Mr. Massarene’s countenance cleared a little. “Oh, yes I believe there is some old china in that apartment. I could take your Excellency in to see it if Lady Kenilworth has gone out; did her maid say that she had?”
Though the ambassador’s countenance was trained to express nothing it did express for an instant a lively alarm.
“Oh, some other time, on some other occasion,” he said hurriedly. “It would not do at all to go into a lady’s chambers in her absence.”
Mr. Massarene felt that he had committed a solecism in proposing such a thing. Yet to his homely mind it seemed a still greater offence to go into her chamber when she was present.
He was perplexed, and uncertain of his ground, and intimidated by the rank and aspect of this notable foreigner; but he looked with an odd expression in his eyes at the dressing-gown of old-gold silk lined with pale rose plush in which the slender person of the visitor to the china birds was arrayed. It might be the custom for dilettanti to pay early morning visits in this kind of attire to see works of art, but he did not think that it was so. He was oppressed, amazed, annoyed, what his guest in the dressing-gown would have called ombrageux, and two conflicting feelings were at work within him: one a sombre jealousy and the other that offended sense of outraged propriety natural to the class to which he belonged.
But he was not sure of his ground, he scarcely dared to realize what he suspected, and he was afraid of this grand gentleman, who, on arrival, had offered him the tips of two fingers and had said that the day was cold, and had from that moment completely forgotten his existence, so that the urbanity and familiarity of this address in the corridor roused suspicion as well as embarrassment in his breast. To think that his house should be used to shelter improper dalliance awakened all the Puritan element in his Protestant breast, whilst as well as his outraged morality there arose in him a different, a more personal, feeling of wrath, vexation, and impatient envy; ridiculous, he knew, but unconquerable. But the diplomatist did not wait for him to disentangle his sentiments, nor did he offer any reason for the untimely hour of his own artistic ardor of investigation.
“Au revoir, mon bon,” he said carelessly, and sauntered on till he reached the door at the other end of the gallery and vanished.
Mr. Massarene shut the valve of the heating-apparatus, and sighed; it was probably the first time in his unsentimental existence that he had ever sighed. How many things he had still to learn!
“Don’t you keep a plumber, Billy?” said Mouse very sharply, later in the day; “don’t you keep a plumber? What do you potter about the pipes yourself for? You woke me this morning opening and shutting those valves in the gallery.”
He muttered his regrets. He was about to say that a distinguished guest had told him that she was already out in the gardens at the time of his inspection of the heating-apparatus; but he perceived that he was on slippery ground, and he held his tongue, observing meekly that he was very afraid of fires, that servants were a bad lot, not to be trusted, and that it was through their negligence that overheated flues burned down half the country houses in England. But he saw that she was deeply and inexplicably displeased.