Twice-Told Tales (46 page)

"Verily," said the old gentleman, "it will be fitting that I enter the
mansion-house of the worthy Colonel Fenwicke, lest any harm should
have befallen that true Christian woman whom ye call the 'Old Maid in
the Winding-Sheet.'"

Behold, then, the venerable clergyman ascending the steps of the
mansion with a torch-bearer behind him. It was the elderly man who had
spoken to the Old Maid, and the same who had afterward explained the
shield of arms and recognized the features of the negro. Like their
predecessors, they gave three raps with the iron hammer.

"Old Cæsar cometh not," observed the priest. "Well, I wot he no longer
doth service in this mansion."

"Assuredly, then, it was something worse in old Cæsar's likeness,"
said the other adventurer.

"Be it as God wills," answered the clergyman. "See! my strength,
though it be much decayed, hath sufficed to open this heavy door. Let
us enter and pass up the staircase."

Here occurred a singular exemplification of the dreamy state of a very
old man's mind. As they ascended the wide flight of stairs the aged
clergyman appeared to move with caution, occasionally standing aside,
and oftener bending his head, as it were in salutation, thus
practising all the gestures of one who makes his way through a throng.
Reaching the head of the staircase, he looked around with sad and
solemn benignity, laid aside his staff, bared his hoary locks, and was
evidently on the point of commencing a prayer.

"Reverend sir," said his attendant, who conceived this a very suitable
prelude to their further search, "would it not be well that the people
join with us in prayer?"

"Well-a-day!" cried the old clergyman, staring strangely around him.
"Art thou here with me, and none other? Verily, past times were
present to me, and I deemed that I was to make a funeral prayer, as
many a time heretofore, from the head of this staircase. Of a truth, I
saw the shades of many that are gone. Yea, I have prayed at their
burials, one after another, and the Old Maid in the Winding-Sheet hath
seen them to their graves."

Being now more thoroughly awake to their present purpose, he took his
staff and struck forcibly on the floor, till there came an echo from
each deserted chamber, but no menial to answer their summons. They
therefore walked along the passage, and again paused, opposite to the
great front window, through which was seen the crowd in the shadow and
partial moonlight of the street beneath. On their right hand was the
open door of a chamber, and a closed one on their left.

The clergyman pointed his cane to the carved oak panel of the latter.

"Within that chamber," observed he, "a whole lifetime since, did I sit
by the death-bed of a goodly young man who, being now at the last
gasp—" Apparently, there was some powerful excitement in the ideas
which had now flashed across his mind. He snatched the torch from his
companion's hand, and threw open the door with such sudden violence
that the flame was extinguished, leaving them no other light than the
moonbeams which fell through two windows into the spacious chamber. It
was sufficient to discover all that could be known. In a high-backed
oaken arm-chair, upright, with her hands clasped across her breast and
her head thrown back, sat the Old Maid in the Winding-Sheet. The
stately dame had fallen on her knees with her forehead on the holy
knees of the Old Maid, one hand upon the floor and the other pressed
convulsively against her heart. It clutched a lock of hair—once
sable, now discolored with a greenish mould.

As the priest and layman advanced into the chamber the Old Maid's
features assumed such a semblance of shifting expression that they
trusted to hear the whole mystery explained by a single word. But it
was only the shadow of a tattered curtain waving betwixt the dead face
and the moonlight.

"Both dead!" said the venerable man. "Then who shall divulge the
secret? Methinks it glimmers to and fro in my mind like the light and
shadow across the Old Maid's face. And now 'tis gone!"

"And so, Peter, you won't even consider of the business?" said Mr.
John Brown, buttoning his surtout over the snug rotundity of his
person and drawing on his gloves. "You positively refuse to let me
have this crazy old house, and the land under and adjoining, at the
price named?"

"Neither at that, nor treble the sum," responded the gaunt, grizzled
and threadbare Peter Goldthwaite. "The fact is, Mr. Brown, you must
find another site for your brick block and be content to leave my
estate with the present owner. Next summer I intend to put a splendid
new mansion over the cellar of the old house."

"Pho, Peter!" cried Mr. Brown as he opened the kitchen door; "content
yourself with building castles in the air, where house-lots are
cheaper than on earth, to say nothing of the cost of bricks and
mortar. Such foundations are solid enough for your edifices, while
this underneath us is just the thing for mine; and so we may both be
suited. What say you, again?"

