The Green Door | Page 2

green door there; but that was nonsense, because Letitia knew there was. Her curiosity grew greater and greater; she took every chance she could get to steal into the cheese-room and shake the door softly, but it was always locked. She even tried to look through the key-hole, but she could see nothing. One thing puzzled her more than all, and that was that the little green door was on the inside of the house only, and not on the outside. When Letitia went out in the field behind the house, there was nothing but the blank wall to be seen. There was no sign of a door in it. But the cheese-room was certainly the last room in the house, and the little green door was in the rear wall. When Letitia asked her Great-aunt Peggy to explain that, she only got the same answer:
"It is not best for you to know, my dear."
Letitia studied the little green door more than she studied her lesson-books, but she never got any nearer the solution of the mystery, until one Sunday morning in January. It was a very cold day, and she had begged hard to stay home from church. Her Aunt Peggy and the maid-servant, old as they were, were going, but Letitia shivered and coughed a little and pleaded, and finally had her own way.
"But you must sit down quietly," charged Aunt Peggy, "and you must learn your texts, to repeat to me when I get home."
After Aunt Peggy and the old servant, in their great cloaks and bonnets and fur tippets, had gone out of the yard and down the road, Letitia sat quiet for fifteen minutes or so, hunting in the Bible for easy texts; then suddenly she thought of the little green door, and wondered, as she had done so many times before, if it could possibly be opened. She laid down her Bible and stole out through the kitchen to the cheese-room and tried the door. It was locked just as usual. "Oh, dear!" sighed Letitia, and was ready to cry. It seemed to her that this little green door was the very worst of all her trials; that she would rather open that and see what was beyond than have all the nice things she wanted and had to do without.
Suddenly she thought of a little satin-wood box with a picture on the lid which Aunt Peggy kept in her top bureau-drawer. Letitia had often seen this box, but had never been allowed to open it.
"I wonder if the key can be in that box," said she.
She did not wait a minute. She was so naughty that she dared not wait for fear she should remember that she ought to be good. She ran out of the cheese-room, through the kitchen and sitting-room, to her aunt's bedroom, and opened the bureau drawer, and then the satin-wood box. It contained some bits of old lace, an old brooch, a yellow letter, some other things which she did not examine, and, sure enough, a little black key on a green ribbon.
Letitia had not a doubt that it was the key of the little green door. She trembled all over, she panted for breath, she was so frightened, but she did not hesitate. She took the key and ran back to the cheese-room. She did not stop to shut the satin-wood box or the bureau drawer. She was so cold and her hands shook so that she had some difficulty in fitting the key into the lock of the little green door; but at last she succeeded, and turned it quite easily. Then, for a second, she hesitated; she was almost afraid to open the door; she put her hand on the latch and drew it back. It seemed to her, too, that she heard strange, alarming sounds on the other side. Finally, with a great effort of her will, she unlatched the little green door, and flung it open and ran out.
Then she gave a scream of surprise and terror, and stood still staring. She did not dare stir nor breathe. She was not in the open fields which she had always seen behind the house. She was in the midst of a gloomy forest of trees so tall that she could just see the wintry sky through their tops. She was hemmed in, too, by a wide, hooping undergrowth of bushes and brambles, all stiff with snow. There was something dreadful and ghastly about this forest, which had the breathless odor of a cellar. And suddenly Letitia heard again those strange sounds she had heard before coming out, and she knew that they were savage whoops of Indians, just as she had read about them in her history-book, and she saw also dark forms skulking