“They do,” replied Ruth, with her usual sympathy and few words.
We paused to rest a moment by the bay. The water sparkled happily, with none of the menace that shrouded the deep blue of the ocean which we had left on “the outside” beyond the dunes. Here were merry little white-caps, as innocent as the children who played upon the flats, and before us the fishing-boats, riding at anchor, had no more flavor of adventure than so many rocking-horses. The sunlight, mirrored from the bright waves, shone upon houses at the water’s edge with a glow that turned the glass of the windows into flame and burnished the brass knockers on the doors. The white paint glistened as if it had been varnished that very afternoon, and the green blinds and the red roses climbing on the cottages were raised in tone to the height of the color of ornaments on a Christmas-tree. The whole village had the aspect of a gaily painted toy. The dust of the road was rose-tinted. The leaves of the trees looked as if they had been scrubbed and polished, and the sails of the vessels on the bay were as white as the clouds that skipped across the bright blue sky.
It was the contrast between this radiant shimmer of sea and cloud, this flicker of sunshine and dazzle of window-pane, this green of the short trimmed grass and crimson of the flowers, that caused my amazement when I first saw the house that was to be mine. I was bewildered by its drab melancholy, and I would have turned away, had not an inner courage urged me on. For it seemed to me, that August afternoon, that I had come to a crossroads in my married life, and it was in the mood of a weary traveler approaching a wayside shrine that I turned through the hedge at last and beheld the House of the Five Pines.
CHAPTER II
MATTIE “CHARLES T. SMITH”
THE old mansion stood back from the road along the bay in a field of high, burnt grass. Drooping dahlias and faded old-fashioned pinks and poppies bordered the half-obscured flagstones which led to a fan-topped door. It was so long since the house had been painted that it had the appearance of having turned white with age, or something more, some terror that had struck it overnight. Wooden blinds, blanched by the salt wind to a dull peacock-blue, hung disjointedly from the great square-paned windows. A low roof sloped forward to the eaves of the first story, its austere expanse interrupted by a pointed gable above the kitchen. Beneath the dormer-window was a second closed and shuttered door.
At some period, already lost in obscurity, a wing had been thrust back into the neglected garden behind the house, and over its gray shingles stood the five pine-trees which we had seen from the sand-dunes. Old Captain Jeremiah Hawes had planted them for a wind-break, and during a century they had raised their gaunt necks, waiting to be guillotined by the winter storms. Faithfully trying to protect their trust from the ravages of wind-driven spray and stinging sand, they extended their tattered arms in sighing protest above the worn old house.
We went wonderingly up the flagging and knocked at the small door of the “porch.” There was no answer. We knocked again, staring, as is the way of strangers, to each side of us and endeavoring to peer through the green shutter. We had to jerk ourselves back and look quickly upward when the dormer-window over our heads went rattling up and an old woman craned her neck out.
“That’s Mattie,” whispered Ruth, “Mattie ‘Charles T. Smith’!”
Gray wisps of hair framed a face thin and brown as a stalk of seaweed, with sharp eyes, like those of a hungry cat, above a narrow mouth. The creature did not ask us what we wanted; she knew. Her perception was clairvoyant. Long experience in dealing with house-hunters made her understand what we had come for without the formality of any explanation. We brushed straight past the first half of what would ordinarily have been the procedure of conversation, and I came to the gist of what was uppermost in my mind and Mattie’s.
“Why won’t you let any one in?” I asked, bluntly.