is! Oh, Barbara, look! Queen Anne!"
Portia and Julian wondered if their mothers had gone mad.
"Are they talking about all those old bureaus and things?" Foster
demanded; he could see that they were, and he was disgusted. Downstairs
the house was a regular furniture store, it was so full of tables and
sofas and chairs and desks; and now here was all this excitement about
still _more_ furniture. He could not understand it.
Mr. Caduggan attempted to explain. "Well, see, the furniture up here is
real old; what they call antique, see. It's like two hundred years old,
give a little take a little, and what's more it was made when folks
knew how to _make_ furniture. My dad was a cabinetmaker, and his dad
before him. I learned about good furniture from them. Look at this,
for instance; this is real fine work: satinwood inlay. My, my, look at
that work."
Portia could see that the pieces were beautifully made, beautifully
ornamented with carved shapes of shells, urns, even of flames. But
Julian inclined toward Foster's view.
"Still it's only furniture," was his judgment. "If it was gold or
jewels or Greek statues, or something, I could understand it. But just
a lot of old furniture when you've _got_ a lot of old furniture--I
don't see why it's so great."
"Look, my young realist," Mrs. Blake said. "Regard it in this light.
The tall cabinet over there, with the urn-shaped finials is called a
highboy. Aside from its beauty, it is extremely valuable. If I can ever
bear to part with it, it will not only pay the bill for all the new
copper piping this house must have, it will probably pay for the entire
electric system as well. And that is only _one_ among these priceless
things...."
"Wow!" Julian conceded.
"And of course I will have to part with some of them," his aunt
continued. "As you know, the Blake family is far from rich. What
Mr. Caduggan has discovered is not only a treasure-trove; it is a
lifesaver!"
The children looked at the furniture with new respect after that,
though it was impossible for them to take great interest in it.
Enthusiasm concerning furniture is something that belongs to grownups.
Mrs. Blake and Aunt Hilda were in a trance of joy, prowling about among
the pieces, opening little doors and drawers, exclaiming with wonder
and delight. No less engrossed and pleased was Popeye, lured hither
and thither by a stimulating age-old smell of mouse. He snuffled,
scuffled, whined, and scratched, thoroughly contented.
Foster pushed his way between objects to the dormer window. From this
he could look down with a new eye at "The Property"--leafless bushes,
ragged loop of drive, brown slopes studded with crocuses. Eli Scaynes
rounded the corner trundling a wheelbarrow full of sticks and twigs. He
looked very small, and so did Julian's dog, Othello, sniffing about in
the orchard. Neither knew that anyone was watching him, and that made
each of them look lonesome.
"Come on, Dave; let's go outdoors," said Foster, and the two of them
went pounding down the stairs.
"But why do you suppose Mrs. Brace-Gideon kept all those marvels in the
attic?" Mrs. Blake wondered.
"Well, judging from the way she furnished her house, these simply
weren't to her taste," Aunt Hilda said. "Not fashionable enough,
probably."
Besides the furniture, this part of the attic was crowded with a great
collection of bedroom crockery, pitchers, basins, bowls of all sizes
and shapes; boxes piled on boxes, and trunks on trunks; there was
another dressmaker's dummy, rather stouter than Baron Bloodshed; there
was an agitated-looking sewing machine, an agitated-looking typewriter,
both rusty; and a large, elaborate bird cage that must once have housed
a parrot.
"Things and things to look at and discover, all summer long," Portia
gloated. "Now where does this door go, I wonder?"
"Well, let's find out."
The door was at the end of the attic storeroom. Julian turned the
handle and gave a shove; for a wonder it yielded easily.
Opening off a narrow corridor were six small rooms, three to a side,
each with an iron bedstead, a washstand, a small looking glass, and a
mousetrap. The little rooms smelled musty and dry, the wallpaper was
stained, and fallen plaster lay on the floors. Portia found a broken
rosary in one room, and on the wall of another there was a tacked-up
faded postal card, showing the picture of a lighthouse. It looked very
forlorn.
"I guess this is where she kept her servants," Julian said.
"In these horrid little rooms?" Portia was shocked. "Why, they're like
the rooms in a jail!"
But then she remembered the tale of how Mrs. Brace-Gideon had been in
the habit of acquiring two kittens for pets each summer, and then when
it was time to return to the city, she would take them to the vet's and
have them chloroformed (until Baby-Belle Tuckertown had outwitted her).
"I think Mrs. Brace-Gideon was a--was a--what's that word that means
you do whatever you want no matter who doesn't want you to?" Portia
demanded.
