“Oh, come, Tuke! You ask too much of the man—upon my word you do. He ain’t exactly a free agent here, I gather. But don’t this follow queerly on what you told us the other night? And Dennis acquaints me there are signs of their having tried to force an entrance already.”
“Does he? He appears to give you confidences that he withholds from me.”
“Well,” answered Sir David, dryly and a little haughtily, “maybe I invite them more than you do.”
“That is possible, of course. Would it be an abuse of them to specify the nature of this presumed attempt?”
The little baronet took his hand from the saddle, and looked at the other with a puzzled and rather angry expression.
“’Tis round by the north wing, I understand,” said he coldly—“a grating that gives light to some secret hole below the basement,”—and with a brief “Good-day to you!” he turned and walked away.
Mr. Tuke made no attempt to follow and conciliate him. He was in fact worried out of all present geniality by the constant strain upon his faculties engendered of wearying suspicion. While he moved so blind and helpless, a friendship that was curious merely confounded him.
Therefore, instead of succumbing to a natural instinct of good-fellowship, he merely pricked his horse on, and rode round by the further wing of the house.
Hitherto he had taken no concern to examine the nature of the opening that admitted light and air to the “Priest’s Hole.” Now, he had little difficulty in identifying the actual spot, for, in addition to its being below a barred aperture in the house-side, which he felt convinced was that that belonged to the gloomy chamber within, its neighbourhood presented unmistakable signs of some recent trespass.
A massive grating of wrought-iron, sunk deep in the masonry of the wall, which it pierced at a basement depth of five or six feet, looked upon a sunless little area—a mere narrow box of cemented stones; and this, without doubt, was the object he sought. The excavation had been so matted in and overgrown with a generation of bramble and dog-wood and wayfaring tree, that no one might have guessed the pit sunk within the mass, had not a torn opening in the latter, bristling with white splints of branches, led him to investigation, as it led the horseman in the present instance.