A MISER'S WILL
Kenny lingered moodily over his supper. His evening was casting its
shadow ahead. He dreaded the thought of climbing the stairs to Adam's
empty room. If he could have kept his hostile memories in the face of
death, he told himself impatiently, it would have been easier. But
Garry was right. He was wild and sentimental. Only pitiful memories
lingered to haunt him: rain and loneliness and the old man's hunger for
excitement.
He went at last with a sigh, oppressed by the creak of the banister
where Adam had sat, sinister and silent in his wheel-chair, listening
to the music. Memories were crowding thick upon him. Again and again
he wished that he had never opened the door of the sitting room that
other night and caught the old man off his guard. It had left a
specter in his mind, horrible in its pathos and intense. Strung
fiercely to the thought of emptiness, it came upon him nevertheless, as
he opened the door, with a curious chill sense of palpability; as if
silence and emptiness could strike one in the face and make him falter.
The room was fireless and silent and unspeakably dreary. Hughie had
left a lamp burning upon the table. The key he had found in the pocket
of the old man's bathrobe lay beside it.
For an interval Kenny stood stock still, his color gone. He faced
strange ghosts. Here in this faded room, with its mystery of books, he
had known agonizing pity and torment, gusts of temper, selfish and
unselfish, real and feigned, moments of triumphal composure that now in
the emptiness it was his fate to remember with a sickening shudder of
remorse. Here he had battled in vain for Joan, practicing brutally the
telling of much truth; and here with his probing finger, Adam Craig had
roused his slumbering conscience into new doubt and new despair. And
here he must not forget he had told the tale of the fairy mill . . .
and suspicion had come darkly to his mind. Suspicion of what? That,
as ever, he refused to face.
A chair stood by the fireplace. Kenny with a shudder moved it to a
distant corner. He could not bear the memory of that last night when
he had barred the old man out from his joyous mood of sparkle, telling
Samhain tales of the fairies and the dead.
After all, had he meant always to be cruel, that keen-eyed old man with
his keener wits? What conflict of spirit and body had lain behind his
fretful fits of temper?
Kenny turned, blinking, from the wheelchair, and his glance, blurred a
little, found the old man's glasses on the mantel. The shabby case,
left behind while Adam faced the great adventure, was oddly pitiful.
Kenny cleared his throat. He had his moment of rebellion then at the
inevitability of death and doom. It behooved all of us, he remembered
with set lips, to be kind and mend quarrels while the sap of life ran
in our veins, strong and full.
The sight of the key upon the table sent his thoughts flying off at a
tangent. A miser's will! . . . Mother of Men! It was a thing of
morbid mystery and romance!
Kenny sat down in wild excitement and opened the drawer.
He saw at once an orderly packet of papers. The will, which barely a
month ago, Hughie said, he and Hannah had signed without reading, lay
uppermost. Adam had written his will himself, disdaining lawyers.
Kenny opened the will and began to read. He read as he always read in
moments of excitement, blurring through with a glance. But though the
old man's writing was distinct and almost insolent in its boldness, the
portent of the written words did not filter through at once to his
understanding. He frowned and read again. Once more he read, pacing
the floor with unquiet eyes. A number of things were becoming clearer.
There was in the first place no mention of the fugitive nephew. Joan
was the sole heir. There was one executor. That executor was Joan's
guardian and Joan's guardian was one--Kennicott O'Neill! Kenny read
the name aloud as if it belonged to someone else. Joan's guardian!
Again he read the clause aloud with an exclamation of doubt and
unbelief. It lay there definite and clear. He was the sole executor
of Adam's will and he was Joan's guardian. Startled he read the rest.
"To Kennicott O'Neill, my friend, my signet ring . . . to my niece,
Joan West, from whom, no matter what the circumstances, I have never
had an unkind word, I bequeath the Craig farm and all the land and all
the rest, residue and remainder of my wealth wheresoever situate,
provided the executor can find it."
Kenny went back with a feeling of numbness in his brain and read it all
again.
"The rest of my wealth wheresoever situate . . . provided the executor
can find it!"
Those words he scanned blankly with a feeling of much fire in his head
and a tantalizing cloud before his eyes. They meant what? Strange
hints and subtle smiles recurred to him. . . . And Adam had been a
miser who read of buccaneers and hidden treasure. . . . Buccaneers and
hidden treasure! . . . He would have hidden pirates' gold, he had
said, under the biggest apple-tree in the orchard, under the lilac bush
or . . . Where else had he said? . . . And . . what . . had . .
he . . meant?
Kenny struck his head fiercely with his hand, raked his hair in the old
familiar gesture and roamed turbulently around the room with the will
in his hand. He was conscious of that dangerous alertness in his brain
that with him always presaged some unusual clarity of vision, a
startling speed with the adding of two and two. Four came now with
bewildering conviction. Fragments of the puzzle of mystery that had
bothered him for days dropped dizzily into place, even the fairy mill
and the Eve of All Souls. What wonder that in a drunken fit of
superstition Adam had staggered out to seek his dead!
With his hair in disarray from the frantic combing of his fingers,
Kenny went down to find Joan. He read the will aloud to her,
controlling his voice with an effort.
"Don shall have the farm," said Joan. "I shouldn't know what to do
with it."
Kenny read the baffling clause at the end of the will again.
"'All the rest, residue and remainder of my wealth, wheresoever
situate, provided the executor can find it.'"
It seemed to him in his excitement that he could not tell her what he
thought--that he could not say it all with care and calm when his head
was whirling.
"Joan," he said gently, "you must tell me everything you remember about
your mother and your father and your uncle. And whether there was ever
money. Much money," he insisted, his vivid face imploring.
