Somehow it didn’t occur to me to ask Mrs. Blunt. Whether she had expected me to do so or not I don’t know but after a while she changed the pose she had kept so long and folded her wonderfully preserved white arms. She looked a perfect picture in silver and grey, with touches of black here and there. Still I said nothing more in my dull misery. She waited a little longer, then she woke me up with a crash. It was as if the house had fallen, and yet she had only asked me:
“I believe you are received on very friendly terms by Madame de Lastaola on account of your common exertions for the cause. Very good friends, are you not?”
“You mean Rita,” I said stupidly, but I felt stupid, like a man who wakes up only to be hit on the head.
“Oh, Rita,” she repeated with unexpected acidity, which somehow made me feel guilty of an incredible breach of good manners. “H’m, Rita. . . . Oh, well, let it be Rita—for the present. Though why she should be deprived of her name in conversation about her, really I don’t understand. Unless a very special intimacy . . .”
She was distinctly annoyed. I said sulkily, “It isn’t her name.”
“It is her choice, I understand, which seems almost a better title to recognition on the part of the world. It didn’t strike you so before? Well, it seems to me that choice has got more right to be respected than heredity or law. Moreover, Mme. de Lastaola,” she continued in an insinuating voice, “that most rare and fascinating young woman is, as a friend like you cannot deny, outside legality altogether. Even in that she is an exceptional creature. For she is exceptional—you agree?”
I had gone dumb, I could only stare at her.
“Oh, I see, you agree. No friend of hers could deny.”
“Madame,” I burst out, “I don’t know where a question of friendship comes in here with a person whom you yourself call so exceptional. I really don’t know how she looks upon me. Our intercourse is of course very close and confidential. Is that also talked about in Paris?”
“Not at all, not in the least,” said Mrs. Blunt, easy, equable, but with her calm, sparkling eyes holding me in angry subjection. “Nothing of the sort is being talked about. The references to Mme. de Lastaola are in a very different tone, I can assure you, thanks to her discretion in remaining here. And, I must say, thanks to the discreet efforts of her friends. I am also a friend of Mme. de Lastaola, you must know. Oh, no, I have never spoken to her in my life and have seen her only twice, I believe. I wrote to her though, that I admit. She or rather the image of her has come into my life, into that part of it where art and letters reign undisputed like a sort of religion of beauty to which I have been faithful through all the vicissitudes of my existence. Yes, I did write to her and I have been preoccupied with her for a long time. It arose from a picture, from two pictures and also from a phrase pronounced by a man, who in the science of life and in the perception of aesthetic truth had no equal in the world of culture. He said that there was something in her of the women of all time. I suppose he meant the inheritance of all the gifts that make up an irresistible fascination—a great personality. Such women are not born often. Most of them lack opportunities. They never develop. They end obscurely. Here and there one survives to make her mark even in history. . . . And even that is not a very enviable fate. They are at another pole from the so-called dangerous women who are merely coquettes. A coquette has got to work for her success. The others have nothing to do but simply exist. You perceive the view I take of the difference?”
I perceived the view. I said to myself that nothing in the world could be more aristocratic. This was the slave-owning woman who had never worked, even if she had been reduced to live by her wits. She was a wonderful old woman. She made me dumb. She held me fascinated by the well-bred attitude, something sublimely aloof in her air of wisdom.
I just simply let myself go admiring her as though I had been a mere slave of aesthetics: the perfect grace, the amazing poise of that venerable head, the assured as if royal—yes, royal even flow of the voice. . . . But what was it she was talking about now? These were no longer considerations about fatal women. She was talking about her son again. My interest turned into mere bitterness of contemptuous attention. For I couldn’t withhold it though I tried to let the stuff go by. Educated in the most aristocratic college in Paris . . . at eighteen . . . call of duty . . . with General Lee to the very last cruel minute . . . after that catastrophe end of the world—return to France—to old friendships, infinite kindness—but a life hollow, without occupation. . . Then 1870—and chivalrous response to adopted country’s call and again emptiness, the chafing of a proud spirit without aim and handicapped not exactly by poverty but by lack of fortune. And she, the mother, having to look on at this wasting of a most accomplished man, of a most chivalrous nature that practically had no future before it.
“You understand me well, Monsieur George. A nature like this! It is the most refined cruelty of fate to look at. I don’t know whether I suffered more in times of war or in times of peace. You understand?”
I bowed my head in silence. What I couldn’t understand was why he delayed so long in joining us again. Unless he had had enough of his mother? I thought without any great resentment that I was being victimized; but then it occurred to me that the cause of his absence was quite simple. I was familiar enough with his habits by this time to know that he often managed to snatch an hour’s sleep or so during the day. He had gone and thrown himself on his bed.
“I admire him exceedingly,” Mrs. Blunt was saying in a tone which was not at all maternal. “His distinction, his fastidiousness, the earnest warmth of his heart. I know him well. I assure you that I would never have dared to suggest,” she continued with an extraordinary haughtiness of attitude and tone that aroused my attention, “I would never have dared to put before him my views of the extraordinary merits and the uncertain fate of the exquisite woman of whom we speak, if I had not been certain that, partly by my fault, I admit, his attention has been attracted to her and his—his—his heart engaged.”
It was as if some one had poured a bucket of cold water over my head. I woke up with a great shudder to the acute perception of my own feelings and of that aristocrat’s incredible purpose. How it could have germinated, grown and matured in that exclusive soil was inconceivable. She had been inciting her son all the time to undertake wonderful salvage work by annexing the heiress of Henry Allegre—the woman and the fortune.
There must have been an amazed incredulity in my eyes, to which her own responded by an unflinching black brilliance which suddenly seemed to develop a scorching quality even to the point of making me feel extremely thirsty all of a sudden. For a time my tongue literally clove to the roof of my mouth. I don’t know whether it was an illusion but it seemed to me that Mrs. Blunt had nodded at me twice as if to say: “You are right, that’s so.” I made an effort to speak but it was very poor. If she did hear me it was because she must have been on the watch for the faintest sound.
“His heart engaged. Like two hundred others, or two thousand, all around,” I mumbled.
“Altogether different. And it’s no disparagement to a woman surely. Of course her great fortune protects her in a certain measure.”
“Does it?” I faltered out and that time I really doubt whether she heard me. Her aspect in my eyes had changed. Her purpose being disclosed, her well-bred ease appeared sinister, her aristocratic repose a treacherous
