The Arrow of Gold

of her.  Two peasants from the upper valley were sent for by military authorities and she saw them, too.  That friar who hangs about the court has been in and out several times.  Well, and lastly, I myself.  I got leave from the outposts.  That was the first time I talked to her.  I would have gone that evening back to the regiment, but the friar met me in the corridor and informed me that I would be ordered to escort that most loyal and noble lady back to the French frontier as a personal mission of the highest honour.  I was inclined to laugh at him.  He himself is a cheery and jovial person and he laughed with me quite readily—but I got the order before dark all right.  It was rather a job, as the Alphonsists were attacking the right flank of our whole front and there was some considerable disorder there.  I mounted her on a mule and her maid on another.  We spent one night in a ruined old tower occupied by some of our infantry and got away at daybreak under the Alphonsist shells.  The maid nearly died of fright and one of the troopers with us was wounded.  To smuggle her back across the frontier was another job but it wasn’t my job.  It wouldn’t have done for her to appear in sight of French frontier posts in the company of Carlist uniforms.  She seems to have a fearless streak in her nature.  At one time as we were climbing a slope absolutely exposed to artillery fire I asked her on purpose, being provoked by the way she looked about at the scenery, ‘A little emotion, eh?’  And she answered me in a low voice: ‘Oh, yes!  I am moved.  I used to run about these hills when I was little.’  And note, just then the trooper close behind us had been wounded by a shell fragment.  He was swearing awfully and fighting with his horse.  The shells were falling around us about two to the minute.

“Luckily the Alphonsist shells are not much better than our own.  But women are funny.  I was afraid the maid would jump down and clear out amongst the rocks, in which case we should have had to dismount and catch her.  But she didn’t do that; she sat perfectly still on her mule and shrieked.  Just simply shrieked.  Ultimately we came to a curiously shaped rock at the end of a short wooded valley.  It was very still there and the sunshine was brilliant.  I said to Dona Rita: ‘We will have to part in a few minutes.  I understand that my mission ends at this rock.’  And she said: ‘I know this rock well.  This is my country.’

“Then she thanked me for bringing her there and presently three peasants appeared, waiting for us, two youths and one shaven old man, with a thin nose like a sword blade and perfectly round eyes, a character well known to the whole Carlist army.  The two youths stopped under the trees at a distance, but the old fellow came quite close up and gazed at her, screwing up his eyes as if looking at the sun.  Then he raised his arm very slowly and took his red boina off his bald head.  I watched her smiling at him all the time.  I daresay she knew him as well as she knew the old rock.  Very old rock.  The rock of ages—and the aged man—landmarks of her youth.  Then the mules started walking smartly forward, with the three peasants striding alongside of them, and vanished between the trees.  These fellows were most likely sent out by her uncle the Cura.

“It was a peaceful scene, the morning light, the bit of open country framed in steep stony slopes, a high peak or two in the distance, the thin smoke of some invisible caserios, rising straight up here and there.  Far away behind us the guns had ceased and the echoes in the gorges had died out.  I never knew what peace meant before. . .

“Nor since,” muttered Mr. Blunt after a pause and then went on.  “The little stone church of her uncle, the holy man of the family, might have been round the corner of the next spur of the nearest hill.  I dismounted to bandage the shoulder of my trooper.  It was only a nasty long scratch.  While I was busy about it a bell began to ring in the distance.  The sound fell deliciously on the ear, clear like the morning light.  But it stopped all at once.  You know how a distant bell stops suddenly.  I never knew before what stillness meant.  While I was wondering at it the fellow holding our horses was moved to uplift his voice.  He was a Spaniard, not a Basque, and he trolled out in Castilian that song you know,

“‘Oh bells of my native village,

I am going away . . . good-bye!’

He had a good voice.  When the last note had floated away I remounted, but there was a charm in the spot, something particular and individual because while we were looking at it before turning our horses’ heads away the singer said: ‘I wonder what is the name of this place,’ and the other man remarked: ‘Why, there is no village here,’ and the first one insisted: ‘No, I mean this spot, this very place.’  The wounded trooper decided that it had no name probably.  But he was wrong.  It had a name.  The hill, or the rock, or the wood, or the whole had a name.  I heard of it by chance later.  It was—Lastaola.”

A cloud of tobacco smoke from Mills’ pipe drove between my head and the head of Mr. Blunt, who, strange to say, yawned slightly.  It seemed to me an obvious affectation on the part of that man of perfect manners, and, moreover, suffering from distressing insomnia.

“This is how we first met and how we first parted,” he said in a weary, indifferent tone.  “It’s quite possible that she did see her uncle on the way.  It’s perhaps on this occasion that she got her sister to come out of the wilderness.  I have no doubt she had a pass from the French Government giving her the completest freedom of action.  She must have got it in Paris before leaving.”

Mr. Blunt broke out into worldly, slightly cynical smiles.

“She can get anything she likes in Paris.  She could get a whole army over the frontier if she liked.  She could get herself admitted into the Foreign Office at one o’clock in the morning if it so pleased her.  Doors fly open before the heiress of Mr. Allegre.  She has inherited the old friends, the old connections . . . Of course, if she were a toothless old woman . . . But, you see, she isn’t.  The ushers in all the ministries bow down to the ground therefore, and voices from the innermost sanctums take on an eager tone when they say, ‘Faites entrer.’  My mother knows something about it.  She has followed her career with the greatest attention.  And Rita herself is not even surprised.  She accomplishes most extraordinary things, as naturally as buying a pair of gloves.  People in the shops are very polite and people in the world are like people in the shops.  What did she know of the world?  She had seen it only from the saddle.  Oh, she will get your cargo released for you all right.  How will she do it? . . Well, when it’s done—you follow me, Mills?—when it’s done she will hardly know herself.”

“It’s hardly possible that she shouldn’t be aware,” Mills pronounced calmly.

“No, she isn’t an idiot,” admitted Mr. Blunt, in the same matter-of-fact voice.  “But she confessed to myself only the other day that she suffered from a sense of unreality.  I told her that at any rate she had her own feelings surely.  And she said to me: Yes, there was one of them at least about which she had no doubt; and you will never guess what it was.  Don’t try.  I happen to know, because we are pretty good friends.”

At that moment we all changed our attitude slightly.  Mills’ staring eyes moved for a glance towards Blunt, I, who was occupying the divan, raised myself on the cushions a little and Mr. Blunt, with half a turn, put his elbow on the table.

“I asked her what it was.  I don’t see,” went on Mr. Blunt, with a perfectly horrible gentleness, “why I should have shown particular consideration to the heiress of Mr. Allegre.  I don’t mean to that particular mood of hers.  It was the mood of weariness.  And so she told me.  It’s fear.  I will say it once again: Fear. . . .”

He added after a pause, “There can be not the slightest doubt of her courage.  But she distinctly uttered the word fear.”

There was under the table the noise of Mills stretching his legs.

“A person of imagination,” he began, “a young, virgin intelligence, steeped for nearly five years in the talk of