The quest for the rose of Sharon

“I think we should all like to say just what Tom has said,” remarked Mr. Chester, after a moment. “We should all like to help, if we could.”

“Oh, you all can!” I cried, impulsively. “I’m sure you can help a great deal.”

“How?” asked Mr. Chester, quietly, but with an earnestness there was no mistaking.

“I’m sure you could help us to work out that riddle that grandaunt left us,” I said. “You know that is the only clue we have.”

“You forget that I haven’t seen the riddle,” he remarked. “What was it?”

“It’s just a verse,” I said, “and rather a silly verse, too. Here it is,” and I repeated the lines slowly, while the Chesters listened in astonishment. Tom’s eyes were gleaming with interest and excitement.

“Let’s see; how is it?” he asked. “Say it again, won’t you?”

I repeated the lines slowly, and he soon had them. They were easy to remember, and, once learned, ran in one’s head like Mark Twain’s famous,

There was a little pause, and I could see that they were repeating the lines over to themselves, and trying to get some meaning out of them.

“Well,” said Mrs. Chester, at last, “that is a problem!”

“I dare say this man Tunstall had a hand in devising it,” observed her husband. “He affects a kind of cryptic utterance, sometimes—it’s one of the tricks of the business. He had acquired considerable influence over your aunt, Mrs. Truman—not enough, evidently, to persuade her to cut you off entirely, but still enough to make your inheritance hang upon this slender thread—and it is a slender one.”

“Can you tell us anything more about him?” asked mother. “I scarcely looked at him to-day—I didn’t realize at the time how deeply he was concerned in all this.”

“I did,” I said; “or, rather, he looked at me, and it sent a creepy feeling all up and down my back. He has the sharpest eyes!”

“Yes,” agreed Mr. Chester, “they’re part of his stock in trade. I’ve imagined, sometimes, that they were a kind of hypnotic eye, which might affect a nervous or weak-minded person very deeply.”

“They evidently affected Aunt Nelson,” said mother. “Please tell us all you can, Mr. Chester. The more we know of the facts in the case, the better chance we shall have of solving this perplexing puzzle.”

“That’s true,” assented Mr. Chester, slowly. “It is only right that you should know; and yet I can tell you very little more than I’ve already told. I’ve said that Tunstall pretended to be a sort of disciple of the occult. I’ve been told that he calls himself a swami, whatever that may be, and pretends to believe in the transmigration of souls, in his power to recall the spirits of the dead, and I don’t know what tomfoolery besides. No doubt he’s a clever operator—he must be, or he couldn’t stay in one locality as long as he has in this. And he’s never been exposed, as most mediums are, sooner or later. I doubt if he’d have remained here as long as he has, but for the hold he got on Mrs. Nelson, and his hope of inheriting her property.”

“Did he have such a hold on her?” inquired mother.

“Oh, yes; I wouldn’t have believed he’d dare go to the lengths he did if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes. I happened upon him one night—” he paused hesitatingly, and looked at his wife, “I don’t know whether I’d better tell the story,” he added.

“Yes, tell it,” said Mrs. Chester. “They have the right to know.”

“Well, then,” went on Mr. Chester, “I was detained in the city very late one night some four or five months ago, and it was after midnight when I reached Fanwood. Mrs. Chester was not expecting me, and there was no carriage at the station. I knew she was in bed, and rather than disturb her, I decided to walk over. It took me about an hour—it was a bright moonlight night, I remember, a good deal like this one, and I took my time. When I turned in at our gate, I fancied I saw a light in our stable, and I walked back to investigate, but found it was only the reflection of the moonlight on a window. I was coming back to the house, by the path which runs along the wall, when I fancied I heard voices on the other side. I stopped to listen, and sure enough, there were two persons talking together on your aunt’s side. I could not make out either voice clearly, one was so low and broken, and the other so high and whining. You can imagine how puzzled I was, and a little frightened, too, I confess, for my first thought was naturally of burglars. But I knew I couldn’t go to bed and to sleep until I had found out what was happening over there, so I went softly back to the stable, got a short ladder, and placed it noiselessly against the wall. Then I climbed up and looked over.”

We were all listening breathlessly; I, at least, with a delicious creepy sensation at the roots of my hair.

“Well,” continued Mr. Chester, “I confess that I was startled for a moment by what I saw—a white and diaphanous-looking figure standing before an old bench, on which there was a dark, huddled shape, which I couldn’t make out clearly. Indeed, I couldn’t make out anything very clearly, for both figures were in the shadow of the wall, and besides I had only a moment to look at them, for I suppose I must have made some sound—an exclamation of surprise, perhaps—for suddenly the white figure vanished among the trees, and the figure on the bench sprang to its feet and I saw it was Mrs. Nelson.

