CHAPTER IV.—THE DEAD HAND.
After a little I found that I could stand upright in the passage. Stretching up my hands I could feel a solid roof above my head. The walls on either side of me were of earth, held back by stout balks of timber. If one were to give way the passage had been a grave indeed; but so far as I could feel with my feet the clay had not fallen at all. Else indeed there could not have been so much air in the passage as to give me breath; and I breathed freely enough, albeit with a certain oppression, and a loathing of the dank smells.
For a time the passage went down into the bowels of the earth as it seemed to me. I guessed by the direction it took from the dining-hall that it must grope under the graveyard—and thinking on this I realized how that indeed the wind that blew from it was a wind of death. And at that time I was too ignorant and too vain to rebuke myself by the thought that this was a burying-place of saints.
Presently my foot stumbled against a step, and much relieved I was to find on ascending it that there was another step and yet another; for I liked not this burrowing among graves like the mole; and the steps seemed to promise a speedy end to my journey. Taking them in the dark there seemed to me a prodigious number of them; yet I was not gone very far when I perceived agreeably a lightening and sweetening of the air. I could have taken but a little while in coming, for I had met with no obstacles; yet it seemed long since the time I had plunged into that pit of blackness ere I came up against a stout door, with a grating in it, designed no doubt to give air to the passage.
To my great joy it was held only by a latch, and even before I had made this happy discovery I felt the sweet air of heaven blow into my face; and I think I never before knew how sweet it tasted.
Undoing the latch and drawing the door to me I stepped within a stone tower. The moon had arisen on the eastward side of the tower, and looking through the crumbling lancet window I saw below me, serene and beautiful, the quiet, terraced graveyard of St. Mary’s.
I could have laughed aloud to think that the journey had seemed to me so long. In truth it had occupied some five minutes, as I discovered, holding my horologe to the moon, and had not occupied so long if it were not for my groping and pausing.
But the floor was solid under my feet. I had to think a minute before I knew where I was. I was in that blind tower of St. Mary’s to the eastward corner, in the basement whereof were deposited the brooms and pails for cleaning of the church.
Playing hide and seek therein with a boy’s irreverence I had marvelled why, since the tower was blind—nothing but a roof of stone above the chamber—that they should have troubled to pierce it with lancets like any honest belfry. The upper portion of the tower was in ruins, as you could see from the graveyard without. Ah, and so the blind tower had its uses; as a hiding-place it might be for some one who had lived in the Manor-house in old wild days. For, as to any manner of egress from the tower, that I could not see at all.
The chamber where I stood was full of the drifted leaves and the nests of birds. Except for the shaft of light from the lancet it was in blackness, and I began to wonder if the tower went no further.