Eldredge's absence from England had been
spent in the search for some trace of those departing footsteps that had
never returned. It is very possible--probable, indeed--that there may
have been some ground for this remarkable legend; not that it is to be
credited that the family of Eldredge, being reckoned among sane men,
would seriously have sought, years and generations after the fact, for
the first track of those bloody footsteps which the first rain of drippy
England must have washed away; to say nothing of the leaves that had
fallen and the growth and decay of so many seasons, that covered all
traces of them since. But nothing is more probable than that the
continual recurrence to the family genealogy, which had been necessitated
by the matter of the dormant peerage, had caused the Eldredges, from
father to son, to keep alive an interest in that ancestor who had
disappeared, and who had been supposed to carry some of the most
important family papers with him. But yet it gave Middleton a strange
thrill of pleasure, that had something fearful in it, to think that all
through these ages he had been waited for, sought for, anxiously
expected, as it were; it seemed as if the very ghosts of his kindred, a
long shadowy line, held forth their dim arms to welcome him; a line
stretching back to the ghosts of those who had flourished in the old, old
times; the doubletted and beruffled knightly shades of Queen Elizabeth's
time; a long line, stretching from the mediaeval ages, and their
duskiness, downward, downward, with only one vacant space, that of him
who had left the Bloody Footstep.
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