Chapter X: A Discovery

Maurice was as good as his word. He never uttered another syllable to Fred, nor did he relax his guard over the shelf where stood the coveted box, but still kept his position on the ladder, arranging in order the various trays of jams, carried down by the others; and after a time, as Fred also remained perfectly silent and inactive in the corner, the "row" was partially forgotten, and jokes and laughter began again to be heard in the halls and passages.

Meantime Fred, who had sat in a kind of gloomy abstraction for nearly half an hour, only showing that he was not asleep by the occasional red gleam from his eyes which shone strangely out of the sombre obscurity of his retreat, suddenly awoke to a strange and thrilling discovery which made his heart beat quick and loud against his side, and which almost tempted him to doubt the evidence of his senses.

And this discovery was brought about in the following manner:--His shoulder, which had been so sorely bruised in the fall, ached terribly for a long time after the other effects of his misfortunes had passed away, till at length, in a vexed and sullen spirit, he searched about and around the place to see against what sharp thing he could have struck when falling, or what accident could have caused the wound which kept on aching so wearily.

For a long time he could see nothing; for the corner where he sat was so dark that objects only revealed themselves slowly to his sight, and it was not for many minutes after he had sat down that he even found out that the platform on which he was seated was used evidently for drying candles and soap, as many squares of the latter were spread out on it, and bundles of candles in orderly rows side by side were also arranged with the same neatness and method; and the roof of the store-room being formed by the stairs overhead it was of necessity a sloping one, and over the shelf on which Fred sat it came slanting down so low as almost to touch his head, so that to rise upright would have been impossible. At some distance behind him the room ended in a dark angle where nothing taller than a cat or a rat could creep along, and as well as Fred's eye could discern, this low nook was used only as a receptacle for old sacks, files of bills, mouse traps and so forth. But so great was Fred's natural curiosity that he longed to pry into its depths, and had he been alone he would certainly have crept on hands and knees along the platform and examined minutely all there was to be seen there; but as it was, he had a character for proud indifference to keep up just now, so he found sufficient interest in searching for the origin of his present suffering, wondering vaguely how it could have been caused.

At length his shoulder became so painful and his back ached so badly, he shoved himself along the wooden platform on which he was seated to the nearest wall of the store-room, so that he might lean his side against it for support, and it was then he awoke suddenly to the discovery which caused him so much surprise and excitement; for as he pressed his head forward toward the wall he again came in contact with something hard and cold protruding from the wooden partition which formed one side of the store-room, and the blow which it gave him, coming, as it did, on the side of his head, caused him almost to cry aloud from pain.

Fred rubbed his wounded ear for a moment or so with his finger and muttered angrily to himself; then, feeling all up the wall with the palm of his hand, he sought to discover the knob or nail which had, as it seemed to him, purposely wounded him.

And he was not long in coming on it. It was an iron knob protruding from the wall, very hard and cold and round, and evidently fastened to the wooden panelling by screws or clamps of some kind or other. Fred turned and fixed his eyes narrowly on the spot; his curiosity was fully aroused, and he determined to get at the root of the matter. As he gazed, it seemed to him as if a silver rod ran down the whole length of the wall beside him, shining quite brightly, and almost glowing in the surrounding darkness.

Fred now ran his fingers down this rod, but found to his surprise that it was nothing tangible; only a long seam of light, which, entering by a crack or fissure in the panels of the wall, gave the appearance of a metal bar; for when some one passed by outside in the passage, the silver bar disappeared, but again returned when the obstruction had moved on.

Once more he ran his fingers up the crack, to ascertain its width, and this time his knuckles came in contact with another knob similar in shape and size to the one he had discovered below, only so high was it placed as to be but an inch or so below the slanting roof of the store-room.

Fred paused for a moment, and with his eyes still eagerly peering into the darkness, drew a long breath. It was just then his heart gave the first great throb, and that the blood tingled so curiously down to his finger-tips.

