“The whole thing,” explained her guest, pointing with the handle of her eye-glass toward the vista of the rooms.
“The—the—house?” said Mrs. Massarene hesitatingly, still not understanding. “We bought it—that is, Mr. Massarene bought it—and Prince Kristof of Karstein was so good as to see to the decorations and the furniture. The duke had left a-many fixtures.”
“Prin and Kris?” repeated Lady Kenilworth, hearing imperfectly through indifference to the subject and attention to the old Saxe around her. “I never heard of them. Are they a London firm?”
“Prince Kristof of Karstein,” repeated Mrs. Massarene, distressed to find the name misunderstood. “He is a great friend of ours. I think your ladyship saw him with us in Paris last autumn.”
Lady Kenilworth opened wide her pretty, innocent, impertinent, forget-me-not colored eyes.
“What, old Khris? Khris Kar? Did he do it all for you? Oh, I must run about and look at it all, if he did it!” she said, as she jumped from her seat, and, without any premiss or permission, began a tour of the rooms, sweeping swiftly from one thing to another, lingering momentarily here and there, agile and restless as a squirrel, yet soft in movement as a swan. She did run about, flitting from one room to another, studying, appraising, censuring, admiring, all in a rapid and cursory way, but with that familiarity with what she saw, and that accurate eye for what was good in it, which the mistress of all these excellent and beautiful things would live to the end of her years without acquiring.
She put up her eye-glass at the pictures, fingered the tapestries, turned the porcelains upside down to see their marks, flitted from one thing to another, knew every orchid and odontoglossum by its seven-leagued name, and only looked disapproval before a Mantegna exceedingly archaic and black, and a Pietro di Cortona ceiling which seemed to her florid and doubtful.
She went from reception-rooms to library, dining-room, conservatories, with drawing-rooms, morning-rooms, studies, bedchambers, galleries, bath-rooms, as swift as a swallow and as keen of glance as a falcon, touching a stuff, eyeing a bit of china, taking up a bibelot, with just the same pretty pecking action as a chaffinch has in an orchard, or a pigeon in a bean-field. Everything was really admirable and genuine. All the while she paid not the slightest attention to the owner of the house, who followed her anxiously and humbly, not daring to ask a question, and panting in her tight corset at the speed of her going, but basking in the sense of her visitor’s rank as a cat basks in the light and warmth of a coal fire and a fur-lined basket.
Not a syllable did Lady Kenilworth deign to cast to her in her breathless scamper through the house. She had some solid knowledge of value in matters of art, and she begrudged these delicious things to the woman with the face like a large unbaked loaf and the fat big hands, as her four-year-old Boo had begrudged the gold box.
“Really they say there is a Providence above us, but I can’t think there is, when I am pestered to death by bills, and this creature owns Harrenden House;” she thought, with those doubts as to the existence of a deity which always assail people when deity is, as it were, in the betting against them. She had read an article that morning by Jules Simon, in which he argued that if the anarchists could be only persuaded to believe in a future life they would turn their bombs into bottles of kid reviver and cheerfully black the boots of the bourgeoisie. But she felt herself that there was something utterly wrong in a scheme of creation which could bestow Harrenden House on a Margaret Massarene, and in a Divine Judge who could look on at such discrepancies of property without disapproval.