Complete Works of Harriet Beecher Stowe

by Harriet Beecher Stowe

  “Harry,” said Tina, decisively, “let ‘s we live here. I like to play with the puppies, and the old woman is good to us.”

  “We ‘ll see, Tina,” said wise little Harry.

  CHAPTER XV.

  THE OLD MANOR-HOUSE.

  ALAS! the next morning dawned wet and rainy. The wind flapped the tent-cover, and the rain put out the fire; and, what was worse, a cross, surly Indian man came home, who beat the poor old woman, and scattered the children and puppies, like partridges, into the bushes.

  The poor old squaw took it all patiently, and seemed only intent on protecting the children from injuries and inconveniences on which she calculated as part of her daily lot. She beckoned them to her, and pointed across a field. “Go dat way. White folks dere be good to you.” And she insisted on giving them the painted basket and some coarse corn bread.

  They set off through the fields; but the wind was chilly and piercing, and the bushes and grass were wet, and Tina was in a doleful state. “O Harry, I wish we had a house to live in! Where do you suppose all the butterflies are staying that we saw yesterday? I ‘d like to go where they stay.”

  “Never mind, Tina; by and by we ‘ll come to a house.”

  They passed a spot where evidently some Indians had been camping, for there were the remains of a fire; and Harry picked up some dry brush and refuse sticks around, and kindled it up bright for Tina to warm and dry herself. They sat there awhile and fed the fire, till they began to feel quite warm. In one of Harry’s excursions for sticks, he came back and reported a house in sight.

  Sure enough, concealed from view behind a pine thicket was a large, stately mansion, the approach to which was through an avenue of majestic trees. The path to this was all grown over with high grass, and a wilderness of ornamental shrubbery seemed to have twined and matted itself together in a wild labyrinth of utter desertion and neglect. The children made their way up the avenue through dripping grass, and bushes that reached almost to their shoulders, and that drizzled water upon their partially dried garments in a way that made Tina shiver. “I ‘m so cold!” she said, pitifully. “The folks must let us come in to dry us.”

  They at last stood before the front door, in a sort of porch which overshadowed it, and which rested on Corinthian pillars of some architectural pretension. The knocker was a black serpent with its tail in its mouth. Tina shuddered with some vague, inward dread, as Harry, rising on tiptoe, struck several loud blows upon it, and then waited to see who would appear.

  The wind now rose, and tossed and swung the branches of the great trees in the avenue with a creaking, groaning sound. The shrubbery had grown around the house in a dense and tangled mass, that produced, in the dismal stormy weather, a sense of oppression and darkness. Huge lilacs had climbed above the chamber windows, and clumps of syringas billowed outward from the house in dense cascades; while roses and various kinds of more tender shrubbery, which had been deprived of light and air by their more hardy neighbors, filled up the space below with bare, dead branches, through which the wind sighed dolefully.

  “Harry, do knock again,” said Tina, when they had waited some time.

  “It ‘s no use,” said the boy; “I don’t think anybody lives here.”

  “Perhaps, if we go round to the back of the house, we shall find somebody,” said Tina; “it ‘s storming worse and worse.” And the little girl plunged resolutely into the thicket of dead shrubbery, and began tearing her way through.

  There was a door on the side of the house, much like that in front; and there were spacious back buildings, which, joining the house, stretched far away in the shrubbery. Harry tried this side door. It was firmly locked. The children then began regularly trying every door that presented itself to their view. At last one, after considerable effort, gave way before their united exertions, and opened to them a shelter from the storm, which was now driving harder and harder. It was a place that had evidently been used for the storing of wood, for there was then quite a pile of fuel systematically arranged against the wall. An ancient axe, perfectly red with rust, was also hanging there.

  “Well, we ‘re in at last,” said Tina, “but wet through. What a storm it is!”

  “Perhaps we can get to some better place in the house,” said Harry; “here is wood, and we might make a fire and dry our clothes, and wait here till the storm is over.”

