The old woman had opened the tall narrow door meanwhile, revealing an interior dimly lighted by a lamp which must have been feeble always, but which was now the veriest glimmer. Lucius followed his new acquaintance through this doorway into a large square hall, from which a broad oaken staircase ascended to an open gallery. There was just enough light for Lucius to see that this hall, instead of being bare and meagrely furnished as he had expected to find it, was crowded with a vast assemblage of heterogeneous objects. Pictures piled against the gloomy panelled walls. Sculpture, porcelain, and delf of every nation and every period, from monster vases of imperial lacquer to fragile déjeuners of Dresden and Copenhagen; from inchoate groups of vermin and shell-fish from the workshop of Pallissy, to the exquisite modelling of teacups resplendent with gods and goddesses from Capo-di-Monte; from gaudy dishes and bowls of old Rouen delf, to the perfection of Louis-Seize Sèvres. Armour of every age, vases of jasper and porphyry, carved-oak cabinets, the particoloured plumage of stuffed birds, Gobelins tapestry, South-Sea shells, Venetian glass, Milan ironwork, were curiously intermingled; as if some maniac artist in the confusion of a once fine taste had heaped these things together. By that dim light, Lucius saw only the fitful glimmer of steel casques and breastplates, the half-defined shapes of marble statues, the outline of jasper vases and huge Pallissy dishes. Later he came to know all those treasures by heart. A Louis-Quatorze clock on a bracket began to strike six, and immediately a chorus of clocks in adjacent rooms, in tones feeble or strong, tenor or bass, took up the strain. ‘I am like Charles the Fifth, particular about my clocks,’ said Mr. Sivewright. ‘I keep them all going. This way, if you please, Mr.—’ ‘Davoren.’ ‘Davoren! That sounds a good name.’ ‘My father cherished a tradition to that effect—a good middle-class family. Our ancestor represented his native county in Queen Elizabeth’s first Parliament. But I inherited nothing except the name.’ He was staring about him in that doubtful light, as he spoke, trying to penetrate the gloom. ‘You are surprised to see such a collection as that in the Shadrack-road? Dismiss your wonder. I am not an antiquarian; but a dealer. Those things represent the remnant of my stock-in-trade. I kept a shop in Bond-street for five-and-thirty years.’ ‘And when you retired from business you kept all those things?’ ‘I kept them as some men keep their money, at compound interest. Every year I live increases the value of those things. They belong to manufactures that are extinct. With every year examples perish. Ten years hence the value of my stock will have multiplied by the square of my original capital.’