CHAPTER IX

A Special Providence¹

EMILY was sure on that first day at school that she would never like it. She must go, she knew, in order to get an education and be ready to earn her own living; but it would always be what Ellen Greene solemnly called “a cross.” Consequently Emily felt quite astonished when, after going to school a few days, it dawned upon her that she was liking² it. To be sure, Miss Brownell did not improve on acquaintance; but the other girls no longer tormented³ her—indeed, to her amazement⁴, they seemed suddenly to forget all that had happened and hailed her as one of themselves. She was admitted to the fellowship of the pack and, although in some occasional tiff⁵ she got a dig about baby aprons⁶ and Murray pride, there was no more hostility⁷, veiled or open. Besides, Emily was quite able to give “digs” herself, as she learned more about the girls and their weak points, and she could give them with such merciless lucidity⁸ and irony92 that the others soon learned not to provoke them. Chestnut-curls, whose name was Grace Wells, and the Freckled-one, whose name was Carrie King, and Jennie Strang became quite chummy with her, and Jennie sent chews of gum and tissue thumb-papers across the aisle⁹ instead of giggles¹⁰. Emily allowed them all to enter the outer court of her temple of friendship but only Rhoda was admitted to the inner shrine¹¹. As for Ilse Burnley, she did not appear after that first day. Ilse, so Rhoda said, came to school or not, just as she liked. Her father never bothered about her. Emily always felt a certain hankering to know more of Ilse, but it did not seem likely to be gratified.

Emily was insensibly becoming happy again. Already she felt as if she belonged to this old cradle of her family. She thought a great deal about the old Murrays; she liked to picture them revisiting the glimpses of New Moon—Great-grandmother rubbing up her candlesticks and making cheeses; Great-aunt Miriam stealing about looking for her lost treasure; homesick Great-great-aunt Elizabeth stalking about in her bonnet¹²; Captain George, the dashing, bronzed sea-captain, coming home with the spotted¹³ shells of the Indies; Stephen, the beloved of all, smiling from its windows; her own mother dreaming of Father—they all seemed as real to her as if she had known them in life.

She still had terrible hours when she was overwhelmed by grief for her father and when all the splendours of New Moon could not stifle¹⁴ the longing¹⁵ 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 drawn¹⁶ any nearer to the child. This hurt Emily always; but Aunt Laura and Cousin Jimmy loved her and she had Saucy¹⁷ Sal and Rhoda, fields creamy with clover, soft93 dark trees against amber¹⁸ skies, and the madcap music the Wind Woman made in the firs behind the barns when she blew straight up from the gulf¹⁹; 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 note-paper 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 slate²⁰ 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 behold²¹ these sacred productions. Sometimes she let Rhoda read them, though Rhoda rasped her by giggling²² 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 itch²³ for writing tingling²⁴ in their baby fingertips, and in the fulness 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 precept²⁵, how the Bugle²⁶ Song should be read.

Standing²⁷ on the platform Miss Brownell, who was not devoid²⁸ of a superficial, elocutionary knack²⁹, read those three wonderful verses. Emily, who should have been94 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 misty³⁰ passes—the mere³¹ sound of the words seemed to make an exquisite³² echo in her soul—and when Miss Brownell came to “Horns of elf-land 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 clatter³³, she rushed up the aisle, she caught Miss Brownell’s arm.

“Oh, teacher,” she cried with passionate³⁴ 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 breach³⁵ 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 resounding³⁶ slap on her face.

“Go right back to your seat and mind your own business, Emily Starr,” said Miss Brownell, her cold eyes malignant³⁷ with her fury.

