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Updated: June 19, 2025
Was he ever part and parcel of it all the Oriental rugs, the soft stair-carpet on the noble oak staircase leading to the gallery, the oil paintings, the impressive statuary, the solid, historical, oak hall furniture?
There was a great smell of nutmeg, port wine, and almonds, on the staircase; the covers were taken off the stair-carpet, and the figure of Venus on the first landing looked as if she were ashamed of the composition-candle in her right hand, which contrasted beautifully with the lamp-blacked drapery of the goddess of love. ‘Ah, uncle!’ said Mr. Kitterbell, ‘how d’ye do?
It was of a piece with the deep green "flock" wall paper, and the tea-urn, and the rocking-chairs with their antimacassars, and the harmonium in rosewood with a Chinese paper-mache tea-caddy on the top of it; even with the carpet, certainly the most curious parlour carpet that ever was, being made of lengths of the stair-carpet sewn together side by side.
Fences would not have improved her father's vast lawn, to her mind, or white paint the low-browed front of his dwelling; nor did she feel the want of a stair-carpet and a parlor-organ.
Again the word derided her. She opened the door, crossed the narrow hall, and walked up the stairs. As she passed, she noticed Westall's sticks and umbrellas: a pair of his gloves lay on the hall table. The same stair-carpet mounted between the same walls; the same old French print, in its narrow black frame, faced her on the landing. This visual continuity was intolerable.
A stair-carpet has other reasons for use in a country-house than æsthetic ones, as the stairs are conductors of sound to all parts of the house, and should therefore be muffled, and because a carpeted stair furnishes much safer footing for the two family extremes of childhood and age. The furniture of the hall should not be fantastic, as some cabinet-makers seem to imagine.
Even that hideous stair-carpet was a little worn, she noted, as noiselessly she mounted to the second story. The house was perfectly quiet, save for a tiny shrill continuance of melody that somehow seemed only to pierce the silence, not to dispel it. Rudolph of all things! had in her absence acquired a canary. And everybody knew what an interminable nuisance a canary was.
'Nursie' had said that there were stamps there, and evidently meant her to write, close, and post the letter, so as to save Stella trouble, and this she accordingly did, as there happened to be a pillar-box just outside the front-gate. Stella, who was still putting down the stair-carpet, heard the gate click, and observed, 'Oh dear, I hope that nobody is coming; they can't come through the hall.
"I'll come down to your room in time to help you finish dressing," Betty promised Georgia. "My things slip on in a minute." But she had reckoned without a loose nail in the stair-carpet, which, apparently resenting her hasty progress past it, had torn a yard of filmy ruching off her skirt before she realized what was happening. "Oh, dear!" she mourned, "now I shall have to rush just as usual.
'I told him you thanked him for his offer of holiday, and that you were busy putting down the stair-carpet, so had told me to write, and that you would be there on Monday at the usual time. That's all I said about you I mean about your business. The rest of the letter was just a friendly one from myself, she said.
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