The Little Fig-tree Stories by Mary Hallock Foote - HTML preview

THE SPARE BEDROOM AT GRANDFATHER’S

It was the hour for fireside talks in the cañon: too early, as dusk falls on a short December day, for lamps to be lighted; too late to snatch a page or two more of the last magazine, by the low gleam that peered in the western windows.

Jack had done his part in the evening’s wood-carrying, and now was enjoying the fruits of honest toil, watching the gay red flames that becked and bowed up the lava-rock chimney. The low-ceiled room, with its rows of books, its guns and pipes and idols in Zuñi pottery, darkled in corners and glowed in spots, and the faces round the hearth were lighted as by footlights, in their various attitudes of thoughtfulness.

“Now, what is that?” cried Jack’s mamma, putting down the fan screen she held, and turning her head to listen.

It was only the wind booming over the housetop, but it had found a new plaything; it was strumming with a free hand and mighty on the long, taut wires that guyed the wash-shed stovepipe. The wash-shed was a post-script in boards and shingles hastily added to the main dwelling after the latter’s completion. It had no chimney, only four feet of pipe projecting from the roof, an item which would have added to the insurance had there been any insurance. The risk of fire was taken along with the other risks, but the family was vigilant.

Mrs. Gilmour listened till she sighed again. The wind, she said, reminded her of a sound she had not thought of for years,—the whirring of swallows’ wings in the spare bedroom chimney at home.

“Swallows in the chimney?” cried Jack, suddenly attentive. “How could they build fires then, without roasting the birds?”

“The chimneys were three stories high, and the swallows built near the top, I suppose. They had the sky and the stars for a ceiling to their dark little bedrooms. In spring there was never more than a blaze of sticks on the hearth—not that, unless we had visitors to stay. Sometimes a young swallow trying to fly fell out of the nest and fluttered across the hearth into the room. That was very exciting to us children. But at house-cleaning time a great bag of straw was stuffed up the chimney’s throat to save the hearth from falling soot and dried mud and the litter from the nests. It was a brick hearth painted red, and washed always with milk to make it shine. The andirons were such as you will see in the garret of any good old house in the East,—fluted brass columns with brass cones on top.

“It was in summer, when the bird colony was liveliest, that we used to hear the beating of wings in the chimney,—a smothered sound like the throbbing of a steamer’s wheels far off in a fog, or behind a neck of land.”

Jack asked more questions; the men seemed not inclined to talk, and the mother fell to remembering aloud, speaking sometimes to Jack, but often to the others. All the simple features of her old Eastern home had gained a priceless value, as things of a past gone out of her life which she had scarcely prized at the time. She was half jealous of her children’s attachment to the West, and longed to make them know the place of the family’s nativity, through such pictures of it as her memory could supply.

But her words meant more to herself than to any that listened.

“Did we ever sleep in that bedroom with the chimney-swallows?” asked Jack. He was thinking, What a mistake to stop up the chimney and cut off communication with such jolly neighbors as the swallows!

Yes, his mother said; he had slept there, but before he could remember. It was the winter he was three years old, when his father was in Deadwood.

There used to be such beautiful frost-pictures on the eastern window panes; and when the sun rose and the fire was lighted and the pictures faded, a group of little bronze-black cedars appeared, half a mile away, topping the ridge by the river, and beyond them were the solemn blue hills. Those hills and the cedars were as much a part of a winter’s sunrise on the Hudson as the sun himself.

Jack used to lie in bed and listen for the train, a signal his mother did not care to hear, for it meant she must get up and set a match to the fire, laid overnight in the big-bellied, air-tight stove that panted and roared on its four short legs, shuddering in a transport of sudden heat.

When the air of the room grew milder, Jack would hop out in his wrapper and slippers, and run to the north window to see what new shapes the fountain had taken in the night.

The jet of water in winter was turned low, and the spray of it froze and piled above the urn, changing as the wind veered and as the sun wasted it. On some mornings it looked like a weeping white lady in a crystal veil; sometimes a Niobe group, children clinging to a white, sad mother, who clasped them and bowed her head. When the sun peeped through the fir-trees, it touched the fountain statuary with sea tints of emerald and pearl.

Had Jack been old enough to know the story of Undine, he might have fancied that he saw her, on those winter mornings, and I am sure he would have wanted to fetch her in and warm her and dry her icy tears.

