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A hall with open roof, wide double staircase, and music gallery, filled the central space between the two projecting wings, and at the back there was a banqueting-chamber or ball-room, where in more prosperous days, the family had been accustomed to dine on all stately occasions a room now shabby and grey with disuse.
But this contrast was more than ever accentuated on the evening of Herod's birthday, when the great banqueting-chamber was specially illuminated; the tables decked with flowers and gold and silver plate; laughter and mirth echoing through the vaulted roof from the splendid company that lay, after the Eastern mode, on sumptuous couches, strewing the floor from one end to the other of the spacious hall.
They went to luncheon in a secondary dining room a comfortable apartment, which served pleasantly for all small gatherings, and had that social air so impossible in a stately banqueting-chamber a perfect gem of a room, hung with gilt leather, relieved here and there by a choice picture in a frame of gold and ebony.
"Well, well," he grumbled, as he took the purse, "the times are hard, and likely to be harder; for when the lion's down who will feed the jackal? Give thy news thyself, and if it do but draw the noble Antony out of this hall of Groans, I care not what it be. Now the palace door is open, and there's the road to the banqueting-chamber."
Don Juan felt something like shame that he must be brought thus to his father's bedside, wearing a courtesan's bouquet, redolent of the fragrance of the banqueting-chamber and the fumes of wine. "You were enjoying yourself!" the old man cried as he saw his son.
Like Belshazzar, he saw clearly through his revels a gleaming hand that traced his doom in letters of flame, not on the narrow walls of the banqueting-chamber, but over the vast spaces of heaven that the rainbow spans. His feast was not, indeed, an orgy confined within the limits of a banquet, for he squandered all the powers of soul and body in exhausting all the pleasures of earth.
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