FIVE NIGHTS AT THE
FIVE PINES

FIVE NIGHTS AT THE
FIVE PINES

BY
AVERY GAUL

NEW YORK
THE CENTURY CO.
1922

Copyright, 1922, by
The Century Co.
PRINTED IN U. S. A.

To
MARY FENOLLOSA

CONTENTS

FIVE NIGHTS AT THE
FIVE PINES

FIVE NIGHTS AT THE
FIVE PINES

CHAPTER I
THE HOUSE OF THE FIVE PINES

A SEA of yellow sand rose, wave on wave, around us. High hills, carved by the bitter salt winds into tawny breakers, reared towering heads, peak upon peak. Like combers that never burst into spray, their static curves remained suspended above us, their tops bent back upon the leeward side, menacing, but never engulfing, the deep pools of purple shadows that lay beneath them. The sand was mauve in the hollows, and black upon white were the cupped dunes hung over their own heights. They were like water that did not move, or mountains with no vegetation. They did not support as much life upon their surface as that which crawls upon the floor of the ocean. They were naked and unashamed as the day when they were tossed up out of the bed of the sea. Only tufts of sharp green grass clung to some of the slopes, their silhouettes flattened out before them like the pin-feathers of a young bird, inadequate and scant, accentuating the barrenness of the saffron sand.

Centuries ago some gigantic upheaval of Neptune had forced this long ridge out of the shielding water, to lie prone in the sight of the sun, like a prehistoric sea-monster forever drying its hide. More isolated than an island, the head of the cape, with the town in its jaws, fought the encroaching sea, which thundered upon it in constant endeavor to separate it from the tail, extending a hundred miles to the mainland. From the height on which we stood, the line of ocean far away was dark blue, following in a frothy scallop the indentations of the coast. The sound of the surf came to us like a repeated threat. It could bend the cape, but never break it, twist and turn it, change the currents and the sand-bars, and toss back upon its shore the wreckage of such vessels as men essayed to sail in, but the sand-dunes continued to bask blandly. Sometimes they shifted, but so silently and gradually that they seemed not so much to move as to vanish. To-day there would be a dune in the way of our path to the sea, so steep as to make a barrier, impossible to scale. To-morrow the force of the wind upon its surface, and the strength of the far-away tide which continually seeped its roots, would have leveled it. The very footsteps one followed, trying to trace a track across the waste, would have melted away.

On this desert each traveler must be his own guide and climb to some eminence which topped all others, to get his bearings from the strip of deep blue that marked the ocean’s rim. Nor could he say to himself, securely, “Here is east,” although he looked out on the Atlantic. Land played a trick upon the wayfarer who trusted it, and turned its back upon the sea, and curled up like a snail, so that the inside of the cape, where the town lay behind us in its green verdure, faced south, and the outside sea, where the sun set, curved west and north. The glory of light in the afternoon struck first upon the hills and was reflected back from the sheltered bay to the little fishing-village.

The path from the woods, by which you entered the dunes, lost itself to sight under the foliage of the scrub-oak trees, and unless you had tied a white rag to the last branch, marking the point where you climbed up out of the forest, you would never find it again. There were many foot-paths through the thicket which separated the hamlet on the inside of the horn from the immense dry sea-bed, but none of them were visible, once you had left them. By day you must mark the entrance to the desert of your own footsteps, by night it was useless to look for them.

This must have been the place, I thought, where Dorothy Bradford was lost. Brave as the Pilgrim Fathers were, they had not loitered here after dark to look for William’s young wife! They had conscientiously attended to their laundry work, on that first November day when the Mayflower landed, and, having finished their domestic duties, waited no longer for any scatterbrain of the party who had been foolish enough to venture from the fold, but weighed anchor without finding her and put off for Plymouth Rock!

As I looked about me at the profound grandeur of space, it seemed to me that I understood why Dorothy had not hurried back to the boat. She had embarked upon the Mayflower, a bride, strange to the ways of men and of marriage, and for sixty-three days the stern-faced Puritans had been her only companions and the rolling sea her entire horizon. Her quarters must have become a prison to her before the voyage was over. When at last this finger of land, reaching into the Atlantic, had beckoned to the mariners, her heart must have sung like a caged canary, even as mine responded when first I saw the cape. Did she linger with the other virtuous housewives at the first spring, to wash her husband’s dirty linen? Not she! I liked to think that in glad escape she ran from all those stuff gowns and starched kerchiefs, through the woods, chasing the scarlet-winged blackbirds on and on, picking the wintergreen berries and ravenously eating them, gathering her arms full of bright autumn leaves, feeding her hungry eyes on the vivid color of growing things and her starved soul, at last, upon the dunes. It was not the Indians who prevented Dorothy Bradford from returning to the ship; it was her own heart. If Indians saw her, they must have fallen on their red knees in the sand and worshiped her for a sprite of limitless space, running past them with gay branches clasped to her gray dress and a wreath of waxy bayberries on her fair young head. It was her wayward feet that forbade her from following further the fortunes of the Pilgrims. No doubt, from some high point on the dunes she watched them sail away, and laughed, taking off her shoes upon the sand and dancing, fleeing further. That is what I would have done. That is what I wanted to do now. Something starving in my heart found food here; a hardness that had been growing within me for two years dissolved, as my mind relaxed, and the troubles that had driven me here appeared insignificant. The tired spirit of hope that had been driven deeper and deeper down beneath the weight of disillusion began to bubble up. There might be a way of regaining the nice balance of life, after all, if one could weigh it every afternoon upon the sand-dunes!

Ruth and I were sitting on a pyramid, where we had brought a picnic lunch, and were watching her children play in the hollows.

“Do people get lost here nowadays?” I asked her.

“The natives never come here,” she answered; “at least, not for fun. They only follow the wagon-track to the coast-guard station on ‘the outside,’ and that is about all the summer people do. It is three miles across the soft sand to the sea, and most people get discouraged and turn back before they reach the further shore. But enough children and strangers have been lost here in recent years to scare away the others! The townspeople say the dunes are haunted, and that at night strange shapes flit across the sand, spirits of those who have never been found. They will not come near the white fields at moonlight, when they are wrapped in mystery. The landmarks are not permanent. Every storm changes them, just as it changes the shoals on ‘the outside.’ The sailors are more afraid of this neck of land than any one else. Do you see how far distant the big steamers keep?” She pointed out to me a thin line of smoke on the horizon. “Hundreds of ships have run aground off here in less than that many years. There are lighthouses at every point now, but the bed of the sea moves constantly. That is why they call this coast the ‘Graveyard of the Cape.’”

“Have there been any wrecks since you have lived here?”

Ruth’s eyes darkened. “A year ago a fleet of fishing-vessels were caught in a sudden tempest and half of them were lost. Eleven men were drowned, all from this town! Star Harbor raises her sons upon the sandy flats of the bay at her doorway, and when they grow old enough they sail away from her, and she knows that one day, sooner or later, they will fail to return. In the meantime the mothers do not bring their boys out here on the dunes to play, as we do our children from the cities. It is too much like dancing on their own graves! They try to forget the dunes are here, and walk up and down the front street of the village.”

