Anxious myself about this very fact, I attempted to reply, but she gave me no opportunity.

"And now for those dinner invitations!" she gaily suggested. "While I feel like it I must busy myself in making out my list. It will give me something new to think about."

CHAPTER XVII. THE TWO WEIRD SISTERS

Ellen seemed to understand my anxiety about Mrs. Packard and to sympathize with it. That afternoon as I pa.s.sed her in the hall she whispered softly:

"I have just been unpacking that bag and putting everything back into place. She told me she had packed it in readiness to go with Mr. Packard if he desired it at the last minute."

I doubted this final statement, but the fact that the bag had been unpacked gave me great relief. I began to look forward with much pleasure to a night of unbroken rest.

Alas! rest was not for me yet. Relieved as to Mrs. Packard, I found my mind immediately reverting to the topic which had before engrossed it, though always before in her connection. The mystery of the so-called ghosts had been explained, but not the loss of the bonds, which had driven my poor neighbors mad. This was still a fruitful subject of thought, though I knew that such well-balanced and practical minds as Mayor Packard's or Mr. Steele's would have but little sympathy with the theory ever recurring to me. Could this money be still in the house?--the possibility of such a fact worked and worked upon my imagination till I grew as restless as I had been over the mystery of the ghosts and presently quite as ready for action.

Possibly the hurried glimpse I had got of Miss Thankful's countenance a little while before, in the momentary visit she paid to the attic window at which I had been accustomed to see either her or her sister constantly sit, inspired me with my present interest in this old and wearing trouble of theirs and the condition into which it had thrown their minds. I thought of their nights of broken rest while they were ransacking the rooms below and testing over and over the same boards, the same panels for the secret hiding-place of their lost treasure, of their foolish attempts to scare away all other intruders, and the racking of nerve and muscle which must have attended efforts so out of keeping with their age and infirmities.

It would be natural to regard the whole matter as an hallucination on their part, to disbelieve in the existence of the bonds, and to regard Miss Thankful's whole story to Mrs. Packard as the play of a diseased imagination.

But I could not, would not, carry my own doubts to this extent. The bonds had been in existence; Miss Thankful had seen them; and the one question calling for answer now was, whether they had been long ago found and carried off, or whether they were still within the reach of the fortunate hand capable of discovering their hiding-place.

The nurse who, according to Miss Thankful, had wakened such dread in the dying man's breast as to drive him to the attempt which had ended in this complete loss of the whole treasure, appeared to me the chief factor in the first theory. If any one had ever found these bonds, it was she; how, it was not for me to say, in my present ignorant state of the events following the reclosing of the house after this old man's death and burial. But the supposition of an utter failure on the part of this woman and of every other subsequent resident of the house to discover this mysterious hiding-place, wakened in me no real instinct of search. I felt absolutely and at once that any such effort in my present blind state of mind would be totally unavailing. The secret trap and the pa.s.sage it led to, with all the opportunities they offered for the concealment of a few folded doc.u.ments, did not, strange as it may appear at first blush, suggest the spot where these papers might be lying hid. The manipulation of the concealed mechanism and the difficulties attending a descent there, even on the part of a well man, struck me as precluding all idea of any such solution to this mystery. Strong as dying men sometimes are in the last flickering up of life in the speedily dissolving frame, the lowering of this trap, and, above all, the drawing of it back into place, which I instinctively felt would be the hardest act of the two, would be beyond the utmost fire or force conceivable in a dying man. No, even if he, as a member of the family, knew of this subterranean retreat, he could not have made use of it. I did not even accept the possibility sufficiently to approach the place again with this new inquiry in mind. Yet what a delight lay in the thought of a possible finding of this old treasure, and the new life which would follow its restoration to the hands which had once touched it only to lose it on the instant.

The charm of this idea was still upon me when I woke the next morning.

At breakfast I thought of the bonds, and in the hour which followed, the work I was doing for Mrs. Packard in the library was rendered difficult by the constant recurrence of the one question into my mind: "What would a man in such a position do with the money he was anxious to protect from the woman he saw coming and secure to his sister who had just stepped next door?" When a moment came at last in which I could really indulge in these intruding thoughts, I leaned back in my chair and tried to reconstruct the room according to Mrs. Packard's description of it at that time. I even pulled my chair over to that portion of the room where his bed had stood, and, choosing the spot where his head would naturally lie, threw back my own on the reclining chair I had chosen, and allowed my gaze to wander over the walls before me in a vague hope of reproducing, in my mind, the ideas which must have pa.s.sed through his before he rose and thrust those papers into their place of concealment.

