“You were looking for another find, eh?--like a cat watching a hole where she has just caught a mouse,” said Floyd-Rosney to his wife with his misfit jocularity.
No one sought to reply. Every eye was on Adrian Ducie, who had found a cold chisel among the tools and was working now at the hinges and now at the lock, wherever there seemed best promise of entrance. The hinges were forced apart finally, the lock was broken, and once more the box was opened here where it was packed forty-odd years ago. A covering of chamois lay over the top, and as Adrian Ducie put it aside with trembling fingers the lamplight gloated down on a responsive glitter of gold and silver, with a glint here and there, as of a precious stone. There was obviously insufficient room in the box for the vanished table service of the family silver, but several odd pieces of such usage were crowded in, of special antiquity of aspect, probably heirlooms, and thus saved at all hazards. The method of packing had utilized the space within to the fraction of an inch. Adrian drew out a massive gold goblet filled with a medley of smaller articles, a rare cameo bracelet, an emerald ring, an old seal quaintly mounted, a child’s sleeve-bracelets, a simple ornament set with turquoise, and a diamond necklace, fit for a princess. None of these were in cases, even the protection of a wrapping would have required more space than could be spared.
“You know that face?” Ducie demanded, holding a miniature out to Floyd-Rosney, catching the lamplight upon it.
“Can’t say I do,” Floyd-Rosney responded, cavalierly and with apparent indifference.
“Perhaps Colonel Kenwynton will recognize it,” said Ducie, with composure.
“Eh, what? Why certainly--a likeness of your grandfather, George Blewitt Ducie,--an excellent likeness! And this,” reaching for a small oval portrait set with pearls, “is his wife--what a beauty she was! Here, too,” handling a gold frame of more antiquated aspect, “is your great grandfather--yes, yes!--in his prime. I never saw him except as an old man, but he held his own--he held his own!”
The miniatures thus identified and his right to the contents of the box established, Ducie continued to lift out the jammed and wedged treasures as fast as they could be disengaged from their artful arrangement. An old silver porringer contained incongruities of value, a silver mug of christening suggestions, a lady’s watch and chain with a bunch of jeweled jangling “charms,” a filagree pouncet-box, a gold thimble, a string of fine and perfect pearls with a ruby clasp, a gold snuff-box with an enameled lid. The up-to-date man thrust his monocle in his eye to better observe, with a sort of æsthetic rapture, the shepherds dancing in the dainty workmanship. There was an array of spoons of many sorts and uses, soup ladles, salt ladles, cream ladles, and several gold and silver platters. These had kept in place one of the old-fashioned silver coasters, which held contents of value that the least æsthetic could appreciate. It was nearly half full of gold coin, worth many times its face value in the days when thus hidden away from the guerrilla and the bushwhacker. Every man’s eyes glittered at the sight except only those of Ducie. He was intent upon the search for the papers, the release of the mortgage that he had believed all his life was stowed away here.