The Arrow of Gold

“There is,” remarked Mills calmly, “but I don’t remember any aunt or uncle in that connection.”

“And there are also certain stories of the discovery and acquisition of some unique objects of art.  The sly approaches, the astute negotiations, the lying and the circumventing . . . for the love of beauty, you know.”

With his dark face and with the perpetual smiles playing about his grimness, Mr. Blunt appeared to me positively satanic.  Mills’ hand was toying absently with an empty glass.  Again they had forgotten my existence altogether.

“I don’t know how an object of art would feel,” went on Blunt, in an unexpectedly grating voice, which, however, recovered its tone immediately.  “I don’t know.  But I do know that Rita herself was not a Danae, never, not at any time of her life.  She didn’t mind the holes in her stockings.  She wouldn’t mind holes in her stockings now. . . That is if she manages to keep any stockings at all,” he added, with a sort of suppressed fury so funnily unexpected that I would have burst into a laugh if I hadn’t been lost in astonishment of the simplest kind.

“No—really!”  There was a flash of interest from the quiet Mills.

“Yes, really,”  Blunt nodded and knitted his brows very devilishly indeed.  “She may yet be left without a single pair of stockings.”

“The world’s a thief,” declared Mills, with the utmost composure.  “It wouldn’t mind robbing a lonely traveller.”

“He is so subtle.”  Blunt remembered my existence for the purpose of that remark and as usual it made me very uncomfortable.  “Perfectly true.  A lonely traveller.  They are all in the scramble from the lowest to the highest.  Heavens!  What a gang!  There was even an Archbishop in it.”

“Vous plaisantez,” said Mills, but without any marked show of incredulity.

“I joke very seldom,” Blunt protested earnestly.  “That’s why I haven’t mentioned His Majesty—whom God preserve.  That would have been an exaggeration. . . However, the end is not yet.  We were talking about the beginning.  I have heard that some dealers in fine objects, quite mercenary people of course (my mother has an experience in that world), show sometimes an astonishing reluctance to part with some specimens, even at a good price.  It must be very funny.  It’s just possible that the uncle and the aunt have been rolling in tears on the floor, amongst their oranges, or beating their heads against the walls from rage and despair.  But I doubt it.  And in any case Allegre is not the sort of person that gets into any vulgar trouble.  And it’s just possible that those people stood open-mouthed at all that magnificence.  They weren’t poor, you know; therefore it wasn’t incumbent on them to be honest.  They are still there in the old respectable warehouse, I understand.  They have kept their position in their quartier, I believe.  But they didn’t keep their niece.  It might have been an act of sacrifice!  For I seem to remember hearing that after attending for a while some school round the corner the child had been set to keep the books of that orange business.  However it might have been, the first fact in Rita’s and Allegre’s common history is a journey to Italy, and then to Corsica.  You know Allegre had a house in Corsica somewhere.  She has it now as she has everything he ever had; and that Corsican palace is the portion that will stick the longest to Dona Rita, I imagine.  Who would want to buy a place like that?  I suppose nobody would take it for a gift.  The fellow was having houses built all over the place.  This very house where we are sitting belonged to him.  Dona Rita has given it to her sister, I understand.  Or at any rate the sister runs it.  She is my landlady . . .”

“Her sister here!” I exclaimed.  “Her sister!”

Blunt turned to me politely, but only for a long mute gaze.  His eyes were in deep shadow and it struck me for the first time then that there was something fatal in that man’s aspect as soon as he fell silent.  I think the effect was purely physical, but in consequence whatever he said seemed inadequate and as if produced by a commonplace, if uneasy, soul.

“Dona Rita brought her down from her mountains on purpose.  She is asleep somewhere in this house, in one of the vacant rooms.  She lets them, you know, at extortionate prices, that is, if people will pay them, for she is easily intimidated.  You see, she has never seen such an enormous town before in her life, nor yet so many strange people.  She has been keeping house for the uncle-priest in some mountain gorge for years and years.  It’s extraordinary he should have let her go.  There is something mysterious there, some reason or other.  It’s either theology or Family.  The saintly uncle in his wild parish would know nothing of any other reasons.  She wears a rosary at her waist.  Directly she had seen some real money she developed a love of it.  If you stay with me long enough, and I hope you will (I really can’t sleep), you will see her going out to mass at half-past six; but there is nothing remarkable in her; just a peasant woman of thirty-four or so.  A rustic nun. . . .”

I may as well say at once that we didn’t stay as long as that.  It was not that morning that I saw for the first time Therese of the whispering lips and downcast eyes slipping out to an early mass from the house of iniquity into the early winter murk of the city of perdition, in a world steeped in sin.  No.  It was not on that morning that I saw Dona Rita’s incredible sister with her brown, dry face, her gliding motion, and her really nun-like dress, with a black handkerchief enfolding her head tightly, with the two pointed ends hanging down her back.  Yes, nun-like enough.  And yet not altogether.  People would have turned round after her if those dartings out to the half-past six mass hadn’t been the only occasion on which she ventured into the impious streets.  She was frightened of the streets, but in a particular way, not as if of a danger but as if of a contamination.  Yet she didn’t fly back to her mountains because at bottom she had an indomitable character, a peasant tenacity of purpose, predatory instincts. . . .

No, we didn’t remain long enough with Mr. Blunt to see even as much as her back glide out of the house on her prayerful errand.  She was prayerful.  She was terrible.  Her one-idead peasant mind was as inaccessible as a closed iron safe.  She was fatal. . . It’s perfectly ridiculous to confess that they all seem fatal to me now; but writing to you like this in all sincerity I don’t mind appearing ridiculous.  I suppose fatality must be expressed, embodied, like other forces of this earth; and if so why not in such people as well as in other more glorious or more frightful figures?

We remained, however, long enough to let Mr. Blunt’s half-hidden acrimony develop itself or prey on itself in further talk about the man Allegre and the girl Rita.  Mr. Blunt, still addressing Mills with that story, passed on to what he called the second act, the disclosure, with, what he called, the characteristic Allegre impudence—which surpassed the impudence of kings, millionaires, or tramps, by many degrees—the revelation of Rita’s existence to the world at large.  It wasn’t a very large world, but then it was most choicely composed.  How is one to describe it shortly?  In a sentence it was the world that rides in the morning in the Bois.

In something less than a year and a half from the time he found her sitting on a broken fragment of stone work buried in the grass of his wild garden, full of thrushes, starlings, and other innocent creatures of the air, he had given her amongst other accomplishments the art of sitting admirably on a horse, and directly they returned to Paris he took her out with him for their first morning ride.

“I leave you to judge of the sensation,” continued Mr. Blunt, with a faint grimace, as though the words had an acrid taste in his mouth.  “And the consternation,” he added venomously.  “Many of those men on that great morning had some one of their womankind with them.  But their hats had to go off all the same, especially the hats of the fellows who were under some sort of obligation to Allegre.  You would be astonished to hear the names of people, of real personalities in the world, who, not to mince matters, owed money to Allegre.  And I don’t mean in the world of art only.  In the first rout of the surprise some story of an adopted daughter was set abroad hastily, I