THE OLD BUREAU.

Otago Witness, Issue 4033, 30 June 1931, Page 73

THE OLD BUREAU.

By

Mollie Jamieson.

" “ Take the old bureau along, with you, Elsie? Why, what nonsense!” said Lisbeth. *

She glanced up from the half-filled suitcase over which she was bending, her expression at once tolerant and affectionate, as became the married woman of experience when dealing with what she privately termed the “ fads ” of a spinster sister. Elsie’s blue eyes met those other harder grey ones half beseechingly, half timidly. “ I kno\v you think me stupid, Lisbeth, but I’ve always had a fancy to keep the old bureau. Mother made such a woik with it when she was alive. It would seem just like losing everything to let it go away.” “ Nonsense,” Mrs Aird said again, uncompromisingly, though not unkindly. “I’m not saying it’s stupid of you, Elsie, but it’s thoughtless when I’ve got everything arranged for the sale to-morrow, and now you raise a to-do like this. It isn’t even as if you were going to a place of your own, but coming home with me when I get back to the town. No, it’s not to be thought of. My house is fuller with things than it will hold, without taking in any more.” ’ “I know. I’m sorry, Lisbeth,” Elsie said, quietly, and turned away, her lip trembling like that of a hurt child. Poor little Elsie, who had been under her handsome, stern-willed old mother’s

dominion all her 38 years of life. Now that, at last, freedom had come to her, an<F the hand which had wielded the l sceptre so long lay cold in death, she could have wept her eyes out with longing for the old tyrannical sway; the safe, sheltered , existence at which she had chafed for So many years. She was like some frightened bird, whose wings have grown inert, untrustworthy for lack of use. Once Elsie would have been ready to flutter her pinions with the best of them, and fly far away—far away, but now—now

, Lisbeth, though quick tempered, was kind hearted, and.now she rose a little stiffly from her kneeling posture, and crossed the room to slip her arm about her young sister. Always there had been something about Elsie, her 10 years’ jumoi, which she did not quite understand; always she had pitied Elsie just a little, without exactly knowing why. “There, dear,. I didn’t mean to ‘be cross, and I’m sorry about the old bureau, just as sorry as you are yourself. See, I’ll put on the kettle, and we'll have a cup of tea. It’s harder on you than on me, seeing all the old things put up for sale. I’ve been away from home so long, but you’ve always' stayed here.” “Yes, I’ve always stayed here,” Elsie said, with a little tremor in her voice. She glanced about th e old, flagged kitchen, which she had always know so well, and now would know no more. From its safe shelter she bad seen them ali go out the brothers and sisters with whom she had played, leaving behind them that awful endless silence which is like none other upon earth, saving that of the greatest absence of all, which meh ca'l death. They had gone, Roger and Bob to fall with their faces to the foe; Mary, and pretty brown-eyed Dollv to homes of their own; Tom to the golden land of promise far aerss the sea. They had gone, and because someone must'stav, Elsie alone had tarried with the o'd mother in the older grey house on the hill, watching the years' of youth slip away, bearing uncomplainingly with the dull, drab dreariness which for so lon« had been her portion. But now the old mother was dea’d; the old mother who, though she had loved her children dearly, had given them so often hard words instead of kisses, condemnation rather than commendation. She was dead, and, much as Elsie would have desired to stay on in the little grey house on the hill, she, who had been ruled all her life, was over-ruled once again. Providence, in the shape of Lisbeth, had decreed that the eld house, with its possessions, should be sold, and Elsie herself, albeit, late in life, transplanted to that town which had been Lisbeth’s home throughout all her married years.

You 11 like it all right once you get settled down,” the elder sister said now comfortingly. “ I couldn’t bear to think of you here all alone, Elsie. What’s Alan Brent been thinking of all those years that he’s never asked you. Sweethearts you used to be, even when you were at school, I remember.”

“ Alan Brent isn’t the marrying kind,” eaid Elsie, and turned away so that the sharp glance of Lisbeth might not note anything it was not meant to see. For once she too had thought the same as her elder sister regarding Alan. Alan, who, because he wa s but a penniless lad, working for his daily bread, the proud old mother had never favoured; but whom Elsie, valorous in this one thing, would have followed to- death and judgment had he but said the word. But Alan had never said the word. Alan her old playmate, her loyal friend, had suddenly grown reserved—aloof—had gone his way, while she had perforce to go hers, hiding even from her mother that breaking heart of hers, whose hurt was all the sorer because it must for ever be borne alone.

