“Well, yes,” she reaffirmed. “My instinct may have told me that my only protection was obscurity, but I didn’t know how and where to find it. Oh, yes, I had that instinct . . . But there were other instincts and . . . How am I to tell you? I didn’t know how to be on guard against myself, either. Not a soul to speak to, or to get a warning from. Some woman soul that would have known, in which perhaps I could have seen my own reflection. I assure you the only woman that ever addressed me directly, and that was in writing, was . . . ”
She glanced aside, saw Mr. Blunt returning from the hall and added rapidly in a lowered voice,
“His mother.”
The bright, mechanical smile of Mr. Blunt gleamed at us right down the room, but he didn’t, as it were, follow it in his body. He swerved to the nearest of the two big fireplaces and finding some cigarettes on the mantelpiece remained leaning on his elbow in the warmth of the bright wood fire. I noticed then a bit of mute play. The heiress of Henry Allègre, who could secure neither obscurity nor any other alleviation to that invidious position, looked as if she would speak to Blunt from a distance; but in a moment the confident eagerness of her face died out as if killed by a sudden thought. I didn’t know then her shrinking from all falsehood and evasion; her dread of insincerity and disloyalty of every kind. But even then I felt that at the very last moment her being had recoiled before some shadow of a suspicion. And it occurred to me, too, to wonder what sort of business Mr. Blunt could have had to transact with our odious visitor, of a nature so urgent as to make him run out after him into the hall? Unless to beat him a little with one of the sticks that were to be found there? White hair so much like an expensive wig could not be considered a serious protection. But it couldn’t have been that. The transaction, whatever it was, had been much too quiet. I must say that none of us had looked out of the window and that I didn’t know when the man did go or if he was gone at all. As a matter of fact he was already far away; and I may just as well say here that I never saw him again in my life. His passage across my field of vision was like that of other figures of that time: not to be forgotten, a little fantastic, infinitely enlightening for my contempt, darkening for my memory which struggles still with the clear lights and the ugly shadows of those unforgotten days.
It was past four o’clock before I left the house, together with Mills. Mr. Blunt, still in his riding costume, escorted us to the very door. He asked us to send him the first fiacre we met on our way to town. “It’s impossible to walk in this get-up through the streets,” he remarked, with his brilliant smile.
At this point I propose to transcribe some notes I made at the time in little black books which I have hunted up in the litter of the past; very cheap, common little note-books that by the lapse of years have acquired a touching dimness of aspect, the frayed, worn-out dignity of documents.
Expression on paper has never been my forte. My life had been a thing of outward manifestations. I never had been secret or even systematically taciturn about my simple occupations which might have been foolish but had never required either caution or mystery. But in those four hours since midday a complete change had come over me. For good or evil I left that house committed to an enterprise that could not be talked about; which would have appeared to many senseless and perhaps ridiculous, but was certainly full of risks, and, apart from that, commanded discretion on the ground of simple loyalty. It would not only close my lips but it would to a certain extent cut me off from my usual haunts and from the society of my friends; especially of the light-hearted, young, harum-scarum kind. This was unavoidable. It was because I felt myself thrown back upon my own thoughts and forbidden to seek relief amongst other lives—it was perhaps only for that reason at first I started an irregular, fragmentary record of my days.
I made these notes not so much to preserve the memory (one cared not for any to-morrow then) but to help me to keep a better hold of the actuality. I scribbled them on shore and I scribbled them on the sea; and in both cases they are concerned not only with the nature of the facts but with the intensity of my sensations. It may be, too, that I learned to love the sea for itself only at that time. Woman and the sea revealed themselves to me together, as it were: two mistresses of life’s values. The illimitable greatness of the one, the unfathomable seduction of the other working their immemorial spells from generation to generation fell upon my heart at last: a common fortune, an unforgettable memory of the sea’s formless might and of the sovereign charm in that woman’s form wherein there seemed to beat the pulse of divinity rather than blood.
I begin here with the notes written at the end of that very day.
—Parted with Mills on the quay. We had walked side by side in absolute silence. The fact is he is too old for me to talk to him freely. For all his sympathy and seriousness I don’t know what note to strike and I am not at all certain what he thinks of all this. As we shook hands at parting, I asked him how much longer he expected to stay. And he answered me that it depended on R. She was making arrangements for him to cross the frontier. He wanted to see the very ground on which the Principle of Legitimacy was actually asserting itself arms in hand. It sounded to my positive mind the most fantastic thing in the world, this elimination of personalities from what seemed but the merest political, dynastic adventure. So it wasn’t Doña Rita, it wasn’t Blunt, it wasn’t the Pretender with his big infectious laugh, it wasn’t all that lot of politicians, archbishops, and generals, of monks, guerrilleros, and smugglers by sea and land, of dubious agents and shady speculators and undoubted swindlers, who were pushing their fortunes at the risk of their precious skins. No. It was the Legitimist Principle asserting itself! Well, I would accept the view but with one reservation. All the others might have been merged into the idea, but I, the latest recruit, I would not be merged in the Legitimist Principle. Mine was an act of independent assertion. Never before had I felt so intensely aware of my personality. But I said nothing of that to Mills. I only told him I thought we had better not be seen very often together in the streets. He agreed. Hearty handshake. Looked affectionately after his broad back. It never occurred to him to turn his head. What was I in comparison with the Principle of Legitimacy?