"Ruthless?"
"Yes. I think she must have been a _ruthless, ruthless_ lady!"
"Aunt Minnehaha says she wasn't so bad," Julian said. "Just too rich to
understand much. Anyway, lots of people treated their servants that way
in those days."
Portia looked at the narrow corridor, at the narrow, neglected rooms.
They made her feel dreary, as though other people's dreariness still
lingered there.
"Well, I know _one_ thing," she said. "Someday, I'm going to fix these
rooms up so they'll look cheerful."
* * * * *
That afternoon Portia and Julian were dispatched to Gone-Away to invite
Mrs. Cheever for a cup of tea.
"If anyone knows why those beautiful things are stuck away in the
attic, she will," said Mrs. Blake.
And it was true. After they had escorted Mrs. Cheever back and after
she had cautiously mounted the attic stairs and done her share of
grown-up furniture-worshiping, they all returned to the drawing room
for tea poured out of a Thermos bottle, and she told them what she
remembered.
"It all comes back to me, now," Mrs. Cheever said, holding her teacup
daintily and watching its fragrant steam. "Yes, yes, indeed it does.
Mrs. Brace-Gideon had two houses, you know: this one for summertime,
and another still grander--oh, very grand, a mansion!--in Pittsburgh.
Shortly before she died, she sold the Pittsburgh house with the
intention of removing to California for the winters. (That is how she
happened to be in San Francisco at the time of the earthquake.) And it
seems to me--yes, I do recollect--that she sold the house furnished,
except for some very old pieces in the attic. They were not to her
taste at all, oh, not at all, but they had been in the family for
generations, so out of sentiment she kept them...."
"Thank fortune," said Mrs. Blake.
"Thank fortune," agreed Mrs. Cheever. "Family sentiment, yes, of
course, but no doubt her shrewd eye for value played a part, too.... So
she stored them here (temporarily, she thought).... Now as I recall,
the American pieces, the Duncan Phyfe and so on, had belonged to her
grandmother--I _think_ it was her grandmother--but I _know_ that all
the rest had been brought in a sailing vessel clear around the Horn by
her great-grandfather, a Captain Deuteronomy Dadware. I remember his
name because how could one possibly forget it?"
Mrs. Cheever sipped her tea delicately. She was wearing a crimson wool
dress, a high lace collar, and many long chains of beads. The bow that
always sailed on top of her crimped white hair was the same color as
her dress. The walk in the March wind and now the hot tea had caused a
wintry pinkness to come into her cheeks. She looked very nice, Portia
and Julian thought. They were sitting cross-legged on the floor,
drinking their own tea and eating whatever was available.
"Aunt Minnehaha, was Mrs. Brace-Gideon what you would call a ruthless
woman?" Portia asked.
"In certain ways she was, yes, indeed she was," replied Mrs. Cheever
decisively. "She was very determined. She not only wanted to have her
own way; she simply _had_ to _have_ her own way, and because of her
strong will and her great wealth she very often got it. Nature, weather
particularly, was a severe trial to her because it simply would not
comply or submit. When we had bad spells of rain or cold, my father
said it must be harder on Mrs. Brace-Gideon than anybody because she
couldn't do a thing about it. She couldn't write to the management or
to the _New York Times_. She couldn't fire anybody or bribe anybody.
She, with all her money, had to live through bad weather just like the
beggar in his hut.
"_But_," continued Mrs. Cheever, "she was just when she saw that
justice was required, and she was very brave.
"One day, one of her maids, Nelly, fell off the end of a Gone-Away
dock--I forget how--into deep water. She couldn't swim a stroke and was
beginning to gulp and go under, but Mrs. Brace-Gideon stood on the end
of the dock and shouted: 'Nelly, I forbid you to drown! I forbid it!
You wait right there!'
"And do you know Nelly didn't drown because she didn't dare to;
she managed to keep her head above water somehow until Mrs.
Brace-Gideon--_who couldn't swim a stroke either, mind you!_--jumped
right into the lake wearing her hat and holding her parasol, in all
her heavy clothes and her heavy corsets and her heavy jewelry! It's a
wonder she ever came up again, but she did, thank fortune, and clinging
to a piling, she reached out her parasol so that Nelly, poor creature,
could grasp it and be towed in. Then Mrs. Brace-Gideon, holding on to
Nelly with one arm and the piling with the other, began calling for
help in the loud, strong operatic voice she had, and everybody heard
her and came running. My father said he never forgot Mrs. Brace-Gideon
being hoisted out of the lake still wearing her big wide picture hat.
