Mrs. Tidings ignored it. She picked up the statue of the superior-looking gentleman and dusted it carefully. “That’s Mr. Goody’s chair you’re sitting in,” she observed. “He was sitting in it the day before he died.” She sighed and replaced the statue so that it gazed again in Hercules’ direction. “Poor Mr. Goody! And him so young and all! He wasn’t more than thirty-five or -six when the accident happened, you know.”
It occurred to Hercules that there were probably a great many things Mrs. Tidings could tell him that he really needed to know. He said, trying to sound casual, “Were you here at the time?”
“Oh yes,” said Mrs. Tidings, gazing upward in a pious manner. “Indeed I was! They carried him in from up the road where the horse threw him. Late one night, it was. Some people going by on their way to the city—they found him and brought him here. I couldn’t bear to look at him, poor man.”
“How did they know where to bring him?” asked Hercules curiously.
“Why, it seems to me they said there was someone else who came along who knew where he belonged—I really don’t remember.” She pressed a hand to her heart. “I ran into the kitchen and hid my face, you know, when they carried him in. But she—I mean, Mrs. Goody—she was as calm as you please about it after the first shock. And in two days he was in his tomb. Sad. Very sad.” She sat down on a little gilded chair across from Hercules and looked at him approvingly, and then she gazed at the ceiling again. “It was a blessing in a way,” she said. “One of the people who found him turned out to be a doctor. He signed the death certificate and sent off the notices to the registrar and everything.”
“Was there a large funeral?” asked Hercules.
“Dear me, no. They hadn’t any friends at all, you see,” said Mrs. Tidings. “Always kept to themselves. No, just a few words at the tomb. The old parson read the service. He’s gone now. And that’s all there was to it. Boom bang—it was over. Here one day and gone the next.” She plucked at the feather duster, looking solemn.
“But then, I suppose,” said Hercules carefully, “Mrs. Goody mourned for a long time.”
Mrs. Tidings closed her eyes. “Well!” she said. “It’s not my place to make observations about my employer. But since you ask, it didn’t seem to me she was a bit sorry. Not a bit!” She opened her eyes again and looked at him severely.
“Still,” said Hercules, “he was dead, wasn’t he, just the same.”
“Oh, indeed he was,” said Mrs. Tidings. “And is, poor man.”
Just at that moment Willet called from the hall upstairs. “Hercules! Hercules, come up! I…I need you.”
Hercules left Mrs. Tidings with a sigh of relief and hurried up the stairs. “What is it?” he asked. “Did you find something you don’t know how to spell?”
But it wasn’t that at all. Willet stood waiting for him in a doorway at the end of the hall and his face was pink with excitement. “Come here!” he whispered. “I just found something!”
The doorway where Willet was waiting opened into an elaborate bedroom full of carved, curly furniture upholstered in satin and velvet and smothered with embroidered cushions. The carpet was a garden of rich, woven flowers and birds, and the mantelpiece was crowded with china figurines.
“This is my mother’s bedroom,” said Willet in a low voice.
“Dear me!” said Hercules. “We shouldn’t be in here!”
“Sh-h-h!” whispered Willet. “I don’t want Mrs. Tidings to know what we’re doing. I’m not allowed to come in here, but I thought it wouldn’t matter for just a few minutes. There are a lot of good things in here to spell. So I came in and I went and sat down on that footstool over there—”
“That’s a hassock,” said Hercules.
“—on that hassock over there, and I guess I sat too close to the edge because it turned over and I ended up on the floor, and when I went to set it up again I noticed something funny—well, come and see for yourself!”
The hassock lay upside down on the carpet and there was a hole in its wooden bottom, a hole fitted with a little hinged door which now stood open. Hercules peered into the hole. Something winked up at him. He reached inside, fished around, and came up with a dazzling handful of loose jewels. Diamonds, a few emeralds, rubies, and sapphires, and several other stones he didn’t recognize. Some were cut and polished and others were still rough. “What in the world is this?” he gasped, staring at the gleaming little mound in his hand.
“Why, it’s jewels, Hercules!” whispered Willet. “Lots and lots of jewels! Aren’t they beautiful? Where do you suppose she got them?”
“Well, your father was a very rich man, you know,” said Hercules in an awed voice. “They’re beautiful, all right. Why, there’s enough here to…to choke a horse.”
“I wonder why she keeps them in this old footstool,” whispered Willet.
