Emily's Quest (9 page)

“You love that old cat more than you do me, Emily,” Dean once said – jestingly yet with an undernote of earnest.

“I
have
to love him,” defended Emily. “He's growing old.
You
have all the years before us. And I must always have a cat about. A house isn't a home without the ineffable contentment of a cat with its tail folded about its feet. A cat gives mystery, charm, suggestion. And you must have a dog.”

“I've never cared to have a dog since Tweed died. But perhaps I'll get one – an altogether different kind of a one. We'll need a dog to keep your cats in order. Oh, isn't it nice to feel that a place belongs to you?”

“It's far nicer to feel that you belong to a place,” said Emily, looking about her affectionately.

“Our house and we are going to be good friends,” agreed Dean.

They hung their pictures one day. Emily brought her favourites up, including the Lady Giovanna and Mona Lisa. These two were hung in the corner between the windows.

“Where your writing desk will be,” said Dean. “And Mona Lisa will whisper to you the ageless secret of her smile and you shall put it in a story.”

“I thought you didn't want me to write any more stories,” said Emily. “You've never seemed to like the fact of my writing.”

“That was when I was afraid it would take you away from me. Now, it doesn't matter. I want you to do just as pleases you.”

Emily felt indifferent. She had never cared to take up her pen since her illness. As the days passed she felt a growing distaste to the thought of ever taking it up. To think of it meant to think of the book she had burned; and
that
hurt beyond bearing. She had ceased to listen for her “random word” – she was an exile from her old starry kingdom.

“I'm going to hang old Elizabeth Bas by the fireplace,” said Dean. “Engraving from a portrait by Rembrandt. Isn't she a delightful old woman, Star, in her white cap and tremendous white ruff collar? And did you ever see such a shrewd, humorous, complacent, slightly contemptuous old face?”

“I don't think I should want to have an argument with Elizabeth,” reflected Emily. “One feels that she is keeping her hands folded under compulsion and might box your ears if you disagreed with her.”

“She has been dust for over a century,” said Dean dreamily “Yet here she is living on this cheap reprint of Rembrandt's canvas. You are expecting her to speak to you. And I feel, as you do, that she wouldn't put up with any nonsense.”

“But likely she has a sweetmeat stored away in some pocket of her gown for you. That fine, rosy, wholesome old woman.
She
ruled her family – not a doubt of it. Her husband did as she told him – but never knew it.”

“
Had
she a husband?” said Dean doubtfully. “There's no wedding-ring on her finger.”

“Then she must have been a most delightful old maid,” averred Emily.

“What a difference between her smile and Mona Lisa's,” said Dean, looking from one to the other. “Elizabeth is tolerating things – with just a hint of a sly, meditative cat about her. But Mona Lisa's face has that everlasting lure and provocation that drives men mad and writes scarlet pages on dim historical records. La Gioconda would be a more stimulating sweetheart. But Elizabeth would be nicer for an aunt.”

Dean hung a little old miniature of his mother up over the mantelpiece. Emily had never seen it before. Dean Priest's mother had been a beautiful woman.

“But why does she look so sad?”

“Because she was married to a Priest,” said Dean.

“Will I look sad?” teased Emily.

“Not if it rests with me,” said Dean.

But did it? Sometimes that question forced itself on Emily, but she would not answer it. She was very happy two-thirds of that summer – which she told herself was a high average. But in the other third were hours of which she never spoke to any one – hours in which her soul felt caught in a trap – hours when the great, green emerald winking on her
finger seemed like a fetter. And once she even took it off just to feel free for a little while – a temporary escape for which she was sorry and ashamed the next day, when she was quite sane and normal again, contented with her lot and more interested than ever in her little grey house, which meant so much to her – “more to me than Dean does,” she said to herself once in a three-o'clock moment of stark, despairing honesty; and then refused to believe it next morning.

Old Great-aunt Nancy of Priest Pond died that summer, very suddenly. “I'm tired of living. I think I'll stop,” she said one day – and stopped. None of the Murrays benefited by her will; everything she had was left to Caroline Priest; but Emily got the gazing-ball and the brass chessy-cat knocker and the gold ear-rings – and the picture Teddy had done of her in water-colours years ago. Emily put the chessy-cat on the front porch door of the Disappointed House and hung the great silvery gazing-ball from the Venetian lantern and wore the quaint old ear-rings to many rather delightful pomps and vanities. But she put the picture away in a box in the New Moon attic – a box that held certain sweet – old, foolish letters full of dreams and plans.

