Twice-Told Tales (47 page)

"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 to unlock the chest the Old Scratch came behind and caught his
arm. The money, they say, was paid Peter out of his purse, and he
wanted Peter to give him a deed of this house and land, which Peter
swore he would not do."

"Just as I swore to John Brown, my old partner," remarked Peter. "But
this is all nonsense, Tabby; I don't believe the story."

"Well, it may not be just the truth," said Tabitha, "for some folks
say that Peter did make over the house to the Old Scratch, and that's
the reason it has always been so unlucky to them that lived in it. And
as soon as Peter had given him the deed the chest flew open, and Peter
caught up a handful of the gold. But, lo and behold! there was nothing
in his fist but a parcel of old rags."

"Hold your tongue, you silly old Tabby!" cried Peter, in great wrath.
"They were as good golden guineas as ever bore the effigies of the
king of England. It seems as if I could recollect the whole
circumstance, and how I, or old Peter, or whoever it was, thrust in my
hand, or his hand, and drew it out all of a blaze with gold. Old rags
indeed!"

But it was not an old woman's legend that would discourage Peter
Goldthwaite. All night long he slept among pleasant dreams, and awoke
at daylight with a joyous throb of the heart which few are fortunate
enough to feel beyond their boyhood. Day after day he labored hard
without wasting a moment except at meal-times, when Tabitha summoned
him to the pork and cabbage, or such other sustenance as she had
picked up or Providence had sent them. Being a truly pious man, Peter
never failed to ask a blessing—if the food were none of the best,
then so much the more earnestly, as it was more needed—nor to return
thanks, if the dinner had been scanty, yet for the good appetite which
was better than a sick stomach at a feast. Then did he hurry back to
his toil, and in a moment was lost to sight in a cloud of dust from
the old walls, though sufficiently perceptible to the ear by the
clatter which he raised in the midst of it.

How enviable is the consciousness of being usefully employed! Nothing
troubled Peter, or nothing but those phantoms of the mind which seem
like vague recollections, yet have also the aspect of presentiments.
He often paused with his axe uplifted in the air, and said to himself,
"Peter Goldthwaite, did you never strike this blow before?" or "Peter,
what need of tearing the whole house down? Think a little while, and
you will remember where the gold is hidden." Days and weeks passed on,
however, without any remarkable discovery. Sometimes, indeed, a lean
gray rat peeped forth at the lean gray man, wondering what devil had
got into the old house, which had always been so peaceable till now.
And occasionally Peter sympathized with the sorrows of a female mouse
who had brought five or six pretty, little, soft and delicate young
ones into the world just in time to see them crushed by its ruin. But
as yet no treasure.

By this time, Peter, being as determined as fate and as diligent as
time, had made an end with the uppermost regions and got down to the
second story, where he was busy in one of the front chambers. It had
formerly been the state-bedchamber, and was honored by tradition as
the sleeping-apartment of Governor Dudley and many other eminent
guests. The furniture was gone. There were remnants of faded and
tattered paper-hangings, but larger spaces of bare wall ornamented
with charcoal sketches, chiefly of people's heads in profile. These
being specimens of Peter's youthful genius, it went more to his heart
to obliterate them than if they had been pictures on a church wall by
Michael Angelo. One sketch, however, and that the best one, affected
him differently. It represented a ragged man partly supporting himself
on a spade and bending his lean body over a hole in the earth, with
one hand extended to grasp something that he had found. But close
behind him, with a fiendish laugh on his features, appeared a figure
with horns, a tufted tail and a cloven hoof.