So, after a long conference with Laura, it was settled that Emily was to have her mother’s room — the “lookout” as it was called, though it was not really a lookout. But it occupied the place in New Moon, looking over the front door to the garden, that the real lookouts did in other Blair Water houses, so it went by that name. It had been prepared for Emily’s occupancy in her absence and when bedtime came on the first evening of her return Aunt Elizabeth curtly told her that henceforth she was to have her mother’s room.
“All to myself?” exclaimed Emily.
“Yes. We will expect you to take care of it yourself and keep it very tidy.”
“It has never been slept in since the night before your mother — went away,” said Aunt Laura, with a queer sound in her voice — a sound of which Aunt Elizabeth disapproved.
“Your mother,” she said, looking coldly at Emily over the flame of the candle — an attitude that gave a rather gruesome effect to her aquiline features—”ran away — flouted her family and broke her father’s heart. She was a silly, ungrateful, disobedient girl. I hope you will never disgrace your family by such conduct.”
“Oh, Aunt Elizabeth,” said Emily breathlessly, “when you hold the candle down like that it makes your face look just like a corpse! Oh, it’s so interesting.”
Aunt Elizabeth turned and led the way upstairs in grim silence. There was no use in wasting perfectly good admonitions on a child like this.
Left alone in her lookout, lighted dimly by the one small candle, Emily gazed about her with keen and thrilling interest. She could not get into bed until she had explored every bit of it. The room was very old-fashioned, like all New Moon rooms. The walls were papered with a design of slender gilt diamonds enclosing golden stars and hung with worked woollen mottoes and pictures that had been “supplements” in the girlhood of her aunts. One of them, hanging over the head of the bed, represented two guardian angels. In its day this had been much admired but Emily looked at it with distaste.
“I don’t like feather wings on angels,” she said decidedly. “Angels should have rainbowy wings.”
On the floor was a pretty homespun carpet and round braided rugs. There was a high black bedstead with carved posts, a fat feather-bed, and an Irish chain quilt, but, as Emily was glad to see, no curtains. A little table, with funny claw-feet and brass-knobbed drawers, stood by the window, which was curtained with muslin frills; one of the window-panes contorted the landscape funnily, making a hill where no hill was. Emily liked this — she couldn’t have told why, but it was really because it gave the pane an individuality of its own. An oval mirror in a tarnished gilt frame hung above the table; Emily was delighted to find she could see herself in it—”all but my boots” — without craning or tipping it. “And it doesn’t twist my face or turn my complexion green,” she thought happily. Two high-backed, black chairs with horsehair seats, a little washstand with a blue basin and pitcher, and a faded ottoman with woollen roses cross-stitched on it, completed the furnishing. On the little mantel were vases full of dried and coloured grasses and a fascinating pot-bellied bottle filled with West Indian shells. On either side were lovable little cupboards with leaded-glass doors like those in the sitting-room. Underneath was a small fireplace.
“I wonder if Aunt Elizabeth will ever let me have a little fire here,” thought Emily.
The room was full of that indefinable charm found in all rooms where the pieces of furniture, whether old or new, are well acquainted with each other and the walls and floors are on good terms. Emily felt it all over her as she flitted about examining everything. This was her room — she loved it already — she felt perfectly at home.
“I belong here,” she breathed happily.
She felt deliciously near to her mother — as if Juliet Starr had suddenly become real to her. It thrilled her to think that her mother had probably crocheted the lace cover on the round pincushion on the table. And that flat, black jar of pot-pourri on the mantel — her mother must have compounded it. When Emily lifted the lid a faint spicy odour floated out. The souls of all the roses that had bloomed through many olden summers at New Moon seemed to be prisoned there in a sort of flower purgatory. Something in the haunting, mystical, elusive odour gave Emily the flash — and her room had received its consecration.
