Therefore, Arthur Burnside, in his black bowler hat and unfashionable overcoat, did not trouble to ring the electric bell, which brought the ducal porter to the little door in the wall, but turned in at the main entrance.
The policeman knew him, and, vaguely recognising him as a henchman of the entourage, saluted as the young scholar of Paul's went by. The great front door of the house was closed. Six people lived in the empty palace and kept its solitariness warm, but there was a side entrance which they used, and which Burnside, since Colonel Simpson had confirmed the dukes' appointment, used also.
He went in, walking briskly through the keen air, rang the bell, was admitted by an under-steward, and hung up his coat and hat in a small lobby. Then he traversed a longish corridor, pushed open a green baize door at the end of it, and came into the great central hall of the house. As he did so he looked round him, stopped, and sighed.
There was a great marble staircase before him, a staircase of white marble from Carrara, which mounted to a wonderful marble balcony, which ran round the central square of the famous house. Statues, each one of which was known and priced minutely in the catalogues of the connoisseurs, were standing in their cold beauty on the stairway. The celebrated purple carpet from Teheran ran up to the gallery above. All round in the hall were huge doors of mahogany, leading to this or that marvellous salon. Another and older carpet of purple, extraordinarily large and woven in Persia for the late duke many years ago, covered the tesselated pavement. There were chairs set about, examples of priceless Chippendale, and little glass-topped tables held collections of miniatures, which were as well known as they were priceless.
The three pictures which hung in the lower part of the great hall beneath the gallery, and surrounding the door which led to the library, were three Gainsboroughs of riant beauty and incomparable value.
But it was all a dead house, a house where nobody lived, a museum of priceless treasures which nobody ever saw.
As the young man stepped across the heavy carpet, walking upon it as one walks upon a well-trimmed tennis lawn, he shuddered a little to think that all this collection of beauty was crammed together in a dead profusion which appealed to nobody. He said to himself: "How terrible it all is! How terrible it is to think of this huge palace of art, set in the very centre of London, closed and shuttered with no appeal to the world. No one can come and see these lovely and famous things, and I myself, who appreciate each and every one of them, am oppressed, not only by the silence and seclusion of it all, but also by the fact that in this one house there are stored treasures of art so thickly that one has no time to think about this before the adjacent other one comes and obscures one's comprehension."
He pushed open the vast panelled door which led to the library and entered. The library was a huge place, as big as the central room in the town hall of any flourishing provincial town. The ceiling was designed by Adams, and the supreme genius of that master of plaster-work seemed to burgeon out and down into the place, reminding one always that the great artist had been here. The books, in their glass-fronted cabinets, reached only to a half-height of the walls. On the top of the shelves stood the late duke's well-known collection of Chinese porcelain of the Ming dynasty.
There were three great fires in the place, and each one of them was glowing now, as the solitary young scholar of Paul's entered and closed the heavy twelve-foot door behind him.