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It is rather a frightening portrait, that portrait of Lady Desmond. If you go into the gallery after nightfall with a candle the pale, far-away eyes stare past you into the dark corners of the wainscot, eyes either over-charged or empty—which? The house is not haunted, but you require either an unimaginative nerve or else a complete certainty of the house’s benevolence before you can wander through the state-rooms after nightfall with a candle. The light gleams on the dull gilding of furniture and into the misty depths of mirrors, and startles up a sudden face out of the gloom; something creaks and sighs; the tapestry sways, and the figures on it undulate and seem to come alive. The recesses of the great beds, deep in shadow, might be inhabited, and you would not know it; eyes might watch you, unseen. The man with the candle is under a terrible disadvantage to the man in the dark.
§ vii
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As there are three galleries among the state-rooms, so are there three principal bedrooms: the King’s, the Venetian Ambassador’s, and the Spangled Room. The King’s bedroom is the only vulgar room in the house. Not that the furniture put there for the reception of James the First is vulgar: it is excessively magnificent, the canopy of the immense bed reaching almost to the ceiling, decked with ostrich feathers, the hangings stiff with gold and silver thread, the coverlet and the interior of the curtains heavily embroidered with a design of pomegranates and tiger-lilies worked in silver on a coral satin ground, the royal cipher embossed over the pillows—all this is very magnificent, but not vulgar. What is vulgar is the set of furniture made entirely in silver: table, hanging mirror, and tripods—the florid and ostentatious product of the florid Restoration. There is a surprising amount of silver in the room: sconces, ginger-jars, mirrors, fire-dogs, toilet-set, rose-water sprinklers, even to a little eye-bath, all of silver, but these smaller objects have not the blatancy of the set of furniture. Charles Sackville, for whom it was made, cannot have known when he had had enough of a good thing.