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  THE LITTLE ROOM
    AND OTHER STORIES




  [Illustration:
    “You don’t
    s’pose
    she _set_ it
    on fire?”]




  THE LITTLE ROOM
    AND OTHER STORIES

  BY
  MADELINE YALE WYNNE

  [Illustration]

  CHICAGO
  WAY & WILLIAMS
  1895




  COPYRIGHT
  BY WAY AND WILLIAMS
  MDCCCXCV

  _Decorations by the Author_




CONTENTS.


                                   PAGE

  THE LITTLE ROOM                     7

  THE SEQUEL TO THE LITTLE ROOM      41

  MY GHOST OF A CHANCE               77

  IN GRANADA                         91

  THE VOICE                         105

  THE SCARF                         119

    [_Thanks are due to the Editors of “Harper’s Magazine” for
  permission to reprint “The Little Room” from the number for
  August, 1895._]




THE LITTLE ROOM.


‘How would it do for a smoking-room?’

‘Just the very place! only, you know, Roger, you must not think of
smoking in the house. I am almost afraid that having just a plain,
common man around, let alone a smoking man, will upset Aunt Hannah. She
is New England--Vermont New England--boiled down.’

‘You leave Aunt Hannah to me; I’ll find her tender side. I’m going to
ask her about the old sea-captain and the yellow calico.’

‘Not yellow calico--blue chintz.’

‘Well, yellow _shell_ then.’

‘No, no! don’t mix it up so; you won’t know yourself what to expect,
and that’s half the fun.’

‘Now you tell me again exactly what to expect; to tell the truth, I
didn’t half hear about it the other day; I was wool-gathering. It was
something queer that happened when you were a child, wasn’t it?’

‘Something that began to happen long before that, and kept happening,
and may happen again; but I hope not.’

‘What was it?’

‘I wonder if the other people in the car can hear us?’

‘I fancy not; we don’t hear them--not consecutively, at least.’

‘Well, mother was born in Vermont, you know; she was the only child by
a second marriage. Aunt Hannah and Aunt Maria are only half-aunts to
me, you know.’

‘I hope they are half as nice as you are.’

‘Roger, be still; they certainly will hear us.’

‘Well, don’t you want them to know we are married?’

‘Yes, but not just married. There’s all the difference in the world.’

‘You are afraid we look too happy!’

‘No; only I want my happiness all to myself.’

‘Well, the little room?’

‘My aunts brought mother up; they were nearly twenty years older than
she. I might say Hiram and they brought her up. You see, Hiram was
bound out to my grandfather when he was a boy, and when grandfather
died Hiram said he “s’posed he went with the farm, ’long o’ the
critters,” and he has been there ever since. He was my mother’s only
refuge from the decorum of my aunts. They are simply workers. They make
me think of the Maine woman who wanted her epitaph to be: “She was a
_hard_ working woman.”’

‘They must be almost beyond their working-days. How old are they?’

‘Seventy, or thereabouts; but they will die standing; or, at least, on
a Saturday night, after all the house-work is done up. They were rather
strict with mother, and I think she had a lonely childhood. The house
is almost a mile away from any neighbors, and off on top of what they
call Stony Hill. It is bleak enough up there, even in summer.

‘When mamma was about ten years old they sent her to cousins in
Brooklyn, who had children of their own, and knew more about bringing
them up. She staid there till she was married; she didn’t go to Vermont
in all that time, and of course hadn’t seen her sisters, for they never
would leave home for a day. They couldn’t even be induced to go to
Brooklyn to her wedding, so she and father took their wedding trip up
there.’

‘And that’s why we are going up there on our own?’

‘Don’t, Roger; you have no idea how loud you speak.’

‘You never say so except when I am going to say that one little word.’

‘Well, don’t say it, then, or say it very, very quietly.’

‘Well, what was the queer thing?’

‘When they got to the house, mother wanted to take father right off
into the little room; she had been telling him about it, just as I am
going to tell you, and she had said that of all the rooms, that one was
the only one that seemed pleasant to her. She described the furniture
and the books and paper and everything, and said it was on the north
side, between the front and back room. Well, when they went to look
for it, there was no little room there; there was only a shallow
china-closet. She asked her sisters when the house had been altered and
a closet made of the room that used to be there. They both said the
house was exactly as it had been built--that they had never made any
changes, except to tear down the old wood-shed and build a smaller one.

‘Father and mother laughed a good deal over it, and when anything was
lost they would always say it must be in the little room, and any
exaggerated statement was called “little-roomy.” When I was a child I
thought that was a regular English phrase, I heard it so often.

‘Well, they talked it over, and finally they concluded that my mother
had been a very imaginative sort of a child, and had read in some book
about such a little room, or perhaps even dreamed it, and then had
“made believe,” as children do, till she herself had really thought the
room was there.’

‘Why, of course, that might easily happen.’

‘Yes, but you haven’t heard the queer part yet; you wait and see if you
can explain the rest as easily.

‘They staid at the farm two weeks, and then went to New York to live.
When I was eight years old my father was killed in the war, and mother
was broken-hearted. She never was quite strong afterwards, and that
summer we decided to go up to the farm for three months.

‘I was a restless sort of a child, and the journey seemed very long
to me; and finally, to pass the time, mamma told me the story of the
little room, and how it was all in her own imagination, and how there
really was only a china-closet there.

