第8章

"No.I don't know.I've never been in there," announced Blunt with that flash of white teeth so strangely without any character of its own that it was merely disturbing.

"But she radiated life," continued Mills."She had plenty of it, and it had a quality.My cousin and Henry Allegre had a lot to say to each other and so I was free to talk to her.At the second visit we were like old friends, which was absurd considering that all the chances were that we would never meet again in this world or in the next.I am not meddling with theology but it seems to me that in the Elysian fields she'll have her place in a very special company."All this in a sympathetic voice and in his unmoved manner.Blunt produced another disturbing white flash and muttered:

"I should say mixed." Then louder: "As for instance...""As for instance Cleopatra," answered Mills quietly.He added after a pause: "Who was not exactly pretty.""I should have thought rather a La Valliere," Blunt dropped with an indifference of which one did not know what to make.He may have begun to be bored with the subject.But it may have been put on, for the whole personality was not clearly definable.I, however, was not indifferent.A woman is always an interesting subject and I was thoroughly awake to that interest.Mills pondered for a while with a sort of dispassionate benevolence, at last:

"Yes, Dona Rita as far as I know her is so varied in her simplicity that even that is possible," he said."Yes.A romantic resigned La Valliere...who had a big mouth."I felt moved to make myself heard.

"Did you know La Valliere, too?" I asked impertinently.

Mills only smiled at me."No.I am not quite so old as that," he said."But it's not very difficult to know facts of that kind about a historical personage.There were some ribald verses made at the time, and Louis XIV was congratulated on the possession - Ireally don't remember how it goes - on the possession of:

"...de ce bec amoureux Qui d'une oreille e l'autre va, Tra le le.

or something of the sort.It needn't be from ear to ear, but it's a fact that a big mouth is often a sign of a certain generosity of mind and feeling.Young man, beware of women with small mouths.

Beware of the others, too, of course; but a small mouth is a fatal sign.Well, the royalist sympathizers can't charge Dona Rita with any lack of generosity from what I hear.Why should I judge her?

I have known her for, say, six hours altogether.It was enough to feel the seduction of her native intelligence and of her splendid physique.And all that was brought home to me so quickly," he concluded, "because she had what some Frenchman has called the 'terrible gift of familiarity'."Blunt had been listening moodily.He nodded assent.

"Yes!" Mills' thoughts were still dwelling in the past."And when saying good-bye she could put in an instant an immense distance between herself and you.A slight stiffening of that perfect figure, a change of the physiognomy: it was like being dismissed by a person born in the purple.Even if she did offer you her hand - as she did to me - it was as if across a broad river.Trick of manner or a bit of truth peeping out? Perhaps she's really one of those inaccessible beings.What do you think, Blunt?"It was a direct question which for some reason (as if my range of sensitiveness had been increased already) displeased or rather disturbed me strangely.Blunt seemed not to have heard it.But after a while he turned to me.

"That thick man," he said in a tone of perfect urbanity, "is as fine as a needle.All these statements about the seduction and then this final doubt expressed after only two visits which could not have included more than six hours altogether and this some three years ago! But it is Henry Allegre that you should ask this question, Mr.Mills.""I haven't the secret of raising the dead," answered Mills good humouredly."And if I had I would hesitate.It would seem such a liberty to take with a person one had known so slightly in life.""And yet Henry Allegre is the only person to ask about her, after all this uninterrupted companionship of years, ever since he discovered her; all the time, every breathing moment of it, till, literally, his very last breath.I don't mean to say she nursed him.He had his confidential man for that.He couldn't bear women about his person.But then apparently he couldn't bear this one out of his sight.She's the only woman who ever sat to him, for he would never suffer a model inside his house.That's why the 'Girl in the Hat' and the 'Byzantine Empress' have that family air, though neither of them is really a likeness of Dona Rita...You know my mother?"Mills inclined his body slightly and a fugitive smile vanished from his lips.Blunt's eyes were fastened on the very centre of his empty plate.

"Then perhaps you know my mother's artistic and literary associations," Blunt went on in a subtly changed tone."My mother has been writing verse since she was a girl of fifteen.She's still writing verse.She's still fifteen - a spoiled girl of genius.So she requested one of her poet friends - no less than Versoy himself - to arrange for a visit to Henry Allegre's house.

At first he thought he hadn't heard aright.You must know that for my mother a man that doesn't jump out of his skin for any woman's caprice is not chivalrous.But perhaps you do know?..."Mills shook his head with an amused air.Blunt, who had raised his eyes from his plate to look at him, started afresh with great deliberation.

"She gives no peace to herself or her friends.My mother's exquisitely absurd.You understand that all these painters, poets, art collectors (and dealers in bric-e-brac, he interjected through his teeth) of my mother are not in my way; but Versoy lives more like a man of the world.One day I met him at the fencing school.