Emily’s Quest E-Book

L.M. Montgomery

• Herausgeber: Classica Libris
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

Emily knows she’s going to be a great writer. She also knows that she and her childhood sweetheart, Teddy Kent, will conquer the world together. But when Teddy leaves home to pursue his goal to become an artist at the School of Design in Montreal, Emily’s world collapses. With Teddy gone, Emily agrees to marry a man she doesn’t love… as she tries to banish all thoughts of Teddy. In her heart, Emily must search for what being a writer really means…

Leseprobe

L. M. Montgomery

EMILY’S QUEST

Copyright

First published in 1927

Copyright © 2020 Classica Libris

Chapter 1

I

“No more cambric-tea” had Emily Byrd Starr written in her diary when she came home to New Moon from Shrewsbury, with high school days behind her and immortality before her.

Which was a symbol. When Aunt Elizabeth Murray permitted Emily to drink real tea—as a matter of course and not as an occasional concession—she thereby tacitly consented to let Emily grow up. Emily had been considered grownup by other people for some time, especially by Cousin Andrew Murray and Friend Perry Miller, each of whom had asked her to marry him and been disdainfully refused for his pains. When Aunt Elizabeth found this out, she knew it was no use to go on making Emily drink cambric-tea. Though, even then, Emily had no real hope that she would ever be permitted to wear silk stockings. A silk petticoat might be tolerated, being a hidden thing, in spite of its seductive rustle, but silk stockings were immoral.

So Emily, of whom it was whispered somewhat mysteriously by people who knew her to people who didn’t know her, “she writes,” was accepted as one of the ladies of New Moon, where nothing had ever changed since her coming there seven years before and where the carved ornament on the sideboard still cast the same queer shadow of an Ethiopian silhouette on exactly the same place on the wall where she had noticed it delightedly on her first evening there. An old house that had lived its life long ago and so was very quiet and wise and a little mysterious. Also a little austere, but very kind. Some of the Blair Water and Shrewsbury people thought it was a dull place and outlook for a young girl and said she had been very foolish to refuse Miss Royal’s offer of “a position on a magazine” in New York. Throwing away such a good chance to make something of herself! But Emily, who had very clear-cut ideas of what she was going to make of herself, did not think life would be dull at New Moon or that she had lost her chance of Alpine climbing because she had elected to stay there.

She belonged by right divine to the Ancient and Noble Order of Story-tellers. Born thousands of years earlier she would have sat in the circle around the fires of the tribe and enchanted her listeners. Born in the foremost files of time she must reach her audience through many artificial mediums.

But the materials of story weaving are the same in all ages and all places. Births, deaths, marriages, scandals—these are the only really interesting things in the world. So she settled down very determinedly and happily to her pursuit of fame and fortune—and of something that was neither. For writing, to Emily Byrd Starr, was not primarily a matter of worldly lucre or laurel crown. It was something she had to do. A thing—an idea—whether of beauty or ugliness, tortured her until it was “written out.” Humorous and dramatic by instinct, the comedy and tragedy of life enthralled her and demanded expression through her pen. A world of lost but immortal dreams, lying just beyond the drop-curtain of the real, called to her for embodiment and interpretation—called with a voice she could not—dared not—disobey.

She was filled with youth’s joy in mere existence. Life was forever luring and beckoning her onward. She knew that a hard struggle was before her; she knew that she must constantly offend Blair Water neighbours who would want her to write obituaries for them and who, if she used an unfamiliar word would say contemptuously that she was “talking big,” she knew there would be rejection slips galore; she knew there would be days when she would feel despairingly that she could not write and that it was of no use to try; days when the editorial phrase, “not necessarily a reflection on its merits,” would get on her nerves to such an extent that she would feel like imitating Marie Bashkirtseff and hurling the taunting, ticking, remorseless sitting-room clock out of the window; days when everything she had done or tried to do would slump—become mediocre and despicable; days when she would be tempted to bitter disbelief in her fundamental conviction that there was as much truth in the poetry of life as in the prose; days when the echo of that “random word” of the gods, for which she so avidly listened, would only seem to taunt her with its suggestions of unattainable perfection and loveliness beyond the reach of mortal ear or pen.