Late that night I went in search of Dominic. That Mediterranean sailor was just the man I wanted. He had a great experience of all unlawful things that can be done on the seas and he brought to the practice of them much wisdom and audacity. That I didn’t know where he lived was nothing since I knew where he loved. The proprietor of a small, quiet café on the quay, a certain Madame Léonore, a woman of thirty-five with an open Roman face and intelligent black eyes, had captivated his heart years ago. In that café with our heads close together over a marble table, Dominic and I held an earnest and endless confabulation while Madame Léonore, rustling a black silk skirt, with gold earrings, with her raven hair elaborately dressed and something nonchalant in her movements, would take occasion, in passing to and fro, to rest her hand for a moment on Dominic’s shoulder. Later when the little café had emptied itself of its habitual customers, mostly people connected with the work of ships and cargoes, she came quietly to sit at our table and looking at me very hard with her black, sparkling eyes asked Dominic familiarly what had happened to his Signorino. It was her name for me. I was Dominic’s Signorino. She knew me by no other; and our connection has always been somewhat of a riddle to her. She said that I was somehow changed since she saw me last. In her rich voice she urged Dominic only to look at my eyes. I must have had some piece of luck come to me either in love or at cards, she bantered. But Dominic answered half in scorn that I was not of the sort that runs after that kind of luck. He stated generally that there were some young gentlemen very clever in inventing new ways of getting rid of their time and their money. However, if they needed a sensible man to help them he had no objection himself to lend a hand. Dominic’s general scorn for the beliefs, and activities, and abilities of upper-class people covered the Principle of Legitimacy amply; but he could not resist the opportunity to exercise his special faculties in a field he knew of old. He had been a desperate smuggler in his younger days. We settled the purchase of a fast sailing craft. Agreed that it must be a balancelle and something altogether out of the common. He knew of one suitable but she was in Corsica. Offered to start for Bastia by mail-boat in the morning. All the time the handsome and mature Madame Léonore sat by, smiling faintly, amused at her great man joining like this in a frolic of boys. She said the last words of that evening: “You men never grow up,” touching lightly the grey hair above his temple.
A fortnight later.
. . . In the afternoon to the Prado. Beautiful day. At the moment of ringing at the door a strong emotion of an anxious kind. Why? Down the length of the dining-room in the rotunda part full of afternoon light Doña R., sitting cross-legged on the divan in the attitude of a very old idol or a very young child and surrounded by many cushions, waves her hand from afar pleasantly surprised, exclaiming: “What! Back already!” I give her all the details and we talk for two hours across a large brass bowl containing a little water placed between us, lighting cigarettes and dropping them, innumerable, puffed at, yet untasted in the overwhelming interest of the conversation. Found her very quick in taking the points and very intelligent in her suggestions. All formality soon vanished between us and before very long I discovered myself sitting cross-legged, too, while I held forth on the qualities of different Mediterranean sailing craft and on the romantic qualifications of Dominic for the task. I believe I gave her the whole history of the man, mentioning even the existence of Madame Léonore, since the little café would have to be the headquarters of the marine part of the plot.
She murmured, “Ah!Une belle Romaine,” thoughtfully. She told me that she liked to hear people of that sort spoken of in terms of our common humanity. She observed also that she wished to see Dominic some day; to set her eyes for once on a man who could be absolutely depended on. She wanted to know whether he had engaged himself in this adventure solely for my sake.
I said that no doubt it was partly that. We had been very close associates in the West Indies from where we had returned together, and he had a notion that I could be depended on, too. But mainly, I suppose, it was from taste. And there was in him also a fine carelessness as to what he did and a love of venturesome enterprise.
“And you,” she said. “Is it carelessness, too?”
“In a measure,” I said. “Within limits.”
“And very soon you will get tired.”
“When I do I will tell you. But I may also get frightened. I suppose you know there are risks, I mean apart from the risk of life.”
“As for instance,” she said.
“For instance, being captured, tried, and sentenced to what they call ‘the galleys,’ in Ceuta.”
“And all this from that love for . . .”
“Not for Legitimacy,” I interrupted the inquiry lightly. “But what’s the use asking such questions? It’s like asking the veiled figure of fate. It doesn’t know its own mind nor its own heart. It has no heart. But what if I were to start asking you—who have a heart and are not veiled to my sight?” She dropped her charming adolescent head, so firm in modelling, so gentle in expression. Her uncovered neck was round like the shaft of a column. She wore the same wrapper of thick blue silk. At that time she seemed to live either in her riding habit or in that wrapper folded tightly round her and open low to a point in front. Because of the absence of all trimming round the neck and from the deep view of her bare arms in the wide sleeve this garment seemed to be put directly on her skin and gave one the impression of one’s nearness to her body which would have been troubling but for the perfect unconsciousness of her manner. That day she carried no barbarous arrow in her hair. It was parted on one side, brushed back severely, and tied with a black ribbon, without any bronze mist about her forehead or temple. This smoothness added to the many varieties of her expression also that of child-like innocence.
Great progress in our intimacy brought about unconsciously by our enthusiastic interest in the matter of our discourse and, in the moments of silence, by the sympathetic current of our thoughts. And this rapidly growing familiarity (truly, she had a terrible gift for it) had all the varieties of earnestness: serious, excited, ardent, and even gay. She laughed in contralto; but her laugh was never very long; and when it had ceased, the silence of the room with the light dying in all its many windows seemed to lie about me warmed by its vibration.
As I was preparing to take my leave after a longish pause into which we had fallen as into a vague dream, she came out of it with a start and a quiet sigh. She said, “I had forgotten myself.” I took her hand and was raising it naturally, without premeditation, when I felt suddenly the arm to which it belonged become insensible, passive, like a stuffed limb, and the whole woman go inanimate all over! Brusquely I dropped the hand before it reached my lips; and it was so lifeless that it fell heavily on to the divan.
I remained standing before her. She raised to me not her eyes but her whole face, inquisitively—perhaps in appeal.
“No! This isn’t good enough for me,” I said.
