Emily's Quest (10 page)

“I cannot marry another man, Mrs. Kent, because I love Teddy. But he does not love me. I know that quite well. So you need not hate me any longer.”

She turned and went swiftly away from the Tansy Patch. Where was her pride, she wondered – the pride of “the proud Murrays” – that she could so calmly acknowledge an unsought, unwanted love. But pride just then had no place in her.

W
hen the letter came from Teddy – the first letter for so long – Emily's hand trembled so that she could hardly open it.

“I must tell you of the strange thing that has happened,” he wrote. “Perhaps you know it already. And perhaps you know nothing and will think me quite mad. I don't know what to think of it myself. I know only what I saw – or thought I saw.

“I was waiting to buy my ticket for the boat-train to Liverpool – I was to sail on the
Flavian
. Suddenly I felt a touch on my arm – I turned and saw
you
. I swear it. You said, ‘Teddy – come.' I was so amazed I could not think or speak. I could only follow you. You were running – no,
not
running. I don't know how you went – I only knew that you were retreating. How rotten this all sounds.
Was
I crazy? And all at once you weren't there – though we were by now away from the crowd in an open space where nothing could have prevented me from seeing you. Yet I looked everywhere – and came to my senses to realise that the boat-train had gone
and I had lost my passage on the
Flavian
. I was furious – ashamed – until the news came. Then – I felt my scalp crinkle.

“Emily – you're not in England? It can't be possible you are in England. But then – what was it I saw in that station?

“Anyhow, I suppose it saved my life. If I had gone on the
Flavian
– well, I didn't. Thanks to – what?

“I'll be home soon. Will sail on the
Moravian
– if you don't prevent me again. Emily, I heard a queer story of you long ago – something about Ilse's mother. I've almost forgotten. Take care. They don't burn witches nowadays, of course – but still –”

No, they don't burn witches. But still – Emily felt that she could have more easily faced the stake than what was before her.

Emily went up the hill path to keep tryst with Dean at the Disappointed House. She had had a note from him that day, written on his return from Montreal, asking her to meet him there at dusk. He was waiting for her on the doorstep – eagerly, happily. The robins were whistling softly in the fir copse and the evening was fragrant with the tang of balsam. But the air all about them was filled with the strangest, saddest, most unforgettable sound in nature – the soft, ceaseless wash on a distant shore on a still evening of the breakers of a spent storm. A sound rarely heard and always to be remembered. It is even more mournful than the rain-wind of night – the heartbreak and despair of all creation is in it. Dean took a quick step forward to meet her – then stopped abruptly. Her face – her eyes – what had happened to Emily in his absence?
This
was not Emily – this strange, white, remote girl of the pale twilight. “Emily – what is it?” asked Dean – knowing before she told him.

Emily looked at him. If you had to deal a mortal blow why try to lighten it?

“I can't marry you after all, Dean,” she said. “I don't love you.”

That was all she could say. No excuses – no self-defence. There was none she could make. But it was shocking to see all the happiness wiped out of a human face like that.

There was a little pause – a pause that seemed an eternity with that unbearable sorrow of the sea throbbing through it. Then Dean said still quietly:

“I knew you didn't love me. Yet you were – content to marry me – before this. What has made it impossible?”

It was his right to know. Emily stumbled through her silly, incredible tale.

“You see,” she concluded miserably, “when – I can call like that to him across space – I belong to him. He doesn't love me – he never will – but I belong to him…. Oh, Dean, don't look so. I
had to
tell you this – but if you wish it – I
will
marry you – only I felt you must know the whole truth – when I knew it myself.”

“Oh, a Murray of New Moon always keeps her word.” Dean's face twisted mockingly. “You will marry me – if I want you to. But I don't want it – now. I see how impossible it is just as clearly as you do. I will not marry a woman whose heart is another man's.”

“Can you ever forgive me, Dean?”

“What is there to forgive? I can't help loving you and you can't help loving him. We must let it go at that. Even the gods can't unscramble eggs. I should have known that only youth could call to youth – and I was never young. If I ever had been, even though I am old now, I might have held you.”

He dropped his poor grey face in his hands. Emily found herself thinking what a nice, pleasant, friendly thing death would be.

But when Dean looked up again his face had changed. It had the old, mocking, cynical look.

“Don't look so tragic, Emily. A broken engagement is a very slight thing nowadays. And it's an ill wind that blows nobody good. Your aunts will thank whatever gods there be and my own clan will think that I have escaped as a bird out of the snare of the fowler. Still – I rather wish that old Highland Scotch grandmother who passed that dangerous chromosome down to you had taken her second sight to the grave with her.”