They had glorious minutes of fun when they stopped to rest occasionally. There was a robin's nest in the fir at the north corner which they watched and protected from Daffy.

“Think of the music penned in this fragile, pale blue wall,” said Dean, touching an egg one day. “Not the music
of the moon perhaps, but an earthlier, homelier music, full of wholesome sweetness and the joy of living. This egg will some day be a robin, Star, to whistle us blithely home in the afterlight.”

They made friends with an old rabbit that often came hopping out of the woods into the garden. They had a game as to who could count the most squirrels in the daytime and the most bats in the evening. For they did not always go home as soon as it got too dark to work. Sometimes they sat out on their sandstone steps listening to the melancholy loveliness of night-wind on the sea and watching the twilight creep up from the old valley and the shadows waver and flicker under the fir-trees and the Blair Water turning to a great grey pool tremulous with early stars. Daff sat beside them, watching everything with his great moonlight eyes, and Emily pulled his ears now and then.

“One understands a cat a little better now. At all other times he is inscrutable, but in the time of dusk and dew we can catch a glimpse of the tantalising secret of his personality.”

“One catches a glimpse of all kinds of secrets now,” said Dean. “On a night like this I always think of the ‘hills where spices grow.' That line of the old hymn Mother used to sing has always intrigued me – though I can't ‘fly like a youthful hart or roe.' Emily, I can see that you are getting your mouth in the proper shape to talk about the colour we'll paint the woodshed. Don't you do it. No one should talk paint when she's expecting a moonrise. There'll be a wonderful one presently– I've arranged for it. But if we
must
talk of furniture let's plan for a few things we haven't got yet and
must
have – a canoe for our boating trips along the Milky Way, for instance – a loom for the weaving of dreams and a jar of pixy-brew for
festal hours. And can't we arrange to have the spring of Ponce de Leon over in that corner? Or would you prefer a fount of Castaly? As for your trousseau, have what you like in it but there
must
be a gown of grey twilight with an evening star for your hair. Also trimmed with moonlight and a scarf of sunset cloud.”

Oh, she liked Dean.
How
she liked him. If she could only love him!

One evening she slipped up alone to see her little house by moonlight. What a dear place it was. She saw herself there in the future – flitting through the little rooms – laughing under the firs – sitting hand in hand with Teddy at the fireplace – Emily came to herself with a shock. With Dean, of course, with Dean. A mere trick of the memory.

There came a September evening when everything was done – even to the horseshoe over the door to keep the witches out – even to the candles Emily had struck all about the living-room – a little, jolly, yellow candle – a full, red, pugnacious candle – a dreamy, pale blue candle – a graceless candle with aces of hearts and diamonds all over it – a slim, dandyish candle.

And the result was good. There was a sense of harmony in the house. The things in it did not have to become acquainted but were good friends from the very start. They did not shriek at each other. There was not a noisy room in the house.

“There's absolutely nothing more we can do,” sighed Emily. “We can't even
pretend
there's anything more to do.”

“I suppose not,” agreed Dean regretfully. Then he looked at the fireplace where kindlings and pine wood were laid.

“Yes, there is,” he cried. “How could we have forgotten it? We've got to see if the chimney will draw properly. I'm going to light that fire.”

Emily sat down on the settee in the corner and when the fire began to burn Dean came and sat beside her. Daffy lay stretched out at their feet, his little striped flanks moving peacefully up and down.

Up blazed the merry flames. They shimmered over the old piano – they played irreverent hide-and-seek with Elizabeth Bas' adorable old face – they danced on the glass doors of the cupboard where the willow-ware dishes were; they darted through the kitchen door and the row of brown and blue bowls Emily had ranged on the dresser winked back at them.

“This is home,” said Dean softly. “It's lovelier than I've ever dreamed of its being. This is how we'll sit on autumn evenings all our lives, shutting out the cold misty nights that come in from the sea – just you and I alone with the firelight and the sweetness. But sometimes we'll let a friend come in and share it – sip of our joy and drink of our laughter. We'll just sit here and think about it all – till the fire burns out.”

