The Heather-Moon
Grandma; but a group of very different furniture beckoned her curiosity.
The fact that there was a group, and that it seemed in the dimness to be
alike in colour and design, suggested mystery of some sort; and,
besides, it was almost impossible to imagine such furniture adorning
this house.
Evidently it had been taken bodily out of one room. Why? As she asked
herself this question Barrie threaded her way delicately along narrow
paths between chairs, extraordinary leather or hairy cowhide trunks and
thrilling bandboxes of enormous size, made quaintly beautiful with
Chinese wall-paper. She wanted to examine the grouped furniture whose
pale coverings and gilded wood glimmered attractively even in the
darkest corner of the garret.
It certainly was the darkest and farthest. Was this a coincidence, or
had there been a special reason for huddling these things out of sight?
There was not even a clear path to them, though there seemed to have
been method in planning most of the lanes that led from one luggage or
furniture village to another. Nothing led to this village built against
a wall. Its site was in a no-thoroughfare, and, perhaps by design,
perhaps by accident, a barricade had been erected before it; not a very
high barricade, but a wall or series of stumbling-blocks made up of
useless litter. If there could be a special corner of disgrace in this
land where all things were under decree of banishment, here was the
corner.
By means of crawling over, under, and between numerous strangely
assorted objects which formed the barricade, the intruder arrived,
somewhat the worse for wear, at her destination. The furniture village
was composed, she discovered, of a set of blue satin-covered chairs and
sofas, with elaborately carved and gilded frames. There were tables to
match, and an empty glass cabinet, two long mirrors with marble brackets
underneath, also a highly ornamental chest of drawers and a bedstead of
gilded cane and wood, with cupids holding garlands of carved roses.
Barrie began talking to herself half aloud, according to
long-established habit. "Good gracious me!" she exclaimed so inelegantly
that it was well Miss Hepburn could not hear. "What things to find in
this house! They're like--like canary birds in an ironmonger's shop. Who
could have owned them?"
Suddenly the answer flashed into her head, and sent the blood to her
face as if she had received a stinging slap such as Grandma used to
give: "These things were my mother's!"
How insulting that these traces of the vanished one should have been
hustled into a dingy hole where no self-righteous eyes could be offended
by the sight of them! How frivolous and daintily young they looked, even
in their dusty and (Barrie was furiously sure) undeserved disgrace! This
was the secret of the locked garret!
The girl occasionally had moments of hatred for Grandma: moments when
she thought it would have delighted her to see the grim old Puritan
scoffed at and humiliated, or even tortured. At the picture of torture,
however, Barrie's heart invariably failed, and in fancy she rescued the
victim. But never had she hated Mrs. MacDonald so actively as now.
"My mother!" she said again. "How dared the wicked old creature be such
a brute to her!"
For Barrie was certain that these were relics of her mother's presence
in the house. She knew the history of every other woman who had ever
lived here since the place was built in the seventeenth century by an
Alexander Hillard, an ancestor of Grandma's. A forbidding old prig he
must have been, judging from the portrait over the dining-room
mantelpiece, a worthy forbear of Ann Hillard, who had married Barrie's
grandfather, John MacDonald of Dhrum. Barrie often said to herself that
she did not feel related to Grandma. She wanted to be all MacDonald
and--whatever her mother had been. But it was just that which she did
not know, and not a soul would tell. This was her grievance, the great
and ever-burning grievance as well as mystery of her otherwise
commonplace existence; a conspiracy of silence which kept the secret
under lock and key.
Because of Mrs. MacDonald's "taboo," Barrie's mother had become her
ideal. The girl felt that whatever Grandma disapproved must be beautiful
and lovable; and there had been enough said, as well as enough left
unsaid whenever dumbness could mean condemnation, to prove that the old
woman had detested her daughter-in-law.
All Barrie knew about the immediate past of her family was that her
father's people had once been rich, and as important as their name
implied. They were the MacDonalds of Dhrum, an island not far from Skye,
but they had lost their money; and while old Mrs. MacDonald was still a
young married woman (it seemed incredible that she could have been
young!) she and her husband, with their one boy, had come to her old
home near Carlisle. This one boy had grown up to marry--Somebody, or,
according to the standards of Grandma, Nobody, a creature beyond the
pale. The bride must have died soon, for even Barrie's elastic memory,
which could recall first steps taken alone and first words spoken
unprompted, had no niche in it for a mother's image, though father's
portrait was almost painfully distinct. It presented a young man very
tall, very thin, very sad, very dark. The frame for this portrait was
the black oak of the library wainscoting, picked out with the faded gold
on backs of books in a uniform binding of brown leather. Once a day
Barrie had been escorted by her nurse to the door of the library and
left to the tender mercies of this sad young man, who raised his eyes
resignedly from reading or writing to emit a "How do you do?" as if she
were a grown-up stranger. After this question and a suitable reply, not
much conversation followed, for neither could think of anything to say.
