Varieties of the Rose of Sharon
“I THINK we should all like to say just what Tom has said,” remarked
Mr. Chester, after a moment. “We should all like to help, if we could.”
“Oh, you all can!” I cried, impulsively. “I’m sure you can help a great
deal.”
“How?” asked Mr. Chester, quietly, but with an earnestness there was no
mistaking.
“I’m sure you could help us to work out that riddle that grandaunt left
us,” I said. “You know that is the only clue we have.”
“You forget that I haven’t seen the riddle,” he remarked. “What was it?”
“It’s just a verse,” I said, “and rather a silly verse, too. Here it
is,” and I repeated the lines slowly, while the Chesters listened in
astonishment. Tom’s eyes were gleaming with interest and excitement.
“Let’s see; how is it?” he asked. “Say it again, won’t you?”
“‘The Rose of Sharon guards the place
Where the Treasure lies; so you must trace
Four to the right, diagonally three,
And you have solved the Mystery.’”
I repeated the lines slowly, and he soon had them. They were easy to
remember, and, once learned, ran in one’s head like Mark Twain’s famous,
“Punch, brothers, punch; punch with care;
Punch in the presence of the passenjaire.”
There was a little pause, and I could see that they were repeating the
lines over to themselves, and trying to get some meaning out of them.
“Well,” said Mrs. Chester, at last, “that is a problem!”
“I dare say this man Tunstall had a hand in devising it,” observed her
husband. “He affects a kind of cryptic utterance, sometimes--it’s one
of the tricks of the business. He had acquired considerable influence
over your aunt, Mrs. Truman--not enough, evidently, to persuade her to
cut you off entirely, but still enough to make your inheritance hang
upon this slender thread--and it is a slender one.”
“Can you tell us anything more about him?” asked mother. “I scarcely
looked at him to-day--I didn’t realize at the time how deeply he was
concerned in all this.”
“_I_ did,” I said; “or, rather, he looked at me, and it sent a creepy
feeling all up and down my back. He has the sharpest eyes!”
“Yes,” agreed Mr. Chester, “they’re part of his stock in trade. I’ve
imagined, sometimes, that they were a kind of hypnotic eye, which might
affect a nervous or weak-minded person very deeply.”
“They evidently affected Aunt Nelson,” said mother. “Please tell us all
you can, Mr. Chester. The more we know of the facts in the case, the
better chance we shall have of solving this perplexing puzzle.”
“That’s true,” assented Mr. Chester, slowly. “It is only right that you
should know; and yet I can tell you very little more than I’ve already
told. I’ve said that Tunstall pretended to be a sort of disciple of
the occult. I’ve been told that he calls himself a swami, whatever
that may be, and pretends to believe in the transmigration of souls,
in his power to recall the spirits of the dead, and I don’t know what
tomfoolery besides. No doubt he’s a clever operator--he must be, or he
couldn’t stay in one locality as long as he has in this. And he’s never
been exposed, as most mediums are, sooner or later. I doubt if he’d
have remained here as long as he has, but for the hold he got on Mrs.
Nelson, and his hope of inheriting her property.”
“Did he have such a hold on her?” inquired mother.
“Oh, yes; I wouldn’t have believed he’d dare go to the lengths he did
if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes. I happened upon him one night--”
he paused hesitatingly, and looked at his wife, “I don’t know whether
I’d better tell the story,” he added.
“Yes, tell it,” said Mrs. Chester. “They have the right to know.”
“Well, then,” went on Mr. Chester, “I was detained in the city very
late one night some four or five months ago, and it was after midnight
when I reached Fanwood. Mrs. Chester was not expecting me, and there
was no carriage at the station. I knew she was in bed, and rather than
disturb her, I decided to walk over. It took me about an hour--it was
a bright moonlight night, I remember, a good deal like this one, and
I took my time. When I turned in at our gate, I fancied I saw a light
in our stable, and I walked back to investigate, but found it was only
the reflection of the moonlight on a window. I was coming back to
the house, by the path which runs along the wall, when I fancied I
heard voices on the other side. I stopped to listen, and sure enough,
there were two persons talking together on your aunt’s side. I could
not make out either voice clearly, one was so low and broken, and the
other so high and whining. You can imagine how puzzled I was, and a
little frightened, too, I confess, for my first thought was naturally
of burglars. But I knew I couldn’t go to bed and to sleep until I had
found out what was happening over there, so I went softly back to the
stable, got a short ladder, and placed it noiselessly against the wall.
