From the "Bloody Lane,"
overshadowed by trees, you come into the field in which Oakwell Hall is
situated. It is known in the neighbourhood to be the place described as
"Field Head," Shirley's residence. The enclosure in front, half court,
half garden; the panelled hall, with the gallery opening into the bed-
chambers running round; the barbarous peach-coloured drawing-room; the
bright look-out through the garden-door upon the grassy lawns and
terraces behind, where the soft-hued pigeons still love to coo and strut
in the sun,--are described in "Shirley." The scenery of that fiction
lies close around; the real events which suggested it took place in the
immediate neighbourhood.
They show a bloody footprint in a bed-chamber of Oakwell Hall, and tell a
story connected with it, and with the lane by which the house is
approached. Captain Batt was believed to be far away; his family was at
Oakwell; when in the dusk, one winter evening, he came stalking along the
lane, and through the hall, and up the stairs, into his own room, where
he vanished. He had been killed in a duel in London that very same
afternoon of December 9th, 1684.
The stones of the Hall formed part of the more ancient vicarage, which an
ancestor of Captain Batt's had seized in the troublous times for property
which succeeded the Reformation.
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