第8章

The two houses together formed a single dwelling, the party-wall having been removed and the rooms placed in communication.These rooms, above-stairs, were extremely numerous, and were painted all over exactly alike, in a yellowish white which had grown sallow with time.On the third floor there was a sort of arched passage, connecting the two sides of the house, which Isabel and her sisters used in their childhood to call the tunnel and which, though it was short and well-lighted, always seemed to the girl to be strange and lonely, especially on winter afternoons.She had been in the house, at different periods, as a child; in those days her grandmother lived there.Then there had been an absence of ten years, followed by a return to Albany before her father's death.Her grandmother, old Mrs.Archer, had exercised, chiefly within the limits of the family, a large hospitality in the early period, and the little girls often spent weeks under her roof- weeks of which Isabel had the happiest memory.The manner of life was different from that of her own home-larger, more plentiful, practically more festal; the discipline of the nursery was delightfully vague and the opportunity of listening to the conversation of one's elders (which with Isabel was a highly-valued pleasure) almost unbounded.There was a constant coming and going; her grandmother's sons and daughters and their children appeared to be in the enjoyment of standing invitations to arrive and remain, so that the house offered to a certain extent the appearance of a bustling provincial inn kept by a gentle old landlady who sighed a great deal and never presented a bill.

Isabel of course knew nothing about bills; but even as a child she thought her grandmother's home romantic.There was a covered piazza behind it, furnished with a swing which was a source of tremulous interest; and beyond this was a long garden, sloping down to the stable and containing peach-trees of barely credible familiarity.

Isabel had stayed with her grandmother at various seasons, but somehow all her visits had a flavour of peaches.On the other side, across the street, was an old house that was called the Dutch House- a peculiar structure dating from the earliest colonial time, composed of bricks that had been painted yellow, crowned with a gable that was pointed out to strangers, defended by a rickety wooden paling and standing sidewise to the street.It was occupied by a primary school for children of both sexes, kept or rather let go, by a demonstrative lady of whom Isabel's chief recollection was that her hair was fastened with strange bedroomy combs at the temples and that she was the widow of some one of consequence.The little girl had been offered the opportunity of laying a foundation of knowledge in this establishment;but having spent a single day in it, she had protested against its laws and had been allowed to stay at home, where, in the September days, when the windows of the Dutch House were open, she used to hear the hum of childish voices repeating the multiplication-table- an incident in which the elation of liberty and the pain of exclusion were indistinguishably mingled.The foundation of her knowledge was really laid in the idleness of her grandmother's house, where, as most of the other inmates were not reading people, she had uncontrolled use of a library full of books with frontispieces, which she used to climb upon a chair to take down.When she had found one to her taste- she was guided in the selection chiefly by the frontispiece- she carried it into a mysterious apartment which lay beyond the library and which was called, traditionally, no one knew why, the office.Whose office it had been and at what period it had flourished, she never learned; it was enough for her that it contained an echo and a pleasant musty smell and that it was a chamber of disgrace for old pieces of furniture whose infirmities were not always apparent (so that the disgrace seemed unmerited and rendered them victims of injustice) and with which, in the manner of children, she had established relations almost human, certainly dramatic.There was an old haircloth sofa in especial, to which she had confided a hundred childish sorrows.The place owed much of its mysterious melancholy to the fact that it was properly entered from the second door of the house, the door that had been condemned, and that it was secured by bolts which a particularly slender little girl found it impossible to slide.She knew that this silent, motionless portal opened into the street; if the sidelights had not been filled with green paper she might have looked out upon the little brown stoop and the well-worn brick pavement.But she had no wish to look out, for this would have interfered with her theory that there was a strange, unseen place on the other side- a place which became to the child's imagination, according to its different moods, a region of delight of terror.

It was in the "office" still that Isabel was sitting on that melancholy afternoon of early spring which I have just mentioned.At this time she might have had the whole house to choose from, and the room she had selected was the most depressed of its scenes.She had never opened the bolted door nor removed the green paper (renewed by other hands) from its sidelights; she had never assured herself that the vulgar street lay beyond.A crude, cold rain fell heavily; the spring-time was indeed an appeal- and it seemed a cynical, insincere appeal- to patience.Isabel, however, gave as little heed as possible to cosmic treacheries; she kept her eyes on her book and tried to fix her mind.It had lately occurred to her that her mind was a good deal of a vagabond, and she had spent much ingenuity in training it to a military step and teaching it to advance, to halt, to retreat, to perform even more complicated manoeuvres, at the word of command.Just now she had given it marching orders and it had been trudging over the sandy plains of a history of German Thought.