“Perhaps Colonel Kenwynton will recognize it,” said Ducie, with composure.
“Eh, what? Why certainly—a likeness of your grandfather, George Blewitt Ducie,—an excellent likeness! And this,” reaching for a small oval portrait set with pearls, “is his wife—what a beauty she was! Here, too,” handling a gold frame of more antiquated aspect, “is your great grandfather—yes, yes!—in his prime. I never saw him except as an old man, but he held his own—he held his own!”
The miniatures thus identified and his right to the contents of the box established, Ducie continued to lift out the jammed and wedged treasures as fast as they could be disengaged from their artful arrangement. An old silver porringer contained incongruities of value, a silver mug of christening suggestions, a lady’s watch and chain with a bunch of jeweled jangling “charms,” a filagree pouncet-box, a gold thimble, a string of fine and perfect pearls with a ruby clasp, a gold snuff-box with an enameled lid. The up-to-date man thrust his monocle in his eye to better observe, with a sort of æsthetic rapture, the shepherds dancing in the dainty workmanship. There was an array of spoons of many sorts and uses, soup ladles, salt ladles, cream ladles, and several gold and silver platters. These had kept in place one of the old-fashioned silver coasters, which held contents of value that the least æsthetic could appreciate. It was nearly half full of gold coin, worth many times its face value in the days when thus hidden away from the guerrilla and the bushwhacker. Every man’s eyes glittered at the sight except only those of Ducie. He was intent upon the search for the papers, the release of the mortgage that he had believed all his life was stowed away here.
To every man the knowledge that he has been befooled, whether by foible or fate, is of vital importance. In many ways he has been influenced to his hurt by the obsession. His actions have been rooted in his mistaken persuasions. His mental processes issue from false premises. He is not the man he would otherwise have been.
All his life Adrian Ducie had raged against the injustice that had involved in absolute oblivion the release of the mortgage, that had wrested from his father both the full satisfaction of the debt and the pledged estate as well. Otherwise he would have inherited wealth, opportunity, the means of advancement, luxury, pleasure. He was asking himself now had he made less of himself, the actual good the gods had doled out, because he had bemoaned fictitious values in case there had never been a release and the lands had gone the facile ways of foreclosure, the imminent, obvious, almost invariable sequence of mortgage. Ah, at last a paper!—carefully folded, indorsed. His grandfather’s will, regularly executed, but worthless now, by reason of the lapse of time. An administrator had distributed the estate as that of an intestate, and defended the action of foreclosure. The incident was closed, and the sere and yellow paper had not more possibility of revivification than the sere and yellow leaves that now and again came with sibilant edge against the windowpane, or winged their way on an errant gust within the room through a rift in the shattered glass.
As Ducie flung the paper aside he chanced to dislodge one of the gold pieces, a sovereign, the money being all of English coinage. It rolled swiftly along the table, slipped off its beveled edge, and was heard spinning somewhere in the shadows of the great dusky room. More than one of the gentlemen rose to recover it, and Paula, with unbecoming officiousness, her husband thought, joined in the search. It was she who secured it, and as she restored the coin she laid a glittering trifle before the box, as if it, too, had fallen from the table. “Here is one of the Ducie jewels,” she said.
“Why, it is a key, how cute,” cried Hildegarde.
Ducie had paused, the papers motionless in his hand. He was looking at Paula, sternly, rebukingly. Perhaps his expression disconcerted her in her moment of triumph, for her voice was a little shrill, her smile both feigned and false, her manner nervous and abashed, yet determined.
“Oh, it is a thing of mystic powers,” she declared. “It commands the doors of promotion and pleasure, it can open the heart and lock it, too; it is the keynote of happiness.” She laughed without relish at the pun while the up-to-date man thrust his monocle in his eye and reached out for the bauble. There was a moment of silence as it was subjected to his searching scrutiny.
“A thing of legend, is it?” he commented. “Well, I must say that it does not justify its reputation—it has a most flimsy and modern aspect, nothing whatever in conformity with those exquisite examples of old bijouterie.” He waved his hand toward the Ducie jewels blazing in rainbow hues, now laid together in a heap on the table. “Its value, why I should say it could not be much, though this is a good white diamond, and the rubies are fair, but quite small; it is not worth more than two hundred dollars or two hundred and fifty at the utmost.”