  The Locked Closet
Elspeth waited anxiously for the answer to this letter, for she had tried to be very tactful and helpful, and to handle strategically the secret that she had surprised, but Buddy's answer was a blow. He wrote:
"I don't see why a tactful letter like mine made him sore," Elizabeth thought, forlornly, and inelegantly.
"I thought I had got all over the habit of crying at Mothers letters, but it seems that I haven't," Elizabeth said. "I know what Buddy's afraid of now. I shall just have to use my own judgment and try to make it the best old judgment I ever used in my life." She wrote again:
It was not long after this exchange of letters that Elizabeth asked her grandmother for the key of the locked closet. "I thought you had forgot all about it," her grandmother said. "No, but I was rash enough to promise Peggy that she could be with me when I opened it, and we've been doing so many things out of doors together that we haven't had any other time." "Well, here it is. You can play with anything you find, as long as you want to, but hang the clothes up again, come night." "I will, Grandmother. I'm so excited, and I've got to go upstairs and twirl my thumbs until Peggy comes. Send her right up, won't you?" Waiting upstairs in her little blue room, Elizabeth began reading over her brother's letters, and pondering on his sudden change of mood. "Oh, Elizabeth-Elspeth," sang Peggy from the bottom of the stairs, "can I bring my sister Ruth up with me?" "Cert-certainly." Elizabeth flew to straighten the pillows on the cradle settee, and to pick up some stray threads from the braided rug in front of it. "I shall be very glad to see her." Ruth Farraday, in a rose-and-white striped satin sports skirt, with a fleecy, rose-coloured sweater and hat to match, made a very pretty picture against the background of Elizabeth's little room. "Like a rose against the blue of the sky," Elizabeth thought. "Her name ought to be Rose, anyway. How becoming she would be to Buddy's dark eyes and colouring." "This is the room, Ruth," Peggy said, "you can look at it for two minutes, and then you've got to stop looking at it, because we are gathered together to-day for quite another purpose, to wit, to penetrate the mysteries of Blue Beard's closet." "It's a lovely room," Ruth said, smiling. "I wouldn't have intruded on this very special occasion, except that it began to rain as I was bidding Peggy "Yes, indeed," Elizabeth said, "and it will be fun to have you see what's in the closet if you don't mind." "I shall adore it." "I adore you," Elizabeth said to herself, "already." "We'd better hurry," Peggy cried. "Ruth is getting ready to rave about the cradle settee and the flag-bottomed chairs. If we get started telling her the history of all the things in the room, we shan't get a look at Blue Beard's wives. Ruthie, dear, this is the key to the enchanted closet. Doesn't it look spooky? This house is a hundred and twenty-five years old, and see, all the doors have latches instead of knobs. Which leads us to this one particular door." Peggy linked an arm through that of her sister on one side and her friend on the other, "And presto! Here we are. Now, Elizabeth-Elspeth." "One, two, three!" Elizabeth turned the big key in the ponderous lock, and the door swung wide. "Blue Beard's wives' trousseaux!" Peggy said. "One hundred and one thousand two hundred and forty-three silk dresses of the Georgian period. I don't know when the Georgian period was, but I guess this is it." Ruth stepped inside the closet. "I suppose I must, but look, look, look, at all these beauties." On rows of little pegs driven into the low rafters of the irregular triangle that formed the closet were the carefully preserved relics of three generations of dainty feminine finery. Dresses of taffeta and dimity and poplin, in all the flower-like gradations of colour that our grandmothers remember their mothers and grandmothers looking most distinguished in. Not only gowns, but capes and dolmans and dressing sacques, and, packed away in a barricade of old-fashioned, flowered bandboxes, were the bonnets and hats, and even some of the gay little bags and muffs that complemented the costumes. "I never saw anything so wonderful in my life," Ruth Farraday said. "Oh, let's try them on. Let's get Grandmummy to tell us about them. Let's dress Ruth up and take a snapshot of her. Let's——" Peggy's breath failed her. "'Oh! let's try them on'" "Here's Grandmother now," Elizabeth said. Grandmother, making her placid way through the outer chamber, smiled, and held out her hand to Ruth Farraday. "This—this is Miss Farraday, Grandmother," Elizabeth said. "She—she isn't——" "Elizabeth is trying to say that I am not a little girl, but I'm not really so very far from it. I'm not so grown up that I want to be sent out of the attic now I've just seen all these lovely things. You don't mind if I stay?" "I'd mind if you didn't stay. You are the kind o' sight that sore eyes is aching for all the world over." The old woman and the girl smiled at each other as if they had been friends all their lives. "First, tell me who this belonged to, Grandmummy," Peggy dragged at her sleeve imploringly, "and then tell me who every single dress here belonged to." "Well, they belonged to a number of people, all told. Some of my