Chapter X: The Cedar Chest

The next day was passed much as days in a mountain-house party are usually passed. The weather was perfect. A slight shower in the early morning had cooled the air and freshened the foliage and grass, and the valley lay basking in the glorious sunshine of a summer day. There were drives along the mountain road and wheeling on the smooth path by its side. Three or four of the older guests went to Mount Washington. At four o’clock the tally-ho was brought out, and the Alpine horn went echoing up and down the hills as the gay party swept by. They were certainly having a good time, and were loud in their protestations of delight when they at last met together in the drawing-room waiting for the summons to dinner. Thanks to Alex.’s instructions, this was not more than half as long as the first had been, and Polly’s pedometer registered only a mile and a quarter when it was over. Sherry was not tired at all, but came near forgetting herself once or twice in her absorption in the conversation at the different tables, which she could hear as they were near each other. Some of the party had explored the attic and examined the quaint old furniture, and expressed interest and curiosity in the chest, wondering what it contained.

“I can tell you in part,” Alex. said. “It is the wardrobe of a lady who lived here a hundred years ago, for what I know. She is buried in that little cemetery across the road. My great-uncle, Mr. Marsh, used to air them, Bowles told me, and he talked a good deal about a flowered silk that would stand alone.”

“Oh-h!” and a chorus of voices broke in together. “Just the things for a masquerade, or costume party, or tableaux. Can’t we get into the chest?”

Sherry held her breath as she listened to Alex.’s reply.

“Why, yes. I don’t know where the key is, but we can wrench off the padlock. I suppose the chest belongs to me if the house does.”

“Certainly it does,” his mother said, while Charley Reeves, who sat at the table nearest to Alex., asked:

“Who were the aborigines, anyhow?”

“Crosbys,” Alex. answered. “They owned the place first years and years ago, and if I knew where any of the descendants were living I should feel inclined to send them the old chest, if they cared for it. It seems as if the clothes should belong to them. I have no use for them. There is a relative of the Crosbys in New York,—a woman without sentiment, I should say, who would not care for such old truck. It is young people who go in for relics. Mrs. Pledger seems like one herself. Maybe you have heard of Joel Pledger? Almost every one has, though his name was new to me till recently.”

“Joel Pledger,—old Pledger, the money lender? I rather think I have,” Charley replied. “He helped me through a tight place when I was in college and the governor in Europe. The interest he charged, though, was frightful. But I paid it, or father did. He has been a good Samaritan to a lot of college boys, but always got good interest. They say he is rich as Crœsus. Do you know him?”

“No, I’ve seen him. Drives a queer old rattle-trap in the Park when he might have his carriage, they say. I’ve met Mrs. Pledger, who would have given me the family history if I’d had time to listen,” Alex. said, with a thought of the girl whom Mrs. Pledger called Sherry, and who was now standing by him with his coffee, her hand shaking so that a part of it was spilled in the saucer.

Alex. did not care for the spilled coffee. His thoughts were on the Pledgers, or rather the girl, and he wondered if Charley had ever seen or heard of her. He would _finesse_ and find out, and he said:

“These Pledgers have no children, I believe, or young people, who would like the chest?”

“None that I know of,” Charley answered. “I’ve not the pleasure of Mrs. Pledger’s acquaintance. I was in the house once to see Joel, but she was gone; regular old crow’s-nest, and a maid who hollered up the stairs, ‘Mr. Pledger, here’s a gentleman come to see you in a carriage.’ I did hear, though, a rumor of a deuced pretty girl who visited them once. Maybe she is a Crosby, with a right to the chest.”

“By George! I never thought of that,” Alex. said to himself, beginning to feel unwilling to have the chest opened and its contents appropriated by strangers, and to wonder if he ought not to write to Mrs. Pledger and ask if the girl was a Crosby.

He never dreamed that she was there close to him, her face so white that his mother noticed her at last and asked if she were ill.

“Oh, no,” Sherry answered, pulling herself together and trying to seem natural, as she attended to her duties with her ears strained to catch every word of the conversation concerning the chest.

