“You surprise me,” exclaimed Tamworth, “how could that have reached your ears?”
“I simply inferred it, for I certainly do not think that the secret tunnel into the chancel was for the purpose of easy attendance upon divine service.”
Tamworth smiled, and Marlowe continued speaking:
“I knew of the imbecility of that prince and the strength of his religious devotion; and naturally in my mind was raised the picture of a world-weary king in penitential cell.”
“You are right,” returned the lawyer. “See.”
He parted the heavy and worm-eaten hangings suspended from the ornamental cornice of the wall beside the painted window. The outline of what appeared to be a walled window appeared. Its sill, like that of the one that was open and uncovered, was only a foot above the floor. He pressed on one of the mullions, which, although apparently blocked with stone on both sides, remained standing out from the surface of the wall. This surface rolled inward as he pressed. The opening was wide enough to admit the passing of a man in stooping posture.
“Come,” said Tamworth.
He stepped upon the stone sill, and as Marlowe, holding back the musty tapestry for a moment, pressed close in his wake, he entered a small room.
They were in what was certainly a devotional chamber. Before them in the center wall of a semi-circular recess, or exedra, was a gilded crucifix in bas-relief. A stone canopy extended from the top of this recess, and was still fringed with heavy black velvet. At the bottom of the recess was a platform slightly raised above the floor of the room. One could imagine that this low ambo bore the imprints of the knees of the royal penitent.
The ceiling was dome-shaped overhead, as severe in its smoothness and absence of tracery as the supporting walls, which without curvature, fronted each other with a space between of twenty feet in length and twelve in breadth. In the face of one wall, near the floor, was a dark cavity, with an iron basket within it, for the maintenance of fire during prolonged self-communion. A leather-covered couch stood in one corner, and before it hung a lamp in rusty chains. An iron table, with legs covered with elaborate scrollwork, stood at the end of the room furthest from the couch. Upon its top was a great black-lettered Mazarin Bible, and beside it was a solid square-seated chair with high carved back. Above this table hung a lamp similar to the one near the couch; and in the smoky wall behind it was a square window covered with an iron lattice. The strips of the lattice were narrow, and not closely crossed, so that the entrance of daylight was little hindered. But no sunshine could enter, for two buttresses extended far beyond its exterior face, thus concealing it from the glance of vagrant eyes in the narrow church-yard of St. Olave. It looked upon that seldom-visited but thick-tenanted piece of burial-earth.