"And there she is going to stay," said Mrs. Blake. "Because in her way, and though she could never know it, Mrs. Brace-Gideon has been a fairy godmother to this family."
"Indeed she has," said Mr. Blake.
When Portia went upstairs to look at her own round room in the turret, she screamed with delight.
"Mother, how did youknowI wanted pink?"
"All girls want pink," replied her mother sensibly.
Just under the curving open window a giant rhododendron had put out hundreds of bouquets of flowers, delicately tinted: not quite white, less definite than pink.
"How lucky that they should turn out to be that color instead of the usual magenta," Mrs. Blake mused, sitting on the window seat and leaning her arms on the sill. "How lucky, really, about everything."
"I know," Portia said, staring dreamily out over her mother's head at the green lawn, the green orchard, the green woods beyond.
Their mood of quiet delight was shattered by a tremendous outburst of rushing waters. It was Foster trying out the plumbing to see if it would work.
"Hey, everybody, the plumbing's working!" he shouted, somewhat unnecessarily. "Come on and see this cool bathroom!"
For some reason Portia had overlooked the bathroom up to now, and it did turn out to be an interesting place: very large, with two high-up diamond-shaped windows, a frieze of mildewed swans above the molding, and many pictures on the wall of young ladies wearing pompadours, shirtwaists, and long skirts, like Mrs. Cheever's.
The hand basin, made of Delft china, was patterned with blue carnations. Swan-necked faucets drooped above it, and on each side there was a broad slab of marble, veined and gray as Roquefort cheese. Traces of ancient soap lay in an ancient dish; and, hung above the basin, an oval mirror offered a green and speckled face to anyone who looked in it.
The bathtub was immense, porcelain encased in solid mahogany. "Sort of like a coffin," Foster said. He would enjoy a bath in this from time to time, he thought. It was so huge, he might be able to swim a stroke or two.
The chain by which he had recently released the uproar was attached to a large tank high above the thronelike fixture, which stood nobly upon its own gray marble slab.
"Yipes, it's the loudest one I ever heard," Foster said in awe, giving the chain another pull and releasing another crashing avalanche of sound.
"This is much better than a new-time bathroom," he shouted above the tumult.
Curious, Portia opened the door of a cabinet hanging on the wall and began to examine the bottles with dried-up medicines and lotions in them: the round bronze-colored paper pillboxes containing petrified pills. From time to time she read a label out loud.
"'Mrs. Baggett's Bunion Balm,'" she read, and then: "Dr. Cupthorn's Efficacious Cough Deterrent, for the cure of coughs, colds, bronchitis, asthma, influenza, wasting diseases, and scrofulous humours!' I wonder what those are?"
"Scrofulous humours," Foster murmured dreamily, as he tried out the bathtub faucets (very slow and trickly). "Scrofulous humours, scrofulous humours."
"And listen to this: 'Princess Razzioli's Celebrated Elixir of Cucumber and Milkweed, for the Preservation of Pulchritude and a Pearly Complexion'!"
"Porsh, where are you?" came Julian's voice from the hall.
"In here reading medicines," Portia called in reply. "Come on in. Mr. Ormond Horton hasn't got around to painting the bathroom yet, so everything's just the way it was."
"Listen to this," Foster said, and gave the chain another pull. Julian was suitably impressed; he said it sounded like a thunderstorm on the Maine coast.
When the racket had subsided, giving way to a series of low mutterings and garglings, Julian's face assumed a serious, intent expression. He began to prowl about the room, stopping to lean against the wall and listen as he rapped it with his knuckles.
"What in the world are you doing?" Portia demanded.
"Well, a safe could be hidden anywhere, couldn't it? Even in a bathroom, couldn't it?"
Julian stooped to open the door of the cupboard beneath the hand basin. Nothing in there but rusty cans of cleaning powder and some stubbed-off scrub brushes.
"Oh, that old safe! You've got that old safe on the brain, Jule. I'd forgotten all about it. And I bet you we'll never find it; she probably buried it under an apple tree, or sent it out to California, or threw it in the well, or something. Anyway, come on; let's go outside," Portia said. "I'm tired of this old bathroom. I'm tired of indoors; I want outdoors."
"All right," Julian agreed willingly enough. "We'll keep the safe-hunting for rainy days. I'm not going to give up, though. Come on, Fang, come outdoors with us."
"O.K.," said Foster gladly, and all three went pelting down the stairs, where children had never pelted until now.
It was very early when Portia woke up the next morning; the birds woke her. Every bird on earth was singing, it seemed. She had never heard such a jingling and jangling in her life.
