The Arrow of Gold

“Yes, Mr. Mills talked to me about you.  What a golden heart that is.  His sympathies are infinite.”

I thought suddenly of Mills pronouncing on Mme. Blunt, whatever his text on me might have been: “She lives by her wits.”  Was she exercising her wits on me for some purpose of her own?  And I observed coldly:

“I really know your son so very little.”

“Oh, voyons,” she protested.  “I am aware that you are very much younger, but the similitudes of opinions, origins and perhaps at bottom, faintly, of character, of chivalrous devotion—no, you must be able to understand him in a measure.  He is infinitely scrupulous and recklessly brave.”

I listened deferentially to the end yet with every nerve in my body tingling in hostile response to the Blunt vibration, which seemed to have got into my very hair.

“I am convinced of it, Madame.  I have even heard of your son’s bravery.  It’s extremely natural in a man who, in his own words, ‘lives by his sword.’”

She suddenly departed from her almost inhuman perfection, betrayed “nerves” like a common mortal, of course very slightly, but in her it meant more than a blaze of fury from a vessel of inferior clay.  Her admirable little foot, marvellously shod in a black shoe, tapped the floor irritably.  But even in that display there was something exquisitely delicate.  The very anger in her voice was silvery, as it were, and more like the petulance of a seventeen-year-old beauty.

“What nonsense!  A Blunt doesn’t hire himself.”

“Some princely families,” I said, “were founded by men who have done that very thing.  The great Condottieri, you know.”

It was in an almost tempestuous tone that she made me observe that we were not living in the fifteenth century.  She gave me also to understand with some spirit that there was no question here of founding a family.  Her son was very far from being the first of the name.  His importance lay rather in being the last of a race which had totally perished, she added in a completely drawing-room tone, “in our Civil War.”

She had mastered her irritation and through the glass side of the room sent a wistful smile to his address, but I noticed the yet unextinguished anger in her eyes full of fire under her beautiful white eyebrows.  For she was growing old!  Oh, yes, she was growing old, and secretly weary, and perhaps desperate.

CHAPTER III

Without caring much about it I was conscious of sudden illumination.  I said to myself confidently that these two people had been quarrelling all the morning.  I had discovered the secret of my invitation to that lunch.  They did not care to face the strain of some obstinate, inconclusive discussion for fear, maybe, of it ending in a serious quarrel.  And so they had agreed that I should be fetched downstairs to create a diversion.  I cannot say I felt annoyed.  I didn’t care.  My perspicacity did not please me either.  I wished they had left me alone—but nothing mattered.  They must have been in their superiority accustomed to make use of people, without compunction.  From necessity, too.  She especially.  She lived by her wits.  The silence had grown so marked that I had at last to raise my eyes; and the first thing I observed was that Captain Blunt was no longer to be seen in the garden.  Must have gone indoors.  Would rejoin us in a moment.  Then I would leave mother and son to themselves.

The next thing I noticed was that a great mellowness had descended upon the mother of the last of his race.  But these terms, irritation, mellowness, appeared gross when applied to her.  It is impossible to give an idea of the refinement and subtlety of all her transformations.  She smiled faintly at me.

“But all this is beside the point.  The real point is that my son, like all fine natures, is a being of strange contradictions which the trials of life have not yet reconciled in him.  With me it is a little different.  The trials fell mainly to my share—and of course I have lived longer.  And then men are much more complex than women, much more difficult, too.  And you, Monsieur George?  Are you complex, with unexpected resistances and difficulties in your etre intime—your inner self?  I wonder now . . .”

The Blunt atmosphere seemed to vibrate all over my skin.  I disregarded the symptom.  “Madame,” I said, “I have never tried to find out what sort of being I am.”

“Ah, that’s very wrong.  We ought to reflect on what manner of beings we are.  Of course we are all sinners.  My John is a sinner like the others,” she declared further, with a sort of proud tenderness as though our common lot must have felt honoured and to a certain extent purified by this condescending recognition.

“You are too young perhaps as yet . . . But as to my John,” she broke off, leaning her elbow on the table and supporting her head on her old, impeccably shaped, white fore-arm emerging from a lot of precious, still older, lace trimming the short sleeve.  “The trouble is that he suffers from a profound discord between the necessary reactions to life and even the impulses of nature and the lofty idealism of his feelings; I may say, of his principles.  I assure you that he won’t even let his heart speak uncontradicted.”

I am sure I don’t know what particular devil looks after the associations of memory, and I can’t even imagine the shock which it would have been for Mrs. Blunt to learn that the words issuing from her lips had awakened in me the visual perception of a dark-skinned, hard-driven lady’s maid with tarnished eyes; even of the tireless Rose handing me my hat while breathing out the enigmatic words: “Madame should listen to her heart.”  A wave from the atmosphere of another house rolled in, overwhelming and fiery, seductive and cruel, through the Blunt vibration, bursting through it as through tissue paper and filling my heart with sweet murmurs and distracting images, till it seemed to break, leaving an empty stillness in my breast.

After that for a long time I heard Mme. Blunt mere talking with extreme fluency and I even caught the individual words, but I could not in the revulsion of my feelings get hold of the sense.  She talked apparently of life in general, of its difficulties, moral and physical, of its surprising turns, of its unexpected contacts, of the choice and rare personalities that drift on it as if on the sea; of the distinction that letters and art gave to it, the nobility and consolations there are in aesthetics, of the privileges they confer on individuals and (this was the first connected statement I caught) that Mills agreed with her in the general point of view as to the inner worth of individualities and in the particular instance of it on which she had opened to him her innermost heart.  Mills had a universal mind.  His sympathy was universal, too.  He had that large comprehension—oh, not cynical, not at all cynical, in fact rather tender—which was found in its perfection only in some rare, very rare Englishmen.  The dear creature was romantic, too.  Of course he was reserved in his speech but she understood Mills perfectly.  Mills apparently liked me very much.

It was time for me to say something.  There was a challenge in the reposeful black eyes resting upon my face.  I murmured that I was very glad to hear it.  She waited a little, then uttered meaningly, “Mr. Mills is a little bit uneasy about you.”

“It’s very good of him,” I said.  And indeed I thought that it was very good of him, though I did ask myself vaguely in my dulled brain why he should be uneasy.