London Pride - Mary Elizabeth Braddon (ebook smartphone TXT) 📗

all over the house for Mrs. Angela and Henriette," Denzil said, and Fareham started up from the chess-table, scared at the young man's agitated tone and pallid countenance. "We have looked in every room--"

"In every closet," interrupted Dorothy.

"In every corner of the staircases and passages," said Squire Dan.

"Can your lordship help us? There may be places you know of which we do not know?" said Denzil, his voice trembling a little. "It is alarming that they should be so long in concealment. We have called to them in every part of the house."

Fareham hurried to the door, taking instant alarm--anxious, pale, alert.

"Come!" he said to the others. "The oak chests in the music-room--the great Florentine coffer in the gallery? Have you looked in those?"

"Yes; we have opened every chest."

"Faith, to see Sir Denzil turn over piles of tapestries, you would have thought he was looking for a fairy that could hide in the folds of a curtain!" said Lettsome.

"It is no theme for jesting. I hate these tricks of hiding in strange corners," said Fareham. "Now, show me where they left you."

"In the long gallery."

"They have gone up to the roof, perhaps."

"We have been in the roof," said Denzil.

"I have scarcely recovered my senses after the cracked skull I got from one of your tie-beams," added Lettsome; and Fareham saw that both men had their doublets coated with dust and cobwebs, in a manner which indicated a remorseless searching of places unvisited by housemaids and brooms.

Mrs. Dorothy, with a due regard for her dainty lace kerchief and ruffles, and her cherry silk petticoat, had avoided these loathly places, the abode of darkness, haunted by the fear of rats.

Fareham tramped the house from cellar to garret, Denzil alone accompanying him.

"We want no posse comitatus," he had said, somewhat discourteously. "You, Squire, had best go and mend your cracked head in the eating-parlour with a brimmer or two of clary wine; and you, Mrs. Dorothy, can go and keep her ladyship company. But not a word of our fright. Swoons and screaming would only hinder us."

He took Mrs. Lettsome's arm, and led her to the staircase, pushing the Squire after her, and then turned his anxious countenance to Denzil.

"If they are not to be found in the house, they must be found outside the house. Oh, the folly, the madness of it! A December night--snow on the ground--a rising wind--another fall of snow, perhaps--and those two afoot and alone!"

"I do not believe they are out-of-doors," Denzil answered. "Your daughter promised that they would not leave the house."

"My daughter tells the truth. It is her chief virtue."

"And yet we have hunted in every hole and corner," said Denzil, dejectedly.

"Hole!" cried Fareham, almost in a shout. "Thou hast hit it, man! That one word is a flash of lightning. The Priest's Hole! Come this way. Bring your candle!" snatching up that which he had himself set down on a table, when he stood still to deliberate. "The Priest's Hole? The child knew the secret of it--fool that I was ever to show her. God! what a place to hide in on a winter night!"

He was halfway up the staircase to the second story before he had uttered the last of these exclamations, Denzil following him.

Suddenly, through the stillness of the house, there sounded a faint far-off cry, the shrill thin sound of a child's voice. Fareham and Warner would hardly have heard it had they not been sportsmen, with ears trained to listen for distant sounds. No view-hallo sounding across miles of wood and valley was ever fainter or more ethereal.

"You hear them?" cried Fareham. "Quick, quick!"

He led the way along a narrow gallery, about eight feet high, where people had danced in Elizabeth's time, when the house was newly converted to secular uses; and then into a room in which there were several iron chests, the muniment room, where a sliding panel, of which the master of the house knew the trick, revealed an opening in the wall. Fareham squeezed himself through the gap, still carrying the tall iron candlestick, with flaring candle, and vanished. Denzil followed, and found himself descending a narrow stone staircase, very steep, built into an angle of the great chimney, while as if from the bowels of the earth there came, louder at every step, that shrill cry of distress, in a voice he could not doubt was Henriette's.

"The other is mute," groaned Fareham; "scared to death, perhaps, like a frightened bird." And then he called, "I am coming. You are safe, love; safe, safe!" And then he groaned aloud, "Oh, the madness, the folly of it!"

Halfway down the staircase there was a sudden gap of six feet, down which Fareham dropped with his hands on the lowest stair, Denzil following; a break in the continuity of the descent planned for the discomfiture of strangers and the protection of the family hiding-place.

Fareham and Denzil were on a narrow stone landing at the bottom of the house; and the child's wail of anguish changed to a joyous shriek, "Father, father!" close in their ears. Fareham set his shoulder against the heavy oak door, and it burst inwards. There had been no question of secret spring or complicated machinery; but the great, clumsy door dragged upon its rusty hinges, and the united strength of the two girls had not served to pull it open, though Papillon, in her eagerness for concealment in the first fever of hiding, had been strong enough to push the door till she had jammed it, and thus made all after efforts vain.