Getting up, she went to the window to look out at the flowering, loudly singing world, and decided to go for a walk in her pajamas.
Everyone else was still asleep, so she tiptoed down the stairs, past the suit of armor on the landing that looked just as if it had a real knight inside it, and past the bronze lady who stood poised on the newel post. The bronze lady was called Miss McCurdy because she bore a striking resemblance to a live lady of this name who was a cashier at the Blue Premium Grocery Store in Pork Ferry.
Gulliver came yawning and stretching from the kitchen.
"We're going for a walk," Portia told him.
When she had unbolted and opened the big front door, Gulliver bounded out and went racing around the lawn in a dance of circles, but Portia walked slowly down the broad new steps, sniffing the air. M-m-m, lilies of the valley. She let her nose lead her to where they grew, spread in a vast green carpet under the apple trees. I was sure they'd all be gone by now, she thought. Of course then she had to stop and pick a big wet bunch of them, admiring their crispness and freshness: each little staff of bells trimmed with two broad leaves, like rabbits' ears.
The air rang with the energetic, joyful clamor of the birds. Only one, whose song came sweetly through the others, sounded meditative and solitary: three minor notes ascending. She wondered what it was.
A lively clanking caused her to turn her head: there came Julian along the drive, his camera, his field glasses, his collecting case, his lunch box, and a small canteen all draped about his person. No wonder he clanked more than usual.
"So early?" Portia said, surprised.
"The birds. I'm used to them, but they even woke me up, so I was positive they'd wakeyouup. I thought we'd better get started early; we've got a lot of work to do."
"We have?"
"Why, sure. We have to get the club fixed up, don't we? No one's cleaned it since September."
"Good," Portia said; that was the one sort of house cleaning she enjoyed. "And Mother's given us some things from here to decorate it with!"
"Great. Foster can help carry."
Through the tangles of singing came the one sweet song.
"What's that bird, Jule? That sort of sad one?"
Julian listened. "White-throated sparrow," he told her. Honestly, that boy knows everything, Portia thought, but she didn't say so.
"I wish it had a prettier name." She sighed. "Hear how pretty it sounds."
"One's all right, maybe ... yes, it sounds nice, it really does ... but a bunch of them together can drive you nuts."
There was never more than one, though, all that month, and every day Portia listened for its song. It meant something special to her, perhaps because it was the little music of this first lovely morning....
Finally the racket of the birds even got through to Foster, and he woke up. Hearing conversation just below his window, he hopped up and looked out to see his sister and his cousin; then he, also in his pajamas, ran down the stairs and out of doors to join them.
"Hi, Fang!" Julian greeted him. "How are you today?"
"I have scrofulous humours," Foster said.
"You havewhat?"
"Something she read off a bottle," Foster explained, indicating his sister. "I haven't really got them. I don't think I have."
"I don't think so either."
"Well, I'm going up to dress," Portia said. "My pajama legs are soaked with dew. Have you had breakfast, Jule?"
"Ye-es." Julian sounded doubtful. "But—"
"But you could eat another one, you mean?"
"If Aunt Barbara wouldn't mind...."
"Oh, she won't mind, she never does. I think I could eat two myself. And afterwards—you help me with the dishes, Jule—and after that we'll go to Gone-Away and see about the club. It's probably a perfect mess," Portia said contentedly, and went singing into the house.
All the length of the drive, until it curved into the woods, Portia kept turning around and walking backward so she could watch her house.
"Remember last year just about now when Aunt Minnehaha told us about the Villa Caprice and said it gave her the creeps? And remember how it gave us the creeps first time we saw it? Well, just look at it now, Jule. Did you ever see anything so changed in all your life?"
Julian walked backward, too, for a minute; so did Foster and so did Davey, who had arrived as soon after breakfast as his mother would let him.
"And it's not even finished yet," Portia said.
They could see Mr. Caduggan up on a ladder putting a screen on a window. Joe Baskerville was putting on another. Popeye was sitting down watching them, and Gulliver was sitting down watching Popeye.
Mr. Ormond Horton had just arrived in his old pickup truck and was assembling his paint buckets, singing melodiously as he did so.
At the far end of the house, Eli Scaynes was down on his knees, setting out pansies. His faithful wheelbarrow waited at his side, with a rake and a shovel sucking out of it.
"I like to see neglected houses getting fixed," Portia said. "Of course I know houses can't possibly think, but sometimes I have a feeling they canfeel. Do you ever, Jule?"
"Nope," said Julian, "I sure as heck don't."
