"Madam's pleasure," she answered. And I could see that she loved to baulk him. However, her pleasure was, this time, short-lived, for at that moment a little bell tinkled in a distant room, and she took up the lamp. "Come," she said. "And do you, sir," she continued, turning to me and speaking sharply, "hold up your head and look as if you could cut your own food. You are going to see an old woman. Do you think that she will eat you?"
I let the gibe pass, and wondering of whom and what it was she reminded me, whenever she spoke, I followed her up a short dark flight of stairs to a second ante-room, or closet, situate, as far as I could judge, over the other. It was hung with dull, faded tapestry and smelled close, as if seldom used and more seldom aired. Setting down the lamp on a little side-table whereon a crumpled domino, a couple of masks, and an empty perfume bottle already lay, she bade us in a low voice wait for her and be silent; and enforcing the last order by placing her finger on her lip, she glided quietly out through a door so skilfully masked by the tapestry as to seem one of the walls.
Left alone with Mr. Smith, who seated himself on the table, I had leisure to take note of the closet. Remarking that the wall at one end was partly hidden by a couple of curtains, between which a bare bracket stood out from the wall, I concluded that the place had been a secret oratory and had witnessed many a clandestine mass. I might have carried my observations farther; but they were cut short at this point by the return of the woman, who nodding, in silence, held the door open for us to pass.
[CHAPTER XVI]
The first to enter, and prepared for many things--among which the gloomy surroundings of an ascetic, devoted to the dark usages of the old faith, held the first place in probability--I halted in surprise on the threshold of a lofty and splendid room suffused with rose-tinted light, and furnished with a luxury to which I had been hitherto a stranger. The walls, hung with gorgeous French tapestry, presented a succession of palaces and hunting scenes, interspersed with birds of strange and tropical plumage; between which and the eyes were scattered a profusion of Japanese screens, cabinets, and tables, with some of those quaint Dutch idols, brought from the East, which, new to me, were beginning at this time to take the public taste. Embracing the upper half of the room, and also a ruelle, in which stood a stately bed with pillars of silver, a circle of stronger light, dispersed by lamps cunningly hidden in the ceiling, fell on a suite of furniture of rose brocade and silver; in the great chair of which, with her feet on a foot-stool set upon the open hearth, sat an elderly lady, leaning on an ebony stick. A monkey mowed and gibbered on the back of her chair; and a parrot, vieing in brilliance with the broidered birds on the wall, hung by its claws from a ring above her head.
Nor was the lady herself unworthy of the splendour of her surroundings. It is true, her face and piled-up hair, painted and dyed into an extravagant caricature of youth, aped the graces of sixteen, and at the first glance touched the note of the grotesque rather than the beautiful; but it needed only a second look to convince me that with all that she on whom I looked was a great lady of the world, so still she sat, and so proud and dark was the gaze she bent on me over her clasped hands.
At first, it seemed to me, she gazed like one who, feeling a great surprise, has learned to hide that and all other emotions. But presently, "Come in, booby," she cried, in a voice petulant and cracking with age. "Does a woman frighten you? Come nearer, I say. Ay, I have seen your double. But the lamp has gone out."
The woman who had admitted me rustled forward. "It has sunk a little perhaps, madam," she said in a smooth voice. "But I----"
"But you are a fool," the lady cried. "I meant the lamp in the man, silly. Do you think that anyone who has ever seen him would take that block of wood for my son? Give him a brain, and light a fire in him, and spark up those oyster eyes, and----turn him round, turn him round, woman!"