The spare-room mantelpiece was high. Jack could see only the tops of things upon it, even by walking far back into the room; but of a morning, mounted on the pillows of the great four-poster, he could explore the mantel’s treasures, which never varied nor changed places. There was the whole length and pattern of the tall silver-plated candlesticks and the snuffers in their tray; the Indian box of birch-bark overlaid with porcupine quills, which held concealed riches of shells and coral and dark sea beans; there was the centre vase of Derbyshire spar, two dolphins wreathing their tails to support a bacchante’s bowl crowned with grape leaves. In winter this vase held an arrangement of dried immortelles, yellow and pink and crimson, and some that verged upon magenta and should have been cast out as an offense to the whole; but grandmother had for flowers a charity that embraced every sin of color they were capable of. When her daughters grew up and put on airs of superior taste, they protested against these stiff mementos; but she was mildly inflexible; she continued to gather and to dry her “everlastings,” with faithful recognition of their prickly virtues. She was not one to slight old friends for a trifling mistake in color, though Art should put forth her edict and call them naught.

In the northeast corner of the room stood a great invalid chair, dressed, like a woman, in white dimity that came down to the floor all round. The plump feather cushion had an apron, as little Jack called it, which fell in neat gathers in front. The high stuffed sides projected, forming comfortable corners where a languid head might rest.

Here the pale young mothers of the family “sat up” for the first time to have their hair braided, or to receive the visits of friends; here, in last illnesses, a wan face sinking back showed the truth of the doctor’s verdict.

White dimity, alternating with a dark-red reps in winter, covered the seats of the fiddle-backed mahogany chairs. White marseilles or dimity covers were on the washstand, and the tall bureau had a swinging glass that rocked back against the wall and showed little Jack a picture of himself walking into a steep background of the room—a small chap in kilts, with a face somewhat out of drawing and of a bluish color; the floor, too, had a queer slant like the deck of a rolling vessel. But with all its faults, this presentation of himself in the glass was an appearance much sought after by Jack, even to the climbing on chairs to attain it.

When grandmother came to her home as a bride, the four-poster was in full panoply of high puffed feather-bed, valance and canopy and curtains of white dimity, “English” blankets, quilted silk comforter, and counterpane of heavy marseilles, in a bygone pattern. No pillow shams were seen in the house; its fashions never changed. The best pillow-cases were plain linen, hemstitched,—smooth as satin with much use, as Jack’s mother remembered them,—and the slender initials, in an old-fashioned hand, above the hem, had faded sympathetically to a pale yellow-brown.

Some of the house linen had come down from great-grandmother’s trousseau. It bore her maiden initials, E. B., in letters that were like the marking on old silver of that time; the gracious old Quaker names, sacred to the memory of gentle women and good housewives whose virtues would read like the last chapter of Proverbs, the words of King Lemuel, the prophecy which his mother taught him.

It was only after the daughters of the house grew up and were married and came home on visits with their children, that the spare bedroom fell into common use, and new fashions intruded as the old things wore out.

When Jack’s mother was a child, it still kept its solemn and festal character of birth and marriage and death chamber; and in times less vital it was set apart for such guests as the family delighted to honor. Little girls were not allowed to stray in there by themselves; even when sent to the room on errands, they went and came with a certain awe of the empty room’s cold dignity.

But at the semi-annual house-cleaning, when every closet and bureau drawer resigned itself to the season’s intrusive spirit of research, the spare room’s kindly mysteries were given to the light. The children could look on and touch and handle and ask questions; and thus began their acquaintance with such relics as had not been consigned to the darker oblivion of the garret, or suffered change through the family passion for “making over.”

In the bottom drawer of the bureau was the “body” of grandmother’s wedding gown. The narrow skirt had served for something useful,—a cradle quilt, perhaps, for one of the babies. Jack could have put the tiny dress waist into one of his trousers’ pockets with less than their customary distention. It was a mere scrap of dove-colored silk, low necked, and laced in the back. Grandmother must have worn over her shoulders one of the embroidered India muslin capes that were turning yellow in that same drawer.

The dress sleeves were “leg o’ mutton,” but these, too, had been sacrificed in some impulse of mistaken economy.

There was the high shell comb, not carved, but a solid piece of shell which the children used to hold up to the light to see the colors glow like a church window. There were the little square-toed satin slippers, heelless, with flat laces that crossed over the instep; and there were the flesh-colored silk stockings and white embroidered wedding shawl.

