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.'"