The last of the light gleamed in her long enigmatic eyes as if they were precious enamel in that shadowy head which in its immobility suggested a creation of a distant past: immortal art, not transient life. Her voice had a profound quietness. She excused herself.
“It’s only habit—or instinct—or what you like. I have had to practise that in self-defence lest I should be tempted sometimes to cut the arm off.”
I remembered the way she had abandoned this very arm and hand to the white-haired ruffian. It rendered me gloomy and idiotically obstinate.
“Very ingenious. But this sort of thing is of no use to me,” I declared.
“Make it up,” suggested her mysterious voice, while her shadowy figure remained unmoved, indifferent amongst the cushions.
I didn’t stir either. I refused in the same low tone.
“No. Not before you give it to me yourself some day.”
“Yes—some day,” she repeated in a breath in which there was no irony but rather hesitation, reluctance what did I know?
I walked away from the house in a curious state of gloomy satisfaction with myself.
And this is the last extract. A month afterwards.
—This afternoon going up to the Villa I was for the first time accompanied in my way by some misgivings. To-morrow I sail.
First trip and therefore in the nature of a trial trip; and I can’t overcome a certain gnawing emotion, for it is a trip thatmustn’tfail. In that sort of enterprise there is no room for mistakes. Of all the individuals engaged in it will every one be intelligent enough, faithful enough, bold enough? Looking upon them as a whole it seems impossible; but as each has got only a limited part to play they may be found sufficient each for his particular trust. And will they be all punctual, I wonder? An enterprise that hangs on the punctuality of many people, no matter how well disposed and even heroic, hangs on a thread. This I have perceived to be also the greatest of Dominic’s concerns. He, too, wonders. And when he breathes his doubts the smile lurking under the dark curl of his moustaches is not reassuring.
But there is also something exciting in such speculations and the road to the Villa seemed to me shorter than ever before.
Let in by the silent, ever-active, dark lady’s maid, who is always on the spot and always on the way somewhere else, opening the door with one hand, while she passes on, turning on one for a moment her quick, black eyes, which just miss being lustrous, as if some one had breathed on them lightly.
On entering the long room I perceive Mills established in an armchair which he had dragged in front of the divan. I do the same to another and there we sit side by side facing R., tenderly amiable yet somehow distant among her cushions, with an immemorial seriousness in her long, shaded eyes and her fugitive smile hovering about but never settling on her lips. Mills, who is just back from over the frontier, must have been asking R. whether she had been worried again by her devoted friend with the white hair. At least I concluded so because I found them talking of the heart-broken Azzolati. And after having answered their greetings I sit and listen to Rita addressing Mills earnestly.
“No, I assure you Azzolati had done nothing to me. I knew him. He was a frequent visitor at the Pavilion, though I, personally, never talked with him very much in Henry Allègre’s lifetime. Other men were more interesting, and he himself was rather reserved in his manner to me. He was an international politician and financier—a nobody. He, like many others, was admitted only to feed and amuse Henry Allègre’s scorn of the world, which was insatiable—I tell you.”
“Yes,” said Mills. “I can imagine.”
“But I know. Often when we were alone Henry Allègre used to pour it into my ears. If ever anybody saw mankind stripped of its clothes as the child sees the king in the German fairy tale, it’s I! Into my ears! A child’s! Too young to die of fright. Certainly not old enough to understand—or even to believe. But then his arm was about me. I used to laugh, sometimes. Laugh! At this destruction—at these ruins!”
“Yes,” said Mills, very steady before her fire. “But you have at your service the everlasting charm of life; you are a part of the indestructible.”
“Am I? . . . But there is no arm about me now. The laugh! Where is my laugh? Give me back my laugh. . . .”
And she laughed a little on a low note. I don’t know about Mills, but the subdued shadowy vibration of it echoed in my breast which felt empty for a moment and like a large space that makes one giddy.
“The laugh is gone out of my heart, which at any rate used to feel protected. That feeling’s gone, too. And I myself will have to die some day.”
“Certainly,” said Mills in an unaltered voice. “As to this body you . . .”
“Oh, yes! Thanks. It’s a very poor jest. Change from body to body as travellers used to change horses at post houses. I’ve heard of this before. . . .”
“I’ve no doubt you have,” Mills put on a submissive air. “But are we to hear any more about Azzolati?”
“You shall. Listen. I had heard that he was invited to shoot at Rambouillet—a quiet party, not one of these great shoots. I hear a lot of things. I wanted to have a certain information, also certain hints conveyed to a diplomatic personage who was to be there, too. A personage that would never let me get in touch with him though I had tried many times.”
“Incredible!” mocked Mills solemnly.
“The personage mistrusts his own susceptibility. Born cautious,” explained Doña Rita crisply with the slightest possible quiver of her lips. “Suddenly I had the inspiration to make use of Azzolati, who had been reminding me by a constant stream of messages that he was an old friend. I never took any notice of those pathetic appeals before. But in this emergency I sat down and wrote a note asking him to come and dine with me in my hotel. I suppose you know I don’t live in the Pavilion. I can’t bear the Pavilion now. When I have to go there I begin to feel after an hour or so that it is haunted. I seem to catch sight of somebody I know behind columns, passing through doorways, vanishing here and there. I hear light footsteps behind closed doors. . . My own!”
Her eyes, her half-parted lips, remained fixed till Mills suggested softly, “Yes, but Azzolati.”
Her rigidity vanished like a flake of snow in the sunshine. “Oh! Azzolati. It was a most solemn affair. It had occurred to me to make a very elaborate toilet. It was most successful. Azzolati looked positively scared for a moment as though he had got into the wrong suite of rooms. He had never before seen meen toilette, you understand. In the old days once out of my riding habit I would never dress. I draped myself, you remember, Monsieur Mills. To go about like that suited my indolence, my longing to feel free in my body, as at that time when I used to herd goats. . . But never mind. My aim was to impress Azzolati. I wanted to talk to him seriously.”
