Out of the Air Part 6

"Oh, give me half an hour or so," Lindsay decided carelessly.

The runabout chugged into the green arch which imprisoned the distance.

Alone, Lindsay strolled between lilac bushes and over the sunken flags which led to the front door. Then, changing his mind, he made an appraising tour about the outside of the place.

Blue Meadows was a big old house: big, so it seemed to his amateur judgment, by an incredible number of rooms; and old--and here his judgment, though swift, was more accurate--to the time of two hundred years. Outside, it had all the earmarks of Colonial architecture--plain lines, stark walls, the windows, with twenty-four lights, geometrically placed; but its lovely lines, its beautiful proportions, and the soft plushy nap which time had laid upon its front clapboardings mitigated all its severities. The s.h.i.+ngles of the roof and sides were weather-beaten and gray, the blinds a deep old blue. At one side jutted an incongruous modern addition; into the second story of which was set a galleried piazza. At the other side stretched an endless series of additions, tapering in size to a tiny shed.

"This is Lutetia's house!" Lindsay stopped to muse. "Is it true that I spent two years with the French Army? Is it true that I served two more with the American Army? Oh, to think you didn't live to see all that, Lutetia!"

A lattice arched over the doorway and on it a big climbing rose was just coming into bud. The beautiful door showed the pointed architrave, the leaded side panels, the fanlight, the engaged columns, of Colonial times. It resisted the first attack of the key, but yielded finally to Lindsay's persuasion. He stepped into the hall.

It was a rectangular hall, running straight to the back of the house.

Pairs of doors, opposite each other, gaped on both sides. At the left arose a slender straight stairway, mahogany-railed. Lindsay strolled from one room to the other, opening windows and blinds. They were big square rooms, finished in the conventional Colonial manner, with fireplaces and fireplace cupboards. The wallpaper, faded and stained, was of course quite bare of pictures and ornaments. He stopped to examine the carving on the white, painted panels above the fireplace--garlands of flowers caught with torches and masks.

Smiling to himself, Lindsay returned to the hall. "Oh, Lutetia, I should like to have seen you here!" he remarked wordlessly.

Behind the stairway, at the back, appeared another door. He opened it into darkness. Fumbling in his pocket, he produced a box of matches, lighted his way through the blackness; again opened windows and shutters. This proved to be the long back room so common in Colonial homes; running the entire width of the house. There were two fireplaces.

One was small, with a Franklin stove. The other--Lindsay calculated that it would take six-foot logs. Four well-grown children, shoulder to shoulder, could have walked into it. This room was not entirely empty.

In the center--by a miracle his stumbling progress had just avoided it--was a long table of the refectory type. Lindsay studied the position of the two fireplaces. He examined the ceiling. "You threw the whole lot of little rooms together to make this big room, Lutetia. You're a lady quite of my own architectural taste. I, too, like a lot of s.p.a.ce."

He continued his explorations. From one side of the long living-room extended kitchen, laundry; servants' rooms and servants' dining-room; an endless maze of b.u.t.teries, pantries, sheds. Lindsay gave them short shrift. At the other side, however, lay a little half-oval room, the first floor of that Victorian addition which he had marked from the outside.

"Oh, Lutetia, Lutetia, how could you, how could you?" he burst out at first glance. "To add this modern bit to that fine Colonial stateliness!

Perhaps we're not kindred souls after all."

Hugging the wall of this room and leading to the second floor was a stairway so narrow that only one person could mount it at a time.

Lindsay proved this to his own satisfaction by ascending it. It opened into a big back room of the main house, the one with the galleried piazza. Lindsay opened all the windows here; and then went rapidly from room to room, letting in the June suns.h.i.+ne.

They were all empty, of course--and yet, in a dozen plaintive ways--faded wall s.p.a.ces, which showed the exact size of pictures, nails with carpet tufts still clinging to them, a forgotten window shade or two--they spoke eloquently of habitation. Indeed, the whole place had a friendly atmosphere, Lindsay reflected; there was none of the cold, dead connotation of most long-empty houses. This old place was spiritually warm, as though some reflection of a long-ago vivid life still hung among its shadows. From the dust, the stains, the cobwebs, it might have been vacant for a century. From the welcoming warmth of its quiet rooms, it might have been vacant but for a day.

