There was such fun in him, too — such sly, surprising fun. He told her jokes — he made her laugh. He told her strange old tales of forgotten gods who were very beautiful — of court festivals and the bridals of kings. He seemed to have the history of the whole world at his fingers’ ends. He described things to her in unforgettable phrases as they walked by the bay shore or sat in the overgrown, shadowy old garden of Wyther Grange. When he spoke of Athens as “the City of the Violet Crown” Emily realized afresh what magic is made when the right words are wedded; and she loved to think of Rome as “the City of the Seven Hills.” Dean had been in Rome and Athens — and almost everywhere else.
“I didn’t know any one ever talked as you do except in books,” she told him.
Dean laughed — with a little note of bitterness that was so often present in his laughter — though less often with Emily than with other people. It was really his laughter that had won Dean his reputation for cynicism. People so often felt that he was laughing at them instead of with them.
“I’ve had only books for companions most of my life,” he said. “Is it any wonder I talk like them?”
“I’m sure I’ll like studying history after this,” said Emily; “except Canadian History. I’ll never like it — it’s so dull. Not just at the first, when we belonged to France and there was plenty of fighting, but after that it’s nothing but politics.”
“The happiest countries, like the happiest women, have no history,” said Dean.
“I hope I’ll have a history,” cried Emily. “I want a thrilling career.”
“We all do, foolish one. Do you know what makes history? Pain — and shame — and rebellion — and bloodshed and heartache. Star, ask yourself how many hearts ached — and broke — to make those crimson and purple pages in history that you find so enthralling. I told you the story of Leonidas and his Spartans the other day. They had mothers, sisters and sweethearts. If they could have fought a bloodless battle at the polls wouldn’t it have been better — if not so dramatic.”
“I — can’t — feel — that way,” said Emily confusedly. She was not old enough to think or say, as she would say ten years later, “The heroes of Thermopylae have been an inspiration to humanity for centuries. What squabble around a ballot-box will ever be that?”
“And, like all female creatures, you form your opinions by your feelings. Well, hope for your thrilling career — but remember that if there is to be drama in your life somebody must pay the piper in the coin of suffering. If not you — then someone else.”
“Oh, no, I wouldn’t like that.”
“Then be content with fewer thrills. What about your tumble over the bank down there? That came near being a tragedy. What if I hadn’t found you?”
“But you did find me,” cried Emily. “I like near escapes — after they’re over,” she added. “If everybody had always been happy there’d be nothing to read about.”
Tweed made a third in their rambles and Emily grew very fond of him, without losing any of her loyalty to the pussy folk.
“I like cats with one part of my mind and dogs with another part,” she said.
“I like cats but I never keep one,” Dean said. “They’re too exacting — they ask too much. Dogs want only love but cats demand worship. They have never got over the Bubastis habit of godship.”
Emily understood this — he had told her all about old Egypt and the goddess Pasht — but she did not quite agree with him.
“Kittens don’t want to be worshipped,” she said. “They just want to be cuddled.”
“By their priestesses — yes. If you had been born on the banks of the Nile five thousand years ago, Emily, you would have been a priestess of Pasht — an adorable, slim, brown creature with a fillet of gold around your black hair and bands of silver on those ankles Aunt Nancy admires, with dozens of sacred little godlings frisking around you under the palms of the temple court.”
“Oh,” gasped Emily rapturously, “that gave me the flash. And,” she added wonderingly, “just for a moment it made me homesick, too. Why?”
“Why? Because I haven’t a doubt you were just such a priestess in a former incarnation and my words reminded your soul of it. Do you believe in the doctrine of the transmigration of souls, Star? But of course not — brought up by the true-blue Calvinists of New Moon.”
“What does it mean?” asked Emily, and when Dean explained it to her she thought it a very delightful belief but was quite sure Aunt Elizabeth would not approve of it.
“So I won’t believe it — yet,” she said gravely.
Then it all came to an end quite suddenly. It had been taken for granted by all concerned that Emily was to stay at Wyther Grange until the end of August. But in mid-August Aunt Nancy said suddenly to her one day:
“Go home, Emily. I’m tired of you. I like you very well — you’re not stupid and you’re passably pretty and you’ve behaved exceedingly well — tell Elizabeth you do the Murrays credit — but I’m tired of you. Go home.”
