Roger Temple winced. His aunt’s harsh, disagreeable voice always jarred horribly on his sensitive nerves. He was fond of her after a fashion, but always that voice made him wonder if there could be anything harder to endure.
Then he gave a bitter little laugh.
“Who’d have me, Aunt Catherine?” he asked.
Catherine Ames looked at him critically across the supper table. She loved him in her way, with all her heart, but she was not in the least blind to his defects. She did not mince matters with herself or with other people. Roger was a sallow, plain-featured fellow, small and insignificant looking. And, as if this were not bad enough, he walked with a slight limp and had one thin shoulder a little higher than the other—”Jarback” Temple he had been called in school, and the name still clung to him. To be sure, he had very fine grey eyes, but their dreamy brilliance gave his dull face an uncanny look which girls did not like, and so made matters rather worse than better. Of course looks didn’t matter so much in the case of a man; Steve Millar was homely enough, and all marked up with smallpox to boot, yet he had got for wife the prettiest and smartest girl in South Bay. But Steve was rich. Roger was poor and always would be. He worked his stony little farm, from which his father and grandfather had wrested a fair living, after a fashion, but Nature had not cut him out for a successful farmer. He hadn’t the strength for it and his heart wasn’t in it. He’d rather be hanging over a book. Catherine secretly thought Roger’s matrimonial chances very poor, but it would not do to discourage the b’y. What he needed was spurring on.
“Ye’ll git someone if ye don’t fly too high,” she announced loudly and cheerfully. “Thar’s always a gal or two here and thar that’s glad to marry for a home. ‘Tain’t no use for you to be settin’ your thoughts on anyone young and pretty. Ye wouldn’t git her and ye’d be worse off if ye did. Your grandfather married for looks, and a nice useless wife he got — sick half her time. Git a good strong girl that ain’t afraid of work, that’ll hold things together when ye’re reading po’try — that’s as much as you kin expect. And the sooner the better. I’m done — last winter’s rheumatiz has about finished me. An’ we can’t afford hired help.”
Roger felt as if his raw, quivering soul were being seared. He looked at his aunt curiously — at her broad, flat face with the mole on the end of her dumpy nose, the bristling hairs on her chin, the wrinkled yellow neck, the pale, protruding eyes, the coarse, good-humoured mouth. She was so extremely ugly — and he had seen her across the table all his life. For twenty-five years he had looked at her so. Must he continue to go on looking at ugliness in the shape of a wife all the rest of his life — he, who worshipped beauty in everything?
“Did my mother look like you, Aunt Catherine?” he asked abruptly.
His aunt stared — and snorted. Her snort was meant to express kindly amusement, but it sounded like derision and contempt.
“Yer ma wasn’t so humly as me,” she said cheerfully, “but she wan’t no beauty either. None of the Temples was ever better lookin’ than was necessary. We was workers. Yer pa wa’n’t bad looking. You’re humlier than either of ‘em. Some ways ye take after yer grandma — though she was counted pretty at one time. She was yaller and spindlin’ like you, and you’ve got her eyes. What yer so int’rested in yer ma’s looks all at once fer?”
“I was wondering,” said Roger coolly, “if Father ever looked at her across the table and wished she were prettier.”
Catherine giggled. Her giggle was ugly and disagreeable like everything else about her — everything except a certain odd, loving, loyal old heart buried deep in her bosom, for the sake of which Roger endured the giggle and all the rest.
“Dessay he did — dessay he did. Men al’ays has a hankerin’ for good looks. But ye’ve got to cut yer coat ‘cording to yer cloth. As for yer poor ma, she didn’t live long enough to git as ugly as me. When I come here to keep house for yer pa, folks said as it wouldn’t be long ‘fore he married me. I wouldn’t a-minded. But yer pa never hinted it. S’pose he’d had enough of ugly women likely.”
Catherine snorted amiably again. Roger got up — he couldn’t endure any more just then. He must escape.
“Now you think over what I’ve said,” his aunt called after him. “Ye’ve gotter git a wife soon, however ye manage it. ‘Twon’t be so hard if ye’re reasonable. Don’t stay out as late as ye did last night. Ye coughed all night. Where was ye — down at the shore?”