"Precisely what I said before, Mr. Brown," answered Peter Goldthwaite.
"And, as for castles in the air, mine may not be as magnificent as
that sort of architecture, but perhaps as substantial, Mr. Brown, as
the very respectable brick block with dry-goods stores, tailors' shops
and banking-rooms on the lower floor, and lawyers' offices in the
second story, which you are so anxious to substitute."

"And the cost, Peter? Eh?" said Mr. Brown as he withdrew in something
of a pet. "That, I suppose, will be provided for off-hand by drawing a
check on Bubble Bank?"

John Brown and Peter Goldthwaite had been jointly known to the
commercial world between twenty and thirty years before under the firm
of Goldthwaite & Brown; which copartnership, however, was speedily
dissolved by the natural incongruity of its constituent parts. Since
that event, John Brown, with exactly the qualities of a thousand other
John Browns, and by just such plodding methods as they used, had
prospered wonderfully and become one of the wealthiest John Browns on
earth. Peter Goldthwaite, on the contrary, after innumerable schemes
which ought to have collected all the coin and paper currency of the
country into his coffers, was as needy a gentleman as ever wore a
patch upon his elbow. The contrast between him and his former partner
may be briefly marked, for Brown never reckoned upon luck, yet always
had it, while Peter made luck the main condition of his projects, and
always missed it. While the means held out his speculations had been
magnificent, but were chiefly confined of late years to such small
business as adventures in the lottery. Once he had gone on a
gold-gathering expedition somewhere to the South, and ingeniously
contrived to empty his pockets more thoroughly than ever, while
others, doubtless, were filling theirs with native bullion by the
handful. More recently he had expended a legacy of a thousand or two
of dollars in purchasing Mexican scrip, and thereby became the
proprietor of a province; which, however, so far as Peter could find
out, was situated where he might have had an empire for the same
money—in the clouds. From a search after this valuable real estate
Peter returned so gaunt and threadbare that on reaching New England
the scarecrows in the corn-fields beckoned to him as he passed by.
"They did but flutter in the wind," quoth Peter Goldthwaite. No,
Peter, they beckoned, for the scarecrows knew their brother.

At the period of our story his whole visible income would not have
paid the tax of the old mansion in which we find him. It was one of
those rusty, moss-grown, many-peaked wooden houses which are scattered
about the streets of our elder towns, with a beetle-browed second
story projecting over the foundation, as if it frowned at the novelty
around it. This old paternal edifice, needy as he was, and though,
being centrally situated on the principal street of the town, it would
have brought him a handsome sum, the sagacious Peter had his own
reasons for never parting with, either by auction or private sale.
There seemed, indeed, to be a fatality that connected him with his
birthplace; for, often as he had stood on the verge of ruin, and
standing there even now, he had not yet taken the step beyond it which
would have compelled him to surrender the house to his creditors. So
here he dwelt with bad luck till good should come.

Here, then, in his kitchen—the only room where a spark of fire took
off the chill of a November evening—poor Peter Goldthwaite had just
been visited by his rich old partner. At the close of their interview,
Peter, with rather a mortified look, glanced downward at his dress,
parts of which appeared as ancient as the days of Goldthwaite & Brown.
His upper garment was a mixed surtout, woefully faded, and patched
with newer stuff on each elbow; beneath this he wore a threadbare
black coat, some of the silk buttons of which had been replaced with
others of a different pattern; and, lastly, though he lacked not a
pair of gray pantaloons, they were very shabby ones, and had been
partially turned brown by the frequent toasting of Peter's shins
before a scanty fire. Peter's person was in keeping with his goodly
apparel. Gray-headed, hollow-eyed, pale-cheeked and lean-bodied, he
was the perfect picture of a man who had fed on windy schemes and
empty hopes till he could neither live on such unwholesome trash nor
stomach more substantial food. But, withal, this Peter Goldthwaite,
crack-brained simpleton as, perhaps, he was, might have cut a very
brilliant figure in the world had he employed his imagination in the
airy business of poetry instead of making it a demon of mischief in
mercantile pursuits. After all, he was no bad fellow, but as harmless
as a child, and as honest and honorable, and as much of the gentleman
which Nature meant him for, as an irregular life and depressed
circumstances will permit any man to be.

