Evidently the gendarme was proud of his house, leaving the kitchen out of the question. That we did not see, nor madame’s bedroom, nor his; but he took us through suites of rooms on the walls of which were some fine pictures, while the massive furniture had once been very handsome and costly. But the heavy brocade upholsterings were faded and frayed; the solid rosewood and mahogany tables and chairs were tarnished and scratched; there was dust everywhere, and one of the small, silken couches was evidently Chance’s bed, when he chose to make it so, for he sprang upon it and lay down, with his tongue lolling and his eyes watching us intently.
“I think it awful untidy. Where are the servants, I wonder?” Mary said to me, in a low tone, but not so low that the gendarme did not hear her, and reply: “I think it is rather untidy, but mother will soon right it up when she comes; she is a raging housekeeper. As to servants, there are plenty of them, such as they are. I dare say the most of them are asleep in the sunshine.”
Up to this time I had said but little. Something was choking me, as I went through the rooms where Nicol used to live, and I tried to imagine him there, with his fastidious ideas and his dainty dress, free from spot or blemish.
“It must have been different then,” I thought, and I said: “Mr. Patoff told me they sometimes had as many as forty servants in his day.”
“Oh, yes,” the gendarme replied. “No doubt of it. I think we at one time had sixty, before the emancipation of the serfs, when labor cost nothing.”
“Sixty!” Mary repeated. “Why, at home if we have one we do well. What did sixty do?”
“I hardly know,” the gendarme answered her. “I think they fell over each other, and quarreled, mostly, and only did one thing, and then their duties were over for that day. We have fewer servants now and better service.”
Mary arched her eyebrows, as she looked around for signs of service, and finally wrote with her finger the word “shiftless” in the dust which lay thickly on the highly polished surface of a handsome inlaid table. If the gendarme saw it, he made no sign, but took us to the next floor through other rooms filled with old and expensive furniture, but in none of which I could have sat down with a homelike feeling. I was beginning to get tired, and showed it, when he said: “I must take you to my den, and then I am through.”
He opened a door into a large, airy room looking out upon the Nevsky and the Neva.
“This is something like it!” Mary exclaimed, pirouetting across the floor and seating herself in a large easy-chair near the window. “This is like home,” and she looked around her admiringly.