On each side of the door, as you entered from the porch, was a window, making the place very light and cheerful. This was the east side. On the south side was an open fireplace, with a bright, oak-wood fire burning in it, defended by a wire fender. Above it was a mantelpiece, adorned by a fine engraving of the Nativity in a plain, wooden frame, and flanked by two brass candlesticks. In the corner was a triangular cupboard with glass doors reaching from floor to ceiling, and filled with a collection of rare old china which would have been the envy and despair of a wealthy and fashionable collector; for one of Aunt Sukey’s grandfathers and two of her uncles and one of her brothers had been captains of East India merchantmen.
On the west side stood a high, old-fashioned chest of drawers, whose top was covered with a fair, white, linen cloth, and adorned by an old-time looking glass mounted on its own box of small dressing drawers. On each side of this glass were two round bandboxes of blue paper, containing two poke bonnets, as common then as now.
Finally, on the north side of the room, with its head against the wall, stood the pride of the chamber—a four-post, mahogany bedstead with white, dimity curtains, and with a full, high, feather bed and bolsters and pillows heaped up, and covered—the bed with a homemade, blue-and-white counterpane, and the bolster and pillows by cases of homespun white linen.
All along the walls of the room, between every piece of furniture, stood plain, chip-bottom pine chairs. In the middle of the room, as being in constant use, was a chip-bottom rocker and a child’s low chair of the same material. A large spinning wheel stood in the corner between the window and the fireplace, and before it stood a negro girl, spinning. This was Miss Sukey’s own maid, Henny.
Miss Susannah Grandiere did not live in her own house, although she was a woman of ample means and might have done so. She divided her time about equally between the two farmhouses—Grove Hill, the home of her married sister, Mrs. William Elk, where she was staying at present; and Oldfield, the home of her married brother, Thomas Grandiere, and also of their widowed sister, Mrs. Dorothy Hedge, to which she had just been invited.
These two places were always familiarly referred to by their respective owners as “Up in the Forest” and “Down on the Bay”—Grove Hill being “Up in the Forest,” and Oldfield “Down on the Bay.”
In both these farmhouses there was a room set apart and known as “Aunt Sukey’s room,” and her treasures, her Lares and Penates, were about equally divided between them.
These rooms, however, when unoccupied, were at the disposal of any visitor who might be staying at either house during the absence of Miss Grandiere.
But whether Aunt Sukey sojourned at Oldfield or at Grove Hill, her quaint, little orphan niece, Rosemary, was always her inseparable companion—an arrangement that was not displeasing to the widowed mother, who said in her heart:
“If anything should happen to me, Sukey will take care of Rosemary.” Or, “If Sukey should never marry, Rosemary will be her heiress.”