Emily put her hands against the little porch column and laid her head against them. Dean's face changed again as he looked at her. His voice when he spoke was very gentle – though cold and pale. All the brilliance and colour and warmth had gone from it.

“Emily, I give your life back to you. It has been mine, remember, since I saved you that day on Malvern rocks. It's your own again. And we must say good-bye at last – in spite of our old compact. Say it briefly – ‘all farewells should be sudden when forever.'”

Emily turned and caught at his arm.

“Oh, not good-bye, Dean – not good-bye. Can't we be friends still? I can't live without your friendship.”

Dean took her face in his hands – Emily's cold face that he had once dreamed might flush against his kiss – and looked gravely and tenderly into it.

“We can't be friends again, dear.”

“Oh, you will forget – you will not always care –”

“A man must die to forget you, I think. No, Star, we cannot be friends. You will not have my love and it has driven everything else out. I am going away. When I am old – really old – I will come back and we will be friends again, perhaps.”

“I can never forgive myself.”

“Again I ask what for? I do not reproach you – I even thank you for this year. It has been a royal gift to me. Nothing can ever take it from me. After all, I would not give that last perfect summer of mine for a generation of other men's happiness. My Star – my Star!”

Emily looked at him, the kiss she had never given him in her eyes. What a lonely place the world would be when Dean was gone – the world that had all at once grown very old. And would she ever be able to forget his eyes with that terrible expression of pain in them?

If he had gone then she would never have been quite free – always fettered by those piteous eyes and the thought of the wrong she had done him. Perhaps Dean realised this, for there was a hint of some malign triumph in his parting smile as he turned away. He walked down the path – he paused with his hand on the gate – he turned and came back.

“Emily, I've something to confess, too. May as well get it off my conscience. A lie – an ugly thing. I won you by a lie, I think. Perhaps that is why I couldn't keep you.”

“A lie?”

“You remember that book of yours? You asked me to tell you the truth about what I thought of it? I didn't. I lied. It is a good piece of work – very good. Oh, some faults in it of
course – a bit emotional – a bit over-strained. You still need pruning – restraint. But it is good. It is out of the ordinary both in conception and development. It has charm and your characters
do
live. Natural, human, delightful. There, you know what I think of it now.”

Emily stared at him, a hot flush suddenly staining the pallor of her tortured little face.

“Good? And I burned it,” she said in a whisper.

Dean started.

“You – burned it!”

“Yes. And I can never write it again. Why – why did you lie to me?
You
?”

“Because I hated the book. You were more interested in it than in me. You
would have
found a publisher eventually – and it would have been successful. You would have been lost to me. How ugly some motives look when you put them into words. And you burned it? It seems very idle to say I'm bitterly sorry for all this. Idle to ask your forgiveness.”

Emily pulled herself together. Something had happened – she was really free – free from remorse, shame, regret. Her own woman once more. The balance hung level between them.

“I must not hold a grudge against Dean for this – like old Hugh Murray,” she thought confusedly. Aloud – “But I do – I do forgive it, Dean.”

“Thank you.” He looked up at the little grey house behind her. “So this is still to be the Disappointed House. Verily, there is a doom on it. Houses, like people, can't escape their doom, it seems.”

Emily averted her gaze from the little house she had loved – still loved. It would never be hers now. It was still to be haunted by the ghosts of things that never happened.

“Dean – here is the key.”

Dean shook his head. “Keep it till I ask for it. What use would it be to me? The house can be sold, I suppose – though that seems like sacrilege.”

There was still something more. Emily held out her left hand with averted face. Dean must take off the emerald he had put on. She felt it drawn from her finger, leaving a little cold band where it had warmed against her flesh, like a spectral circlet. It had often seemed to her like a fetter, but she felt sick with regret when she realised it was gone – forever. For with it went something that had made life beautiful for years – Dean's wonderful friendship and companionship. To miss that – forever. She had not known how bitter a thing freedom could be.

When Dean had limped out of sight Emily went home. There was nothing else to do. With her mocking triumph that Dean had at last admitted she could write.

If Emily's engagement to Dean had made a commotion in the clans the breaking of it brewed a still wilder teapot tempest. The Priests were exultant and indignant at one and the same time, but the inconsistent Murrays were furious. Aunt Elizabeth had steadily disapproved of the engagement, but she disapproved still more strongly of its breaking. What would people think? And many things were said about “the Starr fickleness.”

