The uncommunicative old gardener continued his interrupted vocation; his wife, quitting the party and entering the house by a back door, suddenly flung open the windows of the drawing-room, and so admitted the visitors.
There is always an air of discomfort about a furnished house, a kind of grim bareness that suggests an asylum or a prison, rather than a home; and in foreign furnished houses this is specially apparent: there are the regulation amount of chairs and tables it is true; if there are any ornaments they are always either damaged or in bad taste: they generally combine both qualities. It was so at the Villa Lambert; but everything was spotlessly clean, everything was scrupulously cared for; the chairs stood ranged against the wall in a melancholy manner, cruel Philistine-looking chairs and guiltless of cushions. There were two hard formal-looking couches, with straight backs and spider legs. There was a sort of creepy look about the whole place.
"I wonder where the last proprietor hung himself, dear?" whispered Lucy in her cousin's ear.
But from the rather dismal _salon_ they passed into a more cheerful room. As the old housekeeper opened the shutters one by one streams of strong sunlight entered the place; the floor was inlaid wood, the walls were panelled to the ceiling, and elaborately carved; the ceiling itself was of polished wood, beautifully veined; the furniture was of oak, heavy and substantial; attempt at ornament there was none, nor was ornament needed, for from the windows of this room one looked out straight over the blue waters of the lake. The cheerful sound of music came from the deck of a big saloon steamer, bearing its crowd of noisy tourists. On the opposite shore, at Villeneuve, were the wooded grounds of the hotel Byron; Chillon, a white spot in the turquoise sea, was plainly visible to the right. The cousins stepped to the open windows and descended the flight of stairs that led from the centre one; it brought them to a little terrace which overhung the lake.
Lucy clapped her hands with delight, her more staid cousin was rapt in pleased astonishment. In an instant the thousand and one well-known descriptions ran through her mind, and she thought of the impassioned picture of the palace on the Como lake, which Claude Melnotte had poured into Pauline's delighted ear. Ought she not to be happy? Was not her handsome husband the very ideal Claude?