my thoughts!&nbsp; Of course
+I didn&rsquo;t do anything of the sort.&nbsp; It was nothing uncontrollable,
+it was but a tender longing of a most respectful and purely sentimental
+kind.&nbsp; 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.</p>
+<p>It was all apparently very innocent talk.&nbsp; He informed his &ldquo;dear
+Rita&rdquo; that he was really on his way to Monte Carlo.&nbsp; 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 &ldquo;<i>ch&egrave;re enfant</i>,&rdquo;
+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.&nbsp; For instance he could see to it that
+proper watch was kept over the Pavilion stuffed with all these art treasures.&nbsp;
+What was going to happen to all those things? . . . Making herself heard
+for the first time Do&ntilde;a Rita murmured without moving that she
+had made arrangements with the police to have it properly watched.&nbsp;
+And I was enchanted by the almost imperceptible play of her lips.</p>
+<p>But the anxious creature was not reassured.&nbsp; He pointed out
+that things had been stolen out of the Louvre, which was, he dared say,
+even better watched.&nbsp; And there was that marvellous cabinet on
+the landing, black lacquer with silver herons, which alone would repay
+a couple of burglars.&nbsp; A wheelbarrow, some old sacking, and they
+could trundle it off under people&rsquo;s noses.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Have you thought it all out?&rdquo; 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.</p>
+<p>No, he had not.&nbsp; But he confessed that for years and years he
+had been in love with that cabinet.&nbsp; And anyhow what was going
+to happen to the things?&nbsp; The world was greatly exercised by that
+problem.&nbsp; He turned slightly his beautifully groomed white head
+so as to address Mr. Blunt directly.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I had the pleasure of meeting your mother lately.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Mr. Blunt took his time to raise his eyebrows and flash his teeth
+at him before he dropped negligently, &ldquo;I can&rsquo;t imagine where
+you could have met my mother.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Why, at Bing&rsquo;s, the curio-dealer,&rdquo; said the other
+with an air of the heaviest possible stupidity.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; &ldquo;Bing
+was bowing her out of his shop, but he was so angry about something
+that he was quite rude even to me afterwards.&nbsp; I don&rsquo;t think
+it&rsquo;s very good for <i>Madame</i> <i>votre m&egrave;re</i> to quarrel
+with Bing.&nbsp; He is a Parisian personality.&nbsp; He&rsquo;s quite
+a power in his sphere.&nbsp; All these fellows&rsquo; nerves are upset
+from worry as to what will happen to the All&egrave;gre collection.&nbsp;
+And no wonder they are nervous.&nbsp; A big art event hangs on your
+lips, my dear, great Rita.&nbsp; And by the way, you too ought to remember
+that it isn&rsquo;t wise to quarrel with people.&nbsp; What have you
+done to that poor Azzolati?&nbsp; Did you really tell him to get out
+and never come near you again, or something awful like that?&nbsp; I
+don&rsquo;t doubt that he was of use to you or to your king.&nbsp; A
+man who gets invitations to shoot with the President at Rambouillet!&nbsp;
+I saw him only the other evening; I heard he had been winning immensely
+at cards; but he looked perfectly wretched, the poor fellow.&nbsp; He
+complained of your conduct&mdash;oh, very much!&nbsp; He told me you
+had been perfectly brutal with him.&nbsp; He said to me: &lsquo;I am
+no good for anything, <i>mon cher</i>.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; I missed every shot&rsquo;
+. . . You are not fit for diplomatic work, you know, <i>ma ch&egrave;re</i>.&nbsp;
+You are a mere child at it.&nbsp; When you want a middle-aged gentleman
+to do anything for you, you don&rsquo;t begin by reducing him to tears.&nbsp;
+I should have thought any woman would have known that much.&nbsp; A
+nun would have known that much.&nbsp; What do you say?&nbsp; Shall I
+run back to Paris and make it up for you with Azzolati?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He waited for her answer.&nbsp; The compression of his thin lips
+was full of significance.&nbsp; 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.</p>
+<p>He gave it up.&nbsp; &ldquo;Well, I must be off.&nbsp; The express
+for Nice passes at four o&rsquo;clock.&nbsp; I will be away about three
+weeks and then you shall see me again.&nbsp; Unless I strike a run of
+bad luck and get cleaned out, in which case you shall see me before
+then.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He turned to Mills suddenly.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Will your cousin come south this year, to that beautiful villa
+of his at Cannes?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Mills hardly deigned to answer that he didn&rsquo;t know anything
+about his cousin&rsquo;s movements.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;A <i>grand seigneur</i> combined with a great connoisseur,&rdquo;
+opined the other heavily.&nbsp; His mouth had gone slack and he looked
+a perfect and grotesque imbecile under his wig-like crop of white hair.&nbsp;
+Positively I thought he would begin to slobber.&nbsp; But he attacked
+Blunt next.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Are you on your way down, too?&nbsp; A little flutter. . .
+It seems to me you haven&rsquo;t been seen in your usual Paris haunts
+of late.&nbsp; Where have you been all this time?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Don&rsquo;t you know where I have been?&rdquo; said Mr. Blunt
+with great precision.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No, I only ferret out things that may be of some use to me,&rdquo;
+was the unexpected reply, uttered with an air of perfect vacancy and
+swallowed by Mr. Blunt in blank silence.</p>
+<p>At last he made ready to rise from the table.&nbsp; &ldquo;Think
+over what I have said, my dear Rita.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It&rsquo;s all over and done with,&rdquo; was Do&ntilde;a
+Rita&rsquo;s answer, in a louder tone than I had ever heard her use
+before.&nbsp; It thrilled me while she continued: &ldquo;I mean, this
+thinking.&rdquo;&nbsp; She was back from the remoteness of her meditation,
+very much so indeed.&nbsp; 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.</p>
+<p>It was a conference in the recess of a window.&nbsp; We three remained
+seated round the table from which the dark maid was removing the cups
+and the plates with brusque movements.&nbsp; I gazed frankly at Do&ntilde;a
+Rita&rsquo;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.&nbsp; We couldn&rsquo;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.&nbsp; She spoke with fire without raising her voice.&nbsp;
+The man listened round-shouldered, but seeming much too stupid to understand.&nbsp;
+I could see now and then that he was speaking, but he was inaudible.&nbsp;
+At one moment Do&ntilde;a Rita turned her head to the room and called
+out to the maid, &ldquo;Give me my hand-bag off the sofa.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>At this the other was heard plainly, &ldquo;No, no,&rdquo; and then
+a little lower, &ldquo;You have no tact, Rita. . . .&rdquo;&nbsp; Then
+came her argument in a low, penetrating voice which I caught, &ldquo;Why
+not?&nbsp; Between such old friends.&rdquo;&nbsp; However, she waved
+away the hand-bag, he calmed down, and their voices sank again.&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp; At last he went out of the room, throwing to
+the table an airy &ldquo;<i>Bonjour, bonjour</i>,&rdquo; which was not
+acknowledged by any of us three.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h3>CHAPTER III</h3>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>Mills got up and approached the figure at the window.&nbsp; To my
+extreme surprise, Mr. Blunt, after a moment of obviously painful hesitation,
+hastened out after the man with the white hair.</p>
+<p>In consequence of these movements I was left to myself and I began
+to be uncomfortably conscious of it when Do&ntilde;a Rita, near the
+window, addressed me in a raised voice.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;We have no confidences to exchange, Mr. Mills and I.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>I took this for an encouragement to join them.&nbsp; They were both
+looking at me.&nbsp; Do&ntilde;a Rita added, &ldquo;Mr. Mills and I
+are friends from old times, you know.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>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.&nbsp; There was even, for a moment, a slight
+dimple in her cheek.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;How old, I wonder?&rdquo; I said, with an answering smile.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, for ages, for ages,&rdquo; she exclaimed hastily, frowning
+a little, then she went on addressing herself to Mills, apparently in
+continuation of what she was saying before.</p>
+<p>. . .&nbsp; &ldquo;This man&rsquo;s is an extreme case, and yet perhaps
+it isn&rsquo;t the worst.&nbsp; But that&rsquo;s the sort of thing.&nbsp;
+I have no account to render to anybody, but I don&rsquo;t want to be
+dragged along all the gutters where that man picks up his living.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She had thrown her head back a little but there was no scorn, no
+angry flash under the dark-lashed eyelids.&nbsp; The words did not ring.&nbsp;
+I was struck for the first time by the even, mysterious quality of her
+voice.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Will you let me suggest,&rdquo; said Mills, with a grave,
+kindly face, &ldquo;that being what you are, you have nothing to fear?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And perhaps nothing to lose,&rdquo; she went on without bitterness.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;No.&nbsp; It isn&rsquo;t fear.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s a sort of dread.&nbsp;
+You must remember that no nun could have had a more protected life.&nbsp;
+Henry All&egrave;gre had his greatness.&nbsp; When he faced the world
+he also masked it.&nbsp; He was big enough for that.&nbsp; He filled
+the whole field of vision for me.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You found that enough?&rdquo; asked Mills.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Why ask now?&rdquo; she remonstrated.&nbsp; &ldquo;The truth&mdash;the
+truth is that I never asked myself.&nbsp; Enough or not there was no
+room for anything else.&nbsp; He was the shadow and the light and the
+form and the voice.&nbsp; He would have it so.&nbsp; The morning he
+died they came to call me at four o&rsquo;clock.&nbsp; I ran into his
+room bare-footed.&nbsp; He recognized me and whispered, &lsquo;You are
+flawless.&rsquo;&nbsp; I was very frightened.&nbsp; He seemed to think,
+and then said very plainly, &lsquo;Such is my character.&nbsp; I am
+like that.&rsquo;&nbsp; These were the last words he spoke.&nbsp; I
+hardly noticed them then.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; You know I am very strong.&nbsp;
+I could have done it.&nbsp; I had done it before.&nbsp; He raised his
+hand off the blanket just enough to make a sign that he didn&rsquo;t
+want to be touched.&nbsp; It was the last gesture he made.&nbsp; I hung
+over him and then&mdash;and then I nearly ran out of the house just
+as I was, in my night-gown.&nbsp; I think if I had been dressed I would
+have run out of the garden, into the street&mdash;run away altogether.&nbsp;
+I had never seen death.&nbsp; I may say I had never heard of it.&nbsp;
+I wanted to run from it.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She paused for a long, quiet breath.&nbsp; The harmonized sweetness
+and daring of her face was made pathetic by her downcast eyes.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;<i>Fuir la mort</i>,&rdquo; she repeated, meditatively, in
+her mysterious voice.</p>
+<p>Mills&rsquo; big head had a little movement, nothing more.&nbsp;
+Her glance glided for a moment towards me like a friendly recognition
+of my right to be there, before she began again.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;My life might have been described as looking at mankind from
+a fourth-floor window for years.&nbsp; When the end came it was like
+falling out of a balcony into the street.&nbsp; It was as sudden as
+that.&nbsp; 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,&rdquo; she interjected very quickly, &ldquo;and
+came to no harm.&nbsp; Her guardian angel must have slipped his wings
+under her just in time.&nbsp; He must have.&nbsp; But as to me, all
+I know is that I didn&rsquo;t break anything&mdash;not even my heart.&nbsp;
+Don&rsquo;t be shocked, Mr. Mills.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s very likely that
+you don&rsquo;t understand.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Very likely,&rdquo; Mills assented, unmoved.&nbsp; &ldquo;But
+don&rsquo;t be too sure of that.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Henry All&egrave;gre had the highest opinion of your intelligence,&rdquo;
+she said unexpectedly and with evident seriousness.&nbsp; &ldquo;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.&nbsp;
+It so happened that that creature was somewhere in the neighbourhood.&nbsp;
+How he found out. . . But it&rsquo;s his business to find out things.&nbsp;
+And he knows, too, how to worm his way in anywhere.&nbsp; Indeed, in
+the first days he was useful and somehow he made it look as if Heaven
+itself had sent him.&nbsp; In my distress I thought I could never sufficiently
+repay. . . Well, I have been paying ever since.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What do you mean?&rdquo; asked Mills softly.&nbsp; &ldquo;In
+hard cash?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, it&rsquo;s really so little,&rdquo; she said.&nbsp; &ldquo;I
+told you it wasn&rsquo;t the worst case.&nbsp; I stayed on in that house
+from which I nearly ran away in my nightgown.&nbsp; I stayed on because
+I didn&rsquo;t know what to do next.&nbsp; He vanished as he had come
+on the track of something else, I suppose.&nbsp; You know he really
+has got to get his living some way or other.&nbsp; But don&rsquo;t think
+I was deserted.&nbsp; On the contrary.&nbsp; People were coming and
+going, all sorts of people that Henry All&egrave;gre used to know&mdash;or
+had refused to know.&nbsp; I had a sensation of plotting and intriguing
+around me, all the time.&nbsp; I was feeling morally bruised, sore all
+over, when, one day, Don Rafael de Villarel sent in his card.&nbsp;
+A grandee.&nbsp; I didn&rsquo;t know him, but, as you are aware, there
+was hardly a personality of mark or position that hasn&rsquo;t been
+talked about in the Pavilion before me.&nbsp; Of him I had only heard
+that he was a very austere and pious person, always at Mass, and that
+sort of thing.&nbsp; I saw a frail little man with a long, yellow face
+and sunken fanatical eyes, an Inquisitor, an unfrocked monk.&nbsp; One
+missed a rosary from his thin fingers.&nbsp; He gazed at me terribly
+and I couldn&rsquo;t imagine what he might want.&nbsp; I waited for
+him to pull out a crucifix and sentence me to the stake there and then.&nbsp;
+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&mdash;he called him His
+Majesty.&nbsp; I was amazed by the change.&nbsp; I wondered now why
+he didn&rsquo;t slip his hands into the sleeves of his coat, you know,
+as begging Friars do when they come for a subscription.&nbsp; He explained
+that the Prince asked for permission to call and offer me his condolences
+in person.&nbsp; We had seen a lot of him our last two months in Paris
+that year.&nbsp; Henry All&egrave;gre had taken a fancy to paint his
+portrait.&nbsp; He used to ride with us nearly every morning.&nbsp;
+Almost without thinking I said I should be pleased.&nbsp; Don Rafael
+was shocked at my want of formality, but bowed to me in silence, very
+much as a monk bows, from the waist.&nbsp; If he had only crossed his
+hands flat on his chest it would have been perfect.&nbsp; Then, I don&rsquo;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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; You know his big, irresistible laugh.
+. . .&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No,&rdquo; said Mills, a little abruptly, &ldquo;I have never
+seen him.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No,&rdquo; she said, surprised, &ldquo;and yet you . . . &rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I understand,&rdquo; interrupted Mills.&nbsp; &ldquo;All this
+is purely accidental.&nbsp; 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.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She listened with that enigmatic, still, under the eyelids glance,
+and a friendly turn of the head.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I know you for a frank and loyal gentleman. . . Adventure&mdash;and
+books?&nbsp; Ah, the books!&nbsp; Haven&rsquo;t I turned stacks of them
+over!&nbsp; Haven&rsquo;t I? . . .&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; murmured Mills.&nbsp; &ldquo;That&rsquo;s what
+one does.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She put out her hand and laid it lightly on Mills&rsquo; sleeve.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Listen, I don&rsquo;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.&nbsp;
+But you know I hadn&rsquo;t.&nbsp; The only woman I had anything to
+do with was myself, and they say that one can&rsquo;t know oneself.&nbsp;
+It never entered my head to be on my guard against his warmth and his
+terrible obviousness.&nbsp; You and he were the only two, infinitely
+different, people, who didn&rsquo;t approach me as if I had been a precious
+object in a collection, an ivory carving or a piece of Chinese porcelain.&nbsp;
+That&rsquo;s why I have kept you in my memory so well.&nbsp; Oh! you
+were not obvious!&nbsp; As to him&mdash;I soon learned to regret I was
+not some object, some beautiful, carved object of bone or bronze; a
+rare piece of porcelain, <i>p&acirc;te dure</i>, not <i>p&acirc;te</i>
+<i>tendre</i>.&nbsp; A pretty specimen.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Rare, yes.&nbsp; Even unique,&rdquo; said Mills, looking at
+her steadily with a smile.&nbsp; &ldquo;But don&rsquo;t try to depreciate
+yourself.&nbsp; You were never pretty.&nbsp; You are not pretty.&nbsp;
+You are worse.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Her narrow eyes had a mischievous gleam.&nbsp; &ldquo;Do you find
+such sayings in your books?&rdquo; she asked.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;As a matter of fact I have,&rdquo; said Mills, with a little
+laugh, &ldquo;found this one in a book.&nbsp; It was a woman who said
+that of herself.&nbsp; A woman far from common, who died some few years
+ago.&nbsp; She was an actress.&nbsp; A great artist.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;A great! . . . Lucky person!&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; Yes, greatness
+in art is a protection.&nbsp; I wonder if there would have been anything
+in me if I had tried?&nbsp; But Henry All&egrave;gre would never let
+me try.&nbsp; He told me that whatever I could achieve would never be
+good enough for what I was.&nbsp; The perfection of flattery!&nbsp;
+Was it that he thought I had not talent of any sort?&nbsp; It&rsquo;s
+possible.&nbsp; He would know.&nbsp; I&rsquo;ve had the idea since that
+he was jealous.&nbsp; He wasn&rsquo;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.&nbsp;
+But if so he never repented.&nbsp; I shall never forget his last words.&nbsp;
+He saw me standing beside his bed, defenceless, symbolic and forlorn,
+and all he found to say was, &lsquo;Well, I am like that.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>I forgot myself in watching her.&nbsp; I had never seen anybody speak
+with less play of facial muscles.&nbsp; In the fullness of its life
+her face preserved a sort of immobility.&nbsp; The words seemed to form
+themselves, fiery or pathetic, in the air, outside her lips.&nbsp; 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.</p>
+<p>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.&nbsp; If
+he too was a captive then I had no reason to feel ashamed of my surrender.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And you know,&rdquo; she began again abruptly, &ldquo;that
+I have been accustomed to all the forms of respect.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;That&rsquo;s true,&rdquo; murmured Mills, as if involuntarily.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well, yes,&rdquo; she reaffirmed.&nbsp; &ldquo;My instinct
+may have told me that my only protection was obscurity, but I didn&rsquo;t
+know how and where to find it.&nbsp; Oh, yes, I had that instinct .
+. . But there were other instincts and . . . How am I to tell you?&nbsp;
+I didn&rsquo;t know how to be on guard against myself, either.&nbsp;
+Not a soul to speak to, or to get a warning from.&nbsp; Some woman soul
+that would have known, in which perhaps I could have seen my own reflection.&nbsp;
+I assure you the only woman that ever addressed me directly, and that
+was in writing, was . . . &rdquo;</p>
+<p>She glanced aside, saw Mr. Blunt returning from the ball and added
+rapidly in a lowered voice,</p>
+<p>&ldquo;His mother.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The bright, mechanical smile of Mr. Blunt gleamed at us right down
+the room, but he didn&rsquo;t, as it were, follow it in his body.&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp; I noticed then a bit of mute play.&nbsp;
+The heiress of Henry All&egrave;gre, 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.&nbsp;
+I didn&rsquo;t know then her shrinking from all falsehood and evasion;
+her dread of insincerity and disloyalty of every kind.&nbsp; But even
+then I felt that at the very last moment her being had recoiled before
+some shadow of a suspicion.&nbsp; 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?&nbsp; Unless to beat him a little with one of the sticks
+that were to be found there?&nbsp; White hair so much like an expensive
+wig could not be considered a serious protection.&nbsp; But it couldn&rsquo;t
+have been that.&nbsp; The transaction, whatever it was, had been much
+too quiet.&nbsp; I must say that none of us had looked out of the window
+and that I didn&rsquo;t know when the man did go or if he was gone at
+all.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h3>CHAPTER IV</h3>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>It was past four o&rsquo;clock before I left the house, together
+with Mills.&nbsp; Mr. Blunt, still in his riding costume, escorted us
+to the very door.&nbsp; He asked us to send him the first fiacre we
+met on our way to town.&nbsp; &ldquo;It&rsquo;s impossible to walk in
+this get-up through the streets,&rdquo; he remarked, with his brilliant
+smile.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>Expression on paper has never been my forte.&nbsp; My life had been
+a thing of outward manifestations.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp;
+But in those four hours since midday a complete change had come over
+me.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp; This was unavoidable.&nbsp;
+It was because I felt myself thrown back upon my own thoughts and forbidden
+to seek relief amongst other lives&mdash;it was perhaps only for that
+reason at first I started an irregular, fragmentary record of my days.</p>
+<p>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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; It may be,
+too, that I learned to love the sea for itself only at that time.&nbsp;
+Woman and the sea revealed themselves to me together, as it were: two
+mistresses of life&rsquo;s values.&nbsp; 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&rsquo;s formless might and
+of the sovereign charm in that woman&rsquo;s form wherein there seemed
+to beat the pulse of divinity rather than blood.</p>
+<p>I begin here with the notes written at the end of that very day.</p>
+<p>&mdash;Parted with Mills on the quay.&nbsp; We had walked side by
+side in absolute silence.&nbsp; The fact is he is too old for me to
+talk to him freely.&nbsp; For all his sympathy and seriousness I don&rsquo;t
+know what note to strike and I am not at all certain what he thinks
+of all this.&nbsp; As we shook hands at parting, I asked him how much
+longer he expected to stay.&nbsp; And he answered me that it depended
+on R.&nbsp; She was making arrangements for him to cross the frontier.&nbsp;
+He wanted to see the very ground on which the Principle of Legitimacy
+was actually asserting itself arms in hand.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp;
+So it wasn&rsquo;t Do&ntilde;a Rita, it wasn&rsquo;t Blunt, it wasn&rsquo;t
+the Pretender with his big infectious laugh, it wasn&rsquo;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.&nbsp; No.&nbsp; It was the Legitimist Principle
+asserting itself!&nbsp; Well, I would accept the view but with one reservation.&nbsp;
+All the others might have been merged into the idea, but I, the latest
+recruit, I would not be merged in the Legitimist Principle.&nbsp; Mine
+was an act of independent assertion.&nbsp; Never before had I felt so
+intensely aware of my personality.&nbsp; But I said nothing of that
+to Mills.&nbsp; I only told him I thought we had better not be seen
+very often together in the streets.&nbsp; He agreed.&nbsp; Hearty handshake.&nbsp;
+Looked affectionately after his broad back.&nbsp; It never occurred
+to him to turn his head.&nbsp; What was I in comparison with the Principle
+of Legitimacy?</p>
+<p>Late that night I went in search of Dominic.&nbsp; That Mediterranean
+sailor was just the man I wanted.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; That I didn&rsquo;t
+know where he lived was nothing since I knew where he loved.&nbsp; The
+proprietor of a small, quiet caf&eacute; on the quay, a certain Madame
+L&eacute;onore, a woman of thirty-five with an open Roman face and intelligent
+black eyes, had captivated his heart years ago.&nbsp; In that caf&eacute;
+with our heads close together over a marble table, Dominic and I held
+an earnest and endless confabulation while Madame L&eacute;onore, 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&rsquo;s
+shoulder.&nbsp; Later when the little caf&eacute; 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.&nbsp; It was her name for me.&nbsp;
+I was Dominic&rsquo;s Signorino.&nbsp; She knew me by no other; and
+our connection has always been somewhat of a riddle to her.&nbsp; She
+said that I was somehow changed since she saw me last.&nbsp; In her
+rich voice she urged Dominic only to look at my eyes.&nbsp; I must have
+had some piece of luck come to me either in love or at cards, she bantered.&nbsp;
+But Dominic answered half in scorn that I was not of the sort that runs
+after that kind of luck.&nbsp; He stated generally that there were some
+young gentlemen very clever in inventing new ways of getting rid of
+their time and their money.&nbsp; However, if they needed a sensible
+man to help them he had no objection himself to lend a hand.&nbsp; Dominic&rsquo;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.&nbsp; He had been a desperate smuggler in his younger days.&nbsp;
+We settled the purchase of a fast sailing craft.&nbsp; Agreed that it
+must be a balancelle and something altogether out of the common.&nbsp;
+He knew of one suitable but she was in Corsica.&nbsp; Offered to start
+for Bastia by mail-boat in the morning.&nbsp; All the time the handsome
+and mature Madame L&eacute;onore sat by, smiling faintly, amused at
+her great man joining like this in a frolic of boys.&nbsp; She said
+the last words of that evening: &ldquo;You men never grow up,&rdquo;
+touching lightly the grey hair above his temple.</p>
+<p>A fortnight later.</p>
+<p>. . . In the afternoon to the Prado.&nbsp; Beautiful day.&nbsp; At
+the moment of ringing at the door a strong emotion of an anxious kind.&nbsp;
+Why?&nbsp; Down the length of the dining-room in the rotunda part full
+of afternoon light Do&ntilde;a 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:
+&ldquo;What!&nbsp; Back already!&rdquo;&nbsp; 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.&nbsp;
+Found her very quick in taking the points and very intelligent in her
+suggestions.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; I believe
+I gave her the whole history of the man, mentioning even the existence
+of Madame L&eacute;onore, since the little caf&eacute; would have to
+be the headquarters of the marine part of the plot.</p>
+<p>She murmured, &ldquo;<i>Ah</i>! <i>Une belle Romaine</i>,&rdquo;
+thoughtfully.&nbsp; She told me that she liked to hear people of that
+sort spoken of in terms of our common humanity.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; She wanted to know
+whether he had engaged himself in this adventure solely for my sake.</p>
+<p>I said that no doubt it was partly that.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; But mainly,
+I suppose, it was from taste.&nbsp; And there was in him also a fine
+carelessness as to what he did and a love of venturesome enterprise.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And you,&rdquo; she said.&nbsp; &ldquo;Is it carelessness,
+too?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;In a measure,&rdquo; I said.&nbsp; &ldquo;Within limits.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And very soon you will get tired.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;When I do I will tell you.&nbsp; But I may also get frightened.&nbsp;
+I suppose you know there are risks, I mean apart from the risk of life.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;As for instance,&rdquo; she said.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;For instance, being captured, tried, and sentenced to what
+they call &lsquo;the galleys,&rsquo; in Ceuta.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And all this from that love for . . .&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Not for Legitimacy,&rdquo; I interrupted the inquiry lightly.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;But what&rsquo;s the use asking such questions?&nbsp; It&rsquo;s
+like asking the veiled figure of fate.&nbsp; It doesn&rsquo;t know its
+own mind nor its own heart.&nbsp; It has no heart.&nbsp; But what if
+I were to start asking you&mdash;who have a heart and are not veiled
+to my sight?&rdquo;&nbsp; She dropped her charming adolescent head,
+so firm in modelling, so gentle in expression.&nbsp; Her uncovered neck
+was round like the shaft of a column.&nbsp; She wore the same wrapper
+of thick blue silk.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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&rsquo;s nearness to her body which would have been
+troubling but for the perfect unconsciousness of her manner.&nbsp; That
+day she carried no barbarous arrow in her hair.&nbsp; It was parted
+on one side, brushed back severely, and tied with a black ribbon, without
+any bronze mist about her forehead or temple.&nbsp; This smoothness
+added to the many varieties of her expression also that of child-like
+innocence.</p>
+<p>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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.</p>
+<p>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.&nbsp; She said, &ldquo;I had forgotten myself.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+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!&nbsp;
+Brusquely I dropped the hand before it reached my lips; and it was so
+lifeless that it fell heavily on to the divan.</p>
+<p>I remained standing before her.&nbsp; She raised to me not her eyes
+but her whole face, inquisitively&mdash;perhaps in appeal.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No!&nbsp; This isn&rsquo;t good enough for me,&rdquo; I said.</p>
+<p>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.&nbsp;
+Her voice had a profound quietness.&nbsp; She excused herself.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It&rsquo;s only habit&mdash;or instinct&mdash;or what you
+like.&nbsp; I have had to practise that in self-defence lest I should
+be tempted sometimes to cut the arm off.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>I remembered the way she had abandoned this very arm and hand to
+the white-haired ruffian.&nbsp; It rendered me gloomy and idiotically
+obstinate.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Very ingenious.&nbsp; But this sort of thing is of no use
+to me,&rdquo; I declared.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Make it up,&rdquo; suggested her mysterious voice, while her
+shadowy figure remained unmoved, indifferent amongst the cushions.</p>
+<p>I didn&rsquo;t stir either.&nbsp; I refused in the same low tone.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No.&nbsp; Not before you give it to me yourself some day.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes&mdash;some day,&rdquo; she repeated in a breath in which
+there was no irony but rather hesitation, reluctance what did I know?</p>
+<p>I walked away from the house in a curious state of gloomy satisfaction
+with myself.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
+<p>And this is the last extract.&nbsp; A month afterwards.</p>
+<p>&mdash;This afternoon going up to the Villa I was for the first time
+accompanied in my way by some misgivings.&nbsp; To-morrow I sail.</p>
+<p>First trip and therefore in the nature of a trial trip; and I can&rsquo;t
+overcome a certain gnawing emotion, for it is a trip that <i>mustn&rsquo;t</i>
+fail.&nbsp; In that sort of enterprise there is no room for mistakes.&nbsp;
+Of all the individuals engaged in it will every one be intelligent enough,
+faithful enough, bold enough?&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; And will
+they be all punctual, I wonder?&nbsp; An enterprise that hangs on the
+punctuality of many people, no matter how well disposed and even heroic,
+hangs on a thread.&nbsp; This I have perceived to be also the greatest
+of Dominic&rsquo;s concerns.&nbsp; He, too, wonders.&nbsp; And when
+he breathes his doubts the smile lurking under the dark curl of his
+moustaches is not reassuring.</p>
+<p>But there is also something exciting in such speculations and the
+road to the Villa seemed to me shorter than ever before.</p>
+<p>Let in by the silent, ever-active, dark lady&rsquo;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.</p>
+<p>On entering the long room I perceive Mills established in an armchair
+which he had dragged in front of the divan.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; At least I concluded so because I
+found them talking of the heart-broken Azzolati.&nbsp; And after having
+answered their greetings I sit and listen to Rita addressing Mills earnestly.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No, I assure you Azzolati had done nothing to me.&nbsp; I
+knew him.&nbsp; He was a frequent visitor at the Pavilion, though I,
+personally, never talked with him very much in Henry All&egrave;gre&rsquo;s
+lifetime.&nbsp; Other men were more interesting, and he himself was
+rather reserved in his manner to me.&nbsp; He was an international politician
+and financier&mdash;a nobody.&nbsp; He, like many others, was admitted
+only to feed and amuse Henry All&egrave;gre&rsquo;s scorn of the world,
+which was insatiable&mdash;I tell you.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; said Mills.&nbsp; &ldquo;I can imagine.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But I know.&nbsp; Often when we were alone Henry All&egrave;gre
+used to pour it into my ears.&nbsp; If ever anybody saw mankind stripped
+of its clothes as the child sees the king in the German fairy tale,
+it&rsquo;s I!&nbsp; Into my ears!&nbsp; A child&rsquo;s!&nbsp; Too young
+to die of fright.&nbsp; Certainly not old enough to understand&mdash;or
+even to believe.&nbsp; But then his arm was about me.&nbsp; I used to
+laugh, sometimes.&nbsp; Laugh!&nbsp; At this destruction&mdash;at these
+ruins!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; said Mills, very steady before her fire.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;But you have at your service the everlasting charm of life; you
+are a part of the indestructible.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Am I? . . . But there is no arm about me now.&nbsp; The laugh!&nbsp;
+Where is my laugh?&nbsp; Give me back my laugh. . . .&rdquo;</p>
+<p>And she laughed a little on a low note.&nbsp; I don&rsquo;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.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;The laugh is gone out of my heart, which at any rate used
+to feel protected.&nbsp; That feeling&rsquo;s gone, too.&nbsp; And I
+myself will have to die some day.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Certainly,&rdquo; said Mills in an unaltered voice.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;As to this body you . . .&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, yes!&nbsp; Thanks.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s a very poor jest.&nbsp;
+Change from body to body as travellers used to change horses at post
+houses.&nbsp; I&rsquo;ve heard of this before. . . .&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;ve no doubt you have,&rdquo; Mills put on a submissive
+air.&nbsp; &ldquo;But are we to hear any more about Azzolati?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You shall.&nbsp; Listen.&nbsp; I had heard that he was invited
+to shoot at Rambouillet&mdash;a quiet party, not one of these great
+shoots.&nbsp; I hear a lot of things.&nbsp; I wanted to have a certain
+information, also certain hints conveyed to a diplomatic personage who
+was to be there, too.&nbsp; A personage that would never let me get
+in touch with him though I had tried many times.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Incredible!&rdquo; mocked Mills solemnly.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;The personage mistrusts his own susceptibility.&nbsp; Born
+cautious,&rdquo; explained Do&ntilde;a Rita crisply with the slightest
+possible quiver of her lips.&nbsp; &ldquo;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.&nbsp; I never took any notice
+of those pathetic appeals before.&nbsp; But in this emergency I sat
+down and wrote a note asking him to come and dine with me in my hotel.&nbsp;
+I suppose you know I don&rsquo;t live in the Pavilion.&nbsp; I can&rsquo;t
+bear the Pavilion now.&nbsp; When I have to go there I begin to feel
+after an hour or so that it is haunted.&nbsp; I seem to catch sight
+of somebody I know behind columns, passing through doorways, vanishing
+here and there.&nbsp; I hear light footsteps behind closed doors. .
+. My own!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Her eyes, her half-parted lips, remained fixed till Mills suggested
+softly, &ldquo;Yes, but Azzolati.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Her rigidity vanished like a flake of snow in the sunshine.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;Oh! Azzolati.&nbsp; It was a most solemn affair.&nbsp; It had
+occurred to me to make a very elaborate toilet.&nbsp; It was most successful.&nbsp;
+Azzolati looked positively scared for a moment as though he had got
+into the wrong suite of rooms.&nbsp; He had never before seen me <i>en
+toilette</i>, you understand.&nbsp; In the old days once out of my riding
+habit I would never dress.&nbsp; I draped myself, you remember, Monsieur
+Mills.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; My aim was to impress Azzolati.&nbsp; I wanted
+to talk to him seriously.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>There was something whimsical in the quick beat of her eyelids and
+in the subtle quiver of her lips.&nbsp; &ldquo;And behold! the same
+notion had occurred to Azzolati.&nbsp; Imagine that for this t&ecirc;te-&agrave;-t&ecirc;te
+dinner the creature had got himself up as if for a reception at court.&nbsp;
+He displayed a brochette of all sorts of decorations on the lapel of
+his <i>frac</i> and had a broad ribbon of some order across his shirt
+front.&nbsp; An orange ribbon.&nbsp; Bavarian, I should say.&nbsp; Great
+Roman Catholic, Azzolati.&nbsp; It was always his ambition to be the
+banker of all the Bourbons in the world.&nbsp; The last remnants of
+his hair were dyed jet black and the ends of his moustache were like
+knitting needles.&nbsp; He was disposed to be as soft as wax in my hands.&nbsp;
+Unfortunately I had had some irritating interviews during the day.&nbsp;
+I was keeping down sudden impulses to smash a glass, throw a plate on
+the floor, do something violent to relieve my feelings.&nbsp; His submissive
+attitude made me still more nervous.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; You understand
+the impudence of it, don&rsquo;t you?&nbsp; And his tone was positively
+abject, too.&nbsp; I snapped back at him that I had no door, that I
+was a nomad.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; And you know this made
+me feel a homeless outcast more than ever&mdash;like a little dog lost
+in the street&mdash;not knowing where to go.&nbsp; I was ready to cry
+and there the creature sat in front of me with an imbecile smile as
+much as to say &lsquo;here is a poser for you. . . .&rsquo;&nbsp; I
+gnashed my teeth at him.&nbsp; Quietly, you know . . . I suppose you
+two think that I am stupid.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She paused as if expecting an answer but we made no sound and she
+continued with a remark.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I have days like that.&nbsp; 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&rsquo;s way.&nbsp; That idiot treated me to a piece of brazen
+sincerity which I couldn&rsquo;t stand.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; His heart!&nbsp; He wanted me to sympathize
+with his sorrows.&nbsp; Of course I ought to have listened.&nbsp; One
+must pay for service.&nbsp; Only I was nervous and tired.&nbsp; He bored
+me.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; He had been moaning and sentimentalizing but then
+suddenly he showed me his fangs.&nbsp; &lsquo;No,&rsquo; he cries, &lsquo;you
+can&rsquo;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&rsquo;s boots.&rsquo;&nbsp; You may tell me that he is a contemptible
+animal anyhow, but you should have heard the tone!&nbsp; I felt my bare
+arms go cold like ice.&nbsp; A moment before I had been hot and faint
+with sheer boredom.&nbsp; I jumped up from the table, rang for Rose,
+and told her to bring me my fur cloak.&nbsp; He remained in his chair
+leering at me curiously.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp;
+&lsquo;Take yourself off instantly,&rsquo; I said.&nbsp; &lsquo;Go trample
+on the poor if you like but never dare speak to me again.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+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&mdash;you know&mdash;whether
+he wanted me to have him turned out into the corridor.&nbsp; He fetched
+an enormous sigh.&nbsp; &lsquo;I have only tried to be honest with you,
+Rita.&rsquo;&nbsp; But by the time he got to the door he had regained
+some of his impudence.&nbsp; &lsquo;You know how to trample on a poor
+fellows too,&rsquo; he said.&nbsp; &lsquo;But I don&rsquo;t mind being
+made to wriggle under your pretty shoes, Rita.&nbsp; I forgive you.&nbsp;
+I thought you were free from all vulgar sentimentalism and that you
+had a more independent mind.&nbsp; I was mistaken in you, that&rsquo;s
+all.&rsquo;&nbsp; With that he pretends to dash a tear from his eye-crocodile!&mdash;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?&rdquo;
+she concluded in a tone of extreme candour and a profound unreadable
+stare that went far beyond us both.&nbsp; 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.</p>
+<p>Presently she continued as if speaking for herself only.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It&rsquo;s like taking the lids off boxes and seeing ugly
+toads staring at you.&nbsp; In every one.&nbsp; Every one.&nbsp; That&rsquo;s
+what it is having to do with men more than mere&mdash;Good-morning&mdash;Good
+evening.&nbsp; And if you try to avoid meddling with their lids, some
+of them will take them off themselves.&nbsp; And they don&rsquo;t even
+know, they don&rsquo;t even suspect what they are showing you.&nbsp;
+Certain confidences&mdash;they don&rsquo;t see it&mdash;are the bitterest
+kind of insult.&nbsp; I suppose Azzolati imagines himself a noble beast
+of prey.&nbsp; Just as some others imagine themselves to be most delicate,
+noble, and refined gentlemen.&nbsp; And as likely as not they would
+trade on a woman&rsquo;s troubles&mdash;and in the end make nothing
+of that either.&nbsp; Idiots!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The utter absence of all anger in this spoken meditation gave it
+a character of touching simplicity.&nbsp; And as if it had been truly
+only a meditation we conducted ourselves as though we had not heard
+it.&nbsp; Mills began to speak of his experiences during his visit to
+the army of the Legitimist King.&nbsp; And I discovered in his speeches
+that this man of books could be graphic and picturesque.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp;
+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.</p>
+<p>He shook his head.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I feel that you of all people, Do&ntilde;a Rita, ought to
+be told the truth.&nbsp; I don&rsquo;t know exactly what you have at
+stake.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She was rosy like some impassive statue in a desert in the flush
+of the dawn.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Not my heart,&rdquo; she said quietly.&nbsp; &ldquo;You must
+believe that.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I do.&nbsp; Perhaps it would have been better if you. . .
