We walked away in silence. But it was more than I could stand.
“Did he live in the house?” I asked, at last.
“I don’t know anything about it,” answered the judge unhappily. “I was hoping you wouldn’t ask.” There was upon his face an oldness and discouragement with life that I had never seen there before. “I was his best friend, and his only friend at the end, and he never told me anything about it. The day we buried his mother, old Mis’ Hawes, I saw that little coffin in the vault, just like you did, only there weren’t so much dust on it then. I was staring down at it, after the other pallbearers had gone. The New Captain seen me.
“‘What are you looking at? Come on!’ said he. And I said, ‘Who is that?’ and he said, ‘That’s my son; now you know who it is.’
“That’s all he ever said and all I ever asked him, and I never mentioned it to any one since then.”
A great comprehension suddenly came to me, and I was dazed with what was whirling through my mind. I would have acknowledged the finding of the loft to him, except, from the way the judge had dealt with the matter all these years, I realized that he preferred to be left in ignorance. What he had never inquired into he did not want to know. I did not attempt to intimate to him how much the discovery of the little coffin meant to me. It was one secret more added to the burden of the House of the Five Pines, but one mystery less.
After a while I asked, “How long ago was that, judge?”
And he answered, “Mis’ Hawes died in the early eighties.”
A whiff of vault-like air seemed to pass over my heart. I was back once more in the dark loft, with the rain beating down on the roof. That was the period when boys wore fluted calico shirts.