In those days, of course, ladies' hats were always skewered on with
hatpins."
"I wish I'd seen her," Julian said.
"What other brave things did she do?" Portia wanted to know.
"Well, one night--haven't I told you this? But no, I'm sure I
haven't--one night, when she couldn't sleep, she became aware of a
sound downstairs, a very small but suspicious sound. It was late--oh,
I think two or three o'clock!--so she got up, put on one of the
magnificent dressing-gowns she had, and tiptoed out to listen.... Well,
sure enough, she heard the sound again, whatever it was like, a sort of
careful clinking or chinking, I imagine, and she was convinced it was a
robber!
"So she crept down the stairs. _Crept!_ For such a commanding woman,
she could be very quiet when she needed to.... A light was coming
faintly from the drawing room--this very room (or so she said)....
At the foot of the stairs she picked up that cast-iron pug-dog
doorstop--you know the one?"
"_I_ do," Julian said feelingly. "I tripped over it and fell down,
hard, the first time I ever came exploring in this house!"
"Then you know how solid it is. So Mrs. Brace-Gideon tiptoed to the
drawing-room door and peeked in, and _there_, _yes_, there _was_ a
man--a _burglar_--kneeling on the floor, with a dark lantern beside him
and a pistol in one hand! And the door of the safe was open before him!"
"A safe? You mean it? In this very room?" Julian's eyes were shooting
sparks.
"Well, that's what she told _us_, Julian. But you must remember that
Mrs. Brace-Gideon was not what one would call a trusting person; no,
she was not. So the safe may very well have been concealed in some
other room. However, the rest of the story is absolutely true. Every
bit of it."
"So she saw this burglar...." Portia prompted breathlessly.
"So she saw him. She was a large woman, as you know: imposing. And
I am sure that outrage must have made her twice as large, twice as
imposing!... Well, she stepped quietly up to this creature, this
burglar, and she said: '_Halt!_ I command you to _halt_!' Oh, she had
an imperious voice! It could be terrible when she was giving orders....
"The poor burglar was so startled that he dropped the pistol, and Mrs.
Brace-Gideon, with great presence of mind, moved in and put her foot on
it firmly, and then she hit him on the head with the cast-iron pug-dog!
Well, over he went, just plain keeled over on the floor, entirely
unconscious. And while he _was_ unconscious, she went to the windows,
ripped off the portiere cords, and bound him up with them, trussed him
up tight like a good rolled roast, and when that was done--and the
safe closed up again, I'll be bound--she began ringing bells for the
servants as hard as she could. The coachman was sent for the constable;
the burglar, still unconscious, was carried off to jail; and then, only
_then_, Mrs. Brace-Gideon crossed her ankles gracefully and permitted
herself to faint on the divan of the Turkish cozy corner!"
"Goodness!" said Mrs. Blake.
"I'm glad this house isn't haunted," Aunt Hilda declared. "I think
Mrs. Brace-Gideon might have made a very dominating ghost."
Julian stood up, putting his cup and saucer on the tray.
"I'm just wondering about that safe, though," he said. "I mean maybe
it's still here, somewhere. Would you mind if I sort of investigated,
Aunt Barbara?"
"Do! By all means," said Mrs. Blake.
So from that moment, until it was time to escort Mrs. Cheever back
to Gone-Away, Portia and Julian prowled and crouched about the room,
tapping at the walls and wainscoting, testing the floor boards, feeling
around picture frames for concealed catches--"because it just might be
behind a picture door, like the sheep-lady door," Julian said.
But their search was to no avail.
"Never mind," said Mrs. Cheever, as they walked back through the windy
dusk. "Just as I told you, Mrs. Brace-Gideon was not a trustful person.
No, she was not. I am certain she would never have told anybody where
the safe truly was; or if she had to tell them truly at the time, she
would then have moved it elsewhere. You may still find it, children,
but I doubt there'll be a penny in it."
"It's just that it's fun to look," Julian explained. "It's fun to think
about."
"Oh, I _wish_ I didn't have to go back to the horrible, loathsome,
disgusting old city!" Portia groaned.
"Never mind," Mrs. Cheever said again. "Think of how beautiful it
will be when you come back: all the reeds of Gone-Away tipping and
swishing, and the redwings calling, and the bullfrogs grumping, and the
roses just--Oh, I declare I can hardly wait for it myself! No matter
how old a person gets, he's never old in spring!"
