“Well, that’s settled,” said Uncle Wallace, getting up with an air of relief. “And if I’m going to catch that train I’ve got to hurry. Of course, as far as the matter of expense goes, Elizabeth, I’ll do my share.”
“We are not paupers at New Moon,” said Aunt Elizabeth rather coldly. “Since it has fallen to me to take her, I shall do all that is necessary, Wallace. I do not shirk my duty.”
“I am her duty,” thought Emily. “Father said nobody ever liked a duty. So Aunt Elizabeth will never like me.”
“You’ve got more of the Murray pride than all the rest of us put together, Elizabeth,” laughed Uncle Wallace.
They all followed him out — all except Aunt Laura. She came up to Emily, standing alone in the middle of the room, and drew her into her arms.
“I’m so glad, Emily — I’m so glad,” she whispered. “Don’t fret, dear child. I love you already — and New Moon is a nice place, Emily.”
“It has — a pretty name,” said Emily, struggling for self-control. “I’ve — always hoped — I could go with you, Aunt Laura. I think I am going to cry — but it’s not because I’m sorry I’m going there. My manners are not as bad as you may think, Aunt Laura — and I wouldn’t have listened last night if I’d known it was wrong.”
“Of course you wouldn’t,” said Aunt Laura.
“But I’m not a Murray, you know.”
Then Aunt Laura said a queer thing — for a Murray.
“Thank heaven for that!” said Aunt Laura.
Cousin Jimmy followed Emily out and overtook her in the little hall. Looking carefully around to ensure privacy, he whispered.
“Your Aunt Laura is a great hand at making an apple turnover, pussy.”
Emily thought apple turnover sounded nice, though she did not know what it was. She whispered back a question which she would never have dared ask Aunt Elizabeth or even Aunt Laura.
“Cousin Jimmy, when they make a cake at New Moon, will they let me scrape out the mixing-bowl and eat the scrapings?”
“Laura will — Elizabeth won’t,” whispered Cousin Jimmy solemnly.
“And put my feet in the oven when they get cold? And have a cooky before I go to bed?”
“Answer same as before,” said Cousin Jimmy. “I’ll recite my poetry to you. It’s very few people I do that for. I’ve composed a thousand poems. They’re not written down — I carry them here.” Cousin Jimmy tapped his forehead.
“Is it very hard to write poetry?” asked Emily, looking with new respect at Cousin Jimmy.
“Easy as rolling off a log if you can find enough rhymes,” said Cousin Jimmy.
They all went away that morning except the New Moon people. Aunt Elizabeth announced that they would stay until the next day to pack up and take Emily with them.
“Most of the furniture belongs to the house,” she said, “so it won’t take us long to get ready. There are only Douglas Starr’s books and his few personal belongings to pack.”
“How shall I carry my cats?” asked Emily anxiously.
Aunt Elizabeth stared.
“Cats! You’ll take no cats, miss.”
“Oh, I must take Mike and Saucy Sal!” cried Emily wildly. “I can’t leave them behind. I can’t live without a cat.”
“Nonsense! There are barn cats at New Moon, but they are never allowed in the house.”
“Don’t you like cats?” asked Emily wonderingly.
“No, I do not.”
“Don’t you like the feel of a nice, soft, fat cat?” persisted Emily.
“No; I would as soon touch a snake.”
“There’s a lovely old wax doll of your mother’s up there,” said Aunt Laura. “I’ll dress it up for you.”
“I don’t like dolls — they can’t talk,” exclaimed Emily.
“Neither can cats.”
“Oh, can’t they! Mike and Saucy Sal can. Oh, I must take them. Oh, please, Aunt Elizabeth. I love those cats. And they’re the only things left in the world that love me. Please!”
“What’s a cat more or less on two hundred acres?” said Cousin Jimmy, pulling his forked beard. “Take ’em along, Elizabeth.”
Aunt Elizabeth considered for a moment. She couldn’t understand why anybody should want a cat. Aunt Elizabeth was one of those people who never do understand anything unless it is told them in plain language and hammered into their heads. And then they understand it only with their brains and not with their hearts.
