Chapter 21

So Redclyffe left the Hospital, where he had spent many weeks of
strange and not unhappy life, and went to accept the invitation of the
lord of Braithwaite Hall. It was with a thrill of strange delight,
poignant almost to pain, that he found himself driving up to the door
of the Hall, and actually passing the threshold of the house. He
looked, as he stept over it, for the Bloody Footstep, with which the
house had so long been associated in his imagination; but could nowhere
see it. The footman ushered him into a hall, which seemed to be in the
centre of the building, and where, little as the autumn was advanced, a
fire was nevertheless burning and glowing on the hearth; nor was its
effect undesirable in the somewhat gloomy room. The servants had
evidently received orders respecting the guest; for they ushered him at
once to his chamber, which seemed not to be one of those bachelor's
rooms, where, in an English mansion, young and single men are forced to
be entertained with very bare and straitened accommodations; but a
large, well, though antiquely and solemnly furnished room, with a
curtained bed, and all manner of elaborate contrivances for repose; but
the deep embrasures of the windows made it gloomy, with the little
light that they admitted through their small panes. There must have
been English attendance in this department of the household
arrangements, at least; for nothing could exceed the exquisite nicety
and finish of everything in the room, the cleanliness, the attention to
comfort, amid antique aspects of furniture; the rich, deep preparations
for repose.

The servant told Redclyffe that his master had ridden out, and, adding
that luncheon would be on the table at two o'clock, left him; and
Redclyffe sat some time trying to make out and distinguish the feelings
with which he found himself here, and realizing a lifelong dream. He
ran back over all the legends which the Doctor used to tell about this
mansion, and wondered whether this old, rich chamber were the one where
any of them had taken place; whether the shadows of the dead haunted
here. But, indeed, if this were the case, the apartment must have been
very much changed, antique though it looked, with the second, or third,
or whatever other numbered arrangement, since those old days of
tapestry hangings and rush-strewed floor. Otherwise this stately and
gloomy chamber was as likely as any other to have been the one where
his ancestor appeared for the last time in the paternal mansion; here
he might have been the night before that mysterious Bloody Footstep was
left on the threshold, whence had arisen so many wild legends, and
since the impression of which nothing certain had ever been known
respecting that ill-fated man,--nothing certain in