The quest for the rose of Sharon

by Burton Egbert Stevenson

It was very dark in the room, but I opened one of the shutters and let in a stream of sunlight. Then I sat down to take a careful survey of my surroundings.

The room was not a very large one and was furnished in the simplest fashion. One corner was occupied by a four-poster of moderate size—a mere baby beside the huge one in the guest-chamber. The hangings were rather old and faded, but the bed had on it a quilt, intricately embroidered, which, at another time, would have awakened my enthusiasm. Preoccupied as I was, I paused for an instant to look at it and to wonder at the patience of its maker, for it evidently represented long weeks of labour.

Opposite the bed was a small dressing-table, a very gem of a thing, and in a kind of alcove between the two front windows was a desk, which riveted my attention. It was a very large one, of black walnut, and when I let down the top, innumerable drawers and pigeon-holes were disclosed. There was also a row of drawers down either side to the floor, and in the sides, opening outward behind the drawers, were partitioned receptacles for account-books. All this I took in at a glance, as it were, and my heart was beating wildly, for I knew that this desk was the natural hiding-place of grandaunt’s papers. It was just here that she would keep them!

But the rose of Sharon!

I confess that baffled me for a moment; and yet, I told myself, what was more natural than that the whole hocus-pocus about the rose of Sharon should have been devised merely to throw us off the track. At any rate, I would examine the desk as closely as I could.

There were loose papers and a number of account-books in the pigeon-holes, but a glance at them was sufficient to show me that none of them could be the documents I sought, even had it been probable that grandaunt would have kept such valuable papers so carelessly. The drawers, too, were filled with a litter of papers of various kinds and in the compartments at the sides of the desk, old account-books had been crowded until they would hold no more; but there was nothing which, by any stretch of the imagination, could be made to resemble “stocks, bonds and other securities.” How that phrase mocked me!

The search completed, I sat down again in the chair before the desk and regarded it despondently. The desk itself had been open and not one of the drawers had been locked. The keys, strung upon a wire ring, hung from a tack inside the desk. If grandaunt had kept her securities there, it would, most certainly, have been under lock and key.

There was a wardrobe in the room, but a glance into it had shown me that it contained nothing but an array of grandaunt’s old clothes, hung against the wall. If the papers were not in this desk, where could they be? The room seemed to offer no other reasonable hiding-place—

A dash of colour at the back of the desk caught my eye, and I leaned forward to descry hanging there a little calendar, bearing a picture of a dark girl in a picturesque red costume, standing beside an old well, evidently intended to be Arabian or Egyptian or something Oriental. There was a little line of print under the picture, and my heart leaped with a sudden suffocating rapture as I deciphered it—“The Rose of Sharon!”

I was so a-tremble for a moment that I clutched the arms of the chair to steady myself—to keep myself from failing forward; but the weakness passed, and left behind it a kind of high excitement. My brain seemed somehow wonderfully clear. Without an instant’s hesitation, I counted four pigeon-holes to the right and then three diagonally. The last one was stuffed with papers, which I had already examined. I did not so much as glance at them, as I took them out, but laying them on the desk, I put my hand into the hole and pressed steadily against the back. I half-expected to see the front of the desk swing outward toward me, but apparently nothing happened, though I was certain that I had felt the back of the pigeon-hole move a little. Examining it more carefully with my fingers, I felt a slight projection, and almost at the instant I touched it, a little door at the side of the desk flew open.