She opened a door with bottle-glass panels, real old bottle-glass worth its weight in minted silver, and shewed Phyl into a room.
“This is the nursery,” said she.
It was a large room with two windows, and the windows were barred to keep small people from tumbling into the garden. The place had the air of silence and secrecy that haunts rooms long closed and deserted. An old-fashioned paper shewing birds of Paradise covered the walls. A paper so old that Miss Pinckney remembered it when, as a child, she had come here to tea with the Mascarene children, so good that the dye of the gorgeous Paradise birds had scarcely faded.
A beam of morning sun struck across the room, a great solid, golden bar of light. Phyl, as she stood for a moment on the threshold, saw motes dancing in the bar of light; the air was close and almost stuffy owing to the windows being shut. A rocking-horse, much, much the worse for wear stood in one corner, he was piebald and the beam of light just failed to touch his brush-like tail. A Noah’s Ark of the good old pattern stood on the lid of a great chest under one of the windows, and in the centre of the room a heavy table of plain oak nicked by knives and stained with ink told its tale.
There were books in a little hanging book-case, books of the ‘forties’ and ‘fifties’: “Peter Parley,” “The Child’s Pilgrim’s Progress,” “The Dairy-Maid’s Daughter,” an odd volume of Harper’s Magazine containing an instalment of “Little Dorrit,” Caroline Chesebro’s “Children of Light,” and Samuel Irenæus Prime’s “Elizabeth Thornton or the Flower and Fruit of Female Piety, and other Sketches.” Miss Pinckney opened one of the windows to let in air; Phyl, who had said nothing, stood looking about her at the forsaken toys, the chairs, and the little three-legged stool most evidently once the property of some child.
All nurseries have a generic likeness. It seemed to her that she knew this room, from the beam of light with the motes dancing in it to the bird-patterned paper. Kilgobbin nursery was papered with a paper giving an endless repetition of one subject—a man driving a pig to market—with that exception, the two rooms were not unlike. Yet those birds were the haunting charm of this place, the things that most appealed to her, things that seemed the ghosts of old friends.
She came to the window and looked out through the bars. Across the garden of Vernons one caught a glimpse of other gardens, palmetto-tree tops, and away, beyond the battery, a hint of the blue harbour. Just the picture to fill an imaginative child’s mind with all sorts of pleasant fancies about the world, and Phyl, forgetting for a moment Miss Pinckney, herself, and the room in which she was, stood looking out, caught in a momentary day dream, just like a child in one of those reveries that are part of the fairy tale of childhood.
That touch of blue sea beyond the red roofs and green palmetto fronds gave her mind wings for a moment and a world to fly through. Not the world we live in, but the world worth living in. Old sailor-stories, old scraps of thought and dreams from nowhere pursued her, haunted her during that delightful and tantalising moment, and then she was herself again and Miss Pinckney was saying:
“It’s a pretty view and hasn’t changed since I was a child. Now, in N’York they’d have put up skyscrapers; Lord bless you, they’d have put them up at a loss so’s to seem energetic and spoil the view. That’s a N’Yorker in two words, happy so long as he’s energetic and spoiling views—” Then gazing dreamily towards the touch of blue sea. “Well, I guess the Lord made N’Yorkers same as he made you and me. His ways are inscrutable and past finding out; so’r the ways of some of his creatures.”
She turned from the window, and her eye fell on the great chest by the other window.