There was something whimsical in the quick beat of her eyelids and in the subtle quiver of her lips. “And behold! the same notion had occurred to Azzolati. Imagine that for this tête-à-tête dinner the creature had got himself up as if for a reception at court. He displayed a brochette of all sorts of decorations on the lapel of hisfracand had a broad ribbon of some order across his shirt front. An orange ribbon. Bavarian, I should say. Great Roman Catholic, Azzolati. It was always his ambition to be the banker of all the Bourbons in the world. The last remnants of his hair were dyed jet black and the ends of his moustache were like knitting needles. He was disposed to be as soft as wax in my hands. Unfortunately I had had some irritating interviews during the day. I was keeping down sudden impulses to smash a glass, throw a plate on the floor, do something violent to relieve my feelings. His submissive attitude made me still more nervous. He was ready to do anything in the world for me providing that I would promise him that he would never find my door shut against him as long as he lived. You understand the impudence of it, don’t you? And his tone was positively abject, too. I snapped back at him that I had no door, that I was a nomad. He bowed ironically till his nose nearly touched his plate but begged me to remember that to his personal knowledge I had four houses of my own about the world. And you know this made me feel a homeless outcast more than ever—like a little dog lost in the street—not knowing where to go. I was ready to cry and there the creature sat in front of me with an imbecile smile as much as to say ‘here is a poser for you. . . .’ I gnashed my teeth at him. Quietly, you know . . . I suppose you two think that I am stupid.”
She paused as if expecting an answer but we made no sound and she continued with a remark.
“I have days like that. Often one must listen to false protestations, empty words, strings of lies all day long, so that in the evening one is not fit for anything, not even for truth if it comes in one’s way. That idiot treated me to a piece of brazen sincerity which I couldn’t stand. First of all he began to take me into his confidence; he boasted of his great affairs, then started groaning about his overstrained life which left him no time for the amenities of existence, for beauty, or sentiment, or any sort of ease of heart. His heart! He wanted me to sympathize with his sorrows. Of course I ought to have listened. One must pay for service. Only I was nervous and tired. He bored me. I told him at last that I was surprised that a man of such immense wealth should still keep on going like this reaching for more and more. I suppose he must have been sipping a good deal of wine while we talked and all at once he let out an atrocity which was too much for me. He had been moaning and sentimentalizing but then suddenly he showed me his fangs. ‘No,’ he cries, ‘you can’t imagine what a satisfaction it is to feel all that penniless, beggarly lot of the dear, honest, meritorious poor wriggling and slobbering under one’s boots.’ You may tell me that he is a contemptible animal anyhow, but you should have heard the tone! I felt my bare arms go cold like ice. A moment before I had been hot and faint with sheer boredom. I jumped up from the table, rang for Rose, and told her to bring me my fur cloak. He remained in his chair leering at me curiously. When I had the fur on my shoulders and the girl had gone out of the room I gave him the surprise of his life. ‘Take yourself off instantly,’ I said. ‘Go trample on the poor if you like but never dare speak to me again.’ At this he leaned his head on his arm and sat so long at the table shading his eyes with his hand that I had to ask, calmly—you know—whether he wanted me to have him turned out into the corridor. He fetched an enormous sigh. ‘I have only tried to be honest with you, Rita.’ But by the time he got to the door he had regained some of his impudence. ‘You know how to trample on a poor fellow, too,’ he said. ‘But I don’t mind being made to wriggle under your pretty shoes, Rita. I forgive you. I thought you were free from all vulgar sentimentalism and that you had a more independent mind. I was mistaken in you, that’s all.’ With that he pretends to dash a tear from his eye-crocodile!—and goes out, leaving me in my fur by the blazing fire, my teeth going like castanets. . . Did you ever hear of anything so stupid as this affair?” she concluded in a tone of extreme candour and a profound unreadable stare that went far beyond us both. And the stillness of her lips was so perfect directly she ceased speaking that I wondered whether all this had come through them or only had formed itself in my mind.
Presently she continued as if speaking for herself only.
“It’s like taking the lids off boxes and seeing ugly toads staring at you. In every one. Every one. That’s what it is having to do with men more than mere—Good-morning—Good evening. And if you try to avoid meddling with their lids, some of them will take them off themselves. And they don’t even know, they don’t even suspect what they are showing you. Certain confidences—they don’t see it—are the bitterest kind of insult. I suppose Azzolati imagines himself a noble beast of prey. Just as some others imagine themselves to be most delicate, noble, and refined gentlemen. And as likely as not they would trade on a woman’s troubles—and in the end make nothing of that either. Idiots!”
The utter absence of all anger in this spoken meditation gave it a character of touching simplicity. And as if it had been truly only a meditation we conducted ourselves as though we had not heard it. Mills began to speak of his experiences during his visit to the army of the Legitimist King. And I discovered in his speeches that this man of books could be graphic and picturesque. His admiration for the devotion and bravery of the army was combined with the greatest distaste for what he had seen of the way its great qualities were misused. In the conduct of this great enterprise he had seen a deplorable levity of outlook, a fatal lack of decision, an absence of any reasoned plan.
He shook his head.
“I feel that you of all people, Doña Rita, ought to be told the truth. I don’t know exactly what you have at stake.”
She was rosy like some impassive statue in a desert in the flush of the dawn.
“Not my heart,” she said quietly. “You must believe that.”
“I do. Perhaps it would have been better if you. . . ”
“No,Monsieur le Philosophe. It would not have been better. Don’t make that serious face at me,” she went on with tenderness in a playful note, as if tenderness had been her inheritance of all time and playfulness the very fibre of her being. “I suppose you think that a woman who has acted as I did and has not staked her heart on it is . . . How do you know to what the heart responds as it beats from day to day?”
