CHAPTER XVII

INTO THE ORCHARD HOUSE

Isadora opened the door for Kate as she came up the steps. There was a yellow envelope in her hand.

“A telegram for you, Miss Kate. It came just a minute ago. Oh, I do hope there’s no bad news.”

Kate caught a glimpse of Julia wavering at the farthest end of the hall in shadow, and there was Effie just inside the drawing-room, deliberately watching while she opened the envelope.

“I’m sure it’s not bad news,” Kate informed these anxious friends of her mother’s as she tore open the end of the envelope. “I _expected_ a wire.” She felt some importance in saying that, and she was glad to clear the air, for it was charged with keenest apprehension.

Kate’s message had gone and Katherine’s reply arrived all within an hour. Katherine had certainly not hesitated over a decision. Kate nodded as she read and smiled.

Am autoing to Ludlow Junction to catch back way express Oakdale five-five whatever situation keep cool and brave in a few hours Mother will be with you rejoiced you’re not sick. K.

Katherine certainly had not counted the words!

When Kate looked up, the anxious watchers had vanished, dispersed by her smile as she read. She sat down in a chair standing against the wall. Her arms dropped at her sides and she leaned her head against the high-carved back of the chair, crushing a little her mother’s best hat. For the minute she was too absorbed in her own thoughts and too fatigued—the fatigue that is apt to come with sudden complete relief of mind—to remember such an item as a hat.

A step on the stair made her look up. Bertha was hurrying down, rustling in a raincoat, a scarf tied over her head.

“You’re here,” she exclaimed. “I saw you coming, from a window upstairs. Are these the things?”

Kate nodded, and Bertha took the packages and pocketbook from the floor where Kate had carelessly dropped them to tear open her telegram. Bearing them carefully she went away _through the drawing-room_.

“Well, she can’t get to the kitchen that way,” Kate mused, hardly caring. “And why the raincoat? Oh, well, What’s the use of trying to puzzle anything out any more? Mother’s coming, Mother’s coming, Mother’s coming!”

After a little while, yawning and half asleep, she wandered into Aunt Katherine’s own sitting-room—a graceful, comfortable little retreat tucked away in an isolated corner of the big house. The outstanding feature there was an oil painting of Kate’s mother at the age of sixteen in a blue party frock standing against dark velvet portières. It was a painting by Hopkinson in his earlier manner, executed with finish and most delicate feeling. The painting was one of Miss Frazier’s most valuable possessions, and Kate had surmised, when her aunt had shown it to her, one of the dearest. Certainly it was a painting with a spell over it, a spell of beauty and something besides, unnamable and illusive. Perhaps it was the spirit of youth which the artist had with such genius caught there, that gave it its magic.

Kate unfolded an afghan that lay conveniently on the foot of the sofa beneath the portrait, and curling herself up under it, settled down for a nap. She felt perfectly safe in losing herself for the time because Elsie had given her promise to stay in bed until luncheon.

But at one o’clock Bertha brought down the news that the doctor had ordered Elsie to remain in bed all afternoon, too. She was asleep now, and Bertha thought she would sleep for several hours. Her temperature had gone down to normal and she was comfortable. Later, when she woke, Bertha would take her up a light meal.

Lunching alone for Kate was a rather dreary procedure in spite of the coziness of the breakfast-room where Miss Frazier had thoughtfully ordered the meal served, and the merry little fire crackling on the hearth. Kate had had a good sleep and she was now so rested in body and mind that she could think about things with some clarity. She leaned her elbow on the table and her chin in her hand and regarded the fire as though it were her companion at the meal.

