The young man who was taking me up to the top floor, and treating me rather nonchalantly because I was a North Roomer and a Twelve Francer, waved the lift boy aside to open the door himself for the lady; so that I knew she must be considered a person worth conciliating.
Shut up in my ten-by-six-foot room, I tried to compose myself and make plans; but to make plans on thirty-two francs, when you've no home, and would be far from it even if you had one; when you've nobody to help you, and wouldn't want to ask them if you had—is about as hard as to play the piano brilliantly without ever having taken a lesson. With Princess Boriskoff dead, with Pamela de Nesle sailing for New York to-morrow morning, and no other intimate friends rich enough to do anything for me, even if they were willing to help me fly in the face of Providence and Madame Milvaine, it did seem (as Pamela herself would say) as though I were rather "up against it."
The thought of Miss Paget suddenly jumped into my head, and the wish that, somehow, I had kept her up my sleeve as a last resort, in case she really were in earnest about her offer. But she hadn't told me where she was going in Italy, and it would be of no use writing to one of her English addresses, as I couldn't stop on where I was, waiting for an answer.
Altogether things were very bad with me.
After I had sat down and thought for a while, I rang, and asked for the housekeeper. A hint or two revealed that she was aware of what had happened, and, explaining that I was to have been Princess Boriskoff's companion, I said that I must see the Princess's maid. She must come to my room. I must have a talk with her.
Presently, after an interval which may have been meant to emphasize her dignity, appeared a pale, small Russian woman whose withered face was as tragic and remote from the warmth of daily life as that of the eldest Fate.
She could speak French, and we talked together. Yes, her mistress had died very suddenly, but she and the doctors had always known that it might happen so, at any moment. It was hard for me, but—what would you? Life was hard. It might have been that I would have found life hard with Her Highness. What was to be, would be. I must write to my friends. It was not in her power to do anything for me. Her Highness had left no instructions. These things happened. Well! one made the best of them. There was nothing more to say.
So we said nothing more, and the woman moved away silently, as if to funeral music, to prepare for her journey to Russia. I—went down to luncheon.
One always does go down to luncheon while one is still inclined to keep up appearances before oneself; but the restaurant was large and terribly magnificent, with a violent rose-coloured carpet, and curtains which made me, in my frightened pallor, with my pale yellow hair and my gray travelling dress, feel like a poor little underground celery-stalk flung into a sunlit strawberry-bed, amid a great humming of bees.
The vast rosy sea was thickly dotted with many small table-islands that glittered appetizingly with silver and glass; but I could not have afforded to acknowledge an appetite even if I'd had one.