She knew that Aunt Elizabeth tolerated but never approved her mania for scribbling. In her last two years in Shrewsbury High School Emily, to Aunt Elizabeth’s almost incredulous amazement, had actually earned some money by her verses and stories. Hence the toleration. But no Murray had ever done such a thing before. And there was always that sense, which Dame Elizabeth Murray did not like, of being shut out of something. Aunt Elizabeth really resented the fact that Emily had another world, apart from the world of New Moon and Blair Water, a kingdom starry and illimitable, into which she could enter at will and into which not even the most determined and suspicious of aunts could follow her. I really think that if Emily’s eyes had not so often seemed to be looking at something dreamy and lovely and secretive Aunt Elizabeth might have had more sympathy with her ambitions. None of us, not even self-sufficing Murrays of New Moon, like to be barred out.

II

Those of you who have already followed Emily through her years of New Moon and Shrewsbury[1] must have a tolerable notion what she looked like. For those of you to whom she comes as a stranger let me draw a portrait of her as she seemed to the outward eye at the enchanted portal of seventeen, walking where the golden chrysanthemums lighted up an old autumnal, maritime garden. A place of peace, that garden of New Moon. An enchanted pleasance, full of rich, sensuous colours and wonderful spiritual shadows. Scents of pine and rose were in it; boom of bees, threnody of wind, murmurs of the blue Atlantic gulf; and always the soft sighing of the firs in Lofty John Sullivan’s “bush” to the north of it. Emily loved every flower and shadow and sound in it, every beautiful old tree in and around it, especially her own intimate, beloved trees—a cluster of wild cherries in the south-west corner, Three Princesses of Lombardy, a certain maiden-like wild plum on the brook path, the big spruce in the centre of the garden, a silver maple and a pine farther on, an aspen in another corner always coquetting with gay little winds, and a whole row of stately white birches in Lofty John’s bush.

Emily was always glad that she lived where there were many trees—old ancestral trees, planted and tended by hands long dead, bound up with everything of joy and sorrow that visited the lives in their shadows.

A slender, virginal young thing. Hair like black silk. Purplish-grey eyes, with violet shadows under them that always seemed darker and more alluring after Emily had sat up to some unholy and un-Elizabethan hour completing a story or working out the skeleton of a plot; scarlet lips with a Murray-like crease at the corners; ears with Puckish, slightly pointed tips. Perhaps it was the crease and the ears that made certain people think her something of a puss. An exquisite line of chin and neck; a smile with a trick in it; such a slow-blossoming thing with a sudden radiance of fulfilment. And ankles that scandalous old Aunt Nancy Priest of Priest Pond commended. Faint stains of rose in her rounded cheeks that sometimes suddenly deepened to crimson. Very little could bring that transforming flush—a wind off the sea, a sudden glimpse of blue upland, a flame-red poppy, white sails going out of the harbour in the magic of morning, gulf-waters silver under the moon, a Wedgwood-blue columbine in the old orchard. Or a certain whistle in Lofty John’s bush.

With all this—pretty? I cannot tell you. Emily was never mentioned when Blair Water beauties were being tabulated. But no one who looked upon her face ever forgot it. No one, meeting Emily the second time ever had to say “Er—your face seems familiar but—” Generations of lovely women were behind her. They had all given her something of personality. She had the grace of running water. Something, too, of its sparkle and limpidity. A thought swayed her like a strong wind. An emotion shook her as a tempest shakes a rose. She was one of those vital creatures of whom, when they do die, we say it seems impossible that they can be dead. Against the background of her practical, sensible clan she shone like a diamond flame. Many people liked her, many disliked her. No one was ever wholly indifferent to her.

Once, when Emily had been very small, living with her father down in the little old house at Maywood, where he had died, she had started out to seek the rainbow’s end. Over long wet fields and hills she ran, hopeful, expectant. But as she ran the wonderful arch was faded—was dim—was gone. Emily was alone in an alien valley, not too sure in which direction lay home. For a moment her lips quivered, her eyes filled. Then she lifted her face and smiled gallantly at the empty sky.