+&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No, <i>Monsieur le Philosophe</i>.&nbsp; It would not have
+been better.&nbsp; Don&rsquo;t make that serious face at me,&rdquo;
+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.&nbsp; &ldquo;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?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I wouldn&rsquo;t judge you.&nbsp; What am I before the knowledge
+you were born to?&nbsp; You are as old as the world.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She accepted this with a smile.&nbsp; 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.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;With me it is <i>pun d&rsquo;onor</i>.&nbsp; To my first independent
+friend.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You were soon parted,&rdquo; ventured Mills, while I sat still
+under a sense of oppression.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Don&rsquo;t think for a moment that I have been scared off,&rdquo;
+she said.&nbsp; &ldquo;It is they who were frightened.&nbsp; I suppose
+you heard a lot of Headquarters gossip?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, yes,&rdquo; Mills said meaningly.&nbsp; &ldquo;The fair
+and the dark are succeeding each other like leaves blown in the wind
+dancing in and out.&nbsp; I suppose you have noticed that leaves blown
+in the wind have a look of happiness.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;that sort of leaf is dead.&nbsp;
+Then why shouldn&rsquo;t it look happy?&nbsp; And so I suppose there
+is no uneasiness, no occasion for fears amongst the &lsquo;responsibles.&rsquo;&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Upon the whole not.&nbsp; Now and then a leaf seems as if
+it would stick.&nbsp; There is for instance Madame . . .&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, I don&rsquo;t want to know, I understand it all, I am
+as old as the world.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; said Mills thoughtfully, &ldquo;you are not a
+leaf, you might have been a tornado yourself.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Upon my word,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;there was a time that
+they thought I could carry him off, away from them all&mdash;beyond
+them all.&nbsp; Verily, I am not very proud of their fears.&nbsp; There
+was nothing reckless there worthy of a great passion.&nbsp; There was
+nothing sad there worthy of a great tenderness.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And is <i>this</i> the word of the Venetian riddle?&rdquo;
+asked Mills, fixing her with his keen eyes.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;If it pleases you to think so, Se&ntilde;or,&rdquo; she said
+indifferently.&nbsp; The movement of her eyes, their veiled gleam became
+mischievous when she asked, &ldquo;And Don Juan Blunt, have you seen
+him over there?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I fancy he avoided me.&nbsp; Moreover, he is always with his
+regiment at the outposts.&nbsp; He is a most valorous captain.&nbsp;
+I heard some people describe him as foolhardy.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, he needn&rsquo;t seek death,&rdquo; she said in an indefinable
+tone.&nbsp; &ldquo;I mean as a refuge.&nbsp; There will be nothing in
+his life great enough for that.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You are angry.&nbsp; You miss him, I believe, Do&ntilde;a
+Rita.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Angry?&nbsp; No!&nbsp; Weary.&nbsp; But of course it&rsquo;s
+very inconvenient.&nbsp; I can&rsquo;t very well ride out alone.&nbsp;
+A solitary amazon swallowing the dust and the salt spray of the Corniche
+promenade would attract too much attention.&nbsp; And then I don&rsquo;t
+mind you two knowing that I am afraid of going out alone.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Afraid?&rdquo; we both exclaimed together.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You men are extraordinary.&nbsp; Why do you want me to be
+courageous?&nbsp; Why shouldn&rsquo;t I be afraid?&nbsp; Is it because
+there is no one in the world to care what would happen to me?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>There was a deep-down vibration in her tone for the first time.&nbsp;
+We had not a word to say.&nbsp; And she added after a long silence:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;There is a very good reason.&nbsp; There is a danger.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>With wonderful insight Mills affirmed at once:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Something ugly.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She nodded slightly several times.&nbsp; Then Mills said with conviction:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Ah!&nbsp; Then it can&rsquo;t be anything in yourself.&nbsp;
+And if so . . . &rdquo;</p>
+<p>I was moved to extravagant advice.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You should come out with me to sea then.&nbsp; There may be
+some danger there but there&rsquo;s nothing ugly to fear.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>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:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh!&nbsp; And there is this one, too!&nbsp; Why!&nbsp; Oh,
+why should he run his head into danger for those things that will all
+crumble into dust before long?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>I said: &ldquo;<i>You</i> won&rsquo;t crumble into dust.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+And Mills chimed in:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;That young enthusiast will always have his sea.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>We were all standing up now.&nbsp; She kept her eyes on me, and repeated
+with a sort of whimsical enviousness:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;The sea!&nbsp; The violet sea&mdash;and he is longing to rejoin
+it! . . . At night!&nbsp; Under the stars! . . . A lovers&rsquo; meeting,&rdquo;
+she went on, thrilling me from head to foot with those two words, accompanied
+by a wistful smile pointed by a suspicion of mockery.&nbsp; She turned
+away.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And you, Monsieur Mills?&rdquo; she asked.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I am going back to my books,&rdquo; he declared with a very
+serious face.&nbsp; &ldquo;My adventure is over.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Each one to his love,&rdquo; she bantered us gently.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;Didn&rsquo;t I love books, too, at one time!&nbsp; They seemed
+to contain all wisdom and hold a magic power, too.&nbsp; Tell me, Monsieur
+Mills, have you found amongst them in some black-letter volume the power
+of foretelling a poor mortal&rsquo;s destiny, the power to look into
+the future?&nbsp; Anybody&rsquo;s future . . .&rdquo;&nbsp; Mills shook
+his head. . . &ldquo;What, not even mine?&rdquo; she coaxed as if she
+really believed in a magic power to be found in books.</p>
+<p>Mills shook his head again.&nbsp; &ldquo;No, I have not the power,&rdquo;
+he said.&nbsp; &ldquo;I am no more a great magician, than you are a
+poor mortal.&nbsp; You have your ancient spells.&nbsp; You are as old
+as the world.&nbsp; Of us two it&rsquo;s you that are more fit to foretell
+the future of the poor mortals on whom you happen to cast your eyes.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>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.&nbsp; Then Mills
+pronounced distinctly: &ldquo;Good-bye, old Enchantress.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>They shook hands cordially.&nbsp; &ldquo;Good-bye, poor Magician,&rdquo;
+she said.</p>
+<p>Mills made as if to speak but seemed to think better of it.&nbsp;
+Do&ntilde;a Rita returned my distant how with a slight, charmingly ceremonious
+inclination of her body.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;<i>Bon voyage</i> and a happy return,&rdquo; she said formally.</p>
+<p>I was following Mills through the door when I heard her voice behind
+us raised in recall:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, a moment . . . I forgot . . .&rdquo;</p>
+<p>I turned round.&nbsp; The call was for me, and I walked slowly back
+wondering what she could have forgotten.&nbsp; She waited in the middle
+of the room with lowered head, with a mute gleam in her deep blue eyes.&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp;
+I was too startled to seize it with rapture.&nbsp; It detached itself
+from my lips and fell slowly by her side.&nbsp; We had made it up and
+there was nothing to say.&nbsp; She turned away to the window and I
+hurried out of the room.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines3"><br /><br /><br /></div>
+<h2>PART THREE</h2>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines3"><br /><br /><br /></div>
+<h3>CHAPTER I</h3>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>It was on our return from that first trip that I took Dominic up
+to the Villa to be presented to Do&ntilde;a Rita.&nbsp; If she wanted
+to look on the embodiment of fidelity, resource, and courage, she could
+behold it all in that man.&nbsp; Apparently she was not disappointed.&nbsp;
+Neither was Dominic disappointed.&nbsp; During the half-hour&rsquo;s
+interview they got into touch with each other in a wonderful way as
+if they had some common and secret standpoint in life.&nbsp; Maybe it
+was their common lawlessness, and their knowledge of things as old as
+the world.&nbsp; Her seduction, his recklessness, were both simple,
+masterful and, in a sense, worthy of each other.</p>
+<p>Dominic was, I won&rsquo;t say awed by this interview.&nbsp; No woman
+could awe Dominic.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; Later, at sea, he used to refer to La Se&ntilde;ora
+in a particular tone and I knew that henceforth his devotion was not
+for me alone.&nbsp; And I understood the inevitability of it extremely
+well.&nbsp; As to Do&ntilde;a Rita she, after Dominic left the room,
+had turned to me with animation and said: &ldquo;But he is perfect,
+this man.&rdquo;&nbsp; Afterwards she often asked after him and used
+to refer to him in conversation.&nbsp; More than once she said to me:
+&ldquo;One would like to put the care of one&rsquo;s personal safety
+into the hands of that man.&nbsp; He looks as if he simply couldn&rsquo;t
+fail one.&rdquo;&nbsp; I admitted that this was very true, especially
+at sea.&nbsp; Dominic couldn&rsquo;t fail.&nbsp; But at the same time
+I rather chaffed Rita on her preoccupation as to personal safety that
+so often cropped up in her talk.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;One would think you were a crowned head in a revolutionary
+world,&rdquo; I used to tell her.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;That would be different.&nbsp; One would be standing then
+for something, either worth or not worth dying for.&nbsp; One could
+even run away then and be done with it.&nbsp; But I can&rsquo;t run
+away unless I got out of my skin and left that behind.&nbsp; Don&rsquo;t
+you understand?&nbsp; You are very stupid . . .&rdquo;&nbsp; But she
+had the grace to add, &ldquo;On purpose.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>I don&rsquo;t know about the on purpose.&nbsp; I am not certain about
+the stupidity.&nbsp; Her words bewildered one often and bewilderment
+is a sort of stupidity.&nbsp; I remedied it by simply disregarding the
+sense of what she said.&nbsp; The sound was there and also her poignant
+heart-gripping presence giving occupation enough to one&rsquo;s faculties.&nbsp;
+In the power of those things over one there was mystery enough.&nbsp;
+It was more absorbing than the mere obscurity of her speeches.&nbsp;
+But I daresay she couldn&rsquo;t understand that.</p>
+<p>Hence, at times, the amusing outbreaks of temper in word and gesture
+that only strengthened the natural, the invincible force of the spell.&nbsp;
+Sometimes the brass bowl would get upset or the cigarette box would
+fly up, dropping a shower of cigarettes on the floor.&nbsp; 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.</p>
+<p>It was at that time, too, that she suggested I should take up my
+quarters in her house in the street of the Consuls.&nbsp; There were
+certain advantages in that move.&nbsp; In my present abode my sudden
+absences might have been in the long run subject to comment.&nbsp; On
+the other hand, the house in the street of Consuls was a known out-post
+of Legitimacy.&nbsp; 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: &ldquo;Madame de Lastaola.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>That was the name which the heiress of Henry All&egrave;gre had decided
+to adopt when, according to her own expression, she had found herself
+precipitated at a moment&rsquo;s notice into the crowd of mankind.&nbsp;
+It is strange how the death of Henry All&egrave;gre, which certainly
+the poor man had not planned, acquired in my view the character of a
+heartless desertion.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp;
+If he had hated her he could not have flung that enormous fortune more
+brutally at her head.&nbsp; And his unrepentant death seemed to lift
+for a moment the curtain on something lofty and sinister like an Olympian&rsquo;s
+caprice.</p>
+<p>Do&ntilde;a Rita said to me once with humorous resignation: &ldquo;You
+know, it appears that one must have a name.&nbsp; That&rsquo;s what
+Henry All&egrave;gre&rsquo;s man of business told me.&nbsp; He was quite
+impatient with me about it.&nbsp; But my name, <i>amigo</i>, Henry All&egrave;gre
+had taken from me like all the rest of what I had been once.&nbsp; All
+that is buried with him in his grave.&nbsp; It wouldn&rsquo;t have been
+true.&nbsp; That is how I felt about it.&nbsp; So I took that one.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+She whispered to herself: &ldquo;Lastaola,&rdquo; not as if to test
+the sound but as if in a dream.</p>
+<p>To this day I am not quite certain whether it was the name of any
+human habitation, a lonely <i>caserio</i> 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.&nbsp; It might have been a
+hill for all I know or perhaps a stream.&nbsp; A wood, or perhaps a
+combination of all these: just a bit of the earth&rsquo;s surface.&nbsp;
+Once I asked her where exactly it was situated and she answered, waving
+her hand cavalierly at the dead wall of the room: &ldquo;Oh, over there.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+I thought that this was all that I was going to hear but she added moodily,
+&ldquo;I used to take my goats there, a dozen or so of them, for the
+day.&nbsp; From after my uncle had said his Mass till the ringing of
+the evening bell.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>The epithet of rust-coloured comes from her.&nbsp; It was really
+tawny.&nbsp; Once or twice in my hearing she had referred to &ldquo;my
+rust-coloured hair&rdquo; with laughing vexation.&nbsp; 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 All&egrave;gre.&nbsp;
+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.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;The goats were very good.&nbsp; We clambered amongst the stones
+together.&nbsp; They beat me at that game.&nbsp; I used to catch my
+hair in the bushes.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Your rust-coloured hair,&rdquo; I whispered.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes, it was always this colour.&nbsp; And I used to leave
+bits of my frock on thorns here and there.&nbsp; It was pretty thin,
+I can tell you.&nbsp; There wasn&rsquo;t much at that time between my
+skin and the blue of the sky.&nbsp; My legs were as sunburnt as my face;
+but really I didn&rsquo;t tan very much.&nbsp; I had plenty of freckles
+though.&nbsp; There were no looking-glasses in the Presbytery but uncle
+had a piece not bigger than my two hands for his shaving.&nbsp; One
+Sunday I crept into his room and had a peep at myself.&nbsp; And wasn&rsquo;t
+I startled to see my own eyes looking at me!&nbsp; But it was fascinating,
+too.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; Heavens!&nbsp; When I overhear myself speaking sometimes,
+or look at my limbs, it doesn&rsquo;t seem to be possible.&nbsp; And
+yet it is the same one.&nbsp; I do remember every single goat.&nbsp;
+They were very clever.&nbsp; Goats are no trouble really; they don&rsquo;t
+scatter much.&nbsp; Mine never did even if I had to hide myself out
+of their sight for ever so long.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>It was but natural to ask her why she wanted to hide, and she uttered
+vaguely what was rather a comment on my question:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It was like fate.&rdquo;&nbsp; But I chose to take it otherwise,
+teasingly, because we were often like a pair of children.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, really,&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;you talk like a pagan.&nbsp;
+What could you know of fate at that time?&nbsp; What was it like?&nbsp;
+Did it come down from Heaven?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Don&rsquo;t be stupid.&nbsp; It used to come along a cart-track
+that was there and it looked like a boy.&nbsp; Wasn&rsquo;t he a little
+devil though.&nbsp; You understand, I couldn&rsquo;t know that.&nbsp;
+He was a wealthy cousin of mine.&nbsp; Round there we are all related,
+all cousins&mdash;as in Brittany.&nbsp; He wasn&rsquo;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.&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp; And
+the airs he gave himself!&nbsp; He quite intimidated me sitting there
+perfectly dumb.&nbsp; I remember trying to hide my bare feet under the
+edge of my skirt as I sat below him on the ground.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;<i>C&rsquo;est comique, eh</i>!&rdquo; she interrupted herself
+to comment in a melancholy tone.&nbsp; I looked at her sympathetically
+and she went on:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;He was the only son from a rich farmhouse two miles down the
+slope.&nbsp; In winter they used to send him to school at Tolosa.&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; He was moaning
+and complaining and threatening all the world, including his father
+and mother.&nbsp; He used to curse God, yes, that boy, sitting there
+on a piece of rock like a wretched little Prometheus with a sparrow
+peeking at his miserable little liver.&nbsp; And the grand scenery of
+mountains all round, ha, ha, ha!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She laughed in contralto: a penetrating sound with something generous
+in it; not infectious, but in others provoking a smile.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Of course I, poor little animal, I didn&rsquo;t know what
+to make of it, and I was even a little frightened.&nbsp; But at first
+because of his miserable eyes I was sorry for him, almost as much as
+if he had been a sick goat.&nbsp; But, frightened or sorry, I don&rsquo;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.&nbsp; Yes,
+even then I had to put my hand over my mouth more than once for the
+sake of good manners, you understand.&nbsp; And yet, you know, I was
+never a laughing child.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;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.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;&lsquo;To be with me?&rsquo; I asked.&nbsp; And he said: &lsquo;To
+be with you!&nbsp; No.&nbsp; My people don&rsquo;t know what I do.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+I can&rsquo;t tell why, but I was annoyed.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; He got up, he had a
+switch in his hand, and walked up to me, saying, &lsquo;I will soon
+show you.&rsquo;&nbsp; I went stiff with fright; but instead of slashing
+at me he dropped down by my side and kissed me on the cheek.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; Not very far.&nbsp;
+I couldn&rsquo;t leave the goats altogether.&nbsp; He chased me round
+and about the rocks, but of course I was too quick for him in his nice
+town boots.&nbsp; When he got tired of that game he started throwing
+stones.&nbsp; After that he made my life very lively for me.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; And yet, I often felt inclined to laugh.&nbsp;
+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&rsquo;t show
+the end of my nose for hours.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; Didn&rsquo;t he hate me!&nbsp; At the same
+time I was often terrified.&nbsp; I am convinced now that if I had started
+crying he would have rushed in and perhaps strangled me there.&nbsp;
+Then as the sun was about to set he would make me swear that I would
+marry him when I was grown up.&nbsp; &lsquo;Swear, you little wretched
+beggar,&rsquo; he would yell to me.&nbsp; And I would swear.&nbsp; I
+was hungry, and I didn&rsquo;t want to be made black and blue all over
+with stones.&nbsp; Oh, I swore ever so many times to be his wife.&nbsp;
+Thirty times a month for two months.&nbsp; I couldn&rsquo;t help myself.&nbsp;
+It was no use complaining to my sister Therese.&nbsp; When I showed
+her my bruises and tried to tell her a little about my trouble she was
+quite scandalized.&nbsp; She called me a sinful girl, a shameless creature.&nbsp;
+I assure you it puzzled my head so that, between Therese my sister and
+Jos&eacute; the boy, I lived in a state of idiocy almost.&nbsp; But
+luckily at the end of the two months they sent him away from home for
+good.&nbsp; Curious story to happen to a goatherd living all her days
+out under God&rsquo;s eye, as my uncle the Cura might have said.&nbsp;
+My sister Therese was keeping house in the Presbytery.&nbsp; She&rsquo;s
+a terrible person.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I have heard of your sister Therese,&rdquo; I said.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, you have!&nbsp; Of my big sister Therese, six, ten years
+older than myself perhaps?&nbsp; She just comes a little above my shoulder,
+but then I was always a long thing.&nbsp; I never knew my mother.&nbsp;
+I don&rsquo;t even know how she looked.&nbsp; There are no paintings
+or photographs in our farmhouses amongst the hills.&nbsp; I haven&rsquo;t
+even heard her described to me.&nbsp; I believe I was never good enough
+to be told these things.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; Well, I have no particular
+taste that way.&nbsp; I suppose it is annoying to have a sister going
+fast to eternal perdition, but there are compensations.&nbsp; The funniest
+thing is that it&rsquo;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 <i>Quartel Real</i> last year.&nbsp;
+I couldn&rsquo;t have stayed much more than half an hour with them anyway,
+but still I would have liked to get over the old doorstep.&nbsp; I am
+certain that Therese persuaded my uncle to go out and meet me at the
+bottom of the hill.&nbsp; I saw the old man a long way off and I understood
+how it was.&nbsp; I dismounted at once and met him on foot.&nbsp; We
+had half an hour together walking up and down the road.&nbsp; He is
+a peasant priest, he didn&rsquo;t know how to treat me.&nbsp; And of
+course I was uncomfortable, too.&nbsp; There wasn&rsquo;t a single goat
+about to keep me in countenance.&nbsp; I ought to have embraced him.&nbsp;
+I was always fond of the stern, simple old man.&nbsp; But he drew himself
+up when I approached him and actually took off his hat to me.&nbsp;
+So simple as that!&nbsp; I bowed my head and asked for his blessing.&nbsp;
+And he said &lsquo;I would never refuse a blessing to a good Legitimist.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+So stern as that!&nbsp; 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&rsquo;s
+life patted on the head!&nbsp; When I think of that I . . . I believe
+at that moment I was as wretched as he was himself.&nbsp; I handed him
+an envelope with a big red seal which quite startled him.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp;
+I said to him then, after he had asked me about the health of His Majesty
+in an awfully gloomy tone&mdash;I said then: &lsquo;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.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+What else could I have got for the poor old man?&nbsp; I had no trunks
+with me.&nbsp; I had to leave behind a spare pair of shoes in the hotel
+to make room in my little bag for that snuff.&nbsp; And fancy!&nbsp;
+That old priest absolutely pushed the parcel away.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; I remembered how wretched
+he used to be when he lacked a copper or two to get some snuff with.&nbsp;
+My face was hot with indignation, but before I could fly out at him
+I remembered how simple he was.&nbsp; So I said with great dignity that
+as the present came from the King and as he wouldn&rsquo;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.&nbsp; He shouted:
+&lsquo;Stay, unhappy girl!&nbsp; Is it really from His Majesty, whom
+God preserve?&rsquo;&nbsp; I said contemptuously, &lsquo;Of course.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+He looked at me with great pity in his eyes, sighed deeply, and took
+the little tin from my hand.&nbsp; I suppose he imagined me in my abandoned
+way wheedling the necessary cash out of the King for the purchase of
+that snuff.&nbsp; You can&rsquo;t imagine how simple he is.&nbsp; Nothing
+was easier than to deceive him; but don&rsquo;t imagine I deceived him
+from the vainglory of a mere sinner.&nbsp; I lied to the dear man, simply
+because I couldn&rsquo;t bear the idea of him being deprived of the
+only gratification his big, ascetic, gaunt body ever knew on earth.&nbsp;
+As I mounted my mule to go away he murmured coldly: &lsquo;God guard
+you, Se&ntilde;ora!&rsquo;&nbsp; Se&ntilde;ora!&nbsp; What sternness!&nbsp;
+We were off a little way already when his heart softened and he shouted
+after me in a terrible voice: &lsquo;The road to Heaven is repentance!&rsquo;&nbsp;
+And then, after a silence, again the great shout &lsquo;Repentance!&rsquo;
+thundered after me.&nbsp; Was that sternness or simplicity, I wonder?&nbsp;
+Or a mere unmeaning superstition, a mechanical thing?&nbsp; If there
+lives anybody completely honest in this world, surely it must be my
+uncle.&nbsp; And yet&mdash;who knows?</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Would you guess what was the next thing I did?&nbsp; Directly
+I got over the frontier I wrote from Bayonne asking the old man to send
+me out my sister here.&nbsp; I said it was for the service of the King.&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp; I thought
+it would do extremely well for Carlist officers coming this way on leave
+or on a mission.&nbsp; In hotels they might have been molested, but
+I knew that I could get protection for my house.&nbsp; Just a word from
+the ministry in Paris to the Prefect.&nbsp; But I wanted a woman to
+manage it for me.&nbsp; And where was I to find a trustworthy woman?&nbsp;
+How was I to know one when I saw her?&nbsp; I don&rsquo;t know how to
+talk to women.&nbsp; Of course my Rose would have done for me that or
+anything else; but what could I have done myself without her?&nbsp;
+She has looked after me from the first.&nbsp; It was Henry All&egrave;gre
+who got her for me eight years ago.&nbsp; I don&rsquo;t know whether
+he meant it for a kindness but she&rsquo;s the only human being on whom
+I can lean.&nbsp; She knows . . . What doesn&rsquo;t she know about
+me!&nbsp; She has never failed to do the right thing for me unasked.&nbsp;
+I couldn&rsquo;t part with her.&nbsp; And I couldn&rsquo;t think of
+anybody else but my sister.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;After all it was somebody belonging to me.&nbsp; But it seemed
+the wildest idea.&nbsp; Yet she came at once.&nbsp; Of course I took
+care to send her some money.&nbsp; She likes money.&nbsp; As to my uncle
+there is nothing that he wouldn&rsquo;t have given up for the service
+of the King.&nbsp; Rose went to meet her at the railway station.&nbsp;
+She told me afterwards that there had been no need for me to be anxious
+about her recognizing Mademoiselle Therese.&nbsp; There was nobody else
+in the train that could be mistaken for her.&nbsp; I should think not!&nbsp;
+She had made for herself a dress of some brown stuff like a nun&rsquo;s
+habit and had a crooked stick and carried all her belongings tied up
+in a handkerchief.&nbsp; She looked like a pilgrim to a saint&rsquo;s
+shrine.&nbsp; Rose took her to the house.&nbsp; She asked when she saw
+it: &lsquo;And does this big place really belong to our Rita?&rsquo;&nbsp;
+My maid of course said that it was mine.&nbsp; &lsquo;And how long did
+our Rita live here?&rsquo;&mdash;&lsquo;Madame has never seen it unless
+perhaps the outside, as far as I know.&nbsp; I believe Mr. All&egrave;gre
+lived here for some time when he was a young man.&rsquo;&mdash;&lsquo;The
+sinner that&rsquo;s dead?&rsquo;&mdash;&lsquo;Just so,&rsquo; says Rose.&nbsp;
+You know nothing ever startles Rose.&nbsp; &lsquo;Well, his sins are
+gone with him,&rsquo; said my sister, and began to make herself at home.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;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.&nbsp;
+Some little time afterwards I went to see that sister of mine.&nbsp;
+The first thing she said to me, &lsquo;I wouldn&rsquo;t have recognized
+you, Rita,&rsquo; and I said, &lsquo;What a funny dress you have, Therese,
+more fit for the portress of a convent than for this house.&rsquo;&mdash;&lsquo;Yes,&rsquo;
+she said, &lsquo;and unless you give this house to me, Rita, I will
+go back to our country.&nbsp; I will have nothing to do with your life,
+Rita.&nbsp; Your life is no secret for me.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I was going from room to room and Therese was following me.&nbsp;
+&lsquo;I don&rsquo;t know that my life is a secret to anybody,&rsquo;
+I said to her, &lsquo;but how do you know anything about it?&rsquo;&nbsp;
+And then she told me that it was through a cousin of ours, that horrid
+wretch of a boy, you know.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; I got suddenly very furious.&nbsp; I raged up and down the
+room (we were alone upstairs), and Therese scuttled away from me as
+far as the door.&nbsp; I heard her say to herself, &lsquo;It&rsquo;s
+the evil spirit in her that makes her like this.&rsquo;&nbsp; She was
+absolutely convinced of that.&nbsp; She made the sign of the cross in
+the air to protect herself.&nbsp; I was quite astounded.&nbsp; And then
+I really couldn&rsquo;t help myself.&nbsp; I burst into a laugh.&nbsp;
+I laughed and laughed; I really couldn&rsquo;t stop till Therese ran
+away.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; I had to pull her out by the shoulders from there.&nbsp;
+I don&rsquo;t think she was frightened; she was only shocked.&nbsp;
+But I don&rsquo;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.&nbsp; Quite a little
+programme for a reformed sinner.&nbsp; I got away at last.&nbsp; I left
+her sunk on her heels before the empty chair looking after me.&nbsp;
+&lsquo;I pray for you every night and morning, Rita,&rsquo; she said.&mdash;&lsquo;Oh,
+yes.&nbsp; I know you are a good sister,&rsquo; I said to her.&nbsp;
+I was letting myself out when she called after me, &lsquo;And what about
+this house, Rita?&rsquo;&nbsp; I said to her, &lsquo;Oh, you may keep
+it till the day I reform and enter a convent.&rsquo;&nbsp; The last
+I saw of her she was still on her knees looking after me with her mouth
+open.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp;
+But I believe she really knows how to make men comfortable.&nbsp; Upon
+my word I think she likes to look after men.&nbsp; They don&rsquo;t
+seem to be such great sinners as women are.&nbsp; I think you could
+do worse than take up your quarters at number 10.&nbsp; She will no
+doubt develop a saintly sort of affection for you, too.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>I don&rsquo;t know that the prospect of becoming a favourite of Do&ntilde;a
+Rita&rsquo;s peasant sister was very fascinating to me.&nbsp; If I went
+to live very willingly at No. 10 it was because everything connected
+with Do&ntilde;a Rita had for me a peculiar fascination.&nbsp; She had
+only passed through the house once as far as I knew; but it was enough.&nbsp;
+She was one of those beings that leave a trace.&nbsp; I am not unreasonable&mdash;I
+mean for those that knew her.&nbsp; That is, I suppose, because she
+was so unforgettable.&nbsp; Let us remember the tragedy of Azzolati
+the ruthless, the ridiculous financier with a criminal soul (or shall
+we say heart) and facile tears.&nbsp; 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 Do&ntilde;a
+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.&nbsp; Her glance, her darkly brilliant
+blue glance, had run over the walls of that room which most likely would
+be mine to slumber in.&nbsp; 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:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You will be very comfortable here, Se&ntilde;or.&nbsp; It
+is so peaceful here in the street.&nbsp; Sometimes one may think oneself
+in a village.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s only a hundred and twenty-five francs
+for the friends of the King.&nbsp; And I shall take such good care of
+you that your very heart will be able to rest.&rdquo;</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h3>CHAPTER II</h3>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>Do&ntilde;a 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.&nbsp; At this she clicked her tongue
+amusingly and repeated a remark she had made before: &ldquo;She likes
+young men.&nbsp; The younger the better.&rdquo;&nbsp; The mere thought
+of those two women being sisters aroused one&rsquo;s wonder.&nbsp; Physically
+they were altogether of different design.&nbsp; It was also the difference
+between living tissue of glowing loveliness with a divine breath, and
+a hard hollow figure of baked clay.</p>
+<p>Indeed Therese did somehow resemble an achievement, wonderful enough
+in its way, in unglazed earthenware.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; She smiled with
+compressed mouth.&nbsp; It was indeed difficult to conceive of those
+two birds coming from the same nest.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; It extended even to their common humanity.&nbsp; One,
+as it were, doubted it.&nbsp; If one of the two was representative,
+then the other was either something more or less than human.&nbsp; One
+wondered whether these two women belonged to the same scheme of creation.&nbsp;
+One was secretly amazed to see them standing together, speaking to each
+other, having words in common, understanding each other.&nbsp; And yet!
+. . . Our psychological sense is the crudest of all; we don&rsquo;t
+know, we don&rsquo;t perceive how superficial we are.&nbsp; The simplest
+shades escape us, the secret of changes, of relations.&nbsp; No, upon
+the whole, the only feature (and yet with enormous differences) which
+Therese had in common with her sister, as I told Do&ntilde;a Rita, was
+amiability.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;For, you know, you are a most amiable person yourself,&rdquo;
+I went on.&nbsp; &ldquo;It&rsquo;s one of your characteristics, of course
+much more precious than in other people.&nbsp; You transmute the commonest
+traits into gold of your own; but after all there are no new names.&nbsp;
+You are amiable.&nbsp; You were most amiable to me when I first saw
+you.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Really.&nbsp; I was not aware.&nbsp; Not specially . . . &rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I had never the presumption to think that it was special.&nbsp;
+Moreover, my head was in a whirl.&nbsp; I was lost in astonishment first
+of all at what I had been listening to all night.&nbsp; 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&rsquo;s smile gleaming through a
+fog, the fog in my eyes, from Mills&rsquo; pipe, you know.&nbsp; I was
+feeling quite inanimate as to body and frightfully stimulated as to
+mind all the time.&nbsp; I had never heard anything like that talk about
+you before.&nbsp; Of course I wasn&rsquo;t sleepy, but still I am not
+used to do altogether without sleep like Blunt . . .&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Kept awake all night listening to my story!&rdquo;&nbsp; She
+marvelled.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes.&nbsp; You don&rsquo;t think I am complaining, do you?&nbsp;
+I wouldn&rsquo;t have missed it for the world.&nbsp; Blunt in a ragged
+old jacket and a white tie and that incisive polite voice of his seemed
+strange and weird.&nbsp; It seemed as though he were inventing it all
+rather angrily.&nbsp; I had doubts as to your existence.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Mr. Blunt is very much interested in my story.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Anybody would be,&rdquo; I said.&nbsp; &ldquo;I was.&nbsp;
+I didn&rsquo;t sleep a wink.&nbsp; I was expecting to see you soon&mdash;and
+even then I had my doubts.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;As to my existence?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It wasn&rsquo;t exactly that, though of course I couldn&rsquo;t
+tell that you weren&rsquo;t a product of Captain Blunt&rsquo;s sleeplessness.&nbsp;
+He seemed to dread exceedingly to be left alone and your story might
+have been a device to detain us . . .&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;He hasn&rsquo;t enough imagination for that,&rdquo; she said.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It didn&rsquo;t occur to me.&nbsp; But there was Mills, who
+apparently believed in your existence.&nbsp; I could trust Mills.&nbsp;
+My doubts were about the propriety.&nbsp; I couldn&rsquo;t see any good
+reason for being taken to see you.&nbsp; Strange that it should be my
+connection with the sea which brought me here to the Villa.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Unexpected perhaps.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No.&nbsp; I mean particularly strange and significant.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Why?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Because my friends are in the habit of telling me (and each
+other) that the sea is my only love.&nbsp; They were always chaffing
+me because they couldn&rsquo;t see or guess in my life at any woman,
+open or secret. . .&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And is that really so?&rdquo; she inquired negligently.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Why, yes.&nbsp; I don&rsquo;t mean to say that I am like an
+innocent shepherd in one of those interminable stories of the eighteenth
+century.&nbsp; But I don&rsquo;t throw the word love about indiscriminately.&nbsp;
+It may be all true about the sea; but some people would say that they
+love sausages.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You are horrible.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I am surprised.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I mean your choice of words.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And you have never uttered a word yet that didn&rsquo;t change
+into a pearl as it dropped from your lips.&nbsp; At least not before
+me.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She glanced down deliberately and said, &ldquo;This is better.&nbsp;
+But I don&rsquo;t see any of them on the floor.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It&rsquo;s you who are horrible in the implications of your
+language.&nbsp; Don&rsquo;t see any on the floor!&nbsp; Haven&rsquo;t
+I caught up and treasured them all in my heart?&nbsp; I am not the animal
+from which sausages are made.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She looked at me suavely and then with the sweetest possible smile
+breathed out the word: &ldquo;No.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>And we both laughed very loud.&nbsp; O! days of innocence!&nbsp;
+On this occasion we parted from each other on a light-hearted note.&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp; I meant it absolutely&mdash;not
+excepting the light of the sun.</p>
+<p>From this there was only one step further to take.&nbsp; 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.</p>
+<p>A great revelation this.&nbsp; I don&rsquo;t mean to say it was soul-shaking.&nbsp;
+The soul was already a captive before doubt, anguish, or dismay could
+touch its surrender and its exaltation.&nbsp; But all the same the revelation
+turned many things into dust; and, amongst others, the sense of the
+careless freedom of my life.&nbsp; If that life ever had any purpose
+or any aim outside itself I would have said that it threw a shadow across
+its path.&nbsp; But it hadn&rsquo;t.&nbsp; There had been no path.&nbsp;
+But there was a shadow, the inseparable companion of all light.&nbsp;
+No illumination can sweep all mystery out of the world.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; What if they were to be victorious at the last?&nbsp;
+They, or what perhaps lurks in them: fear, deception, desire, disillusion&mdash;all
+silent at first before the song of triumphant love vibrating in the
+light.&nbsp; Yes.&nbsp; Silent.&nbsp; Even desire itself!&nbsp; All
+silent.&nbsp; But not for long!</p>
+<p>This was, I think, before the third expedition.&nbsp; Yes, it must
+have been the third, for I remember that it was boldly planned and that
+it was carried out without a hitch.&nbsp; The tentative period was over;
+all our arrangements had been perfected.&nbsp; There was, so to speak,
+always an unfailing smoke on the hill and an unfailing lantern on the
+shore.&nbsp; Our friends, mostly bought for hard cash and therefore
+valuable, had acquired confidence in us.&nbsp; This, they seemed to
+say, is no unfathomable roguery of penniless adventurers.&nbsp; This
+is but the reckless enterprise of men of wealth and sense and needn&rsquo;t
+be inquired into.&nbsp; The young <i>caballero</i> 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.&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp; That judgment was not exactly correct.&nbsp; I had my share
+of judgment and audacity which surprises me now that the years have
+chilled the blood without dimming the memory.&nbsp; 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 &ldquo;Oh, certainly&rdquo;&mdash;just
+as the humour of the moment prompted him.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I suppose Alphonso and Carlos, Carlos and Alphonso, they are
+nothing to you, together or separately?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>I said: &ldquo;Dominic, if they were both to vanish from the earth
+together or separately it would make no difference to my feelings.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He remarked: &ldquo;Just so.&nbsp; A man mourns only for his friends.&nbsp;
+I suppose they are no more friends to you than they are to me.&nbsp;
+Those Carlists make a great consumption of cartridges.&nbsp; That is
+well.&nbsp; But why should we do all those mad things that you will
+insist on us doing till my hair,&rdquo; he pursued with grave, mocking
+exaggeration, &ldquo;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&mdash;no
+friend.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes, why?&rdquo; I murmured, feeling my body nestled at ease
+in the sand.</p>
+<p>It was very dark under the overhanging rock on that night of clouds
+and of wind that died and rose and died again.&nbsp; Dominic&rsquo;s
+voice was heard speaking low between the short gusts.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Friend of the Se&ntilde;ora, eh?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;That&rsquo;s what the world says, Dominic.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Half of what the world says are lies,&rdquo; he pronounced
+dogmatically.&nbsp; &ldquo;For all his majesty he may be a good enough
+man.&nbsp; Yet he is only a king in the mountains and to-morrow he may
+be no more than you.&nbsp; Still a woman like that&mdash;one, somehow,
+would grudge her to a better king.&nbsp; She ought to be set up on a
+high pillar for people that walk on the ground to raise their eyes up
+to.&nbsp; But you are otherwise, you gentlemen.&nbsp; You, for instance,
+Monsieur, you wouldn&rsquo;t want to see her set up on a pillar.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;That sort of thing, Dominic,&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;that sort
+of thing, you understand me, ought to be done early.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He was silent for a time.&nbsp; And then his manly voice was heard
+in the shadow of the rock.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I see well enough what you mean.&nbsp; I spoke of the multitude,
+that only raise their eyes.&nbsp; But for kings and suchlike that is
+not enough.&nbsp; Well, no heart need despair; for there is not a woman
+that wouldn&rsquo;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.&nbsp; And then, what&rsquo;s the good of asking
+how long any woman has been up there?&nbsp; There is a true saying that
+lips that have been kissed do not lose their freshness.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>I don&rsquo;t know what answer I could have made.&nbsp; I imagine
+Dominic thought himself unanswerable.&nbsp; As a matter of fact, before
+I could speak, a voice came to us down the face of the rock crying secretly,
+&ldquo;Ol&agrave;, down there!&nbsp; All is safe ashore.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>It was the boy who used to hang about the stable of a muleteer&rsquo;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.&nbsp;
+We both started to our feet and Dominic said, &ldquo;A good boy that.&nbsp;
+You didn&rsquo;t hear him either come or go above our heads.&nbsp; Don&rsquo;t
+reward him with more than one peseta, Se&ntilde;or, whatever he does.&nbsp;
+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.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>The clear flame shooting up revealed him in the black cloak with
+a hood of a Mediterranean sailor.&nbsp; His eyes watched the dancing
+dim light to seaward.&nbsp; And he talked the while.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;The only fault you have, Se&ntilde;or, is being too generous
+with your money.&nbsp; In this world you must give sparingly.&nbsp;
+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.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>I noticed the dancing light in the dark west much closer to the shore
+now.&nbsp; Its motion had altered.&nbsp; It swayed slowly as it ran
+towards us, and, suddenly, the darker shadow as of a great pointed wing
+appeared gliding in the night.&nbsp; Under it a human voice shouted
+something confidently.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;<i>Bueno</i>,&rdquo; muttered Dominic.&nbsp; From some receptacle
+I didn&rsquo;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.&nbsp; And his hooded
+figure vanished from my sight in a great hiss and the warm feel of ascending
+steam.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;That&rsquo;s all over,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;and now we go
+back for more work, more toil, more trouble, more exertion with hands
+and feet, for hours and hours.&nbsp; And all the time the head turned
+over the shoulder, too.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>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.&nbsp; I remonstrated against this arrangement as
+we stopped to rest.&nbsp; I had no doubt I would grab at his cloak if
+I felt myself falling.&nbsp; I couldn&rsquo;t help doing that.&nbsp;
+But I would probably only drag him down with me.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I will say this for us, that we are carrying out all this
+deadly foolishness as conscientiously as though the eyes of the Se&ntilde;ora
+were on us all the time.&nbsp; And as to risk, I suppose we take more
+than she would approve of, I fancy, if she ever gave a moment&rsquo;s
+thought to us out here.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; Even your way of flinging money
+about cannot make safety for men set on defying a whole big country
+for the sake of&mdash;what is it exactly?&mdash;the blue eyes, or the
+white arms of the Se&ntilde;ora.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He kept his voice equably low.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; Very far off a tiny light twinkled a little
+way up the seaward shoulder of an invisible mountain.&nbsp; Dominic
+moved on.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Fancy yourself lying here, on this wild spot, with a leg smashed
+by a shot or perhaps with a bullet in your side.&nbsp; It might happen.&nbsp;
+A star might fall.&nbsp; I have watched stars falling in scores on clear
+nights in the Atlantic.&nbsp; And it was nothing.&nbsp; The flash of
+a pinch of gunpowder in your face may be a bigger matter.&nbsp; Yet
+somehow it&rsquo;s pleasant as we stumble in the dark to think of our
+Se&ntilde;ora 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.&nbsp; And very still . . .&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He remembered her&mdash;whose image could not be dismissed.</p>
+<p>I laid my hand on his shoulder.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;That light on the mountain side flickers exceedingly, Dominic.&nbsp;
+Are we in the path?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He addressed me then in French, which was between us the language
+of more formal moments.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;<i>Prenez mon bras, monsieur</i>.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; And there is no
+need to take offence.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; Pah!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>I had good hold of his arm.&nbsp; Suddenly he dropped the formal
+French and pronounced in his inflexible voice:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;For a pair of white arms, Se&ntilde;or.&nbsp; <i>Bueno</i>.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He could understand.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h3>CHAPTER III</h3>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>On our return from that expedition we came gliding into the old harbour
+so late that Dominic and I, making for the caf&eacute; kept by Madame
+L&eacute;onore, found it empty of customers, except for two rather sinister
+fellows playing cards together at a corner table near the door.&nbsp;
+The first thing done by Madame L&eacute;onore was to put her hands on
+Dominic&rsquo;s shoulders and look at arm&rsquo;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.</p>
+<p>Indeed we didn&rsquo;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.&nbsp; At least it was so with
+me who saw as through a mist Madame L&eacute;onore moving with her mature
+nonchalant grace, setting before us wine and glasses with a faint swish
+of her ample black skirt.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; Presently
+she sat down by us, touched lightly Dominic&rsquo;s curly head silvered
+on the temples (she couldn&rsquo;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.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know,&rdquo; said Dominic, &ldquo;He&rsquo;s
+young.&nbsp; And there is always the chance of dreams.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What do you men dream of in those little barques of yours
+tossing for months on the water?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Mostly of nothing,&rdquo; said Dominic.&nbsp; &ldquo;But it
+has happened to me to dream of furious fights.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And of furious loves, too, no doubt,&rdquo; she caught him
+up in a mocking voice.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No, that&rsquo;s for the waking hours,&rdquo; Dominic drawled,
+basking sleepily with his head between his hands in her ardent gaze.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;The waking hours are longer.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;They must be, at sea,&rdquo; she said, never taking her eyes
+off him.&nbsp; &ldquo;But I suppose you do talk of your loves sometimes.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You may be sure, Madame L&eacute;onore,&rdquo; I interjected,
+noticing the hoarseness of my voice, &ldquo;that you at any rate are
+talked about a lot at sea.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I am not so sure of that now.&nbsp; There is that strange
+lady from the Prado that you took him to see, Signorino.&nbsp; She went
+to his head like a glass of wine into a tender youngster&rsquo;s.&nbsp;
+He is such a child, and I suppose that I am another.&nbsp; Shame to
+confess it, the other morning I got a friend to look after the caf&eacute;
+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!&nbsp; And
+I thought they were so sleepy and tired, the poor fellows!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She kept our curiosity in suspense for a moment.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well, I have seen your marvel, Dominic,&rdquo; she continued
+in a calm voice.&nbsp; &ldquo;She came flying out of the gate on horseback
+and it would have been all I would have seen of her if&mdash;and this
+is for you, Signorino&mdash;if she hadn&rsquo;t pulled up in the main
+alley to wait for a very good-looking cavalier.&nbsp; He had his moustaches
+so, and his teeth were very white when he smiled at her.&nbsp; But his
+eyes are too deep in his head for my taste.&nbsp; I didn&rsquo;t like
+it.&nbsp; 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.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It was no priest in disguise, Madame L&eacute;onore,&rdquo;
+I said, amused by her expression of disgust.&nbsp; &ldquo;That&rsquo;s
+an American.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Ah!&nbsp; <i>Un Americano</i>!&nbsp; Well, never mind him.&nbsp;
+It was her that I went to see.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What!&nbsp; Walked to the other end of the town to see Do&ntilde;a
+Rita!&rdquo;&nbsp; Dominic addressed her in a low bantering tone.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;Why, you were always telling me you couldn&rsquo;t walk further
+than the end of the quay to save your life&mdash;or even mine, you said.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well, I did; and I walked back again and between the two walks
+I had a good look.&nbsp; And you may be sure&mdash;that will surprise
+you both&mdash;that on the way back&mdash;oh, Santa Madre, wasn&rsquo;t
+it a long way, too&mdash;I wasn&rsquo;t thinking of any man at sea or
+on shore in that connection.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No.&nbsp; And you were not thinking of yourself, either, I
+suppose,&rdquo; I said.&nbsp; Speaking was a matter of great effort
+for me, whether I was too tired or too sleepy, I can&rsquo;t tell.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;No, you were not thinking of yourself.&nbsp; You were thinking
+of a woman, though.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;<i>Si</i>.&nbsp; As much a woman as any of us that ever breathed
+in the world.&nbsp; Yes, of her!&nbsp; Of that very one!&nbsp; You see,
+we woman are not like you men, indifferent to each other unless by some
+exception.&nbsp; Men say we are always against one another but that&rsquo;s
+only men&rsquo;s conceit.&nbsp; What can she be to me?&nbsp; I am not
+afraid of the big child here,&rdquo; and she tapped Dominic&rsquo;s
+forearm on which he rested his head with a fascinated stare.&nbsp; &ldquo;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.&nbsp; I would
+have thought less of him if he hadn&rsquo;t been able to get out of
+hand a little, for something really fine.&nbsp; As for you, Signorino,&rdquo;
+she turned on me with an unexpected and sarcastic sally, &ldquo;I am
+not in love with you yet.&rdquo;&nbsp; She changed her tone from sarcasm
+to a soft and even dreamy note.&nbsp; &ldquo;A head like a gem,&rdquo;
+went on that woman born in some by-street of Rome, and a plaything for
+years of God knows what obscure fates.&nbsp; &ldquo;Yes, Dominic!&nbsp;
+<i>Antica</i>.&nbsp; I haven&rsquo;t been haunted by a face since&mdash;since
+I was sixteen years old.&nbsp; It was the face of a young cavalier in
+the street.&nbsp; He was on horseback, too.&nbsp; He never looked at
+me, I never saw him again, and I loved him for&mdash;for days and days
+and days.&nbsp; That was the sort of face he had.&nbsp; And her face
+is of the same sort.&nbsp; She had a man&rsquo;s hat, too, on her head.&nbsp;
+So high!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;A man&rsquo;s hat on her head,&rdquo; remarked with profound
+displeasure Dominic, to whom this wonder, at least, of all the wonders
+of the earth, was apparently unknown.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;<i>Si</i>.&nbsp; And her face has haunted me.&nbsp; Not so
+long as that other but more touchingly because I am no longer sixteen
+and this is a woman.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; And I, too, didn&rsquo;t know why I had come into
+the world any more than she does.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And now you know,&rdquo; Dominic growled softly, with his
+head still between his hands.</p>
+<p>She looked at him for a long time, opened her lips but in the end
+only sighed lightly.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And what do you know of her, you who have seen her so well
+as to be haunted by her face?&rdquo; I asked.</p>
+<p>I wouldn&rsquo;t have been surprised if she had answered me with
+another sigh.&nbsp; For she seemed only to be thinking of herself and
+looked not in my direction.&nbsp; But suddenly she roused up.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Of her?&rdquo; she repeated in a louder voice.&nbsp; &ldquo;Why
+should I talk of another woman?&nbsp; And then she is a great lady.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>At this I could not repress a smile which she detected at once.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Isn&rsquo;t she?&nbsp; Well, no, perhaps she isn&rsquo;t;
+but you may be sure of one thing, that she is both flesh and shadow
+more than any one that I have seen.&nbsp; Keep that well in your mind:
+She is for no man!&nbsp; She would be vanishing out of their hands like
+water that cannot be held.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>I caught my breath.&nbsp; &ldquo;Inconstant,&rdquo; I whispered.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t say that.&nbsp; Maybe too proud, too wilful,
+too full of pity.&nbsp; Signorino, you don&rsquo;t know much about women.&nbsp;
+And you may learn something yet or you may not; but what you learn from
+her you will never forget.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Not to be held,&rdquo; I murmured; and she whom the quayside
+called Madame L&eacute;onore closed her outstretched hand before my
+face and opened it at once to show its emptiness in illustration of
+her expressed opinion.&nbsp; Dominic never moved.</p>
+<p>I wished good-night to these two and left the caf&eacute; 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.&nbsp; I left behind me the end of the Cannebi&egrave;re,
+a wide vista of tall houses and much-lighted pavements losing itself
+in the distance with an extinction of both shapes and lights.&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp;
+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&rsquo;-shanter worn very much on one side and with
+a red tuft of wool in the centre.&nbsp; This was even the reason why
+I had lingered so long in the caf&eacute;.&nbsp; I didn&rsquo;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.&nbsp; At that
+hour when the performances were over and all the sensible citizens in
+their beds I didn&rsquo;t hesitate to cross the Place of the Opera.&nbsp;
+It was dark, the audience had already dispersed.&nbsp; The rare passers-by
+I met hurrying on their last affairs of the day paid no attention to
+me at all.&nbsp; The street of the Consuls I expected to find empty,
+as usual at that time of the night.&nbsp; But as I turned a corner into
+it I overtook three people who must have belonged to the locality.&nbsp;
+To me, somehow, they appeared strange.&nbsp; Two girls in dark cloaks
+walked ahead of a tall man in a top hat.&nbsp; I slowed down, not wishing
+to pass them by, the more so that the door of the house was only a few
+yards distant.&nbsp; 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.</p>
+<p>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.&nbsp;
+After waiting a little longer to let the others get away from the hall
+I entered in my turn.&nbsp; 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&mdash;who
+lived by his sword.&nbsp; 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, &ldquo;<i>Am&eacute;ricain</i>,
+<i>Catholique</i> <i>et</i> <i>gentilhomne.&nbsp; Amer</i>. . . &rdquo;&nbsp;
+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
+. . . &ldquo;<i>et</i> <i>gentilhomme</i>.&rdquo;&nbsp; I tugged at
+the bell pull and somewhere down below a bell rang as unexpected for
+Therese as a call from a ghost.</p>
+<p>I had no notion whether Therese could hear me.&nbsp; I seemed to
+remember that she slept in any bed that happened to be vacant.&nbsp;
+For all I knew she might have been asleep in mine.&nbsp; As I had no
+matches on me I waited for a while in the dark.&nbsp; The house was
+perfectly still.&nbsp; Suddenly without the slightest preliminary sound
+light fell into the room and Therese stood in the open door with a candlestick
+in her hand.</p>
+<p>She had on her peasant brown skirt.&nbsp; The rest of her was concealed
+in a black shawl which covered her head, her shoulders, arms, and elbows
+completely, down to her waist.&nbsp; The hand holding the candle protruded
+from that envelope which the other invisible hand clasped together under
+her very chin.&nbsp; And her face looked like a face in a painting.&nbsp;
+She said at once:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You startled me, my young Monsieur.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She addressed me most frequently in that way as though she liked
+the very word &ldquo;young.&rdquo;&nbsp; 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.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I meant to do it,&rdquo; I said.&nbsp; &ldquo;I am a very
+bad person.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;The young are always full of fun,&rdquo; she said as if she
+were gloating over the idea.&nbsp; &ldquo;It is very pleasant.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But you are very brave,&rdquo; I chaffed her, &ldquo;for you
+didn&rsquo;t expect a ring, and after all it might have been the devil
+who pulled the bell.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It might have been.&nbsp; But a poor girl like me is not afraid
+of the devil.&nbsp; I have a pure heart.&nbsp; I have been to confession
+last evening.&nbsp; No.&nbsp; But it might have been an assassin that
+pulled the bell ready to kill a poor harmless woman.&nbsp; This is a
+very lonely street.&nbsp; What could prevent you to kill me now and
+then walk out again free as air?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>I couldn&rsquo;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.&nbsp; It seems that
+for some days people could talk of nothing else.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; &ldquo;That&rsquo;s
+what carnal sin (<i>p&ecirc;ch&eacute; de chair</i>) leads to,&rdquo;
+she commented severely and passed her tongue over her thin lips.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;And then the devil furnishes the occasion.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I can&rsquo;t imagine the devil inciting me to murder you,
+Therese,&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;and I didn&rsquo;t like that ready way
+you took me for an example, as it were.&nbsp; I suppose pretty near
+every lodger might be a potential murderer, but I expected to be made
+an exception.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>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.&nbsp; And she only compressed her
+lips.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;All right,&rdquo; I said, making myself comfortable on a sofa
+after pulling off my boots.&nbsp; &ldquo;I suppose any one is liable
+to commit murder all of a sudden.&nbsp; Well, have you got many murderers
+in the house?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;it&rsquo;s pretty good.&nbsp;
+Upstairs and downstairs,&rdquo; she sighed.&nbsp; &ldquo;God sees to
+it.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And by the by, who is that grey-headed murderer in a tall
+hat whom I saw shepherding two girls into this house?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She put on a candid air in which one could detect a little of her
+peasant cunning.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, yes.&nbsp; They are two dancing girls at the Opera, sisters,
+as different from each other as I and our poor Rita.&nbsp; But they
+are both virtuous and that gentleman, their father, is very severe with
+them.&nbsp; Very severe indeed, poor motherless things.&nbsp; And it
+seems to be such a sinful occupation.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I bet you make them pay a big rent, Therese.&nbsp; With an
+occupation like that . . .&rdquo;</p>
+<p>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.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;Good-night,&rdquo; she murmured.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Good-night, Mademoiselle.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Then in the very doorway she turned right round as a marionette would
+turn.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;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.&nbsp;
+Oh,&rdquo; she added with a priceless air of compunction, &ldquo;he
+is such a charming gentleman.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>And the door shut after her.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h3>CHAPTER IV</h3>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>That night I passed in a state, mostly open-eyed, I believe, but
+always on the border between dreams and waking.&nbsp; The only thing
+absolutely absent from it was the feeling of rest.&nbsp; The usual sufferings
+of a youth in love had nothing to do with it.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp;
+A faith presents one with some hope, though.&nbsp; But I had no hope,
+and not even desire as a thing outside myself, that would come and go,
+exhaust or excite.&nbsp; It was in me just like life was in me; that
+life of which a popular saying affirms that &ldquo;it is sweet.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+For the general wisdom of mankind will always stop short on the limit
+of the formidable.</p>
+<p>What is best in a state of brimful, equable suffering is that it
+does away with the gnawings of petty sensations.&nbsp; Too far gone
+to be sensible to hope and desire I was spared the inferior pangs of
+elation and impatience.&nbsp; Hours with her or hours without her were
+all alike, all in her possession!&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; I had sent word of my
+arrival of course.&nbsp; I had written a note.&nbsp; I had rung the
+bell.&nbsp; Therese had appeared herself in her brown garb and as monachal
+as ever.&nbsp; I had said to her:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Have this sent off at once.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>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.&nbsp; 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.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, that Rita, that Rita,&rdquo; she murmured.&nbsp; &ldquo;And
+you, too!&nbsp; Why are you trying, you, too, like the others, to stand
+between her and the mercy of God?&nbsp; What&rsquo;s the good of all
+this to you?&nbsp; And you such a nice, dear, young gentleman.&nbsp;
+For no earthly good only making all the kind saints in heaven angry,
+and our mother ashamed in her place amongst the blessed.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Mademoiselle Therese,&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;<i>vous &ecirc;tes
+folle</i>.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>I believed she was crazy.&nbsp; She was cunning, too.&nbsp; I added
+an imperious: &ldquo;<i>Allez</i>,&rdquo; and with a strange docility
+she glided out without another word.&nbsp; All I had to do then was
+to get dressed and wait till eleven o&rsquo;clock.</p>
+<p>The hour struck at last.&nbsp; If I could have plunged into a light
+wave and been transported instantaneously to Do&ntilde;a Rita&rsquo;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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; If one could
+have kept a record of one&rsquo;s physical sensations it would have
+been a fine collection of absurdities and contradictions.&nbsp; 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&mdash;and
+an awful symbol; not to be approached without awe&mdash;and yet coming
+open in the ordinary way to the ring of the bell.</p>
+<p>It came open.&nbsp; Oh, yes, very much as usual.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; But not at all!&nbsp; She actually waited for me to enter.&nbsp;
+I was extremely taken aback and I believe spoke to her for the first
+time in my life.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;<i>Bonjour</i>, Rose.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>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.&nbsp; She was a girl without smiles.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; It was positively embarrassing
+from its novelty.&nbsp; While busying herself with those trifles she
+murmured without any marked intention:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Captain Blunt is with Madame.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>This didn&rsquo;t exactly surprise me.&nbsp; I knew he had come up
+to town; I only happened to have forgotten his existence for the moment.&nbsp;
+I looked at the girl also without any particular intention.&nbsp; But
+she arrested my movement towards the dining-room door by a low, hurried,
+if perfectly unemotional appeal:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Monsieur George!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>That of course was not my name.&nbsp; It served me then as it will
+serve for this story.&nbsp; In all sorts of strange places I was alluded
+to as &ldquo;that young gentleman they call Monsieur George.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+Orders came from &ldquo;Monsieur George&rdquo; to men who nodded knowingly.&nbsp;
+Events pivoted about &ldquo;Monsieur George.&rdquo;&nbsp; I haven&rsquo;t
+the slightest doubt that in the dark and tortuous streets of the old
+Town there were fingers pointed at my back: there goes &ldquo;Monsieur
+George.&rdquo;&nbsp; I had been introduced discreetly to several considerable
+persons as &ldquo;Monsieur George.&rdquo;&nbsp; I had learned to answer
+to the name quite naturally; and to simplify matters I was also &ldquo;Monsieur
+George&rdquo; in the street of the Consuls and in the Villa on the Prado.&nbsp;
+I verify believe that at that time I had the feeling that the name of
+George really belonged to me.&nbsp; I waited for what the girl had to
+say.&nbsp; I had to wait some time, though during that silence she gave
+no sign of distress or agitation.&nbsp; It was for her obviously a moment
+of reflection.&nbsp; Her lips were compressed a little in a characteristic,
+capable manner.&nbsp; I looked at her with a friendliness I really felt
+towards her slight, unattractive, and dependable person.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well,&rdquo; I said at last, rather amused by this mental
+hesitation.&nbsp; I never took it for anything else.&nbsp; I was sure
+it was not distrust.&nbsp; She appreciated men and things and events
+solely in relation to Do&ntilde;a Rita&rsquo;s welfare and safety.&nbsp;
+And as to that I believed myself above suspicion.&nbsp; At last she
+spoke.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Madame is not happy.&rdquo;&nbsp; This information was given
+to me not emotionally but as it were officially.&nbsp; It hadn&rsquo;t
+even a tone of warning.&nbsp; A mere statement.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; In
+that short moment I heard no voices inside.&nbsp; 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.</p>
+<p>Then I heard something: Do&ntilde;a Rita&rsquo;s voice raised a little
+on an impatient note (a very, very rare thing) finishing some phrase
+of protest with the words &ldquo; . . . Of no consequence.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>I heard them as I would have heard any other words, for she had that
+kind of voice which carries a long distance.&nbsp; But the maid&rsquo;s
+statement occupied all my mind.&nbsp; &ldquo;<i>Madame</i> <i>n&rsquo;est
+pas heureuse</i>.&rdquo;&nbsp; It had a dreadful precision . . . &ldquo;Not
+happy . . .&rdquo;&nbsp; This unhappiness had almost a concrete form&mdash;something
+resembling a horrid bat.&nbsp; I was tired, excited, and generally overwrought.&nbsp;
+My head felt empty.&nbsp; What were the appearances of unhappiness?&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp; I didn&rsquo;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.</p>
+<p>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 Do&ntilde;a Rita there was nothing extraordinary in her attitude
+either, except perhaps that her hair was all loose about her shoulders.&nbsp;
+I hadn&rsquo;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.&nbsp; It covered
+her very feet.&nbsp; And before the normal fixity of her enigmatical
+eyes the smoke of the cigarette ascended ceremonially, straight up,
+in a slender spiral.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;How are you,&rdquo; was the greeting of Captain Blunt with
+the usual smile which would have been more amiable if his teeth hadn&rsquo;t
+been, just then, clenched quite so tight.&nbsp; How he managed to force
+his voice through that shining barrier I could never understand.&nbsp;
+Do&ntilde;a 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.&nbsp; She inquired with that particular
+gleam of the eyes in which there was something immemorial and gay:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Perfect success.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I could hug you.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>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.&nbsp; And yet it left my heart heavy.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, yes, for joy,&rdquo; I said bitterly but very low; &ldquo;for
+your Royalist, Legitimist, joy.&rdquo;&nbsp; Then with that trick of
+very precise politeness which I must have caught from Mr. Blunt I added:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t want to be embraced&mdash;for the King.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>And I might have stopped there.&nbsp; But I didn&rsquo;t.&nbsp; 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: &ldquo;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.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>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.&nbsp;
+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.</p>
+<p>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.&nbsp; As a matter of fact, I don&rsquo;t
+suppose he could have heard.&nbsp; He was too far away, our voices were
+too contained.&nbsp; Moreover, he didn&rsquo;t want to hear.&nbsp; There
+could be no doubt about it; but she addressed him unexpectedly.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;As I was saying to you, Don Juan, I have the greatest difficulty
+in getting myself, I won&rsquo;t say understood, but simply believed.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>No pose of detachment could avail against the warm waves of that
+voice.&nbsp; He had to hear.&nbsp; After a moment he altered his position
+as it were reluctantly, to answer her.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;That&rsquo;s a difficulty that women generally have.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yet I have always spoken the truth.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;All women speak the truth,&rdquo; said Blunt imperturbably.&nbsp;
+And this annoyed her.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Where are the men I have deceived?&rdquo; she cried.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes, where?&rdquo; said Blunt in a tone of alacrity as though
+he had been ready to go out and look for them outside.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No!&nbsp; But show me one.&nbsp; I say&mdash;where is he?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, I don&rsquo;t know.&nbsp; Probably nowhere.&nbsp; But
+if such a man could be found I am certain he would turn out a very stupid
+person.&nbsp; You can&rsquo;t be expected to furnish every one who approaches
+you with a mind.&nbsp; To expect that would be too much, even from you
+who know how to work wonders at such little cost to yourself.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;To myself,&rdquo; she repeated in a loud tone.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Why this indignation?&nbsp; I am simply taking your word for
+it.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Such little cost!&rdquo; she exclaimed under her breath.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I mean to your person.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, yes,&rdquo; she murmured, glanced down, as it were upon
+herself, then added very low: &ldquo;This body.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well, it is you,&rdquo; said Blunt with visibly contained
+irritation.&nbsp; &ldquo;You don&rsquo;t pretend it&rsquo;s somebody
+else&rsquo;s.&nbsp; It can&rsquo;t be.&nbsp; You haven&rsquo;t borrowed
+it. . . . It fits you too well,&rdquo; he ended between his teeth.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You take pleasure in tormenting yourself,&rdquo; she remonstrated,
+suddenly placated; &ldquo;and I would be sorry for you if I didn&rsquo;t
+think it&rsquo;s the mere revolt of your pride.&nbsp; And you know you
+are indulging your pride at my expense.&nbsp; As to the rest of it,
+as to my living, acting, working wonders at a little cost. . . . it
+has all but killed me morally.&nbsp; Do you hear?&nbsp; Killed.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, you are not dead yet,&rdquo; he muttered,</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No,&rdquo; she said with gentle patience.&nbsp; &ldquo;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.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He remained silent for a while and then with a polite smile and a
+movement of the head in my direction he warned her.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Our audience will get bored.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;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.&nbsp; Don&rsquo;t you find this room extremely confined?&rdquo;
+she asked me.</p>
+<p>The room was very large but it is a fact that I felt oppressed at
+that moment.&nbsp; 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&rsquo;t
+even attempt to answer.&nbsp; And she continued:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;More space.&nbsp; More air.&nbsp; Give me air, air.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp; We both remained perfectly still.&nbsp; Her hands
+dropped nervelessly by her side.&nbsp; &ldquo;I envy you, Monsieur George.&nbsp;
+If I am to go under I should prefer to be drowned in the sea with the
+wind on my face.&nbsp; What luck, to feel nothing less than all the
+world closing over one&rsquo;s head!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>A short silence ensued before Mr. Blunt&rsquo;s drawing-room voice
+was heard with playful familiarity.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I have often asked myself whether you weren&rsquo;t really
+a very ambitious person, Do&ntilde;a Rita.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And I ask myself whether you have any heart.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+She was looking straight at him and he gratified her with the usual
+cold white flash of his even teeth before he answered.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Asking yourself?&nbsp; That means that you are really asking
+me.&nbsp; But why do it so publicly?&nbsp; I mean it.&nbsp; One single,
+detached presence is enough to make a public.&nbsp; One alone.&nbsp;
+Why not wait till he returns to those regions of space and air&mdash;from
+which he came.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>His particular trick of speaking of any third person as of a lay
+figure was exasperating.&nbsp; Yet at the moment I did not know how
+to resent it, but, in any case, Do&ntilde;a Rita would not have given
+me time.&nbsp; Without a moment&rsquo;s hesitation she cried out:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I only wish he could take me out there with him.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>For a moment Mr. Blunt&rsquo;s face became as still as a mask and
+then instead of an angry it assumed an indulgent expression.&nbsp; As
+to me I had a rapid vision of Dominic&rsquo;s astonishment, awe, and
+sarcasm which was always as tolerant as it is possible for sarcasm to
+be.&nbsp; But what a charming, gentle, gay, and fearless companion she
+would have made!&nbsp; I believed in her fearlessness in any adventure
+that would interest her.&nbsp; It would be a new occasion for me, a
+new viewpoint for that faculty of admiration she had awakened in me
+at sight&mdash;at first sight&mdash;before she opened her lips&mdash;before
+she ever turned her eyes on me.&nbsp; She would have to wear some sort
+of sailor costume, a blue woollen shirt open at the throat. . . . Dominic&rsquo;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.&nbsp;
+The confined space of the little vessel&rsquo;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.&nbsp; As restless, too&mdash;perhaps.</p>
+<p>But the picture I had in my eye, coloured and simple like an illustration
+to a nursery-book tale of two venturesome children&rsquo;s escapade,
+was what fascinated me most.&nbsp; Indeed I felt that we two were like
+children under the gaze of a man of the world&mdash;who lived by his
+sword.&nbsp; And I said recklessly:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes, you ought to come along with us for a trip.&nbsp; You
+would see a lot of things for yourself.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Mr. Blunt&rsquo;s expression had grown even more indulgent if that
+were possible.&nbsp; Yet there was something ineradicably ambiguous
+about that man.&nbsp; I did not like the indefinable tone in which he
+observed:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You are perfectly reckless in what you say, Do&ntilde;a Rita.&nbsp;
+It has become a habit with you of late.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;While with you reserve is a second nature, Don Juan.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>This was uttered with the gentlest, almost tender, irony.&nbsp; Mr.
