CHAPTER XVI. AUNT UNA’S STORY

Felicity, and Cecily, Dan, Felix, Sara Ray and I were sitting one evening on the mossy stones in Uncle Roger’s hill pasture, where we had sat the morning the Story Girl told us the tale of the Wedding Veil of the Proud Princess. But it was evening now and the valley beneath us was brimmed up with the glow of the afterlight. Behind us, two tall, shapely spruce trees rose up against the sunset, and through the dark oriel of their sundered¹ branches an evening star looked down. We sat on a little strip of emerald grassland² and before us was a sloping meadow all white with daisies.

We were waiting for Peter and the Story Girl. Peter had gone to Markdale after dinner to spend the afternoon with his reunited parents because it was his birthday. He had left us grimly determined⁴ to confess to his father the dark secret of his Presbyterianism, and we were anxious to know what the result had been. The Story Girl had gone that morning with Miss Reade to visit the latter’s home near Charlottetown, and we expected soon to see her coming gaily⁵ along over the fields from the Armstrong place.

Presently Peter came jauntily⁶ stepping along the field path up the hill.

“Hasn’t Peter got tall?” said Cecily.

“Peter is growing to be a very fine looking boy,” decreed Felicity.

“I notice he’s got ever so much handsomer since his father came home,” said Dan, with a killing⁷ sarcasm⁸ that was wholly lost on Felicity, who gravely responded that she supposed it was because Peter felt so much freer from care and responsibility.

“What luck, Peter?” yelled Dan, as soon as Peter was within earshot.

“Everything’s all right,” he shouted jubilantly. “I told father right off, licketty-split, as soon as I got home,” he added when he reached us. “I was anxious to have it over with. I says, solemn-like, ‘Dad, there’s something I’ve got to tell you, and I don’t know how you’ll take it, but it can’t be helped,’ I says. Dad looked pretty sober, and he says, says he, ‘What have you been up to, Peter? Don’t be afraid to tell me. I’ve been forgiven to seventy times seven, so surely I can forgive a little, too?’ ‘Well,’ I says, desperate-like, ‘the truth is, father, I’m a Presbyterian. I made up my mind last summer, the time of the Judgment⁹ Day, that I’d be a Presbyterian, and I’ve got to stick to it. I’m sorry I can’t be a Methodist, like you and mother and Aunt Jane, but I can’t and that’s all there is to it,’ I says. Then I waited, scared-like. But father, he just looked relieved and he says, says he, ‘Goodness, boy, you can be a Presbyterian or anything else you like, so long as it’s Protestant. I’m not caring,’ he says. ‘The main thing is that you must be good and do what’s right.’ I tell you,” concluded Peter emphatically, “father is a Christian¹⁰ all right.”

“Well, I suppose your mind will be at rest now,” said Felicity. “What’s that you have in your buttonhole?”

“That’s a four-leaved clover,” answered Peter exultantly¹¹. “That means good luck for the summer. I found it in Markdale. There ain’t much clover in Carlisle this year of any kind of leaf. The crop is going to be a failure. Your Uncle Roger says it’s because there ain’t enough old maids in Carlisle. There’s lots of them in Markdale, and that’s the reason, he says, why they always have such good clover crops there.”

“What on earth have old maids to do with it?” cried Cecily.

“I don’t believe they’ve a single thing to do with it, but Mr. Roger says they have, and he says a man called Darwin proved it. This is the rigmarole he got off to me the other day. The clover crop depends on there being plenty of bumble-bees, because they are the only insects with tongues long enough to—to—fer—fertilize—I think he called it the blossoms. But mice eat bumble-bees and cats eat mice and old maids keep cats. So your Uncle Roger says the more old maids the more cats, and the more cats the fewer field-mice, and the fewer field-mice the more bumble-bees, and the more bumble-bees the better clover crops.”

“So don’t worry if you do get to be old maids, girls,” said Dan. “Remember, you’ll be helping¹² the clover crops.”

“I never heard such stuff as you boys talk,” said Felicity, “and Uncle Roger is no better.”

“There comes the Story Girl,” cried Cecily eagerly. “Now we’ll hear all about Beautiful Alice’s home.”

The Story Girl was bombarded with eager questions as soon as she arrived. Miss Reade’s home was a dream of a place, it appeared. The house was just covered with ivy¹³ and there was a most delightful¹⁴ old garden—“and,” added the Story Girl, with the joy of a connoisseur¹⁵ who has found a rare gem¹⁶, “the sweetest little story connected with it. And I saw the hero of the story too.”

