What were the appearances of unhappiness? I was still naive enough to associate them with tears, lamentations, extraordinary attitudes of the body and some sort of facial distortion, all very dreadful to behold. I didn’t know what I should see; but in what I did see there was nothing startling, at any rate from that nursery point of view which apparently I had not yet outgrown.
With immense relief the apprehensive child within me beheld Captain Blunt warming his back at the more distant of the two fireplaces; and as to Dona Rita there was nothing extraordinary in her attitude either, except perhaps that her hair was all loose about her shoulders. I hadn’t the slightest doubt they had been riding together that morning, but she, with her impatience of all costume (and yet she could dress herself admirably and wore her dresses triumphantly), had divested herself of her riding habit and sat cross-legged enfolded in that ample blue robe like a young savage chieftain in a blanket. It covered her very feet. And before the normal fixity of her enigmatical eyes the smoke of the cigarette ascended ceremonially, straight up, in a slender spiral.
“How are you,” was the greeting of Captain Blunt with the usual smile which would have been more amiable if his teeth hadn’t been, just then, clenched quite so tight. How he managed to force his voice through that shining barrier I could never understand. Dona Rita tapped the couch engagingly by her side but I sat down instead in the armchair nearly opposite her, which, I imagine, must have been just vacated by Blunt. She inquired with that particular gleam of the eyes in which there was something immemorial and gay:
“Well?”
“Perfect success.”
“I could hug you.”
At any time her lips moved very little but in this instance the intense whisper of these words seemed to form itself right in my very heart; not as a conveyed sound but as an imparted emotion vibrating there with an awful intimacy of delight. And yet it left my heart heavy.
“Oh, yes, for joy,” I said bitterly but very low; “for your Royalist, Legitimist, joy.” Then with that trick of very precise politeness which I must have caught from Mr. Blunt I added:
“I don’t want to be embraced—for the King.”
And I might have stopped there. But I didn’t. With a perversity which should be forgiven to those who suffer night and day and are as if drunk with an exalted unhappiness, I went on: “For the sake of an old cast-off glove; for I suppose a disdained love is not much more than a soiled, flabby thing that finds itself on a private rubbish heap because it has missed the fire.”
She listened to me unreadable, unmoved, narrowed eyes, closed lips, slightly flushed face, as if carved six thousand years ago in order to fix for ever that something secret and obscure which is in all women. Not the gross immobility of a Sphinx proposing roadside riddles but the finer immobility, almost sacred, of a fateful figure seated at the very source of the passions that have moved men from the dawn of ages.
Captain Blunt, with his elbow on the high mantelpiece, had turned away a little from us and his attitude expressed excellently the detachment of a man who does not want to hear. As a matter of fact, I don’t suppose he could have heard. He was too far away, our voices were too contained. Moreover, he didn’t want to hear. There could be no doubt about it; but she addressed him unexpectedly.
“As I was saying to you, Don Juan, I have the greatest difficulty in getting myself, I won’t say understood, but simply believed.”
No pose of detachment could avail against the warm waves of that voice. He had to hear. After a moment he altered his position as it were reluctantly, to answer her.
“That’s a difficulty that women generally have.”
“Yet I have always spoken the truth.”
“All women speak the truth,” said Blunt imperturbably. And this annoyed her.
“Where are the men I have deceived?” she cried.
“Yes, where?” said Blunt in a tone of alacrity as though he had been ready to go out and look for them outside.
“No! But show me one. I say—where is he?”
He threw his affectation of detachment to the winds, moved his shoulders slightly, very slightly, made a step nearer to the couch, and looked down on her with an expression of amused courtesy.
“Oh, I don’t know. Probably nowhere. But if such a man could be found I am certain he would turn out a very stupid person. You can’t be expected to furnish every one who approaches you with a mind. To expect that would be too much, even from you who know how to work wonders at such little cost to yourself.”
“To myself,” she repeated in a loud tone.
“Why this indignation? I am simply taking your word for it.”
“Such little cost!” she exclaimed under her breath.
“I mean to your person.”
“Oh, yes,” she murmured, glanced down, as it were upon herself, then added very low: “This body.”
“Well, it is you,” said Blunt with visibly contained irritation. “You don’t pretend it’s somebody else’s. It can’t be. You haven’t borrowed it. . . . It fits you too well,” he ended between his teeth.
“You take pleasure in tormenting yourself,” she remonstrated, suddenly placated; “and I would be sorry for you if I didn’t think it’s the mere revolt of your pride. And you know you are indulging your pride at my expense. As to the rest of it, as to my living, acting, working wonders at a little cost. . . . it has all but killed me morally. Do you hear? Killed.”
“Oh, you are not dead yet,” he muttered,
“No,” she said with gentle patience. “There is still some feeling left in me; and if it is any satisfaction to you to know it, you may be certain that I shall be conscious of the last stab.”
He remained silent for a while and then with a polite smile and a movement of the head in my direction he