"Could it be?" he murmured, almost aloud; and then he took a furtive glance towards the stalwart figure of Maurice, who stood with his back turned, and perched on the top of the ladder. He ran his fingers no longer up the wall, but across it; and then he paused again, while the throbbing at his heart became more violent and uncomfortable. "Yes, it was what he suspected it to be." Quite far back he could feel hinges, one above and one below, corresponding exactly to the knobs on the opposite side of the panel. And these knobs, what were they? what could they be? Why, bolts of course; which, closing tightly on the silvery bar of light, kept this hidden egress from the room safe from the visits of intruders.

This was a discovery; as great and significant at the moment to Fred as if he had stumbled on a treasure of pure gold hidden away in some nook or cranny of the wall.

Then came the next question,--could the bolts move, or had long disuse rendered them stiff, and cramped, and useless? That they had not been opened for a long time, the cobwebs which stuck closely over them could testify; sticky gray cobwebs which clung to Fred's fingers and the knees of his trousers, and made him feel as if spiders were running down the back of his neck.

He must try whether the bolts would stir at his bidding or not; but oh! how cautiously must this essay be made, lest Maurice, ever on the alert, should look round and catch him in the act. Fred leaned his head once more in an attitude of weariness against the wall, and with one hand and arm thrust behind him, took the knob in his fingers and pressed, first gently, then a little harder; but no, it would not move, he must push more strongly still. But supposing it were to fly suddenly back, the door might leap open--oh! what a triumph for Maurice, what bitterness of defeat for him.

So Fred continued to push, ever so gently and gingerly, yet at the same time firmly, till at last there was a sharp creak and a grating squeak which could be heard all over the store-room.

Maurice turned hastily round and peered into the darkness; but there was Fred still sitting disconsolately on the step with his head against the wall. Maurice knew nothing of this secret door, so he only remarked, as if in answer to his own thoughts, "Rats," and turned away again carelessly to resume his work.

Meanwhile, Fred's eye had become riveted on a dish, on which lay heaped one on the top of the other sundry pounds of butter, evidently fresh from the churn. It had been placed on the same shelf where he sat, only at a safe distance from the aroma of the soap and candles; but a quick movement, now that Maurice's back was turned, would easily reach it; and Fred, stretching out his hand, like a flash of lightning removed a small piece from off the nearest roll, and conveying it to his other fingers, cautiously rubbed the rusty lock with the oily but most opportune "find."

This operation was decidedly successful; the next time he tried the bolt it moved, and no creak followed to betray him. The upper lock was greased in the same way, and it also moved, though a slight groan issued from its iron-moulded joints, which caused Maurice once again to turn his head, and murmur "Rats," while he wondered vaguely how such a cowardly fellow as Fred could be content to sit quietly over there in the dark, in such close proximity to rats and other vermin. Perhaps it was the weary dejected position in which Fred sat, with his head resting against the wall, that caused a momentary gleam of contrition and remorse in Maurice's bosom; for presently, in a voice which betrayed an evident struggle between pride and pity, he said, turning towards his cousin,--

"I advise you strongly not to take up your position in that corner, Fred; for the place is alive with cockroaches, and they will be crawling up your leg if you don't take care."

"I have not seen one," replied Fred shortly and sullenly.

"They are there for all that: it was only a few nights ago, when I came down here to fetch up some night-lights for mother, that I came on one as large as a cow, with horns that could have tossed me into the middle of next week. I never saw such a brute; he was more like an old stag cantering along the wall than a human being."

"I never knew cockroaches were human beings before," laughed one of Maurice's sisters, who was standing patiently at the foot of the table with a heavy load of jam in her extended arms, waiting for her brother to arrange them on the shelf above.

"My dear child, who ever supposed you did? But for all that I'm not so far out, for all men are animals, ain't they? and if a cockroach is not an ugly beast of an animal, what else is it? therefore _a fortiori_ it follows, that if both are animals, there is no difference between them."

"All men are animals, but all animals are not men," replied Alice Brinsley, quoting somewhat sententiously from one of her well-read lesson books.