“I do not want to forget them,” said I. “They mean something to me, Ruth, something that I have needed for a long time.”

Ruth smiled at me fondly, without replying. We had known each other for a long time.

“It is like the touch of a hand on the heart,” I tried to explain, “or like a song heard outside a window in the dark—or a flaming embroidery on a stucco wall.”

The sun shone down upon the tawny sand, illuminating the dunes with so blinding a radiance that description was futile. The effect of so much heat and light was soothing and restful, and at the same time stimulating. The body drank up enough electricity, through contact with the sand, to renew its youth and send the worn years reeling backward. The children were shouting and sliding down the inside of a crater below us, transposing their winter sports to the summertime, climbing up the opposite slope, only to shoot down again on the seats of their rompers, laughing and crawling up, and repeating the game, in ecstasy of abandonment.

“I would like to do that, too,” said I.

Ruth smiled. “You would get sand in your sneakers.”

“Sneakers!” I scoffed.

“And wear holes in your silk stockings.”

“Silk stockings! No one should wear stockings out here. They should run barefoot before the wind, and leap from peak to peak. It is absurd, in the face of this vast emptiness, to wear clothes at all!”

“So many people feel that way,” said Ruth, dryly.

But I refused to be rebuffed.

“We need it, Ruth,” I cried. “We, who are cooped up in cities, are starving for this very thing—space and sunlight, air and warmth. Not the suffocating heat of the area-ways, but the glow that glances off the sun-kissed sand. Our eyes are blind with gray pavements and white asphalt, stone and cement, nothing but colors as hard as the substance we tread on. We hunger for blue and for purple, for the sea and the seacoast shadows, for green that is brighter than burnt sod, and for living red and yellow. The craving for earth under our feet is still natural to us. It is what has made possible the barefoot cult of the people who choose to get up in the morning and run around in the dew, and the ‘back to all fours’ cult of those who put their hands down on the floor and prance like a trained bear. And the ‘stand on your head’ cult, who pick out a cushion which best suits their psychic soul and balance themselves with their feet in the air for hours at a time. Perhaps it is true that it is stimulating to the brain. But Ruth, joking aside, there must be a fundamental reason for all of this ‘simple life’ movement—the elemental need for relaxation, which is what this sort of exercise gives to the worn human machine. I am going to give up my apartment in New York and pitch a tent on the sand-dunes!”

Ruth laughed.

I thought that probably she would point out to me how impractical I was. But she did not. She seemed to be weighing the matter, taking me more seriously than I took myself. Ruth had a penetrating quality of sympathy with another’s trouble that made of it an immediate problem for her to solve and for the sufferer to relinquish. I had come up here a week ago, for no other reason than that life had reached the stage with me where I had to run away from the confusion of my own ménage. I needed another line of vision, another angle from which to approach it, and I considered it worth taking the long dull journey up the cape to get my friend’s point of view. All that quiet August afternoon, while we had watched her children playing on the sand-dunes, we had been talking over life and our place in it as only two women can who had known each other since childhood and have managed to keep friends, although both of them are married. Our conversation had been mostly about New York, from which I was escaping, and that offshoot of society which has its roots among actors and producers and its branches in the motion-picture studios. Ruth was far removed from this forcing frame, spending her winters, more happily, in Charleston, and her summers on Cape Cod, so that I thought I could get from her the calm point of view and the fresh focus that I needed.

“Well, if you want to live here and get back to nature by way of the sand-dunes, by all means do so,” she was saying dispassionately; “that would be saner than running on all fours and standing on your head in the city. But don’t pitch a tent out here! It has been demonstrated that hurricanes have an antipathy for canvas. Buy a house in town, and at least have shingles over your head and running water in the kitchen. Even the birds refuse to drink from the rank pools in this desert. There is alkali on the surface and quicksands along the edges of the ponds. I’ll show you a house in Star Harbor that has been waiting for years for some one like you to come along and take a chance on moving into it.”

She stood up and, giving a long “Woo-ooh!” through her hands to the turbulent young ones, led me back over the dunes to the green edge of the woods.

“There,” she said, pointing over the tree-tops to the town that nestled at the edge of the encircled bay, “do you see five pine-trees standing up higher than all the others? That is the place.”

I saw below me a mass of scrubby oaks and stunted pines, which wore out to a thin edge on the shore where the fishing-village huddled. The bright white paint of the cottages, with the sun at their backs, picked them out distinctly from the blue bay beyond them, and one house, larger than any of the others, thrust its sloping roof into prominence beside a row of pines.

“That!” I exclaimed. “But how large it is—for only my husband and myself! We would rattle around in it. We haven’t enough furniture!”

I was alarmed at the expansive turn of Ruth’s imagination. Even if you have put yourself in the power of a friend’s advice, or perhaps just because of that, you are not ready to admit that she, with one slash of unprejudiced judgment, has cut the knot which you have been patiently trying to untangle.

“Furniture!” scoffed Ruth. “If that is all that is worrying you—There is more furniture in that house than any other house on Cape Cod. That is a captain’s place, old Captain Jeremiah Hawes, and he brought home fine mahogany from wherever he dropped anchor. In his day they sailed to England for their Chippendale and to China for a set of dishes.”

“What good would that do me?”

“You don’t seem to understand,” Ruth explained patiently; “it all goes together. There is hardly a house sold in Star Harbor but what the furniture is included in the deal. You get whatever the house contains, when you buy it.”

We were retracing the path through the woods by which we had entered the dunes earlier in the day. The children ran before us, playing wood-tag from tree to tree, exploring “fairy circles,” and stopping from time to time to let us catch up with them, when they would drop completely out of sight among the blueberry-bushes. These grew so thick at our feet that you could pull the berries off by the handful and munch them as you strolled along.

“Tell me more about the house,” I begged. My mouth was full of blueberries, but my mind was full of plans.

“It was built over a hundred years ago, by ships’ carpenters who came down here all the way from Boston. They don’t know how to do that kind of cabinet-work any more. The soil in the yard was hauled here by the wagon-load from ten miles down the cape to make the garden—no sea sand left there to sprout burrs! The Old Captain knew what he wanted and where to get it. He made what was, in those days, a fortune. He was master of a fleet of fishing-vessels, and used to make yearly voyages to the banks of Newfoundland for cod and to Iceland for sperm-oil whales. A pair of his big iron testing-kettles are still down in his wharf-shed, and the house is full of valuable maps and charts. Not that any one has ever seen them.”

“Why not? How long has it been vacant?”

“It has never been vacant at all! That’s the trouble. After old Captain Hawes and his wife died, their son, whom every one calls the ‘New Captain,’ lived on there in the house for years, along with the same woman who had always been a servant to his mother. He died after we came here, five years ago, under peculiar circumstances, but she still lives on, behind closed shutters.”

