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And then he dreamed that he saw before him again that laid-out table, where one guest sat two yards from the other while all round holy pictures were hanging on the walls, with their faces turned away, as if they did not wish to gaze upon the scene. In the middle of the room there was hanging from the ceiling a heavy chandelier with twelve branches, and on it was swaying the host himself.
The door flew open, and a motley throng appeared men and women in file, two and two holding each other by the arm and stamping their heels on the ground to mark time, advanced into the studio like a snake uncoiling itself. They howled: "Come, and let us all be merry, Pretty maids and soldiers gay!" M. Saval, thunderstruck, remained standing in evening dress under the chandelier.
Tedham was sitting in the chair I had shown him when I brought him in, and in the half-light of one gas-burner in the chandelier he looked, with his rough, clean clothes, and his slouch hat lying in his lap, like some sort of decent workingman; his features, refined by the mental suffering he had undergone, and the pallor of a complexion so seldom exposed to the open air, gave him the effect of a workingman just out of the hospital.
As you sat drinking coffee out of the dark blue coffee cups with gold linings you knew it couldn't be true. You were reassured by the pattern of the chintzes pink roses and green leaves on a pearl-grey ground by the crystal chains and pendants of the chandelier, by the round black mirror sunk deep in the bowl of its gilt frame.
Walking for the belt, and I've got it too," laughed Jack, pointing to an old gilt chandelier chain hanging on the bedpost. "You little noodle, you'd better revolve into bed before you lose your head entirely. I never saw such a fellow for taking himself off his legs."
There was a soft-coal fire in the small, old-fashioned grate under the old, old-fashioned white marble mantel. Dozing always dozing on the hearth-rug, at a comfortable distance from the fire, was Herod, the big yellow cat. In the centre of the room, under the chandelier, was a table, with a cover of her mother's fancy working, and a drop-light with a green shade.
He next examined the broken incandescent burner in the chandelier in the middle of the room, and took careful measurements of the distances between the gas jet, the bedside and the door, observing, as he did so, that the gaslight was almost in a line with the foot of the bed.
These phantasms added their chill to that imparted by the tone of the walls, the landscapes, and the carpets, and contributed to the violence of the contrast when the chandelier was lighted up full glare, and the heat of the whole furnace welled up from the registers into the quivering atmosphere on one of the rare occasions when the Laphams invited company.
Here were the sanded floors, the old water-bottles, the large chandelier with its cut glasses in the middle of the room, the small tables with their coarse clean linen. The same old French waiters stood here and there about, each with impeccable apron and very peccable shoes, as is the wont of all waiters.
And now, if you will tip back your head like a paper-hanger whose Adam's apple would seem to attest a life of sidereal contemplation you will see in the center of the murk above you a single point of light. It is the spark that will ignite the great gas chandelier. I strain my neck to the point of breaking.
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