He was terrible, this old man, and notwithstanding
the paint on his face, I felt a certain respect for
him. While he was speaking, we could hear the
music upstairs, and the horses of the municipal guards
shaking their curb-chains in the square. From
without, our festivities must have seemed very brilliant,
all lighted up by their thousands of candles, and
with the great portico illuminated. And when one
reflected that ruin perhaps lay beneath it all!
We sat there in the vestibule like rats that hold
counsel with each other at the bottom of a ship’s
hold, when the vessel is beginning to leak and before
the crew has found it out, and I saw clearly that
all the lackeys and chambermaids would not be long
in decamping at the first note of alarm. Could
such a catastrophe indeed be possible? And in
that case what would become of me, and the Territorial,
and the money I had advanced, and the arrears due to
me?
That Francis has left me with a cold shudder down
my back.
The bright warmth of a clear May afternoon heated
the lofty casement windows of the Mora mansion to
the temperature of a greenhouse. The blue silk
curtains were visible from outside through the branches
of the trees, and the wide terraces, where exotic
flowers were planted out of doors for the first time
of the season, ran in borders along the whole length
of the quay. The raking of the garden paths traced
the light footprints of summer in the sand, while
the soft fall of the water from the hoses on the lawns
was its refreshing song.
All the luxury of the princely residence lay sunning
itself in the soft warmth of the temperature, borrowing
a beauty from the silence, the repose of this noontide
hour, the only hour when the roll of carriages was
not to be heard under the arches, nor the banging of
the great doors of the antechamber, and that perpetual
vibration which the ringing of bells upon arrivals
or departures sent coursing through the very ivy on
the walls; the feverish pulse of the life of a fashionable
house. It was well known that up to three o’clock
the duke held his reception at the Ministry, and that
the duchess, a Swede still benumbed by the snows of
Stockholm, had hardly issued from her drowsy curtains;
consequently nobody came to call, neither visitors
or petitioners, and only the footmen, perched like
flamingoes on the deserted flight of steps in front
of the house, gave the place a touch of animation with
the slim shadows of their long legs and their yawning
weariness of idlers.
As an exception, however, that day Jenkins’s
brougham was standing waiting in a corner of the court-yard.
The duke, unwell since the previous evening, had felt
worse after leaving the breakfast-table, and in all
haste had sent for the man of the pearls in order to
question him on his singular condition. Pain
nowhere, sleep and appetite as usual; only an inconceivable
lassitude, and a sense of terrible chill which nothing