The fire crackled and snapped. Daffy purred. The moon shone down through the dance of the fir-boughs straight on them through the windows. And Emily was thinking – could not help thinking – of the time she and Teddy had sat there. The odd part was that she did not think of him longingly or lovingly. She just thought of him. Would she, she asked herself, in mingled exasperation and dread, find herself thinking of Teddy when she was standing up to be married to Dean?

When the fire had died down into white ashes Dean got up.

“It was worth while to have lived long dreary years for this – and to live them again, if need be, looking back to it,”
he said, holding out his hand. He drew her nearer. What ghost came between the lips that might have met? Emily turned away with a sigh.

“Our happy summer is over, Dean.”

“
Our first
happy summer,” corrected Dean. But his voice suddenly sounded a little tired.

T
hey locked the door of the Disappointed House one November evening and Dean gave the key to Emily. “Keep it till spring,” he said, looking out over the quiet, cold, grey fields across which a chilly wind was blowing. “We won't come back here till then.”

In the stormy winter that followed, the cross-lots path to the little house was so heaped with drifts that Emily never went near it. But she thought about it often and happily, waiting amid its snows for spring and life and fulfilment. That winter was, on the whole, a happy time. Dean did not go away and made himself so charming to the older ladies of New Moon that they almost forgave him for being Jarback Priest. To be sure, Aunt Elizabeth never could understand more than half of his remarks and Aunt Laura put down to his debit account the change in Emily. For she was changed. Cousin Jimmy and Aunt Laura knew that, though no one else seemed to notice it. Often there was an odd restlessness in her eyes. And something was missing from her laughter. It was not so quick – so spontaneous as of old. She was a woman before her time, thought
Aunt Laura with a sigh. Was that dreadful fall down the New Moon stairs the only cause?
Was
Emily happy? Laura dared not ask.
Did
she love Dean Priest whom she was going to marry in June? Laura did not know; but she
did
know that love is something that cannot be generated by an intellectual rule o' thumb. Also that a girl who is as happy as an engaged girl should be does not spend so many hours when she should be sleeping pacing up and down her room. This was not to be explained away on the ground that Emily was thinking out stories. Emily had given up writing. In vain Miss Royal wrote pleading and scolding letters from New York. In vain Cousin Jimmy slyly laid a new Jimmy-book at intervals on her desk. In vain Laura timidly hinted that it was a pity not to keep on when you had made such a good start. Even Aunt Elizabeth's contemptuous assertion that she had always known Emily would get tired of it –”the Starr fickleness, you see” – failed to sting Emily back to her pen. She could not write – she would never try to write again.

“I've paid my debts and I've enough in the bank to get what Dean calls my wedding doo-dabs. And you've crocheted two filet spreads for me,” she told Aunt Laura a little wearily and bitterly. “So what does it matter?”

“Was it – your fall that took away your – your ambition?” faltered poor Aunt Laura, voicing what had been her haunting dread all winter.

Emily smiled and kissed her.

“No, darling. That had nothing to do with it. Why worry over a simple, natural thing? Here I am, going to be married, with a prospective house and husband to think about. Doesn't that explain why I've ceased to care about – other things?”

It should have, but that evening Emily went out of the house after sunset. Her soul was pining for freedom and she went out to slip its leash for a little while. It had been an April
day, warm in the sun, cold in the shadow. You felt the coldness even amid the sunlight warmth. The evening was chill. The sky was overcast with wrinkled, grey clouds, save along the west where a strip of yellow sky gleamed palely and in it, sad and fair, a new moon setting behind a dark hill. No living creature but herself seemed abroad and the cold shadows settling down over the withered fields lent to the landscape of too-early spring an aspect inexpressibly dreary and mournful. It made Emily feel hopeless, as if the best of life already lay in the past. Externals always had a great influence upon her – too great perhaps. Yet she was glad it was a dour evening. Anything else would have insulted her mood. She heard the sea shuddering beyond the dunes. An old verse from one of Roberts' poems came into her head:

Nonsense! Weak, silly, sentimental nonsense. No more of it!

But that letter from Ilse that day. Teddy was coming home. He was to sail on the
Flavian
. He was going to be home most of the summer.