There was a picture of her mother hanging over the mantel — a large daguerreotype taken when she was a little girl. Emily looked at it lovingly. She had the picture of her mother which her father had left, taken after their marriage. But when Aunt Elizabeth had brought that from Maywood to New Moon she had hung it in the parlour where Emily seldom saw it. This picture, in her bedroom, of the golden-haired, rose-cheeked girl, was all her own. She could look at it — talk to it at will.
“Oh, Mother,” she said, “what did you think of when you were a little girl here like me? I wish I could have known you then. And to think nobody has ever slept here since that last night you did before you ran away with Father. Aunt Elizabeth says you were wicked to do it but I don’t think you were. It wasn’t as if you were running away with a stranger. Anyway, I’m glad you did, because if you hadn’t there wouldn’t have been any me.”
Emily, very glad that there was an Emily, opened her lookout window as high as it would go, got into bed and drifted off to sleep, feeling a happiness that was so deep as to be almost pain as she listened to the sonorous sweep of the night wind among the great trees in Lofty John’s bush. When she wrote to her father a few days later she began the letter, “Dear Father and Mother.”
“And I’ll always write the letter to you as well as Father after this, Mother. I’m sorry I left you out so long. But you didn’t seem real till that night I came home. I made the bed beautifully next morning — Aunt Elizabeth didn’t find a bit of fault with it — and I dusted everything — and when I went out I knelt down and kissed the doorstep. I didn’t think Aunt Elizabeth saw me but she did and said had I gone crazy. Why does Aunt Elizabeth think any one is crazy who does something she never does? I said ‘No, it’s only because I love my room so much’ and she sniffed and said ‘You’d better love your God.’ But so I do, dear Father — and Mother — and I love Him better than ever since I have my dear room. I can see all over the garden from it and into Lofty John’s bush and one little bit of the Blair Water through the gap in the trees where the Yesterday Road runs. I like to go to bed early now. I love to lie all alone in my own room and make poetry and think out descriptions of things while I look through the open window at the stars and the nice, big, kind, quiet trees in Lofty John’s bush.
“Oh, Father dear and Mother, we are going to have a new teacher. Miss Brownell is not coming back. She is going to be married and Ilse says that when her father heard it he said ‘God help the man.’ And the new teacher is a Mr Carpenter. Ilse saw him when he came to see her father about the school — because Dr Burnley is a trustee this year — and she says he has bushy grey hair and whiskers. He is married, too, and is going to live in that little old house down in the hollow below the school. It seems so funny to think of a teacher having a wife and whiskers.
“I am glad to be home. But I miss Dean and the gazing-ball. Aunt Elizabeth looked very cross when she saw my bang but didn’t say anything. Aunt Laura says just to keep quiet and go on wearing it. But I don’t feel comfortable going against Aunt Elizabeth so I have combed it all back except a little fringe. I don’t feel quite comfortable about it even yet, but I have to put up with being a little uncomfortable for the sake of my looks. Aunt Laura says bustles are going out of style so I’ll never be able to have one but I don’t care because I think they’re ugly. Rhoda Stuart will be cross because she was just longing to be old enough to wear a bustle. I hope I’ll be able to have a gin-jar all to myself when the weather gets cold. There is a row of gin-jars on the high shelf in the cook-house.
“Teddy and I had the nicest adventure yesterday evening. We are going to keep it a secret from everybody — partly because it was so nice, and partly because we th
ink we’d get a fearful scolding for one thing we did.
“We went up to the Disappointed House, and we found one of the boards on the windows loose. So we pried it off and crawled in and went all over the house. It is lathed but not plastered, and the shavings are lying all over the floors just as the carpenters left them years ago. It seemed more disappointed than ever. I just felt like crying. There was a dear little fireplace in one room so we went to work and kindled a fire in it with shavings and pieces of boards (this is the thing we would be scolded for, likely) and then sat before it on an old carpenter’s bench and talked. We decided that when we grew up we would buy the Disappointed House and live here together. Teddy said he supposed we’d have to get married, but I thought maybe we could find a way to manage without going to all that bother. Teddy will paint pictures and I will write poetry and we will have toast and bacon and marmalade every morning for breakfast — just like Wyther Grange — but never porridge. And we’ll always have lots of nice things to eat in the pantry and I’ll make lots of jam and Teddy is always going to help me wash the dishes and we’ll hang the gazing-ball from the middle of the ceiling in the fireplace room — because likely Aunt Nancy will be dead by then.