+Blunt waited a while before he said:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Certainly. . . . Would you have liked me to be otherwise?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She extended her hand to him on a sudden impulse.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Forgive me!&nbsp; I may have been unjust, and you may only
+have been loyal.&nbsp; The falseness is not in us.&nbsp; The fault is
+in life itself, I suppose.&nbsp; I have been always frank with you.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And I obedient,&rdquo; he said, bowing low over her hand.&nbsp;
+He turned away, paused to look at me for some time and finally gave
+me the correct sort of nod.&nbsp; But he said nothing and went out,
+or rather lounged out with his worldly manner of perfect ease under
+all conceivable circumstances.&nbsp; With her head lowered Do&ntilde;a
+Rita watched him till he actually shut the door behind him.&nbsp; I
+was facing her and only heard the door close.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Don&rsquo;t stare at me,&rdquo; were the first words she said.</p>
+<p>It was difficult to obey that request.&nbsp; I didn&rsquo;t know
+exactly where to look, while I sat facing her.&nbsp; So I got up, vaguely
+full of goodwill, prepared even to move off as far as the window, when
+she commanded:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Don&rsquo;t turn your back on me.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>I chose to understand it symbolically.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You know very well I could never do that.&nbsp; I couldn&rsquo;t.&nbsp;
+Not even if I wanted to.&rdquo;&nbsp; And I added: &ldquo;It&rsquo;s
+too late now.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well, then, sit down.&nbsp; Sit down on this couch.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>I sat down on the couch.&nbsp; Unwillingly?&nbsp; Yes.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp;
+But I didn&rsquo;t sit down very far away from her, though that soft
+and billowy couch was big enough, God knows!&nbsp; No, not very far
+from her.&nbsp; Self-control, dignity, hopelessness itself, have their
+limits.&nbsp; The halo of her tawny hair stirred as I let myself drop
+by her side.&nbsp; 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.</p>
+<p>We sat like two venturesome children in an illustration to a tale,
+scared by their adventure.&nbsp; But not for long.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; It was
+too much for me.&nbsp; I must have given a nervous start.&nbsp; At once
+I heard a murmur: &ldquo;You had better go away now.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>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.&nbsp; And I moved away
+on tiptoe.</p>
+<p>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.&nbsp; I let her help
+me into it.&nbsp; And then (again as if by enchantment) she had my hat
+in her hand.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No.&nbsp; Madame isn&rsquo;t happy,&rdquo; I whispered to
+her distractedly.</p>
+<p>She let me take my hat out of her hand and while I was putting it
+on my head I heard an austere whisper:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Madame should listen to her heart.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Austere is not the word; it was almost freezing, this unexpected,
+dispassionate rustle of words.&nbsp; I had to repress a shudder, and
+as coldly as herself I murmured:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;She has done that once too often.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Rose was standing very close to me and I caught distinctly the note
+of scorn in her indulgent compassion.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, that! . . . Madame is like a child.&rdquo;&nbsp; It was
+impossible to get the bearing of that utterance from that girl who,
+as Do&ntilde;a Rita herself had told me, was the most taciturn of human
+beings; and yet of all human beings the one nearest to herself.&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp; Like
+a piece of glass breathed upon they reflected no light, revealed no
+depths, and under my ardent gaze remained tarnished, misty, unconscious.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Will Monsieur kindly let me go.&nbsp; Monsieur shouldn&rsquo;t
+play the child, either.&rdquo;&nbsp; (I let her go.)&nbsp; &ldquo;Madame
+could have the world at her feet.&nbsp; Indeed she has it there only
+she doesn&rsquo;t care for it.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>How talkative she was, this maid with unsealed lips!&nbsp; For some
+reason or other this last statement of hers brought me immense comfort.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes?&rdquo; I whispered breathlessly.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes!&nbsp; But in that case what&rsquo;s the use of living
+in fear and torment?&rdquo; she went on, revealing a little more of
+herself to my astonishment.&nbsp; She opened the door for me and added:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Those that don&rsquo;t care to stoop ought at least make themselves
+happy.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>I turned in the very doorway: &ldquo;There is something which prevents
+that?&rdquo; I suggested.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;To be sure there is.&nbsp; <i>Bonjour</i>, Monsieur.&rdquo;</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines3"><br /><br /><br /></div>
+<h2>PART FOUR</h2>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines3"><br /><br /><br /></div>
+<h3>CHAPTER I</h3>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>&ldquo;Such a charming lady in a grey silk dress and a hand as white
+as snow.&nbsp; She looked at me through such funny glasses on the end
+of a long handle.&nbsp; A very great lady but her voice was as kind
+as the voice of a saint.&nbsp; I have never seen anything like that.&nbsp;
+She made me feel so timid.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>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.&nbsp; The glow of a sunshiny day was
+toned down by closed jalousies to a mere transparency of darkness.&nbsp;
+In this thin medium Therese&rsquo;s form appeared flat, without detail,
+as if cut out of black paper.&nbsp; 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.</p>
+<p>In truth all that night had been the abomination of desolation to
+me.&nbsp; After wrestling with my thoughts, if the acute consciousness
+of a woman&rsquo;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.&nbsp; 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.</p>
+<p>It was Therese&rsquo;s habit to begin talking directly she entered
+the room with the tray of morning coffee.&nbsp; This was her method
+for waking me up.&nbsp; 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&rsquo;s
+practice to do the marketing for the house.&nbsp; As a matter of fact
+the necessity of having to pay, to actually give money to people, infuriated
+the pious Therese.&nbsp; But the matter of this morning&rsquo;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&rsquo;t know why, his very soul revolts.</p>
+<p>In sober truth my soul remained in revolt though I was convinced
+that I was no longer dreaming.&nbsp; I watched Therese coming away from
+the window with that helpless dread a man bound hand and foot may be
+excused to feel.&nbsp; For in such a situation even the absurd may appear
+ominous.&nbsp; She came up close to the bed and folding her hands meekly
+in front of her turned her eyes up to the ceiling.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;If I had been her daughter she couldn&rsquo;t have spoken
+more softly to me,&rdquo; she said sentimentally.</p>
+<p>I made a great effort to speak.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Mademoiselle Therese, you are raving.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;She addressed me as Mademoiselle, too, so nicely.&nbsp; 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.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She compressed her lips with an angry glance at me as if I could
+help her wrinkles, then she sighed.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;God sends wrinkles, but what is our face?&rdquo; she digressed
+in a tone of great humility.&nbsp; &ldquo;We shall have glorious faces
+in Paradise.&nbsp; But meantime God has permitted me to preserve a smooth
+heart.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Are you going to keep on like this much longer?&rdquo; I fairly
+shouted at her.&nbsp; &ldquo;What are you talking about?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I am talking about the sweet old lady who came in a carriage.&nbsp;
+Not a fiacre.&nbsp; I can tell a fiacre.&nbsp; In a little carriage
+shut in with glass all in front.&nbsp; I suppose she is very rich.&nbsp;
+The carriage was very shiny outside and all beautiful grey stuff inside.&nbsp;
+I opened the door to her myself.&nbsp; She got out slowly like a queen.&nbsp;
+I was struck all of a heap.&nbsp; Such a shiny beautiful little carriage.&nbsp;
+There were blue silk tassels inside, beautiful silk tassels.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Obviously Therese had been very much impressed by a brougham, though
+she didn&rsquo;t know the name for it.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; Such a turn-out had never been presented
+to her notice before.&nbsp; The traffic in the street of the Consuls
+was mostly pedestrian and far from fashionable.&nbsp; And anyhow Therese
+never looked out of the window.&nbsp; She lurked in the depths of the
+house like some kind of spider that shuns attention.&nbsp; She used
+to dart at one from some dark recesses which I never explored.</p>
+<p>Yet it seemed to me that she exaggerated her raptures for some reason
+or other.&nbsp; With her it was very difficult to distinguish between
+craft and innocence.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Do you mean to say,&rdquo; I asked suspiciously, &ldquo;that
+an old lady wants to hire an apartment here?&nbsp; I hope you told her
+there was no room, because, you know, this house is not exactly the
+thing for venerable old ladies.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Don&rsquo;t make me angry, my dear young Monsieur.&nbsp; I
+have been to confession this morning.&nbsp; Aren&rsquo;t you comfortable?&nbsp;
+Isn&rsquo;t the house appointed richly enough for anybody?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>That girl with a peasant-nun&rsquo;s face had never seen the inside
+of a house other than some half-ruined <i>caserio</i> in her native
+hills.</p>
+<p>I pointed out to her that this was not a matter of splendour or comfort
+but of &ldquo;convenances.&rdquo;&nbsp; She pricked up her ears at that
+word which probably she had never heard before; but with woman&rsquo;s
+uncanny intuition I believe she understood perfectly what I meant.&nbsp;
+Her air of saintly patience became so pronounced that with my own poor
+intuition I perceived that she was raging at me inwardly.&nbsp; 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.</p>
+<p>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&rsquo;t an honest girl enough
+to look after any old lady belonging to a world which after all was
+sinful.&nbsp; She reminded me that she had kept house ever since she
+was &ldquo;so high&rdquo; for her uncle the priest: a man well-known
+for his saintliness in a large district extending even beyond Pampeluna.&nbsp;
+The character of a house depended upon the person who ruled it.&nbsp;
+She didn&rsquo;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 &ldquo;our Rita&rsquo;s&rdquo; ill-disposed
+heart.&nbsp; But he was dead and she, Therese, knew for certain that
+wickedness perished utterly, because of God&rsquo;s anger (<i>la col&egrave;re
+du bon Dieu</i>).&nbsp; She would have no hesitation in receiving a
+bishop, if need be, since &ldquo;our, Rita,&rdquo; with her poor, wretched,
+unbelieving heart, had nothing more to do with the house.</p>
+<p>All this came out of her like an unctuous trickle of some acrid oil.&nbsp;
+The low, voluble delivery was enough by itself to compel my attention.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You think you know your sister&rsquo;s heart,&rdquo; I asked.</p>
+<p>She made small eyes at me to discover if I was angry.&nbsp; She seemed
+to have an invincible faith in the virtuous dispositions of young men.&nbsp;
+And as I had spoken in measured tones and hadn&rsquo;t got red in the
+face she let herself go.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Black, my dear young Monsieur.&nbsp; Black.&nbsp; I always
+knew it.&nbsp; Uncle, poor saintly man, was too holy to take notice
+of anything.&nbsp; He was too busy with his thoughts to listen to anything
+I had to say to him.&nbsp; For instance as to her shamelessness.&nbsp;
+She was always ready to run half naked about the hills. . . &rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes.&nbsp; After your goats.&nbsp; All day long.&nbsp; Why
+didn&rsquo;t you mend her frocks?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, you know about the goats.&nbsp; My dear young Monsieur,
+I could never tell when she would fling over her pretended sweetness
+and put her tongue out at me.&nbsp; 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?&nbsp; I saw him often with his
+parents at Sunday mass.&nbsp; The grace of God preserved him and made
+him quite a gentleman in Paris.&nbsp; Perhaps it will touch Rita&rsquo;s
+heart, too, some day.&nbsp; But she was awful then.&nbsp; When I wouldn&rsquo;t
+listen to her complaints she would say: &lsquo;All right, sister, I
+would just as soon go clothed in rain and wind.&rsquo;&nbsp; And such
+a bag of bones, too, like the picture of a devil&rsquo;s imp.&nbsp;
+Ah, my dear young Monsieur, you don&rsquo;t know how wicked her heart
+is.&nbsp; You aren&rsquo;t bad enough for that yourself.&nbsp; I don&rsquo;t
+believe you are evil at all in your innocent little heart.&nbsp; I never
+heard you jeer at holy things.&nbsp; You are only thoughtless.&nbsp;
+For instance, I have never seen you make the sign of the cross in the
+morning.&nbsp; Why don&rsquo;t you make a practice of crossing yourself
+directly you open your eyes.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s a very good thing.&nbsp;
+It keeps Satan off for the day.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>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, &ldquo;But the house is mine,&rdquo; she insisted
+very quietly with an accent which made me feel that Satan himself would
+never manage to tear it out of her hands.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And so I told the great lady in grey.&nbsp; I told her that
+my sister had given it to me and that surely God would not let her take
+it away again.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You told that grey-headed lady, an utter stranger!&nbsp; You
+are getting more crazy every day.&nbsp; You have neither good sense
+nor good feeling, Mademoiselle Therese, let me tell you.&nbsp; Do you
+talk about your sister to the butcher and the greengrocer, too?&nbsp;
+A downright savage would have more restraint.&nbsp; What&rsquo;s your
+object?&nbsp; What do you expect from it?&nbsp; What pleasure do you
+get from it?&nbsp; Do you think you please God by abusing your sister?&nbsp;
+What do you think you are?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;A poor lone girl amongst a lot of wicked people.&nbsp; Do
+you think I wanted to go forth amongst those abominations? it&rsquo;s
+that poor sinful Rita that wouldn&rsquo;t let me be where I was, serving
+a holy man, next door to a church, and sure of my share of Paradise.&nbsp;
+I simply obeyed my uncle.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s he who told me to go forth
+and attempt to save her soul, bring her back to us, to a virtuous life.&nbsp;
+But what would be the good of that?&nbsp; She is given over to worldly,
+carnal thoughts.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; No, let her give her ill-gotten wealth
+up to the deserving and devote the rest of her life to repentance.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She uttered these righteous reflections and presented this programme
+for the salvation of her sister&rsquo;s soul in a reasonable convinced
+tone which was enough to give goose flesh to one all over.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Mademoiselle Therese,&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;you are nothing
+less than a monster.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She received that true expression of my opinion as though I had given
+her a sweet of a particularly delicious kind.&nbsp; She liked to be
+abused.&nbsp; It pleased her to be called names.&nbsp; I did let her
+have that satisfaction to her heart&rsquo;s content.&nbsp; At last I
+stopped because I could do no more, unless I got out of bed to beat
+her.&nbsp; I have a vague notion that she would have liked that, too,
+but I didn&rsquo;t try.&nbsp; After I had stopped she waited a little
+before she raised her downcast eyes.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You are a dear, ignorant, flighty young gentleman,&rdquo;
+she said.&nbsp; &ldquo;Nobody can tell what a cross my sister is to
+me except the good priest in the church where I go every day.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And the mysterious lady in grey,&rdquo; I suggested sarcastically.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Such a person might have guessed it,&rdquo; answered Therese,
+seriously, &ldquo;but I told her nothing except that this house had
+been given me in full property by our Rita.&nbsp; And I wouldn&rsquo;t
+have done that if she hadn&rsquo;t spoken to me of my sister first.&nbsp;
+I can&rsquo;t tell too many people about that.&nbsp; One can&rsquo;t
+trust Rita.&nbsp; I know she doesn&rsquo;t fear God but perhaps human
+respect may keep her from taking this house back from me.&nbsp; If she
+doesn&rsquo;t want me to talk about her to people why doesn&rsquo;t
+she give me a properly stamped piece of paper for it?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>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.&nbsp;
+It was immense.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;That lady, the strange lady, spoke to you of your sister first!&rdquo;
+I cried.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;The lady asked me, after she had been in a little time, whether
+really this house belonged to Madame de Lastaola.&nbsp; She had been
+so sweet and kind and condescending that I did not mind humiliating
+my spirit before such a good Christian.&nbsp; I told her that I didn&rsquo;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.&nbsp; She
+raised her eyebrows at that but she looked at me at the same time so
+kindly, as much as to say, &lsquo;Don&rsquo;t trust much to that, my
+dear girl,&rsquo; that I couldn&rsquo;t help taking up her hand, soft
+as down, and kissing it.&nbsp; She took it away pretty quick but she
+was not offended.&nbsp; But she only said, &lsquo;That&rsquo;s very
+generous on your sister&rsquo;s part,&rsquo; in a way that made me run
+cold all over.&nbsp; I suppose all the world knows our Rita for a shameless
+girl.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp;
+She said to me, &lsquo;There is nothing to be unhappy about.&nbsp; Madame
+de Lastaola is a very remarkable person who has done many surprising
+things.&nbsp; She is not to be judged like other people and as far as
+I know she has never wronged a single human being. . . .&rsquo;&nbsp;
+That put heart into me, I can tell you; and the lady told me then not
+to disturb her son.&nbsp; She would wait till he woke up.&nbsp; She
+knew he was a bad sleeper.&nbsp; I said to her: &lsquo;Why, I can hear
+the dear sweet gentleman this moment having his bath in the fencing-room,&rsquo;
+and I took her into the studio.&nbsp; They are there now and they are
+going to have their lunch together at twelve o&rsquo;clock.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Why on earth didn&rsquo;t you tell me at first that the lady
+was Mrs. Blunt?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Didn&rsquo;t I?&nbsp; I thought I did,&rdquo; she said innocently.&nbsp;
+I felt a sudden desire to get out of that house, to fly from the reinforced
+Blunt element which was to me so oppressive.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I want to get up and dress, Mademoiselle Therese,&rdquo; I
+said.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>I looked at my watch; it was ten o&rsquo;clock.&nbsp; Therese had
+been late with my coffee.&nbsp; The delay was clearly caused by the
+unexpected arrival of Mr. Blunt&rsquo;s mother, which might or might
+not have been expected by her son.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; It caused in me a feeling of inferiority which I intensely
+disliked.&nbsp; This did not arise from the actual fact that those people
+originated in another continent.&nbsp; I had met Americans before.&nbsp;
+And the Blunts were Americans.&nbsp; But so little!&nbsp; That was the
+trouble.&nbsp; Captain Blunt might have been a Frenchman as far as languages,
+tones, and manners went.&nbsp; But you could not have mistaken him for
+one. . . . Why?&nbsp; You couldn&rsquo;t tell.&nbsp; It was something
+indefinite.&nbsp; 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&mdash;but
+arms of some sort.&nbsp; 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.</p>
+<p>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.&nbsp; It crushed, it overshadowed, too,
+it was immense.&nbsp; If there were any smiles in the world (which I
+didn&rsquo;t believe) I could not have seen them.&nbsp; Love for Rita
+. . . if it was love, I asked myself despairingly, while I brushed my
+hair before a glass.&nbsp; It did not seem to have any sort of beginning
+as far as I could remember.&nbsp; A thing the origin of which you cannot
+trace cannot be seriously considered.&nbsp; It is an illusion.&nbsp;
+Or perhaps mine was a physical state, some sort of disease akin to melancholia
+which is a form of insanity?&nbsp; 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. . . .</p>
+<p>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.&nbsp;
+It haunted me.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; Oh,
+yes, certainly I was haunted by her but so was her sister Therese&mdash;who
+was crazy.&nbsp; It proved nothing.&nbsp; As to her tears, since I had
+not caused them, they only aroused my indignation.&nbsp; To put her
+head on my shoulder, to weep these strange tears, was nothing short
+of an outrageous liberty.&nbsp; It was a mere emotional trick.&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp;
+And then when she had no longer any need of support she dispensed with
+it by simply telling me to go away.&nbsp; How convenient!&nbsp; The
+request had sounded pathetic, almost sacredly so, but then it might
+have been the exhibition of the coolest possible impudence.&nbsp; With
+her one could not tell.&nbsp; Sorrow, indifference, tears, smiles, all
+with her seemed to have a hidden meaning.&nbsp; Nothing could be trusted.
+. . Heavens!&nbsp; 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.</p>
+<p>I felt suddenly that &ldquo;this sort of thing&rdquo; would kill
+me.&nbsp; The definition of the cause was vague, but the thought itself
+was no mere morbid artificiality of sentiment but a genuine conviction.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;That sort of thing&rdquo; was what I would have to die from.&nbsp;
+It wouldn&rsquo;t be from the innumerable doubts.&nbsp; Any sort of
+certitude would be also deadly.&nbsp; It wouldn&rsquo;t be from a stab&mdash;a
+kiss would kill me as surely.&nbsp; It would not be from a frown or
+from any particular word or any particular act&mdash;but from having
+to bear them all, together and in succession&mdash;from having to live
+with &ldquo;that sort of thing.&rdquo;&nbsp; About the time I finished
+with my neck-tie I had done with life too.&nbsp; I absolutely did not
+care because I couldn&rsquo;t tell whether, mentally and physically,
+from the roots of my hair to the soles of my feet&mdash;whether I was
+more weary or unhappy.</p>
+<p>And now my toilet was finished, my occupation was gone.&nbsp; An
+immense distress descended upon me.&nbsp; It has been observed that
+the routine of daily life, that arbitrary system of trifles, is a great
+moral support.&nbsp; But my toilet was finished, I had nothing more
+to do of those things consecrated by usage and which leave you no option.&nbsp;
+The exercise of any kind of volition by a man whose consciousness is
+reduced to the sensation that he is being killed by &ldquo;that sort
+of thing&rdquo; cannot be anything but mere trifling with death, an
+insincere pose before himself.&nbsp; I wasn&rsquo;t capable of it.&nbsp;
+It was then that I discovered that being killed by &ldquo;that sort
+of thing,&rdquo; I mean the absolute conviction of it, was, so to speak,
+nothing in itself.&nbsp; The horrible part was the waiting.&nbsp; That
+was the cruelty, the tragedy, the bitterness of it.&nbsp; &ldquo;Why
+the devil don&rsquo;t I drop dead now?&rdquo; I asked myself peevishly,
+taking a clean handkerchief out of the drawer and stuffing it in my
+pocket.</p>
+<p>This was absolutely the last thing, the last ceremony of an imperative
+rite.&nbsp; I was abandoned to myself now and it was terrible.&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp; 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 <i>petit salon</i>, up the white staircase.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp;
+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.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;That fellow (<i>ce gar&ccedil;on</i>) is a primitive nature,
+but he may be an artist in a sense.&nbsp; He has broken away from his
+conventions.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; It can be only for himself.&nbsp; And even he won&rsquo;t
+be able to see it in its completeness except on his death-bed.&nbsp;
+There is something fine in that.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>I had blushed with pleasure; such fine ideas had never entered my
+head.&nbsp; But there was something fine. . . . How far all this seemed!&nbsp;
+How mute and how still!&nbsp; What a phantom he was, that man with a
+beard of at least seven tones of brown.&nbsp; And those shades of the
+other kind such as Baptiste with the shaven diplomatic face, the <i>ma&icirc;tre</i>
+<i>d&rsquo;h&ocirc;tel</i> in charge of the <i>petit salon</i>, taking
+my hat and stick from me with a deferential remark: &ldquo;Monsieur
+is not very often seen nowadays.&rdquo;&nbsp; And those other well-groomed
+heads raised and nodding at my passage&mdash;&ldquo;<i>Bonjour</i>.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+&ldquo;<i>Bonjour</i>&rdquo;&mdash;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: &ldquo;Are you well?&rdquo;&mdash;&ldquo;Will
+one see you anywhere this evening?&rdquo;&mdash;not from curiosity,
+God forbid, but just from friendliness; and passing on almost without
+waiting for an answer.&nbsp; What had I to do with them, this elegant
+dust, these moulds of provincial fashion?</p>
+<p>I also often lunched with Do&ntilde;a Rita without invitation.&nbsp;
+But that was now unthinkable.&nbsp; 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?&nbsp; Obviously
+I could have nothing to do with her.&nbsp; My five minutes&rsquo; meditation
+in the middle of the bedroom came to an end without even a sigh.&nbsp;
+The dead don&rsquo;t sigh, and for all practical purposes I was that,
+except for the final consummation, the growing cold, the <i>rigor mortis</i>&mdash;that
+blessed state!&nbsp; With measured steps I crossed the landing to my
+sitting-room.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h3>CHAPTER II</h3>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>The windows of that room gave out on the street of the Consuls which
+as usual was silent.&nbsp; And the house itself below me and above me
+was soundless, perfectly still.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; I suppose it
+was very solidly built.&nbsp; Yet that morning I missed in the stillness
+that feeling of security and peace which ought to have been associated
+with it.&nbsp; It is, I believe, generally admitted that the dead are
+glad to be at rest.&nbsp; But I wasn&rsquo;t at rest.&nbsp; What was
+wrong with that silence?&nbsp; There was something incongruous in that
+peace.&nbsp; What was it that had got into that stillness?&nbsp; Suddenly
+I remembered: the mother of Captain Blunt.</p>
+<p>Why had she come all the way from Paris?&nbsp; And why should I bother
+my head about it?&nbsp; H&rsquo;m&mdash;the Blunt atmosphere, the reinforced
+Blunt vibration stealing through the walls, through the thick walls
+and the almost more solid stillness.&nbsp; Nothing to me, of course&mdash;the
+movements of Mme. Blunt, <i>m&egrave;re</i>.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.</p>
+<p>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.&nbsp; I could always sleep in the end.&nbsp;
+In the end.&nbsp; Escape into a nightmare.&nbsp; Wouldn&rsquo;t he revel
+in that if he could!&nbsp; But that wasn&rsquo;t for him.&nbsp; He had
+to toss about open-eyed all night and get up weary, weary.&nbsp; But
+oh, wasn&rsquo;t I weary, too, waiting for a sleep without dreams.</p>
+<p>I heard the door behind me open.&nbsp; I had been standing with my
+face to the window and, I declare, not knowing what I was looking at
+across the road&mdash;the Desert of Sahara or a wall of bricks, a landscape
+of rivers and forests or only the Consulate of Paraguay.&nbsp; But I
+had been thinking, apparently, of Mr. Blunt with such intensity that
+when I saw him enter the room it didn&rsquo;t really make much difference.&nbsp;
+When I turned about the door behind him was already shut.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp;
+He was smiling, easy, correct, perfectly delightful, fit to kill</p>
+<p>He had come to ask me, if I had no other engagement, to lunch with
+him and his mother in about an hour&rsquo;s time.&nbsp; He did it in
+a most <i>d&eacute;gag&eacute;</i> tone.&nbsp; His mother had given
+him a surprise.&nbsp; The completest . . . The foundation of his mother&rsquo;s
+psychology was her delightful unexpectedness.&nbsp; 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 t&ecirc;te-&agrave;-t&ecirc;te
+for a while (that is if I had no other engagement.&nbsp; Flash of teeth).&nbsp;
+His mother was exquisitely and tenderly absurd.&nbsp; She had taken
+it into her head that his health was endangered in some way.&nbsp; And
+when she took anything into her head . . . Perhaps I might find something
+to say which would reassure her.&nbsp; 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).&nbsp;
+He hoped I wouldn&rsquo;t mind if she treated me a little as an &ldquo;interesting
+young man.&rdquo;&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; That again got overlaid by the <i>sans-fa&ccedil;on</i>
+of a <i>grande dame</i> of the Second Empire.</p>
+<p>I accepted the invitation with a worldly grin and a perfectly just
+intonation, because I really didn&rsquo;t care what I did.&nbsp; I only
+wondered vaguely why that fellow required all the air in the room for
+himself.&nbsp; There did not seem enough left to go down my throat.&nbsp;
+I didn&rsquo;t say that I would come with pleasure or that I would be
+delighted, but I said that I would come.&nbsp; He seemed to forget his
+tongue in his head, put his hands in his pockets and moved about vaguely.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;I am a little nervous this morning,&rdquo; he said in French,
+stopping short and looking me straight in the eyes.&nbsp; His own were
+deep sunk, dark, fatal.&nbsp; I asked with some malice, that no one
+could have detected in my intonation, &ldquo;How&rsquo;s that sleeplessness?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He muttered through his teeth, &ldquo;<i>Mal.&nbsp; Je ne dors</i>
+<i>plus</i>.&rdquo;&nbsp; He moved off to stand at the window with his
+back to the room.&nbsp; I sat down on a sofa that was there and put
+my feet up, and silence took possession of the room.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Isn&rsquo;t this street ridiculous?&rdquo; said Blunt suddenly,
+and crossing the room rapidly waved his hand to me, &ldquo;<i>A</i>
+<i>bient&ocirc;t donc</i>,&rdquo; and was gone.&nbsp; He had seared
+himself into my mind.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp;
+Of course it isn&rsquo;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.&nbsp; 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&mdash;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.&nbsp; Captain Blunt
+with smiling formality introduced me by name, adding with a certain
+relaxation of the formal tone the comment: &ldquo;The Monsieur George!
+whose fame you tell me has reached even Paris.&rdquo;&nbsp; Mrs. Blunt&rsquo;s
+reception of me, glance, tones, even to the attitude of the admirably
+corseted figure, was most friendly, approaching the limit of half-familiarity.&nbsp;
+I had the feeling that I was beholding in her a captured ideal.&nbsp;
+No common experience!&nbsp; But I didn&rsquo;t care.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; I was not even wondering to myself
+at what on earth I was doing there.&nbsp; She breathed out: &ldquo;<i>Comme
+c&rsquo;est romantique</i>,&rdquo; 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:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I have heard this name murmured by pretty lips in more than
+one royalist salon.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>I didn&rsquo;t say anything to that ingratiating speech.&nbsp; 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.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You won&rsquo;t mind, I am sure, if an old woman whose heart
+is still young elects to call you by it,&rdquo; she declared.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Certainly, Madame.&nbsp; It will be more romantic,&rdquo;
+I assented with a respectful bow.</p>
+<p>She dropped a calm: &ldquo;Yes&mdash;there is nothing like romance
+while one is young.&nbsp; So I will call you Monsieur George,&rdquo;
+she paused and then added, &ldquo;I could never get old,&rdquo; in a
+matter-of-fact final tone as one would remark, &ldquo;I could never
+learn to swim,&rdquo; and I had the presence of mind to say in a tone
+to match, &ldquo;<i>C&rsquo;est &eacute;vident</i>, Madame.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+It was evident.&nbsp; She couldn&rsquo;t get old; and across the table
+her thirty-year-old son who couldn&rsquo;t get sleep sat listening with
+courteous detachment and the narrowest possible line of white underlining
+his silky black moustache.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Your services are immensely appreciated,&rdquo; she said with
+an amusing touch of importance as of a great official lady.&nbsp; &ldquo;Immensely
+appreciated by people in a position to understand the great significance
+of the Carlist movement in the South.&nbsp; There it has to combat anarchism,
+too.&nbsp; I who have lived through the Commune . . .&rdquo;</p>
+<p>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.&nbsp; The ears of all the Bourbons in the world must have been
+burning.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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:&mdash;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.&nbsp; In my youthful haste
+I asked myself what sort of airy soul she had.</p>
+<p>At last Therese put a dish of fruit on the table, a small collection
+of oranges, raisins, and nuts.&nbsp; No doubt she had bought that lot
+very cheap and it did not look at all inviting.&nbsp; Captain Blunt
+jumped up.&nbsp; &ldquo;My mother can&rsquo;t stand tobacco smoke.&nbsp;
+Will you keep her company, <i>mon cher</i>, while I take a turn with
+a cigar in that ridiculous garden.&nbsp; The brougham from the hotel
+will be here very soon.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He left us in the white flash of an apologetic grin.&nbsp; 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 &ldquo;ridiculous&rdquo;
+garden: for its elegance and its air of good breeding the most remarkable
+figure that I have ever seen before or since.&nbsp; He had changed his
+coat.&nbsp; Madame Blunt <i>m&egrave;re</i> lowered the long-handled
+glasses through which she had been contemplating him with an appraising,
+absorbed expression which had nothing maternal in it.&nbsp; But what
+she said to me was:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You understand my anxieties while he is campaigning with the
+King.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She had spoken in French and she had used the expression &ldquo;<i>mes
+transes</i>&rdquo; but for all the rest, intonation, bearing, solemnity,
+she might have been referring to one of the Bourbons.&nbsp; I am sure
+that not a single one of them looked half as aristocratic as her son.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I understand perfectly, Madame.&nbsp; But then that life is
+so romantic.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Hundreds of young men belonging to a certain sphere are doing
+that,&rdquo; she said very distinctly, &ldquo;only their case is different.&nbsp;
+They have their positions, their families to go back to; but we are
+different.&nbsp; We are exiles, except of course for the ideals, the
+kindred spirit, the friendships of old standing we have in France.&nbsp;
+Should my son come out unscathed he has no one but me and I have no
+one but him.&nbsp; I have to think of his life.&nbsp; Mr. Mills (what
+a distinguished mind that is!) has reassured me as to my son&rsquo;s
+health.&nbsp; But he sleeps very badly, doesn&rsquo;t he?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>I murmured something affirmative in a doubtful tone and she remarked
+quaintly, with a certain curtness, &ldquo;It&rsquo;s so unnecessary,
+this worry!&nbsp; The unfortunate position of an exile has its advantages.&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp; You see
+examples in the aristocracies of all the countries.&nbsp; A chivalrous
+young American may offer his life for a remote ideal which yet may belong
+to his familial tradition.&nbsp; We, in our great country, have every
+sort of tradition.&nbsp; But a young man of good connections and distinguished
+relations must settle down some day, dispose of his life.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No doubt, Madame,&rdquo; I said, raising my eyes to the figure
+outside&mdash;&ldquo;<i>Am&eacute;ricain</i>, <i>Catholique et gentilhomme</i>&rdquo;&mdash;walking
+up and down the path with a cigar which he was not smoking.&nbsp; &ldquo;For
+myself, I don&rsquo;t know anything about those necessities.&nbsp; I
+have broken away for ever from those things.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes, Mr. Mills talked to me about you.&nbsp; What a golden
+heart that is.&nbsp; His sympathies are infinite.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>I thought suddenly of Mills pronouncing on Mme. Blunt, whatever his
+text on me might have been: &ldquo;She lives by her wits.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+Was she exercising her wits on me for some purpose of her own?&nbsp;
+And I observed coldly:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I really know your son so very little.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, <i>voyons</i>,&rdquo; she protested.&nbsp; &ldquo;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&mdash;no, you must be able to understand him in a measure.&nbsp;
+He is infinitely scrupulous and recklessly brave.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I am convinced of it, Madame.&nbsp; I have even heard of your
+son&rsquo;s bravery.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s extremely natural in a man who,
+in his own words, &lsquo;lives by his sword.&rsquo;&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She suddenly departed from her almost inhuman perfection, betrayed
+&ldquo;nerves&rdquo; 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.&nbsp; Her admirable little foot, marvellously shod in a black
+shoe, tapped the floor irritably.&nbsp; But even in that display there
+was something exquisitely delicate.&nbsp; The very anger in her voice
+was silvery, as it were, and more like the petulance of a seventeen-year-old
+beauty.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What nonsense!&nbsp; A Blunt doesn&rsquo;t hire himself.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Some princely families,&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;were founded
+by men who have done that very thing.&nbsp; The great Condottieri, you
+know.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>It was in an almost tempestuous tone that she made me observe that
+we were not living in the fifteenth century.&nbsp; She gave me also
+to understand with some spirit that there was no question here of founding
+a family.&nbsp; Her son was very far from being the first of the name.&nbsp;
+His importance lay rather in being the last of a race which had totally
+perished, she added in a completely drawing-room tone, &ldquo;in our
+Civil War.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>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.&nbsp;
+For she was growing old!&nbsp; Oh, yes, she was growing old, and secretly
+weary, and perhaps desperate.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h3>CHAPTER III</h3>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>Without caring much about it I was conscious of sudden illumination.&nbsp;
+I said to myself confidently that these two people had been quarrelling
+all the morning.&nbsp; I had discovered the secret of my invitation
+to that lunch.&nbsp; They did not care to face the strain of some obstinate,
+inconclusive discussion for fear, maybe, of it ending in a serious quarrel.&nbsp;
+And so they had agreed that I should be fetched downstairs to create
+a diversion.&nbsp; I cannot say I felt annoyed.&nbsp; I didn&rsquo;t
+care.&nbsp; My perspicacity did not please me either.&nbsp; I wished
+they had left me alone&mdash;but nothing mattered.&nbsp; They must have
+been in their superiority accustomed to make use of people, without
+compunction.&nbsp; From necessity, too.&nbsp; She especially.&nbsp;
+She lived by her wits.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; Must have
+gone indoors.&nbsp; Would rejoin us in a moment.&nbsp; Then I would
+leave mother and son to themselves.</p>
+<p>The next thing I noticed was that a great mellowness had descended
+upon the mother of the last of his race.&nbsp; But these terms, irritation,
+mellowness, appeared gross when applied to her.&nbsp; It is impossible
+to give an idea of the refinement and subtlety of all her transformations.&nbsp;
+She smiled faintly at me.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But all this is beside the point.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; With
+me it is a little different.&nbsp; The trials fell mainly to my share&mdash;and
+of course I have lived longer.&nbsp; And then men are much more complex
+than women, much more difficult, too.&nbsp; And you, Monsieur George?&nbsp;
+Are you complex, with unexpected resistances and difficulties in your
+<i>&ecirc;tre intime</i>&mdash;your inner self?&nbsp; I wonder now .