Then I climbed up and looked over.”
We were all listening breathlessly; I, at least, with a delicious
creepy sensation at the roots of my hair.
“Well,” continued Mr. Chester, “I confess that I was startled for a
moment by what I saw--a white and diaphanous-looking figure standing
before an old bench, on which there was a dark, huddled shape, which I
couldn’t make out clearly. Indeed, I couldn’t make out anything very
clearly, for both figures were in the shadow of the wall, and besides I
had only a moment to look at them, for I suppose I must have made some
sound--an exclamation of surprise, perhaps--for suddenly the white
figure vanished among the trees, and the figure on the bench sprang to
its feet and I saw it was Mrs. Nelson.
“‘What is it?’ she cried, and then she looked up and saw my white face
peering down at her.
“I felt rather foolish, as one will when he is caught eavesdropping, no
matter how good his motives may have been.
“‘I beg your pardon,’ I said, ‘if I’m intruding; but I happened to hear
voices--’
“She didn’t seem to understand very clearly, but stared about her in a
dazed way, and just then who should come forward from among the trees
but Silas Tunstall. Then I understood. He had been up to some of his
mummeries, imposing upon that old woman. He glared up at me for a
moment; but without saying a word, laid his hand upon Mrs. Nelson’s
arm and led her off toward the house. I confess that it was with no
very pleasant feeling I looked after them. I thought it all over next
day, but I didn’t see how I could interfere. After all, it was none of
my business, and so I decided to do nothing, and told no one of the
incident except my wife.”
Then I recalled that half-forgotten adventure, which I have already
recorded--my starting to get a drink one night, and meeting grandaunt
in the hall. And for the first time, I understood her terror. She
believed in ghosts--and the little white figure she had seen disappear
into the gloomy doorway had looked ghostly enough! Poor grandaunt! How
she had screamed! Mr. Tunstall had no doubt found it easy enough to
make a disciple of her, since she was ready to come more than half-way
to meet him.
“Horrible!” breathed mother at last. “Did he--did he have any other
victims?”
“Oh, yes. He is said to have a number of followers, though I haven’t
any idea who they are. He gives seances, from time to time, I
understand, but only a very few are admitted to them, and then only
people of whom he is absolutely sure. You understand this is mere
rumour, Mrs. Truman; I don’t know personally that it is true. But where
there’s so much smoke, there must surely be a little fire.”
“And he was with Aunt Nelson after that?” asked mother.
“Oh, a great deal. He was almost constantly at her house, toward the
last. We often saw him coming or going. I think her mind failed a
little, though, of course, there would be no way of absolutely proving
it. But I noticed many little changes in her. It might be,” he added,
“that the will could be set aside.”
But mother shook her head decidedly.
“No,” she said; “if we can’t get the property in the way she provided,
we won’t get it at all. She had a right to do as she pleased with
it--we had no claim upon her. We will never carry the matter into the
courts.”
“That is right, Mrs. Truman,” cried Mrs. Chester warmly. “I don’t
believe in washing one’s family linen in public. Besides, I’ve always
had a horror of the courts.”
“And you a lawyer’s wife!” laughed her husband, as we rose from table.
“I don’t care,” retorted Mrs. Chester; “the courts are incomprehensible
to me. They’re supposed to be established for the administration of
justice, and yet I’ve known them to be very unjust; and even when it is
justice they administer, they seem to choose the very longest and most
tortuous way of doing it.”
“I’ve always understood,” said mother, “that it was the lawyers who led
justice around by the nose and made her appear such a sorry figure,”
and laughing, we passed on into the drawing-room.
“I say,” whispered Tom, his eyes bright, to Dick and me, “let’s go up
to the library and see if we can’t find out something more about the
rose of Sharon.”
