Part 2

Nan didn’t mistrust that Rita had been there, and she began excitedly to tell her all about her visit. Rita could almost have believed Nan had been there if she hadn’t known it was not so. She let her go on for some time, enjoying her enthusiasm, and the impressive way in which she described her opening the door and finding the ‘little room.’ Then Rita said: ‘Now, Nan, that is enough fibbing. I went to the farm myself on my way up yesterday, and there is _no_ little room, and there _never_ has been any; it is a china-closet, just as Mrs. Grant saw it last.’

She was pretending to be busy unpacking her trunk, and did not look up for a moment; but as Nan did not say anything, she glanced at her over her shoulder. Nan was actually pale, and it was hard to say whether she was most angry or frightened. There was something of both in her look. And then Rita began to explain how her telegram had put her in the spirit of going up there alone. She hadn’t meant to cut Nan out. She only thought--Then Nan broke in: ‘It isn’t that; I am sure you can’t think it is that. But I went myself, and you did not go; you can’t have been there, for _it is a little room_.’

Oh, what a night they had! They couldn’t sleep. They talked and argued, and then kept still for a while, only to break out again, it was so absurd. They both maintained that they had been there, but both felt sure the other one was either crazy or obstinate beyond reason. They were wretched; it was perfectly ridiculous, two friends at odds over such a thing; but there it was--‘little room,’ ‘china-closet,’--‘china-closet,’ ‘little room.’

The next morning Nan was tacking up some tarlatan at a window to keep the midges out. Rita offered to help her, as she had done for the past ten years. Nan’s ‘No, thanks,’ cut her to the heart.

‘Nan,’ said she, ‘come right down from that step-ladder and pack your satchel. The stage leaves in just twenty minutes. We can catch the afternoon express train, and we will go together to the farm. I am either going there or going home. You better go with me.’

Nan didn’t say a word. She gathered up the hammer and tacks, and was ready to start when the stage came round.

It meant for them thirty miles of staging and six hours of train, besides crossing the lake; but what of that, compared with having a lie lying round loose between them! Europe would have seemed easy to accomplish, if it would settle the question.

At the little junction in Vermont they found a farmer with a wagon full of meal-bags. They asked him if he could not take them up to the old Keys farm and bring them back in time for the return train, due in two hours.

They had planned to call it a sketching trip, so they said, ‘We have been there before, we are artists, and we might find some views worth taking; and we want also to make a short call upon the Misses Keys.’

‘Did ye calculate to paint the old _house_ in the picture?’

They said it was possible they might do so. They wanted to see it, anyway.

‘Waal, I guess you are too late. The _house_ burnt down last night, and everything in it.’

THE SEQUEL TO THE LITTLE ROOM.

‘For the land’s sake! What’ll Maria do now!’

‘That’s just what Hiram said--“What’ll Maria do now!” It aint as if she had folks belongin’ to her, and now the house is burnt, and Hannah is _as_ she is, it does seem as if Maria’d find it hard gittin’ on alone and doin’ her own thinkin’.’

‘There wan’t nothin’ saved, I s’pose.’

‘Next door to nothin’; one washtub, I believe, and the old gray horse that was out to pasture, that’s about all; I did hear, though, something about the men-folks’ having saved a blue-chintz sofy--’twas the only thing they could get out of the house before the roof fell in; they couldn’t seem to get a holt of anythin’ else, ’twas so hot, and the old house burnt like tinder; Hannah she was that scairt she seemed dazed, and this mornin’ Miss Fife, she that married Ben Fife down on the Edge farm, at the foot of the hill, they took ’em in and did for ’em; and when Lucindy Fife went to call ’em to breakfast at five o’clock, there was Maria cryin’ like a baby, and Hannah lyin’, like an image, with her eyes starin’ wide open; she must a had a shock in the night.’

‘Fur the land’s sake!’ said the other woman again.

‘Yes, and Miss Fife she tried to get Maria to eat somethin’, but she wouldn’t eat a thing; she just sat and cried; you know she was always sort of a shadder to Hannah, and now she’s just like a baby.’

‘I declair! I believe I’ll go up to Miss Fife’s; I hate to lose the time, I ought to stir butter to-day; but just as likely as not lots of folks’ll drop in, and I sort of want to hear it all at first hand.’

‘I believe you’re right, and if you’ll set a while, I’ll hurry up these doughnuts and be ready in no time; it’s a sort of lonesome walk up there.’

