第55章

"Isn't this street ridiculous?" said Blunt suddenly, and crossing the room rapidly waved his hand to me, "A bientot donc," and was gone.He had seared himself into my mind.I did not understand him nor his mother then; which made them more impressive; but Ihave discovered since that those two figures required no mystery to make them memorable.Of course it isn't every day that one meets a mother that lives by her wits and a son that lives by his sword, but there was a perfect finish about their ambiguous personalities which is not to be met twice in a life-time.I shall never forget that grey dress with ample skirts and long corsage yet with infinite style, the ancient as if ghostly beauty of outlines, the black lace, the silver hair, the harmonious, restrained movements of those white, soft hands like the hands of a queen - or an abbess; and in the general fresh effect of her person the brilliant eyes like two stars with the calm reposeful way they had of moving on and off one, as if nothing in the world had the right to veil itself before their once sovereign beauty.Captain Blunt with smiling formality introduced me by name, adding with a certain relaxation of the formal tone the comment: "The Monsieur George!

whose fame you tell me has reached even Paris." Mrs.Blunt's reception of me, glance, tones, even to the attitude of the admirably corseted figure, was most friendly, approaching the limit of half-familiarity.I had the feeling that I was beholding in her a captured ideal.No common experience! But I didn't care.It was very lucky perhaps for me that in a way I was like a very sick man who has yet preserved all his lucidity.I was not even wondering to myself at what on earth I was doing there.She breathed out: "Comme c'est romantique," at large to the dusty studio as it were; then pointing to a chair at her right hand, and bending slightly towards me she said:

"I have heard this name murmured by pretty lips in more than one royalist salon."I didn't say anything to that ingratiating speech.I had only an odd thought that she could not have had such a figure, nothing like it, when she was seventeen and wore snowy muslin dresses on the family plantation in South Carolina, in pre-abolition days.

"You won't mind, I am sure, if an old woman whose heart is still young elects to call you by it," she declared.

"Certainly, Madame.It will be more romantic," I assented with a respectful bow.

She dropped a calm: "Yes - there is nothing like romance while one is young.So I will call you Monsieur George," she paused and then added, "I could never get old," in a matter-of-fact final tone as one would remark, "I could never learn to swim," and I had the presence of mind to say in a tone to match, "C'est evident, Madame." It was evident.She couldn't get old; and across the table her thirty-year-old son who couldn't get sleep sat listening with courteous detachment and the narrowest possible line of white underlining his silky black moustache.

"Your services are immensely appreciated," she said with an amusing touch of importance as of a great official lady."Immensely appreciated by people in a position to understand the great significance of the Carlist movement in the South.There it has to combat anarchism, too.I who have lived through the Commune..."Therese came in with a dish, and for the rest of the lunch the conversation so well begun drifted amongst the most appalling inanities of the religious-royalist-legitimist order.The ears of all the Bourbons in the world must have been burning.Mrs.Blunt seemed to have come into personal contact with a good many of them and the marvellous insipidity of her recollections was astonishing to my inexperience.I looked at her from time to time thinking:

She has seen slavery, she has seen the Commune, she knows two continents, she has seen a civil war, the glory of the Second Empire, the horrors of two sieges; she has been in contact with marked personalities, with great events, she has lived on her wealth, on her personality, and there she is with her plumage unruffled, as glossy as ever, unable to get old: - a sort of Phoenix free from the slightest signs of ashes and dust, all complacent amongst those inanities as if there had been nothing else in the world.In my youthful haste I asked myself what sort of airy soul she had.