I.
MY SUPERIORS ARE ENGAGED IN PLOTS FOR THE RESTORATION OF KING JAMES II.
Not having been able to sleep for thinking of some lines for eels which he had placed the night before, the lad was lying in his little bed, waiting for the hour when the gate would be open, and he and his comrade, Job Lockwood, the porter’s son, might go to the pond and see what fortune had brought them. At daybreak Job was to awaken him, but his own eagerness for the sport had served as a réveillé long since—so long that it seemed to him as if the day never would come.
It might have been four o’clock when he heard the door of the opposite chamber, the chaplain’s room, open, and the voice of a man coughing in the passage. Harry jumped up, thinking for certain it was a robber, or hoping perhaps for a ghost, and, flinging open his own door, saw before him the chaplain’s door open, and a light inside, and a figure standing in the doorway, in the midst of a great smoke which issued from the room.
“Who’s there?” cried out the boy, who was of a good spirit.
“Silence!” whispered the other; “ ’tis I, my boy!” and, holding his hand out, Harry had no difficulty in recognizing his master and friend, Father Holt. A curtain was over the window of the chaplain’s room that looked to the court, and Harry saw that the smoke came from a great flame of papers which were burning in a brazier when he entered the chaplain’s room. After giving a hasty greeting and blessing to the lad, who was charmed to see his tutor, the father continued the burning of his papers, drawing them from a cupboard over the mantelpiece wall, which Harry had never seen before.
Father Holt laughed, seeing the lad’s attention fixed at once on this hole. “That is right, Harry,” he said; “faithful little friend, see all and say nothing. You are faithful, I know.”
“I know I would go to the stake for you,” said Harry.
“I don’t want your head,” said the father, patting it kindly; “all you have to do is to hold your tongue. Let us burn these papers and say nothing to anybody. Should you like to read them?”
Harry Esmond blushed and held down his head; he had looked as the fact was, and without thinking, at the paper before him; and though he had seen it, could not understand a word of it, the letters being quite clear enough, but quite without meaning. They burned the papers, beating down the ashes in a brazier so that scarce any traces of them remained.
Harry had been accustomed to see Father Holt in more dresses than one; and he was, in consequence, in no wise astonished that the priest should now appear before him in a riding dress, with large buff leather boots, and a feather to his hat, plain, but such as gentlemen wore.
“You know the secret of the cupboard,” said he, laughing, “and must be prepared for other mysteries”; and he opened—but not a secret cupboard this time—only a wardrobe, which he usually kept locked, and from which he now took out two or three dresses and perruques of different colors, and a couple of swords of a pretty make (Father Holt was an expert practitioner with the small-sword, and every day while he was at home he and his pupil practiced this exercise, in which the lad became a very great proficient), a military coat and cloak, and a farmer’s smock, and placed them in the large hole over the mantelpiece from which the papers had been taken.
“If they miss the cupboard,” he said, “they will not find these; if they find them they’ll tell no tales, except that Father Holt wore more suits of clothes than one.”
Harry was alarmed at the notion that his friend was about to leave him; but “No,” the priest said, “I may very likely come back with my lord in a few days. We are to be tolerated; we are not to be persecuted. But they may take a fancy to pay a visit at Castlewood ere our return; and, as gentlemen of my cloth are suspected, they might choose to examine my papers, which concern nobody—at least not them.” And to this day, whether the papers in cipher related to politics or to the affairs of that mysterious society whereof Father Holt was a member, his pupil, Harry Esmond, remains in entire ignorance.
The rest of his goods, his small wardrobe, etc., Holt left untouched on his shelves and in his cupboard, taking down—with a laugh, however,—and flinging into the brazier, where he only half burned them, some theological treatises which he had been writing. “And now,” said he, “Henry, my son, you may testify, with a safe conscience, that you saw me burning Latin sermons the last time I was here before I went away to London; and it will be daybreak directly, and I must be away before Lockwood is stirring.”
“Will not Lockwood let you out, sir?” Esmond asked. Holt laughed; he was never more gay or good-humored than when in the midst of action or danger.
“Lockwood knows nothing of my being here, mind you,” he said; “nor would you, you little wretch! had you slept better. You must forget that I have been here; and now farewell. Close the door and go to your own room and don’t come out till—stay, why should you not know one secret more? I know you will never betray me.”
In the chaplain’s room were two windows; the one looking into the court facing westward to the fountain; the other a small casement strongly barred, and looking on to the green in front of the hall. This window was too high to reach from the ground; but, mounting on a buffet which stood beneath it, Father Holt showed me how, by pressing on the base of the window, the whole framework of lead, glass, and iron stanchions descended into a cavity worked below, from which it could be drawn and restored to its usual place from without; a broken pane being purposely open to admit the hand which was to work upon the spring of the machine.
“When I am gone,” Father Holt said, “you may push away the buffet, so that no one may fancy that an exit has been made that way; lock the door; place the key—where shall we put the key?—under Chrysostom on the bookshelf; and if any ask for it, say I keep it there, and told you where to find it, if you had need to go to my room. The descent is easy down the wall into the ditch; and so once more farewell, until I see thee again, my dear son.” And with this the intrepid father mounted the buffet with great agility and briskness, stepped across the window, lifting up the bars and framework again from the other side, and only leaving room for Harry Esmond to stand on tiptoe and kiss his hand before the casement closed, the bars fixing as firm as ever, seemingly, in the stone arch overhead. When Father Holt next arrived at Castlewood, it was by the public gate on horseback; and he never so much as alluded to the existence of the private issue to Harry, except when he had need of a private messenger from within, for which end, no doubt, he had instructed his young pupil in the means of quitting the hall.
Esmond, young as he was, would have died sooner than betray his friend and master, as Mr. Holt well knew; for he had tried the boy more than once, putting temptations in his way, to see whether he would yield to them and confess afterward, or whether he would resist them, as he did sometimes, or whether he would lie, which he never did.