Emily, thus dashed to earth, moved back to her seat in a daze³⁸. Her smitten³⁹ cheek was crimson⁴⁰, but the wound was in her heart. One moment ago in the seventh heaven—and now this—pain, humiliation⁴¹, misunderstanding! She could not bear it. What had she done to deserve it? She had never been slapped in her life before. The degradation⁴² and the injustice⁴³ ate into her soul. She95 could not cry—this was “a grief too deep for tears”—she went home from school in a suppressed anguish⁴⁴ of bitterness and shame and resentment—an anguish that had no outlet⁴⁵, 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, horrid⁴⁶ 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 seething⁴⁷ volcano of wounded feeling and misery⁴⁸ 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-room⁴⁹ bookcase to look in its lower compartment⁵⁰ 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 rummaging⁵¹ 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 letter-bills were burned,” she said. “What a pile of them! They’ve been here gathering⁵² dust for years and they are no earthly good. Father once kept the post-office 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 ‘letter-bills,’96 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,” gasped⁵³ 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 letter-bills.”

“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 vex⁵⁴ Aunt Elizabeth. This was the quiet corner of the dormer window, where shadows always moved about, softly and swingingly, and beautiful mosaics⁵⁵ patterned the bare floor. From it one could see over the tree-tops right down to the Blair Water. The walls were hung around with great bundles of soft fluffy⁵⁶ rolls, all ready for spinning, and hanks of untwisted yarn⁵⁷. Sometimes Aunt Laura spun⁵⁸ on the great wheel at the other end of the garret and Emily loved the whirr of it.

In the recess⁵⁹ of the dormer window she crouched—breathlessly she selected a letter-bill and extracted a lead pencil from her pocket. An old sheet of cardboard served as a desk; she began to write feverishly⁶⁰.

“Dear Father”—and then she poured out her tale of the day—of her rapture⁶¹ and her pain—writing heedlessly and intently until the sunset faded into dim, star-litten twilight⁶². 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 mattered97 it? Emily, in the delightful⁶³ throes of literary composition, was lost to all worldly things.

When she had covered the backs of four letter-bills she could see to write no more. But she had emptied out her soul and it was once more free from evil passions. She even felt curiously⁶⁴ indifferent to Miss Brownell. Emily folded up her letter-bills and wrote clearly across the packet,

Mr. Douglas Starr,

On the Road to Heaven.

Then she stepped softly across to an old, worn-out sofa in a far corner and knelt down, stowing away her letter and her “letter-bills” snugly⁶⁵ on a little shelf formed by a board nailed across it underneath⁶⁶. Emily had discovered this one day when playing in the garret and had noted⁶⁷ it as a lovely hiding-place for secret documents. Nobody would ever come across them there. She had writing paper enough to last for months—there must be hundreds of those jolly old letter-bills.

“Oh,” cried Emily, dancing down the garret stairs, “I feel as if I was made out of star-dust.”

Thereafter few evenings passed on which Emily did not steal up to the garret and write a letter, long or short, to her father. The bitterness died out of her grief. Writing to him seemed to bring him so near; and she told him everything, with a certain honesty of confession⁶⁸ that was characteristic of her—her triumphs, her failures, her joys, her sorrows, everything went down on the letter-bills of a Government which had not been so economical of paper as it afterwards became. There was fully half a yard of paper in each bill and Emily wrote a small hand and made the most of every inch.

“I like New Moon. It’s so stately and splendid here,” she told her father. “And it seems as if we must be very aristokratik when we have a sun dyal. I can’t help98 feeling proud of it all. I am afraid I have too much pride and so I ask God every night to take most of it away but not quite all. It is very easy to get a repputation for pride in Blair Water school. If you walk straight and hold your head up you are a proud one. Rhoda is proud, too, because her father ought to be King of England. I wonder how Queen Victoria would feel if she knew that. It’s very wonderful to have a friend who would be a princess if every one had their rites⁶⁹. I love Rhoda with all my heart. She is so sweet and kind. But I don’t like her giggles. And when I told her I could see the school wallpaper small in the air she said You lie. It hurt me awfully⁷⁰ to have my dearest friend say that to me. And it hurt me worse when I woke up in the night and thought about it. I had to stay awake ever so long, too, because I was tired lying on one side and I was afraid to turn over because Aunt Elizabeth would think I was figitting.

