all too soon and denied her the light of the lamp along the footpath.
Suddenly there was a bright ray from the window, as if some one had
pushed back the curtain and stood with the lamp close to the sash.
"That's Hannah," said the retreating guest. "She'd told me somethin'
about things, I know, if it hadn't 'a' been for Betsey. Catch me
workin' myself to pieces again for 'em." But, however grudgingly this
was said, Mrs. Downs's conscience told her that the industry of the
past two days had been somewhat selfish on her part; she had hoped
that in the excitement of this unexpected funeral season she might for
once be taken into the sisters' confidence. More than this, she knew
that they were certain of her motive, and had deliberately refused the
expected satisfaction. "'T ain't as if I was one o' them curious
busy-bodies anyway," she said to herself pityingly; "they might 'a'
neighbored with somebody for once, I do believe." Everybody would have
a question ready for her the next day, for it was known that she had
been slaving herself devotedly since the news had come of old Captain
Knowles's sudden death in his bed from a stroke, the last of three
which had in the course of a year or two changed him from a strong old
man to a feeble, chair-bound cripple.
Mrs. Downs stepped bravely along the dark country road; she could see
a light in her own kitchen window half a mile away, and did not stop
to notice either the penetrating dampness, or the shadowy woods at her
right. It was a cloudy night, but there was a dim light over the open
fields. She had a disposition of mind towards the exciting
circumstances of death and burial, and was in request at such times
among her neighbors; in this she was like a city person who prefers
tragedy to comedy, but not having the semblance within her reach, she
made the most of looking on at real griefs and departures.
Some one was walking towards her in the road; suddenly she heard
footsteps. The figure stopped, then it came forward again.
"Oh, 't is you, ain't it?" with a tone of disappointment. "I cal'lated
you'd stop all night, 't had got to be so late, an' I was just going
over to the Knowles gals'; well, to kind o' ask how they be, an'"--Mr.
Peter Downs was evidently counting on his visit.
"They never passed me the compliment," replied the wife. "I declare I
didn't covet the walk home; I'm most beat out, bein' on foot so much.
I was 'most put out with 'em for letten' of me see quite so plain that
my room was better than my company. But I don't know's I blame 'em;
they want to look an' see what they've got, an' kind of git by
theirselves, I expect. 'T was natural."
Mrs. Downs knew that her husband would resent her first statements,
being a sensitive and grumbling man. She had formed a pacific habit of
suiting her remarks to his point of view, to save an outburst. He
contented Himself with calling the Knowles girls hoggish, and put a
direct question as to whether they had let fall any words about their
situation, but Martha Downs was obliged to answer in the negative.
"Was Enoch Holt there after the folks come back from the grave?"
"He wa'n't; they never give _him_ no encouragement neither."
"He appeared well, I must say," continued Peter Downs. "He took his
place next but one behind us in the procession, 'long of Melinda
Dutch, an' walked to an' from with her, give her his arm, and then I
never see him after we got back; but I thought he might be somewhere
in the house, an' I was out about the barn an' so on."
"They was civil to him. I was by when he come, just steppin' out of
the bedroom after we'd finished layin' the old Cap'n into his coffin.
Hannah looked real pleased when she see Enoch, as if she hadn't really
expected him, but Betsey stuck out her hand's if 't was an eend o'
board, an' drawed her face solemner 'n ever. There, they had natural
feelin's. He was their own father when all was said, the Cap'n was,
an' I don't know but he was clever to 'em in his way, 'ceptin' when he
disappointed Hannah about her marryin' Jake Good'in. She l'arned to
respect the old Cap'n's foresight, too."
"Sakes alive, Marthy, how you do knock folks down with one hand an'
set 'em up with t' other," chuckled Mr. Downs. They next discussed the
Captain's appearance as he lay in state in the front room, a subject
which, with its endless ramifications, would keep the whole
neighborhood interested for weeks to come.
An hour later the twinkling light in the Downs house suddenly
disappeared. As Martha Downs took a last look out of doors through her
bedroom window she could see no other light; the neighbors had all
gone to bed. It was a little past nine, and the night was damp and
still.
