University of Virginia Library

3. CHAPTER III.
RUBBISH PALACE.

Stillfleet drew a great key, aimed at the
keyhole, and snapped the bolt, all with a mysterious
and theatrical air.

“Now,” said he, “how is your pulse?”

“Steady and full. Why should n't it be?”

“Shut your eyes, then! Open sesame! Eyes
tight? Enter into Rubbish Palace!”

He led me several steps forward.

“Open!” he commanded.

“Where am I?” I cried, staring about in surprise.

“City of Manhattan, corner of Mannering
Place and Ailanthus Square, Chrysalis College
Buildings.”

“Harry,” said I, “this is magic, phantasmagoria.
Outside was the nineteenth century;
here is the fifteenth. When I shut my eyes, I
was in a seedy building in a busy modern town;
I open them, and here I am in the Palazzo Sforza
of an old Italian city, in the great chamber
where there was love and hate, passion and despair,

revelry and poison, long before Columbus
cracked the egg.”

“It is rather a rum old place,” said Stillfleet,
twisting his third moustache, and enjoying my
surprise.

“Trot out your Bengal tiger. Let me swing
him, and measure the dimensions.”

“Tiger and I did that long ago. It is thirty
feet square and seventeen high.”

“Built for some grand college purpose, I suppose.”

“As a hall, I believe, for the dons to receive
lions on great occasions. But lions and great
occasions never come. So I have inherited. It
is the old story. `Sic vos non vobis ædificatis
ædes.' How do you like it? Not too sombre,
eh? with only those two narrow windows opening
north?”

“Certainly not too sombre. I don't want the
remorseless day staring in upon my studies.
How do I like it? Enormously. The place is
a romance.”

“It is Dantesque, Byronic, Victor Hugoish.”

“Yes,” said I, looking up. “I shall be sure
of rich old morbid fancies under this ceiling, with
its frescoed arabesques, faded and crumbling.”

“You have a taste for the musty, then,” said
Harry.

“Anything is better than the raw. The Chuzzlewit

has given me enough of that. Well, Harry,
your den is my den, if you say so.”

“Yours to have and to hold while I am gone,
and much romance may you find here. Let me
show you the whole. Here 's my bath-room,
`replete,' as the advertisements say, `with every
convenience.' Here, alongside, is my bedroom.”

He opened doors in the wall opposite the windows.

“A gilded bedstead!” said I.

“It was Marshal Soult's, bought cheap at his
sale.”

“A yellow satin coverlet!”

“Louis Philippe's. Citizen Sabots stole it from
the Tuileries in '48 and sold it to me.”

“But what is this dark cavern, next the bedroom?”
I asked. “Where does that door at
the back open?”

“Oh! that is my trash room. Those boxes
contain `Raphaels, Correggios, and stuff.' I was
jockeyed with old masters once, as my compatriots
still are. I don't hang them up and post
myself for a greenhorn.”

“But that door at the back?”

“What are you afraid of, Byng?”

“I ask for information.”

“Your voice certainly trembled. No danger.
Rachel will never peer through and hiss `Le
flambeau fume encore.' No Lady Macbeth will

march in, wringing her hands that never will be
clean.”

“I hope not, I am sure.”

“It is clear you expect it. Your tone is
ominous.”

“Indeed. A Palazzo Sforza style of place
inspires Palazzo Sforza fancies, perhaps. But
really, Harry, where does the door open?”

“It does not open, and probably will not till
doomsday. It is bolted solid on my side, whatever
it be on the other. It leads to a dark
room.”

“A dark room! that is Otrantoish.”

“A windowless room, properly an appendage
to this. But there is another door on the corridor.
You may have noticed it, closed with a
heavy padlock. The tenant enters there, and
asks no right of way of me.”

“The tenant, who is he? I should know my
next neighbor.”

“You know him already.”

“Don't play with my curiosity. Name.”

“Densdeth.”

“Densdeth,” I repeated, aware of a slight uneasiness.
“What use has he for a dark room?
— here, too, in this public privacy of Chrysalis?”

“The publicity makes privacy. Densdeth says
it is his store-room for books and furniture.”

“Well, why not? You speak incredulously.”

“Because there is a faint suspicion that he
lies. The last janitor, an ex-servant of Densdeth's,
is dead. None now is allowed to enter
there except the owner's own man, a horrid
black creature. He opens the door cautiously,
and a curtain appears. He closes the door before
he lifts it. Densdeth may pestle poisons,
grind stilettos, sweat eagles, revel by gas-light
there. What do I know?”

“You are not inquisitive, then, in Chrysalis.”

“No. We have no concierge by the street-door
to spy ourselves or our visitors. We can
live here in completer privacy than anywhere in
Christendom. Daggeroni, De Bogus, or Mademoiselle
des Mollets might rendezvous with my
neighbor, and I never be the wiser.”

“Well, if Densdeth is well bolted out of my
quarters, I will not pry into his. And now I 'll
look about a little at your treasures.”

“Do; while I finish packing. I cannot quite
decide about taking clean shirts to Washington.
In a clean shirt I might abash a Senator.”

“Abash without mercy! the country will thank
you,” said I. “But, old fellow, what a wealth
of art, virtu, and rococo you have here!”

“I have sampled all the ages of the world. No
era has any right to complain of neglect,” says
Stillfleet, patronizingly. “You will find specimens
of the arts from Tubal Cain's time down.

One does not prowl about Europe ten years without
making a fair bag of plunder. How old
Churm enjoys my old books, old plates, and old
objets!”

“I hope he will not desert the place when its
proper master is gone. Where are his quarters
in Chrysalis?”

“Story above, southwest corner, with an eye
to the sunset. Odd fellow he is! He lurks here
in a little hermit cell, when he might live in a
gold house with diamond window-panes.”

“Is he so rich?”

“Crœsus was a barefooted pauper to him.”

“Not a miser, — that I know.”

“No; he spends as a prairie gives crops. But
always for others. He would be too lavish, if
he were not discretion itself. Only his personal
habits are ascetic.”

“Perhaps he once had to harden himself sternly
against a sorrow, and so asceticism grew a
habit.”

“Perhaps. He is a lonely man. Well, here
I am, packed, abashing shirts and all! Come
down now. I must exhibit you, as my successor,
to Locksley, the janitor of Chrysalis, — and a
capital good fellow he is.”