“‘What is it?’ she cried, and then she looked up and saw my white face peering down at her.

“I felt rather foolish, as one will when he is caught eavesdropping, no matter how good his motives may have been.

“‘I beg your pardon,’ I said, ‘if I’m intruding; but I happened to hear voices—’

“She didn’t seem to understand very clearly, but stared about her in a dazed way, and just then who should come forward from among the trees but Silas Tunstall. Then I understood. He had been up to some of his mummeries, imposing upon that old woman. He glared up at me for a moment; but without saying a word, laid his hand upon Mrs. Nelson’s arm and led her off toward the house. I confess that it was with no very pleasant feeling I looked after them. I thought it all over next day, but I didn’t see how I could interfere. After all, it was none of my business, and so I decided to do nothing, and told no one of the incident except my wife.”

Then I recalled that half-forgotten adventure, which I have already recorded—my starting to get a drink one night, and meeting grandaunt in the hall. And for the first time, I understood her terror. She believed in ghosts—and the little white figure she had seen disappear into the gloomy doorway had looked ghostly enough! Poor grandaunt! How she had screamed! Mr. Tunstall had no doubt found it easy enough to make a disciple of her, since she was ready to come more than half-way to meet him.

“Horrible!” breathed mother at last. “Did he—did he have any other victims?”

“Oh, yes. He is said to have a number of followers, though I haven’t any idea who they are. He gives seances, from time to time, I understand, but only a very few are admitted to them, and then only people of whom he is absolutely sure. You understand this is mere rumour, Mrs. Truman; I don’t know personally that it is true. But where there’s so much smoke, there must surely be a little fire.”

“And he was with Aunt Nelson after that?” asked mother.

“Oh, a great deal. He was almost constantly at her house, toward the last. We often saw him coming or going. I think her mind failed a little, though, of course, there would be no way of absolutely proving it. But I noticed many little changes in her. It might be,” he added, “that the will could be set aside.”

But mother shook her head decidedly.

“No,” she said; “if we can’t get the property in the way she provided, we won’t get it at all. She had a right to do as she pleased with it—we had no claim upon her. We will never carry the matter into the courts.”

“That is right, Mrs. Truman,” cried Mrs. Chester warmly. “I don’t believe in washing one’s family linen in public. Besides, I’ve always had a horror of the courts.”

“And you a lawyer’s wife!” laughed her husband, as we rose from table.

“I don’t care,” retorted Mrs. Chester; “the courts are incomprehensible to me. They’re supposed to be established for the administration of justice, and yet I’ve known them to be very unjust; and even when it is justice they administer, they seem to choose the very longest and most tortuous way of doing it.”

“I’ve always understood,” said mother, “that it was the lawyers who led justice around by the nose and made her appear such a sorry figure,” and laughing, we passed on into the drawing-room.

“I say,” whispered Tom, his eyes bright, to Dick and me, “let’s go up to the library and see if we can’t find out something more about the rose of Sharon.”

“Splendid!” I cried, and excusing ourselves, we scampered away up the stairs.

Tom went to work at once among the dictionaries and encyclopedias in a business-like way which impressed me immensely. The great volumes seemed to possess no terrors nor mysteries for him, but stood ready to yield up their secrets to his touch. It reminded me of the cave of the Forty Thieves—it was no trouble at all to get in, if one just knew how.

“Of course,” he pointed out, “the first thing is to find out everything we can about the rose of Sharon. That’s the keystone of the arch, as it were. So we’ll begin there.”

At the end of half an hour we had achieved the following result:

“Well,” observed Dick, disgustedly, when we had got this far, “the farther we go, the more we seem to get tangled up! Even these dictionary fellows don’t agree with each other.”

“They seldom do,” said Tom, with a wisdom born of experience. “All you can do, usually, is to average up what they say and reach your own conclusion. But wait a minute. Suppose we look up the Bible verse ourselves.”

“What is ‘Cant.’?” queried Dick. “I don’t know any book of the Bible called that, or anything like it.”

“Neither do I,” agreed Tom, as he took down his father’s Bible. “Let’s see,” and he ran rapidly through the list of books at the front. “I have it—‘Cant.’ is short for ‘Canto,’ which is Latin for song.”

“The Song of Solomon,” I ventured.

“Of course,” said Tom, and he turned to it.

I have since learned that our reasoning upon this occasion was not so brilliant as I then thought it, and that “Cant.” is an abbreviation of “Canticles,” the scholarly name for the Song of Songs. However, we had guessed rightly, although our logic was at fault, and we found the verse we were looking for at the beginning of the second chapter: “I am the rose of Sharon and the lily of the valleys.”

Tom pored over it for a moment, then looked up.

