‘Blame them, when I am so much their debtor! I wish you would believe that you are the queen of all the gardens here. Why, even still you are hesitating to pluck the camellias!’
‘Because they told me never to touch them; I only looked at them; I think M. Duvelleroy sends them to Nice to sell. Indeed—indeed—I have never taken but what he told me I might have.’
What seemed so very terrible to her was that she must appear to the owner of S. Pharamond as a thief of his flowers! A vague idea flashed across her mind, that perhaps she might pay for the value of them—but then she had no money! The old jewels of her mother were to be hers, indeed; but when? She had not even seen them since her grandmother had died; perhaps they were to be sold to defray the cost of her entrance into convent life; she did not know. The great trouble of her spirit was reflected in her face, which was full of conflicting emotions; her mouth, which had been too silent the night before, trembled a little; the tears gleamed under her long lashes. Othmar thought her much more interesting with all this expression breaking up from under the mask of white marble which the convent had made her wear. In her bewilderment she became altogether a child; and the stately quiet of her manner fell away from her like an embroidered ermine-lined robe too heavy for her years.
‘Do they sell my camellias—the rogues?’ he said with a smile. ‘Of course you shall go away if you will, but not empty-handed. There must be something better worth having than those frost-bitten roses.’
He called a man who was sweeping up leaves on a lawn here.
‘Go and tell your chief to cut his finest orchids and bring them in a basket to me himself: any other rare thing he may have in the houses he can cut also. Mademoiselle,’ he said, turning to the girl, ‘you must not go back to Millo with such a poor opinion of my gardens. Is the Duchesse well? You remember that I had the honour to be presented to you by her last evening?’
‘You are Count Othmar?’
‘Men call me so,’ he replied, for he never loved that title which seemed to him so contemptible a thing, given, as it had been, in the beginning of the century by the first Emperor. ‘I am happy to be the owner of S. Pharamond, since you deign to visit it. You are at Millo every winter, I think?’
‘I am; they are not,’ she said, regaining her composure a little. ‘I did not hear your name last night. I thought you were some gentleman from Paris.’
‘I live oftenest in Paris,’ he replied, ‘but at the present moment I come from Central Asia. I am a friend of Monsignore Melville, as I told you; and I hope you will believe me when I say that, if only for his regard for you, you would be welcome at S. Pharamond.’