magic, seemed to loosen something — some strange formidable power in Emily’s soul. She turned deliberately around and faced her aunt. She felt her brows drawing together in an unaccustomed way — she felt an uprush as from unknown depths of some irresistible surge of energy.
“Aunt Elizabeth,” she said, looking straight at the lady with the scissors, “my hair is not going to be cut off. Let me hear no more of this.”
An amazing thing happened to Aunt Elizabeth. She turned pale — she laid the scissors down — she looked aghast for one moment at the transformed or possessed child before her — and then for the first time in her life Elizabeth Murray turned tail and fled — literally fled — to the kitchen.
“What is the matter, Elizabeth?” cried Laura, coming in from the cookhouse.
“I saw — Father — looking from her face,” gasped Elizabeth, trembling. “And she said, ‘Let me hear no more of this’ — just as he always said it — his very words.”
Emily overheard her and ran to the sideboard mirror. She had had, while she was speaking, an uncanny feeling of wearing somebody else’s face instead of her own. It was vanishing now — but Emily caught a glimpse of it as it left — the Murray look, she supposed. No wonder it had frightened Aunt Elizabeth — it frightened herself — she was glad that it had gone. She shivered — she fled to her garret retreat and cried; but somehow, she knew that her hair would not be cut.
Nor was it; Aunt Elizabeth never referred to the matter again. But several days passed before she meddled much with Emily.
It was a rather curious fact that from that day Emily ceased to grieve over her lost friend. The matter had suddenly become of small importance. It was as if it had happened so long ago that nothing, save the mere emotionless memory of it, remained. Emily speedily regained appetite and animation, resumed her letters to her father and found that life tasted good again, marred only by a mysterious prescience that Aunt Elizabeth had it in for her in regard to her defeat in the matter of her hair and would get even sooner or later.
Aunt Elizabeth “got even” within the week. Emily was to go on an errand to the shop. It was a broiling day and she had been allowed to go barefooted at home; but now she must put on boots and stockings. Emily rebelled — it was too hot — it was too dusty — she couldn’t walk that long half-mile in buttoned boots. Aunt Elizabeth was inexorable. No Murray must be seen barefooted away from home — and on they went. But the minute Emily was outside the New Moon gate she deliberately sat down, took them off, stowed them in a hole in the dyke, and pranced away barefooted.
She did her errand and returned with an untroubled conscience. How beautiful the world was — how softly blue was the great, round Blair Water — how glorious that miracle of buttercups in the wet field below Lofty John’s bush! At sight of it Emily stood stock still and composed a verse of poetry.
Buttercup, flower of the yellow dye,
I see thy cheerful face
Greeting and nodding everywhere
Careless of time and place.
In boggy field or public road
Or cultured garden’s pale
You sport your petals satin-soft,
And down within the vale.
So far, so good. But Emily wanted another verse to round the poem off properly and the divine afflatus seemed gone. She walked dreamily home, and by the time she reached New Moon she had got her verse and was reciting it to herself with an agreeable sense of completion.
You cast your loveliness around
Where’er you chance to be,
And you shall always, buttercup,
Be a flower dear to me.
Emily felt very proud. This was her third poem and undoubtedly her best. Nobody could say it was very blank. She must hurry up to the garret and write it on a letterbill. But Aunt Elizabeth was confronting her on the steps.
“Emily, where are your boots and stockings?”
Emily came back from cloudland with a disagreeable jolt. She had forgotten all about boots and stockings.
“In the hole by the gate,” she said flatly.
“You went to the store barefooted?”
“Yes.”
“After I had told you not to?”
This seemed to Emily a superfluous question and she did not answer it. But Aunt Elizabeth’s turn had come.
Ilse
Emily was locked in the spare-room and told that she must stay there until bedtime. She had pleaded against such a punishment in vain. She had tried to give the Murray look but it seemed that — in her case at any rate — it did not come at will.
“Oh, don’t shut me up alone there, Aunt Elizabeth,” she implored. “I know I was naughty — but don’t put me in the spare-room.”
Aunt Elizabeth was inexorable. She knew that it was a cruel thing to shut an over-sensitive child like Emily in that gloomy room. But she thought she was doing her duty. She did not realize and would not have for a moment believed that she was really wreaking her own smothered resentment with Emily for her defeat and fright on the day of the threatened hair-cutting. Aunt Elizabeth believed she had been stampeded on that occasion by a chance family resemblance coming out under stress, and she was ashamed of it. The Murray pride had smarted under that humbling, and the smart ceased to annoy her only when she turned the key of the spare-room on the white-faced culprit.
Emily, looking very small and lost and lonely, her eyes full of such fear as should have no place in a child’s eyes, shrank close against the door of the spare-room. It was better that way. She could not imagine things behind her then. And the room was so big and dim that a dreadful number of things could be imagined in it. Its bigness and dimness filled her with a terror against which she could not strive. Ever since she could remember she had had a horror of being shut up alone in semi-darkness. She was not frightened of twilight out-of-doors, but this shadowy, walled gloom made of the spare-room a place of dread.
The window was hung with heavy, dark-green material, reinforced by drawn slat blinds. The big canopied bed, jutting out from the wall into the middle of the floor, was high and rigid and curtained also with dark draperies. Anything might jump at her out of such a bed. What if some great black hand should suddenly reach out of it — reach right across the floor — and pluck at her? The walls, like those of the parlour, were adorned with pictures of departed relatives. There was such a large connection of dead Murrays. The glasses of their frames gave out weird reflections of the spectral threads of light struggling through the slat blinds. Worst of all, right across the room from her, high up on the top of the black wardrobe, was a huge, stuffed white Arctic owl, staring at her with uncanny eyes. Emily shrieked aloud when she saw it, and then cowered down in her corner aghast at the sound she had made in the great, silent, echoing room. She wished that something would jump out of the bed and put an end to her.
“I wonder what Aunt Elizabeth would feel like if I was found here dead,” she thought, vindictively.
In