* * * * *
Only three of them: Foster and Portia and Mr. Blake took the train from
Creston the next morning. Mrs. Blake would have to stay behind for
several weeks until the house was in more livable shape.
Portia and Foster would miss their mother, of course, but they knew
they wouldn't fare too badly. Mrs. Bryant would clean the house each
morning. Mr. Blake knew how to cook steaks, chops, hamburgers, and hot
dogs. He could also bake a potato. Portia knew how to cook pancakes and
fudge. Foster knew how to make chocolate milk. As for Gulliver, his
food came out of a can.
"So we'll be all right, we'll be fine," Mr. Blake assured his wife.
"Of course you will, I know you will," she said. "But, Paul darling, do
see that Foster really _brushes_ his teeth, not just strokes them. And
do watch him with the catsup. If you let him, he'd pour it on his food
the way Vesuvius poured lava on Pompeii. I don't see how he knows what
he's eating. And then about Portia--"
But fortunately for Portia, the train arrived at that moment.
From its windows, after only ten days, the country they traveled
through already seemed less the property of winter. All the snow
patches were gone, and the trees, especially the willows, showed a
color of life in their twigs.
"It won't really be very long before we come back," Portia said, to
comfort both herself and Foster. "It only seems long."
"That's just the same as being," Foster said.
7
_Another Beginning_
But at last it was June. At last school was over and summer, huge as an
ocean, lay before them.
"September is forever away!" sang Portia, sitting on her suitcase to
shut it. "Forever and ever and ever away!"
This time when they returned to the country, Gulliver went with them
because they drove there. They drove in their own brand-new car:
"Bought," as Mrs. Blake explained to Julian later, "by courtesy of the
Sheraton octagonal drum table." She sighed when she said it: she had
hated parting with the drum table. "But if we're going to have a house
in the country miles from any town, we must have a car."
"And that's the only way we could afford it," Portia added, "because of
buying the house and fixing it up and all."
They made the journey on a wonderful day: June at its most fragrant
and expansive. Foster, to the relief of all, seemed to have outgrown
his car sickness; and Gulliver, about whom there had been some doubt,
proved to be a courteous passenger, neither trampling nor barking.
It was late afternoon when they turned in at the gates of the Villa
Caprice. The road and driveway had been partly reclaimed from the
woods, but were still far from smooth, the going was very jouncy.
Emerging, finally, from the shade of new-leafed trees, the Blakes were
surprised and charmed by what they saw. Eli Scaynes had made great
headway with "The Property." The grass had been cut, and large areas
of lawn were newly seeded. Bushes had been pruned, brush and brambles
cleared away.
"It still looks wild, but sort of _neatly_ wild," Portia said
approvingly.
And the house looked so different! The porch was gone; the vine had
been trimmed and the shutters painted. It was not beautiful, but it
looked respectable. And in spite of looking respectable, it looked
interesting.
"It's not a training school for witches any more, is it?" said Mr.
Blake.
"No." Foster agreed. "Now it's a people's house."
Mr. Blake took one hand from the wheel and put his arm around Mrs.
Blake's shoulders.
"Barbara, you've worked a miracle," he told her.
"Wait till you see the inside," said Mrs. Blake rather boastfully.
As they drove up to the house, the front door opened and down the broad
shallow steps that had replaced the porch came all the Jarmans: Uncle
Jake, Aunt Hilda, Julian, and their dogs, Katy and Othello, who had
come to welcome Gulliver.
There was a turmoil of barkings, greetings, and embracings. Foster,
grinning self-consciously at Julian, displayed the ingenuous gap where
his two front teeth had been. (For at last, at last they had come out!
A friend at school had recommended the biting of an apple, and this,
though painful for a moment, had done the trick.)
"Holy crow," said Julian, "you look just like an adder!" Then he
pretended to cower away. "Take cover, men, it is the Fang!" he warned.
Foster was pleased.
"But come in, come in! Welcome to your own house," Aunt Hilda said,
holding the big door open.
The first thing they saw was a great burst of peonies on the hall
table. Aunt Hilda had filled the house with flowers, and it did look
lovely, especially the drawing room, which was freshly painted, light,
clean, and airy despite the large and curious assortment of furniture.
The walls were white; the polished floor was the color of honey;
overhead the chandelier twinkled and tinkled, and through the windows
came a smell of lilies of the valley.
"I don't see why all these things go together so well," Uncle Jake
objected. "There's absolutely no reason why they should."