“No,” said Roger, who always answered her questions even when he hated to. “I was down at Aunt Isabel’s grave.”
“Till eleven o’clock! Ye ain’t wise! I dunno what hankering ye have after that unchancy place. I ain’t been near it for twenty year. I wonder ye ain’t scairt. What’d ye think ye’d do if ye saw her ghost?”
Catherine looked curiously at Roger. She was very superstitious and she believed firmly in ghosts, and saw no absurdity in her question.
“I wish I could see it,” said Roger, his great eyes flashing. He believed in ghosts too, at least in Isabel Temple’s ghost. His uncle had seen it; his grandfather had seen it; he believed he would see it — the beautiful, bewitching, mocking, luring ghost of lovely Isabel Temple.
“Don’t wish such stuff,” said Catherine. “Nobody ain’t never the same after they’ve seen her.”
“Was Uncle different?” Roger had come back into the kitchen and was looking curiously at his aunt.
“Diff’rent? He was another man. He didn’t even look the same. Sich eyes! Al’ays looking past ye at something behind ye. They’d give anyone creeps. He never had any notion of flesh-and-blood women after that — said a man wouldn’t, after seeing Isabel. His life was plumb ruined. Lucky he died young. I hated to be in the same room with him — he wa’n’t canny, that was all there was to it. You keep away from that grave — you don’t want to look odder than ye are by nature. And when ye git married, ye’ll have to give up roamin’ about half the night in graveyards. A wife wouldn’t put up with it, as I’ve done.”
“I’ll never get as good a wife as you, Aunt Catherine,” said Roger with a little whimsical smile that gave him the look of an amused gnome.
“Dessay you won’t. But someone ye have to have. Why’n’t ye try ‘Liza Adams. She might have ye — she’s gittin’ on.”
“‘Liza ... Adams!”
“That’s what I said. Ye needn’t repeat it—’Liza ... Adams—’s if I’d mentioned a hippopotamus. I git out of patience with ye. I b’lieve in my heart ye think ye ought to git a wife that’d look like a picter.”
“I do, Aunt Catherine. That’s just the kind of wife I want — grace and beauty and charm. Nothing less than that will ever content me.”
Roger laughed bitterly again and went out. It was sunset. There was no work to do that night except to milk the cows, and his little home boy could do that. He felt a glad freedom. He put his hand in his pocket to see if his beloved Wordsworth was there and then he took his way across the fields, under a sky of purple and amber, walking quickly despite his limp. He wanted to get to some solitary place where he could forget Aunt Catherine and her abominable suggestions and escape into the world of dreams where he habitually lived and where he found the loveliness he had not found nor could hope to find in his real world.
Roger’s mother had died when he was three and his father when he was eight. His little, old, bedridden grandmother had lived until he was twelve. He had loved her passionately. She had not been pretty in his remembrance — a tiny, shrunken, wrinkled thing — but she had beautiful grey eyes that never grew old and a soft, gentle voice — the only woman’s voice he had ever heard with pleasure. He was very critical as regards women’s voices and very sensitive to them. Nothing hurt him quite so much as an unlovely voice — not even unloveliness of face. Her death had left him desolate. She was the only human being who had ever understood him. He could never, he thought, have got through his tortured school days without her. After she died he would not go to school. He was not in any se
nse educated. His father and grandfather had been illiterate men and he had inherited their underdeveloped brain cells. But he loved poetry and read all he could get of it. It overlaid his primitive nature with a curious iridescence of fancy and furnished him with ideals and hungers his environment could never satisfy. He loved beauty in everything. Moonrises hurt him with their loveliness and he could sit for hours gazing at a white narcissus — much to his aunt’s exasperation. He was solitary by nature. He felt horribly alone in a crowded building but never in the woods or in the wild places along the shore. It was because of this that his aunt could not get him to go to church — which was a horror to her orthodox soul. He told her he would like to go to church if it were empty but he could not bear it when it was full — full of smug, ugly people. Most people, he thought, were ugly — though not so ugly as he was — and ugliness made him sick with repulsion. Now and then he saw a pretty girl at whom he liked to look but he never saw one that wholly pleased him. To him, the homely, crippled, poverty-stricken Roger Temple whom they all would have scorned, there was always a certain subtle something wanting, and the lack of it kept him heartwhole. He knew that this probably