“It’s snowing!” cried Randy one Saturday morning from her roost in the cupola. She had gone up there with a book of Father’s called Jean-Christophe which she didn’t understand. “Real snow!” she shouted exultantly, forgetting all about the strange boy in the book and tumbling down the steps to the Office. “First I thought it was just ashes from the chimney but I watched and it melted right on the windowsill!”
Rush stopped playing the piano. Mona stopped writing her play. Oliver stopped trying to draw a battle between fourteen airplanes and thirteen submarines, all on the same sheet of paper. With one accord they went downstairs, put on their coats and, as an afterthought, their galoshes, and went outdoors. None of them had ever seen snow in the country. At first it wasn’t very exciting, really. The sparse, papery flakes flew down, alighted, and vanished without making any difference on the landscape.
But Oliver made a discovery.
“Look,” he said, examining the snowflakes on his sleeve. “They’re shaped like little sort of fuzzy stars.”
Oh, everybody knew that!
“Didn’t you really ever notice it before, Oliver?” Randy sounded astonished. Nevertheless, she ran into the house and borrowed one of the lenses from Rush’s microscope and she and Oliver took turns peering through it at the snow crystals. How wonderful they were! So tiny, so perfect, down to the last point, the last feathering of frost. There were little stars, and miniature geometrical ferns and flowers and patterns for fairy crowns, and tiny hexagons of lace. And each was different from all the others.
“How can they ever think of so many patterns?” wondered Randy, relinquishing the lens to Oliver.
“How can who ever think of them?” said Oliver, breathing so hard on the flake he was examining that it turned into a drop of water.
“God I suppose,” Randy answered, catching some snow on the tip of her tongue and eating it.
“Does He draw them first, or does He just go ahead and cut them out and drop them?” Oliver wanted to know.
But that was too much for Randy. Snowflakes were a mystery altogether.
“Come on,” she said. “Let’s go up through the woods to the top of the hill and see how it looks from up there.”
By lunchtime the valley was lightly coated, like a cake with confectioner’s sugar; and by half past three the snow was of a respectable depth: halfway to the tops of their galoshes. There was white fur on the antlers of the iron deer and on the melancholy boughs of the Norway spruce.
They cleared the front drive with Willy, built a snowman for Oliver and a fort for all of them. “But, gee, if we only had a sled!” Rush said finally. Oliver stopped digging, leaned thoughtfully on his spade, and in a moment or two drifted inconspicuously toward the house.
Scrape, scr-a-a-pe, went Willy’s industrious shovel. The millions of little white stars twinkled down, and down, and down; an endless supply. Mona bent over and wrote her name, big, on the snow with the point of her mitten.
MONA MELENDY.
Then she stood off and looked at it. It was the kind of name that would look well in lights when she was famous. Oh, yes, of course, Mona Melendy. Isn’t she wonderful? The most perfect Juliet I ever—
“Ow! Rush, you devil!” yelped Mona furiously as a wet, generous handful of snow down her back brought the glorious daydream to a close. The fight was on. Half in earnest, half in fun, they pelted each other, rolled on the ground, got soaking wet. Rush was strong, but Mona was bigger. She got him down, finally, and was sitting firmly on his chest combing her disheveled hair when she saw Oliver returning.
“Why, look what he’s got!” she exclaimed, rising suddenly and liberating her victim.
“Sleds, gee whiz,” murmured Rush, in awe. They were sort of funny, shabby old things with high, rusted runners, and names painted on them in fancy letters. “Snow Demon,” one was called. “Little Kriss Kringle” was the other. Yes, they were strange, but never mind, they were sleds!
“Where’d you ever get them, Fatso?” inquired Rush.
“Me? Oh. I just found them,” replied Oliver vaguely.
“But where?”
“Oh, just around.”
“What do you mean around? I never saw any sleds lying around the Four-Story Mistake. Come on, Oliver, give us the dope, like a good guy.”
“I can’t,” said Oliver firmly. “It’s a secret.”
Randy couldn’t resist boasting a little. “I know where he got them,” she crowed. “But I promised not to tell.” And she and Oliver exchanged a wink of the greatest satisfaction and good will.
The sleds turned out to be all right, though not greased lightning by any means. Rush had an inspiration, too, and went and got two large dishpans from the house; so each of them had a suitable vehicle for traveling down a snowy hill. The dishpans were particularly exciting, because they not only descended rapidly, but spun round and round while doing so. At the bottom of the slope you rose with difficulty, staggered, and discovered that you were the exact center of a world that revolved about you like a mammoth merry-go-round. Oliver was the only one who didn’t care for this. His stomach resented the spinning of the dishpan, though for some reason it did not resent being slammed down belly-whopper on a sled over and over again.
