CHAPTER II
The windows of that room gave out on the street of the Consuls
which as usual was silent. And the house itself below me and above
me was soundless, perfectly still. In general the house was quiet,
dumbly quiet, without resonances of any sort, something like what
one would imagine the interior of a convent would be. I suppose it
was very solidly built. Yet that morning I missed in the stillness
that feeling of security and peace which ought to have been
associated with it. It is, I believe, generally admitted that the
dead are glad to be at rest. But I wasn't at rest. What was wrong
with that silence? There was something incongruous in that peace.
What was it that had got into that stillness? Suddenly I
remembered: the mother of Captain Blunt.
Why had she come all the way from Paris? And why should I bother
my head about it? H'm--the Blunt atmosphere, the reinforced Blunt
vibration stealing through the walls, through the thick walls and
the almost more solid stillness. Nothing to me, of course--the
movements of Mme. Blunt, mere. It was maternal affection which had
brought her south by either the evening or morning Rapide, to take
anxious stock of the ravages of that insomnia. Very good thing,
insomnia, for a cavalry officer perpetually on outpost duty, a real
godsend, so to speak; but on leave a truly devilish condition to be
in.
The above sequence of thoughts was entirely unsympathetic and it
was followed by a feeling of satisfaction that I, at any rate, was
not suffering from insomnia. I could always sleep in the end. In
the end. Escape into a nightmare. Wouldn't he revel in that if he
could! But that wasn't for him. He had to toss about open-eyed
all night and get up weary, weary. But oh, wasn't I weary, too,
waiting for a sleep without dreams.
I heard the door behind me open. I had been standing with my face
to the window and, I declare, not knowing what I was looking at
across the road--the Desert of Sahara or a wall of bricks, a
landscape of rivers and forests or only the Consulate of Paraguay.
But I had been thinking, apparently, of Mr. Blunt with such
intensity that when I saw him enter the room it didn't really make
much difference. When I turned about the door behind him was
already shut. He advanced towards me, correct, supple, hollow-
eyed, and smiling; and as to his costume ready to go out except for
the old shooting jacket which he must have affectioned
particularly, for he never lost any time in getting into it at
every opportunity. Its material was some tweed mixture; it had
gone inconceivably shabby, it was shrunk from old age, it was
ragged at the elbows; but any one could see at a glance that it had
been made in London by a celebrated tailor, by a distinguished
specialist. Blunt came towards me in all the elegance of his
slimness and affirming in every line of his face and body, in the
correct set of his shoulders and the careless freedom of his
movements, the superiority, the inexpressible superiority, the
unconscious, the unmarked, the not-to-be-described, and even not-
to-be-caught, superiority of the naturally born and the perfectly
finished man of the world, over the simple young man. He was
smiling, easy, correct, perfectly delightful, fit to kill
He had come to ask me, if I had no other engagement, to lunch with
him and his mother in about an hour's time. He did it in a most
degage tone. His mother had given him a surprise. The completest
. . . The foundation of his mother's psychology was her delightful
unexpectedness. She could never let things be (this in a peculiar
tone which he checked at once) and he really would take it very
kindly of me if I came to break the tete-a-tete for a while (that
is if I had no other engagement. Flash of teeth). His mother was
exquisitely and tenderly absurd. She had taken it into her head
that his health was endangered in some way. And when she took
anything into her head . . . Perhaps I might find something to say
which would reassure her. His mother had two long conversations
with Mills on his passage through Paris and had heard of me (I knew
how that thick man could speak of people, he interjected
ambiguously) and his mother, with an insatiable curiosity for
anything that was rare (filially humorous accent here and a softer
flash of teeth), was very anxious to have me presented to her
(courteous intonation, but no teeth). He hoped I wouldn't mind if
she treated me a little as an "interesting young man." His mother
had never got over her seventeenth year, and the manner of the
spoilt beauty of at least three counties at the back of the
Carolinas. That again got overlaid by the sans-facon of a grande
dame of the Second Empire.
I accepted the invitation with a worldly grin and a perfectly just
intonation, because I really didn't care what I did. I only
wondered vaguely why that fellow required all the air in the room
for himself. There did not seem enough left to go down my throat.