“There will be other rainbows,” she said.

Emily was a chaser of rainbows.

III

Life at New Moon had changed. She must adjust herself to it. A certain loneliness must be reckoned with. Ilse Burnley, the madcap pal of seven faithful years, had gone to the School of Literature and Expression in Montreal. The two girls parted with the tears and vows of girlhood. Never to meet on quite the same ground again. For, disguise the fact as we will, when friends, even the closest—perhaps the more because of that very closeness—meet again after a separation there is always a chill, lesser or greater, of change. Neither finds the other quite the same. This is natural and inevitable. Human nature is ever growing or retrogressing—never stationary. But still, with all our philosophy, who of us can repress a little feeling of bewildered disappointment when we realize that our friend is not and never can be just the same as before—even though the change may be by way of improvement? Emily, with the strange intuition which supplied the place of experience, felt this as Ilse did not, and felt that in a sense she was bidding good-bye for ever to the Ilse of New Moon days and Shrewsbury years.

Perry Miller, too, former “hired boy” of New Moon, medalist of Shrewsbury High School, rejected but not quite hopeless suitor of Emily, butt of Ilse’s rages, was gone. Perry was studying law in an office in Charlottetown, with his eye fixed firmly on several glittering legal goals. No rainbow ends—no mythical pots of gold for Perry. He knew what he wanted would stay put and he was going after it. People were beginning to believe he would get it. After all, the gulf between the law clerk in Mr. Abel’s office and the Supreme Court Bench of Canada was no wider than the gulf between that same law clerk and the barefoot gamin of Stovepipe Town-by-the-Harbour.

There was more of the rainbow-seeker in Teddy Kent, of the Tansy Patch. He, too, was going. To the School of Design in Montreal. He, too, knew—had known for years—the delight and allurement and despair and anguish of the rainbow quest.

“Even if we never find it,” he said to Emily, as they lingered in the New Moon garden under the violet sky of a long, wondrous, northern twilight, on the last evening before he went away, “there’s something in the search for it that’s better than even the finding would be.”

“But we will find it,” said Emily, lifting her eyes to a star that glittered over the tip of one of the Three Princesses. Something in Teddy’s use of “we” thrilled her with its implications. Emily was always very honest with herself and she never attempted to shut her eyes to the knowledge that Teddy Kent meant more to her than anyone else in the world. Whereas she—what did she mean to him? Little? Much? Or nothing?

She was bareheaded and she had put a star-like cluster of tiny yellow ’mums in her hair. She had thought a good deal about her dress before she decided on her primrose silk. She thought she was looking very well, but what difference did that make if Teddy didn’t notice it? He always took her so for granted, she thought a little rebelliously. Dean Priest, now, would have noticed it and paid her some subtle compliment about it.

“I don’t know,” said Teddy, morosely scowling at Emily’s topaz-eyed grey cat, Daffy, who was fancying himself as a skulking tiger in the spirea thicket. “I don’t know. Now that I’m really flying the Blue Peter I feel—flat. After all—perhaps I can never do anything worthwhile. A little knack of drawing—what does it amount to? Especially when you’re lying awake at three o’clock at night?”

“Oh, I know that feeling,” agreed Emily. “Last night I mulled over a story for hours and concluded despairingly that I could never write—that it was no use to try—that I couldn’t do anything really worthwhile. I went to bed on that note and drenched my pillow with tears. Woke up at three and couldn’t even cry. Tears seemed as foolish as laughter—or ambition. I was quite bankrupt in hope and belief. And then I got up in the chilly grey dawn and began a new story. Don’t let a three-o’clock-at-night feeling fog your soul.”

“Unfortunately there’s a three o’clock every night,” said Teddy. “At that ungodly hour I am always convinced that if you want things too much, you’re not likely ever to get them. And there are two things that I want tremendously. One, of course, is to be a great artist. I never supposed I was a coward, Emily, but I’m afraid now. If I don’t make good! Everybody’ll laugh at me. Mother will say she knew it. She hates to see me go really, you know. To go and fail! It would be better not to go.”

