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Updated: June 12, 2025
His mind was as full of queer nooks and tortuous passages as any mansion-house of Elizabeth's day or earlier, where the rooms are cosey, albeit a little low in the roof; where dusty stained lights are falling on old oaken panellings; where every bit of furniture has a reverent flavour of ancientness; where portraits of noble men and women, all dead long ago, are hanging on the walls; and where a black-letter Chaucer with silver clasps is lying open on a seat in the window.
The dining-room is in accordance with the rest of the architecture and fittings up of the house, and is a very good reproduction of an old baronial hall, with high panellings and a roof of dark, polished wood. There were about twenty guests at table; and if they and the waiters had been dressed in mediaeval costume, we might have imagined ourselves banqueting in the Middle Ages.
The glorious carved panellings of Van Huysum and the portrait of the great Claes had been sold. The dining-room was empty: there was nothing in it but two straw chairs and a common deal table, on which Marguerite, terrified, saw two plates, two bowls, two forks and spoons, and the remains of a salt herring which Claes and his servant had evidently just eaten.
Underneath all these ancient structures were queer nooks and corners, secret passages and stairs, hiding-places, cellarings going far beneath the gardens at the backs of the houses: Neale, as a boy, had made many an exploration in them, especially beneath the bank-house, which was a veritable treasury of concealed stairways and cunningly contrived doors in the black oak of the panellings.
It may be that the primal source of all those pictorial delusions will be found among the oldest Hindoo, Egyptian, and Grecian sculptures. For ever since those inventive but unscrupulous times when on the marble panellings of temples, the pedestals of statues, and on shields, medallions, cups, and coins, the dolphin was drawn in scales of chain-armor like Saladin's, and a helmeted head like St.
Lloyd's dog-cart, a very gorgeous, high-wheeled affair, was always kept at Bannister. The room in which she now sat was delightful. Everything was white, from the curtains of the bed to the chintz hangings on the walls. A rug of white fur was on the floor. The panellings and wooden shutters of the windows were painted white.
It was in that grave and silent abode, with Alresca, that I first acquired a taste for bric-â-brac. Ah! the Dutch marquetry, the French cabinetry, the Belgian brassware, the curious panellings, the oak-frames, the faience, the silver candlesticks, the Amsterdam toys in silver, the Antwerp incunables, and the famous tenth-century illuminated manuscript in half-uncials!
On the wall, just above his shoulder, is a sketch of a Viking putting the lighted brand to his ship in mid sea, and you are to understand that his time is come and so should a Viking die: further, if you will, the subject is a modern Viking, ready for the responsibilities of the title. Sketches of our ancient wooden walls and our iron and plated defences line the panellings.
He delights in sombre, old Flemish rooms, with dim lights streaming through narrow Gothic windows, upon huge chimney-pieces and panellings, incrusted with antique figures, carved in the black heart of oak knights, and squires, and priests of old.
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