XIII
A Sensitive Soul
Uncle Israel was securely locked in for the night, and was correspondingly restless. He felt like a caged animal, and sleep, though earnestly wooed, failed to come to his relief. A powerful draught of his usual sleeping potion had been like so much water, as far as effect was concerned.
At length he got up, his lifelong habit of cautious movement asserting itself even here, and with tremulous, withered hands, lighted his candle. Then he put on his piebald dressing-gown and his carpet slippers, and sat on the declivity of his bed, blinking at the light, as wide awake as any owl.
Presently it came to him that he had not as yet made a thorough search of his own apartment, so he began at the foundation, so to speak, and crawled painfully over the carpet, paying special attention to the edges. Next, he fingered the baseboards carefully, rapping here and there, as though he expected some significant sound to penetrate his deafness. Rising, he went over the wall systematically, and at length, with the aid of a chair, reached up to the picture-moulding. He had gone nearly around the room, without any definite idea of what he was searching for, when his questioning fingers touched a small, metallic object.
A smile of childlike pleasure transfigured Uncle Israel’s wizened old face. Trembling, he slipped down from the chair, falling over the bath cabinet in his descent, and tried the key in the lock. It fitted, and the old man fairly chuckled.
“Wait till I tell Belinda,” he muttered, delightedly. Then a crafty second thought suggested that it might be wiser to keep “Belinda” in the dark, lest she might in some way gain possession of the duplicate key.
“Lor’,” he thought, “but how I pity them husbands of her’n. Bet their graves felt good when they got into ’em, the hull seven graves. What with sneerin’ at medicines and things a person eats, it must have been awful, not to mention stealin’ of keys and a-lockin’ ’em in nights. S’pose the house had got afire, where’d I be now?” Grasping his treasure closely, Uncle Israel blew out his candle and tottered to bed, thereafter sleeping the sleep of the just.
Mrs. Dodd detected subdued animation in his demeanour when he appeared at breakfast the following morning, and wondered what had occurred.
“You look ’s if sunthin’ pleasant had happened, Israel,” she began in a sprightly manner.