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.