Groping with both hands to recover it, Ruth found to her astonishment, that, instead of coming, as she expected, into contact with the corresponding panelling of the room beyond, they strayed off into space, and on closer examination of the framework of the fallen panel, she found that it was grooved. Surely it looked vastly as if she had come upon one of the sliding panels old Adam Lockit declared the house was full of! Very like it indeed, Ruth thought as she kindled a light with her tinder-box, and stepping with it into the pitch-dark cavity, looked round.
Barely high enough for her to stand upright in, it evidently extended on each side of the opening, to the stone and brickwork supports of the arched communicating door, of which as we have already seen Richard Rumbold secured the key into his own keeping. Thus the opening formed a dark passage of nearly a couple of feet wide, and six or seven feet long.
While she was occupied in these investigations a sudden hustling, shuffling sound in the room beyond, ordinarily as still as the very vaults of Stanstead Church, nearly startled her out of her senses. The next instant, however, her own merry laugh at her own terrors broke the echoes, for what was the disturbance but the scratching of the rats, whom her tour of discovery had sent stampeding willy nilly, like bad Bishop Hatto's long-tailed visitors:
"From the right and the left, from behind and before,
From within and without, from above and below."
Up by the chimney, down by the open windows plump into the moat.
Ruth's secret.
"Now," smiled Ruth to herself, in the dead silence that ensued, "now I have a secret! and never a creature shall be told of it. Not even Maudlin, nor Lawrence—Lawrence indeed! certainly not! A rare fine place to hide in when next Lettice Larkspur and Dorothy Dingle come to spend the day. Why, if they'd search till midnight, they'd not find me. I should be shut in safe—," here a sneeze, caused by the cloud of dust her movements had raised, interrupted her, "safe as the 'mistleto bough' bride. Almost, that is to say," she went on, brushing away the cobwebs festooning her skirts, as she stepped back over the skirting-board, and kneeling down to replace the panel, she discovered that by the merest touch of her finger she could work it backwards and forwards in its grooves. Not so hard to open as the old oak chest was, certainly; though in every probability it had been so once upon a time, before the dry-rot had shrivelled the wood in its sockets, and the fragments of iron bolts, some strewing the floor, some still hanging, had rusted and given way. A pasteboard sort of protection now the place would have been, though it was no doubt safe enough in those war times of the Roses, when it was built.
And carefully indeed Ruth had kept her secret, though there were times when it grew to be rather a burden to her. When, for instance, she lay in her bed and thought what dismal straits those poor people must have been driven to, before they should have sought such a refuge.
The very existence of the place is, however, forgotten now in this other mystery that haunts her sleeping and waking.
She does not find it at all true, as she sits uncoiling her hair, and absently brushing out its brown waves, that sharing her load of care makes it lighter, as people are so fond of telling you that it does. The weight, on the contrary, seems to have grown heavier, especially within these last hours; and oblivious of everything beyond her troubled reflections, she is only recalled to a sense of realities by Maudlin Sweetapple's voice querulously clamouring for the lamp to be extinguished. "Beshrew the thing!" piped she; "how many more times am I to shut my eyes, and open 'em again, to see all these ghosts about the place?"