Twice-told tales
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.
“Yes,” cried Peter Goldthwaite, again; “to-morrow I will set about it.”
The deeper he looked at the matter, the more certain of success grew
Peter. His spirits were naturally so elastic that even now, in the
blasted autumn of his age, he could often compete with the springtime
gayety of other people. Enlivened by his brightening prospects, he
began to caper about the kitchen like a hobgoblin, with the queerest
antics of his lean limbs and gesticulations of his starved features.
Nay, in the exuberance of his feelings, he seized both of Tabitha’s
hands and danced the old lady across the floor till the oddity of her
rheumatic motions set him into a roar of laughter, which was echoed
back from the rooms and chambers, as if Peter Goldthwaite were laughing
in every one. Finally, he bounded upward, almost out of sight, into the
smoke that clouded the roof of the kitchen, and, alighting safely on
the floor again, endeavored to resume his customary gravity.
“To-morrow, at sunrise,” he repeated, taking his lamp to retire to bed,
“I’ll see whether this treasure be hid in the wall of the garret.”
“And, as we’re out of wood, Mr. Peter,” said Tabitha, puffing and
panting with her late gymnastics, “as fast as you tear the house down
I’ll make a fire with the pieces.”
Gorgeous that night were the dreams of Peter Goldthwaite. At one time
he was turning a ponderous key in an iron door not unlike the door of a
sepulchre, but which, being opened, disclosed a vault heaped up with
gold coin as plentifully as golden corn in a granary. There were chased
goblets, also, and tureens, salvers, dinner-dishes and dish-covers of
gold or silver-gilt, besides chains and other jewels, incalculably
rich, though tarnished with the damps of the vault; for, of all the
wealth that was irrevocably lost to man, whether buried in the earth or
sunken in the sea, Peter Goldthwaite had found it in this one
treasure-place. Anon he had returned to the old house as poor as ever,
and was received at the door by the gaunt and grizzled figure of a man
whom he might have mistaken for himself, only that his garments were of
a much elder fashion. But the house, without losing its former aspect,
had been changed into a palace of the precious metals. The floors,
walls and ceilings were of burnished silver; the doors, the
window-frames, the cornices, the balustrades and the steps of the
staircase, of pure gold; and silver, with gold bottoms, were the
chairs, and gold, standing on silver legs, the high chests of drawers,
and silver the bedsteads, with blankets of woven gold and sheets of
silver tissue. The house had evidently been transmuted by a single
touch, for it retained all the marks that Peter remembered, but in gold
or silver instead of wood, and the initials of his name—which when a
boy he had cut in the wooden door-post—remained as deep in the pillar
of gold. A happy man would have been Peter Goldthwaite except for a
certain ocular deception which, whenever he glanced backward, caused
the house to darken from its glittering magnificence into the sordid
gloom of yesterday.
Up betimes rose Peter, seized an axe, hammer and saw which he had
placed by his bedside, and hied him to the garret. It was but scantily
lighted up as yet by the frosty fragments of a sunbeam which began to
glimmer through the almost opaque bull-eyes of the window. A moralizer
might find abundant themes for his speculative and impracticable wisdom
in a garret. There is the limbo of departed fashions, aged trifles of a
day and whatever was valuable only to one generation of men, and which
passed to the garret when that generation passed to the grave—not for
safekeeping, but to be out of the way. Peter saw piles of yellow and
musty account-books in parchment covers, wherein creditors long dead
and buried had written the names of dead and buried debtors in ink now
so faded that their moss-grown tombstones were more legible. He found
old moth-eaten garments, all in rags and tatters, or Peter would have
put them on. Here was a naked and rusty sword—not a sword of service,
but a gentleman’s small French rapier—which had never left its scabbard
till it lost it. Here were canes of twenty different sorts, but no
gold-headed ones, and shoebuckles of various pattern and material, but
not silver nor set with precious stones. Here was a large box full of
shoes with high heels and peaked toes. Here, on a shelf, were a
multitude of phials half filled with old apothecary’s stuff which, when
the other half had done its business on Peter’s ancestors, had been
brought hither from the death-chamber. Here—not to give a longer
inventory of articles that will never be put up at auction—was the
fragment of a full-length looking-glass which by the dust and dimness
of its surface made the picture of these old things look older than the
reality. When Peter, not knowing that there was a mirror there, caught
the faint traces of his own figure, he partly imagined that the former
Peter Goldthwaite had come back either to assist or impede his search
for the hidden wealth. And at that moment a strange notion glimmered
through his brain that he was the identical Peter who had concealed the
gold, and ought to know whereabout it lay. This, however, he had
unaccountably forgotten.