Emily’s feelings were mixed. It hurt her to be told Aunt Nancy was tired of her — it would hurt any one. It rankled in her for several days until she thought of a sharp answer she might have made Aunt Nancy and wrote it down in her Jimmy-book. She felt quite as relieved then as if she had really said it.
And she was sorry to leave Wyther Grange; she had grown to love the old beautiful house, with its flavour of hidden secrets — a flavour that was wholly a trick of its architecture, for there had never been anything in it but the simple tale of births and deaths and marriages and everyday living that most houses have. She was sorry to leave the bay shore and the quaint garden and the gazing-ball and the chessy-cat and the Pink Room bed of freedom; and most of all she was sorry to leave Dean Priest. But on the other hand it was delightful to think of going back to New Moon and all the loved ones there — Teddy and his dear whistle, Ilse and her stimulating comradeship, Perry with his determined reaching up for higher things, Saucy Sal and the new kitten that must be needing proper training now, and the fairy world of the Midsummer Night’s Dream. Cousin Jimmy’s garden would be in its prime of splendour, the August apples would be ripe. Suddenly, Emily was very ready to go. She packed her little black box jubilantly and found it an excellent chance to work in neatly a certain line from a poem Dean had recently read to her which had captured her fancy.
“‘Good-bye, proud world, I’m going home,’” she declaimed feelingly, standing at the top of the long, dark, shining staircase and apostrophizing the row of grim Priest photographs hanging on the wall.
But she was much annoyed over one thing. Aunt Nancy would not give her back the picture Teddy had painted.
“I’m going to keep it,” Aunt Nancy said, grinning and shaking her gold tassels. “Some day that picture will be worth something as the early effort of a famous artist.”
“I only lent it to you — I told you I only lent it to you,” said Emily indignantly.
“I’m an unscrupulous old demon,” said Aunt Nancy coolly. “That is what the Priests all call me behind my back. Don’t they, Caroline? May as well have the game as the name. I happen to have a fancy for that picture, that’s all. I’m going to frame it and hang it here in my parlour. But I’ll leave it to you in my will — that and the chessy-cat and the gazing-ball and my gold ear-rings. Nothing else — I’m not going to leave you a cent of my money — never count on that.”
“I don’t want it,” said Emily loftily. “I’m going to earn heaps of money for myself. But it isn’t fair of you to keep my picture. It was given to me.”
“I never was fair,” said Aunt Nancy. “Was I, Caroline?”
“No,” said Caroline shrewishly.
“You see. Now don’t make a fuss, Emily. You’ve been a very good child but I feel that I’ve done my duty by you for this year. Go back to New Moon and when Elizabeth won’t let you do things tell her I always let you. I don’t know if it will do any good but try it. Elizabeth, like every one else related to me, is always
wondering what I’m going to do with my money.”
Cousin Jimmy came over for Emily. How glad she was to see his kind face with its gentle, elfish eyes and forked beard again! But she felt very badly when she turned to Dean.
“If you like I’ll kiss you good-bye,” she said chokily.
Emily did not like kissing people. She did not really want to kiss Dean but she liked him so much she thought she ought to extend all the courtesies to him.
Dean looked down smiling into her face, so young, so pure, so softly curved.
“No, I don’t want you to kiss me — yet. And our first kiss mustn’t have the flavour of good-bye. It would be a bad omen. Star o’ Morning, I’m sorry you’re going. But I’ll see you again before long. My oldest sister lives in Blair Water, you know, and I feel a sudden access[???] of brotherly affection towards her. I seem to see myself visiting her very often henceforth. In the meantime remember you have promised to write me every week. And I’ll write you.”
“Nice fat letters,” coaxed Emily. “I love fat letters.”
“Fat! They’ll be positively corpulent, Star. Now, I’m not even going to say good-bye. Let’s make a pact, Star. We’ll never say good-bye to each other. We’ll just smile and go.”
