I EXPLORE A PASSAGE
“Bates!”—I found him busy replenishing the candlesticks
in the library,—it seemed to me that he was always
poking about with an armful of candles,—“there
are a good many queer things in this world, but I guess
you’re one of the queerest. I don’t mind telling you
that there are times when I think you a thoroughly bad
lot, and then again I question my judgment and don’t
give you credit for being much more than a doddering
fool.”
He was standing on a ladder beneath the great crystal
chandelier that hung from the center of the ceiling,
and looked down upon me with that patient injury
that is so appealing in a dog—in, say, the eyes of an
Irish setter, when you accidentally step on his tail.
That look is heartbreaking in a setter, but, seen in a
man, it arouses the direst homicidal feelings of which
I am capable.
“Yes, Mr. Glenarm,” he replied humbly.
“Now, I want you to grasp this idea that I’m going
to dig into this old shell top and bottom; I’m going
to blow it up with dynamite, if I please; and if I catch
you spying on me or reporting my doings to my enemies,
or engaging in any questionable performances
whatever, I’ll hang you between the posts out there in
the school-wall—do you understand?—so that the sweet
Sisters of St. Agatha and the dear little school-girls
and the chaplain and all the rest will shudder through
all their lives at the very thought of you.”
“Certainly, Mr. Glenarm,”—and his tone was the
same he would have used if I had asked him to pass
me the matches, and under my breath I consigned him
to the harshest tortures of the fiery pit.
“Now, as to Morgan—”
“Yes, sir.”
“What possible business do you suppose he has with
Mr. Pickering?” I demanded.
“Why, sir, that’s clear enough. Mr. Pickering owns
a house up the lake,—he got it through your grandfather.
Morgan has the care of it, sir.”
“Very plausible, indeed!”—and I sent him off to his
work.
After luncheon I went below and directly to the end
of the corridor, and began to sound the walls. To the
eye they were all alike, being of cement, and substantial
enough. Through the area window I saw the solid earth
and snow; surely there was little here to base hope upon,
and my wonder grew at the ease with which Morgan
had vanished through a barred window and into frozen
ground.
The walls at the end of the passage were as solid as
rock, and they responded dully to the stroke of the
hammer. I sounded them on both sides, retracing my
steps to the stairway, becoming more and more impatient
at my ill-luck or stupidity. There was every reason
why I should know my own house, and yet a stranger
and an outlaw ran through it with amazing daring.
After an hour’s idle search I returned to the end of
the corridor, repeated all my previous soundings, and,
I fear, indulged in language unbecoming a gentleman.
Then, in my blind anger, I found what patient search
had not disclosed.
I threw the hammer from me in a fit of temper; it
struck upon a large square in the cement floor which
gave forth a hollow sound. I was on my knees in an
instant, my fingers searching the cracks, and drawing
down close I could feel a current of air, slight but unmistakable,
against my face.
The cement square, though exactly like the others in
the cellar floor, was evidently only a wooden imitation,
covering an opening beneath.
The block was fitted into its place with a nicety that
certified to the skill of the hand that had adjusted it.
I broke a blade of my pocket-knife trying to pry it
up, but in a moment I succeeded, and found it to be
in reality a trap-door, hinged to the substantial part
of the floor.
A current of cool fresh air, the same that had surprised
me in the night, struck my face as I lay flat and
peered into the opening. The lower passage was as black
as pitch, and I lighted a lantern I had brought with me,
found that wooden steps gave safe conduct below and
went down.
I stood erect in the passage and had several inches
to spare. It extended both ways, running back under
the foundations of the house. This lower passage cut
squarely under the park before the house and toward
the school wall. No wonder my grandfather had
brought foreign laborers who could speak no English
to work on his house! There was something delightful
in the largeness of his scheme, and I hurried through
the tunnel with a hundred questions tormenting my
brain.
The air grew steadily fresher, until, after I had gone
about two hundred yards, I reached a point where the
wind seemed to beat down on me from above. I put
up my hands and found two openings about two yards
apart, through which the air sucked steadily. I moved
out of the current with a chuckle in my throat and a
grin on my face. I had passed under the gate in the
school-wall, and I knew now why the piers that held it
had been built so high,—they were hollow and were the
means of sending fresh air into the tunnel.
I had traversed about twenty yards more when I felt
a slight vibration accompanied by a muffled roar, and
almost immediately came to a short wooden stair that
marked the end of the passage. I had no means of
judging directions, but I assumed I was somewhere near
the chapel in the school-grounds.
