‘But it is mine when I am in it, and I invite you both. Come.’
Othmar hesitated till she gave him a little look, one brief fleeting look. Two years seemed to have fled away; he was again on the staircase of the Grand Opéra, she gave him her fan to carry, she had on a cloak of soft white feathers, a gardenia dropped out of her bouquet, he picked it up; in the whole glittering mass of Paris he only saw that one delicate face, pale as a narcissus, with two wonderful liquid eyes like night; and, with a sort of shock, he recollected himself, and realised that he was standing on the terrace of La Jacquemerille beside a woman whom he had vowed to put out of his life for ever and aye.
‘Come!’ said Princess Nadine, and he did not resist her.
He followed in her shadow down the flight of marble steps leading to the sea; while Geraldine, with a tempestuous rage stifled in his heart, drove Napraxine (who never drove himself), as furiously as Russian horses can be driven, along the sunny road, shaded with olives and caruba trees, which led from La Jacquemerille to the gambler’s paradise a few miles westward on the shore.
‘When boys sulk, they should always be punished,’ thought the Princess Nadine with silent diversion, as she heard the plunge and rush of the horses on the other side of the gardens, and divined that their driver was already repenting of the moment of petulance and of jealousy in which he had exiled himself from her presence, and condemned himself to the society of her lord.
‘Poor Platon is the dullest of companions, and Geraldine thinks it dans son rôle to detest him; and yet he goes with him by way of showing his pique against Othmar. How stupid, how intensely stupid!’ she thought, with exceeding amusement to herself, as she descended the water-stairs and stepped into Geraldine’s boat.
It was droll to her that anybody should either detest or envy her husband, he was so infinitesimally little in her own life. She readily did justice to his good humour, his loyalty, his courage, and his honesty; but those qualities were all obscured by his dulness and heaviness, and also by the simple fact that he was her husband, as the good points in a landscape are blotted out by a fog. ‘Dogs’ virtues! all of them,’ she called them, with a mixture of esteem and impatience, of appreciation and contempt.
The boat glided through a quarter of a mile of blue water, and brought them to the side of Geraldine’s yacht, a beautiful racer-like schooner with canvas white as foam, and flying the pennon of Cowes.
‘My poor “Berenice” was once as elegant and spotless as this,’ said Othmar, ‘but she has been through sore stress of weather. Her sails are rags, her sides are battered, her rudder is gone. She made a sorry spectacle when we hove to last night, but I am attached to her. I shall not buy another yacht.’
‘You always take things so seriously,’ said Princess Nadine. ‘A yacht is a toy like any other; when one is broken get another. Why should you be attached to a thing of teak and copper?’