“My uncle seems to have got excited as he went on,” said Cosmo, “to judge by the number of words he has underlined!”
“He enters into the spirit of the thing pretty well for a clergyman!” said the laird.
CHAPTER LIII.
A SMALL DISCOVERY.
When they had had a little talk over the narrative, the laird desired Cosmo to replace the papers, and rising he went to obey. As he approached the closet, the first beams of the rising sun were shining upon the door of it. The window through which they entered was a small one, and the mornings of the year in which they so fell were not many. When he opened the door, they shot straight to the back of the closet, lighting with rare illumination the little place, commonly so dusky that in it one book could hardly be distinguished from another. It was as if a sudden angel had entered a dungeon. When the door fell to behind him, as was its custom, the place felt so dark that he seemed to have lost memory as well as sight, and not to know where he was. He set it open again, and having checked it so, proceeded to replace the papers. But the strangeness of the presence there of such a light took so great a hold on his imagination, and it was such a rare thing to see what the musty dingy little closet, which to Cosmo had always been the treasure-chamber of the house, was like, that he stood for a moment with his hand on the cover of the bureau, gazing into the light-invaded corners as if he had suddenly found himself in a department of Aladdin’s cave. Old to him beyond all memory, it yet looked new and wonderful, much that had hitherto been scarcely known but to his hands now suddenly revealed in radiance to his eyes also. Amongst other facts he discovered that the bureau stood, not against a rough wall as he had imagined, but against a plain surface of wood. In mild surprise he tapped it with his knuckles, and almost started at the hollow sound it returned.
“What can there be ahin’ the bureau, father?” he asked, re-entering the room.
“I dinna ken o’ onything,” answered the laird. “The desk stan’s close again’ the wa’, does na ’t?”
“Ay, but the wa’ ’s timmer, an’ soon’s how.”
“It may be but a wainscotin’; an’ gien there was but an inch atween hit an’ the stane, it wad soon’ like that.”
“I wad like to draw the desk oot a bit, an’ hae a nearer luik. It fills up a’ the space, ’at I canna weel win at it.”
“Du as ye like, laddie. The hoose is mair yours nor mine. But noo ye hae putten ’t i’ my heid, I min’ my mother sayin’ ’at there was ance a passage atween the twa blocks o’ the hoose: could it be there? I aye thoucht it had been atween the kitchen an’ the dinin’ room. My father, she said, had it closed up.”