The Little Fig-tree Stories

by Mary Hallock Foote

In the bottom drawer of the bureau was the “body” of grandmother’s wedding gown. The narrow skirt had served for something useful,—a cradle quilt, perhaps, for one of the babies. Jack could have put the tiny dress waist into one of his trousers’ pockets with less than their customary distention. It was a mere scrap of dove-colored silk, low necked, and laced in the back. Grandmother must have worn over her shoulders one of the embroidered India muslin capes that were turning yellow in that same drawer.

The dress sleeves were “leg o’ mutton,” but these, too, had been sacrificed in some impulse of mistaken economy.

There was the high shell comb, not carved, but a solid piece of shell which the children used to hold up to the light to see the colors glow like a church window. There were the little square-toed satin slippers, heelless, with flat laces that crossed over the instep; and there were the flesh-colored silk stockings and white embroidered wedding shawl.

Little grandmother must have been rather a gay Friend; she never wore the dress, as did her mother, who put on the “plain distinguishing cap” before she was forty. She dressed as one of the “world’s people,” but always plainly, with a little distance between herself and the latest fashion. She had a conscientious scorn of poor materials. Ordinary self-respect would have prevented her wearing an edge of lace that was not “real,” or a stuff that was not all wool, if wool it professed to be, or a print that would not “wash;” and her contempt for linen that was part cotton, for silk that was part linen, or velvet with a “cotton back,” was of a piece with her truthfulness and horror of pretense.

Among the frivolities in the lower drawer was a very dainty little nightcap, embroidered mull or some such frailness; the children used to tie it on over their short hair, framing the round cheeks of ten and twelve years old. It was the envelope for sundry odd pieces of lace, “old English thread,” and yellow Valenciennes, ripped from the necks and sleeves of little frocks long outgrown.

The children learned these patterns by heart; also the scrolls and garlands on certain broad collars and cuffs of needlework which always looked as if something might be made of them; but nothing was, although Jack’s mamma was conscious of a long felt want in doll’s petticoats, which those collars would have filled to ecstasy.

In that lower drawer were a few things belonging to grandmother’s mother, E. B. of gracious memory. There were her gauze neck-handkerchiefs, and her long-armed silk mitts which reported her a “finer woman” than any of her descendants of the third generation, since not a girl of them all could show an arm that would fill out these cast coverings handsomely from wrist to biceps.

And there was a bundle of her silk house shawls, done up in one of the E. B. towels, lovely in color and texture as the fair, full grandmotherly throat they once encircled. They were plain, self-fringed, of every shade of white that was not white.

There they lay and no one used them; and after a while it began to seem a waste to the little girls who had grown to be big girls. The lightest minded of them began to covet those sober vanities for their own adornment. Mother’s scruples were easily smiled away; so the old Quaker shawls came forth and took their part in the young life of the house—a gayer part, it would be safe to say, than was ever theirs upon the blessed shoulders of E. B. One or two of them were made into plaited waists to be worn with skirts and belts of the world’s fashion. And one soft cream-white shawl wrapped little Jack on his first journey in this world; and afterward on many journeys, much longer than that first one “from the blue room to the brown.”

No advertised perfumes were used in grandmother’s house, yet the things in the drawers had a faint sweet breath of their own. Especially it lingered about those belongings of her mother’s time—the odor of seclusion, of bygone cleanliness and household purity.