“No, it wouldn’t,” said Emily passionately, wondering at the same time in the back of her head what was the other thing Teddy wanted so tremendously. “You must not be afraid. Father said I wasn’t to be afraid of anything in that talk I had with him the night he died. And isn’t it Emerson who said, ‘Always do what you are afraid to do?’”

“I’ll bet Emerson said that when he’d got through with being afraid of things. It’s easy to be brave when you’re taking off your harness.”

“You know I believe in you, Teddy,” said Emily softly.

“Yes, you do. You and Mr. Carpenter. You are the only ones who really do believe in me. Even Ilse thinks that Perry has by far the better chance of bringing home the bacon.”

“But you are not going after bacon. You’re going after rainbow gold.”

“And if I fail to find it—and disappoint you—that will be worst of all.”

“You won’t fail. Look at that star, Teddy—the one just over the youngest Princess. It’s Vega of the Lyre. I’ve always loved it. It’s my dearest among the stars. Do you remember how, years ago when you and Ilse and I sat out in the orchard on the evenings when Cousin Jimmy was boiling pigs’ potatoes, you used to spin us wonderful tales about that star—and of a life you had lived in it before you came to this world. There was no three o’clock in the morning in that star.”

“What happy, carefree little shavers we were those times,” said Teddy, in the reminiscent voice of a middle-aged, care-oppressed man wistfully recalling youthful irresponsibility.

“I want you to promise me,” said Emily, “that whenever you see that star, you’ll remember that I am believing in you—hard.”

“Will you promise me that whenever you look at that star, you’ll think of me?” said Teddy. “Or rather, let us promise each other that whenever we see that star, we’ll always think of each other—always. Everywhere and as long as we live.”

“I promise,” said Emily, thrilled. She loved to have Teddy look at her like that.

A romantic compact. Meaning what? Emily did not know. She only knew that Teddy was going away—that life seemed suddenly very blank and cold—that the wind from the gulf, sighing among the trees in Lofty John’s bush was very sorrowful—that summer had gone, and autumn had come. And that the pot of gold at the rainbow’s end was on some very far-distant hill.

Why had she said that thing about the star? Why did dusk and fir-scent and the afterglow of autumnal sunsets make people say absurd things?

Chapter 2

I

“New Moon,

“November 18, 19—

“Today the December number of Marchwood’s came with my verses Flying Gold in it. I consider the occasion worthy of mention in my diary because they were given a whole page to themselves and illustrated—the first time ever any poem of mine was so honoured. It is trashy enough in itself, I suppose—Mr. Carpenter only sniffed when I read it to him and refused to make any comment whatever on it. Mr. Carpenter never ‘damns with faint praise’ but he can damn with silence in a most smashing manner. But my poem looked so dignified that a careless reader might fancy there was something in it. Blessings on the good editor who was inspired to have it illustrated. He has bolstered up my self-respect considerably.

“But I did not care overmuch for the illustration itself. The artist did not catch my meaning at all. Teddy would have done better.

“Teddy is doing splendidly at the School of Design. And Vega shines brilliantly every night. I wonder if he really does always think of me when he sees it. Or if he ever does see it. Perhaps the electric lights of Montreal blot it out. He seems to see a good bit of Ilse. It’s awfully nice for them to know each other in that big city of strangers.”

II

“November 26, 19—

“Today was a glamorous November afternoon—summer-mild and autumn-sweet. I sat and read a long while in the pond burying-ground. Aunt Elizabeth thinks this a most gruesome place to sit in and tells Aunt Laura that she is afraid there’s a morbid streak in me. I can’t see anything morbid about it. It’s a beautiful spot where wild, sweet odours are always coming across Blair Water on the wandering winds. And so quiet and peaceful, with the old graves all about me—little green hillocks with small frosted ferns sprinkled over them. Men and women of my house are lying there. Men and women who had been victorious—men and women who had been defeated—and their victory and defeat are now one. I never can feel either much exalted or much depressed there. The sting and the tang alike go out of things. I like the old, old red sandstone slabs, especially the one for Mary Murray with its ‘Here I Stay’—the inscription into which her husband put all the concealed venom of a lifetime. His grave is right beside hers and I feel sure they have forgiven each other long ago. And perhaps they come back sometimes in the dark o’ the moon and look at the inscription and laugh at it. It is growing a little dim with tiny lichens. Cousin Jimmy has given up scraping them away. Some day they will overgrow it so that it will be nothing but a green-and-red-and-silver smear on the old red stone.”

