CHAPTER XXIII

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 gla.s.ses 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 circ.u.mstances, 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 superst.i.tion 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 h.o.a.rding and hiding. Money he had kept so long he hated to relinquish. Yet he dared not keep it. And so he buried the money.

G.o.d 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.