“I believe I’ve found it!” he cried. “See, four words to the right gives us ‘and the lily,’ then over here in the next column, ‘by.’ Then three diagonally, ‘my trees among.’ ‘And the lily by my trees among’—that isn’t very good English, but it means something, anyway. If there is a lily among the trees—”

“But,” I objected, “the words may not be arranged the same way in grandaunt’s Bible.”

“That’s so,” he assented, plunged into despondency again. “We’ll have to look at her Bible and see. In the meantime, there’s the apple-tree and the plum. Perhaps the treasure is in a cavity in one of them.”

“Don’t forget the early potato,” laughed Dick. “I see clearly that we’ll have to dig up the whole place, chop down the orchard, and perhaps tear down the house, if we expect to follow up all these clues. We’ve got a large job on hand.”

There was nothing more to be discovered in the library, so we put the books we had been consulting back in their places and went down-stairs to join our elders. We found them still talking over the various aspects of the problem, and sat down to listen.

“The thing that puzzles me,” Mr. Chester was saying, “is that Mrs. Nelson made no stipulation in the will about Tunstall finding this treasure. If you fail to find it, the property goes to him; but there is no penalty if he fails to find it. And suppose both of you fail to find it? What then?”

“It’s a sort of game of ‘we lose,’ whatever happens,” broke in Tom.

“The only explanation is,” added Mr. Chester, “that Mrs. Nelson took it for granted that Tunstall would have no difficulty in finding the treasure.”

“With the aid of his Hindu gods, perhaps,” Mrs. Chester suggested.

“What is the ‘treasure,’ anyway, Mr. Chester?” mother queried in a kind of desperation. “The word makes one think of chests of gold and that sort of thing, but, I take it, that’s not what we’re to look for.”

“Oh, no. The will says the ‘treasure’—I use the word because it is used in the key—consists of ‘stocks, bonds, and other securities.’ Mrs. Nelson never took me into her confidence, so I can’t even guess at the amount.”

“And what shape will they be in? What must we look for?”

“I think you will find them in a small steel box such as is usually used for holding securities of that kind. Tom, run up and bring down that box off my desk. Of course I may be mistaken,” he added, as Tom reappeared carrying a little black metal box, “but I believe that some such box as this is the object of your search.”

We all stared at it for a moment, as though this were the veritable box.

“Then if we don’t find it,” asked mother, at last, “and this Mr. Tunstall doesn’t find it, as you suggested might possibly happen, the ‘treasure’ will be lost?”

“Oh, probably most of the securities could be replaced upon proper proof of loss. But I don’t believe there’s any danger of their being lost. I believe Tunstall knows where they are, and that he devised the puzzle, or, at least, suggested it. The verse sounds very much like him.”

For a moment, no one spoke; but I know I grew pale at the thought of how completely we were in that man’s power. I could see Tom grow pale, too, and he stared across at me with eyes almost starting from his head.

“But,” faltered mother, at last, “if he knows where they are, he may have removed them.”

“Yes, that’s possible,” assented Mr. Chester. “But perhaps he’s so confident you’ll never find them that’s he’s content to wait till the end of the month, so that everything will be quite straight and regular.”

I felt as though my brain would burst in the effort I made to look at this new possibility from all sides.

“Besides,” added Mr. Chester, “it wouldn’t do him any good to steal them. Stocks and bonds aren’t of much use to anyone unless they are legally come by.”

“But he might remove them,” said Dick, “to prevent our finding them, and then put them back.”

“Oh, be sure of one thing,” cried Mrs. Chester. “If he had any hand in hiding them he did it so well that they won’t be found till he finds them himself!”

“I don’t believe he knows,” I burst out, at last. “If he knew, he wouldn’t have read the key when he picked it up after I let it fall. If he knew what it was, he’d have handed it back to us without looking at it.”

Mr. Chester nodded.

“You may be right,” he said. “That’s a good point.”

“But whether he knows or not,” I went on, “the thing for us to do is to solve the puzzle. He certainly hasn’t had a chance to remove the ‘treasure’ yet, and we must see that he doesn’t get a chance. Where do you suppose grandaunt would conceal her property, Mr. Chester?”

“It seems to me,” answered Mr. Chester, slowly, “that Mrs. Nelson would not bury the papers, or conceal them anywhere outside the house. Moisture works havoc with securities of that kind, and to bury them would be the very worst thing which could be done with them, even in a box like this. Besides, she would naturally want them where she could keep her eye on them, and have ready access to them. Bonds usually have coupons attached to them which have to be detached and sent in for payment of interest. Most people keep securities of that kind in a safe-deposit box at a bank. I believe that you will find them somewhere in the house—in a place that was under Mrs. Nelson’s eyes constantly.”