II.
The Captain Knowles place was eastward from the Downs's, and a short
turn in the road and the piece of hard-wood growth hid one house from
the other. At this unwontedly late hour the elderly sisters were still
sitting in their warm kitchen; there were bright coals under the
singing tea-kettle which hung from the crane by three or four long
pothooks. Betsey Knowles objected when her sister offered to put on
more wood.
"Father never liked to leave no great of a fire, even though he slept
right here in the bedroom. He said this floor was one that would light
an' catch easy, you r'member."
"Another winter we can move down and take the bedroom ourselves--'t
will be warmer for us," suggested Hannah; but Betsey shook her head
doubtfully. The thought of their old father's grave, unwatched and
undefended in the outermost dark field, filled their hearts with a
strange tenderness. They had been his dutiful, patient slaves, and it
seemed like disloyalty to have abandoned the poor shape; to be sitting
there disregarding the thousand requirements and services of the past.
More than all, they were facing a free future; they were their own
mistresses at last, though past sixty years of age. Hannah was still a
child at heart. She chased away a dread suspicion, when Betsey forbade
the wood, lest this elder sister, who favored their father' s looks,
might take his place as stern ruler of the household.
"Betsey," said the younger sister suddenly, "we'll have us a cook
stove, won't we, next winter? I expect we're going to have something
to do with?"
Betsey did not answer; it was impossible to say whether she truly felt
grief or only assumed it. She had been sober and silent for the most
part since she routed neighbor Downs, though she answered her sister's
prattling questions with patience and sympathy. Now, she rose from her
chair and went to one of the windows, and, pushing back the sash
curtain, pulled the wooden shutter across and hasped it.
"I ain't going to bed just yet," she explained. "I've been a-waiting
to make sure nobody was coming in. I don't know's there'll be any
better time to look in the chest and see what we've got to depend on.
We never'll get no chance to do it by day."
Hannah looked frightened for a moment, then nodded, and turned to the
opposite window and pulled that shutter with much difficulty; it had
always caught and hitched and been provoking--a warped piece of red
oak, when even-grained white pine would have saved strength and
patience to three generations of the Knowles race. Then the sisters
crossed the kitchen and opened the bedroom door. Hannah shivered a
little as the colder air struck her, and her heart beat loudly.
Perhaps it was the same with Betsey.
The bedroom was clean and orderly for the funeral guests. Instead of
the blue homespun there was a beautifully quilted white coverlet which
had been part of their mother's wedding furnishing, and this made the
bedstead with its four low posts-look unfamiliar and awesome. The
lamplight shone through the kitchen door behind them, not very bright
at best, but Betsey reached under the bed, and with all the strength
she could muster pulled out the end of a great sea chest. The sisters
tugged together and pushed, and made the most of their strength before
they finally brought it through the narrow door into the kitchen. The
solemnity of the deed made them both whisper as they talked, and
Hannah did not dare to say what was in her timid heart--that she would
rather brave discovery by daylight than such a feeling of being
disapprovingly watched now, in the dead of night. There came a slight
sound outside the house which made her look anxiously at Betsey, but
Betsey remained tranquil.
"It's nothing but a stick falling down the woodpile," she answered in
a contemptuous whisper, and the younger woman was reassured.
Betsey reached deep into her pocket and found a great key which was
worn smooth and bright like silver, and never had been trusted
willingly into even her own careful hands. Hannah held the lamp, and
the two thin figures bent eagerly over the lid as it opened. Their
shadows were waving about the low walls, and looked like strange
shapes bowing and dancing behind them.