“If it could only have been all over – before he came,” muttered Emily.

Always to be afraid of to-morrow? Content – even happy with to-day – but always afraid of to-morrow. Was this to be
her life? And
why
that fear of to-morrow?

She had brought the key of the Disappointed House with her. She had not been in it since November and she wanted to see it – beautiful, waiting, desirable.
Her
home. In its charm and sanity vague, horrible fears and doubts would vanish. The soul of that happy last summer would come back to her. She paused at the garden gate to look lovingly at it – the dear little house nestled under the old trees that sighed softly as they had sighed to her childhood visions. Below, Blair Water was grey and sullen. She loved Blair Water in all its changes – its sparkle of summer, its silver of dusk, its miracle of moonlight, its dimpled rings of rain. And she loved it now, dark and brooding. There was somehow a piercing sadness in that sullen, waiting landscape all around her – as if– the odd fancy crossed her mind – as if it were
afraid
of spring. How this idea of fear haunted her! She looked up beyond the spires of the Lombardies on the hill. And in a sudden pale rift between the clouds, a star shone down on her – Vega of the Lyre.

With a shiver Emily hurriedly unlocked the door and stepped in. The house seemed to be vacant – waiting for her. She fumbled through the darkness to the matches she knew were on the mantelpiece and lighted the tall, pale-green taper beside the clock. The beautiful room glimmered out at her in the flickering light – just as they had left it that last evening. There was Elizabeth Bas, who could never have known the meaning of fear – Mona Lisa, who mocked at it. But the Lady Giovanna, who never turned her saintly profile to look squarely at you. Had she ever known it – this subtle, secret fear that one could never put in words? – that would be so ridiculous if one could put it in words? Dean Priest's sad lovely mother. Yes, she had known fear; it looked out of her pictured eyes now in that dim, furtive light.

Emily shut the door and sat down in the armchair beneath Elizabeth Bas' picture. She could hear the dead, dry leaves of a dead summer rustling eerily on the beach just outside the window. And the wind – rising – rising – rising. But she liked it. “The wind is free – not a prisoner like me.” She crushed the unbidden thought down sternly. She would
not
think such things. Her fetters were of her own forging. She had put them on willingly, even desirously. Nothing to do but wear them gracefully.

How the sea moaned down there below the fields! But here in the little house what a silence there was! Something strange and uncanny about the silence. It seemed to hold some profound meaning. She would not have dared to speak lest
something
should answer her. Yet fear suddenly left her. She felt dreamy – happy – far away from life and reality. The walls of the shadowy room seemed slowly to fade from her vision. The pictures withdrew themselves. There seemed to be nothing before her but Great-aunt Nancy's gazing-ball hung from the old iron lantern – a big, silvery, gleaming globe. In it she saw the reflected room, like a shining doll's-house, with herself sitting in the old, low chair and the taper on the mantelpiece like a tiny, impish star. Emily looked at it as she leaned back in her chair – looked at it till she saw nothing but that tiny point of light in a great misty universe.

Did she sleep? Dream? Who knows? Emily herself never knew. Twice before in her life – once in delirium
*
– once in sleep
^†
– she
had drawn aside the veil of sense and time and seen beyond. Emily never liked to remember those experiences. She forgot them deliberately. She had not recalled them for years. A dream – a fancy fever-bred. But this?

A small cloud seemed to shape itself within the gazing-ball. It dispersed – faded. But the reflected doll's-house in the ball was gone. Emily saw an entirely different scene – a long lofty room filled with streams of hurrying people – and among them a face she knew.

The gazing-ball was gone – the room in the Disappointed House was gone. She was no longer sitting in her chair looking on. She was
in
that strange, great room – she was among those throngs of people – she was standing by the man who was waiting impatiently before a ticket-window. As he turned his face and their eyes met she saw that it was Teddy – she saw the amazed recognition in his eyes. And she knew, indisputably, that he was in some terrible danger – and that
she
must save him.

“Teddy.
Come
.”