The Widder Luke turned the light side of a doughnut under, the fat sizzled, and Jane Peebles said: ‘Did you hear what sofy ’twas that they saved?’

‘I don’t rightly know myself which one ’twas. Miss Culver she said it was the blue chintz one, but I don’t recollect as they had no blue sofy; I don’t seem to know exactly what they did have. Hannah never was just the same to me after we had that tiff over the raspberry jam she and I made for the church sale; but I aint goin’ to bring that up agin her, now she’s laid low; I shall go up there just the same in their time of trouble.’

‘I s’pose the sofy must have been a new one, or they wouldn’t have been so keen to save it.’

‘I guess ’twas;--seems as if these doughnuts wouldn’t never brown; it’s always so when you’re in a hurry.’

‘I guess I’ll ask Maria about that sofy,’ said Jane; ‘it’s likely that she’ll tell all she knows when she gets used to the situation; I always thought Maria was a sight nicer than she seemed. I know once she came near tellin’ me how they made that soft soap, that special kind you know, so white, and it keeps like jell, year after year; ’twas at a sewin’-bee, and Maria she warmed up and was just goin’ to tell me, when Hannah she came in, and Maria she shet up as quick as anythin’. It was sort of curious how she knuckled down to Hannah. Did you ever think Hannah was sort of set?’ added Jane, in a low, mysterious tone.

‘Hannah _set_! She was sotter’n a meetin’-house, and you know it, Jane Peebles, for all you sided with her about that raspberry jam.’

Widder Luke’s eyes flashed as she lifted the kettle of hot fat. She got in a good stroke on an old score, and Jane did not dare to retort. Soon after twelve she and Jane Peebles were walking through the lane towards the Fifes’--there was a Sunday air about their dresses, but a Monday decision in their faces; the reporting in hill towns is done mostly by such volunteers, and one must ‘git up airly’ for the first news.

Widder Luke carried a plate of doughnuts as a neighborly tribute to the occasion.

At the Corners the women paused a moment; they could see from where they stood the black skeleton of the burned barn silhouetted against the sky, beyond ‘Huckleberry Hill.’

Just then Si Briggs came along in his spring wagon, with two strange ladies on the back seat. They took the right-hand road that led to the old Keys place, and as they passed, Mr. Briggs drew his reins with an osh-sh-sh to his horse.

‘Won’t you get in and ride up the hill?’

Widder Luke and Miss Peebles decorously hesitated a moment, and then climbed over the wheel and sat on either side of Mr. Briggs, who settled himself leisurely between the two women with neighborly familiarity. Then pointing backward with the butt-end of his whip to indicate and introduce his passengers, he said: ‘These ladies were pretty well disappointed to find the Keys house burnt up; they come all the way from--where did you say ’twas you come from?’

‘We came down from the Adirondacks,’ said Rita. ‘We wanted to call on Miss Hannah and Maria, and if possible to get a sketch of the house, to paint a picture of it.’

‘You don’t say so! well I declair for it, it’s too bad!’ said the Widder Luke; ‘but there’s sights of houses older’n that one you might paint; there’s the Fife house, where they are stoppin’ now; that’s as old agin and more tumble-down, if that’s what you want. I read a piece in the “Greentown Gazette” about artists; it said they always took the worst-lookin’ houses to paint, though it does seem queer to me.’

‘Did you know the Keys house very well, and can you tell us how the rooms were built?’

‘Why, certain!’ said Mr. Briggs. ‘I’ve been in it a hundred times if I have once.’

Rita and Nan bent forward to listen; the horse jogged slowly up the hill, Mr. Briggs flicking his whip from side to side to encourage the steady walk.

‘There was a hall a-runnin’ right through the middle, from front to back--an awful waste of space to my thinkin’; when my brother Joel built his house he sot out to have just such a hall, and I said to him, sez I: “While you’re about it why don’t you build a house, or else build a hall and let it out for dancin’?” Joel was dead set agin dancin’ and it kind of stuck in his mind, so he built his’n without any hall; you jest step right out of doors into the settin’-room; it’s nice in summer, but a _leetle_ cold in winter.’

‘Yes, I should think it might be. What were the other rooms in the Keys house?’

