Emily of New Moon (8 page)

“Your great-great grandfather, Hugh Murray, had that brought out from the Old Country,” said Cousin Jimmy. “There isn't as fine a one in the Maritime Provinces. And Uncle George Murray brought those conchs from the Indies. He was a sea-captain.”

Emily looked about her with delight. The garden was lovely and the house quite splendid to her childish eyes. It had a big front porch with Grecian columns. These were thought very elegant in Blair Water, and went far to justify the Murray pride. A schoolmaster had said they gave the house a classical air. To be sure, the classical effect was just now rather smothered in hop vines that rioted over the whole porch and hung in pale-green festoons above the rows of potted scarlet geraniums that flanked the steps.

Emily's heart swelled with pride.

“It's a noble house,” she said.

“And what about my garden?” demanded Cousin Jimmy jealously.

“It's fit for a queen,” said Emily, gravely and sincerely.

Cousin Jimmy nodded, well pleased, and then a strange sound crept into his voice and an odd look into his eyes.

“There is a spell woven round this garden. The blight shall spare it and the green worm pass it by. Drought dares not invade it and the rain comes here gently.”

Emily took an involuntary step backward—she almost felt like running away. But now Cousin Jimmy was himself again.

“Isn't this grass about the sundial like green velvet? I've taken some pains with it, I can tell you. You make yourself at home in this garden.” Cousin Jimmy made a splendid gesture. “I confer the freedom of it upon you. Good-luck to you, and may you find the Lost Diamond.”

“The Lost Diamond?” said Emily wonderingly. What fascinating thing was this?

“Never hear the story? I'll tell it tomorrow—Sunday's lazy day at New Moon. I must get off to my turnips now or I'll have Elizabeth out looking at me. She won't say anything—she'll just
look
. Ever seen the real Murray look?”

“I guess I saw it when Aunt Ruth pulled me out from under the table,” said Emily ruefully.

“No—no. That was the Ruth Dutton look—spite and malice and all uncharitableness. I hate Ruth Dutton. She laughs at my poetry—not that she ever hears any of it. The spirit never moves when Ruth is around. Dunno where they got her. Elizabeth is a crank but she's sound as a nut, and Laura's a saint. But Ruth's worm-eaten. As for the Murray look, you'll know it when you see it. It's as well-known as the Murray pride. We're a darn queer lot—but we're the finest people ever happened. I'll tell you all about us tomorrow.”

Cousin Jimmy kept his promise while the aunts were away at church. It had been decided in family conclave that Emily was not to go to church that day.

“She has nothing suitable to wear,” said Aunt Elizabeth. “By next Sunday we will have her white dress ready.”

Emily was disappointed that she was not to go to church. She had always found church very interesting on the rare occasions when she got there. It had been too far at Maywood for her father to walk but sometimes Ellen Greene's brother had taken her and Ellen.

“Do you think, Aunt Elizabeth,” she said wistfully, “that God would be much offended if I wore my black dress to church? Of course it's cheap—I think Ellen Greene paid for it herself—but it covers me all up.”

“Little girls who do not understand things should hold their tongues,” said Aunt Elizabeth. “I do not choose that Blair Water people should see my niece in such a dress as that wretched black merino. And if Ellen Greene paid for it we must repay her. You should have told us that before we came away from Maywood. No, you are not going to church today. You can wear the black dress to school tomorrow. We can cover it up with an apron.”

Emily resigned herself with a sigh of disappointment to staying home; but it was very pleasant after all. Cousin Jimmy took her for a walk to the pond, showed her the graveyard and opened the book of yesterday for her.

“Why are all the Murrays buried here?” asked Emily. “Is it really because they are too good to be buried with common people?”

“No—no, pussy. We don't carry our pride as far as
that
. When old Hugh Murray settled at New Moon there was nothing much but woods for miles and no graveyards nearer than Charlottetown. That's why the old Murrays were buried here—and later on we kept it up because we wanted to lie with our own, here on the green, green banks of the old Blair Water.”

“That sounds like a line out of a poem, Cousin Jimmy,” said Emily.

“So it is—out of one of my poems.”

“I kind of like the idea of a 'sclusive burying-ground like this,” said Emily decidedly, looking around her approvingly at the velvet grass sloping down to the fairy-blue pond, the neat walks, the well-kept graves.