‘She told it with all the particulars; and even to me, who knew
beforehand that the room wasn’t there, it seemed just as real as
could be. She said it was on the north side, between the front and
back rooms; that it was very small, and they sometimes called it an
entry. There was a door also that opened out-of-doors, and that one
was painted green, and was cut in the middle like the old Dutch doors,
so that it could be used for a window by opening the top part only.
Directly opposite the door was a lounge or couch; it was covered with
blue chintz--India chintz--some that had been brought over by an old
Salem sea-captain as a “venture.” He had given it to Hannah when she
was a young girl. She was sent to Salem for two years to school.
Grandfather originally came from Salem.’

‘I thought there wasn’t any room or chintz.’

‘_That is just it._ They had decided that mother had imagined it all,
and yet you see how exactly everything was painted in her mind, for
she had even remembered that Hiram had told her that Hannah could have
married the sea-captain if she had wanted to!

‘The India cotton was the regular blue stamped chintz, with the peacock
figure on it. The head and body of the bird were in profile, while
the tail was full front view behind it. It had seemed to take mamma’s
fancy, and she drew it for me on a piece of paper as she talked.
Doesn’t it seem strange to you that she could have made all that up, or
even dreamed it?

‘At the foot of the lounge were some hanging shelves with some old
books on them. All the books were leather-colored except one; that was
bright red, and was called the _Ladies’ Album_. It made a bright break
between the other thicker books.

‘On the lower shelf was a beautiful pink sea-shell, lying on a mat
made of balls of red shaded worsted. This shell was greatly coveted
by mother, but she was only allowed to play with it when she had been
particularly good. Hiram had shown her how to hold it close to her ear
and hear the roar of the sea in it.

‘I know you will like Hiram, Roger; he is quite a character in his way.

‘Mamma said she remembered, or _thought_ she remembered, having been
sick once, and she had to lie quietly for some days on the lounge; then
was the time she had become so familiar with everything in the room,
and she had been allowed to have the shell to play with all the time.
She had had her toast brought to her in there, with make-believe tea.
It was one of her pleasant memories of her childhood; it was the first
time she had been of any importance to anybody, even herself.

‘Right at the head of the lounge was a light-stand, as they called it,
and on it was a very brightly polished brass candlestick and a brass
tray, with snuffers. That is all I remember of her describing, except
that there was a braided rag rug on the floor, and on the wall was a
beautiful flowered paper--roses and morning-glories in a wreath on a
light blue ground. The same paper was in the front room.’

‘And all this never existed except in her imagination?’

‘She said that when she and father went up there, there wasn’t
any little room at all like it anywhere in the house; there was a
china-closet where she had believed the room to be.’

‘And your aunts said there had never been any such room.’

‘That is what they said.’

‘Wasn’t there any blue chintz in the house with a peacock figure?’

‘Not a scrap, and Aunt Hannah said there had never been any that she
could remember; and Aunt Maria just echoed her--she always does that.
You see, Aunt Hannah is an up-and-down New England woman. She looks
just like herself; I mean, just like her character. Her joints move
up and down or backward and forward in a plain square fashion. I
don’t believe she ever leaned on anything in her life, or sat in an
easy-chair. But Maria is different; she is rounder and softer; she
hasn’t any ideas of her own; she never had any. I don’t believe she
would think it right or becoming to have one that differed from Aunt
Hannah’s, so what would be the use of having any? She is an echo,
that’s all.

‘When mamma and I got there, of course I was all excitement to see the
china-closet, and I had a sort of feeling that it would be the little
room after all. So I ran ahead and threw open the door, crying, “Come
and see the little room.”

‘And Roger,’ said Mrs. Grant, laying her hand in his, ‘there really
was a little room there, exactly as mother had remembered it. There
was the lounge, the peacock chintz, the green door, the shell, the
morning-glory, and rose paper, _everything exactly as she had described
it to me_.’

‘What in the world did the sisters say about it?’

‘Wait a minute and I will tell you. My mother was in the front hall
still talking with Aunt Hannah. She didn’t hear me at first, but I ran
out there and dragged her through the front room, saying, “The room
_is_ here--it is all right.”

‘It seemed for a minute as if my mother would faint. She clung to me in
terror. I can remember now how strained her eyes looked and how pale
she was.

‘I called out to Aunt Hannah and asked her when they had had the closet
taken away and the little room built; for in my excitement I thought
that that was what had been done.

‘“That little room has always been there,” said Aunt Hannah, “ever
since the house was built.”

‘“But mamma said there wasn’t any little room here, only a
china-closet, when she was here with papa,” said I.

“No, there has never been any china-closet there; it has always been
just as it is now,” said Aunt Hannah.

‘Then mother spoke; her voice sounded weak and far off. She said,
slowly, and with an effort, “Maria, don’t you remember that you told
me that there had _never been any little room here_? and Hannah said so
too, and then I said I must have dreamed it?”

‘“No, I don’t remember anything of the kind,” said Maria, without the
slightest emotion. “I don’t remember you ever said anything about any
china-closet. The house has never been altered; you used to play in
this room when you were a child, don’t you remember?”

‘“I know it,” said mother, in that queer slow voice that