She still had terrible hours when she was overwhelmed by grief for her father and when all the splendours of New Moon could not stifle the longing for the shabby little house in the hollow where they had loved each other so. Then Emily fled to some secret corner and cried her heart out, emerging with red eyes that always seemed to annoy Aunt Elizabeth. Aunt Elizabeth had become used to having Emily at New Moon but she had not drawn any nearer to the child. This hurt Emily always; but Aunt Laura and Cousin Jimmy loved her and she had Saucy Sal and Rhoda, fields creamy with clover, soft dark trees against amber skies, and the madcap music the Wind Woman made in the firs behind the barns when she blew straight up from the gulf; her days became vivid and interesting, full of little pleasures and delights, like tiny, opening, golden buds on the tree of life. If she could only have had her old yellow account-book, or some equivalent, she could have been fully content. She missed it next to her father, and its enforced burning was something for which she held Aunt Elizabeth responsible and for which she felt she could never wholly forgive her. It did not seem possible to get any substitute. As Cousin Jimmy had said, writing-paper of any kind was scarce at New Moon. Letters were seldom written, and when they were a sheet of notepaper sufficed. Emily dared not ask Aunt Elizabeth for any. There were times when she felt she would burst if she couldn’t write out some of the things that came to her. She found a certain safety valve in writing on her slate in school; but these scribblings had to be rubbed off sooner or later — which left Emily with a sense of loss — and there was always the danger that Miss Brownell would see them. That, Emily felt, would be unendurable. No stranger eyes must behold these sacred productions. Sometimes she let Rhoda read them, though Rhoda rasped her by giggling over her finest flights. Emily thought Rhoda as near perfection as a human being could be, but giggling was her fault.
But there is a destiny which shapes the ends of young misses who are born with the itch for writing tingling in their baby fingertips, and in the fullness of time this destiny gave to Emily the desire of her heart — gave it to her, too, on the very day when she most needed it. That was the day, the ill-starred day, when Miss Brownell elected to show the fifth class, by example as well as precept, how the Bugle Song should be read.
Standing on the platform Miss Brownell, who was not devoid of a superficial, elocutionary knack, read those three wonderful verses. Emily, who should have been doing a sum in long division, dropped her pencil and listened entranced. She had never heard the Bugle Song before — but now she heard it — and saw it — the rose-red splendour falling on those storied, snowy summits and ruined castles — the lights that never were on land or sea streaming over the lakes — she heard the wild echoes flying through the purple valleys and the misty passes — the mere sound of the words seemed to make an exquisite echo in her soul — and when Miss Brownell came to “Horns of elfland faintly blowing” Emily trembled with delight. She was snatched out of herself. She forgot everything but the magic of that unequalled line — she sprang from her seat, knocking her slate to the floor with a clatter, she rushed up the aisle, she caught Miss Brownell’s arm.
“Oh, teacher,” she cried with passionate earnestness, “read that line over again — oh, read that line over again!”
Miss Brownell, thus suddenly halted in her elocutionary display, looked down into a rapt, uplifted face where great purplish-grey eyes were shining with the radiance of a divine vision — and Miss Brownell was angry. Angry with this breach of her strict discipline — angry with this unseemly display of interest in a third-class atom whose attention should have been focused on long division. Miss Brownell shut her book and shut her lips and gave Emily a resounding slap on her face.
“Go right back to your seat and mind your own business, Emily Starr,” said Miss Brownell, her cold eyes malignant with her fury.
Emily, thus dashed to earth, moved back to her seat in a daze. Her smitten cheek was crimson, but the wound was in her heart. One moment ago in the seventh heaven — and now this — pain, humiliation, misunderstanding! She could not bear it. What had she done to deserve it? She had never been slapped in her life before. The degradation and the injustice ate into her soul. She could not cry — this was “a grief too deep for tears” — she went home from school in a suppressed anguish of bitterness and shame and resentment — an anguish that had no outlet, for she dared not tell her story at New Moon. Aunt Elizabeth, she felt sure, would say that Miss Brownell had done quite right, and even Aunt Laura, kind and sweet as she was, would not understand. She would be grieved because Emily had misbehaved in school and had had to be punished.
“Oh, if I could only tell Father all about it!” thought Emily.
She could not eat any supper — she did not think she would ever be able to eat again. And oh, how she hated that unjust, horrid Miss Brownell! She could never forgive her — never! If there were only some way in which she could get square with Miss Brownell! Emily, sitting small and pale and quiet at the New Moon supper-table, was a seething volcano of wounded feeling and misery and pride — ay, pride! Worse even than the injustice was the sting of humiliation over this thing that had happened. She, Emily Byrd Starr, on whom no hand had ever before been ungently laid, had been slapped like a naughty baby before the whole school. Who could endure this and live?
Then destiny stepped in and drew Aunt Laura to the sitting-room bookcase to look in its lower compartment for a certain letter she wanted to see. She took Emily with her to show her a curious old snuff-box that had belonged to Hugh Murray, and in rummaging for it lifted out a big, flat bundle of dusty paper — paper of a deep pink colour in oddly long and narrow sheets.
“It’s time these old letterbills were burned,” she said. “What a pile of them! They’ve been here gathering dust for years and they are no earthly good. Father once kept the postoffice here at New Moon, you know, Emily. The mail came only three times a week then, and each day there was one of these long red ‘letterbills,’ as they were called. Mother always kept them, though when once used they were of no further use. But I’m going to burn them right away.”
“Oh, Aunt Laura,” gasped Emily, so torn between desire and fear that she could hardly speak. “Oh, don’t do that — give them to me — please give them to me.”
“Why, child, what ever do you want of them?”
“Oh, Aunty, they have such lovely blank backs for writing on. Please, Aunt Laura, it would be a sin to burn those letterbills.”
“You can have them, dear. Only you’d better not let Elizabeth see them.”
“I won’t — I won’t,” breathed Emily.
She gathered her precious booty into her arms and fairly ran upstairs — and then upstairs again into the garret, where she already had her “favourite haunt,” in which her uncomfortable habit of thinking of things thousands of miles away could not vex Aunt Elizabeth. This was the quiet corner of the dormer-window, where shadows always moved about, softly and swingingly, and beautiful mosaics patterned the bare floor. From it one could see over the treetops right down to the Blair Water. The walls were hung around with great bundles of soft fluffy rolls, all ready for spinning, and hanks of untwisted yarn. Sometimes Aunt Laura spun on the great wheel at the other end of the garret and Emily loved the whir of it.
In the recess of the dormer-window she crouched — breathlessly she selected a letterbill and extracted a lead-pencil from her pocket. An old sheet of cardboard served as a desk; she began to write feverishly.
“Dear Father” — and then she poured out her tale of the day — of her rapture and her pain — writing heedlessly and intently until the sunset faded into dim, starlitten twilight. The chickens went unfed — Cousin Jimmy had to go himself for the cows — Saucy Sal got no new milk — Aunt Laura had to wash the dishes — what mattered it? Emily, in the delightful throes of literary composition, was lost to all worldly