As Peter stood on the uneven bricks of his hearth looking round at the
disconsolate old kitchen his eyes began to kindle with the
illumination of an enthusiasm that never long deserted him. He raised
his hand, clenched it and smote it energetically against the smoky
panel over the fireplace.

"The time is come," said he; "with such a treasure at command, it were
folly to be a poor man any longer. Tomorrow morning I will begin with
the garret, nor desist till I have torn the house down."

Deep in the chimney-corner, like a witch in a dark cavern, sat a
little old woman mending one of the two pairs of stockings wherewith
Peter Goldthwaite kept his toes from being frost-bitten. As the feet
were ragged past all darning, she had cut pieces out of a cast-off
flannel petticoat to make new soles. Tabitha Porter was an old maid
upward of sixty years of age, fifty-five of which she had sat in that
same chimney-corner, such being the length of time since Peter's
grandfather had taken her from the almshouse. She had no friend but
Peter, nor Peter any friend but Tabitha; so long as Peter might have a
shelter for his own head, Tabitha would know where to shelter hers,
or, being homeless elsewhere, she would take her master by the hand
and bring him to her native home, the almshouse. Should it ever be
necessary, she loved him well enough to feed him with her last morsel
and clothe him with her under-petticoat. But Tabitha was a queer old
woman, and, though never infected with Peter's flightiness, had become
so accustomed to his freaks and follies that she viewed them all as
matters of course. Hearing him threaten to tear the house down, she
looked quietly up from her work.

"Best leave the kitchen till the last, Mr. Peter," said she.

"The sooner we have it all down, the better," said Peter Goldthwaite.
"I am tired to death of living in this cold, dark, windy, smoky,
creaking, groaning, dismal old house. I shall feel like a younger man
when we get into my splendid brick mansion, as, please Heaven, we
shall by this time next autumn. You shall have a room on the sunny
side, old Tabby, finished and furnished as best may suit your own
notions."

"I should like it pretty much such a room as this kitchen," answered
Tabitha. "It will never be like home to me till the chimney-corner
gets as black with smoke as this, and that won't be these hundred
years. How much do you mean to lay out on the house, Mr. Peter?"

"What is that to the purpose?" exclaimed Peter, loftily. "Did not my
great-grand-uncle, Peter Goldthwaite, who died seventy years ago, and
whose namesake I am, leave treasure enough to build twenty such?"

"I can't say but he did, Mr. Peter," said Tabitha, threading her
needle.

Tabitha well understood that Peter had reference to an immense hoard
of the precious metals which was said to exist somewhere in the cellar
or walls, or under the floors, or in some concealed closet or other
out-of-the-way nook of the old house. This wealth, according to
tradition, had been accumulated by a former Peter Goldthwaite whose
character seems to have borne a remarkable similitude to that of the
Peter of our story. Like him, he was a wild projector, seeking to heap
up gold by the bushel and the cart-load instead of scraping it
together coin by coin. Like Peter the second, too, his projects had
almost invariably failed, and, but for the magnificent success of the
final one, would have left him with hardly a coat and pair of breeches
to his gaunt and grizzled person. Reports were various as to the
nature of his fortunate speculation, one intimating that the ancient
Peter had made the gold by alchemy; another, that he had conjured it
out of people's pockets by the black art; and a third—still more
unaccountable—that the devil had given him free access to the old
provincial treasury. It was affirmed, however, that some secret
impediment had debarred him from the enjoyment of his riches, and that
he had a motive for concealing them from his heir, or, at any rate,
had died without disclosing the place of deposit. The present Peter's
father had faith enough in the story to cause the cellar to be dug
over. Peter himself chose to consider the legend as an indisputable
truth, and amid his many troubles had this one consolation—that,
should all other resources fail, he might build up his fortunes by
tearing his house down. Yet, unless he felt a lurking distrust of the
golden tale, it is difficult to account for his permitting the
paternal roof to stand so long, since he had never yet seen the moment
when his predecessor's treasure would not have found plenty of room in
his own strong-box. But now was the crisis. Should he delay the search
a little longer, the house would pass from the lineal heir, and with
it the vast heap of gold, to remain in its burial-place till the ruin
of the aged walls should discover it to strangers of a future
generation.