The Blue Castle: a novel
Valancy poured tea out of Barney’s little battered old pewter teapot of
incredible age. She had not even a set of dishes—only Barney’s
mismatched chipped bits—and a dear, big, pobby old jug of robin’s-egg
blue.
After the meal was over they would sit there and talk for hours—or sit
and say nothing, in all the languages of the world, Barney pulling away
at his pipe, Valancy dreaming idly and deliciously, gazing at the
far-off hills beyond Mistawis where the spires of firs came out against
the sunset. The moonlight would begin to silver the Mistawis dusk. Bats
would begin to swoop darkly against the pale, western gold. The little
waterfall that came down on the high bank not far away would, by some
whim of the wildwood gods, begin to look like a wonderful white woman
beckoning through the spicy, fragrant evergreens. And Leander would
begin to chuckle diabolically on the mainland shore. How sweet it was
to sit there and do nothing in the beautiful silence, with Barney at
the other side of the table, smoking!
There were plenty of other islands in sight, though none were near
enough to be troublesome as neighbours. There was one little group of
islets far off to the west which they called the Fortunate Isles. At
sunrise they looked like a cluster of emeralds, at sunset like a
cluster of amethysts. They were too small for houses; but the lights on
the larger islands would bloom out all over the lake, and bonfires
would be lighted on their shores, streaming up into the wood shadows
and throwing great, blood-red ribbons over the waters. Music would
drift to them alluringly from boats here and there, or from the
verandahs on the big house of the millionaire on the biggest island.
“Would you like a house like that, Moonlight?” Barney asked once,
waving his hand at it. He had taken to calling her Moonlight, and
Valancy loved it.
“No,” said Valancy, who had once dreamed of a mountain castle ten times
the size of the rich man’s “cottage” and now pitied the poor
inhabitants of palaces. “No. It’s too elegant. I would have to carry it
with me everywhere I went. On my back like a snail. It would own
me—possess me, body and soul. I like a house I can love and cuddle and
boss. Just like ours here. I don’t envy Hamilton Gossard ‘the finest
summer residence in Canada.’ It is magnificent, but it isn’t my Blue
Castle.”
Away down at the far end of the lake they got every night a glimpse of
a big, continental train rushing through a clearing. Valancy liked to
watch its lighted windows flash by and wonder who was on it and what
hopes and fears it carried. She also amused herself by picturing Barney
and herself going to the dances and dinners in the houses on the
islands, but she did not want to go in reality. Once they did go to a
masquerade dance in the pavilion at one of the hotels up the lake, and
had a glorious evening, but slipped away in their canoe, before
unmasking time, back to the Blue Castle.
“It was lovely—but I don’t want to go again,” said Valancy.
So many hours a day Barney shut himself up in Bluebeard’s Chamber.
Valancy never saw the inside of it. From the smells that filtered
through at times she concluded he must be conducting chemical
experiments—or counterfeiting money. Valancy supposed there must be
smelly processes in making counterfeit money. But she did not trouble
herself about it. She had no desire to peer into the locked chambers of
Barney’s house of life. His past and his future concerned her not. Only
this rapturous present. Nothing else mattered.
Once he went away and stayed away two days and nights. He had asked
Valancy if she would be afraid to stay alone and she had said she would
not. He never told her where he had been. She was not afraid to be
alone, but she was horribly lonely. The sweetest sound she had ever
heard was Lady Jane’s clatter through the woods when Barney returned.
And then his signal whistle from the shore. She ran down to the landing
rock to greet him—to nestle herself into his eager arms—they _did_ seem
eager.
“Have you missed me, Moonlight?” Barney was whispering.
“It seems a hundred years since you went away,” said Valancy.
“I won’t leave you again.”
“You must,” protested Valancy, “if you want to. I’d be miserable if I
thought you wanted to go and didn’t, because of me. I want you to feel
perfectly free.”
Barney laughed—a little cynically.
“There is no such thing as freedom on earth,” he said. “Only different
kinds of bondages. And comparative bondages. _You_ think you are free
now because you’ve escaped from a peculiarly unbearable kind of
bondage. But are you? You love me—_that’s_ a bondage.”
“Who said or wrote that ‘the prison unto which we doom ourselves no
prison is’?” asked Valancy dreamily, clinging to his arm as they
climbed up the rock steps.
“Ah, now you have it,” said Barney. “That’s all the freedom we can hope
for—the freedom to choose our prison. But, Moonlight,”—he stopped at
the door of the Blue Castle and looked about him—at the glorious lake,
the great, shadowy woods, the bonfires, the twinkling
lights—“Moonlight, I’m glad to be home again. When I came down through
the woods and saw my home lights—mine—gleaming out under the old
pines—something I’d never seen before—oh, girl, I was glad—glad!”
But in spite of Barney’s doctrine of bondage, Valancy thought they were
splendidly free. It was amazing to be able to sit up half the night and
look at the moon if you wanted to. To be late for meals if you wanted
to—she who had always been rebuked so sharply by her mother and so
reproachfully by Cousin Stickles if she were one minute late. Dawdle
over meals as long as you wanted to. Leave your crusts if you wanted
to. Not come home at all for meals if you wanted to. Sit on a sun-warm
rock and paddle your bare feet in the hot sand if you wanted to. Just
sit and do nothing in the beautiful silence if you wanted to. In short,
do any fool thing you wanted to whenever the notion took you. If _that_
wasn’t freedom, what was?