“ Well, you’re maybe better. the way you are,” Mrs Aird, made wise by matrimony, had said. “ Marriage at most’s a lottery, even with the best of men, though 111 be glad enough to see John again to-morrow. You’re pleased to be coming home with me to-morrow, aren’t you, Elsie, One’s own fireside’s best, after all.”

“Yes,, but you’ve got to remember that it isn’t my house, nor my fireside, Lisbeth. That’s what makes all the difference,” was what Elsie said, and there was a little tremor, not unlike a sob, in her always quiet voice.

The old grey house on the hill lay in brooding silence that summer night, little reckoning that the end, which comes to all things earthly, was, for it, at hand; that the morrow should see it displenished and forsaken by the last of the children it had reared, and cared for, and sheltered for'so long, and ' now would never, in all the distant, unknown years to be, shelter more. Lisbeth, calmly sleeping, did not dream how • her younger sister kept vigil in the home which, in a few short hours, she was to leave for ever. To and fro, treading noiselessly, crept the small, shadowy figure, candle in hand, taking her last farewell of the familiar rooms, the loved household goods so soon to be dispersed. The old bureau—she would have liked to have kept the old bureau, handed down from generation to generation, of which her mother had ever been so proud—but Lisbeth, as always, was right. There would have been but little room in that dingy town flat, of which she shivered a little as she thought, for the old bureau.

“ There’s nothing in it, I know that quite well, but, still, I’ll just make certain,” Elsie said. She opened the bureau,

passing her fingers slowly, lovingly, through each well-known nook and cranny. Just here her mother had kqpt the bairns’ letters when so many of the home birds had flown; there the little packet of cookery recipes, the careful gathering of many years, had been tucked away; ah! how she hated Lisbeth burning these precious relics so that they might not fall into alien hands. A secret drawer somewhere? Yes, she could remember her father, dead long since, showing her, as a little child, the secret drawer, for which, strangely enough, she had never curiosity enough to look again. “ I’ve got to find it. I don’t know why, but I’ve got a sort of feeling that I’ve just got to find it,” Elsie told herself, and shifted her wavering candle this way and that, the better to see. “ Queer, I never minded about it until now, and I don’t believe Lisbeth ever knew, or she’d have hunted it out. It’s lucky she’s sleeping, she would be telling me that I was foolish to be taking so

much pains for nothing, if she was here. ’ - For it really did seem for quite a long time as though Elsie’s “pains” were to go for nothing. She felt and fumbled, and fumbled and felt, but all to no purpose. Smiling a little at her folly, she was almost giving up the fruitless search when her fingers unexpectedly came in contact with a small projection, so minute as almost to pass unperceived. A slight pressure, and a panel sprang back, revealing an aperture within. Holding the candle nearer, Elsie saw that, at the back of the drawer, which at first sight seemed empty, lay a letter, am* that, stranger still, the letter was addressed to herself. “Alan?” The word came in a little, strangled whisper. For the writing, too, was familiar —that writing, she would have known it anywhere, and among a thou-and. How or when it had got there she did not question; she knew’ only that the letter was from Alan; the message it contained for her eyes, and her eyes alone. With trembling fingers she tore the envelope open, with ’’ng, wonder ing eyes, read: — “My darling Lil., -#irl, —Unde Sandy’s ill, and I’m called off, but I’ll be back by Wednesday, »".re and certain. Will you meet me at Bluebell Wood then, same as usual? I've got something to tell you; something to ask you. too. — Yours ever, Alan.” “,Oh. Alan’!” poor Elsie whispered a little piteously, and again, “Oh, Alan;’ The date, 20 years earlier, faced her there, and vivid as though it had hap pened but yesterday, came back the memory of that cruel and heart-breaking time, when unexplicably had arisen that estrangement which, ever since, had lain ~ like a shadow across both their lives. Clear as a flash, she realised now just what had happened. Her mother ha 1 never cared for Alan; into her hands, by some mischance, th e letter had fallen, and, shrinking from burning the incriminating missive, she had salved her Puritanical conscience by thrusting it into the secret drawer, where it was as securely hidden as though it had perished in the flames. She might have meant, who knew’, to give it back to Elsie by and by, when Alan, thus discouraged,

had gone about his business, hut, if so. that convenient season had never arrived. Alan, hurt, chagrined at her non-appear-ance and reception of a message which had meant so much to him, had read his dismissal in her very evident action. He, no more than Elsie, intended to wear the willow, and no subsequent explanation was either asked for or made. To the grey old house set on the hill Alan Brent came again no more, while into Elsie’s blue eyes gradually crept that look which is not seldom found in blue orbs of single women, though the sorrow underlying it is hidden away so carefully from every curious eve.