Elsie’s father was a thief! How would it feel to have your father a thief and in prison and everybody knowing it? Kate had never known a father, so she found it difficult to put herself in Elsie’s place. But suppose it were her mother? Oh, supposing that was too painful, and certainly it wasn’t like that for Elsie. Perhaps Elsie cared as little for her father as she had for her mother. (Kate had never recovered from the horrid shock of that disclosure.) She certainly never mentioned him. But she was not allowed to mention him. What had Aunt Katherine’s letter said on that point? “Nick’s name is not mentioned here, either by Elsie or the servants,”—something like that. But imagine consenting to forget your father for _any one_! No, of course Elsie had no such devotion for her father as Kate’s for her mother. Not likely. No use to try to compare, then. Besides, the mere notion was altogether too painful.

Let’s begin at the beginning, though. Why had Elsie bought bread and eggs and lettuce and nuts which she surely had no use for herself; and why had she been so urgent that Kate should buy more to-day? Surely she didn’t expect to take such perishable things with her in her flight from Aunt Katherine’s house! There had been no sign of eatables when Kate unpacked the runaway’s suitcase last night. Oh! An idea! Had Elsie planned to run away only as far as the orchard house, and was the food supply stored there? Was that the mystery about the orchard house? Had she discovered a secret room or something and was planning to live in it like a hermit without any one’s knowing? Kate built up quite a plot around that idea. It would be exciting and fascinating to live right under your guardian’s nose while that guardian was scouring the country for you. But in spite of the possibilities of this story-like mystery, Kate finally let it go as an explanation. It was too far-fetched.

A better solution! Had Nick, her father, escaped from prison? Elsie was shielding him, perhaps. Why, of course, she was hiding him in the orchard house. Kate’s heart began to hammer. Stupid, not to have thought of that at once, just the minute Jack told her about Elsie’s father being a thief. All the food had been for him. The book she couldn’t afford to buy, too! She had wanted it for him. How very simple it all was! And they were going to escape together. They would escape into Canada or somewhere. No, vague memories of something called “extradition papers” came to mind. They would simply hide themselves in the crowds of some big city. They would vanish. Oh, well, from the very first Elsie had been a vanishing comrade. When she ran away with her father she would vanish for good.

Now, how did the detective work into this solution of the puzzle? Suddenly there was a snag. If Nick had escaped from prison, wouldn’t state detectives be on his trail? Mr. O’Brien, Aunt Katherine had told her, was a private detective. And if Nick had really escaped from prison surely Aunt Katherine would not in any way be concerned in finding him. That would be simply a matter for the police.

Kate turned her eyes uneasily to the open door, almost expecting to see a plain-clothes man spying upon her from the rain out there. But there was only the drenched garden and beyond, the orchard, wreathed in a haze of wet weather.

One more snag: surely if Nick had escaped from prison it would have got into the papers, and someone in Oakdale have seen it. Then Jack would know, and he had not even hinted at such a thing.

But now for the most important consideration of all: the stranger in the garden who had given her the note for Elsie last night? Who was he, and where did he come in? The reasonable answer was that he was Nick himself, Elsie’s father, the thief, the man who had stolen from his own benefactress. But Kate did not harbour this idea for the fraction of a second. That voice was not the voice of such a one, and such a one would hardly be quoting from “The King of the Fairies.”

Deep down in her heart, deep beyond reason, Kate had connected that stranger in the garden with what Elsie had said about fairies in the orchard house. This man himself, who had given her the note, was a human being, of course, She didn’t go so far as to think him unearthly; but he might very well know about those fairies who “were in it somehow.” He seemed a person who would indeed be _likely_ to know. Kate was ready to connect that stranger with any mystery so long as it was a pleasant mystery. With an unpleasant mystery—never. His note had told Elsie not to run away; Elsie herself had said so. But he had known that she meant to run away. That was apparent. Where had he come from out of the wind last night?

What of that light she had seen in the orchard house her first night here? Those three open windows? That closing door in the second story—closing as though a knob had been turned?

Oh, there were just too many things to think of and to fit in. The shortest cut to clearing up some of the mystery and giving her mother a starting point to work from with Elsie when she should get here at five o’clock to-night was to explore the orchard house now, right away. There was her heart whacking at her sides again! Yes, but she must do it, escaped convict or not. That was the first step to be taken. She had the end of the string—Jack Denton had given her that—the orchard house came next, made the first knot to be untangled.

