Complete Works of Joseph Conrad (Illustrated) (498 page)

He insisted to us that the first and only time he had seen Allègre a little close was that morning in the Bois with his mother.  His Majesty (whom God preserve), then not even an active Pretender, flanked the girl, still a girl, on the other side, the usual companion for a month past or so.  Allègre had suddenly taken it into his head to paint his portrait.  A sort of intimacy had sprung up.  Mrs. Blunt’s remark was that of the two striking horsemen Allègre looked the more kingly.

“The son of a confounded millionaire soap-boiler,” commented Mr. Blunt through his clenched teeth.  “A man absolutely without parentage.  Without a single relation in the world.  Just a freak.”

“That explains why he could leave all his fortune to her,” said Mills.

“The will, I believe,” said Mr. Blunt moodily, “was written on a half sheet of paper, with his device of an Assyrian bull at the head.  What the devil did he mean by it?  Anyway it was the last time that she surveyed the world of men and women from the saddle.  Less than three months later. . .”

“Allègre died and. . . “ murmured Mills in an interested manner.

“And she had to dismount,” broke in Mr. Blunt grimly.  “Dismount right into the middle of it.  Down to the very ground, you understand.  I suppose you can guess what that would mean.  She didn’t know what to do with herself.  She had never been on the ground.  She . . . “

“Aha!” said Mills.

“Even eh! eh! if you like,” retorted Mr. Blunt, in an unrefined tone, that made me open my eyes, which were well opened before, still wider.

He turned to me with that horrible trick of his of commenting upon Mills as though that quiet man whom I admired, whom I trusted, and for whom I had already something resembling affection had been as much of a dummy as that other one lurking in the shadows, pitiful and headless in its attitude of alarmed chastity.

“Nothing escapes his penetration.  He can perceive a haystack at an enormous distance when he is interested.”

I thought this was going rather too far, even to the borders of vulgarity; but Mills remained untroubled and only reached for his tobacco pouch.

“But that’s nothing to my mother’s interest.  She can never see a haystack, therefore she is always so surprised and excited.  Of course Doña Rita was not a woman about whom the newspapers insert little paragraphs.  But Allègre was the sort of man.  A lot came out in print about him and a lot was talked in the world about her; and at once my dear mother perceived a haystack and naturally became unreasonably absorbed in it.  I thought her interest would wear out.  But it didn’t.  She had received a shock and had received an impression by means of that girl.  My mother has never been treated with impertinence before, and the aesthetic impression must have been of extraordinary strength.  I must suppose that it amounted to a sort of moral revolution, I can’t account for her proceedings in any other way.  When Rita turned up in Paris a year and a half after Allègre’s death some shabby journalist (smart creature) hit upon the notion of alluding to her as the heiress of Mr. Allègre.  ‘The heiress of Mr. Allègre has taken up her residence again amongst the treasures of art in that Pavilion so well known to the élite of the artistic, scientific, and political world, not to speak of the members of aristocratic and even royal families. . . ‘  You know the sort of thing.  It appeared first in the Figaro, I believe.  And then at the end a little phrase: ‘She is alone.’  She was in a fair way of becoming a celebrity of a sort.  Daily little allusions and that sort of thing.  Heaven only knows who stopped it.  There was a rush of ‘old friends’ into that garden, enough to scare all the little birds away.  I suppose one or several of them, having influence with the press, did it.  But the gossip didn’t stop, and the name stuck, too, since it conveyed a very certain and very significant sort of fact, and of course the Venetian episode was talked about in the houses frequented by my mother.  It was talked about from a royalist point of view with a kind of respect.  It was even said that the inspiration and the resolution of the war going on now over the Pyrenees had come out from that head. . . Some of them talked as if she were the guardian angel of Legitimacy.  You know what royalist gush is like.”

Mr. Blunt’s face expressed sarcastic disgust.  Mills moved his head the least little bit.  Apparently he knew.

“Well, speaking with all possible respect, it seems to have affected my mother’s brain.  I was already with the royal army and of course there could be no question of regular postal communications with France.  My mother hears or overhears somewhere that the heiress of Mr. Allègre is contemplating a secret journey.  All the noble Salons were full of chatter about that secret naturally.  So she sits down and pens an autograph: ‘Madame, Informed that you are proceeding to the place on which the hopes of all the right thinking people are fixed, I trust to your womanly sympathy with a mother’s anxious feelings, etc., etc.,’ and ending with a request to take messages to me and bring news of me. . . The coolness of my mother!”

