第11章

Then he leaned back in his chair and with interest - I don't mean curiosity, I mean interest: "Does anybody know besides the two parties concerned?" he asked, with something as it were renewed (or was it refreshed?) in his unmoved quietness."I ask because one has never heard any tales.I remember one evening in a restaurant seeing a man come in with a lady - a beautiful lady - very particularly beautiful, as though she had been stolen out of Mahomet's paradise.With Dona Rita it can't be anything as definite as that.But speaking of her in the same strain, I've always felt that she looked as though Allegre had caught her in the precincts of some temple...in the mountains."I was delighted.I had never heard before a woman spoken about in that way, a real live woman that is, not a woman in a book.For this was no poetry and yet it seemed to put her in the category of visions.And I would have lost myself in it if Mr.Blunt had not, most unexpectedly, addressed himself to me.

"I told you that man was as fine as a needle."And then to Mills: "Out of a temple? We know what that means."His dark eyes flashed: "And must it be really in the mountains?"he added.

"Or in a desert," conceded Mills, "if you prefer that.There have been temples in deserts, you know."Blunt had calmed down suddenly and assumed a nonchalant pose.

"As a matter of fact, Henry Allegre caught her very early one morning in his own old garden full of thrushes and other small birds.She was sitting on a stone, a fragment of some old balustrade, with her feet in the damp grass, and reading a tattered book of some kind.She had on a short, black, two-penny frock (une petite robe de deux sous) and there was a hole in one of her stockings.She raised her eyes and saw him looking down at her thoughtfully over that ambrosian beard of his, like Jove at a mortal.They exchanged a good long stare, for at first she was too startled to move; and then he murmured, "Restez donc." She lowered her eyes again on her book and after a while heard him walk away on the path.Her heart thumped while she listened to the little birds filling the air with their noise.She was not frightened.I am telling you this positively because she has told me the tale herself.What better authority can you have...?" Blunt paused.

"That's true.She's not the sort of person to lie about her own sensations," murmured Mills above his clasped hands.

"Nothing can escape his penetration," Blunt remarked to me with that equivocal urbanity which made me always feel uncomfortable on Mills' account."Positively nothing." He turned to Mills again.

"After some minutes of immobility - she told me - she arose from her stone and walked slowly on the track of that apparition.

Allegre was nowhere to be seen by that time.Under the gateway of the extremely ugly tenement house, which hides the Pavilion and the garden from the street, the wife of the porter was waiting with her arms akimbo.At once she cried out to Rita: 'You were caught by our gentleman.'

"As a matter of fact, that old woman, being a friend of Rita's aunt, allowed the girl to come into the garden whenever Allegre was away.But Allegre's goings and comings were sudden and unannounced; and that morning, Rita, crossing the narrow, thronged street, had slipped in through the gateway in ignorance of Allegre's return and unseen by the porter's wife.

"The child, she was but little more than that then, expressed her regret of having perhaps got the kind porter's wife into trouble.

"The old woman said with a peculiar smile: 'Your face is not of the sort that gets other people into trouble.My gentleman wasn't angry.He says you may come in any morning you like.'

"Rita, without saying anything to this, crossed the street back again to the warehouse full of oranges where she spent most of her waking hours.Her dreaming, empty, idle, thoughtless, unperturbed hours, she calls them.She crossed the street with a hole in her stocking.She had a hole in her stocking not because her uncle and aunt were poor (they had around them never less than eight thousand oranges, mostly in cases) but because she was then careless and untidy and totally unconscious of her personal appearance.She told me herself that she was not even conscious then of her personal existence.She was a mere adjunct in the twilight life of her aunt, a Frenchwoman, and her uncle, the orange merchant, a Basque peasant, to whom her other uncle, the great man of the family, the priest of some parish in the hills near Tolosa, had sent her up at the age of thirteen or thereabouts for safe keeping.

She is of peasant stock, you know.This is the true origin of the 'Girl in the Hat' and of the 'Byzantine Empress' which excited my dear mother so much; of the mysterious girl that the privileged personalities great in art, in letters, in politics, or simply in the world, could see on the big sofa during the gatherings in Allegre's exclusive Pavilion: the Dona Rita of their respectful addresses, manifest and mysterious, like an object of art from some unknown period; the Dona Rita of the initiated Paris.Dona Rita and nothing more - unique and indefinable." He stopped with a disagreeable smile.

"And of peasant stock?" I exclaimed in the strangely conscious silence that fell between Mills and Blunt.

"Oh! All these Basques have been ennobled by Don Sanche II," said Captain Blunt moodily."You see coats of arms carved over the doorways of the most miserable caserios.As far as that goes she's Dona Rita right enough whatever else she is or is not in herself or in the eyes of others.In your eyes, for instance, Mills.Eh?"For a time Mills preserved that conscious silence.