+. .&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The Blunt atmosphere seemed to vibrate all over my skin.&nbsp; I
+disregarded the symptom.&nbsp; &ldquo;Madame,&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;I
+have never tried to find out what sort of being I am.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Ah, that&rsquo;s very wrong.&nbsp; We ought to reflect on
+what manner of beings we are.&nbsp; Of course we are all sinners.&nbsp;
+My John is a sinner like the others,&rdquo; 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.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You are too young perhaps as yet . . . But as to my John,&rdquo;
+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.&nbsp; &ldquo;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.&nbsp; I assure you that
+he won&rsquo;t even let his heart speak uncontradicted.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>I am sure I don&rsquo;t know what particular devil looks after the
+associations of memory, and I can&rsquo;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&rsquo;s maid with tarnished eyes; even of the tireless
+Rose handing me my hat while breathing out the enigmatic words: &ldquo;Madame
+should listen to her heart.&rdquo;&nbsp; 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.</p>
+<p>After that for a long time I heard Mme. Blunt <i>m&egrave;re</i>
+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.&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp; Mills had a universal
+mind.&nbsp; His sympathy was universal, too.&nbsp; He had that large
+comprehension&mdash;oh, not cynical, not at all cynical, in fact rather
+tender&mdash;which was found in its perfection only in some rare, very
+rare Englishmen.&nbsp; The dear creature was romantic, too.&nbsp; Of
+course he was reserved in his speech but she understood Mills perfectly.&nbsp;
+Mills apparently liked me very much.</p>
+<p>It was time for me to say something.&nbsp; There was a challenge
+in the reposeful black eyes resting upon my face.&nbsp; I murmured that
+I was very glad to hear it.&nbsp; She waited a little, then uttered
+meaningly, &ldquo;Mr. Mills is a little bit uneasy about you.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It&rsquo;s very good of him,&rdquo; I said.&nbsp; 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.</p>
+<p>Somehow it didn&rsquo;t occur to me to ask Mrs. Blunt.&nbsp; Whether
+she had expected me to do so or not I don&rsquo;t know but after a while
+she changed the pose she had kept so long and folded her wonderfully
+preserved white arms.&nbsp; She looked a perfect picture in silver and
+grey, with touches of black here and there.&nbsp; Still I said nothing
+more in my dull misery.&nbsp; She waited a little longer, then she woke
+me up with a crash.&nbsp; It was as if the house had fallen, and yet
+she had only asked me:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I believe you are received on very friendly terms by Madame
+de Lastaola on account of your common exertions for the cause.&nbsp;
+Very good friends, are you not?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You mean Rita,&rdquo; I said stupidly, but I felt stupid,
+like a man who wakes up only to be hit on the head.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, Rita,&rdquo; she repeated with unexpected acidity, which
+somehow made me feel guilty of an incredible breach of good manners.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;H&rsquo;m, Rita. . . . Oh, well, let it be Rita&mdash;for the
+present.&nbsp; Though why she should be deprived of her name in conversation
+about her, really I don&rsquo;t understand.&nbsp; Unless a very special
+intimacy . . .&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She was distinctly annoyed.&nbsp; I said sulkily, &ldquo;It isn&rsquo;t
+her name.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It is her choice, I understand, which seems almost a better
+title to recognition on the part of the world.&nbsp; It didn&rsquo;t
+strike you so before?&nbsp; Well, it seems to me that choice has got
+more right to be respected than heredity or law.&nbsp; Moreover, Mme.
+de Lastaola,&rdquo; she continued in an insinuating voice, &ldquo;that
+most rare and fascinating young woman is, as a friend like you cannot
+deny, outside legality altogether.&nbsp; Even in that she is an exceptional
+creature.&nbsp; For she is exceptional&mdash;you agree?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>I had gone dumb, I could only stare at her.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, I see, you agree.&nbsp; No friend of hers could deny.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Madame,&rdquo; I burst out, &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know where
+a question of friendship comes in here with a person whom you yourself
+call so exceptional.&nbsp; I really don&rsquo;t know how she looks upon
+me.&nbsp; Our intercourse is of course very close and confidential.&nbsp;
+Is that also talked about in Paris?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Not at all, not in the least,&rdquo; said Mrs. Blunt, easy,
+equable, but with her calm, sparkling eyes holding me in angry subjection.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;Nothing of the sort is being talked about.&nbsp; The references
+to Mme. de Lastaola are in a very different tone, I can assure you,
+thanks to her discretion in remaining here.&nbsp; And, I must say, thanks
+to the discreet efforts of her friends.&nbsp; I am also a friend of
+Mme. de Lastaola, you must know.&nbsp; Oh, no, I have never spoken to
+her in my life and have seen her only twice, I believe.&nbsp; I wrote
+to her though, that I admit.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; Yes, I did write
+to her and I have been preoccupied with her for a long time.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; He said that there
+was something in her of the women of all time.&nbsp; I suppose he meant
+the inheritance of all the gifts that make up an irresistible fascination&mdash;a
+great personality.&nbsp; Such women are not born often.&nbsp; Most of
+them lack opportunities.&nbsp; They never develop.&nbsp; They end obscurely.&nbsp;
+Here and there one survives to make her mark even in history. . . .
+And even that is not a very enviable fate.&nbsp; They are at another
+pole from the so-called dangerous women who are merely coquettes.&nbsp;
+A coquette has got to work for her success.&nbsp; The others have nothing
+to do but simply exist.&nbsp; You perceive the view I take of the difference?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>I perceived the view.&nbsp; I said to myself that nothing in the
+world could be more aristocratic.&nbsp; This was the slave-owning woman
+who had never worked, even if she had been reduced to live by her wits.&nbsp;
+She was a wonderful old woman.&nbsp; She made me dumb.&nbsp; She held
+me fascinated by the well-bred attitude, something sublimely aloof in
+her air of wisdom.</p>
+<p>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&mdash;yes, royal even flow of the voice.
+. . . But what was it she was talking about now?&nbsp; These were no
+longer considerations about fatal women.&nbsp; She was talking about
+her son again.&nbsp; My interest turned into mere bitterness of contemptuous
+attention.&nbsp; For I couldn&rsquo;t withhold it though I tried to
+let the stuff go by.&nbsp; 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&mdash;return to France&mdash;to old friendships, infinite kindness&mdash;but
+a life hollow, without occupation. . . Then 1870&mdash;and chivalrous
+response to adopted country&rsquo;s call and again emptiness, the chafing
+of a proud spirit without aim and handicapped not exactly by poverty
+but by lack of fortune.&nbsp; 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.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You understand me well, Monsieur George.&nbsp; A nature like
+this!&nbsp; It is the most refined cruelty of fate to look at.&nbsp;
+I don&rsquo;t know whether I suffered more in times of war or in times
+of peace.&nbsp; You understand?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>I bowed my head in silence.&nbsp; What I couldn&rsquo;t understand
+was why he delayed so long in joining us again.&nbsp; Unless he had
+had enough of his mother?&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; I was familiar enough with his
+habits by this time to know that he often managed to snatch an hour&rsquo;s
+sleep or so during the day.&nbsp; He had gone and thrown himself on
+his bed.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I admire him exceedingly,&rdquo; Mrs. Blunt was saying in
+a tone which was not at all maternal.&nbsp; &ldquo;His distinction,
+his fastidiousness, the earnest warmth of his heart.&nbsp; I know him
+well.&nbsp; I assure you that I would never have dared to suggest,&rdquo;
+she continued with an extraordinary haughtiness of attitude and tone
+that aroused my attention, &ldquo;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&mdash;his&mdash;his
+heart engaged.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>It was as if some one had poured a bucket of cold water over my head.&nbsp;
+I woke up with a great shudder to the acute perception of my own feelings
+and of that aristocrat&rsquo;s incredible purpose.&nbsp; How it could
+have germinated, grown and matured in that exclusive soil was inconceivable.&nbsp;
+She had been inciting her son all the time to undertake wonderful salvage
+work by annexing the heiress of Henry All&egrave;gre&mdash;the woman
+and the fortune.</p>
+<p>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.&nbsp; For a time my tongue literally clove
+to the roof of my mouth.&nbsp; I don&rsquo;t know whether it was an
+illusion but it seemed to me that Mrs. Blunt had nodded at me twice
+as if to say: &ldquo;You are right, that&rsquo;s so.&rdquo;&nbsp; I
+made an effort to speak but it was very poor.&nbsp; If she did hear
+me it was because she must have been on the watch for the faintest sound.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;His heart engaged.&nbsp; Like two hundred others, or two thousand,
+all around,&rdquo; I mumbled.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Altogether different.&nbsp; And it&rsquo;s no disparagement
+to a woman surely.&nbsp; Of course her great fortune protects her in
+a certain measure.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Does it?&rdquo; I faltered out and that time I really doubt
+whether she heard me.&nbsp; Her aspect in my eyes had changed.&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp; She
+was a terrible old woman with those straight, white wolfish eye-brows.&nbsp;
+How blind I had been!&nbsp; Those eyebrows alone ought to have been
+enough to give her away.&nbsp; Yet they were as beautifully smooth as
+her voice when she admitted: &ldquo;That protection naturally is only
+partial.&nbsp; There is the danger of her own self, poor girl.&nbsp;
+She requires guidance.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>I marvelled at the villainy of my tone as I spoke, but it was only
+assumed.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t think she has done badly for herself, so far,&rdquo;
+I forced myself to say.&nbsp; &ldquo;I suppose you know that she began
+life by herding the village goats.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>In the course of that phrase I noticed her wince just the least bit.&nbsp;
+Oh, yes, she winced; but at the end of it she smiled easily.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No, I didn&rsquo;t know.&nbsp; So she told you her story!&nbsp;
+Oh, well, I suppose you are very good friends.&nbsp; A goatherd&mdash;really?&nbsp;
+In the fairy tale I believe the girl that marries the prince is&mdash;what
+is it?&mdash;<i>a gardeuse d&rsquo;oies</i>.&nbsp; And what a thing
+to drag out against a woman.&nbsp; One might just as soon reproach any
+of them for coming unclothed into the world.&nbsp; They all do, you
+know.&nbsp; And then they become&mdash;what you will discover when you
+have lived longer, Monsieur George&mdash;for the most part futile creatures,
+without any sense of truth and beauty, drudges of all sorts, or else
+dolls to dress.&nbsp; In a word&mdash;ordinary.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The implication of scorn in her tranquil manner was immense.&nbsp;
+It seemed to condemn all those that were not born in the Blunt connection.&nbsp;
+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!</p>
+<p>&ldquo;How many of them,&rdquo; pursued Mrs. Blunt, &ldquo;have had
+the good fortune, the leisure to develop their intelligence and their
+beauty in aesthetic conditions as this charming woman had?&nbsp; Not
+one in a million.&nbsp; Perhaps not one in an age.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;The heiress of Henry All&egrave;gre,&rdquo; I murmured.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Precisely.&nbsp; But John wouldn&rsquo;t be marrying the heiress
+of Henry All&egrave;gre.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No,&rdquo; I said.&nbsp; &ldquo;It would be Mme. de Lastaola
+then.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Mme. la Comtesse de Lastaola as soon as she likes after the
+success of this war.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And you believe in its success?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Do you?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Not for a moment,&rdquo; I declared, and was surprised to
+see her look pleased.</p>
+<p>She was an aristocrat to the tips of her fingers; she really didn&rsquo;t
+care for anybody.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; She was above all that.&nbsp; Perhaps &ldquo;the
+world&rdquo; 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.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;My dear Monsieur George, I have lived in the great world all
+my life.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s the best that there is, but that&rsquo;s only
+because there is nothing merely decent anywhere.&nbsp; It will accept
+anything, forgive anything, forget anything in a few days.&nbsp; And
+after all who will he be marrying?&nbsp; A charming, clever, rich and
+altogether uncommon woman.&nbsp; What did the world hear of her?&nbsp;
+Nothing.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; I have seen her myself.&nbsp; I went on purpose.&nbsp;
+I was immensely struck.&nbsp; I was even moved.&nbsp; Yes.&nbsp; She
+might have been&mdash;except for that something radiant in her that
+marked her apart from all the other daughters of men.&nbsp; The few
+remarkable personalities that count in society and who were admitted
+into Henry All&egrave;gre&rsquo;s Pavilion treated her with punctilious
+reserve.&nbsp; I know that, I have made enquiries.&nbsp; I know she
+sat there amongst them like a marvellous child, and for the rest what
+can they say about her?&nbsp; That when abandoned to herself by the
+death of All&egrave;gre she has made a mistake?&nbsp; I think that any
+woman ought to be allowed one mistake in her life.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; And this, you will allow, is rather uncommon upon
+the whole.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You make her out very magnificent,&rdquo;&nbsp; I murmured,
+looking down upon the floor.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Isn&rsquo;t she?&rdquo; 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.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t think there is a single grain of vulgarity in all
+her enchanting person.&nbsp; Neither is there in my son.&nbsp; I suppose
+you won&rsquo;t deny that he is uncommon.&rdquo;&nbsp; She paused.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Absolutely,&rdquo; 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.&nbsp; She took my answer at her own valuation and
+was satisfied.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;They can&rsquo;t fail to understand each other on the very
+highest level of idealistic perceptions.&nbsp; Can you imagine my John
+thrown away on some enamoured white goose out of a stuffy old salon?&nbsp;
+Why, she couldn&rsquo;t even begin to understand what he feels or what
+he needs.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; I said impenetrably, &ldquo;he is not easy to
+understand.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I have reason to think,&rdquo; she said with a suppressed
+smile, &ldquo;that he has a certain power over women.&nbsp; Of course
+I don&rsquo;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.&nbsp; But I should like to know the exact degree.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>I disregarded an annoying tendency to feel dizzy that came over me
+and was very careful in managing my voice.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;May I ask, Madame, why you are telling me all this?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;For two reasons,&rdquo; she condescended graciously.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;First of all because Mr. Mills told me that you were much more
+mature than one would expect.&nbsp; In fact you look much younger than
+I was prepared for.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Madame,&rdquo; I interrupted her, &ldquo;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.&nbsp;
+They are outside my interest.&nbsp; I have had no experience.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Don&rsquo;t make yourself out so hopeless,&rdquo; she said
+in a spoilt-beauty tone.&nbsp; &ldquo;You have your intuitions.&nbsp;
+At any rate you have a pair of eyes.&nbsp; You are everlastingly over
+there, so I understand.&nbsp; Surely you have seen how far they are
+. . .&rdquo;</p>
+<p>I interrupted again and this time bitterly, but always in a tone
+of polite enquiry:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You think her facile, Madame?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She looked offended.&nbsp; &ldquo;I think her most fastidious.&nbsp;
+It is my son who is in question here.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>And I understood then that she looked on her son as irresistible.&nbsp;
+For my part I was just beginning to think that it would be impossible
+for me to wait for his return.&nbsp; I figured him to myself lying dressed
+on his bed sleeping like a stone.&nbsp; But there was no denying that
+the mother was holding me with an awful, tortured interest.&nbsp; Twice
+Therese had opened the door, had put her small head in and drawn it
+back like a tortoise.&nbsp; But for some time I had lost the sense of
+us two being quite alone in the studio.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; It lay there
+prostrate, handless, without its head, pathetic, like the mangled victim
+of a crime.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;John is fastidious, too,&rdquo; began Mrs. Blunt again.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;Of course you wouldn&rsquo;t suppose anything vulgar in his resistances
+to a very real sentiment.&nbsp; One has got to understand his psychology.&nbsp;
+He can&rsquo;t leave himself in peace.&nbsp; He is exquisitely absurd.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>I recognized the phrase.&nbsp; Mother and son talked of each other
+in identical terms.&nbsp; But perhaps &ldquo;exquisitely absurd&rdquo;
+was the Blunt family saying?&nbsp; There are such sayings in families
+and generally there is some truth in them.&nbsp; Perhaps this old woman
+was simply absurd.&nbsp; She continued:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;We had a most painful discussion all this morning.&nbsp; He
+is angry with me for suggesting the very thing his whole being desires.&nbsp;
+I don&rsquo;t feel guilty.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s he who is tormenting himself
+with his infinite scrupulosity.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Ah,&rdquo; I said, looking at the mangled dummy like the model
+of some atrocious murder.&nbsp; &ldquo;Ah, the fortune.&nbsp; But that
+can be left alone.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What nonsense!&nbsp; How is it possible?&nbsp; It isn&rsquo;t
+contained in a bag, you can&rsquo;t throw it into the sea.&nbsp; And
+moreover, it isn&rsquo;t her fault.&nbsp; I am astonished that you should
+have thought of that vulgar hypocrisy.&nbsp; No, it isn&rsquo;t her
+fortune that cheeks my son; it&rsquo;s something much more subtle.&nbsp;
+Not so much her history as her position.&nbsp; He is absurd.&nbsp; It
+isn&rsquo;t what has happened in her life.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s her very
+freedom that makes him torment himself and her, too&mdash;as far as
+I can understand.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>I suppressed a groan and said to myself that I must really get away
+from there.</p>
+<p>Mrs. Blunt was fairly launched now.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;For all his superiority he is a man of the world and shares
+to a certain extent its current opinions.&nbsp; He has no power over
+her.&nbsp; She intimidates him.&nbsp; He wishes he had never set eyes
+on her.&nbsp; Once or twice this morning he looked at me as if he could
+find it in his heart to hate his old mother.&nbsp; There is no doubt
+about it&mdash;he loves her, Monsieur George.&nbsp; He loves her, this
+poor, luckless, perfect <i>homme du monde</i>.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The silence lasted for some time and then I heard a murmur: &ldquo;It&rsquo;s
+a matter of the utmost delicacy between two beings so sensitive, so
+proud.&nbsp; It has to be managed.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>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&mdash;and I sat down again.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I told you I had a request to make,&rdquo; she said.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;I have understood from Mr. Mills that you have been to the West
+Indies, that you have some interests there.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>I was astounded.&nbsp; &ldquo;Interests!&nbsp; I certainly have been
+there,&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;but . . .&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She caught me up.&nbsp; &ldquo;Then why not go there again?&nbsp;
+I am speaking to you frankly because . . .&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But, Madame, I am engaged in this affair with Do&ntilde;a
+Rita, even if I had any interests elsewhere.&nbsp; I won&rsquo;t tell
+you about the importance of my work.&nbsp; I didn&rsquo;t suspect it
+but you brought the news of it to me, and so I needn&rsquo;t point it
+out to you.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>And now we were frankly arguing with each other.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But where will it lead you in the end?&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; And
+would you sacrifice all this to&mdash;the Pretender?&nbsp; A mere figure
+for the front page of illustrated papers.&rdquo;&rsquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I never think of him,&rdquo;&nbsp; I said curtly, &ldquo;but
+I suppose Do&ntilde;a Rita&rsquo;s feelings, instincts, call it what
+you like&mdash;or only her chivalrous fidelity to her mistakes&mdash;&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Do&ntilde;a Rita&rsquo;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.&nbsp; It simplifies infinite difficulties,
+I mean moral as well as material.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s extremely to the
+advantage of her dignity, of her future, and of her peace of mind.&nbsp;
+But I am thinking, of course, mainly of my son.&nbsp; He is most exacting.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>I felt extremely sick at heart.&nbsp; &ldquo;And so I am to drop
+everything and vanish,&rdquo; I said, rising from my chair again.&nbsp;
+And this time Mrs. Blunt got up, too, with a lofty and inflexible manner
+but she didn&rsquo;t dismiss me yet.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; she said distinctly.&nbsp; &ldquo;All this, my
+dear Monsieur George, is such an accident.&nbsp; What have you got to
+do here?&nbsp; You look to me like somebody who would find adventures
+wherever he went as interesting and perhaps less dangerous than this
+one.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She slurred over the word dangerous but I picked it up.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What do you know of its dangers, Madame, may I ask?&rdquo;&nbsp;
+But she did not condescend to hear.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And then you, too, have your chivalrous feelings,&rdquo; she
+went on, unswerving, distinct, and tranquil.&nbsp; &ldquo;You are not
+absurd.&nbsp; But my son is.&nbsp; He would shut her up in a convent
+for a time if he could.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;He isn&rsquo;t the only one,&rdquo; I muttered.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Indeed!&rdquo; she was startled, then lower, &ldquo;Yes.&nbsp;
+That woman must be the centre of all sorts of passions,&rdquo; she mused
+audibly.&nbsp; &ldquo;But what have you got to do with all this?&nbsp;
+It&rsquo;s nothing to you.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She waited for me to speak.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Exactly, Madame,&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;and therefore I don&rsquo;t
+see why I should concern myself in all this one way or another.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No,&rdquo; she assented with a weary air, &ldquo;except that
+you might ask yourself what is the good of tormenting a man of noble
+feelings, however absurd.&nbsp; His Southern blood makes him very violent
+sometimes.&nbsp; I fear&mdash;&rdquo;&nbsp; And then for the first time
+during this conversation, for the first time since I left Do&ntilde;a
+Rita the day before, for the first time I laughed.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Do you mean to hint, Madame, that Southern gentlemen are dead
+shots?&nbsp; I am aware of that&mdash;from novels.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>I spoke looking her straight in the face and I made that exquisite,
+aristocratic old woman positively blink by my directness.&nbsp; There
+was a faint flush on her delicate old cheeks but she didn&rsquo;t move
+a muscle of her face.&nbsp; I made her a most respectful bow and went
+out of the studio.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h3>CHAPTER IV</h3>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>Through the great arched window of the hall I saw the hotel brougham
+waiting at the door.&nbsp; 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: &ldquo;I am
+obliged to go out.&nbsp; Your mother&rsquo;s carriage is at the door.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+I didn&rsquo;t think he was asleep.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp;
+But I didn&rsquo;t stop&mdash;I didn&rsquo;t want to see him&mdash;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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; It was a woman.&nbsp; A
+totally unexpected woman.&nbsp; A perfect stranger.&nbsp; She came away
+quickly to meet me.&nbsp; Her face was veiled and she was dressed in
+a dark walking costume and a very simple form of hat.&nbsp; She murmured:
+&ldquo;I had an idea that Monsieur was in the house,&rdquo; raising
+a gloved hand to lift her veil.&nbsp; It was Rose and she gave me a
+shock.&nbsp; I had never seen her before but with her little black silk
+apron and a white cap with ribbons on her head.&nbsp; This outdoor dress
+was like a disguise.&nbsp; I asked anxiously:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What has happened to Madame?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Nothing.&nbsp; I have a letter,&rdquo; she murmured, and I
+saw it appear between the fingers of her extended hand, in a very white
+envelope which I tore open impatiently.&nbsp; It consisted of a few
+lines only.&nbsp; It began abruptly:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;If you are gone to sea then I can&rsquo;t forgive you for
+not sending the usual word at the last moment.&nbsp; If you are not
+gone why don&rsquo;t you come?&nbsp; Why did you leave me yesterday?&nbsp;
+You leave me crying&mdash;I who haven&rsquo;t cried for years and years,
+and you haven&rsquo;t the sense to come back within the hour, within
+twenty hours!&nbsp; This conduct is idiotic&rdquo;&mdash;and a sprawling
+signature of the four magic letters at the bottom.</p>
+<p>While I was putting the letter in my pocket the girl said in an earnest
+undertone: &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t like to leave Madame by herself for
+any length of time.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;How long have you been in my room?&rdquo; I asked.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;The time seemed long.&nbsp; I hope Monsieur won&rsquo;t mind
+the liberty.&nbsp; I sat for a little in the hall but then it struck
+me I might be seen.&nbsp; In fact, Madame told me not to be seen if
+I could help it.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Why did she tell you that?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I permitted myself to suggest that to Madame.&nbsp; It might
+have given a false impression.&nbsp; Madame is frank and open like the
+day but it won&rsquo;t do with everybody.&nbsp; There are people who
+would put a wrong construction on anything.&nbsp; Madame&rsquo;s sister
+told me Monsieur was out.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And you didn&rsquo;t believe her?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;<i>Non</i>, Monsieur.&nbsp; I have lived with Madame&rsquo;s
+sister for nearly a week when she first came into this house.&nbsp;
+She wanted me to leave the message, but I said I would wait a little.&nbsp;
+Then I sat down in the big porter&rsquo;s chair in the hall and after
+a while, everything being very quiet, I stole up here.&nbsp; I know
+the disposition of the apartments.&nbsp; I reckoned Madame&rsquo;s sister
+would think that I got tired of waiting and let myself out.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And you have been amusing yourself watching the street ever
+since?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;The time seemed long,&rdquo; she answered evasively.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;An empty <i>coup&eacute;</i> came to the door about an hour ago
+and it&rsquo;s still waiting,&rdquo; she added, looking at me inquisitively.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It seems strange.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;There are some dancing girls staying in the house,&rdquo;
+I said negligently.&nbsp; &ldquo;Did you leave Madame alone?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;There&rsquo;s the gardener and his wife in the house.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Those people keep at the back.&nbsp; Is Madame alone?&nbsp;
+That&rsquo;s what I want to know.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Monsieur forgets that I have been three hours away; but I
+assure Monsieur that here in this town it&rsquo;s perfectly safe for
+Madame to be alone.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And wouldn&rsquo;t it be anywhere else?&nbsp; It&rsquo;s the
+first I hear of it.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;In Paris, in our apartments in the hotel, it&rsquo;s all right,
+too; but in the Pavilion, for instance, I wouldn&rsquo;t leave Madame
+by herself, not for half an hour.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What is there in the Pavilion?&rdquo; I asked.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It&rsquo;s a sort of feeling I have,&rdquo; she murmured reluctantly
+. . . &ldquo;Oh!&nbsp; There&rsquo;s that <i>coup&eacute;</i> going
+away.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She made a movement towards the window but checked herself.&nbsp;
+I hadn&rsquo;t moved.&nbsp; The rattle of wheels on the cobble-stones
+died out almost at once.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Will Monsieur write an answer?&rdquo; Rose suggested after
+a short silence.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Hardly worth while,&rdquo; I said.&nbsp; &ldquo;I will be
+there very soon after you.&nbsp; Meantime, please tell Madame from me
+that I am not anxious to see any more tears.&nbsp; Tell her this just
+like that, you understand.&nbsp; I will take the risk of not being received.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She dropped her eyes, said: &ldquo;<i>Oui</i>, Monsieur,&rdquo; and
+at my suggestion waited, holding the door of the room half open, till
+I went downstairs to see the road clear.</p>
+<p>It was a kind of deaf-and-dumb house.&nbsp; The black-and-white hall
+was empty and everything was perfectly still.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; I emitted a low whistle which didn&rsquo;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.&nbsp; With
+just a nod to my whisper: &ldquo;Take a fiacre,&rdquo; she glided out
+and I shut the door noiselessly behind her.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I have given Madame the message,&rdquo; she said in her contained
+voice, swinging the door wide open.&nbsp; Then after relieving me of
+my hat and coat she announced me with the simple words: &ldquo;<i>Voil&agrave;</i>
+Monsieur,&rdquo; and hurried away.&nbsp; Directly I appeared Do&ntilde;a
+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: &ldquo;The dry season
+has set in.&rdquo;&nbsp; I glanced at the pink tips of her fingers perfunctorily
+and then drew back.&nbsp; She let her hands fall negligently as if she
+had no use for them any more and put on a serious expression.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;So it seems,&rdquo; I said, sitting down opposite her.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;For how long, I wonder.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;For years and years.&nbsp; One gets so little encouragement.&nbsp;
+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&rsquo;t know how to do it.&nbsp; You should sit much nearer
+the edge of the chair and hold yourself very stiff, and make it quite
+clear that you don&rsquo;t know what to do with your hands.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>All this in a fascinating voice with a ripple of badinage that seemed
+to play upon the sober surface of her thoughts.&nbsp; Then seeing that
+I did not answer she altered the note a bit.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;<i>Amigo</i> George,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;I take the trouble
+to send for you and here I am before you, talking to you and you say
+nothing.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What am I to say?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;How can I tell?&nbsp; You might say a thousand things.&nbsp;
+You might, for instance, tell me that you were sorry for my tears.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I might also tell you a thousand lies.&nbsp; What do I know
+about your tears?&nbsp; I am not a susceptible idiot.&nbsp; It all depends
+upon the cause.&nbsp; There are tears of quiet happiness.&nbsp; Peeling
+onions also will bring tears.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, you are not susceptible,&rdquo; she flew out at me.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;But you are an idiot all the same.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Is it to tell me this that you have written to me to come?&rdquo;
+I asked with a certain animation.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes.&nbsp; 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.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well, tell me what you think of me.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I would in a moment if I could be half as impertinent as you
+are.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What unexpected modesty,&rdquo; I said.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;These, I suppose, are your sea manners.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I wouldn&rsquo;t put up with half that nonsense from anybody
+at sea.&nbsp; Don&rsquo;t you remember you told me yourself to go away?&nbsp;
+What was I to do?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;How stupid you are.&nbsp; I don&rsquo;t mean that you pretend.&nbsp;
+You really are.&nbsp; Do you understand what I say?&nbsp; I will spell
+it for you.&nbsp; S-t-u-p-i-d.&nbsp; Ah, now I feel better.&nbsp; Oh,
+<i>amigo</i> George, my dear fellow-conspirator for the king&mdash;the
+king.&nbsp; Such a king!&nbsp; <i>Vive le</i> <i>Roi</i>!&nbsp; Come,
+why don&rsquo;t you shout <i>Vive</i> <i>le Roi</i>, too?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I am not your parrot,&rdquo; I said.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No, he never sulked.&nbsp; He was a charming, good-mannered
+bird, accustomed to the best society, whereas you, I suppose, are nothing
+but a heartless vagabond like myself.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I daresay you are, but I suppose nobody had the insolence
+to tell you that to your face.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well, very nearly.&nbsp; It was what it amounted to.&nbsp;
+I am not stupid.&nbsp; There is no need to spell out simple words for
+me.&nbsp; It just came out.&nbsp; Don Juan struggled desperately to
+keep the truth in.&nbsp; It was most pathetic.&nbsp; And yet he couldn&rsquo;t
+help himself.&nbsp; He talked very much like a parrot.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Of the best society,&rdquo; I suggested.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes, the most honourable of parrots.&nbsp; I don&rsquo;t like
+parrot-talk.&nbsp; It sounds so uncanny.&nbsp; Had I lived in the Middle
+Ages I am certain I would have believed that a talking bird must be
+possessed by the devil.&nbsp; I am sure Therese would believe that now.&nbsp;
+My own sister!&nbsp; She would cross herself many times and simply quake
+with terror.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But you were not terrified,&rdquo; I said.&nbsp; &ldquo;May
+I ask when that interesting communication took place?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yesterday, just before you blundered in here of all days in
+the year.&nbsp; I was sorry for him.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Why tell me this?&nbsp; I couldn&rsquo;t help noticing it.&nbsp;
+I regretted I hadn&rsquo;t my umbrella with me.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Those unforgiven tears!&nbsp; Oh, you simple soul!&nbsp; Don&rsquo;t
+you know that people never cry for anybody but themselves? . . . <i>Amigo</i>
+George, tell me&mdash;what are we doing in this world?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Do you mean all the people, everybody?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No, only people like you and me.&nbsp; Simple people, in this
+world which is eaten up with charlatanism of all sorts so that even
+we, the simple, don&rsquo;t know any longer how to trust each other.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Don&rsquo;t we?&nbsp; Then why don&rsquo;t you trust him?&nbsp;
+You are dying to do so, don&rsquo;t you know?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What have you been doing since you left me yesterday?&rdquo;
+she asked.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;The first thing I remember I abused your sister horribly this
+morning.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And how did she take it?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Like a warm shower in spring.&nbsp; She drank it all in and
+unfolded her petals.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What poetical expressions he uses!&nbsp; That girl is more
+perverted than one would think possible, considering what she is and
+whence she came.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s true that I, too, come from the same
+spot.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;She is slightly crazy.&nbsp; I am a great favourite with her.&nbsp;
+I don&rsquo;t say this to boast.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It must be very comforting.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes, it has cheered me immensely.&nbsp; 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.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Do&ntilde;a Rita raised her head.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;A lady!&nbsp; Women seem such mysterious creatures to me.&nbsp;
+I don&rsquo;t know them.&nbsp; Did you abuse her?&nbsp; Did she&mdash;how
+did you say that?&mdash;unfold her petals, too?&nbsp; Was she really
+and truly . . .?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;She is simply perfection in her way and the conversation was
+by no means banal.&nbsp; I fancy that if your late parrot had heard
+it, he would have fallen off his perch.&nbsp; For after all, in that
+All&egrave;gre Pavilion, my dear Rita, you were but a crowd of glorified
+<i>bourgeois</i>.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She was beautifully animated now.&nbsp; 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.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Now I think of it! . . . Perhaps that&rsquo;s the reason I
+never could feel perfectly serious while they were demolishing the world
+about my ears.&nbsp; I fancy now that I could tell beforehand what each
+of them was going to say.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; That doesn&rsquo;t apply to the master
+of the house, who never talked much.&nbsp; He sat there mostly silent
+and looming up three sizes bigger than any of them.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;The ruler of the aviary,&rdquo; I muttered viciously.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It annoys you that I should talk of that time?&rdquo; she
+asked in a tender voice.&nbsp; &ldquo;Well, I won&rsquo;t, except for
+once to say that you must not make a mistake: in that aviary he was
+the man.&nbsp; I know because he used to talk to me afterwards sometimes.&nbsp;
+Strange!&nbsp; For six years he seemed to carry all the world and me
+with it in his hand. . . . &rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;He dominates you yet,&rdquo; I shouted.</p>
+<p>She shook her head innocently as a child would do.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No, no.&nbsp; You brought him into the conversation yourself.&nbsp;
+You think of him much more than I do.&rdquo;&nbsp; Her voice drooped
+sadly to a hopeless note.&nbsp; &ldquo;I hardly ever do.&nbsp; He is
+not the sort of person to merely flit through one&rsquo;s mind and so
+I have no time.&nbsp; Look.&nbsp; I had eleven letters this morning
+and there were also five telegrams before midday, which have tangled
+up everything.&nbsp; I am quite frightened.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>And she explained to me that one of them&mdash;the long one on the
+top of the pile, on the table over there&mdash;seemed to contain ugly
+inferences directed at herself in a menacing way.&nbsp; She begged me
+to read it and see what I could make of it.</p>
+<p>I knew enough of the general situation to see at a glance that she
+had misunderstood it thoroughly and even amazingly.&nbsp; I proved it
+to her very quickly.&nbsp; But her mistake was so ingenious in its wrongheadedness
+and arose so obviously from the distraction of an acute mind, that I
+couldn&rsquo;t help looking at her admiringly.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Rita,&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;you are a marvellous idiot.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Am I?&nbsp; Imbecile,&rdquo; she retorted with an enchanting
+smile of relief.&nbsp; &ldquo;But perhaps it only seems so to you in
+contrast with the lady so perfect in her way.&nbsp; What is her way?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Her way, I should say, lies somewhere between her sixtieth
+and seventieth year, and I have walked t&ecirc;te-&agrave;-t&ecirc;te
+with her for some little distance this afternoon.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Heavens,&rdquo; she whispered, thunderstruck.&nbsp; &ldquo;And
+meantime I had the son here.&nbsp; He arrived about five minutes after
+Rose left with that note for you,&rdquo; she went on in a tone of awe.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;As a matter of fact, Rose saw him across the street but she thought
+she had better go on to you.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I am furious with myself for not having guessed that much,&rdquo;
+I said bitterly.&nbsp; &ldquo;I suppose you got him out of the house
+about five minutes after you heard I was coming here.&nbsp; Rose ought
+to have turned back when she saw him on his way to cheer your solitude.&nbsp;
+That girl is stupid after all, though she has got a certain amount of
+low cunning which no doubt is very useful at times.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I forbid you to talk like this about Rose.&nbsp; I won&rsquo;t
+have it.&nbsp; Rose is not to be abused before me.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I only mean to say that she failed in this instance to read
+your mind, that&rsquo;s all.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;This is, without exception, the most unintelligent thing you
+have said ever since I have known you.&nbsp; You may understand a lot
+about running contraband and about the minds of a certain class of people,
+but as to Rose&rsquo;s mind let me tell you that in comparison with
+hers yours is absolutely infantile, my adventurous friend.&nbsp; It
+would be contemptible if it weren&rsquo;t so&mdash;what shall I call
+it?&mdash;babyish.&nbsp; You ought to be slapped and put to bed.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp;
+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&rsquo;s heart.&nbsp; No wonder the
+poor wretch could not forget the scene and couldn&rsquo;t restrain his
+tears on the plain of Rambouillet.&nbsp; My moods of resentment against
+Rita, hot as they were, had no more duration than a blaze of straw.&nbsp;
+So I only said:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Much <i>you</i> know about the management of children.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+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.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Come, <i>amigo</i> George, let us leave poor Rose alone.&nbsp;
+You had better tell me what you heard from the lips of the charming
+old lady.&nbsp; Perfection, isn&rsquo;t she?&nbsp; I have never seen
+her in my life, though she says she has seen me several times.&nbsp;
+But she has written to me on three separate occasions and every time
+I answered her as if I were writing to a queen.&nbsp; <i>Amigo</i> George,
+how does one write to a queen?&nbsp; 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?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I will ask you as I have asked the old queen: why do you tell
+me all this, Do&ntilde;a Rita?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;To discover what&rsquo;s in your mind,&rdquo; she said, a
+little impatiently.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;If you don&rsquo;t know that yet!&rdquo; I exclaimed under
+my breath.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No, not in your mind.&nbsp; Can any one ever tell what is
+in a man&rsquo;s mind?&nbsp; But I see you won&rsquo;t tell.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What&rsquo;s the good?&nbsp; You have written to her before,
+I understand.&nbsp; Do you think of continuing the correspondence?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Who knows?&rdquo; she said in a profound tone.&nbsp; &ldquo;She
+is the only woman that ever wrote to me.&nbsp; I returned her three
+letters to her with my last answer, explaining humbly that I preferred
+her to burn them herself.&nbsp; And I thought that would be the end
+of it.&nbsp; But an occasion may still arise.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, if an occasion arises,&rdquo; I said, trying to control
+my rage, &ldquo;you may be able to begin your letter by the words &lsquo;<i>Ch&egrave;re
+Maman</i>.&rsquo;&rdquo;</p>
+<p>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.&nbsp; I got up at
+once and wandered off picking them up industriously.&nbsp; Do&ntilde;a
+Rita&rsquo;s voice behind me said indifferently:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Don&rsquo;t trouble, I will ring for Rose.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No need,&rdquo; I growled, without turning my head, &ldquo;I
+can find my hat in the hall by myself, after I&rsquo;ve finished picking
+up . . . &rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Bear!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>I returned with the box and placed it on the divan near her.&nbsp;
+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.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;George, my friend,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;we have no manners.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You would never have made a career at court, Do&ntilde;a Rita,&rdquo;
+I observed.&nbsp; &ldquo;You are too impulsive.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;This is not bad manners, that&rsquo;s sheer insolence.&nbsp;
+This has happened to you before.&nbsp; If it happens again, as I can&rsquo;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.&nbsp;
+Why did you say this to me?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, just for nothing, out of a full heart.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;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.&nbsp; No! you said
+that for the pleasure of appearing terrible.&nbsp; And you see you are
+not terrible at all, you are rather amusing.&nbsp; Go on, continue to
+be amusing.&nbsp; 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.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I hardly remember now.&nbsp; I heard something about the unworthiness
+of certain white geese out of stuffy drawing-rooms.&nbsp; It sounds
+mad, but the lady knows exactly what she wants.&nbsp; I also heard your
+praises sung.&nbsp; I sat there like a fool not knowing what to say.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Why?&nbsp; You might have joined in the singing.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I didn&rsquo;t feel in the humour, because, don&rsquo;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.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Ah, <i>par example</i>!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;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.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She nodded with an amused air of understanding and I could see that
+she was interested.&nbsp; &ldquo;Anything more?&rdquo; she asked, with
+a flash of radiant eagerness in all her person and bending slightly
+forward towards me.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, it&rsquo;s hardly worth mentioning.&nbsp; It was a sort
+of threat wrapped up, I believe, in genuine anxiety as to what might
+happen to my youthful insignificance.&nbsp; If I hadn&rsquo;t been rather
+on the alert just then I wouldn&rsquo;t even have perceived the meaning.&nbsp;
+But really an allusion to &lsquo;hot Southern blood&rsquo; I could have
+only one meaning.&nbsp; Of course I laughed at it, but only &lsquo;<i>pour
+l&rsquo;honneur</i>&rsquo; and to show I understood perfectly.&nbsp;
+In reality it left me completely indifferent.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Do&ntilde;a Rita looked very serious for a minute.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Indifferent to the whole conversation?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>I looked at her angrily.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;To the whole . . . You see I got up rather out of sorts this
+morning.&nbsp; Unrefreshed, you know.&nbsp; As if tired of life.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>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.&nbsp; Then as if she had made up her mind
+under the pressure of necessity:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Listen, <i>amigo</i>,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;I have suffered
+domination and it didn&rsquo;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&rsquo;t really worthy of me.&nbsp; My dear, it
+went down like a house of cards before my breath.&nbsp; There is something
+in me that will not be dazzled by any sort of prestige in this world,
+worthy or unworthy.&nbsp; I am telling you this because you are younger
+than myself.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;If you want me to say that there is nothing petty or mean
+about you, Do&ntilde;a Rita, then I do say it.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She nodded at me with an air of accepting the rendered justice and
+went on with the utmost simplicity.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And what is it that is coming to me now with all the airs
+of virtue?&nbsp; All the lawful conventions are coming to me, all the
+glamours of respectability!&nbsp; And nobody can say that I have made
+as much as the slightest little sign to them.&nbsp; Not so much as lifting
+my little finger.&nbsp; I suppose you know that?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know.&nbsp; I do not doubt your sincerity in
+anything you say.&nbsp; I am ready to believe.&nbsp; You are not one
+of those who have to work.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Have to work&mdash;what do you mean?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It&rsquo;s a phrase I have heard.&nbsp; What I meant was that
+it isn&rsquo;t necessary for you to make any signs.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She seemed to meditate over this for a while.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Don&rsquo;t be so sure of that,&rdquo; she said, with a flash
+of mischief, which made her voice sound more melancholy than before.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;I am not so sure myself,&rdquo; she continued with a curious,
+vanishing, intonation of despair.&nbsp; &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know the
+truth about myself because I never had an opportunity to compare myself
+to anything in the world.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; For he is all that.&nbsp; And as a
+matter of fact I was touched.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I know.&nbsp; Even to tears,&rdquo; I said provokingly.&nbsp;
+But she wasn&rsquo;t provoked, she only shook her head in negation (which
+was absurd) and pursued the trend of her spoken thoughts.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;That was yesterday,&rdquo; she said.&nbsp; &ldquo;And yesterday
+he was extremely correct and very full of extreme self-esteem which
+expressed itself in the exaggerated delicacy with which he talked.&nbsp;
+But I know him in all his moods.&nbsp; I have known him even playful.&nbsp;
+I didn&rsquo;t listen to him.&nbsp; I was thinking of something else.&nbsp;
+Of things that were neither correct nor playful and that had to be looked
+at steadily with all the best that was in me.&nbsp; And that was why,
+in the end&mdash;I cried&mdash;yesterday.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I saw it yesterday and I had the weakness of being moved by
+those tears for a time.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;If you want to make me cry again I warn you you won&rsquo;t
+succeed.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No, I know.&nbsp; He has been here to-day and the dry season
+has set in.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes, he has been here.&nbsp; I assure you it was perfectly
+unexpected.&nbsp; Yesterday he was railing at the world at large, at
+me who certainly have not made it, at himself and even at his mother.&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp;
+But he ended by telling me that one couldn&rsquo;t believe a single
+word I said, or something like that.&nbsp; You were here then, you heard
+it yourself.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And it cut you to the quick,&rdquo; I said.&nbsp; &ldquo;It
+made you depart from your dignity to the point of weeping on any shoulder
+that happened to be there.&nbsp; 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.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What perspicacity,&rdquo; she observed, with an indulgent,
+mocking smile, then changed her tone.&nbsp; &ldquo;Therefore he wasn&rsquo;t
+expected to-day when he turned up, whereas you, who were expected, remained
+subject to the charms of conversation in that studio.&nbsp; It never
+occurred to you . . . did it?&nbsp; No!&nbsp; What had become of your
+perspicacity?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I tell you I was weary of life,&rdquo; I said in a passion.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;He came in full of smiling playfulness.&nbsp; How well I know
+that mood!&nbsp; Such self-command has its beauty; but it&rsquo;s no
+great help for a man with such fateful eyes.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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&rsquo;t the courage
