Smiling to himself, Lindsay returned to the hall. “Oh, Lutetia, I should like to have seen you here!” he remarked wordlessly.
Behind the stairway, at the back, appeared another door. He opened it into darkness. Fumbling in his pocket, he produced a box of matches, lighted his way through the blackness; again opened windows and shutters. This proved to be the long back room so common in Colonial homes; running the entire width of the house. There were two fireplaces. One was small, with a Franklin stove. The other—Lindsay calculated that it would take six-foot logs. Four well-grown children, shoulder to shoulder, could have walked into it. This room was not entirely empty. In the center—by a miracle his stumbling progress had just avoided it—was a long table of the refectory type. Lindsay studied the position of the two fireplaces. He examined the ceiling. “You threw the whole lot of little rooms together to make this big room, Lutetia. You’re a lady quite of my own architectural taste. I, too, like a lot of space.”
He continued his explorations. From one side of the long living-room extended kitchen, laundry; servants’ rooms and servants’ dining-room; an endless maze of butteries, pantries, sheds. Lindsay gave them short shrift. At the other side, however, lay a little half-oval room, the first floor of that Victorian addition which he had marked from the outside.
“Oh, Lutetia, Lutetia, how could you, how could you?” he burst out at first glance. “To add this modern bit to that fine Colonial stateliness! Perhaps we’re not kindred souls after all.”
Hugging the wall of this room and leading to the second floor was a stairway so narrow that only one person could mount it at a time. Lindsay proved this to his own satisfaction by ascending it. It opened into a big back room of the main house, the one with the galleried piazza. Lindsay opened all the windows here; and then went rapidly from room to room, letting in the June sunshine.
They were all empty, of course—and yet, in a dozen plaintive ways—faded wall spaces, which showed the exact size of pictures, nails with carpet tufts still clinging to them, a forgotten window shade or two—they spoke eloquently of habitation. Indeed, the whole place had a friendly atmosphere, Lindsay reflected; there was none of the cold, dead connotation of most long-empty houses. This old place was spiritually warm, as though some reflection of a long-ago vivid life still hung among its shadows. From the dust, the stains, the cobwebs, it might have been vacant for a century. From the welcoming warmth of its quiet rooms, it might have been vacant but for a day.
Through the back windows, Lindsay looked down onto what must once have been a huge rectangle of lawn; and near the house, what must once have been an oval of flower garden. The lawn, stretching to a stone wall—beyond which towered a chaos of trees—was now knee-deep in timothy-grass; the garden had reverted to jungle. He studied the garden. Close to the house, an enormous syringa bush heaped into a mountain of fragrant snow. Near, a smoke-bush was just beginning to bubble into rounds of blood-scarlet gauze. Strangled rosebushes showed yellow or crimson. Afar an enormous patch of tiger lilies gave the effect of a bizarre, orchidous tropical group. The rest was an indiscriminate early-summer tangle of sumac; elderberry; bayberry; silver birches; wild roses; daisies; buttercups; and what would later be Queen Anne’s lace and goldenrod. From a back corner window, it seemed to him that he caught a glint of water; but he could not recapture it from any other point of view. However, he lost all memory of this in a more affording discovery. For the front windows gave him the reason of the name, Blue Meadows. Across the road stretched a series of meadows, all bluish purple with blooming iris.
Lindsay contemplated this charming prospect for a long interval.
“And now, Lutetia,” he suddenly turned and addressed the empty rooms, “I want to find your room. Which of these six was it?”