"And all girls are donkeys, though all donkeys aren't girls. I declare, Alice, I think you are the most assified old cockroach in the whole place; for a fellow can't make the most simple and natural observation in the world, but you thrust out your horns and pin him to the wall, while every scrap of knowledge that you have in your shallow pate could be found bound up between the two covers of Mangnall's Questions, beginning at the date when William the Conqueror threw the famous bucket of cold water over his brother Robert le Diable, down to the chap who found out how to square the circle, and make lemon pudding out of pigs' whiskers. There take that;" and Maurice concluded his exordium by seizing a large ball of cord from the shelf beside him, and flinging it right at his sister's uplifted nose, from which it sprang aside and rolled into the dark corner where Fred still sat with his head against the wall, apparently gloomy and abstracted.

But oh! how his face and attitude belied his real feelings, especially now he beheld the ball of cord, which for the last ten minutes he had been gazing at with covetous eyes, actually rolling forward to his very feet. Surely Maurice must have read his thoughts, and fathomed the scheme by which his cousin hoped to retrieve his vantage ground, and make good his angry boast. He must have caught a glimpse of the hungry eyes fixed on the coil of cord above his head, and putting two and two together, must have resolved to aid and abet his enemy, by conniving at his plans, and only planning the more completely and fatally to overthrow and destroy him.

These doubts made Fred hesitate for some minutes whether to avail himself of the unlooked-for assistance, during which time he watched his cousin closely, and narrowly scanned the fluctuating expression of his face; an expression all the more difficult to decipher, as Maurice, having lighted on a jar of French plums, had crammed about a dozen of them into his mouth at one time, and was now making the most frightful grimaces, struggling to eat them without choking or swallowing any of the stones.

But Maurice was perfectly innocent of any plan or plot being laid to undermine his pride; and as soon as he could find room to move his tongue, he again resumed his attack upon his sister, whose arms ached from the weight of the jam pots she still held in her hands, and from which he seemed in no hurry to relieve her.

"Here, Alice, are some rare seeds for you; or as Mangnall would call them, umbelliferous stones," cried Maurice, removing some of the kernels from his mouth, and placing them on the tray before her; "if you plant them in some good farinaceous kind of earth, and water them four times an hour, for fifteen minutes at a go, you'll have in the course of time a magnificent French-plum forest, similar in size and appearance to the famous forest of Ardennes, where Henry the Eighth killed the horrible wild boar, and was afterwards horribly bored to death himself by, I forget how many wives, with patent reversible heads, which could be taken off and on without any trouble; and which, according to Mangnall, was the origin of the penny stamp movement, which was called ever after Anne Boleyn's tragic end, a Queen's head.--Another pot of strawberry, if you please, and then the upper row will be quite full; and give us another handful of French plummers at the same time, that's a good girl, and then I shall be quite full also."

"My dear Maurice, you will really make yourself ill; and besides, you will certainly swallow some of the stones."

"And if I do, what harm? for if you have studied page 40 of Mangnall's 'Internal Economy,' you will find that a stone or apple allowed to fall inside a given circle, proves the gravitation of the Earth. But, good gracious, did you hear those rats again? I say, Fred, have you cheese-parings or what in your pockets, that you seem to be tempting them out of their holes at this time of day?"

To this Fred did not deign a reply, or, if he spoke, the answer was uttered in such a low voice that no one heard him; and Maurice, with a nod of his head, indicative of careless contempt, turned away for good from his cousin, and made no further effort to draw him into conversation.

Fred, meantime, had not been idle; he had, with his penknife, cut off two pieces of cord from the ball which lay, apparently still untouched, at his feet. At the end of each piece of cord he had made a running knot, and this knot he had skilfully placed like a noose over the neck of each bolt, and then drawn the knot tightly with his hands; but the greatest difficulty remained still unsurmounted. The bolts could, of course, be easily withdrawn by any one within the store-room, even without the aid of the cord; but the point which Fred was now eagerly debating in his mind was, how to get the ends of the cord on the other side of the panel, and thus give the power to an outsider to enter at any time he pleased.