“I didn’t dare tell Rhoda about the Wind Woman because I suppose that really is a kind of lie, though she seems so real to me. I hear her now singing up on the roof around the big chimneys. I have no Emily-in-the-glass here. The looking-glasses are all too high up in the rooms I’ve been in. I’ve never been in the look-out. It is always locked. It was Mother’s room and Cousin Jimmy says her father locked it up after she ran away with you and Aunt Elizabeth keeps it locked still out of respect to his memory, though Cousin Jimmy says Aunt Elizabeth used to fight with her father something scandalus when he was alive though no outsider knew of it because of the Murray pride. I feel that way myself. When Rhoda asked me if Aunt Elizabeth burned candles because she was old-fashioned I answered hawtily no, it was a Murray tradishun. Cousin Jimmy has told me all the tradishuns of the Murrays. Saucy Sal is very well and bosses the barns but still she will not have kittens and I can’t understand it. I asked Aunt Elizabeth about99 it and she said nice little girls didn’t talk about such things but I cannot see why kittens are impropper. When Aunt Elizabeth is away Aunt Laura and I smuggle⁷¹ Sal into the house but when Aunt Elizabeth comes back I always feel gilty and wish I hadn’t. But the next time I do it again. I think that very strange. I never hear about dear Mike. I wrote Ellen Greene and asked about him and she replyed and never mentioned Mike but told me all about her roomatism. As if I cared about her roomatism.

“Rhoda is going to have a birthday party and she is going to invite me. I am so exited. You know I never was to a party before. I think about it a great deal and picture it out. Rhoda is not going to invite all the girls but only a favered few. I hope Aunt Elizabeth will let me ware⁷² my white dress and good hat. Oh, Father, I pinned that lovely picture of the lace ball dress up on the wall of Aunt Elizabeth’s room, just like I had it at home and Aunt Elizabeth took it down and burned it and skolded me for making pin marks in the paper. I said Aunt Elizabeth you should not have burned that picture. I wanted to have it when I grow up to have a dress made like it for balls. And Aunt Elizabeth said Do you expect to attend many balls if I may ask and I said Yes when I am rich and famus and Aunt Elizabeth said Yes when the moon is made of green cheese.

“I saw Dr. Burnley yesterday when he came over to buy some eggs from Aunt Elizabeth. I was disappointed because he looks just like other people. I thought a man who didn’t believe in God would look queer in some way. He did not sware either and I was sorry for I have never heard any one sware and I am very angshus to. He has big yellow eyes like Ilse and a loud voice and Rhoda says when he gets mad you can hear him yelling all over Blair Water. There is some mistery about Ilse’s mother which I cannot fathum. Dr. Burnley and Ilse live alone. Rhoda says Dr. Burnley says he will have no devils of100 women in that house. That speech is wikked but striking. Old Mrs. Simms goes over and cooks dinner and supper for them and then vamooses and they get their own breakfast. The doctor sweeps out the house now and then and Ilse never does anything but run wild. The doctor never smiles so Rhoda says. He must be like King Henry the Second.

“I would like to get akwanted with Ilse. She isn’t as sweet as Rhoda but I like her looks, too. But she doesn’t come to school much and Rhoda says I mustn’t have any chum but her or she will cry her eyes out. Rhoda loves me as much as I love her. We are both going to pray that we may live together all our lives and die the same day.

“Aunt Elizabeth always puts up my school dinner for me. She won’t give me anything but plain bread and butter but she cuts good thick slices and the butter is thick too and never has the horrid taste Ellen Greene’s butter used to have. And Aunt Laura slips in a cooky or an apple turnover⁷³ when Aunt Elizabeth’s back is turned. Aunt Elizabeth says apple turnovers⁷⁴ are not helthy for me. Why is it that the nicest things never are helthy, Father? Ellen Greene used to say that too.

