“Gracious!” exclaimed Molly, “what possessed him to leave them in such places? Was he crazy?”
“On the contrary, he was too wise. Not wishing to dispose of them in a lump, he did it gradually, and concealed them for greater safety in different places, so that no one thief could steal them all. Whenever he sold them he invested the proceeds in solid securities. No one knows to what extent the old farmhouse is still a jewel casket. It is more than likely that cracks and corners to-day are hiding their precious stones.”
“How mysterious and exciting!” exclaimed Molly. “It seems too romantic for practical New England.”
“That is just the trouble with it,” said her father. He leaned back in his chair and continued, with a smile, “I suspect our guest has been reading his ‘Monte Cristo’ lately, which may account for a pardonable exaggeration in a historian who means to be honest. Who told you all this, Sam? The Judds’ family cat?”
Mr. Fettiplace drew his hand slowly across his forehead and closed his blue eyes, as if hesitating for a reply. “There is so much that is hard to believe connected with Amos that one ought to prepare his audience before talking about him. I will tell you one little thing that happened to myself, an occurrence not dependent upon other people’s credulity. One day last autumn, late in the afternoon, I was walking along an untravelled road through the woods, when I met two little children who were playing horse. The front one, the horse, wore a garment that looked like a white silk overcoat without sleeves. Otherwise the children were roughly clad, with battered straw hats and bare feet. The overcoat had a curious, Oriental cut, and there was a good deal of style to it; so much, in fact, and of such a foreign flavor, that I stopped to get a better look at it. The wearer, a boy of eight or ten, I recognized as the son of an unprosperous farmer who lived in a dilapidated old house not far away. When I asked him where he got his jacket he said he wore it at the children’s tableaux: that he was the prince who awoke the sleeping beauty in the town hall last night. Then I remembered there had been a performance to raise money for the library.
“While talking with him I noticed there were four rows of little pearl-shaped buttons around the neck and down the front. They formed part of an elaborate design, beautifully embroidered in gold and silver thread, old and somewhat tarnished, but in excellent preservation. I asked him what those ornaments were, and he answered they were beads. ‘But who owns the jacket?’ I asked: ‘Does it belong to you?’ No, it belonged to Mrs. Judd, who had lent it for the performance. ‘Then why don’t you return it to Mrs. Judd?’ Oh, they were going to return it to-morrow morning. I offered to take it, as I was going that way, and the jacket was handed over.
“The more I examined the article, the more interested I became, and finally I sat down on a rock and made a study of it. I found the garment was of white silk and completely covered with a most elaborate stitching of gold and silver thread. I am no expert in precious stones, but I knew those beads were either pearls or tremendously clever imitations, and when I remembered there was a good old-fashioned mystery connected with Amos’s arrival in these parts, I began to feel that the beads stood a fair chance of being more than they pretended. I counted a hundred and twenty of them.
“When I took the garment to Mrs. Judd and told her what I thought, she didn’t seem at all surprised; simply told me it had been lying in a bureau-drawer ever since Amos came, about twenty years ago. She is over eighty and her memory has gone rapidly the last few years, but she closed her eyes, stroked her hair, and said she remembered now that her husband had told her this jacket was worth a good many dollars. And so they always kept it locked away in an upstairs drawer, but she had forgotten all about that when she offered it to the Faxons for their performance. Down the front of the jacket were large splashes of a dark reddish-brown color which she said had always been there, and she remembered thinking, as she first laid the coat away, that Amos had been in some mischief with currant jelly. Amos was away just then, but when he returned we took all the beads off, and a few days later I showed a dozen of them to a New York jeweller who said they were not only real pearls, but for size and quality he had seldom seen their equal.”
“They must have been tremendously valuable,” said Molly.
“They averaged twelve hundred dollars apiece.”