Even Willy Sloper came and joined them for a while, and the picture of him going down the slide in a dishpan, arms and legs waving like an old-fashioned windmill was one that none of them would ever forget.
“I know what let’s do,” Mona said, when they were all exhausted and hot and red-cheeked. “I read about it in a book. They made snow ice cream in this book. Why don’t we make some?”
“How do you do it?”
“Well, first we have to beg a bottle of milk and some sugar from Cuffy. You do it, Rush. You’re best at it.”
“Okay,” said Rush, who was hungry, trotting obediently toward the house.
“And some cups,” called Mona, “and some spoons!”
Then she and Randy and Oliver went looking for the cleanest, purest patch of snow they could find, which was in the middle of the front lawn: untouched, unmarked, it looked as though it had been created to be eaten.
It tasted very good, too, though rather flat, later on when Rush had brought sugar and milk to mix with it. Oliver ate so much that his alert and responsive little stomach felt strange again, and he retired to the house.
Mona and Randy gathered up cups and spoons and went back to the house, too. But Rush left them and took a walk up into the woods. It was dusk, but the snow lent a strange radiance to the world. Flakes still fell, melting cold on his cheek, whispering with a feathery sound. There was no sound but their whisper, and his boots crunching softly. Isaac bounded at his heels with a white beard and ear-fringes.
“Just think,” Rush said, “almost a year ago I found you. And in a snowstorm like this.” He leaned down and patted Isaac, who looked up at him lovingly with one cold paw raised out of the snow.
“Let’s go back,” Rush said. The woods were beautiful and mysterious; but suddenly he was cold; he longed for noise, and warmth and light. Isaac understood; he turned with a little yelp of joy and galloped beside his master down the hill toward the bright windows of the kitchen.
The next day, Sunday, was a great disappointment to them all. During the night, by some strange alchemy, the snow had turned to rain. The spruce trees looked dreary and uncomfortable, like monstrous, wet crows. Only Oliver took any pleasure in the morning, slopping about and digging in the dissolving snow. The rest of them did their chores, their homework, and snapped at each other. After dinner when they started a noisy game of dumb-crambo in the living room Father came out of the study and asked them to go up to the Office. “I can’t even hear my typewriter,” he complained, “let alone my own thoughts!”
Silent and out of sorts they retired to the Office. By now it was pouring. What is worse than a rainy Sunday afternoon when you’ve eaten a heavy dinner?
Randy sat down at the piano. She played the piece that Rush had taught her. It was a simple air by Bach, and the oftener she played it the better she liked it. First she played it as if she were very happy, and then as if she were very sad. (It sounded wonderful when played sadly, so she did it several times.) She also made it into a dance; into a thunderstorm, a picnic on the first day of spring, a funeral march, and a witch’s lament. It sounded beautiful to her in all its transformations, she never got tired of it, but after half an hour Mona looked up from her book and said, “If you play that tune one more time, Ran, I’m going to start screaming and I don’t think I’ll be able to stop!”
“Oh, all right, if you feel like that.” Randy folded her hands in her lap and sat very stiff on the piano bench. She hoped she looked deeply hurt, and stared coldly at the cutout pictures on the wall above the piano.
“Well, that’s funny,” she exclaimed a moment later, standing up and peering closer at the wall.
“Hmmm?” Mona’s voice came vaguely from the distant regions of Castle Blair.
“I said, well, that’s very funny,” repeated Randy remembering to sound offended.
“What is?” Rush looked up languidly.
“Why, goodness! Come here, Rush! Look!”
“I don’t see anything,” said Rush, standing beside her. “Just those same old pictures pasted up. I practically know them by heart.”
“No, no,” Randy was excited. “See how the paper’s sort of broken along here?”
“It’s just a crack between the boards,” Rush said.
“No, I don’t think so,” Randy persisted. “Look how it goes: up to here, and then across to there, and then down again. And look, there’s kind of a bulge on that side. Like a hinge!”
“Like a hinge,” repeated Rush, light dawning. “Creepers, Ran! Do you suppose it could be a door?”
“That’s what I think,” agreed Randy, as solemn as an archaeologist who has discovered the relics of a lost primitive race.
“Come on, kids, help move the piano out so we can see.” But they didn’t need to be asked; already they were pushing and tugging and the piano moved slowly outward, squealing on its casters.
“Where’s your knife, Rush? Why don’t you slit the paper along those cracks?” suggested Mona.
“No, let Randy,” said Rush honorably, unsheathing the wicked-looking blade of his scout knife. “After all, she discovered it.”
