He glanced as he spoke at Nadine Napraxine, who was lying back against the golden gleams of the plush of her couch; she had a tea-rose in her hand which she had plucked from the gardens. She looked dream-like and ethereal. She had on her lips that little smile which meant so much and yet said nothing, and was half compassion and half disdain, and partially, also, amusement. If she had been mistress here and in all his other houses, he thought, each one of them would have been Eden to him. But that had not been Melville’s meaning.
At that moment his servants brought in the tea noiselessly and quickly: little Saxe cups, frosted cakes, forced strawberries, appearing on great old plateaux of gold,—as though he had been served there every day instead of having been absent ten years.
‘Really, Othmar, you have a little of the Haroun Alraschid, though you do not care for your throne,’ said Melville: ‘who would have imagined that returning from Asia last night you would have tea all ready made for your friends?’
‘My friends reconcile me to my house,’ said Othmar; ‘you will leave almost a perfume of home behind you, these rooms will seem lonely no more.’
‘The rooms are quite perfect,’ said Princess Nadine, ‘but still I think we will have our tea out of doors; the sun is still brilliant. We have now and then little fits of rurality; when we have those we sit on a terrace and take tea; that is as near rusticity as we care to go.’
She walked through one of the doorways into the air as she spoke.
To Othmar the golden-coloured room with its white roses and blue irises seemed to grow dark as she left it.
As she passed out to the gardens his people brought him a note; it was inside a silver-grey envelope, with a silver couronne upon it, and on a silver-grey card was written a very pressingly worded invitation to dinner the following night with his neighbours the Duc and Duchesse de Vannes. They had just heard of his arrival; they would have a few people; they begged him not to be formal, &c. &c. The château nearest to him was Millo, their favourite winter retreat; a gorgeous and fantastic place, with many a gilded cupola and shining dome which caught the sunshine from the sea, amidst groves of magnolia and woods of ilex. He had not been to Millo for ten years. When he had been last there the Duc had been just married to a famous beauty, and he had known them very well in Paris ever since that time. They were not people for whom he cared much: Alain de Vannes was a sporting man, and his wife was one of the leaders of fashion, with half a hundred lovers given to her, rightly or wrongly, by report. They were, however, legitimist in politics to the backbone. Neither of their families had ever pandered to Emperor or Elysée, and they were, despite their easy morals and their profound indifference to each other, exceedingly exclusive, and, with all their nonchalance, even arrogant.
‘It must be a strange house for that poor little girl,’ he thought as he threw the card aside, and remembered the Greuze face in the Venetian red boat. Millo was not more than a mile off him, at one point their woods and his joined, and looking from his terrace any day he could see the gilded minarets and the varicoloured tiles of their villas shining in the light against billows of dark evergreen foliage.