“But the rose of Sharon, sir,” I objected. “That could scarcely be in the house.”

“No,” he agreed slowly, “no; I confess that puzzles me. Yet it seems most improbable that Mrs. Nelson would do anything so foolish as to bury her securities. She would be too anxious, I imagine, to have them within reach, like a miser with his gold. I am tempted to believe that the ‘rose of Sharon’ does not refer to a bush or a tree, but to something else which we have not discovered as yet. It might be a piece of furniture, or a picture, or a plant—almost anything, in fact. I would scrutinize everything in the house carefully to see if the appellation, ‘rose of Sharon,’ cannot be made to fit.”

Dick groaned.

“There’s no end to it,” he said, mournfully. “It seems to me that ‘rose of Sharon’ can mean about everything under the sun.”

“Well,” said Mr. Chester, smiling, “I would certainly look for it very carefully in the house; though, of course, it will do no harm to continue your search outdoors, too.”

“I told Biffkins, a while ago,” observed Dick, “that we should probably have to dig up the whole place and tear down the house before we were through. It seems to me the easiest way would be to scare it—”

But he stopped suddenly without completing the sentence, and we were all too preoccupied to notice.

We fell silent pondering the problem, which seemed to grow more perplexing the more we tried to unravel it. I have had a clothes-line act in just that way! But I saw what a help a trained mind like Mr. Chester’s would be to us. And we should need help—all we could get. Yet I had always delighted in solving puzzles—the more difficult the better—and I was determined to solve this one, upon which so much depended. The very fact that so much depended upon it, seemed to make it more difficult. It was impossible to approach it light-heartedly, not caring much whether one succeeded or not; and the very anxiety to succeed somehow beclouded the intellect.

Mr. Chester smiled as he looked at my serious, intent face.

“Come, my dear,” he said, “don’t take it so much to heart. Remember you have nearly a month in which to work out the answer. A great many things may happen in that time. Besides, as you grow better acquainted with the place, some natural solution of the puzzle may suggest itself to you. You mustn’t be discouraged over a first failure—that won’t do at all.”

“I’m not discouraged, sir,” I answered stoutly. “I don’t intend to permit myself to become discouraged.”

“That’s right,” he said heartily. “That’s the spirit that overcomes obstacles and wins out in the end. Do you remember the last lines that Browning ever wrote, where he described himself as

“Did Browning write that?” I asked, my eyes a little blurred with the quick tears which had sprung to them. “But I thought he was a stuffy old poet whom nobody could understand?”

“Many people think so,” answered Mr. Chester, with his kind smile; “but it is mostly because they have taken somebody else’s word for it and have never tried to understand, themselves. Suppose you try for yourself, sometime. You’ll find him a tonic—just such a tonic as you need.”

“I will,” I said, gratefully; and then, for the first time, I noticed that the two boys were no longer in the room. Mother noticed their absence, too, at the same moment.

“Why, where is Dick?” she asked.

“They’ve probably gone back to the library,” I suggested, leaping at once to the conclusion that they had found a new clue. “Shall I go after them?”

“Yes, dear—we must be going. Tell Dick it’s getting late.”

I ran up the stairs to the library door, eager to find out what it was they had discovered. But in the first moment, as I entered, I thought the room was empty. Then I heard the low murmur of excited voices from the deep window-seat. But at the sound of my footsteps, the murmur ceased abruptly.

“I SAW FROM THEIR FLUSHED FACES THAT THEY HAD, INDEED, MADE SOME DISCOVERY.”

“Have you found out something, Dick?” I cried, bursting in upon them. “Oh, tell me!”

I saw from their flushed faces that they had, indeed, made some discovery; but instead of confiding in me at once, as I naturally expected them to do, they glanced guiltily at each other like two conspirators.

“Aren’t you going to tell me?” I demanded. “I don’t think that’s fair!”

“Well, you see, Biffkins,” began Dick, stammeringly, “this isn’t anything for—for a girl to know.”

“It isn’t?” I cried, my temper rising at such duplicity. “I should just like to know why? Perhaps you think I couldn’t help?”

“No,” replied Dick, grinning fiendishly, as he always did whenever I grew angry; “I don’t believe you could!”

I gasped with astonishment at the absurdity of such a thing, and glared at Tom Chester, whose face was as crimson as my own. And to think that only a short while before he had danced around the table to shake hands with me in an alliance offensive and defensive! His treason fairly took my breath away. And I had thought him a nice boy, upon whom one could rely! I felt the hot tears rushing into my eyes; then my pride asserted itself; and crushing them back, I tossed up my head and scorched them both with a single fiery glance.

“Oh, very well!” I said, and marched from the room.