Chapter 10 Emily’s Quest by Lucy Montgomery
I
They 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 any 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:
Grey rocks and greyer sea.
And surf along the shore,
And in my heart a name
My lips shall speak no more.
Nonsense! Weak, silly, sentimental nonsense. No more of it!
II
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 tomorrow. Was this to be her life? And why that fear of to-morrow?
She had brought the key of the Disapppinted 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 beech 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.
III
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?
* See Emily of New Moon. ** See Emily Climbs.
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.
IV
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 realizing what she was doing she turned her face seaward through the spruce wood--down the long, windy, pasture-field--over the dunes to the sandshore--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.
V
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.
"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.