“What a site for a Calvary!” Father Nostradamus replied, indicating with a detached and pensive air the cleft in the White Mountain’s distant peaks.
“I adore the light the hills take on when the sun drops down,” Mademoiselle de Nazianzi declared.
“It must be close on Salut....”
It was beneath the dark colonnades by the Court Chapel door that they received the news from the lips of a pair of vivacious dowagers that the Prince was to leave the Summer-Palace on the morrow to attend “the Manœuvres,” after which it was expected his Royal Highness would proceed “to England.”
X
And meanwhile the representatives of the Court of St James were enjoying the revivifying country air and outdoor-life of the Villa Clement. It was almost exquisite how rapidly the casual mode of existence adopted during the summer villeggiatura by their Excellencies, drew themselves and their personnel together, until soon they were as united and as sans gêne as the proverbial family party. No mother, in the “acclimatization” period, could have dosed her offspring more assiduously than did her Excellency the attachés in her charge; flavouring her little inventions frequently with rum or gin until they resembled cocktails. But it was Sir Somebody himself if anyone that required a tonic. Lady Something’s pending litigation, involving as it did the crown, was fretting the Ambassador more than he cared to admit, and the Hon. Mrs Chilleywater, ever alert, told “Harold” that the injudicious chatter of the Ambassadress (who even now notwithstanding her writ, would say to every other visitor that came to the villa: “Have you heard about the Ritz?? The other night we were dining at the Palace, and I heard the King,” etc.) was wearing their old Chief out.
And so through the agreeable vacation life there twitched the grim vein of tension.
One day disturbed by her daughter’s persistent trilling of the latest coster song When I sees ’im I topple giddy, Lady Something gathered up her morning letters and stepped out upon the lawn.
Oh so formal, oh so slender towered the Cypress-trees against the rose-farded hills and diamantine waters of the lake. The first hint of Autumn was in the air; and over the gravel paths, and in the basins of the fountains, a few shed leaves lay hectically strewn already.
Besides an under-stamped missive, with a foreign postmark, from her Majesty the Queen of the Land of Dates beginning “My dear Gazel,” there was a line from the eloquent, and moderately-victorious, young barrister, engaged in the approaching suit with the Ritz: He had spared himself no pains he assured his client in preparing the defence, which was he said to be the respectability of Claridge’s.