Ruth looked at me in some surprise.
Mattie put up a long thin arm to keep the window from falling on her shoulders. “I dunno as I need to say,” she answered me, directly.
“What?” said Ruth. My friend, being complacent-minded, had not followed the argument so fast.
But Mattie did not repeat herself. She and I understood each other. She kept on gazing straight at me in that piercing way which I knew instinctively had driven many a purchaser from her inscrutable doorway.
“Will you let me in if I get a permit from the agent?” I insisted.
“That depends,” replied Mattie.
Her lean body withdrew from the frame of the upper gable, her eyes still holding mine, until her face gradually disappeared into the gloom of the room behind her. The last thing I saw were two veined hands gradually lowering the sash, and the last sound was a little click as it shut.
Ruth, having brought me to see the house, was murmuring words of apologetic responsibility. But I did not feel daunted.
“I think I will take it, anyway,” I said, “just for the view.”
From the doorstep of the House of the Five Pines we faced the bay across the road, where many little fishing-boats were anchored, and white sails, rounding the lighthouse-point, made a home-coming procession into Star Harbor. Remembering Mattie “Charles T. Smith” at her upper window, I wondered if she, too, saw the picture as I did and loved it the same way. But Mattie would have seen far more—not only what lay before us, but the ships that “used to be” and the wharf of old Captain Jeremiah Hawes, the piles of which were left on the beach now, like teeth of some buried sea-monster protruding from the sand. She would have counted the drying-frames hung with salt cod in pungent rows upon the bank of the shore lot, and she would have seen the burly fishermen themselves, who used to tramp back from the flats to the “Big House” for their breakfast. She had been a part of that former life which was gone, and now, like an old hull on the flats, she was waiting for that last great storm that was to sweep her out to sea. Sympathy for her made me almost wish to abandon my own project before it was begun, and yet it seemed to me that her life was almost over and that the House of the Five Pines needed the youth that we could bring it as much as we needed the shelter it could offer us. I brushed aside the thought of Mattie as if it were a cobweb that clung to my face in the woods.