“Your old Great-aunt Nancy over there at Priest Pond detests me,” he said, with the little whimsical smile that sometimes gave him the look of an amused gnome, “And the Ladies Laura and Elizabeth treat me with the frosty politeness reserved by the Murrays for their dearest foes. Oh, I think I know why.”
Emily flushed. She, too, was beginning to have an unwelcome suspicion why Aunts Elizabeth and Laura were even more frostily polite to Dean than of yore. She did not want to have it; she thrust it fiercely out and locked the door of thought upon it whenever it intruded there. But the thing whined on her doorstep and would not be banished. Dean, like everything and everybody else, seemed to have changed overnight. And what did the change imply — hint? Emily refused to answer this question. The only answer that suggested itself was too absurd. And too unwelcome.
Was Dean Priest changing from friend to lover? Nonsense. Arrant nonsense. Disagreeable nonsense. For she did not want him as a lover and she did want him madly as a friend. She couldn’t lose his friendship. It was too dear, delightful, stimulating, wonderful. Why did such devilish things ever happen? When Emily reached this point in her disconnected musings she always stopped and retraced her mental steps fiercely, terrified to realize that she was almost on the point of admitting that “the something devilish” had already happened or was in process of happening.
In one way it was almost a relief to her when Dean said casually one November evening:
“I suppose I must soon be thinking of my annual migration.”
“Where are you going this year?” asked Emily.
“Japan. I’ve never been there. Don’t want to go now particularly. But what’s the use of staying? Would you want to talk to me in the sitting-room all winter with the aunts in hearing?”
“No,” said Emily between a laugh and a shiver. She recalled one fiendish autumn evening of streaming rain and howling wind when they couldn’t walk in the garden but had to sit in the room where Aunt Elizabeth was knitting and Aunt Laura crocheting by the table. It had been awful. And again why? Why couldn’t they talk as freely and whimsically and intimately then as they did in the garden? The answer to this at least was not to be expressed in any terms of sex. Was it because they talked of so many things Aunt Elizabeth could not understand and so disapproved of? Perhaps. But whatever the cause Dean might as well have been at the other side of the world for all the real conversation that was possible.
“So I might as well go,” said Dean, waiting for this exquisite, tall, white girl in an old garden to say she would miss him horribly. She had said it every one of his flitting autumns for many years. But she did not say it this time. She found she dared not.
Again, why?
Dean was looking at her with eyes that could be tender or sorrowful or passionate, as he willed, and which now seemed to be a mixture of all three expressions. He must hear her say she would miss him. His true reason for going away again this winter was to make her realize how much she missed him — make her feel that she could not live without him.
“Will you miss me, Emily?”
“That goes without saying,” answered Emily lightly — too lightly. Other years she had been very frank and serious about it. Dean was not altogether regretful for the change. But he could guess nothing of the attitude of mind behind it. She must have changed because she felt something — suspected something, of what he had striven for years to hide and suppress as rank madness. What then? Did this new lightness indicate that she didn’t want to make a too important thing of admitting she would miss him? Or was it only the instinctive defence of a woman against something that implied or evoked too much?
“It will be so dreadful here this winter without you and Teddy and Ilse that I will not let myself think of it at all,” went on Emily. “Last winter was bad. And this — I know somehow — will be worse. But I’ll have my work.”
“Oh, yes, your work,” agreed Dean with the little, tolerant, half-amused inflection in his voice that always came now when he spoke of her “work,” as if it tickled him hugely that she should call her pretty scribblings “work.” Well, one must humour the charming child. He could not have said so more plainly in words. His implications cut across Emily’s sensitive soul like a whip-lash. And all at once her work and her ambitions became — momentarily at least — as childish and unimportant as he considered them. She could not hold her own conviction against him. He must know. He was so clever — so well-educated. He must know. That was the agony of it. She could not ignore his opinion. Emily knew deep down in her heart that she would never be able wholly to believe in herself until Dean Priest admitted that she could do something honestly worth while in its way. And if he never admitted it —
“I shall carry pictures of you wherever I go, Star,” Dean was saying. Star was his old nickname for her — not as a pun on her name but because he said she reminded him of a star. “I shall see you sitting in your room by that old lookout window, spinning your pretty cobwebs — pacing up and down in this old garden — wandering in the Yesterday Road — looking out to sea. Whenever I shall recall a bit of Blair Water loveliness I shall see you in it. After all, all other beauty is only a background for a beautiful woman.”
