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Lost Treasure
by
The last Friday of the quarter Hugh divided his money in lots, and it was that he had eleven pounds over his debts. “Eleven soferens now,” he cried to his wife. “That’s grand! Makes twenty-one the first six months of the wedded life.”
“It reflects great credit on you,” said Millie, concealing her unhappiness.
“Another eighty and I’d have an agency. Start a factory, p’raps. There’s John Daniel. He purchases an house. Ten hands he has working gents’ shirts for him.”
Millie turned away her face and demanded from God strength with which to acquaint her husband of her misfortune. What she asked for was granted unto her at her husband’s amorous moment of the Sabbath morning.
Hugh’s passion deadened, and in his agony he sweated.
“They’re gone! Every soferen,” he cried. “They can’t all have gone. The whole ten.” He opened his eyes widely. “Woe is me. Dear me. Dear me.”
Until day dimmed and night grayed did they two search, neither of them eating and neither of them discovering the treasure.
Therefore Hugh had not peace nor quietness. Grief he uttered with his tongue, arms, and feet, and it was in the crease of his garments. He sought sympathy and instruction from those with whom he traded. “All the steam is gone out of me,” he wailed. One shopkeeper advised him: “Has it slipped under the lino?” Another said: “Any mice in the house? Money has been found in their holes.” The third said: “Sure the wife hasn’t spent it on dress. You know what ladies are.” These hints and more Hugh wrote down on paper, and he mused in this wise: “An old liar is the wench. For why I wedded the English? Right was mam fach; senseless they are. Crying she has lost the yellow gold, the bitch. What blockhead lost one penny? What is in the stomach of my purse this one minute? Three shillings–soferen–five pennies–half a penny–ticket railway. Hie backwards will I on Thursday on the surprise. No comfort is mine before I peep once again.”
He pried in every drawer and cupboard, and in the night he arose and inquired into the clothes his wife had left off; and he pushed his fingers into the holes of mice and under the floor coverings, and groped in the fireplaces; and he put subtle questions to Millie.
“If you’d done like this in a shop you’d be sacked without a ref,” he said when his search was over. “We must have him back. It’s a sin to let him go. Reduce expenses at once.”
Millie disrobed herself by the light of a street lamp, and she ate little of such foods as are cheapest, whereat her white cheeks sunk and there was no more luster in her brown hair; and her larder was as though there was a famine in the country. If she said to Hugh: “Your boots are leaking,” she was told: “Had I the soferens I would get a pair”; or if she said: “We haven’t a towel in the place,” the reply was: “Find the soferens and buy one or two.”
The more Hugh sorrowed and scrimped, the more he gained; and word of his fellows’ hardships struck his broad, loose ears with a pleasant tinkle. While on his journeys he stayed at common lodging-houses, and he did not give back to his employers any of the money which was allowed him to stay at hotels. Some folk despised him, some mocked him, and many nicknamed him “the ten-pound traveler.” To the shopkeeper who hesitated to deal with him he whined his loss, making it greater than it was, and expressing: “The interest alone is very big.”
By such methods he came to possess one hundred and twenty pounds in two years. His employers had knowledge of his deeds, and they summoned him to them and said to him that because of the drab shabbiness of his clothes and his dishonest acts they had appointed another in his stead.