“I wouldn’t judge you. What am I before the knowledge you were born to? You are as old as the world.”
She accepted this with a smile. I who was innocently watching them was amazed to discover how much a fleeting thing like that could hold of seduction without the help of any other feature and with that unchanging glance.
“With me it ispun 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 isthisthe word of the Venetian riddle?” asked Mills, fixing her with his keen eyes.
“If it pleases you to think so, Señor,” she said indifferently. The movement of her eyes, their veiled gleam became mischievous when she asked, “And Don Juan Blunt, have you seen him over there?”
“I fancy he avoided me. Moreover, he is always with his regiment at the outposts. He is a most valorous captain. I heard some people describe him as foolhardy.”
“Oh, he needn’t seek death,” she said in an indefinable tone. “I mean as a refuge. There will be nothing in his life great enough for that.”
“You are angry. You miss him, I believe, Doña Rita.”
“Angry? No! Weary. But of course it’s very inconvenient. I can’t very well ride out alone. A solitary amazon swallowing the dust and the salt spray of the Corniche promenade would attract too much attention. And then I don’t mind you two knowing that I am afraid of going out alone.”
“Afraid?” we both exclaimed together.
“You men are extraordinary. Why do you want me to be courageous? Why shouldn’t I be afraid? Is it because there is no one in the world to care what would happen to me?”
There was a deep-down vibration in her tone for the first time. We had not a word to say. And she added after a long silence:
“There is a very good reason. There is a danger.”
With wonderful insight Mills affirmed at once:
“Something ugly.”
She nodded slightly several times. Then Mills said with conviction:
“Ah! Then it can’t be anything in yourself. And if so . . . ”
I was moved to extravagant advice.
“You should come out with me to sea then. There may be some danger there but there’s nothing ugly to fear.”
She gave me a startled glance quite unusual with her, more than wonderful to me; and suddenly as though she had seen me for the first time she exclaimed in a tone of compunction:
“Oh! And there is this one, too! Why! Oh, why should he run his head into danger for those things that will all crumble into dust before long?”
I said: “Youwon’t crumble into dust.” And Mills chimed in:
“That young enthusiast will always have his sea.”
We were all standing up now. She kept her eyes on me, and repeated with a sort of whimsical enviousness:
“The sea! The violet sea—and he is longing to rejoin it! . . . At night! Under the stars! . . . A lovers’ meeting,” she went on, thrilling me from head to foot with those two words, accompanied by a wistful smile pointed by a suspicion of mockery. She turned away.
“And you, Monsieur Mills?” she asked.
“I am going back to my books,” he declared with a very serious face. “My adventure is over.”
“Each one to his love,” she bantered us gently. “Didn’t I love books, too, at one time! They seemed to contain all wisdom and hold a magic power, too. Tell me, Monsieur Mills, have you found amongst them in some black-letter volume the power of foretelling a poor mortal’s destiny, the power to look into the future? Anybody’s future . . .” Mills shook his head. . . “What, not even mine?” she coaxed as if she really believed in a magic power to be found in books.
Mills shook his head again. “No, I have not the power,” he said. “I am no more a great magician, than you are a poor mortal. You have your ancient spells. You are as old as the world. Of us two it’s you that are more fit to foretell the future of the poor mortals on whom you happen to cast your eyes.”
At these words she cast her eyes down and in the moment of deep silence I watched the slight rising and falling of her breast. Then Mills pronounced distinctly: “Good-bye, old Enchantress.”
They shook hands cordially. “Good-bye, poor Magician,” she said.
Mills made as if to speak but seemed to think better of it. Doña Rita returned my distant bow with a slight, charmingly ceremonious inclination of her body.
“Bon voyageand 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.
It was on our return from that first trip that I took Dominic up to the Villa to be presented to Doña Rita. If she wanted to look on the embodiment of fidelity, resource, and courage, she could behold it all in that man. Apparently she was not disappointed. Neither was Dominic disappointed. During the half-hour’s interview they got into touch with each other in a wonderful way as if they had some common and secret standpoint in life. Maybe it was their common lawlessness, and their knowledge of things as old as the world. Her seduction, his recklessness, were both simple, masterful and, in a sense, worthy of each other.
Dominic was, I won’t say awed by this interview. No woman could awe Dominic. But he was, as it were, rendered thoughtful by it, like a man who had not so much an experience as a sort of revelation vouchsafed to him. Later, at sea, he used to refer to La Señora in a particular tone and I knew that henceforth his devotion was not for me alone. And I understood the inevitability of it extremely well. As to Doña Rita she, after Dominic left the room, had turned to me with animation and said: “But he is perfect, this man.” Afterwards she often asked after him and used to refer to him in conversation. More than once she said to me: “One would like to put the care of one’s personal safety into the hands of that man. He looks as if he simply couldn’t fail one.” I admitted that this was very true, especially at sea. Dominic couldn’t fail. But at the same time I rather chaffed Rita on her preoccupation as to personal safety that so often cropped up in her talk.
“One would think you were a crowned head in a revolutionary world,” I used to tell her.
“That would be different. One would be standing then for something, either worth or not worth dying for. One could even run away then and be done with it. But I can’t run away unless I got out of my skin and left that behind. Don’t you understand? You are very stupid . . .” But she had the grace to add, “On purpose.”
I don’t know about the on purpose. I am not certain about the stupidity. Her words bewildered one often and bewilderment is a sort of stupidity. I remedied it by simply disregarding the sense of what she said. The sound was there and also her poignant heart-gripping presence giving occupation enough to one’s faculties. In the power of those things over one there was mystery enough. It was more absorbing than the mere obscurity of her speeches. But I daresay she couldn’t understand that.
