“Ruth Murray,” he said, “do you remember the story that got around forty years ago about you and Fred Blair? Do you?”
Aunt Ruth pushed back her chair. Cousin Jimmy followed her.
“Do you remember that you were caught in a scrape that looked far worse than this? Didn’t it?”
Again poor Aunt Ruth pushed back her chair. Again Cousin Jimmy followed.
“Do you remember how mad you were because people wouldn’t believe you? But your father believed you — he had confidence in his own flesh and blood. Hadn’t he?”
Aunt Ruth had reached the wall by this time and had to surrender at discretion.
“I — I — remember well enough,” she said shortly.
Her cheeks were a curdled red. Emily looked at her interestedly. Was Aunt Ruth trying to blush? Ruth Dutton was, in fact, living over some very miserable months in her long past youth. When she was a girl of eighteen she had been trapped in a very ugly situation. And she had been innocent — absolutely innocent. She had been the helpless victim of a most impish combination of circumstances. Her father had believed her story and her own family had backed her up. But her contemporaries had believed the evidence of known facts for years — perhaps believed it yet, if they ever thought about the matter. Ruth Dutton shivered over the remembrance of her suffering under the lash of scandal. She no longer dared to refuse credence to Emily’s story but she could not yield gracefully.
“Jimmy,” she said sharply, “will you be good enough to go away and sit down? I suppose Emily is telling the truth — it’s a pity she took so long deciding to tell it. And I’m sure that creature was making love to her.”
“No, he was only asking me to marry him,” said Emily coolly.
You heard three gasps in the room. Aunt Ruth alone was able to speak.
“Do you intend to, may I ask?”
“No. I’ve told him so half a dozen times.”
“Well, I’m glad you had that much sense. Stovepipe Town, indeed!”
“Stovepipe Town had nothing to do with it. Ten years from now Perry Miller will be a man whom even a Murray would delight to honour. But he doesn’t happen to be the type I fancy, that’s all.”
Could this be Emily — this tall young woman coolly giving her reasons for refusing an offer of marriage — and talking about the “types” she fancied? Elizabeth — Laura — even Ruth looked at her as if they had never seen her before. And there was a new respect in their eyes. Of course they knew that Andrew was — was — well, in short, that Andrew was. But years must doubtless pass before Andrew would — would — well, would! And now the thing had happened already with another suitor — happened “half a dozen times” mark you! At that moment, although they were quite unconscious of it, they ceased to regard her as a child. At a bound she had entered their world and must henceforth be met on equal terms. There could be no more family courts. They felt this, though they did not perceive it. Aunt Ruth’s next remark showed it. She spoke almost as she might have spoken to Laura or Elizabeth, if she had deemed it her duty to admonish them.
“Just suppose, Emily, if anyone passing had seen Perry Miller sitting in that window at that hour of night?”
“Yes, of course. I see your angle of it perfectly, Aunt Ruth. All I want is to get you to see mine. I was foolish to open the window and talk to Perry — I see that now. I simply didn’t think — and then I got so interested in the story of his mishaps at Dr. Hardy’s dinner that I forgot how time was going.”
“Was Perry Miller to dinner at Dr. Hardy’s?” asked Aunt Elizabeth. This was another staggerer for her. The world — the Murray world — must be literally turned upside-down if Stovepipe Town was invited to dinner on Queen Street. At the same moment Aunt Ruth remembered with a pang of horror that Perry Miller had seen her in her pink flannel nightgown. It hadn’t mattered before — he had been only the help-boy at New Moon. Now he was Dr. Hardy’s guest.
“Yes. Dr. Hardy thinks he is a very brilliant debater and says he has a future,” said Emily.
“Well,” snapped Aunt Ruth, “I wish you would stop prowling about my house at all hours, writing novels. If you had been in your bed, as you should have been, this would never have happened.”
“I wasn’t writing novels,” cried Emily. “I’ve never written a word of fiction since I promised Aunt Elizabeth. I wasn’t writing anything. I told you I just went down to get my Jimmy-book.”
“Why couldn’t you have left that where it was till morning?” persisted Aunt Ruth.
