第56章

At last Therese put a dish of fruit on the table, a small collection of oranges, raisins, and nuts.No doubt she had bought that lot very cheap and it did not look at all inviting.Captain Blunt jumped up."My mother can't stand tobacco smoke.Will you keep her company, mon cher, while I take a turn with a cigar in that ridiculous garden.The brougham from the hotel will be here very soon."He left us in the white flash of an apologetic grin.Almost directly he reappeared, visible from head to foot through the glass side of the studio, pacing up and down the central path of that "ridiculous" garden: for its elegance and its air of good breeding the most remarkable figure that I have ever seen before or since.

He had changed his coat.Madame Blunt mere lowered the long-handled glasses through which she had been contemplating him with an appraising, absorbed expression which had nothing maternal in it.But what she said to me was:

"You understand my anxieties while he is campaigning with the King."She had spoken in French and she had used the expression "mes transes" but for all the rest, intonation, bearing, solemnity, she might have been referring to one of the Bourbons.I am sure that not a single one of them looked half as aristocratic as her son.

"I understand perfectly, Madame.But then that life is so romantic.""Hundreds of young men belonging to a certain sphere are doing that," she said very distinctly, "only their case is different.

They have their positions, their families to go back to; but we are different.We are exiles, except of course for the ideals, the kindred spirit, the friendships of old standing we have in France.

Should my son come out unscathed he has no one but me and I have no one but him.I have to think of his life.Mr.Mills (what a distinguished mind that is!) has reassured me as to my son's health.But he sleeps very badly, doesn't he?"I murmured something affirmative in a doubtful tone and she remarked quaintly, with a certain curtness, "It's so unnecessary, this worry! The unfortunate position of an exile has its advantages.At a certain height of social position (wealth has got nothing to do with it, we have been ruined in a most righteous cause), at a certain established height one can disregard narrow prejudices.You see examples in the aristocracies of all the countries.A chivalrous young American may offer his life for a remote ideal which yet may belong to his familial tradition.We, in our great country, have every sort of tradition.But a young man of good connections and distinguished relations must settle down some day, dispose of his life.""No doubt, Madame," I said, raising my eyes to the figure outside -"Americain, Catholique et gentilhomme" - walking up and down the path with a cigar which he was not smoking."For myself, I don't know anything about those necessities.I have broken away for ever from those things.""Yes, Mr.Mills talked to me about you.What a golden heart that is.His sympathies are infinite."I thought suddenly of Mills pronouncing on Mme.Blunt, whatever his text on me might have been: "She lives by her wits." Was she exercising her wits on me for some purpose of her own? And Iobserved coldly:

"I really know your son so very little."

"Oh, voyons," she protested."I am aware that you are very much younger, but the similitudes of opinions, origins and perhaps at bottom, faintly, of character, of chivalrous devotion - no, you must be able to understand him in a measure.He is infinitely scrupulous and recklessly brave."I listened deferentially to the end yet with every nerve in my body tingling in hostile response to the Blunt vibration, which seemed to have got into my very hair.

"I am convinced of it, Madame.I have even heard of your son's bravery.It's extremely natural in a man who, in his own words, 'lives by his sword.'"She suddenly departed from her almost inhuman perfection, betrayed "nerves" like a common mortal, of course very slightly, but in her it meant more than a blaze of fury from a vessel of inferior clay.

Her admirable little foot, marvellously shod in a black shoe, tapped the floor irritably.But even in that display there was something exquisitely delicate.The very anger in her voice was silvery, as it were, and more like the petulance of a seventeen-year-old beauty.

"What nonsense! A Blunt doesn't hire himself.""Some princely families," I said, "were founded by men who have done that very thing.The great Condottieri, you know."It was in an almost tempestuous tone that she made me observe that we were not living in the fifteenth century.She gave me also to understand with some spirit that there was no question here of founding a family.Her son was very far from being the first of the name.His importance lay rather in being the last of a race which had totally perished, she added in a completely drawing-room tone, "in our Civil War."She had mastered her irritation and through the glass side of the room sent a wistful smile to his address, but I noticed the yet unextinguished anger in her eyes full of fire under her beautiful white eyebrows.For she was growing old! Oh, yes, she was growing old, and secretly weary, and perhaps desperate.