“Dec. 20, 19—

“Something nice happened today. I feel pleasantly exhilarated. Madison’s took my story, AFlaw in the Indictment!!!! Yes, it deserves some exclamation-points after it to a certainty. If it were not for Mr. Carpenter, I would write it in italics. Italics! Nay, I’d use capitals. It is very hard to get in there. Don’t I know! Haven’t I tried repeatedly and gained nothing for my pains but a harvest of ‘we-regrets?’ And at last it has opened its doors to me. To be in Madison’s is a clear and unmistakable sign that you’re getting somewhere on the Alpine path. The dear editor was kind enough to say it was a charming story.

“Nice man!

“He sent me a cheque for fifty dollars. I’ll soon be able to begin to repay Aunt Ruth and Uncle Wallace what they spent on me in Shrewsbury. Aunt Elizabeth as usual looked at the cheque suspiciously but for the first time forbore to wonder if the bank would really cash it. Aunt Laura’s beautiful blue eyes beamed with pride. Aunt Laura’s eyes really do beam. She is one of the Victorians. Edwardian eyes glitter and sparkle and allure but they never beam. And somehow, I do like beaming eyes—especially when they beam over my success.

“Cousin Jimmy says that Madison’s is worth all the other Yankee magazines put together in his opinion.

“I wonder if Dean Priest will like A Flaw in the Indictment. And if he will say so. He never praises anything I write nowadays. And I feel such a craving to compel him to. I feel that his is the only commendation, apart from Mr. Carpenter’s, that is worth anything.

“It’s odd about Dean. In some mysterious way he seems to be growing younger. A few years ago I thought of him as quite old. Now he seems only middle-aged. If this keeps up, he’ll soon be a mere youth. I suppose the truth is that my mind is beginning to mature a bit and I’m catching up with him. Aunt Elizabeth doesn’t like my friendship with him any more than she ever did. Aunt Elizabeth has a well-marked antipathy to any Priest. But I don’t know what I’d do without Dean’s friendship. It’s the very salt of life.”

“January 15, 19—

“Today was stormy. I had a white night last night after four rejections of MSS. I had thought especially good. As Miss Royal predicted, I felt that I had been an awful idiot not to have gone to New York with her when I had the chance. Oh, I don’t wonder babies always cry when they wake up in the night. So often I want to do it, too. Everything presses on my soul then and no cloud has a silver lining. I was blue and disgruntled all the forenoon and looked forward to the coming of the mail as the one possible rescue from the doldrums. There is always such a fascinating expectancy and uncertainty about the mail. What would it bring me? A letter from Teddy—Teddy writes the most delightful letters. A nice thin envelope with a cheque? A fat one woefully eloquent of more rejected manuscripts? One of Ilse’s fascinating scrawls? Nothing of the sort. Merely an irate epistle from Second-cousin-once-removed Beulah Grant of Derry Pond, who is furious because she thinks I ‘put her’ into my story Fools of Habit, which has just been copied into a widely circulated Canadian farm paper. She wrote me a bitterly reproachful letter which I received today. She thinks I ‘might have spared an old friend who has always wished me well.’ She is ‘not accustomed to being ridiculed in the newspapers’ and will I, in future, be so kind as to refrain from making her the butt of my supposed wit in the public press. Second-cousin-once-removed Beulah wields a facile pen of her own, when it comes to that, and while certain things in her letter hurt me other parts infuriated me. I never once even thought of Cousin Beulah when I wrote that story. The character of AuntKate is purely imaginary. And if I had thought of Cousin Beulah, I most certainly wouldn’t have put her in a story. She is too stupid and commonplace. And she isn’t a bit like Aunt Kate, who is, I flattered myself, a vivid, snappy, humorous old lady.