“Splendid!” I cried, and excusing ourselves, we scampered away up the
stairs.
Tom went to work at once among the dictionaries and encyclopedias in
a business-like way which impressed me immensely. The great volumes
seemed to possess no terrors nor mysteries for him, but stood ready to
yield up their secrets to his touch. It reminded me of the cave of the
Forty Thieves--it was no trouble at all to get in, if one just knew how.
“Of course,” he pointed out, “the first thing is to find out everything
we can about the rose of Sharon. That’s the keystone of the arch, as it
were. So we’ll begin there.”
At the end of half an hour we had achieved the following result:
1.--Rose of Sharon--an ornamental malvaceous shrub. In the Bible the
name is used for some flower not yet identified; perhaps a narcissus,
or possibly the great lotus flower.--_Webster’s Dictionary._
2.--Rose of Sharon--(a) in Scrip. Cant. II. 1, the autumn crocus; (b)
a St. John’s wort; (c) same as althea.--_The Century Dictionary._
3.--The Rose of Sharon--(a) a variety of apple; (b) a variety of plum;
(c) a kind of early potato.
“Well,” observed Dick, disgustedly, when we had got this far, “the
farther we go, the more we seem to get tangled up! Even these
dictionary fellows don’t agree with each other.”
“They seldom do,” said Tom, with a wisdom born of experience. “All
you can do, usually, is to average up what they say and reach your
own conclusion. But wait a minute. Suppose we look up the Bible verse
ourselves.”
“What is ‘Cant.’?” queried Dick. “I don’t know any book of the Bible
called that, or anything like it.”
“Neither do I,” agreed Tom, as he took down his father’s Bible. “Let’s
see,” and he ran rapidly through the list of books at the front. “I
have it--‘Cant.’ is short for ‘Canto,’ which is Latin for song.”
“The Song of Solomon,” I ventured.
“Of course,” said Tom, and he turned to it.
I have since learned that our reasoning upon this occasion was not so
brilliant as I then thought it, and that “Cant.” is an abbreviation
of “Canticles,” the scholarly name for the Song of Songs. However, we
had guessed rightly, although our logic was at fault, and we found the
verse we were looking for at the beginning of the second chapter: “I am
the rose of Sharon and the lily of the valleys.”
Tom pored over it for a moment, then looked up.
“I believe I’ve found it!” he cried. “See, four words to the right
gives us ‘and the lily,’ then over here in the next column, ‘by.’
Then three diagonally, ‘my trees among.’ ‘And the lily by my trees
among’--that isn’t very good English, but it means something, anyway.
If there is a lily among the trees--”
“But,” I objected, “the words may not be arranged the same way in
grandaunt’s Bible.”
“That’s so,” he assented, plunged into despondency again. “We’ll have
to look at her Bible and see. In the meantime, there’s the apple-tree
and the plum. Perhaps the treasure is in a cavity in one of them.”
“Don’t forget the early potato,” laughed Dick. “I see clearly that
we’ll have to dig up the whole place, chop down the orchard, and
perhaps tear down the house, if we expect to follow up all these
clues. We’ve got a large job on hand.”
There was nothing more to be discovered in the library, so we put the
books we had been consulting back in their places and went down-stairs
to join our elders. We found them still talking over the various
aspects of the problem, and sat down to listen.
“The thing that puzzles me,” Mr. Chester was saying, “is that Mrs.
Nelson made no stipulation in the will about Tunstall finding this
treasure. If _you_ fail to find it, the property goes to him; but there
is no penalty if _he_ fails to find it. And suppose both of you fail to
find it? What then?”
“It’s a sort of game of ‘we lose,’ whatever happens,” broke in Tom.
“The only explanation is,” added Mr. Chester, “that Mrs. Nelson took
it for granted that Tunstall would have no difficulty in finding the
treasure.”
“With the aid of his Hindu gods, perhaps,” Mrs. Chester suggested.
“What is the ‘treasure,’ anyway, Mr. Chester?” mother queried in a kind
of desperation. “The word makes one think of chests of gold and that
sort of thing, but, I take it, that’s not what we’re to look for.”