“You may take one of your cats,” she said at last, with the air of a person making a great concession. “One — and no more. No, don’t argue. You may as well learn first as last, Emily, that when I say a thing I mean it. That’s enough, Jimmy.”
Cousin Jimmy bit off something he had tried to say, stuck his hands in his pockets, and whistled at the ceiling.
“When she won’t, she won’t — Murray-like. We’re all born with that kink in us, small pussy, and you’ll have to put up with it — more by token that you’re full of it yourself, you know. Talk about your not being Murray! The Starr is only skin deep with you.”
“It isn’t — I’m all Starr — I want to be,” cried Emily. “And, oh, how can I choose between Mike and Saucy Sal?”
This was indeed a problem. Emily wrestled with it all day, her heart bursting. She liked Mike best — there was no doubt of that; but she couldn’t leave Saucy Sal to Ellen’s tender mercies. Ellen had always hated Sal; but she rather liked Mike and she would be good to him. Ellen was going back to her own little house in Maywood village and she wanted a cat. At last in the evening, Emily made her bitter decision. She would take Saucy Sal.
“Better take the Tom,” said Cousin Jimmy. “Not so much bother with kittens you know, Emily.”
“Jimmy!” said Aunt Elizabeth sternly. Emily wondered over the sternness. Why weren’t kittens to be spoken of? But she didn’t like to hear Mike called “the Tom.” It sounded insulting, someway.
And she didn’t like the bustle and commotion of packing up. She longed for the old quiet and the sweet, remembered talks with her father. She felt as if he had been thrust far away from her by this influx of Murrays.
“What’s this?” said Aunt Elizabeth suddenly, pausing for a moment in her packing. Emily looked up and saw with dismay that Aunt Elizabeth had in her hands the old account-book — that she was opening it — that she was reading in it. Emily sprang across the floor and snatched the book.
“You mustn’t read that, Aunt Elizabeth,” she cried indignantly, “that’s mine — my own private property.”
“Hoity-toity, Miss Starr,” said Aunt Elizabeth, staring at her, “let me tell you that I have a right to read your books. I am responsible for you now. I am not going to have anything hidden or underhanded, understand that. You have evidently something there that you are ashamed to have seen and I mean to see it. Give me that book.”
“I’m not ashamed of it,” cried Emily, backing away, hugging her precious book to her breast. “But I won’t let you — or anybody — see it.”
Aunt Elizabeth followed.
“Emily Starr, do you hear what I say? Give me that book — at once.”
“No — no!” Emily turned and ran. She would never let Aunt Elizabeth see that book. She fled to the kitchen stove — she whisked off a cover — she crammed the book into the glowing fire. It caught and blazed merrily. Emily watched it in agony. It seemed as if part of herself were burning there. But Aunt Elizabeth should never see it — see all the little things she had written and read to Father — all her fancies about the Wind Woman — and Emily-in-the-glass — all her little cat dialogues — all the things she had said in it last night about the Murrays. She watched the leaves shrivel and shudder, as if they were sentient things, and then turn black. A line of white writing came out vividly on one. “Aunt Elizabeth is very cold and hawty.” What if Aunt Elizabeth had seen that? What if she were seeing it now! Emily glanced apprehensively over her shoulder. No, Aunt Elizabeth had gone back to the room and shut the door with
what, in anybody but a Murray, would have been called a bang. The account-book was a little heap of white film on the glowing coals. Emily sat down by the stove and cried. She felt as if she had lost something incalculably precious. It was terrible to think that all those dear things were gone. She could never write them again — not just the same; and if she could she wouldn’t dare — she would never dare to write anything again, if Aunt Elizabeth must see everything. Father never insisted on seeing them. She liked to read them to him — but if she hadn’t wanted to do it he would never have made her. Suddenly Emily, with tears glistening on her cheeks, wrote a line in an imaginary account-book.
“Aunt Elizabeth is cold and hawty; and she is not fair.”