Cousin Jimmy chuckled.

“And yet they say you ain't a Murray,” he said. “Murray and Byrd and Starr—and a dash of Shipley to boot, or Cousin Jimmy Murray is much mistaken.”

“Shipley?”

“Yes—Hugh Murray's wife—your great-great-grandmother—was a Shipley—an Englishwoman. Ever hear of how the Murrays came to New Moon?”

“No.”

“They were bound for Quebec—hadn't any notion of coming to P. E. I. They had a long rough voyage and water got scarce, so the captain of the
New
Moon
put in here to get some. Mary Murray had nearly died of seasickness coming out—never seemed to get her sea-legs—so the captain, being sorry for her, told her she could go ashore with the men and feel solid ground under her for an hour or so. Very gladly she went and when she got to shore she said, ‘Here I stay.' And stay she did; nothing could budge her; old Hugh—he was young Hugh then, of course—coaxed and stormed and raged and argued—and even cried, I've been told—but Mary wouldn't be moved. In the end he gave in and had his belongings landed and stayed, too. So that is how the Murrays came to P. E. Island.”

“I'm glad it happened like that,” said Emily.

“So was old Hugh in the long run. And yet it rankled, Emily—it rankled. He never forgave his wife with a whole heart. Her grave is over there in the corner—that one with the flat red stone. Go you and look at what he had put on it.”

Emily ran curiously over. The big flat stone was inscribed with one of the long, discursive epitaphs of an older day. But beneath the epitaph was no scriptural verse or pious psalm. Clear and distinct, in spite of age and lichen, ran the line, “Here I stay.”

“
That's
how he got even with her,” said Cousin Jimmy. “He was a good husband to her—and she was a good wife and bore him a fine family—and he never was the same after her death. But that rankled in him until it had to come out.”

Emily gave a little shiver. Somehow, the idea of that grim old ancestor with his undying grudge against his nearest and dearest was rather terrifying.

“I'm glad I'm only
half
Murray,” she said to herself. Aloud—“Father told me it was a Murray tradition not to carry spite past the grave.”

“So 'tis now—but it took its rise from this very thing. His family were so horrified at it, you see. It made considerable of a scandal. Some folks twisted it round to mean that old Hugh didn't believe in the resurrection, and there was talk of the session taking it up, but after a while the talk died away.”

Emily skipped over to another lichen-grown stone.

“Elizabeth Burnley—who was she, Cousin Jimmy?”

“Old William Murray's wife. He was Hugh's brother, and came out here five years after Hugh did. His wife was a great beauty and had been a belle in the Old Country. She didn't like the P. E. Island woods. She was homesick, Emily—scandalous homesick. For weeks after she came here she wouldn't take off her bonnet—just walked the floor in it, demanding to be taken back home.”

“Didn't she take it off when she went to bed?” asked Emily.

“Dunno if she did go to bed. Anyway, William wouldn't take her back home so in time she took off her bonnet and resigned herself. Her daughter married Hugh's son, so Elizabeth was just great-great-grandmother.”

Emily looked down at the sunken green grave and wondered if any homesick dreams haunted Elizabeth Burnley's slumber of a hundred years.

“It's dreadful to be homesick—
I
know,” she thought sympathetically.

“Little Stephen Murray is buried over there,” said Cousin Jimmy. “His was the first marble stone in the burying-ground. He was your grandfather's brother—died when he was twelve. He has,” said Cousin Jimmy solemnly, “become a Murray tradition.”

“Why?”

“He was so beautiful and clever and good. He hadn't a fault—so of course he couldn't live. They say there never was such a handsome child in the connection. And lovable—everybody loved him. He has been dead for ninety years—not a Murray living today ever saw him—and yet we talk about him at family gatherings—he's more real than lots of living people. So you see, Emily, he must have been an extraordinary child—but it ended in that—” Cousin Jimmy waved his hand towards the grassy grave and the white, prim headstone.

“I wonder,” thought Emily, “if anyone will remember
me
ninety years after I'm dead.”

“This old yard is nearly full,” reflected Cousin Jimmy. “There's just room in yonder corner for Elizabeth and Laura—and me. None for you, Emily.”