“Come, come,” said Cousin Jimmy, “don’t start up another argument. I want my supper. You girls go and get it.”
Elizabeth and Laura left the room as meekly as if old Archibald Murray himself had commanded it. After a moment Ruth followed them. Things had not turned out just as she anticipated; but, after all, she was resigned. It would not have been a nice thing for a scandal like this concerning a Murray to be blown abroad, as must have happened if a verdict of guilty had been found against Emily.
“So that’s settled,” said Cousin Jimmy to Emily as the door closed.
Emily drew a long breath. The quiet, dignified old room suddenly seemed very beautiful and friendly to her.
“Yes, thanks to you,” she said, springing across it to give him an impetuous hug. “Now, scold me, Cousin Jimmy, scold me hard.”
“No, no. But it would have been more prudent not to have opened that window, wouldn’t it now, Pussy?”
“Of course it would. But prudence is such a shoddy virtue at times, Cousin Jimmy. One is ashamed of it — one likes to just go ahead and — and—”
“And hang consequences,” supplied Cousin Jimmy.
“Something like that,” Emily laughed. “I hate to go mincing through life, afraid to take a single long step for fear somebody is watching. I want to ‘wave my wild tail and walk by my wild lone.’ There wasn’t a bit of real harm in my opening that window and talking to Perry. There wasn’t even any harm in his trying to kiss me. He just did it to tease me. Oh, I hate conventions. As you say — hang consequences.”
“But we can’t hang ‘em, Pussy — that’s just the trouble. They’re more likely to hang us. I put it to you, Pussy — suppose — there’s no harm in supposing it — that you were grown up and married and had a daughter of your age, and you went downstairs one night and found her as Aunt Ruth found you and Perry. Would you like it? Would you be well pleased? Honest, now?”
Emily stared hard at the fire for a moment.
“No, I wouldn’t,” she said at last. “But then — that’s different. I wouldn’t know.”
Cousin Jimmy chuckled.
“That’s the point, Pussy. Other people can’t know. So we’ve got to watch our step. Oh, I’m only simple Jimmy Murray, but I can see we have to watch our step. Pussy, we’re going to have roast spare-ribs for supper.”
A savoury whiff crept in from the kitchen at that very moment — a homely, comfortable odour that had nothing in common with compromising situations and family skeletons. Emily gave Cousin Jimmy another hug.
“Better a dinner of herbs where Cousin Jimmy is than roast spare-ribs and Aunt Ruth therewith,” she said.
“Airy Voices”
“April 3, 19 —
“There are times when I am tempted to believe in the influence of evil stars or the reality of unlucky days. Otherwise how can such diabolical things happen as do happen to well-meaning people? Aunt Ruth has only just begun to grow weary of recalling the night she found Perry kissing me in the dining-room, and now I’m in another ridiculous scrape.
“I will be honest. It was not dropping my umbrella which was responsible for it, neither was it the fact that I let the kitchen mirror at New Moon fall last Saturday and crack. It was just my own carelessness.
“St. John’s Presbyterian church here in Shrewsbury became vacant at New Year’s and has been hearing candidates. Mr. Towers of the Times asked me to report the sermons for his paper on such Sundays as I was not in Blair Water. The first se
rmon was good and I reported it with pleasure. The second one was harmless, very harmless, and I reported it without pain. But the third, which I heard last Sunday, was ridiculous. I said so to Aunt Ruth on the way home from church and Aunt Ruth said, ‘Do you think you are competent to criticize a sermon?’
“Well, yes, I do!
“That sermon was a most inconsistent thing. Mr. Wickham contradicted himself half a dozen times. He mixed his metaphors — he attributed something to St. Paul that belonged to Shakespeare — he committed almost every conceivable literary sin, including the unpardonable one of being deadly dull. However, it was my business to report the sermon, so report it I did. Then I had to do something to get it out of my system, so I wrote, for my own satisfaction, an analysis of it. It was a crazy but delightful deed. I showed up all the inconsistencies, the misquotations, the weaknesses and the wobblings. I enjoyed writing it — I made it as pointed and satirical and satanical as I could — oh, I admit it was a very vitriolic document.
