I am yours very affeckshunately.
“Emily Byrd Starr.
“P. S. Because you are my very dearest friend still, Father. Ilse says she loves me best of anything in the world and her red leather boots that Mrs Simms gave her next.”
A Daughter of Eve
New moon was noted for its apples and on that first autumn of Emily’s life there both the “old” and the “new” orchards bore a bumper crop. In the new were the titled and pedigreed apples; and in the old the seedlings, unknown to catalogues, that yet had a flavour wildly sweet and all their own. There was no taboo on any apple and Emily was free to eat all she wanted of each and every kind — the only prohibition being that she must not take any to bed with her. Aunt Elizabeth, very properly, did not want her bed messed up with apple seeds; and Aunt Laura had a horror of anyone eating apples in the dark lest they might eat an apple worm into the bargain. Emily, therefore, should have been able fully to satisfy her appetite for apples at home; but there is a certain odd kink in human nature by reason of which the flavour of the apples belonging to somebody else is always vastly superior to our own — as the crafty serpent of Eden very well knew. Emily, like most people, possessed this kink, and consequently thought that nowhere were there such delicious apples as those belonging to Lofty John. He was in the habit of keeping a long row of apples on one of the beams in his workshop and it was understood that she and Ilse might help themselves freely whenever they visited that charming, dusty, shaving-carpeted spot. Three varieties of Lofty John’s apples were their especial favourites — the “scabby apples,” that looked as if they had leprosy but were of unsurpassed deliciousness under their queerly blotched skins; the “little red apples,” scarcely bigger than a crab, deep crimson all over and glossy as satin, that had such a sweet, nutty flavour; and the big green “sweet apples” that children usually thought the best of all. Emily considered that day wasted whose low descending sun had not beheld her munching one of Lofty John’s big green sweets.
In the back of her mind Emily knew quite well that she should not be going to Lofty John’s at all. To be sure, she had never been forbidden to go — simply because it had never occurred to her aunts that an inmate of New Moon could so forget the beloved old family feud between the houses of Murray and Sullivan belonging to two generations back. It was an inheritance that any proper Murray would live up to as a matter of course. But when Emily was off with that wild little Ishmaelite of an Ilse, traditions lost their power under the allurement of Lofty John’s “reds” and “scabs.”
She wandered rather lonesomely into his workshop one September evening at twilight. She had been alone since she came from school; her aunts and Cousin Jimmy had gone to Shrewsbury, promising to be back by sunset. Ilse was away also, her father, prodded thereto by Mrs Simms, having taken her to Charlottetown to get her a winter coat. Emily liked being alone very well at first. She felt quite important over being in charge of New Moon. She ate the supper Aunt Laura had left on the cookhouse dresser for her and she went into the dairy and skimmed six lovely big pans of milk. She had no business at all to do this but she had always hankered to do it and this was too good a chance to be missed. She did it beautifully and nobody ever knew — each aunt supposing the other had done it — and so she was never scolded for it. This does not point any particular moral, of course; in a proper yarn Emily should either have been found out and punished for disobedience or been driven by an uneasy conscience to confess; but I am sorry — or ought to be — to have to state that Emily’s conscience never worried her about the matter at all. Still, she was doomed to suffer enough that night from an entirely different cause, to balance all her little peccadillos.
By the time the cream was skimmed and poured into the big stone crock and well stirred — Emily didn’t forget that, either — it was after sunset and still nobody had come home. Emily didn’t like the idea of going alone into the big, dusky, echoing house; so she hied her to Lofty John’s shop, which she found unoccupied, though the plane halted midway on a board indicated that Lofty John had been working there quite recently and would probably return. Emily sat down on a round section of a huge log and looked around to see what she could get to eat. There was a row of “reds” and “scabs” clean across the side of the shop but no “sweet” among them; and Emily felt that what she needed just then was a “sweet” and nothing else.
Then she spied one — a huge one — the biggest “sweet” Emily had ever seen, all by itself on one of the steps of the stair leading up to the loft. She climbed up, possessed herself of it and ate it out of hand. She was gnawing happily at the core when Lofty John came in. He nodded to her with a seemingly careless glance around.
“Just been in to get my supper,” he said. “The wife’s away so I had to get it myself.”
He fell to planing in silence. Emily sat on the stairs, counting the seeds of the big “sweet” — you told your fortunes by the seeds — listening to the Wind Woman whistling elfishly through a knot hole in the loft, and composing a “Deskripshun of Lofty John’s Carpenter Shop By Lantern Light,” to be written later on a letterbill. She was lost in a mental hunt for an accurate phrase to picture the absurd elongated shadow of Lofty John’s nose on the opposite wall when Lofty John whirled about, so suddenly that the shadow of his nose shot upward like a huge spear to the ceiling, and demanded in a startled voice,
“What’s become av that big sweet apple that was on that stair?”
“Why — I — I et it,” stammered Emily.
Lofty John dropped his plane, threw up his hands and looked at Emily with a horrified face.
“The saints preserve us, child. Ye never et that apple — don’t tell me ye’ve gone and et that apple!”
“Yes, I did,” said Emily uncomfortably. “I didn’t think it was any harm — I—”
“Harm! Listen to her, will you? That apple was poisoned for the rats! They’ve been plaguing me life out here and I had me mind made up to finish their fun. And now you’ve et the apple — it would kill a dozen av ye in a brace of shakes.”
Lofty John saw a white face and a gingham apron flash through the workshop and out into the dark. Emily’s first wild impulse was to get home at once — before she dropped dead. She tore across the field through the bush and the garden and dashed into the house. It was still silent and dark — nobody was home yet. Emily gave a bitter little shriek of despair — when they came they would find her stiff and cold, black in the face likely, everything in this dear world ended for her for ever, all because she had eaten an apple which she thought she was perfectly welcome to eat. It wasn’t fair — she didn’t want to die.
But she must. She only hoped desperately that some one would come before she was dead. It would be so terrible to die there all alone in that great, big, empty New Moon. She dared not try to go anywhere for help. It was too dark now and she would likely drop dead on the way. To die out there — alone — in the dark — oh, that would be too dreadful. It did not occur to her that anything could be done for her; she thought if you once swallowed poison that was the end of you.
With hands shaking in panic she got a candle lighted. It wasn’t quite so bad then — you could face things in the light. And Emily, pale, terrified, alone, was already deciding that this must be faced bravely. She must not shame the Starrs and the Murrays. She clenched her cold hands and tried to stop trembling. How long would it be before she died, she wondered. Lofty John had said the apple would kill her in a “brace of shakes.” What did that mean?