‘Wall, there was the family settin’-room, on the right-hand side of the hall, and back of that the bed-room for the old folks; Hannah she’s slep’ there for some years now; on the north side there was the keepin’-room, and back of that the dinin’-room, though I’ll be blessed if I know why it wasn’t a kitchen, that is, if a kitchen is where folks cook. Them Keyses, way back to Jonathan Keys, was always folks for high-flyin’ names, ’specially Hannah.’

‘Was that all the rooms there were in the lower part?’

‘Pretty much all, except a shed they used for a kitchen in old times.’

‘Wasn’t there a little room between the front and back rooms on the north side?’ asked Nan, a little hesitatingly, while Rita gave her a pinch of excitement.

‘I don’no’ as there was,’ said Mr. Briggs.

Jane Peebles spoke up:

‘I believe there was some sort of a room there. I remember once Maria said she kept that north door a leetle crack open in fly-time, and it did seem to rid the little room of flies considerble.’

‘I don’t recollect,’ said Mr. Briggs, ‘as there was a door on the north side, but I aint sure; them pine-trees was so dark and the rose-bushes so thick; I can’t remember as I’ve been round there lately; it didn’t seem any special place to go to.’

‘Well!’ said Jane Peebles, decisively, ‘I guess there aint nobody in Titusville that knows any more about that house than I do, unless it’s the Keyses themselves; and I _know_ there was a little room.’

‘Now Jane!’ said Widder Luke (Jane wilted a little); ‘if there was a little room there, where was the door to it--on the inside I mean? I guess I haven’t been to the Baptist Sewing Circle for forty years for nothin’, and the Keyses have had it once every year, in January; and I venture to say I’ve set and sewed in that front room scores of times, and the only door in the front room was the door into the china-closet, except, of course, the door into the hall-way; and as to the dinin’-room, as they called it’ (Si Briggs was a widower, and this was a subtle compliment to him), ‘there wan’t no door at all on that side of the room, just blank wall, with them black pictures of the family done in ink, under glass. I always was struck with that one of Jonathan Keys, it did look exactly like Hannah--just so set and stubborn about the mouth. Poor Hannah, she has had her day though. I have often heard my mother say that Hannah was the prettiest girl in Titusville when she was sixteen, though she was always that stiff. She was sixteen just before she went down to Salem.’

Here was an opening, and Nan plunged in.

‘I heard something about that: didn’t she meet an old sea-captain down there and come near marrying him?’

‘I don’t know how near she came to marrying him, I know he never came to Titusville. Now I wonder how you ever came to hear that old story; it seems a hundred years ago since my mother told me.’

‘Here we be!’ called out Mr. Briggs, as he stopped his horse with the soothing down-east osh-sh-sh.

Beyond them yawned the black pit where the cellar of the Keys house had been; the ashes still guarded the mystery of the Little Room.

‘My! but don’t it look mournful!’ ejaculated Widder Luke, and then she continued: ‘My mother said ’twas rumored round Titusville that Hannah had caught a beau down to Salem. Of course that made a stir and folks wanted to know all the particulars, but all they could find out by hook or by crook was that ’twas a sea-captain, and that he was after his third wife, having buried his two others, and that he had asked Hannah to marry him; he gave her lots of heathenish stuff that he had brought from India for his first wife. They couldn’t seem to find out much more than that, when suddenly Hannah came home, without any warnin’; she brought an extry trunk back with her, but she did look dreadful peakid; she was sort of pale, and her eyes had a look just like her Grandfather Keys’; she hadn’t never looked like any of the Keyses before. She didn’t let on that anything had happened, and she went everywhere just the same, and nobody knew what she had brought home in that extry trunk, till one day, when the family had all gone to meetin’, Nancy Stack--she was Hannah’s mother’s sister--she went and peeked in the trunk and she saw a lot of trash, sea-shells and queer sorts of calico; but just as she went to lift the tray to see what else there was, she heard the folks comin’, so she shut it up quicker’n lightnin’; ’twas a snap-lock and her apron got caught; she couldn’t take time to open it, so she just tore off a piece of the hem to get away, meanin’ to go and get the scrap out some other time; but Hannah must have been in the habit of goin’ to that trunk, and before night she found the checked gingham caught in the lid, and Nancy Stark she left very sudden that afternoon and didn’t never set foot in the house again. It’s queer how it all comes back to me. I s’pose it’s seein’ the house gone and knowin’ how Hannah was took last night.’

‘Oh, do tell us more,’ said Rita, breathlessly. ‘We know Mrs. Grant, their niece, and it is all so interesting.’

