I opened one of the drawers of the cherry bureau and discovered that it was full of the clothes of a little boy, of a period so long ago that I could not fathom the mystery of who he might have been. Tears came to my eyes as I unfolded the little ruffled shirts made by hand out of faded anchor-printed calico, and picked up the knitted stockings. This had been a real child; there were real holes in the stockings.
My theory that it was the captain who was living up here was exploded. Like a percussion-cap under a railroad train it had gone off when I blundered into the room. Nothing remained of it now but a wan smile and a sensation of relief. I only regretted that I had not broken open both doors behind my bed after the first night and rid my mind of the obsession at once. I walked across the room to the door at the far end and found it was not locked after all, only that the rusty latch was stuck. Forcing it up, I found myself, as I had expected, in the eaves closet, where the little door ahead of me led into Mattie’s room. I would have to go down the other way and move the bed in order to open it, but I felt assured that no one had been before me and escaped by retreating through here. I peered up and down the black length of the closet, whose floor was the adjacent edge of the roof of the old part of the house. Obviously no one was concealed. But from the rain that filtered in and the shaking of the attic beneath the storm, I felt that drafts alone might have caused the bending of the wall. Wind was sure to be playing tag at midnight in this space between two partitions, and a neurasthenic imagination could supply the rest.
I only wished that I had all those miserable hours back that I had wasted during the day, wrestling with the mystery. The best theory that I had evolved was that the New Captain had not died at all, but that Mattie, watching him during that legendary week, had managed to raise him out of his cataleptic sleep, and, although the townspeople thought he had been buried, she had kept his life a secret for the last five years. She could easily have hidden him in this unknown room. That would explain why she was so loath to show the house to any one. It would also explain why she refused to move out and why, in the end, she committed suicide rather than do so. Not daring to abandon him and have him discovered by the next occupant, an event which would end by their both being incarcerated in the same poor-house, she had done away with herself. The significance of this move would have been that Mattie was no longer dependent on the New Captain nor enchained to him by the spirit, as she was always reported to have been. Loving him, she would never have deserted him. But thinking of him in the rôle of a cataleptic old man, resuscitated after his second death, it was plausible to suppose that he would be so loathsome as to have worn out all her emotions, even faithfulness. He must have been no more than a crazy man, shut up in that loft, and love, though as strong as Mattie’s had been, cannot live forever on mere remembrance. So, according to my solution, she had at last forsaken him, after having provisioned him beforehand, as for a siege. It had been only the short length of a month after her drowning that we had moved in, and during that time no one else had been near the place. After my arrival, perhaps as before, he had lain quiet all day. By night he had prowled around trying to get out.
It was a grand theory—while it lasted. I did not analyse the flaws in it, now I had given it up. Another night did that!
However, so many things had been solved by my heroic journey into the unknown and the unknowable, and I was so interested in them, that I forgot the rest. Here was the crux of the building of the captain’s wing, the reason for not hiring workmen in the town, and why Mattie alone had helped to carry lumber and worked until she fell exhausted from her own roof. Without dwelling on the secret room that had become a nursery, considering that room in its original aspect as part of the passageway between Mattie’s room and the New Captain’s, here was cause enough for not wanting any outside help. Mrs. Dove had been wrong in her conclusion that because he had employed no village carpenters they had afterward boycotted him. He would never have given them the opportunity. Also, the architectural idiosyncrasies of that room were her excuse for not showing the house when the judge had tried to sell it. A person who would buy it as I had, without going inside the door, was an exception. There were not many whose need was so urgent; most house-shoppers would have poked behind her bed and pried into all the closets before the deal was closed.
Mattie had managed to keep this room hidden all her life. Alf, at the Sailor’s Rest, had told me squarely that there was no attic, and he knew as much as any one else in the town about the House of the Five Pines. Old Mis’ Hawes had died without knowing that after Mattie had plumped up her pillows and thrust the brass warming-pan into her bed, and taken her candle and gone upstairs, she was able to come down again and spend the evening with the New Captain. I would keep the secret, too, partly out of loyalty to Mattie, who had bequeathed it to me, and partly because it would be a lark to have it known only to my dear one. I could hear Jasper’s exclamation of pleased surprise when, some night after he had tucked me in, I appeared again through his study-closet. It would be a game for winter evenings.
I let myself down the steep steps behind the chimney and, going through the study and the kitchen, came up into Mattie’s room. Shoving the bed away from the little door in the eaves closet, I opened it and walked straight back into the attic-chamber. That was the way of it—a complete loop through the house!
Mattie’s room was to be mine for no other reason than its mysterious means of egress. If I had any servants or any visiting relatives, I would put them in the two big bedrooms on the other side of the upper hall and turn the hall bedroom into a bath-room. But if I ever had any babies, if we ever had, I knew where I would put them. There was a room next mine waiting for some child to play with the wall-eyed rocking-horse and sleep in the little turned bed. Dormer-windows could be cut on both sides and running water be brought up, and such a nursery would bloom beneath the old roof that the art magazines would send up representatives to take pictures of it. I could hardly restrain my impatience to begin to make it ready, although as yet there was no need for it. For the first time since we moved into the house I was happy and contented.
I was in the mood to write Jasper a long and intimate letter, telling him of my hopes for our life up here and how the House of the Five Pines was all ready for us. Of my hallucinations about the attic I said, “Nothing was locked in the room but my own fears.”