wedding things is there. That rose lavender silk in your hand, Peggy, was the dress I appeared out to meeting in the Sunday after I was married. The blue silk with the black velvet ribbon scallops around the basque was the dress my sister Alviry wore to my wedding. She had long, pink ribbon streamers on her hat, a chip hat trimmed with pink roses, and she was a picture, I can tell you. My appearing-out hat is here somewhere—like "What's this little love of a pink muslin with all these tiny, tiny ruffles on it, Grandmother dear? See these bell-shaped white undersleeves, and this figured pink sash, Peggy. Wouldn't your sister look a dream in it?" "That was the dress I wore when I give your grandfather my promise. I liked it better than any dress I ever had." "I should think you would have," Peggy put in, fervently. "I should have liked it best if your grandfather had never been born in the world. Leastways, that's what I've always said. It was the first dress my mother ever let me have all the say about. Dresses had to be chose for their wearing qualities when I was a girl. If they wouldn't wash and turn, year out and year in, we warn't allowed to have 'em, but I had set my heart on a pink muslin with dolman undersleeves, and after I went and nursed Grandmother White through scarlet fever, and just barely lived after I caught it myself, Mother said I could have anything I wanted as a present to get well on. "I should think you would have," Peggy said, again. "It was pretty brave of you to go into a house where they had scarlet fever, and nurse your grandmother through it," Elizabeth said. "Weren't you deadly afraid?" "I don't remember much about that part. My father sent me, and so I went, but I shall never forget the day when I first put on the dress. Your grandfather he was calling on my brother Jonas when I come down the stairs drawing my train after me. Jonas he started to stare at me, and then he began to say poetry. An old poem he used to say whenever he wanted to tease me: "Here she goes, there she goes, All dressed up in her Sunday clothes, High-heeled boots and a cashmere shawl, Grecian bend and a waterfall. I was so put out, I run upstairs and didn't come down again till he coaxed me down with the promise of a drive to Bass River by moonlight." "But how about Grandfather? You said that was the very dress he proposed to you in." "So t'was." "Did he propose that evening?" "That was hard on Grandfather." "He went and got another girl and took her to the Harvest Dance. Eliza Perkins, and she wore a mahogany-coloured silk that made her look as sallow as a pumpkin. I was so sorry for him that I kinder made it up to him. I suppose girls will always be high and mighty with the boys they like best. I never took the trouble to plague any other of the young men, but your grandfather I used to make life a burden to." "Nowadays it's the young men that are high and mighty," Ruth Farraday said, "they go into the service, and their uniforms turn their heads, and then they—forget." "I guess the young men to-day ain't so different from the men in my time, if you come right down to it. I guess liking is liking—just the same as it always was. Love will go where it's sent." "Do you believe it comes once to every man, as the saying goes?" "I know it. There's a lot of talk about loving this one and that one, but when you get right down to it, the second time is a pretty poor imitation of the first. There is natures that's different, of course, but true natures find their own and cling to it." "It ain't so often one-sided as you think—the real thing ain't. If it ain't real—why, that's another story." "But how is anybody going to tell if it is real?" "There ain't really any way of not telling." "Grandmummy," Peggy begged, "can we dress Ruth up in your pink muslin and take a snapshot of her?" "Certain, but you ought to curl her hair. I made a hundred and twenty curls when I wore that dress." "That's where Elizabeth inherits her curly locks. Please dress up in Grandmother's muslin, Ruth. Don't you want her to, Grandmummy?" "It would do my heart good to see her pretty face shining out over my pink muslin." "If you feel like that, then you shall," Ruth said. "I have a kind o' feeling that it will bring you luck," Grandmother said, when the soft hair had been loosened and curled about the face, and the pink muslin had been hooked and buttoned and tied till it undulated in delicate folds and curves all about the girl's slender body. On the lawn under the honeysuckle arbour, on the gate post, on the front steps of the old house, which followed the old-time habit of facing the south, "There comes Father," Grandmother said, "let's see how much he'll notice." Grandfather, approaching, took in the tableau under the honeysuckles. Elizabeth and Peggy watched breathlessly as he made straight for the little figure in Grandmothers pink muslin gown and stood staring down at it. "I don't know who you be," he said, slowly, "nor where you got the dress you're wearing, but I know what you make me feel like." He swept his hat to his breast with a courtly, old-time bow, and bent over Ruth's little hand and saluted it. Then he put out his other hand to his wife and drew her arm within his. "Mother," he said, softly. |
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