“That’s what he saved in Babylon. Dedn’t Oi say as he died warrum?”
“But you must listen, Gran’fer. Uncle Lilliwhyte——” she recapitulated the story.
“They’re mine anyways!” He scooped them up in his skinny palms and let them fall into the pot with a voluptuous clang. “Ye gits quite enough out o’ my biznus.”
This seemed so exactly the reverse of Will’s attitude that she found herself smiling ruefully at the way she was caught again between her “two mules.” But she could not thus lose her marriage-portion. “Uncle Lilliwhyte gave them to me for myself,” she said firmly.
“And don’t ye owe me back all the money Oi paid when your feyther died?”
Jinny was taken aback. “How much did you pay?”
“Hunderds and hunderds. Dedn’t, he’d a-been a disgraced corpse, and your mother too.”
Jinny was silent. The Angel-Mother seemed rustling overhead. The Gaffer closed shutters and bolted doors with rigorous precautions, and hugging the teapot to his bosom stumbled up to bed. Depressed by this unexpected seizure of her windfall, she found herself too utterly weary after her long day’s work and excitement to open the shutters again, much as she disliked an airless room; she had scarcely energy to pull out her chest of drawers. For a few minutes she watched from her bed the blue flickering flame of the log, then knew no more till suddenly she saw above the dead fire a monstrous shadow curling over the chimney-piece and along the ceiling: in another instant she traced it to something still more horrible—her grandfather’s legless trunk appearing over the hearthstone, with his nightlight in one hand and the teapot in the other. The rush-candle shook in its holed tin cylinder and set his grisly counterpart dancing. Jinny’s blood ran cold. Evidently some one had murdered him for the gold and this was his ghost. Then she told herself it was one of her nightmares, and she looked around for Henry Brougham, Esq., to clear up the situation. But with a soft thud the trunk dropped as through a trap-door and there was nothing left but a great glimmering hole where the hearthstone should have been. Instantly she realized that it was only a secret hiding-place in which her magpie of a grandfather was bestowing the treasure—yes, there was the hearthstone slewed round as on a pivot. This must be that old smugglers’ storehouse he and gossip had sometimes hinted at—with perhaps the long underground passages of ancient legend, reaching to Beacon Chimneys, nay, to the parsonage itself.
She closed her eyes carefully as his shadow heralded his re-ascent. He came up almost as noiselessly as that giant spectre, and between her lids she saw him scrutinize her. Reassured to see his shanks again, she emitted one of his snores, wondering whimsically if she did snore, or if any other girl had ever heard herself snore, and a smile almost broke the impassivity of her cheeks. Satisfied with the snore, he stooped down and she saw the hearthstone veer back to its place. “Well, I can always get it when I want it,” she thought cheerfully, as his slow stockinged feet bore him and his more sinister shadow upstairs.
For some time she lay awake, pondering over the fate of her money, which seemed like Cleopatra’s to be “in bonds,” and wondering whether poor Uncle Lilliwhyte was still alive; then everything faded into a vision of Mr. Flippance jogging marionettes for rugged miners who poured out their teapots at the box-office, reducing it to such a swamp that its boxes floated in the tea.