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She might have been made thus inhuman by the force of an invisible purpose. I waited a moment, then, stealthily, with extreme caution, I opened the door of the so-called Captain Blunt’s room. The glow of embers was all but out.
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.
Mills, sitting silent with his air of watchful intelligence, seemed to read my thoughts, waved his pipe slightly and explained: “The Captain is from South Carolina.” “Oh,” I murmured, and then after the slightest of pauses I heard the second of Mr. J. K. Blunt’s declarations.
“I don’t know whether you are mature or not,” said Mills humorously. “But I think you will do. You . . . ” “Tell me,” I interrupted, “what is really Captain Blunt’s position there?” And I nodded at the alley of the Prado opening before us between the rows of the perfectly leafless trees. “Thoroughly false, I should think.
It was to Corsica that he carried her off—I mean first of all.” There was the slightest contraction of Mr. Blunt’s facial muscles. Very slight; but I, staring at the narrator after the manner of all simple souls, noticed it; the twitch of a pain which surely must have been mental.
Blunt’s expression had grown even more indulgent if that were possible. Yet there was something ineradicably ambiguous about that man. I did not like the indefinable tone in which he observed: “You are perfectly reckless in what you say, Doña Rita. It has become a habit with you of late.” “While with you reserve is a second nature, Don Juan.”
I bounded back, closed the door of Blunt’s room, and the next moment was speaking to the Italian. “A little patience.” My hands trembled but I managed to take down the chain and as I allowed the door to swing open a little more I put myself in his way. He was burly, venerable, a little indignant, and full of thanks.
What luck, to feel nothing less than all the world closing over one’s head!” A short silence ensued before Mr. Blunt’s drawing-room voice was heard with playful familiarity. “I have often asked myself whether you weren’t really a very ambitious person, Doña Rita.”
I think that the black-and-white hall surprised Ortega. I had closed the front door without noise and stood for a moment listening, while he glanced about furtively. There were only two other doors in the hall, right and left. Their panels of ebony were decorated with bronze applications in the centre. The one on the left was of course Blunt’s door.
“It wasn’t exactly that, though of course I couldn’t tell that you weren’t a product of Captain Blunt’s sleeplessness. He seemed to dread exceedingly to be left alone and your story might have been a device to detain us . . .” “He hasn’t enough imagination for that,” she said. “It didn’t occur to me. But there was Mills, who apparently believed in your existence. I could trust Mills.
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