His host preceded him, lit a candle with his own hands, and showed the way up the staircase. At its head opened a very wide corridor, lit from above by skylights, and hung with pictures which were part of the glory of the house.
They passed one canvas after another, Lord Benthorpe still holding and shading the candle, Mr Burden listening with intelligent respect to all he heard. This was Naples, that Lucerne; a third Nice, a fourth Mentone—all the strange, beautiful places Lord Benthorpe had admired in the course of his extensive travels: pictures ordered by him from local masters whose name still stood clearly inscribed in the bottom left-hand corner of their creations.
There were portraits too. A very fine, but somewhat sinister figure, turbaned and sombre, was his great-aunt Kathleen, his grandfather’s only sister. His grandmother, represented as the Tragic Muse, filled amply the next frame; his grandfather the next.
Standing in his robes against a fringed and tasselled velvet curtain of a rich purple hue with a broken pillar at his side, while a sunbeam bursting through a distant cloud, threw into fine relief the orator’s gesture, the Great Irishman was represented speaking in the House of Lords in favour of the reform of the Poor Law. His left hand touched with the index finger a map of Great Britain; his right was slightly raised to heaven in dignified appeal. A wolf-hound nestling at his feet indicated the domestic nature of his character, for the taste of that time permitted the allegory in spite of the grave improbability of such a creature’s presence in such a place and upon such an occasion.
Towards the end of the corridor, before a painting more modern in treatment and hanging quite alone, they halted a moment in silence. It represented a woman yet young: hair of a colour similar to her own was caught up behind her head in those ordered masses once known as the Chignon; her skirt, which was most ample, was of a brilliant pink; she was seated writing at a superb escritoire, or writing-table, holding a graceful quill in a hand of which the little finger emerged coquettishly above its fellows. The frame was surmounted by the ornament of a dainty coronet; upon the features an amiable smile was recorded.
“My wife,” said Lord Benthorpe simply. Then, after a long pause, “by Marsten ...”; finally in a deeper and more subdued voice ... “from a photograph.”
The two men parted, and Mr Burden dressed in profound thought, wondering to have seen so much greatness united with such native ease.
Lord Benthorpe had been granted by his financial assistants the widest latitude for this evening’s entertainment. Indeed, a cheque, upon which no questions were asked, was sent him the moment his request reached them. He preferred, however, with inbred tact, to call but one other guest to his table, lest the merchant should be confused by too considerable a gathering. This other guest, chosen with admirable judgment, was Mrs Warner, who lived as an honoured neighbour in the seclusion of her widowed cottage near by. Lord Benthorpe introduced the clergyman’s widow as is the custom among men of breeding, in a voice so low and blurred as to leave Mr Burden under the erroneous impression that the lady, if not a peeress, enjoyed at least a courtesy title; nor can I regret the trivial error, when I reflect how admirably it served at once to prove the equality that reigns over all our social relations, and to afford, though by an illusion, the most vivid interest and pleasure to my dear old friend.
As for the meal that followed, not the mere meats, though these also had been ordered by the master of the house and cooked to singular perfection—not these, but the subdued and cultured converse which illumined it, are most worthy of memory.
To a soup, clear, but if anything insufficiently salted, and during the absorption of which very little was said, succeeded a boiled turbot, whose sauce, a mixture of butter and of flour, was handed noiselessly from out the surrounding darkness by a manservant other than he who poured at intervals of due length, and at the personal choice of each guest, hock or claret.