Chapter 21 Emily’s Quest by Lucy Montgomery
I
Teddy and Ilse were coming home for a brief ten days in July. How was it, wondered Emily, that they always came together? That couldn't be just a coincidence. She dreaded the visit and wished it were over. It would be good to see Ilse again--somehow she could never feel a stranger with Ilse. No matter how long she was away, the moment she came back you found the old Ilse. But she did not want to see Teddy. Teddy who had forgotten her. Who had never written since he went away last. Teddy who was already famous, as a painter of lovely women. So famous and so successful that--Ilse wrote--he was going to give up magazine work. Emily felt a certain relief when she read that. She would no longer dread to open a magazine lest she see her own face--or soul--looking at her out of some illustration--with "Frederick Kent" scrawled in the corner, as if to say "know all men by these presents that this girl is mine." Emily resented less the pictures which looked like her whole face than the ones in which only the eyes were hers. To be able to paint her eyes like that Teddy must know everything that was in her soul. The thought always filled her with fury and shame--and a sense of horrible helplessness. She would not--could not--tell Teddy to stop using her as a model. She had never stooped to acknowledge to him that she had noticed any resemblance to herself in his illustrations--she never would stoop.
And now he was coming home--might be home any time. If only she could go away--on any pretence--for a few weeks. Miss Royal was wanting her to go to New York for a visit. But it would never do to go away when Ilse was coming.
Well--Emily shook herself. What an idiot she was! Teddy was coming home, a dutiful son, to see his mother--and he would doubtless be glad enough to see old friends when their actual presence recalled them to his memory; and why should there be anything difficult about it? She must get rid of this absurd self-consciousness. She would.
She was sitting at her open window. The night outside was like a dark, heavy, perfumed flower. An expectant night--a night when things intended to happen. Very still. Only the loveliest of muted sounds--the faintest whisper of trees, the airiest sigh of wind, the half-heard, half-felt moan of the sea.
"Oh, beauty!" whispered Emily, passionately, lifting her hands to the stars. "What would I have done without you all these years?"
Beauty of night--and perfume--and mystery. Her soul was filled with it. There was, just then, room for nothing else. She bent out, lifting her face to the jewelled sky--rapt, ecstatic.
Then she heard it. A soft, silvery signal in Lofty John's bush--two higher notes and one long, low one--the old, old call that would once have sent her with flying feet to the shadows of the firs.
Emily sat as if turned to stone, her white face framed in the vines that clustered round her window. He was there--Teddy was there--in Lofty John's bush--waiting for her--calling to her as of old. Expecting her!
Almost she had sprung to her feet--almost she had run downstairs and out to the shadows--the beautiful, perfumed shadows where he was waiting for her. But--
Was he only trying to see if he still had the old power over her?
He had gone away two years ago without even a written word of farewell. Would the Murray pride condone that? Would the Murray pride run to meet the man who had held her of so little account? The Murray pride would not. Emily's young face took on lines of stubborn determination in the dim light. She would not go. Let him call as he might. "Whistle and I'll come to you, my lad," indeed! No more of that for Emily Byrd Starr. Teddy Kent need not imagine that he could come and go as went the years and find her meekly waiting to answer his lordly signal.
Again the call came--twice. He was there--so close to her. In a moment if she liked, she could be beside him--her hands in his--his eyes looking into hers--perhaps--
He had gone away without saying good-bye to her!
Emily rose deliberately and lighted her lamp. She sat down at her desk near the window, took up her pen and fell to writing--or a semblance of writing. Steadily she wrote--next day she found sheets covered with aimless repetitions of old poems learned in school-days--and as she wrote she listened. Would the call come again? Once more? It did not. When she was quite sure it was not coming again she put out her light and lay down on her bed with her face in the pillow. Pride was quite satisfied. She had shown him she was not to be whistled off and on. Oh, how thankful she felt that she had been firm enough not to go. For which reason, no doubt, her pillow was wet with savage tears.
II
He came next night--with Ilse--in his new car. And there was handshaking and gaiety and laughter--oh, a great deal of laughter. Ilse was looking radiant in a big yellow hat trimmed with crimson roses. One of those preposterous hats only Ilse could get away with. How unlike the neglected, almost ragged Ilse of olden days. Yet just as lovable as ever. Nobody could help loving Ilse. Teddy was charming, too--with just the right amount of mingled interest and detachment an old resident coming back to childhood's home would naturally feel. Interested in everything and everybody. Oh, yes, indeed, hugely! Ilse tells me you're bringing out a book. Capital. What's it about? Must get a copy. Blair Water quite unchanged. Delightful to come back to a place where time seems to stand still.