He was no longer alone in his clanking. They all clanked. Everyone had a lunch box, and Portia in addition had a large basket filled with donations from the Villa Caprice. Julian had another. As for the two little boys, they were burdened with buckets and brushes. They were not carrying these things because they wished to but because that was the condition under which they had been allowed to come.
Foster permitted himself a grumble or two, but the day was so dazzling, the air was so ravishing, that the grumbles dried up in spite of him.
Emerging from the woods where everything seemed to be flying and singing, the four children approached the old houses of Gone-Away from the rear. In the weedy wastes that had once been gardens or back yards were relics left from an earlier day: the vine-trapped sleigh behind the Humboldt house, clothes posts silvered by a thousand weathers, the slatted skeleton of an old lawn swing. Some of the fences remained, half lost in weeds, with many of their pickets missing, like giant combs with broken teeth.
"Look, the barn swallows are nesting in Judge Chater's house again this year!"
"Swallows hate to change their habits," Julian said. "They're worse than grownups."
The fork-tailed birds, azure-blue in the sunlight, swooped and curved in and out of the tottering cupola that crowned the decaying mansion. They used the air as fishes use a river; they seemed to swing and spin effortlessly on invisible currents.
"If I had to be a bird, I'd be a swallow," Foster said. "They have the best time flying. They look as if they do."
"If you were a bird, you'd have to eat bugs," Davey told him. "You'd have to eat worms. You'dliketo eat worms. Oig. If anybody told me I had to be a bird, I wouldn't."
At the Tuckertown house they set their burdens down on the front doorstep. They had decided before getting down to work to pay a call first to Mr. Payton, because his house was nearest, and then to Mrs. Cheever.
"Because it's the polite thing to do," Julian said, his courteous Gone-Away manners descending on him like a mantle.
"And anyway because we want to," Foster added.
"Check."
Feeling as light as the swallows, now that their hands were free, the children ran along the footpath that lay between the Gone-Away houses and the swamp, connecting Mr. Payton's house at the extreme right to Mrs. Cheever's house at the extreme left.
As they neared Mr. Payton's house, a faint smell of goat was wafted toward them, mingling with all the other smells: roses, fresh grass, swamp water.
"Wind's from the north," Julian commented, not without logic, since Mr. Payton's house was at the north end of Gone-Away and he kept goats.
They found him busy in his vegetable garden at the far side of his house. The rows of vegetables, perfectly straight, were stripes of various greens except for two, which were strangely covered up with cloth.
"Good morning, good morning!" Mr. Payton called, delighted to see them. He took off his broad-brimmed hat, waving it in a flourish of welcome.
"Ma-a-a," called Uncle Sam, the billy goat, from his pen near the woods. Perhaps he meant it as a greeting.
"May I offer anyone a radish? Or a spring onion? Or a very young carrot? These are all my garden affords at present," Mr. Payton said, but for once nobody was hungry, not even Julian.
"We had waffles," Foster explained.
"Ah. Entirely understandable."
Near Mr. Payton's garden there was another just like it but without a fence around it. This was his rabbit or guest garden for animals. There was food there for any hungry rabbit, woodchuck, field mouse, or deer.
"To say nothing of the scoundrel blackbirds," he said with a frown. "Thoserascals wait until the exact moment when the peas have reached perfection; then they walk along the rows and slit the pods with their bills, neat as if they were opening their mail, and there go your peas! Frustrating. Well, I tried everything. Scarecrows never scared them; I put a dozen pin wheels to a row; but they'd wait till the wind died down. Smart villains. Finally I struck on the idea of covering the peas inmygarden with mosquito netting, as you see. Worked like a charm. Those birds can eat their own peas. Perfectly fair. But not mine. And it's a pleasure to frustratethemfor a change!"
Fatly, the cat, came trotting along a furrow with his collar bell tinkling. He had the sleekness and softness of a healthy country cat. His eyes looked dazzled in the sunshine.
"I frustratehim, too, this time of year," Mr. Payton told them. "I feed him so handsomely each morning that he has no interest whatever in catching birds."
By this time, on a common impulse, they had moved away from the garden and were starting along the path in the direction of Mrs. Cheever's house. To the right of them, the wall of new reeds rippled and shivered; to the left, in the old door yards, persistent garden flowers bloomed again: iris, peonies, poppies, roses.
As they walked, the children remarked on changes in the scene.
"The Delaneys' porch has finally fallen off."
"Look at that big fat wisteria vine on the Vogelharts' barn. I don't remember that."
"The turret on the Thompsons' house is much more sideways than it was."