Next morning, while Cousin Jimmy was tying the boxes at the back of the double-seated buggy, and Aunt Elizabeth was giving Ellen her final instructions, Emily said good-bye to everything — to the Rooster Pine and Adam-and-Eve—”they’ll miss me so when I’m gone; there won’t be any one here to love them,” she said wistfully — to the spider crack in the kitchen window — to the old wing-chair — to the bed of striped grass — to the silver birch-ladies. Then she went upstairs to the window of her own old room. That little window had always seemed to Emily to open on a world of wonder. In the burned account-book there had been one piece of which she was especially proud. “A deskripshun of the vew from my Window.” She had sat there and dreamed; at night she used to kneel there and say her little prayers. Sometimes the stars shone through it — sometimes the rain beat against it — sometimes the little greybirds and swallows visited it — sometimes airy fragrances floated in from apple and lilac blossom — sometimes the Wind Woman laughed and sighed and sang and whistled round it — Emily had heard her there in the dark nights and in wild, white winter storms. She did not say good-bye to the Wind Woman, for she knew the Wind Woman would be at New Moon, too; but she said good-bye to the little window and the green hill she had loved, and to her fairy-haunted barrens and to little Emily-in-the-glass. There might be another Emily-in-the-glass at New Moon, but she wouldn’t be the same one. And she unpinned from the wall and stowed away in her pocket the picture of the ball dress she had cut from a fashion sheet. It was such a wonderful dress — all white lace and wreaths of rosebuds, with a long, long train of lace flounces that must reach clear across a room. Emily had pictured herself a thousand times wearing that dress, sweeping, a queen of beauty, across a ballroom door.
Downstairs they were waiting for her. Emily said good-bye to Ellen Greene rather indifferently — she had never liked Ellen Greene at any time, and since the night Ellen had told her her father was going to die she had hated and feared her.
Ellen amazed Emily by bursting into tears and hugging her — begging her not to forget her — asking her to write to her — calling her “my blessed child.”
“I am not your blessed child,” said Emily, “but I will write to you. And will you be very good to Mike?”
“I b’lieve you feel worse over leaving that cat than you do over leaving me,” sniffed Ellen.
“Why, of course I do,” said Emily, amazed that there could be any question about it.
It took all her resolution not to cry when she bade farewell to Mike, who was curled up on the sun-warm grass at the back door.
“Maybe I’ll see you again sometime,” she whispered as she hugged him. “I’m sure good pussy cats go to heaven.”
Then they were off in the double-seated buggy with its fringed canopy, always affected by the Murrays of New Moon. Emily had never driven in anything so splendid before. She had never had many drives. Once or twice her father had borrowed Mr Hubbard’s old buckboard and grey pony and driven to Charlottetown. The buckboard was rattly and the pony slow, but Father had talked to her all the way and made the road a wonder.
Cousin Jimmy and Aunt Elizabeth sat in front, the latter very imposing in black lace bonnet and mantle. Aunt Laura and Emily occupied the seat behind, with Saucy Sal between them in a basket, shrieking piteously.
Emily glanced back as they drove up the grassy lane, and thought the little, old, brown house in the hollow had a brokenhearted look. She longed to run back and comfort it. In spite of her resolution, the tears came into her eyes; but Aunt Laura put a kid-gloved hand across Sal’s basket and caught Emily’s in a close, understanding squeeze.
“Oh, I just love you, Aunt Laura,” whispered Emily.
And Aunt Laura’s eyes were very, very blue and deep and kind.
New Moon
Emily found the drive through the blossomy June world pleasant. Nobody talked much; even Saucy Sal had subsided into the silence of despair; now and then Cousin Jimmy made a remark, more to himself, as it seemed, than to anybody else. Sometimes Aunt Elizabeth answered it, sometimes not. She always spoke crisply and used no unnecessary words.
They stopped in Charlottetown and had dinner. Emily, who had had no appetite since her father’s death, could not eat the roast beef which the boarding-house waitress put before her. Whereupon Aunt Elizabeth whispered mysteriously to the waitress who went away and presently returned with a plateful of delicate cold chicken — fine white slices, beautifully trimmed with lettuce frills.
“Can you eat that?” said Aunt Elizabeth sternly, as to a culprit at the bar.
“I’ll — try,” whispered Emily.
She was too frightened just then to say more, but by the time she had forced down some of the chicken she had made up her small mind that a certain matter must be put right.
“Aunt Elizabeth,” she said.
“Hey, what?” said Aunt Elizabeth, directing her steel-blue eyes straight at her niece’s troubled ones.