The chest was stoutly timbered, as if it were built in some ship-yard,
and there were heavy wrought-iron hinges and a large escutcheon for
the keyhole that the ship's blacksmith might have hammered out. On the
top somebody had scratched deeply the crossed lines for a game of fox
and geese, which had a trivial, irreverent look, and might have been
the unforgiven fault of some idle ship's boy. The sisters had hardly
dared look at the chest or to signify their knowledge of its
existence, at unwary times. They had swept carefully about it year
after year, and wondered if it were indeed full of gold as the
neighbors used to hint; but no matter how much found a way in, little
had found the way out. They had been hampered all their lives for
money, and in consequence had developed a wonderful facility for
spinning and weaving, mending and making. Their small farm was an
early example of intensive farming; they were allowed to use its
products in a niggardly way, but the money that was paid for wool, for
hay, for wood, and for summer crops had all gone into the chest. The
old captain was a hard master; he rarely commended and often blamed.
Hannah trembled before him, but Betsey faced him sturdily, being
amazingly like him, with a feminine difference; as like as a ruled
person can be to a ruler, for the discipline of life had taught the
man to aggress, the woman only to defend. In the chest was a fabled
sum of prize-money, besides these slender earnings of many years; all
the sisters' hard work and self-sacrifice were there in money and a
mysterious largess besides. All their lives they had been looking
forward to this hour of ownership.
There was a solemn hush in the house; the two sisters were safe from
their neighbors, and there was no fear of interruption at such an hour
in that hard-working community, tired with a day's work that had been
early begun. If any one came knocking at the door, both door and
windows were securely fastened.
The eager sisters bent above the chest, they held their breath and
talked in softest whispers. With stealthy tread a man came out of the
woods near by.
He stopped to listen, came nearer, stopped again, and then crept close
to the old house. He stepped upon the banking, next the window with
the warped shutter; there was a knothole in it high above the women's
heads, towards the top. As they leaned over the chest, an eager eye
watched them. If they had turned that way suspiciously, the eye might
have caught the flicker of the lamp and betrayed itself. No, they were
too busy: the eye at the shutter watched and watched.
There was a certain feeling of relief in the sisters' minds because
the contents of the chest were so commonplace at first sight. There
were some old belongings dating back to their father's early days of
seafaring. They unfolded a waistcoat pattern or two of figured stuff
which they had seen him fold and put away again and again. Once he had
given Betsey a gay China silk handkerchief, and here were two more
like it. They had not known what a store of treasures might be waiting
for them, but the reality so far was disappointing; there was much
spare room to begin with, and the wares within looked pinched and few.
There were bundles of papers, old receipts, some letters in two not
very thick bundles, some old account books with worn edges, and a
blackened silver can which looked very small in comparison with their
anticipation, being an heirloom and jealously hoarded and secreted by
the old man. The women began to feel as if his lean angry figure were
bending with them over the sea chest.
They opened a package wrapped in many layers of old soft paper--a
worked piece of Indian muslin, and an embroidered red scarf which they
had never seen before. "He must have brought them home to mother,"
said Betsey with a great outburst of feeling. "He never was the same
man again; he never would let nobody else have them when he found she
was dead, poor old father!"
Hannah looked wistfully at the treasures. She rebuked herself for
selfishness, but she thought of her pinched girlhood and the delight
these things would have been. Ah yes! it was too late now for many
things besides the sprigged muslin. "If I was young as I was once
there's lots o' things I'd like to do now I'm free," said Hannah with
a gentle sigh; but her sister checked her anxiously--it was fitting
that they should preserve a semblance of mourning even to themselves.
The lamp stood in a kitchen chair at the chest's end and shone full
across their faces. Betsey looked intent and sober as she turned over
the old man's treasures. Under the India mull was an antique pair of
buff trousers, a waistcoat of strange old-fashioned foreign stuff, and
a blue coat with brass buttons, brought home from over seas, as the
women knew, for their father's wedding clothes. They had seen him
carry them out at long intervals to hang them in the spring sunshine;
he had been very feeble the last time, and Hannah remembered that she
had longed to take them from his shaking hands.
"I declare for 't I wish 't we had laid him out in 'em, 'stead o' the
robe," she whispered; but Betsey made no answer. She was kneeling
still, but held herself upright and looked away. It was evident that
she was lost in her own thoughts.
"I can't find nothing else by eyesight," she muttered. "This chest
never 'd be so heavy with them old clothes. Stop! Hold that light
down, Hannah; there's a place underneath here. Them papers in the till
takes a shallow part. Oh, my gracious! See here, will ye? Hold the
light, hold the light!"
