“Now a credulous man,” said Ralph Cranfield carelessly to himself, “might suppose that the treasure which I have sought round the world lies buried, after all, at the very door of my mother’s dwelling. That would be a jest indeed!”
More he thought not about the matter; for now the door was opened, and an elderly woman appeared on the threshold, peering into the dusk to discover who it might be that had intruded on her premises, and was standing in the shadow of her tree. It was Ralph Cranfield’s mother. Pass we over their greeting, and leave the one to her joy and the other to his rest,—if quiet rest be found.
But when morning broke, he arose with a troubled brow; for his sleep and his wakefullness had alike been full of dreams. All the fervor was rekindled with which he had burned of yore to unravel the threefold mystery of his fate. The crowd of his early visions seemed to have awaited him beneath his mother’s roof, and thronged riotously around to welcome his return. In the well-remembered chamber, on the pillow where his infancy had slumbered, he had passed a wilder flight than ever in an Arab tent, or when he had reposed his head in the ghastly shades of a haunted forest. A shadowy maid had stolen to his bedside, and laid her finger on the scintillating heart: a hand of flame had glowed amid the darkness, pointing downward to a mystery within the earth; a hoary sage had waved his prophetic wand, and beckoned the dreamer onward to a chair of state. The same phantoms, though fainter in the daylight, still flitted about the cottage, and mingled among the crowd of familiar faces that were drawn thither by the news of Ralph Cranfield’s return, to bid him welcome for his mother’s