Alas! those walls were barren of all suggestion, and my eyes went wandering through the window before me in a vague appeal, when a sudden remembrance of his last moments struck me sharply and I bounded up with a new thought, a new idea, which sent me in haste to my room and brought me down again in hat and jacket. Mrs. Packard had once said that the ladies next door were pleased to have callers, and advised me to visit them. I would test her judgment in the matter. Early though it was, I would present myself at the neighboring door and see what my reception would be. The discovery I had made in my unfortunate accident in the old entry way should be my excuse. Apologies were in order from us to them; I would make these apologies.

I was prepared to confront poverty in this bare and comfortless-looking abode of decayed gentility. But I did not expect quite so many evidences of it as met my eyes as the door swung slowly open some time after my persistent knock, and I beheld Miss Charity's meager figure outlined against walls and a flight of uncarpeted stairs such as I had never seen before out of a tenement house. I may have dropped my eyes, but I recovered myself immediately. Marking the slow awakening of pleasure in the wan old face as she recognized me, I uttered some apology for my early call and then waited to see if she would welcome me in.

She not only did so, but did it with such a sudden breaking up of her rigidity into the pliancy of a naturally hospitable nature, that my heart was touched, and I followed her into the great bare apartment, which must have once answered the purposes of a drawing-room, with very different feelings from those with which I had been accustomed to look upon her face in the old attic window.

"I should like to see your sister, too," I said, as she hastily, but with a certain sort of ceremony, too, pushed forward one of the ancient chairs which stood at long intervals about the room. "I have not been your neighbor very long, but I should like to pay my respects to both of you."

I had purposely spoken with the formal precision she had been accustomed to in her earlier days, and I could see how perceptibly her self-respect returned at this echo of the past, giving her a sudden dignity which made me forget for the moment her neglected appearance.

"I will summon my sister," she returned, disappearing quietly from the room.

I waited fifteen minutes, then Miss Thankful entered, dressed in her very best, followed by my first acquaintance in her same gown, but with a little cap on her head. The cap, despite its faded ribbons carefully pressed out but with too cold an iron, gave her an old-time fashionable air which for the moment created the impression that she might have been a beauty and a belle in her early days, which I afterward discovered to be true.

It was Miss Thankful, however, who had the personal presence, and it was she who now expressed their sense of the honor, pushing forward another chair than that from which I had risen, with the remark:

"Take this, I pray. Many an honored guest has occupied this seat. Let us see you in it."

I could detect no difference between the one she offered and the one in which I had just sat, but I at once stepped forward and took the chair she proffered. She bowed and Miss Charity bowed, and then they seated themselves side by side on the hair-cloth sofa, which was the only other article of furniture in the room.

"We are--we are preparing to move," stammered Miss Charity, a faint flush tingeing her faded cheeks, as she caught the involuntary glance I had cast about me.

Miss Thankful bridled and gave her sister a look of open rebuke. She had, as one could instantly see from her strong features and purposeful ways, been a woman of decided parts and of strict, upright character.

Weakened as she was, the shadow of an untruth disturbed her. Her pride ran in a different groove from that of her once over-complimented, over-fostered sister. She was going to add a protest in words to that expressed by her gesture, but I hastily prevented this by coming at once to the point of my errand.

"My excuse for this early call," I said, this time addressing Miss Thankful, "lies in an adventure which occurred to me yesterday in the adjoining house." It was painful to see how they both started, and how they instinctively caught each at the other's hand as they sat side by side on the sofa, as if only thus they could bear the shock of what might be coming next. I had to nerve myself to proceed. "You know, or rather I gather from your kind greetings that you know that I am at present staying with Mrs. Packard. She is very kind and we spend many pleasant hours together; but of course some of the time I have to be alone, and then I try to amuse myself by looking about at the various interesting things which are scattered through the house."

A gasp from Miss Charity, a look still more expressive from Miss Thankful. I hastened to cut their suspense short.

"You know the little cabinet they have placed in the old entrance pointing this way? Well, I was looking at that when the whim seized me--I hardly know how--to press one of the k.n.o.bs in the molding which runs about the doorway, when instantly everything gave way under me and I fell into a deep hole which had been scooped out of the alley-way--n.o.body knows for what."