I climbed the steps, noting still the vibration, and
found a door that yielded readily to pressure. In a
moment I stood blinking, lantern in hand, in a well-lighted,
floored room. Overhead the tumult and thunder
of an organ explained the tremor and roar I had heard
below. I was in the crypt of St. Agatha’s chapel. The
inside of the door by which I had entered was a part of
the wainscoting of the room, and the opening was wholly
covered with a map of the Holy Land.
In my absorption I had lost the sense of time, and I
was amazed to find that it was five o’clock, but I resolved
to go into the chapel before going home.
The way up was clear enough, and I was soon in the
vestibule. I opened the door, expecting to find a service
in progress; but the little church was empty save where,
at the right of the chancel, an organist was filling the
church with the notes of a triumphant march. Cap in
hand I stole forward and sank down in one of the
pews.
A lamp over the organ keyboard gave the only light
in the chapel, and made an aureole about her head,—
about the uncovered head of Olivia Gladys Armstrong!
I smiled as I recognized her and smiled, too, as I remembered
her name. But the joy she brought to the
music, the happiness in her face as she raised it in the
minor harmonies, her isolation, marked by the little isle
of light against the dark background of the choir,—
these things touched and moved me, and I bent forward,
my arms upon the pew in front of me, watching and
listening with a kind of awed wonder. Here was a
refuge of peace and lulling harmony after the disturbed
life at Glenarm, and I yielded myself to its solace with
an inclination my life had rarely known.
There was no pause in the outpouring of the melody.
She changed stops and manuals with swift fingers and
passed from one composition to another; now it was an
august hymn, now a theme from Wagner, and finally
Mendelssohn’s Spring Song leaped forth exultant in the
dark chapel.
She ceased suddenly with a little sigh and struck
her hands together, for the place was cold. As she
reached up to put out the lights I stepped forward to
the chancel steps.
“Please allow me to do that for you?”
She turned toward me, gathering a cape about her.
“Oh, it’s you, is it?” she asked, looking about quickly.
“I don’t remember—I don’t seem to remember—that
you were invited.”
“I didn’t know I was coming myself,” I remarked
truthfully, lifting my hand to the lamp.
“That is my opinion of you,—that you’re a rather unexpected
person. But thank you, very much.”
She showed no disposition to prolong the interview,
but hurried toward the door, and reached the vestibule
before I came up with her.
“You can’t go any further, Mr. Glenarm,” she said,
and waited as though to make sure I understood.
Straight before us through the wood and beyond the
school-buildings the sunset faded sullenly. The night
was following fast upon the gray twilight and already
the bolder planets were aflame in the sky. The path
led straight ahead beneath the black boughs.
“I might perhaps walk to the dormitory, or whatever
you call it,” I said.
“Thank you, no! I’m late and haven’t time to
bother with you. It’s against the rules, you know, for
us to receive visitors.”
She stepped out into the path.
“But I’m not a caller. I’m just a neighbor. And I
owe you several calls, anyhow.”
She laughed, but did not pause, and I followed a
pace behind her.
“I hope you don’t think for a minute that I chased
a rabbit on your side of the fence just to meet you; do
you, Mr. Glenarm?”
“Be it far from me! I’m glad I came, though, for I
liked your music immensely. I’m in earnest; I think
it quite wonderful, Miss Armstrong.”
She paid no heed to me.
“And I hope I may promise myself the pleasure of
hearing you often.”
“You are positively flattering, Mr. Glenarm; but as
I’m going away—”
I felt my heart sink at the thought of her going
away. She was the only amusing person I had met at
Glenarm, and the idea of losing her gave a darker note
to the bleak landscape.
“That’s really too bad! And just when we were getting
acquainted! And I was coming to church every
Sunday to hear you play and to pray for snow, so you’d
come over often to chase rabbits!”
This, I thought, softened her heart. At any rate her
tone changed.
“I don’t play for services; they’re afraid to let me
for fear I’d run comic-opera tunes into the Te Deum!”
“How shocking!”
“Do you know, Mr. Glenarm,”—her tone became confidential
and her pace slackened,—“we call you the
squire, at St. Agatha’s, and the lord of the manor, and
names like that! All the girls are perfectly crazy about
you. They’d be wild if they thought I talked with you,
clandestinely,—is that the way you pronounce it?”
“Anything you say and any way you say it satisfies
me,” I replied.
