He led me down the hall with its bare, cold flagstones and somber paneling dimly seen under the feeble gleaming light he carried, and in a few paces my grim host stopped and held that shine aloft. It shone redly on a tarnished trophy of arms, chain-mail, and helmets, whence he bid me choose whatever took my fancy, making the while small effort to hide his contempt for the obvious eagerness and pleasure with which I sampled that dusty hoard. After a minute or two I selected a strong Spanish blade, a little light and playful, perhaps, with golden arabesques all down it, and a pretty fluted hollow for the foeman’s blood, and a chased love-knot at the hilt; yet, nevertheless, a good blade, and serviceable, with an edge as keen as a lover’s eye, and a temper as true as ever was got into good steel, I thought, as I sprang it on the tiles, between hammer and anvil. This Toledo blade had a cover of black velvet, bound and hooped with silver bands, and a stout belt of like kind, nicely suiting that livery I carried upon my arm. I bound the sword about me, and, after being so long unweaponed, found it wondrous comfortable and pleasant wear.
“Now then, Sir Host,” I cried, “lead on! If this chamber of thine were in the porch of paradise or in the nethermost pit of hell, I am equally ready to explore it.”
Up the gloomy stairs we went, now to right and then to left, by corridors and passages, until the road we came was hopelessly mazed to me; and soon my host led to a wider, gloomier avenue of silent doorways than any we had passed.
“Choose!”—he laughed—“choose you a bed! Better men than you have lodged—and died—within these cheerful chambers.” And that wild old man, with furrowed face and mad, sparkling eyes, seeming in that small, round globe of light like some spectral remnant of the fortunes of his lonely house, opened door after door for me to note the grim black solitudes within. In every chamber hung the same staring portraits on the wall, cold, proud, dead eyes fixed hard upon you wherever you might look! on every rotten cornice were tattered hangings, half shrouding those dim cobwebbed windows that gazed so wistfully out upon the moonlit garden; and dusky panel doors and cupboard casements that gently creaked and moved upon the sighing draught till you could swear ghostly fingers played upon the latches; the same stern black furniture, crumbling and decayed, was in each set straight against the walls; the same cenotaph four-posted bedsteads with ruined tapestries and moldy coverlets—“Choose,” he laughed, with a horrid goblin laughter that rattled down the empty corridors—“my house is roomy, though the guests be few and silent.”
But, in truth, there was little to choose where all was so alike. Therefore, and not to seem the least bit moved by all this dreadfulness, I threw down my borrowed clothes and rapier upon the settle in one of the first rooms we happed upon, and said: “Here, then, good host—and thanks for courteous harborage! What time doth sound reveillé—what time, I mean, doth thy household wake?”
“My household, stranger, sleeps on forever. They will not wake for any mortal sunrise, and I spend the long night-hours in work and vigil”—and he looked at me with the gloomy fanaticism of an absent mind—“yet you must wake again,” he went on after a minute. “I have something to ask thee to-morrow, perhaps something to show——”
“Why, then, until we meet again, good-night and pleasant vigils, since it is to them you go.”
“Good-night, young man, and sober sleep! Remember this is no place to dream of tilts and tourneys, of lost causes or light leman love”; and, muttering to himself as he shuffled down the bare, dusty floors, I heard him pass away from corridor to corridor, and flight to flight, until even that faint sound was swallowed by the cavernous silence of the sepulchral mansion, and night and impenetrable stillness fell on those empty stairways and gaunt voiceless rooms.
CHAPTER XIX
I slept all that night a deep, unbroken slumber, waking with the first glimpse of morning, calm and refreshed, but very sleepily perplexed at my surroundings. It was only after long cogitations that the thread of my coming hither took form and shape. When at last I had examined myself in my antecedents, and reduced them to the melancholy present, I got up and looked from the window. A fair tract of country lay outside, deep-wooded and undulating, with pastoral meadows in between the hangers, and beyond, in the open, that streamlet whose prattle had been heard the night before lay spread into a broad, rushy tarn overgrown with green weeds and water things, and then running on through the flat soft meadows of this hollow where the house was built wound into the far distance, where it joined something that shone in the low white light like the gleam of a broader river. It was not a cheerful morning, for it had rained much, and the chilly mist hung low and still about these somber-wooded thickets, and the long grass between them; the sleepy rooks in the nests upon the bare treetops were later to wing than usual, cawing melancholy from the sodden boughs as though loth to leave them; and down below nothing sang or moved but the dark black merle fluttering along the covert side, and the mavis tuning a plaintive and uncertain note from off the wet fir-tops.