It seemed to her that she caught his hand and pulled him away from the window. Then she was drifting back from him – back – back – and he was following – running after her – heedless of the people he ran into – following – following – she was back on the chair – outside of the gazing-ball – in it she still saw the station-room shrunk again to play-size – and that one figure running – still running – the cloud again – filling the ball – whitening – wavering – thinning – clearing. Emily was lying back in her chair staring fixedly into Aunt Nancy's gazing-ball, where the living-room was reflected calmly and silverly, with a dead-white spot that was her face and one solitary taper-light twinkling like an impish star.

Emily, feeling as if she had died and come back to life, got herself out of the Disappointed House somehow, and locked the door. The clouds had cleared away and the world was dim and unreal in starlight. Hardly realising what she was doing she turned her face seaward through the spruce wood – down the long, windy, pasture-field – over the dunes to the sand-shore – along it like a haunted, driven creature in a weird, uncanny half-lit kingdom. The sea afar out was like grey satin half hidden in a creeping fog but it washed against the sands as she passed in little swishing, mocking ripples. She was shut in between the misty sea and the high, dark sand-dunes. If she could only go on so forever – never have to turn back and confront the unanswerable question the night had put to her.

She
knew
, beyond any doubt or cavil or mockery, that she had seen Teddy – had saved, or tried to save him, from some unknown peril. And she knew, just as simply and just as surely that she loved him – had always loved him, with a love that lay at the very foundation of her being.

And in two months' time she was to be married to Dean Priest.

What could she do? To marry him now was unthinkable. She could not live such a lie. But to break his heart – snatch from him all the happiness possible to his thwarted life – that, too, was unthinkable.

Yes, as Ilse had said, it
was
a very devilish thing to be a woman.

“Particularly,” said Emily, filled with bitter self-contempt, “a woman who seemingly doesn't know her own mind for a month at a time. I was so sure last summer that Teddy no longer meant anything to me – so sure that I really cared enough for Dean to marry him. And now to-night – and that horrible
power or gift or curse coming again when I thought I had outgrown it – left it behind forever.”

Emily walked on that eerie sandshore half the night and slipped guiltily and stealthily into New Moon in the wee sma's to fling herself on her bed and fall at last into the absolute slumber of exhaustion.

A very ghastly time followed. Fortunately Dean was away having gone to Montreal on business. It was during his absence that the world was horrified by the tragedy of the
Flavian's
fatal collision with an iceberg. The headlines struck Emily in the face like a blow. Teddy was to have sailed on the
Flavian
– Had he – had he? Who could tell her? Perhaps his mother – his queer, solitary mother who hated her with a hatred that Emily always felt like a tangible thing between them. Hitherto Emily would have shrunk unspeakably from seeking Mrs. Kent. Now nothing mattered except finding out if Teddy were on the
Flavian
. She hurried to the Tansy Patch. Mrs. Kent came to the door – unaltered in all the years since Emily had first known her – frail, furtive, with her bitter mouth and that disfiguring red scar across her paleness. Her face changed as it always did when she saw Emily. Hostility and fear contended in her dark, melancholy eyes.

“Did Teddy sail on the
Flavian!”
demanded Emily without circumlocution.

Mrs. Kent smiled – an unfriendly little smile.

“Does it matter to you?” she said.

“Yes.” Emily was very blunt. The “Murray look” was on her face – the look few people could encounter undefeatedly “If you know – tell me.”

Mrs. Kent told her, unwillingly, hating her, shaking like a little dead leaf quivering with a semblance of life in a cruel wind.

“He did not. I had a cable from him to-day. At the last moment he was prevented from sailing.”

“Thank you.” Emily turned away, but not before Mrs. Kent had seen the joy and triumph that had leaped into her shadowy eyes. She sprang forward and caught Emily's arm.

“It is nothing to you,” she cried wildly. “Nothing to you whether he is safe or not. You are going to marry another man. How dare you come here – demanding to know of my son – as if you had a right?”

Emily looked down at her pityingly, understandingly. This poor creature whose jealousy, coiled in her soul like a snake, had made life a vale of torment for her.

“No right perhaps – except the right of loving him,” she said.

Mrs. Kent struck her hands together wildly.

“You – you dare to say that – you who are to marry another man?”

“I am not going to marry another man,” Emily found herself saying. It was quite true. For days she had not known what to do – now quite unmistakably she knew what she must do. Dreadful as it would be, still something that must be done. Everything was suddenly clear and bitter and inevitable before her.