“Hassock,” said Hercules, “and we’d better put them back before someone finds us here.” He dumped the shining pile back into the hole, closed the little door, and turned the hassock upright again. And he was just in time—someone was clumping up the stairs. They hurried to the door, but it was too late to escape. Alfreida was coming down the hall with an armload of folded bedsheets, and she saw them at once.
“Well, well!” she said. “All dried out this morning, Mr. Feltwright? What are you doing in there?”
“We’re playing a spelling game,” said Hercules heartily. “Curtain, Willet. C-U-R-T-A-I-N.”
“I’m glad to see you’re paying some attention to your tutoring,” said Alfreida, “but you’re not supposed to tute in Mrs. Goody’s bedroom. No one’s allowed in Mrs. Goody’s bedroom except to change the sheets. So you’d better go and tute somewhere else.”
“Bugfat,” said Willet. “This is my house and I guess I can go where I want to in it.”
“It isn’t your house,” said Alfreida calmly. “It’s your mother’s house. And your mother says no one’s allowed in her bedroom except to change the sheets.”
“Never mind,” said Hercules. “We were just going out anyway. Come along, Willet—we’ll try some spelling words outside. Lilac, for instance—L-I-L-A-C.”
Alfreida put down her load of sheets on a table in the hall. “If you want a really hard word, dearie,” she grinned, “how about séance? S-E-A-N-C-E.”
Hercules hurried Willet down the stairs without replying, but they could hear Alfreida chuckling as she went about her work.
The sun had dried the iron stag’s smooth hide by now and the grass around its hooves smelled rich and fragrant. Hercules and Willet went there to sit side by side in what had become their own special spot. Hercules glanced at Willet and then rubbed his forehead ruefully. “Webs within webs!” he said. “Now it’s jewels hidden in a hassock! And yet,” he added, “I suppose it isn’t really so strange after all. She wouldn’t just leave them lying about, a fortune like that. They’re probably old family jewels, you know. Handed down from father to son. It’s odd they’ve never been set into bracelets or something, though, isn’t it?” Willet said nothing, so he went on chattily. “It’s very possible your mother has been selling them off—to keep going, you know. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if that’s what she does when she goes to the city. Although I can’t see why she’d want to keep it a secret from you. They’ll all be yours someday, anyway, if there are any left by that time.” Still Willet said nothing. “Of course, they’d last a whole lot longer,” Hercules observed, “if there wasn’t such a big house to keep up and Mrs. Tidings to pay and all, but I suppose if one is used to living grandly, it would be hard to change. Well, it’s a good thing Mott Snave isn’t really anywhere about! He’d love to sneak off with a treasure like that.”
And still Willet was silent, pulling at the grass between his knees.
“All right,” said Hercules, “I know what you’re thinking, but it isn’t like that at all.”
Willet looked at him reproachfully. “You went to see Alfreida last night, didn’t you? And you didn’t tell m
e.”
Hercules sighed. “I didn’t want to say anything about it yet. I don’t know quite what to make of it all.”
“Did you ask her if she knew anything about my father?” Willet demanded.
“Well, you see, I went to see Alfresco, really, but he acted a little queer. He didn’t seem to want to talk. And then Alfreida—Alfreida suggested a séance.”
“A séance? Why?”
“That’s the part I didn’t want to tell you about until I’d had time to think it over,” said Hercules. “I would have told you sooner or later—it’s just that at the moment I’m not sure what there is to tell.”
Willet looked accusing. “It’s my father after all, Hercules. Tell me what happened.”
“Well, all right. But it won’t be much help. You see, Alfreida thought that she could call your father back and I could talk to him.” Willet frowned, but sat silent. “There was a voice,” Hercules continued. “I don’t know whether it was real or not. It said that your father hadn’t—that is, that he isn’t dead.”
Color rushed into Willet’s cheeks. “But that’s what I’ve been saying all along!” he cried. “I told you, Hercules!”
“I know, Willet. But a séance—it doesn’t prove anything, really.”
“What you mean is, you didn’t believe the voice.”
“Well—I did for a while, but now I’m not so sure. Alfreida may have made the whole thing up, just to fool me.”
“But why would she want to do that?”
Hercules frowned. “I don’t know. I can’t think why. The thing is, Willet, I have to be sure. I hope you’re right about your father. I want you to be right. But the clank in the coffin and all, and the séance—that’s just not enough to send you and me wandering off in all directions looking for a man who may not want to be found, even if he is alive.”