Hence, at times, the amusing outbreaks of temper in word and gesture that only strengthened the natural, the invincible force of the spell. Sometimes the brass bowl would get upset or the cigarette box would fly up, dropping a shower of cigarettes on the floor. We would pick them up, re-establish everything, and fall into a long silence, so close that the sound of the first word would come with all the pain of a separation.
It was at that time, too, that she suggested I should take up my quarters in her house in the street of the Consuls. There were certain advantages in that move. In my present abode my sudden absences might have been in the long run subject to comment. On the other hand, the house in the street of Consuls was a known out-post of Legitimacy. But then it was covered by the occult influence of her who was referred to in confidential talks, secret communications, and discreet whispers of Royalist salons as: “Madame de Lastaola.”
That was the name which the heiress of Henry Allègre had decided to adopt when, according to her own expression, she had found herself precipitated at a moment’s notice into the crowd of mankind. It is strange how the death of Henry Allègre, which certainly the poor man had not planned, acquired in my view the character of a heartless desertion. It gave one a glimpse of amazing egoism in a sentiment to which one could hardly give a name, a mysterious appropriation of one human being by another as if in defiance of unexpressed things and for an unheard-of satisfaction of an inconceivable pride. If he had hated her he could not have flung that enormous fortune more brutally at her head. And his unrepentant death seemed to lift for a moment the curtain on something lofty and sinister like an Olympian’s caprice.
Doña Rita said to me once with humorous resignation: “You know, it appears that one must have a name. That’s what Henry Allègre’s man of business told me. He was quite impatient with me about it. But my name,amigo, Henry Allègre had taken from me like all the rest of what I had been once. All that is buried with him in his grave. It wouldn’t have been true. That is how I felt about it. So I took that one.” She whispered to herself: “Lastaola,” not as if to test the sound but as if in a dream.
To this day I am not quite certain whether it was the name of any human habitation, a lonelycaseriowith a half-effaced carving of a coat of arms over its door, or of some hamlet at the dead end of a ravine with a stony slope at the back. It might have been a hill for all I know or perhaps a stream. A wood, or perhaps a combination of all these: just a bit of the earth’s surface. Once I asked her where exactly it was situated and she answered, waving her hand cavalierly at the dead wall of the room: “Oh, over there.” I thought that this was all that I was going to hear but she added moodily, “I used to take my goats there, a dozen or so of them, for the day. From after my uncle had said his Mass till the ringing of the evening bell.”
I saw suddenly the lonely spot, sketched for me some time ago by a few words from Mr. Blunt, populated by the agile, bearded beasts with cynical heads, and a little misty figure dark in the sunlight with a halo of dishevelled rust-coloured hair about its head.
The epithet of rust-coloured comes from her. It was really tawny. Once or twice in my hearing she had referred to “my rust-coloured hair” with laughing vexation. Even then it was unruly, abhorring the restraints of civilization, and often in the heat of a dispute getting into the eyes of Madame de Lastaola, the possessor of coveted art treasures, the heiress of Henry Allègre. She proceeded in a reminiscent mood, with a faint flash of gaiety all over her face, except her dark blue eyes that moved so seldom out of their fixed scrutiny of things invisible to other human beings.
“The goats were very good. We clambered amongst the stones together. They beat me at that game. I used to catch my hair in the bushes.”
“Your rust-coloured hair,” I whispered.
“Yes, it was always this colour. And I used to leave bits of my frock on thorns here and there. It was pretty thin, I can tell you. There wasn’t much at that time between my skin and the blue of the sky. My legs were as sunburnt as my face; but really I didn’t tan very much. I had plenty of freckles though. There were no looking-glasses in the Presbytery but uncle had a piece not bigger than my two hands for his shaving. One Sunday I crept into his room and had a peep at myself. And wasn’t I startled to see my own eyes looking at me! But it was fascinating, too. I was about eleven years old then, and I was very friendly with the goats, and I was as shrill as a cicada and as slender as a match. Heavens! When I overhear myself speaking sometimes, or look at my limbs, it doesn’t seem to be possible. And yet it is the same one. I do remember every single goat. They were very clever. Goats are no trouble really; they don’t scatter much. Mine never did even if I had to hide myself out of their sight for ever so long.”
It was but natural to ask her why she wanted to hide, and she uttered vaguely what was rather a comment on my question:
“It was like fate.” But I chose to take it otherwise, teasingly, because we were often like a pair of children.
“Oh, really,” I said, “you talk like a pagan. What could you know of fate at that time? What was it like? Did it come down from Heaven?”
“Don’t be stupid. It used to come along a cart-track that was there and it looked like a boy. Wasn’t he a little devil though. You understand, I couldn’t know that. He was a wealthy cousin of mine. Round there we are all related, all cousins—as in Brittany. He wasn’t much bigger than myself but he was older, just a boy in blue breeches and with good shoes on his feet, which of course interested and impressed me. He yelled to me from below, I screamed to him from above, he came up and sat down near me on a stone, never said a word, let me look at him for half an hour before he condescended to ask me who I was. And the airs he gave himself! He quite intimidated me sitting there perfectly dumb. I remember trying to hide my bare feet under the edge of my skirt as I sat below him on the ground.
“C’est comique,eh!” she interrupted herself to comment in a melancholy tone. I looked at her sympathetically and she went on:
“He was the only son from a rich farmhouse two miles down the slope. In winter they used to send him to school at Tolosa. He had an enormous opinion of himself; he was going to keep a shop in a town by and by and he was about the most dissatisfied creature I have ever seen. He had an unhappy mouth and unhappy eyes and he was always wretched about something: about the treatment he received, about being kept in the country and chained to work. He was moaning and complaining and threatening all the world, including his father and mother. He used to curse God, yes, that boy, sitting there on a piece of rock like a wretched little Prometheus with a sparrow pecking at his miserable little liver. And the grand scenery of mountains all round, ha, ha, ha!”