“My teacher’s name is Miss Brownell. I don’t like the cut of her jib. (That is a naughtical frays⁷⁵ that Cousin Jimmy uses. I know frays is not spelled right but there is no dixonary at New Moon but that is the sound of it.) She is too sarkastik and she likes to make you rediklus. Then she laughs at you in a disagreable, snorting way. But I forgave her for slapping me and I took a boquet to her to school next day to make up. She receeved it very coldly and let it fade on her desk. In a story she would have wepped on my neck. I don’t know whether it is any use forgiving people or not. Yes, it is, it makes you feel more comfortable yourself. You never had to ware baby aprons and sunbonnets because you were a boy so you can’t understand how I feel101 about it. And the aprons are made of such good stuff that they will never ware out and it will be years before I grow out of them. But I have a white dress for church with a black silk sash and a white legorn hat with black bows and black kid slippers⁷⁶, and I feel very elegant in them. I wish I could have a bang but Aunt Elizabeth will not hear to it. Rhoda told me I had beautiful eyes. I wish she hadn’t. I have always suspekted my eyes were beautiful but I was not sure. Now that I know they are I’m afraid I’ll always be wondering if people notis it. I have to go to bed at half past eight and I don’t like it but I sit up in bed and look out of the window till it gets dark, so I get square with Aunt Elizabeth that way, and I listen to the sound the sea makes. I like it now though it always makes me feel sorrowful, but it’s a kind of a nice sorrow. I have to sleep with Aunt Elizabeth and I don’t like that either because if I move ever so little she says I figit but she admits that I don’t kick. And she won’t let me put the window up. She doesn’t like fresh air or light in the house. The parlour is dark as a toomb. I went in one day and rolled up all the blinds and Aunt Elizabeth was horrifyed and called me a little hussy and gave me the Murray look. You would suppose I had committed a crime. I felt so insulted that I came up to the garret and wrote a deskription of myself being drowned on a letter-bill and then I felt better. Aunt Elizabeth said I was never to go into the parlour again without permission but I don’t want to. I am afraid of the parlour. All the walls are hung over with pictures of our ancesters and there is not one good-looking person among them except Grand-father Murray who looks handsome but very cross. The spare room is upstairs and is just as gloomy as the parlour. Aunt Elizabeth only lets distingwished people sleep there. I like the kitchen in daytime, and the garret and the cook-house and the sitting-room and the hall because of the lovely red front door and I love the dairy, but I don’t like102 the other New Moon rooms. Oh, I forgot the cellar cubbord. I love to go down there and look at the beautiful rows of jam and jelly pots. Cousin Jimmy says it is a New Moon tradishun that the jam pots must never be empty. What a lot of tradishuns New Moon has. It is a very spashus house, and the trees are lovely. I have named the three lombardys at the garden gate the Three Princesses and I have named the old summer house Emily’s Bower⁷⁷, and the big apple tree by the old orchard⁷⁸ gate the Praying Tree because it holds up its long boughs⁷⁹ exactly as Mr. Dare holds up his arms in church where he prays.

“Aunt Elizabeth has given me the little right hand top burow drawer to keep my things in.

“Oh, Father dear, I have made a great diskoverry. I wish I had made it when you were alive for I think you’d have liked to know. I can write poetry. Perhaps I could have written it long ago if I’d tried. But after that first day in school I felt I was bound in honnour to try and it is so easy. There is a little curly black-covered book in Aunt Elizabeth’s bookcase called Thompson’s Seasons and I decided⁸⁰ I would write a poem on a season and the first three lines are,

Now Autumn comes ripe with the peech and pear,

The sportsman’s horn is heard throughout the land,

And the poor partridge fluttering falls dead.