Aunt Minnehaha's chickens came trotting, helter-skelter, to meet them; her duck, stepping on its own feet, waddled out from under its shade of dock leaves. "Everything is just like last year," Julian said. "Except it's better."
"I know," Portia agreed. "That's because it's ours now, in a way; or else because we're its."
No barking sounded from Mrs. Cheever's house. They found her kitchen empty, but the rustling range and the ticking clock made it seem occupied.
"She's in her bog-garden, I'll be bound," Mr. Payton surmised, glancing into the square of looking glass above the sink and smoothing out his mustache. "Well, come along, Philosophers; we'll go and see."
"Her and Julian are Philosophers—" Foster started to say, but Portia interrupted him. "Sheand Julian, you mean, Foster."
"Sheand Julian are Philosophers, Uncle Pin, but me and Davey—"
"Foster! Davey andI," corrected his sister.
"—but Davey andIbelong to another club, the Club of the Fang," Foster said proudly. "I'm the one that thought it up."
"I see. Very well then, come along Philosophers and Fangs."
So they went out again, by the front door this time, and there, yes, there beyond the reeds, beyond the water meadow and the dead tree that marked the entrance to the bog, they spotted Mrs. Cheever's bell-shaped hat.
"Further I shall not go," Mr. Payton stated. "I do not care for wading and I've brought no boots. Minnie's busy in her garden, and I'll return to mine. Farewell, Philosophers. Farewell, Fangs."
"Good-by, Uncle Pin."
Already the children were sitting on the ground, taking off their shoes and socks. Soon they were squelching cautiously through the forest of reeds. It was eventful walking. Frogs kept popping out of the way, and once something slithered and wriggled under Portia's foot.
"Man, can you squeal!" Julian said admiringly. "You sounded like the noon whistle at Pork Ferry."
"Well, heavens, I'm not in the habit of walking on snakes!"
Now they emerged from the reeds to the water meadow; Tarrigo saw them and came barking and splashing, sending showers of water sparks into the air.
Beyond, where water meadow turned to tufted bog, Mrs. Cheever stood waving to them with her trowel.
"Good morning, children, welcome! You're just in time to see the arethusas; they've survived another winter, thank fortune."
Great banks of sheep laurel were in bloom, deep rose color—"beautiful, but poisonous," Mrs. Cheever said. "That's why it has that name. Sheep have grazed on it and died." Clumps of wild flag made blue islands in a sea already blue with blue-eyed grass; but the arethusas were pink, each growing by itself, its flower shaped like a tiny half-open hand. Portia admired every one of them, and after that every grass pink, and every pitcher plant. She prowled and stooped and examined, wading in and out of water. At this time of year, when brooks and ponds were cold as ice, the bog water, thin and open to the sun, was as warm as her own skin.
"I love this place," Portia said. "I love the smell of it. It smells like a jungle near the Orinoco, or someplace."
"Or like a hothouse," Julian said.
Actually it smelled like both those things: steamy, rich, tropical, healthy. And it had so much to offer! Rare flowers for those who were interested in them; bog butterflies for people who were lepidopterists, like Julian; snakes for people who were herpetologists, like his friend Tom Parks; frogs and turtles for people who were seven years old, like Foster and Davey.
"But I suppose we ought to go and start our house cleaning," Portia said regretfully.
"I guess so, and anyway the mosquitoes are beginning." Julian gave himself a vigorous slap.
"We forgot to put on your Anti-Pest Decoction," Portia told Mrs. Cheever, and slappedherself.
"Well, run along then, run along; you'll be devoured!"
"We have to clean our club, too," Foster said importantly. "Come on, Dave; we haven't got all day."
"Dirt is patient; it will wait," said Mrs. Cheever calmly. "That'sonething."
After they had filled a bucket with water at Mrs. Cheever's pump, Portia and Julian returned to Bellemere. They clattered up the stairs from the plaster-littered wreck of the first floor, to the shabby melancholy of the second, and then to the cozy attic, which was their clubhouse.
It was decidedly in need of attention. Dust was everywhere, and dead spiders dotted the floor. Their old webs hung from the rafters in deserted swags; seeing them, Portia hastily tied a dustcloth around her head; then she went to work on them with her broom. Julian attacked the floor with his.
"Next thing is scrubbing," he said.
"And after that the waxing."
"Yes. And then the windows."
"Oh, there's such an enormous amount to bedone," Portia moaned, exactly as her mother had done about the Villa Caprice and sounding just as happy.
So the morning passed. They really did work hard, but every now and then, because it was simply impossible not to, they ran down the stairs and out into the blazing June sunshine; just to breathe and listen and feel.