Rush was wonderful, Randy thought. Almost trembling with excitement she slit the ancient paper along the crack upward from the floor. But she wasn’t tall enough to reach along the top.
“It’s a door all right,” whispered Rush, as though an enemy lurked beyond the partition. “But it’s nailed shut: I can feel the nailheads under the paper. Here, hand over the knife, Randy. I’m taller. I’ll do the top.”
“Think how long it’s been shut,” Mona said, awed. “The pictures on this part of the wall are the oldest in the Office; I’ve noticed that before. There’s a date down here above this newspaper engraving that says 1875!”
“What do you think’s behind the door, Mona?” said Oliver, looking a little worried.
“Ah, that’s a question, Fatso,” Rush told him. “Maybe gold, maybe jewels, maybe a rattrap, maybe nothing.”
“Not—not anything alive?” Oliver looked relieved.
“After almost seventy years? Not likely.”
“Maybe a ghost,” said Randy ghoulishly. “Maybe a skeleton hanging from the rafters.”
“Mona?” Oliver’s fat hand crept into hers.
“They’re just joking, darling. Of course there’s nothing like that.” But she didn’t sound too sure herself.
“Funny there doesn’t seem to be a trace of a latch or a handle of any kind,” said Rush, feeling along the right side of the door with his long, sensitive fingers. “But I think—hmmm—I think maybe if I dig a hole just here with the point of my knife I might—just possibly—yes! It is! Look, there’s a keyhole!”
A keyhole!
“You look first, Randy,” Rush said nobly.
“I’m almost scared to,” Randy confessed. But then she knelt down and glued her eye to the keyhole while the others held their breaths.
“For heaven’s sake!” she exclaimed.
“What do you see?” They all asked it at the same time.
“Are we ever dumb!” said Randy.
“Why, what do you see?” Oliver was dancing up and down with impatience.
“I see a window,” Randy replied slowly. “I can see the spruce branches beyond it.”
“What else?”
“Just floor and some wall: it’s got blue-flowered wallpaper on it. But are we ever dumb!”
“I don’t see why,” said Rush, gently but firmly pushing her out of the way so that he could get a good look himself.
“Well, because we know there are dormer windows all around the roof,” Randy explained. “Twelve of them there are: three on each side. You can walk around the house outdoors and count them if you want to. Now just look at the Office. How many windows do you see?”
“Seven,” said Mona. “I catch on. Three windows on the west wall; two apiece on the north and south. None at all on the east; just plain wall and pasted-up pictures.” She knocked on the wall. “And listen how hollow it sounds. Why didn’t we ever notice!”
“Unobservant,” Rush told her. “And dumb, just like Randy says. Very, very dumb.”
“But not even Father noticed,” Mona said. “Not even Cuffy.”
“And you can’t call them dumb!” Oliver was shocked at the mere idea.
“No, you certainly can’t,” Rush agreed. Suddenly he stood up. “Listen, kids. I’m going to get a hammer and a pair of pliers: we’ve got to get this door open. Oliver, you go find the library paste. Mona and Randy, you’ll have to patch the places I tear in the paper. This must be kept secret, do you understand?”
They all understood perfectly. There had never been any doubt in their minds about that.
“Because who knows what we’ll find when we open it,” Rush continued darkly. “We might find a skeleton at that, or—or a torture chamber, or—”
“Or a ghost,” repeated Randy, as a chill ran over her scalp.
Oliver looked dubious.
“Ghosts!” scoffed Mona. “Honestly, Randy! And at your age.” Nevertheless, her cheeks were pink, her eyes shining with excitement.
“I move we take a vow of secrecy. A blood vow,” Rush said. “What do you think?”
“Oh, yes, a blood vow!” cried Randy, with a rapturous leap. “The only other blood vow we ever took was when we swore not to tell Cuffy or Father that we’d been exposed to whooping cough that time.”
“Well, they just would have worried, and anyway we never got it,” said Rush, as if that had justified the act. “Now, who has a pin?”
Mona had a safety pin in the ripped hem of her skirt. Providentially she hadn’t mended it days ago when she was supposed to.
“But first it has to be sterilized,” she insisted from the depth of her first-aid wisdom. So they sterilized the pin in a match flame. Of course Mona knew that the whole performance was nonsense but there was something rather solemn about the way they pricked their thumbs and made a scarlet X on a piece of paper opposite their names.
Mona and Randy, and Rush, that is. Oliver was firm in declining to yield his blood to the enterprise, so finally they had to let him use red water color instead.
“Though it’s not really legal and binding,” Rush warned him.