“Is the house for sale?”

“It’s been for sale ever since the New Captain died, but the old woman who lives in it won’t let any one inside the door to look at it.”

“I’d take it without seeing it, if it’s all you say it is,” I answered. “Why don’t they put the old woman out?”

Ruth shrugged, as one who would suggest that no outsider could hope to understand how business was managed on the cape.

“Let’s go and see it on our way home,” I suggested.

“All right; we can send the children on.”

They were scampering through the brush ahead of us, chasing limp-winged yellow butterflies and spilling their precious garnered blueberries as they ran. Their bare legs, covered with sand from the dunes and scratched by the briers of the woods, stood the strain of the long walk better than ours, in their flimsy stockings and hot rubber-soled shoes. I wanted to sit on a log in the shady woods and rest, but no one else seemed tired and the thought of the old house lured me on to hurry to its doorstep.

It needed only that difficulty of getting possession to make me sure that this was the very house for which I had been waiting all my life. I knew, too, that the romance of the situation would be the deciding point in any opposition that I might well expect to meet from my husband, who was still in New York. Jasper was a fiction-writer, at present aspiring to be a playwright, and it was true that he needed for his work an atmosphere that he could people with the phantoms of his own mind, rather than the disturbing congestion of the apartment where we now lived. In setting out to follow Ruth’s advice and buy a house on Cape Cod, I felt that I was doing my best not only for myself and the sort of family life that I felt would naturally follow, but for my husband and his exacting career. I realized that it would be for both of us a solution of the philosophy of living. Jasper had reached that stage in the beginning of success when it seemed to his friends that he was working too hard and playing too hard, squandering his talents upon Carthaginian gods who would only burn him up in the end.

I had been following Ruth in silence, for the way through the wood was hard, but now we came into the outskirts of the fishing-village and, crossing the single railroad track that ran the length of the cape, struck the easy tread of the boardwalks. There were only two streets in Star Harbor, front and back, and, sending the children on to Ruth’s house by the back way, their pockets oozing with blueberries, we emerged to the front street and faced the bay, just as the Pond-Lily Man was passing.

He was returning from his day’s work, peddling pond-lilies up and down the cape on his bicycle, a great basket of them dripping from his arm now, their luscious white heads closed, although not wilted; and he offered them all to Ruth hopefully, to get rid of them.

“Pond-lilies,” he repeated automatically, as he saw us coming into sight. “Pond-lilies. Five cents a bunch!”

He was a thin little man with a tired face, apologetic, but stubborn about his trade, selling his flowers with a mildness and a persistence that was deceptive.

Ruth bought them all, only asking if he would, as a favor, carry them up to her cottage.

“As a favor,” he replied; “this time!”

“Pond-lilies! Pond-lilies!” he called again, as he started off, seeming to forget that we had purchased the entire stock.

“Poor thing,” said Ruth; “that cry is a habit with him. He must do it in his sleep. He used to be a parson of some sort, but his ‘health failed him’ and that’s the way he supports his family. They say his children all get out in a flat-bottomed boat on Pink Pond, down the cape, and pick them for him every morning before it is light.”

“They work hard up here,” said I, feeling rather inadequate to the occasion, which was so tremendously local.

“They do,” replied Ruth, with her usual sympathy and few words.

We paused to rest a moment by the bay. The water sparkled happily, with none of the menace that shrouded the deep blue of the ocean which we had left on “the outside” beyond the dunes. Here were merry little white-caps, as innocent as the children who played upon the flats, and before us the fishing-boats, riding at anchor, had no more flavor of adventure than so many rocking-horses. The sunlight, mirrored from the bright waves, shone upon houses at the water’s edge with a glow that turned the glass of the windows into flame and burnished the brass knockers on the doors. The white paint glistened as if it had been varnished that very afternoon, and the green blinds and the red roses climbing on the cottages were raised in tone to the height of the color of ornaments on a Christmas-tree. The whole village had the aspect of a gaily painted toy. The dust of the road was rose-tinted. The leaves of the trees looked as if they had been scrubbed and polished, and the sails of the vessels on the bay were as white as the clouds that skipped across the bright blue sky.

It was the contrast between this radiant shimmer of sea and cloud, this flicker of sunshine and dazzle of window-pane, this green of the short trimmed grass and crimson of the flowers, that caused my amazement when I first saw the house that was to be mine. I was bewildered by its drab melancholy, and I would have turned away, had not an inner courage urged me on. For it seemed to me, that August afternoon, that I had come to a crossroads in my married life, and it was in the mood of a weary traveler approaching a wayside shrine that I turned through the hedge at last and beheld the House of the Five Pines.

CHAPTER II
MATTIE “CHARLES T. SMITH”

THE old mansion stood back from the road along the bay in a field of high, burnt grass. Drooping dahlias and faded old-fashioned pinks and poppies bordered the half-obscured flagstones which led to a fan-topped door. It was so long since the house had been painted that it had the appearance of having turned white with age, or something more, some terror that had struck it overnight. Wooden blinds, blanched by the salt wind to a dull peacock-blue, hung disjointedly from the great square-paned windows. A low roof sloped forward to the eaves of the first story, its austere expanse interrupted by a pointed gable above the kitchen. Beneath the dormer-window was a second closed and shuttered door.

At some period, already lost in obscurity, a wing had been thrust back into the neglected garden behind the house, and over its gray shingles stood the five pine-trees which we had seen from the sand-dunes. Old Captain Jeremiah Hawes had planted them for a wind-break, and during a century they had raised their gaunt necks, waiting to be guillotined by the winter storms. Faithfully trying to protect their trust from the ravages of wind-driven spray and stinging sand, they extended their tattered arms in sighing protest above the worn old house.

We went wonderingly up the flagging and knocked at the small door of the “porch.” There was no answer. We knocked again, staring, as is the way of strangers, to each side of us and endeavoring to peer through the green shutter. We had to jerk ourselves back and look quickly upward when the dormer-window over our heads went rattling up and an old woman craned her neck out.

“That’s Mattie,” whispered Ruth, “Mattie ‘Charles T. Smith’!”

Gray wisps of hair framed a face thin and brown as a stalk of seaweed, with sharp eyes, like those of a hungry cat, above a narrow mouth. The creature did not ask us what we wanted; she knew. Her perception was clairvoyant. Long experience in dealing with house-hunters made her understand what we had come for without the formality of any explanation. We brushed straight past the first half of what would ordinarily have been the procedure of conversation, and I came to the gist of what was uppermost in my mind and Mattie’s.

“Why won’t you let any one in?” I asked, bluntly.

Ruth looked at me in some surprise.

Mattie put up a long thin arm to keep the window from falling on her shoulders. “I dunno as I need to say,” she answered me, directly.

“What?” said Ruth. My friend, being complacent-minded, had not followed the argument so fast.

But Mattie did not repeat herself. She and I understood each other. She kept on gazing straight at me in that piercing way which I knew instinctively had driven many a purchaser from her inscrutable doorway.