“But Cousin Beulah wrote to Aunt Elizabeth too, and we have had a family ruction. Aunt Elizabeth won’t believe I am guiltless—she declares Aunt Kate is an exact picture of Cousin Beulah and she politely requests me—Aunt Elizabeth’s polite requests are awesome things—not to caricature my relatives in my future productions.

“‘It is not,’ said Aunt Elizabeth in her stateliest manner, ‘a thing any Murray should do—make money out of the peculiarities of her friends.’

“It was just another of Miss Royal’s predictions fulfilled. Oh, was she as right about everything else? If she was—

“But the worst slam of all came from Cousin Jimmy, who had chuckled over Fools of Habit.

“‘Never mind old Beulah, pussy,’ he whispered. ‘That was fine. You certainly did her up brown in Aunt Kate. I recognized her before I’d read a page. Knew her by her nose.’ There you are! I unluckily happened to dower Aunt Kate with a ‘long, drooping nose.’ Nor can it be denied that Cousin Beulah’s nose is long and drooping. People have been hanged on no clearer circumstantial evidence. It was of no use to wail despairingly that I had never even thought of Cousin Beulah. Cousin Jimmy just nodded and chuckled again.

“‘Of course. Best to keep it quiet. Best to keep anything like that pretty quiet.’

“The worst sting in all this is, that if Aunt Kate is really like Cousin Beulah Grant then I failed egregiously in what I was trying to do.

“However, I feel much better now than when I began this entry. I’ve got quite a bit of resentment and rebellion and discouragement out of my system.

“That’s the chief use of a diary, I believe.”

III

“Feb. 3, 19—

“This was a ‘big day.’ I had three acceptances. And one editor asked me to send him some stories. To be sure, I hate having an editor ask me to send a story, somehow. It’s far worse than sending them unasked. The humiliation of having them returned after all is far deeper than when one just sends off a MS. to some dim impersonality behind an editorial desk a thousand miles away.

“And I have decided that I can’t write a story ‘to order.’ ’Tis a diabolical task. I tried to lately. The editor of Young People asked me to write a story along certain lines. I wrote it. He sent it back, pointing out some faults and asking me to rewrite it. I tried to. I wrote and rewrote and altered and interlined until my MS. looked like a crazy patchwork of black and blue and red inks. Finally I lifted one of the covers of the kitchen stove and dumped in the original yarn and all my variations thereof.

“After this I’m just going to write what I want to. And the editors can be—canonized!

“There are northern lights and a misty new moon tonight.”

IV

“Feb. 16, 19—

“My story What the Jest Was Worth was in The Home Monthly today. But I was only one of ‘others’ on the cover. However, to balance that I have been listed by name as ‘one of the well-known and popular contributors for the coming year’ in Girlhood Days. Cousin Jimmy has read this editor’s foreword over half a dozen times and I heard him murmuring ‘well-known and popular’ as he split the kindlings. Then he went to the corner store and bought me a new Jimmy-book. Every time I pass a new milestone on the Alpine path Cousin Jimmy celebrates by giving me a new Jimmy-book. I never buy a notebook for myself. It would hurt his feelings. He always looks at the little pile of Jimmy-books on my writing-table with awe and reverence, firmly believing that all sorts of wonderful literature is locked up in the hodgepodge of description and characters and ‘bits’ they contain.

“I always give Dean my stories to read. I can’t help doing it, although he always brings them back with no comment, or, worse than no comment—faint praise. It has become a sort of obsession with me to make Dean admit I can write something worthwhile in its line. That would be triumph. But unless and until he does, everything will be dust and ashes. Because—he knows.”

V

“April 2, 19—

“The spring has affected a certain youth of Shrewsbury who comes out to New Moon occasionally. He is not a suitor of whom the House of Murray approves. Nor, which is more important, one of whom E. B. Starr approves. Aunt Elizabeth was very grim because I went to a concert with him. She was sitting up when I came home.

“‘You see I haven’t eloped, Aunt Elizabeth,’ I said. ‘I promise you I won’t. If I ever want to marry anyone, I’ll tell you so and marry him in spite of your teeth.’