Emily almost thought she must have dreamed the whistle in Lofty John's bush.
But she went for a drive to Priest Pond with him and Ilse--and made quite a sensation, for cars were still great novelties thereabouts. And they had a merry, delightful time--then and for the few remaining days of their visit. Ilse had meant to stay three weeks but found she could stay only five days. And Teddy, who seemed to be master of his own time, decided to stay no longer, too. And they both came over to say good-bye to Emily and all went for a farewell moonlit spin--and laughed a great deal--and Ilse, with a hug, declared it was just like old times and Teddy agreed.
"If only Perry had been round," he amended. "I'm sorry not to have seen old Perry. They tell me he is getting on like a house afire."
Perry had gone to the Coast on business for his firm. Emily bragged a little about him and his success. Teddy Kent need not suppose he was the only one who was arriving.
"Are his manners any better than they used to be?" asked Ilse.
"His manners are good enough for us simple Prince Edward Islanders," said Emily, nastily.
"Oh, well, I admit I never saw him pick his teeth in public," conceded Ilse. "Do you know"--with a sly, sidelong glance at Teddy which Emily instantly noticed--"once I fancied myself quite in love with Perry Miller."
"Lucky Perry!" said Teddy with what seemed a quiet smile of satisfied understanding.
Ilse did not kiss Emily good-bye, but she shook hands very cordially as did Teddy. Emily was thanking her stars, in genuine earnest this time, that she had not gone to Teddy when he whistled--if he ever had whistled. They drove gaily off down the lane. But when a few moments later Emily turned into New Moon there were flying footsteps behind her and she was enveloped in a silken embrace.
"Emily darling, good-bye. I love you as much as ever--but everything is so horribly changed--and we can never find the Islands of Enchantment again. I wish I hadn't come home at all--but say you love me and always will. I couldn't bear it if you didn't."
"Of course I'll always love you, Ilse."
They kissed lingeringly--almost sadly--among the faint, cold, sweet perfumes of night. Ilse went down the lane to where Teddy was purring and scintillating for her--or his car was--and Emily went into New Moon where her two old aunts and Cousin Jimmy were waiting for her.
"I wonder if Ilse and Teddy will ever be married," said Aunt Laura.
"It's time Ilse was settling down," said Aunt Elizabeth.
"Poor Ilse," said Cousin Jimmy inexplainably.
III
One late, lovely autumn day in November Emily walked home from the Blair Water post-office with a letter from Ilse and a parcel. She was athrill with an intoxication of excitement that easily passed for happiness. The whole day had been a strangely, unreasonably delightful one of ripe sunshine on the sere hills, faint, grape-like bloom on the faraway woods and a soft, blue sky with little wisps of grey cloud like cast-off veils. Emily had wakened in the morning from a dream of Teddy--the dear, friendly Teddy of the old days--and all day she had been haunted by an odd sense of his nearness. It seemed as if his footstep sounded at her side and as if she might come upon him suddenly when she rounded a spruce-fringed curve in the red road or went down into some sunny hollow where the ferns were thick and golden--find him smiling at her with no shadow of change between them, the years of exile and alienation forgotten. She had not really thought much about him for a long while. The summer and autumn had been busy--she was hard at work on a new story--Ilse's letters had been few and scrappy. Why this sudden, irrational sense of his nearness? When she got Ilse's fat letter she was quite sure there was some news of Teddy in it.
But it was the little parcel that was responsible for her excitement. It was stamped with the sign manual of the House of Wareham and Emily knew what it must hold. Her book--her Moral of the Rose.
She hurried home by the cross-lots road--the little old road over which the vagabond wandered and the lover went to his lady and children to joy and tired men home--the road that linked up eventually with the pasture field by the Blair Water and the Yesterday Road. Once in the grey-boughed solitude of the Yesterday Road Emily sat down in a bay of brown bracken and opened her parcel.
There lay her book. Her book, spleet-new from the publishers. It was a proud, wonderful, thrilling moment. The crest of the Alpine Path at last? Emily lifted her shining eyes to the deep blue November sky and saw peak after peak of sunlit azure still towering beyond. Always new heights of aspiration. One could never reach the top really. But what a moment when one reached a plateau and outlook like this! What a reward for the long years of toil and endeavour and disappointment and discouragement.
But oh, for her unborn Seller of Dreams!
