The Heather-Moon
forever--that never could she be like one of those lovely beings in
books with whom men fall desperately in love, and for whom they gladly
die.
In great excitement she took off her short, badly made blue serge, and
put on the coral satin, which was low in the neck, and had tiny puffed
sleeves. The dress fastened at the back, but Barrie had grown clever in
"doing up" her own frocks without help, and she easily managed the few
hooks and eyes. The satin was creased, but in the dim light it looked
fresh and beautiful as the petals of some gorgeous flower, and the long,
straight-hanging gown with magic suddenness turned the childlike girl
into a young woman. The two massive tails of hair, which fell over
Barrie's shoulders, ending in thick curls at her waist, now offended her
sense of fitness. They were not "grown up" enough to suit the wearer of
this fairy robe; and crossing the braids at the back of her head, she
brought them round it over her ears, tying the two curls together in a
sort of bow at the top.
"I'm like Cinderella dressed for the ball," she thought, "all except the
glass slippers," and she glanced down distastefully at the thick,
serviceable boots whose toes pointed out from under a line of gold
embroidery.
There must once have been shoes to match this dress. Perhaps they were
at the bottom of the big trunk, whose depths she had not yet reached.
Bending down for another search, she caught sight of something in the
background which she had not seen--a large picture with its face against
the wall.
Instantly Barrie forgot the shoes. Her heart jumped as it had jumped
when she first saw the key in the door of the garret stairs. Would they
have turned to the wall in this dark corner any picture save one? The
girl knew that in another moment she would be looking at the portrait of
her mother.
To get at it, she had to shut the trunk and climb on the rounded lid,
for the big wooden Noah's Ark was too heavy to lift, and too firmly
wedged in among large pieces of furniture to be pushed out of the way.
Kneeling on the trunk, regardless of her finery, Barrie grasped the
picture frame with both hands and pulled it up from its narrow
hiding-place. Then, scrambling down, she backed out into a space clear
enough to permit of turning the picture, round. Then she could not help
giving a little cry, for it seemed that she was beholding a miracle. Her
own face, her own figure, the very dress she wore, and the odd way she
had looped up her red braids, were repeated on the dusty canvas.
It seemed too wonderful to be true, yet it was true that she had chosen
to put on the gown in which its owner had long ago stood for her
portrait. And the knotted curls just above the picture-forehead were
like little ruddy leaping flames.
Just at first glance Barrie thought that she was exactly like the
picture; but when she had wiped the dust off the canvas, and saw the
painting clearly, she began to realize and count the differences. The
portrait was that of a young woman, not a girl still almost a child.
Knowledge and love of the world glittered in the great dark eyes which
turned up ever so slightly at their outer corners in a curiously
bewitching way. Barrie's eyes were dark too, but they were hazel, and
could look gray or even greenish yellow in a bright light; but the eyes
in the picture were almost black, and full of a triumphing consciousness
of their own fascination. The artist had hinted at dimples, and these
Barrie's cheeks repeated; but the girl's face was in shape a delicate
oval, though the chin was as firm as if a loving thumb and finger had
pinched it into prominence. The face on the canvas was fuller, shorter,
squarer, and its chin was cleft in the middle. The mouth was smaller and
more pouting--a self-conscious, petulant mouth; but Barrie thought it
beautiful, with its flowerlike, half-smiling red lips.
"Mother--mother!" she said, "darling, lovely mother! Oh, if you could
only talk to me! If you could only tell me all about yourself!"
As she spoke aloud something moved in the garret: a board creaked, a
struck chair or table scraped along the uneven floor, and Mrs. Muir
appeared round a corner of the piled furniture. Barrie stiffened
herself, standing up straight and tall and defiant, ready for battle,
holding the portrait as if it were a shield. But she was not prepared to
see Mrs. Muir start back, stumbling against something which fell with a
sharp crash, nor to hear her give vent to a squeal of terror. It was
anger the girl had expected to rouse, not fear, and she faced the old
housekeeper from her distance in blank astonishment.
They stood staring at each other across the shadows lit by floating
motes of gold; and Mrs. Muir's large, pallid face looked, Barrie
thought, as if it had been turned to gray stone, the gray stone of the
carved monuments in the family burial-ground. For a moment neither
spoke, but at last some words seemed to drop from the old woman's mouth,
rather than be deliberately uttered:
"May God have mercy on me!"
"What _is_ the matter?" Barrie exclaimed, the strange spell broken; but
instead of answering, Mrs. Muir gasped, and then broke out crying, a
queer gurgly sort of crying which frightened the girl. She did not
dislike the housekeeper, and she was so genuinely distressed as well as
surprised at this strange exhibition, that she would have set down the
portrait to run to Mrs. Muir's succour if at that moment the stillness
of the garret had not been wakened by the tap, tap of a stick. Somebody
was coming up the stairs, hobbling, limping, yet hurrying with
extraordinary energy.
There was only one person in the house, or maybe in the world, whose
coming made that noise, that mingled hobble, rush, and tap: Grandma.
Barrie and Mrs. Muir continued to stare at one another, but their
expression had changed. The approach of a danger to be shared in common
had made the enemies friends. "This is going to be awful. What shall we
do?" the old eyes said to the young and the young eyes said to the old.
