The room is long and deep.
Where the window is, the light streams in through the wide, stained-glass panes; but, inside, where the fireplace rises to the ceiling, it is always dark.
No one has ever seen the curtain drawn before the window. But, even if the sun could shine right into the room, it would never have seen a human being there. By day, the room is dead.
It is placed so strangely in the house that it seems to form no part of it. The life of every day passes outside it; and, even when the whole house is lighted up and the horses paw the ground in the gateway and glasses clink and music sounds in the great drawing-room, the door of the room remains constantly closed.
No one has ever crossed its threshold but the master of the house and his wife and the oldest servant in their employ.
For the room is the soul of the house and its tradition and its secret chamber.
It was destined for this purpose long ago by the man who built the house; and so cunningly did he contrive it that no one could guess that it was there, unless he knew of it. Then, when the work was ended, he sealed the architect’s tongue with a solemn oath and a heavy fee and the man kept his sworn word.
And the builder of the house decorated the room as richly as was possible according to the means of those days, with gilt and figured leather hangings and stained-glass window-panes and costly carpets from the East. But he placed no furniture in it until the very last. Then he brought two splendid armchairs which he had had made for him in Milan.
They were odd-looking chairs. They glided so smoothly over the floor that a child could move them, and were so large that people became quite small when they sat in them. Their woodwork was carved into birds and animals, whose faces grinned strangely in the dark but ceased to do so when the lights were lit.
When everything was thus ordered for the best, he called an old servant, who had been in the house since he was a child, gave him a key of the room and told him to care for it faithfully. Every evening, when it grew dusk, he was to light the candles on the mantelpiece and he was to do this even if he knew that his master was travelling in distant lands. Every morning, he was to adjust the room with his own hands. None but himself was ever to cross the threshold.