“Well, Mr. Peter!” cried Tabitha, on the garret stairs. “Have you torn
the house down enough to heat the teakettle?”
“Not yet, old Tabby,” answered Peter, “but that’s soon done, as you
shall see.” With the word in his mouth, he uplifted the axe, and laid
about him so vigorously that the dust flew, the boards crashed, and in
a twinkling the old woman had an apron full of broken rubbish.
“We shall get our winter’s wood cheap,” quoth Tabitha.
The good work being thus commenced, Peter beat down all before him,
smiting and hewing at the joints and timbers, unclenching spike-nails,
ripping and tearing away boards, with a tremendous racket from morning
till night. He took care, however, to leave the outside shell of the
house untouched, so that the neighbors might not suspect what was going
on.
Never, in any of his vagaries, though each had made him happy while it
lasted, had Peter been happier than now. Perhaps, after all, there was
something in Peter Goldthwaite’s turn of mind which brought him an
inward recompense for all the external evil that it caused. If he were
poor, ill-clad, even hungry and exposed, as it were, to be utterly
annihilated by a precipice of impending ruin, yet only his body
remained in these miserable circumstances, while his aspiring soul
enjoyed the sunshine of a bright futurity. It was his nature to be
always young, and the tendency of his mode of life to keep him so. Gray
hairs were nothing—no, nor wrinkles nor infirmity; he might look old,
indeed, and be somewhat disagreeably connected with a gaunt old figure
much the worse for wear, but the true, the essential Peter was a young
man of high hopes just entering on the world. At the kindling of each
new fire his burnt-out youth rose afresh from the old embers and ashes.
It rose exulting now. Having lived thus long—not too long, but just to
the right age—a susceptible bachelor with warm and tender dreams, he
resolved, so soon as the hidden gold should flash to light, to go
a-wooing and win the love of the fairest maid in town. What heart could
resist him? Happy Peter Goldthwaite!
Every evening—as Peter had long absented himself from his former
lounging-places at insurance offices, news-rooms, and book-stores, and
as the honor of his company was seldom requested in private circles—he
and Tabitha used to sit down sociably by the kitchen hearth. This was
always heaped plentifully with the rubbish of his day’s labor. As the
foundation of the fire there would be a goodly-sized back-log of red
oak, which after being sheltered from rain or damp above a century
still hissed with the heat and distilled streams of water from each
end, as if the tree had been cut down within a week or two. Next there
were large sticks, sound, black and heavy, which had lost the principle
of decay and were indestructible except by fire, wherein they glowed
like red-hot bars of iron. On this solid basis Tabitha would rear a
lighter structure, composed of the splinters of door-panels, ornamented
mouldings, and such quick combustibles, which caught like straw and
threw a brilliant blaze high up the spacious flue, making its sooty
sides visible almost to the chimney-top. Meantime, the gloom of the old
kitchen would be chased out of the cobwebbed corners and away from the
dusky cross-beams overhead, and driven nobody could tell whither, while
Peter smiled like a gladsome man and Tabitha seemed a picture of
comfortable age. All this, of course, was but an emblem of the bright
fortune which the destruction of the house would shed upon its
occupants.
While the dry pine was flaming and crackling like an irregular
discharge of fairy-musketry, Peter sat looking and listening in a
pleasant state of excitement; but when the brief blaze and uproar were
succeeded by the dark-red glow, the substantial heat and the deep
singing sound which were to last throughout the evening, his humor
became talkative. One night—the hundredth time—he teased Tabitha to
tell him something new about his great-granduncle.
“You have been sitting in that chimney-corner fifty-five years, old
Tabby, and must have heard many a tradition about him,” said Peter.
“Did not you tell me that when you first came to the house there was an
old woman sitting where you sit now who had been housekeeper to the
famous Peter Goldthwaite?”
“So there was, Mr. Peter,” answered Tabitha, “and she was near about a
hundred years old. She used to say that she and old Peter Goldthwaite
had often spent a sociable evening by the kitchen fire—pretty much as
you and I are doing now, Mr. Peter.”
“The old fellow must have resembled me in more points than one,” said
Peter, complacently, “or he never would have grown so rich. But
methinks he might have invested the money better than he did. No
interest! nothing but good security! and the house to be torn down to
come at it! What made him hide it so snug, Tabby?”
“Because he could not spend it,” said Tabitha, “for as often as he went