All the guests were talking of it now, saying they must have it opened and see what ladies wore sixty or seventy years ago. Alex.’s spirits had gone down with thoughts of the girl, but the pressure was so great that he agreed to see what they could do to-morrow, and with this the party left the dining-room.

The next morning was rainy, precluding any outdoor amusements, but just the time for an inspection of old Mrs. Crosby’s wardrobe, some of the young people said, as they gathered at the breakfast table. Sherry, who was at her post, was feeling wretchedly, and could scarcely keep on her feet. The night before, when no one saw her, she had gone to the attic and looked at the chest and tried to move it from the wall, thinking she might find the key, if it was still where Mrs. Pledger had said it was kept years ago. But it was heavy, and she had returned to her room with a feeling that she ought to prevent its contents from being desecrated by stranger hands. Her great-grandmother’s bridal dress was probably there, and Sherry tried to fancy her as she must have looked on that night of the great Crosby party. It was a long time before she could sleep, she was so excited about the chest and what she had heard of the Pledgers, and what Charley Reeves had said of the “deuced pretty girl” who had visited the “old crow’s nest,” where the maid “hollered up the stairs.” She was the girl, no doubt, but the compliment paid her was lost in the sting of the maid and the “crow’s nest,” and she tossed from side to side until at last she fell asleep and dreamed that her grandmother came to her clad in heavy brocade silk, with jewels in her ears and knots of old point lace on her sleeves and at her bosom and on the shoulders, and on her head a white bonnet with pink bows and wide ribbon strings.

“Come,” she had said, beckoning to Sherry, who went with her to the attic, where together they drew the chest a little from the wall, and her grandmother showed her the key to the padlock hanging on a tack which had been driven into the wood, just as Mrs. Pledger had said it was.

Then she woke suddenly, bathed in perspiration, and with a feeling that she had really been to the attic and found the key. She did not try to sleep again and rose early, with a nervous headache, a sense of depression unusual to her and a sensation of trying to recall something which came almost within the grasp of her memory and then eluded it. Her dream was still so vivid that she half resolved on going to the attic to see if the key was really hanging behind the chest. By this time there was a good deal of stir in the house. Servants were moving about. She might be seen and her actions wondered at. She would wait developments, but her nervousness increased and her face grew whiter when at breakfast she heard plans for opening the chest.

“Let’s go and have a look at the old thing. I don’t suppose the party across the road under the sod will care, do you?” Charley Reeves said when breakfast was over, and with Alex. at their head some of the guests were soon climbing the narrow stairs to the attic. “Jolly, what a big room this is! I wonder you don’t have it finished up for a dancing hall,” Charley said.

“What would I do with the trunk?” Alex. asked.

“Sell it at auction. Every article would bring a thundering price if you labelled it a century old, as it must be,” Charley replied, sitting down in a carved chair, the back of which gave way and sent him to the floor amid the jeers of his companions.

Picking himself up, he went with the others to the chest, where Alex. was standing with a puzzled look on his face. When he saw it the day before he was sure it was close against the wall and a little under the rafters, where it would be out of the way. Now one end of it was moved five or six inches. Somebody must have been there, and who? Not one of his guests, surely, and if some one else had a curiosity with regard to its contents, it was time he opened it and saw for himself what it contained. A thought of the pretty girl who had visited the Pledgers had haunted him continually since Charley had spoken of her, and he could not shake off a feeling that if she were a Crosby or a remote connection, she had a better right to the chest than himself and the gay crowd clamoring to have it opened.

“I guess I’ll have to do it,” he thought, taking hold of one end and finding it heavier than he had anticipated.

“Where’s the key?” Charley asked, and Alex. replied:

“Lost or stolen. I must go for something to pry off the padlock.”

Sherry’s room was in the hall from which the stairs led to the attic and only three doors from it. She had gone up to bathe her throbbing head, and as her door was open she heard what Alex. said.

