child was not contented.
“I asked you what you were crying for, Emily?” she repeated.
“I’m — homesick, I guess,” sobbed Emily.
Aunt Elizabeth was annoyed.
“A nice home you had to be homesick for,” she said sharply.
“It — it wasn’t as elegant — as New Moon,” sobbed Emily, “but — Father was there. I guess I’m Fathersick, Aunt Elizabeth. Didn’t you feel awfully lonely when your father died?”
Elizabeth Murray involuntarily remembered the ashamed, smothered feeling of relief when old Archibald Murray had died — the handsome, intolerant, autocratic old man who had ruled his family with a rod of iron all his life and had made existence at New Moon miserable with the petulant tyranny of the five years of invalidism that had closed his career. The surviving Murrays had behaved impeccably, and wept decorously, and printed a long and flattering obituary. But had one genuine feeling of regret followed Archibald Murray to his tomb? Elizabeth did not like the memory and was angry with Emily for evoking it.
“I was resigned to the will of Providence,” she said coldly. “Emily, you must understand right now that you are to be grateful and obedient and show your appreciation of what is being done for you. I won’t have tears and repining. What would you have done if you had no friends to take you in? Answer me that.”
“I suppose I would have starved to death,” admitted Emily — instantly beholding a dramatic vision of herself lying dead, looking exactly like the pictures she had seen in one of Ellen Greene’s missionary magazines depicting the victims of an Indian famine.
“Not exactly — but you would have been sent to some orphanage where you would have been half-starved, probably. You little know what you have escaped. You have come to a good home where you will be cared for and educated properly.”
Emily did not altogether like the sound of being “educated properly.” But she said humbly,
“I know it was very good of you to bring me to New Moon, Aunt Elizabeth. And I won’t bother you long, you know. I’ll soon be grownup and able to earn my own living. What do you think is the earliest age a person can be called grownup, Aunt Elizabeth?”
“You needn’t think about that,” said Aunt Elizabeth shortly. “The Murray women have never been under any necessity for earning their own living. All we require of you is to be a good and contented child and to conduct yourself with becoming prudence and modesty.”
This sounded terribly hard.
“I will be,” said Emily, suddenly determining to be heroic, like the girl in the stories she had read. “Perhaps it won’t be so very hard after all, Aunt Elizabeth,” — Emily happened at this point to recall a speech she had heard her father use once, and thought this a good opportunity to work it in—”because, you know, God is good and the devil might be worse.”
Poor Aunt Elizabeth! To have a speech like that fired at her in the darkness of the night from that unwelcome little interloper into her orderly life and peaceful bed! Was it any wonder that for a moment or so she was too paralysed to reply! Then she exclaimed in tones of horror, “Emily, never say that again!”
“All right,” said Emily meekly. “But,” she added defiantly under her breath, “I’ll go on thinking it.”
“And now,” said Aunt Elizabeth, “I want to say that I am not in the habit of talking all night if you are. I tell you to go to sleep, and I expect you to obey me. Good night.”
The tone of Aunt Elizabeth’s good night would have spoiled the best night in the world. But Emily lay very still and sobbed no more, though the noiseless tears trickled down her cheeks in the darkness for some time. She lay so still that Aunt Elizabeth imagined she was asleep and went to sleep herself.
“I wonder if anybody in the world is awake but me,” thought Emily, feeling a sickening loneliness. “If I only had Saucy Sal here! She isn’t so cuddly as Mike but she’d be better than nothing. I wonder where she is. I wonder if they gave her any supper.”
Aunt Elizabeth had handed Sal’s basket to Cousin Jimmy with an impatient, “Here — look to this cat,” and Jimmy had carried it off. Where had he put it? Perhaps Saucy Sal would get out and go home — Emily had heard cats always went back home. She wished she could get out and go home — she pictured herself and her cat running eagerly along the dark, starlit roads to the little house in the hollow — back to the birches and Adam-and-Eve and Mike, and the old wing-chair and her dear little cot and the open window where the Wind Woman sang to her and at dawn one could see the blue of the mist on the homeland hills.
“Will it ever be morning?” thought Emily. “Perhaps things won’t be so bad in the morning.”
And then — she heard the Wind Woman at the window — she heard the little, low, whispering murmur of the June night breeze — cooing, friendly, lovesome.
“Oh, you’re out there, are you, dearest one?” she whispered, stretching out her arms. “Oh, I’m so glad to hear you. You’re such company, Wind Woman. I’m not lonesome any more. And the flash came, too! I was afraid it might never come at New Moon.”
Her soul suddenly escaped from the bondage of Aunt Elizabeth’s stuffy featherbed and gloomy canopy and sealed windows. She was out in the open with the Wind Woman and the other gipsies of the night — the fireflies, the moths, the brooks, the clouds. Far and wide she wandered in enchanted reverie until she coasted the shore of dreams and fell soundly asleep on the fat, hard pillow, while the Wind Woman sang softly and luringly in the vines that clustered over New Moon.
The Book of Yesterday
That first Saturday and Sunday at New Moon always stood out in Emily’s memory as a very wonderful time, so crowded was it with new and generally delightful impressions. If it be true that we “count time by heart throbs” Emily lived two years in it instead of two days. Everything was fascinating from the moment she came down the long, polished staircase into the square hall that was filled with a soft, rosy light coming through the red glass panes of the front door. Emily gazed through the panes delightedly. What a strange, fascinating, red world she beheld, with a weird red sky that looked, she thought, as if it belonged to the Day of Judgment.
There was a certain charm about the old house which Emily felt keenly and responded to, although she was too young to understand it. It was a house which aforetime had had vivid brides and mothers and wives, and the atmosphere of their loves and lives still hung around it, not yet banished by the old-maidishness of the regime of Elizabeth and Laura.
“Why — I’m going to love New Moon,” thought Emily, quite amazed at the idea.
Aunt Laura was setting the breakfast table in the kitchen, which seemed quite bright and jolly in the glow of morning sunshine. Even the black hole in the ceiling had ceased to be spookish and become only a commonplace entrance to the kitchen loft. And on the red-sandstone doorstep Saucy Sal was sitting, preening her fur as contentedly as if she had lived at New Moon all her life. Emily did not know it, but Sal had already drunk deep the delight of battle with her peers that morning and taught the barn cats their place once and for all. Cousin Jimmy’s big yellow Tom had got a fearful