A cry and they were on their feet, still holding hands and endeavoring to show nothing but concern for my disaster.

"Oh, I wasn't hurt," I smiled. "I was frightened, of course, but not so much as to lose my curiosity. When I got to my feet again, I looked about in this surprising hole--"

"It was our uncle's way of reaching his winecellar," Miss Thankful explained with great dignity as she and her sister sank back into their seats. "He had some remarkable old wine, and, as he was covetous of it, he conceived this way of securing it from everybody's knowledge but his own. It was a strange way, but he was a little touched," she added, laying a slow impressive finger on her forehead, "just a little touched here."

The short, significant glance she cast at Charity as she said this, and the little smile she gave were to give me to understand that this weakness had descended in the family. I felt my heart contract; my self-imposed task was a harder one than I had antic.i.p.ated, but I could not shirk it now. "Did this wine-cellar you mention run all the way to this house?" I lightly inquired. "I stumbled on a pa.s.sage leading here, which I thought you ought to know is now open to any one in Mayor Packard's house. Of course, it will be closed soon," I hastened to add as Miss Charity hurriedly rose at her sister's quick look and anxiously left the room. "Mrs. Packard will see to that."

"Yes, yes, I have no doubt; she's a very good woman, a very fair woman, don't you think so, Miss--"

"My name is Saunders."

"A very good name. I knew a fine family of that name when I was younger.

There was one of them--his name was Robert--" Here she rambled on for several minutes as if this topic and no other filled her whole mind; then, as if suddenly brought back to what started it, she uttered in sudden anxiety, "You think well of Mrs. Packard? You have confidence in her?"

I allowed myself to speak with all the enthusiasm she so greedily desired.

"Indeed I have," I cried. "I think she can be absolutely depended on to do the right thing every time. You are fortunate in having such good neighbors at the time of this mishap."

At this minute Miss Charity reentered. Her panting condition, as well as the unsettled position of the cap on her head, told very plainly where she had been. Reseating herself, she looked at Miss Thankful and Miss Thankful looked at her, but no word pa.s.sed. They evidently understood each other.

"I'm obliged to Mrs. Packard," now fell from Miss Thankful's lips, "and to you, too, young lady, for acquainting us with this accident. The pa.s.sage we extended ourselves after taking up our abode in this house.

We--we did not see why we should not profit by our ancestor's old and undiscovered wine-cellar to secure certain things which were valuable to us."

Her hesitation in uttering this final sentence--a sentence all the more marked because naturally, she was a very straightforward person--awoke my doubt and caused me to ask myself what she meant by this word "secure." Did she mean, as circ.u.mstances went to show and as I had hitherto believed, that they had opened up this pa.s.sage for the purpose of a private search in their old home for the lost valuables they believed to be concealed there? Or had they, under some temporary suggestion of their disorganized brains, themselves hidden away among the rafters of this unexplored spot the treasure they believed lost and now constantly bewailed?

The doubt thus temporarily raised in my mind made me very uneasy for a moment, but I soon dismissed it and dropping this subject for the nonce, began to speak of the houses as they now looked and of the changes which had evidently been made in them since they had left the one and entered the other.

"I understand," I ventured at last, "that in those days this house also had a door opening on the alley-way. Where did it lead--do you mind my asking?--into a room or into a hallway? I am so interested in old houses."

They did not resent this overt act of curiosity; I had expected Miss Thankful to, but she didn't. Some recollection connected with the name of Saunders had softened her heart toward me and made her regard with indulgence an interest which she might otherwise have looked upon as intrusive.

"We long ago boarded up that door," she answered. "It was of very little use to us from our old library."

"It looked into one of the rooms then?" I persisted, but with a wary gentleness which I felt could not offend.

"No; there is no room there, only a pa.s.sageway. But it has closets in it, and we did not like to be seen going to them any time of day. The door had gla.s.s panes in it, you know, just like a window. It made the relations so intimate with people only a few feet away."

"Naturally," I cried, "I don't wonder you wanted to shut them off if you could." Then with a sudden access of interest which I vainly tried to hide, I thought of the closets and said with a smile, "The closets were for china, I suppose; old families have so much china."

Miss Charity nodded, complacency in every feature; but Miss Thankful thought it more decorous to seem to be indifferent in this matter.