“I came here at this time,” continued Mr. Perkins, addressing his speech to the jack-knife, which he held upon the palm of his hand, “to see Cap’n Steele on an important business matter. He had agreed to meet me. But I saw Ned Britton at the tavern, las’ night, an’ heerd fer the first time that the ‘Saracen’ had gone to Davy Jones an’ took the Cap’n with her. So I come up here to have a little talk with you, which is his son and my own nevvy.”
“Why didn’t you come up to the house?” I enquired.
Mr. Perkins turned upon me his peculiar wink, and his shoulders began to shake again, till I feared more convulsions. But he suddenly stopped short, and with abrupt gravity nodded his head at me several times.
“The woman!” he said, in a low voice. “I jest can’t abide women. ’Specially when they’s old an’ given to argument, as Ned Britton says this one is.”
I sympathized with him, and said so. Whereat my uncle gave me a look gentle and kindly, and said in a friendly tone:
“Sam, my boy, I want to tell you all about myself, that’s your blood uncle an’ no mistake; but first I want you to tell me all about yourself. You’re an orphan, now, an’ my dead sister’s child, an’ I take it I’m the only real friend you’ve got in the world. So now, fire away!”
There was something about the personality of Naboth Perkins that invited confidence; or perhaps it was my loneliness and need of a friend that led me to accept this astonishing uncle in good faith. Anyway, I did not hesitate to tell him my whole story, including my recent grief at the news of my dear father’s death and the startling discovery I had just made that I was penniless and in debt for my living to Mrs. Ranck.
“Father has often told me,” I concluded, “that the house was mine, and had been put in Mrs. Ranck’s name because he felt she was honest, and would guard my interests in his absence. And he told me there was a store of valuable articles in his room, which he had been accumulating for years, and that the old sea-chest alone contained enough to make me independent. But when we examined the room this morning everything was gone, and the chest was empty. I don’t know what to think about it, I’m sure; for father never lied, in spite of what Mrs. Ranck says.”
Uncle Naboth whistled a sailor’s hornpipe in a slow, jerky, and altogether dismal fashion. When it was quite finished, even to the last quavering bar, he said:
“Sam, who kept the keys to the room, an’ the chest?”