“Her pretty cobwebs—” ah, there it was. That was all Emily heard. She did not even realize that he was telling her he thought her a beautiful woman.
“Do you think what I write is nothing but cobwebs, Dean?” she asked chokingly.
Dean looked surprised, doing it very well.
“Star, what else is it? What do you think it is yourself? I’m glad you can amuse yourself by writing. It’s a splendid thing to have a little hobby of the kind. And if you can pick up a few shekels by it — well, that’s all very well too in this kind of a world. But I’d hate to have you dream of being a Brontë or an Austen — and wake to find you’d wasted your youth on a dream.”
“I don’t fancy myself a Brontë or an Austen,” said Emily. “But you didn’t talk like that long ago, Dean. You used to think then I could do something some day.”
“We don’t bruise the pretty visions of a child,” said Dean. “But it’s foolish to carry childish dreams over into maturity. Better face facts. You write charming things of their kind, Emily. Be content with that and don’t waste your best years yearning for the unattainable or striving to reach some height far beyond your grasp.”
II
Dean was not looking at Emily. He was leaning on the old sundial and scowling down at it with the air of a man who was forcing himself to say a disagreeable thing because he felt it was his duty.
“I won’t be just a mere scribbler of pretty stories,” cried Emily rebelliously. He looked into her face. She was as tall as he was — a trifle taller, though he would not admit it.
“You do not need to be anything but what you are,” he said in a low vibrant tone. “A woman such as this old New Moon has never seen before. You can do more with those eyes — that smile — than you can ever do with your pen.”
“You sound like Great-aunt Nancy Priest,” said Emily cruelly and contemptuously.
But had he not been cruel and contemptuous to her? Three o’clock that night found her wide-eyed and anguished. She had lain through sleepless hours face to face with two hateful convictions. One was that she could never do anything worth doing with her pen. The other was that she was going to lose Dean’s friendship. For friendship was all she could give him and it would not satisfy him. She must hurt him. And oh, how could she hurt Dean whom life had used so cruelly? She had said “no” to Andrew Murray and laughed a refusal to Perry Miller without a qualm. But this was an utterly different thing.
Emily sat up in bed in the darkness and moaned in a despair that was none the less real and painful because of the indisputable fact that thirty years later she might be wondering what on earth she had been moaning about.
“I wish there were no such things as lovers and love-making in the world,” she said with savage intensity, honestly believing she meant it.
III
Like everybody, in daylight Emily found things much less tragic and more endurable than in the darkness. A nice fat cheque and a kind letter of appreciation with it restored a good deal of her self-respect and ambition. Very likely, too, she had imagined implications into Dean’s words and looks that he never meant. She was not going to be a silly goose, fancying that every man, young or old, who liked to talk to her, or even to pay her compliments in shadowy, moonlit gardens, was in love with her. Dean was old enough to be her father.
Dean’s unsentimental parting when he went away confirmed her in this comforting assurance and left her free to miss him without any reservations. Miss him she did abominably. The rain in autumn fields that year was a very sorrowful thing and so were the grey ghost-fogs coming slowly in from the gulf. Emily was glad when snow and sparkle came. She was very busy, writing such long hours, often far into the night, that Aunt Laura began to worry over her health and Aunt Elizabeth once or twice remarked protestingly that the price of coal-oil had gone up. As Emily paid for her own coal-oil this hint had no effect on her. She was very keen about making enough money to repay Uncle Wallace and Aunt Ruth what they had spent on her high school years. Aunt Elizabeth thought this was a praiseworthy ambition. The Murrays were an independent folk. It was a clan by-word that the Murrays had a boat of their own at the Flood. No promiscuous Ark for them.