“When the fire burned out we jammed the board into place in the window and came away. Every now and then to-day Teddy would say to me “Toast and bacon and marmalade” in the most mysterious tones and Ilse and Perry are wild because they can’t find out what he means.
“Cousin Jimmy has got Jimmy Joe Belle to help with the harvest. Jimmy Joe Belle comes from over Derry Pond way. There are a great many French there and when a French girl marries they call her mostly by her husband’s first name instead of Mrs like the English do. If a girl named Mary marries a man named Leon she will always be called Mary Leon after that. But in Jimmy Joe Belle’s case, it is the other way and he is called by his wife’s names. I asked Cousin Jimmy why, and he said it was because Jimmy Joe was a poor stick of a creature and Belle wore the britches. But still I don’t understand. Jimmy Joe wears britches himself — that means trousers — and why should he be called Jimmy Joe Bell instead of her being called Belle Jimmy Joe just because she wears them too! I won’t rest till I find out.
“Cousin Jimmy’s garden is splendid now. The tiger lilies are out. I am trying to love them because nobody seems to like them at all but deep down in my heart I know I love the late roses best. You just can’t help loving the roses best.
“Ilse and I hunted all over the old orchard to-day for a four-leaved clover and couldn’t find one. Then I found one in a clump of clover by the dairy steps to-night when I was straining the milk and never thinking of clovers. Cousin Jimmy says that is the way luck always comes, and it is no use to look for it.
“It is lovely to be with Ilse again. We have only fought twice since I came home. I am going to try not to fight with Ilse any more because I don’t think it is dignified, although quite interesting. But it is hard not to because even when I keep quiet and don’t say a word Ilse thinks that’s a way of fighting and gets madder and says worse things than ever. Aunt Elizabeth says it always takes two to make a quarrel but she doesn’t know Ilse as I do. Ilse called me a sneaking albatross to-day. I wonder how many animals are left to call me. She never repeats the same one twice. I wish she wouldn’t clapper-claw Perry so much. (Clapper-claw is a word I learnt from Aunt Nancy. Very striking, I think.) It seems as if she couldn’t bear him. He dared Teddy to jump from the henhouse roof across to the pighouse roof. Teddy wouldn’t. He said he would try it if it had to be done or would do anybody any good but he wasn’t going to do it just to show off. Perry did it and landed safe. If he hadn’t he might have broken his neck. Then he bragged about it and said Teddy was afraid and Ilse turned red as a beet and told him to shut up or she would bite his snout off. She can’t bear to have anything said against Teddy, but I guess he can take care of himself.
“Ilse can’t study for the Entrance either. Her father won’t let her. But she says she doesn’t care. She says she’s going to run away when she gets a little older and study for the stage. That sounds wicked, but interesting.
“I felt very queer and guilty when I saw Ilse first, because I knew about her mother. I don’t know why I felt guilty because I had nothing to do with it. The feeling is wearing away a little now but I am so unhappy by spells over it. I wish I could either forget it altogether or find out the rights of it. Because I am sure nobody knows them.
“I had a letter from Dean to-day. He writes lovely letters — just as if I was grown up. He sent me a little poem he had cut out of a paper called The Fringed Gentian. He said it made him think of me. It is all lovely but I like the last verse best of all. This is it:
Then whisper, blossom, in thy sleep
How I may upward climb
The Alpine Path, so hard, so steep,
That leads to heights sublime.
How I may reach that far-off goal
Of true and honoured fame
And write upon its shining scroll
A woman’s humble name.
“When I read that the flash came, and I took a sheet of paper — I forgot to tell you Cousin Jimmy gave me a little box of paper and envelopes — on the sly — and I wrote on it:
I, Emily Byrd Starr, do solemnly vow this day that I will climb the Alpine Path and write my name on the scroll of fame.
