The Keys of the Chest by Jane Barlow

Name: The Keys of the Chest
Author: Jane Barlow

"The Keys of the Chest" centers on Eileen Fitzmaurice, a lonely, imaginative girl growing up at Glendoula House in Ireland after her family's fortunes collapse following her father Sir Gerald's suicide (prompted by the accidental drowning of his infant son and heir) and her mother's subsequent invalid seclusion. Isolated with her ailing mother, her detached Aunt Geraldine, and the elderly butler Timothy Gabbett, Eileen grows up starved of companionship and fed only wistful tales of the family's vanished splendor—Timothy's nostalgic accounts of the silver plate once displayed at the ancestral Drumlough Castle, all long since sold off, though he cannot bring himself to admit this to the child, instead telling her the treasure is "stored up safe" and destined to be hers when she comes of age. Eileen fixes on a huge, symmetrical limestone boulder on the ridge above the house—a glacial erratic nicknamed for its coffer-like shape and the crack resembling a lid—as the secret repository of this imagined fortune. Her fantasy is reinforced by a lurid children's story, "The Glittering Hoard in the Coffer of Stone," and by a housemaid's offhand remark about the stone's size. She wears down a footpath with her regular pilgrimages to the rock, elaborating an entire private mythology of the treasure locked within, complete with a tiny keyhole she is convinced awaits a matching key. Her cousin Pierce Wilmot, visiting as a boy, humors her belief and even promises to have a key made for her one day, later sending her a small ornamental key as a token gift, which she treasures for years and wears as a brooch. Nine uneventful years pass. Then the Great Famine descends on the district: the potato crop blackens and rots, and Eileen watches neighboring families sicken and starve while she has almost nothing to give them, her aunt and Timothy resisting charity from the household's meager stores. Desperate, Eileen even sells a keepsake bracelet for bread. Her longing to unlock the "chest" and sell its imagined silver to relieve the starving becomes an obsession, sharpened by her powerlessness and by her legal inability to claim any inheritance before age twenty-one. Pierce returns to the district, now a grown civil engineer overseeing famine-relief road works being built through the nearby valley of Letterglas and the mountain pass called the Nick of Time. He and Eileen, now young adults, fall in love, though Pierce is initially thrown into anxious self-doubt about his feelings. Eileen finally confides her long-held plan: she wants Pierce to help her open the great stone chest and sell its contents to feed the starving. Pierce, horrified to realize his beloved cousin has nursed since infancy a fantastical delusion eerily reminiscent of the erratic behavior that doomed her father and other unstable relatives in the family line, reacts with sharp, uncharacteristic harshness, fearing for her sanity. Seeing her wounded composure, he immediately softens, comforts her, and declares his love, and the two become informally engaged. But privately he confers with Aunt Geraldine about Eileen's "queer fancy," and resolves to cure her of it by destroying the boulder itself with blasting powder as part of the road works already scheduled to pass that way—reasoning that seeing the illusion shattered will free her from it, much as another sufferer was cured of a delusion by having its supposed talisman destroyed. The next morning is thick with a dense, drifting fog blanketing the valley. Pierce's road crew proceeds with the planned blasting of the boulder at the Nick of Time, working by feel in the mist. Unbeknownst to Pierce, Eileen, unable to sleep and drawn out by the beauty of the fog, wanders up her old familiar path toward the stone that morning, happily reconciled to her engagement and no longer even troubled by the failure of her treasure scheme, since she has now transferred her hopes and cares entirely to Pierce. Young Larry M'Farlane, who overheard talk of the blasting plan, races desperately to warn her off the hill but arrives too late, having missed her in the fog. The charge is fired; a flying fragment of the shattered boulder strikes Eileen fatally in the temple, killing her almost instantly, seemingly before she even fully registers what has happened, the gathered weeds still in her hand. The story closes in the aftermath of the explosion, as fog lifts to reveal brilliant sunshine over the valley, underscoring the story's bitter irony: the "treasure chest" that had sustained Eileen's most cherished private hope through years of loneliness and grief proves literally lethal the moment Pierce tries to demolish the illusion for her own good, just as he had begun to imagine a future together. Word also arrives that a local famine victim, Mick O'Neil, has died by the roadside the same morning, juxtaposing personal tragedy with the wider devastation of the famine surrounding the household. Pierce is left bewildered and shattered, having unwittingly destroyed both the childhood fantasy and the person he loved while attempting to rescue her from delusion, the promised "key" to her inheritance rendered forever moot by the very stone he blew apart to free her from it.

By Jane Barlow · First published 1897 · Genre: Literary Fiction, Tragedy, Psychological Fiction · 22,215 words

First lines

The little valley of Letterglas is a very green and very lonesome place almost always, for snow seldom lies on it, and the few people who come into it depart again even sooner and as tracelessly, so that its much grass spreads from month to month uncovered and untrodden. It runs westward-that is, towards the ocean-but never reaches the shore, because a great grassy curtain intervenes, curved round the end of it, and prolonged in the lower hill-ranges that bound it to north and south. They are just swarded embankments of most simple construction, with scarcely a fold to complicate the sweep of their smooth green slopes, and the outline of their ridge against the sky undulates as softly as young corn in a drowsy breeze. Only at one point-about midway on the right hand looking westward-it is suddenly broken by a sharp dip down and up again, making a gap like an inverted Gothic arch. And this is called by everybody _the Nick of Time_. I once asked the reason of a gossoon who was guiding me over the opposite hills, but he replied: "Sure, what else would they be callin' it? " Nor have I ever yet lighted upon a more satisfactory explanation.

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The Keys of the Chest is listed on Textopian as a short story by Jane Barlow, dated 1897 CE.

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Work type: Short story
Author: Jane Barlow
Date: 1897 CE
Language: English
Genres: Literary Fiction, Tragedy, Psychological Fiction, Gothic Fiction, Irish Literature
Length: 22,215 words
Structure: 1 section, 160 paragraphs
Reading fit: Standard (8th-9th Grade)

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Genres

Literary Fiction — Sophisticated prose style with ornate Victorian-era language, complex sentence structures, vivid metaphorical descriptions, and artistic treatment of themes prioritize literary artistry and psychological depth over plot mechanics.
Tragedy — Structured as classical tragedy with tragic protagonist, escalating complications, catastrophic reversal of fortune, and death resulting from well-intentioned but misguided intervention; Pierce's act of love destroys the object of his affection.
Psychological Fiction — Extensive exploration of Eileen's interior mental life, her sustained delusion about the stone chest, psychological development over years, and the family's concern about inherited mental instability drive the narrative.
Gothic Fiction — Dark atmosphere, psychological disturbance and possible madness, foreshadowing of doom, ominous tone, isolated rural setting, and tragic irony characteristic of Gothic traditions pervade the work.