CHAPTER XXX
They didn’t spend all their days on the island. They spent more than
half of them wandering at will through the enchanted Muskoka country.
Barney knew the woods as a book and he taught their lore and craft to
Valancy. He could always find trail and haunt of the shy wood people.
Valancy learned the different fairy-likenesses of the mosses—the charm
and exquisiteness of woodland blossoms. She learned to know every bird
at sight and mimic its call—though never so perfectly as Barney. She
made friends with every kind of tree. She learned to paddle a canoe as
well as Barney himself. She liked to be out in the rain and she never
caught cold.
Sometimes they took a lunch with them and went berrying—strawberries
and blueberries. How pretty blueberries were—the dainty green of the
unripe berries, the glossy pinks and scarlets of the half ripes, the
misty blue of the fully matured! And Valancy learned the real flavour
of the strawberry in its highest perfection. There was a certain sunlit
dell on the banks of Mistawis along which white birches grew on one
side and on the other still, changeless ranks of young spruces. There
were long grasses at the roots of the birches, combed down by the winds
and wet with morning dew late into the afternoons. Here they found
berries that might have graced the banquets of Lucullus, great
ambrosial sweetnesses hanging like rubies to long, rosy stalks. They
lifted them by the stalk and ate them from it, uncrushed and virgin,
tasting each berry by itself with all its wild fragrance ensphered
therein. When Valancy carried any of these berries home that elusive
essence escaped and they became nothing more than the common berries of
the market-place—very kitchenly good indeed, but not as they would have
been, eaten in their birch dell until her fingers were stained as pink
as Aurora’s eyelids.
Or they went after water-lilies. Barney knew where to find them in the
creeks and bays of Mistawis. Then the Blue Castle was glorious with
them, every receptacle that Valancy could contrive filled with the
exquisite things. If not water lilies then cardinal flowers, fresh and
vivid from the swamps of Mistawis, where they burned like ribbons of
flame.
Sometimes they went trouting on little nameless rivers or hidden brooks
on whose banks Naiads might have sunned their white, wet limbs. Then
all they took with them were some raw potatoes and salt. They roasted
the potatoes over a fire and Barney showed Valancy how to cook the
trout by wrapping them in leaves, coating them with mud and baking them
in a bed of hot coals. Never were such delicious meals. Valancy had
such an appetite it was no wonder she put flesh on her bones.
Or they just prowled and explored through woods that always seemed to
be expecting something wonderful to happen. At least, that was the way
Valancy felt about them. Down the next hollow—over the next hill—you
would find it.
“We don’t know where we’re going, but isn’t it fun to go?” Barney used
to say.
Once or twice night overtook them, too far from their Blue Castle to
get back. But Barney made a fragrant bed of bracken and fir boughs and
they slept on it dreamlessly, under a ceiling of old spruces with moss
hanging from them, while beyond them moonlight and the murmur of pines
blended together so that one could hardly tell which was light and
which was sound.
There were rainy days, of course, when Muskoka was a wet green land.
Days when showers drifted across Mistawis like pale ghosts of rain and
they never thought of staying in because of it. Days when it rained in
right good earnest and they had to stay in. Then Barney shut himself up
in Bluebeard’s Chamber and Valancy read, or dreamed on the wolfskins
with Good Luck purring beside her and Banjo watching them suspiciously
from his own peculiar chair. On Sunday evenings they paddled across to
a point of land and walked from there through the woods to the little
Free Methodist church. One felt really too happy for Sunday. Valancy
had never really liked Sundays before.
And always, Sundays and weekdays, she was with Barney. Nothing else
really mattered. And what a companion he was! How understanding! How
jolly! How—how Barney-like! That summed it all up.
Valancy had taken some of her two hundred dollars out of the bank and
spent it in pretty clothes. She had a little smoke-blue chiffon which
she always put on when they spent the evening at home—smoke-blue with
touches of silver about it. It was after she began wearing it that
Barney began calling her Moonlight.
“Moonlight and blue twilight—that is what you look like in that dress.
I like it. It belongs to you. You aren’t exactly pretty, but you have
some adorable beauty-spots. Your eyes. And that little kissable dent
just between your collar bones. You have the wrist and ankle of an
aristocrat. That little head of yours is beautifully shaped. And when
you look backward over your shoulder you’re maddening—especially in
twilight or moonlight. An elf maiden. A wood sprite. You belong to the
woods, Moonlight—you should never be out of them. In spite of your
ancestry, there is something wild and remote and untamed about you. And
you have such a nice, sweet, throaty, summery voice. Such a nice voice
for love-making.”
“Shure an’ ye’ve kissed the Blarney Stone,” scoffed Valancy. But she
tasted these compliments for weeks.
She got a pale green bathing-suit, too—a garment which would have given
her clan their deaths if they had ever seen her in it. Barney taught
her how to swim. Sometimes she put her bathing-dress on when she got up
and didn’t take it off until she went to bed—running down to the water
for a plunge whenever she felt like it and sprawling on the sun-warm
rocks to dry.