“Well then,” said Willet helplessly, “what are you going to do?”
“I don’t know yet,” said Hercules.
But he did. Without ever being conscious of it, he had in fact made up his mind. He looked across the lawn at the hedge behind the garden. He couldn’t see the tomb through the thick leaves, but the slender upper branches of the poplars that surrounded it beckoned to him over the top of the hedge, and he knew what he had to do.
Chapter 10
Hercules Feltwright took out his nose putty and squeezed it. Outside, the moon blinked through drifting shreds of cloud, and the lilac bush scratched against his window as a stiff night breeze circled the beautiful house. Hercules pressed the putty over his nose and was annoyed to see that his hands were shaking a little. “After all, though,” he thought defensively, “it isn’t exactly what I expected in the line of tutoring duty.” The nose was in place at last, as much like the first one as he could manage, and he went to the wardrobe and swung open its double doors. “Acting was simpler,” he observed to himself as he took out the vest and cloak and put them on. “It’s much easier to talk about doing things than it is to really do them. Why, I’ve been through all kinds of horrors on stage, without a quiver. For instance, that terrible murder, all pretend, of course, and then I come out and I say:
“Friends, Romans, countrymen, send me your fears.
I come to harry Caesar, not to raise him.
The evils that ensue…”
He stopped suddenly, remembering the voice in Alfreida’s parlor. “Or something like that,” he ended lamely, listening over his shoulder as if he half expected the waspish voice to come out of nowhere and correct him again. But nothing happened. Reassured, he wrapped the long red scarf around his neck and chin, and put on the flat black hat. “There!” he said to his muffled reflection in the mirror. “If someone catches you at this dreadful business, they won’t know it’s you. I hope.”
And still he lingered at the mirror, adjusting and readjusting the scarf, and patting at the putty nose until at last, from the next room, he heard Willet turn over and sigh in his sleep. “Willet!” he thought. “I’m doing it for Willet. To settle this question once and for all.” And so he straightened his shoulders, picked up matches and a candle, and in the soundless, prowling step he imagined for the thief Mott Snave, he glided out of the room and down the stairs.
Outside, on the dim and shadowy lawn, the breeze wrapped the cloak tight around his knees and then flung it out behind him, and the ends of the scarf danced. He stood there, his knees glued with reluctance, and then an idea occurred to him. “Perhaps the entrance will be sealed shut. Yes, of course it will be. Why didn’t I think of that long ago? Well, I guess there’s really no point in…” But just as he was about to turn back to the house, he thought again of Willet and was ashamed of himself. “Forward!” he commanded desperately, and marched himself across the grass toward the hedge.
In the garden, the tulips nodded stiffly. They looked gray and black and rather dead in the gloom. Hercules stepped around them with care and confronted the hedge. Now, where was that spot where you could squeeze through without scratching yourself to bits? Oh yes, here it was, over here. And he forced his way through the probing branches and stood at last, cloak and scarf and tip of nose askew, on the other side.
The poplars which had beckoned to him earlier whispered now—ahh-h-h!—and bowed their heads, and the moon chose that moment to slip free of a claw of clouds. In the sudden glow, the small square building, the tomb of Midas Goody, loomed before him and it was like the last grim stepping-stone of life.
Everything that had ever happened to Hercules Feltwright before this instant receded from his memory as he stood there looking at the tomb. Every love, every joy, and every happy purpose drained away. He felt weightless and brittle, like the paper shell of some long-dead insect, and the hand that reached out to the door seemed to belong to somebody else. But the wood pressing back at his fingers was real enough. It was cool and rough to the touch, and when he pushed against it, it moved with alarming ease, swung inward, and hung open over what appeared to be a chasm of darkness. Then in the moonlight he was able to make out the beginning of a flight of stone steps. “This is it,” he croaked to himself. “Here it is, the descent into Hell, and I’m going down. I, Hercules Feltwright, am going down.”
Inside, on the top step out of the wind, he paused and with trembling fingers lit the candle he had brought along. The sudden light was blinding at first. He held it up and stood under it, sheltered from the dark as, the night before, he had stood under the umbrella. Then he realized that he was moving forward. “I really am going down!” he said in horrified surprise.