saved him from much suffering, but for all that he regretted it. He wanted to love, even vainly; he wanted to experience this passion of which the poets sang so much. Without it he felt he lacked the key to a world of wonder. He even tried to fall in love; he went to church for several Sundays and sat where he could see beautiful Elsa Carey. She was lovely — it gave him pleasure to look at her; the gold of her hair was so bright and living; the pink of her cheek so pure, the curve of her neck so flawless, the lashes of her eyes so dark and silken. But he looked at her as at a picture. When he tried to think and dream of her, it bored him. Besides, he knew she had a rather nasal voice. He used to laugh sarcastically to himself over Elsa’s feelings if she had known how desperately he was trying to fall in love with her and failing — Elsa the queen of hearts, who believed she had only to look to reign. He gave up trying at last, but he still longed to love. He knew he would never marry; he could not marry plainness, and beauty would have longed to love. He knew he would never marry; he could not marry plainness, and beauty would have none of him; but he did not want to miss everything and he had moments when he was very bitter and rebellious because he felt he must miss it forever.
He went straight to Isabel Temple’s grave in the remote shore field of his farm. Isabel Temple had lived and died eighty years ago. She had been very lovely, very wilful, very fond of playing with the hearts of men. She had married William Temple, the brother of his great-grandfather, and as she stood in her white dress beside her bridegroom, at the conclusion of the wedding ceremony, a jilted lover, crazed by despair, had entered the house and shot her dead. She had been buried in the shore field, where a square space had been dyked off in the centre for a burial lot because the church was then so far away. With the passage of years the lot had grown up so thickly with fir and birch and wild cherry that it looked like a compact grove. A winding path led through it to its heart where Isabel Temple’s grave was, thickly overgrown with long, silken, pale green grass. Roger hurried along the path and sat down on the big grey boulder by the grave, looking about him with a long breath of delight. How lovely — and witching — and unearthly it was here. Little ferns were growing in the hollows and cracks of the big boulder where clay had lodged. Over Isabel Temple’s crooked, lichened gravestone hung a young wild cherry in its delicate bloom. Above it, in a little space of sky left by the slender tree tops, was a young moon. It was too dark here after all to read Wordsworth, but that did not matter. The place, with its moist air, its tang of fir balsam, was like a perfumed room where a man might dream dreams and see visions. There was a soft murmur of wind in the boughs over him, and the faraway moan of the sea on the bar crept in. Roger surrendered himself utterly to the charm of the place. When he entered that grove, he had left behind the realm of daylight and things known and come into the realm of shadow and mystery and enchantment. Anything might happen — anything might be true.
Eighty long years had come and gone, but Isabel Temple, thus cruelly torn from life at the moment when it had promised her most, did not even yet rest calmly in her grave; such at least was the story, and Roger believed it. It was in his blood to believe it. The Temples were a superstitious family, and there was nothing in Roger’s upbringing to correct the tendency. His was not a sceptical or scientific mind. He was ignorant and poetical and credulous. He had always accepted unquestioningly the tale that Isabel Temple had been seen on earth long after the red clay was heaped over her murdered body. Her bridegroom had seen her, when he went to visit her on the eve of his second and unhappy marriage; his grandfather had seen her. His grandmother, who had told him Isabel’s story, had told him this too, and believed it. She had added, with a bitterness foreign to his idea of her, that her husband had never been the same to her afterwards; his uncle had seen her — and had lived and died a haunted man. It was only to men the lovely, restless ghost appeared, and her appearance boded no good to him who saw. Roger knew this, but he had a curious longing to see her. He had never avoided her grave as others of his tribe did. He loved the spot, and he believed that some time he would see Isabel Temple there. She came, so the story went, to one in each generation of the family.
He gazed down at her sunken grave; a little wind, that came stealing along the floor of the grove, raised and swayed the long, hair-like grass on it, giving the curious suggestion of something prisoned under it trying to draw a long breath and float upward.
