But Watkins stayed him.
“This way, hif you please, sir,” the valet said subserviently, indicating a quite different turn in the vast hall. “The ladies are that side of the ’ouse, sir, hand the military gentleman, because of his lidy, but your rooms are hover ’ere, sir, and this man will hattend you.”
Traherne nodded a little curtly but, as the others already had done, did as he was told. Best carry on, he reflected, none too reassured, and carry on warily and quietly.
They all separately had come to the same forced, uncomfortable conclusion.
Alone, lost in this no-white-man’s land, the three English just carried on. It seemed all they could do.
CHAPTER XXI
The rooms to which Mrs. Crespin and the two Englishmen had been conducted were in as perfect taste as they were luxurious and were all comfortable, hers even more all this than theirs, but all admirable and irreproachable.
But the room to which they were taken, to await the Raja’s pleasure and his dinner, left a good deal to be desired, displayed a good deal to regret. In no way as bad as the usual State Apartments of a native palace, it smacked of them in much. The room itself, and the costliness of the deckings, would have discredited no princely house in Europe or New York; a spacious and beautifully proportioned room, opening wide at the back upon a wide loggia. Beyond the loggia rose the snow-clad peaks of the distant mountains, rose-dappled now by the kiss of the late afternoon sun, and with strips and spaces of blue and soft purple sky between them.
The room itself was splendidly though dashingly and somewhat sparsely furnished. Most of its furnishings old-fashioned now—no “new-art” here—and some of it faded, but all the sightlier for that, because colors and materials, insistently pronounced when new, time and wear had softened and mellowed to a friendly, gracious exquisiteness that was welcome and restful and kind. But the usual clocks were there, a dozen or more, all of them ugly, several of them tawdry. Most of the actual furniture was black, but for that it was admirable, rich, not heavy, the black wood picked out delicately with gold, the upholstery covered with yellow brocades. But the yellow damasks and the gold tracing did not clash, for they had grown old and amiable together, and time had blended them. The crystal chandelier was there, to be sure, but only one, and a crystal chandelier with a difference. Its lines were graceful, its long pendants winked and sparkled pleasantly; and it flooded the great room without dominating it—a great, gorgeous, costly thing, but you could forget it. It was not insistent—imperial without being impertinent; old, dignified, in no way “new rich,” and no more garish than soft, changeable silk is. A rounded ottoman—an inviting resting-place heaped with soft cushions, neither buried nor crushed beneath them—stood under the chandelier, placed there too mathematically. The marble fireplace would have rejoiced an Athenian sculptor, or Robert Adam when he carved and cut old London’s Adelphi into forms and lines of beauty; and the mirror above it would have intrigued Marie Antoinette or the beauties of Watteau.
In this room of his the Raja of Rukh, if he himself had selected and directed its appointments, had mingled things from many lands and of many times, but they did not blend, and not many of them suited the room itself. Two crystal candlesticks on the fireplace mantle, echoed with their pendants the iridescent note of the large chandelier, and between them, the mantle’s only other ornament, stood exquisitely molded in bronze, eighteen inches perhaps in height, but a small thing in the room’s big space, a seemingly tiny reproduction of the six-armed goddess in the temple.