+to tear himself away from here.&nbsp; He was as simple as that.&nbsp;
+He&rsquo;s a <i>tr&egrave;s galant homme</i> of absolute probity, even
+with himself.&nbsp; I said to him: The trouble is, Don Juan, that it
+isn&rsquo;t love but mistrust that keeps you in torment.&nbsp; I might
+have said jealousy, but I didn&rsquo;t like to use that word.&nbsp;
+A parrot would have added that I had given him no right to be jealous.&nbsp;
+But I am no parrot.&nbsp; I recognized the rights of his passion which
+I could very well see.&nbsp; He is jealous.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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&rsquo;t want to be damned with me before
+his own judgment seat.&nbsp; He is a most noble and loyal gentleman,
+but I have my own Basque peasant soul and don&rsquo;t want to think
+that every time he goes away from my feet&mdash;yes, <i>mon cher</i>,
+on this carpet, look for the marks of scorching&mdash;that he goes away
+feeling tempted to brush the dust off his moral sleeve.&nbsp; That!&nbsp;
+Never!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>With brusque movements she took a cigarette out of the box, held
+it in her fingers for a moment, then dropped it unconsciously.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And then, I don&rsquo;t love him,&rdquo; she uttered slowly
+as if speaking to herself and at the same time watching the very quality
+of that thought.&nbsp; &ldquo;I never did.&nbsp; At first he fascinated
+me with his fatal aspect and his cold society smiles.&nbsp; But I have
+looked into those eyes too often.&nbsp; There are too many disdains
+in this aristocratic republican without a home.&nbsp; His fate may be
+cruel, but it will always be commonplace.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; I was sorry enough for him to feel that if he had suddenly
+taken me by the throat and strangled me slowly, <i>avec d&eacute;lices</i>,
+I could forgive him while I choked.&nbsp; How correct he was!&nbsp;
+But bitterness against me peeped out of every second phrase.&nbsp; At
+last I raised my hand and said to him, &lsquo;Enough.&rsquo;&nbsp; I
+believe he was shocked by my plebeian abruptness but he was too polite
+to show it.&nbsp; His conventions will always stand in the way of his
+nature.&nbsp; 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,&mdash;and yet in everything
+there was an implication that he couldn&rsquo;t forgive me my very existence.&nbsp;
+I did ask him whether he didn&rsquo;t think that it was absurd on his
+part . . . &rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Didn&rsquo;t you say that it was exquisitely absurd?&rdquo;
+I asked.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Exquisitely! . . . &rdquo; Do&ntilde;a Rita was surprised
+at my question.&nbsp; &ldquo;No.&nbsp; Why should I say that?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It would have reconciled him to your abruptness.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s
+their family expression.&nbsp; It would have come with a familiar sound
+and would have been less offensive.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Offensive,&rdquo; Do&ntilde;a Rita repeated earnestly.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t think he was offended; he suffered in another way,
+but I didn&rsquo;t care for that.&nbsp; It was I that had become offended
+in the end, without spite, you understand, but past bearing.&nbsp; I
+didn&rsquo;t spare him.&nbsp; 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&mdash;that was neither generous nor high
+minded; it was positively frantic.&nbsp; He got up and went away to
+lean against the mantelpiece, there, on his elbow and with his head
+in his hand.&nbsp; You have no idea of the charm and the distinction
+of his pose.&nbsp; I couldn&rsquo;t help admiring him: the expression,
+the grace, the fatal suggestion of his immobility.&nbsp; Oh, yes, I
+am sensible to aesthetic impressions, I have been educated to believe
+that there is a soul in them.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I suspect he was never so disgusted and appalled in his life.&nbsp;
+His self-command is the most admirable worldly thing I have ever seen.&nbsp;
+What made it beautiful was that one could feel in it a tragic suggestion
+as in a great work of art.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>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.&nbsp; I said:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I always thought that love for you could work great wonders.&nbsp;
+And now I am certain.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Are you trying to be ironic?&rdquo; she said sadly and very
+much as a child might have spoken.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know,&rdquo; I answered in a tone of the same
+simplicity.&nbsp; &ldquo;I find it very difficult to be generous.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I, too,&rdquo; she said with a sort of funny eagerness.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;I didn&rsquo;t treat him very generously.&nbsp; Only I didn&rsquo;t
+say much more.&nbsp; I found I didn&rsquo;t care what I said&mdash;and
+it would have been like throwing insults at a beautiful composition.&nbsp;
+He was well inspired not to move.&nbsp; It has spared him some disagreeable
+truths and perhaps I would even have said more than the truth.&nbsp;
+I am not fair.&nbsp; I am no more fair than other people.&nbsp; I would
+have been harsh.&nbsp; My very admiration was making me more angry.&nbsp;
+It&rsquo;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.&nbsp; When I came to that conclusion I became glad that
+I was angry or else I would have laughed right out before him.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I have heard a woman say once, a woman of the people&mdash;do
+you hear me, Do&ntilde;a Rita?&mdash;therefore deserving your attention,
+that one should never laugh at love.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;My dear,&rdquo; she said gently, &ldquo;I have been taught
+to laugh at most things by a man who never laughed himself; but it&rsquo;s
+true that he never spoke of love to me, love as a subject that is.&nbsp;
+So perhaps . . . But why?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Because (but maybe that old woman was crazy), because, she
+said, there was death in the mockery of love.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Do&ntilde;a Rita moved slightly her beautiful shoulders and went
+on:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I am glad, then, I didn&rsquo;t laugh.&nbsp; And I am also
+glad I said nothing more.&nbsp; I was feeling so little generous that
+if I had known something then of his mother&rsquo;s allusion to &lsquo;white
+geese&rsquo; I would have advised him to get one of them and lead it
+away on a beautiful blue ribbon.&nbsp; Mrs. Blunt was wrong, you know,
+to be so scornful.&nbsp; A white goose is exactly what her son wants.&nbsp;
+But look how badly the world is arranged.&nbsp; Such white birds cannot
+be got for nothing and he has not enough money even to buy a ribbon.&nbsp;
+Who knows!&nbsp; Maybe it was this which gave that tragic quality to
+his pose by the mantelpiece over there.&nbsp; Yes, that was it.&nbsp;
+Though no doubt I didn&rsquo;t see it then.&nbsp; As he didn&rsquo;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.&nbsp;
+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&rsquo;t be dismissed at will.&nbsp;
+And as I shook my head he insisted rather darkly: &lsquo;Oh, yes, Do&ntilde;a
+Rita, it is so.&nbsp; Cherish no illusions about that fact.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+It sounded so threatening that in my surprise I didn&rsquo;t even acknowledge
+his parting bow.&nbsp; He went out of that false situation like a wounded
+man retreating after a fight.&nbsp; No, I have nothing to reproach myself
+with.&nbsp; I did nothing.&nbsp; I led him into nothing.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; He must have felt like a man who had betrayed
+himself for nothing.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s horrible.&nbsp; It&rsquo;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&rsquo;t help his hatred of
+the thing that is: and as to his love, which is just as real, well&mdash;could
+I have rushed away from him to shut myself up in a convent?&nbsp; Could
+I?&nbsp; After all I have a right to my share of daylight.&rdquo;</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h3>CHAPTER V</h3>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>I took my eyes from her face and became aware that dusk was beginning
+to steal into the room.&nbsp; How strange it seemed.&nbsp; 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&rsquo; wings.&nbsp; The effect was supposed to be
+Pompeiian and Rita and I had often laughed at the delirious fancy of
+some enriched shopkeeper.&nbsp; 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.</p>
+<p>Without words, without gestures, Do&ntilde;a Rita was heard again.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;It may have been as near coming to pass as this.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+She showed me the breadth of her little finger nail.&nbsp; &ldquo;Yes,
+as near as that.&nbsp; Why?&nbsp; How?&nbsp; Just like that, for nothing.&nbsp;
+Because it had come up.&nbsp; Because a wild notion had entered a practical
+old woman&rsquo;s head.&nbsp; Yes.&nbsp; And the best of it is that
+I have nothing to complain of.&nbsp; Had I surrendered I would have
+been perfectly safe with these two.&nbsp; It is they or rather he who
+couldn&rsquo;t trust me, or rather that something which I express, which
+I stand for.&nbsp; Mills would never tell me what it was.&nbsp; Perhaps
+he didn&rsquo;t know exactly himself.&nbsp; He said it was something
+like genius.&nbsp; My genius!&nbsp; Oh, I am not conscious of it, believe
+me, I am not conscious of it.&nbsp; But if I were I wouldn&rsquo;t pluck
+it out and cast it away.&nbsp; I am ashamed of nothing, of nothing!&nbsp;
+Don&rsquo;t be stupid enough to think that I have the slightest regret.&nbsp;
+There is no regret.&nbsp; First of all because I am I&mdash;and then
+because . . . My dear, believe me, I have had a horrible time of it
+myself lately.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>This seemed to be the last word.&nbsp; 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&mdash;<i>por</i>
+<i>el Rey</i>! After a time, tipping the ash into the bowl on her left
+hand, she asked me in a friendly, almost tender, tone:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What are you thinking of, <i>amigo</i>?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I was thinking of your immense generosity.&nbsp; You want
+to give a crown to one man, a fortune to another.&nbsp; That is very
+fine.&nbsp; But I suppose there is a limit to your generosity somewhere.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t see why there should be any limit&mdash;to fine
+intentions!&nbsp; Yes, one would like to pay ransom and be done with
+it all.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;That&rsquo;s the feeling of a captive; and yet somehow I can&rsquo;t
+think of you as ever having been anybody&rsquo;s captive.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You do display some wonderful insight sometimes.&nbsp; My
+dear, I begin to suspect that men are rather conceited about their powers.&nbsp;
+They think they dominate us.&nbsp; Even exceptional men will think that;
+men too great for mere vanity, men like Henry All&egrave;gre for instance,
+who by his consistent and serene detachment was certainly fit to dominate
+all sorts of people.&nbsp; Yet for the most part they can only do it
+because women choose more or less consciously to let them do so.&nbsp;
+Henry All&egrave;gre, 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.&nbsp; I could
+have run away.&nbsp; I was perfectly capable of it.&nbsp; But I stayed
+looking up at him and&mdash;in the end it was HE who went away and it
+was I who stayed.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Consciously?&rdquo; I murmured.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Consciously?&nbsp; You may just as well ask my shadow that
+lay so still by me on the young grass in that morning sunshine.&nbsp;
+I never knew before how still I could keep.&nbsp; It wasn&rsquo;t the
+stillness of terror.&nbsp; I remained, knowing perfectly well that if
+I ran he was not the man to run after me.&nbsp; I remember perfectly
+his deep-toned, politely indifferent &lsquo;<i>Restez donc</i>.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+He was mistaken.&nbsp; Already then I hadn&rsquo;t the slightest intention
+to move.&nbsp; 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&rsquo;t know for what purpose I remained.&nbsp; Really, that
+couldn&rsquo;t be expected. . . . Why do you sigh like this?&nbsp; Would
+you have preferred me to be idiotically innocent or abominably wise?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;These are not the questions that trouble me,&rdquo; I said.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;If I sighed it is because I am weary.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And getting stiff, too, I should say, in this Pompeiian armchair.&nbsp;
+You had better get out of it and sit on this couch as you always used
+to do.&nbsp; That, at any rate, is not Pompeiian.&nbsp; You have been
+growing of late extremely formal, I don&rsquo;t know why.&nbsp; If it
+is a pose then for goodness&rsquo; sake drop it.&nbsp; Are you going
+to model yourself on Captain Blunt?&nbsp; You couldn&rsquo;t, you know.&nbsp;
+You are too young.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t want to model myself on anybody,&rdquo; I said.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;And anyway Blunt is too romantic; and, moreover, he has been
+and is yet in love with you&mdash;a thing that requires some style,
+an attitude, something of which I am altogether incapable.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You know it isn&rsquo;t so stupid, this what you have just
+said.&nbsp; Yes, there is something in this.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I am not stupid,&rdquo; I protested, without much heat.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, yes, you are.&nbsp; You don&rsquo;t know the world enough
+to judge.&nbsp; You don&rsquo;t know how wise men can be.&nbsp; Owls
+are nothing to them.&nbsp; Why do you try to look like an owl?&nbsp;
+There are thousands and thousands of them waiting for me outside the
+door: the staring, hissing beasts.&nbsp; You don&rsquo;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.&nbsp; I have known nothing of this in my
+life but with you.&nbsp; There had always been some fear, some constraint,
+lurking in the background behind everybody, everybody&mdash;except you,
+my friend.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;An unmannerly, Arcadian state of affairs.&nbsp; I am glad
+you like it.&nbsp; Perhaps it&rsquo;s because you were intelligent enough
+to perceive that I was not in love with you in any sort of style.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;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.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You may say anything without offence.&nbsp; But has it never
+occurred to your sagacity that I just, simply, loved you?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Just&mdash;simply,&rdquo; she repeated in a wistful tone.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You didn&rsquo;t want to trouble your head about it, is that
+it?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;My poor head.&nbsp; From your tone one might think you yearned
+to cut it off.&nbsp; No, my dear, I have made up my mind not to lose
+my head.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You would be astonished to know how little I care for your
+mind.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Would I?&nbsp; Come and sit on the couch all the same,&rdquo;
+she said after a moment of hesitation.&nbsp; Then, as I did not move
+at once, she added with indifference: &ldquo;You may sit as far away
+as you like, it&rsquo;s big enough, goodness knows.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The light was ebbing slowly out of the rotunda and to my bodily eyes
+she was beginning to grow shadowy.&nbsp; I sat down on the couch and
+for a long time no word passed between us.&nbsp; We made no movement.&nbsp;
+We did not even turn towards each other.&nbsp; All I was conscious of
+was the softness of the seat which seemed somehow to cause a relaxation
+of my stern mood, I won&rsquo;t say against my will but without any
+will on my part.&nbsp; Another thing I was conscious of, strangely enough,
+was the enormous brass bowl for cigarette ends.&nbsp; Quietly, with
+the least possible action, Do&ntilde;a Rita moved it to the other side
+of her motionless person.&nbsp; Slowly, the fantastic women with butterflies&rsquo;
+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.</p>
+<p>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.&nbsp;
+I fought against it for a moment and then my resistance gave way.&nbsp;
+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 Do&ntilde;a
+Rita&rsquo;s shoulder which yet did not give way, did not flinch at
+all.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; But I remained dry-eyed.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; All that time she hadn&rsquo;t
+stirred.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; The distance must have
+been immense because the silence was so perfect, the feeling as if of
+eternal stillness.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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&mdash;and my felicity became complete.</p>
+<p>It was a dreamlike state combined with a dreamlike sense of insecurity.&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp;
+At this sound the greatness of spaces departed.&nbsp; 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:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Why did you ring, Rita?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>There was a bell rope within reach of her hand.&nbsp; I had not felt
+her move, but she said very low:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I rang for the lights.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You didn&rsquo;t want the lights.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It was time,&rdquo; she whispered secretly.</p>
+<p>Somewhere within the house a door slammed.&nbsp; I got away from
+her feeling small and weak as if the best part of me had been torn away
+and irretrievably lost.&nbsp; Rose must have been somewhere near the
+door.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It&rsquo;s abominable,&rdquo; I murmured to the still, idol-like
+shadow on the couch.</p>
+<p>The answer was a hurried, nervous whisper: &ldquo;I tell you it was
+time.&nbsp; I rang because I had no strength to push you away.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>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.&nbsp; Rose distributed them over the room.&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp; Rose attended
+to the lamp on the nearest mantelpiece, then turned about and asked
+in a confident undertone.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;<i>Monsieur d&icirc;ne</i>?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>I had lost myself with my elbows on my knees and my head in my hands,
+but I heard the words distinctly.&nbsp; I heard also the silence which
+ensued.&nbsp; I sat up and took the responsibility of the answer on
+myself.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Impossible.&nbsp; I am going to sea this evening.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>This was perfectly true only I had totally forgotten it till then.&nbsp;
+For the last two days my being was no longer composed of memories but
+exclusively of sensations of the most absorbing, disturbing, exhausting
+nature.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp;
+But now I was recovering.&nbsp; And naturally the first thing I remembered
+was the fact that I was going to sea.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You have heard, Rose,&rdquo; Do&ntilde;a Rita said at last
+with some impatience.</p>
+<p>The girl waited a moment longer before she said:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, yes!&nbsp; There is a man waiting for Monsieur in the
+hall.&nbsp; A seaman.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>It could be no one but Dominic.&nbsp; 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.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I have seen him before,&rdquo; continued Rose, &ldquo;and
+as he told me he has been pursuing Monsieur all the afternoon and didn&rsquo;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.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>I said: &ldquo;Very well,&rdquo; and with a sudden resumption of
+her extremely busy, not-a-moment-to-lose manner Rose departed from the
+room.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; But
+everything vanished at the sound of Do&ntilde;a Rita&rsquo;s loud whisper
+full of boundless dismay, such as to make one&rsquo;s hair stir on one&rsquo;s
+head.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;<i>Mon Dieu</i>!&nbsp; And what is going to happen now?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She got down from the couch and walked to a window.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp;
+Whatever the question meant she was not likely to see an answer to it
+outside.&nbsp; But her whisper had offended me, had hurt something infinitely
+deep, infinitely subtle and infinitely clear-eyed in my nature.&nbsp;
+I said after her from the couch on which I had remained, &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t
+lose your composure.&nbsp; You will always have some sort of bell at
+hand.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>I saw her shrug her uncovered shoulders impatiently.&nbsp; 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.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You set up for being unforgiving,&rdquo; she said without
+anger.</p>
+<p>I sprang to my feet while she turned about and came towards me bravely,
+with a wistful smile on her bold, adolescent face.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It seems to me,&rdquo; she went on in a voice like a wave
+of love itself, &ldquo;that one should try to understand before one
+sets up for being unforgiving.&nbsp; Forgiveness is a very fine word.&nbsp;
+It is a fine invocation.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;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.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;This thing is beyond words altogether,&rdquo; I said.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;Beyond forgiveness, beyond forgetting, beyond anger or jealousy.
+. . . There is nothing between us two that could make us act together.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Then we must fall back perhaps on something within us, that&mdash;you
+admit it?&mdash;we have in common.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Don&rsquo;t be childish,&rdquo; I said.&nbsp; &ldquo;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!&nbsp; But it can&rsquo;t be
+broken.&nbsp; And forgetfulness, like everything else, can only come
+from you.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s an impossible situation to stand up against.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She listened with slightly parted lips as if to catch some further
+resonances.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;There is a sort of generous ardour about you,&rdquo; she said,
+&ldquo;which I don&rsquo;t really understand.&nbsp; No, I don&rsquo;t
+know it.&nbsp; Believe me, it is not of myself I am thinking.&nbsp;
+And you&mdash;you are going out to-night to make another landing.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes, it is a fact that before many hours I will be sailing
+away from you to try my luck once more.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Your wonderful luck,&rdquo; she breathed out.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, yes, I am wonderfully lucky.&nbsp; Unless the luck really
+is yours&mdash;in having found somebody like me, who cares at the same
+time so much and so little for what you have at heart.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What time will you be leaving the harbour?&rdquo; she asked.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Some time between midnight and daybreak.&nbsp; Our men may
+be a little late in joining, but certainly we will be gone before the
+first streak of light.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What freedom!&rdquo; she murmured enviously.&nbsp; &ldquo;It&rsquo;s
+something I shall never know. . . .&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Freedom!&rdquo; I protested.&nbsp; &ldquo;I am a slave to
+my word.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; That&rsquo;s
+my freedom.&nbsp; I wonder what they would think if they knew of your
+existence.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t exist,&rdquo; she said.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;That&rsquo;s easy to say.&nbsp; But I will go as if you didn&rsquo;t
+exist&mdash;yet only because you do exist.&nbsp; You exist in me.&nbsp;
+I don&rsquo;t know where I end and you begin.&nbsp; You have got into
+my heart and into my veins and into my brain.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Take this fancy out and trample it down in the dust,&rdquo;
+she said in a tone of timid entreaty.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Heroically,&rdquo; I suggested with the sarcasm of despair.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well, yes, heroically,&rdquo; she said; and there passed between
+us dim smiles, I have no doubt of the most touching imbecility on earth.&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp; Do&ntilde;a Rita made a step towards
+me, and as I attempted to seize her hand she flung her arms round my
+neck.&nbsp; I felt their strength drawing me towards her and by a sort
+of blind and desperate effort I resisted.&nbsp; And all the time she
+was repeating with nervous insistence:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But it is true that you will go.&nbsp; You will surely.&nbsp;
+Not because of those people but because of me.&nbsp; You will go away
+because you feel you must.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>With every word urging me to get away, her clasp tightened, she hugged
+my head closer to her breast.&nbsp; I submitted, knowing well that I
+could free myself by one more effort which it was in my power to make.&nbsp;
+But before I made it, in a sort of desperation, I pressed a long kiss
+into the hollow of her throat.&nbsp; And lo&mdash;there was no need
+for any effort.&nbsp; With a stifled cry of surprise her arms fell off
+me as if she had been shot.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp;
+I knew perfectly well what I had done and yet I felt that I didn&rsquo;t
+understand what had happened.&nbsp; I became suddenly abashed and I
+muttered that I had better go and dismiss that poor Dominic.&nbsp; She
+made no answer, gave no sign.&nbsp; She stood there lost in a vision&mdash;or
+was it a sensation?&mdash;of the most absorbing kind.&nbsp; I hurried
+out into the hall, shamefaced, as if I were making my escape while she
+wasn&rsquo;t looking.&nbsp; And yet I felt her looking fixedly at me,
+with a sort of stupefaction on her features&mdash;in her whole attitude&mdash;as
+though she had never even heard of such a thing as a kiss in her life.</p>
+<p>A dim lamp (of Pompeiian form) hanging on a long chain left the hall
+practically dark.&nbsp; Dominic, advancing towards me from a distant
+corner, was but a little more opaque shadow than the others.&nbsp; He
+had expected me on board every moment till about three o&rsquo;clock,
+but as I didn&rsquo;t turn up and gave no sign of life in any other
+way he started on his hunt.&nbsp; He sought news of me from the <i>gar&ccedil;ons</i>
+at the various caf&eacute;s, from the <i>cochers de fiacre</i> in front
+of the Exchange, from the tobacconist lady at the counter of the fashionable
+<i>D&eacute;bit de Tabac</i>, from the old man who sold papers outside
+the <i>cercle</i>, and from the flower-girl at the door of the fashionable
+restaurant where I had my table.&nbsp; That young woman, whose business
+name was Irma, had come on duty about mid-day.&nbsp; She said to Dominic:
+&ldquo;I think I&rsquo;ve seen all his friends this morning but I haven&rsquo;t
+seen him for a week.&nbsp; What has become of him?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;That&rsquo;s exactly what I want to know,&rdquo; 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 L&eacute;onore&rsquo;s caf&eacute;.</p>
+<p>I expressed to him my surprise that he should fuss about me like
+an old hen over a chick.&nbsp; It wasn&rsquo;t like him at all.&nbsp;
+And he said that &ldquo;<i>en effet</i>&rdquo; it was Madame L&eacute;onore
+who wouldn&rsquo;t give him any peace.&nbsp; He hoped I wouldn&rsquo;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&rsquo;t at home but the woman of the house looked so funny
+that he didn&rsquo;t know what to make of it.&nbsp; Therefore, after
+some hesitation, he took the liberty to inquire at this house, too,
+and being told that I couldn&rsquo;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.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;There is nothing changed, Dominic,&rdquo; I said.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No change of any sort?&rdquo; 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.&nbsp; He peered at me
+in an extraordinary manner as if he wanted to make sure that I had all
+my limbs about me.&nbsp; 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 L&eacute;onore was not easy in her mind about me.</p>
+<p>As I stood alone in the hall, without a sound of any sort, Rose appeared
+before me.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Monsieur will dine after all,&rdquo; she whispered calmly,</p>
+<p>&ldquo;My good girl, I am going to sea to-night.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What am I going to do with Madame?&rdquo; she murmured to
+herself.&nbsp; &ldquo;She will insist on returning to Paris.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, have you heard of it?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I never get more than two hours&rsquo; notice,&rdquo; she
+said.&nbsp; &ldquo;But I know how it will be,&rdquo; her voice lost
+its calmness.&nbsp; &ldquo;I can look after Madame up to a certain point
+but I cannot be altogether responsible.&nbsp; There is a dangerous person
+who is everlastingly trying to see Madame alone.&nbsp; 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&rsquo;t even speak
+to Madame about it.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What sort of person do you mean?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Why, a man,&rdquo; she said scornfully.</p>
+<p>I snatched up my coat and hat.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Aren&rsquo;t there dozens of them?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh!&nbsp; But this one is dangerous.&nbsp; Madame must have
+given him a hold on her in some way.&nbsp; I ought not to talk like
+this about Madame and I wouldn&rsquo;t to anybody but Monsieur.&nbsp;
+I am always on the watch, but what is a poor girl to do? . . . Isn&rsquo;t
+Monsieur going back to Madame?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No, I am not going back.&nbsp; Not this time.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+A mist seemed to fall before my eyes.&nbsp; I could hardly see the girl
+standing by the closed door of the Pempeiian room with extended hand,
+as if turned to stone.&nbsp; But my voice was firm enough.&nbsp; &ldquo;Not
+this time,&rdquo; 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.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Perhaps some other time,&rdquo; I added.</p>
+<p>I heard her say twice to herself: &ldquo;<i>Mon Dieu</i>!&nbsp; <i>Mon,
+Dieu</i>!&rdquo; and then a dismayed: &ldquo;What can Monsieur expect
+me to do?&rdquo;&nbsp; But I had to appear insensible to her distress
+and that not altogether because, in fact, I had no option but to go
+away.&nbsp; 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.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You will tell Madame that I am gone.&nbsp; It will please
+her.&nbsp; Tell her that I am gone&mdash;heroically.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Rose had come up close to me.&nbsp; She met my words by a despairing
+outward movement of her hands as though she were giving everything up.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I see it clearly now that Madame has no friends,&rdquo; she
+declared with such a force of restrained bitterness that it nearly made
+me pause.&nbsp; But the very obscurity of actuating motives drove me
+on and I stepped out through the doorway muttering: &ldquo;Everything
+is as Madame wishes it.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She shot at me a swift: &ldquo;You should resist,&rdquo; of an extraordinary
+intensity, but I strode on down the path.&nbsp; Then Rose&rsquo;s schooled
+temper gave way at last and I heard her angry voice screaming after
+me furiously through the wind and rain: &ldquo;No!&nbsp; Madame has
+no friends.&nbsp; Not one!&rdquo;</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines3"><br /><br /><br /></div>
+<h2>PART FIVE</h2>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines3"><br /><br /><br /></div>
+<h3>CHAPTER I</h3>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>That night I didn&rsquo;t get on board till just before midnight
+and Dominic could not conceal his relief at having me safely there.&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp; I was a mere receptacle for dust and ashes, a living
+testimony to the vanity of all things.&nbsp; My very thoughts were like
+a ghostly rustle of dead leaves.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; But I know nothing about it.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; And thus I had to live alone, unobserved
+even by myself.</p>
+<p>But the trip had been successful.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.</p>
+<p>Generally we used to step on the quay together and I never failed
+to enter for a moment Madame L&eacute;onore&rsquo;s caf&eacute;.&nbsp;
+But this time when I got on the quay Dominic was nowhere to be seen.&nbsp;
+What was it?&nbsp; Abandonment&mdash;discretion&mdash;or had he quarrelled
+with his L&eacute;onore before leaving on the trip?</p>
+<p>My way led me past the caf&eacute; and through the glass panes I
+saw that he was already there.&nbsp; On the other side of the little
+marble table Madame L&eacute;onore, leaning with mature grace on her
+elbow, was listening to him absorbed.&nbsp; Then I passed on and&mdash;what
+would you have!&mdash;I ended by making my way into the street of the
+Consuls.&nbsp; I had nowhere else to go.&nbsp; There were my things
+in the apartment on the first floor.&nbsp; I couldn&rsquo;t bear the
+thought of meeting anybody I knew.</p>
+<p>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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; I accepted
+and said I would be down in the studio in half an hour.&nbsp; I found
+her there by the side of the laid table ready for conversation.&nbsp;
+She began by telling me&mdash;the dear, poor young Monsieur&mdash;in
+a sort of plaintive chant, that there were no letters for me, no letters
+of any kind, no letters from anybody.&nbsp; Glances of absolutely terrifying
+tenderness mingled with flashes of cunning swept over me from head to
+foot while I tried to eat.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Are you giving me Captain Blunt&rsquo;s wine to drink?&rdquo;
+I asked, noting the straw-coloured liquid in my glass.</p>
+<p>She screwed up her mouth as if she had a twinge of toothache and
+assured me that the wine belonged to the house.&nbsp; I would have to
+pay her for it.&nbsp; As far as personal feelings go, Blunt, who addressed
+her always with polite seriousness, was not a favourite with her.&nbsp;
+The &ldquo;charming, brave Monsieur&rdquo; was now fighting for the
+King and religion against the impious Liberals.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; Wanted
+probably to say good-bye to me, shake my hand, the dear, polite Monsieur.</p>
+<p>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.&nbsp; He
+had written to her once about some of his things which he wanted her
+to send to Paris to his mother&rsquo;s address; but she was going to
+do nothing of the kind.&nbsp; 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.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You will get yourself into trouble with the police, Mademoiselle
+Therese, if you go on like that,&rdquo; I said.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; There was
+something behind this attitude which I could not fathom.&nbsp; Suddenly
+she fetched a deep sigh.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Our Rita, too, will end by coming to her sister.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The name for which I had been waiting deprived me of speech for the
+moment.&nbsp; The poor mad sinner had rushed off to some of her wickednesses
+in Paris.&nbsp; Did I know?&nbsp; No?&nbsp; How could she tell whether
+I did know or not?&nbsp; Well!&nbsp; 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. . .</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What time was it?&rdquo; I managed to ask.&nbsp; And with
+the words my life itself was being forced out through my lips.&nbsp;
+But Therese, not noticing anything strange about me, said it was something
+like half-past seven in the morning.&nbsp; The &ldquo;poor sinner&rdquo;
+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 &ldquo;that
+French creature&rdquo; (whom she seemed to love more than her own sister)
+went into my salon and hid herself behind the window curtain.</p>
+<p>I had recovered sufficiently to ask in a quiet natural voice whether
+Do&ntilde;a Rita and Captain Blunt had seen each other.&nbsp; Apparently
+they had not seen each other.&nbsp; The polite captain had looked so
+stern while packing up his kit that Therese dared not speak to him at
+all.&nbsp; And he was in a hurry, too.&nbsp; He had to see his dear
+mother off to Paris before his own departure.&nbsp; Very stern.&nbsp;
+But he shook her hand with a very nice bow.</p>
+<p>Therese elevated her right hand for me to see.&nbsp; It was broad
+and short with blunt fingers, as usual.&nbsp; The pressure of Captain
+Blunt&rsquo;s handshake had not altered its unlovely shape.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What was the good of telling him that our Rita was here?&rdquo;
+went on Therese.&nbsp; &ldquo;I would have been ashamed of her coming
+here and behaving as if the house belonged to her!&nbsp; I had already
+said some prayers at his intention at the half-past six mass, the brave
+gentleman.&nbsp; 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 <i>locataires&rsquo;</i> rooms.&nbsp; At last she
+opened it&mdash;and what do you think?&nbsp; All her hair was loose
+over her shoulders.&nbsp; I suppose it all came down when she flung
+her hat on your bed.&nbsp; I noticed when she arrived that her hair
+wasn&rsquo;t done properly.&nbsp; She used your brushes to do it up
+again in front of your glass.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Wait a moment,&rdquo; I said, and jumped up, upsetting my
+wine to run upstairs as fast as I could.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; I had been struck by the
+wild hope of finding a trace of Rita&rsquo;s passage, a sign or something.&nbsp;
+I pulled out all the drawers violently, thinking that perhaps she had
+hidden there a scrap of paper, a note.&nbsp; It was perfectly mad.&nbsp;
+Of course there was no chance of that.&nbsp; Therese would have seen
+to it.&nbsp; I picked up one after another all the various objects on
+the dressing-table.&nbsp; 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&rsquo;s tawny hairs entangled amongst
+the bristles by a miraculous chance.&nbsp; But Therese would have done
+away with that chance, too.&nbsp; There was nothing to be seen, though
+I held them up to the light with a beating heart.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; Then I
+lighted a cigarette and came downstairs slowly.&nbsp; 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.</p>
+<p>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.&nbsp;
+She hadn&rsquo;t moved at all.&nbsp; She hadn&rsquo;t even picked up
+the overturned glass.&nbsp; But directly I appeared she began to speak
+in an ingratiating voice.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;If you have missed anything of yours upstairs, my dear young
+Monsieur, you mustn&rsquo;t say it&rsquo;s me.&nbsp; You don&rsquo;t
+know what our Rita is.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I wish to goodness,&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;that she had taken
+something.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>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.&nbsp; Perhaps she had taken something?&nbsp; Anything.&nbsp;
+Some small object.&nbsp; I thought suddenly of a Rhenish-stone match-box.&nbsp;
+Perhaps it was that.&nbsp; I didn&rsquo;t remember having seen it when
+upstairs.&nbsp; I wanted to make sure at once.&nbsp; At once.&nbsp;
+But I commanded myself to sit still.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And she so wealthy,&rdquo; Therese went on.&nbsp; &ldquo;Even
+you with your dear generous little heart can do nothing for our Rita.&nbsp;
+No man can do anything for her&mdash;except perhaps one, but she is
+so evilly disposed towards him that she wouldn&rsquo;t even see him,
+if in the goodness of his forgiving heart he were to offer his hand
+to her.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s her bad conscience that frightens her.&nbsp;
+He loves her more than his life, the dear, charitable man.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You mean some rascal in Paris that I believe persecutes Do&ntilde;a
+Rita.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; Don&rsquo;t you know that
+your sister can get him shut up any day or get him expelled by the police?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Therese sighed deeply and put on a look of pained virtue.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, the hardness of her heart.&nbsp; She tried to be tender
+with me.&nbsp; She is awful.&nbsp; I said to her, &lsquo;Rita, have
+you sold your soul to the Devil?&rsquo; and she shouted like a fiend:
+&lsquo;For happiness!&nbsp; Ha, ha, ha!&rsquo;&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; She is possessed.&nbsp; Oh, my dear innocent
+young Monsieur, you have never seen anything like that.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; Such a nice, stout, severe man.&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp; I am sure I don&rsquo;t know what she said.&nbsp; She
+must be leagued with the devil.&nbsp; And then she asked me if I would
+go down and make a cup of chocolate for her Madame.&nbsp; Madame&mdash;that&rsquo;s
+our Rita.&nbsp; Madame!&nbsp; It seems they were going off directly
+to Paris and her Madame had had nothing to eat since the morning of
+the day before.&nbsp; Fancy me being ordered to make chocolate for our
+Rita!&nbsp; However, the poor thing looked so exhausted and white-faced
+that I went.&nbsp; Ah! the devil can give you an awful shake up if he
+likes.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Therese fetched another deep sigh and raising her eyes looked at
+me with great attention.&nbsp; I preserved an inscrutable expression,
+for I wanted to hear all she had to tell me of Rita.&nbsp; I watched
+her with the greatest anxiety composing her face into a cheerful expression.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;So Do&ntilde;a Rita is gone to Paris?&rdquo; I asked negligently.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes, my dear Monsieur.&nbsp; I believe she went straight to
+the railway station from here.&nbsp; When she first got up from the
+couch she could hardly stand.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp;
+And she lying there looking as if she wouldn&rsquo;t live a day.&nbsp;
+But she always hated me.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>I said bitterly, &ldquo;You needn&rsquo;t have worried her like this.&nbsp;
+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.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>I then said a few more things indicative of my disgust with her rapacity,
+but they were quite inadequate, as I wasn&rsquo;t able to find words
+strong enough to express my real mind.&nbsp; But it didn&rsquo;t matter
+really because I don&rsquo;t think Therese heard me at all.&nbsp; She
+seemed lost in rapt amazement.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What do you say, my dear Monsieur?&nbsp; What!&nbsp; All for
+me without any sort of paper?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She appeared distracted by my curt: &ldquo;Yes.&rdquo;&nbsp; Therese
+believed in my truthfulness.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; I expected her to continue the horrible tale but
+apparently she had found something to think about which checked the
+flow.&nbsp; She fetched another sigh and muttered:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Then the law can be just, if it does not require any paper.&nbsp;
+After all, I am her sister.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It&rsquo;s very difficult to believe that&mdash;at sight,&rdquo;
+I said roughly.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Ah, but that I could prove.&nbsp; There are papers for that.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>After this declaration she began to clear the table, preserving a
+thoughtful silence.</p>
+<p>I was not very surprised at the news of Do&ntilde;a Rita&rsquo;s
+departure for Paris.&nbsp; It was not necessary to ask myself why she
+had gone.&nbsp; I didn&rsquo;t even ask myself whether she had left
+the leased Villa on the Prado for ever.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp;
+This, Rita herself had told her before her departure on that agitated
+morning spent in the house&mdash;in my rooms.&nbsp; A close investigation
+demonstrated to me that there was nothing missing from them.&nbsp; Even
+the wretched match-box which I really hoped was gone turned up in a
+drawer after I had, delightedly, given it up.&nbsp; It was a great blow.&nbsp;
+She might have taken that at least!&nbsp; She knew I used to carry it
+about with me constantly while ashore.&nbsp; She might have taken it!&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp; It was like the mania of those disordered
+minds who spend their days hunting for a treasure.&nbsp; I hoped for
+a forgotten hairpin, for some tiny piece of ribbon.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; Of course it was empty; and, anyway, Rita could not possibly
+have known of its existence.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; It was no longer a question
+of &ldquo;this sort of thing&rdquo; killing me.&nbsp; The moral atmosphere
+of this torture was different.&nbsp; It would make me mad.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; They told me that his grievance was quite imaginary.&nbsp;
+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&rsquo;s
+heart long before one came to the door of his cell.</p>
+<p>And there was no one from whom I could hear, to whom I could speak,
+with whom I could evoke the image of Rita.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp; But, really, I could not have given her any intelligible
+excuse for that outrage.&nbsp; 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&rsquo;t make up her mind to part with a few
+francs every month to a servant.&nbsp; It seemed to me that I was no
+longer such a favourite with her as I used to be.&nbsp; That, strange
+to say, was exasperating, too.&nbsp; It was as if some idea, some fruitful
+notion had killed in her all the softer and more humane emotions.&nbsp;
+She went about with brooms and dusters wearing an air of sanctimonious
+thoughtfulness.</p>
+<p>The man who to a certain extent took my place in Therese&rsquo;s
+favour was the old father of the dancing girls inhabiting the ground
+floor.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; He smiled gravely down at
+her, and meanwhile tried to edge towards the front door.&nbsp; I imagine
+he didn&rsquo;t put a great value on Therese&rsquo;s favour.&nbsp; Our
+stay in harbour was prolonged this time and I kept indoors like an invalid.&nbsp;
+One evening I asked that old man to come in and drink and smoke with
+me in the studio.&nbsp; He made no difficulties to accept, brought his
+wooden pipe with him, and was very entertaining in a pleasant voice.&nbsp;
+One couldn&rsquo;t tell whether he was an uncommon person or simply
+a ruffian, but in any case with his white beard he looked quite venerable.&nbsp;
+Naturally he couldn&rsquo;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.&nbsp;
+They were friendly creatures with pleasant, merry voices and he was
+very much devoted to them.&nbsp; He was a muscular man with a high colour
+and silvery locks curling round his bald pate and over his ears, like
+a <i>barocco</i> apostle.&nbsp; I had an idea that he had had a lurid
+past and had seen some fighting in his youth.&nbsp; 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&mdash;which was encouraged.&nbsp;
+I sometimes wondered whether those two careless, merry hard-working
+creatures understood the secret moral beauty of the situation.</p>
+<p>My real company was the dummy in the studio and I can&rsquo;t say
+it was exactly satisfying.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; I knew its history.&nbsp; It was
+not an ordinary dummy.&nbsp; One day, talking with Do&ntilde;a Rita
+about her sister, I had told her that I thought Therese used to knock
+it down on purpose with a broom, and Do&ntilde;a Rita had laughed very
+much.&nbsp; This, she had said, was an instance of dislike from mere
+instinct.&nbsp; That dummy had been made to measure years before.&nbsp;
+It had to wear for days and days the Imperial Byzantine robes in which
+Do&ntilde;a 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.&nbsp;
+Do&ntilde;a 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; Later, it wore
+with the same patience the marvellous hat of the &ldquo;Girl in the
+Hat.&rdquo;&nbsp; But Do&ntilde;a Rita couldn&rsquo;t understand how
+the poor thing ever found its way to Marseilles minus its turnip head.&nbsp;
+Probably it came down with the robes and a quantity of precious brocades
+which she herself had sent down from Paris.&nbsp; The knowledge of its
+origin, the contempt of Captain Blunt&rsquo;s references to it, with
+Therese&rsquo;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&rsquo;t be explained.&nbsp; I felt positively friendly
+to it as if it had been Rita&rsquo;s trusted personal attendant.&nbsp;
+I even went so far as to discover that it had a sort of grace of its
+own.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp;
+I left it in peace.&nbsp; I wasn&rsquo;t mad.&nbsp; I was only convinced
+that I soon would be.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h3>CHAPTER II</h3>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>Notwithstanding my misanthropy I had to see a few people on account
+of all these Royalist affairs which I couldn&rsquo;t very well drop,
+and in truth did not wish to drop.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; I couldn&rsquo;t give all that up.&nbsp; And besides all
+this was related to Do&ntilde;a Rita.&nbsp; 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&rsquo;s and yet conveyed a unique sensation.&nbsp; The very
+memory of it would go through me like a wave of heat.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; Rita&rsquo;s own spirit hovered over the troubled
+waters of Legitimity.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp;
+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&mdash;Madame
+de Lastaola.&nbsp; That&rsquo;s how that steel-grey man called the greatest
+mystery of the universe.&nbsp; 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.</p>
+<p>He would refer in a studiously grave tone to Madame de Lastaola&rsquo;s
+wishes, plans, activities, instructions, movements; or picking up a
+letter from the usual litter of paper found on such men&rsquo;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 &ldquo;a direct communication from&mdash;er&mdash;Paris
+lately.&rdquo;&nbsp; And there would be other maddening circumstances
+connected with those visits.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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&rsquo;s mind except perhaps myself.&nbsp; He, of
+course, was just simply a banker, a very distinguished, a very influential,
+and a very impeccable banker.&nbsp; He persisted also in deferring to
+my judgment and sense with an over-emphasis called out by his perpetual
+surprise at my youth.&nbsp; Though he had seen me many times (I even
+knew his wife) he could never get over my immature age.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; On one occasion he said to me.&nbsp; &ldquo;By
+the by, the Marquis of Villarel is here for a time.&nbsp; He inquired
+after you the last time he called on me.&nbsp; May I let him know that
+you are in town?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>I didn&rsquo;t say anything to that.&nbsp; The Marquis of Villarel
+was the Don Rafael of Rita&rsquo;s own story.&nbsp; What had I to do
+with Spanish grandees?&nbsp; 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?&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; But when I made up my mind (which
+I did quickly, to be done with it) to call on the banker&rsquo;s wife,
+almost the first thing she said to me was that the Marquis de Villarel
+was &ldquo;amongst us.&rdquo;&nbsp; She said it joyously.&nbsp; If in
+her husband&rsquo;s room at the bank legitimism was a mere unpopulated
+principle, in her salon Legitimacy was nothing but persons.&nbsp; &ldquo;<i>Il
+m&rsquo;a caus&eacute; beaucoup</i> <i>de vous</i>,&rdquo; she said
+as if there had been a joke in it of which I ought to be proud.&nbsp;
+I slunk away from her.&nbsp; I couldn&rsquo;t believe that the grandee
+had talked to her about me.&nbsp; I had never felt myself part of the
+great Royalist enterprise.&nbsp; I confess that I was so indifferent
+to everything, so profoundly demoralized, that having once got into
+that drawing-room I hadn&rsquo;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, &ldquo;Look!&nbsp;
+Over there&mdash;in that corner.&nbsp; That&rsquo;s the notorious Monsieur
+George.&rdquo;&nbsp; At last she herself drove me out by coming to sit
+by me vivaciously and going into ecstasies over &ldquo;<i>ce cher</i>
+Monsieur Mills&rdquo; 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.&nbsp; &ldquo;<i>Vous
+devez bien regretter son</i> <i>d&eacute;part pour Paris</i>,&rdquo;
+she cooed, looking with affected bashfulness at her fan. . . . How I
+got out of the room I really don&rsquo;t know.&nbsp; There was also
+a staircase.&nbsp; I did not fall down it head first&mdash;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.&nbsp; It showed not
+a gleam of light through the thin foliage of its trees.</p>
+<p>I spent the next day with Dominic on board the little craft watching
+the shipwrights at work on her deck.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; Dominic, too, devoted
+himself to his business, but his taciturnity was sardonic.&nbsp; Then
+I dropped in at the caf&eacute; and Madame L&eacute;onore&rsquo;s loud
+&ldquo;Eh, Signorino, here you are at last!&rdquo; pleased me by its
+resonant friendliness.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; That man and that woman seemed to know
+something.&nbsp; What did they know?&nbsp; At parting she pressed my
+hand significantly.&nbsp; What did she mean?&nbsp; But I didn&rsquo;t
+feel offended by these manifestations.&nbsp; The souls within these
+people&rsquo;s breasts were not volatile in the manner of slightly scented
+and inflated bladders.&nbsp; Neither had they the impervious skins which
+seem the rule in the fine world that wants only to get on.&nbsp; 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.</p>
+<p>That day on returning home I found Therese looking out for me, a
+very unusual occurrence of late.&nbsp; She handed me a card bearing
+the name of the Marquis de Villarel.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;How did you come by this?&rdquo; I asked.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; A young gentleman had brought it.&nbsp; Such
+a nice young gentleman, she interjected with her piously ghoulish expression.&nbsp;
+He was not very tall.&nbsp; He had a very smooth complexion (that woman
+was incorrigible) and a nice, tiny black moustache.&nbsp; Therese was
+sure that he must have been an officer <i>en las filas legitimas</i>.&nbsp;
+With that notion in her head she had asked him about the welfare of
+that other model of charm and elegance, Captain Blunt.&nbsp; To her
+extreme surprise the charming young gentleman with beautiful eyes had