IV
The excitement at New Moon that afternoon almost equalled Emily's own. Cousin Jimmy gave up unblushingly his plan of finishing the ploughing of the hill field to sit at home and gloat over the book. Aunt Laura cried--of course--and Aunt Elizabeth looked indifferent, merely remarking in a tone of surprise that it was bound like a real book. Evidently Aunt Elizabeth had been expecting paper covers. But she made some rather foolish mistakes in her quilt patches that afternoon and she did not once ask Jimmy why he wasn't ploughing. And when some callers dropped in later on The Moral of the Rose was mysteriously on the parlour table, though it had been up on Emily's desk when Aunt Elizabeth saw the automobile drive into the yard. Aunt Elizabeth never mentioned it and neither of the callers noticed it. When they went away Aunt Elizabeth said witheringly that John Angus had less sense than ever he had and that for her part, if she were Cousin Margaret, she would not wear clothes twenty years too young for her.
"An old ewe tricked out like a lamb," said Aunt Elizabeth contemptuously.
If they had done what was expected of them in regard to The Moral of the Rose Aunt Elizabeth would probably have said that John Angus had always been a jovial, good-natured sort of creature and that it was really wonderful how Cousin Margaret had held her own.
V
In all the excitement Emily had--not exactly forgotten Ilse's letter, but wanted to wait until things had settled down a little before reading it. At twilight she went to her room and sat down in the fading light. The wind had changed at sunset and the evening was cold and edged. What Jimmy called a "skiff" of snow had fallen suddenly whitening the world and the withered, unlovely garden. But the storm-cloud had passed and the sky was clear and yellow over the white hills and dark firs. The odd perfume that Ilse always affected floated out of her letter when it was opened. Emily had always vaguely disliked it. But then her taste differed from Ilse's in the matter of perfumes as in so many others. Ilse liked the exotic, oriental, provocative odors. To the day of her death Emily will never catch a whiff of that perfume without turning cold and sick.
"Exactly one thousand times have I planned to write to you," wrote Ilse, "but when one is revolving rapidly on the wheel of things there doesn't seem to be an opportunity for anything one really wants to do. All these months I've been so rushed that I've felt precisely like a cat just one jump ahead of a dog. If I stopped for a breath it would catch me.
"But the spirit moves me to utter a few yowls to-night. I've something to tell you. And your darling letter came to-day--so I will write to-night, and let the dog eat me if he will.
"I'm glad you're keeping well and good-humoured. There are times I envy you fiercely, Emily--your New Moon quiet and peace and leisure--your intense absorption and satisfaction in your work--your singleness of purpose. 'If thine eye be single thy whole body shall be full of light.' That's either in the Bible or Shakespeare, but wherever it is, it is true. I remember you told me once you envied me my opportunities of travel. Emily, old dear, rushing about from one place to another isn't travelling. If you were like your foolish Ilse, chasing a score of butterfly projects and ambitions you wouldn't be so happy. You always remind me--always did remind me, even in our old chummy days--of somebody's line--'her soul was like a star and dwelt apart.'
"Well, when one can't get the thing one really wants, one can't help chasing after anything that might made a decent substitute. I know you've always thought me an unmitigated donkey because I cared so much about Perry Miller. I knew you never quite understood. You couldn't. You never really cared a hoot about any he-creature, did you, Emily? So you thought me an idiot. I daresay I was. But I'm going to be sensible in future, I'm going to marry Teddy Kent."
VI
"There--it's out!"
Emily laid down--or dropped--the letter for a moment. She did not feel either pain or surprise--one does not feel either, I am told, when a bullet strikes the heart. It seemed to her that she had always known this was coming--always. At least, since the night of Mrs. Chidlaw's dinner-dance. And yet, now that it had really happened, it seemed to her that she was suffering everything of death but its merciful dying. In the dim, twilit mirror before her she saw her own face. Had Emily-in-the-glass ever looked like that before? But her room was just the same. It seemed indecent that it should be the same. After a few moments--or years--Emily picked up the letter and read on.
"I'm not in love with Teddy, of course. But he's just got to be a habit with me. I can't do without him--and I either have to do without him or marry him. He won't stand my hesitation any longer. Besides, he's going to be very famous. I shall enjoy being the wife of a famous man. Also, he will have the simoleons, too. Not that I'm altogether mercenary, Emily. I said 'No' to a millionaire last week. A nice fellow, too--but with a face like a good-natured weasel's, if there can be such a thing. And he cried when I told him I wouldn't marry him. Oh, it was ghastly.
