She looked at him, very sweetly, without offence.
“I understand. You love this woman still. She was the mother of your dead child. I understand—oh! so completely! Well, if ever I can prove to you that I am right and you are wrong, I shall be very glad, for I am quite sure that you will never care for any other person. It may seem to you very impertinent, but I have an idea—an idea—— Never mind, if there be any grounds for it, time will show.”
“You speak very strangely, madame,” said Vanderlin, agitated to a degree which it was hard for him to conceal, yet extremely suspicious of her motives.
“I dare say I do,” she answered without offence, “for I know nothing whatever, and I conjecture a great deal; very feminine that, you will say. Hush! the Archduke is stirring.”
At that moment the Archduke awoke from his slumber, astonished to find himself where he was, and looking round for his missing gentleman. Vanderlin hastened, of course, to his side, and the tête-à-tête was over, but it had lasted long enough for her to be certain that it would be as easy to raise the sunken galleys of Carthage from the violet seas beyond the windows as to revive passion in the heart of her host.
She hastened to leave him and go out on to the terrace to tell Boo to be quiet, for she had, as she had truly said, no knowledge whatever, and merely some vague impressions suggested by the visit and the warning of Prince Khris. But she had gleaned two certainties from her conversation with Vanderlin—one, that he had never ceased to regret his divorced wife, the other that it would be as much use to woo a marble statue as to attempt to fascinate this man, whose heart was buried in the deep sea grave of a shipwrecked passion. She had read of such passions, and seen them represented on the stage, but she had never before believed in their existence. Now that she did believe in them, such a waste of opportunities seemed to her supremely idiotic. The idea of a financier, a man of the world, a Crœsus of Paris and Berlin, sitting down to weep for the broken jug of spilt milk, for the shattered basket of eggs, like the farm-girl in the fable! What could be sillier or less remunerative? But she remembered she had often heard that the cleverest men in public business were always the greatest fools in private life.
She drove away in the radiance of the late afternoon in the Archduke’s carriage, Boo sitting opposite to her holding disconsolately a bouquet of orchids, of which the rarity did not compensate to her for not having got anything else.
“What a pity that man does not marry again,” said the old gentleman, as they passed through the olive and ilex woods of the park.
“I believe he is in love with his lost wife,” said Mouse.
“Very possibly,” replied the Archduke. “I remember her as a young girl; her beauty was quite extraordinary; it was her misfortune, for it was the cause of his jealousy.”