The Little Fig-tree Stories

by Mary Hallock Foote

The garret had kept a faithful family record, and hence it told of sickness and suffering as well as of pleasure and business and life and feasting.

A little old crutch, padded by some woman’s hand with an attempt to make it handsome as well as comfortable, stood against the chimney on the dark side next the eaves. It was short enough for a child of twelve to lean upon. It had seen considerable use, for the brown velvet pad was worn quite thin and gray. Had the little cripple ever walked again? With what feelings did the mother put that crutch away up-garret when it was needed no more? The garret did not say how that story of pain had ended; or whether it was long or short. The children never sought to know. It was one of the questions which they did not ask: they knew very little about pain themselves, and perhaps they did not fully enter into the meaning of that sad little relic.

Still less did they understand the reverence with which the house-cleaning women handled a certain bare wooden frame, neither handsome nor comfortable looking. It had been made to support an invalid in a sitting posture in bed; and the invalid for whom it was provided, in her last days, had suffered much from difficulty of breathing, and had passed many weary hours, sometimes whole nights, supported by this frame. It had for those who knew its use the sacredness of association with that long ordeal of pain, endured with perfect patience and watched over with constant love.

But these were memories which the little children could not share. When their prattling questions touched upon the sore places, the wounds in the family past, they were not answered, or were put aside till some more fitting occasion, or until they were old enough to listen with their hearts.

Under the eaves there was an old green chest whose contents, year after year, the children searched through in the never-failing hope that they should find something which had not been there the year before. There were old account-books with their stories of loss and gain which the children could not read. There were bundles of old letters which they were not allowed to examine. There were “ink-portraits,” family profiles in silhouette, which they thought very funny, especially in the matter of coat collars and “back hair.” There were schoolgirl prizes of fifty years ago; the schoolgirls had grown into grandmammas, and some were dead. There was old-fashioned art-work, paintings on velvet or satin; boxes covered with shells; needlebooks and samplers showing the most exemplary stitches in colors faded by time. There were handsomely bound volumes of “Extracts,” containing poems and long passages of elegant prose copied in pale-brown ink, in the proper penmanship of the time. And there was a roll of steel-plate engravings which had missed the honor of frames; and of these the children’s favorite picture was one called The Wife.

It is some time since I have seen that picture; I may be wrong about some of the details. But as I remember her, the wife was a long-necked lady with very large eyes, dressed in white, with large full sleeves and curls falling against her cheek. She held a feather hand-screen, and she was doing nothing but look beautiful and sweetly attentive to her husband, who was seated on the other side of the table and was reading aloud to her by the light of an old-fashioned astral lamp.

This, of course, was the ideal wife, so thought the little girls. Every other form of wifehood known to them was more or less made up of sewing and housework and everyday clothes. Even in the family past, it had the taint of the Dutch oven and the spinning-wheel and the candle moulds upon it. They looked at their finger-tips; no, it was not likely theirs would ever grow to be long and pointed like hers. The wife no one of them should ever be—only a wife perhaps, with the usual sewing-work, and not enough white dresses to afford to wear one every evening.

It took one day to clean the garret and another to put things away. Winter clothing had to be brushed and packed in the chests where it was kept; the clothes closet had to be cleaned; then its door was closed and locked. The last of the brooms and dust-pans beat a retreat, the stair door was shut, and the dust and the mystery began to gather as before.

But summer, though no foe to dust, was a great scatterer of the garret mysteries. Gay, lightsome summer peeped in at the half-moon window and smiled down from the scuttle in the roof. Warm weather had come, the sash that fitted the gable window was taken out permanently. Outdoor sounds and perfumes floated up. Athwart the sleeping sunbeams golden dust motes quivered, and bees from the garden sailed in and out on murmuring wing.

If a thunderstorm came up suddenly, then there was a fine race up two flights of stairs!—and whoever reached the scuttle ladder first had the first right to climb it, and to pull in the shutter that covered the scuttle hole. There was time, perhaps, for one breathless look down the long slope of bleached shingles,—at the tossing treetops, the meadow grass whipped white, the fountain’s jet of water bending like a flame and falling silent on the grass, the neighbor’s team hurrying homeward, and the dust rising along the steep upward grade of the village road.