‘It looks well,’ Maria said, for it helped to change the aspect of the room; ‘but where does it take one?’
‘To the chapel,’ replied the steward. ‘I found a narrow passage leading directly to a small door on the left side of the altar. You can thus reach the chapel by a private way without going through the apartment. The corridor was quite dark, but I have had electric light put in. The key is here, you see.’
Schmidt moved it and opened the door at the same time with his other hand, and Maria saw a narrow passage, brightly lit up. The walls were white and varnished, and the floor was of plain white tiles.
‘It must have been made in the beginning of the eighteenth century,’ Schmidt said. ‘There was a Countess at that time who was a princess of Saxony and was excessively devout. She died mad.’
‘You know the family history better than I do,’ observed Maria.
‘We have served the Excellent house from father to son more than two hundred years.’
Schmidt said this as if he were telling her the most ordinary fact in the world.
‘Will your Excellency please go to the chapel by the private passage?’ he asked.
Maria let him lead the way and followed him. She was gratified by the use he had made of his discovery, for she thought that it would sometimes be a relief to go to the chapel alone and unnoticed. But she also wished to assure herself that no one else could use the corridor, and that there was a bolt or a lock on the door at the other end. It was not that she distrusted Schmidt; on the contrary, she thought very well of him, and was sure that he had consulted only her convenience in what he had done. But when she thought of what was before her, she felt very defenceless in the great old house, so different from the comfortable little modern apartment in which she had lived with Leone, where there were no hidden staircases, nor secret passages, nor legends of mad countesses in the eighteenth century, nor any ghosts of Maria’s own life.