Most unexpectedly Mills was heard murmuring a question which seemed to me very odd.

“I wonder how your mother addressed that note?”

A moment of silence ensued.

“Hardly in the newspaper style, I should think,” retorted Mr. Blunt, with one of his grins that made me doubt the stability of his feelings and the consistency of his outlook in regard to his whole tale.  “My mother’s maid took it in a fiacre very late one evening to the Pavilion and brought an answer scrawled on a scrap of paper: ‘Write your messages at once’ and signed with a big capital R.  So my mother sat down again to her charming writing desk and the maid made another journey in a fiacre just before midnight; and ten days later or so I got a letter thrust into my hand at the avanzadas just as I was about to start on a night patrol, together with a note asking me to call on the writer so that she might allay my mother’s anxieties by telling her how I looked.

“It was signed R only, but I guessed at once and nearly fell off my horse with surprise.”

“You mean to say that Doña Rita was actually at the Royal Headquarters lately?” exclaimed Mills, with evident surprise.  “Why, we — everybody — thought that all this affair was over and done with.”

“Absolutely.  Nothing in the world could be more done with than that episode.  Of course the rooms in the hotel at Tolosa were retained for her by an order from Royal Headquarters.  Two garret-rooms, the place was so full of all sorts of court people; but I can assure you that for the three days she was there she never put her head outside the door.  General Mongroviejo called on her officially from the King.  A general, not anybody of the household, you see.  That’s a distinct shade of the present relation.  He stayed just five minutes.  Some personage from the Foreign department at Headquarters was closeted for about a couple of hours.  That was of course business.  Then two officers from the staff came together with some explanations or instructions to her.  Then Baron H., a fellow with a pretty wife, who had made so many sacrifices for the cause, raised a great to-do about seeing her and she consented to receive him for a moment.  They say he was very much frightened by her arrival, but after the interview went away all smiles.  Who else?  Yes, the Archbishop came.  Half an hour.  This is more than is necessary to give a blessing, and I can’t conceive what else he had to give her.  But I am sure he got something out of her.  Two peasants from the upper valley were sent for by military authorities and she saw them, too.  That friar who hangs about the court has been in and out several times.  Well, and lastly, I myself.  I got leave from the outposts.  That was the first time I talked to her.  I would have gone that evening back to the regiment, but the friar met me in the corridor and informed me that I would be ordered to escort that most loyal and noble lady back to the French frontier as a personal mission of the highest honour.  I was inclined to laugh at him.  He himself is a cheery and jovial person and he laughed with me quite readily — but I got the order before dark all right.  It was rather a job, as the Alphonsists were attacking the right flank of our whole front and there was some considerable disorder there.  I mounted her on a mule and her maid on another.  We spent one night in a ruined old tower occupied by some of our infantry and got away at daybreak under the Alphonsist shells.  The maid nearly died of fright and one of the troopers with us was wounded.  To smuggle her back across the frontier was another job but it wasn’t my job.  It wouldn’t have done for her to appear in sight of French frontier posts in the company of Carlist uniforms.  She seems to have a fearless streak in her nature.  At one time as we were climbing a slope absolutely exposed to artillery fire I asked her on purpose, being provoked by the way she looked about at the scenery, ‘A little emotion, eh?’  And she answered me in a low voice: ‘Oh, yes!  I am moved.  I used to run about these hills when I was little.’  And note, just then the trooper close behind us had been wounded by a shell fragment.  He was swearing awfully and fighting with his horse.  The shells were falling around us about two to the minute.

“Luckily the Alphonsist shells are not much better than our own.  But women are funny.  I was afraid the maid would jump down and clear out amongst the rocks, in which case we should have had to dismount and catch her.  But she didn’t do that; she sat perfectly still on her mule and shrieked.  Just simply shrieked.  Ultimately we came to a curiously shaped rock at the end of a short wooded valley.  It was very still there and the sunshine was brilliant.  I said to Doña Rita: ‘We will have to part in a few minutes.  I understand that my mission ends at this rock.’  And she said: ‘I know this rock well.  This is my country.’

