"Tomorrow, at sunrise," he repeated, taking his lamp to retire tobed, "I'll see whether this treasure be hid in the wall of thegarret.""And as we're out of wood, Mr. Peter," said Tabitha, puffing andpanting with her late gymnastics, "as fast as you tear the house down,I'll make a fire with the pieces."Gorgeous that night were the dreams of Peter Goldthwaite! At onetime he was turning a ponderous key in an iron door not unlike thedoor of a sepulchre, but which, being opened, disclosed a vault heapedup with gold coin, as plentifully as golden corn in a granary. Therewere chased goblets, also, and tureens, salvers, dinner dishes, anddish covers of gold, or silver gilt, besides chains and otherjewels, incalculably rich, though tarnished with the damps of thevault; for, of all the wealth that was irrevocably lost to man,whether buried in the earth or sunken in the sea, Peter Goldthwaitehad found it in this one treasure-place. Anon, he had returned tothe old house as poor as ever, and was received at the door by thegaunt and grizzled figure of a man whom he might have mistaken forhimself, only that his garments were of a much elder fashion. Butthe house, without losing its former aspect, had been changed into apalace of the precious metals. The floors, walls, and ceiling wereof burnished silver; the doors, the window-frames, the cornices, thebalustrades, and the steps of the staircase, of pure gold; and silver,with gold bottoms, were the chairs, and gold, standing on silver legs,the high chests of drawers, and silver the bedsteads, with blankets ofwoven gold, and sheets of silver tissue. The house had evidentlybeen transmuted by a single touch; for it retained all the marksthat Peter remembered, but in gold or silver instead of wood; andthe initials of his name, which, when a boy, he had cut in thewooden door-post, remained as deep in the pillar of gold. A happyman would have been Peter Goldthwaite except for a certain oculardeception, which, whenever he glanced backwards, caused the house todarken from its glittering magnificence into the sordid gloom ofyesterday.
Up, betimes, rose Peter, seized an axe, hammer, and saw, which hehad placed by his bedside, and hied him to the garret. It was butscantily lighted up, as yet, by the frosty fragments of a sunbeam,which began to glimmer through the almost opaque bull's-eyes of thewindow. A moralizer might find abundant themes for his speculative andimpracticable wisdom in a garret. There is the limbo of departedfashions, aged trifles of a day, and whatever was valuable only to onegeneration of men, and which passed to the garret when that generationpassed to the grave, not for safe keeping, but to be out of the way.
Peter saw piles of yellow and musty account-books, in parchmentcovers, wherein creditors, long dead and buried, had written the namesof dead and buried debtors in ink now so faded that their moss-growntombstones were more legible. He found old moth-eaten garments allin rags and tatters, or Peter would have put them on. Here was a nakedand rusty sword, not a sword of service, but a gentleman's smallFrench rapier, which had never left its scabbard till it lost it. Herewere canes of twenty different sorts, but no gold-headed ones, andshoe-buckles of various pattern and material, but not silver nor setwith precious stones. Here was a large box full of shoes, with highheels and peaked toes. Here, on a shelf, were a multitude of phials,half filled with old apothecaries' stuff, which, when the other halfhad done its business on Peter's ancestors, had been brought hitherfrom the death chamber. Here- not to give a longer inventory ofarticles that will never be put up at auction- was the fragment of afull-length looking-glass, which, by the dust and dimness of itssurface, made the picture of these old things look older than thereality. When Peter, not knowing that there was a mirror there, caughtthe faint traces of his own figure, he partly imagined that the formerPeter Goldthwaite had come back, either to assist or impede his searchfor the hidden wealth. And at that moment a strange notion glimmeredthrough his brain that he was the identical Peter who had concealedthe gold, and ought to know whereabout it lay. This, however, he hadunaccountably forgotten.
"Well, Mr. Peter!" cried Tabitha, on the garret stairs. "Have youtorn the house down enough to heat the teakettle?""Not yet, old Tabby," answered Peter; "but that's soon done- as youshall see."With the word in his mouth, he uplifted the axe, and laid about himso vigorously that the dust flew, the boards crashed, and, in atwinkling, the old woman had an apron full of broken rubbish.
"We shall get our winter's wood cheap," quoth Tabitha.
The good work being thus commenced, Peter beat down all before him,smiting and hewing at the joists and timbers, unclinching spike-nails,ripping and tearing away boards, with a tremendous racket, frommorning till night. He took care, however, to leave the outsideshell of the house untouched, so that the neighbors might notsuspect what was going on.
Never, in any of his vagaries, though each had made him happy whileit lasted, had Peter been happier than now. Perhaps, after all,there was something in Peter Goldthwaite's turn of mind, which broughthim an inward recompense for all the external evil that it caused.
