The Mayor's Wife

by Anna Katharine Green

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 passage it led to, with all the opportunities they offered for the concealment of a few folded documents, 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 passed 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: