“Die a natural death. I understand,” interrupted Lady Lochinvar. “You may be sure I will not encourage the young lady to talk about Mr. Castellani.”
Mildred explained her responsibility with regard to Pamela and the young lady’s position, with its substantial attraction for the adventurer in search of a wife. She had deemed it her duty to confide thus much in Lady Lochinvar, lest Castellani should change his tactics, and pursue Pamela with addresses which might be only too readily accepted.
She left the Palais Montano at two o’clock, and drove round the bay to St. Jean, where the rose-hedges were in flower, and where the gardens were bright with bloom under a sky which suggested an English June.
She left the fly at the little inn where the holiday people go to eat bouillabaisse on Sundays and fête-days, but which was silent and solitary to-day, and then walked slowly along the winding road, looking for the Bout du Monde. The place was prettier and more rustic, after an almost English fashion, than any spot she had seen since she left Enderby. Villas and cottages were scattered in a desultory way upon different levels, under the shelter of precipitous cliffs, and on every bit of rising ground and in every hollow there were orange and lemon groves, with here and there a peach or a cherry in full bloom, and here and there a vivid patch of flowers, and here and there a wall covered with the glowing purple of the Bougainvilliers. Great carouba-trees rose tall and dark amidst all this brightness, and through every opening in the foliage the changeful colour of the Mediterranean shone in the distance, like the jasper sea of the Apocalypse.
Mildred went slowly along the dusty road, looking at all the villas, lingering here and there at a garden gate, and asking any intelligent-looking person who passed to direct her to the Bout du Monde. It was not till she had made the inquiry half-a-dozen times that she obtained any information; but at last she met with a bright-faced market-woman, tramping home with empty baskets after a long morning at Nice, and white with the dust of the hillside.
“Le Bout du Monde? But that was the villa where the poor young English lady lived whose husband threw her over the cliff,” said the woman cheerily. “The proprietor changed the name of the house next season, for fear people should fancy it was haunted if the story got about. It is called Montfleuri now.”
“Is there any one living there?” Mildred asked.
No, it was let last year to an English family. O, but an amiable family, rich, ah, but richissime, who had bought flowers in heaps of the speaker. But they had left, malheureusement. They had returned to their property near London, a great and stupendous property in a district which the flower-woman described as le Crommu-elle Rodd. There had never been such a family in St. Jean—five English servants, three English mees who mounted on horseback daily: a benefaction for the whole village. Now, alas! there was no one living at Montfleuri but an old woman in charge.
“Could you take me to the house?” asked Mildred, opening her purse.
The woman would have been all politeness and good-nature without the stimulant offered by that open purse. She had all the southern kindliness and alacrity to oblige, but when the lady dropped half-a-dozen francs into her broad brown hand she almost sank to the earth in a rapture of gratitude.