At noon they borrowed the great conch shell that hung by Mrs. Cheever's door, and Julian blew a blast on it to summon Foster and Davey from their clubhouse on Craneycrow Island. In a moment the little boys could be heard drumming across the bridge above the Gulper. They had spent a satisfactory morning, after rapidly abandoning the idea of house cleaning in favor of more congenial pursuits. They had lain on their stomachs on the bridge, dropping pebbles and watching the deadly Gulper suck them in; they had found ten new turtles for their turtlearium, all of which would soon escape; and they had conducted a frog hunt. In Foster's lunch box—he had prudently eaten his lunch early to make room for it—there was a bullfrog the size of a small puppy. Portia gave one of her noon-whistle squeals when she saw it.
"Listen; he's a very nice, gentle frog," Foster said reproachfully. "I'm going to keep him and raise him."
"He's already raised," Julian told Foster. "And if you keep him in captivity, he'll probably die."
"He will?" To their surprise, Foster looked rather relieved. "Well, O.K. I'll take him back and let him go then. Anyway, I was sort of afraid he'd scare me if he croaked in the night."
"He would have, too. That kind doesn't just croak; it goes off like a gun, boom!"
"You'll be all right; I'll let you go pretty soon," Foster told the frog; then he turned to his cousin. "I've named him already, though, and I named him after you: Julian Jarman Frog."
"Thanks a lot," Julian said. "I appreciate that a lot."
They ate their lunch lazily in the shade of the Vogelhart willow tree. Foster was persuaded to partake of a cooky. There was a noonday stillness on Gone-Away; only the red-winged blackbirds trilled and clucked, and the frog in the lunch box gave a sudden resounding boom.
"Yeeps!" said Foster. "He would have scared me all right."
After the little boys had departed, Julian and Portia lingered on, lying on their backs in the warm grass and looking straight into the sky.
"Not a cloud, not a bird, not a plane. Not a mosquito, even," Portia mused. "Just blue nothing. It makes you feel—I don't know—peaceful, I guess."
"M-m-m," Julian murmured noncommittally. It made him feel sleepy. He lay with his eyes half closed, chewing on a grass stem.
"Millions and trillions of miles of just blue nothing," Portia repeated dreamily. She liked that phrase.
"There goes a June bug, though. And up, way up, now, there's a hawk. And even if you can't see them, think of all the other things there are up there: satellites in orbit, meteors and meteorites, suns, moons, planets, stars; millions and billions and trillions of those! It doesn't make me feel peaceful, brother, it makes me feel nervous! 'Blue nothing,'nothing!"
"Honestly," was all Portia could think of to say to that.
Now a tiny plane went purring across the sky, very high, very slow to eyes grown accustomed to the flight of jets.
Portia lay thinking about the club. When they were through with the cleaning, and they almost were, they would decorate it with the things from the Villa Caprice: the painting of a starchily dressed young lady swinging on a crescent moon; the Tiffany glass lamp shade (they had no lamp in the club, but if they turned the shade upside down, it would look like a vase, and it was a beautiful thing: all the colors of the rainbow, melted). They also had been given the cast-iron pug-dog with which Mrs. Brace-Gideon had felled the burglar, and the procession of teakwood elephants, and many other treasures. When everything was in place, Portia would go out and pick a big bouquet of roses and iris, and that would be the finishing touch.
The distant plane made a peaceful, soothing sound. Very, very soothing....
Portia sat up abruptly and looked at her cousin.
"Jule, don't youdarego to sleep!" She began to tickle him mercilessly. "Wake up, wake up; we haven't finished working yet! Wake up this minute, Julian Jarman Frog!"
Fine weather can't last forever. One morning, about a week later, Julian woke to a steady sound of rain.
"A good day to look for safes," he thought. He had spent the night at the Villa Caprice, as he would often do that summer. There were so many rooms in the house that there was also one for him.
"You must consider it your very own," his aunt had said, and this he was glad to do without a moment's hesitation.
It was a solemn, manly room with an enormous black bureau, an enormous black bed, an enormous black chair scratchily covered with horsehair. On the wall there was a steel engraving of the Roman Forum. Julian sat up and looked at his stately room. Othello, who had also spent the night, was lying on the oval rug before the fireplace. He suited the room admirably; he was a very solemn-looking dog, particularly when he was asleep.
Beyond the window the rain fell, straight down; all that could be seen through it was the deepened green of leaves.
Julian jumped out of bed and picked his clothes up from the floor; they had skidded off the horsehair chair, where he had tossed them the night before.
Othello woke up, too, and greeted him with a wide pink yawn.