“Oh, no. The will says the ‘treasure’--I use the word because it is
used in the key--consists of ‘stocks, bonds, and other securities.’
Mrs. Nelson never took me into her confidence, so I can’t even guess at
the amount.”
“And what shape will they be in? What must we look for?”
“I think you will find them in a small steel box such as is usually
used for holding securities of that kind. Tom, run up and bring down
that box off my desk. Of course I may be mistaken,” he added, as Tom
reappeared carrying a little black metal box, “but I believe that some
such box as this is the object of your search.”
We all stared at it for a moment, as though this were the veritable box.
“Then if we don’t find it,” asked mother, at last, “and this Mr.
Tunstall doesn’t find it, as you suggested might possibly happen, the
‘treasure’ will be lost?”
“Oh, probably most of the securities could be replaced upon proper
proof of loss. But I don’t believe there’s any danger of their being
lost. I believe Tunstall knows where they are, and that he devised the
puzzle, or, at least, suggested it. The verse sounds very much like
him.”
For a moment, no one spoke; but I know I grew pale at the thought of
how completely we were in that man’s power. I could see Tom grow pale,
too, and he stared across at me with eyes almost starting from his head.
“But,” faltered mother, at last, “if he knows where they are, he may
have removed them.”
“Yes, that’s possible,” assented Mr. Chester. “But perhaps he’s so
confident you’ll never find them that’s he’s content to wait till
the end of the month, so that everything will be quite straight and
regular.”
I felt as though my brain would burst in the effort I made to look at
this new possibility from all sides.
“Besides,” added Mr. Chester, “it wouldn’t do him any good to steal
them. Stocks and bonds aren’t of much use to anyone unless they are
legally come by.”
“But he might remove them,” said Dick, “to prevent our finding them,
and then put them back.”
“Oh, be sure of one thing,” cried Mrs. Chester. “If he had any hand in
hiding them he did it so well that they won’t be found till he finds
them himself!”
“I don’t believe he knows,” I burst out, at last. “If he knew, he
wouldn’t have read the key when he picked it up after I let it fall. If
he knew what it was, he’d have handed it back to us without looking at
it.”
Mr. Chester nodded.
“You may be right,” he said. “That’s a good point.”
“But whether he knows or not,” I went on, “the thing for us to do is
to solve the puzzle. He certainly hasn’t had a chance to remove the
‘treasure’ yet, and we must see that he doesn’t get a chance. Where do
you suppose grandaunt would conceal her property, Mr. Chester?”
“It seems to me,” answered Mr. Chester, slowly, “that Mrs. Nelson
would not bury the papers, or conceal them anywhere outside the house.
Moisture works havoc with securities of that kind, and to bury them
would be the very worst thing which could be done with them, even in a
box like this. Besides, she would naturally want them where she could
keep her eye on them, and have ready access to them. Bonds usually
have coupons attached to them which have to be detached and sent in
for payment of interest. Most people keep securities of that kind in a
safe-deposit box at a bank. I believe that you will find them somewhere
in the house--in a place that was under Mrs. Nelson’s eyes constantly.”
“But the rose of Sharon, sir,” I objected. “That could scarcely be in
the house.”
“No,” he agreed slowly, “no; I confess that puzzles me. Yet it seems
most improbable that Mrs. Nelson would do anything so foolish as to
bury her securities. She would be too anxious, I imagine, to have them
within reach, like a miser with his gold. I am tempted to believe
that the ‘rose of Sharon’ does not refer to a bush or a tree, but to
something else which we have not discovered as yet. It might be a piece
of furniture, or a picture, or a plant--almost anything, in fact.
I would scrutinize everything in the house carefully to see if the
appellation, ‘rose of Sharon,’ cannot be made to fit.”
Dick groaned.
“There’s no end to it,” he said, mournfully. “It seems to me that ‘rose
of Sharon’ can mean about everything under the sun.”
“Well,” said Mr. Chester, smiling, “I would certainly look for it
very carefully in the house; though, of course, it will do no harm to
continue your search outdoors, too.”