Emily made a gallant effort — smiled — and went. Aunt Nancy and Caroline returned to the back parlour and their cribbage. Dean Priest whistled for Tweed and went to the bay shore. He was so lonely that he laughed at himself.
Emily and Cousin Jimmy had so much to talk of that the drive home seemed very short.
New Moon was white in the evening sunshine which also lay with exceeding mellowness on the grey old barns. The Three Princesses, shooting up against the silvery sky, were as remote and princessly as ever. The old gulf was singing away down over the fields.
Aunt Laura came running out to meet them, her lovely blue eyes shining with pleasure. Aunt Elizabeth was in the cookhouse preparing supper and only shook hands with Emily, but looked a trifle less grim and stately than usual, and she had made Emily’s favourite cream-puffs for supper. Perry was hanging about barefooted and sunburned, to tell her all the gossip of kittens and calves and little pigs and the new foal. Ilse came swooping over, and Emily discovered she had forgotten how vivid Ilse was — how brilliant her amber eyes, how golden her mane of spun-silk hair, looking more golden than ever under the bright blue silk tam Mrs Simms had bought her in Shrewsbury. As an article of dress, that loud tam made Laura Murray’s eyes and sensibilities ache, but its colour certainly did set off Ilse’s wonderful hair. She engulfed Emily in a rapturous embrace and quarrelled bitterly with her ten minutes later over the fact that Emily refused to give her Saucy Sal’s sole surviving kitten.
“I ought to have it, you doddering hyena,” stormed Ilse. “It’s as much mine as yours, pig! Our old barn cat is its father.”
“Such talk is not decent,” said Aunt Elizabeth, pale with horror. “And if you two children are going to quarrel over that kitten I’ll have it drowned — remember that.”
Ilse was finally appeased by Emily’s offering to let her name the kitten and have a half-interest in it. Ilse named it Daffodil. Emily did not think this suitable, since, from the fact of Cousin Jimmy referring to it as Little Tommy, she suspected it was of the sterner sex. But rather than again provoke Aunt Elizabeth’s wrath by discussing tabooed subjects, she agreed.
“I can call it Daff,” she thought. “That sounds more masculine.”
The kitten was a delicate bit of striped greyness that reminded Emily of her dear lost Mikes. And it smelled so nice — of warmth and clean furriness, with whiffs of the clover hay where Saucy Sal had made her mother-nest.
After supper she heard Teddy’s whistle in the old orchard — the same enchanting call. Emily flew out to greet him — after all, there was nobody just like Teddy in the world. They had an ecstatic scamper up to the Tansy Patch to see a new puppy that Dr Burnley had given Teddy. Mrs Kent did not seem very glad to see Emily — she was colder and more remote than ever, and she sat and watched the two children playing with the chubby little pup with a smouldering fire in her dark eyes that made Emily vaguely uncomfortable whenever she happened to glance up and encounter it. Never before had she sensed Mrs Kent’s dislike for her so keenly as that night.
“Why doesn’t your mother like me?” she asked Teddy bluntly, when they carried little Leo to the barn for the night.
“Because I do,” said Teddy briefly. “She doesn’t like anything I like. I’m afraid she’ll poison Leo very soon. I — I wish she wasn’t so fond of me,” he burst out, in the beginning of a revolt against this abnormal jealousy of love, which he felt rather than understood to be a fetter that was becoming galling. “She says she won’t let me take up Latin and Algebra this year — you know Miss Brownell said I might — because I’m not to go to college. She says she can’t bear to part from me — ever. I don’t care about the Latin and stuff — but I want to learn to be an artist — I want to go away some day to the schools where they teach that. She won’t let me — she hates my pictures now because she thinks I like them better than her. I don’t — I love Mother — she’s awful sweet and good to me every other way. But she thinks I do — and she’s burned some of them. I know she has. They’re missing from the barn wall and I can’t find them anywhere. If she does anything to Leo — I’ll — I’ll hate her.”