“I don’t see why it matters,” Oliver maintained stoutly. “Just two different kinds of juice, that’s all. You can’t tell the difference on the paper.”
“But it’s the principle of the thing,” Rush argued weakly. “Oh, well, nuts. I’m going down to get the pliers and hammer now, and we’ll get to work.”
What an afternoon they had! It took ages to get the nails out; they were old and rusty, and had been in the wood so long they had almost become a part of it. Each one squeaked protestingly as Rush yanked it out.
In the middle of all this they heard Cuffy coming up the stairs and had to shove the piano back into place at once. There was a scuffle as Rush and Mona returned to their books, Oliver to his drawing, and Randy sat down on the floor and covered the nails and hammer with her skirt. Four scarlet faces confronted Cuffy as she heaved into view. “What mischief are you up to?” she inquired suspiciously, looking at them.
“Us? Nothing,” replied Randy. And a loud, nervous giggle escaped from her.
“We-e-e-l-l—” Cuffy was skeptical. Still the place looked no more upset than usual, and nobody seemed to be crying, so maybe it was all right. “I just came up to see if any of you would like to lick the bowl. I’ve just made a chocolate cake for supper and there’s lots of frosting left over.”
What was the matter with them? They followed her so politely down the stairs, almost as if they were reluctant to come, instead of racing and bumping into one another, each in an attempt to get there first, as they had always done on similar occasions. And when they did get there they lapped up the chocolate fast as if they wanted to get it over with. Even Oliver failed to follow his customary procedure of licking his spoon so slowly that he could hold it up when everyone else had finished and say, “Look at all I’ve got left!” Yes, something was up, no doubt, but Cuffy was too busy to bother about it now. The children thanked her politely, if hastily, and lunged for the stairs, racing and bumping, each in an attempt to get there first. Cuffy sighed. That was more natural.
By four o’clock it was almost dark, but Rush wouldn’t let anyone turn on the lights. Instead he went down to his room and got his flashlight and worked by the light of that. “This is much safer,” he told them. “Less revealing.” Randy secretly thought he just liked it better that way: it made the whole enterprise more dramatic. She didn’t blame him; she liked it better that way herself.
“The Egyptians used to blow anthrax dust into the cracks of the royal tombs when they sealed them,” Rush recounted with relish. “Whoever broke them open was supposed to get the disease and die in agony a few days later.”
“What’s anthrax?” said Randy. “It sounds like something Cuffy might use in the kitchen.”
“I trust not,” replied Rush, with the dignity demanded by the setting. “It’s a very bad disease. Cows get it, I think. Well, anyway, inside the tombs they put a spell on all the gold and jewels and stuff, so that any robber or explorer or anybody who fooled around with them would meet a dire and dreadful fate. Even if it was thousands of years later.”
They were silent, thinking of the old tombs: each with its sarcophagus staring into the dark.
The sleety rain brushed the windows, the spruce branches sighed funereally in the wind, and the last nail came out of the door.
“There!” said Rush. He stood up, put the tip of the pliers into the keyhole and pulled gently. At first the door refused to budge, but after a moment or two it yielded gingerly. Rush only opened it a crack; then he handed the flashlight to Randy.
“Madam,” he said, “the honor is yours. You go in alone first.”
What? After all that talk about skeletons, and ghosts, and anthrax dust, and ancient Egyptian curses? Oh, no, Randy wasn’t going through that doorway by herself.
“You come in with me, Rush,” she insisted. “Right beside me. And Mona and Oliver you stay close behind.”
“Okay, ready?” Rush opened the door and slowly, half fearfully they stepped into the secret chamber. The windows admitted only the frail, pearly glow of a wet twilight, and Rush flashed his light into the room. It was a long, narrow room, they saw: merely the sliced-off end of an attic, but it had five windows of its own and the walls and even the ceiling were covered with the pretty old-fashioned blue-flowered paper. Rush flashed the lamp more thoroughly about the room.
Who was that?
Randy screamed. Even Rush made a startled sound, and Mona and Oliver leaped back into the Office as though they had been shot. Randy was right on their heels.
“A ghost, I saw a ghost!” she was gasping. “I knew there’d be a ghost, and there was!”
Oliver began to cry.
“No, no, kids. Come back!” called Rush. “It’s only a picture! That’s all it is. Honest. Just a big picture. Come on back and see.”
Reluctantly they went back into the room. As for Oliver, he just peeked around the edge of the door until he was sure.