‘Wall, folks _is_ generally interested in what they are interested in, but I don’t know that there’s much more to tell. The captain he never turned up to get his third wife. Nancy Stark she died, and Hannah and Maria here always lived up there alone since the old folks died, and a pretty lonesome spot it was, to be sure.’

‘Did anybody ever dare to ask Miss Hannah about the captain?’

‘No, I guess not; folks up here mind their own business pretty much.’

There was a silence after this rebuke; but Nan, who always began to hold on when other people let go, said:

‘I heard once that they had some beautiful china in the china-closet, some that had belonged to their grandmother.’

Nobody volunteered any remark about this. Mr. Briggs had got out and was poking round with a stick in the ashes.

Nan persisted:

‘Did you ever see the china?’

‘_I_ did’ said Jane Peebles, ‘sights of times.’

‘What kind was it?’

‘Oh, just blue willer pattern,--but there was sights of it.’

‘Then they didn’t have any other kind, white with a gilt edge, for instance?’

‘Wall, up _here_, blue willer, _if_ it’s the real old kind, is considered good ’nough for most folks.’

‘Why, of course; I only wish I had any half so nice,’ said Rita, politely.

‘Be you a chaney collector?’ asked Widder Luke, with a defiant note.

‘Not at all, oh no; but I do wish we could find out whether they ever did have a gilt-edged set.’

‘Sakes alive! if you really want to know particular, I shouldn’t make any bones myself about asking Maria. I should like her to know I don’t bear any grudge against ’em, though we did have a fallin’-out about that jam, Hannah and me, come ten years ago next August. I shouldn’t mind showin’ I had friendly interest in them--now, they’re in trouble.’

The ruins of the old house looked small and insignificant in the broad sunshine. The poplars were shrivelled by the fire, and the thicket of roses was blackened and trampled; it was as dehumanized as if no one had lived there for a century.

Mr. Briggs came back to the wagon and said, briskly:

‘Wall! where’ll you go next?’

Rita and Nan hesitated; then Rita said:

‘Do you suppose Miss Maria would like to see us? We met her niece just before she sailed for Europe. She asked us to call and give her aunts some messages, but if you think they are too much broken down by the fire and all--’

‘Oh, no; it will do Maria good--it’s no use cryin’ over spilt milk, or burnt houses for that matter, and I guess you could look at Hannah too; she can’t speak, I hear it said, but she lies right in the bed off of the livin’-room, and most everybody goes in to look at her.’

‘The theatre is nowhere,’ whispered Nan to Rita; ‘but isn’t it ghastly!’

Miss Maria sat in state in the front room at the Fifes’; her black dress, borrowed from a neighbor, was large for even her plump figure, and it had a tendency to make her look as if she had been ill for a long time and had grown thin; her face was pale with the recent excitement, and wore the air of one who was waiting; she sat quite erect in the rocking-chair, with her plump hands folded on her lap; there was an appealing look in her eyes--she missed Hannah; there was no one to give her a pattern for thought or act. Neighbors passed in and out, and there was something so passive in Maria’s look that they talked of her freely as _she_ as if she were not there. There was plenty of sympathy for her, but it was swept out of sight by the tide of curiosity and detail,--how the house had caught fire; who had seen it first; how Hannah slept so heavily she could not be roused for a long time; how it happened that the well was so low; how the pump-handle broke; how the men tried to save something, but how little had been got out! and then, ‘how bad Hannah looks,’ and how old Simeon Bissell lived ten years after his stroke, and Hannah was younger than he, and the Keyses were a long-lived family.

They passed in and out of Hannah’s room, Lucinda Fife asking each new-comer to ‘just step in and look at Hannah!’

Borne along by their sympathy and curiosity, Rita and Nan went in and looked on poor Hannah, stiff and uncompromising as of old, lying in her unwonted bed. She eyed them with her impenetrable gray gaze, and it was evident that the mystery of the Little Room would never be revealed by her, even if one could be bold enough to storm that granite citadel. They talked with Maria. She heard the messages from her niece in gentle silence. Rita took her passive hand and tried to tell her how they sympathized with her in her troubles, and to explain how it was they had happened to come at this time, but it evidently did not get below the surface of Maria’s consciousness. She seemed most taken with Nan, however, and to like to have her near her. Just before they left her, Rita ventured to ask if any of their gilt-edged china was saved.

‘No, I guess not,’ said Maria.