Little grandmother must have been rather a gay Friend; she never wore the dress, as did her mother, who put on the “plain distinguishing cap” before she was forty. She dressed as one of the “world’s people,” but always plainly, with a little distance between herself and the latest fashion. She had a conscientious scorn of poor materials. Ordinary self-respect would have prevented her wearing an edge of lace that was not “real,” or a stuff that was not all wool, if wool it professed to be, or a print that would not “wash;” and her contempt for linen that was part cotton, for silk that was part linen, or velvet with a “cotton back,” was of a piece with her truthfulness and horror of pretense.

Among the frivolities in the lower drawer was a very dainty little nightcap, embroidered mull or some such frailness; the children used to tie it on over their short hair, framing the round cheeks of ten and twelve years old. It was the envelope for sundry odd pieces of lace, “old English thread,” and yellow Valenciennes, ripped from the necks and sleeves of little frocks long outgrown.

The children learned these patterns by heart; also the scrolls and garlands on certain broad collars and cuffs of needlework which always looked as if something might be made of them; but nothing was, although Jack’s mamma was conscious of a long felt want in doll’s petticoats, which those collars would have filled to ecstasy.

In that lower drawer were a few things belonging to grandmother’s mother, E. B. of gracious memory. There were her gauze neck-handkerchiefs, and her long-armed silk mitts which reported her a “finer woman” than any of her descendants of the third generation, since not a girl of them all could show an arm that would fill out these cast coverings handsomely from wrist to biceps.

And there was a bundle of her silk house shawls, done up in one of the E. B. towels, lovely in color and texture as the fair, full grandmotherly throat they once encircled. They were plain, self-fringed, of every shade of white that was not white.

There they lay and no one used them; and after a while it began to seem a waste to the little girls who had grown to be big girls. The lightest minded of them began to covet those sober vanities for their own adornment. Mother’s scruples were easily smiled away; so the old Quaker shawls came forth and took their part in the young life of the house—a gayer part, it would be safe to say, than was ever theirs upon the blessed shoulders of E. B. One or two of them were made into plaited waists to be worn with skirts and belts of the world’s fashion. And one soft cream-white shawl wrapped little Jack on his first journey in this world; and afterward on many journeys, much longer than that first one “from the blue room to the brown.”

No advertised perfumes were used in grandmother’s house, yet the things in the drawers had a faint sweet breath of their own. Especially it lingered about those belongings of her mother’s time—the odor of seclusion, of bygone cleanliness and household purity.

The spare bedroom was at its gayest in summer-time, when, after the daughters of the house grew up, young company was expected. Swept and dusted and soberly expectant, it waited, like a wise but prudent virgin, with candles unlighted and shutters darkened. Its very colors were cool and decorous, white and green and dark mahogany polish, door knobs and candlesticks gleaming, andirons reflected in the dull-red shine of the hearth.

After sundown, if friends were expected by the evening boat, the shutters were fastened back, and the green Venetian blinds raised, to admit the breeze and a view of the garden and the grass and the plashing fountain. Each girl hostess visited the room in turn on a last, characteristic errand,—one with her hands full of roses, new blown that morning; another to remove the sacrificed leaves and broken stems which the rose-gatherer had forgotten; and the mother last of all to look about her with modest pride, peopling the room with the friends of her own girlhood, to be welcomed there no more.

Then, when the wagon drove up, what a joyous racket in the hall; and what content for the future in the sound of heavy trunks carried upstairs!

If only one girl guest had come, she must have her particular friend of the house for a bedfellow; and what in all the world did they not talk of, lying awake half the summer night in pure extravagance of joy—while the fountain plashed and paused, and the soft wind stirred in the cherry-trees, and in the moonlit garden overblown roses dropped their petals on the wet box-borders.

Visitors from the city brought with them—besides new books, new songs, sumptuous confectionery and the latest ideas in dress—an odor of the world; something complex rich and strange as the life of the city itself. It spread its spell upon the cool, pure atmosphere of the Quaker home, and set the light hearts beating and the young heads dreaming.

In after years came the Far West, with its masculine incense of camps and tobacco and Indian leather and soft-coal smoke. It arrived in company with several pieces of singularly dusty male baggage; but it had not come to stay.

For a few days of confusion and bustle it pervaded the house, and then departed, on the “Long Trail,” taking little Jack and his mother away. And in the chances and changes of the years that followed, they were never again to sleep in the spare bedroom at grandfather’s.