"Father!" she cried, leaping into his arms, as he came into the room, large enough to hold six-men standing upright; but a hideous den in which to perish alone in the dark. "Oh, father! I thought no one would ever find us. I was afraid we should have died like the Italian lady--and people would have found our skeletons and wondered about us. I never was afraid before. Not when the great horse reared as high as a house--and her ladyship screamed. I only laughed then--but to-night I have been afraid."

Fareham put her aside without looking at her.

"Angela! Great God! She is dead!"

No, she was not dead, only in a half swoon, leaning against the angle of the wall, ghastly white in the flare of the candles. She was not quite unconscious. She knew whose strong arms were holding her, whose lips were so near her own, whose head bent suddenly upon her breast, leaning against the lace kerchief, to listen for the beating of her heart.

She made a great effort to relieve his fear, understanding dimly that he thought her dead; but could only murmur broken syllables, till he carried her up three or four stairs, to a secret door that opened into the garden. There in the wintry air, under the steely light of wintry stars, her senses came back to her. She opened her eyes and looked at him.

"I am sorry I have not Papillon's courage," she said.

"Tu m'as donné une affreuse peur--je te croyais morte," muttered Fareham, letting his arms drop like lead as she released herself from their support.

Denzil and Henriette were close to them. They had come to the open door for fresh air, after the charnel-like chill and closeness of the small underground chamber.

"Father is angry with me," said the girl; "he won't speak to me."

"Angry! no, no;" and he bent to kiss her. "But oh, child, the folly of it! She might have died--you too--found just an hour too late."

"It would have taken a long time to kill me," said Papillon; "but I was very cold, and my teeth were chattering, and I should soon have been hungry. Have you had supper yet?"

"Nobody has even thought of supper."

"I am glad of that. And I may have supper with you, mayn't I, and eat what I like, because it's Christmas, and because I might have been starved to death in the Priest's Hole. But it was a good hiding-place, tout de meme. Who guessed at last?"

"The only person who knew of the place, child. And now, remember, the secret is to be kept. Your dungeon may some day save an honest man's life. You must tell nobody where you were hid."

"But what shall I say when they ask me? I must not tell them a story."

"Say you were hidden in the great chimney--which is truth; for the Priest's Hole is but a recess at the back of the chimney. And you, Warner," turning to Denzil, who had not spoken since the opening of the door, "I know you'll keep the secret."

"Yes. I will keep your secret," Denzil answered, cold as ice; and said no word more.

They walked slowly round the house by the terrace, where the clipped yews stood out like obelisks against the bleak bright sky. Papillon ran and skipped at her father's side, clinging to him, expatiating upon her sufferings in the dust and darkness. Denzil followed with, Angela, in a dead silence.


CHAPTER XI.


LIGHTER THAN VANITY.

"I think father must be a witch," Henriette said at dinner next day, "or why did he tell me of the Italian lady who was shut in the dower-chest, just before Angela and I were lost in"--she checked herself at a look from his lordship--"in the chimney?"

"It wants no witch to tell that little girls are foolish and mischievous," answered Fareham.

"You ladies must have been vastly black when you came out of your hiding-place," said De Malfort. "I should have been sorry to see so much beauty disguised in soot. Perhaps Mrs. Kirkland means to appear in the character of a chimney at our next Court masquerade. She would cause as great a stir as Lady Muskerry, in all her Babylonian splendour; but for other reasons. Nothing could mitigate the Muskerry's ugliness; and no disguise could hide Mrs. Angela's beauty."

"What would the costume be?" asked Papillon.

"Oh, something simple. A long black satin gown, and a brick-dust velvet hat, tall and curiously twisted, like your Tudor chimney; and a cluster of grey feathers on the top, to represent smoke."

"Monsieur le Comte makes a joke of everything. But what would father have said if we had never been found?"

"I should have said that they are right who swear there is a curse upon all property taken from the Church, and that the ban fell black and bitter upon Chilton Abbey," answered his lordship's grave deep voice from the end of the table, where he sat somewhat apart from the rest, gloomy and silent, save when directly addressed.

Her ladyship and De Malfort had always plenty to talk about. They had the past as well as the present for their discourse, and were always sighing for the vanished glories of their youth--at Paris, at Fontainebleau, at St. Germain. Nor were they restricted to the realities of the present and the memories of the past; they had that wider world of unreality in which to circulate; they had the Scudèry language at the tips of their tongues, the fantastic sentimentalism of that marvellous old maid who invented the seventeenth-century hero and heroine; or who crystallised the vanishing figures of that brilliant age and made them immortal. All that little language of toyshop platonics had become a natural form of speech with these two, bred and educated in the Marais, while