“Laura,” said Aunt Elizabeth, “take this child out to the cookhouse and give her a good dose of mustard and water at once. It will do no harm and may do some good, if there’s anything in this yarn of hers. I’m going down to the doctor’s — he may be back — but I’ll see Lofty John on the way.”
Aunt Elizabeth went out — and Aunt Elizabeth went out very quickly — if it had been any one else it might have been said she ran. As for Emily — well, Aunt Laura gave her that emetic in short order and two minutes later Emily had no doubt at all that she was dying then and there — and the sooner the better. When Aunt Elizabeth returned Emily was lying on the sofa in the kitchen, as white as the pillow under her head, and as limp as a faded lily.
“Wasn’t the doctor home?” cried Aunt Laura desperately.
“I don’t know — there’s no need of the doctor. I didn’t think there was from the first. It was just one of Lofty John’s jokes. He thought he’d give Emily a fright — just for fun — his idea of fun. March you off to bed, Miss Emily. You deserve all you’ve got for going over there to Lofty John’s at all and I don’t pity you a particle. I haven’t had such a turn for years.”
“I did have a pain in my stomach,” wailed Emily, in whom fright and mustard-and-water combined had temporarily extinguished all spirit.
“Any one who eats apples from dawn to dark must expect a few pains in her stomach. You won’t have any more tonight, I reckon — the mustard will remedy that. Take your candle and go.”
“Well,” said Emily, getting unsteadily to her feet. “I hate that dodgasted Lofty John.”
“Emily!” said both aunts together.
“He deserves it,” said Emily vindictively.
“Oh, Emily — that dreadful word you used!” Aunt Laura seemed curiously upset about something.
“Why, what’s the matter with dodgasted?” said Emily, quite mystified. “Cousin Jimmy uses it often, when things vex him. He used it to-day — he said that dodgasted heifer had broken out of the graveyard pasture again.”
“Emily,” said Aunt Elizabeth, with the air of one impaling herself on the easiest horn of a dilemma, “your Cousin Jimmy is a man — and men sometimes use expressions, in the heat of anger, that are not proper for little girls.”
“But what is the matter with dodgasted?” persisted Emily. “It isn’t a swear word, is it? And if it isn’t, why can’t I use it?”
“It isn’t a — a ladylike word,” said Aunt Laura.
“Well, then, I won’t use it any more,” said Emily resignedly, “but Lofty John is dodgasted.”
Aunt Laura laughed so much after Emily had gone upstairs that Aunt Elizabeth told her a woman of her age should have more sense.
“Elizabeth, you know it was funny,” protested Laura.
Emily being safely out of sight, Elizabeth permitted herself a somewhat grim smile.
“I told Lofty John a few plain truths — he’ll not go telling children they’re poisoned again in a hurry. I left him fairly dancing with rage.”
Worn out, Emily fell asleep as soon as she was in bed; but an hour later she awakened. Aunt Elizabeth had not yet come to bed so the blind was still up and Emily saw a dear, friendly star winking down at her. Far away the sea moaned alluringly. Oh, it was nice just to be alone and to be alive. Life tasted good to her again—”tasted like more,” as Cousin Jimmy said. She could have a chance to write more letterbills, and poetry — Emily already saw a yard of verses entitled “Thoughts of One Doomed to Sudden Death” — and play with Ilse and Teddy — scour the barns with Saucy Sal, watch Aunt Laura skim cream in the dairy and help Cousin Jimmy garden — read books in Emily’s Bower and trot along the To-day Road — but not visit Lofty John’s workshop. She determined that she would never have anything to do with Lofty John again after his diabolical cruelty. She felt so indignant with him for frightening her — after they had been such good friends, too — that she could not go to sleep until she had composed an account of her death by poison, of Lofty John being tried for her murder and condemned to death, and of his being hanged on a gibbet as lofty as himself, Emily being present at the dreadful scene, in spite of the fact that she was dead by his act. When she had finally cut him down and buried him with obloquy — the tears streaming down her face out of sympathy for Mrs Lofty John — she forgave him. Very likely he was not dodgasted after all.
She wrote it all down on a letterbill in the garret the next day.
Fancy Fed
In October Cousin Jimmy began to boil the pigs’ potatoes — unromantic name for a most romantic occupation — or so it appeared to Emily, whose love of the beautiful and picturesque was satisfied as it had never yet been on those long, cool, starry twilights of the waning year at New Moon.
There was a clump of spruce-trees in a corner of the old orchard, and under them an immense iron pot was hung over a circle of large stones — a pot so big that an ox could have been comfortably stewed in it. Emily thought it must have come down from the days of fairy tales and been some giant’s porridge pot; but Cousin Jimmy told her that it was only a hundred years old and old Hugh Murray had had it sent out from England.
“We’ve used it ever since to boil the potatoes for the New Moon pigs,” he said. “Blair Water folks think it old-fashioned; they’ve all got boiler-houses now, with built-in boilers; but as long as Elizabeth’s boss at New Moon we’ll use this.”
Emily was sure no built-in boiler could have the charm of the big pot. She helped Cousin Jimmy fill it full of potatoes, after she came from school; then, when supper was over, Cousin Jimmy lighted the fire under it and pottered about it all the evening. Sometimes he poked the fire — Emily loved that part of the performance — sending glorious streams of rosy sparks upward into the darkness; sometimes he stirred the potatoes with a long pole, looking, with his queer, forked grey beard and belted “jumper,” just like some old gnome or troll of northland story mixing the contents of a magical cauldron; and sometimes he sat beside Emily on the grey granite boulder near the pot and recited his poetry for her. Emily liked this best of all, for Cousin Jimmy’s poetry was surprisingly good — at least in spots — and Cousin Jimmy had “fit audience though few” in this slender little maiden with her pale eager face and rapt eyes.
They were an odd couple and they were perfectly happy together. Blair Water people thought Cousin Jimmy a failure and a mental weakling. But he dwelt in an ideal world of which none of them knew anything. He had recited his poems a hundred times thus, as he boiled the pigs’ potatoes; the ghosts of a score of autumns haunted the clump of spruces for him. He was an odd, ridiculous figure enough, bent and wrinkled and unkempt, gesticulating awkwardly as he recited. But it was his hour; he was no longer “simple Jimmy Murray” but a prince in his own realm. For a little while he was strong and young and splendid and beautiful, accredited master of song to a listening, enraptured world. None of his prosperous, sensible Blair Water neighbours ever lived through such an hour. He would not have exchanged places with one of them. Emily, listening to him, felt vaguely that if it had not been for that unlucky push into the New Moon well, this queer little man beside her might have stood in the presence of kings.
But Elizabeth had pushed him into the New Moon well and as a consequence he boiled pigs’ potatoes and recited poetry to Emily — Emily, who wrote poetry too, and loved these evenings so much that she could not sleep after she went to bed until she had composed a minute description of them. The flash came almost every evening over something or other. The Wind Woman swooped or purred in the tossing boughs above them —