“And now it’s too late! Oh, Alan!

and I'm going away, likely for ever,” poor Elsie, whispered, with a little sobbing sigh. To her provincial mind the crowded, smoky city might indeed have, been a distant foreign land, so remote and alien did it seem compared with all she had loved and known her lonely life through. She was leaving much, losing much, falling in with Lisbeth’s wishes Ilins as she had so meekly done; but, as it came to her of a sudden now, leaving and losing no. thing half so dear as the man who, for a lifetime, had held her nothing better than the merest of mere acquaintances, and hardly even that. For Alan Brent had not gone away, as many a disappointed lover had done before him, to hide his grief overseas. He had stuck manfully by the little farm which long and rigorous saving on his part had enabled him to acquire; had played his part in the Great War when it 'came, and returned to his home at last with nothing worse than a slight limp to remind him of the cruel years of battle and bloodshed which had gone before. Alan had never married, and, with old deaf Jenny, his housekeeper and distant kinswoman, still kept bachelor state at Misty Law. It was the thought of the utter loneliness of the man which had made even more sore Elsie’s always tender heart—the utter loneliness, while she, who would have given so much, even all that she had, was denied so much as a kind word, a look.

She closed the old bureau, and, still clasping the letter, which, for her, held a lifetime’s regret, crept through the still house back to her room, though not to sleep. With morning would come that cruellest trial of all, the dispersal of those poor household goods which her mother had ever prized so'dearly; the bidding farewell to the old house, which wan the only home she had ever known ;

the taking leave of all which had once, in her far-off youth, made life so sweet and fair. Daiyn, rising weirdly dim across the distant hills, was alreadyushering in the coming day ere at last slumber touched her tired eyelids, and | Elsie fell asleep with her old lover’s I letter in her hand, to dream that Alan was coming to meet her, as he so often 1 had, across the fields of morning sunshine—that no shadow lay between them; that time, and age; and tlie slowpassing of the weary- years w-ere as nothing, and less than nothing, now that they were once more together—and alone.

“ So that’s the end of it,” said Lisbeth.

She glanced with a certain air of brisk cheerfulness about the now almost empty rooms, where the few- articles of furniture still remaining wore an oddly altered look, as of those ■whose companions of a lifetime have been reft from them, leaving them stranded and alone. Now she turned to her younger sister, nodding encouragingly. “ That’s the worst over, Elsie, and now that everything’s settled, we’ll get the 8 train, and be back in town by 10 o’clock. You’ll like to have another look at your old bureau. Alan Brent hasn’t come for it yet—yes, it was Alan who bought it, didn’t you know ? But we’ll go along and have a cup of tea with Mrs Green first; she ran in to ask us just now. That’ll leave the house empty for the people to come in and fetch away the things they've bought, without thinking we’re spying on them.” “ You go, Lisbeth. I’ll be just a minute,” Elsie said a little wearily. How trying' this particular day had been to her. no one, not even her elder sister, would ever know-. All that had been loved, and dear, and familiar, seemed to have been reft from her, and now she faced the unknown life, desolate and alone. It was not only the old house—it was Alan whom she was leaving behind her for ever. Alan, who would never know- for himself the story of that old, missing letter, and just why and how, in

those far-off years, she had failed him. “ Well, I’m off, but don’t you be long,” Lisbeth cautioned her. She was sympathetic enough to understand that, in that last farewell which Elsie desired to take of the old home, no one, not even a sister, might intermeddle. “ I know quite well what you’re feeling, Elsie but it’ll soon be over, and you as happy as can be when you'get to the town.” She passed out through the open doorway, and down the little flagged garden path, a comfortable, middle-aged figure in her black gown; while Elsie, waiting half impatiently for the clash of the little white gate which told that she was gone, turned back into the desolate house with a heart w-hich was hardly less desolate, hardly less empty of all which had, once upon a day, made it so desired and fair.