“I don’t know whether Aunt Elizabeth went to bed with an easier mind or not. Mother eloped—thank goodness!—and Aunt Elizabeth is a firm believer in heredity.”

VI

“April 15, 19—

“This evening I went away up the hill and prowled about the Disappointed House by moonlight. The Disappointed House was built thirty-seven years ago—partly built, at least—for a bride who never came to it. There it has been ever since, boarded up, unfinished, heart-broken, haunted by the timid, forsaken ghosts of things that should have happened but never did. I always feel so sorry for it. For its poor blind eyes that have never seen—that haven’t even memories. No home light ever shone out through them—only once, long ago, a gleam of firelight. It might have been such a nice little house, snuggled against that wooded hill, pulling little spruces all around it to cover it. A warm, friendly little house. And a good-natured little house. Not like the new one at the Corner that Tom Semple is putting up. It is a bad-tempered house. Vixenish, with little eyes and sharp elbows. It’s odd how much personality a house can have even before it is ever lived in at all. Once long ago, when Teddy and I were children, we pried a board off the window and climbed in and made a fire in the fireplace. Then we sat there and planned out our lives. We meant to spend them together in that very house. I suppose Teddy has forgotten all about that childish nonsense. He writes often and his letters are full and jolly and Teddy-like. And he tells me all the little things I want to know about his life. But lately they have become rather impersonal, it seems to me. They might just as well have been written to Ilse as to me.

“Poor little Disappointed House. I suppose you will always be disappointed.”

VII

“May 1, 19—

“Spring again! Young poplars with golden, ethereal leaves. Leagues of rippling gulf beyond the silver-and-lilac sand-dunes.

“The winter has gone with a swiftness incredible, in spite of some terrible, black three-o’clock and lonely, discouraged twilights. Dean will soon be home from Florida. But neither Teddy nor Ilse is coming home this summer. This gave me a white night or two recently. Ilse is going to the coast to visit an aunt—a mother’s sister who never took any notice of her before. And Teddy has got the chance of illustrating a series of North-west Mounted Police stories for a New York firm and must spend his holidays making sketches for it in the far North. Of course it’s a splendid chance for him and I wouldn’t be a bit sorry—if he seemed a bit sorry because he wasn’t coming to Blair Water. But he didn’t.

“Well, I suppose Blair Water and the old life here are to him as a tale that is told now.

“I didn’t realize how much I had been building on Ilse and Teddy being here for the summer or how much the hope of it had helped me through a few bad times in the winter. When I let myself remember that not once this summer will I hear Teddy’s signal whistle in Lofty John’s bush—not once happen on him in our secret, beautiful haunts of lane and brookside—not once exchange a thrilling, significant glance in a crowd when something happened which had a special meaning for us, all the colour seems to die out of life, leaving it just a drab, faded thing of shreds and patches.

“Mrs. Kent met me at the post-office yesterday and stopped to speak—something she very rarely does. She hates me as much as ever.

“‘I suppose you have heard that Teddy is not coming home this summer?’

“‘Yes,’ I said briefly.

“There was a certain odd, aching triumph in her eyes as she turned away—a triumph I understood. She is very unhappy because Teddy will not be home for her, but she is exultant that he will not be home for me. This shows, she is almost sure, that he cares nothing about me.

“Well, I dare say she is right. Still one can’t be altogether gloomy in spring.

“And Andrew is engaged! To a girl of whom Aunt Addie entirely approves. ‘I could not be more pleased with Andrew’s choice if I had chosen her myself,’ she said this afternoon to Aunt Elizabeth. To Aunt Elizabeth and at me. Aunt Elizabeth was coldly glad—or said she was. Aunt Laura cried a little—Aunt Laura always cries a bit when any one she knows is born or dead or married or engaged or come or gone or polling his first vote. She couldn’t help feeling a little disappointed. Andrew would have been such a safe husband for me. Certainly there is no dynamite in Andrew.”