“Did you,” demanded Uncle Wallace sarcastically, “expect that girl to remain in the same mind from one day to another?”

All the Murrays said things, according to their separate flavour, but for some reason Andrew's dictum rankled with the
keenest venom in Emily's bruised spirit. Andrew had picked up a word somewhere – he said Emily was “temperamental.” Half the Murrays did not know just what it meant but they pounced on it eagerly. Emily was “temperamental” – just that. It explained everything – henceforth it clung to her like a burr. If she wrote a poem – if she didn't like carrot pudding when everybody else in the clan did – if she wore her hair low when every one else was wearing it high – if she liked a solitary ramble over moonlit hills – if she looked some mornings as if she had not slept – if she took a notion to study the stars through a field-glass – if it was whispered that she had been seen dancing alone by moonlight among the coils of a New Moon hayfield – if tears came into her eyes at the mere glimpse of some beauty – if she loved a twilight tryst in the “old orchard” better than a dance in Shrewsbury – it was all because she was temperamental. Emily felt herself alone in a hostile world. Nobody, not even Aunt Laura, understood. Even Ilse wrote rather an odd letter, every sentence of which contradicted some other sentence and left Emily with a nasty, confused feeling that Ilse loved her as much as ever but thought her “temperamental” too. Could Ilse, by any chance, have suspected the fact that, as soon as Perry Miller heard that “everything was off” between Dean Priest and Emily Starr, he had come out to New Moon and again asked Emily to promise to marry him? Emily had made short work of him, after a fashion which made Perry vow disgustedly that he was done with the proud monkey. But then he had vowed that so many times before.

“May 4, 19–     

“O
ne o'clock is a somewhat unearthly hour to be writing in a journal. The truth is, I've been under a white night. I can't sleep and I'm tired of lying in the dark fancying things – unpleasant things – so I've lighted my candle and hunted up my old diary to ‘write it out.'

“I've never written in this journal since the night I burned my book and fell downstairs – and died. Coming back to life to find everything changed and all things made new. And unfamiliar and dreadful. It seems a life-time ago. As I turn over the pages and glance at those gay, light-hearted entries I wonder if they were really written by me, Emily Byrd Starr.

“Night is beautiful when you are happy – comforting when you are in grief – terrible when you are lonely and unhappy. And to-night I have been horribly lonely. Misery overwhelmed me. I seem never to be able to stop halfway in any emotion and when loneliness does seize hold on me it takes possession of me body and soul and wrings me in its blank
pain until all strength and courage go out of me. To-night I am lonely – lonely. Love will not come to me – friendship is lost to me – most of all, as I verily feel, I cannot write. I have tried repeatedly and failed. The old creative fire seems to have burned out into ashes and I cannot rekindle it. All the evening I tried to write a story – a wooden thing in which wooden puppets moved when I jerked the strings. I finally tore it into a thousand pieces and felt that I did God service.

“These past weeks have been bitter ones. Dean has gone – where I know not. He has never written – never will, I suppose. Not to be getting letters from Dean when he is away seems strange and unnatural.

“And yet it is terribly sweet to be free once more.

“Ilse writes me that she is to be home for July and August. Also that Teddy will be, too. Perhaps this latter fact partly accounts for my white night. I want to run away before he comes.

“I have never answered the letter he wrote me after the sinking of the
Flavian
. I could not. I could not write of
that
. And if when he comes he speaks of it – I shall not be able to bear it. Will he guess that it is because I love him that I was able to set at naught the limitations of time and space to save him? I am ready to die of shame at thought of it. And at thought of what I said to Mrs. Kent. Yet somehow I have never been able to wish
that
unsaid. There was a strange relief in the stark honesty of it. I am not afraid she will ever tell him what I said. She would never have him know I cared if she could prevent it.

“But I'd like to know how I am to get through the summer.

“There are times when I hate life. Other times again when I love it fiercely with an agonised realisation of how beautiful it is – or might be – if –

“Before Dean went away he boarded up all the windows of the Disappointed House. I never go where I can see it. But I
do
see it for all that. Waiting there on its hill – waiting – dumb – blind. I have never taken my things out of it – which Aunt Elizabeth thinks a sure indication of insanity. And I don't think Dean did either. Nothing has been touched. Mona Lisa is still mocking in the gloom and Elizabeth Bas is tolerantly contemptuous of temperamental idiots and the Lady Giovanna understands it all. My dear little house! And it is never to be a home. I feel as I felt that evening years ago when I followed the rainbow – and lost it. ‘There will be other rainbows' I said then. But will there be?