It was a picture, all right. Life-size, too, and set in the heaviest, fanciest, dustiest gold frame any of them had ever seen. It was a portrait of a young girl, almost a child, she might have been anywhere from twelve to sixteen, though her clothes were grown-up, old-fashioned clothes. She wore a dark-red dress with a tiny waist and a long full skirt, and lots of buttons, and loops, and fringes all over it. The artist hadn’t missed a single one. Her head was bent slightly to one side, cheek resting on one finger in a sentimental attitude. Her great mane of dark ringlets fell sideways, too, like heavy tassels on a curtain, and in her half-opened, curly little mouth each tooth was painted carefully, white and gleaming as a pearl. In her right hand she held a rose about the size of a head of Boston lettuce, with a big tear of dew clinging to its petals. Below her left hand (the one that supported her cheek), her elbow was poised upon a marble balustrade. She was painted against a classic background, with what appeared to be a mighty thunderstorm sweeping across the sky.
“Who is she?” whispered Randy, in awe.
“Why’s she standing in the middle of a cemetery?” said Oliver.
“That’s not a cemetery, Fatso,” Rush explained. “That’s just a lot of ruined Greek columns in the background.”
“Why’re they ruined? Did a bomb drop?”
“No, they’re just old; they fell to pieces.”
“Oh. Well, why’s she standing in the middle of all those busted columns?”
“Search me. In those days people were always painting people beside temples and ruins and stuff.”
“Look,” said Mona. She leaned down. Attached to the frame at the bottom of the picture was a small gold plate with something engraved on it. Mona dusted it off with the tip of her finger.
“‘Clarinda,’” she read aloud. “That’s her name, I suppose. Just ‘Clarinda,’ and then a number, or a date I guess it is: 1869.”
“Clarinda, 1869,” said Rush thoughtfully. “Who was she, do you think? I bet she was a Cassidy! Clarinda Cassidy; very euphonious. It goes with all those curls. She looks kind of nice, though, doesn’t she? I wonder how she could ever bend over without snapping right in half. Her waist looks about as big around as a doughnut.”
“Why do you suppose she was ever nailed up in this room all by herself,” said Randy, “all these years and years?”
That was a mystery no one could explain. They stood there in a little silent cluster staring at that tilted head, that narrow waist, that pearly smile. It had been a pretty exciting day altogether. First a hidden door; and then a secret room which had been closed for seventy years, and now an imprisoned maiden in a golden frame. Clarinda, 1869. What more could you ask on a wet Sunday?
A piercing blast from the kitchen shattered the stillness. Cuffy’s police whistle. That meant it was time for Oliver’s supper; time for Randy to set the table, and for Mona to clean the Office, since it was her week. Hurriedly, they left the secret room, closed the door, and shoved the piano back in place. Like conspirators, they separated in the directions of their various tasks. Rush’s pockets were full of rusty nails that had to be disposed of; Mona remained in the Office with the lights on, hurriedly pasting back torn strips of paper so old that they kept crumbling like ashes in her fingers.
“My,” said Cuffy at suppertime. “What in the world was you doing all afternoon? I thought I heard furniture being pushed around, and then everything quiet for hours, and then a lot of squeals and a kind of stampede. Some new kind of game?”
“Sort of, Cuffy,” Randy said uncomfortably, with her fingers crossed under the table. It was true in a way, wasn’t it?
Rush seemed to have developed a sudden consuming interest in the Cassidy family.
“Fourteen children you said, didn’t you, Father? I wonder what happened to them all!”
“Somebody or other told me about one of them who’s still alive. A rich old gentleman out west someplace: hasn’t been back in forty years,” said Father. “There may be others scattered about, and doubtless many descendants.”
“Why didn’t they hang onto this swell place, I wonder?” Rush said. “I should think they’d have wanted to keep it in the family.”
Father shrugged his shoulders; that was a question. “Perhaps they thought it was a funny old place; aesthetically it’s sort of a freak, you know. I bought it through the agents of the estate of the two daughters who owned the property: two old spinsters they were; lived here till they died a few years back.”
“What were their names, Father?” Rush put down his fork. So did Mona. So did Randy.
“The old ladies’? Well, let’s see. One was named Minnie, or Lizzie. Lizzie, I believe, and the other—”
“Not Clarinda, by any chance?” Rush demanded.
“Clarinda? No, it was Christabelle. I remember because the contrast of the two names seemed so marked. Why on earth should it have been Clarinda?” Father wanted to know.
“Oh, I—I just read the name someplace,” Rush said lamely. “It’s an old-fashioned name and I just thought—” But he didn’t have to cross his fingers under the table, for it was the simple truth.
That night the children dreamed all night about Clarinda and the secret room. Mona and Randy and Rush, that is. Oliver dreamed that he was driving a Greyhound bus full of policemen across the Brooklyn Bridge.