Joan shook her head sadly.
"There is so little I remember, Kenny," she said. "So very little.
There was never money. I do not remember my mother or my father.
Neither does Donald. We lived until I was eight with an old cousin,
Nellie Craig. She said that uncle was a miser who loved nothing but
his brandy. Then she died and we came here. We had to come. There
was no other place for us. I remember that Don's clothes and mine were
always ragged until I grew old enough to mend them. Then I found
mother's trunks in the garret. Later Don and I thought of the ferry
and had for the first time some money of our own."
Kenny looked crestfallen.
"And there is nothing more?" he said. "Think, Joan, think!"
"Nothing," said Joan. "Donald and I were afraid of Uncle. We never
dared to ask him questions. And he never spoke of my mother save to
sneer and curse the stage. What is it, Kenny? What are you thinking?"
"I think," said Kenny, making a colossal effort to speak with the calm
he could not feel, "that somewhere buried on the farm is a great deal
of money. I think it belonged to your mother and that it was left in
trust to your uncle for Donald and you--"
"Kenny!"
"I think," went on Kenny steadily, "that this singular clause in your
uncle's will was a miser's struggle between justice and his instinct
for hoarding and hiding. Money he had kept so long he hated to
relinquish. Yet he dared not keep it. And so he buried the money.
God knows how or where, and shunted the responsibility of its finding
upon me. If it was never found, as perhaps he hoped, he had still
fulfilled his trust and the dictates of his conscience in willing the
money back to you."
"But, Kenny, how could he bury it?"
"How often," reminded Kenny, "has Hughie in summer wheeled him out to
the orchard and left him there? How often has he wheeled himself
around the walk by the lilac bush? And he was clever and cunning.
Could he not, from time to time, hide the money in his bathrobe and
find some means of digging?"
Joan looked unconvinced.
"And where," she said, "would my mother, who earned her living on the
stage, get money? A great deal, I mean?"
"I--I don't know," said Kenny, wiping the sweat from his forehead. "I
wish I did. Sometime or other, Joan, there has been Craig money and a
lot of it. This old house is the house of an aristocrat with money
enough to gratify expensive whims. Either the money was willed to her
or with the beauty she must have had, she married it. They are the
things you and I must find out somehow. Of one thing I am absolutely
convinced. There is money. It did not belong to your uncle. It is
hidden somewhere on the farm."
He told her of the fairy mill, of the old man's gloating pride in the
word miser, of All Souls' Eve and Adam Craig's hints about the apple
tree and the lilac bush.
"And many another place," added Kenny bitterly, "that slipped by me for
I didn't listen!"
"It is unlikely," Joan said, "that he would find the opportunity for
hiding money in so many places. Why then did he name them all?"
"His conscience forced him to give some inkling of the spot where he
had hidden money not his own. But he purposely multiplied our chances
of failure. Joan, I've got to get a spade and dig up the apple-tree!"
His excitement was contagious. Neither of them heard Hughie in the
doorway until he spoke.
"Mr. O'Neill," he said eagerly, "have you read the will?"
Kenny struck himself upon the forehead and stared at Hughie in genuine
resentment. Hughie was another problem. But Hughie's quiet eyes
pleaded; and Hughie's ruddy face was honest. Kenny told him all.
"I'm not surprised," said Hughie. "From the minute I set foot here
three years back, I said, and Hannah said, that Mr. Craig was a miser.
And it's common talk in the village."
But Kenny was off through the doorway with the will in his hand. Joan
and Hughie followed him to the kitchen.
Here when the will had been read again commotion seized them all.
Hughie went out to the barn to hunt a spade, Hannah trotted about
talking of wraps, Hetty found a lantern for Kenny and Kenny burned his
fingers lighting it, and stepped on the cat. Joan soothed the outraged
feline with a nervous laugh. There was madness in the air. In an
interval of blank disgust in which he criticized the length of the
cat's tail and the clarion quality of his yell, Kenny fumed off
barnwards in search of Hughie. His excitement was compelling. Hannah
headed a cloaked exodus from the kitchen, chirping an astonishment
which she claimed was unprecedented in her quiet life.
They straggled up the orchard hill in a flutter.
It was snowing a little. The coldness of the air was soft and heavy.
Hannah and Hughie held the lanterns high and with a startling attack
that made the dirt fly, Kenny began to dig.
The lantern light rayed off grotesquely through the leafless orchard
but the silent group, intent upon the energetic digger, watched only
the spot where the fan-like rays converged upon the spade. The wind,
sharp, intermittent and bringing with it now and then a flurry of snow,
flapped their clothes about them. Kenny, pausing to wipe his forehead,
thought the night warm. Joan's eyes, dark, solemn, frightened, spurred
him on to greater effort. He dug furiously, flinging earth in all
directions. Hughie marvelled at his madcap speed and the strength of
his sinewy arms. His jaw was set. His face, dark and vivid in the
lantern light, shone with a boy's excitement. But when the wind came
he looked defiant. They could not know that to him, then, the spirit
of Adam Craig seemed to come with a sigh and a rustle and hover near
them.
Hughie took his turn at the spade but to Kenny his methodical
competence proved an irritant. He was glad when Hughie's back gave out
and forced him to surrender.
"Mr. O'Neill," said Hannah flatly after what seemed an interminable
interval of digging, "you've dug a hole big enough to bury yourself.
Mr. Craig's money couldn't be no further down than that. Myself I
think you'd better let it go until morning. It's snowin' harder every
minute and we'll all get our death of cold."
Kenny shuddered at the homely phrase. But he wiped the dirt and
perspiration from his forehead and went off toward the kitchen in
gloomy silence, his energy and optimism gone.