Emily of New Moon
ache, but its colour certainly did set off Ilse’s wonderful hair. She
engulfed Emily in a rapturous embrace and quarrelled bitterly with her
ten minutes later over the fact that Emily refused to give her Saucy
Sal’s sole surviving kitten.
“I ought to have it, you doddering hyena,” stormed Ilse. “It’s as much
mine as yours, pig! Our old barn cat is its father.”
“Such talk is not decent,” said Aunt Elizabeth, pale with horror. “And
if you two children are going to quarrel over that kitten I’ll have it
drowned--remember that.”
Ilse was finally appeased by Emily’s offering to let her name the
kitten and have a half interest in it. Ilse named it Daffodil. Emily
did not think this suitable, since, from the fact of Cousin Jimmy
referring to it as Little Tommy, she suspected it was of the sterner
sex. But rather than again provoke Aunt Elizabeth’s wrath by discussing
tabooed subjects, she agreed.
“I can call it Daff,” she thought. “That sounds more _masculine_.”
The kitten was a delicate bit of striped greyness that reminded Emily
of her dear lost Mikes. And it smelled so nice--of warmth and clean
furriness, with whiffs of the clover hay where Saucy Sal had made her
mother-nest.
After supper she heard Teddy’s whistle in the old orchard--the same
enchanting call. Emily flew out to greet him--after all, there was
nobody just like Teddy in the world. They had an ecstatic scamper up to
the Tansy Patch to see a new puppy that Dr. Burnley had given Teddy.
Mrs. Kent did not seem very glad to see Emily--she was colder and more
remote than ever, and she sat and watched the two children playing with
the chubby little pup with a smouldering fire in her dark eyes that
made Emily vaguely uncomfortable whenever she happened to glance up and
encounter it. Never before had she sensed Mrs. Kent’s dislike for her
so keenly as that night.
“Why doesn’t your mother like me?” she asked Teddy bluntly, when they
carried little Leo to the barn for the night.
“Because _I_ do,” said Teddy briefly. “She doesn’t like _anything_ I
like. I’m afraid she’ll poison Leo very soon. I--I wish she wasn’t
so fond of me,” he burst out, in the beginning of a revolt against
this abnormal jealousy of love, which he felt rather than understood
to be a fetter that was becoming galling. “She says she won’t let me
take up Latin and Algebra this year--you know Miss Brownell said I
might--because I’m not to go to college. She says she can’t bear to
part from me--ever. I don’t care about the Latin and stuff--but I want
to learn to be an artist--I want to go away some day to the schools
where they teach that. She won’t let me--she hates my pictures now
because she thinks I like them better than her. I _don’t_--I love
Mother--she’s awful sweet and good to me every other way. But she
thinks I do--and she’s burned some of them. I know she has. They’re
missing from the barn wall and I can’t find them anywhere. If she does
anything to Leo--I’ll--I’ll _hate_ her.”
“Tell her that,” said Emily coolly, with some of the Murray shrewdness
coming uppermost in her. “She doesn’t know that _you_ know she poisoned
Smoke and Buttercup. Tell her you do know it and that if she does
anything to Leo you won’t love her any more. She’ll be so frightened
of your _not_ loving her that she won’t meddle with Leo--I _know_.
Tell her gently--don’t hurt her feelings--but _tell_ her. It will,”
concluded Emily, with a killing imitation of Aunt Elizabeth delivering
an ultimatum, “be better for all concerned.”
“I believe I will,” said Teddy, much impressed. “I _can’t_ have Leo
disappear like my cats did--he’s the only dog I’ve ever had and I’ve
always wanted a dog. Oh, Emily, I’m glad you’re back!”
It was very nice to be told this--especially by Teddy. Emily went home
to New Moon happily. In the old kitchen the candles were lighted and
their flames were dancing in the winds of the August night blowing
through door and window.
“I suppose you’ll not like candles very well, Emily, after being used
to lamps at Wyther Grange,” said Aunt Laura with a little sigh. It was
one of the bitter, small things in Laura Murray’s life that Elizabeth’s
tyranny extended to candles.
Emily looked around her thoughtfully. One candle sputtered and bobbed
at her as if greeting her. One, with a long wick, glowed and smouldered
like a sulky little demon. One had a tiny flame--a sly, meditative
candle. One swayed with a queer fiery grace in the draught from the
door. One burned with a steady upright flame like a faithful soul.
“I--don’t know--Aunt Laura,” she answered slowly. “You can
be--friends--with candles. I believe I like the candles best after all.”
Aunt Elizabeth, coming in from the cook-house, heard her. Something
like pleasure gleamed in her gulf-blue eyes.
“You have some sense in you,” she said.
“That’s the second compliment she has paid me,” thought Emily.
“I think Emily has grown taller since she went to Wyther Grange,” Aunt
Laura said, looking at her rather wistfully.
Aunt Elizabeth, snuffing the candles, glanced sharply over her glasses.
“I can’t see it,” she said. “Her dress is just the same length on her.”
“I’m sure she has,” persisted Laura.
Cousin Jimmy, to settle the dispute, measured Emily by the sitting-room
door. She just touched the former mark.
“You see,” said Aunt Elizabeth triumphantly, liking to be right even in
this small matter.
“She looks--different,” said Laura with a sigh.
