Then he showed him the secret, how one shelf had to be drawn out steadily, and the nail in another pressed simultaneously, and how then the entire set of shelves swung open.
Then they went back and he showed him the spring behind the frame of the picture.
“You see the advantage of this,” he went on: “on the one side you may flee upstairs, a treasonable skulking cassocked jack-priest with the lords and the commons and the Queen’s Majesty barking at your heels; and on the other side you may saunter down the gallery without your beard and in a murrey doublet, a friend of Mr. Buxton’s, taking the air and wondering what the devil all the clamouring be about.”
Then he took him downstairs again and showed him finally the escape of which he was most proud—the entrance, designed in the cellar-staircase, to an underground passage from the cellars, which led, he told him, across to the garden-house beyond the lime-avenue.
“That is the pride of my heart,” he said, “and maybe will be useful some day; though I pray not. Ah! her Grace and her honest Council are right. We Papists are a crafty and deceitful folk, Father Anthony.”
The four grew very intimate during those few weeks; they had many memories and associations in common on which to build up friendship, and the aid of a common faith and a common peril with which to cement it. The gracious beauty of the house and the life at Stanfield, too, gilded it all with a very charming romance. They were all astonished at the easy intimacy with which they behaved, one to another.
Mary Corbet was obliged to return to her duties at Court at the beginning of September; and she had something of an ache at her heart as the time drew on; for she had fallen once more seriously in love with Isabel. She said a word of it to Mr. Buxton. They were walking in the lime-avenue together after dinner on the last day of Mary’s visit.
“You have a good chaplain,” she said; “what an honest lad he is! and how serious and recollected! Please God he at least may escape their claws!”
“It is often so,” said Mr. Buxton, “with those wholesome out-of-door boys; they grow up into such simple men of God.”