"There," said Mr. Buxton, "who would suspect Tacitus his history and
Juvenal his satires of guarding the passage of a Christian ecclesiastic
fleeing for his life?"
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.
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