+apparently never heard of Blunt.&nbsp; 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
+Se&ntilde;ora Do&ntilde;a Rita de Lastaola.&nbsp; The question staggered
+Therese, but with great presence of mind she answered the young gentleman
+that she didn&rsquo;t know what excellence there was about it, but that
+the house was her property, having been given to her by her own sister.&nbsp;
+At this the young gentleman looked both puzzled and angry, turned on
+his heel, and got back into his fiacre.&nbsp; Why should people be angry
+with a poor girl who had never done a single reprehensible thing in
+her whole life?</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I suppose our Rita does tell people awful lies about her poor
+sister.&rdquo;&nbsp; She sighed deeply (she had several kinds of sighs
+and this was the hopeless kind) and added reflectively, &ldquo;Sin on
+sin, wickedness on wickedness!&nbsp; And the longer she lives the worse
+it will be.&nbsp; It would be better for our Rita to be dead.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>I told &ldquo;Mademoiselle Therese&rdquo; that it was really impossible
+to tell whether she was more stupid or atrocious; but I wasn&rsquo;t
+really very much shocked.&nbsp; These outbursts did not signify anything
+in Therese.&nbsp; One got used to them.&nbsp; 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.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What&rsquo;s the good of getting you anything to eat, my dear
+young Monsieur,&rdquo; she quizzed me tenderly.&nbsp; &ldquo;You just
+only peck like a little bird.&nbsp; Much better let me save the money
+for you.&rdquo;&nbsp; It will show the super-terrestrial nature of my
+misery when I say that I was quite surprised at Therese&rsquo;s view
+of my appetite.&nbsp; Perhaps she was right.&nbsp; I certainly did not
+know.&nbsp; I stared hard at her and in the end she admitted that the
+dinner was in fact ready that very moment.</p>
+<p>The new young gentleman within Therese&rsquo;s horizon didn&rsquo;t
+surprise me very much.&nbsp; Villarel would travel with some sort of
+suite, a couple of secretaries at least.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; The card was, under
+its social form, a mere command to present myself before the grandee.&nbsp;
+No Royalist devoted by conviction, as I must have appeared to him, could
+have mistaken the meaning.&nbsp; I put the card in my pocket and after
+dining or not dining&mdash;I really don&rsquo;t remember&mdash;spent
+the evening smoking in the studio, pursuing thoughts of tenderness and
+grief, visions exalting and cruel.&nbsp; From time to time I looked
+at the dummy.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; By and
+by Therese drifted in.&nbsp; It was then late and, I imagine, she was
+on her way to bed.&nbsp; She looked the picture of cheerful, rustic
+innocence and started propounding to me a conundrum which began with
+the words:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;If our Rita were to die before long . . .&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She didn&rsquo;t get any further because I had jumped up and frightened
+her by shouting: &ldquo;Is she ill?&nbsp; What has happened?&nbsp; Have
+you had a letter?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She had had a letter.&nbsp; I didn&rsquo;t ask her to show it to
+me, though I daresay she would have done so.&nbsp; I had an idea that
+there was no meaning in anything, at least no meaning that mattered.&nbsp;
+But the interruption had made Therese apparently forget her sinister
+conundrum.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; I believe I went to
+sleep there from sheer exhaustion.&nbsp; Some time during the night
+I woke up chilled to the bone and in the dark.&nbsp; These were horrors
+and no mistake.&nbsp; I dragged myself upstairs to bed past the indefatigable
+statuette holding up the ever-miserable light.&nbsp; The black-and-white
+hall was like an ice-house.</p>
+<p>The main consideration which induced me to call on the Marquis of
+Villarel was the fact that after all I was a discovery of Do&ntilde;a
+Rita&rsquo;s, her own recruit.&nbsp; My fidelity and steadfastness had
+been guaranteed by her and no one else.&nbsp; I couldn&rsquo;t bear
+the idea of her being criticized by every empty-headed chatterer belonging
+to the Cause.&nbsp; And as, apart from that, nothing mattered much,
+why, then&mdash;I would get this over.</p>
+<p>But it appeared that I had not reflected sufficiently on all the
+consequences of that step.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp;
+Then when I got in after much hesitation&mdash;being admitted by the
+man in the green baize apron who recognized me&mdash;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.&nbsp; 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&mdash;that Villa was like
+a <i>Salade Russe</i> of styles) and introduced me into a big, light
+room full of very modern furniture.&nbsp; The portrait <i>en pied</i>
+of an officer in a sky-blue uniform hung on the end wall.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp;
+That striking picture dominated a massive mahogany desk, and, in front
+of this desk, a very roomy, tall-backed armchair of dark green velvet.&nbsp;
+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.</p>
+<p>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.&nbsp; He altered his position slowly and rested his hollow,
+black, quietly burning eyes on my face in prolonged scrutiny.&nbsp;
+I detected something comminatory in his yellow, emaciated countenance,
+but I believe now he was simply startled by my youth.&nbsp; I bowed
+profoundly.&nbsp; He extended a meagre little hand.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Take a chair, Don Jorge.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He was very small, frail, and thin, but his voice was not languid,
+though he spoke hardly above his breath.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; He
+was all fidelity, inflexibility, and sombre conviction, but like some
+great saints he had very little body to keep all these merits in.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You are very young,&rdquo; he remarked, to begin with.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;The matters on which I desired to converse with you are very
+grave.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I was under the impression that your Excellency wished to
+see me at once.&nbsp; But if your Excellency prefers it I will return
+in, say, seven years&rsquo; time when I may perhaps be old enough to
+talk about grave matters.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He didn&rsquo;t stir hand or foot and not even the quiver of an eyelid
+proved that he had heard my shockingly unbecoming retort.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You have been recommended to us by a noble and loyal lady,
+in whom His Majesty&mdash;whom God preserve&mdash;reposes an entire
+confidence.&nbsp; God will reward her as she deserves and you, too,
+Se&ntilde;or, according to the disposition you bring to this great work
+which has the blessing (here he crossed himself) of our Holy Mother
+the Church.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I suppose your Excellency understands that in all this I am
+not looking for reward of any kind.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>At this he made a faint, almost ethereal grimace.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I was speaking of the spiritual blessing which rewards the
+service of religion and will be of benefit to your soul,&rdquo; he explained
+with a slight touch of acidity.&nbsp; &ldquo;The other is perfectly
+understood and your fidelity is taken for granted.&nbsp; His Majesty&mdash;whom
+God preserve&mdash;has been already pleased to signify his satisfaction
+with your services to the most noble and loyal Do&ntilde;a Rita by a
+letter in his own hand.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>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.&nbsp; &ldquo;I
+am afraid, Se&ntilde;or, 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.&nbsp; Are you a young man of
+that sort?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I am a very good gun-runner, your Excellency,&rdquo; I answered
+quietly.</p>
+<p>He bowed his head gravely.&nbsp; &ldquo;We are aware.&nbsp; But I
+was looking for the motives which ought to have their pure source in
+religion.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I must confess frankly that I have not reflected on my motives,&rdquo;
+I said.&nbsp; &ldquo;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.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He had listened patiently and when he saw that there was nothing
+more to come he ended the discussion.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Se&ntilde;or, we should reflect upon our motives.&nbsp; It
+is salutary for our conscience and is recommended (he crossed himself)
+by our Holy Mother the Church.&nbsp; I have here certain letters from
+Paris on which I would consult your young sagacity which is accredited
+to us by the most loyal Do&ntilde;a Rita.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The sound of that name on his lips was simply odious.&nbsp; I was
+convinced that this man of forms and ceremonies and fanatical royalism
+was perfectly heartless.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp;
+Yet for the credit of Do&ntilde;a Rita I did not withhold from him my
+young sagacity.&nbsp; What he thought of it I don&rsquo;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.&nbsp;
+We agreed on certain things to be done, and finally, always out of regard
+for Do&ntilde;a Rita&rsquo;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.&nbsp; He got out
+of the chair laboriously, like a sick child might have done.&nbsp; The
+audience was over but he noticed my eyes wandering to the portrait and
+he said in his measured, breathed-out tones:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;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.&nbsp; Unfortunately she, too, is
+touched by the infection of this irreverent and unfaithful age.&nbsp;
+But she is young yet.&nbsp; She is young.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>These last words were pronounced in a strange tone of menace as though
+he were supernaturally aware of some suspended disasters.&nbsp; With
+his burning eyes he was the image of an Inquisitor with an unconquerable
+soul in that frail body.&nbsp; 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 &ldquo;Adios, Se&ntilde;or&mdash;may
+God guard you from sin.&rdquo;</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h3>CHAPTER III</h3>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>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.&nbsp; The business
+was getting dangerous.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp;
+Once we were ambushed by a lot of &ldquo;rascally Carabineers,&rdquo;
+as Dominic called them, who hid themselves among the rocks after disposing
+a train of mules well in view on the seashore.&nbsp; Luckily, on evidence
+which I could never understand, Dominic detected something suspicious.&nbsp;
+Perhaps it was by virtue of some sixth sense that men born for unlawful
+occupations may be gifted with.&nbsp; &ldquo;There is a smell of treachery
+about this,&rdquo; he remarked suddenly, turning at his oar.&nbsp; (He
+and I were pulling alone in a little boat to reconnoitre.)&nbsp; I couldn&rsquo;t
+detect any smell and I regard to this day our escape on that occasion
+as, properly speaking, miraculous.&nbsp; Surely some supernatural power
+must have struck upwards the barrels of the Carabineers&rsquo; rifles,
+for they missed us by yards.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; Dominic believed in angels in a conventional way, but
+laid no claim to having one of his own.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; Dominic&rsquo;s mighty and inspired yell: &ldquo;<i>A
+plat ventre</i>!&rdquo; and also an unexpected roll to windward saved
+all our lives.&nbsp; Nobody got a scratch.&nbsp; We were past in a moment
+and in a breeze then blowing we had the heels of anything likely to
+give us chase.&nbsp; But an hour afterwards, as we stood side by side
+peering into the darkness, Dominic was heard to mutter through his teeth:
+&ldquo;<i>Le m&eacute;tier se g&acirc;te</i>.&rdquo;&nbsp; I, too, had
+the feeling that the trade, if not altogether spoiled, had seen its
+best days.&nbsp; But I did not care.&nbsp; In fact, for my purpose it
+was rather better, a more potent influence; like the stronger intoxication
+of raw spirit.&nbsp; A volley in the dark after all was not such a bad
+thing.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; It came on, a whizzing trail of
+light, but I always woke up before it struck.&nbsp; Always.&nbsp; Invariably.&nbsp;
+It never had a chance.&nbsp; A volley of small arms was much more likely
+to do the business some day&mdash;or night.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
+<p>At last came the day when everything slipped out of my grasp.&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp; Even Dominic
+failed me, his moral entity destroyed by what to him was a most tragic
+ending of our common enterprise.&nbsp; The lurid swiftness of it all
+was like a stunning thunder-clap&mdash;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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; I hadn&rsquo;t any money in my pocket.&nbsp;
+I hadn&rsquo;t even the bundle and the stick of a destitute wayfarer.&nbsp;
+I was unshaven and unwashed, and my heart was faint within me.&nbsp;
+My attire was such that I daren&rsquo;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.&nbsp; The other I gave up to the
+fortunate of this earth.&nbsp; I didn&rsquo;t believe in my power of
+persuasion.&nbsp; I had no powers.&nbsp; I slunk on and on, shivering
+with cold, through the uproarious streets.&nbsp; Bedlam was loose in
+them.&nbsp; It was the time of Carnival.</p>
+<p>Small objects of no value have the secret of sticking to a man in
+an astonishing way.&nbsp; 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&mdash;but a small penknife
+and a latchkey had never parted company with me.&nbsp; With the latchkey
+I opened the door of refuge.&nbsp; The hall wore its deaf-and-dumb air,
+its black-and-white stillness.</p>
+<p>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&rsquo;s
+breadth its graceful pose on the toes of its left foot; and the staircase
+lost itself in the shadows above.&nbsp; Therese was parsimonious with
+the lights.&nbsp; To see all this was surprising.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; And
+there was Therese herself descending the stairs, frightened but plucky.&nbsp;
+Perhaps she thought that she would be murdered this time for certain.&nbsp;
+She had a strange, unemotional conviction that the house was particularly
+convenient for a crime.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; She did not expect me
+for another week at least, and, besides, she explained, the state I
+was in made her blood take &ldquo;one turn.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Indeed my plight seemed either to have called out or else repressed
+her true nature.&nbsp; But who had ever fathomed her nature!&nbsp; There
+was none of her treacly volubility.&nbsp; There were none of her &ldquo;dear
+young gentlemans&rdquo; and &ldquo;poor little hearts&rdquo; and references
+to sin.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; Yes, she did lay hands on me for that charitable
+purpose.&nbsp; They trembled.&nbsp; Her pale eyes hardly left my face.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;What brought you here like this?&rdquo; she whispered once.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;If I were to tell you, Mademoiselle Therese, you would see
+there the hand of God.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She dropped the extra pillow she was carrying and then nearly fell
+over it.&nbsp; &ldquo;Oh, dear heart,&rdquo; she murmured, and ran off
+to the kitchen.</p>
+<p>I sank into bed as into a cloud and Therese reappeared very misty
+and offering me something in a cup.&nbsp; I believe it was hot milk,
+and after I drank it she took the cup and stood looking at me fixedly.&nbsp;
+I managed to say with difficulty: &ldquo;Go away,&rdquo; whereupon she
+vanished as if by magic before the words were fairly out of my mouth.&nbsp;
+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: &ldquo;It&rsquo;s midday&rdquo;. . . Youth
+will have its rights.&nbsp; I had slept like a stone for seventeen hours.</p>
+<p>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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; I couldn&rsquo;t imagine
+why Blunt should wish to return to Marseilles.&nbsp; She told me also
+that the house was empty except for myself and the two dancing girls
+with their father.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp;
+But I went out early to perform an unpleasant task.&nbsp; It was only
+proper that I should let the Carlist agent ensconced in the Prado Villa
+know of the sudden ending of my activities.&nbsp; It would be grave
+enough news for him, and I did not like to be its bearer for reasons
+which were mainly personal.&nbsp; I resembled Dominic in so far that
+I, too, disliked failure.</p>
+<p>The Marquis of Villarel had of course gone long before.&nbsp; The
+man who was there was another type of Carlist altogether, and his temperament
+was that of a trader.&nbsp; He was the chief purveyor of the Legitimist
+armies, an honest broker of stores, and enjoyed a great reputation for
+cleverness.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; The gossip of the Legitimist circles appreciated
+those favours with smiling indulgence.&nbsp; He was the man who had
+been so distressed and frightened by Do&ntilde;a Rita&rsquo;s first
+visit to Tolosa.&nbsp; He had an extreme regard for his wife.&nbsp;
+And in that sphere of clashing arms and unceasing intrigue nobody would
+have smiled then at his agitation if the man himself hadn&rsquo;t been
+somewhat grotesque.</p>
+<p>He must have been startled when I sent in my name, for he didn&rsquo;t
+of course expect to see me yet&mdash;nobody expected me.&nbsp; He advanced
+soft-footed down the room.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; I, of course,
+could not share his consternation.&nbsp; My feelings in that connection
+were of a different order; but I was annoyed at his unintelligent stare.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I suppose,&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;you will take it on yourself
+to advise Do&ntilde;a Rita, who is greatly interested in this affair.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes, but I was given to understand that Madame de Lastaola
+was to leave Paris either yesterday or this morning.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>It was my turn to stare dumbly before I could manage to ask: &ldquo;For
+Tolosa?&rdquo; in a very knowing tone.</p>
+<p>Whether it was the droop of his head, play of light, or some other
+subtle cause, his nose seemed to have grown perceptibly longer.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;That, Se&ntilde;or, is the place where the news has got to
+be conveyed without undue delay,&rdquo; he said in an agitated wheeze.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;I could, of course, telegraph to our agent in Bayonne who would
+find a messenger.&nbsp; But I don&rsquo;t like, I don&rsquo;t like!&nbsp;
+The Alphonsists have agents, too, who hang about the telegraph offices.&nbsp;
+It&rsquo;s no use letting the enemy get that news.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He was obviously very confused, unhappy, and trying to think of two
+different things at once.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Sit down, Don George, sit down.&rdquo;&nbsp; He absolutely
+forced a cigar on me.&nbsp; &ldquo;I am extremely distressed.&nbsp;
+That&mdash;I mean Do&ntilde;a Rita is undoubtedly on her way to Tolosa.&nbsp;
+This is very frightful.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>I must say, however, that there was in the man some sense of duty.&nbsp;
+He mastered his private fears.&nbsp; After some cogitation he murmured:
+&ldquo;There is another way of getting the news to Headquarters.&nbsp;
+Suppose you write me a formal letter just stating the facts, the unfortunate
+facts, which I will be able to forward.&nbsp; There is an agent of ours,
+a fellow I have been employing for purchasing supplies, a perfectly
+honest man.&nbsp; He is coming here from the north by the ten o&rsquo;clock
+train with some papers for me of a confidential nature.&nbsp; I was
+rather embarrassed about it.&nbsp; It wouldn&rsquo;t do for him to get
+into any sort of trouble.&nbsp; He is not very intelligent.&nbsp; I
+wonder, Don George, whether you would consent to meet him at the station
+and take care of him generally till to-morrow.&nbsp; I don&rsquo;t like
+the idea of him going about alone.&nbsp; 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 Do&ntilde;a Rita who will no doubt be already there.
+. . .&rdquo;&nbsp; He became again distracted all in a moment and actually
+went so far as to wring his fat hands.&nbsp; &ldquo;Oh, yes, she will
+be there!&rdquo; he exclaimed in most pathetic accents.</p>
+<p>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.&nbsp;
+My mind was very far away.&nbsp; I thought: Why not?&nbsp; Why shouldn&rsquo;t
+I also write a letter to Do&ntilde;a Rita, telling her that now nothing
+stood in the way of my leaving Europe, because, really, the enterprise
+couldn&rsquo;t be begun again; that things that come to an end can never
+be begun again.&nbsp; The idea&mdash;never again&mdash;had complete
+possession of my mind.&nbsp; I could think of nothing else.&nbsp; Yes,
+I would write.&nbsp; 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.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, yes,&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;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&rsquo;clock to-night.&nbsp; What&rsquo;s he like?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, he has a black moustache and whiskers, and his chin is
+shaved,&rdquo; said the newly-fledged baron cordially.&nbsp; &ldquo;A
+very honest fellow.&nbsp; I always found him very useful.&nbsp; His
+name is Jos&eacute; Ortega.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He was perfectly self-possessed now, and walking soft-footed accompanied
+me to the door of the room.&nbsp; He shook hands with a melancholy smile.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;This is a very frightful situation.&nbsp; My poor wife will be
+quite distracted.&nbsp; She is such a patriot.&nbsp; Many thanks, Don
+George.&nbsp; You relieve me greatly.&nbsp; The fellow is rather stupid
+and rather bad-tempered.&nbsp; Queer creature, but very honest!&nbsp;
+Oh, very honest!&rdquo;</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h3>CHAPTER IV</h3>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>It was the last evening of Carnival.&nbsp; 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.</p>
+<p>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.&nbsp; It must have been&mdash;to a day or two.&nbsp; But on
+this evening it wasn&rsquo;t merely loneliness that I felt.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; This consciousness
+of universal loss had this advantage that it induced something resembling
+a state of philosophic indifference.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; The delay of the train did not irritate
+me in the least.&nbsp; I had finally made up my mind to write a letter
+to Do&ntilde;a Rita; and this &ldquo;honest fellow&rdquo; for whom I
+was waiting would take it to her.&nbsp; He would have no difficulty
+in Tolosa in finding Madame de Lastaola.&nbsp; The General Headquarters,
+which was also a Court, would be buzzing with comments on her presence.&nbsp;
+Most likely that &ldquo;honest fellow&rdquo; was already known to Do&ntilde;a
+Rita.&nbsp; For all I knew he might have been her discovery just as
+I was.&nbsp; Probably I, too, was regarded as an &ldquo;honest fellow&rdquo;
+enough; but stupid&mdash;since it was clear that my luck was not inexhaustible.&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp;
+But why should he?&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; I pictured the fellow
+to myself trudging over the stony slopes and scrambling down wild ravines
+with my letter to Do&ntilde;a Rita in his pocket.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp;
+It would be worthy of the woman.&nbsp; No experience, no memories, no
+dead traditions of passion or language would inspire it.&nbsp; She herself
+would be its sole inspiration.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; A breath
+of vanity passed through my brain.&nbsp; A letter as moving as her mere
+existence was moving would be something unique.&nbsp; I regretted I
+was not a poet.</p>
+<p>I woke up to a great noise of feet, a sudden influx of people through
+the doors of the platform.&nbsp; I made out my man&rsquo;s whiskers
+at once&mdash;not that they were enormous, but because I had been warned
+beforehand of their existence by the excellent Commissary General.&nbsp;
+At first I saw nothing of him but his whiskers: they were black and
+cut somewhat in the shape of a shark&rsquo;s fin and so very fine that
+the least breath of air animated them into a sort of playful restlessness.&nbsp;
+The man&rsquo;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.&nbsp; Obviously he didn&rsquo;t expect to be met, because
+when I murmured an enquiring, &ldquo;Se&ntilde;or Ortega?&rdquo; into
+his ear he swerved away from me and nearly dropped a little handbag
+he was carrying.&nbsp; His complexion was uniformly pale, his mouth
+was red, but not engaging.&nbsp; His social status was not very definite.&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp; I hurried my man into a fiacre.&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp;
+His red lips trembled and I noted an underhand, cynical curiosity when
+he had occasion to raise his eyes to my face.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; I was very anxious that
+nothing should stop his projected mission of courier to headquarters.&nbsp;
+As we passed various street corners where the mistral blast struck at
+us fiercely I could feel him shivering by my side.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; Service of the King!&nbsp; I must say that she was
+amiable and didn&rsquo;t seem to mind anything one asked her to do.&nbsp;
+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: &ldquo;What
+did you say?&rdquo;&mdash;&ldquo;Nothing,&rdquo; I answered, very much
+surprised.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; But somehow he didn&rsquo;t arouse
+my compassion.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; &ldquo;I am starving,&rdquo; he remarked acidly, and I
+felt a little compunction.&nbsp; Clearly, the first thing to do was
+to feed him.&nbsp; We were then entering the Cannebi&egrave;re and as
+I didn&rsquo;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 Dor&eacute;e.&nbsp; That was
+more of a place of general resort where, in the multitude of casual
+patrons, he would pass unnoticed.</p>
+<p>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.&nbsp;
+I led the way to the grand salon, for as to private rooms they had been
+all retained days before.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; The revellers, intent on their pleasure, paid no
+attention to us.&nbsp; Se&ntilde;or Ortega trod on my heels and after
+sitting down opposite me threw an ill-natured glance at the festive
+scene.&nbsp; It might have been about half-past ten, then.</p>
+<p>Two glasses of wine he drank one after another did not improve his
+temper.&nbsp; He only ceased to shiver.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; His mouth,
+however, betrayed an abiding bitterness.&nbsp; I mean when he smiled.&nbsp;
+In repose it was a very expressionless mouth, only it was too red to
+be altogether ordinary.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; He seemed to expect you to give yourself
+away by some unconsidered word that he would snap up with delight.&nbsp;
+It was that peculiarity that somehow put me on my guard.&nbsp; I had
+no idea who I was facing across the table and as a matter of fact I
+did not care.&nbsp; All my impressions were blurred; and even the promptings
+of my instinct were the haziest thing imaginable.&nbsp; Now and then
+I had acute hallucinations of a woman with an arrow of gold in her hair.&nbsp;
+This caused alternate moments of exaltation and depression from which
+I tried to take refuge in conversation; but Se&ntilde;or Ortega was
+not stimulating.&nbsp; He was preoccupied with personal matters.&nbsp;
+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&rsquo;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.</p>
+<p>He glared at me like a basilisk.&nbsp; &ldquo;And why have I been
+met like this?&rdquo; he enquired with an air of being prepared to hear
+a lie.</p>
+<p>I explained that it was the Baron&rsquo;s wish, as a matter of prudence
+and to avoid any possible trouble which might arise from enquiries by
+the police.</p>
+<p>He took it badly.&nbsp; &ldquo;What nonsense.&rdquo;&nbsp; He was&mdash;he
+said&mdash;an employ&eacute; (for several years) of Hernandez Brothers
+in Paris, an importing firm, and he was travelling on their business&mdash;as
+he could prove.&nbsp; He dived into his side pocket and produced a handful
+of folded papers of all sorts which he plunged back again instantly.</p>
+<p>And even then I didn&rsquo;t know whom I had there, opposite me,
+busy now devouring a slice of p&acirc;t&eacute; de foie gras.&nbsp;
+Not in the least.&nbsp; It never entered my head.&nbsp; How could it?&nbsp;
+The Rita that haunted me had no history; she was but the principle of
+life charged with fatality.&nbsp; Her form was only a mirage of desire
+decoying one step by step into despair.</p>
+<p>Se&ntilde;or Ortega gulped down some more wine and suggested I should
+tell him who I was.&nbsp; &ldquo;It&rsquo;s only right I should know,&rdquo;
+he added.</p>
+<p>This could not be gainsaid; and to a man connected with the Carlist
+organization the shortest way was to introduce myself as that &ldquo;Monsieur
+George&rdquo; of whom he had probably heard.</p>
+<p>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.&nbsp; It was only much later that I understood
+how near death I had been at that moment.&nbsp; But the knives on the
+tablecloth were the usual restaurant knives with rounded ends and about
+as deadly as pieces of hoop-iron.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; For it could have been nothing but a sudden impulse.&nbsp;
+His settled purpose was quite other.&nbsp; It was not my heart that
+he was after.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; Heard!&nbsp; To be sure he had heard!&nbsp; The chief of
+the great arms smuggling organization!</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh!&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;that&rsquo;s giving me too much
+importance.&rdquo;&nbsp; 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.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I am as noble as she is,&rdquo; he snapped peevishly, and
+I put him down at once as a very offensive beast.&nbsp; &ldquo;And as
+to being loyal, what is that?&nbsp; It is being truthful!&nbsp; It is
+being faithful!&nbsp; I know all about her.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>I managed to preserve an air of perfect unconcern.&nbsp; He wasn&rsquo;t
+a fellow to whom one could talk of Do&ntilde;a Rita.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You are a Basque,&rdquo; I said.</p>
+<p>He admitted rather contemptuously that he was a Basque and even then
+the truth did not dawn upon me.&nbsp; I suppose that with the hidden
+egoism of a lover I was thinking of myself, of myself alone in relation
+to Do&ntilde;a Rita, not of Do&ntilde;a Rita herself.&nbsp; He, too,
+obviously.&nbsp; He said: &ldquo;I am an educated man, but I know her
+people, all peasants.&nbsp; There is a sister, an uncle, a priest, a
+peasant, too, and perfectly unenlightened.&nbsp; One can&rsquo;t expect
+much from a priest (I am a free-thinker of course), but he is really
+too bad, more like a brute beast.&nbsp; As to all her people, mostly
+dead now, they never were of any account.&nbsp; There was a little land,
+but they were always working on other people&rsquo;s farms, a barefooted
+gang, a starved lot.&nbsp; I ought to know because we are distant relations.&nbsp;
+Twentieth cousins or something of the sort.&nbsp; Yes, I am related
+to that most loyal lady.&nbsp; And what is she, after all, but a Parisian
+woman with innumerable lovers, as I have been told.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t think your information is very correct,&rdquo;
+I said, affecting to yawn slightly.&nbsp; &ldquo;This is mere gossip
+of the gutter and I am surprised at you, who really know nothing about
+it&mdash;&rdquo;</p>
+<p>But the disgusting animal had fallen into a brown study.&nbsp; The
+hair of his very whiskers was perfectly still.&nbsp; I had now given
+up all idea of the letter to Rita.&nbsp; Suddenly he spoke again:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Women are the origin of all evil.&nbsp; One should never trust
+them.&nbsp; They have no honour.&nbsp; No honour!&rdquo; he repeated,
+striking his breast with his closed fist on which the knuckles stood
+out very white.&nbsp; &ldquo;I left my village many years ago and of
+course I am perfectly satisfied with my position and I don&rsquo;t know
+why I should trouble my head about this loyal lady.&nbsp; I suppose
+that&rsquo;s the way women get on in the world.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>I felt convinced that he was no proper person to be a messenger to
+headquarters.&nbsp; He struck me as altogether untrustworthy and perhaps
+not quite sane.&nbsp; This was confirmed by him saying suddenly with
+no visible connection and as if it had been forced from him by some
+agonizing process: &ldquo;I was a boy once,&rdquo; and then stopping
+dead short with a smile.&nbsp; He had a smile that frightened one by
+its association of malice and anguish.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Will you have anything more to eat?&rdquo; I asked.</p>
+<p>He declined dully.&nbsp; He had had enough.&nbsp; But he drained
+the last of a bottle into his glass and accepted a cigar which I offered
+him.&nbsp; While he was lighting it I had a sort of confused impression
+that he wasn&rsquo;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.&nbsp; Next moment I felt that I could have knocked him down
+if he hadn&rsquo;t looked so amazingly unhappy, while he came out with
+the astounding question: &ldquo;Se&ntilde;or, have you ever been a lover
+in your young days?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What do you mean?&rdquo; I asked.&nbsp; &ldquo;How old do
+you think I am?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;That&rsquo;s true,&rdquo; 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.&nbsp; &ldquo;It&rsquo;s
+true, you don&rsquo;t seem to have anything on your mind.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;Tell me,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;between men, you know, has this&mdash;wonderful
+celebrity&mdash;what does she call herself?&nbsp; How long has she been
+your mistress?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>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.&nbsp; He was smoking his cigar with a poignantly
+mocking air and not even looking at me.&nbsp; One can&rsquo;t hit like
+that a man who isn&rsquo;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.&nbsp; It was only his body that was there
+in that chair.&nbsp; It was manifest to me that his soul was absent
+in some hell of its own.&nbsp; At that moment I attained the knowledge
+of who it was I had before me.&nbsp; This was the man of whom both Do&ntilde;a
+Rita and Rose were so much afraid.&nbsp; 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&mdash;and anywhere but to Tolosa.&nbsp;
+Yes, evidently, I mustn&rsquo;t lose sight of him.&nbsp; I proposed
+in the calmest tone that we should go on where he could get his much-needed
+rest.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; It was then past eleven, not much, because we had
+not been in that restaurant quite an hour, but the routine of the town&rsquo;s
+night-life being upset during the Carnival the usual row of fiacres
+outside the Maison Dor&eacute;e was not there; in fact, there were very
+few carriages about.&nbsp; Perhaps the coachmen had assumed Pierrot
+costumes and were rushing about the streets on foot yelling with the
+rest of the population.&nbsp; &ldquo;We will have to walk,&rdquo; I
+said after a while.&mdash;&ldquo;Oh, yes, let us walk,&rdquo; assented
+Se&ntilde;or Ortega, &ldquo;or I will be frozen here.&rdquo;&nbsp; It
+was like a plaint of unutterable wretchedness.&nbsp; I had a fancy that
+all his natural heat had abandoned his limbs and gone to his brain.&nbsp;
+It was otherwise with me; my head was cool but I didn&rsquo;t find the
+night really so very cold.&nbsp; We stepped out briskly side by side.&nbsp;
+My lucid thinking was, as it were, enveloped by the wide shouting of
+the consecrated Carnival gaiety.&nbsp; 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&mdash;and
+no mistake about it whatever!&nbsp; Our appearance, the soberness of
+our gait made us conspicuous.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp;
+On those occasions there was nothing for it but to stand still till
+the flurry was over.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; We might have
+also joined in the dance, but for some reason or other it didn&rsquo;t
+occur to us; and I heard once a high, clear woman&rsquo;s voice stigmatizing
+us for a &ldquo;species of swelled heads&rdquo; (<i>esp&egrave;ce d&rsquo;enfl&eacute;s</i>).&nbsp;
+We proceeded sedately, my companion muttered with rage, and I was able
+to resume my thinking.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; He was fundamentally
+mad, though not perhaps completely; which of course made him all the
+greater, I won&rsquo;t say danger but, nuisance.</p>
+<p>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.&nbsp; He asserted that they were the real majority.&nbsp;
+When asked whether he considered himself as belonging to the majority,
+he said frankly that he didn&rsquo;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.&nbsp; We shouted
+down him and his theory, but there is no doubt that it had thrown a
+chill on the gaiety of our gathering.</p>
+<p>We had now entered a quieter quarter of the town and Se&ntilde;or
+Ortega had ceased his muttering.&nbsp; For myself I had not the slightest
+doubt of my own sanity.&nbsp; It was proved to me by the way I could
+apply my intelligence to the problem of what was to be done with Se&ntilde;or
+Ortega.&nbsp; Generally, he was unfit to be trusted with any mission
+whatever.&nbsp; The unstability of his temper was sure to get him into
+a scrape.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; My private letter to Do&ntilde;a Rita,
+the wonderful, the unique letter of farewell, I had given up for the
+present.&nbsp; Naturally I thought of the Ortega problem mainly in the
+terms of Do&ntilde;a Rita&rsquo;s safety.&nbsp; Her image presided at
+every council, at every conflict of my mind, and dominated every faculty
+of my senses.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp;
+She penetrated me, my head was full of her . . . And his head, too,
+I thought suddenly with a side glance at my companion.&nbsp; He walked
+quietly with hunched-up shoulders carrying his little hand-bag and he
+looked the most commonplace figure imaginable.</p>
+<p>Yes.&nbsp; There was between us a most horrible fellowship; the association
+of his crazy torture with the sublime suffering of my passion.&nbsp;
+We hadn&rsquo;t been a quarter of an hour together when that woman had
+surged up fatally between us; between this miserable wretch and myself.&nbsp;
+We were haunted by the same image.&nbsp; But I was sane!&nbsp; I was
+sane!&nbsp; 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.</p>
+<p>If I were to go early in the morning and tell that fat, bilious man:
+&ldquo;Look here, your Ortega&rsquo;s mad,&rdquo; he would certainly
+think at once that I was, get very frightened, and . . . one couldn&rsquo;t
+tell what course he would take.&nbsp; He would eliminate me somehow
+out of the affair.&nbsp; And yet I could not let the fellow proceed
+to where Do&ntilde;a 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&mdash;incredible as the thing
+appeared!&nbsp; I couldn&rsquo;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.&nbsp;
+And that girl Rose seemed to fear something graver even than a scandal.&nbsp;
+But if I were to explain the matter fully to H. he would simply rejoice
+in his heart.&nbsp; Nothing would please him more than to have Do&ntilde;a
+Rita driven out of Tolosa.&nbsp; What a relief from his anxieties (and
+his wife&rsquo;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&mdash;I went on thinking coldly with a stoical rejection
+of the most elementary faith in mankind&rsquo;s rectitude&mdash;why
+then, that accommodating husband would simply let the ominous messenger
+have his chance.&nbsp; He would see there only his natural anxieties
+being laid to rest for ever.&nbsp; Horrible?&nbsp; Yes.&nbsp; But I
+could not take the risk.&nbsp; In a twelvemonth I had travelled a long
+way in my mistrust of mankind.</p>
+<p>We paced on steadily.&nbsp; I thought: &ldquo;How on earth am I going
+to stop you?&rdquo;&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; A little trip to sea would not have done
+Se&ntilde;or Ortega any harm; though no doubt it would have been abhorrent
+to his feelings.&nbsp; But now I had not the means.&nbsp; I couldn&rsquo;t
+even tell where my poor Dominic was hiding his diminished head.</p>
+<p>Again I glanced at him sideways.&nbsp; 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&rsquo;s very soul writhing in
+his body like an impaled worm.&nbsp; 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 Do&ntilde;a Rita.&nbsp; It was enough
+to awaken in any human being a movement of horrified compassion; but
+my pity went out not to him but to Do&ntilde;a Rita.&nbsp; It was for
+her that I felt sorry; I pitied her for having that damned soul on her
+track.&nbsp; I pitied her with tenderness and indignation, as if this
+had been both a danger and a dishonour.</p>
+<p>I don&rsquo;t mean to say that those thoughts passed through my head
+consciously.&nbsp; I had only the resultant, settled feeling.&nbsp;
+I had, however, a thought, too.&nbsp; It came on me suddenly, and I
+asked myself with rage and astonishment: &ldquo;Must I then kill that
+brute?&rdquo;&nbsp; There didn&rsquo;t seem to be any alternative.&nbsp;
+Between him and Do&ntilde;a Rita I couldn&rsquo;t hesitate.&nbsp; I
+believe I gave a slight laugh of desperation.&nbsp; The suddenness of
+this sinister conclusion had in it something comic and unbelievable.&nbsp;
+It loosened my grip on my mental processes.&nbsp; A Latin tag came into
+my head about the facile descent into the abyss.&nbsp; I marvelled at
+its aptness, and also that it should have come to me so pat.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; We had
+just turned the corner.&nbsp; All the houses were dark and in a perspective
+of complete solitude our two shadows dodged and wheeled about our feet.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Here we are,&rdquo; I said.</p>
+<p>He was an extraordinarily chilly devil.&nbsp; When we stopped I could
+hear his teeth chattering again.&nbsp; I don&rsquo;t know what came
+over me, I had a sort of nervous fit, was incapable of finding my pockets,
+let alone the latchkey.&nbsp; I had the illusion of a narrow streak
+of light on the wall of the house as if it had been cracked.&nbsp; &ldquo;I
+hope we will be able to get in,&rdquo; I murmured.</p>
+<p>Se&ntilde;or Ortega stood waiting patiently with his handbag, like
+a rescued wayfarer.&nbsp; &ldquo;But you live in this house, don&rsquo;t
+you?&rdquo; he observed.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No,&rdquo; I said, without hesitation.&nbsp; I didn&rsquo;t
+know how that man would behave if he were aware that I was staying under
+the same roof.&nbsp; He was half mad.&nbsp; He might want to talk all
+night, try crazily to invade my privacy.&nbsp; How could I tell?&nbsp;
+Moreover, I wasn&rsquo;t so sure that I would remain in the house.&nbsp;
+I had some notion of going out again and walking up and down the street
+of the Consuls till daylight.&nbsp; &ldquo;No, an absent friend lets
+me use . . . I had that latchkey this morning . . . Ah! here it is.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>I let him go in first.&nbsp; The sickly gas flame was there on duty,
+undaunted, waiting for the end of the world to come and put it out.&nbsp;
+I think that the black-and-white hall surprised Ortega.&nbsp; I had
+closed the front door without noise and stood for a moment listening,
+while he glanced about furtively.&nbsp; There were only two other doors
+in the hall, right and left.&nbsp; Their panels of ebony were decorated
+with bronze applications in the centre.&nbsp; The one on the left was
+of course Blunt&rsquo;s door.&nbsp; As the passage leading beyond it
+was dark at the further end I took Se&ntilde;or Ortega by the hand and
+led him along, unresisting, like a child.&nbsp; For some reason or other
+I moved on tip-toe and he followed my example.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp; He hardly listened to what I said.&nbsp; What
+were all those things to him!&nbsp; He knew that his destiny was to
+sleep on a bed of thorns, to feed on adders.&nbsp; But he tried to show
+a sort of polite interest.&nbsp; He asked: &ldquo;What is this place?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It used to belong to a painter,&rdquo;&nbsp; I mumbled.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Ah, your absent friend,&rdquo; he said, making a wry mouth.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;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.&nbsp; You think perhaps I am a Royalist?&nbsp;
+No.&nbsp; If there was anybody in heaven or hell to pray to I would
+pray for a revolution&mdash;a red revolution everywhere.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You astonish me,&rdquo; I said, just to say something.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No!&nbsp; But there are half a dozen people in the world with
+whom I would like to settle accounts.&nbsp; One could shoot them like
+partridges and no questions asked.&nbsp; That&rsquo;s what revolution
+would mean to me.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It&rsquo;s a beautifully simple view,&rdquo; I said.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;I imagine you are not the only one who holds it; but I really
+must look after your comforts.&nbsp; You mustn&rsquo;t forget that we
+have to see Baron H. early to-morrow morning.&rdquo;&nbsp; And I went
+out quietly into the passage wondering in what part of the house Therese
+had elected to sleep that night.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; However, it wasn&rsquo;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.&nbsp;
+Her attire made it perfectly clear that she could not have heard us
+coming in.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp;
+But what thought, need, or sudden impulse had driven Therese out of
+bed like this was something I couldn&rsquo;t conceive.</p>
+<p>I didn&rsquo;t call out after her.&nbsp; I felt sure that she would
+return.&nbsp; I went up slowly to the first floor and met her coming
+down again, this time carrying a lighted candle.&nbsp; She had managed
+to make herself presentable in an extraordinarily short time.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, my dear young Monsieur, you have given me a fright.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes.&nbsp; And I nearly fainted, too,&rdquo; I said.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;You looked perfectly awful.&nbsp; What&rsquo;s the matter with
+you?&nbsp; Are you ill?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; Most unexpectedly she betrayed a ridiculous
+consternation, but only for a moment.&nbsp; Then she assumed at once
+that I would give him hospitality upstairs where there was a camp-bedstead
+in my dressing-room.&nbsp; I said:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No.&nbsp; Give him a shake-down in the studio, where he is
+now.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s warm in there.&nbsp; And remember! I charge you
+strictly not to let him know that I sleep in this house.&nbsp; In fact,
+I don&rsquo;t know myself that I will; I have certain matters to attend
+to this very night.&nbsp; You will also have to serve him his coffee
+in the morning.&nbsp; I will take him away before ten o&rsquo;clock.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>All this seemed to impress her more than I had expected.&nbsp; As
+usual when she felt curious, or in some other way excited, she assumed
+a saintly, detached expression, and asked:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;The dear gentleman is your friend, I suppose?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I only know he is a Spaniard and a Carlist,&rdquo; I said:
+&ldquo;and that ought to be enough for you.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Instead of the usual effusive exclamations she murmured: &ldquo;Dear
+me, dear me,&rdquo; and departed upstairs with the candle to get together
+a few blankets and pillows, I suppose.&nbsp; As for me I walked quietly
+downstairs on my way to the studio.&nbsp; 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.</p>
+<p>Also feelings had altered all their values.&nbsp; The words, too,
+had become strange.&nbsp; It was only the inanimate surroundings that
+remained what they had always been.&nbsp; For instance the studio. .
+. .</p>
+<p>During my absence Se&ntilde;or 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.&nbsp;
+I repressed an absurd impulse to walk round him as though he had been
+some sort of exhibit.&nbsp; His hands were spread over his knees and
+he looked perfectly insensible.&nbsp; I don&rsquo;t mean strange, or
+ghastly, or wooden, but just insensible&mdash;like an exhibit.&nbsp;
+And that effect persisted even after he raised his black suspicious
+eyes to my face.&nbsp; He lowered them almost at once.&nbsp; It was
+very mechanical.&nbsp; I gave him up and became rather concerned about
+myself.&nbsp; My thought was that I had better get out of that before
+any more queer notions came into my head.&nbsp; 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&rsquo;s rest.&nbsp;
+And directly I spoke it struck me that this was the most extraordinary
+speech that ever was addressed to a figure of that sort.&nbsp; He, however,
+did not seem startled by it or moved in any way.&nbsp; He simply said:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Thank you.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>In the darkest part of the long passage outside I met Therese with
+her arms full of pillows and blankets.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h3>CHAPTER V</h3>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>Coming out of the bright light of the studio I didn&rsquo;t make
+out Therese very distinctly.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; I passed her without
+a word and heard behind me the door of the studio close with an unexpected
+crash.&nbsp; It strikes me now that under the circumstances I might
+have without shame gone back to listen at the keyhole.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; Neither were the exact connections
+of persons present to my mind.&nbsp; And, besides, one doesn&rsquo;t
+listen at a keyhole but in pursuance of some plan; unless one is afflicted
+by a vulgar and fatuous curiosity.&nbsp; But that vice is not in my
+character.&nbsp; As to plan, I had none.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; And the only person that could
+have answered to that description was Se&ntilde;or Ortega.&nbsp; I moved
+on, stealthy, absorbed, undecided; asking myself earnestly: &ldquo;What
+on earth am I going to do with him?&rdquo;&nbsp; That exclusive preoccupation
+of my mind was as dangerous to Se&ntilde;or Ortega as typhoid fever
+would have been.&nbsp; It strikes me that this comparison is very exact.&nbsp;
+People recover from typhoid fever, but generally the chance is considered
+poor.&nbsp; This was precisely his case.&nbsp; His chance was poor;
+though I had no more animosity towards him than a virulent disease has
+against the victim it lays low.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; No,
+I had no plans against him.&nbsp; I had only the feeling that he was
+in mortal danger.</p>
+<p>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.&nbsp;
+It is only the devil, they say, that loves logic.&nbsp; But I was not
+a devil.&nbsp; I was not even a victim of the devil.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; A dreadful
+order seemed to lurk in the darkest shadows of life.&nbsp; 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&mdash;not at the chance, but at the design.</p>
+<p>For it was my love that was called upon to act here, and nothing
+else.&nbsp; 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.</p>
+<p>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.&nbsp; Plucked out, stamped down, torn to shreds, it had remained
+with me secret, intact, invincible.&nbsp; Before the danger of the situation
+it sprang, full of life, up in arms&mdash;the undying child of immortal
+love.&nbsp; 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!</p>
+<p>This excluded for the moment all considerations of ways and means
+and risks and difficulties.&nbsp; Its tremendous intensity robbed it
+of all direction and left me adrift in the big black-and-white hall
+as on a silent sea.&nbsp; It was not, properly speaking, irresolution.&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp; I didn&rsquo;t think further
+forward for many reasons, more or less optimistic, but mainly because
+I have no homicidal vein in my composition.&nbsp; 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 employ&eacute; of Hernandez Brothers, the jealous wretch
+with an obscene tongue and an imagination of the same kind to drive
+him mad.&nbsp; I thought of him without pity but also without contempt.&nbsp;
+I reflected that there were no means of sending a warning to Do&ntilde;a
+Rita in Tolosa; for of course no postal communication existed with the
+Headquarters.&nbsp; 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?&nbsp; How could I communicate
+to another that certitude which was in my mind, the more absolute because
+without proofs that one could produce?</p>
+<p>The last expression of Rose&rsquo;s distress rang again in my ears:
+&ldquo;Madame has no friends.&nbsp; Not one!&rdquo; and I saw Do&ntilde;a
+Rita&rsquo;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.&nbsp; What I had to do
+first of all was to stop that wretch at all costs.&nbsp; I became aware
+of a great mistrust of Therese.&nbsp; I didn&rsquo;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.&nbsp; There was the alternative of a live-long
+night of watching outside, before the dark front of the house.&nbsp;
+It was a most distasteful prospect.&nbsp; And then it occurred to me
+that Blunt&rsquo;s former room would be an extremely good place to keep
+a watch from.&nbsp; I knew that room.&nbsp; When Henry All&egrave;gre
+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.&nbsp; 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&rsquo;s
+monogram, repeated on the backs of chairs and sofas, and on the heavy
+curtains reaching from ceiling to floor.&nbsp; 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&rsquo;s decorative monogram in its complicated design.&nbsp; Afterwards
+the work was stopped and the house had fallen into disrepair.&nbsp;
+When Rita devoted it to the Carlist cause a bed was put into that drawing-room,
+just simply the bed.&nbsp; The room next to that yellow salon had been
+in All&egrave;gre&rsquo;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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; It communicated
+by a small door with the studio.</p>
+<p>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&rsquo;t want to be caught
+by Therese there was no time to lose.&nbsp; I made the step and extended
+the hand, thinking that it would be just like my luck to find the door
+locked.&nbsp; But the door came open to my push.&nbsp; In contrast to
+the dark hall the room was most unexpectedly dazzling to my eyes, as
+if illuminated <i>a giorno</i> for a reception.&nbsp; No voice came
+from it, but nothing could have stopped me now.&nbsp; As I turned round
+to shut the door behind me noiselessly I caught sight of a woman&rsquo;s
+dress on a chair, of other articles of apparel scattered about.&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp;
+The faintest possible whiff of a familiar perfume made my head swim
+with its suggestion.</p>
+<p>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.&nbsp;
+The silence was profound.&nbsp; It was like being in an enchanted place.&nbsp;
+Suddenly a voice began to speak, clear, detached, infinitely touching
+in its calm weariness.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Haven&rsquo;t you tormented me enough to-day?&rdquo; it said.