Then, when he lifted his eyes again, he saw her!
She was standing behind the gravestone, under the cherry tree, whose long white branches touched her head; standing there, with her head drooping a little, but looking steadily at him. It was just between dusk and dark now, but he saw her very plainly. She was dressed in white, with some filmy scarf over her head, and her hair hung in a dark heavy braid over her shoulder. Her face was small and ivory-white, and her eyes were very large and dark. Roger looked straight into them and they did something to him — drew something out of him that was never to be his again — his heart? his soul? He did not know. He only knew that lovely Isabel Temple had now come to him and that he was hers forever.
For a few moments that seemed years he looked at her — looked till the lure of her eyes drew him to his feet as a man rises in sleep-walking. As he slowly stood up, the low-hanging bough of a fir tree pushed his cap down over his face and blinded him. When he snatched it off, she was gone.
Roger Temple did not go home that night till the spring dawn was in the sky. Catherine was sleepless with anxiety about him. When she heard him come up the stairs, she opened her door and peeped out. Roger went along the hall without seeing her. His brilliant eyes stared straight before him, and there was something in his face that made Catherine steal back to her bed with a little shiver of fear. He looked like his uncle. She did not ask him, when they met at breakfast, where or how he had spent the night. He had been dreading the question and was relieved beyond measure when it was not asked. But, apart from that, he was hardly conscious of her presence. He ate and drank mechanically and voicelessly. When he had gone out, Catherine wagged her uncomely grey head ominously.
“He’s bewitched,” she muttered. “I know the signs. He’s seen her — drat her! It’s time she gave up that kind of work. Well, I dunno what to do — thar ain’t anything I can do, I reckon. He’ll never marry now — I’m as sure of that as of any mortal thing. He’s in love with a ghost.”
It had not yet occurred to Roger that he was in love. He thought of nothing but Isabel Temple — her lovely, lovely face, sweeter than any picture he had ever seen or any ideal he had dreamed, her long dark hair, her slim form and, more than all, her compelling eyes. He saw them wherever he looked — they drew him — he would have followed them to the end of the world, heedless of all else.
He longed for night, that he might again steal to the grave in the haunted grove. She might
come again — who knew? He felt no fear, nothing but a terrible hunger to see her again. But she did not come that night — nor the next — nor the next. Two weeks went by and he had not seen her. Perhaps he would never see her again — the thought filled him with anguish not to be borne. He knew now that he loved her — Isabel Temple, dead for eighty years. This was love — this searing, torturing, intolerably sweet thing — this possession of body and soul and spirit. The poets had sung but weakly of it. He could tell them better if he could find words. Could other men have loved at all — could any man love those blowzy, common girls of earth? It seemed impossible — absurd. There was only one thing that could be loved — that white spirit. No wonder his uncle had died. He, Roger Temple, would soon die too. That would be well. Only the dead could woo Isabel. Meanwhile he revelled in his torment and his happiness — so madly commingled that he never knew whether he was in heaven or hell. It was beautiful — and dreadful — and wonderful — and exquisite — oh, so exquisite. Mortal love could never be so exquisite. He had never lived before — now he lived in every fibre of his being.
He was glad Aunt Catherine did not worry him with questions. He had feared she would. But she never asked any questions now and she was afraid of Roger, as she had been afraid of his uncle. She dared not ask questions. It was a thing that must not be tampered with. Who knew what she might hear if she asked him questions? She was very unhappy. Something dreadful had happened to her poor boy — he had been bewitched by that hussy — he would die as his uncle had died.
“Mebbe it’s best,” she muttered. “He’s the last of the Temples, so mebbe she’ll rest in her grave when she’s killed ’em all. I dunno what she’s sich a spite at them for — there’d be more sense if she’d haunt the Mortons, seein’ as a Morton killed her. Well, I’m mighty old and tired and worn out. It don’t seem that it’s been much use, the way I’ve slaved and fussed to bring that b’y up and keep things together for him — and now the ghost’s got him. I might as well have let him die when he was a sickly baby.”
The Complete Works of L M Montgomery Page 738