“I have half a mind to tell him to look behind the chest. I believe the key is there, my dream was so vivid,” she thought, and stepped into the hall just as Alex. came down the stairs.

“Oh, Fanny,” he said, “if you are going to the kitchen, won’t you please send Mark up with a wrench, file and screw-driver? I am going to open the chest.”

Sherry’s impulse to speak of the key left her suddenly, as she thought she would probably be questioned as to how she knew it was there, and, bowing to Alex., she went to the kitchen and found the file and wrench, but not Mark, the boy of all work.

“I’ll take them myself,” she said, and, returning with them, she met Amy in the hall just going to the attic and gave them to her.

Her head was still aching, and she had that strange feeling or fatigue she had felt in the early morning.

“I’ll rest a minute,” she thought, sitting down in her room near the open door, where she could hear distinctly what was said in the attic.

Ruth Doane was saying to Amy: “I was right when I thought I heard some one up here last night dragging something on the floor. The chest has been moved from the wall.”

“No!” Amy exclaimed in surprise, while Sherry felt as if a heavy blow had been struck her. Her dream was true in part.

She had not seen her grandmother, but she had been in the attic. The habit of her childhood, which she hoped she had outgrown, had come back, and she knew why she felt so weak and depressed. She had always felt this way after walking in her sleep. She had dreaded these fits of somnambulism, and rejoiced when they left her, and she could not understand why they had returned, unless induced by the unusual strain upon her nerves since coming to Maplehurst and from thinking so much of the chest.

“Yes, it was that,” she said to herself. “It was in my mind when I went to sleep, and that is why I got up. I must have had a great deal of strength to move that chest. But it seems I did it. I was always strong when I was in this sleep. Did I really find the key, and where did I put it if I did? I used to hide things. Oh, this is dreadful!”

In a dazed kind of way she began to look for the key, a cold, clammy sweat breaking out through every pore when she found it in her work-box. For a moment she recoiled from it as from something uncanny, then, picking it up, she whispered: “I must take it to them and tell them, and that it is my great-grandmother’s chest.”

She heard the rasping sound of the file as she began to ascend the stairs, and tried to hurry, when she was suddenly stopped by Alex.’s voice, sounding just as it did in the dining-room when she dropped the salad and saying nearly the same words: “Sherry, go down. You are not wanted here.”

But for the railing on the side of the staircase she would have fallen, she grew so faint and dizzy.

“Yes, I’ll go,” she thought, feeling her way back to her room, where she shank into a chair, with her hands over her eyes and her brain in such a whirl that she did not think of the dog until she felt his paws on her shoulders and his hot breath on her face.

Uncovering her eyes, she saw him looking at her, with an expression so human and full of pity that she put her arms around his neck, and burying her face in his long mane began to cry.

“You dear old dog,” she sobbed; “it was you he meant and not me. I might have known it, but I couldn’t think, I feel so queer.”

The dog’s answer was a low whine as he capered round her with little barks of joy.

“Hush, hush,” she said, trying to quiet him. “They must not know I am here unless I take the key, as I suppose I ought.”

Just then there came to her cries of delight. The chest was opened and the young ladies were going into raptures over its contents, while Charley Reeves was careering around the attic with a white silk bonnet on his head ornamented with pink satin bows and long streamers of wide ribbon for strings. It was Mrs. Crosby’s wedding bonnet of a fashion seventy years back, and the young ladies were wild over it, as they were over everything.

“They do not need the key,” she thought. “I’ll keep it, and before I go away I’ll give it to Mr. Marsh and tell him the truth.”

Dropping it into her work-box, she went downstairs, followed by the dog, who made many ineffectual attempts for her to play with him, as she had often done during her leisure hours.

“Not now, doggie,” she said, patting his head. “I can’t call you Sherry, but next time I hear your master do so I trust I shall have sense enough to know he does not mean me. Three times and out!”

She was beginning to feel better and went about her work with her usual energy, although still depressed when she thought of the return of the somnambulistic habit and what it might lead to.