Emily of New Moon
impressively as she turned to go out of the room, “though I may not
be very good-looking now, when I go to heaven I believe I’ll be very
beautiful.”
“Some people think Emily quite pretty,” said Aunt Laura, but she did
not say it until Emily was out of hearing. She was Murray enough for
that.
“I don’t know where they see it,” said Aunt Ruth. “She’s vain and
pert and says things to be thought smart. You heard her just now. But
the thing I dislike most in her is that she is un-childlike--and deep
as the sea. Yes, she is, Laura--deep as the sea. You’ll find it out
to your cost one day if you disregard my warning. She’s capable of
anything. Sly is no word for it. You and Elizabeth don’t keep a tight
enough rein over her.”
“I’ve done my best,” said Elizabeth stiffly. She herself did think
she had been much too lenient with Emily--Laura and Jimmy were two to
one--but it nettled her to have Ruth say so.
Uncle Wallace also had an attack of worrying over Emily that winter.
He looked at her one day when he was at New Moon and remarked that she
was getting to be a big girl.
“How old are you, Emily?” He asked her that every time he came to New
Moon.
“Thirteen in May.”
“H’m. What are you going to do with her, Elizabeth?”
“I don’t know what you mean,” said Aunt Elizabeth coldly--or as
coldly as is possible to speak when one is pouring melted tallow into
candle-moulds.
“Why, she’ll soon be grown up. She can’t expect you to provide for her
indefinitely”--
“I don’t,” Emily whispered resentfully under her breath.
“--and it’s time we decided what is best to be done for her.”
“The Murray women have never had to work out for a living,” said Aunt
Elizabeth, as if that disposed of the matter.
“Emily is only half Murray,” said Wallace. “Besides, times are
changing. You and Laura will not live forever, Elizabeth, and when you
are gone New Moon goes to Oliver’s Andrew. In my opinion Emily should
be fitted to support herself if necessary.”
Emily did not like Uncle Wallace but she was very grateful to him at
that moment. Whatever his motives were he was proposing the very thing
she secretly yearned for.
“I would suggest,” said Uncle Wallace, “that she be sent to Queen’s
Academy to get a teacher’s license. Teaching is a genteel, lady-like
occupation. _I_ will do my share in providing for the expense of it.”
A blind person might have seen that Uncle Wallace thought this very
splendid of himself.
“If you do,” thought Emily, “I’ll pay every cent back to you as soon as
I’m able to earn it.”
But Aunt Elizabeth was adamant.
“I do not believe in girls going out into the world,” she said. “I
don’t mean Emily to go to Queen’s. I told Mr. Carpenter so when he
came to see me about her taking up the Entrance work. He was very
rude--school-teachers knew their place better in my father’s time. But
I made him understand, I think. I’m rather surprised at _you_, Wallace.
You did not send your own daughter out to work.”
“_My_ daughter had parents to provide for her,” retorted Uncle Wallace
pompously. “Emily is an orphan. I imagined from what I had heard about
her that she would prefer earning her own living to living on charity.”
“So I would,” cried out Emily. “So I would, Uncle Wallace. Oh, Aunt
Elizabeth, please let me study for the Entrance. Please! I’ll pay you
back every cent you spend on it--I will indeed. I pledge you my word of
honour.”
“It does not happen to be a question of money,” said Aunt Elizabeth
in her stateliest manner. “I undertook to provide for you, Emily, and
I will do it. When you are older I may send you to the High School in
Shrewbury for a couple of years. I am not decrying education. But you
are not going to be a slave to the public--no Murray girl ever was
_that_.”
Emily realising the uselessness of pleading, went out in the same
bitter disappointment she had felt after Mr. Carpenter’s visit. Then
Aunt Elizabeth looked at Wallace.
“Have you forgotten what came of sending Juliet to Queen’s?” she asked
significantly.
If Emily was not allowed to take up the Entrance classes, Perry
had no one to say him nay and he went at them with the same dogged
determination he showed in all other matters. Perry’s status at New
Moon had changed subtly and steadily. Aunt Elizabeth had ceased to
refer scornfully to him as “a hired boy.” Even she recognised that
though he was still indubitably a hired boy he was not going to remain
one, and she no longer objected to Laura’s patching up his ragged bits
of clothing, or to Emily’s helping him with his lessons in the kitchen
after supper, nor did she growl when Cousin Jimmy began to pay him a
certain small wage--though older boys than Perry were still glad to put
in the winter months choring for board and lodging in some comfortable
home. If a future premier was in the making at New Moon Aunt Elizabeth
wanted to have some small share in the making. It was credible and
commendable that a boy should have ambitions. A girl was an entirely
different matter. A girl’s place was at home.
Emily helped Perry work out algebra problems and heard his lessons in
French and Latin. She picked up more thus than Aunt Elizabeth would
have approved and more still when the Entrance pupils talked those
languages in school. It was quite an easy matter for a girl who had
once upon a time invented a language of her own. When George Bates,
by way of showing off, asked her one day in French--_his_ French, of
which Mr. Carpenter had once said doubtfully that perhaps God might
understand it--“Have you the ink of my grandmother and the shoebrush of
my cousin and the umbrella of my aunt’s husband in your desk?” Emily
retorted quite as glibly and _quite_ as Frenchily, “No, but I have the
pen of your father and the cheese of the innkeeper and the towel of
your uncle’s maidservant in my basket.”