“I don't want to be buried here,” flashed Emily. “I think it's splendid to have a graveyard like this in the family—but
I
am going to be buried in Charlottetown graveyard with Father and Mother. But there's one thing worries me, Cousin Jimmy, do
you
think I'm likely to die of consumption?”

Cousin Jimmy looked judicially down into her eyes.

“No,” he said, “no, Miss Puss. You've got enough life in
you
to carry you far. You aren't meant for death.”

“I feel that, too,” said Emily, nodding. “And now, Cousin Jimmy,
why
is that house over there disappointed?”

“Which one?—oh, Fred Clifford's house. Fred Clifford began to build that house thirty years ago. He was to be married and his lady picked out the plan. And when the house was just as far along as you see she jilted him, Emily—right in the face of day she jilted him. Never another nail was driven in the house. Fred went out to British Columbia. He's living there yet—married and happy. But he won't sell that lot to anyone—so I reckon he feels the sting yet.”

“I'm so sorry for that house. I
wish
it had been finished. It
wants
to be—even yet it
wants
to be.”

“Well, I reckon it never will. Fred had a bit of Shipley in him, too, you see. One of old Hugh's girls was his grandmother. And Doctor Burnley up there in the big gray house has more than a bit.”

“Is he a relation of ours, too, Cousin Jimmy?”

“Forty-second cousin. Way back he had a cousin of Mary Shipley's for a great-something. That was in the Old Country—his forebears came out here after we did. He's a good doctor but an odd stick—odder by far than I am, Emily, and yet nobody ever says he's not all there. Can you account for that?
He
doesn't believe in God—and
I
am not such a fool as that.”

“Not in
any
God?”

“Not in any God. He's an infidel, Emily. And he's bringing his little girl up the same way, which I think is a shame, Emily,” said Cousin Jimmy confidentially.

“Doesn't her mother teach her things?”

“Her mother is—dead,” answered Cousin Jimmy, with a little odd hesitation. “Dead these ten years,” he added in a firmer tone. “Ilse Burnley is a great girl—hair like daffodils and eyes like yellow diamonds.”

“Oh, Cousin Jimmy, you promised you'd tell me about the Lost Diamond,” cried Emily eagerly.

“To be sure—to be sure. Well, it's there—somewhere in or about the old summer-house, Emily. Fifty years ago Edward Murray and his wife came here from Kingsport for a visit. A great lady she was, and wearing silks and diamonds like a queen, though no beauty. She had a ring on with a stone in it that cost two hundred pounds, Emily. That was a big lot of money to be wearing on one wee woman-finger, wasn't it? It sparkled on her white hand as she held her dress going up the steps of the summer house; but when she came down the steps it was gone.”

“And was it
never
found?” asked Emily breathlessly.

“Never—and for no lack of searching. Edward Murray wanted to have the house pulled down—but Uncle Archibald wouldn't hear of it—because he had built it for his bride. The two brothers quarreled over it and were never good friends again. Everybody in the connection has taken a spell hunting for the diamond. Most folks think it fell out of the summer house among the flowers or shrubs. But I know better, Emily. I know Miriam Murray's diamond is somewhere about that old house yet. On moonlit nights, Emily, I've seen it glinting—glinting and beckoning. But never in the same place—and when you go to it—it's gone, and you see it laughing at you from somewhere else.”

Again there was that eerie, indefinable something in Cousin Jimmy's voice or look that gave Emily a sudden crinkly feeling in her spine. But she loved the way he talked to her, as if she were grown-up; and she loved the beautiful land around her; and, in spite of the ache for her father and the house in the hollow which persisted all the time and hurt her so much at night that her pillow was wet with secret tears, she was beginning to be a little glad again in sunset and bird song and early white stars, in moonlit nights and singing winds. She knew life was going to be wonderful here—wonderful and interesting, what with outdoor cook-houses and cream-girdled dairies and pond paths and sun-dials, and Lost Diamonds, and Disappointed Houses and men who didn't believe in
any
God—not even Ellen Greene's God. Emily hoped she would soon see Dr. Burnley. She was very curious to see what an infidel looked like. And she had already quite made up her mind that she would find the Lost Diamond.