Chapter 3

I

At first nobody thought Mr. Carpenter’s illness serious. He had had good many attacks of rheumatism in recent years, laying him up for a few days. Then he could hobble back to work, as grim and sarcastic as ever, with a new edge to his tongue. In Mr. Carpenter’s opinion teaching in Blair Water School was not what it had been. Nothing there now, he said, but rollicking, soulless young nonentities. Not a soul in the school who could pronounce February or Wednesday.

“I’m tired trying to make soup in a sieve,” he said gruffly.

Teddy and Ilse and Perry and Emily were gone—the four pupils who had leavened the school with a saving inspiration. Perhaps Mr. Carpenter was a little tired of—everything. He was not very old, as years go, but he had burned up most of his constitution in a wild youth. The little, timid, faded slip of a woman who had been his wife had died unobtrusively in the preceding autumn. She had never seemed to matter much to Mr. Carpenter; but he had “gone down” rapidly after her funeral. The school children went in awe of his biting tongue and his more frequent spurts of temper. The trustees began to shake their heads and talk of a new teacher when the school year ended.

Mr. Carpenter’s illness began as usual with an attack of rheumatism. Then there was heart trouble. Dr. Burnley, who went to see him despite his obstinate refusal to have a doctor, looked grave and talked mysteriously of a lack of “the will to live.” Aunt Louisa Drummond of Derry Pond came over to nurse him. Mr. Carpenter submitted to this with a resignation that was a bad omen—as if nothing mattered any more.

“Have your own way. She can potter round if it will ease your consciences. So long as she leaves me alone, I don’t care what she does. I won’t be fed, and I won’t be coddled, and I won’t have the sheets changed. Can’t bear her hair, though. Too straight and shiny. Tell her to do something to it. And why does her nose look as if it were always cold?”

Emily ran in every evening to sit awhile with him. She was the only person the old man cared to see. He did not talk a great deal, but he liked to open his eyes every few minutes and exchange a sly smile of understanding with her—as if the two of them were laughing together over some excellent joke of which only they could sample the flavour. Aunt Louisa did not know what to make of this commerce of grins and consequently disapproved of it. She was a kind-hearted creature, with much real motherliness in her thwarted maiden breast, but she was all at sea with these cheerful, Puckish, deathbed smiles of her patient. She thought he had much better be thinking of his immortal soul. He was not a member of the church, was he? He would not even let the minister come in to see him. But Emily Starr was welcomed whenever she came. Aunt Louisa had her own secret suspicion of the said Emily Starr. Didn’t she write? Hadn’t she put her own mother’s second-cousin, body and bones, into one of her stories? Probably she was looking for “copy” in this old pagan’s deathbed. That explained her interest in it, beyond a doubt. Aunt Louisa looked curiously at this ghoulish young creature. She hoped Emily wouldn’t put her in a story.

For a long time Emily had refused to believe that it was Mr. Carpenter’s deathbed. He couldn’t be so ill as all that. He didn’t suffer—he didn’t complain. He would be all right as soon as warmer weather came. She told herself this so often that she made herself believe it. She could not let herself think of life in Blair Water without Mr. Carpenter.

One May evening Mr. Carpenter seemed much better. His eyes flashed with their old satiric fire, his voice rang with its old resonance; he joked poor Aunt Louisa—who never could understand his jokes but endured them with Christian patience. Sick people must be humoured. He told a funny story to Emily and laughed with her over it till the little low-raftered room rang. Aunt Louisa shook her head. There were some things she did not know, poor lady, but she did know her own humble, faithful little trade of unprofessional nursing; and she knew that this sudden rejuvenescence was no good sign. As the Scotch would say, he was “fey.” Emily in her inexperience did not know this. She went home rejoicing that Mr. Carpenter had taken such a turn for the better. Soon he would be all right, back at school, thundering at his pupils, striding absently along the road reading some dog-eared classic, criticizing her manuscripts with all his old trenchant humour. Emily was glad. Mr. Carpenter was a friend she could not afford to lose.

II

Aunt Elizabeth wakened her at two. She had been sent for. Mr. Carpenter was asking for her.

“Is he—worse?” asked Emily, slipping out of her high, black bed with its carved posts.