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Updated: May 24, 2025
The pewter and copper cooking utensils on and about the huge earthenware stove were resplendently bright, and the carved oak dower-chest with open lid displayed a dazzling wealth of snow-white linen hand-woven and hand-embroidered towels, sheets, pillow-cases, all lying in beautiful bundles, neatly tied with red ribbons and bows. Again Elsa sighed in that quaint, wistful little way of hers.
"In the dower-chest, mother?" suggested Elsa, who knew of old that that article of furniture was the receptacle for everything that hadn't a proper place. "Yes. Look at the bottom," said Irma placidly, "it might be there." It was getting dark now. Through the open door and the tiny hermetically closed windows the grey twilight peeped in shyly.
The linen press was of old oak, almost as old as the house. And opposite it stood a finely-carved dower-chest with the date 1511 carved upon it. The landing-floor, like the stairs, was of polished oak, and the wainscoted walls had one or two old pictures on them. Rose looked round her, feeling as she had never felt before the beauty of her home. How fresh it was, and roomy!
The interior of Kapus Benkó's home was as squalid, as forlorn looking as its approach; everywhere the hand of the thriftless housewife was painfully apparent, in the blackened crockery upon the hearth, in the dull, grimy look of the furniture once so highly polished in the tattered table-cloth, the stains upon the floor and the walls, but above all was it apparent in the dower-chest that inalienable pride of every thrifty Hungarian housewife the dower-chest, which in Ilona's cottage was such a marvel of polish outside, and so glittering in its rich contents of exquisite linen.
"When I was in Italy I was told of a bride who hid herself in an old dower-chest, on her wedding-day and the lid clapped to with a spring and kept her there for half a century." "There's no spring that ever locksmith wrought that will keep down Papillon," cried De Malfort, sounding a light accompaniment to his words on the guitar strings, with delicatest touch, like fairy music.
"Monsieur Max would have you to know, mademoiselle, that he possesses an altogether unusual and superior set of Oriental china, which he bought from a certain villanous Jew at the corner of the rue André de Sarte; that for safety he has locked that china into the artistic and musty dower-chest standing against the wall; and that for greater safety he has forgotten the key in an antique hotel near the Gare du Nord!"
And the bunda was thrust away into the dower-chest with the husks of maize and the cabbage-stalks, and it had never been taken out until to-night the eve of Elsa's wedding-day. She tore open the envelope now with fingers that trembled slightly. The light was very dim, and where the glorious sunset had been such a little while ago there was only the dull grey canopy of an overcast sky.
The courtyard beyond was empty and so, save for a dead horse, were the stables to the right. Passing up the steps of the hall that also stood open, they entered. Here the place was in confusion, as though those who dwelt there had left in haste. The mouldering remains of a meal lay on the broad oak table; a great dower-chest inlaid with ivory, but half filled with arms and armour, stood wide.
The more distant corner of the little living-room, that which embraced the hearth and the dower-chest, was already wrapped in gloom. Elsa bent over the worm-eaten piece of furniture: her hands plunged in the midst of maize-husks and dirty linen of cabbage-stalks and sunflower-seeds, till presently they encountered something soft and woolly. "Here is the bunda, mother," she said.
"I think father must be a witch," Henriette said at dinner next day, "or why did he tell me of the Italian lady who was shut in the dower-chest, just before Angela and I were lost in" she checked herself at a look from his lordship "in the chimney?" "It wants no witch to tell that little girls are foolish and mischievous," answered Fareham.
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