"Maybe we'll find a fortune today," Julian told him.
His room also had a paneled wainscoting of dark wood. He had, of course, lost no time in tapping each panel, hoping to find one that sounded hollow, but none of them did, or at least not hollow enough. He tapped them again now, though, just to be on the safe side.
"Nope, no good. Come on, Thel; let's go."
Foster was sliding down the banisters slowly, because he didn't wish to bang into Miss McCurdy on the newel post. He had done this once, and Miss McCurdy's dancing foot, daintily raised, had met the back of his head with the force of a hammer; he could still feel the lump. But sliding down slowly was better than not sliding down at all.
"It'sraining, it'spouring, the old man issnoring!" sang Foster lustily, as if this were an anthem of great wit and originality. When he dismounted at the end of the banister, he said: "Today I'm going to get into that suit of armor. I'm going to try to. Will you help me, Jule?"
"I might. After I've hunted for the safe."
But Portia was not interested in hunting for the safe. She was sure it would never be found, and anyway she wanted to explore the attic storeroom.
"All those trunks, Jule, all those boxes! Why, we might findanything. And it's just the day for it!"
"It's just the day to hunt for a safe."
"Why don't you compromise?" Mrs. Blake suggested. "Portia can explore the trunks while Julian searches the attic. My great-uncle Groveralwayskept his safe in the attic."
So after breakfast and their household chores were done, Portia and Julian repaired to the top of the house.
It was nice up there. It had a good dry attic smell, and there was coziness and comfort in the sound of rain on the roof. The storeroom seemed larger now; nearly all of the old furniture had been removed: some of it sold to meet expenses, some—most of it—moved downstairs to beautify the house. All that was left were some chairs without seats and a secretary that had lost its two left legs and leaned like the Tower of Pisa.
The trunks were grouped together in a surrounding of pitchers and basins and other oddments. The dressmaker's dummy stood sentry-duty at one side.
While Portia clattered and clanged, arranging a path amongst the crockery, Julian snooped about under the eaves, opening the doors of washstands. He had to help Portia open the first trunk, and when it was opened, it was a disappointment: nothing but old clothes and a strong smell of camphor. The clothes were petticoats mainly, dozens and dozens of massive petticoats, embroidered and ruffled and ribboned and ruched. There were many vast nightgowns, too, with real lace collars and real lace cuffs; there were pairs and pairs of stockings with embroidered clocks, and pairs and pairs of gloves with pearl buttons, folded in tissue paper. Altogether a very boring trunk, Portia thought. She put all the things back neatly, though. This had been a condition laid down firmly by her mother.
The next trunk was full of furs. Portia gave a faint shriek when she lifted the lid; the last thing she had expected was the sight of fur, and just for an instant she thought an animal was packed in there! It gave her a shock. This trunk released a blinding smell of moth balls and camphor, but the moths had obviously hardened themselves long ago to the defenses laid down against them; they had invaded the trunk as Caesar's legions had invaded Gaul. When Portia lifted out the thick soft cape that lay on top, she gave it a little shake, and all the fur departed from the skins; it rose in clouds of soft black thistledown, tickling her nose and getting in her eyelashes and nestling gently on her arms.
"Ow, Jule, help! Oh, how horrid! Ugh!" Portia blew fur from her lips, brushed herself off, shivered. "I bet this is exactly how Pandora felt!"
"Better keep on digging, then. Hope was in that box, remember? Maybe there's something great in this one, too."
"I'll never know," Portia said, shutting the clasps firmly, still shaking herself, and blowing at the little hairs of fur.
"Do you suppose Mrs. Brace-Gideon ever threwanythingaway?"
"I'm glad she didn't. I like finding things," Julian said. He was wearing a very old pith helmet that sat down on his ears like a soup tureen. Lacking panels to tap and quickly exhausting the safe-searching possibilities of the attic, he had been opening a box or two himself.
In the next trunk that Portia tackled there were many flannel bags with ribbon drawstrings, and each bag contained a pair of shoes or slippers: little pointy shoes with heels, buttoned ones, buckled ones, silk ones with bead-embroidered toes.
"Mrs. Brace-Gideon must have had very tiny feet for such a great big lady," Portia said thoughtfully, looking at the small frayed slipper in her hand.
"Jule?"
"M-m?... Yes?"
"Do you think it's really all right for us to do this? I mean, to go through all her very own things like this?Idon't believe she'd like it if she knew ... do you?"
Julian considered.