Of course there were still many rejections — which Cousin Jimmy carried home from the post-office speechless with indignation. But the percentage of acceptances rose steadily. Every new magazine conquered meant a step upward on her Alpine path. She knew she was steadily gaining the mastery over her art. Even the “love talk” that had bothered her so much in the old days came easily now. Had Teddy Kent’s eyes taught her so much? If she had taken time to think she might have been very lonely. There were some bad hours. Especially after a letter had come from Ilse full of all her gay doings in Montreal, her triumphs in the School of Oratory and her pretty new gowns. In the long twilights when she looked shiveringly from the windows of the old farmhouse and thought how very white and cold and solitary were the snow fields on the hill, how darkly remote and tragic the Three Princesses, she lost confidence in her star. She wanted summer; fields of daisies; seas misty with moonrise or purple with sunset; companionship; Teddy. In such moments she always knew she wanted Teddy.
Teddy seemed far away. They still corresponded faithfully, but the correspondence was not what it was. Suddenly in the autumn Teddy’s letters had grown slightly colder and more formal. At this first hint of frost the temperature of Emily’s dropped noticeably.
IV
But she had hours of rapture and insight that shed a glory backward and forward. Hours when she felt the creative faculty within her, burning like a never-dying flame. Rare, sublime moments when she felt as a god, perfectly happy and undesirous. And there was always her dream-world into which she could escape from monotony and loneliness, and taste strange, sweet happiness unmarred by any cloud or shadow. Sometimes she slipped mentally back into childhood and had delightful adventures she would have been ashamed to tell her adult world.
She liked to prowl about a good deal by herself, especially in twilight or moonlight alone with the stars and the trees, rarest of companions.
“I can’t be contented indoors on a moonlight night. I have to be up and away,” she told Aunt Elizabeth, who did not approve of prowling. Aunt Elizabeth never lost her uneasy consciousness that Emily’s mother had eloped. And anyhow, prowling was odd. None of the other Blair Water girls prowled.
There were walks over the hills in the owl’s light when the stars rose — one after another, the great constellations of myth and legend. There were frosty moonrises that hurt her with their beauty; spires of pointed firs against fiery sunsets; spruce copses dim with mystery; pacings to and fro on the To-morrow Road. Not the To-morrow Road of June, blossom-misted, tender in young green. Nor yet the To-morrow Road of October, splendid in crimson and gold. But the To-morrow Road of a still, snowy winter twilight — a white, mysterious, silent place full of wizardry. Emily loved it better than all her other dear spots. The spirit delight of that dream-haunted solitude never cloyed — its remote charm never palled.
If only there had been a friend to talk things over with! One night she awakened and found herself in tears, with a late moon shining bluely and coldly on her through the frosted window-panes. She had dreamed that Teddy had whistled to her from Lofty John’s bush — the old, dear, signal whistle of childhood days; and she had run so eagerly across the garden to the bush. But she could not find Teddy.
“Emily Byrd Starr, if I catch you crying again over a dream!” she said passionately.
Chapter V
I
Only three dynamic things happened that year to vary the noiseless tenor of Emily’s way. In the autumn she had a love affair — as Aunt Laura Victorianly phrased it. Rev. James Wallace, the new, well-meaning, ladylike young minister at Derry Pond, began making excuses for visiting Blair Water Manse quite often and from there drifted over to New Moon. Soon everybody in Blair Water and Derry Pond knew that Emily Starr had a ministerial beau. Gossip was very rife. It was a foregone conclusion that Emily would jump at him. A minister! Heads were shaken over it. She would never make a suitable minister’s wife. Never in the world. But wasn’t it always the way? A minister picking on the very last girl he should have.