“Then I handed it into the Times by mistake!
“Mr. Towers passed it over to the typesetter without reading it. He had a touching confidence in my work, which he will never have again. It came out the next day.
“I woke to find myself infamous.
“I expected Mr. Towers would be furious; but he is only mildly annoyed — and a little amused at the back of it. It isn’t as if Mr. Wickham had been a settled minister here, of course. Nobody cared for him or his sermon and Mr. Towers is a Presbyterian, so the St. John’s people can’t accuse him of wanting to insult them. It is poor Emily B. on whom is laid the whole burden of condemnation. It appears most of them think I did it ‘to show off.’ Aunt Ruth is furious, Aunt Elizabeth outraged; Aunt Laura grieved, Cousin Jimmy alarmed. It is such a shocking thing to criticize a minister’s sermon. It is a Murray tradition that ministers’ sermons — Presbyterian Ministers’ especially — are sacrosanct. My presumption and vanity will yet be the ruin of me, so Aunt Elizabeth coldly informs me. The only person who seems pleased is Mr. Carpenter. (Dean is away in New York. I know he would like it, too.) Mr. Carpenter is telling every one that my ‘report’ is the best thing of its kind he ever read. But Mr. Carpenter is suspected of heresy, so his commendation will not go far to rehabilitate me.
“I feel wretched over the affair. My mistakes worry me more than my sins sometimes. And yet, an unholy something, ‘way back in me, is grinning over it all. Every word in that ‘report’ was true. And more than true — appropriate. I didn’t mix my metaphors.
“Now, to live this down!
********
“April 20, 19 —
“‘Awake thou north wind and come thou south. Blow upon my garden that the spices thereof may flow out.’
“So chanted I as I went through the Land of Uprightness this evening — only I put ‘woods’ in place of garden. For spring is just around the corner and I have forgotten everything but gladness.
“We had a grey, rainy dawn but sunshine came in the afternoon and a bit of April frost to-night — just enough to make the earth firm. It seemed to me a night when the ancient gods might be met with in the lonely places. But I saw nothing except some sly things back among the fir copses that may have been companies of goblins, if they weren’t merely shadows.
“(I wonder why goblin is such an enchanting word and gobbling such an ugly one. And why is shadowy suggestive of all beauty while umbrageous is so ugly?)
“But I heard all kinds of fairy sounds and each gave me an exquisite vanishing joy as I went up the hill. There is always something satisfying in climbing to the top of a hill. And that is a hill-top I love. When I reached it I stood still and let the loveliness of the evening flow through me like music. How the Wind Woman was singing in the bits of birchland around me — how she whistled in the serrated tops of the trees against the sky! One of the thirteen new silver moons of the year was hanging over the harbour. I stood there and thought of many, many beautiful things — of wild, free brooks running through starlit April fields — of rippled grey-satin seas — of the grace of an elm against the moonlight — of roots stirring and thrilling in the earth — owls laughing in darkness — a curl of foam on a long sandy shore — a young moon setting over a dark hill — the grey of gulf storms.
“I had only seventy-five cents in the world but Paradise isn’t bought with money.
“Then I sat down on an old boulder and tried to put those moments of delicate happiness into a poem. I caught the shape of them fairly well, I think — but not their soul. It escaped me.
“It was quite dark when I came back and the whole character of my Land of Uprightness seemed changed. It was eerie — almost sinister. I would have run if I could have dared. The trees, my old well-known friends, were strange and aloof. The sounds I heard were not the cheery, companionable sounds of daytime — nor the friendly, fairy sounds of the sunset — they were creeping and weird, as if the life of the woods had suddenly developed something almost hostile to me — something at least that was furtive and alien and unacquainted. I could fancy that I heard stealthy footsteps all around me — that strange eyes were watching me through the boughs. When I reached the open space and hopped over the fence into Aunt Ruth’s back yard I felt as if I were escaping from some fascinating but not altogether hallowed locality — a place given over to Paganism and the revels of satyrs. I don’t believe the woods are ever wholly Christian in the darkness. There is always a lurking life in them that dares not show itself to the sun but regains its own with the night.
