Shrewsbury by Stanley J. Weyman

The first to enter, and prepared for many things -- among which the gloomy surroundings of an ascetic, devoted to the dark usages of the old faith, held the first place in probability -- I halted in surprise on the threshold of a lofty and splendid room suffused with rose-tinted light, and furnished with a luxury to which I had been hitherto a stranger. The walls, hung with gorgeous French tapestry, presented a succession of palaces and hunting scenes, interspersed with birds of strange and tropical plumage; between which and the eyes were scattered a profusion of Japanese screens, cabinets, and tables, with some of those quaint Dutch idols, brought from the East, which, new to me, were beginning at this time to take the public taste. Embracing the upper half of the room, and also a _ruelle_, in which stood a stately bed with pillars of silver, a circle of stronger light, dispersed by lamps cunningly hidden in the ceiling, fell on a suite of furniture of rose brocade and silver; in the great chair of which, with her feet on a foot-stool set upon the open hearth, sat an elderly lady, leaning on an ebony stick. A monkey mowed and gibbered on the back of her chair; and a parrot, vieing in brilliance with the broidered birds on the wall, hung by its claws from a ring above her head.

Nor was the lady herself unworthy of the splendour of her surroundings. It is true, her face and piled-up hair, painted and dyed into an extravagant caricature of youth, aped the graces of sixteen, and at the first glance touched the note of the grotesque rather than the beautiful; but it needed only a second look to convince me that with all that she on whom I looked was a great lady of the world, so still she sat, and so proud and dark was the gaze she bent on me over her clasped hands.