CHAPTER IX.
Othmar went into his house, but before taking his coffee sent for his steward, and gave him a brief but severe reprimand for having permitted Duvelleroy and his underlings to use the gardens as a nursery-ground.
‘The grounds may be sacked to please my friends,’ he said, in conclusion. ‘But if a single carnation be sold for a single centime, it is not the seller who will be dismissed, but yourself, who are paid highly only that you may save your subordinates from those temptations which kill honesty and should be no more left in the path of poor men than poisoned mangolds in a sheep-field.’
The notion that his hothouses and gardens had furnished the flower-sellers of Nice with materials for their myriads of bouquets, irritated him disproportionately. He would have taken his oath that on none of his estates did his people steal a farthing’s worth. They were all highly paid, and those set in authority over them were all men who had been chosen and enriched by his father; he had often spoken of their probity and affection with pride; and now they cheated him for sake of selling a bouquet!
It was a mere trifle, no doubt. He would have cleared his gardens at a stroke to please anyone he liked; and he would have given a poor man willingly the value of all his forcing houses; but the knowledge that his hirelings sold his mignonette and his heliotrope to profit themselves irritated him, and even quite embittered life to him for the moment. The most generous minds feel the most acutely betrayal in small things, and resent most vividly the contemptible robberies which take advantage of trust and opportunity. That the rich man is so seldom honestly served goes further, perhaps, to redress the balance between him and the poor man than the latter, in his ignorance, ever supposes.
‘After all,’ he thought, ‘perhaps I only feed rogues, like Napraxine.’ And the thought was painful to him, for he fed them well.
It was primarily his own fault for so seldom coming to the place; perhaps it was natural that when years rolled on and they never saw their master they should learn to consider his possessions as almost their own. But he had so many places that he could not live in them all. His fathers had bought them, so, out of respect to their memories, he could not get rid of them. He had a great house on the Boulevard St. Germain; another great house in Piccadilly; another in the Teresian Platz of Vienna; he had estates in France, England, Germany, and Austria, a Scotch moor, a Flemish forest, a château on the shores of the Dalmatian Adriatic, a villa at Biarritz, a castle in dense woods on the Moselle, and whole towns, villages, plains, and hills in Croatia itself. How was he to live at all these places? He lent them liberally, but he could hardly sell them; the head of the house of Othmar could not sell what he had inherited. If he had sold them he would only have had more millions with which he would not have known what to do.
When he had drunk a cup of coffee and a glass of iced water, he went for a long ride, mounting high up into the hills until the sea lay far below, blue as a great bed of mysotis, and the gilded cupolas of La Jacquemerille glittered in his sight far beneath the darkening slopes of pine. When he returned to his one o’clock breakfast, he found that his house was deserted no more. He was told that his uncle, the Baron Friederich, had arrived by the rapide from Paris. He was not greatly pleased, but he prepared to do his duties as a host without betraying his sense that the new comer was not precisely in harmony with a romantic retreat amidst myrtles, camellias, and bromelias.
But he also foresaw a tedious day and evening, and he did not care to have the keen blue eyes of his father’s brother fixed on him at a moment when he was sending telegrams in all directions and commanding all kinds of novel diversions to amuse and receive the Princess Napraxine.
‘Have your travels tended to convince you that Europeans are wrong not to let the tails of sheep fatten and appear at their tables?’ said his unbidden guest, coming out of the house as though they had parted the previous night instead of twenty months before.