“‘You should not be out in the damp with that cough of yours,’ said Aunt Ruth.
“But it wasn’t the damp that hurt me — for I was hurt. It was that little fascinating whisper of something unholy. I was afraid of it — and yet I loved it. The beauty I had loved on the hill-top seemed suddenly quite tasteless beside it. I sat down in my room and wrote another poem. When I had written it I felt that I had exorcised something out of my soul and Emily-in-the-Glass seemed no longer a stranger to me.
********
“Aunt Ruth has just brought in a dose of hot milk and cayenne pepper for my cough. It is on the table before me — I have to drink it — and it has made both Paradise and Pagan-land seem very foolish and unreal!
********
“May 25, 19 —
“Dean came home from New York last Friday and that evening we walked and talked in New Moon garden in a weird, uncanny twilight following a rainy day. I had a light dress on and as Dean came down the path he said,
“‘When I saw you first I thought you were a wild, white cherry-tree — like that’ — and he pointed to one that was leaning and beckoning, ghost-fair in the dusk, from Lofty John’s bush.
“It was such a beautiful thing that just to be distantly compared to it made me feel very well pleased with myself, and it was lovely to have dear old Dean back again. So we had a delightful evening, and picked a big bunch of Cousin Jimmy’s pansies and watched the grey rain-clouds draw together in great purple masses in the east, leaving the western sky all clear and star-powdered.
“‘There is something in your company,’ said Dean, ‘that makes stars seem starrier and pansies purpler.’
“Wasn’t that nice of him! How is it that his opinion of me and Aunt Ruth’s opinion of me are so very different?
“He had a little flat parcel under his arm and when he went away he handed it to me.
“‘I brought you that to counteract Lord Byron,’ he said.
“It was a framed copy of the ‘Portrait of Giovanna Degli Albizzi, wife of Lorenzo Tornabuoni Ghirlanjo’ — a Lady of the Quatro Cento. I brought it to Shrewsbury and have it hanging in my room. I love to look at the Lady Giovanna — that slim, beautiful young thing with her sleek coils of pale gold and her prim little curls and her fine, high-bred profile (did the painter flatter her?) and her white neck and open, unshadowed brow, with the indefinable air over it all of saintliness and remoteness and fate — for the Lady Giovanna died young.
&n
bsp; “And her embroidered velvet sleeves, slashed and puffed, very beautifully made and fitting the arm perfectly. The Lady Giovanna must have had a good dressmaker and, in spite of her saintliness, one thinks she was quite aware of the fact. I am always wishing that she would turn her head and let me see her full face.
“Aunt Ruth thinks she is queer-looking and evidently doubts the propriety of having her in the same room with the jewelled chromo of Queen Alexandra.
“I doubt it myself.
********
“June 10, 19 —
“I do all my studying now by the pool in the Land of Uprightness, among those wonderful, tall, slender trees. I’m a Druidess in the woods — I regard trees with something more than love — worship.
“And then, too, trees, unlike so many humans, always improve on acquaintance. No matter how much you like them at the start you are sure to like them much better further on, and best of all when you have known them for years and enjoyed intercourse with them in all seasons. I know a hundred dear things about these trees in the Land of Uprightness that I didn’t know when I came here two years ago.
“Trees have as much individuality as human beings. Not even two spruces are alike. There is always some kink or curve or bend of bough to single each one out from its fellows. Some trees love to grow sociably together, their branches twining, like Ilse and me with our arms about each other, whispering interminably of their secrets. Then there are more exclusive groups of four or five — clan-Murray trees; and there are hermits of trees who choose to stand apart in solitary state and who hold commune only with the winds of heaven. Yet these trees are often the best worth knowing. One feels it is more of a triumph to win their confidence than that of easier trees. To-night I suddenly saw a great, pulsating star resting on the very crest of the big fir that stands alone in the eastern corner and I had a sense of two majesties meeting that will abide with me for days and enchant everything — even classroom routine and dish-washing and Aunt Ruth’s Saturday cleaning.
The Complete Works of L M Montgomery Page 274
