The upstairs hall, like the one below, was large and dim, and while we crossed it, my companion called my attention to a loosened board or two in the floor. “The rats are bad,” she observed. “I hope they won’t bother you. They make a good deal of noise at night.” And then almost immediately: “I don’t know how you’ll manage without a bathroom, but Mr. Blanton would never have water put in the house.”
As she spoke, she opened a door at the front and ushered me into an immense bedroom, which was hung in a last-century fashion with faded calico. So far as I could distinguish in the dim light, there was not so much as a touch of red in the room. The furniture was all of rich old mahogany, made in too heavy a style for the taste that has been formed on Chippendale or Sheraton, and much of it looked as if it were dropping to pieces for lack of proper care. There was a high-tester bed, hung with the dingy calico; there was an elaborately carved bureau, with a greenish mirror which reflected my features in a fog; and there was a huge screen, papered in a design of castles and peacocks, which concealed an old-fashioned washstand. Yes, it was primitive. The touch about the water belonged to the dark ages; and yet the place possessed, for me at least, an inexpressible charm.
When Mrs. Blanton had left me alone, after telling me that supper would be served in half an hour, I made a few hurried preparations, while I tried in vain to get a glimpse of myself in the mirror, where my reflection floated like a leaf in a lily pond. Then, stealing cautiously from the room and across the deserted hall, with its musty smell of old spices, I crept down the staircase and out of the open back door. Here that provocative fragrance, the aroma of vanished springs, seized me again; and running down the worn steps of the porch, I passed the bower of lilacs beside the whitewashed kitchen wall, and followed the flagged walk to the sunken garden.
At the end of the walk a primitive wooden stile, like an illustration in Mother Goose, led into the garden; and when I passed it, I found myself in a flowery space, which was surrounded by banks of honeysuckle instead of a wall. A few old fruit trees, now well past blooming, stood in the centre; and edging the grassy paths, there were all the shrubs with quaint-sounding names of which I had dreamed in my childhood—guelder rose, bridal wreath, mock orange, flowering quince, and caly-canthus. Over all there hung a mist which had floated up from the low ground by the river; and it seemed to me that this moisture released the scents of a hundred springs. Never until that moment had I known what the rapture of smell could be.
And the starry profusion of the narcissi! From bank to bank of honeysuckle the garden looked as if the Milky Way had fallen over it and been caught in the high grass.
Suddenly, in that enchanted silence, I heard the sound of a bell. In a house where there were no bathrooms, I surmised that bells were probably still rung for meals; and turning reluctantly, I started back to the stile. I had gone but a step or two when a light flashing through the windows of the house arrested my gaze; and the next instant, when I glanced round again, I saw the figure of the old negress, in her white apron and red turban, standing motionless under the boughs of a pear-tree. In the twilight I saw her eyes fixed upon me, as I had seen them at sunset, with a look of entreaty like the inarticulate appeal in the eyes of the dumb. While I returned her gaze I felt, as I had felt at our first meeting, that she was speaking to me in some inaudible language which I did not yet understand, that she bore a message to me which, sooner or later, she would find a way to deliver. What could she mean? Why had she sought out me, a stranger, when she appeared to avoid the family and even the servants? Quickening my steps, I hastened toward her with a question on my lips; but before I reached her the bell rang again with a chiming sound, and when I withdrew my eyes from the old woman’s face, I noticed that the little boy was running down the flagged walk to the stile. Bitterly I regretted the moment’s inadvertence, for when I looked back, the negress had slipped beyond some of the flowering shrubs, and the garden appeared to be deserted. Well, next time I would be more careful, I resolved. And with this resolution in my mind, I hurried to meet Pell at the stile.
“She says you must come to supper,” began the boy as soon as I came within reach of his voice. It was the first time I had heard him allude to his stepmother, and never, during the week I spent at Whispering Leaves, did he speak of her, in my presence, by any more intimate name.
I held out my arms, and he came to me shyly but trustingly. Though I could see that he was a nervous and sensitive child, the victim, I fancied, of an excitable imagination, I felt that it would not be difficult to win his confidence, if only one started about it in the right way. For the first time in my life I was drawn to a child, and I knew that the boy returned my liking in spite of his reserved manner.
“It is so beautiful I hate to go in,” I said, with my arm about him.
“I wish I could never go in,” he answered, turning back to the garden. “It is so lonely inside the house.”