  He accordingly pushed against a door at the farther end of the wood-shed, and it opened before him into a large old kitchen. There was the ample fireplace of olden times, extending quite across one side, garnished with a crane having various hooks and other paraphernalia for the convenience of culinary operations.

  “There, now,” said Harry, “is a fireplace, and here is wood. Now we can dry ourselves. Just you wait here, and I ‘ll go back and bring a brand from our fire, if the rain has n’t put it all out.” And Harry turned, and hastily made the best of his way out of the house, to secure his treasure before it should be too late.

  Tina now resolved to explore some of the other rooms. She opened a door which seemed to lead into a large dining-hall. A heavy dining-table of dark wood stood in the middle of this room; and a large, old-fashioned carved sideboard filled up an arched recess. Heavy mahogany chairs with stuffed leathern bottoms stood against the wall, but the brass nails with which they had been finished were green with rust. The windows of this room were so matted over with cobwebs, and so darkened by the dense shrubbery outside, as to give the apartment a most weird and forlorn appearance. One of the panes of the window had been broken, perhaps by the striking of the shrubbery against it; and the rain and snow beating in there had ruined the chair that stood below, for the seat of it was all discolored with mould.

  Tina shivered as she looked at this dreary room, and the tapping of her own little heels seemed to her like something ghostly; so she hastened to open another door. This led to a small apartment, which had evidently been a lady’s boudoir. The walls were hung with tapestry of a dark-green ground on which flowers and fruits and birds were represented in colors that yet remained brilliant, not withstanding the dilapidated air of some portions of it. There was a fireplace in this room, and the mantel was choicely carved, of white Italian marble, and upon it were sundry flasks and vases of Venetian glass, of quaint and strange shapes, which the child eyed with awe-struck curiosity. By the side of the fireplace was a broad lounge or sofa, with a pile of cushions, covered with a rich but faded brocade, of a pattern evidently made to carry out the same design with the tapestry on the wall.

  A harpischord occupied another side of the room, and upon it were piled music-books and manuscript music yellow with age. There was a sort of Oriental guitar or lute suspended from the wall, of which one of the strings, being broken, vibrated with air of the door when the child made her way into the room, and continued quivering in a way that seemed to her nervous and ghostly. Still she was a resolute and enterprising little body; and though her heart was beating at a terrible rate, she felt a sort of mixture of gratified curiosity and exultation in her discovery.

  “I wish Harry would come back,” she said to herself. “We might make a fire in this pretty little room, and it would be quite snug, and we could wait here till the folks come home.” How glad she was when the sound of his voice and footsteps broke the terrible loneliness! She ran out to him, exclaiming, “O Harry, we won’t make a fire in this great, doleful old kitchen. I ‘ve found such a nice little room full of pretty things! Let me bring in some wood”; – and, running to the wood-pile, she filled her arms.

  “It was all I could do to find a brand with a bit of fire on it,” said Harry. “There was only the least spark left, but I put it under my jacket and blew and blew, and now we have quite a bright spot in it,” he said, showing with exultation a black brand with a round, fiery eye in it, which had much the appearance of a knowing old goblin winking at the children.

  The desolate boudoir was soon a scene of much animation, and the marble hearth was strewn with chips and splinters.r />
  “Let me blow, Harry,” said Tina, “while you go and look for some more of this brushwood. I saw a heap in that wood-house. I ‘ll tend the fire while you are gone. See,” she said triumphantly to him, when he returned, dragging in a heavy pole of brushwood, “we ‘ll soon have such a fire!” – and she stooped down over the hearth, laying the burnt ends of sticks together, and blowing till her cheeks were so aflame with zeal and exertion that she looked like a little live coal herself. “Now for it!” she said, as she broke bit after bit of the brushwood. “See now it ‘s beginning to burn, – hear it crackle! Now put on more and more.”

  Very soon, in fact, the brushwood crackled and roared in a wide sheet of flame up the old chimney; and being now reinforced with stout sticks of wood, the fire took a solid and settled and companionable form, – the brightest, most hopeful companion a mortal could ask for in a chill, stormy day in autumn.