To console herself for her disappointment in regard to the Entrance
class Emily wrote more poetry than ever. It was especially delightful
to write poetry on a winter evening when the storm winds howled without
and heaped the garden and orchard with big ghostly drifts, starred
over with rabbits’ candles. She also wrote several stories--desperate
love affairs wherein she struggled heroically against the difficulties
of affectionate dialogue; tales of bandits and pirates--Emily liked
these because there was no necessity for bandits and pirates to
converse lovingly; tragedies of earls and countesses whose conversation
she dearly loved to pepper with scraps of French; and a dozen other
subjects she didn’t know anything about. She also meditated beginning a
novel but decided it would be too hard to get enough paper for it. The
letter-bills were all done now and the Jimmy-books were not big enough,
though a new one always appeared mysteriously in her school basket when
the old one was almost full. Cousin Jimmy seemed to have an uncanny
prescience of the proper time--that was part of his Jimmyness.
Then one night, as she lay in her lookout bed and watched a full moon
gleaming lustrously from a cloudless sky across the valley, she had a
sudden dazzling idea.
She would send her latest poem to the Charlottetown _Enterprise_.
The _Enterprise_ had a Poet’s Corner where “original” verses were
frequently printed. Privately Emily thought her own were quite as
good--as probably they were, for most of the _Enterprise_ “poems” were
sad trash.
Emily was so excited over the idea that she could not sleep for the
greater part of the night--and didn’t want to. It was glorious to lie
there, thrilling in the darkness, and picture the whole thing out. She
saw her verses in print signed E. Byrd Starr--she saw Aunt Laura’s
eyes shining with pride--she saw Mr. Carpenter pointing them out to
strangers--“the work of a pupil of mine, by gad”--she saw all her
schoolmates envying her or admiring, according to type--she saw herself
with one foot at least firmly planted on the ladder of fame--one hill
at least of the Alpine Path crested, with a new and glorious prospect
opening therefrom.
Morning came. Emily went to school, so absent-minded because of her
secret that she did badly in everything and was raged at by Mr.
Carpenter. But it all slipped off her like the proverbial water off a
duck’s back. Her body was in Blair Water school but her spirit was in
kingdoms empyreal.
As soon as school was out she betook herself to the garret with half a
sheet of blue-lined notepaper. Very painstakingly she copied down the
poem, being especially careful to dot every _i_ and cross every _t_.
She wrote it on both sides of the paper, being in blissful ignorance
of any taboo thereon. Then she read it aloud delightedly, not omitting
the title _Evening Dreams_. There was one line in it she tasted two or
three times:
The haunting elfin music of the air.
“I think that line is _very_ good,” said Emily. “I wonder now how I
happened to think of it.”
She mailed her poem the next day and lived in a delicious mystic
rapture until the following Saturday. When the _Enterprise_ came she
opened it with tremulous eagerness and ice-cold fingers, and turned to
the Poet’s Corner. Now for her great moment!
There was not a sign of an Evening Dream about it!
Emily threw down the _Enterprise_ and fled to the garret dormer where,
face downward on the old haircloth sofa, she wept out her bitterness
of disappointment. She drained the draught of failure to the very
dregs. It was horribly real and tragic to her. She felt exactly as if
she had been slapped in the face. She was crushed in the very dust of
humiliation and was sure she could never rise again.
How thankful she was that she hadn’t told Teddy anything about it--she
had been so strongly tempted to, and only refrained because she didn’t
want to spoil the dramatic surprise of the moment when she would show
him the verses with her name signed to them. She _had_ told Perry,
and Perry was furious when he saw her tear-stained face later on in
the dairy, as they strained the milk together. Ordinarily Emily loved
this, but to-night the savour had gone out of the world. Even the
milky splendour of the still, mild winter evening and the purple bloom
over the hillside woods that presaged a thaw could not give her the
accustomed soul-thrill.
“I’m going to Charlottetown if I have to walk and I’ll bust that
_Enterprise_ editor’s head,” said Perry, with the expression which,
thirty years later, warned the members of his party to scatter for
cover.
“That wouldn’t be any use,” said Emily drearily. “He didn’t think it
good enough to print--that is what hurts me so, Perry--he didn’t think
it any good. Busting his head wouldn’t change _that_.”
It took her a week to recover from the blow. Then she wrote a story
in which the editor of the _Enterprise_ played the part of a dark and
desperate villain who found lodging eventually behind prison bars.
This got the venom out of her system and she forgot all about him in
the delight of writing a poem addressed to “Sweet Lady April.” But
I question if she ever really forgave him--even when she discovered
eventually that you must _not_ write on both sides of the paper--even
when she read over _Evening Dreams_ a year later and wondered how she
could ever have thought it any good.
This sort of thing was happening frequently now. Every time she read
her little hoard of manuscripts over she found some of which the fairy
gold had unaccountably turned to withered leaves, fit only for the
burning. Emily burned them,--but it hurt her a little. Outgrowing
things we love is never a pleasant process.
CHAPTER XXIX
SACRILEGE
There had been several clashes between Aunt Elizabeth and Emily that
winter and spring. Generally Aunt Elizabeth came out victorious; there