Evidence of Things Seen (2 page)

“He'd hate worse for you to be here with only meself to look after you. But what's the poor man to do, off we don't know where, and one of his letters sunk in the sea?”

Clara swallowed some coffee before she replied: “We don't know that it was sunk in the sea, Maggie. It may have got lost. Maggie, it's so pleasant here; I didn't think you'd spoil it for me.”

“Ma'am, I'll say no more about it.” Maggie went into the kitchen, and returned with raspberries and cream.

After supper Clara took a candle and wandered about, admiring her domain. Miss Radford, she thought, must have engaged excellent decorators. The two principal rooms were done in dark green, the little bedrooms leading off them were in pale green and pale blue, the bathroom was a bright turquoise. All the little windows had white muslin curtains, and the wallpapers had been chosen by experts. Perhaps they had persuaded Miss Radford to leave her valuable pine and mahogany furniture here.

The little pale-green bedchamber off the dining room was to be the Herons' maid's; it was charming. Clara wished that Miss Radford had not had the door in the south wall closed up, though; it was painted to match the woodwork, its latch had been removed and its keyhole plugged. Why should it have been condemned? For warmth in winter, perhaps. Clara wondered whether the egg-woman would let it be opened again, and she also wondered why she had never noticed it on the outside of the cottage.

It must be in that angle where the lilac bush is, she thought, and went back to the living room for her flashlight.

Maggie called to her from the kitchen window: “You're walking out in the wet grass, ma'am?”

“I just want to see where that blind door comes out, Maggie.”

She went around the kitchen wing. The lilac bush grew in an angle between the bathroom and the south wall of the little bedroom; it had been allowed to straggle this year, and its branches almost hid the door, which had no doorstep any more, and which had been painted the yellow of the cottage. It had no knob, its keyhole was invisible; but it was a door just the same, and once the lilac bush had shaded it.

Clara went back to the living room to finish her letter to her husband. He had departed for a destination unknown three months before, and she would not know that he had returned, by plane or by sea, until he was actually on American shores. She wrote:

At this point Clara stopped writing and bit the end of her penholder. She never knew how to refer to her husband's absence without seeming to lament or complain, and this time also she gave up the problem. She added a few sentences of an intimate and personal nature, and then dated the letter—July 1st, 1942. Gamadge liked dates. She addressed the envelope, as usual, to Washington; an office in Washington got his mail to him in the shortest time and by the shortest way.

It was not until she had reread the letter that the obvious occurred to her. She thought: Can Maggie be as silly as that? put the letter in the envelope, and got a stamp. On her way to the mailbox beside the road she stopped at the kitchen door.

“Maggie,” she asked, “did Miss Radford's sister die here—in the cottage?”

Maggie looked up from her dishes. “Why do you want to know that, I wonder?”

“It just occurred to me. I don't know why I vaguely thought before that she was in a hospital. In cities most people do die in hospitals.”

“People die where they can, God help them.”

“No, but did Mrs. Simms or somebody tell you she died here, and do you mind if she did?”

“Mind? It's not for me to mind such a thing.”

Clara, as she went out and came back again, was puzzled by the look that had been on Maggie's face. She had not really spoken as if she minded the simple fact that somebody had died in the cottage, but she had looked as though she minded something else.

The open doorway sent a cheerful fan of light out upon the porch; Clara, standing there, suddenly felt as if she had received a slight, a very slight blow on the chest; she thought: Maggie
can't
be so silly! But she asked Maggie no more questions. She stood breathing in the moist, wood-scented air, and listening to the rush of the waterfall. She stood for several moments after she wished very much to turn and dash into the cottage; but she restrained herself.

“Only a woman in a sunbonnet!” she told herself scornfully, adding: “Besides, she always comes at sunset.”

Then she went in and locked both doors. Maggie called: “Will I sleep on the same floor with you till your friends get here, ma'am?”

“Not unless you'd be more comfortable, Maggie.”

“Me own room is cool and pleasant enough.”

“Then don't think of moving, you're so nicely settled.”

Clara took her lamp and went upstairs. The sitting room was cozy and cheerful, the attic door firmly closed as she had left it. Her bedroom welcomed her; the bed was turned down, rambler roses from the porch vine were in a jug on the dresser. She heaped pillows, lighted her reading lamp, and was soon in bed. The waterfall murmured, an occasional moth struck a window screen with the sound of a string plucked on a bass viol; this was perfect. But it would be nice when the Herons came, and they could all sit and talk in the sitting room before they went to bed.

It's just that attic door that bothers me, she thought. I'll go up there tomorrow. I'll get Mrs. Simms' man to come and look at the latch. Of course there's a draft or something.

Clara opened her book, but she could not make herself read. Instead, her thoughts wandered in and out of the ambiguous pattern that seemed to be weaving itself about the cottage, closing it in as a spider web closes around a leaf; thin as a spider web, and with as little substance. A woman in a sunbonnet, a door that came open of itself whenever she appeared; a death, an inheritance, an old woman who wouldn't come into the cottage.

Clara gave up her attempt to read, put out her light, and cast her extra pillow on the floor. She lay down in the dark, and presently she ceased to hear the thrum of moths against the screens, the sound of the waterfall. The waterfall sent her to sleep.

M
RS. HENRY GAMADGE
was endowed by nature with high spirits and good sense; she therefore reacted cheerfully to the bright coolness of the following morning—Thursday, July the second. She put on a dress that was very much the color of the rambler roses, and looked at herself in the little glass of the painted bureau, while she arranged the thick, smooth waves of her hair, with calm determination.