“No, no dessert, thank you.” You couldn’t eat with your heart hammering like that, could you? She walked to the door. The rain was stopping, had almost entirely stopped. The key was upstairs, back in the drawer of her dressing table where she had replaced it after wringing it from Elsie yesterday. If she went for it now Elsie might hear and again weep her into a promise to keep away from the orchard house. The key had been only a matter of form, anyway. There were always the windows. Kate was sure they couldn’t all be locked. She would try getting in that way before she bothered about the key.

She glanced down at her rubber-soled canvas ties. No need for rubbers. No need for a sweater or umbrella, either: the little showers of rain blowing down from trees and bushes would do her chintz no harm.

She crossed the terrace, hoping neither Elsie nor Bertha was looking from a window overhead, and walked through the orchard straight to the orchard house. Before trying the windows, better try the door. That was only common sense. The latch lifted under her fingers! Had the house always stood open like this, and all that fuss about the key! She pushed the door softly open and went in.

“Something to do with fairies,” Elsie had said. Kate remembered the words as she crossed the threshold. And she felt surely as though it might easily have something to do with fairies; she might have been stepping into Fairyland itself for the eerie sensation that crossing the threshold gave her.

She left the door open behind her, and a gusty wet wind followed her like a companion. It filled the hall with the pungent scent of the syringa bush by the step.

There was nothing in the hall but a little oblong table standing against the wall at the foot of the stairs, a table with curly legs and a carved top on which stood an empty card tray, and hung above the table was a narrow long mirror in a gilded frame.

Kate looked into the mirror. How many, many times it had reflected her mother’s face. How very unlike Katherine her daughter was, hair bobbed so straight, rather slanting narrow eyes, full lips, freckles across the nose! Kate surveyed this image with her usual slight sense of annoyance upon meeting it in a mirror. She imagined Katherine, a Katherine of her own age, looking over her shoulder in the glass, their two heads together. It was the Katherine of the portrait, dark curly head, wide misty eyes, olive cheeks ever so delicately touched with rose.

Oh! Had that face actually gleamed out there for an instant? Her mental vision had been so clear that she could not be sure it had not, just for a flash, taken actual form.

Well, if the Katherine of sixteen years ago had joined her now and was going to accompany her in her exploration of the orchard house, so much the better. Kate had always longed for a girl comrade more than for anything else in the world. Come, let’s pretend she had one at last, Katherine at fifteen.

First the parlour. It opened on the right. The door stuck. Kate pushed with her knee and lifted up on the knob simultaneously. It opened explosively. And a door up in the second story somewhere opened in sympathy with it. Kate stood very still, listening. The jarring of the walls was the cause, of course; but even with this explanation accepted, it was creepy.

The little parlour was stuffy, as all closed rooms are stuffy. But almost at once the syringa-scented air from the open front door had remedied that; it was so much more vital than the smell of dust and mildew. But why think of the parlour as “little,” for by any ordinary standards it was certainly a good-sized room. Only in comparison with Aunt Katherine’s spacious drawing-room did Kate feel it now small and quaint.

The furniture was much as it had been left when Grandfather Frazier died and the house was closed. But the books were gone from the low bookcases that lined the walls. Those Aunt Katherine had sent to her niece, and Kate had grown up in their company.

The bookcases, a Franklin stove with a worn low bench in front of it, a big square library table between the windows, some oil paintings on the walls (Kate guessed some of these to be Aunt Katherine’s work), a comfortable-looking but very unfashionable chintz-covered sofa, and several very shabby, very welcoming easy chairs with deep seats and wide arms and curving backs—that was the parlour.