"Well, think of it this way. Mrs. Brace-Gideon has been gone a long, long time. Long before our fathers and mothers were born, even. So now she's like someone in a book, or in history. If we were a couple of archaeologists digging up a buried palace that had belonged to an ancient queen or something, we wouldn't feel wrong about it, would we?"
"No, I suppose not."
"Well, there you are," Julian said handily, and Portia felt better.
Among the large trunks there was a very small one, a box really, covered with cowhide and bearing on its curved lid the initial D, made of brass nailheads. She lifted the lid cautiously (she had been very cautious since opening the fur trunk) and saw that the little chest was filled to the brim with yellowed paper bundles.
"Jule, come here; let's see what these are."
The paper was so old that it crumbled and powdered when she opened the first bundle; and what it had contained was a sea shell, curved and dappled as a little quail.
"Why, how pretty!"
"Look, it's got a label on it, too."
And so it had; a tiny glued-on label with the Latin name of the shell written on it in meticulous old-fashioned handwriting.
"Cypraea zebra," Julian read, pronouncing thezebrapart correctly.
Portia had opened another bundle and held out a brown shell, fancy as a fern.
"Murex palmarosae," read Julian, stabbing wildly at pronunciation.
Then he undid a bundle himself.
"Anyway, I know what this one is," he said, showing her a large ear-shaped shell, lined with the luminous greens and blues of peacock feathers. "It's an abalone. But that's not what itsaysit is; it says it's aHaliotissomething or other. I give up. I can't wait till I study Latin. How are you going to be a scientist without it?"
"I don't look forward to it in the least," said Portia. "And I'm never going to be a scientist."
Happy and absorbed, they sat cross-legged on the floor, taking out bundle after bundle. Outside of a museum they had never seen such shells: they were shaped like fans, lockets, towers, pin wheels, hearts, trumpets. They were pleated and patterned, tinted with pink, rose, crimson, yellow, mother-of-pearl; there were several pairs that looked as if they had petals and that were colored like dahlias.
"I'm going to take these down to show Mother, later," Portia said. "This is as good as a Christmas stocking, isn't it, Jule?"
"Better. More in it. I wonder who collected them all and marked them all?"
"There's an initial on the lid: the letter D."
"Oh. Then obviously it must have been that ancestor of Mrs. Brace-Gideon's: that Captain Deuteronomy Dadware. He must have sailed to every beach on earth!"
"The lucky!"
"I know," agreed Julian.
When they were done with the shells, they found some cardboard boxes containing quantities of old, old magazines: fashion magazines of the early 1900's adorned with many pictures of strangely shaped young ladies wearing hairdo's that jutted forward from their heads, and large upturned hats that shot forward from the hairdo's, so that each young lady looked something like a water pitcher.
Julian soon tired of these, but Portia was entranced. There were other sorts of magazines, too, even older: in one, Portia found a story calledPeter Ibbetson. She liked the illustrations, and there were children in them, so she began to read....
When Foster started calling Julian at the top of his lungs, she hardly heard him, and when Julian told her he was going downstairs, she did not hear him, either. Sometimes a story can open a world for you: you step into it and forget the real one that you live in. Evidently this was such a story.
Foster was waiting on the downstairs landing by the suit of armor. He had a monkey wrench, a pair of pliers, and a can opener.
"I thought maybe you'd need these."
Julian looked at the suit of armor, then at Foster.
"Listen, Fang, it's still too big for you. No use even trying."
"I was afraid so. I suppose I'll just have to wait to grow into it, then, won't I?" said Foster philosophically.
"Perhaps we can try the helmet on you, though. If I can ever get it off; it probably hasn'tbeenoff in hundreds of years."
Julian gave a mighty tug, and the helmet flew up in his hands with no effort at all.
"Why, it's not even fastened down! O.K., Foss, stand still; let's try this bonnet on you."
Julian lowered the helmet gently down over Foster's head.
"There you go, Sir Launcelot! Can you see all right?"
"Yes, through the eye windows, but it isn't very comfortable in here," Foster complained. His voice inside the helmet had a clangorous twang: a robot's voice. "I don't like it very much. Something keeps tickling my nose. Ow."
"Wait a minute."
Julian lifted the sharp-snouted visor without any trouble. Foster's eyes and nose looked out, and a scrap of paper fluttered to the floor.
"Was that what was bothering my nose?"
But Julian didn't answer him. He had stooped to retrieve the piece of paper and was studying it.
"Now what the—" he muttered, perplexed. Then all at once he jumped straight up in the air as though he had stepped on a bee barefoot. "Oh, man! Oh man, ohbrother! PORSH!"
And he went thundering up the stairs in a one-boy stampede to the attic.