Mrs. Muir had forgotten her burning wish and intention to scold Miss
Barribel; nevertheless, the housekeeper was not to be trusted as an
ally. Under the lash of Mrs. MacDonald's tongue she would defend
herself, and Barrie would go to the wall. But the spirit of the martyr
was in the girl, and when the first dread thrill of the tap, tap on the
garret stairs had subsided in her nerves, she remembered her wrongs and
her mother's wrongs, and was not afraid of Grandma. She girded herself
for war.
The tapping came nearer. Mrs. MacDonald was grievously crippled with
rheumatism. Only a strong incentive could have urged her up the steep
straight stairway, with its high steps; but Grandma was indomitable.
Lurching like a ship in a heavy sea, she swept round the corner and
brought herself to anchor by planting her stick with a crash on the wavy
oak floor. There she stood, the grim and hard old craft that had
weathered a hundred storms and refused to be dismayed by any. She must
have been alarmed by the housekeeper's scream and the crash of falling
furniture, and the figure in the coral satin dress was at least as
startling for her as for her old servant; but she gave no cry, and her
face looked as it always looked, hard, and stern, and passionless, as
her gray eyes travelled from granddaughter to housekeeper, from
housekeeper to granddaughter.
"What is the meaning of this?" she inquired in her worst voice, which
Barrie always thought like the turning of a key in an unoiled lock.
"This, ma'am?" quavered Mrs. Muir, unused to the pangs of guilty fear,
and bitterly ashamed of them. "Why, I'd been up here getting some more
moth-balls out of the chemist's store-box, and while I was gone Miss
Barribel----"
"You must have left the stairway door unlocked, woman."
"For the first time in my life, ma'am, I did." The answer was an appeal
for justice if not mercy. It was an awful thing to be called "woman" by
the mistress, and to be impaled on that sharp gray gaze never sheathed
behind spectacles. Mrs. Muir was not one to quail easily, but she had
been at fault, and she realized how her small sin of omission was
leading up to consequences more momentous than anything which had
happened in this house for seventeen years. In a flash she remembered,
too, that it was just seventeen years ago this month of August since the
first wearer of the coral satin had gone forever.
"That is no excuse," said Mrs. MacDonald. "There are some things it is a
sin to forget. Locking the garret door is one, you well know why. Now
the mischief is done."
"Who'd ha' dreamed, ma'am, that Miss Barribel would ha' bin on the watch
like a cat for a mouse----"
"It's no question of dreaming, but experience. You ought to know as well
as I do that unfortunately the girl is always on the watch for anything
she ought not to see or do. It is in her blood. These many years I have
struggled to crush down inherited tendencies, and keep her on the
straight path I would have her father's daughter tread. Yet how have I
succeeded? Every day shows how little. This is only one instance among
many."
The pale cold eyes, having chilled Mrs. Muir's blood, turned to do their
work of icing Barrie into subjection; but the girl's veins ran fire. For
once, Grandma was powerless to make her feel a frozen worm.
"I wish I'd known before that my mother's things were here," she said,
in a clear, loud voice. "I'd have broken down the door to get to them.
They're mine--all mine. I will have them."
"You will not," Mrs. MacDonald answered. "Set that portrait back where
you found it with its face to the wall. Take off that immodest,
outrageous dress, and put on your own decent one. Fold up the scarlet
abomination and lay it in the trunk with the rest of the brood."
Somehow that word "brood" in connection with her lost mother's gay,
pretty garments made Barrie see her grandmother through a red haze.
"It's the things you say, not mother's lovely clothes, that are exactly
like a brood of horrid, ugly imps!" she cried. "Always you've kept
everything about her a secret from me, but you can't go on doing it now.
I've seen her beautiful picture. I know it's hers without any telling.
Nothing can make me believe it isn't, no matter what you say, either of
you. So you may as well tell me all about her. I won't move till you
do."
"So be it, then," said Mrs. MacDonald in an iron voice. "The time had to
come some day. Let it be to-day, though for your father's sake I would
have spared you the knowledge until you reached your twenty-first year.
Do not flatter yourself that your threat 'not to move' has the smallest
effect on me. It has none. If I chose, I could force you to obey me this
instant, and put those reminders of sin out of my sight. But if you have
any sense of shame in you, any affection for your father's memory, it
will be the severest punishment I can inflict to tell you the truth
while you are wearing that dress and looking at the face of that
portrait."
Despite her inward flame of fury, which did not wane, the girl was
struck into silence by her grandmother's tone and manner. She stood very
still and white in the coral satin.
"You can go now, Muir," said Mrs. MacDonald. "What is to come must be
between me and my son's child."
Without a word the housekeeper turned and went away. Perhaps she was
glad to escape. And now that her own scolding was over, there was
sympathy in the last look she threw the girl.
There was a certain vague and very dim sense of gratitude in Barrie's
heart toward Mrs. MacDonald for what she had just done. For Barrie did
not want other ears to hear evil words spoken of her mother, and she was
sure that they would be spoken.
Not until the stairs had ceased to creak under the departing feet did