And the fifteen-year-old Katherine Frazier had gone in ahead of Kate. She was moving about the room, poking up the fire (the fire that didn’t exist) in the grate, throwing her school books on the sofa, reading absorbedly curled up with her feet under her in the deepest chair by the window, making toast at the coals in the grate while the blue teapot kept itself warm on the stove’s top. Katherine had told Kate about this room, how she loved it and what she did in it. Her father was there usually in the picture, too, and often Aunt Katherine. But somehow Kate imagined neither of them now.

What a merry, comfortable, _spirited_ room it was. Its spirit had been created by that dark-eyed girl. And the smell of the syringa! Now Kate knew why her mother could never get by the syringa bush at the corner of Professor Hart’s lawn without stopping for deep breaths when the syringa was in flower.

The dining-room was across the hall. The dining table was long and narrow, the handicraft of Great-grandfather Frazier. It was curly maple and mirror-like with the polishings of many years. Close at one end two chairs were drawn up to it. Several more stood with their backs against the wall. Did Grandfather Frazier and Katherine sit close together like that at the end of the long table those years they lived alone? Kate wondered. Yes, she was sure they did; for there was the Katherine of her imagination pouring tea for her father and handing it to him with a sweet, affectionate smile. No need for Nora to come in from the kitchen to pass it. This father and daughter could reach each other.

The kitchen failed to hold Kate’s attention. She missed Katherine there. The young Katherine had not liked housework. Indeed, it was still a burden to her, however gracefully she carried the burden. Perhaps that was why Kate could not find her in the kitchen.

If stepping across the threshold into this empty house had stirred Kate’s imagination and made her feel the possibility of fairies hiding somewhere in the apparent emptiness, going up the stairs stirred it even more.

It was a steep, rather narrow, little staircase, painted black and with the wooden treads deeply worn by generations of feet. And right in the very middle of her ascent, on the seventh stair, to be precise, there happened to her a thing that had sometimes happened before but never quite so _definitely_. She thought and felt that she had done this all before, that she had come up these stairs on exactly the errand she was on now; she remembered herself on this identical stair, with her hand on this identical portion of the railing. More than that she knew exactly what was going to happen to her when she reached the top—why shouldn’t she know when she had experienced it all before?

But even as she felt this and in fact knew it, her foot had left that seventh stair and the memory had vanished. Now she only had a memory of a memory, or to be exact not even that. She only remembered that she _had_ remembered. The instant itself, the connection, was lost.

She looked into the guest-room first. It was a pretty room in spite of the absence of curtains and bedding. The furniture was painted a creamy yellow. Katherine had painted it a few days before her marriage. By the window there was a dainty little writing table with pens and blotters and even ink-bottle conveniently placed. But the ink had been long evaporated and the pens were rusty. Above the bed there hung, passe-partouted in white, a flower-wreathed quotation. Had Aunt Katherine or her mother painted the flowers and illuminated the letters? The flowers were morning-glories, very realistically done, and the quotation from “Macbeth”: “Sleep that knits up the ravelled sleave of care.”

“Morning-glories are incongruous with the words,” Kate mused, smiling. She felt more sophisticated than the fifteen-year-old Katherine who had admired this crude bit of art enough to hang it in the guest-room, who perhaps was even herself its perpetrator. “Yes, morning-glories are incongruous with the words.”

“_Are they. Why?_”

“Perhaps they aren’t,” Kate answered, aloud. She remembered her flight that very morning toward the slowly opening many-coloured portals of sleep. Morning-glories might very well be growing on Sleep’s walls.

But whom had she answered? Who had spoken? No one, of course. There was no one there _to_ speak, except Kate herself.

On either side the hall there was another bedroom. Kate merely looked in at their doors. One had been her mother’s, and it was entirely bare now, for all the furniture had gone to the barn-house in Ashland years ago. The other had been Grandfather Frazier’s room, and somehow Kate felt that she did not want to pry there. It would be like getting acquainted with him when his back was turned.