“Where was the heroine?” queried¹⁷ Cecily.

“She is dead.”

“Oh, of course she’d have to die,” exclaimed Dan in disgust. “I’d like a story where somebody lived once in awhile.”

“I’ve told you heaps of stories where people lived,” retorted the Story Girl. “If this heroine hadn’t died there wouldn’t have been any story. She was Miss Reade’s aunt and her name was Una, and I believe she must have been just like Miss Reade herself. Miss Reade told me all about her. When we went into the garden I saw in one corner of it an old stone bench arched over by a couple of pear trees and all grown about with grass and violets. And an old man was sitting on it—a bent¹⁸ old man with long, snow-white hair and beautiful sad blue eyes. He seemed very lonely and sorrowful and I wondered that Miss Reade didn’t speak to him. But she never let on she saw him and took me away to another part of the garden. After awhile he got up and went away and then Miss Reade said, ‘Come over to Aunt Una’s seat and I will tell you about her and her lover—that man who has just gone out.’

“‘Oh, isn’t he too old for a lover?’ I said.

“Beautiful Alice laughed and said it was forty years since he had been her Aunt Una’s lover. He had been a tall, handsome young man then, and her Aunt Una was a beautiful girl of nineteen.

“We went over and sat down and Miss Reade told me all about her. She said that when she was a child she had heard much of her Aunt Una—that she seemed to have been one of those people who are not soon forgotten, whose personality seems to linger about the scenes of their lives long after they have passed away.”

“What is a personality? Is it another word for ghost?” asked Peter.

“No,” said the Story Girl shortly. “I can’t stop in a story to explain words.”

“I don’t believe you know what it is yourself,” said Felicity.

The Story Girl picked up her hat, which she had thrown down on the grass, and placed it defiantly¹⁹ on her brown curls.

“I’m going in,” she announced. “I have to help Aunt Olivia ice a cake tonight, and you all seem more interested in dictionaries than stories.”

“That’s not fair,” I exclaimed. “Dan and Felix and Sara Ray and Cecily and I have never said a word. It’s mean to punish us for what Peter and Felicity did. We want to hear the rest of the story. Never mind what a personality is but go on—and, Peter, you young ass³, keep still.”

“I only wanted to know,” muttered Peter sulkily.

“I DO know what personality is, but it’s hard to explain,” said the Story Girl, relenting. “It’s what makes you different from Dan, Peter, and me different from Felicity or Cecily. Miss Reade’s Aunt Una had a personality that was very uncommon²⁰. And she was beautiful, too, with white skin and night-black eyes and hair—a ‘moonlight beauty,’ Miss Reade called it. She used to keep a kind of a diary, and Miss Reade’s mother used to read parts of it to her. She wrote verses in it and they were lovely; and she wrote descriptions of the old garden which she loved very much. Miss Reade said that everything in the garden, plot or shrub²¹ or tree, recalled to her mind some phrase or verse of her Aunt Una’s, so that the whole place seemed full of her, and her memory haunted the walks like a faint, sweet perfume.

“Una had, as I’ve told you, a lover; and they were to have been married on her twentieth birthday. Her wedding dress was to have been a gown of white brocade with purple violets in it. But a little while before it she took ill with fever and died; and she was buried on her birthday instead of being married. It was just in the time of opening roses. Her lover has been faithful to her ever since; he has never married, and every June, on her birthday, he makes a pilgrimage to the old garden and sits for a long time in silence on the bench where he used to woo her on crimson²² eves and moonlight nights of long ago. Miss Reade says she always loves to see him sitting there because it gives her such a deep and lasting²³ sense of the beauty and strength of love which can thus outlive time and death. And sometimes, she says, it gives her a little eerie²⁴ feeling, too, as if her Aunt Una were really sitting there beside him, keeping tryst²⁵, although she has been in her grave for forty years.”

“It would be real romantic to die young and have your lover make a pilgrimage to your garden every year,” reflected Sara Ray.

“It would be more comfortable to go on living and get married to him,” said Felicity. “Mother says all those sentimental²⁶ ideas are bosh and I expect they are. It’s a wonder Beautiful Alice hasn’t a beau herself. She is so pretty and lady-like.”

“The Carlisle fellows all say she is too stuck up,” said Dan.

“There’s nobody in Carlisle half good enough for her,” cried the Story Girl, “except—ex-cept—”

“Except who?” asked Felix.

“Never mind,” said the Story Girl mysteriously.