“I would like you to understand,” said Emily, speaking very primly and precisely so that she would be sure to get things right, “that it was not because I did not like the roast beef I did not eat it. I was not hungry at all; and I just et some of the chicken to oblige you, not because I liked it any better.”
“Children should eat what is put before them and never turn up their noses at good, wholesome food,” said Aunt Elizabeth severely. So Emily felt that Aunt Elizabeth had not understood after all and she was unhappy about it.
After dinner Aunt Elizabeth announced to Aunt Laura that they would do some shopping.
“We must get some things for the child,” she said.
“Oh, please don’t call me ‘the child,’” exclaimed Emily. “It makes me feel as if I didn’t belong anywhere. Don’t you like my name, Aunt Elizabeth? Mother thought it so pretty. And I don’t need any ‘things.’ I have two whole sets of underclothes — only one is patched—”
“S-s-sh!” said Cousin Jimmy, gently kicking Emily’s shins under the table.
Cousin Jimmy only meant that it would be better if she let Aunt Elizabeth buy “things” for her when she was in the humour for it; but Emily thought he was rebuking her for mentioning such matters as underclothes and subsided in scarlet confusion. Aunt Elizabeth went on talking to Laura as if she had not heard.
“She must not wear that cheap black dress in Blair Water. You could sift oatmeal through it. It is nonsense expecting a child of ten to wear black at all. I shall get her a nice white dress with a black sash for good, and some black-and-white-check gingham for school. Jimmy, we’ll leave the child with you. Look after her.”
Cousin Jimmy’s method of looking after her was to take her to a restaurant down street and fill her up with ice-cream. Emily had never had many chances at ice-cream and she needed no urging, even with lack of appetite, to eat two saucerfuls. Cousin Jimmy eyed her with satisfaction.
“No use my getting anything for you that Elizabeth could see,” he said. “But she can’t see what is inside of you. Make the most of your chance, for goodness alone knows when you’ll get any more.”
“Do you never have ice-cream at New Moon?”
Cousin Jimmy shook his head.
“Your Aunt Elizabeth doesn’t like new-fangled things. In the house, we belong to fifty years ago, but on the f
arm she has to give way. In the house — candles; in the dairy, her grandmother’s big pans to set the milk in. But, pussy, New Moon is a pretty good place after all. You’ll like it some day.”
“Are there any fairies there?” asked Emily, wistfully.
“The woods are full of ‘em,” said Cousin Jimmy. “And so are the columbines in the old orchard. We grow columbines there on purpose for the fairies.”
Emily sighed. Since she was eight she had known there were no fairies anywhere nowadays; yet she hadn’t quite given up the hope that one or two might linger in old-fashioned, out-of-the-way spots. And where so likely as at New Moon?”
“Really-truly fairies?” she questioned.
“Why, you know, if a fairy was really-truly it wouldn’t be a fairy,” said Cousin Jimmy seriously. “Could it, now?”
Before Emily could think this out the aunts returned and soon they were all on the road again. It was sunset when they came to Blair Water — a rosy sunset that flooded the long, sandy sea-coast with colour and brought red road and fir-darkened hill out in fleeting clearness of outline. Emily looked about her on her new environment and found it good. She saw a big house peering whitely through a veil of tall old trees — no mushroom growth of yesterday’s birches but trees that had loved and been loved by three generations — a glimpse of silver water glistening through the dark spruces — that was the Blair Water itself, she knew — and a tall, golden-white church spire shooting up above the maple woods in the valley below. But it was none of these that brought her the flash — that came with the sudden glimpse of the dear, friendly, little dormer window peeping through vines on the roof — and right over it, in the opalescent sky, a real new moon, golden and slender. Emily was tingling all over with it as Cousin Jimmy lifted her from the buggy and carried her into the kitchen.
She sat on a long wooden bench that was satin-smooth with age and scrubbing, and watched Aunt Elizabeth lighting candles here and there, in great, shining, brass candlesticks — on the shelf between the windows, on the high dresser where the row of blue and white plates began to wink her a friendly welcome, on the long table in the corner. And as she lighted them, elvish “rabbits’ candles” flashed up amid the trees outside the windows.
The Complete Works of L M Montgomery Page 221
