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Updated: June 20, 2025
He found himself in a long oak-panelled room; that room whose west window looked out across the courtyard to the east window of the library. It was almost dark except for a small fire-lit, lamp-lit, square at the far end. Lucia was sitting in a low chair by the fireplace, under the tall shaded lamp, where the light fell full on her shoulders. She was not alone.
Tired as she was and frightened as she was feeling now, she could not but admire the beauty and symmetry of the place. Like most historic mansions of to-day, the place had been fitted with electric light, and a soft illuminating flood of it filled the hall. It was a magnificent oak-panelled apartment, filled with old armor and trophies, and lined with portraits of the owner's ancestors.
The two interlocutors in this dialogue were sitting in a low oak-panelled room in Plymouth town, handsomely enough furnished, adorned with carving and gilding and coats of arms, and noteworthy for many strange knickknacks, Spanish gold and silver vessels on the sideboard; strange birds and skins, and charts and rough drawings of coast which hung about the room; while over the fireplace, above the portrait of old Captain Will Hawkins, pet of Henry the Eighth, hung the Spanish ensign which Captain John had taken in fair fight at Rio de la Hacha fifteen years before, when, with two hundred men, he seized the town in despite of ten hundred Spanish soldiers, and watered his ship triumphantly at the enemy's wells.
Then had come some iconoclast who hewed a big rectangle through the solid stone-work, converted the oak-panelled apartment into a most comfortable dining-room, built a new wing with a gable, changed a farm-yard into a flower-bordered lawn, and generally played havoc with Georgian utility while carrying out a determined scheme of landscape gardening.
As they sat waiting for him in the oak-panelled dining-room, a fresh wave of pity swept over Elisabeth as she realized for the first time though she had sat there over and over again what a cheerless home this was in which to spend one's childhood and youth, and how pluckily Christopher had always made the best of things, and had never confessed even to her what a dreary lot was his.
He would never sit in the oak-panelled dining-room again, never see Manders again. . . . Throughout the ritual of the day he could not grow accustomed to saying good-bye. It was all so familiar; he never persuaded himself that everything was over. By an error of judgement he was several minutes late in reaching Belgrave Square, as when first he dined there.
But I could not eat much, and soon I took to walking, or rather limping being permanently lame from the bite of a lion up and down, up and down the oak-panelled vestibule; for there is a vestibule in my house in England. On all the four walls of this vestibule were placed pairs of horns about a hundred pairs altogether, all of which I had shot myself.
Of course, I did not find this very interesting, and so cast about for some means to bring the conversation round again. Now, we were dining in an oak-panelled vestibule, and on the wall opposite to me were fixed two gigantic elephant tusks, and under them a pair of buffalo horns, very rough and knotted, showing that they came off an old bull, and having the tip of one horn split and chipped.
He went into the long oak-panelled dining-room, where above the high carved dado were more Dares. Perhaps that man with the book was his namesake, the departed Alfred Dare. He wondered vaguely how he should look when he also took his place among his relations.
"We will be with you presently," she cried after Isabel. Then the two went together to the little west parlour, oak-panelled, with a wide fireplace with the logs in their places, and the latticed windows with their bottle-end glass, looking upon the walled garden. Anthony stood on a chair and opened the top window, letting a flood of summer noises into the room.
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