“And yonder is the coffer,” said the pensioner. “Open but that; and our quest is ended.”
“That, if I mistake not, I can do,” said Redclyffe.
He drew forth—what he had kept all this time, as something that might yet reveal to him the mystery of his birth—the silver key that had been found by the grave in far New England; and applying it to the lock, he slowly turned it on the hinges, that had not been turned for two hundred years. All—even Lord Braithwaite, guilty and shame-stricken as he felt—pressed forward to look upon what was about to be disclosed. What were the wondrous contents? The entire, mysterious coffer was full of golden ringlets, abundant, clustering through the whole coffer, and living with elasticity, so as immediately, as it were, to flow over the sides of the coffer, and rise in large abundance from the long compression. Into this—by a miracle of natural production which was known likewise in other cases—into this had been resolved the whole bodily substance of that fair and unfortunate being, known so long in the legends of the family as the Beauty of the Golden Locks. As the pensioner looked at this strange sight,—the lustre of the precious and miraculous hair gleaming and glistening, and seeming to add light to the gloomy room,—he took from his breast pocket another lock of hair, in a locket, and compared it, before their faces, with that which brimmed over from the coffer.
“It is the same!” said he.
“And who are you that know it?” asked Redclyffe, surprised.
“He whose ancestors taught him the secret,—who has had it handed down to him these two centuries, and now only with regret yields to the necessity of making it known.”
“You are the heir!” said Redclyffe.
In that gloomy room, beside the dead old man, they looked at him, and saw a dignity beaming on him, covering his whole figure, that broke out like a lustre at the close of day.