After an interval of strained politeness, the child was dismissed to
play or lessons--generally lessons, even from the first, for play had
never been considered of importance in Hillard House. It was nobler, in
the estimation of Grandma, and perhaps of father, to learn how to spell
"the fat cat sat on the black rug," rather than to sprawl personally on
the black rug, sporting in company with the fat cat.
One day, Barrie remembered, she had been told that father was ill and
she could not bid him good morning. She had been treacherously glad, for
father was depressing; but when days passed and she was still kept from
him, it occurred to her that after all father was much, much nicer than
Grandma, and that his eyes, though sad, were kind. The next and last
time she ever saw him, the kind sad eyes were shut, and he was lying in
a queer bed, like a box. He was white as a doll made of porcelain which
he had once given her, and Grandma, who led the child into his room,
said that he was dead. The sleeping figure in the box was only the body,
and the soul had gone to heaven. Heaven, according to Grandma, who wore
black and had red rims round her eyes, was a place high up above the sky
where if you were a sheep you played constantly on a harp and sang
songs. If you were a goat, you did not get there at all, which might
have been preferable, except for the fact that being a goat doomed you
to burn in everlasting fire. Sheep were saved, goats were damned; and,
of course, the sheep must be deserving and clever if they had learned to
sing and play on harps.
Barrie thought she could have been no more than three when her father
died, but she never cared to question Grandma concerning the episode,
after a day when Mrs. MacDonald said in an icy voice, "Your mother was
before God guilty of your father's death." That was years ago now, but
Barrie had not forgotten the shock, or the hateful, thwarted feeling,
almost like suffocation, when Grandma had answered an outbreak of hers
with the words, "The less you know about your mother the better for you.
And the less like her you grow up, the more chance you will have of
escaping punishment in this world and the next."
Barrie believed that her mother's hair must have been red, for once she
had heard nurse say to Mrs. Muir, "No wonder the sight of the child's a
daily eyesore to the mistress; what with them identical dimples, and
hair of the selfsame shade, it must be a living reminder of what we'd
all be glad to forget." Barrie's hair was extremely red; and it had been
intimated to her that no red-haired girl could have cause for vanity,
because to such unfortunates beauty was denied; but loyalty to the
unknown mother forbade the child to hate her copper-coloured locks.
In a room decorated with pale blue satin, red hair might perhaps
simulate gold. The furniture was quite new-looking and unless there had
been some special reason, no mere change of taste would have induced
economical Grandma to make a clean sweep of these practically unused
things.
A tall mirror with its wooden back turned outward helped to screen the
furniture; and deep under the dusty surface of the glass Barrie saw her
own figure dimly reflected, like a form moving stealthily in water
beneath thin ice. It half frightened her, like seeing a spirit, and she
brought the gliding ghost to life by polishing the glass. This gave her
back suddenly the only friend she had, herself, and she was glad of the
companionship. Close to the huddled furniture stood a large trunk, a
Noah's Ark of a trunk. Perhaps it was old-fashioned, but compared to
other luggage stored here in the garret it was new and defiantly smart.
It had a rounded top, and was made of gray painted wood clamped with
iron.
Too good to be true that it should not be locked! And yes, locked it
was, of course. But tied to the iron handle on one end was a key. It
seemed as if some one had thought that the trunk might be sent for, and
therefore the key must be kept handy. The knot was easily undone. The
key fitted the lock. Her heart beating fast, Barrie lifted the lid, and
up to her nostrils floated a faint fragrance. She had never smelled any
perfume quite like it before. The nearest thing was the scent of a
certain rose in the garden when its petals were dried, as she dried them
sometimes for a bowl in her own room.
It was deep twilight in this corner, but Barrie's eyes were accustoming
themselves to the gloom. In the tray of the big trunk there were hats,
and masses of something fluffy and soft, yet crisp like gauze. "My
mother's things!" she said to herself in a very little voice, with a
catch of the breath at the word "mother." And gently she lifted out the
tray, to carry it nearer the light. There was a cartwheel of a Leghorn
hat in it, wreathed with cornflowers; another hat of white tulle trimmed
with a single waterlily, and a queer little bonnet made of
forget-me-nots. The fluffy stuff was a large blue scarf spangled with
pinkish sequins.
Barrie rested the tray on a marble-topped table, and dipped deep into
the trunk for other treasures. There were several dresses, of delicate
materials and pale shades, or else of daring colours elaborately
trimmed. There was a gown of coral-tinted satin embroidered with gold,
and this was of Empire fashion, so like the styles which Barrie saw in
illustrated papers that it might have been made yesterday. Could a
red-haired woman have chosen to wear such a colour? For a moment the
girl doubted that these had been her mother's possessions; but when she
held the folds of satin under her own chin, she was startled by the
picture in the mirror. Why, coral was far more becoming than blue, which
Miss Hepburn always said was the only colour to go with red hair. It
even occurred to Barrie that she might perhaps be--well, almost pretty.
"What if I _am_ pretty, after all?" she asked herself; for she
worshipped beauty, and it had been sad to feel that to her it was denied