Five nights at the Five Pines

by Harriet A. Gaul

“Yes, wait. There is only one train, Jasper. Take it. Write out an answer for the boy. I’ll get you started.”

There it was. I had to force Jasper to answer this urgent summons, had to pack his bag and hurry him off and appear glad to see him go, when all the time I was furious with the fate that took him and the power there was in material circumstances to keep us separated. Once in a year or so comes a glad day to each of us when he can control destiny, when the thing that he has set his heart on doing is accomplished between sunrise and sunset and his spiritual house is set in order, as it habitually pretends to be. This was not one of the days.

After he had gone I set myself to finding out what was the matter with the headboard. I went up to the little bedroom over the kitchen, where we had spent the night, and prepared to move the furniture. There never was a house in which one tenant can follow another without changing every stick in it, and I had a particularly urgent reason for beginning on the bed.

Subconsciously, perhaps, I was looking for it; at least, I was not surprised when I found it. Behind the headboard was another door.

This door was little and low, and had a hand-made brass latch that sprang open when I tried it. Stooping down, I found myself in a long blind closet under the eaves, where the roof of the ell that made the big room behind the kitchen was fastened to the old house. We had not supposed there was a room above the one below, which was the one that the New Captain had added for his own uses, but now I began to see, coming out of the darkness, the outlines of another door in a second wall, from which one would draw the conclusion that it must open on an attic-chamber. I tried it, but the latch would not lift up; it was fastened on the inside.

I listened. There was no sound within. But suddenly there swept over me the remembrance of the night before. As vividly as if it were again occurring, I felt the pressure that had been thrown against my headboard, and I knew that it had been directed by some force struggling to get out of this room into mine. Overcome by horror, but with feet so fascinated by an uncanny attraction that they almost refused to carry me away, I crept out of the cubbyhole and fled down the stairs, out into the sunlight.

My first thought was of Ruth. If Ruth were only here! But in the six weeks that I had been in New York she had packed her trunks and gone. There was no use in asking sympathy of the Winkle-Man, or Alf, or any of those townsmen who had so generously, and so thoroughly, insisted on warning me not to move in. My troubles were most peculiarly my own. And Jasper had gone.

The thought of Jasper and the cold October sunshine revived my courage. Jasper would have laughed. I could see the way he would have opened the door and made copy of it for future use in fiction. It would mean a great deal to him, the little doorway under the eaves; he would be glad we had it. To his observation that none of the rooms were in their right places, he could now add the fact that there was one room which did not belong to the house at all. It would be depriving him of a pleasure for me to have the first delight of opening the door and discovering what lay beyond. I would save it until he came back—a day or two, at most—and we would lift up the latch together.

I walked around to the back of the house and looked up. Now I could see clearly how the roof of the captain’s wing had been built. It was quite high enough to admit of a loft beneath the ridge-pole and was lighted by a skylight. I noticed, too, while I was in the yard, the accumulation of cast-off lumber that filled the “under.” Everything that had been thrown out in the last fifty years had been left here, instead of being taken to the “town dump” on the sand-dunes. There were rungless chairs and stepless ladders, oil-stoves and a spinning-wheel, two rowboats and half a dozen mattresses. I determined to have them removed that day. There might be no cellar and no attic to the House of the Five Pines, but that was no reason why the family refuse should lie out in plain sight under the house.

A high two-wheeled cart was going down the back street, and in my innocence I thought that this would be just the thing to secure for hauling away the rubbish.