The bolts, he had definitely discovered, were screwed to the door, and shot into iron clamps on the wall; so, in order to draw them back from the outside, the ends of the string would have to be passed through some aperture behind the head of the bolt; and how to make this opening without exciting suspicion, was the present stumbling-block in Fred's path. But as he moved himself a little further back on the shelf to get a clearer view of the door, he observed that just beneath the hinges there was also a faint glimmer of daylight, and this discovery solved the problem so satisfactorily, that in a few moments, with the aid of his penknife, he had thrust the end of the cord nearest to him out through the chink into the passage beyond, and he had only to wait patiently for a favourable opportunity to secure the other in the like manner.

Nor had he to wait long, as Maurice had begun to grow tired of his elevated position, and presently, coming down off the ladder, he began arranging the jam on some of the lower shelves, and in this work became so occupied and interested, that he temporarily forgot Fred and his corner, and only paused in his work to make some absurd remarks to his friends.

Fred seized a favourable opportunity when Maurice's back was turned, and no one else was in the store-room, to rise slightly from the shelf, and thrust the second piece of cord through the upper hinge; which effort was so successful, that he felt quite elated, and sat down quietly for a few moments to think out the probable result of his plot.

That he could enter the store-room secretly at some future time, and there and then make good his boast to Maurice, there seemed now no doubt, and Fred glanced up triumphantly at the two pieces of cord securely fastened to the knobs or handles of the bolt and stretching out to the hinges; but how, when he had got in, he was to get out again, without the open door betraying his ingress and egress, was the subject now uppermost in his mind. Was there no plan by which he could shut the door as well as open it? He almost thought there must be; and in order to consider this point thoroughly, he leaned his elbows on his knees, and his head on his hands, and to a speculative eye looked, if possible, even more disconsolate and inscrutable than ever.

Maurice gave one or two side glances towards his cousin, but thought it wiser not to break the unpleasant silence, but to allow Fred's sulky mood to pass over without remark, as all interference seemed only to increase his gloom and reticence; but he determined, at the same time, that when once it had passed over, it would not be his fault if he quarrelled with Fred again, or allowed any guest in his house to feel as uncomfortable and depressed as he had caused Fred to be all the afternoon. And as Maurice made these good resolutions, he whistled softly to himself; and a better and much pleasanter light came into his eyes, as he put aside a box of candied fruit with a beautiful picture on the top of it, as a peace-offering for his cousin, whenever the favourable moment for presenting it should arrive. Little he knew what burning thoughts were passing through Fred's mind, or what a fire of revengeful feelings was smouldering under the quiet attitude and dispirited appearance of his cousin.

Fred meanwhile had not only thought out his new plan, but had actually begun to carry it into execution. Once more, unseen, he had picked up the ball of cord, and cut two pieces from it; and now he was busy, while Maurice's back was turned, making slip knots on these also. And when Maurice leaned across the shelf to take down the prettiest box of preserved fruits for the proposed gift, Fred quickly drew these second loops over the two bolts, and with the ends hanging down beside him, only waited for a further opportunity of pushing them through the hinge of the large door which stood conveniently near its neighbour, and on the very side which would enable him to draw the bolts of the latter securely back into their places.

The gong sounding for dressing soon afforded him the desired moment for action, and when the store-room was nearly full of the guests assembling around Maurice, preparatory to their departure upstairs, Fred stood up, and drawing into the shadow of the large door, which opened inwardly, he thrust the cords carefully through the slit beneath the hinges, and then passing out almost unobserved into the passage, he delayed just sufficiently long to see that they were all well out, and ready for action, and also to assure himself that they would be quite invisible to the eye of a passer-by, as the light painting of the wood corresponded so nearly in shade to the colour of the cord, that unless a person had intentionally sought for the strings, they would never have their attention drawn to the spot.

At any rate, Fred reasoned with himself, the afternoon was already fast closing in, and every moment the hall and staircase would be growing darker; the gas jet in the passage was purposely fixed so as to throw its light in through the window of the store-room, and thus the outside walls lay in comparative shadow; and there was no need to think of to-morrow, for what could be done at once without danger ought not to be deferred until suspicion might be aroused; and Fred, full of a deep and earnest purpose, walked slowly up to his own room and began to dress for dinner.