  “Now, Harry,” said Tina, “let ‘s dry our clothes, and then we will see what we can do in our house.”

  “But is it really ours?” said thoughtful Harry. “Who knows who it may belong to?”

  “Do you think,” said Tina, apprehensively, “that any giant lives here that has gone out and will come home again? Father used to tell us a story like that.”

  “There are n’t really giants now-a-days, Tina,” said Harry; “those are only stories. I don’t think that it looks as if anybody had lived here for a great while. Things don’t look as if anybody lived here, or was expecting to come back.”

  “Then we may as well live here as anybody,” said Tina, “and I will keep house for you. I will roast some apples for our dinner, – I saw ever so many out here on the tree. Roast apples with our corn bread will be so good! And then we can sleep tonight on this great, wide sofa, – can’t we? Here, let me sweep up the chips we have made, and make our little house look nice.”

  “It must be a long time since any one has lived here,” said Harry, looking up at the cobwebbed window, against which the shrubbery was dashing and beating in the fury of the storm, “and there can’t be the least harm in our staying here till the storm is over.”

  “Such a strange, pretty room this is!” said Tina, “and so many strange, pretty things in it! Do you know, Harry, I was almost afraid to be here while you were gone; but this bright, warm fire makes such a difference. Fire is company, is n’t it?”

  When the little one had dried her clothes, she began, with a restless, butterfly sort of motion, to investigate more closely the various objects of the apartment. She opened the harpsichord, and struck a few notes, which sounded rather discordantly, as an instrument which chill and solitude had smitten with a lasting hoarseness.

  “O, horrid! This is n’t pretty,” she said. “I wonder who ever played on it? But, O Harry! come and look here! I thought this was another room in here, with a fire in it,” she said, as she lifted a curtain which hung over a recess. “Look! it ‘s only looking-glass in a door. Where does it go to? Let ‘s see.” And with eager curiosity she turned the knob, and the door opened, disclosing only a sort of inner closet, which had been evidently employed for a writing-cabinet, as a writing-table stood there, and book-cases filled with books.

  What most attracted the attention of the children was a picture, which was hung exactly opposite the door, so that it met the children face to face. It was the image of a young girl, dressed in white, with long, black, curling hair falling down over her neck and shoulders. The dark eyes had an expression both searching and melancholy; and it was painted in that peculiar manner, which produces such weird effects on the beholder, in which the eyes seem to be fixed upon the spectator, and to follow him on whichever side he stands.

  “What a pretty lady! But she looks at us so!” said Tina, covering her eyes. “I almost thought it was a real woman.”

  “Whichever way we move, she looks after us,” said Harry.

  “She looks as if she would speak to us,” said Tina; “she surely wants to say something.”

  “It is something very sad, then,” said the boy, studying the picture attentively. “She was not sad as mother was,” said he with a delicate, spiritual instinct reading the impression of the face. “Mother used to look very, very sad, but in a different way, – a better way, I think.”

  “Of course it is n’t in the least like mother,” said Tina. “Mother had soft, bright hair, – not black, like this; and her eyes were blue, like yours, Harry.”

  “I don’t mean her hair or her eyes,” said Harry; “but when mother was sad, she always used to pray. I don’t think this one looks as if she would pray,” said the boy, rather under his breath.

  There was, in fact, a lurking sparkle of haughty determination in the depths of the mournful eyes, and a firm curve to the lines of the mouth, an arching of the neck, and a proud carriage of the head, that confirmed the boy’s strictures, and indicated that, whatever sorrows might have crushed the poor heart that beat beneath that fair form, they were borne in her own strength, with no uplooking for aid.

  Tina longed to open the drawers of the cabinet beneath the picture, but Harry held her hand. “Tina, dear, what would mother say?” he said, reprovingly. “This is n’t our house. Whoever owns it would n’t think it was wrong for us to stay here in such a storm, but we certainly ought not to touch their things.”