Now there remained only the “playroom” and the upstairs “study”—a long room at the back of the house, the room where the windows had stood open that first night of Kate’s arrival—and ever since, for all she knew. From her very first entrance into the house Kate had been _listening_ toward this room. It was in that room she fully expected to discover Elsie’s secret. It was really the goal of her pilgrimage through the house. But the nearer she drew to it physically the more she drew back mentally. She was not exactly frightened. What did not frighten Elsie need not frighten her. It was simply uneasiness in the face of mystery.

There was the playroom between, though. Kate was grateful to pause a minute in the playroom.

The playroom was down a step, through a little low door. Kate had to bend her head to go through the door. It was the smallest room she had ever been in, about the size of a goodly closet. Shelves were built in all around the walls, leaving space only for the one little low window that reached the floor. Before the shelves, strung on brass rings to brass rods, hung dusty, faded calico curtains, yellow flowers on a blue background. Kate pushed back a curtain, jangling all its rings. The shelves held a jumble of toys, birds, beasts, carts, engines, and on the top shelf a row of dolls, some broken almost beyond recognition as dolls, but two or three still healthy bisque beauties smiling blandly over her head at the opposite wall.

There were three lilliputian chairs in the room, one a black rocker painted on the back and seat with flowers and fruit. In one corner there was a huge box of blocks, wooden building blocks that Great-grandfather Frazier had made for Grandfather Frazier when he was a little boy.

Kate knelt by that box, and idly began constructing a house. She had always adored building with blocks when she was a little girl, and now the old fascination seized her; besides, she was putting off the minute when she would open the door of that last room.

But as she completed the second wall of the house she turned suddenly and looked over her shoulder. Had she heard something? A rustling, like a dress coming down the hall and pausing at the door of the playroom? Whom did she expect to see bending down at the low door and looking in at her where she sat on the floor building with blocks like a little girl? Strangely, it was not the sixteen-year-old Katherine she had been imagining as her companion whom she pictured stooping down at that door to look in. It was Katherine’s mother, Kate’s grandmother, who had died when Katherine was still a little girl playing with blocks. Only she would not look like an ordinary grandmother, of course. For she had died when she was only twenty-four. She was a young woman, very graceful, very gentle, lovely.

Of course she wasn’t really there at the door, wondering who had come in her baby’s stead to play in the playroom. Of course she wasn’t there with a spray of syringa flower at her belt. It was just Kate’s vivid imagination. She was sensible enough to know that. The rustling of her dress had been the leaves of the drenched apple tree boughs against the window pane tossed by a rainy breeze. And the syringa scent had followed Kate up here and even down into the little playroom.

It was a low little room, so low that Kate could but just stand up straight in it. And it was entirely bare except for the shelves with their treasure trove of toys, the box of blocks, and the lilliputian chairs. But for all that the room was alive to Kate now. It was almost giddy with life. And it was a life that did not concern her. She was an intruder. She became uneasy as intruders are uneasy.

But she was not driven away precipitately. She stayed long enough to replace the blocks in their place coolly. Then, still coolly, she stood up and went out of the playroom, closing the door softly after her.

In the hall, however, she allowed herself to hurry. The door to the last room, the study, was ajar. Had the figure of Kate’s imagination gone on ahead to that room—the young mother? For an instant Kate hesitated with her fingers on the knob.

“Psha! What are you afraid of! Silly!”

Downstairs, the hall door, which she had left open, blew shut with a bang, A fresh downpour of rain rattled on the shingles just above her head. (There was no attic above this part of the house.) Kate’s impulse was to run down and secure at least the staying open of the front door, so that she might have an unimpeded exit in case of panic. The door fastened open, she would come back and have the fun of discovering for herself Elsie’s secret which was the mystery of the orchard house.

But Kate did not follow her impulse. Instead, she squared her shoulders, lifted her head a little defiantly, and pushed back that last door. She stepped in.

“Oh! Oh!” But it was not a shriek. It was just a soft “oh! oh!” of purest astonishment. For the room was occupied; but not by the ghost of her grandmother.