But the great-grandfather’s cloak was of a dark green color, and not well brushed. It had a high, majestic velvet collar, hooked with a heavy steel clasp and chain; but for all its respectable and kindly associations, it looked, hanging from the garret rafters, just as much a gallows-bird as any of its ruffian company.
The children could not forgive their great-grandfather for having had such a sinister-looking garment, or for leaving it behind him to hang in the grim old garret and frighten them. Solemn as the garret looked, no doubt this was one of its jokes: to dress itself up in shadows and pretend things to tease the children, as we have known some real persons to do. It certainly was not fair, when they were up there all alone.
The scuttle in the roof was shut, in winter, to keep out the snow. A long ladder led up to it from the middle garret, and close to this ladder stood another uncanny-looking object—the bath-closet.
The family had always been inveterate bathers, but surely this shower bath must have capped the climax of its cold-water experiments.
It was contrived so that a pail of water, carried up by the scuttle ladder and emptied into a tilting vessel on top of the closet, could be made to descend on a sudden in a deluge of large drops upon the head of the person inside. There was no escape for that person; the closet gave him but just room to stand up under the infliction, and once the pail was tilted, the water was bound to come.
The children thought of this machine with shivering and dread. They had heard it said—perhaps in the kitchen—that their little grandmother had “nearly killed herself” in that shower bath, till the doctor forbade her to use it any more.
Its walls were screens of white cotton cloth, showing a mysterious opaque glimmer against the light, also the shadowy outlines of some objects within which the children could not account for. The narrow screen door was always shut, and no child ever dreamed of opening it or of meddling with the secrets of that pale closet. It was enough to have to pass it on lonesome errands, looming like a “sheeted ghost” in the garret’s perpetual twilight.
The garret, like some of the great foreign churches, had a climate of its own; still and dry, but subject to extremes of heat and cold. In summer it was the tropics, in winter the frozen pole.
But it had its milder moods also,—when it was neither hot nor cold, nor light nor dark; when it beamed in mellow half-tones upon its youthful visitors, left off its ugly frightening tricks, told them “once upon a time” stories, and even showed them all its old family keepsakes.
These pleasant times occurred about twice every year, at the spring and fall house-cleaning, when the women with brooms and dust-pans invaded the garret and made a cheerful bustle in that deserted place.