But they did. The graceful Chippendale highboy looked perfectly at home
with the boisterous red and gold piano. The curving Sheraton cabinet
seemed entirely suited to the gilded chairs, the bamboo curtain, and
the harp. The harp was so pretty that they had had to keep it, though
nobody, as yet, knew how to play it.
Above the mantel hung a portrait of Mrs. Brace-Gideon; a well-corseted
lady with a pink, opinionated face. She was sitting bolt-upright in a
chair, wearing an embroidered gown and holding a fan.
"And there she is going to stay," said Mrs. Blake. "Because in her way,
and though she could never know it, Mrs. Brace-Gideon has been a fairy
godmother to this family."
"Indeed she has," said Mr. Blake.
When Portia went upstairs to look at her own round room in the turret,
she screamed with delight.
"Mother, how did you _know_ I wanted pink?"
"All girls want pink," replied her mother sensibly.
Just under the curving open window a giant rhododendron had put out
hundreds of bouquets of flowers, delicately tinted: not quite white,
less definite than pink.
"How lucky that they should turn out to be that color instead of the
usual magenta," Mrs. Blake mused, sitting on the window seat and
leaning her arms on the sill. "How lucky, really, about everything."
"I know," Portia said, staring dreamily out over her mother's head at
the green lawn, the green orchard, the green woods beyond.
Their mood of quiet delight was shattered by a tremendous outburst of
rushing waters. It was Foster trying out the plumbing to see if it
would work.
"Hey, everybody, the plumbing's working!" he shouted, somewhat
unnecessarily. "Come on and see this cool bathroom!"
For some reason Portia had overlooked the bathroom up to now, and it
did turn out to be an interesting place: very large, with two high-up
diamond-shaped windows, a frieze of mildewed swans above the molding,
and many pictures on the wall of young ladies wearing pompadours,
shirtwaists, and long skirts, like Mrs. Cheever's.
The hand basin, made of Delft china, was patterned with blue
carnations. Swan-necked faucets drooped above it, and on each side
there was a broad slab of marble, veined and gray as Roquefort cheese.
Traces of ancient soap lay in an ancient dish; and, hung above the
basin, an oval mirror offered a green and speckled face to anyone who
looked in it.
The bathtub was immense, porcelain encased in solid mahogany. "Sort of
like a coffin," Foster said. He would enjoy a bath in this from time to
time, he thought. It was so huge, he might be able to swim a stroke or
two.
The chain by which he had recently released the uproar was attached to
a large tank high above the thronelike fixture, which stood nobly upon
its own gray marble slab.
"Yipes, it's the loudest one I ever heard," Foster said in awe, giving
the chain another pull and releasing another crashing avalanche of
sound.
"This is much better than a new-time bathroom," he shouted above the
tumult.
Curious, Portia opened the door of a cabinet hanging on the wall and
began to examine the bottles with dried-up medicines and lotions in
them: the round bronze-colored paper pillboxes containing petrified
pills. From time to time she read a label out loud.
"'Mrs. Baggett's Bunion Balm,'" she read, and then: "Dr. Cupthorn's
Efficacious Cough Deterrent, for the cure of coughs, colds, bronchitis,
asthma, influenza, wasting diseases, and scrofulous humours!' I wonder
what those are?"
"Scrofulous humours," Foster murmured dreamily, as he tried out
the bathtub faucets (very slow and trickly). "Scrofulous humours,
scrofulous humours."
"And listen to this: 'Princess Razzioli's Celebrated Elixir of Cucumber
and Milkweed, for the Preservation of Pulchritude and a Pearly
Complexion'!"
"Porsh, where are you?" came Julian's voice from the hall.
"In here reading medicines," Portia called in reply. "Come on in.
Mr. Ormond Horton hasn't got around to painting the bathroom yet, so
everything's just the way it was."
"Listen to this," Foster said, and gave the chain another pull. Julian
was suitably impressed; he said it sounded like a thunderstorm on the
Maine coast.
When the racket had subsided, giving way to a series of low mutterings
and garglings, Julian's face assumed a serious, intent expression. He
began to prowl about the room, stopping to lean against the wall and
listen as he rapped it with his knuckles.
"What in the world are you doing?" Portia demanded.
"Well, a safe could be hidden anywhere, couldn't it? Even in a
bathroom, couldn't it?"
Julian stooped to open the door of the cupboard beneath the hand basin.
Nothing in there but rusty cans of cleaning powder and some stubbed-off
scrub brushes.