+. . . My head was steady now but my heart began to beat violently.&nbsp;
+I listened to the end without moving, &ldquo;Can&rsquo;t you make up
+your mind to leave me alone for to-night?&rdquo;&nbsp; It pleaded with
+an accent of charitable scorn.</p>
+<p>The penetrating quality of these tones which I had not heard for
+so many, many days made my eyes run full of tears.&nbsp; I guessed easily
+that the appeal was addressed to the atrocious Therese.&nbsp; The speaker
+was concealed from me by the high back of the sofa, but her apprehension
+was perfectly justified.&nbsp; 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?&nbsp; Mere surprise at Do&ntilde;a
+Rita&rsquo;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.&nbsp; I didn&rsquo;t even ask myself
+how she came there.&nbsp; It was enough for me that she was not in Tolosa.&nbsp;
+I could have smiled at the thought that all I had to do now was to hasten
+the departure of that abominable lunatic&mdash;for Tolosa: an easy task,
+almost no task at all.&nbsp; Yes, I would have smiled, had not I felt
+outraged by the presence of Se&ntilde;or Ortega under the same roof
+with Do&ntilde;a Rita.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; But that was not to be done for various reasons.&nbsp;
+One of them was pity.&nbsp; I was suddenly at peace with all mankind,
+with all nature.&nbsp; I felt as if I couldn&rsquo;t hurt a fly.&nbsp;
+The intensity of my emotion sealed my lips.&nbsp; With a fearful joy
+tugging at my heart I moved round the head of the couch without a word.</p>
+<p>In the wide fireplace on a pile of white ashes the logs had a deep
+crimson glow; and turned towards them Do&ntilde;a Rita reclined on her
+side enveloped in the skins of wild beasts like a charming and savage
+young chieftain before a camp fire.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; That precious head reposed in the palm of her
+hand; the face was slightly flushed (with anger perhaps).&nbsp; She
+kept her eyes obstinately fixed on the pages of a book which she was
+holding with her other hand.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; I had never seen them before; I mean the slippers.&nbsp;
+The gleam of the insteps, too, for that matter.&nbsp; 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&rsquo;t be eternal.&nbsp;
+I had never tasted such perfect quietness before.&nbsp; It was not of
+this earth.&nbsp; I had gone far beyond.&nbsp; It was as if I had reached
+the ultimate wisdom beyond all dreams and all passions.&nbsp; She was
+That which is to be contemplated to all Infinity.</p>
+<p>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.&nbsp; And no wonder!&nbsp; The glance was meant for
+Therese and assumed in self-defence.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; She had never wished
+so much to be left in peace.&nbsp; She had never been so astonished
+in her life.&nbsp; She had arrived by the evening express only two hours
+before Se&ntilde;or 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&rsquo;s feelings.&nbsp; Seizing this
+unexpected occasion Therese had displayed a distracting versatility
+of sentiment: rapacity, virtue, piety, spite, and false tenderness&mdash;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.&nbsp; After
+that she had retired from the field of battle slowly, undefeated, still
+defiant, firing as a last shot the impudent question: &ldquo;Tell me
+only, have you made your will, Rita?&rdquo;&nbsp; To this poor Do&ntilde;a
+Rita with the spirit of opposition strung to the highest pitch answered:
+&ldquo;No, and I don&rsquo;t mean to&rdquo;&mdash;being under the impression
+that this was what her sister wanted her to do.&nbsp; There can be no
+doubt, however, that all Therese wanted was the information.</p>
+<p>Rita, much too agitated to expect anything but a sleepless night,
+had not the courage to get into bed.&nbsp; She thought she would remain
+on the sofa before the fire and try to compose herself with a book.&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp; She
+didn&rsquo;t hear the slightest noise of any sort till she heard me
+shut the door gently.&nbsp; Quietness of movement was one of Therese&rsquo;s
+accomplishments, and the harassed heiress of the All&egrave;gre millions
+naturally thought it was her sister coming again to renew the scene.&nbsp;
+Her heart sank within her.&nbsp; In the end she became a little frightened
+at the long silence, and raised her eyes.&nbsp; She didn&rsquo;t believe
+them for a long time.&nbsp; She concluded that I was a vision.&nbsp;
+In fact, the first word which I heard her utter was a low, awed &ldquo;No,&rdquo;
+which, though I understood its meaning, chilled my blood like an evil
+omen.</p>
+<p>It was then that I spoke.&nbsp; &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;it&rsquo;s
+me that you see,&rdquo; and made a step forward.&nbsp; She didn&rsquo;t
+start; only her other hand flew to the edges of the fur coat, gripping
+them together over her breast.&nbsp; Observing this gesture I sat down
+in the nearest chair.&nbsp; The book she had been reading slipped with
+a thump on the floor.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;How is it possible that you should be here?&rdquo; she said,
+still in a doubting voice.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I am really here,&rdquo; I said.&nbsp; &ldquo;Would you like
+to touch my hand?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She didn&rsquo;t move at all; her fingers still clutched the fur
+coat.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What has happened?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It&rsquo;s a long story, but you may take it from me that
+all is over.&nbsp; The tie between us is broken.&nbsp; I don&rsquo;t
+know that it was ever very close.&nbsp; It was an external thing.&nbsp;
+The true misfortune is that I have ever seen you.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>This last phrase was provoked by an exclamation of sympathy on her
+part.&nbsp; She raised herself on her elbow and looked at me intently.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;All over,&rdquo; she murmured.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes, we had to wreck the little vessel.&nbsp; It was awful.&nbsp;
+I feel like a murderer.&nbsp; But she had to be killed.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Why?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Because I loved her too much.&nbsp; Don&rsquo;t you know that
+love and death go very close together?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I could feel almost happy that it is all over, if you hadn&rsquo;t
+had to lose your love.&nbsp; Oh, <i>amigo</i> George, it was a safe
+love for you.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; I said.&nbsp; &ldquo;It was a faithful little
+vessel.&nbsp; She would have saved us all from any plain danger.&nbsp;
+But this was a betrayal.&nbsp; It was&mdash;never mind.&nbsp; All that&rsquo;s
+past.&nbsp; The question is what will the next one be.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Why should it be that?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know.&nbsp; Life seems but a series of betrayals.&nbsp;
+There are so many kinds of them.&nbsp; This was a betrayed plan, but
+one can betray confidence, and hope and&mdash;desire, and the most sacred
+. . .&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But what are you doing here?&rdquo; she interrupted.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, yes!&nbsp; The eternal why.&nbsp; Till a few hours ago
+I didn&rsquo;t know what I was here for.&nbsp; And what are you here
+for?&rdquo; I asked point blank and with a bitterness she disregarded.&nbsp;
+She even answered my question quite readily with many words out of which
+I could make very little.&nbsp; I only learned that for at least five
+mixed reasons, none of which impressed me profoundly, Do&ntilde;a Rita
+had started at a moment&rsquo;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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; And did I know what that extraordinary girl said?&nbsp;
+She had said: &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t let Madame think that I would be too
+proud to accept anything whatever from her; but I can&rsquo;t even dream
+of leaving Madame.&nbsp; I believe Madame has no friends.&nbsp; Not
+one.&rdquo;&nbsp; So instead of a large sum of money Do&ntilde;a 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.&nbsp; &ldquo;Hide from them,&rdquo; she went
+on with ardour.&nbsp; &ldquo;Yes, I came here to hide,&rdquo; she repeated
+twice as if delighted at last to have hit on that reason among so many
+others.&nbsp; &ldquo;How could I tell that you would be here?&rdquo;&nbsp;
+Then with sudden fire which only added to the delight with which I had
+been watching the play of her physiognomy she added: &ldquo;Why did
+you come into this room?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She enchanted me.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; The words didn&rsquo;t matter.&nbsp; They had to be answered,
+of course.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I came in for several reasons.&nbsp; One of them is that I
+didn&rsquo;t know you were here.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Therese didn&rsquo;t tell you?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Never talked to you about me?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>I hesitated only for a moment.&nbsp; &ldquo;Never,&rdquo; I said.&nbsp;
+Then I asked in my turn, &ldquo;Did she tell you I was here?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No,&rdquo; she said.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It&rsquo;s very clear she did not mean us to come together
+again.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Neither did I, my dear.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What do you mean by speaking like this, in this tone, in these
+words?&nbsp; You seem to use them as if they were a sort of formula.&nbsp;
+Am I a dear to you?&nbsp; Or is anybody? . . . or everybody? . . .&rdquo;</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Why do you try to hurt my feelings?&rdquo; she asked.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;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.&nbsp;
+You don&rsquo;t pretend to make me believe that you do it for any sort
+of reason that a decent person would confess to.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The colour had gone from her face; but a fit of wickedness was on
+me and I pursued, &ldquo;What are the motives of your speeches?&nbsp;
+What prompts your actions?&nbsp; On your own showing your life seems
+to be a continuous running away.&nbsp; You have just run away from Paris.&nbsp;
+Where will you run to-morrow?&nbsp; What are you everlastingly running
+from&mdash;or is it that you are running after something?&nbsp; What
+is it?&nbsp; A man, a phantom&mdash;or some sensation that you don&rsquo;t
+like to own to?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Truth to say, I was abashed by the silence which was her only answer
+to this sally.&nbsp; I said to myself that I would not let my natural
+anger, my just fury be disarmed by any assumption of pathos or dignity.&nbsp;
+I suppose I was really out of my mind and what in the middle ages would
+have been called &ldquo;possessed&rdquo; by an evil spirit.&nbsp; I
+went on enjoying my own villainy.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Why aren&rsquo;t you in Tolosa?&nbsp; You ought to be in Tolosa.&nbsp;
+Isn&rsquo;t Tolosa the proper field for your abilities, for your sympathies,
+for your profusions, for your generosities&mdash;the king without a
+crown, the man without a fortune!&nbsp; But here there is nothing worthy
+of your talents.&nbsp; No, there is no longer anything worth any sort
+of trouble here.&nbsp; There isn&rsquo;t even that ridiculous Monsieur
+George.&nbsp; I understand that the talk of the coast from here to Cette
+is that Monsieur George is drowned.&nbsp; Upon my word I believe he
+is.&nbsp; And serve him right, too.&nbsp; There&rsquo;s Therese, but
+I don&rsquo;t suppose that your love for your sister . . .&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;For goodness&rsquo; sake don&rsquo;t let her come in and find
+you here.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Those words recalled me to myself, exorcised the evil spirit by the
+mere enchanting power of the voice.&nbsp; They were also impressive
+by their suggestion of something practical, utilitarian, and remote
+from sentiment.&nbsp; The evil spirit left me and I remained taken aback
+slightly.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well,&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;if you mean that you want me to
+leave the room I will confess to you that I can&rsquo;t very well do
+it yet.&nbsp; But I could lock both doors if you don&rsquo;t mind that.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Do what you like as long as you keep her out.&nbsp; You two
+together would be too much for me to-night.&nbsp; Why don&rsquo;t you
+go and lock those doors?&nbsp; I have a feeling she is on the prowl.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>I got up at once saying, &ldquo;I imagine she has gone to bed by
+this time.&rdquo;&nbsp; I felt absolutely calm and responsible.&nbsp;
+I turned the keys one after another so gently that I couldn&rsquo;t
+hear the click of the locks myself.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; That penitential attitude had but little
+remorse in it.&nbsp; I detected no movement and heard no sound from
+her.&nbsp; In one place a bit of the fur coat touched my cheek softly,
+but no forgiving hand came to rest on my bowed head.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; Indeed to remain seemed to me a complete solution for
+all the problems that life presents&mdash;even as to the very death
+itself.</p>
+<p>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.&nbsp;
+But I got up without despair.&nbsp; She didn&rsquo;t murmur, she didn&rsquo;t
+stir.&nbsp; There was something august in the stillness of the room.&nbsp;
+It was a strange peace which she shared with me in this unexpected shelter
+full of disorder in its neglected splendour.&nbsp; What troubled me
+was the sudden, as it were material, consciousness of time passing as
+water flows.&nbsp; It seemed to me that it was only the tenacity of
+my sentiment that held that woman&rsquo;s body, extended and tranquil
+above the flood.&nbsp; But when I ventured at last to look at her face
+I saw her flushed, her teeth clenched&mdash;it was visible&mdash;her
+nostrils dilated, and in her narrow, level-glancing eyes a look of inward
+and frightened ecstasy.&nbsp; The edges of the fur coat had fallen open
+and I was moved to turn away.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; I really didn&rsquo;t
+understand.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.</p>
+<p>And suddenly she spoke.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; She asked as if nothing
+had happened:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What are you thinking of, <i>amigo</i>?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>I turned about.&nbsp; 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.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Can I think of anything but you?&rdquo; I murmured, taking
+a seat near the foot of the couch.&nbsp; &ldquo;Or rather it isn&rsquo;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.&nbsp; I see you now lying on this couch but that is
+only the insensible phantom of the real you that is in me.&nbsp; And
+it is the easier for me to feel this because that image which others
+see and call by your name&mdash;how am I to know that it is anything
+else but an enchanting mist?&nbsp; You have always eluded me except
+in one or two moments which seem still more dream-like than the rest.&nbsp;
+Since I came into this room you have done nothing to destroy my conviction
+of your unreality apart from myself.&nbsp; You haven&rsquo;t offered
+me your hand to touch.&nbsp; 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?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>One of her hands was under the fur and the other under her cheek.&nbsp;
+She made no sound.&nbsp; She didn&rsquo;t offer to stir.&nbsp; She didn&rsquo;t
+move her eyes, not even after I had added after waiting for a while,</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Just what I expected.&nbsp; You are a cold illusion.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She smiled mysteriously, right away from me, straight at the fire,
+and that was all.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h3>CHAPTER VI</h3>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>I had a momentary suspicion that I had said something stupid.&nbsp;
+Her smile amongst many other things seemed to have meant that, too.&nbsp;
+And I answered it with a certain resignation:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well, I don&rsquo;t know that you are so much mist.&nbsp;
+I remember once hanging on to you like a drowning man . . . But perhaps
+I had better not speak of this.&nbsp; It wasn&rsquo;t so very long ago,
+and you may . . . &rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t mind.&nbsp; Well . . .&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well, I have kept an impression of great solidity.&nbsp; I&rsquo;ll
+admit that.&nbsp; A woman of granite.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;A doctor once told me that I was made to last for ever,&rdquo;
+she said.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But essentially it&rsquo;s the same thing,&rdquo; I went on.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;Granite, too, is insensible.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>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 &ldquo;Imbecile.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+I expected it to come, but it didn&rsquo;t come.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; &ldquo;I
+will tell you how it is,&rdquo; I said.&nbsp; &ldquo;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.&nbsp; It was like that from the
+beginning.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp;
+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&mdash;for its profanations,
+too.&nbsp; Don&rsquo;t imagine me grovelling in spiritual abasement
+before a mere image.&nbsp; I got a grip on you that nothing can shake
+now.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Don&rsquo;t speak like this,&rdquo; she said.&nbsp; &ldquo;It&rsquo;s
+too much for me.&nbsp; And there is a whole long night before us.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You don&rsquo;t think that I dealt with you sentimentally
+enough perhaps?&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; And is it my fault
+that what I had to give was real flame, and not a mystic&rsquo;s incense?&nbsp;
+It is neither your fault nor mine.&nbsp; And now whatever we say to
+each other at night or in daylight, that sentiment must be taken for
+granted.&nbsp; It will be there on the day I die&mdash;when you won&rsquo;t
+be there.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She continued to look fixedly at the red embers; and from her lips
+that hardly moved came the quietest possible whisper: &ldquo;Nothing
+would be easier than to die for you.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Really,&rdquo; I cried.&nbsp; &ldquo;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.&nbsp; But as it happens there
+is nothing in me but contempt for this sublime declaration.&nbsp; How
+dare you offer me this charlatanism of passion?&nbsp; 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?&nbsp;
+Is it possible that you are a charlatan at heart?&nbsp; Not from egoism,
+I admit, but from some sort of fear.&nbsp; Yet, should you be sincere,
+then&mdash;listen well to me&mdash;I would never forgive you.&nbsp;
+I would visit your grave every day to curse you for an evil thing.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Evil thing,&rdquo; she echoed softly.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Would you prefer to be a sham&mdash;that one could forget?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You will never forget me,&rdquo; she said in the same tone
+at the glowing embers.&nbsp; &ldquo;Evil or good.&nbsp; But, my dear,
+I feel neither an evil nor a sham.&nbsp; I have got to be what I am,
+and that, <i>amigo</i>, is not so easy; because I may be simple, but
+like all those on whom there is no peace I am not One.&nbsp; No, I am
+not One!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You are all the women in the world,&rdquo; I whispered bending
+over her.&nbsp; She didn&rsquo;t seem to be aware of anything and only
+spoke&mdash;always to the glow.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;If I were that I would say: God help them then.&nbsp; But
+that would be more appropriate for Therese.&nbsp; For me, I can only
+give them my infinite compassion.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; How could I help it?&nbsp; For the talk was clever and&mdash;and
+I had a mind.&nbsp; And I am also, as Therese says, naturally sinful.&nbsp;
+Yes, my dear, I may be naturally wicked but I am not evil and I could
+die for you.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You!&rdquo; I said.&nbsp; &ldquo;You are afraid to die.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes.&nbsp; But not for you.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The whole structure of glowing logs fell down, raising a small turmoil
+of white ashes and sparks.&nbsp; The tiny crash seemed to wake her up
+thoroughly.&nbsp; She turned her head upon the cushion to look at me.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It&rsquo;s a very extraordinary thing, we two coming together
+like this,&rdquo; she said with conviction.&nbsp; &ldquo;You coming
+in without knowing I was here and then telling me that you can&rsquo;t
+very well go out of the room.&nbsp; That sounds funny.&nbsp; I wouldn&rsquo;t
+have been angry if you had said that you wouldn&rsquo;t.&nbsp; It would
+have hurt me.&nbsp; But nobody ever paid much attention to my feelings.&nbsp;
+Why do you smile like this?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;At a thought.&nbsp; Without any charlatanism of passion I
+am able to tell you of something to match your devotion.&nbsp; I was
+not afraid for your sake to come within a hair&rsquo;s breadth of what
+to all the world would have been a squalid crime.&nbsp; Note that you
+and I are persons of honour.&nbsp; And there might have been a criminal
+trial at the end of it for me.&nbsp; Perhaps the scaffold.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Do you say these horrors to make me tremble?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, you needn&rsquo;t tremble.&nbsp; There shall be no crime.&nbsp;
+I need not risk the scaffold, since now you are safe.&nbsp; But I entered
+this room meditating resolutely on the ways of murder, calculating possibilities
+and chances without the slightest compunction.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s all
+over now.&nbsp; It was all over directly I saw you here, but it had
+been so near that I shudder yet.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She must have been very startled because for a time she couldn&rsquo;t
+speak.&nbsp; Then in a faint voice:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;For me!&nbsp; For me!&rdquo; she faltered out twice.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;For you&mdash;or for myself?&nbsp; Yet it couldn&rsquo;t have
+been selfish.&nbsp; What would it have been to me that you remained
+in the world?&nbsp; I never expected to see you again.&nbsp; I even
+composed a most beautiful letter of farewell.&nbsp; Such a letter as
+no woman had ever received.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Instantly she shot out a hand towards me.&nbsp; The edges of the
+fur cloak fell apart.&nbsp; A wave of the faintest possible scent floated
+into my nostrils.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Let me have it,&rdquo; she said imperiously.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You can&rsquo;t have it.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s all in my head.&nbsp;
+No woman will read it.&nbsp; I suspect it was something that could never
+have been written.&nbsp; But what a farewell!&nbsp; And now I suppose
+we shall say good-bye without even a handshake.&nbsp; But you are safe!&nbsp;
+Only I must ask you not to come out of this room till I tell you you
+may.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>I was extremely anxious that Se&ntilde;or Ortega should never even
+catch a glimpse of Do&ntilde;a Rita, never guess how near he had been
+to her.&nbsp; 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 Do&ntilde;a Rita completely.&nbsp; 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&mdash;keep
+a shop and grow fat.&nbsp; All this flashed through my mind in an instant
+and while I was still dazzled by those comforting images, the voice
+of Do&ntilde;a Rita pulled me up with a jerk.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You mean not out of the house?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No, I mean not out of this room,&rdquo; I said with some embarrassment.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What do you mean?&nbsp; Is there something in the house then?&nbsp;
+This is most extraordinary!&nbsp; Stay in this room?&nbsp; And you,
+too, it seems?&nbsp; Are you also afraid for yourself?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I can&rsquo;t even give you an idea how afraid I was.&nbsp;
+I am not so much now.&nbsp; But you know very well, Do&ntilde;a Rita,
+that I never carry any sort of weapon in my pocket.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Why don&rsquo;t you, then?&rdquo; she asked in a flash of
+scorn which bewitched me so completely for an instant that I couldn&rsquo;t
+even smile at it.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Because if I am unconventionalized I am an old European,&rdquo;
+I murmured gently.&nbsp; &ldquo;No, <i>Excellentissima</i>, I shall
+go through life without as much as a switch in my hand.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s
+no use you being angry.&nbsp; Adapting to this great moment some words
+you&rsquo;ve heard before: I am like that.&nbsp; Such is my character!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Do&ntilde;a Rita frankly stared at me&mdash;a most unusual expression
+for her to have.&nbsp; Suddenly she sat up.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Don George,&rdquo; she said with lovely animation, &ldquo;I
+insist upon knowing who is in my house.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You insist! . . . But Therese says it is <i>her</i> house.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>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.&nbsp; Rosy all over, cheeks, neck, shoulders, she seemed lighted
+up softly from inside like a beautiful transparency.&nbsp; But she didn&rsquo;t
+raise her voice.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You and Therese have sworn my ruin.&nbsp; If you don&rsquo;t
+tell me what you mean I will go outside and shout up the stairs to make
+her come down.&nbsp; I know there is no one but the three of us in the
+house.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes, three; but not counting my Jacobin.&nbsp; There is a
+Jacobin in the house.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;A Jac . . .!&nbsp; Oh, George, is this the time to jest?&rdquo;
+she began in persuasive tones when a faint but peculiar noise stilled
+her lips as though they had been suddenly frozen.&nbsp; She became quiet
+all over instantly.&nbsp; I, on the contrary, made an involuntary movement
+before I, too, became as still as death.&nbsp; 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&rsquo;s
+senses.&nbsp; Do&ntilde;a Rita looked inquisitively at me.&nbsp; I gave
+her a slight nod.&nbsp; We remained looking into each other&rsquo;s
+eyes while we listened and listened till the silence became unbearable.&nbsp;
+Do&ntilde;a Rita whispered composedly: &ldquo;Did you hear?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I am asking myself . . . I almost think I didn&rsquo;t.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Don&rsquo;t shuffle with me.&nbsp; It was a scraping noise.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Something fell.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Something!&nbsp; What thing?&nbsp; What are the things that
+fall by themselves?&nbsp; Who is that man of whom you spoke?&nbsp; Is
+there a man?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No doubt about it whatever.&nbsp; I brought him here myself.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What for?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Why shouldn&rsquo;t I have a Jacobin of my own?&nbsp; Haven&rsquo;t
+you one, too?&nbsp; But mine is a different problem from that white-haired
+humbug of yours.&nbsp; He is a genuine article.&nbsp; There must be
+plenty like him about.&nbsp; He has scores to settle with half a dozen
+people, he says, and he clamours for revolutions to give him a chance.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But why did you bring him here?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know&mdash;from sudden affection . . . &rdquo;</p>
+<p>All this passed in such low tones that we seemed to make out the
+words more by watching each other&rsquo;s lips than through our sense
+of hearing.&nbsp; Man is a strange animal.&nbsp; I didn&rsquo;t care
+what I said.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp;
+All I was thinking of was that she was adorable and too lovely for words!&nbsp;
+I cared for nothing but that sublimely aesthetic impression.&nbsp; It
+summed up all life, all joy, all poetry!&nbsp; It had a divine strain.&nbsp;
+I am certain that I was not in my right mind.&nbsp; I suppose I was
+not quite sane.&nbsp; I am convinced that at that moment of the four
+people in the house it was Do&ntilde;a Rita who upon the whole was the
+most sane.&nbsp; She observed my face and I am sure she read there something
+of my inward exaltation.&nbsp; She knew what to do.&nbsp; In the softest
+possible tone and hardly above her breath she commanded: &ldquo;George,
+come to yourself.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Her gentleness had the effect of evening light.&nbsp; I was soothed.&nbsp;
+Her confidence in her own power touched me profoundly.&nbsp; I suppose
+my love was too great for madness to get hold of me.&nbsp; I can&rsquo;t
+say that I passed to a complete calm, but I became slightly ashamed
+of myself.&nbsp; I whispered:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No, it was not from affection, it was for the love of you
+that I brought him here.&nbsp; That imbecile H. was going to send him
+to Tolosa.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;That Jacobin!&rdquo; Do&ntilde;a Rita was immensely surprised,
+as she might well have been.&nbsp; Then resigned to the incomprehensible:
+&ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; she breathed out, &ldquo;what did you do with him?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I put him to bed in the studio.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>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.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;And then?&rdquo; she inquired.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Then I came in here to face calmly the necessity of doing
+away with a human life.&nbsp; I didn&rsquo;t shirk it for a moment.&nbsp;
+That&rsquo;s what a short twelvemonth has brought me to.&nbsp; Don&rsquo;t
+think I am reproaching you, O blind force!&nbsp; You are justified because
+you <i>are</i>.&nbsp; Whatever had to happen you would not even have
+heard of it.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Horror darkened her marvellous radiance.&nbsp; Then her face became
+utterly blank with the tremendous effort to understand.&nbsp; Absolute
+silence reigned in the house.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; Suddenly Do&ntilde;a Rita raised
+a warning finger.&nbsp; I had heard nothing and shook my head; but she
+nodded hers and murmured excitedly,</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes, yes, in the fencing-room, as before.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>In the same way I answered her: &ldquo;Impossible!&nbsp; The door
+is locked and Therese has the key.&rdquo;&nbsp; She asked then in the
+most cautious manner,</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Have you seen Therese to-night?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; I confessed without misgiving.&nbsp; &ldquo;I
+left her making up the fellow&rsquo;s bed when I came in here.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;The bed of the Jacobin?&rdquo; she said in a peculiar tone
+as if she were humouring a lunatic.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I think I had better tell you he is a Spaniard&mdash;that
+he seems to know you from early days. . . .&rdquo;&nbsp; I glanced at
+her face, it was extremely tense, apprehensive.&nbsp; For myself I had
+no longer any doubt as to the man and I hoped she would reach the correct
+conclusion herself.&nbsp; But I believe she was too distracted and worried
+to think consecutively.&nbsp; She only seemed to feel some terror in
+the air.&nbsp; In very pity I bent down and whispered carefully near
+her ear, &ldquo;His name is Ortega.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>I expected some effect from that name but I never expected what happened.&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp; The vigour, the instinctive precision
+of that spring, were something amazing.&nbsp; I just escaped being knocked
+over.&nbsp; She landed lightly on her bare feet with a perfect balance,
+without the slightest suspicion of swaying in her instant immobility.&nbsp;
+It lasted less than a second, then she spun round distractedly and darted
+at the first door she could see.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp;
+She was muttering all the time, &ldquo;No, no, no.&rdquo;&nbsp; She
+abandoned herself to me just for an instant during which I got her back
+to the middle of the room.&nbsp; There she attempted to free herself
+and I let her go at once.&nbsp; With her face very close to mine, but
+apparently not knowing what she was looking at she repeated again twice,
+&ldquo;No&mdash;No,&rdquo; with an intonation which might well have
+brought dampness to my eyes but which only made me regret that I didn&rsquo;t
+kill the honest Ortega at sight.&nbsp; Suddenly Do&ntilde;a Rita swung
+round and seizing her loose hair with both hands started twisting it
+up before one of the sumptuous mirrors.&nbsp; The wide fur sleeves slipped
+down her white arms.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp;
+Then she sprang away from the glass muttering feverishly, &ldquo;Out&mdash;out&mdash;out
+of this house,&rdquo; and trying with an awful, senseless stare to dodge
+past me who had put myself in her way with open arms.&nbsp; At last
+I managed to seize her by the shoulders and in the extremity of my distress
+I shook her roughly.&nbsp; If she hadn&rsquo;t quieted down then I believe
+my heart would have broken.&nbsp; I spluttered right into her face:
+&ldquo;I won&rsquo;t let you.&nbsp; Here you stay.&rdquo;&nbsp; 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, &ldquo;O! George!&nbsp; No!&nbsp; No!&nbsp; Not Ortega.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>There was a passion of mature grief in this tone of appeal.&nbsp;
+And yet she remained as touching and helpless as a distressed child.&nbsp;
+It had all the simplicity and depth of a child&rsquo;s emotion.&nbsp;
+It tugged at one&rsquo;s heart-strings in the same direct way.&nbsp;
+But what could one do?&nbsp; How could one soothe her?&nbsp; It was
+impossible to pat her on the head, take her on the knee, give her a
+chocolate or show her a picture-book.&nbsp; I found myself absolutely
+without resource.&nbsp; Completely at a loss.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes, Ortega.&nbsp; Well, what of it?&rdquo; I whispered with
+immense assurance.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h3>CHAPTER VII</h3>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>My brain was in a whirl.&nbsp; I am safe to say that at this precise
+moment there was nobody completely sane in the house.&nbsp; Setting
+apart Therese and Ortega, both in the grip of unspeakable passions,
+all the moral economy of Do&ntilde;a Rita had gone to pieces.&nbsp;
+Everything was gone except her strong sense of life with all its implied
+menaces.&nbsp; The woman was a mere chaos of sensations and vitality.&nbsp;
+I, too, suffered most from inability to get hold of some fundamental
+thought.&nbsp; The one on which I could best build some hopes was the
+thought that, of course, Ortega did not know anything.&nbsp; I whispered
+this into the ear of Do&ntilde;a Rita, into her precious, her beautifully
+shaped ear.</p>
+<p>But she shook her head, very much like an inconsolable child and
+very much with a child&rsquo;s complete pessimism she murmured, &ldquo;Therese
+has told him.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The words, &ldquo;Oh, nonsense,&rdquo; 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.&nbsp; I knew that room.&nbsp;
+There was nothing there that by the wildest stretch of imagination could
+be conceived as falling with that particular sound.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; And that was all.&nbsp; And the door leading to the studio
+was locked.&nbsp; And Therese had the key.&nbsp; And it flashed on my
+mind, independently of Do&ntilde;a Rita&rsquo;s pessimism, by the force
+of personal conviction, that, of course, Therese would tell him.&nbsp;
+I beheld the whole succession of events perfectly connected and tending
+to that particular conclusion.&nbsp; Therese would tell him!&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; So at least Therese would think.&nbsp; She
+could not be but under the impression that (providentially) I had been
+called out for the rest of the night.</p>
+<p>And now there was one sane person in the house, for I had regained
+complete command of my thoughts.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; For who could mistake the state that made
+Jos&eacute; Ortega the figure he was, inspiring both pity and fear?&nbsp;
+I could not deny that I understood, not the full extent but the exact
+nature of his suffering.&nbsp; Young as I was I had solved for myself
+that grotesque and sombre personality.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; No doubt I was very near death in the
+&ldquo;grand salon&rdquo; of the Maison Dor&eacute;e, only that his
+torture had gone too far.&nbsp; It seemed to me that I ought to have
+heard his very soul scream while we were seated at supper.&nbsp; But
+in a moment he had ceased to care for me.&nbsp; I was nothing.&nbsp;
+To the crazy exaggeration of his jealousy I was but one amongst a hundred
+thousand.&nbsp; What was my death?&nbsp; Nothing.&nbsp; All mankind
+had possessed that woman.&nbsp; I knew what his wooing of her would
+be: Mine&mdash;or Dead.</p>
+<p>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.&nbsp; An idiot.&nbsp; A one-ideaed creature.&nbsp; Only the idea
+was complex; therefore it was impossible really to say what she wasn&rsquo;t
+capable of.&nbsp; This was what made her obscure processes so awful.&nbsp;
+She had at times the most amazing perceptions.&nbsp; Who could tell
+where her simplicity ended and her cunning began?&nbsp; 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&rsquo;s surprising
+justice.&nbsp; Recalling her naive admiration of the &ldquo;just&rdquo;
+law that required no &ldquo;paper&rdquo; from a sister, I saw her casting
+loose the raging fate with a sanctimonious air.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp;
+Righteousness demanded that the erring sister should be taken unawares.</p>
+<p>All the above is the analysis of one short moment.&nbsp; Images are
+to words like light to sound&mdash;incomparably swifter.&nbsp; And all
+this was really one flash of light through my mind.&nbsp; A comforting
+thought succeeded it: that both doors were locked and that really there
+was no danger.</p>
+<p>However, there had been that noise&mdash;the why and the how of it?&nbsp;
+Of course in the dark he might have fallen into the bath, but that wouldn&rsquo;t
+have been a faint noise.&nbsp; It wouldn&rsquo;t have been a rattle.&nbsp;
+There was absolutely nothing he could knock over.&nbsp; He might have
+dropped a candle-stick if Therese had left him her own.&nbsp; That was
+possible, but then those thick mats&mdash;and then, anyway, why should
+he drop it? and, hang it all, why shouldn&rsquo;t he have gone straight
+on and tried the door?&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; I had a conviction that he was still
+listening.&nbsp; Why?&nbsp; Goodness knows!&nbsp; He may have been only
+gloating over the assurance that the night was long and that he had
+all these hours to himself.</p>
+<p>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.&nbsp; I hadn&rsquo;t
+the same confidence in the efficiency of the lock.&nbsp; Still I . .
+. Guarding my lips with my hand I urged Do&ntilde;a Rita to go back
+to the sofa.&nbsp; She wouldn&rsquo;t answer me and when I got hold
+of her arm I discovered that she wouldn&rsquo;t move.&nbsp; 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.</p>
+<p>I was extremely anxious that she shouldn&rsquo;t betray herself.&nbsp;
+I reasoned, save the mark, as a psychologist.&nbsp; I had no doubt that
+the man knew of her being there; but he only knew it by hearsay.&nbsp;
+And that was bad enough.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; I was
+rather ridiculously worried about the locks.&nbsp; A horrid mistrust
+of the whole house possessed me.&nbsp; I saw it in the light of a deadly
+trap.&nbsp; I had no weapon, I couldn&rsquo;t say whether he had one
+or not.&nbsp; I wasn&rsquo;t afraid of a struggle as far as I, myself,
+was concerned, but I was afraid of it for Do&ntilde;a Rita.&nbsp; To
+be rolling at her feet, locked in a literally tooth-and-nail struggle
+with Ortega would have been odious.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp;
+I looked at her face.&nbsp; For immobility it might have been a carving.&nbsp;
+I wished I knew how to deal with that embodied mystery, to influence
+it, to manage it.&nbsp; Oh, how I longed for the gift of authority!&nbsp;
+In addition, since I had become completely sane, all my scruples against
+laying hold of her had returned.&nbsp; I felt shy and embarrassed.&nbsp;
+My eyes were fixed on the bronze handle of the fencing-room door as
+if it were something alive.&nbsp; I braced myself up against the moment
+when it would move.&nbsp; This was what was going to happen next.&nbsp;
+It would move very gently.&nbsp; My heart began to thump.&nbsp; But
+I was prepared to keep myself as still as death and I hoped Do&ntilde;a
+Rita would have sense enough to do the same.&nbsp; I stole another glance
+at her face and at that moment I heard the word: &ldquo;Beloved!&rdquo;
+form itself in the still air of the room, weak, distinct, piteous, like
+the last request of the dying.</p>
+<p>With great presence of mind I whispered into Do&ntilde;a Rita&rsquo;s
+ear: &ldquo;Perfect silence!&rdquo; and was overjoyed to discover that
+she had heard me, understood me; that she even had command over her
+rigid lips.&nbsp; She answered me in a breath (our cheeks were nearly
+touching): &ldquo;Take me out of this house.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>I glanced at all her clothing scattered about the room and hissed
+forcibly the warning &ldquo;Perfect immobility&rdquo;; noticing with
+relief that she didn&rsquo;t offer to move, though animation was returning
+to her and her lips had remained parted in an awful, unintended effect
+of a smile.&nbsp; And I don&rsquo;t know whether I was pleased when
+she, who was not to be touched, gripped my wrist suddenly.&nbsp; It
+had the air of being done on purpose because almost instantly another:
+&ldquo;Beloved!&rdquo; louder, more agonized if possible, got into the
+room and, yes, went home to my heart.&nbsp; It was followed without
+any transition, preparation, or warning, by a positively bellowed: &ldquo;Speak,
+perjured beast!&rdquo; which I felt pass in a thrill right through Do&ntilde;a
+Rita like an electric shock, leaving her as motionless as before.</p>
+<p>Till he shook the door handle, which he did immediately afterwards,
+I wasn&rsquo;t certain through which door he had spoken.&nbsp; The two
+doors (in different walls) were rather near each other.&nbsp; It was
+as I expected.&nbsp; He was in the fencing-room, thoroughly aroused,
+his senses on the alert to catch the slightest sound.&nbsp; A situation
+not to be trifled with.&nbsp; Leaving the room was for us out of the
+question.&nbsp; It was quite possible for him to dash round into the
+hall before we could get clear of the front door.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; There was no advantage in locking ourselves up anywhere
+upstairs where the original doors and locks were much lighter.&nbsp;
+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&rsquo;t care which.</p>
+<p>For me to go out and meet him would have been stupid.&nbsp; Now I
+was certain that he was armed.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; Ortega
+had only to make his barbarous choice.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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 Do&ntilde;a
+Rita would have been left utterly defenceless.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;He will speak,&rdquo; came to me the ghostly, terrified murmur
+of her voice.&nbsp; &ldquo;Take me out of the house before he begins
+to speak.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Keep still,&rdquo; I whispered.&nbsp; &ldquo;He will soon
+get tired of this.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You don&rsquo;t know him.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, yes, I do.&nbsp; Been with him two hours.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>At this she let go my wrist and covered her face with her hands passionately.&nbsp;
+When she dropped them she had the look of one morally crushed.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What did he say to you?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;He raved.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Listen to me.&nbsp; It was all true!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I daresay, but what of that?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>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.&nbsp; 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&mdash;one
+poor little word.&nbsp; Then it gave up, then repeated once more, &ldquo;Say
+you are there, Rita, Say one word, just one word.&nbsp; Say &lsquo;yes.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+Come!&nbsp; Just one little yes.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You see,&rdquo; I said.&nbsp; She only lowered her eyelids
+over the anxious glance she had turned on me.</p>
+<p>For a minute we could have had the illusion that he had stolen away,
+unheard, on the thick mats.&nbsp; But I don&rsquo;t think that either
+of us was deceived.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; When it paused it left us looking
+profoundly at each other.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It&rsquo;s almost comic,&rdquo; I whispered.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes.&nbsp; One could laugh,&rdquo; she assented, with a sort
+of sinister conviction.&nbsp; Never had I seen her look exactly like
+that, for an instant another, an incredible Rita!&nbsp; &ldquo;Haven&rsquo;t
+I laughed at him innumerable times?&rdquo; she added in a sombre whisper.</p>
+<p>He was muttering to himself out there, and unexpectedly shouted:
+&ldquo;What?&rdquo; as though he had fancied he had heard something.&nbsp;
+He waited a while before he started up again with a loud: &ldquo;Speak
+up, Queen of the goats, with your goat tricks. . .&rdquo;&nbsp; All
+was still for a time, then came a most awful bang on the door.&nbsp;
+He must have stepped back a pace to hurl himself bodily against the
+panels.&nbsp; The whole house seemed to shake.&nbsp; He repeated that
+performance once more, and then varied it by a prolonged drumming with
+his fists.&nbsp; It <i>was</i> comic.&nbsp; But I felt myself struggling
+mentally with an invading gloom as though I were no longer sure of myself.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Take me out,&rdquo; whispered Do&ntilde;a Rita feverishly,
+&ldquo;take me out of this house before it is too late.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You will have to stand it,&rdquo; I answered.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;So be it; but then you must go away yourself.&nbsp; Go now,
+before it is too late.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>I didn&rsquo;t condescend to answer this.&nbsp; The drumming on the
+panels stopped and the absurd thunder of it died out in the house.&nbsp;
+I don&rsquo;t know why precisely then I had the acute vision of the
+red mouth of Jos&eacute; Ortega wriggling with rage between his funny
+whiskers.&nbsp; He began afresh but in a tired tone:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Do you expect a fellow to forget your tricks, you wicked little
+devil?&nbsp; Haven&rsquo;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?&nbsp; I wonder I didn&rsquo;t
+throw stones at you, I wonder I didn&rsquo;t run after you shouting
+the tale&mdash;curse my timidity!&nbsp; But I daresay they knew as much
+as I did.&nbsp; More.&nbsp; All the new tricks&mdash;if that were possible.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>While he was making this uproar, Do&ntilde;a Rita put her fingers
+in her ears and then suddenly changed her mind and clapped her hands
+over my ears.&nbsp; Instinctively I disengaged my head but she persisted.&nbsp;
+We had a short tussle without moving from the spot, and suddenly I had
+my head free, and there was complete silence.&nbsp; He had screamed
+himself out of breath, but Do&ntilde;a Rita muttering; &ldquo;Too late,
+too late,&rdquo; 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.&nbsp; Determined to prevent this, but
+indeed without thinking very much what I was doing, I got hold of her
+arm.&nbsp; That struggle was silent, too; but I used the least force
+possible and she managed to give me an unexpected push.&nbsp; Stepping
+back to save myself from falling I overturned the little table, bearing
+the six-branched candlestick.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; He on the other side of the door naturally heard
+the noise and greeted it with a triumphant screech: &ldquo;Aha!&nbsp;
+I&rsquo;ve managed to wake you up,&rdquo; the very savagery of which
+had a laughable effect.&nbsp; I felt the weight of Do&ntilde;a 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.&nbsp; But he didn&rsquo;t
+even thump it.&nbsp; He seemed to have exhausted himself in that scream.&nbsp;
+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 Do&ntilde;a
+Rita sunk on her knees in a penitential and despairing attitude.&nbsp;
+Before this collapse I, who had been wrestling desperately with her
+a moment before, felt that I dare not touch her.&nbsp; This emotion,
+too, I could not understand; this abandonment of herself, this conscience-stricken
+humility.&nbsp; A humbly imploring request to open the door came from
+the other side.&nbsp; Ortega kept on repeating: &ldquo;Open the door,
+open the door,&rdquo; 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.&nbsp; Then he remarked, parenthetically as it were, &ldquo;Oh,
+you know how to torment a man, you brown-skinned, lean, grinning, dishevelled
+imp, you.&nbsp; And mark,&rdquo; he expounded further, in a curiously
+doctoral tone&mdash;&ldquo;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&mdash;and altogether you
+are perdition.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>This statement was astonishingly deliberate.&nbsp; He drew a moaning
+breath after it and uttered in a heart-rending tone, &ldquo;You know,
+Rita, that I cannot live without you.&nbsp; I haven&rsquo;t lived.&nbsp;
+I am not living now.&nbsp; This isn&rsquo;t life.&nbsp; Come, Rita,
+you can&rsquo;t take a boy&rsquo;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.&nbsp; But
+I will forgive you if you only open the door,&rdquo; he ended in an
+inflated tone: &ldquo;You remember how you swore time after time to
+be my wife.&nbsp; You are more fit to be Satan&rsquo;s wife but I don&rsquo;t
+mind.&nbsp; You shall be my wife!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>A sound near the floor made me bend down hastily with a stern: &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t
+laugh,&rdquo; for in his grotesque, almost burlesque discourses there
+seemed to me to be truth, passion, and horror enough to move a mountain.</p>
+<p>Suddenly suspicion seized him out there.&nbsp; With perfectly farcical
+unexpectedness he yelled shrilly: &ldquo;Oh, you deceitful wretch!&nbsp;
+You won&rsquo;t escape me!&nbsp; I will have you. . . .&rdquo;</p>
+<p>And in a manner of speaking he vanished.&nbsp; Of course I couldn&rsquo;t
+see him but somehow that was the impression.&nbsp; I had hardly time
+to receive it when crash! . . . he was already at the other door.&nbsp;
+I suppose he thought that his prey was escaping him.&nbsp; His swiftness
+was amazing, almost inconceivable, more like the effect of a trick or
+of a mechanism.&nbsp; The thump on the door was awful as if he had not
+been able to stop himself in time.&nbsp; The shock seemed enough to
+stun an elephant.&nbsp; It was really funny.&nbsp; And after the crash
+there was a moment of silence as if he were recovering himself.&nbsp;
+The next thing was a low grunt, and at once he picked up the thread
+of his fixed idea.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You will have to be my wife.&nbsp; I have no shame.&nbsp;
+You swore you would be and so you will have to be.&rdquo;&nbsp; Stifled
+low sounds made me bend down again to the kneeling form, white in the
+flush of the dark red glow.&nbsp; &ldquo;For goodness&rsquo; sake don&rsquo;t,&rdquo;
+I whispered down.&nbsp; She was struggling with an appalling fit of
+merriment, repeating to herself, &ldquo;Yes, every day, for two months.&nbsp;
+Sixty times at least, sixty times at least.&rdquo;&nbsp; Her voice was
+rising high.&nbsp; She was struggling against laughter, but when I tried
+to put my hand over her lips I felt her face wet with tears.&nbsp; She
+turned it this way and that, eluding my hand with repressed low, little
+moans.&nbsp; I lost my caution and said, &ldquo;Be quiet,&rdquo; so
+sharply as to startle myself (and her, too) into expectant stillness.</p>
+<p>Ortega&rsquo;s voice in the hall asked distinctly: &ldquo;Eh?&nbsp;
+What&rsquo;s this?&rdquo; and then he kept still on his side listening,
+but he must have thought that his ears had deceived him.&nbsp; He was
+getting tired, too.&nbsp; He was keeping quiet out there&mdash;resting.&nbsp;
+Presently he sighed deeply; then in a harsh melancholy tone he started
+again.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;My love, my soul, my life, do speak to me.&nbsp; What am I
+that you should take so much trouble to pretend that you aren&rsquo;t
+there?&nbsp; Do speak to me,&rdquo; 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: &ldquo;What
+shall I do now?&rdquo; as though he were speaking to himself.</p>
+<p>I shuddered to hear rising from the floor, by my side, a vibrating,
+scornful: &ldquo;Do!&nbsp; Why, slink off home looking over your shoulder
+as you used to years ago when I had done with you&mdash;all but the
+laughter.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Rita,&rdquo; I murmured, appalled.&nbsp; He must have been
+struck dumb for a moment.&nbsp; Then, goodness only knows why, in his
+dismay or rage he was moved to speak in French with a most ridiculous
+accent.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;So you have found your tongue at last&mdash;<i>Catin</i>!&nbsp;
+You were that from the cradle.&nbsp; Don&rsquo;t you remember how .
