Читать книгу The Adventure of the Seven Keyholes - Augusta Huiell Seaman - Страница 4

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When Barbara finally reached Pine Point, she stood and gazed up at the old house for a long time, trying to decide where it was best to begin her search. The Fairfax mansion—it had been a mansion long ago, when Grandpa Fairfax was a boy—was a rambling, quaintly shaped house with a long, sloping roof at the back, and a high-pillared veranda in front. It reminded Barbara of the pictures she had sometimes seen of old Southern plantation houses. In fact, Grandpa Fairfax had once told her that it was originally built by an ancestor of his who for his health’s sake had come to Pine Point from Georgia, shortly after the Revolutionary War.

As a rule, when her grandfather was alive Barbara had entered the house by way of the back door, which led straight into the little kitchen. For Grandpa Fairfax had made no pretense of occupying the entire house. He had his quarters that were comfortable enough, in the kitchen and a little back bedroom, and the rest of the house he used chiefly to ramble about in, rummaging occasionally through the dusty drawers and chests, or peering into musty old books and talking about their contents to Barbara.

But somehow, this time, with the mysterious brass key in her hand, Barbara felt that an entrance through the back kitchen was not quite proper. She must go into the house as if she had not been used to prowling around it all her life, enter correctly and in a dignified manner by the front door on the broad, broken-down veranda, and try to imagine she was going in for the first time as a strange visitor might. But first she sat down on the veranda steps and tried to think where all those seven keyholes might be. And how was she to know which was the first and which the seventh and which all the rest? Of course there was a keyhole in the front door,—there always had been, naturally,—but as far back as she could remember it had never been used. Grandpa Fairfax had always said there was nothing in the house worth stealing, so why bother to lock it up? She supposed that there were locks on the doors inside, too, but neither had these ever been in use. Besides, the locks on all those doors would take much, much bigger keys than the one Grandpa had left her. Well, anyhow, she decided, she would begin at the front door. So she scrambled up, brandishing the key, and crossed the veranda.

But there was just one lock on the front door and, as Barbara had surmised, only a very large key would fit it. She found that the door was not locked, anyway, and perfectly easy to open, as it had always been. She pushed it wide and entered, shivering a little at the musty chill of the house. Nothing had been changed since she was last in it, some time before her grandfather’s death. She left the front door standing open and hurried about, raising all the windows to let in the warm, sweet, pine-scented air from outside. This done, she began to feel more natural, and strolled about the wide central hall, wondering where it was best to begin her search.

“One thing is certain,” she said aloud. She often talked aloud to herself when she was quite alone. It seemed more companionable, somehow. “I’ll have to look where it is likely that locks would be . . . on doors of rooms and closets and cupboards, or on bureau drawers and desks . . . anything that can be locked or unlocked . . . for that’s the only way I’ll find a use for this funny little key. So here goes!”

Barbara had just made a dive toward the tall door of a big closet in the corner of the hall when she was startled by a loud whoop from the river. And peering out at the open front door, she beheld the Carroll twins in their bathing-suits, each brandishing a crab-net, shouting and calling her name. They had undoubtedly come prowling along the river bank from the next cove where her aunt’s boarding-house stood. They must have seen her as she rested on the veranda and of course they knew that she was now inside the house.

“Oh, dear!” she sighed. “I’ll have an awful time trying to shoo them away from here! And I simply won’t have them prying into my secret. They’re good fun . . . both of them . . . But I want to keep this thing to myself.

“I can’t come down just now; I’m busy!” she called down to them, and hoped that they would take the hint and go away. But evidently she was not to be rid of them so easily. They came streaming up the bank toward the house, demanding indignantly why she had gone off and hidden herself this way and why she wouldn’t play with them, and was she “mad at” anything? The Carroll twins were comical-looking youngsters, both with bushy bobbed hair as light as tow, twinkling little blue eyes, and a sprinkling of freckles that peppered their faces and arms. So much alike were they that they could easily have changed clothes and Kit passed for Kat and no one been the wiser.

“Say, you ain’t mad, are you?” demanded Kat, imploringly. “What do you want to come off here by yourself for, anyhow? This is an old deserted place, ain’t it?”

“This was my grandfather’s house,” announced Barbara, with much injured dignity. Then she remembered that the twins had never seen or known of Grandpa Fairfax, as they were recent summer arrivals at Mrs. Bentley’s boarding-house. “I’ve got some work to do here,” she went on, more amiably, “and I can’t come out to play till I’ve finished it.”

“Oh, let us help you!” implored Kit, delightedly. “I’m great on house-cleanin’—when Ma wants me to help. It’ll be sport and you’ll get done quicker.”

“No, thank you,” responded Barbara, stiffly. “I’m not house-cleaning and I must do this thing alone. I’ll come down and swim when I get through. Please go now.”

Decidedly miffed, the twins reluctantly took their departure, casting many a grim backward look at Barbara as she stood at the front door, watching them make their way down to the bank of the river. Not till they had paddled disconsolately out of sight around a bend did Barbara turn back into the house.

“I’m afraid I’m going to have trouble with them,” she thought aloud. “They are full up with curiosity this very minute, and goodness knows where they’ll stop if they once get going.” With this disquieting reflection, she resumed her search, but in the fascination of hunting the whereabouts of the first keyhole she quickly forgot her misgivings.

It was not in the big old closet door in the hall. The key did not fit that lock, nor did it fit the one to the cellar door, at the other end of the hall. Nor did it fit the door to a great parlor or living-room on one side of the hall, nor the door to what had once been a dining-room, on the other. Barbara decided to investigate the living-room first and stood in the middle of the floor uncertainly gazing about her and trying to plan where to begin.

The room was in great disorder—had always been, as far back as she could remember. Her grandfather had used it as a sort of workshop where he had done much casual tinkering, at an old carpenter’s work-bench he had built, himself, and placed in the center. Barbara remembered that he was very fond, too, of puttering about with rusty keys and locks, fitting and oiling and experimenting with them for endless hours at a time. Locks were apparently his hobby, and he had once told her about King Louis XVI of France and how he loved to work with locks and keys, till the people of his kingdom had scornfully dubbed him “Louis the Locksmith.” Her grandfather had said he could sympathize with the poor monarch who wanted so much to have something to play with and think about besides tiresome affairs of state.

Remembering all this now, Barbara approached the work-bench, thinking a little sorrowfully of the kindly old man who had so often sat there and whom she would never see again. The bench was a big, home-made affair like a long, low table, and on it still lay the tools, rusty now, that he had so often used. While she stood gazing at it, thinking more about her grandfather than of her present quest, her eye was suddenly caught by the drawer in it, at one side of the bench where he had always sat when at work. She remembered that the drawer had contained many different sizes of nails, as well as various small tools. If it had ever had a lock, she did not remember it.

But as she bent to examine it now, it exhibited very evident signs of a diamond-shaped lock, and, what was more startling, there was pasted beside the lock a tiny scrap of paper on which was an unmistakable figure 1.

“Oh, I’ve found it! I’ve found it!” cried Barbara, dancing up and down and flourishing the key about her head. “I’ve found the very first one. Hurrah!”

“Oh, you have, have you?” answered a mocking voice. And whirling about, startled almost out of her wits, Barbara beheld the Carroll twins hanging over the sill of an open window, grinning at her maliciously.