“It would have reconciled him to your abruptness. It’s their family expression. It would have come with a familiar sound and would have been less offensive.”
“Offensive,” Dona Rita repeated earnestly. “I don’t think he was offended; he suffered in another way, but I didn’t care for that. It was I that had become offended in the end, without spite, you understand, but past bearing. I didn’t spare him. I told him plainly that to want a woman formed in mind and body, mistress of herself, free in her choice, independent in her thoughts; to love her apparently for what she is and at the same time to demand from her the candour and the innocence that could be only a shocking pretence; to know her such as life had made her and at the same time to despise her secretly for every touch with which her life had fashioned her—that was neither generous nor high minded; it was positively frantic. He got up and went away to lean against the mantelpiece, there, on his elbow and with his head in his hand. You have no idea of the charm and the distinction of his pose. I couldn’t help admiring him: the expression, the grace, the fatal suggestion of his immobility. Oh, yes, I am sensible to aesthetic impressions, I have been educated to believe that there is a soul in them.”
With that enigmatic, under the eyebrows glance fixed on me she laughed her deep contralto laugh without mirth but also without irony, and profoundly moving by the mere purity of the sound.
“I suspect he was never so disgusted and appalled in his life. His self-command is the most admirable worldly thing I have ever seen. What made it beautiful was that one could feel in it a tragic suggestion as in a great work of art.”
She paused with an inscrutable smile that a great painter might have put on the face of some symbolic figure for the speculation and wonder of many generations. I said:
“I always thought that love for you could work great wonders. And now I am certain.”
“Are you trying to be ironic?” she said sadly and very much as a child might have spoken.
“I don’t know,” I answered in a tone of the same simplicity. “I find it very difficult to be generous.”
“I, too,” she said with a sort of funny eagerness. “I didn’t treat him very generously. Only I didn’t say much more. I found I didn’t care what I said—and it would have been like throwing insults at a beautiful composition. He was well inspired not to move. It has spared him some disagreeable truths and perhaps I would even have said more than the truth. I am not fair. I am no more fair than other people. I would have been harsh. My very admiration was making me more angry. It’s ridiculous to say of a man got up in correct tailor clothes, but there was a funereal grace in his attitude so that he might have been reproduced in marble on a monument to some woman in one of those atrocious Campo Santos: the bourgeois conception of an aristocratic mourning lover. When I came to that conclusion I became glad that I was angry or else I would have laughed right out before him.”
“I have heard a woman say once, a woman of the people—do you hear me, Dona Rita?—therefore deserving your attention, that one should never laugh at love.”
“My dear,” she said gently, “I have been taught to laugh at most things by a man who never laughed himself; but it’s true that he never spoke of love to me, love as a subject that is. So perhaps . . . But why?”
“Because (but maybe that old woman was crazy), because, she said, there was death in the mockery of love.”
Dona Rita moved slightly her beautiful shoulders and went on:
“I am glad, then, I didn’t laugh. And I am also glad I said nothing more. I was feeling so little generous that if I had known something then of his mother’s allusion to ‘white geese’ I would have advised him to get one of them and lead it away on a beautiful blue ribbon. Mrs. Blunt was wrong, you know, to be so scornful. A white goose is exactly what her son wants. But look how badly the world is arranged. Such white birds cannot be got for nothing and he has not enough money even to buy a ribbon. Who knows! Maybe it was this which gave that tragic quality to his pose by the mantelpiece over there. Yes, that was it. Though no doubt I didn’t see it then. As he didn’t offer to move after I had done speaking I became quite unaffectedly sorry and advised him very gently to dismiss me from his mind definitely. He moved forward then and said to me in his usual voice and with his usual smile that it would have been excellent advice but unfortunately I was one of those women who can’t be dismissed at will. And as I shook my head he insisted rather darkly: ‘Oh, yes, Dona Rita, it is so. Cherish no illusions about that fact.’ It sounded so threatening that in my surprise I didn’t even acknowledge his parting bow. He went out of that false situation like a wounded man retreating after a fight. No, I have nothing to reproach myself with. I did nothing. I led him into nothing. Whatever illusions have passed through my head I kept my distance, and he was so loyal to what he seemed to think the redeeming proprieties of the situation that he has gone from me for good without so much as kissing the tips of my fingers. He must have felt like a man who had betrayed himself for nothing. It’s horrible. It’s the fault of that enormous fortune of mine, and I wish with all my heart that I could give it to him; for he couldn’t help his hatred of the thing that is: and as to his love, which is just as real, well—could I have rushed away from him to shut myself up in a convent? Could I? After all I have a right to my share of daylight.”
CHAPTER V
I took my eyes from her face and became aware that dusk was beginning to steal into the room. How strange it seemed. Except for the glazed rotunda part its long walls, divided into narrow panels separated by an order of flat pilasters, presented, depicted on a black background and in vivid colours, slender women with butterfly wings and lean youths with narrow birds’ wings. The effect was supposed to be Pompeiian and Rita and I had often laughed at the delirious fancy of some enriched shopkeeper. But still it was a display of fancy, a sign of grace; but at that moment these figures appeared to me weird and intrusive and strangely alive in their attenuated grace of unearthly beings concealing a power to see and hear.
Without words, without gestures, Dona Rita was heard again. “It may have been as near coming to pass as this.” She showed me the breadth of her little finger nail. “Yes, as near as that. Why? How? Just like that, for nothing. Because it had come up. Because a wild notion had entered a practical old woman’s head. Yes. And the best of it is that I have nothing to complain of. Had I surrendered I would have been perfectly safe with these two. It is they or rather he who couldn’t trust me, or rather that something which I express, which I stand for. Mills would never tell me what it was. Perhaps he didn’t know exactly himself. He said it was something like genius. My genius! Oh, I am not conscious of it, believe me, I am not conscious of it. But if I were I wouldn’t pluck it out and cast it away. I am ashamed of nothing, of nothing! Don’t be stupid enough to think that I have the slightest regret. There is no regret. First of all because I am I—and then because . . . My dear, believe me, I have had a horrible time of it myself lately.”
This seemed to be the last word. Outwardly quiet, all the time, it was only then that she became composed enough to light an enormous cigarette of the same pattern as those made specially for the king—
“What are you thinking of,
“I was thinking of your immense generosity. You want to give a crown to one man, a fortune to another. That