“Will you let me in if I get a permit from the agent?” I insisted.

“That depends,” replied Mattie.

Her lean body withdrew from the frame of the upper gable, her eyes still holding mine, until her face gradually disappeared into the gloom of the room behind her. The last thing I saw were two veined hands gradually lowering the sash, and the last sound was a little click as it shut.

Ruth, having brought me to see the house, was murmuring words of apologetic responsibility. But I did not feel daunted.

“I think I will take it, anyway,” I said, “just for the view.”

From the doorstep of the House of the Five Pines we faced the bay across the road, where many little fishing-boats were anchored, and white sails, rounding the lighthouse-point, made a home-coming procession into Star Harbor. Remembering Mattie “Charles T. Smith” at her upper window, I wondered if she, too, saw the picture as I did and loved it the same way. But Mattie would have seen far more—not only what lay before us, but the ships that “used to be” and the wharf of old Captain Jeremiah Hawes, the piles of which were left on the beach now, like teeth of some buried sea-monster protruding from the sand. She would have counted the drying-frames hung with salt cod in pungent rows upon the bank of the shore lot, and she would have seen the burly fishermen themselves, who used to tramp back from the flats to the “Big House” for their breakfast. She had been a part of that former life which was gone, and now, like an old hull on the flats, she was waiting for that last great storm that was to sweep her out to sea. Sympathy for her made me almost wish to abandon my own project before it was begun, and yet it seemed to me that her life was almost over and that the House of the Five Pines needed the youth that we could bring it as much as we needed the shelter it could offer us. I brushed aside the thought of Mattie as if it were a cobweb that clung to my face in the woods.

“Take me to the trustee, or whoever controls the place,” I begged my friend; “let’s see what can be done!”

“Now?” asked Ruth.

We had turned reluctantly through the hedge into the road.

“Why not?” I answered. “I’m going back to New York to-morrow.”

“You can’t do things so quickly around here.”

She must have noticed my disappointment, for she added, “There are no telephones or street-cars, and whenever you go to see people, the first three times you call they always happen to be out.”

“Don’t be lazy,” I urged, so full of my own enthusiasm that I had no mercy on plump and pretty Ruth. “How far is it to this man’s office?”

“Office? He doesn’t have any office. His house is at the other end of town.”

Clang-kilang! Clang-kilang!

The clamor of bell-ringing finished our argument.

Down the boardwalk, to meet us, hobbled a strange figure. Supporting a great copper bell, which he swung with a short stroke of his stumpy right arm, was a stodgy man dressed in a tight, faded, sailor’s suit, a straw hat on his bald head, fringed with red hair, and a florid face that at present was all open mouth and teeth and tongue. He was the town crier.

In front of the deserted House of the Five Pines he stopped and, holding a printed dodger high in the air, read off it, in stentorian tones, “Hi Yi, Gu Jay, Be Boom Bee Boy!”

“Whatever in the world is he trying to say?” I gasped.

“I don’t know,” said Ruth. “Nobody ever knows. You can’t understand him.”

“But what does he do that for?”

“Why,” smiled Ruth, “that’s the way we get the news around. If there is a meeting in the town hall, you give the town crier a dollar, and he goes up and down the boardwalk and rings his bell.”

“But if no one can understand him?”

“Oh, they ask each other afterward. The man who sends the crier out always knows. He tells some one, who tells the next, so that often the news travels faster than the crier does and you know what it is beforehand.”

“It’s well you do!”

“Yes,” Ruth agreed, “because for the most part he gives out the notices in front of a vacant lot. And if you ask him to repeat, he is furious with you. I’ll show you. O Dave,” she called after him, “what is the news?”

The town crier turned upon the sweet-mannered city woman like an angry child on his partner in a game of croquet who has not obeyed the rules. He clanged down his bell insolently, and kept on clanging it up and down as he turned on his heel and strode away.

Ruth laughed. “You see!” she said.

“I see.”

“He is the last town crier in America. We are very proud of him!”

“I should think you would be,” I replied. It seemed to me that I understood why the race had become extinct. I would have traded him for a telephone.

We walked slowly down the village street. To the right of us the fishermen’s cottages, behind their white picket-fences and green, well-tended squares of lawn, made patches of paint as gay as the quilts that hung airing on their clothes-lines. They looked as if each one had been done over with what was left in the bottom of the can after their owners had finished painting their boats. On the side of the street toward the bay freshly tarred nets were spread to dry upon low bushes, dories were dragged up and turned over, and straggling wharves, with their long line of storm-bent buildings, stretched their necks out into the flats. We passed a great, ugly cold-storage house, which had superseded the private industry of the old days, the company which owned it controlling all of the seines in the bay, for whom the fishermen rose at four to pull up the nets which had once been theirs.

“You can’t buy fresh fish in Star Harbor now,” Ruth was saying; “it all goes to Boston on ice and comes back again on the train.”

Down the steep roadways beside the wharves one caught sight of tall-masted schooners, anchored to unload, and the dead herring thrown from the packing-houses to the beach, rotting in the stale tidewater, made an unwholesome stench. In front of the fish-houses swarthy Portuguese sat drowsing in the sun. Their day’s work had begun with the trip to the seines at dawn and had ended with their big breakfast at noon. Their children swarmed about them in the streets, quarreling over ice-cream cones, which they shared, lick for lick, with their dogs. On the corner near the government wharf we had to turn into the road to avoid a crowd of noisy middies who were taking up all the sidewalk, laughing like schoolboys at recess, enjoying their two hours’ leave from the big destroyer anchored in the harbor. They had no contact with the town except through mild flirtation with the girls, and no festivity while on shore greater than eating pop-corn on the curb, but they seemed to feel satisfied that they were “seeing the world” and were quite hilarious about it. They were as much a part of the port as the Portuguese sailors, and more vital to it than the stray artists whom we had seen, absorbed each in his own canvas, which he had pitched in some picturesque—and cool—spot along the water-front.

Passing through a neighborhood where the little shops filled their fly-specked windows with shell souvenirs for visitors, we turned up an alleyway and entered the yard of a house built squarely behind the row of front store buildings. In this neighborhood they did not mind because they had no view of the sea. They were tired of looking at it and were more than glad to be shut off from its sharp wind in the winter.

Judge Bell was sitting on the open porch that ran around three sides of his pink house like the deck of a ship. He was perfectly content with the location.

“We have come to see you,” I began, “about buying the House of the Five Pines.”

The judge marked the book he was reading and laid it down, looking at us mildly, without surprise.

“I’ll do all I can for you,” he replied, with what seemed to me undue emphasis on the “can.” “Won’t you come up and set down? We might talk it over, anyway.”

“Talk it over!” I repeated impatiently, rocking violently in one of his big chairs. “How much is it, and how soon can I get it?”

I felt Ruth and the judge exchanging glances over my head.