Laura, after all, was right. Emily _had_ grown, taller and older, in
soul, if not in body. It was this change which Laura felt, as close
and tender affection swiftly feels. The Emily who returned from Wyther
Grange was not the Emily who had gone there. She was no longer wholly
the child. Aunt Nancy’s family histories over which she had pondered,
her enduring anguish over the story of Ilse’s mother, that terrible
hour when she had lain cheek by jowl with death on the cliffs of the
bay shore, her association with Dean Priest, all had combined to mature
her intelligence and her emotions. When she went to the garret next
morning and pulled out her precious little bundle of manuscripts to
read them lovingly over she was amazed and rather grieved to find that
they were not half so good as she had believed they were. Some of them
were positively silly, she thought; she was ashamed of them--so ashamed
that she smuggled them down to the cook-house stove and burned them,
much to Aunt Elizabeth’s annoyance when she came to prepare dinner and
found the fire-box all choked up with charred paper.
Emily no longer wondered that Miss Brownell had made fun of
them--though this did not mellow her bitterness of remembrance in
regard to that lady in any degree. The rest she put back on the sofa
shelf, including “The Child of the Sea,” which still impressed her as
fairly good, though not just the wonderful composition she had once
deemed it. She felt that many passages could be re-written to their
advantage. Then she immediately began writing a new poem, “On Returning
Home After Weeks’ Absence.” As everything and everybody connected with
New Moon had to be mentioned in this poem it promised to be quite long
and to furnish agreeable occupation for spare minutes in many weeks to
come. It was very good to be home again.
“There is no place just like dear New Moon,” thought Emily.
One thing that marked her return--one of those little household
“epochs” that make a keener impression on the memory and imagination
than perhaps their real importance warrants--was the fact that she was
given a room of her own. Aunt Elizabeth had found her unshared slumber
too sweet a thing to be again surrendered. She decided that she could
not put up any longer with a squirming bedfellow who asked unearthly
questions at any hour of the night she took it into her head to do so.
So, after a long conference with Laura, it was settled that Emily was
to have her mother’s room--the “lookout” as it was called, though
it was not really a lookout. But it occupied the place in New Moon,
looking over the front door to the garden, that the real lookouts did
in other Blair Water houses, so it went by that name. It had been
prepared for Emily’s occupancy in her absence and when bedtime came on
the first evening of her return Aunt Elizabeth curtly told her that
henceforth she was to have her mother’s room.
“All to myself?” exclaimed Emily.
“Yes. We will expect you to take care of it yourself and keep it very
tidy.”
“It has never been slept in since the night before your mother--went
away,” said Aunt Laura, with a queer sound in her voice--a sound of
which Aunt Elizabeth disapproved.
“Your mother,” she said, looking coldly at Emily over the flame of the
candle--an attitude that gave a rather gruesome effect to her acquiline
features--“_ran_ away--flouted her family and broke her father’s heart.
She was a silly, ungrateful, disobedient girl. I hope _you_ will never
disgrace your family by such conduct.”
“Oh, Aunt Elizabeth,” said Emily breathlessly, “when you hold the
candle down like that it makes your face look just like a corpse! Oh,
it’s so interesting.”
Aunt Elizabeth turned and led the way upstairs in grim silence. There
was no use in wasting perfectly good admonitions on a child like this.
Left alone in her lookout, lighted dimly by the one small candle, Emily
gazed about her with keen and thrilling interest. She could not get
into bed until she had explored every bit of it. The room was very
old-fashioned, like all the New Moon rooms. The walls were papered with
a design of slender gilt diamonds enclosing golden stars and hung with
worked woollen mottoes and pictures that had been “supplements” in the
girlhood of her aunts. One of them, hanging over the head of the bed,
represented two guardian angels. In its day this had been much admired
but Emily looked at it with distaste.
“I don’t like feather wings on angels,” she said decidedly. “Angels
should have rainbowy wings.”
On the floor was a pretty homespun carpet and round braided rugs. There
was a high black bedstead with carved posts, a fat feather-bed, and an
Irish chain quilt, but, as Emily was glad to see, no curtains. A little
table, with funny claw-feet and brass-knobbed drawers, stood by the
window, which was curtained with muslin frills; one of the window-panes
contorted the landscape funnily, making a hill where no hill was. Emily
liked this--she couldn’t have told why, but it was really because
it gave the pane an individuality of its own. An oval mirror in a
tarnished gilt frame hung above the table; Emily was delighted to
find she could see herself in it--“all but my boots”--without craning
or tipping it. “And it doesn’t twist my face or turn my complexion
green,” she thought happily. Two high-backed, black chairs with
horsehair seats, a little washstand with a blue basin and pitcher, and
a faded ottoman with woollen roses cross-stitched on it, completed the
furnishing. On the little mantel were vases full of dried and coloured
grasses and a fascinating pot-bellied bottle filled with West Indian
shells. On either side were lovable little cupboards with leaded-glass
doors like those in the sitting-room. Underneath was a small fireplace.
“I wonder if Aunt Elizabeth will ever let me have a little fire here,”
thought Emily.
The room was full of that indefinable charm found in all rooms where
the pieces of furniture, whether old or new, are well acquainted with
each other and the walls and floors are on good terms. Emily felt it
all over her as she flitted about examining everything. This was her
room--she loved it already--she felt perfectly at home.
“I belong here,” she breathed happily.
She felt deliciously _near_ to her mother--as if Juliet Starr had