She laughed in contralto: a penetrating sound with something generous in it; not infectious, but in others provoking a smile.
“Of course I, poor little animal, I didn’t know what to make of it, and I was even a little frightened. But at first because of his miserable eyes I was sorry for him, almost as much as if he had been a sick goat. But, frightened or sorry, I don’t know how it is, I always wanted to laugh at him, too, I mean from the very first day when he let me admire him for half an hour. Yes, even then I had to put my hand over my mouth more than once for the sake of good manners, you understand. And yet, you know, I was never a laughing child.
“One day he came up and sat down very dignified a little bit away from me and told me he had been thrashed for wandering in the hills.
“‘To be with me?’ I asked. And he said: ‘To be with you! No. My people don’t know what I do.’ I can’t tell why, but I was annoyed. So instead of raising a clamour of pity over him, which I suppose he expected me to do, I asked him if the thrashing hurt very much. He got up, he had a switch in his hand, and walked up to me, saying, ‘I will soon show you.’ I went stiff with fright; but instead of slashing at me he dropped down by my side and kissed me on the cheek. Then he did it again, and by that time I was gone dead all over and he could have done what he liked with the corpse but he left off suddenly and then I came to life again and I bolted away. Not very far. I couldn’t leave the goats altogether. He chased me round and about the rocks, but of course I was too quick for him in his nice town boots. When he got tired of that game he started throwing stones. After that he made my life very lively for me. Sometimes he used to come on me unawares and then I had to sit still and listen to his miserable ravings, because he would catch me round the waist and hold me very tight. And yet, I often felt inclined to laugh. But if I caught sight of him at a distance and tried to dodge out of the way he would start stoning me into a shelter I knew of and then sit outside with a heap of stones at hand so that I daren’t show the end of my nose for hours. He would sit there and rave and abuse me till I would burst into a crazy laugh in my hole; and then I could see him through the leaves rolling on the ground and biting his fists with rage. Didn’t he hate me! At the same time I was often terrified. I am convinced now that if I had started crying he would have rushed in and perhaps strangled me there. Then as the sun was about to set he would make me swear that I would marry him when I was grown up. ‘Swear, you little wretched beggar,’ he would yell to me. And I would swear. I was hungry, and I didn’t want to be made black and blue all over with stones. Oh, I swore ever so many times to be his wife. Thirty times a month for two months. I couldn’t help myself. It was no use complaining to my sister Therese. When I showed her my bruises and tried to tell her a little about my trouble she was quite scandalized. She called me a sinful girl, a shameless creature. I assure you it puzzled my head so that, between Therese my sister and José the boy, I lived in a state of idiocy almost. But luckily at the end of the two months they sent him away from home for good. Curious story to happen to a goatherd living all her days out under God’s eye, as my uncle the Cura might have said. My sister Therese was keeping house in the Presbytery. She’s a terrible person.”
“I have heard of your sister Therese,” I said.
“Oh, you have! Of my big sister Therese, six, ten years older than myself perhaps? She just comes a little above my shoulder, but then I was always a long thing. I never knew my mother. I don’t even know how she looked. There are no paintings or photographs in our farmhouses amongst the hills. I haven’t even heard her described to me. I believe I was never good enough to be told these things. Therese decided that I was a lump of wickedness, and now she believes that I will lose my soul altogether unless I take some steps to save it. Well, I have no particular taste that way. I suppose it is annoying to have a sister going fast to eternal perdition, but there are compensations. The funniest thing is that it’s Therese, I believe, who managed to keep me out of the Presbytery when I went out of my way to look in on them on my return from my visit to theQuartel Reallast year. I couldn’t have stayed much more than half an hour with them anyway, but still I would have liked to get over the old doorstep. I am certain that Therese persuaded my uncle to go out and meet me at the bottom of the hill. I saw the old man a long way off and I understood how it was. I dismounted at once and met him on foot. We had half an hour together walking up and down the road. He is a peasant priest, he didn’t know how to treat me. And of course I was uncomfortable, too. There wasn’t a single goat about to keep me in countenance. I ought to have embraced him. I was always fond of the stern, simple old man. But he drew himself up when I approached him and actually took off his hat to me. So simple as that! I bowed my head and asked for his blessing. And he said ‘I would never refuse a blessing to a good Legitimist.’ So stern as that! And when I think that I was perhaps the only girl of the family or in the whole world that he ever in his priest’s life patted on the head! When I think of that I . . . I believe at that moment I was as wretched as he was himself. I handed him an envelope with a big red seal which quite startled him. I had asked the Marquis de Villarel to give me a few words for him, because my uncle has a great influence in his district; and the Marquis penned with his own hand some compliments and an inquiry about the spirit of the population. My uncle read the letter, looked up at me with an air of mournful awe, and begged me to tell his excellency that the people were all for God, their lawful King and their old privileges. I said to him then, after he had asked me about the health of His Majesty in an awfully gloomy tone—I said then: ‘There is only one thing that remains for me to do, uncle, and that is to give you two pounds of the very best snuff I have brought here for you.’ What else could I have got for the poor old man? I had no trunks with me. I had to leave behind a spare pair of shoes in the hotel to make room in my little bag for that snuff. And fancy! That old priest absolutely pushed the parcel away. I could have thrown it at his head; but I thought suddenly of that hard, prayerful life, knowing nothing of any ease or pleasure in the world, absolutely nothing but a pinch of snuff now and then. I remembered how wretched he used to be when he lacked a copper or two to get some snuff with. My face was hot with indignation, but before I could fly out at him I remembered how simple he was. So I said with great dignity that as the present came from the King and as he wouldn’t receive it from my hand there was nothing else for me to do but to throw it into the brook; and I made as if I were going to do it, too. He shouted: ‘Stay, unhappy girl! Is it really from His Majesty, whom God preserve?’ I said contemptuously, ‘Of course.’ He looked at me with great pity in his eyes, sighed deeply, and took the little tin from my hand. I suppose he imagined me in my abandoned way wheedling the necessary cash out of the King for the purchase of that snuff. You can’t imagine how simple he is. Nothing was easier than to deceive him; but don’t imagine I deceived him from the vainglory of a mere sinner. I lied to the dear man, simply because I couldn’t bear the idea of him being deprived of the only gratification his big, ascetic, gaunt body ever knew on earth. As I mounted my mule to go away he murmured coldly: ‘God guard you, Señora!’ Señora! What sternness! We were off a little way already when his heart softened and he shouted after me in a terrible voice: ‘The road to Heaven is repentance!’ And then, after a silence, again the great shout ‘Repentance!’ thundered after me. Was that sternness or simplicity, I wonder? Or a mere unmeaning superstition, a mechanical thing? If there lives anybody completely honest in this world, surely it must be my uncle. And yet—who knows?