“It ain’t quite so simple as that,” he said quietly, weighing me, as all these Cape Cod people do, with unveiled, appraising eyes. “Two thousand dollars is all I’m asking for it now, as trustee—”

“I thought it was three!” Ruth could not help exclaiming. “I was told you were holding it for three.”

“I’m holding it,”—his big leathery face broke into the lines of a smile—“for Mattie ‘Charles T. Smith’ to move out. That’s all I’m holding it for. I could ’a’ sold it five times a year in the last five years, if it hadn’t been for her. And it’s gettin’ a name now. I’d be glad to be rid of it.” He passed his heavy hand over his face speculatively, and held his lower jaw down as he weighed me once more. “I’d be real glad to get shet with the whole deal!”

“I’ll take it,” said I.

Even Ruth looked startled. She remembered what I did not, in my sudden enthusiasm; that I had yet to get my husband’s consent to living here—and the money. But it seemed so ridiculously cheap that I was already in that cold real-estate sweat which breaks out on the novice in his first venture for fear that some one else, between night and morning or while he goes for his lunch, will get the treasure that he has set his heart on.

“How soon can you get Mattie ‘Charles T. Smith’ out?” I asked nervously.

The judge’s lower jaw went up with a snap.

“I don’t know,” he said, tapping the arms of his chair with his hammerhead fingers, “as I can ever get her out.”

“You mean as long as she lives?”

“As long as she lives, certainly—and after that, maybe never.”

He got up and spit over the porch-rail.

As he did so I picked up the book that he had knocked to the floor—“Brewster’s Natural Magic,” edited in London in 1838. It was full of diagrams of necromancy and open at a chapter on phantom ships. I showed the title to Ruth surreptitiously. She nodded.

“They are all that way up here,” she said.

But the shrewd old judge had heard her.

“I’ll let you read that book,” he said, “if you can understand it.”

“I’d like to,” I answered, to cover my embarrassment. “But I do understand you. You mean that her influence would remain.”

“I mean more than that.”

I would have liked nothing better than to have started the judge talking on “natural magic,” but just for this one afternoon it seemed as if we ought to keep to real estate. If I lived here, I could come back and talk to him again on psychic subjects.

“You think, then, that Mattie has some claim on the place?”

“No legal claim, no. But there is claims and claims. The claims on parents that children have, and the claims on children that parents have. And the claims of them that are not the true children of their parents, but adopted. Maybe not legally; but morally, yes. If people take children and bring them up, like Captain Jeremiah Hawes done, that makes them have some obligation toward them, doesn’t it? And then there are the claims that married people have on each other, and the people that ain’t married, and I sometimes think that the people that ain’t legally married have more claim on each other than people who are, just on account of that. It puts it up to the individual. And if the individual fails, it is more of a moral breakdown than if the law fails. For the law is only responsible to man, but man, he is responsible to God. Do you follow me?”

“All the way,” I said.

The judge got up and spit over the rail of the porch again.

“As I was sayin’, Mattie ain’t got no legal claim to the House of the Five Pines, and I could put her out in a minute if I was a mind to. I expect I could have done it five years ago, when the New Captain died, only it seemed the town would have to take care of her all the rest of her natural days. We’ve saved five years’ board on her at the poor-farm now, and it looks as if she might live quite a while longer. Plenty of ’em get to be a hundred around here, and she ain’t over seventy; not any older than I am, likely. At least, she didn’t used to be when she was young!” He sighed, as if suddenly feeling the weight of his days. “And the town, as a town, don’t hanker after the responsibility of taking on Mattie ‘Charles T. Smith.’”

“Why do they call her that?” interrupted Ruth. “Is that her name?”

“That’s as good a name as any for a person who ain’t got one of her own. Charles T. Smith was the vessel old Captain Hawes was sailin’ in, the time he picked her up out of the sea.”

“Picked her up out of the sea!” we both exclaimed.

“Didn’t you ever hear about that?” he asked. “Well it’s so common known around here there’s no need in my concealing it from you.

“Captain Hawes was up on the Grand Banks fishing, along in the fifties, and had all his small boats out from the ship when a hurricane struck him. The sea was standing right up on its legs. Just as he was trying to get back his men, and letting all the cod go to do it, too, there he see a big sloop right on top of him, almost riding over him, on the crest of a wave as high as that dune back there. High and solid like that, and yellow. But instead of comin’ over on him, like he fully expected an’ was praying against, the vessel slipped back. By the time he rode the crest, there she was diving stern down into the bottom of the trough. And she never come up again. The only thing that come up was this here Mattie. Sebastian Sikes, he was out in a small boat still, and he leaned over and grabbed her up, a little girl, tied to a life-preserver. The captain was for letting her go adrift again when he come ashore, but Mis’ Hawes wouldn’t let him. She said as long as Mattie was the only thing he salvaged out of the whole voyage, the Lord He meant they should keep her.

“The child couldn’t even speak the language at first. They thought it must be Portuguese she was jabberin’, but the sailors they said no, they wouldn’t claim it neither. So they come to think afterward it might have been French, her being picked up there off Newfoundland, and all them French sailors coming out that way from Quebec. But by the time somebody had thought of that, she had forgot how to speak it, anyway. She was only about five. The missis had her baptized ‘Matilda,’ after a black slave her father had brought home to Maine when she was a girl herself, up to Wiscasset. But ‘Mattie’ it came to be, and ‘Charles T. Smith,’ after the ship that saved her.”

“And didn’t he leave her anything in his will, after all that?”

“Neither Jeremiah Hawes nor his wife left any will,” replied Judge Bell. “The only will there is is the one the New Captain made. It’s up to Caleb Snow’s place.”

“Can I see it?”

“You can if he ain’t out winkling.” The judge picked up his “Natural Magic” as if he hoped that we were going.

“What’s ‘winkling’?” I whispered to Ruth, as we turned away.

“Oh, nothing important—something the children do out on the flats, gathering little shell-fish they use for bait.”

“He’ll be in if the tide ain’t out,” the judge called after us.

CHAPTER III
THE WINKLE-MAN AND THE WILL

WE found the man who gathers winkles sitting on the floor of the sail-loft. Caleb Snow combined the resources of real estate with the independence of a fisherman, and sent his daughter to the State normal-school on the proceeds. When one can go out on the flats at low tide and pick up a living with a pronged stick, why worry about rents? Judge Bell, himself too busy attending séances to give the matter his best thought, had persuaded Caleb Snow to handle the House of the Five Pines. We wondered if the Winkle-Man would take any interest in either it or us.

“Judge Bell told us that we might ask you to show us the will of the late Captain Hawes,” I began.

“You mean the New Captain.”

Caleb went on with the deft mending of the great tarred net, in the center of which he was bent like some old spider. He was a little man, and he made us feel even taller than we were as he peered up at us in the dusk of the low-beamed room, shadowed by the hanging sails and paraphernalia of ships which obscured the lights from the dusty windows.

“It’s up in the loft,” he said wiping his greasy hands on the seat of his overalls.

“Can’t we go up there?”

