Ringing the dinner bell out of the back door, the sign to Larsen that he was wanted, Miss Keith began by taking the decorated “fireboard” from before the wide fireplace, and brushing up the fragments of swallow’s nests that had fallen down since the regular autumn clearing. Going to a deep closet under the back stairs, she pulled out a large bundle wrapped in papers and cloth, which being unrolled gave forth a pair of long-necked andirons, with oval head-pieces and curiously curved legs, made of what was known in the old days as princess metal, a warm-hued alloy of copper and brass. Setting these in the fireplace, she directed Larsen, who now appeared in the carpet slippers without which he never dared come indoors, to bring in logs and lay a substantial fire with backlog, forestick, catstick, and kindling, such as would outlast a night, instead of the mere “splutter blaze that needs tending like a spoiled child,” as she called the modern wood fire.
Next she had the ornate and hideous black-walnut bed, a product of the “ugly sixties,” that she had long regarded as a patent of respectability, unscrewed, taken up garret, and put under the eaves, from which she unpacked the frame of a slender-limbed four-poster of mellow, unstained mahogany. The Wests had always been of plain farming stock, and had never possessed carved mahogany or beds of the famous pineapple pattern. Dull and lustreless as was the wood, she set the man to work with rags and a compound of beeswax, oil, and turpentine, of which she always kept a jar for brightening spotted furniture. Meanwhile she untied a bundle shaped like a pillow, and carefully unfolded curtains, valance, and tester of dimity, finished with a cross-stitch border, mended carefully here and there, and yellow with age.
Looking at the clock, which had not yet struck ten, she turned the fabric over carefully, evidently weighing something in her mind, the while saying aloud, “Yes, I’ll simply scald them, and iron them out with a bit of starch. To bleach them would take weeks, and besides this old dimity will never stand the strain.”
While the irons were heating she returned to her reconstructive attempt. The canvas bottom was laced firmly to the bed frame, the bedding adjusted with mathematical precision, and finished with a cheerful patchwork quilt from one of the attic chests. From the floor of her own room she dragged a great rug made of rags in the herring-bone pattern, and spread it over the somewhat faded parlour carpet, which it concealed, all but a narrow border. A work-stand, with fat stomach and many little drawers, and an old chintz-covered English arm-chair, with high back and head-rest flaps at the top, were also brought to light and put in place, while the haircloth parlour set, in its flowered outer covering, suggestive of a gay domino worn over ministerial clothes, was distributed in living room and hall, the long sofa being obliged to seek refuge under the plant window in the angle of the kitchen itself.
Twelve o’clock saw the bed draperies ironed and fastened in place, the yellow hue of the dimity harmonizing with the painted woodwork and blending with the wall paper of a cheerful nosegay pattern that Brooke had chosen several years before, much to Miss Keith’s disappointment, as at the time embossed papers with effects of gold, silver, and copper were much in vogue in Gilead.
Still not quite satisfied, Miss Keith swept into her apron all the accumulations of little meaningless nothings that covered table and mantel-shelf. Seeking for something with which to replace them, she gathered half a dozen books from the old desk case in the living room, and set a pair of iron candlesticks as sentinels on the corners of the mantel-shelf, to guard a row of polished shells of various sorts.
Raising the flap of the table near the west window, that coming between two closets formed a small bay, Miss Keith placed half a dozen geraniums upon it, that were rather overcrowding the plant window in the kitchen. Satisfied with that quarter of the room, she was haunted by the partial recollection of some bit of furniture that had once filled in the angle between chimney and door leading to the back stairs, yet refused to become definite. But presently the veil lifted, and going to the attic for the twentieth time that morning, she returned followed by a bumping sound, one bump for each stair of the two flights, twenty-six in all, and presently the light of the fire that had kindled slowly cast sidewise glances at a mahogany cradle, from under whose hood three generations of little Wests had first gazed out into life.
With a sigh of content Miss Keith folded her arms, searched every nook in the room with eyes into which there crept a moisture, born neither of nervousness nor of grief, but of an emotion in which race instinct and true womanliness of heart were blended, and as, the circle of the room being rounded, she looked beyond into the square hallway, her eyes stopped, as if asking for courage, upon the face of the tall clock, above which a full-rigged brig had been sailing for more than a hundred years toward the harbour it never reached. At the same moment it struck the six strokes of the three-quarter hour, and the words it said sounded like “Well done! well done! well done!”
In January, though the days have begun to lengthen minute by minute, dusk begins to weave its shadows soon after four o’clock, and this fabric was blending hill and river in its impenetrable gray when Miss Keith’s keen eyes, now strained with watching, saw a man on horseback coming up the second hill, while farther down, turning from the cut that connected the upper and lower roads, two vehicles could be seen moving slowly, the rockaway being in the lead, but as to their occupants, nothing was discernible.