“Of course there are no peeches in P. E. Island and I never heard a sportsman’s horn here either, but you don’t have to stick too close to facts in poetry. I filled a whole letter-bill with it and then I ran and read it to Aunt Laura. I thought she would be overjoyed to find she had a niece who could write poetry but she took it very coolly and said it didn’t sound much like poetry. It’s blank verse I cryed. Very blank said Aunt Elizabeth103 sarkastically though I hadn’t asked her opinion. But I think I will write ryming poetry after this so that there will be no mistake about it and I intend to be a poetess when I grow up and become famus. I hope also that I will be silph-like. A poetess should be silph-like. Cousin Jimmy makes poetry too. He has made over 1000 pieces but he never writes any down but carries them in his head. I offered to give him some of my letter-bills—for he is very kind to me—but he said he was too old to learn new habits. I haven’t heard any of his poetry yet because the spirit hasn’t moved him but I am very angshus to and I am sorry they don’t fatten⁸¹ the pigs till the fall. I like Cousin Jimmy more and more all the time, except when he takes his queer spells of looking and talking. Then he fritens me but they never last long. I have read a good many of the books in the New Moon bookcase. A history of the reformation in France, very relijus and sad. A little fat book deskribing the months in England and the afoursaid Thompson’s Seasons. I like to read them because they have so many pretty words in them, but I don’t like the feel of them. The paper is so rough and thick it makes me creepy. Travels in Spain, very fassinating, with lovely smooth shiny paper, a missionary⁸² book on the Paciffic Islands, pictures very interesting because of the way the heathen chiefs arange their hair. After they became Christians⁸³ they cut it off which I think was a pity. Mrs. Hemans Poems. I am passhunately fond of poetry, also of stories about desert islands. Rob Roy, a novel, but I only read a little of it when Aunt Elizabeth said I must stop because I must not read novels. Aunt Laura says to read it on the sly. I don’t see why it wouldn’t be all right to obey Aunt Laura but I have a queer feeling about it and I haven’t yet. A lovely Tiger-book, full of pictures and stories of tigers that make me feel so nice and shivery. The Royal Road, also104 relijus but some fun in it so very good for Sundays. Reuben and Grace, a story but not a novel, because Reuben and Grace are brother and sister and there is no getting married. Little Katy and Jolly Jim, same as above but not so exciting and traggic. Nature’s Mighty⁸⁴ Wonders which is good and improving. Alice in Wonderland, which is perfectly⁸⁵ lovely, and the Memoirs⁸⁶ of Anzonetta B. Peters who was converted at seven and died at twelve. When anybody asked for a question she answered with a hym verse. That is after she was converted. Before that she spoke⁸⁷ English. Aunt Elizabeth told me I ought to try to be like Anzonetta. I think I might be an Alice under more faverable circumstances but I am sure I can never be as good as Anzonetta was and I don’t believe I want to be because she never had any fun. She got sick as soon as she was converted and suffered aggonies for years. Besides I am sure that if I talked hyms to people it would exite ridicule⁸⁸. I tried it once. Aunt Laura asked me the other day if I would like blue stripes better than red in my next winter’s stockings and I ansered just as Anzonetta did when asked a similar question, only different, about a sack,

Jesus Thy blood and rightchusness

My beauty are, my glorious dress.

And Aunt Laura said was I crazy and Aunt Elizabeth said I was ireverent. So I know it wouldn’t work. Besides, Anzonetta couldn’t eat anything for years having ulsers in her stomach and I am pretty fond of good eating.

“Old Mr. Wales on the Derry Pond Road is dying of canser. Jennie Strang says his wife has her morning all ready.

“I wrote a biograffy of Saucy Sal to-day and a deskripshun of the road in Lofty John’s bush. I will pin105 them to this letter so you can read them too. Good night my beloved Father.

“Yours most obedient humble⁸⁹ servant,

“Emily B. Starr.

“P. S. I think Aunt Laura loves me. I like to be loved, Father dear.

“E. B. S.”