+. .&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Do&ntilde;a Rita sprang to her feet at my side with a loud cry, &ldquo;No,
+George, no,&rdquo; which bewildered me completely.&nbsp; The suddenness,
+the loudness of it made the ensuing silence on both sides of the door
+perfectly awful.&nbsp; It seemed to me that if I didn&rsquo;t resist
+with all my might something in me would die on the instant.&nbsp; 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.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Therese, Therese,&rdquo; yelled Ortega.&nbsp; &ldquo;She has
+got a man in there.&rdquo;&nbsp; He ran to the foot of the stairs and
+screamed again, &ldquo;Therese, Therese!&nbsp; There is a man with her.&nbsp;
+A man!&nbsp; Come down, you miserable, starved peasant, come down and
+see.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>I don&rsquo;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.&nbsp;
+With a final yell: &ldquo;Come down and see,&rdquo; he flew back at
+the door of the room and started shaking it violently.</p>
+<p>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.&nbsp; It was deafening, distressing, and vaguely alarming
+as if it could bring the house down.&nbsp; At the same time the futility
+of it had, it cannot be denied, a comic effect.&nbsp; The very magnitude
+of the racket he raised was funny.&nbsp; But he couldn&rsquo;t keep
+up that violent exertion continuously, and when he stopped to rest we
+could hear him shouting to himself in vengeful tones.&nbsp; He saw it
+all!&nbsp; He had been decoyed there!&nbsp; (Rattle, rattle, rattle.)&nbsp;
+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!&nbsp;
+(Rattle, rattle.)&nbsp; By this shameless &ldquo;<i>Catin</i>! <i>Catin</i>!
+<i>Catin</i>!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He started at the door again with superhuman vigour.&nbsp; Behind
+me I heard Do&ntilde;a Rita laughing softly, statuesque, turned all
+dark in the fading glow.&nbsp; I called out to her quite openly, &ldquo;Do
+keep your self-control.&rdquo;&nbsp; And she called back to me in a
+clear voice: &ldquo;Oh, my dear, will you ever consent to speak to me
+after all this?&nbsp; But don&rsquo;t ask for the impossible.&nbsp;
+He was born to be laughed at.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; I cried.&nbsp; &ldquo;But don&rsquo;t let yourself
+go.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>I don&rsquo;t know whether Ortega heard us.&nbsp; 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.</p>
+<p>He stopped, uttered a few curses at the door, and seemed calmer from
+sheer exhaustion.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;This story will be all over the world,&rdquo; we heard him
+begin.&nbsp; &ldquo;Deceived, decoyed, inveighed, in order to be made
+a laughing-stock before the most debased of all mankind, that woman
+and her associates.&rdquo;&nbsp; This was really a meditation.&nbsp;
+And then he screamed: &ldquo;I will kill you all.&rdquo;&nbsp; Once
+more he started worrying the door but it was a startlingly feeble effort
+which he abandoned almost at once.&nbsp; He must have been at the end
+of his strength.&nbsp; Do&ntilde;a Rita from the middle of the room
+asked me recklessly loud: &ldquo;Tell me!&nbsp; Wasn&rsquo;t he born
+to be laughed at?&rdquo;&nbsp; I didn&rsquo;t answer her.&nbsp; I was
+so near the door that I thought I ought to hear him panting there.&nbsp;
+He was terrifying, but he was not serious.&nbsp; He was at the end of
+his strength, of his breath, of every kind of endurance, but I did not
+know it.&nbsp; He was done up, finished; but perhaps he did not know
+it himself.&nbsp; How still he was!&nbsp; Just as I began to wonder
+at it, I heard him distinctly give a slap to his forehead.&nbsp; &ldquo;I
+see it all!&rdquo; he cried.&nbsp; &ldquo;That miserable, canting peasant-woman
+upstairs has arranged it all.&nbsp; No doubt she consulted her priests.&nbsp;
+I must regain my self-respect.&nbsp; Let her die first.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+I heard him make a dash for the foot of the stairs.&nbsp; I was appalled;
+yet to think of Therese being hoisted with her own petard was like a
+turn of affairs in a farce.&nbsp; A very ferocious farce.&nbsp; Instinctively
+I unlocked the door.&nbsp; Do&ntilde;a Rita&rsquo;s contralto laugh
+rang out loud, bitter, and contemptuous; and I heard Ortega&rsquo;s
+distracted screaming as if under torture.&nbsp; &ldquo;It hurts!&nbsp;
+It hurts!&nbsp; It hurts!&rdquo;&nbsp; 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.</p>
+<p>The sight of Ortega lying on his back at the foot of the stairs arrested
+me in the doorway.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; One of his arms lay across his breast.&nbsp; The other arm
+was extended full length on the white-and-black pavement with the hand
+palm upwards and the fingers rigidly spread out.&nbsp; The shadow of
+the lowest step slanted across his face but one whisker and part of
+his chin could be made out.&nbsp; He appeared strangely flattened.&nbsp;
+He didn&rsquo;t move at all.&nbsp; He was in his shirt-sleeves.&nbsp;
+I felt an extreme distaste for that sight.&nbsp; The characteristic
+sound of a key worrying in the lock stole into my ears.&nbsp; I couldn&rsquo;t
+locate it but I didn&rsquo;t attend much to that at first.&nbsp; I was
+engaged in watching Se&ntilde;or Ortega.&nbsp; 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 Se&ntilde;or Ortega.&nbsp;
+It was rather fascinating to see him so quiet at the end of all that
+fury, clamour, passion, and uproar.&nbsp; Surely there was never anything
+so still in the world as this Ortega.&nbsp; I had a bizarre notion that
+he was not to be disturbed.</p>
+<p>A noise like the rattling of chain links, a small grind and click
+exploded in the stillness of the hall and a eciov began to swear in
+Italian.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; Was somebody trying to get in?&nbsp; I had
+no objection, I went to the door and said: &ldquo;Wait a moment, it&rsquo;s
+on the chain.&rdquo;&nbsp; The deep voice on the other side said: &ldquo;What
+an extraordinary thing,&rdquo; and I assented mentally.&nbsp; It was
+extraordinary.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; It was the old Italian and his daughters returning
+from the ball who were trying to get in.</p>
+<p>Suddenly I became intensely alive to the whole situation.&nbsp; I
+bounded back, closed the door of Blunt&rsquo;s room, and the next moment
+was speaking to the Italian.&nbsp; &ldquo;A little patience.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp;
+He was burly, venerable, a little indignant, and full of thanks.&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp; One had kept her little black mask on her face, the other
+held hers in her hand.</p>
+<p>The Italian was surprised at my blocking the way and remarked pleasantly,
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s cold outside, Signor.&rdquo;&nbsp; I said, &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo;
+and added in a hurried whisper: &ldquo;There is a dead man in the hall.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+He didn&rsquo;t say a single word but put me aside a little, projected
+his body in for one searching glance.&nbsp; &ldquo;Your daughters,&rdquo;
+I murmured.&nbsp; He said kindly, &ldquo;<i>Va bene, va bene</i>.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+And then to them, &ldquo;Come in, girls.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>There is nothing like dealing with a man who has had a long past
+of out-of-the-way experiences.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; They had no time for more
+than one scared look over the shoulder.&nbsp; He hustled them in and
+locked them up safely in their part of the house, then crossed the hall
+with a quick, practical stride.&nbsp; When near Se&ntilde;or Ortega
+he trod short just in time and said: &ldquo;In truth, blood&rdquo;;
+then selecting the place, knelt down by the body in his tall hat and
+respectable overcoat, his white beard giving him immense authority somehow.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;But&mdash;this man is not dead,&rdquo; he exclaimed, looking
+up at me.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; &ldquo;He
+managed to give himself an enormous gash in his side,&rdquo; was his
+calm remark.&nbsp; &ldquo;And what a weapon!&rdquo; he exclaimed, getting
+it out from under the body.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; A mere cruel-looking
+curio of inconceivable clumsiness to European eyes.</p>
+<p>The old man let it drop with amused disdain.&nbsp; &ldquo;You had
+better take hold of his legs,&rdquo; he decided without appeal.&nbsp;
+I certainly had no inclination to argue.&nbsp; When we lifted him up
+the head of Se&ntilde;or Ortega fell back desolately, making an awful,
+defenceless display of his large, white throat.</p>
+<p>We found the lamp burning in the studio and the bed made up on the
+couch on which we deposited our burden.&nbsp; My venerable friend jerked
+the upper sheet away at once and started tearing it into strips.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You may leave him to me,&rdquo; said that efficient sage,
+&ldquo;but the doctor is your affair.&nbsp; If you don&rsquo;t want
+this business to make a noise you will have to find a discreet man.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He was most benevolently interested in all the proceedings.&nbsp;
+He remarked with a patriarchal smile as he tore the sheet noisily: &ldquo;You
+had better not lose any time.&rdquo;&nbsp; I didn&rsquo;t lose any time.&nbsp;
+I crammed into the next hour an astonishing amount of bodily activity.&nbsp;
+Without more words I flew out bare-headed into the last night of Carnival.&nbsp;
+Luckily I was certain of the right sort of doctor.&nbsp; He was an iron-grey
+man of forty and of a stout habit of body but who was able to put on
+a spurt.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp;
+It was only on arriving at the house that I perceived that I had left
+the front door wide open.&nbsp; All the town, every evil in the world
+could have entered the black-and-white hall.&nbsp; But I had no time
+to meditate upon my imprudence.&nbsp; 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:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What was he up to, that imbecile?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, he was examining this curiosity,&rdquo; I said.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, yes, and it accidentally went off,&rdquo; said the doctor,
+looking contemptuously at the Nubian knife I had thrown on the table.&nbsp;
+Then while wiping his hands: &ldquo;I would bet there is a woman somewhere
+under this; but that of course does not affect the nature of the wound.&nbsp;
+I hope this blood-letting will do him good.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Nothing will do him any good,&rdquo; I said.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Curious house this,&rdquo; went on the doctor, &ldquo;It belongs
+to a curious sort of woman, too.&nbsp; I happened to see her once or
+twice.&nbsp; I shouldn&rsquo;t wonder if she were to raise considerable
+trouble in the track of her pretty feet as she goes along.&nbsp; I believe
+you know her well.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Curious people in the house, too.&nbsp; There was a Carlist
+officer here, a lean, tall, dark man, who couldn&rsquo;t sleep.&nbsp;
+He consulted me once.&nbsp; Do you know what became of him?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The doctor had finished wiping his hands and flung the towel far
+away.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Considerable nervous over-strain.&nbsp; Seemed to have a restless
+brain.&nbsp; Not a good thing, that.&nbsp; For the rest a perfect gentleman.&nbsp;
+And this Spaniard here, do you know him?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Enough not to care what happens to him,&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;except
+for the trouble he might cause to the Carlist sympathizers here, should
+the police get hold of this affair.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well, then, he must take his chance in the seclusion of that
+conservatory sort of place where you have put him.&nbsp; I&rsquo;ll
+try to find somebody we can trust to look after him.&nbsp; Meantime,
+I will leave the case to you.&rdquo;</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h3>CHAPTER VIII</h3>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>Directly I had shut the door after the doctor I started shouting
+for Therese.&nbsp; &ldquo;Come down at once, you wretched hypocrite,&rdquo;
+I yelled at the foot of the stairs in a sort of frenzy as though I had
+been a second Ortega.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp; I stepped back and pointed my finger at the
+darkness of the passage leading to the studio.&nbsp; She passed within
+a foot of me, her pale eyes staring straight ahead, her face still with
+disappointment and fury.&nbsp; Yet it is only my surmise.&nbsp; She
+might have been made thus inhuman by the force of an invisible purpose.&nbsp;
+I waited a moment, then, stealthily, with extreme caution, I opened
+the door of the so-called Captain Blunt&rsquo;s room.</p>
+<p>The glow of embers was all but out.&nbsp; It was cold and dark in
+there; but before I closed the door behind me the dim light from the
+hall showed me Do&ntilde;a Rita standing on the very same spot where
+I had left her, statuesque in her night-dress.&nbsp; Even after I shut
+the door she loomed up enormous, indistinctly rigid and inanimate.&nbsp;
+I picked up the candelabra, groped for a candle all over the carpet,
+found one, and lighted it.&nbsp; All that time Do&ntilde;a Rita didn&rsquo;t
+stir.&nbsp; When I turned towards her she seemed to be slowly awakening
+from a trance.&nbsp; She was deathly pale and by contrast the melted,
+sapphire-blue of her eyes looked black as coal.&nbsp; They moved a little
+in my direction, incurious, recognizing me slowly.&nbsp; But when they
+had recognized me completely she raised her hands and hid her face in
+them.&nbsp; A whole minute or more passed.&nbsp; Then I said in a low
+tone: &ldquo;Look at me,&rdquo; and she let them fall slowly as if accepting
+the inevitable.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Shall I make up the fire?&rdquo; . . . I waited.&nbsp; &ldquo;Do
+you hear me?&rdquo;&nbsp; She made no sound and with the tip of my finger
+I touched her bare shoulder.&nbsp; But for its elasticity it might have
+been frozen.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; I had to put her arms
+into the sleeves, myself, one after another.&nbsp; They were cold, lifeless,
+but flexible.&nbsp; Then I moved in front of her and buttoned the thing
+close round her throat.&nbsp; To do that I had actually to raise her
+chin with my finger, and it sank slowly down again.&nbsp; I buttoned
+all the other buttons right down to the ground.&nbsp; It was a very
+long and splendid fur.&nbsp; Before rising from my kneeling position
+I felt her feet.&nbsp; Mere ice.&nbsp; The intimacy of this sort of
+attendance helped the growth of my authority.&nbsp; &ldquo;Lie down,&rdquo;
+I murmured, &ldquo;I shall pile on you every blanket I can find here,&rdquo;
+but she only shook her head.</p>
+<p>Not even in the days when she ran &ldquo;shrill as a cicada and thin
+as a match&rdquo; through the chill mists of her native mountains could
+she ever have felt so cold, so wretched, and so desolate.&nbsp; Her
+very soul, her grave, indignant, and fantastic soul, seemed to drowse
+like an exhausted traveller surrendering himself to the sleep of death.&nbsp;
+But when I asked her again to lie down she managed to answer me, &ldquo;Not
+in this room.&rdquo;&nbsp; The dumb spell was broken.&nbsp; She turned
+her head from side to side, but oh! how cold she was!&nbsp; 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.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Not in this room; not here,&rdquo; she protested, with that
+peculiar suavity of tone which made her voice unforgettable, irresistible,
+no matter what she said.&nbsp; &ldquo;Not after all this!&nbsp; I couldn&rsquo;t
+close my eyes in this place.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s full of corruption and
+ugliness all round, in me, too, everywhere except in your heart, which
+has nothing to do where I breathe.&nbsp; And here you may leave me.&nbsp;
+But wherever you go remember that I am not evil, I am not evil.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>I said: &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t intend to leave you here.&nbsp; There
+is my room upstairs.&nbsp; You have been in it before.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, you have heard of that,&rdquo; she whispered.&nbsp; The
+beginning of a wan smile vanished from her lips.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I also think you can&rsquo;t stay in this room; and, surely,
+you needn&rsquo;t hesitate . . .&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No.&nbsp; It doesn&rsquo;t matter now.&nbsp; He has killed
+me.&nbsp; Rita is dead.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>While we exchanged these words I had retrieved the quilted, blue
+slippers and had put them on her feet.&nbsp; She was very tractable.&nbsp;
+Then taking her by the arm I led her towards the door.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;He has killed me,&rdquo; she repeated in a sigh.&nbsp; &ldquo;The
+little joy that was in me.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;He has tried to kill himself out there in the hall,&rdquo;
+I said.&nbsp; She put back like a frightened child but she couldn&rsquo;t
+be dragged on as a child can be.</p>
+<p>I assured her that the man was no longer there but she only repeated,
+&ldquo;I can&rsquo;t get through the hall.&nbsp; I can&rsquo;t walk.&nbsp;
+I can&rsquo;t . . .&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well,&rdquo; I said, flinging the door open and seizing her
+suddenly in my arms, &ldquo;if you can&rsquo;t walk then you shall be
+carried,&rdquo; 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.</p>
+<p>I ought really to have put those blue slippers in my pocket.&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp; Though I had an odd sense
+of being engaged in a sort of nursery adventure she was no child to
+carry.&nbsp; I could just do it.&nbsp; But not if she chose to struggle.&nbsp;
+I set her down hastily and only supported her round the waist for the
+rest of the way.&nbsp; My room, of course, was perfectly dark but I
+led her straight to the sofa at once and let her fall on it.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; I didn&rsquo;t even pause to lock my door.&nbsp; All
+the time I was aware of her presence behind me, nay, of something deeper
+and more my own&mdash;of her existence itself&mdash;of a small blue
+flame, blue like her eyes, flickering and clear within her frozen body.&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp;
+My reason for this was that the room was large, too large for the fireplace,
+and the couch was nearest to the fire.&nbsp; She gave no sign but one
+of her wistful attempts at a smile.&nbsp; In a most business-like way
+I took the arrow out of her hair and laid it on the centre table.&nbsp;
+The tawny mass fell loose at once about her shoulders and made her look
+even more desolate than before.&nbsp; But there was an invincible need
+of gaiety in her heart.&nbsp; She said funnily, looking at the arrow
+sparkling in the gas light:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Ah!&nbsp; That poor philistinish ornament!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;how far away all this is.&nbsp;
+And you wouldn&rsquo;t leave even that object behind when you came last
+in here.&nbsp; Perhaps it is for that reason it haunted me&mdash;mostly
+at night.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; But it never reached it.&nbsp; It always fell at
+my feet as I woke up.&nbsp; The huntress never meant to strike down
+that particular quarry.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;The huntress was wild but she was not evil.&nbsp; And she
+was no nymph, but only a goatherd girl.&nbsp; Dream of her no more,
+my dear.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>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.&nbsp; &ldquo;Upon
+my soul, goatherd, you are not responsible,&rdquo; I said.&nbsp; &ldquo;You
+are not!&nbsp; Lay down that uneasy head,&rdquo; I continued, forcing
+a half-playful note into my immense sadness, &ldquo;that has even dreamed
+of a crown&mdash;but not for itself.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She lay down quietly.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp;
+In the end I lost myself in thought.&nbsp; I woke with a start to her
+voice saying positively:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No.&nbsp; Not even in this room.&nbsp; I can&rsquo;t close
+my eyes.&nbsp; Impossible.&nbsp; I have a horror of myself.&nbsp; That
+voice in my ears.&nbsp; All true.&nbsp; All true.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She was sitting up, two masses of tawny hair fell on each side of
+her tense face.&nbsp; I threw away the pillows from which she had risen
+and sat down behind her on the couch.&nbsp; &ldquo;Perhaps like this,&rdquo;
+I suggested, drawing her head gently on my breast.&nbsp; She didn&rsquo;t
+resist, she didn&rsquo;t even sigh, she didn&rsquo;t look at me or attempt
+to settle herself in any way.&nbsp; It was I who settled her after taking
+up a position which I thought I should be able to keep for hours&mdash;for
+ages.&nbsp; After a time I grew composed enough to become aware of the
+ticking of the clock, even to take pleasure in it.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; And
+presently my breathing fell into the quiet rhythm of the sleep which
+descended on her at last.&nbsp; My thought was that now nothing mattered
+in the world because I had the world safe resting in my arms&mdash;or
+was it in my heart?</p>
+<p>Suddenly my heart seemed torn in two within my breast and half of
+my breath knocked out of me.&nbsp; It was a tumultuous awakening.&nbsp;
+The day had come.&nbsp; Do&ntilde;a Rita had opened her eyes, found
+herself in my arms, and instantly had flung herself out of them with
+one sudden effort.&nbsp; 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.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Daylight,&rdquo; she whispered in an appalled voice.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;Don&rsquo;t look at me, George.&nbsp; I can&rsquo;t face daylight.&nbsp;
+No&mdash;not with you.&nbsp; Before we set eyes on each other all that
+past was like nothing.&nbsp; I had crushed it all in my new pride.&nbsp;
+Nothing could touch the Rita whose hand was kissed by you.&nbsp; But
+now!&nbsp; Never in daylight.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>I sat there stupid with surprise and grief.&nbsp; This was no longer
+the adventure of venturesome children in a nursery-book.&nbsp; A grown
+man&rsquo;s bitterness, informed, suspicious, resembling hatred, welled
+out of my heart.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;All this means that you are going to desert me again?&rdquo;
+I said with contempt.&nbsp; &ldquo;All right.&nbsp; I won&rsquo;t throw
+stones after you . . . Are you going, then?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Then go quickly,&rdquo; I said.&nbsp; &ldquo;You are afraid
+of living flesh and blood.&nbsp; What are you running after?&nbsp; Honesty,
+as you say, or some distinguished carcass to feed your vanity on?&nbsp;
+I know how cold you can be&mdash;and yet live.&nbsp; What have I done
+to you?&nbsp; You go to sleep in my arms, wake up and go away.&nbsp;
+Is it to impress me?&nbsp; Charlatanism of character, my dear.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>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&mdash;goatherd
+child leaping on the rocks of her native hills which she was never to
+see again.&nbsp; I snatched the arrow of gold from the table and threw
+it after her.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Don&rsquo;t forget this thing,&rdquo; I cried, &ldquo;you
+would never forgive yourself for leaving it behind.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>It struck the back of the fur coat and fell on the floor behind her.&nbsp;
+She never looked round.&nbsp; 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&mdash;waiting for her sister.&nbsp; The heavy ends
+of a big black shawl thrown over her head hung massively in biblical
+folds.&nbsp; With a faint cry of dismay Do&ntilde;a Rita stopped just
+within my room.</p>
+<p>The two women faced each other for a few moments silently.&nbsp;
+Therese spoke first.&nbsp; There was no austerity in her tone.&nbsp;
+Her voice was as usual, pertinacious, unfeeling, with a slight plaint
+in it; terrible in its unchanged purpose.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I have been standing here before this door all night,&rdquo;
+she said.&nbsp; &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know how I lived through it.&nbsp;
+I thought I would die a hundred times for shame.&nbsp; So that&rsquo;s
+how you are spending your time?&nbsp; You are worse than shameless.&nbsp;
+But God may still forgive you.&nbsp; You have a soul.&nbsp; You are
+my sister.&nbsp; I will never abandon you&mdash;till you die.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What is it?&rdquo; Do&ntilde;a Rita was heard wistfully, &ldquo;my
+soul or this house that you won&rsquo;t abandon.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Come out and bow your head in humiliation.&nbsp; I am your
+sister and I shall help you to pray to God and all the Saints.&nbsp;
+Come away from that poor young gentleman who like all the others can
+have nothing but contempt and disgust for you in his heart.&nbsp; Come
+and hide your head where no one will reproach you&mdash;but I, your
+sister.&nbsp; Come out and beat your breast: come, poor Sinner, and
+let me kiss you, for you are my sister!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>While Therese was speaking Do&ntilde;a Rita stepped back a pace and
+as the other moved forward still extending the hand of sisterly love,
+she slammed the door in Therese&rsquo;s face.&nbsp; &ldquo;You abominable
+girl!&rdquo; she cried fiercely.&nbsp; Then she turned about and walked
+towards me who had not moved.&nbsp; I felt hardly alive but for the
+cruel pain that possessed my whole being.&nbsp; 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.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You thought I wouldn&rsquo;t give it to you.&nbsp; <i>Amigo</i>,
+I wanted nothing so much as to give it to you.&nbsp; And now, perhaps&mdash;you
+will take it.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Not without the woman,&rdquo; I said sombrely.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Take it,&rdquo; she said.&nbsp; &ldquo;I haven&rsquo;t the
+courage to deliver myself up to Therese.&nbsp; No.&nbsp; Not even for
+your sake.&nbsp; Don&rsquo;t you think I have been miserable enough
+yet?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>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:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Speak no words of love, George!&nbsp; Not yet.&nbsp; Not in
+this house of ill-luck and falsehood.&nbsp; Not within a hundred miles
+of this house, where they came clinging to me all profaned from the
+mouth of that man.&nbsp; Haven&rsquo;t you heard them&mdash;the horrible
+things?&nbsp; And what can words have to do between you and me?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Her hands were stretched out imploringly, I said, childishly disconcerted:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But, Rita, how can I help using words of love to you?&nbsp;
+They come of themselves on my lips!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;They come!&nbsp; Ah!&nbsp; But I shall seal your lips with
+the thing itself,&rdquo; she said.&nbsp; &ldquo;Like this. . . &rdquo;</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines3"><br /><br /><br /></div>
+<h2>SECOND NOTE</h2>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines3"><br /><br /><br /></div>
+<p>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.&nbsp; The tone of it is much less of exultation than might have
+been expected.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; The sentimental interest could only have a
+fascination for readers themselves actually in love.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; My conviction is
+that the mood in which the continuation of his story would appear sympathetic
+is very rare.&nbsp; This consideration has induced me to suppress it&mdash;all
+but the actual facts which round up the previous events and satisfy
+such curiosity as might have been aroused by the foregoing narrative.</p>
+<p>It is to be remarked that this period is characterized more by a
+deep and joyous tenderness than by sheer passion.&nbsp; All fierceness
+of spirit seems to have burnt itself out in their preliminary hesitations
+and struggles against each other and themselves.&nbsp; Whether love
+in its entirety has, speaking generally, the same elementary meaning
+for women as for men, is very doubtful.&nbsp; Civilization has been
+at work there.&nbsp; But the fact is that those two display, in every
+phase of discovery and response, an exact accord.&nbsp; Both show themselves
+amazingly ingenuous in the practice of sentiment.&nbsp; I believe that
+those who know women won&rsquo;t be surprised to hear me say that she
+was as new to love as he was.&nbsp; 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&rsquo;s fitness in a
+specially intense way.&nbsp; Upon the whole, I think that there must
+be some truth in his insistence of there having always been something
+childlike in their relation.&nbsp; In the unreserved and instant sharing
+of all thoughts, all impressions, all sensations, we see the naiveness
+of a children&rsquo;s foolhardy adventure.&nbsp; This unreserved expressed
+for him the whole truth of the situation.&nbsp; With her it may have
+been different.&nbsp; It might have been assumed; yet nobody is altogether
+a comedian; and even comedians themselves have got to believe in the
+part they play.&nbsp; Of the two she appears much the more assured and
+confident.&nbsp; But if in this she was a comedienne then it was but
+a great achievement of her ineradicable honesty.&nbsp; Having once renounced
+her honourable scruples she took good care that he should taste no flavour
+of misgivings in the cup.&nbsp; Being older it was she who imparted
+its character to the situation.&nbsp; 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.</p>
+<p>This is what appears from the pages I have discreetly suppressed&mdash;partly
+out of regard for the pages themselves.&nbsp; In every, even terrestrial,
+mystery there is as it were a sacred core.&nbsp; A sustained commentary
+on love is not fit for every eye.&nbsp; A universal experience is exactly
+the sort of thing which is most difficult to appraise justly in a particular
+instance.</p>
+<p>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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp;
+It may be that Do&ntilde;a Rita had given her a glimpse of the unavoidable
+end, and that the girl&rsquo;s tarnished eyes masked a certain amount
+of apprehensive, helpless desolation.</p>
+<p>What meantime was becoming of the fortune of Henry All&egrave;gre
+is another curious question.&nbsp; We have been told that it was too
+big to be tied up in a sack and thrown into the sea.&nbsp; That part
+of it represented by the fabulous collections was still being protected
+by the police.&nbsp; But for the rest, it may be assumed that its power
+and significance were lost to an interested world for something like
+six months.&nbsp; What is certain is that the late Henry All&egrave;gre&rsquo;s
+man of affairs found himself comparatively idle.&nbsp; The holiday must
+have done much good to his harassed brain.&nbsp; He had received a note
+from Do&ntilde;a 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.&nbsp; &ldquo;It&rsquo;s
+enough for you&rdquo;&mdash;she wrote&mdash;&ldquo;to know that I am
+alive.&rdquo;&nbsp; Later, at irregular intervals, he received scraps
+of paper bearing the stamps of various post offices and containing the
+simple statement: &ldquo;I am still alive,&rdquo; signed with an enormous,
+flourished exuberant R.&nbsp; I imagine Rose had to travel some distances
+by rail to post those messages.&nbsp; A thick veil of secrecy had been
+lowered between the world and the lovers; yet even this veil turned
+out not altogether impenetrable.</p>
+<p>He&mdash;it would be convenient to call him Monsieur George to the
+end&mdash;shared with Do&ntilde;a Rita her perfect detachment from all
+mundane affairs; but he had to make two short visits to Marseilles.&nbsp;
+The first was prompted by his loyal affection for Dominic.&nbsp; He
+wanted to discover what had happened or was happening to Dominic and
+to find out whether he could do something for that man.&nbsp; But Dominic
+was not the sort of person for whom one can do much.&nbsp; Monsieur
+George did not even see him.&nbsp; It looked uncommonly as if Dominic&rsquo;s
+heart were broken.&nbsp; Monsieur George remained concealed for twenty-four
+hours in the very house in which Madame L&eacute;onore had her caf&eacute;.&nbsp;
+He spent most of that time in conversing with Madame L&eacute;onore
+about Dominic.&nbsp; She was distressed, but her mind was made up.&nbsp;
+That bright-eyed, nonchalant, and passionate woman was making arrangements
+to dispose of her caf&eacute; before departing to join Dominic.&nbsp;
+She would not say where.&nbsp; Having ascertained that his assistance
+was not required Monsieur George, in his own words, &ldquo;managed to
+sneak out of the town without being seen by a single soul that mattered.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The second occasion was very prosaic and shockingly incongruous with
+the super-mundane colouring of these days.&nbsp; He had neither the
+fortune of Henry All&egrave;gre nor a man of affairs of his own.&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp; There came a time when Monsieur George had to
+descend from the heights of his love in order, in his own words, &ldquo;to
+get a supply of cash.&rdquo;&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; That business
+was transacted in the office of the banker mentioned in the story.&nbsp;
+Monsieur George wished to avoid seeing the man himself but in this he
+did not succeed.&nbsp; The interview was short.&nbsp; The banker naturally
+asked no questions, made no allusions to persons and events, and didn&rsquo;t
+even mention the great Legitimist Principle which presented to him now
+no interest whatever.&nbsp; But for the moment all the world was talking
+of the Carlist enterprise.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; The banker
+(his wife&rsquo;s salon had been very Carlist indeed) declared that
+he had never believed in the success of the cause.&nbsp; &ldquo;You
+are well out of it,&rdquo; he remarked with a chilly smile to Monsieur
+George.&nbsp; The latter merely observed that he had been very little
+&ldquo;in it&rdquo; as a matter of fact, and that he was quite indifferent
+to the whole affair.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You left a few of your feathers in it, nevertheless,&rdquo;
+the banker concluded with a wooden face and with the curtness of a man
+who knows.</p>
+<p>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 Do&ntilde;a Rita
+had stolen out of it like two scared yet jubilant children.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; No, she never saw the person.&nbsp; Neither had she
+seen the Spaniard.&nbsp; She had only heard the talk of the street.&nbsp;
+Of course she didn&rsquo;t know where these people had gone.&nbsp; She
+manifested some impatience to get rid of Monsieur George and even attempted
+to push him towards the door.&nbsp; It was, he says, a very funny experience.&nbsp;
+He noticed the feeble flame of the gas-jet in the hall still waiting
+for extinction in the general collapse of the world.</p>
+<p>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.&nbsp;
+He could not have asked Madame L&eacute;onore for hospitality because
+Madame L&eacute;onore had gone away already.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.</p>
+<p>Monsieur George was far from delighted.&nbsp; 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.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You haven&rsquo;t been seen for some time,&rdquo; he said.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;You were perhaps somewhere where the news from the world couldn&rsquo;t
+reach you?&nbsp; There have been many changes amongst our friends and
+amongst people one used to hear of so much.&nbsp; There is Madame de
+Lastaola for instance, who seems to have vanished from the world which
+was so much interested in her.&nbsp; You have no idea where she may
+be now?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Monsieur George remarked grumpily that he couldn&rsquo;t say.</p>
+<p>The other tried to appear at ease.&nbsp; Tongues were wagging about
+it in Paris.&nbsp; 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&mdash;astonishing how such fellows
+get into the best clubs&mdash;oh! Azzolati was his name.&nbsp; But perhaps
+what a fellow like that said did not matter.&nbsp; The funniest thing
+was that there was no man of any position in the world who had disappeared
+at the same time.&nbsp; 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.</p>
+<p>Monsieur George remarked more unamiably than before that he really
+could not help all that.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No,&rdquo; said the other with extreme gentleness, &ldquo;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.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What!&rdquo; cried Monsieur George.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Just so,&rdquo; said the other meaningly.&nbsp; &ldquo;You
+know that all my people like you very much, though they hold various
+opinions as to your discretion.&nbsp; Only the other day Jane, you know
+my married sister, and I were talking about you.&nbsp; She was extremely
+distressed.&nbsp; 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.</p>
+<p>Naturally Monsieur George wanted to know what it was all about; and
+the other appeared greatly relieved.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I was sure you couldn&rsquo;t have heard.&nbsp; I don&rsquo;t
+want to be indiscreet, I don&rsquo;t want to ask you where you were.&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp; Listen.&nbsp; You know a certain Captain Blunt,
+don&rsquo;t you?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Monsieur George owned to knowing Captain Blunt but only very slightly.&nbsp;
+His friend then informed him that this Captain Blunt was apparently
+well acquainted with Madame de Lastaola, or, at any rate, pretended
+to be.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; He talked like
+a man certain of his facts and as he mentioned names . . .</p>
+<p>&ldquo;In fact,&rdquo; the young man burst out excitedly, &ldquo;it
+is your name that he mentions.&nbsp; 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.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>How Blunt had got enough information to base that atrocious calumny
+upon, Monsieur George couldn&rsquo;t imagine.&nbsp; But there it was.&nbsp;
+He kept silent in his indignation till his friend murmured, &ldquo;I
+expect you will want him to know that you are here.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; said Monsieur George, &ldquo;and I hope you will
+consent to act for me altogether.&nbsp; First of all, pray, let him
+know by wire that I am waiting for him.&nbsp; This will be enough to
+fetch him down here, I can assure you.&nbsp; You may ask him also to
+bring two friends with him.&nbsp; I don&rsquo;t intend this to be an
+affair for Parisian journalists to write paragraphs about.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes.&nbsp; That sort of thing must be stopped at once,&rdquo;
+the other admitted.&nbsp; He assented to Monsieur George&rsquo;s request
+that the meeting should be arranged for at his elder brother&rsquo;s
+country place where the family stayed very seldom.&nbsp; There was a
+most convenient walled garden there.&nbsp; And then Monsieur George
+caught his train promising to be back on the fourth day and leaving
+all further arrangements to his friend.&nbsp; He prided himself on his
+impenetrability before Do&ntilde;a Rita; on the happiness without a
+shadow of those four days.&nbsp; However, Do&ntilde;a 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.</p>
+<p>Of the proceedings in the walled garden there is no need to speak
+in detail.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; One bit of byplay unnoticed
+by the seconds, very busy for the moment with their arrangements, must
+be mentioned.&nbsp; Disregarding the severe rules of conduct in such
+cases Monsieur George approached his adversary and addressed him directly.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Captain Blunt,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;the result of this meeting
+may go against me.&nbsp; In that case you will recognize publicly that
+you were wrong.&nbsp; For you are wrong and you know it.&nbsp; May I
+trust your honour?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>In answer to that appeal Captain Blunt, always correct, didn&rsquo;t
+open his lips but only made a little bow.&nbsp; For the rest he was
+perfectly ruthless.&nbsp; If he was utterly incapable of being carried
+away by love there was nothing equivocal about his jealousy.&nbsp; Such
+psychology is not very rare and really from the point of view of the
+combat itself one cannot very well blame him.&nbsp; What happened was
+this.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; That gentleman&rsquo;s arm dropped powerless
+by his side.&nbsp; But he did not drop his weapon.&nbsp; There was nothing
+equivocal about his determination.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp; A thickly veiled
+woman&rsquo;s head looked out of the window, took in the state of affairs
+at a glance, and called out in a firm voice: &ldquo;Follow my carriage.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+The brougham turning round took the lead.&nbsp; 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, Proven&ccedil;al dust.&nbsp;
+And this is the last appearance of Captain Blunt in Monsieur George&rsquo;s
+narrative.&nbsp; Of course he was only told of it later.&nbsp; At the
+time he was not in a condition to notice things.&nbsp; Its interest
+in his surroundings remained of a hazy and nightmarish kind for many
+days together.&nbsp; From time to time he had the impression that he
+was in a room strangely familiar to him, that he had unsatisfactory
+visions of Do&ntilde;a 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.&nbsp; The face, too, sometimes resembled
+the face of Rose.&nbsp; There were also one or two men&rsquo;s faces
+which he seemed to know well enough though he didn&rsquo;t recall their
+names.&nbsp; He could have done so with a slight effort, but it would
+have been too much trouble.&nbsp; Then came a time when the hallucinations
+of Do&ntilde;a Rita and the faithful Rose left him altogether.&nbsp;
+Next came a period, perhaps a year, or perhaps an hour, during which
+he seemed to dream all through his past life.&nbsp; He felt no apprehension,
+he didn&rsquo;t try to speculate as to the future.&nbsp; He felt that
+all possible conclusions were out of his power, and therefore he was
+indifferent to everything.&nbsp; He was like that dream&rsquo;s disinterested
+spectator who doesn&rsquo;t know what is going to happen next.&nbsp;
+Suddenly for the first time in his life he had the soul-satisfying consciousness
+of floating off into deep slumber.</p>
+<p>When he woke up after an hour, or a day, or a month, there was dusk
+in the room; but he recognized it perfectly.&nbsp; It was his apartment
+in Do&ntilde;a Rita&rsquo;s house; those were the familiar surroundings
+in which he had so often told himself that he must either die or go
+mad.&nbsp; But now he felt perfectly clear-headed and the full sensation
+of being alive came all over him, languidly delicious.&nbsp; The greatest
+beauty of it was that there was no need to move.&nbsp; This gave him
+a sort of moral satisfaction.&nbsp; Then the first thought independent
+of personal sensations came into his head.&nbsp; He wondered when Therese
+would come in and begin talking.&nbsp; He saw vaguely a human figure
+in the room but that was a man.&nbsp; He was speaking in a deadened
+voice which had yet a preternatural distinctness.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;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.&nbsp;
+She will go on like this leaving a track behind her and then some day
+there will be really a corpse.&nbsp; This young fellow might have been
+it.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;In this case, Doctor,&rdquo; said another voice, &ldquo;one
+can&rsquo;t blame the woman very much.&nbsp; I assure you she made a
+very determined fight.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What do you mean?&nbsp; That she didn&rsquo;t want to. . .
+&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes.&nbsp; A very good fight.&nbsp; I heard all about it.&nbsp;
+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?&nbsp; No, she isn&rsquo;t guilty.&nbsp; She is simply&mdash;what
+she is.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And what&rsquo;s that?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Very much of a woman.&nbsp; Perhaps a little more at the mercy
+of contradictory impulses than other women.&nbsp; But that&rsquo;s not
+her fault.&nbsp; I really think she has been very honest.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The voices sank suddenly to a still lower murmur and presently the
+shape of the man went out of the room.&nbsp; Monsieur George heard distinctly
+the door open and shut.&nbsp; Then he spoke for the first time, discovering,
+with a particular pleasure, that it was quite easy to speak.&nbsp; He
+was even under the impression that he had shouted:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Who is here?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>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.&nbsp;
+Do&ntilde;a 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.&nbsp; For, as he said later to Monsieur George,
+he had become fully awake to his part of responsibility.&nbsp; And he
+added: &ldquo;It was not of you alone that I was thinking.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+But the very first question that Monsieur George put to him was:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;How long is it since I saw you last?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Something like ten months,&rdquo; answered Mills&rsquo; kindly
+voice.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Ah!&nbsp; Is Therese outside the door?&nbsp; She stood there
+all night, you know.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes, I heard of it.&nbsp; She is hundreds of miles away now.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well, then, ask Rita to come in.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I can&rsquo;t do that, my dear boy,&rdquo; said Mills with
+affectionate gentleness.&nbsp; He hesitated a moment.&nbsp; &ldquo;Do&ntilde;a
+Rita went away yesterday,&rdquo; he said softly.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Went away?&nbsp; Why?&rdquo; asked Monsieur George.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Because, I am thankful to say, your life is no longer in danger.&nbsp;
+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.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>It must be believed that Mills was right.&nbsp; Monsieur George fell
+asleep before he could feel any pang at that intelligence.&nbsp; A sort
+of confused surprise was in his mind but nothing else, and then his
+eyes closed.&nbsp; The awakening was another matter.&nbsp; But that,
+too, Mills had foreseen.&nbsp; For days he attended the bedside patiently
+letting the man in the bed talk to him of Do&ntilde;a Rita but saying
+little himself; till one day he was asked pointedly whether she had
+ever talked to him openly.&nbsp; And then he said that she had, on more
+than one occasion.&nbsp; &ldquo;She told me amongst other things,&rdquo;
+Mills said, &ldquo;if this is any satisfaction to you to know, that
+till she met you she knew nothing of love.&nbsp; That you were to her
+in more senses than one a complete revelation.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And then she went away.&nbsp; Ran away from the revelation,&rdquo;
+said the man in the bed bitterly.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What&rsquo;s the good of being angry?&rdquo; remonstrated
+Mills, gently.&nbsp; &ldquo;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.&nbsp; No, a world of lovers would be impossible.&nbsp;
+It would be a mere ruin of lives which seem to be meant for something
+else.&nbsp; What this something is, I don&rsquo;t know; and I am certain,&rdquo;
+he said with playful compassion, &ldquo;that she and you will never
+find out.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>A few days later they were again talking of Do&ntilde;a Rita Mills
+said:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;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.&nbsp; This message sounds rather
+cryptic.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, I understand perfectly,&rdquo; said Monsieur George.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;Don&rsquo;t give me the thing now.&nbsp; Leave it somewhere where
+I can find it some day when I am alone.&nbsp; But when you write to
+her you may tell her that now at last&mdash;surer than Mr. Blunt&rsquo;s
+bullet&mdash;the arrow has found its mark.&nbsp; There will be no more
+dreaming.&nbsp; Tell her.&nbsp; She will understand.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t even know where she is,&rdquo; murmured Mills.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No, but her man of affairs knows. . . . Tell me, Mills, what
+will become of her?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;She will be wasted,&rdquo; said Mills sadly.&nbsp; &ldquo;She
+is a most unfortunate creature.&nbsp; Not even poverty could save her
+now.&nbsp; She cannot go back to her goats.&nbsp; Yet who can tell?&nbsp;
+She may find something in life.&nbsp; She may!&nbsp; It won&rsquo;t
+be love.&nbsp; She has sacrificed that chance to the integrity of your
+life&mdash;heroically.&nbsp; Do you remember telling her once that you
+meant to live your life integrally&mdash;oh, you lawless young pedant!&nbsp;
+Well, she is gone; but you may be sure that whatever she finds now in
+life it will not be peace.&nbsp; You understand me?&nbsp; Not even in
+a convent.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;She was supremely lovable,&rdquo; said the wounded man, speaking
+of her as if she were lying dead already on his oppressed heart.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And elusive,&rdquo; struck in Mills in a low voice.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;Some of them are like that.&nbsp; She will never change.&nbsp;
+Amid all the shames and shadows of that life there will always lie the
+ray of her perfect honesty.&nbsp; I don&rsquo;t know about your honesty,
+but yours will be the easier lot.&nbsp; You will always have your .
+. . other love&mdash;you pig-headed enthusiast of the sea.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Then let me go to it,&rdquo; cried the enthusiast.&nbsp; &ldquo;Let
+me go to it.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>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.&nbsp; After this discovery he was fit to
+face anything.&nbsp; He tells his correspondent that if he had been
+more romantic he would never have looked at any other woman.&nbsp; But
+on the contrary.&nbsp; No face worthy of attention escaped him.&nbsp;
+He looked at them all; and each reminded him of Do&ntilde;a Rita, either
+by some profound resemblance or by the startling force of contrast.</p>
+<p>The faithful austerity of the sea protected him from the rumours
+that fly on the tongues of men.&nbsp; He never heard of her.&nbsp; Even
+the echoes of the sale of the great All&egrave;gre collection failed
+to reach him.&nbsp; And that event must have made noise enough in the
+world.&nbsp; But he never heard.&nbsp; He does not know.&nbsp; Then,
+years later, he was deprived even of the arrow.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; It was not
+a thing that one could leave behind one for strange hands&mdash;for
+the cold eyes of ignorance.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; He says he smiled at the romantic notion.&nbsp;
+But what else could he have done with it?</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines3"><br /><br /><br /></div>
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+</html>
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