“It was built over a hundred years ago, by ships’ carpenters who came down here all the way from Boston. They don’t know how to do that kind of cabinet-work any more. The soil in the yard was hauled here by the wagon-load from ten miles down the cape to make the garden—no sea sand left there to sprout burrs! The Old Captain knew what he wanted and where to get it. He made what was, in those days, a fortune. He was master of a fleet of fishing-vessels, and used to make yearly voyages to the banks of Newfoundland for cod and to Iceland for sperm-oil whales. A pair of his big iron testing-kettles are still down in his wharf-shed, and the house is full of valuable maps and charts. Not that any one has ever seen them.”
“Why not? How long has it been vacant?”
“It has never been vacant at all! That’s the trouble. After old Captain Hawes and his wife died, their son, whom every one calls the ‘New Captain,’ lived on there in the house for years, along with the same woman who had always been a servant to his mother. He died after we came here, five years ago, under peculiar circumstances, but she still lives on, behind closed shutters.”
“Is the house for sale?”
“It’s been for sale ever since the New Captain died, but the old woman who lives in it won’t let any one inside the door to look at it.”
“I’d take it without seeing it, if it’s all you say it is,” I answered. “Why don’t they put the old woman out?”
Ruth shrugged, as one who would suggest that no outsider could hope to understand how business was managed on the cape.
“Let’s go and see it on our way home,” I suggested.
“All right; we can send the children on.”
They were scampering through the brush ahead of us, chasing limp-winged yellow butterflies and spilling their precious garnered blueberries as they ran. Their bare legs, covered with sand from the dunes and scratched by the briers of the woods, stood the strain of the long walk better than ours, in their flimsy stockings and hot rubber-soled shoes. I wanted to sit on a log in the shady woods and rest, but no one else seemed tired and the thought of the old house lured me on to hurry to its doorstep.