It was all vast, stately and deserted. Only
ten days earlier she had been in the same place at a great reception,
brilliant with beautiful women and handsome men, alive with the
flashing of jewels and decorations in the vivid light, full of the
discreet noise of society in good-humour, full of faces she knew, and
voices familiar, and of the moonlight of priceless pearls and the
sunlight of historic diamonds; all of which manifestations she dearly
loved.
Her husband had perhaps known what was coming, and how soon, but she
had not. There was something awful in the contrast. As she went
through one of the rooms a mouse ran from under the fringe of a velvet
curtain and took refuge under an armchair. She had sat in that very
chair ten days ago and the Russian ambassador had talked to her; she
remembered how he had tried to extract information from her about the
new issue of three and a half per cent national bonds, because her
husband was one of the financiers who were expected to "manipulate"
the loan.
A portrait of a Conti in black velvet, by Velasquez, looked down,
coldly supercilious, at the empty armchair under which the mouse was
hiding. It could make no difference, great or small, to him, whether
the Baroness Volterra ever sat there again to talk with an ambassador;
he had sat where he pleased, undisturbed in his own house, to the end
of his days, and no one can take the past from the dead, except a
modern German historian.
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