  “But we may go through the house, and see all the rooms,” said Tina, who had a genuine feminine passion for rummaging, and whose curiosity was piqued to the extreme point by the discoveries already made. “I shall be afraid to sleep here tonight, unless I know all that is in the house.”

  So the children went, hand in hand, through the various apartments. The house was one of those stately manors which, before the Revolutionary war, the titled aristocracy of England delighted to reproduce on the virgin soil of America. Even to this modern time, some of the old provincial towns in New England preserve one or two of these monuments of the pride and pomp of old colonial days, when America was one of the antechambers of the English throne and aristocracy.

  The histories of these old houses, if searched into, present many romantic incidents, in which truth may seem wilder than fiction. In the breaking of the ties between the mother country and America, many of these stately establishments were suddenly broken up, and the property, being subject to governmental claims yet undecided, lay a long time unoccupied; the real claimants being in England, and their possessions going through all the processes of deterioration and decay incident to property in the hands of agents at a distance from the real owners. The moss of legend and tradition grew upon these deserted houses. Life in New England, in those days, had not the thousand stimulants to the love of excitement which are to be found in the throng and rush of modern society, and there was a great deal more of story-telling and romancing in real life than exists now; and the simple villagers by their firesides delighted to plunge into the fathomless abyss of incident that came from the histories of grand, unknown people across the water, who had established this incidental connection with their neighborhood. They exaggerated the records of the pomp and wealth that had environed them. They had thrilling legends of romantic and often tragic incidents, of which such houses had been the theatres. More than one of them had its well-attested ghosts, which, at all proper hours, had been veritably seen to go through all those aimless ghostly perambulations and performances which, according to village legends, diversify the leisure of the spiritual state.

  The house into which the children’s wandering fortune had led them was one whose legends and history formed the topic of many an excited hour of my childhood, as crooned over to me by different story-telling gossips; and it had, in its structure and arrangements, the evident impress of days nevermore to be reproduced in New England. Large and lofty apartments, some of them still hung with tapestry, and some adorned with arches and columns, were closed in from air and light by strong shutters, although a dusky glimmer came through the heart-shaped holes cut in them. Some of these apartments were qui
te dismantled and bare. In others the furniture was piled together in confusion, as if for the purpose of removal. One or two chambers were still thoroughly furnished, and bore the marks of having been, at some recent period, occupied; for there were mattresses and pillows and piles of bedclothing on the great, stately bedsteads.

  “We might sleep in one of these rooms,” said Harry.

  “O, no, no!” said the child, clinging to him; “I should be afraid. That great, dreadful-looking, dark bed! And who knows what might be behind the curtains! Let me sleep in the bright little room, where we can see all around us. I should be afraid that lady in the closet would walk about these rooms in the night.”

  “Perhaps she did once,” said Harry. “But come, let us go down. The wind blows and howls so about these lonesome rooms, it makes me afraid.”

  “How it rumbles down the chimneys!” said Tina; “and how it squeals just as if somebody was hurting it. It ‘s a terrible storm, is n’t it?”

  “Yes, it ‘s well we are in a house at any rate,” said Harry; “but let ‘s go down and bring in wood, and I ‘ll get some apples and pears off the trees out by the back door.”

  And so the two poor little swallows chittered as they built their small, innocent nest in the deserted house, as ignorant of the great Before and After, as if they had had wings and feathers, and round, bright bird-eyes, instead of curly, golden heads. Harry brought in a quantity of fruit in Tina’s little checked apron, and, like two squirrels, they stored it under the old brocade sofa.

  “Now ever so much wood in the hall here,” said Tina, with the providence of a little housewife; “because when the dark night comes we shall be afraid to go into the wood-house.”

  Harry felt very large and very provident, and quite like a householder, as he brought armful after armful and laid it outside the door, while Tina arranged some apples to roast on the marble hearth. “If we only could get something to eat every day, we might live here always,” she said.