“Can ye?” he answered. He walked slowly over to a steep ladder that led up into a black hole and began to mount. Near the top he turned around and called down to us:

“I ain’t a-goin’ to bring it below, not for no one!”

I started after him.

“Isn’t there any light up there?” asked Ruth cravenly, from the bottom rung.

For answer he swung open a pair of double doors, and the glory of the afternoon sunshine streamed in upon us. Gold and bronze the water fell in the long lines of the incoming tide. Deep blue shadows pooled the mirrored surface beneath the boats that were anchored along the shore. The radiance of the bay filled the dark corners of the sail-loft like a blessing.

Caleb Snow bent over an old safe under the eaves and presently lifted out a manuscript in a long envelope.

“I don’t show this to many folks,” he said; “it wouldn’t do.”

“Will you read it to us?”

“Oh, no.” He thrust it into my hands so quickly that I wondered if he were afraid of it, or if it was that he simply could not read.

Ruth and I sat down on the lid of an old sea-chest and carefully examined the document. First there were the usual unintelligible legal clauses, and then the sum of the whole text—that the New Captain bequeathed the proceeds of his entire estate to found a home for stray animals, especially cats.

“Why cats?” I turned to Caleb.

“Well, she allus had ’em,” he explained, “Mattie ‘Charles T. Smith.’ She used to take ’em in when the summer people went away and left ’em on the beach. Wild like, they get, and dangerous. She had him taught to notice ’em. That’s why.”

Poor Mattie! Her example had trained his only virtue to her own detriment. There was not a word about the New Captain’s leaving any of his money to her, nor even a stick of furniture. I read further.

“It is my wish that Mattie ‘Charles T. Smith’ sit in the room with my body for a week after I die, thereby fulfilling a last solemn trust.”

“Why did he say that?” I gasped.

Caleb Snow was sitting in the upper doorway, with his legs hanging out, whittling at a piece of wood.

“Well, you see, he died once before and come to life again, and this time he didn’t want to disappoint nobody.”

“What?”

“He simply stretched out dead one day, like he had heart-failure, and after Mattie had got the old crape out of the chest and tacked it on the door, and the undertaker was there going about his business, the New Captain come to again. It was the coffin turned the trick. He wouldn’t let ’em put him into it. He had an awful hate towards coffins after that. Said coffin-makers was a low form of life. He took up some foreign religion and read books to prove it by. Claimed undertakers would be caterpillars in their next life, crawling on their bellies and never coming out of their own cocoons. I bet he don’t stay in his, neither!”

“Nonsense,” said I; “those things don’t happen twice.”

“If things happen once that hadn’t ought to happen at all, they got a right to happen twice,” said Caleb doggedly, “or three or four times, for that matter!”

“But he was cataleptic.”

“Call him anything you like.” Caleb went on whittling. “All I know is, he was so scairt he would be buried alive, he made Mattie promise she would watch him for a week.”

“And did she do it?”

“Yep. It was two years after the first time that he died the second time, and they had it all planned out. She sat there in the back room, with the shutters closed, and never took her eyes off him. Folks would go in and out and offer her a cup of tea once in a while, but she let on as how she didn’t know them. She never was a hand to speak to any one before that, and after that she never has spoke to any one at all. If you ask her anything, like I’m obliged to, strictly business, she looks as if she didn’t have it on her mind what you was talking about. Nor on anything else, for that matter. It turned her.”

“I should think it would!” said Ruth and I together.

“Yep,” Caleb continued, “he was dead all right when they took him out. Leastwise, as dead as he will ever get. I didn’t see him; nobody went to the funeral except Judge Bell, but he O. K.’d it. An’ if Mattie decided he was beyond recall, why he was; that settles it. For if he had been only halfway, like the other time, she would ’a’ fetched him back herself.”

He gave us a look profoundly mysterious.

“You think, then, that Mattie has the power to raise people from the dead?”

“Well, I wouldn’t go so far as to have it said I say so,” he evaded. “Not humans, maybe, but cats! I’ve seen her take a dead cat up off the beach in her apron, drowned or starved, no difference to her, and the next day there it would be, lapping up milk on the doorstep.” He paused a minute to let us weigh this, and then he added, “An’ cats ain’t the only things that has nine lives.”

Ruth and I stared blankly at him and at each other, and back to the faded ink-written pages of the New Captain’s will.

“Did Mattie ever show this—power—in any other way?”

“I don’t know,” replied Caleb testily. “I don’t know her at all. Nobody does. She don’t go around where folks are.”

“Didn’t she ever attend church?”

“Not her! She’s got a system of her own. Her and the New Captain got it up together. The Old Captain and his wife was regular members, but down to the public library Mis’ Katy says the New Captain used to ask for books that a Christian would ’a’ been ashamed to be seen carrying up the street under his arm.”

“Occultism, probably.”

“The judge can tell you. He understands them things.”

“Is he a spiritualist?”

“Not precisely, but leanin’. Goes to the First Baptist on Sunday mornings, and all over the cape week-days, to parlor meetings. It was the New Captain started him off, too. The judge, he thinks if he keeps after it, he’ll get a message from him, and he’s real worried, waitin’. But Mattie—she goes around in the yard, even, talking out loud to the cap’n, as if he was right there, diggin’ in the garden.”

“Lots of people talk to themselves.”

“To themselves, yes! I know they do. But Turtle’s boy—he takes the groceries, and he is the only one that will go in there now—he says sometimes it’s more than he can stand. He jest puts the stuff down on the step and runs away. She gets that cross-eyed girl next door to go on errands for her. All that family is—” he tapped his head significantly, “and don’t know the difference.”

“You mean that Mattie is crazy?” I asked indignantly. “She’s no more crazy than you or me.”

Ruth smiled then at the look Caleb gave me. It was as much as to say that he had suspected I was right along, and that now I had admitted it.

“She only appears to us to act,” my friend defended me, “as any one might who had always lived in one place and felt she had a right to stay there. Especially, because she is out of contact with life and does not know any longer how to take it up. There is nothing weak-minded in the course she is pursuing.”

“No mind at all,” Caleb contradicted her.

But there was something important that I wanted to find out.

“Why,” I asked, “didn’t the New Captain leave Mattie anything in his will?”

Caleb cocked one eye at the thing that he was whittling.

“He was past the place.”

“You mean that there was a time when he would have left her his money?”

“There was a time when he would have married her—only his mother wouldn’t let him.”

Somehow the idea of the rugged Captain Hawes, a sailor in his youth and a terrifying figure in his old age, a recluse around whom strange tales had been woven by his townspeople, did not seem like a man who could have been prevented by his mother from marrying an orphan girl.

“You can laugh,” Caleb scolded us; “you never saw her!”

“Old Jeremiah Hawes’ wife?”

“Her!” Caleb jabbed with his jack-knife as he spoke, as if he wished that it was the old lady he had under his blade.

“But I don’t see why the New Captain could not have married Mattie after his mother died. They must have lived a long time together in the House of the Five Pines after that.”

