She might have been frightened of the Beast’s silence if she had not been so absorbed by her thoughts, in not thinking the thoughts that most pressed on and plucked at her. She came to herself and noticed his silence and wondered if she had offended him, and a small cold prickle of fear touched her. But then he said: “You will see... what remains of my garden.” He looked out over the box hedges, the paths, and the stone pools, and she thought that they brought him no pleasure; this was not what he thought of when he thought of his garden. “Later.”
He led her into his great house, and Beauty followed timidly, keeping not too near to him, but not—she hoped—too far away. Everything was silent, except when Beauty brushed her hand against a curtain, or a dangling crystal drop from a low sconce—just to hear the sound. The carpet was deep, and neither her footsteps nor the Beast’s made any noise at all; nor did he make any further attempt at conversation, and she could think of nothing she wished to say to him.
But there was still—wasn’t there?—some odd quality to this silence, a heaviness, as if the air itself were denser here than usual, that it did not carry sound as ordinary air did, that it required a slightly greater effort than usual to walk through. Was this what a sorcerer’s house always felt like? She had never been invited indoors at the house of the salamander’s master, but he had also been retired, so perhaps that would still have told her nothing. There had been no sense of oppression—of otherness—in his front garden, except by what the salamander provided in its own self, and that was all she knew. There was an almost liquid quality to this air, to this unknown ether coiling among the solid objects, herself and the Beast among them. She waved her arm in front of her and fancied that she saw liny, ghostly ripples of turbulence, like the surface of a troubled pond, following the motion.
But even this occupied only part of her attention. She was so astonished by everything she saw that this oppression—whatever caused it—was not as great as that simpler oppression of spirits she had anticipated when she had followed the Beast indoors. She knew that her weariness of soul and body, after what had already happened to her both today and all the days since her father had relumed from his disastrous journey, made her more susceptible to intimidation, but knowing this, she was still oppressed and intimidated and had little power of resistance.
This indoors was so unlike what she had left, so unlike even the very grand house they had had, long ago, in the city when they had been wealthy. It seemed to her that this house was as much grander than their city house as their city house was to Rose Cottage, and it was Rose Cottage that she loved, far more than she had ever loved anything in the city. And the walls were so high and wide, the ceilings so distant that the Beast seemed no larger than an ordinary man, in such a setting, but Beauty felt no bigger than a beetle, creeping after him.
At last they came to an enormous circular room, with an eight-pointed star inlaid upon the floor, and eight doorways leading out of it, and sunlight through a dome overhead, the dome ringed with an inlay that matched the star. Even here the Beast’s footfalls made no sound, but Beauty’s more ordinary shoes made a soft tapping on the smooth bare floor. The Beast strode across the star without hesitation, the wings of his gown laying flying shadows over the sparkling tiles, and threw open one of the doors. “I will leave you now,” he said. “If there is anything you need, say it aloud, and if it is within this house’s power—or mine—it will be brought to you at once.’’ He turned to go the way they had come.
“Oh, but wait,” said Beauty. “Please. Your garden—”
“Later,” said the Beast, his hand on the door, and he crossed the threshold without pausing.
Beauty looked after him as the door closed behind him, but as soon as she looked away—to the other doors, to the sun lighting up the gilt and coloured enamel tiles in the floor—she no longer knew which door they had entered by. She turned to the one that had remained open, the one the Beast had opened for her.
Inside was an enormous room, or rooms. There were no proper doorways with doors, hut a series of large spaces semidivided by half-width walls, their demarcations more clearly indicated by the arrangement of the furnishings. There were jungles of furniture, cities of statuary, and the walls were thick with tapestries and paintings.
The outer rooms of the palace which she had seen had been even larger, more dramatically designed, more spectacularly ornamented: these rooms were almost more humbling by being closer to her own experience of wealth and magnificence. She knew she did not belong in this palace; this recurred to her with every caress of the queer thick air against her skin. But in these rooms ... It was a little as if a king had decided to reward a farmer, and knowing the farmer would have no use for, nor interest in, silks and velvets and fancy wines, still gave him a phaeton and a team of blood horses when he would rather have had a good pair to pull his plough.
It took her a little while to realise that her sense of the wrong sort of familiarity—the not merely disorienting, the distressing pull towards something unsuitable, as the farmer might have admired, and even longed for, the phaeton team—was caused by the fact that every decorative pattern, every carving, every lick of paint and bit of fabric, were of vines and flowers and trees and fruit. And the commonest representation was of roses.
The carpet she first stepped ob from the mosaic floor of the chamber of the star was dark green, but it was also thick with huge pale pink cabbage roses. Towards the first wide door space these grew darker till in the next room the roses were all a vivid pink; but they faded again and lost some of their petals towards the next doorway, till in the next room the roses Beauty walked on opened fiat, their golden stamens showing in the centre of but a dozen or so gracefully curved petals which were pink-tipped and cream-hearted ... and so on.
The wallpaper—what could be seen of it—all bore small climbing roses in different colours, and the table that stood in the centre of the first room, so that Beauty had to go round it to reach the next, had roses carved in relief round its edge, and inlaid in exquisitely tinted pietra dura across its surface; the stems of the torcheres, standing in slender elegant clusters in every corner, were wound round with roses, and tiny rosebuds surrounded each individual candle: a stone maiden, not unlike the one Beauty had seen in the pool in the front garden, stood holding a bowl of roses over her head, whose brim she had tipped, and she was so covered by a cascade of stony roses that all of her that was visible were an eye, one cheek, a smiling mouth, and the tips of her toes.