"Yes, it's mostly ambition, I grant you. And a certain odd kind of weariness and impatience with my life as it has been these last few years. Everything seems squeezed dry. But I'm really very fond of Teddy--always was. He's nice and companionable--and our taste in jokes is exactly the same. And he never bores me. I have no use for people who bore me. Of course he's too good-looking for a man--he'll always be a target for the head-hunters. But since I don't care too much for him I shan't be tortured by jealousy. In life's morning march when my bosom was young I could have fried in boiling oil anyone--except you--at whom Perry Miller cast a sheep's eye.
"I've thought for years and known for weeks that this was coming some day. But I've been staving Teddy off--I wouldn't let him say the words that would really bind us. I don't know whether I'd ever have scraped up the courage to let him say them, but destiny took a hand. We were out for a spin two weeks ago one evening and a most unseasonable and malignant thunder-storm came up. We had a dreadful time getting back--there was no place on that bare, lonely hill-road we could stop--the rain fell in torrents, the thunder crashed, the lightning flashed. It was unendurable and we didn't endure it. We just tore through it and cussed. Then it cleared off as suddenly as it had began--and my nerves went to pieces--fancy! I have nerves now--and I began to cry like a frightened, foolish baby. And Teddy's arms were about me and he was saying I must marry him--and let him take care of me. I suppose I said I would because it's quite clear he thinks we are engaged. He has given me a blue Chow pup and a sapphire ring--a sapphire he picked up in Europe somewhere--an historic jewel for which a murder was once committed, I believe.
"I think it will be rather nice to be taken care of. Properly. I never was, you know. Dad had no use for me until you found out the truth about Mother--what a witch you were! And after that he adored and spoiled me. But he didn't take any more real care of me than before.
"We are to be married next June. Dad will be pleased, I fancy. Teddy was always the white-haired boy with him. Besides, I think he was beginning to be a little scared I was never going to hook a husband. Dad plumes himself on being a radical but at heart he out-Victorians the Victorians.
"And of course you must be my bridesmaid. Oh, Emily dear, how I wish I could see you to-night--talk with you--one of our old-time spiels--walk with you over the Delectable Mountain and along the ferny, frosted woodside, hang about that old garden by the sea where red poppies blow--all our old familiar places. I wish--I think I really do wish--I was ragged, barefooted, wild Ilse Burnley again. Life is pleasant still--oh, I don't say it isn't. Very pleasant--in spots--like the curate's immortal egg. But the 'first fine careless rapture'--the thrush may recapture it but we never. Emily, old pal, would you turn the clock back if you could?"
VII
Emily read the letter over three times. Then she sat for a very long time at her window, looking blindly out on the blanched, dim world lying under the terrible mockery of a sky full of stars. The wind around the eaves was full of ghostly voices. Bits here and there in Ilse's letter turned and twisted and vanished in her consciousness like little venomous snakes, each with a mortal sting.
"Your singleness of purpose"--"you never cared for anyone"--"of course you must be my bridesmaid"--"I'm really very fond of Teddy"--"my hesitation."
Could any girl really "hesitate" over accepting Teddy Kent? Emily heard a little note of bitter laughter. Was it something in herself that laughed--or that vanishing spectre of Teddy that had haunted her all day--or an old smothered persistent hope that laughed before it died at last?
And at that very moment probably Ilse and Teddy were together.
"If I had gone--that night--last summer--when he called--would it have made any difference?" was the question that asked itself over and over again maddeningly.
"I wish I could hate Ilse. It would make it easier," she thought drearily. "If she loved Teddy I think I could hate her. Somehow, it isn't so dreadful when she doesn't. It ought to be more dreadful. It's very strange that I can bear the thought of his loving her when I couldn't bear the thought of her loving him."
A great weariness suddenly possessed her. For the first time in her life death seemed a friend. It was very late when she finally went to bed. Towards morning she slept a little. But wakened stupidly at dawn. What was it she had heard?
She remembered.
She got up and dressed--as she must get up and dress every morning to come for endless years.
"Well," she said aloud to Emily-in-the-glass. "I've spilled my cup of life's wine on the ground--somehow. And she will give me no more. So I must go thirsty. Would--would it have been different if I had gone to him that night he called. If I only knew!" She thought she could see Dean's ironical, compassionate eyes.
Suddenly she laughed.
"In plain English--as Ilse would say--what a devilish mess I've made of things!"