“May 15, 19–     

“This has been a lyric spring day – and a miracle has happened. It happened at dawn – when I was leaning out of my window, listening to a little, whispering tricksy wind o' morning blowing out of Lofty John's bush. Suddenly – the flash came – again – after these long months of absence – my old inexpressible glimpse of eternity. And all at once I knew I could write. I rushed to my desk and seized my pen. All the hours of early morning I wrote; and when I heard Cousin Jimmy going downstairs I flung down my pen and bowed my head over my desk in utter thankfulness that I could work again.

“So wrote Elizabeth Barret Browning – and truly It is hard to understand why work should be called a curse – until one remembers what bitterness forced or uncongenial labour is. But the work for which we are fitted – which we feel we are sent into the world to do – what a blessing it is and what fulness of joy it holds. I felt this to-day as the old fever burned in my finger-tips and my pen once more seemed a friend.

“‘Leave to work' – one would think any one could obtain so much. But sometimes anguish and heartbreak forbid us the leave. And then we realise what we have lost and know that it is better to be cursed by God than forgotten by Him. If He had punished Adam and Eve by sending them out to
idleness
, then indeed they would have been outcast and accursed. Not all the dreams of Eden ‘whence the four great rivers flow' could have been as sweet as those I am dreaming to-night, because the power to work has come back to me.

“Oh, God, as long as I live give me ‘leave to work.' Thus pray I. Leave and courage.”

“M
AY
25, 19–     

“Dear sunshine, what a potent medicine you are. All day I revelled in the loveliness of the wonderful white bridal world. And to-night I washed my soul free from dust in the aerial bath of a spring twilight. I chose the old hill road over the Delectable Mountain for its solitude and wandered happily along, pausing every few moments to think out fully some thought or fancy that came to me like a winged spirit. Then I prowled about the hill fields till long after dark,
studying the stars with my field-glass. When I came in I felt as if I had been millions of miles away in the blue ether and all my old familiar surroundings seemed momentarily forgotten and strange.

“But there was one star at which I did not look. Vega of the Lyre.”

“May 30, 19–     

“This evening, just when I was in the middle of a story Aunt Elizabeth said she wanted me to weed the onion-bed. So I had to lay down my pen and go out to the kitchen garden. But one can weed onions and think wonderful things at the same time, glory be. It is one of the blessings that we don't always have to put our souls into what our hands may be doing, praise the gods – for otherwise who would have any soul left? So I weeded the onion-bed and roamed the Milky Way in imagination.

“June 10, 19–     

“Cousin Jimmy and I felt like murderers last night. We were. Baby-killers at that!

“It is one of the springs when there is a crop of maple-trees. Every key that fell from a maple this year seems to have grown. All over the lawn and garden and old orchard tiny maple-trees have sprung up by the hundreds. And of course they have to be rooted out. It would never do to let them grow. So we pulled them up all day yesterday and felt so mean and guilty over it. The dear, tiny, baby things. They have a right to
grow – a right to keep on growing into great, majestic, splendid trees. Who are we to deny it to them? I caught Cousin Jimmy in tears over the brutal necessity.

“‘I sometimes think,' he whispered, ‘that it's wrong to prevent anything from growing. I never grew up – not in my head.'

“And last night I had a horrible dream of being pursued by thousands of indignant young maple-tree ghosts. They crowded around me – tripped me up – thrashed me with their boughs – smothered me with their leaves. And I woke gasping for breath and nearly frightened to death, but with a splendid idea for a story in my head –
The Vengeance of the Tree
.”

“June 15, 19–     

“I picked strawberries on the banks of Blair Water this afternoon among the windy, sweet-smelling grasses. I love picking strawberries. The occupation has in it something of perpetual youth. The gods might have picked strawberries on high Olympus without injuring their dignity. A queen – or a poet – might stoop to it; a beggar has the privilege.

“And to-night I've been sitting here in my dear old room, with my dear books and dear pictures and dear little window of the kinky panes, dreaming in the soft, odorous summer twilight, while the robins are calling to each other in Lofty John's bush and the poplars are talking eerily of old, forgotten things.

“After all, it's not a bad old world – and the folks in it are not half bad either. Even Emily Byrd Starr is decent in spots. Not altogether the false, fickle, ungrateful perversity she thinks she is in the wee sma's – not altogether the friendless, forgotten maiden she imagines she is on white nights – not
altogether the failure she supposes bitterly when three MSS. are rejected in succession. And
not
altogether the coward she feels herself to be when she thinks of Frederick Kent's coming to Blair Water in July.”