Through the back windows, Lindsay looked down onto what must once have been a huge rectangle of lawn; and near the house, what must once have been an oval of flower garden. The lawn, stretching to a stone wall--beyond which towered a chaos of trees--was now knee-deep in timothy-gra.s.s; the garden had reverted to jungle. He studied the garden.

Close to the house, an enormous syringa bush heaped into a mountain of fragrant snow. Near, a smoke-bush was just beginning to bubble into rounds of blood-scarlet gauze. Strangled rosebushes showed yellow or crimson. Afar an enormous patch of tiger lilies gave the effect of a bizarre, orchidous tropical group. The rest was an indiscriminate early-summer tangle of sumac; elderberry; bayberry; silver birches; wild roses; daisies; b.u.t.tercups; and what would later be Queen Anne's lace and goldenrod. From a back corner window, it seemed to him that he caught a glint of water; but he could not recapture it from any other point of view. However, he lost all memory of this in a more affording discovery. For the front windows gave him the reason of the name, Blue Meadows. Across the road stretched a series of meadows, all bluish purple with blooming iris.

Lindsay contemplated this charming prospect for a long interval.

"And now, Lutetia," he suddenly turned and addressed the empty rooms, "I want to find _your_ room. Which of these six was it?"

Retracing his steps, he went from room to room until, many times, he had made a complete survey of the second floor. He crossed and recrossed his own trail, as the excitement of the quest mounted in him.

"Ah!" he exclaimed aloud, "here it is! You can't escape your soul-mate, Lutetia."

It was not because the room was so much bigger than the rest that he made this decision; it was only because it was so much more quaint. At one side it merged, by means of a slender doorway, with the galleried piazza. From it, by means of that tiny flight of stairs, Lutetia could have descended to the first floor of that mid-Victorian addition. "I take it all back, Lutetia," he approved. "Middle of the nineteenth century or not, it's a wonder--this combination." At the back of Lutetia's room was a third door; as slender as the door leading to the gallery, but much lower; not four feet high. Lindsay pushed it open, crawled on hands and knees through it. He had of course, on his first exploration, entered the small room into which it led. But he had gone in and out without careful examination; it had seemed merely a four-walled room. Coming into it, however, from Lutetia's bedroom, it suddenly acquired character.

The walls were papered in white. And on the mid-Victorian dado scarcely legible now, he suddenly discovered drawings. Drawings of a curious character and of a more curious technique. He followed their fluttery maze from wall to wall--a flight of little beings, winged at the shoulders and knees, with flying locks and strange finlike hands and feet; fanciful, comic, tender.

"Oh!" Lindsay emitted aloud. "Ah!" And in an instant: "I see! This room belonged to that child Hyde spoke of."

He ascended to the garret. This was of course the big storeroom of the Colonial imagination. It too was quite empty. At one spot a post--obviously not a roof-support--ran from floor to ceiling. Lindsay gazed about a little unseeingly. "I wonder what that post was for?" he questioned himself absently. After a while, "What's become of that child?" he demanded of circ.u.mambient s.p.a.ce.

As though this offered food for reflection, he descended by means of the main stairway to the lower floor; sat on the doorsteps a while. He mused--gazing out into the green-colored, sweet-scented June afternoon.

After an interval he arose and repeated his voyage of exploration.

Again he was struck with the friendly quality of the old place. That physical dampness, which long vacant houses hold in solution, seemed entirely to have disappeared before the flood of June suns.h.i.+ne. The spiritual chill, which always accompanies it--that sinister quality so connotative of congregations of evil spirits--he again observed was completely lacking. As he emerged from one room to enter another, it seemed to him that the one back of him filled with--_companions.h.i.+p_, he described it to himself. As he continued his explorations, it seemed to him that the room he was about to enter would offer him not ghostly but human welcome. That human welcome did not come, of course. Instead, there surged upon him the rich odors of the lilacs and syringas; the staccato greetings of the birds.

After a while he went downstairs again. Sitting in the front doorway, he fell into a rich revery.

