“Not exactly — but you would have been sent to some orphanage where you would have been half-starved, probably. You little know what you have escaped. You have come to a good home where you will be cared for and educated properly.”
Emily did not altogether like the sound of being “educated properly.” But she said humbly,
“I know it was very good of you to bring me to New Moon, Aunt Elizabeth. And I won’t bother you long, you know. I’ll soon be grownup and able to earn my own living. What do you think is the earliest age a person can be called grownup, Aunt Elizabeth?”
“You needn’t think about that,” said Aunt Elizabeth shortly. “The Murray women have never been under any necessity for earning their own living. All we require of you is to be a good and contented child and to conduct yourself with becoming prudence and modesty.”
This sounded terribly hard.
“I will be,” said Emily, suddenly determining to be heroic, like the girl in the stories she had read. “Perhaps it won’t be so very hard after all, Aunt Elizabeth,” — Emily happened at this point to recall a speech she had heard her father use once, and thought this a good opportunity to work it in—”because, you know, God is good and the devil might be worse.”
Poor Aunt Elizabeth! To have a speech like that fired at her in the darkness of the night from that unwelcome little interloper into her orderly life and peaceful bed! Was it any wonder that for a moment or so she was too paralysed to reply! Then she exclaimed in tones of horror, “Emily, never say that again!”
“All right,” said Emily meekly. “But,” she added defiantly under her breath, “I’ll go on thinking it.”
“And now,” said Aunt Elizabeth, “I want to say that I am not in the habit of talking all night if you are. I tell you to go to sleep, and I expect you to obey me. Good night.”
The tone of Aunt Elizabeth’s good night would have spoiled the best night in the world. But Emily lay very still and sobbed no more, though the noiseless tears trickled down her cheeks in the darkness for some time. She lay so still that Aunt Elizabeth imagined she was asleep and went to sleep herself.
“I wonder if anybody in the world is awake but me,” thought Emily, feeling a sickening loneliness. “If I only had Saucy Sal here! She isn’t so cuddly as Mike but she’d be better than nothing. I wonder where she is. I wonder if they gave her any supper.”
Aunt Elizabeth had handed Sal’s basket to Cousin Jimmy with an impatient, “Here — look to this cat,” and Jimmy had carried it off. Where had he put it? Perhaps Saucy Sal would get out and go home — Emily had heard cats always went back home. She wished she could get out and go home — she pictured herself and her cat running eagerly along the dark, starlit roads to the little house in the hollow — back to the birches and Adam-and-Eve and Mike, and the old wing-chair and her dear little cot and the open window where the Wind Woman sang to her and at dawn one could see the blue of the mist on the homeland hills.
“Will it ever be morning?” thought Emily. “Perhaps things won’t be so bad in the morning.”
And then — she heard the Wind Woman at the window — she heard the little, low, whispering murmur of the June night breeze — cooing, friendly, lovesome.
“Oh, you’re out there, are you, dearest one?” she whispered, stretching out her arms. “Oh, I’m so glad to hear you. You’re such company, Wind Woman. I’m not lonesome any more. And the flash came, too! I was afraid it might never come at New Moon.”
Her soul suddenly escaped from the bondage of Aunt Elizabeth’s stuffy featherbed and gloomy canopy and sealed windows. She was out in the open with the Wind Woman and the other gipsies of the night — the fireflies, the moths, the brooks, the clouds. Far and wide she wandered in enchanted reverie until she coasted the shore of dreams and fell soundly asleep on the fat, hard pillow, while the Wind Woman sang softly and luringly in the vines that clustered over New Moon.
The Book of Yesterday
That first Saturday and Sunday at New Moon always stood out in Emily’s memory as a very wonderful time, so crowded was it with new and generally delightful impressions. If it be true that we “count time by heart throbs” Emily lived two years in it instead of two days. Everything was fascinating from the moment she came down the long, polished staircase into the square hall that was filled with a soft, rosy light coming through the red glass panes of the front door. Emily gazed through the panes delightedly. What a strange, fascinating, red world she beheld, with a weird red sky that looked, she thought, as if it belonged to the Day of Judgment.
There was a certain charm about the old house which Emily felt keenly and responded to, although she was too young to understand it. It was a house which aforetime had had vivid brides and mothers and wives, and the atmosphere of their loves and lives still hung around it, not yet banished by the old-maidishness of the regime of Elizabeth and Laura.
“Why — I’m going to love New Moon,” thought Emily, quite amazed at the idea.
Aunt Laura was setting the breakfast table in the kitchen, which seemed quite bright and jolly in the glow of morning sunshine. Even the black hole in the ceiling had ceased to be spookish and become only a commonplace entrance to the kitchen loft. And on the red-sandstone doorstep Saucy Sal was sitting, preening her fur as contentedly as if she had lived at New Moon all her life. Emily did not know it, but Sal had already drunk deep the delight of battle with her peers that morning and taught the barn cats their place once and for all. Cousin Jimmy’s big yellow Tom had got a fearful drubbing, and was minus several bits of his anatomy, while a stuck-up, black lady-cat, who fancied herself considerably, had made up her mind that if that grey-and-white, narrow-faced interloper from goodness knew where was going to stay at New Moon, she was not.
Emily gathered Sal up in her arms and kissed her joyously, to the horror of Aunt Elizabeth, who was coming across the platform from the cookhouse with a plate of sizzling bacon in her hands.
“Don’t ever let me see you kissing a cat again,” she ordered.
“Oh, all right,” agreed Emily cheerfully, “I’ll only kiss her when you don’t see me after this.”
“I don’t want any of your pertness, miss. You are not to kiss cats at all.”
“But Aunt Elizabeth, I didn’t kiss her on her mouth, of course. I just kissed her between her ears. It’s nice — won’t you just try it for once and see for yourself?”
“That will do, Emily. You have said quite enough.” And Aunt Elizabeth sailed on into the kitchen majestically, leaving Emily momentarily wretched. She felt that she had offended Aunt Elizabeth, and she hadn’t the least notion why or how.
But the scene before her was too interesting to worry long about Aunt Elizabeth. Delicious smells were coming from the cookhouse — a little, slant-roofed building at the corner where the big cooking-stove was placed in summer. It was thickly overgrown with hop vines, as most of the New Moon buildings were. To the right was the “new” orchard, very wonderful now in blossom, but a rather commonplace spot after all, since Cousin Jimmy cultivated it in most up-to-date fashion and had grain growing in the wide spaces between the straight rows of trees that looked all alike. But on the other side of the barn lane, just behind the well, was the “old orchard,” where Cousin Jimmy said the columbines grew and which seemed to be a delightful place where trees had come up at their own sweet will, and grown into individual shapes and sizes, where blue-eyed ivy twined about their roots and wild-briar roses rioted over the grey paling fence. Straight ahead, closing the vista between the orchards, was a little slope covered with