Nicholas had not had much
experience of the art of fitting keys into keyholes and turning locks,
but for some days past he had practised with the key of the schoolroom
door; he did not believe in trusting too much to luck and accident. The
key turned stiffly in the lock, but it turned. The door opened, and
Nicholas was in an unknown land, compared with which the gooseberry
garden was a stale delight, a mere material pleasure.
Often and often Nicholas had pictured to himself what the lumber-room
might be like, that region that was so carefully sealed from youthful
eyes and concerning which no questions were ever answered. It came up to
his expectations. In the first place it was large and dimly lit, one
high window opening on to the forbidden garden being its only source of
illumination. In the second place it was a storehouse of unimagined
treasures. The aunt-by-assertion was one of those people who think that
things spoil by use and consign them to dust and damp by way of
preserving them. Such parts of the house as Nicholas knew best were
rather bare and cheerless, but here there were wonderful things for the
eye to feast on. First and foremost there was a piece of framed tapestry
that was evidently meant to be a fire-screen. To Nicholas it was a
living, breathing story; he sat down on a roll of Indian hangings,
glowing in wonderful colours beneath a layer of dust, and took in all the
details of the tapestry picture. A man, dressed in the hunting costume
of some remote period, had just transfixed a stag with an arrow; it could
not have been a difficult shot because the stag was only one or two paces
away from him; in the thickly-growing vegetation that the picture
suggested it would not have been difficult to creep up to a feeding stag,
and the two spotted dogs that were springing forward to join in the chase
had evidently been trained to keep to heel till the arrow was discharged.
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