“How did you manage that exactly?” Lindsay asked.
“Oh, that was easy enough,” Mrs. Spash confessed cheerfully. “Between Miss Murray’s death and the auction, I was here a lot, fixing up. They all trusted me, of course. Those toys was all set out in little villages by the Dew Pond. Nobody knew that they were there. So I just did them up in tissue paper and put them in that big tin box and hid them in the bushes. One night late I came back and buried them. Folks didn’t think of them for a long time after the auction. You see, nobody had touched them during Miss Murray’s illness. And when they did remember them, they thought they had disappeared during the sale.” Mrs. Spash paused a moment. Her face assumed an expression of extreme disapproval. “Other things disappeared during the sale,” she accused, lowering her voice.
“Who took them?” Lindsay asked.
All the caution of the Yankee appeared in Mrs. Spash’s voice. “I don’t know as I’d like to say, because it isn’t a thing anybody can prove. I have my suspicions though.”
Lindsay did not continue these inquiries.
“Where did Miss Murray get all these toys?”
“Well, a lot of ’em came from China. Miss Murray had a great-uncle who was a sea-captain. He used to go on them long whaling voyages. He brought them to her different times. Miss Murray had played with them when she was a child, and so she liked to have little Cherry play with them. Sometimes they’d all go out to the Dew Pond—Miss Murray, Mr. Monroe, Mr. Gale, Mr. Lewis, and spend a whole afternoon laying them out in little towns—jess about as you’ve got ’em there. There was two little places on the shore that Miss Murray had all cut down, so’s the bushes wouldn’t be too tall. They useter call the pond the Pacific Ocean. One of them cleared places was the China coast and the other the Japanese coast. They’d stay there for hours, floating little boats back and forth from China to Japan. And how they’d laugh! I useter listen to their voices coming through the window. But then, the house was always full of laughter. It began at seven o’clock in the morning, when they got up, and it never stopped until—after midnight sometimes—when they went to bed. Oh, it was such a gay place in those days.”
Lindsay arose and stretched. But the stretching did not seem so much an expression of fatigue or drowsiness as the demand of his spirit for immediate activity of some sort. He sat down again instantly. Under his downcast lids, his eyes were bright. “These walls are soaked with laughter,” he remarked.
“Yes,” Mrs. Spash seemed to understand. “But there was tears too and plenty of them—in the last years.”
“I suppose there were,” Lindsay agreed. He did not speak for a moment; nor did Mrs. Spash. There came a silence so concentrated that the sunlight poured into it tangible gold. Then, outside a thick white cloud caught the sun in its woolly net. The world gloomed again.