The Arrow of Gold

to be recognized in the streets in that costume and still less to be seen entering the house in the street of the Consuls.  At that hour when the performances were over and all the sensible citizens in their beds I didn’t hesitate to cross the Place of the Opera.  It was dark, the audience had already dispersed.  The rare passers-by I met hurrying on their last affairs of the day paid no attention to me at all.  The street of the Consuls I expected to find empty, as usual at that time of the night.  But as I turned a corner into it I overtook three people who must have belonged to the locality.  To me, somehow, they appeared strange.  Two girls in dark cloaks walked ahead of a tall man in a top hat.  I slowed down, not wishing to pass them by, the more so that the door of the house was only a few yards distant.  But to my intense surprise those people stopped at it and the man in the top hat, producing a latchkey, let his two companions through, followed them, and with a heavy slam cut himself off from my astonished self and the rest of mankind.

In the stupid way people have I stood and meditated on the sight, before it occurred to me that this was the most useless thing to do.  After waiting a little longer to let the others get away from the hall I entered in my turn.  The small gas-jet seemed not to have been touched ever since that distant night when Mills and I trod the black- and-white marble hall for the first time on the heels of Captain Blunt—who lived by his sword.  And in the dimness and solitude which kept no more trace of the three strangers than if they had been the merest ghosts I seemed to hear the ghostly murmur, “Americain, Catholique et gentilhomme.  Amer. . . ”  Unseen by human eye I ran up the flight of steps swiftly and on the first floor stepped into my sitting-room of which the door was open . . . “et gentilhomme.”  I tugged at the bell pull and somewhere down below a bell rang as unexpected for Therese as a call from a ghost.

I had no notion whether Therese could hear me.  I seemed to remember that she slept in any bed that happened to be vacant.  For all I knew she might have been asleep in mine.  As I had no matches on me I waited for a while in the dark.  The house was perfectly still.  Suddenly without the slightest preliminary sound light fell into the room and Therese stood in the open door with a candlestick in her hand.

She had on her peasant brown skirt.  The rest of her was concealed in a black shawl which covered her head, her shoulders, arms, and elbows completely, down to her waist.  The hand holding the candle protruded from that envelope which the other invisible hand clasped together under her very chin.  And her face looked like a face in a painting.  She said at once:

“You startled me, my young Monsieur.”

She addressed me most frequently in that way as though she liked the very word “young.”  Her manner was certainly peasant-like with a sort of plaint in the voice, while the face was that of a serving Sister in some small and rustic convent.

“I meant to do it,” I said.  “I am a very bad person.”

“The young are always full of fun,” she said as if she were gloating over the idea.  “It is very pleasant.”

“But you are very brave,” I chaffed her, “for you didn’t expect a ring, and after all it might have been the devil who pulled the bell.”

“It might have been.  But a poor girl like me is not afraid of the devil.  I have a pure heart.  I have been to confession last evening.  No.  But it might have been an assassin that pulled the bell ready to kill a poor harmless woman.  This is a very lonely street.  What could prevent you to kill me now and then walk out again free as air?”

While she was talking like this she had lighted the gas and with the last words she glided through the bedroom door leaving me thunderstruck at the unexpected character of her thoughts.

I couldn’t know that there had been during my absence a case of atrocious murder which had affected the imagination of the whole town; and though Therese did not read the papers (which she imagined to be full of impieties and immoralities invented by godless men) yet if she spoke at all with her kind, which she must have done at least in shops, she could not have helped hearing of it.  It seems that for some days people could talk of nothing else.  She returned gliding from the bedroom hermetically sealed in her black shawl just as she had gone in, with the protruding hand holding the lighted candle and relieved my perplexity as to her morbid turn of mind by telling me something of the murder story in a strange tone of indifference even while referring to its most horrible features.  “That’s what carnal sin (peche de chair) leads to,” she commented severely and passed her tongue over her thin lips.  “And then the devil furnishes the occasion.”

“I can’t imagine the devil inciting me to murder you, Therese,” I said, “and I didn’t like that ready way you took me for an example, as it were.  I suppose pretty near every lodger might be a potential murderer, but I expected to be made an exception.”

With the candle held a little below her face, with that face of one tone and without relief she looked more than ever as though she had come out of an old, cracked, smoky painting, the subject of which was altogether beyond human conception.  And she only compressed her lips.

“All right,” I said, making myself comfortable on a sofa after pulling off my boots.  “I suppose any one is liable to commit murder all of a sudden.  Well, have you got many murderers in the house?”

“Yes,” she said, “it’s pretty good.  Upstairs and downstairs,” she sighed.  “God sees to it.”

“And by the by, who is that grey-headed murderer in a tall hat whom I saw shepherding two girls into this house?”

She put on a candid air in which one could detect a little of her peasant cunning.

“Oh, yes.  They are two dancing girls at the Opera, sisters, as different from each other as I and our poor Rita.  But they are both virtuous and that gentleman, their father, is very severe with them.  Very severe indeed, poor motherless things.  And it seems to be such a sinful occupation.”

“I bet you make them pay a big rent, Therese.  With an occupation like that . . .”

She looked at me with eyes of invincible innocence and began to glide towards the door, so smoothly that the flame of the candle hardly swayed.  “Good-night,” she murmured.

“Good-night, Mademoiselle.”

Then in the very doorway she turned right round as a marionette would turn.

“Oh, you ought to know, my dear young Monsieur, that Mr. Blunt, the dear handsome man, has arrived from Navarre three days ago or more.  Oh,” she added with a priceless air of compunction, “he is such a charming gentleman.”

And the door shut after her.