The Arrow of Gold

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 Jose 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 the Quartel Real last 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, Senora!’  Senora!  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 Allegre 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. Allegre 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