“I told Biffkins, a while ago,” observed Dick, “that we should probably
have to dig up the whole place and tear down the house before we were
through. It seems to me the easiest way would be to scare it--”
But he stopped suddenly without completing the sentence, and we were
all too preoccupied to notice.
We fell silent pondering the problem, which seemed to grow more
perplexing the more we tried to unravel it. I have had a clothes-line
act in just that way! But I saw what a help a trained mind like Mr.
Chester’s would be to us. And we should need help--all we could get.
Yet I had always delighted in solving puzzles--the more difficult the
better--and I was determined to solve this one, upon which so much
depended. The very fact that so much depended upon it, seemed to make
it more difficult. It was impossible to approach it light-heartedly,
not caring much whether one succeeded or not; and the very anxiety to
succeed somehow beclouded the intellect.
Mr. Chester smiled as he looked at my serious, intent face.
“Come, my dear,” he said, “don’t take it so much to heart. Remember
you have nearly a month in which to work out the answer. A great many
things may happen in that time. Besides, as you grow better acquainted
with the place, some natural solution of the puzzle may suggest itself
to you. You mustn’t be discouraged over a first failure--that won’t do
at all.”
“I’m not discouraged, sir,” I answered stoutly. “I don’t intend to
permit myself to become discouraged.”
“That’s right,” he said heartily. “That’s the spirit that overcomes
obstacles and wins out in the end. Do you remember the last lines that
Browning ever wrote, where he described himself as
“‘One who never turned his back but marched breast forward,
Never doubted clouds would break,
Never dreamed, though right were worsted, wrong would triumph,
Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better,
Sleep to wake’?”
“Did Browning write that?” I asked, my eyes a little blurred with the
quick tears which had sprung to them. “But I thought he was a stuffy
old poet whom nobody could understand?”
“Many people think so,” answered Mr. Chester, with his kind smile;
“but it is mostly because they have taken somebody else’s word for it
and have never tried to understand, themselves. Suppose you try for
yourself, sometime. You’ll find him a tonic--just such a tonic as you
need.”
“I will,” I said, gratefully; and then, for the first time, I noticed
that the two boys were no longer in the room. Mother noticed their
absence, too, at the same moment.
“Why, where is Dick?” she asked.
“They’ve probably gone back to the library,” I suggested, leaping at
once to the conclusion that they had found a new clue. “Shall I go
after them?”
“Yes, dear--we must be going. Tell Dick it’s getting late.”
I ran up the stairs to the library door, eager to find out what it was
they had discovered. But in the first moment, as I entered, I thought
the room was empty. Then I heard the low murmur of excited voices from
the deep window-seat. But at the sound of my footsteps, the murmur
ceased abruptly.
[Illustration: “I SAW FROM THEIR FLUSHED FACES THAT THEY HAD, INDEED,
MADE SOME DISCOVERY.”]
“Have you found out something, Dick?” I cried, bursting in upon them.
“Oh, tell me!”
I saw from their flushed faces that they had, indeed, made some
discovery; but instead of confiding in me at once, as I naturally
expected them to do, they glanced guiltily at each other like two
conspirators.
“Aren’t you going to tell me?” I demanded. “I don’t think that’s fair!”
“Well, you see, Biffkins,” began Dick, stammeringly, “this isn’t
anything for--for a girl to know.”
“It isn’t?” I cried, my temper rising at such duplicity. “I should just
like to know why? Perhaps you think I couldn’t help?”
“No,” replied Dick, grinning fiendishly, as he always did whenever I
grew angry; “I don’t believe you could!”
I gasped with astonishment at the absurdity of such a thing, and glared
at Tom Chester, whose face was as crimson as my own. And to think that
only a short while before he had danced around the table to shake hands
with me in an alliance offensive and defensive! His treason fairly
took my breath away. And I had thought him a nice boy, upon whom one
could rely! I felt the hot tears rushing into my eyes; then my pride
asserted itself; and crushing them back, I tossed up my head and
scorched them both with a single fiery glance.
“Oh, very well!” I said, and marched from the room.