Читать книгу Knole and the Sackvilles - V. Sackville-West - Страница 11

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In a remote corner of the house is the Chapel of the Archbishops, small, and very much bejewelled. Tapestry, oak, and stained-glass—the chapel smoulders with colour. It is greatly improved since the oak has been pickled and the mustard-yellow paint removed, also the painted myrtle-wreaths, tied with a gilt ribbon, in the centre of each panel, with which the nineteenth century adorned it, when it was considered “very simple, plain, and neat in its appearance, and well adapted for family worship.” The hand of the nineteenth century fell rather heavily on the chapel: besides painting the oak yellow and the ceiling blue with gold stars, it erected a Gothic screen and a yellow organ; but fortunately these are both at the entrance, and you can turn your back on them and look down the little nave to the altar where Mary Queen of Scots’ gifts stand under the Perpendicular east window. All along the left-hand wall hangs the Gothic tapestry—scenes from the life of Christ, the figures, ungainly enough, trampling on an edging of tall irises and lilies exquisitely designed; and “Saint Luke in his first profession,” wrote Horace Walpole irreverently, “holding a urinal.” There used to be other tapestries in the house; there was one of the Seven Deadly Sins set, woven with gold threads, and there was another series, very early, representing the Flood and the two-by-two procession of the animals going into a weather-boarded Ark; but these, alas, had to be sold, and are now in America.

THE STONE COURT

The chapel looks strange and lovely during a midnight thunderstorm: the lightning flashes through the stone ogives of the east window, and one gets a queer effect, unreal like colour photography, of the colours lit up by that unfamiliar means. A flight of little private steps leads out of my bedroom straight into the Family Pew; so I dare to say that there are few aspects under which I have not seen the chapel; and as a child I used to “take sanctuary” there when I had been naughty: that is to say, fairly often. They never found me, sulking inside the pulpit.