“ But I’m glad that Alan is to have the old bureau. Always I’ll be glad that it’s Alan that’s to have the old bureau,” she whispered, letting her fingers stray softly, and for the last time, over the dark, polished surface. “ I’d like Alan to have known—but there! it’s too late now, and nothing that I can do will ever make any difference. Even if I was to put back the letter there—let him find it for himself, he wouldn’t understand. He’d never guess that it had been hidden away all those years, and that I never knew.” She took the leter from the pocket of her dress, and stood, considering, a slim, pathetic figure in the liglit of afternoon. Supposing she were to put it back where she found it, trust to Alan coming upon it some day—was it likely, after all, that he would be any the wiser for her pains? Fain would she have inscribed some last message from herself upon the faded envelope, but maiden modesty, as ever, held her back from what she most desired. And yet, stay! she had it—a sprig of forget-me-not from the bed beneath the kitchen window, and surely Alan would understand—comprehend? She could not do any less to make him understand; she dared not do any more. “ He mayn’t ever find it, but there isn’t anything else that I can do.” Passing out through the back door to the hedge-guarded, old-fashioned garden at the rear of the house, she gathered the little blue-flowered, starry-eyed sprig, pressed it mutely to her lips, and went swiftly back into the kitchen. Little over a minute she had been, and yet, in her

absence, it would seem that someone had entered by the front door; someone who now stood by the- old bureau. It was Alan Brent who looked round at her coming, flushing up almost like a schoolboy as He saw her standing, black-gowned, in the' open doorway, the sunlight all behind her, the sprig of forget-me-not in her hand.

“ I’m sorry. I’ll come again,” he muttered, and, turning, would have gone a? unexpectedly as he had come, had not Elsie, coming forward, held out her hand. There was an almost pitiful little break in her usually quiet voice. “ Aren’t you going to wait to say ‘ good-bye,’ Alan ? It’ll be for such a long time, for I’ll never be coming back. I’m glad that you’ve come just this once, so that we’ll be able to say ‘-good-bye.’” “ Good-bye,” Alan Brent said, and took the little, work-worn hand in his. Man-like he would have funked this thing if he could, but he had thought the house was empty, or the fetching away of the old bureau might have waited for a hundred to-morrows for all he cared. And then fell an almost painful silence betwixt these two, who had once been all the world to each other; Alan, because he could not, Elsie because she dared not speak. “ I’ll be off, then,” Alan said, at last, a little awkwardly, and, turning, would now of a certainty have gone, and that clean out of Elsie’s life, as he had been any time throughout the last 20 years, had not his eye, glancing downwards, fallen upon the letter inscribed in his own hand writing, which still lay upon the bureau top. Half mechanically he stretched out' his hand, then withdrew it, realising that, after all, this was no concern of his. Elsie, following his gaze, nodded.

“ I’ve only just found it, Alan the letter.” Her blue eyes, appealing, as he had never before remembered them, met his, a world of entreaty in their depths. “ That’s how I want you to forgive me, before I go away, for what was never meant—intended. Oh, my lad! my lad! what is it that you’ve been thinking of me for all those years? ”

Then Alan Brent forgot that he had intended to retreat, ’and that with what haste he might, from the presence of this woman who, he always felt, had treated him so callously and hardly. He only remembered that this was Elsie, playmate of his childhood, companion of his boyhood, friend of his young manhood; Elsie, who, had things gone as he wished, would have been his dear and honoured wife long since. He paused, looking down at her, unspoken questioning in his own sombre glance, and, when he broke the silence, it was as one who wakes, and that but slowly, from a torturing dream. “ You’ve got to tell me, dear. I can’t take it in—not yet, at least, or else, what I’m taking in, is too good to be true.” And when Elsie, sparing the old mother as best she could—for who could tell, after all, who had actually been toblame?—had told her story, there was still the letter to show, the letter which told so much, yet left so much untold—so much that only Alan Brent could tell her now.

“My poor lass, and you thought I’d used you as ill as that,” he said at length, and, greatly daring, stooped to put his arm about her. “ It’s for you to say, Elsie, but if it’s to be the end of an old song, and you’re willing to begin where we left off twenty years since, and if you’re not so set on going to the town as Lisbeth’s always saying ” “Oh, Alan!” said Elsie, and there, beside the old bureau, which had taken so much from her, and yet, in the coming of Alan, given so much back again, wept out her happy tears —not upon its smoothly polished surface, but within his sheltering arms.—Weekly Scotsman.