I didn't say that I would come with pleasure or that I would be
delighted, but I said that I would come. He seemed to forget his
tongue in his head, put his hands in his pockets and moved about
vaguely. "I am a little nervous this morning," he said in French,
stopping short and looking me straight in the eyes. His own were
deep sunk, dark, fatal. I asked with some malice, that no one
could have detected in my intonation, "How's that sleeplessness?"
He muttered through his teeth, "Mal. Je ne dors plus." He moved
off to stand at the window with his back to the room. I sat down
on a sofa that was there and put my feet up, and silence took
possession of the room.
"Isn't this street ridiculous?" said Blunt suddenly, and crossing
the room rapidly waved his hand to me, "A bientot donc," and was
gone. He had seared himself into my mind. I did not understand
him nor his mother then; which made them more impressive; but I
have discovered since that those two figures required no mystery to
make them memorable. Of course it isn't every day that one meets a
mother that lives by her wits and a son that lives by his sword,
but there was a perfect finish about their ambiguous personalities
which is not to be met twice in a life-time. I shall never forget
that grey dress with ample skirts and long corsage yet with
infinite style, the ancient as if ghostly beauty of outlines, the
black lace, the silver hair, the harmonious, restrained movements
of those white, soft hands like the hands of a queen--or an abbess;
and in the general fresh effect of her person the brilliant eyes
like two stars with the calm reposeful way they had of moving on
and off one, as if nothing in the world had the right to veil
itself before their once sovereign beauty. Captain Blunt with
smiling formality introduced me by name, adding with a certain
relaxation of the formal tone the comment: "The Monsieur George!
whose fame you tell me has reached even Paris." Mrs. Blunt's
reception of me, glance, tones, even to the attitude of the
admirably corseted figure, was most friendly, approaching the limit
of half-familiarity. I had the feeling that I was beholding in her
a captured ideal. No common experience! But I didn't care. It
was very lucky perhaps for me that in a way I was like a very sick
man who has yet preserved all his lucidity. I was not even
wondering to myself at what on earth I was doing there. She
breathed out: "Comme c'est romantique," at large to the dusty
studio as it were; then pointing to a chair at her right hand, and
bending slightly towards me she said:
"I have heard this name murmured by pretty lips in more than one
royalist salon."
I didn't say anything to that ingratiating speech. I had only an
odd thought that she could not have had such a figure, nothing like
it, when she was seventeen and wore snowy muslin dresses on the
family plantation in South Carolina, in pre-abolition days.
"You won't mind, I am sure, if an old woman whose heart is still
young elects to call you by it," she declared.
"Certainly, Madame. It will be more romantic," I assented with a
respectful bow.
She dropped a calm: "Yes--there is nothing like romance while one
is young. So I will call you Monsieur George," she paused and then
added, "I could never get old," in a matter-of-fact final tone as
one would remark, "I could never learn to swim," and I had the
presence of mind to say in a tone to match, "C'est evident,
Madame." It was evident. She couldn't get old; and across the
table her thirty-year-old son who couldn't get sleep sat listening
with courteous detachment and the narrowest possible line of white
underlining his silky black moustache.
"Your services are immensely appreciated," she said with an amusing
touch of importance as of a great official lady. "Immensely
appreciated by people in a position to understand the great
significance of the Carlist movement in the South. There it has to
combat anarchism, too. I who have lived through the Commune . . ."
Therese came in with a dish, and for the rest of the lunch the
conversation so well begun drifted amongst the most appalling
inanities of the religious-royalist-legitimist order. The ears of
all the Bourbons in the world must have been burning. Mrs. Blunt
seemed to have come into personal contact with a good many of them
and the marvellous insipidity of her recollections was astonishing
to my inexperience. I looked at her from time to time thinking:
She has seen slavery, she has seen the Commune, she knows two
continents, she has seen a civil war, the glory of the Second
Empire, the horrors of two sieges; she has been in contact with
marked personalities, with great events, she has lived on her
wealth, on her personality, and there she is with her plumage
unruffled, as glossy as ever, unable to get old:--a sort of Phoenix
free from the slightest signs of ashes and dust, all complacent
amongst those inanities as if there had been nothing else in the
world. In my youthful haste I asked myself what sort of airy soul
she had.
