The Arrow of Gold

said that I would come.  He seemed to forget his tongue in his head, put his hands in his pockets and moved about vaguely.  “I am a little nervous this morning,” he said in French, stopping short and looking me straight in the eyes.  His own were deep sunk, dark, fatal.  I asked with some malice, that no one could have detected in my intonation, “How’s that sleeplessness?”

He muttered through his teeth, “Mal.  Je ne dors plus.”  He moved off to stand at the window with his back to the room.  I sat down on a sofa that was there and put my feet up, and silence took possession of the room.

“Isn’t this street ridiculous?” said Blunt suddenly, and crossing the room rapidly waved his hand to me, “A bientot donc,” and was gone.  He had seared himself into my mind.  I did not understand him nor his mother then; which made them more impressive; but I have discovered since that those two figures required no mystery to make them memorable.  Of course it isn’t every day that one meets a mother that lives by her wits and a son that lives by his sword, but there was a perfect finish about their ambiguous personalities which is not to be met twice in a life-time.  I shall never forget that grey dress with ample skirts and long corsage yet with infinite style, the ancient as if ghostly beauty of outlines, the black lace, the silver hair, the harmonious, restrained movements of those white, soft hands like the hands of a queen—or an abbess; and in the general fresh effect of her person the brilliant eyes like two stars with the calm reposeful way they had of moving on and off one, as if nothing in the world had the right to veil itself before their once sovereign beauty.  Captain Blunt with smiling formality introduced me by name, adding with a certain relaxation of the formal tone the comment: “The Monsieur George! whose fame you tell me has reached even Paris.”  Mrs. Blunt’s reception of me, glance, tones, even to the attitude of the admirably corseted figure, was most friendly, approaching the limit of half-familiarity.  I had the feeling that I was beholding in her a captured ideal.  No common experience!  But I didn’t care.  It was very lucky perhaps for me that in a way I was like a very sick man who has yet preserved all his lucidity.  I was not even wondering to myself at what on earth I was doing there.  She breathed out: “Comme c’est romantique,” at large to the dusty studio as it were; then pointing to a chair at her right hand, and bending slightly towards me she said:

“I have heard this name murmured by pretty lips in more than one royalist salon.”

I didn’t say anything to that ingratiating speech.  I had only an odd thought that she could not have had such a figure, nothing like it, when she was seventeen and wore snowy muslin dresses on the family plantation in South Carolina, in pre-abolition days.

“You won’t mind, I am sure, if an old woman whose heart is still young elects to call you by it,” she declared.

“Certainly, Madame.  It will be more romantic,” I assented with a respectful bow.

She dropped a calm: “Yes—there is nothing like romance while one is young.  So I will call you Monsieur George,” she paused and then added, “I could never get old,” in a matter-of-fact final tone as one would remark, “I could never learn to swim,” and I had the presence of mind to say in a tone to match, “C’est evident, Madame.”  It was evident.  She couldn’t get old; and across the table her thirty-year-old son who couldn’t get sleep sat listening with courteous detachment and the narrowest possible line of white underlining his silky black moustache.

“Your services are immensely appreciated,” she said with an amusing touch of importance as of a great official lady.  “Immensely appreciated by people in a position to understand the great significance of the Carlist movement in the South.  There it has to combat anarchism, too.  I who have lived through the Commune . . .”

Therese came in with a dish, and for the rest of the lunch the conversation so well begun drifted amongst the most appalling inanities of the religious-royalist-legitimist order.  The ears of all the Bourbons in the world must have been burning.  Mrs. Blunt seemed to have come into personal contact with a good many of them and the marvellous insipidity of her recollections was astonishing to my inexperience.  I looked at her from time to time thinking: She has seen slavery, she has seen the Commune, she knows two continents, she has seen a civil war, the glory of the Second Empire, the horrors of two sieges; she has been in contact with marked personalities, with great events, she has lived on her wealth, on her personality, and there she is with her plumage unruffled, as glossy as ever, unable to get old:—a sort of Phoenix free from the slightest signs of ashes and dust, all complacent amongst those inanities as if there had been nothing else in the world.  In my youthful haste I asked myself what sort of airy soul she had.

At last Therese put a dish of fruit on the table, a small collection of oranges, raisins, and nuts.  No doubt she had bought that lot very cheap and it did not look at all inviting.  Captain Blunt jumped up.  “My mother can’t stand tobacco smoke.  Will you keep her company, mon cher, while I take a turn with a cigar in that ridiculous garden.  The brougham from the hotel will be here very soon.”

He left us in the white flash of an apologetic grin.  Almost directly he reappeared, visible from head to foot through the glass side of the studio, pacing up and down the central path of that “ridiculous” garden: for its elegance and its air of good breeding the most remarkable figure that I have ever seen before or since.  He had changed his coat.  Madame Blunt mere lowered the long-handled glasses through which she had been contemplating him with an appraising, absorbed expression which had nothing maternal in it.  But what she said to me was:

“You understand my anxieties while he is campaigning with the King.”

She had spoken in French and she had used the expression “mes transes” but for all the rest, intonation, bearing, solemnity, she might have been referring to one of the Bourbons.  I am sure that not a single one of them looked half as aristocratic as her son.

“I understand perfectly, Madame.  But then that life is so romantic.”

“Hundreds of young men belonging to a certain sphere are doing that,” she said very distinctly, “only their case is different.  They have their positions, their families to go back to; but we are different.  We are exiles, except of course for the ideals, the kindred spirit, the friendships of old standing we have in France.  Should my son come out unscathed he has no one but me and I have no one but him.  I have to think of his life.  Mr. Mills (what a distinguished mind that is!) has reassured me as to my son’s health.  But he sleeps very badly, doesn’t he?”

I murmured something affirmative in a doubtful tone and she remarked quaintly, with a certain curtness, “It’s so unnecessary, this worry!  The unfortunate position of an exile has its advantages.  At a certain height of social position (wealth has got nothing to do with it, we have been ruined in a most righteous cause), at a certain established height one can disregard narrow prejudices.  You see examples in the aristocracies of all the countries.  A chivalrous young American may offer his life for a remote ideal which yet may belong to his familial tradition.  We, in our great country, have every sort of tradition.  But a young man of good connections and distinguished relations must settle down some day, dispose of his life.”

“No doubt, Madame,” I said, raising my eyes to the figure outside—“Americain, Catholique et gentilhomme”—walking up and down the path with a cigar which he was not smoking.  “For myself, I don’t know anything about those necessities.  I have broken away for ever from those things.”