At New Moon opinion was divided. Aunt Laura, who owned to a Dr. Fell feeling about Mr. Wallace, hoped Emily wouldn’t “take” him. Aunt Elizabeth, in her secret soul, was not overfond of him either, but she was dazzled by the idea of a minister. And such a safe lover. A minister would never think of eloping. She thought Emily would be a very lucky girl if she could “get” him.
When it became sadly evident that Mr. Wallace’s calls at New Moon had ceased, Aunt Elizabeth gloomily asked Emily the reason and was horrified to hear that the ungrateful minx had told Mr. Wallace she could not marry him.
“Why?” demanded Aunt Elizabeth in icy disapproval.
“His ears, Aunt Elizabeth, his ears,” said Emily flippantly. “I really couldn’t risk having my children inherit ears like that.”
The indelicacy of such a reply staggered Aunt Elizabeth — which was probably why Emily had made it. She knew Aunt Elizabeth would be afraid to refer to the subject again.
The Rev. James Wallace thought it was “his duty” to go West the next spring. And that was that.
II
Then there was the episode of the local theatricals in Shrewsbury which were written up with vitriolic abuse in one of the Charlottetown papers. Shrewsbury people blamed Emily Byrd Starr for doing it. Who else, they demanded, could or would have written with such diabolic cleverness and sarcasm? Every one knew that Emily Byrd Starr had never forgiven Shrewsbury people for believing those yarns about her in the old John House affair. This was her method of revenge. Wasn’t that like the Murrays? Carrying a secret grudge for years, until a suitable chance for revenge presented itself. Emily protested her innocence in vain. It was never discovered who had written the report and as long as she lived it kept coming up against her.
But in one way it worked out to her advantage. She was invited to all the social doings in Shrewsbury after that. People were afraid to leave her out lest she “write them up.” She could not get to everything — Shrewsbury was seven miles from Blair Water. But she got to Mrs. Tom Nickle’s dinner dance and thought for six weeks that it had changed the current of her whole existence.
Emily-in-the-glass looked very well that night. She had got the dress she had longed for for years — spent the whole price of a story on it, to her Aunt’s horror. Shot silk — blue in one light, silver in another, with mists of lace. She remembered that Teddy had said that when she got that dress he would paint her as an Ice-maiden in it.
Her right-hand neighbour was a man who kept making “funny speeches” all through the meal and kept her wondering for what good purpose God had e
ver fashioned him.
But her left-hand neighbour! He talked little but he looked! Emily decided that she liked a man whose eyes said more than his lips. But he told her she looked like “the moonbeam of a blue summer night” in that gown. I think it was that phrase that finished Emily — shot her clean through the heart — like the unfortunate little duck of the nursery rhyme. Emily was helpless before the charm of a well-turned phrase. Before the evening was over Emily, for the first time in her life, had fallen wildly and romantically into the wildest and most romantic kind of love—”the love the poets dreamed of,” as she wrote in her diary. The young man — I believe his beautiful and romantic name was Aylmer Vincent — was quite as madly in love as she. He literally haunted New Moon. He wooed beautifully. His way of saying “dear lady” charmed her. When he told her that “a beautiful hand was one of the chief charms of a beautiful woman” and looked adoringly at hers Emily kissed her hands when she went to her room that night because his eyes had caressed them. When he called her raptly “a creature of mist and flame” she misted and flamed about dim old New Moon until Aunt Elizabeth unthinkingly quenched her by asking her to fry up a batch of doughnuts for Cousin Jimmy. When he told her she was like an opal — milk-white outside but with a heart of fire and crimson, she wondered if life would always be like this.
“And to think I once imagined I cared for Teddy Kent,” she thought in amazement at herself.
She neglected her writing and asked Aunt Elizabeth if she could have the old blue box in the attic for a hope chest. Aunt Elizabeth graciously acceded. The record of the new suitor had been investigated and found impeccable. Good family — good social position — good business. All the omens were auspicious.
III
The Complete Works of L M Montgomery Page 285