The Arrow of Gold

He insisted to us that the first and only time he had seen Allegre a little close was that morning in the Bois with his mother.  His Majesty (whom God preserve), then not even an active Pretender, flanked the girl, still a girl, on the other side, the usual companion for a month past or so.  Allegre had suddenly taken it into his head to paint his portrait.  A sort of intimacy had sprung up.  Mrs. Blunt’s remark was that of the two striking horsemen Allegre looked the more kingly.

“The son of a confounded millionaire soap-boiler,” commented Mr. Blunt through his clenched teeth.  “A man absolutely without parentage.  Without a single relation in the world.  Just a freak.”

“That explains why he could leave all his fortune to her,” said Mills.

“The will, I believe,” said Mr. Blunt moodily, “was written on a half sheet of paper, with his device of an Assyrian bull at the head.  What the devil did he mean by it?  Anyway it was the last time that she surveyed the world of men and women from the saddle.  Less than three months later. . .”

“Allegre died and. . . ” murmured Mills in an interested manner.

“And she had to dismount,” broke in Mr. Blunt grimly.  “Dismount right into the middle of it.  Down to the very ground, you understand.  I suppose you can guess what that would mean.  She didn’t know what to do with herself.  She had never been on the ground.  She . . . ”

“Aha!” said Mills.

“Even eh! eh! if you like,” retorted Mr. Blunt, in an unrefined tone, that made me open my eyes, which were well opened before, still wider.

He turned to me with that horrible trick of his of commenting upon Mills as though that quiet man whom I admired, whom I trusted, and for whom I had already something resembling affection had been as much of a dummy as that other one lurking in the shadows, pitiful and headless in its attitude of alarmed chastity.

“Nothing escapes his penetration.  He can perceive a haystack at an enormous distance when he is interested.”

I thought this was going rather too far, even to the borders of vulgarity; but Mills remained untroubled and only reached for his tobacco pouch.

“But that’s nothing to my mother’s interest.  She can never see a haystack, therefore she is always so surprised and excited.  Of course Dona Rita was not a woman about whom the newspapers insert little paragraphs.  But Allegre was the sort of man.  A lot came out in print about him and a lot was talked in the world about her; and at once my dear mother perceived a haystack and naturally became unreasonably absorbed in it.  I thought her interest would wear out.  But it didn’t.  She had received a shock and had received an impression by means of that girl.  My mother has never been treated with impertinence before, and the aesthetic impression must have been of extraordinary strength.  I must suppose that it amounted to a sort of moral revolution, I can’t account for her proceedings in any other way.  When Rita turned up in Paris a year and a half after Allegre’s death some shabby journalist (smart creature) hit upon the notion of alluding to her as the heiress of Mr. Allegre.  ‘The heiress of Mr. Allegre has taken up her residence again amongst the treasures of art in that Pavilion so well known to the elite of the artistic, scientific, and political world, not to speak of the members of aristocratic and even royal families. . . ’  You know the sort of thing.  It appeared first in the Figaro, I believe.  And then at the end a little phrase: ‘She is alone.’  She was in a fair way of becoming a celebrity of a sort.  Daily little allusions and that sort of thing.  Heaven only knows who stopped it.  There was a rush of ‘old friends’ into that garden, enough to scare all the little birds away.  I suppose one or several of them, having influence with the press, did it.  But the gossip didn’t stop, and the name stuck, too, since it conveyed a very certain and very significant sort of fact, and of course the Venetian episode was talked about in the houses frequented by my mother.  It was talked about from a royalist point of view with a kind of respect.  It was even said that the inspiration and the resolution of the war going on now over the Pyrenees had come out from that head. . . Some of them talked as if she were the guardian angel of Legitimacy.  You know what royalist gush is like.”

Mr. Blunt’s face expressed sarcastic disgust.  Mills moved his head the least little bit.  Apparently he knew.

“Well, speaking with all possible respect, it seems to have affected my mother’s brain.  I was already with the royal army and of course there could be no question of regular postal communications with France.  My mother hears or overhears somewhere that the heiress of Mr. Allegre is contemplating a secret journey.  All the noble Salons were full of chatter about that secret naturally.  So she sits down and pens an autograph: ‘Madame, Informed that you are proceeding to the place on which the hopes of all the right thinking people are fixed, I trust to your womanly sympathy with a mother’s anxious feelings, etc., etc.,’ and ending with a request to take messages to me and bring news of me. . . The coolness of my mother!”

Most unexpectedly Mills was heard murmuring a question which seemed to me very odd.

“I wonder how your mother addressed that note?”

A moment of silence ensued.

“Hardly in the newspaper style, I should think,” retorted Mr. Blunt, with one of his grins that made me doubt the stability of his feelings and the consistency of his outlook in regard to his whole tale.  “My mother’s maid took it in a fiacre very late one evening to the Pavilion and brought an answer scrawled on a scrap of paper: ‘Write your messages at once’ and signed with a big capital R.  So my mother sat down again to her charming writing desk and the maid made another journey in a fiacre just before midnight; and ten days later or so I got a letter thrust into my hand at the avanzadas just as I was about to start on a night patrol, together with a note asking me to call on the writer so that she might allay my mother’s anxieties by telling her how I looked.

“It was signed R only, but I guessed at once and nearly fell off my horse with surprise.”

“You mean to say that Dona Rita was actually at the Royal Headquarters lately?” exclaimed Mills, with evident surprise.  “Why, we—everybody—thought that all this affair was over and done with.”

“Absolutely.  Nothing in the world could be more done with than that episode.  Of course the rooms in the hotel at Tolosa were retained for her by an order from Royal Headquarters.  Two garret-rooms, the place was so full of all sorts of court people; but I can assure you that for the three days she was there she never put her head outside the door.  General Mongroviejo called on her officially from the King.  A general, not anybody of the household, you see.  That’s a distinct shade of the present relation.  He stayed just five minutes.  Some personage from the Foreign department at Headquarters was closeted for about a couple of hours.  That was of course business.  Then two officers from the staff came together with some explanations or instructions to her.  Then Baron H., a fellow with a pretty wife, who had made so many sacrifices for the cause, raised a great to-do about seeing her and she consented to receive him for a moment.  They say he was very much frightened by her arrival, but after the interview went away all smiles.  Who else?  Yes, the Archbishop came.  Half an hour.  This is more than is necessary to give a blessing, and I can’t conceive what else he had to give her.  But I am sure he got something out