This was where Lutetia Murray wrote the books which had so intrigued his boyish fancy. Mentally he ran over the list: _The Sport of the G.o.ddesses_, _The Weary Time_, _Mary Towle_, _Old Age_, _Intervals_, _With Pitfall and with Gin_, _Cynthia Ware_-- Details came up before his mental vision which he had entirely forgotten and now only half remembered; dramatic moments; descriptive pa.s.sages; conversational interludes; scenes; epigrams.... He tried to imagine Lutetia Murray at Blue Meadows. The picture which, in college, he had cut from a book-house catalogue, flashed before him; he had found it among his papers. The figure was standing.... He had looked at it only yesterday, but his masculine observation retained no details of the gown except that it left her neck and arms bare. The face was in profile. The curling hair rose to a high ma.s.s on her head. The delicate features were _mignonne_, except for the delicious, warm, lusciously cut mouth-- Was she blonde or brunet he wondered. She died at forty-five. To David Lindsay at twenty-two, forty-five had seemed a respectable old age. To David Lindsay at twenty-eight, it seemed almost young. She was dead, of course, when he began to read her. Oh, if he could only have met her! It was a great pity that she had died so young. Her work--he had made a point of this in his thesis--had already swung from an erratic, highly colored first period into a more balanced, carefully characterized second period; was just emerging into a third period that was the union of these two; big and rounded and satisfying. But death had cut that development short. In the last four years Lindsay had seen a great deal of death and often in atrocious form. He had long ago concluded that he had thought on the end of man all the thoughts that were in him. But now, sitting in the scented warmth of Lutetia's trellised doorway, he found that there were still other thoughts which he could think.

The runabout chugged up the road presently. "Ben waiting long?" the freckled d.i.c.k asked with a cheery shamelessness.

"No, I've been looking the house over. Wonderful old place, isn't it?"

"Don't care much for it myself," d.i.c.k answered. "I don't like anything old--old houses or that old truck the summer folks are always buying.

Things can't be too new or up-to-date for me."

Lindsay did not appear at first to hear this; he was still bemused from the experiences of the afternoon. But as they approached the Arms, he emerged from his daze with a belated reply. "Well, I suppose a lot of people feel the way you do," he remarked vaguely. "Mr. Hyde tells me that the Murray place hasn't been let for fifteen years. I expect the rest of the people around here don't like old houses."

"Oh, that ain't the reason the Murray house hasn't let," d.i.c.k explained with the scorn of rustic omniscience. "They say it's haunted."

"What rent do they ask for the Murray house?" Lindsay asked Hyde that evening.

Hyde scratched the back of his head. His face contracted with that mental agony which afflicts the Yankee when an exact statement is demanded of him. "Well, I shouldn't be surprised if you could get it for two hundred dollars the season," he finally brought out.

Lindsay considered, but apparently not Hyde's answer; for presently he came out with a different question. "Why do they say it's haunted?"

Hyde emitted a short contemptuous laugh. "Did you ever hear of any house in the country that's been empty for a number of years that worn't considered haunted?"

"No," Lindsay admitted. "I am disappointed, though. I had hoped you would be able to tell me about the ghost."

"Well, I can't," Hyde a.s.serted scornfully, "nor n.o.body else neither."

The two men smoked in silence.

After a while Lindsay made the motions preliminary to rising. He knocked the ashes out of his pipe; put his pipe in his pocket; withdrew his feet from their comfortable elevation on the piazza rail. Finally he a.s.sembled his full height on the floor, but not without a prolonged stretching movement. "Well," he said, halfway through the yawn, "I guess you can tell that brother of yours that I'm going to hire the Murray house for the season."

Hyde was equally if not more _degage_. He did not move; nor did he change his expression. "All right," he commented without enthusiasm, "I'll let him know. How soon would you like to go in, say?"

"As soon as I can buy a bed." Lindsay disappeared through the doorway.

Two days later Lindsay found himself comfortably settled at Blue Meadows. Upstairs--he had of course chosen Lutetia's room--was a cot and a bureau of soft wood. Downstairs was a limited a.s.sortment of cheap china; cheaper cutlery; the meagerest possible cooking equipment.

But there was an atmosphere given to Lindsay's room by Lutetia's own picture hanging above the bureau. And another to the living-room by Lutetia's own works--a miscellaneous collection of ugly-proportioned, ugly-colored, late-nineteenth-century volumes--ranged on the broad shelf above the fireplace; by Lindsay's writing materials scattered over the refectory table. Economical as he had been inside, he had exploded into extravagance outside. A Gloucester hammock swung at the back. A collection of garden materials which included a scythe, a spade, a sickle, a lawn-mower, and a hose filled one corner of the barn.