CHAPTER XXIX

Valancy toiled¹ not, neither did she spin. There was really very little work to do. She cooked their meals on a coal-oil stove, performing all her little domestic rites² carefully and exultingly³, and they ate out on the verandah that almost overhung the lake. Before them lay Mistawis, like a scene out of some fairy tale of old time. And Barney smiling his twisted, enigmatical smile at her across the table.

“What a view old Tom picked out when he built this shack⁴!” Barney would say exultantly⁵.

Supper was the meal Valancy liked best. The faint laughter of winds was always about them and the colours of Mistawis, imperial and spiritual, under the changing clouds were something that cannot be expressed in mere⁶ words. Shadows, too. Clustering in the pines until a wind shook them out and pursued them over Mistawis. They lay all day along the shores, threaded by ferns and wild blossoms. They stole around the headlands in the glow of the sunset, until twilight⁷ wove them all into one great web of dusk.

The cats, with their wise, innocent little faces, would sit on the verandah railing and eat the tidbits Barney flung them. And how good everything tasted! Valancy, amid all the romance of Mistawis, never forgot that men had stomachs. Barney paid her no end of compliments on her cooking.

“After all,” he admitted, “there’s something to be said for square meals. I’ve mostly got along by boiling two or three dozen eggs hard at once and eating a few when I got hungry, with a slice of bacon once in a while and a jorum of tea.”

Valancy poured tea out of Barney’s little battered⁸ old pewter teapot of incredible age. She had not even a set of dishes—only Barney’s mismatched chipped bits—and a dear, big, pobby old jug⁹ of robin’s-egg blue.

After the meal was over they would sit there and talk for hours—or sit and say nothing, in all the languages of the world, Barney pulling away at his pipe, Valancy dreaming idly and deliciously, gazing at the far-off hills beyond Mistawis where the spires¹⁰ of firs came out against the sunset. The moonlight would begin to silver the Mistawis dusk. Bats would begin to swoop¹¹ darkly against the pale, western gold. The little waterfall that came down on the high bank not far away would, by some whim¹² of the wildwood gods, begin to look like a wonderful white woman beckoning¹³ through the spicy¹⁴, fragrant¹⁵ evergreens¹⁶. And Leander would begin to chuckle¹⁷ diabolically¹⁸ on the mainland shore. How sweet it was to sit there and do nothing in the beautiful silence, with Barney at the other side of the table, smoking!

There were plenty of other islands in sight, though none were near enough to be troublesome as neighbours. There was one little group of islets far off to the west which they called the Fortunate Isles¹⁹. At sunrise they looked like a cluster of emeralds, at sunset like a cluster of amethysts²⁰. They were too small for houses; but the lights on the larger islands would bloom out all over the lake, and bonfires would be lighted on their shores, streaming up into the wood shadows and throwing great, blood-red ribbons over the waters. Music would drift to them alluringly²¹ from boats here and there, or from the verandahs on the big house of the millionaire on the biggest island.

“Would you like a house like that, Moonlight?” Barney asked once, waving his hand at it. He had taken to calling her Moonlight, and Valancy loved it.

“No,” said Valancy, who had once dreamed of a mountain castle ten times the size of the rich man’s “cottage” and now pitied the poor inhabitants of palaces. “No. It’s too elegant. I would have to carry it with me everywhere I went. On my back like a snail²². It would own me—possess me, body and soul. I like a house I can love and cuddle and boss. Just like ours here. I don’t envy Hamilton Gossard ‘the finest summer residence in Canada.’ It is magnificent, but it isn’t my Blue Castle.”

Away down at the far end of the lake they got every night a glimpse of a big, continental²³ train rushing through a clearing. Valancy liked to watch its lighted windows flash by and wonder who was on it and what hopes and fears it carried. She also amused herself by picturing Barney and herself going to the dances and dinners in the houses on the islands, but she did not want to go in reality. Once they did go to a masquerade dance in the pavilion at one of the hotels up the lake, and had a glorious evening, but slipped away in their canoe, before unmasking time, back to the Blue Castle.

“It was lovely—but I don’t want to go again,” said Valancy.

So many hours a day Barney shut himself up in Bluebeard’s Chamber²⁴. Valancy never saw the inside of it. From the smells that filtered through at times she concluded he must be conducting chemical experiments—or counterfeiting²⁶ money. Valancy supposed there must be smelly processes in making counterfeit²⁵ money. But she did not trouble herself about it. She had no desire to peer into the locked chambers²⁷ of Barney’s house of life. His past and his future concerned her not. Only this rapturous present. Nothing else mattered.

Once he went away and stayed away two days and nights. He had asked Valancy if she would be afraid to stay alone and she had said she would not. He never told her where he had been. She was not afraid to be alone, but she was horribly lonely. The sweetest sound she had ever heard was Lady Jane’s clatter²⁸ through the woods when Barney returned. And then his signal whistle from the shore. She ran down to the landing rock to greet him—to nestle herself into his eager arms—they did seem eager.

“Have you missed me, Moonlight?” Barney was whispering.

“It seems a hundred years since you went away,” said Valancy.

“I won’t leave you again.”

“You must,” protested Valancy, “if you want to. I’d be miserable²⁹ if I thought you wanted to go and didn’t, because of me. I want you to feel perfectly³⁰ free.”

Barney laughed—a little cynically³¹.

“There is no such thing as freedom on earth,” he said. “Only different kinds of bondages. And comparative bondages. You think you are free now because you’ve escaped from a peculiarly unbearable³³ kind of bondage³². But are you? You love me—that’s a bondage.”

“Who said or wrote that ‘the prison unto which we doom³⁴ ourselves no prison is’?” asked Valancy dreamily, clinging to his arm as they climbed up the rock steps.

“Ah, now you have it,” said Barney. “That’s all the freedom we can hope for—the freedom to choose our prison. But, Moonlight,”—he stopped at the door of the Blue Castle and looked about him—at the glorious lake, the great, shadowy woods, the bonfires, the twinkling lights—“Moonlight, I’m glad to be home again. When I came down through the woods and saw my home lights—mine—gleaming out under the old pines—something I’d never seen before—oh, girl, I was glad—glad!”

But in spite of Barney’s doctrine³⁵ of bondage, Valancy thought they were splendidly free. It was amazing to be able to sit up half the night and look at the moon if you wanted to. To be late for meals if you wanted to—she who had always been rebuked³⁶ so sharply by her mother and so reproachfully by Cousin Stickles if she were one minute late. Dawdle³⁷ over meals as long as you wanted to. Leave your crusts if you wanted to. Not come home at all for meals if you wanted to. Sit on a sun-warm rock and paddle your bare feet in the hot sand if you wanted to. Just sit and do nothing in the beautiful silence if you wanted to. In short, do any fool thing you wanted to whenever the notion took you. If that wasn’t freedom, what was?