Mouse knew this well enough—she had often been irritated at this room being locked against her; but her knowledge did not prevent her pillaging it any more than the sanctity of a church or a mosque to its pious devotees prevents soldiers from sacking and firing it. She had nothing to do, this rainy, chilly, dull day, and the examination of her mother-in-law’s relics and treasures served to pass the time; her second maid aided her, a sagacious and discreet young woman, who knew when to use her eyes and when to close them.
The poor dead duchess’s room was the cosiest and cheeriest in the whole huge building of Staghurst, which was an immense, uninteresting, last-century house built by Bonnani, and with a fire burning on its long-cold hearth, and a dozen wax-candles lighted in its silver sconces, it was a warm, comfortable, pleasant place for a chilly evening. She had a nice succulent little dinner served there, and when she had done full justice to it returned to her examination of the Japanese cabinets and the Indian boxes and the sandal-wood coffers.
What sentimental creatures men are, she thought, seeing a bouquet of flowers, which had been dead five-and-twenty years, still left untouched in their porcelain bowl in which the water had long been dry. If ever there was a male flirt, poor Poodle had been one, and yet he had cherished such a solemn culte for his dead wife that he had kept her morning-room like a temple for a quarter of a century! It seemed to her very droll.
The little boys came to bid her good-night, and she gave them some marrons glacés and kissed them and sent them away. She was impatient to go on with her examination of her late mother-in-law’s possessions before anyone could interrupt her, for she did not know at all who had the legal right to them.
Jack’s brilliant eyes under their long lashes roved over the room and espied the suggestive confusion of it.
“She’s been lootin’,” he thought; he knew what looting was; Harry had told him.
“P’rhaps these was looted too,” he thought, gazing down on his handful of Paris chestnuts.
He was a very honest little man; he was honest by nature, and Harry had made him so on principle; he had never seen his friend “dedful angy” save once, when he, Jack, had taken a large, sweet, crescent-shaped cake off a stall in the Promenade des Sept Heures at Spa.
His mother had no such qualms; she continued her investigations.
There were things which would have touched some women. There were the love letters of Otterbourne, then Lord Kenilworth, ardent, tender, and graceful, tied up with faded ribbon. There were innocent little notes written by Cocky in a big round hand between pencilled lines beginning “my darling mama.” There were baby shoes in pale-blue kid and pale-pink satin, of which the little wearers had died in infancy. There were diaries, very simple, very brief, not always perfectly well spelled, but always full of affectionate records and entreating prayers of which her husband and her children were the objects. But these things did not move the present occupier of the title and of the room; she pitched them all into a heap with no very gentle touch and cast the heap upon the fire. Old rubbish was best burned!