At last Therese put a dish of fruit on the table, a small
collection of oranges, raisins, and nuts. No doubt she had bought
that lot very cheap and it did not look at all inviting. Captain
Blunt jumped up. "My mother can't stand tobacco smoke. Will you
keep her company, mon cher, while I take a turn with a cigar in
that ridiculous garden. The brougham from the hotel will be here
very soon."
He left us in the white flash of an apologetic grin. Almost
directly he reappeared, visible from head to foot through the glass
side of the studio, pacing up and down the central path of that
"ridiculous" garden: for its elegance and its air of good breeding
the most remarkable figure that I have ever seen before or since.
He had changed his coat. Madame Blunt mere lowered the long-
handled glasses through which she had been contemplating him with
an appraising, absorbed expression which had nothing maternal in
it. But what she said to me was:
"You understand my anxieties while he is campaigning with the
King."
She had spoken in French and she had used the expression "mes
transes" but for all the rest, intonation, bearing, solemnity, she
might have been referring to one of the Bourbons. I am sure that
not a single one of them looked half as aristocratic as her son.
"I understand perfectly, Madame. But then that life is so
romantic."
"Hundreds of young men belonging to a certain sphere are doing
that," she said very distinctly, "only their case is different.
They have their positions, their families to go back to; but we are
different. We are exiles, except of course for the ideals, the
kindred spirit, the friendships of old standing we have in France.
Should my son come out unscathed he has no one but me and I have no
one but him. I have to think of his life. Mr. Mills (what a
distinguished mind that is!) has reassured me as to my son's
health. But he sleeps very badly, doesn't he?"
I murmured something affirmative in a doubtful tone and she
remarked quaintly, with a certain curtness, "It's so unnecessary,
this worry! The unfortunate position of an exile has its
advantages. At a certain height of social position (wealth has got
nothing to do with it, we have been ruined in a most righteous
cause), at a certain established height one can disregard narrow
prejudices. You see examples in the aristocracies of all the
countries. A chivalrous young American may offer his life for a
remote ideal which yet may belong to his familial tradition. We,
in our great country, have every sort of tradition. But a young
man of good connections and distinguished relations must settle
down some day, dispose of his life."
"No doubt, Madame," I said, raising my eyes to the figure outside--
"Americain, Catholique et gentilhomme"--walking up and down the
path with a cigar which he was not smoking. "For myself, I don't
know anything about those necessities. I have broken away for ever
from those things."
"Yes, Mr. Mills talked to me about you. What a golden heart that
is. His sympathies are infinite."
I thought suddenly of Mills pronouncing on Mme. Blunt, whatever his
text on me might have been: "She lives by her wits." Was she
exercising her wits on me for some purpose of her own? And I
observed coldly:
"I really know your son so very little."
"Oh, voyons," she protested. "I am aware that you are very much
younger, but the similitudes of opinions, origins and perhaps at
bottom, faintly, of character, of chivalrous devotion--no, you must
be able to understand him in a measure. He is infinitely
scrupulous and recklessly brave."
I listened deferentially to the end yet with every nerve in my body
tingling in hostile response to the Blunt vibration, which seemed
to have got into my very hair.
"I am convinced of it, Madame. I have even heard of your son's
bravery. It's extremely natural in a man who, in his own words,
'lives by his sword.'"
She suddenly departed from her almost inhuman perfection, betrayed
"nerves" like a common mortal, of course very slightly, but in her
it meant more than a blaze of fury from a vessel of inferior clay.
Her admirable little foot, marvellously shod in a black shoe,
tapped the floor irritably. But even in that display there was
something exquisitely delicate. The very anger in her voice was
silvery, as it were, and more like the petulance of a seventeen-
year-old beauty.
"What nonsense! A Blunt doesn't hire himself."
"Some princely families," I said, "were founded by men who have
done that very thing. The great Condottieri, you know."
It was in an almost tempestuous tone that she made me observe that
we were not living in the fifteenth century. She gave me also to
understand with some spirit that there was no question here of
founding a family. Her son was very far from being the first of
the name. His importance lay rather in being the last of a race
which had totally perished, she added in a completely drawing-room
tone, "in our Civil War."
She had mastered her irritation and through the glass side of the
room sent a wistful smile to his address, but I noticed the yet
unextinguished anger in her eyes full of fire under her beautiful
white eyebrows. For she was growing old! Oh, yes, she was growing
old, and secretly weary, and perhaps desperate.
