The Secret Passage | Page 6

the fields to the left she saw an unfinished mansion, large and stately,
rising amidst a forest of pines. This was girdled by a high brick wall
which looked older than the suburb itself. Remembering that she had
seen this house behind the cottage of Miss Loach, the girl used it as a
landmark, and turning down a side street managed to find the top of a
crooked lane at the bottom of which Rose Cottage was situated. This
lane showed by its very crookedness that it belonged to the ancient
civilization of the district. Here were no paths, no lamps, no
aggressively new fences and raw brick houses. Susan, stepping down
the slight incline, passed into quite an old world, smacking of the
Georgian times, leisurely and quaint. On either side of the lane,
old-fashioned cottages, with whitewash walls and thatched roofs, stood
amidst gardens filled with unclipped greenery and homely flowers.

Quickset hedges, ragged and untrimmed, divided these from the
roadway, and to add to the rural look one garden possessed straw
bee-hives. Here and there rose ancient elm-trees and grass grew in the
roadway. It was a blind lane and terminated in a hedge, which bordered
a field of corn. To the left was a narrow path running between hedges
past the cottages and into the country.
Miss Loach's house was a mixture of old and new. Formerly it had been
an unpretentious cottage like the others, but she had added a new wing
of red brick built in the most approved style of the jerry-builder, and
looking like the villas in the more modern parts of Rexton. The crabbed
age and the uncultured youth of the old and new portions, planted
together cheek by jowl, appeared like ill-coupled clogs and quite out of
harmony. The thatched and tiled roofs did not seem meet neighbors,
and the whitewash walls of the old-world cottage looked dingy beside
the glaring redness of the new villa. The front door in the new part was
reached by a flight of dazzling white steps. From this, a veranda ran
across the front of the cottage, its rustic posts supporting rose-trees and
ivy. On the cottage side appeared an old garden, but the new wing was
surrounded by lawns and decorated with carpet bedding. A gravel walk
divided the old from the new, and intersected the garden. At the back,
Susan noted again the high brick wall surrounding the half-completed
mansion. Above this rose tall trees, and the wall itself was overgrown
with ivy. It apparently was old and concealed an unfinished palace of
the sleeping beauty, so ragged and wild appeared the growth which
peeped over the guardian wall.
With a quickness of perception unusual in her class, Susan took all this
in, then rang the bell. There was no back door, so far as she could see,
and she thought it best to enter as she had done in the morning. But the
large fat woman who opened the door gave her to understand that she
had taken a liberty.
"Of course this morning and before engaging, you were a lady," said
the cook, hustling the girl into the hall, "but now being the housemaid,
Miss Loach won't be pleased at your touching the front bell."
"I did not see any other entrance," protested Susan.

"Ah," said the cook, leading the way down a few steps into the thatched
cottage, which, it appeared was the servants' quarters, "you looked
down the area as is natural-like. But there ain't none, it being a
conservitery!"
"Why does Miss Loach live in the basement?" asked Susan, on being
shown into a comfortable room which answered the purpose of a
servants' hall.
The cook resented this question. "Ah!" said she with a snort, "and why
does a miller wear a white 'at, Miss Grant, that being your name I take
it. Don't you ask no questions but if you must know, Miss Loach have
weak eyes and don't like glare. She lives like a rabbit in a burrow, and
though the rooms on the ground floor are sich as the King might in'abit,
she don't come up often save to eat. She lives in the basement room
where you saw her, Miss Grant, and she sleeps in the room orf. When
she eats, the dining-room above is at her service. An' I don't see why
she shouldn't," snorted the cook.
"I don't mean any -- "
"No offence being given none is taken," interrupted cook, who seemed
fond of hearing her own wheezy voice. "Emily Pill's my name, and I
ain't ashamed of it, me having been cook to Miss Loach for years an'
years and years. But if you had wished to behave like a servant, as you
are," added she with emphasis, "why didn't you