“Then she thanked me for bringing her there and presently three peasants appeared, waiting for us, two youths and one shaven old man, with a thin nose like a sword blade and perfectly round eyes, a character well known to the whole Carlist army.  The two youths stopped under the trees at a distance, but the old fellow came quite close up and gazed at her, screwing up his eyes as if looking at the sun.  Then he raised his arm very slowly and took his red boina off his bald head.  I watched her smiling at him all the time.  I daresay she knew him as well as she knew the old rock.  Very old rock.  The rock of ages — and the aged man — landmarks of her youth.  Then the mules started walking smartly forward, with the three peasants striding alongside of them, and vanished between the trees.  These fellows were most likely sent out by her uncle the Cura.

“It was a peaceful scene, the morning light, the bit of open country framed in steep stony slopes, a high peak or two in the distance, the thin smoke of some invisible caserios, rising straight up here and there.  Far away behind us the guns had ceased and the echoes in the gorges had died out.  I never knew what peace meant before. . .

“Nor since,” muttered Mr. Blunt after a pause and then went on.  “The little stone church of her uncle, the holy man of the family, might have been round the corner of the next spur of the nearest hill.  I dismounted to bandage the shoulder of my trooper.  It was only a nasty long scratch.  While I was busy about it a bell began to ring in the distance.  The sound fell deliciously on the ear, clear like the morning light.  But it stopped all at once.  You know how a distant bell stops suddenly.  I never knew before what stillness meant.  While I was wondering at it the fellow holding our horses was moved to uplift his voice.  He was a Spaniard, not a Basque, and he trolled out in Castilian that song you know,

“‘Oh bells of my native village,

I am going away . . . good-bye!’

He had a good voice.  When the last note had floated away I remounted, but there was a charm in the spot, something particular and individual because while we were looking at it before turning our horses’ heads away the singer said: ‘I wonder what is the name of this place,’ and the other man remarked: ‘Why, there is no village here,’ and the first one insisted: ‘No, I mean this spot, this very place.’  The wounded trooper decided that it had no name probably.  But he was wrong.  It had a name.  The hill, or the rock, or the wood, or the whole had a name.  I heard of it by chance later.  It was — Lastaola.”

A cloud of tobacco smoke from Mills’ pipe drove between my head and the head of Mr. Blunt, who, strange to say, yawned slightly.  It seemed to me an obvious affectation on the part of that man of perfect manners, and, moreover, suffering from distressing insomnia.

“This is how we first met and how we first parted,” he said in a weary, indifferent tone.  “It’s quite possible that she did see her uncle on the way.  It’s perhaps on this occasion that she got her sister to come out of the wilderness.  I have no doubt she had a pass from the French Government giving her the completest freedom of action.  She must have got it in Paris before leaving.”

Mr. Blunt broke out into worldly, slightly cynical smiles.

“She can get anything she likes in Paris.  She could get a whole army over the frontier if she liked.  She could get herself admitted into the Foreign Office at one o’clock in the morning if it so pleased her.  Doors fly open before the heiress of Mr. Allègre.  She has inherited the old friends, the old connections . . . Of course, if she were a toothless old woman . . . But, you see, she isn’t.  The ushers in all the ministries bow down to the ground therefore, and voices from the innermost sanctums take on an eager tone when they say, ‘Faites entrer.’  My mother knows something about it.  She has followed her career with the greatest attention.  And Rita herself is not even surprised.  She accomplishes most extraordinary things, as naturally as buying a pair of gloves.  People in the shops are very polite and people in the world are like people in the shops.  What did she know of the world?  She had seen it only from the saddle.  Oh, she will get your cargo released for you all right.  How will she do it? . . Well, when it’s done — you follow me, Mills? — when it’s done she will hardly know herself.”

“It’s hardly possible that she shouldn’t be aware,” Mills pronounced calmly.

“No, she isn’t an idiot,” admitted Mr. Blunt, in the same matter-of-fact voice.  “But she confessed to myself only the other day that she suffered from a sense of unreality.  I told her that at any rate she had her own feelings surely.  And she said to me: Yes, there was one of them at least about which she had no doubt; and you will never guess what it was.  Don’t try.  I happen to know, because we are pretty good friends.”