CHAPTER XII

Valancy hurried home through the faint blue twilight—hurried too fast perhaps. The attack she had when she thankfully reached the shelter of her own room was the worst yet. It was really very bad. She might die in one of those spells. It would be dreadful to die in such pain. Perhaps—perhaps this was death. Valancy felt pitifully alone. When she could think at all she wondered what it would be like to have some one with her who could sympathise—some one who really cared—just to hold her hand tight, if nothing else—some one just to say, “Yes, I know. It’s dreadful—be brave—you’ll soon be better;” not some one merely fussy¹ and alarmed. Not her mother or Cousin Stickles. Why did the thought of Barney Snaith come into her mind? Why did she suddenly feel, in the midst of this hideous² loneliness of pain, that he would be sympathetic—sorry for any one that was suffering? Why did he seem to her like an old, well-known friend? Was it because she had been defending him—standing up to her family for him?

She was so bad at first that she could not even get herself a dose of Dr. Trent’s prescription³. But eventually she managed it, and soon after relief came. The pain left her and she lay on her bed, spent, exhausted⁴, in a cold perspiration⁵. Oh, that had been horrible! She could not endure many more attacks like that. One didn’t mind dying if death could be instant and painless. But to be hurt so in dying!

Suddenly she found herself laughing. That dinner had been fun. And it had all been so simple. She had merely said the things she had always thought. Their faces—oh, their faces! Uncle Benjamin—poor, flabbergasted Uncle Benjamin! Valancy felt quite sure he would make a new will that very night. Olive would get Valancy’s share of his fat hoard⁶. Olive had always got Valancy’s share of everything. Remember the dust-pile.

To laugh at her clan⁷ as she had always wanted to laugh was all the satisfaction she could get out of life now. But she thought it was rather pitiful that it should be so. Might she not pity herself a little when nobody else did?

Valancy got up and went to her window. The moist, beautiful wind blowing across groves⁸ of young-leafed wild trees touched her face with the caress⁹ of a wise, tender, old friend. The lombardies in Mrs. Tredgold’s lawn, off to the left—Valancy could just see them between the stable and the old carriage-shop—were in dark purple silhouette¹⁰ against a clear sky and there was a milk-white, pulsating¹¹ star just over one of them, like a living pearl on a silver-green lake. Far beyond the station were the shadowy, purple-hooded woods around Lake Mistawis. A white, filmy mist hung over them and just above it was a faint, young crescent. Valancy looked at it over her thin left shoulder.

“I wish,” she said whimsically, “that I may have one little dust-pile before I die.”