“Would you guess what was the next thing I did? Directly I got over the frontier I wrote from Bayonne asking the old man to send me out my sister here. I said it was for the service of the King. You see, I had thought suddenly of that house of mine in which you once spent the night talking with Mr. Mills and Don Juan Blunt. I thought it would do extremely well for Carlist officers coming this way on leave or on a mission. In hotels they might have been molested, but I knew that I could get protection for my house. Just a word from the ministry in Paris to the Prefect. But I wanted a woman to manage it for me. And where was I to find a trustworthy woman? How was I to know one when I saw her? I don’t know how to talk to women. Of course my Rose would have done for me that or anything else; but what could I have done myself without her? She has looked after me from the first. It was Henry Allègre who got her for me eight years ago. I don’t know whether he meant it for a kindness but she’s the only human being on whom I can lean. She knows . . . What doesn’t she know about me! She has never failed to do the right thing for me unasked. I couldn’t part with her. And I couldn’t think of anybody else but my sister.
“After all it was somebody belonging to me. But it seemed the wildest idea. Yet she came at once. Of course I took care to send her some money. She likes money. As to my uncle there is nothing that he wouldn’t have given up for the service of the King. Rose went to meet her at the railway station. She told me afterwards that there had been no need for me to be anxious about her recognizing Mademoiselle Therese. There was nobody else in the train that could be mistaken for her. I should think not! She had made for herself a dress of some brown stuff like a nun’s habit and had a crooked stick and carried all her belongings tied up in a handkerchief. She looked like a pilgrim to a saint’s shrine. Rose took her to the house. She asked when she saw it: ‘And does this big place really belong to our Rita?’ My maid of course said that it was mine. ‘And how long did our Rita live here?’—‘Madame has never seen it unless perhaps the outside, as far as I know. I believe Mr. Allègre lived here for some time when he was a young man.’—‘The sinner that’s dead?’—‘Just so,’ says Rose. You know nothing ever startles Rose. ‘Well, his sins are gone with him,’ said my sister, and began to make herself at home.
“Rose was going to stop with her for a week but on the third day she was back with me with the remark that Mlle. Therese knew her way about very well already and preferred to be left to herself. Some little time afterwards I went to see that sister of mine. The first thing she said to me, ‘I wouldn’t have recognized you, Rita,’ and I said, ‘What a funny dress you have, Therese, more fit for the portress of a convent than for this house.’—‘Yes,’ she said, ‘and unless you give this house to me, Rita, I will go back to our country. I will have nothing to do with your life, Rita. Your life is no secret for me.’
“I was going from room to room and Therese was following me. ‘I don’t know that my life is a secret to anybody,’ I said to her, ‘but how do you know anything about it?’ And then she told me that it was through a cousin of ours, that horrid wretch of a boy, you know. He had finished his schooling and was a clerk in a Spanish commercial house of some kind, in Paris, and apparently had made it his business to write home whatever he could hear about me or ferret out from those relations of mine with whom I lived as a girl. I got suddenly very furious. I raged up and down the room (we were alone upstairs), and Therese scuttled away from me as far as the door. I heard her say to herself, ‘It’s the evil spirit in her that makes her like this.’ She was absolutely convinced of that. She made the sign of the cross in the air to protect herself. I was quite astounded. And then I really couldn’t help myself. I burst into a laugh. I laughed and laughed; I really couldn’t stop till Therese ran away. I went downstairs still laughing and found her in the hall with her face to the wall and her fingers in her ears kneeling in a corner. I had to pull her out by the shoulders from there. I don’t think she was frightened; she was only shocked. But I don’t suppose her heart is desperately bad, because when I dropped into a chair feeling very tired she came and knelt in front of me and put her arms round my waist and entreated me to cast off from me my evil ways with the help of saints and priests. Quite a little programme for a reformed sinner. I got away at last. I left her sunk on her heels before the empty chair looking after me. ‘I pray for you every night and morning, Rita,’ she said.—‘Oh, yes. I know you are a good sister,’ I said to her. I was letting myself out when she called after me, ‘And what about this house, Rita?’ I said to her, ‘Oh, you may keep it till the day I reform and enter a convent.’ The last I saw of her she was still on her knees looking after me with her mouth open. I have seen her since several times, 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 Doña 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 Doña 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 Doña 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, Señor. 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.”
Doña 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 Doña 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 youngcaballerohas 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 Señora, 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, “Olà, 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, Señor, 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.”