“Forty years is all. Same reason that he didn’t leave her nothin’. He was past the place where he wanted to.”

Caleb had finished what he was whittling now, and, as if he knew that Ruth carried all such things home to her children, he handed it to her with an apologetic smile. It was the hull of a little fishing-boat, with two masts and a rudder all in place.

We thanked him and backed out down the ladder.

Looking at the toy in the sunlight, Ruth exclaimed. The name of that fatal ship which had brought the little half-drowned French child to the sterile land of her adoption had been carved by the Winkle-Man upon this tiny model—Charles T. Smith.

“It must have looked just like that!” I cried.

“It’s like Caleb,” said Ruth, with her slow, fond smile.

CHAPTER IV
THE BOYCOTT

“I ’M going home to-day,” I announced to Ruth after breakfast the next morning, “to secure Jasper’s consent to buying the House of the Five Pines. I’ll go round on the back street now, while you are busy, and get my washing from Mrs. Dove, so that I can pack it.”

As I passed the big old house it looked so innocent that I scoffed at the stories that it had gathered to itself, as a ship gathers barnacles. “All I need to do is to have it painted,” I thought, “and I will have the finest place on the cape. I’ll see how much it will cost to have a few things done.”

I turned into Turtle’s store, and after a search found the proprietor out in the back room making himself an ice-cream cone. I asked him if he knew any one whom I could get to paint a house.

“What house?” he parried, as if it made all the difference in the world.

“The House of the Five Pines.”

“What do you want to paint that for?”

I tried to keep my temper. “I’m going to buy it.”

“Well, you’ll probably never move in,” was his reply. “I wouldn’t waste no paint on it.”

As I turned out of his hostile door I bumped into a man coming in with open pails of white lead in each hand.

“Can you give me an estimate on a house—the House of the Five Pines?”

He looked from me to Mr. Turtle. “Why, I don’t do no painting,” he replied.

“What’s that?” I pointed to the evidence he had forgotten he was carrying.

“Well, hardly any,” he corrected; “just a little now and then to oblige a friend, when I ain’t busy.”

Ruth had warned me of this. The independent son of the Puritan Fathers on Cape Cod will only work as a favor, and out of kindness charges you more than if he were drawing union wages.

“What do you do when you are busy?”

“Oh,—boats.”

“Wouldn’t you have time in the fall?”

“In the fall I won’t be here,” he answered, with a relieved sigh.

Mr. Turtle gave a guffaw, but when I looked at him sharply he was methodically cutting a piece of cheese. “Will you have a sample?” he asked me, holding a sliver out to me on the end of a knife.

I slammed the screen-door.

As soon as I arrived in the hospitable back-yard of Mrs. Dove, I asked her what was wrong with them, or with me, that they should rebuff me so. Stout and red-faced with exertion, she was laboriously washing on a bench under the trees and kept on splashing the suds. Being the only laundry in town, she could not waste time on explanations. Mrs. Dove contracted to do the summer people’s clothing by the dozen, and, counting almost everything that was given her as not rightfully within that dozen, supplied herself with sufficient funds to hibernate for the winter. During the dull season she prepared for the next year’s trade by making rag-rugs and mats with button-eyed cats, the patterns for which had traditionally been brought back from Newfoundland by the sailors. After she had listened to my story and hung up the stockings, she took the clothes-pins out of her mouth long enough to answer.

“You’ll have a hard time all right, getting any one to go near the place. They’re all against it.”

“But why?”

“Well, it has a bad name around here.”

That was what the judge had said. That was the reason he was willing to sell it cheap.

“Do you mean it is haunted?”

Mrs. Dove held a child’s rompers up to the sunlight, soaped a spot on the seat, and rubbed hard again.

“Well, not ghosts, precisely, but there’s always been strange goings-on there, things a person could not understand and that never has been explained. All the men is down on it, because the New Captain didn’t hire none of them to work on the wing he built.”

“But that was years ago!”

“Fifty, maybe. The house was put up in the first place by ships’ carpenters from Boston, and there’s some is still jealous of that. Still, when the New Captain added to it, seems as if he might have hired folks around here. Instead of that he was so stingy that he built it all himself, him and Mattie. He had her working around there just like a man. Pretty near killed her carrying lumber. I’d ’a’ seen myself hammerin’ and climbing up and down ladders for any of them Haweses!”

“Did she really do that?”

“She did anything he said. Anything at all! From the time that he used to chase her barefooted in and out of the drying-frames on the shore lot where the cod was spread, she just worshiped him. And what good did it do her? Mis’ Hawes was so set against her that she made her life a torment, trying to keep her busy and away from him.”

“Why wouldn’t she let him marry her?”

“How did you know about that? Oh, you seen Caleb Snow! People that talk all the time has to say something. I bet the judge didn’t mention it!”

“He said that Mattie was picked up out of the sea.”

“Oh, as for that!”

“And that Mrs. Hawes came from Maine.”

“Did he? Well, she did, then. And she always thought there was nothing good enough for her in Star Harbor. There was hardly a family on Cape Cod that she would associate with. Her father was one of them old sea-captains, pirates, I call them, who took slaves up there in his own vessels, and she just naturally had it in her to make Mattie into a slave of her own. She would no more have let her son marry that orphan girl than if she was a nigger. I was a child then myself, and I used to hear her hollerin’ at Mattie. She was bedridden the last six years, and she used to lie by the window, downstairs in the front room, and call out to people passing in the street. Stone deaf, Mis’ Hawes was, and so as she could hear the sound of her own voice she used to shout loud enough to call the hands in off the ships in the harbor. Yes, ma’am, her lightest whisper could be heard all over the bay.”

“Did she live longer than her husband?”

“Oh, years and years! He went down with the White Wren—they got his body off the point. It was after that she had the stroke and was so mean to Mattie and the New Captain. They was young people then, and just the age. She wouldn’t let him have a penny of the Old Captain’s fortune. I suppose it was because she wouldn’t give him any cash to do it with that he had to build the new wing himself. She was dead set against it. But it served her right. Mattie got so wore out with it that she had to go to a hospital in Boston and get laid up for a while. Some say she fell off the roof, but I used to be right around there watchin’ them half the time and I never see her fall off any roof. And Mis’ Hawes, she had a miserable time of it while Mattie was gone. Once you get depending on any one, it’s them that is the masters.

“I don’t believe Mattie ever would ’a’ come back after that, she was so long away, only one day the New Captain hitched up his horse and went and fetched her. His mother simply couldn’t do without her another minute. It was winter and there was no ships plying. The harbor was ice from here way over to the lighthouse-point; I remember it. And we didn’t have trains clear down the cape in those times. So what did the New Captain do but drive all the way down to Boston and back in his square box-buggy. He was gone days and days. I saw them coming home that night, the horse’s coat all roughed up and sweaty and his breath steaming into the cold, like smoke, the side-curtains drawn tight shut and the lamps lit. I was bringing back our cow, and I drew to one side of the road to let them pass, and I could hear her whimpering-like inside. He must have thought a powerful sight of Mattie to have made that journey for her.”