She had made up her mind to behave today as Gamadge would have behaved in the same circumstances. She would approach this curious business of the door that opened itself, the watcher in the sunbonnet, Miss Radford's ambiguous behavior about her ownership of the cottage, with a detached and open mind. Clara did not think that she herself was superstitious; she was annoyed with herself for having allowed Maggie to influence her by suggestion. Maggie had certainly done so; without Maggie's conduct and veiled words Clara felt that she might not have given a second thought to the woman in the sunbonnet, or even to the attic door.

After breakfast, therefore, when Miss Radford's old horse and buggy stopped at the bottom of the path, Clara came out to greet her landlady with a bright smile. Miss Radford had a long, yellowish face, a thin, obstinate mouth, a high nose, and a filmy blue eye. She was clothed in what Clara supposed to be half mourning, since—though her black silk dress was sprigged with lavender—she wore black cotton driving gloves and a black chiffon veil; this was looped, with a sad and somber effect, about the brim of her black straw hat. She looked at Clara through gold-rimmed spectacles.

“Your help says you're having company to supper on the fourth,” she began, in her abrupt way. “I can let you have chickens.”

“Oh, thank you, Miss Radford. Yes, the Hunters are driving down.”

Miss Radford leaned from her seat to hand Clara a basket which had been on the buggy floor. “Here's the can of milk and the butter. I put in some garden stuff. I can't send Sam over early because I'm shorthanded, like the rest of the folks, and Sam's the only man I've got left.”

“It's awfully nice of you to bring things at all.” Clara received the basket, and put it down on the grass. “I have my car, you know. I could run over.”

“Guess you'd just as soon save your gas and tires for when your husband gets here.”

“I would.” Clara fondled the nose of the dapple-gray. “How lucky you are to have this boy and your buggy. It makes you so independent for short trips.”

“They come in handy.” Miss Radford's eye wandered to indeterminate regions above and behind the cottage. “Is the barn all right for your car? It was roofed last year.”

“It's splendid. But if it was good enough for this nice hackney it ought to be good enough for a Ford convertible.”

“That's what he is—a hackney. I guess you ride?”

“I used to.”

“My sister rode Billy.”

“I was so surprised, Miss Radford, when Maggie told me last night that you own the cottage.”

“I don't know as it matters. All the business is in the hands of the Hartford agent, and I thought perhaps it wouldn't get out—that I was the owner.” Miss Radford's lips curved downward, instead of upward, to show that she was dryly amused. “Try and keep anything from getting out around here!”

“Around anywhere,” said Clara.

“I thought perhaps I wouldn't care about the tenants, and it would be just as well if they couldn't come bothering me.”

“I'm glad you don't seem to think we will.”

“I guess you won't.” This seemed to be meant as a compliment, and Clara received it as such. She smiled, looked gratified, and went cheerfully on:

“It was wonderful of you to leave us all that lovely furniture. We'll take good care of it, but I don't know how you could bring yourself to part with it, even in the summer.”

“I got some new furniture when I fixed up the farm. I have more than I need right now. You can't hurt that old stuff.”

“But it's your family stuff, isn't it?”

“I have lots of family stuff down at the farm. We owned that farm more than a hundred years.”

“Oh, did you? And it looks so new,” said Clara, who could not bear the way Miss Radford had fixed the farm.

“It was choked with trees, and the doorway rotted. No paint since the last tenants had it.”

“I suppose it isn't so easy to get tenants now, for a big farm like that.”

“We nearly lost it in 1932. Put a mortgage on; but it's all clear now. This was our farmer's and dairyman's cottage once.”

“It's lovely, the way you had it remodeled. My husband and our friends are going to enjoy it so much. I don't know how you could bear to move away; from the woods, and the waterfall, and everything.”

“You try it in winter.”

“I'd love to,” laughed Clara.

“You couldn't stand it. The only way my sister and I could live here in the cold weather was by shutting off the top floors and blocking the fireplaces and putting up stoves. And half the time the delivery men couldn't get through.”

“You and your sister must have slept in those dear little bedrooms downstairs. They're so pretty. And then I suppose you moved upstairs again in the summertime.”

“I did; she didn't. She got quite lame.”

“The stairs
are
rather steep.”

“We put the downstairs bathroom in when she got crippled up with rheumatism. I guess,” said Miss Radford, with a glimmer of a smile, “you wouldn't have thought much of the cottage before it was fixed.”

“Well, I love it now.”

“I was afraid you folks might not like a bathroom opening off the dining room that way, but it had to be there. It was a pantry. Your kitchen wing was built on last fall.”

“I think it's very convenient, having the bathroom where it is; but my husband and I will take most of our baths in the pool under the waterfall. I bathe there now.”

Miss Radford gazed at her for some moments in a bleak silence. Then she said: “You'll get a cramp; that water's cold as ice.”

“Oh, I like it. Did you sleep in the little room with the mysterious door, Miss Radford?”

After a pause Miss Radford said: “I don't know what you mean by a mysterious door.”

“The door that doesn't go anywhere. The door without any step, under the lilac bush.”

“My sister had that room,” said Miss Radford in a cold voice. “When she decided to stay there winters, of course we closed the door up and plugged the keyhole; if she'd lived we would have papered over. I guess you don't know how much wind comes through keyholes and cracks in a cottage like this. The cracks ain't so bad, that door fits quite tight; but if she'd lived we would have papered over.”