Page:A history of the gunpowder plot-The conspiracy and its agents (1904).djvu/184

158 Had the Government depended solely on what they could elicit in cross-examination from Garnet as evidence to be used against him at his trial, they would hardly have been able to secure a conviction. They, however, invented a far more subtle plan for incriminating him than this method of continued personal examination. Garnet and Oldcorne were incarcerated in adjoining chambers, and were told by a janitor that by pulling open a kind of secret panel in a wall they could converse (provided they did so quietly) together, and without fear of detection. It seems extraordinary that astute men like these hunted Jesuits, who had for many years had to defend themselves against innumerable tricks and strategems laid for them by their enemies, should have fallen into so simple a trap. But they did, and relying on their janitor's word and fidelity, opened up a series of conversations by removing the stone in the wall, utterly unsuspecting that this same hollow wall concealed the persons of two agents of the Privy Council, who wrote down every word they heard of these conversations. What was overheard of the conversations by the Government's agents proved fatal to Garnet, although some allowance must be made for the probability that the listeners did not always hear quite so plainly as they pretended. So unsuspicious were the two Jesuits of the open trap into which they had