第35章

It was on our return from that first trip that I took Dominic up to the Villa to be presented to Dona Rita.If she wanted to look on the embodiment of fidelity, resource, and courage, she could behold it all in that man.Apparently she was not disappointed.Neither was Dominic disappointed.During the half-hour's interview they got into touch with each other in a wonderful way as if they had some common and secret standpoint in life.Maybe it was their common lawlessness, and their knowledge of things as old as the world.Her seduction, his recklessness, were both simple, masterful and, in a sense, worthy of each other.

Dominic was, I won't say awed by this interview.No woman could awe Dominic.But he was, as it were, rendered thoughtful by it, like a man who had not so much an experience as a sort of revelation vouchsafed to him.Later, at sea, he used to refer to La Senora in a particular tone and I knew that henceforth his devotion was not for me alone.And I understood the inevitability of it extremely well.As to Dona Rita she, after Dominic left the room, had turned to me with animation and said: "But he is perfect, this man." Afterwards she often asked after him and used to refer to him in conversation.More than once she said to me:

"One would like to put the care of one's personal safety into the hands of that man.He looks as if he simply couldn't fail one." Iadmitted that this was very true, especially at sea.Dominic couldn't fail.But at the same time I rather chaffed Rita on her preoccupation as to personal safety that so often cropped up in her talk.

"One would think you were a crowned head in a revolutionary world,"I used to tell her.

"That would be different.One would be standing then for something, either worth or not worth dying for.One could even run away then and be done with it.But I can't run away unless I got out of my skin and left that behind.Don't you understand? You are very stupid..." But she had the grace to add, "On purpose."I don't know about the on purpose.I am not certain about the stupidity.Her words bewildered one often and bewilderment is a sort of stupidity.I remedied it by simply disregarding the sense of what she said.The sound was there and also her poignant heart-gripping presence giving occupation enough to one's faculties.In the power of those things over one there was mystery enough.It was more absorbing than the mere obscurity of her speeches.But Idaresay she couldn't understand that.

Hence, at times, the amusing outbreaks of temper in word and gesture that only strengthened the natural, the invincible force of the spell.Sometimes the brass bowl would get upset or the cigarette box would fly up, dropping a shower of cigarettes on the floor.We would pick them up, re-establish everything, and fall into a long silence, so close that the sound of the first word would come with all the pain of a separation.

It was at that time, too, that she suggested I should take up my quarters in her house in the street of the Consuls.There were certain advantages in that move.In my present abode my sudden absences might have been in the long run subject to comment.On the other hand, the house in the street of Consuls was a known out-post of Legitimacy.But then it was covered by the occult influence of her who was referred to in confidential talks, secret communications, and discreet whispers of Royalist salons as:

"Madame de Lastaola."

That was the name which the heiress of Henry Allegre had decided to adopt when, according to her own expression, she had found herself precipitated at a moment's notice into the crowd of mankind.It is strange how the death of Henry Allegre, which certainly the poor man had not planned, acquired in my view the character of a heartless desertion.It gave one a glimpse of amazing egoism in a sentiment to which one could hardly give a name, a mysterious appropriation of one human being by another as if in defiance of unexpressed things and for an unheard-of satisfaction of an inconceivable pride.If he had hated her he could not have flung that enormous fortune more brutally at her head.And his unrepentant death seemed to lift for a moment the curtain on something lofty and sinister like an Olympian's caprice.

Dona Rita said to me once with humorous resignation: "You know, it appears that one must have a name.That's what Henry Allegre's man of business told me.He was quite impatient with me about it.But my name, amigo, Henry Allegre had taken from me like all the rest of what I had been once.All that is buried with him in his grave.

It wouldn't have been true.That is how I felt about it.So Itook that one." She whispered to herself: "Lastaola," not as if to test the sound but as if in a dream.

To this day I am not quite certain whether it was the name of any human habitation, a lonely caserio with a half-effaced carving of a coat of arms over its door, or of some hamlet at the dead end of a ravine with a stony slope at the back.It might have been a hill for all I know or perhaps a stream.A wood, or perhaps a combination of all these: just a bit of the earth's surface.Once I asked her where exactly it was situated and she answered, waving her hand cavalierly at the dead wall of the room: "Oh, over there." I thought that this was all that I was going to hear but she added moodily, "I used to take my goats there, a dozen or so of them, for the day.From after my uncle had said his Mass till the ringing of the evening bell."I saw suddenly the lonely spot, sketched for me some time ago by a few words from Mr.Blunt, populated by the agile, bearded beasts with cynical heads, and a little misty figure dark in the sunlight with a halo of dishevelled rust-coloured hair about its head.

The epithet of rust-coloured comes from her.It was really tawny.