Five nights at the Five Pines

by Harriet A. Gaul

Jasper threw his electric flash on the white paneling of a narrow hall, with stairs running up between the walls. As he did so, something rushed past us through the entry and out into the dark.

I shrank back against the wall and pointed after it. A starving “miau” came floating back. It was a cat that had been shut up in the House of the Five Pines ever since Mattie’s death.

We laughed, remembering how, in his will, the New Captain had desired to found a home for stray animals, but we were both a little shaken. We lit all the lamps that we could find and, with the aid of their bright circle, looked into the shadows to discover what we could about the house that we had purchased without entering. Never having been inside the door, it would have been a just rebuke to our ignorance if we had been badly disappointed. But fate had been capriciously kind. The bargain was better than we had dared to dream.

Each room was large and high, with white woodwork and panels beneath the square-paned windows, and the furniture was of the period of the house, a hundred years old, much of it mahogany. We would have to wait until morning to justify an impression of it. The household belongings were all just as Mattie had left them—curtains and rugs, dishes and kitchen-utensils, even food. I knew that I would never eat any of the food.

Some of the rooms were in the sort of disorder that comes through disuse, but the kitchen looked as if Mattie had lived there, and gave us an uncomfortable sense of intruding. Nothing remained of her now in the house where she had spent so many years but her feeling that she ought to continue there, and that permeated the place like a live presence, a protest in every room. She seemed not only at war with us, but in a surer and more subtle way fighting against some other presence, also unseen, but strongly felt. It made us aware that we had allied ourselves with her enemy and that the captain gloated over our arrival. I could not pretend to understand this antagonism, because I knew that they were held to have been lovers, but I felt that it was antecedent to his death and to his will—to be, in fact, the cause of that cryptic document. I began to fear that the peace which we had come so far to find was not waiting us. We would have to introduce that note ourselves into the symphony of the House of the Five Pines.

Jasper was thinking of architecture.

“Have you noticed,” he asked, “that none of the rooms are in their right places?”

I saw what he meant. The kitchen was to the right of the hall, in the part of the house called the “porch,” and behind it had been built the “captain’s wing,” which was simply a large living-room, one story high, hardly pretentious enough to have caused so much jealousy. To the left of the hall, the front room was a bedroom, the same room, doubtless, from which the bedridden “Old Mis’ Hawes” used to shout at passers-by on the street. Behind the bedroom was the dining-room, evidently seldom used, for it had no access to the kitchen except through the front hall. Upstairs the rooms in the main part of the house were divided as if a child had laid them out with blocks, each one leading into the next. To the right of the stairs was the room over the kitchen, with its dormer-window facing the sea, the very window from which Mattie had leaned on the only occasion that I had ever seen her. This room was habitable, and here we decided to spend the night.

“Nothing can keep me awake,” yawned Jasper, and we both thought of Alf’s pessimism when we had left him at the Sailor’s Rest.

I was sorry that what my husband said would undoubtedly be true. I have always found that in the more elusive moments of life the male partner escapes much responsibility and untold anxiety by simply being asleep.