"Hey, wait!" cried Foster in his robot voice: the steel visor had dropped down again. "Let me out of this thing!"
But Julian was gone. Foster sighed an echoing sigh within the helmet. He could see pretty well through the eye slits, but he felt top-heavy, as though he were wearing an iron bucket on his head, and he couldn't get it off by himself. Sighing again, he felt for the banister and started cautiously up the stairs to find his cousin.
"Portia!" roared Julian.
"Now what?" she said, marking her place on the page with her finger.
"Listen to this, just listen! This piece of paper fell out of the helmet—"
"What helmet?"
"Oh, never mind, it doesn't matter. Listen; here's what it says: zero dash, six R dash, two L dash, eight R dash, three whole turns R to eight."
Portia stared at him. "Are you crazy or something?"
"Doesn't it mean anything to you? Listen again. R means right and L means left, see? So it's zero dash, sixrightdash, twoleftdash, eightrightdash, three whole turnsrighttoeight. Do you dig it now?"
"No," Portia said.
"Oh, for Pete's sake. It's a combination, brain. It's sort of a recipe for opening a safe. Now do you see?"
"Mrs. Brace-Gideon's safe?"
Julian just sighed.
"Well, how do you know that's what it is? Maybe it's a recipe for some kind of dance: turn three times to the right and then six times to the left or whatever it is. Itcouldbe a dance."
Julian rolled his eyes upward.
"How do you start a dance at zero?" he inquired. "Just give me a clue."
At this moment, staring beyond him, Portia gasped. Footsteps were sounding slowly on the attic stairs, and just above the level of the attic floor appeared the helmet of an armored knight.
"Oh, Jule, oh, Jule," she whispered, grasping his arm; and then she wished she hadn't. How she wished she hadn't! Because below the shining headdress of Sir Launcelot was the figure of her brother Foster, sloppily attired in blue jeans and a grass-stained T-shirt.
"When Knighthood Was in Flower," commented Julian, kindly ignoring his cousin's moment of panic.
"Get me out of here, will you?" begged Foster, his plea reverberating in the helmet. "Please hurry up."
When Julian had liberated him, he did a little hopping.
"Now my head feels light again. I feel light all over, and nice. But you know what, Jule? I bet they used to have a lot of headaches in knight-days. And stiff necks, too. And if their ear itched, how could they ever scratch it?"
"What I don't see," Portia objected later that day, "is what's so wonderful about finding the combination when you haven't found the safe and maybe never will."
"I don't know myself, to tell you the truth. It's just that it makes the safe seemrealer—as if we really would find it. I know that doesn't make sense and it's a dumb way to reason; I guess you'd call it a superstition or a hunch or something, but that's the way I feel."
"It will probably be empty if we do find it, just as Aunt Minnehaha said."
"Maybe," Julian conceded, but he did not sound convinced. He refused to give up the lovely thought of treasure—though for an instant he glimpsed the idea that even if they did find the safe and even if it did contain marvels, it still wouldn't be quite as good as thinking about it and looking for it.
He and Portia were tramping along the soaked drive toward the road to Gone-Away. The rain had stopped, but one felt it had only taken the time to draw a breath or two before it began again. The clouds hung low and wet, and when the small breeze stirred, every tree shook water down.
"I like this day," Julian said. "But I don't see why I do."
The woods looked mysterious and dark, particularly where the honeysuckle had woven its canopies among the branches; the roadside was edged thickly with the green umbrellas of May-apple leaves; and here and there, like a queer bell with a clapper, stood a jack-in-the-pulpit, lonely and alert.
"Indians used to make flour from the roots of those, Aunt Minnehaha says," Portia told Julian. "She said she tried it once and it tasted terrible. She knows absolutely everything about everything that grows: all the plants that you can eat or make medicine of, and all the plants that can make you sick or kill you."
"Well,Iknow that," Julian said. He had eaten many oddities at Aunt Minnehaha's table; some he had liked: the day-lily buds dipped in batter and fried, the salads made of young purslane and nasturtium leaves; and some he had not: the pigweed spinach, and the boiled milkweed sprouts.
"Aunt Minnehaha says there's no excuse for anybody starving in this region. Why, you can even eat reindeer moss if you boil it! Did you know that?"
"Well, I'm never going to do it till I have to," Julian said.
He and Portia were bearing gifts for Mrs. Cheever and her brother. Julian had a pound of butter because the old people relished it and had it rarely. Portia was bringing one of Captain Dadware's sea shells (Voluta imperialiswas what the label said it was), because Mrs. Cheever had once told her she was "partial to shells."