“That’s ever so nice of you,” she said, mockingly
again.
I felt foolish and guilty. She would probably get
roundly scolded if the grave Sisters learned of her talks
with me, and very likely I should win their hearty contempt.
But I did not turn back.
“I hope the reason you’re leaving isn’t—” I hesitated.
“Ill conduct? Oh, yes; I’m terribly wicked, Squire
Glenarm! They’re sending me off.”
“But I suppose they’re awfully strict, the Sisters.”
“They’re hideous,—perfectly hideous.”
“Where is your home?” I demanded. “Chicago, Indianapolis,
Cincinnati, perhaps?”
“Humph, you are dull! You ought to know from my
accent that I’m not from Chicago. And I hope I haven’t
a Kentucky girl’s air of waiting to be flattered to death.
And no Indianapolis girl would talk to a strange man at
the edge of a deep wood in the gray twilight of a winter
day,—that’s from a book; and the Cincinnati girl is
without my élan, esprit,—whatever you please to call it.
She has more Teutonic repose,—more of Gretchen-of-the-Rhine-Valley
about her. Don’t you adore French,
Squire Glenarm?” she concluded breathlessly, and with
no pause in her quick step.
“I adore yours, Miss Armstrong,” I asserted, yielding
myself further to the joy of idiocy, and delighting in
the mockery and changing moods of her talk. I did
not make her out; indeed, I preferred not to! I was
not then,—and I am not now, thank God,—of an analytical
turn of mind. And as I grow older I prefer,
even after many a blow, to take my fellow human beings
a good deal as I find them. And as for women, old
or young, I envy no man his gift of resolving them into
elements. As well carry a spray of arbutus to the laboratory
or subject the enchantment of moonlight upon
running water to the flame and blow-pipe as try to
analyze the heart of a girl,—particularly a girl who
paddles a canoe with a sure stroke and puts up a good
race with a rabbit.
A lamp shone ahead of us at the entrance of one of
the houses, and lights appeared in all the buildings.
“If I knew your window I should certainly sing under
it,—except that you’re going home! You didn’t tell
me why they were deporting you.”
“I’m really ashamed to! You would never—”
“Oh, yes, I would; I’m really an old friend!” I insisted,
feeling more like an idiot every minute.
“Well, don’t tell! But they caught me flirting—with
the grocery boy! Now aren’t you disgusted?”
“Thoroughly! I can’t believe it! Why, you’d a lot
better flirt with me,” I suggested boldly.
“Well, I’m to be sent away for good at Christmas. I
may come back then if I can square myself. My!
That’s slang,—isn’t it horrid?”
“The Sisters don’t like slang, I suppose?”
“They loathe it! Miss Devereux—you know who she
is!—she spies on us and tells.”
“You don’t say so; but I’m not surprised at her. I’ve
heard about her!” I declared bitterly.
We had reached the door, and I expected her to fly;
but she lingered a moment.
“Oh, if you know her! Perhaps you’re a spy, too!
It’s just as well we should never meet again, Mr. Glenarm,”
she declared haughtily.
“The memory of these few meetings will always linger
with me, Miss Armstrong,” I returned in an imitation
of her own tone.
“I shall scorn to remember you!”—and she folded
her arms under the cloak tragically.
“Our meetings have been all too few, Miss Armstrong.
Three, exactly, I believe!”
“I see you prefer to ignore the first time I ever saw
you,” she said, her hand on the door.
“Out there in your canoe? Never! And you’ve forgiven
me for overhearing you and the chaplain on the
wall—please!”
She grasped the knob of the door and paused an instant
as though pondering.
“I make it four times, not counting once in the road
and other times when you didn’t know, Squire Glenarm!
I’m a foolish little girl to have remembered the first. I
see now how b-l-i-n-d I have been.”
She opened and closed the door softly, and I heard
her running up the steps within.
I ran back to the chapel, roundly abusing myself for
having neglected my more serious affairs for a bit of
silly talk with a school-girl, fearful lest the openings
I had left at both ends of the passage should have been
discovered. The tunnel added a new and puzzling factor
to the problem already before me, and I was eager
for an opportunity to sit down in peace and comfort to
study the situation.
[Illustration: “I shall scorn to remember you!”—and she folded her arms under
the cloak tragically.]
At the chapel I narrowly escaped running into Stoddard,
but I slipped past him, pulled the hidden door
into place, traversed the tunnel without incident, and
soon climbed through the hatchway and slammed the
false block securely into the opening.