CHAPTER XV
HOW HENRIETTE READ HISTORY TO SOME PURPOSE
The inside of the Château de Lancilly was a curious labyrinth of arched stone passages paved with brick, cold on the hottest day, with short flights of steps making unexpected changes of level; every wall so thick as to hold deep cupboards, even small rooms, or private staircases climbing steeply up or down. The old ghosts of the château, who slipped in and out of these walls and flitted about the hidden steps, had lost a good deal of their credit in the last twenty years. No self-respecting ghost could show itself to Urbain de la Marinière, and few mortals besides him haunted the remote passages while the great house stood empty.
And now one may be sure that the ghosts were careful to hide themselves from Madame de Sainfoy. No half-lights, no chilly shadows wavering on the wall, no quick passing of a wind from nowhere, such hints and vanishings as might send a shiver through ordinary bones, had any effect on Adélaïde's cool dignity. The light of reason shone in her clear-cut face; her voice, penetrating and decided, was enough to frighten any foolish spirit who chose to sweep rushingly beside her through the wall as she walked along the passages.
"Do you hear the rats?" she would say. "How can we catch them? These old houses are infested with them."
She spoke so firmly that even the ghost itself believed it was a rat, and scuttled away out of hearing.
To reach the north wing, where her three girls and their governess lived, Madame de Sainfoy had to mount a short flight of steps from the hall, then to go along a vaulted corridor lighted only by a small lucarne window here and there, then down a staircase which brought her to the level of the great salons and the dining-room at the opposite end, which formerly, like this north wing, had hung over the moat, but were now being brought nearer the ground by Monsieur de Sainfoy's earthworks.
This old north wing had been less restored than any other part of the château. The passage which ran through it, only lighted by a window at the foot of the staircase, ended at the arched door of a silent, deserted chapel with an altar on its east side, a quaint figure of Our Lady in a carved niche, and a window half-darkened with ivy leaves, overhanging the green and damp depths of the moat, now empty of water.
Before reaching the chapel—lonely and neglected, but not desecrated, for by the care of Madame de la Marinière mass had been said in it once a year—there were four doors, two on each side of the corridor. The first on the left was that of the room where Sophie and Lucie both slept and did their lessons, a large room looking out west to the gardens and woods behind Lancilly; and opening from this, with a separate door into the passage, was Mademoiselle Moineau's room. On the right the rooms were smaller, the chapel cutting them off to the north, with a secret staircase in the thickness of the wall by the altar. A maid slept in the first; and the second, nearest the chapel, but with a wide, cheerful view of its own across the valley to the east, was Hélène's room.
Madame de Sainfoy, after disposing of Hervé and hearing all that Urbain had to tell her, with digressions to the almost equally interesting subject of silk hangings, set off across the château to inspect the young people at their lessons. She was an excellent mother. She did not, like so many women, leave her children entirely to the consciences of their teachers.