‘Did they save the blue-chintz sofa?’ impetuously asked Nan.

‘No, I didn’t hear as they did.’

‘You _did_ have a gilt-edged china set, didn’t you?’ said Nan.

‘And a blue sofa?’ persuaded Rita.

‘I don’t seem to remember anything much,’ said Maria, with an appealing glance towards the room where Hannah lay. It would be barbarity to press her further just then.

Rita and Nan went away--not to the Adirondacks, however, but to spend a few days with Jane Peebles, who gladly acceded to their petition to be boarded there for a time.

‘Miss Peebles, where is that man Hiram who always lived at the Keys’?’ asked Rita, as Jane helped them to apple-sauce and ginger-bread at supper.

‘Hiram? I guess he’s pretty well tuckered out, what with the fire and Hannah’s stroke; he come over here this mornin’ and wanted a piece of my huckleberry pie; he said he couldn’t seem to relish any other food; he always did set a great store by my pie; it wan’t any better than what Hannah made, so fer as I could see, but he always ’lotted on havin’ the corner-piece when he brought me eggs from the farm.’

Miss Jane’s secret was not so hard to discover as was the secret of the Little Room.

‘I would like to talk with Hiram,’ said Nan.

‘Oh, Hiram he’ll talk till doomsday, once set him goin’, and say pretty smart things too, for a man.’

‘Hiram, can’t you tell us something about the old house?’ asked Nan the next morning, as Hiram rose from the kitchen table where he had been taking the solace of a corner-piece of Jane’s huckleberry pie.

‘That depends,’ said Hiram, ‘upon what you want to know. I s’pose I can tell as much as anybody.’

‘What we really want to know,’ said Rita, candidly, ‘is whether there was a closet or a little room on the north side of the Keys house, between the front and the back rooms.’

Hiram rubbed his ear carefully and began in a judicial way:

‘When Jonathan Keys first built that house, some time way back in 1700, he planned to have--’

‘Jane Peebles! Jane Peebles! you’re wanted right off, up to the Fifes’, and Hiram too; Hannah she’s took worse, and Maria she’s no more use than a babe unborn. I’m on my way up there now,’ concluded the Widder Luke, as she hurried up the hill.

When Rita and Nan went to say good-bye to Maria, a few days later, Maria clung to them. She had begun to like these new friends who had taken it upon themselves to try and do for her what Mrs. Grant would have done had she been there. She followed them to the door, and said, in a whisper:

‘I asked Hannah, only the day before her last shock, whether she _did_ have any gilt-edged china, and she sort of nodded. Then I asked her if we had a blue sofy, and she nodded again; but come to think it over by myself, I don’t think it really meant anything, because you know Hannah couldn’t do anything else but nod after she had that first stroke; she couldn’t shake her head; but I thought I would tell you, you have been so kind and you seemed so interested.’

Out on the stone wall at the Corners Nan and Rita sat and laughed and cried; the tragedy and the comedy appealed to them, and not even when Nan said, as they walked down to Jane Peebles’ house, ‘All the same, _I saw the Little Room_,’ and Rita said, ‘_I saw the china-closet_,’ did they feel any bitterness.

‘Good-bye,’ said Hiram; ‘I’m real glad you came, and I want you to tell Miss Grant, when you write to her, that Hiram--she’ll remember Hiram fast enough--Hiram is going to marry Jane Peebles, and that Maria shan’t never want for a home so long as Jane can make huckleberry pies.’

‘Oh, we are so glad; and you will send us a piece of wedding-cake, won’t you?’

‘I shouldn’t wonder,’ said Hiram.

‘Won’t you please tell us what you started to that time when Miss Hannah was taken worse so suddenly? we do so want to know whether there was a room or a china-closet there on the north side.’

‘I do remember now that I started in to tell you that; it wan’t much anyhow, only when their Grandfather Keys built the house he boasted that he intended to build the _en_tire house of timber that hadn’t a knot in it. He spent ten years a-gettin’ the timber ready, and when it was done he found that right in the front-room closet they had put a piece of board with a great knot in it. He was dreadful mad, but he kept it there all the same--on purpose, he said, to show folks it wan’t no use to set out to do anythin’ perfect in this world.’

‘Then there was a china-closet--’

‘Wall, yes, there certainly was a closet there.’

‘Oh, Nan!’ said Rita, as the cars moved away from where Hiram stood, ‘he didn’t say exactly what kind of a closet even then.’