Paul knew her too well to dare to remark what he had thought all the afternoon, that it had been a sad waste of some fifty thousand francs’ worth of blossoms. He closed the windows in silence. She passed on towards her dressing-chambers through the little library which divided the boudoir from them, the gayest and most coquettish of little libraries in appearance, with ivory bookcases ornamented by painted medallions of birds, a few white marble busts, and hangings of modern Gobelin tapestry; but a library by no means destitute of serious and philosophic works of some Latin authors, and of transactions of recent scientific research.
In the library, Paul, hesitating, ventured to approach her with a bouquet which was not harmed by the twilight frost.
‘This was left a few moments ago,’ he explained as he tendered it in some trepidation, uncertain whether he had done wrong to exclude it from the general massacre. She took it indifferently: it was very simple;—a bouquet of narcissus with a rim of white violets, nothing else. The name on the card with it was Othmar’s. She smiled and took it with her into her dressing-room. It was the bunch of ‘corn-cockles’ for which she had wished.
‘I did not do wrong,’ thought Paul, with a sigh of relief. Then he smiled too as he recalled the winter in which the sender had been many times alone with his mistress in that little room where the orchids had now withered in their gilded baskets. ‘It was he if it were ever anyone,’ he thought; ‘but I do not believe it has ever been anyone—yet.’
His knowledge of the world made him make the restriction, as he called one of his subordinates to sweep away all that rubbish, pointing to the poor murdered flowers, whose costly corbeilles would be one of his many perquisites.
She, meanwhile, was undressed, clothed in a loose gown of embroidered china silk, took a cup of tea, and slept peacefully in the perfumed warmth. She liked to come out of the frosty and foggy air, and lie still with the pleasant drowsiness caused by the contrast of the sharp evening wind and the atmosphere heated to 40° Réaumur. Physicians told her that so sudden a change was not wise or safe, but she laughed at them. ‘What is pleasant is always wholesome,’ she said, constructing new rules of hygiene, as she often did new rules of etiquette. She liked the warmth, the sense of repose, of languor, of voluptuousness, as a cat loves it, stretched on velvet, in still hot air. She slept now with perfect composure, dreamlessly, from the semi-stupor that driving against cold winds brings with it afterwards. Then, all at once, she dreamt of a lake half frozen, of dark tempestuous skies, of an open grave in the black water under the jagged drifting ice; and she awoke with a little unconscious cry to open her eyes on the mellow light, the satin hangings, the Saxe mirrors, the snowy bear-skins of her dressing-room, the little tray of silver and china, the bouquet of narcissus and violets near her.
‘What a wretched dream! I, who never dream,’ she said impatiently, as she stretched her limbs out on the white furs of her couch. Then she remembered Geraldine.
‘Will he haunt me every time I go to sleep?’ she thought, with a little shiver. It seemed to her altogether unreasonable and undeserved. She had never told him to go on the Gulf of S. Lawrence in the dangerous season before the ice was solid.
In an hour’s time she took the bouquet of narcissus in her hand, and descended to her drawing-rooms. She wore the pink pearls that night, the little crown holding up her hair, raised like that of the portraits of Madame Tallien: she never wore her hair twice together in the same fashion. ‘If you always wear your hair the same way, you have no imagination, and you are always suspected of a peruke,’ she was wont to say.
Platon Napraxine seeing his despised gift thus honoured, was almost contented. In the régime of starvation, on which he had been kept so long, the smallest crumbs of condescension were eagerly seized by him.