There was a hidden drawer in the chest's side--a long, deep place, and
it was full of gold pieces. Hannah had seated herself in the chair to
be out of her sister's way. She held the lamp with one hand and
gathered her apron on her lap with the other, while Betsey, exultant
and hawk-eyed, took out handful after handful of heavy coins, letting
them jingle and chink, letting them shine in the lamp's rays, letting
them roll across the floor--guineas, dollars, doubloons, old French
and Spanish and English gold!
_Now, now! Look! The eye at the window!_
At last they have found it all; the bag of silver, the great roll of
bank bills, and the heavy weight of gold--the prize-money that had
been like Robinson Crusoe's in the cave. They were rich women that
night; their faces grew young again as they sat side by side and
exulted while the old kitchen grew cold. There was nothing they might
not do within the range of their timid ambitions; they were women of
fortune now and their own mistresses. They were beginning at last to
live.
The watcher outside was cramped and chilled. He let himself down
softly from the high step of the winter banking, and crept toward the
barn, where he might bury himself in the hay and think. His fingers
were quick to find the peg that opened the little barn door; the
beasts within were startled and stumbled to their feet, then went back
to their slumbers. The night wore on; the light spring rain began to
fall, and the sound of it on the house roof close down upon the
sisters' bed lulled them quickly to sleep. Twelve, one, two o'clock
passed by.
They had put back the money and the clothes and the minor goods and
treasures and pulled the chest back into the bedroom so that it was
out of sight from the kitchen; the bedroom door was always shut by
day. The younger sister wished to carry the money to their own room,
but Betsey disdained such precaution. The money had always been safe
in the old chest, and there it should stay. The next week they would
go to Riverport and put it into the bank; it was no use to lose the
interest any longer. Because their father had lost some invested money
in his early youth, it did not follow that every bank was faithless.
Betsey's self-assertion was amazing, but they still whispered to each
other as they got ready for bed. With strange forgetfulness Betsey had
laid the chest key on the white coverlet in the bedroom and left it
there.
III.
In August of that year the whole countryside turned out to go to
court.
The sisters had been rich for one night; in the morning they waked to
find themselves poor with a bitter pang of poverty of which they had
never dreamed. They had said little, but they grew suddenly pinched
and old. They could not tell how much money they had lost, except that
Hannah's lap was full of gold, a weight she could not lift nor carry.
After a few days of stolid misery they had gone to the chief lawyer of
their neighborhood to accuse Enoch Holt of the robbery. They dressed
in their best and walked solemnly side by side across the fields and
along the road, the shortest way to the man of law. Enoch Holt's
daughter saw them go as she stood in her doorway, and felt a cold
shiver run through her frame as if in foreboding. Her father was not
at home; he had left for Boston late on the afternoon of Captain
Knowles's funeral. He had had notice the day before of the coming in
of a ship in which he owned a thirty-second; there was talk of
selling the ship, and the owners' agent had summoned him. He had taken
pains to go to the funeral, because he and the old captain had been on
bad terms ever since they had bought a piece of woodland together, and
the captain declared himself wronged at the settling of accounts. He
was growing feeble even then, and had left the business to the younger
man. Enoch Holt was not a trusted man, yet he had never before been
openly accused of dishonesty. He was not a professor of religion, but
foremost on the secular side of church matters. Most of the men in
that region were hard men; it was difficult to get money, and there
was little real comfort in a community where the sterner, stingier,
forbidding side of New England life was well exemplified.
The proper steps had been taken by the officers of the law, and in
answer to the writ Enoch Holt appeared, much shocked and very
indignant, and was released on bail which covered the sum his shipping
interest had brought him. The weeks had dragged by; June and July were
long in passing, and here was court day at last, and all the townsfolk
hastening by high-roads and by-roads to the court-house. The Knowles
girls themselves had risen at break of day and walked the distance
steadfastly, like two of the three Fates: who would make the third, to
cut the thread for their enemy's disaster? Public opinion was divided.