“Were they happy after that?”

“Not that anybody knows of. There was old Mis’ Hawes so set against his marrying her that she would fly into a passion if she saw you was even so much as thinking of such a thing; and yet, what could she do about it? Or what did she even know about it, shut up in one room? Yes, ma’am, there’s been strange goings-on in that house, and there is still. That’s why the men they won’t go near it. When the New Captain wanted the roof shingled or the pipes mended from time to time, he had to do it himself.”

“Well, I’m not going to paint the house myself,” I said. “After I get in and have it all opened up, they will feel differently about it.” I held up my chin defiantly.

“That is, if you ever get in,” rejoined Mrs. Dove.

I walked on down the back street with my clean white skirts, that she had washed, over my arm, and thought things over.

To every house, as to every human being, is granted two sorts of life, physical and spiritual. These wear out. To renew the physical life, all that is needed is a few shingles and a can of white lead and a thorough overhauling of the drains. The regeneration of the spiritual is more complex, requiring a change of occupant. The deterioration of a family within the walls of a house leaves an aroma of decay that only the complete relinquishment of the last surviving occupant can dissipate. Even then, the new tenant, in order to be exempt from the influence of past psychological experiences, must be unaware of them. I was learning too much about the House of the Five Pines. I determined that I would inquire no further, but brush these revelations from my mind and make a clean beginning. I would go back to New York now, remembering the house only in its external aspect, impressing that alone upon my husband and forestalling his reaction to the side of the situation that lent itself to fiction, which was his profession, by not telling him all of these legends that I had recently unearthed. Jasper was more sensitive to such suggestions than myself, and I felt that if he knew what I did we should have no peace. To protect myself from exhaustive argument and speculation, it would be wiser to repeat nothing.

The road where I was walking led across the rear of the premises of the House of the Five Pines, which extended a block, from what was always called the “Front Street” to the “Back Street.” From here one had a view of the garden and the four-foot brick walls that held up the precious earth hauled from such a distance. The century’s growth of the five pine-trees had burst open the wall along one side, and their roots, extending into the next yard, had been ruthlessly chopped off. I hoped that these new neighbors would not extend their animosity to me. The land sloped gradually down from the house until it rose again in a wooded hill on the further side of Back Street. This incline had necessitated the placing of piles, topped with inverted tin pans, as they are in country corn-bins, to hold up the rear of the captain’s wing. The space thus formed beneath the house, called the “under,” was filled with the rubbish of years. There were no doors at the back of the house, nor did this one-story addition have any entrance. There was a big chimney in the center of the end-wall and windows on either side. No barns or outbuildings fringed the road. The needs of seafaring folk demanded that they keep their properties in sheds upon their wharves.

At first there was no sign of Mattie, but as I lingered in Back Street, lost in speculation, a little old woman came around the side of the mysterious house. She was dragging two heavy oars behind her which she propped against a tree, and, setting down a wicker fish-basket beside them, lifted out a live green lobster.

She wore a yellow oilskin hat, with the brim bent down around her withered face, and a dirty sailor’s middy over a bedraggled skirt. Holding her freshly-caught lobster in a way that would have been precarious to most people, she talked to it like a pet, and as I continued to watch her, fascinated, she carried it tenderly away. I wondered if she would drop it into boiling water, which was its natural destiny, or take it into the kitchen and feed it a saucer of milk. She did not appear again, but realizing that from behind some shutter she might be observing me, I became self-conscious and moved on.

Judge Bell was leaning against the door of the Winkle-Man’s loft and greeted me like an old friend as I passed. I knew that he had strolled up there this morning to find out what had transpired after I left him the day before.

“Are you going to take the house?” he asked.

“I hope so. I’m going back home this afternoon and tell my husband about it.”

“Oh, ye’ve got a husband, have ye?” said Caleb, appearing with his winkle-fork in his hand.

“What would I want that big house for if I didn’t have any husband?”

“Give it up! What do you want it for anyway? The judge and me have give up wondering what summer people wants anything for, ain’t we, judge?”

Judge Bell would not answer; he was afraid Caleb was going to spoil the sale.

“They always pick out the worst ramshackle down-at-the-heels places that they can get for nothin’, and talks about the ‘possibilities’ of ’em, like a revivalist prayin’ over a sinner, until you would think the blessed old rat-trap was something!”

“The House of the Five Pines isn’t a rat-trap,” said the judge, touchily.

“No, it ain’t,” grinned Caleb, shouldering his long fork and picking up his bait-bucket. “It’s a man-trap!”

He slouched off down the bank.

“Don’t you worry,” I reassured the judge, who was looking sour. “I’ll take the house if I possibly can. You put your mind on getting Mattie moved out of it, and I’ll write you.”

I told Ruth about my interviews when I reached the cottage. “You’ve found out more about that house in the last twenty-four hours,” she replied in her leisurely way, “than I’ve ever heard in the five years I’ve lived here. I only pray you will take it now. The town-people won’t like it if you don’t; you’ve got their hopes aroused.”

“I have my own aroused,” I replied. “I have more hope now for the future than I have had for the last six months.”

Ruth saw me off cheerfully on the afternoon train, but I knew that in her kind heart were forebodings as to what might happen in my life before she could see me again. Her whole family would migrate soon now, and our winters would be spent in cities too far apart for us to help each other. If she could have known how much I was going to need her, she would never have left Star Harbor.

CHAPTER V
“THE SHOALS OF YESTERDAY”

AFTER I had been back in New York for a month I had about decided that Mrs. Dove was right.

Jasper had greeted my idea about buying the house with enthusiasm, but, when it came to details, with a stubborn refusal to face the facts and sign a check. To my entreaties that he go down and look at it, or write to Judge Bell about it, or arrange to move there soon, I was constantly met with, “Wait till after the play.”

We lived in four rooms in the old arcade near Columbus Circle which we had originally chosen because artists lived there, and at that time I had thought of myself as an artist. I did, in truth, have some flair for it, and a little education, which had been laboriously acquired at the School of Design associated with the Carnegie Technical Schools. Two years of marriage had seen the dwindling away of my aspirations by attrition. The one room that we had which possessed a window facing north, which by any stretch of good-will might have been called a studio, had been given up for our common sleeping-room, and Jasper, because of the constant necessity of his profession to keep late hours, was never out of bed until long after the sun had slid around to the court. I bore fate no grudge because of this. It was quite true, as he often pointed out to me, that I could paint out-of-doors or in some one else’s studio, but the day that I felt free to do this never came. When, after two years of married life, our finances still necessitated the curtailment of every extravagance, paints and canvas seemed one of the most plausible things to do without. It was only when prompted by the exhibition of some woman painter, who had evidently managed these things better, my husband would ask me why I did not paint any more, that I suffered momentarily. For the rest of the time his own work seemed to me much more important.