Afterward he realized that there were only a few steps, six or seven, but now it seemed as if the tomb were bottomless, as if he were going deeper and deeper into the very center of the earth, ten feet, ten miles deep with every step. The light of the candle, which had been so brilliant at the top, now seemed to shrink pitifully to no more than a glow he could hold in one hand, the feeble pinpoint of a lightning bug. And then, after an hour, after a year, he was at the bottom of the steps, and before him, on a slab of stone, lay the coffin of Midas Goody.
Hercules Feltwright stood absolutely still, gazing at the coffin, aware by degrees of the coldness of the air, the flat, clammy coldness that had been five years hanging there without a breath to stir it. The candle flickered and he realized that he was staring so hugely that his lids ached. He wondered then if his eyes might not fall out, and shut them hastily. When he opened them again, the coffin was still there. “It’s waiting,” he told himself, “waiting for me.”
From somewhere deep in his horrified brain a reasonable question formed: “Why you? It’s nothing to do with you, not really. Take off that silly nose and run. Run!” But he didn’t run. Instead, he summoned every ounce of courage from every corner of himself—from his knees, his thumbs, the soles of his feet—and he said aloud, “Bugfat!” It seemed to help. Moving stiffly, he bent over and stood the candle against the moist stones of the wall, where it hissed a little, sending black streaks of soot up the wall like ink spi
lled upside down; and after observing this interesting phenomenon for a moment, he straightened and looked again at the coffin. With the candle on the floor now, the shadows had shifted. His own hung swollen down the far wall of the little room, and the coffin, lit from below, seemed twice as large. He walked slowly up to it, as you walk toward the edge of a cliff, and laid his hands on the lid. “Now!” he said to himself. But his muscles paid no attention. “Now!” he said again, more firmly. “I’m standing at the very Gates of Hell—and I’m going to open—NOW!”
With a great wrench, and a cracking of the old wax seals, he heaved, and the lid of the coffin flew open. And Hercules Feltwright stood staring, not at the rotted wrappings and indignant bones of Midas Goody, but at the stiff silver grins of three dogs’ heads, the three-headed, tarnished gleam of the silver statue of Cerberus.
If you cracked open your morning egg and found a book of poetry inside, if you lifted the top from a candy box and found instead of candy a bowl of water complete with goldfish, you would know, somewhat, how Hercules Feltwright felt in the tomb of Midas Goody. The first crazy thought that came into his head was that his mother had been there before him and had hidden the Cerberus statue, knowing he would come down and find it. He looked around the gloomy cubicle angrily, fully expecting her to step out of a corner and congratulate him. But no one was there. And then he thought, “It’s impossible. I’m dreaming the whole thing.” But the statue was real. And unless there were somehow two of them, which seemed very unlikely, it was Mott Snave’s Cerberus, the bishop’s Cerberus, exactly as it had always been described to him. He leaned heavily against the coffin, rubbing his eyes, and as he leaned, the coffin moved sidewise slightly and the statue, which stood a little unsteadily on its four silver legs, went clank.
Clank. “It went clank!” cried Hercules. “It did! It did!” And all at once, in a great rush, his blood seemed to leap again in his veins. His hands, so cold before, went hot, and his toes tingled. He seized the candle joyfully and, without bothering to replace the lid of the coffin, ran up the stone steps and out into the fresh dark night. The breeze snatched at him and the candle was puffed out, but Hercules Feltwright didn’t care. He was full of a wild exultation. “I’ll wake up Willet right away,” he promised himself breathlessly. “I’ll wake him and tell him he was right. Oops, the door—I almost forgot the door!” He hurried back and pulled it shut, found that he had shut it on the end of his scarf, opened it again, freed the scarf, and then again he shut it. He was through the hedge in a burst and standing on the lawn of the beautiful house, pausing to catch his breath, before it struck him: “But—good grief! That really was Mott Snave’s statue of Cerberus in Midas Goody’s coffin! How in the name of heaven did it get there?” And then, as if a switch had been thrown, his blood froze again on the instant. For there, not three yards away from him, and staring out at him from under the brim of another flat black hat, stood another shadowy figure wrapped in cloak and obscuring scarf, another figure so exactly like his own that for a moment he thought he was staring into a mirror. The other figure paused for an instant, and he thought he heard it whisper, “Ye gods!” And then, in a swirl of wind-tossed cloak, it turned and melted away into the darkness.