“Then I put it in the envelope and sealed it up and wrote on it The Vow of Emily Byrd Starr, aged 12 years and 3 months, and put it away on the sofa shelf in the garret.
“I am writing a murder story now and I am trying to feel how a man would feel who was a murderer. It is creepy, but thrilling. I almost feel as if I had murdered somebody.
“Good night, dear Father and Mother.
“Your lovingest daughter, Emily,
“P.S. I have been wondering how I’ll sign my name when I grow up and print my pieces. I don’t know which would be best — Emily Byrd Starr in full or Emily B. Starr, or E. B. Starr, or E. Byrd Starr. Sometimes I think I’ll have a nom-de-plume — that is, another name you pick for yourself. It’s in my dictionary among the “French phrases” at the back. If I did that then I could hear people talking of my pieces right before me, never suspecting, and say just what they really thought of them. That would be interesting but perhaps not always comfortable. I think I’ll be,
“E. Byrd Starr.”
A Weaver of Dreams
It took Emily several weeks to make up her mind whether she liked Mr Carpenter or not. She knew she did not dislike him, not even though his first greeting, shot at her on the opening day of school in a gruff voice, accompanied by a startling lift of his spiky grey brows was, “So you’re the girl that writes poetry, eh? Better stick to your needle and duster. Too many fools in the world trying to write poetry and failing. I tried it myself once. Got better sense now.”
“You don’t keep your nails clean,” thought Emily.
But he upset every kind of school tradition so speedily and thoroughly that Ilse, who gloried in upsetting things and hated routine, was the only scholar that liked him from the start. Some never liked him — the Rhoda Stuart type for example — but most of them came to it after they got used to never being used to anything. And Emily finally decided that she liked him tremendously.
Mr Carpenter was somewhere between forty and fifty — a tall man, with an upstanding shock of bushy grey hair, bristling grey moustache and eyebrows, a truculent beard, bright blue eyes out of which all his wild life had not yet burned the fire, and a long, lean, greyish face, deeply lined. He lived in a little two-roomed house below the school with a shy mouse of a wife. He never talked of his past or offered any explanation of the fact that at his age he had no better profession than teaching a district school for a pittance of salary, but the truth leaked out after a while; for Prince Edward Island is a small province and everybody in it knows something about everybody else. So eventually Blair Water people, and even the school children, understood that Mr Carpenter had b
een a brilliant student in his youth and had had his eye on the ministry. But at college he had got in with a “fast set” — Blair Water people nodded heads slowly and whispered the dreadful phrase portentously — and the fast set had ruined him. He “took to drink” and went to the dogs generally. And the upshot of it all was that Francis Carpenter, who had led his class in his first and second years at McGill, and for whom his teachers had predicted a great career, was a country school-teacher at forty-five with no prospect of ever being anything else. Perhaps he was resigned to it — perhaps not. Nobody ever knew, not even the brown mouse of a wife. Nobody in Blair Water cared — he was a good teacher, and that was all that mattered. Even if he did go on occasional “sprees” he always took Saturday for them and was sober enough by Monday. Sober, and especially dignified, wearing a rusty black frock-coat which he never put on any other day of the week. He did not invite pity and he did not pose as a tragedy. But sometimes, when Emily looked at his face, bent over the arithmetic problems of Blair Water School, she felt horribly sorry for him without in the least understanding why.
He had an explosive temper which generally burst into flame at least once a day, and then he would storm about wildly for a few minutes, tugging at his beard, imploring heaven to grant him patience, abusing everybody in general and the luckless object of his wrath in particular. But these tempers never lasted long. In a few minutes Mr Carpenter would be smiling as graciously as a sun bursting through a storm-cloud on the very pupil he had been rating. Nobody seemed to cherish any grudge because of his scoldings. He never said any of the biting things Miss Brownell was wont to say, which rankled and festered for weeks; his hail of words fell alike on just and unjust and rolled off harmlessly.
The Complete Works of L M Montgomery Page 245
