Twice-told tales
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!”
PETER GOLDTHWAITE’S TREASURE
“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