“Tell her that,” said Emily coolly, with some of the Murray shrewdness coming uppermost in her. “She doesn’t know that you know she poisoned Smoke and Buttercup. Tell her you do know it and that if she does anything to Leo you won’t love her any more. She’ll be so frightened of your not loving her that she won’t meddle with Leo — I know. Tell her gently — don’t hurt her feelings — but tell her. It will,” concluded Emily, with a killing imitation of Aunt Elizabeth delivering an ultimatum, “be better for all concerned.”
“I believe I will,” said Teddy, much impressed. “I can’t have Leo disappear like my cats did — he’s the only dog I’ve ever had and I’ve always wanted a dog. Oh, Emily, I’m glad you’re back!”
It was very nice to be told this — especially by Teddy. Emily went home to New Moon happily. In the old kitchen the candles were lighted and their flames were dancing in the winds of the August night blowing through door and window.
“I suppose you’ll not like candles very well, Emily, after being used to lamps at Wyther Grange,” said Aunt Laura with a little sigh. It was one of the bitter, small things in Laura Murray’s life that Elizabeth’s tyranny extended to candles.
Emily looked around her thoughtfully. One candle sputtered and bobbed at her as if greeting her. One, with a long wick, glowed and smouldered like a sulky little demon. One had a tiny flame — a sly, meditative candle. One swayed with a queer fiery grace in the draught from the door. One burned with a steady upright flame like a faithful soul.
“I — don’t know — Aunt Laura,” she answered slowly. “You can be — friends — with candles. I believe I like the candles best after all.”
Aunt Elizabeth, coming in from the cook-house, heard her. Something like pleasure gleamed in her gulf-blue eyes.
“You have some sense in you,” she said.
“That’s the second compliment she has paid me,” thought Emily.
“I think Emily has grown taller since she went to Wyther Grange,” Aunt Laura said, looking at her rather wistfully.
Aunt Elizabeth, snuffing the candles, glanced sharply over her glasses.
“I can’t see it,” she said. “Her dress is just the same length on her.”
“I’m sure she has,” persisted Laura.
Cousin Jimmy, to settle the dispute, measured Emily by the sitting-room door. She just touched the former mark.
“You see,” said Aunt Elizabeth triumphantly, liking to be right even in this small matter.
“She looks — different,” said Laura with a sigh.
Laura, after all, was right. Emily had grown, taller and older, in soul, if not in body.
It was this change which Laura felt, as close and tender affection swiftly feels. The Emily who returned from Wyther Grange was not the Emily who had gone there. She was no longer wholly the child. Aunt Nancy’s family histories over which she had pondered, her enduring anguish over the story of Ilse’s mother, that terrible hour when she had lain cheek by jowl with death on the cliffs of the bay shore, her association with Dean Priest, all had combined to mature her intelligence and her emotions. When she went to the garret next morning and pulled out her precious little bundle of manuscripts to read them lovingly over she was amazed and rather grieved to find that they were not half so good as she had believed they were. Some of them were positively silly, she thought; she was ashamed of them — so ashamed that she smuggled them down to the cook-house stove and burned them, much to Aunt Elizabeth’s annoyance when she came to prepare dinner and found the fire-box all choked up with charred paper.
Emily no longer wondered that Miss Brownell had made fun of them — though this did not mellow her bitterness of remembrance in regard to that lady in any degree. The rest she put back on the sofa shelf, including “The Child of the Sea,” which still impressed her as fairly good, though not just the wonderful composition she had once deemed it. She felt that many passages could be re-written to their advantage. Then she immediately began writing a new poem, “On Returning Home After Weeks’ Absence.” As everything and everybody connected with New Moon had to be mentioned in this poem it promised to be quite long and to furnish agreeable occupation for spare minutes in many weeks to come. It was very good to be home again.
“There is no place just like dear New Moon,” thought Emily.
One thing that marked her return — one of those little household “epochs” that make a keener impression on the memory and imagination than perhaps their real importance warrants — was the fact that she was given a room of her own. Aunt Elizabeth had found her unshared slumber too sweet a thing to be again surrendered. She decided that she could not put up any longer with a squirming bedfellow who asked unearthly questions at any hour of the night she took it into her head to do so.
The Complete Works of L M Montgomery Page 244