There were many voices ready to speak on the accused man's side; a
sharp-looking acquaintance left his business in Boston to swear that
Holt was in his office before noon on the day following the robbery,
and that he had spent most of the night in Boston, as proved by
several minor details of their interview. As for Holt's young married
daughter, she was a favorite with the townsfolk, and her husband was
away at sea overdue these last few weeks. She sat on one of the hard
court benches with a young child in her arms, born since its father
sailed; they had been more or less unlucky, the Holt family, though
Enoch himself was a man of brag and bluster.
All the hot August morning, until the noon recess, and all the hot
August afternoon, fly-teased and wretched with the heavy air, the
crowd of neighbors listened to the trial. There was not much evidence
brought; everybody knew that Enoch Holt left the funeral procession
hurriedly, and went away on horseback towards Boston. His daughter
knew no more than this. The Boston man gave his testimony impatiently,
and one or two persons insisted that they saw the accused on his way
at nightfall, several miles from home.
As the testimony came out, it all tended to prove his innocence,
though public opinion was to the contrary. The Knowles sisters looked
more stern and gray hour by hour; their vengeance was not to be
satisfied; their accusation had been listened to and found wanting,
but their instinctive knowledge of the matter counted for nothing.
They must have been watched through the knot-hole of the shutter;
nobody had noticed it until, some years before, Enoch Holt himself had
spoken of the light's shining through on a winter's night as he came
towards the house. The chief proof was that nobody else could have
done the deed. But why linger over _pros_ and _cons?_ The jury
returned directly with a verdict of "not proven," and the tired
audience left the court-house.
But not until Hannah Knowles with angry eyes had risen to her feet.
The sterner elder sister tried to pull her back; every one said that
they should have looked to Betsey to say the awful words that
followed, not to her gentler companion. It was Hannah, broken and
disappointed, who cried in a strange high voice as Enoch Holt was
passing by without a look:
"You stole it, you thief! You know it in your heart!"
The startled man faltered, then he faced the women. The people who
stood near seemed made of eyes as they stared to see what he would
say.
"I swear by my right hand I never touched it."
"Curse your right hand, then!" cried Hannah Knowles, growing tall and
thin like a white flame drawing upward. "Curse your right hand, yours
and all your folks' that follow you! May I live to see the day!"
The people drew back, while for a moment accused and accuser stood
face to face. Then Holt's flushed face turned white, and he shrank
from the fire in those wild eyes, and walked away clumsily down the
courtroom. Nobody followed him, nobody shook hands with him, or told
the acquitted man that they were glad of his release. Half an hour
later, Betsey and Hannah Knowles took their homeward way, to begin
their hard round of work again. The horizon that had widened with such
glory for one night, had closed round them again like an iron wall.
Betsey was alarmed and excited by her sister's uncharacteristic
behavior, and she looked at her anxiously from time to time. Hannah
had become the harder-faced of the two. Her disappointment was the
keener, for she had kept more of the unsatisfied desires of her
girlhood until that dreary morning when they found the sea-chest
rifled and the treasure gone.
Betsey said inconsequently that it was a pity she did not have that
black silk gown that would stand alone. They had planned for it over
the open chest, and Hannah's was to be a handsome green. They might
have worn them to court. But even the pathetic facetiousness of her
elder sister did not bring a smile to Hannah Knowles's face, and the
next day one was at the loom and the other at the wheel again. The
neighbors talked about the curse with horror; in their minds a fabric
of sad fate was spun from the bitter words.
The Knowles sisters never had worn silk gowns and they never would.
Sometimes Hannah or Betsey would stealthily look over the chest in one
or the other's absence. One day when Betsey was very old and her mind
had grown feeble, she tied her own India silk handkerchief about her
neck, but they never used the other two. They aired the wedding suit
once every spring as long as they lived. They were both too old and
forlorn to make up the India mull. Nobody knows how many times they
took everything out of the heavy old clamped box, and peered into
every nook and corner to see if there was not a single gold piece
left. They never answered any one who made bold to speak of their
misfortune.
IV.