you suppose I care what you think, you insignificant serpent? Why, you haven’t any sense.”
“I’ve got something then that’s far better,” said Emily, with a maddening superior smile. “Something that you can never have, Ilse Burnley.”
Ilse doubled her fists as if she would like to demolish Emily by physical force.
“If I couldn’t write better poetry than you, I’d hang myself,” she derided.
“I’ll lend you a dime to buy a rope,” said Emily.
Ilse glared at her, vanquished.
“You can go to the devil!” she said.
Emily got up and went, not to the devil, but back to New Moon. Ilse relieved her feelings by knocking the boards of their china closet down, and kicking their “moss gardens” to pieces, and departed also.
Emily felt exceedingly badly. Here was another friendship destroyed — a friendship, too, that had been very delightful and satisfying. Ilse had been a splendid chum — there was no doubt about that. After Emily had cooled down she went to the dormer-window and cried.
“Wretched, wretched me!” she sobbed, dramatically, but very sincerely.
Yet the bitterness of her break with Rhoda was not present. This quarrel was fair and open and aboveboard. She had not been stabbed in the back. But of course she and Ilse would never be chums again. You couldn’t be chums with a person who called you a chit and a biped, and a serpent, and told you to go to the devil. The thing was impossible. And besides, Ilse could never forgive her — for Emily was honest enough to admit to herself that she had been very aggravating, too.
Yet, when Emily went to the playhouse next morning, bent on retrieving her share of broken dishes and boards, there was Ilse, skipping around, hard at work, with all the shelves back in place, the moss garden re-made, and a beautiful parlour laid out and connected with the livingroom by a spruce arch.
“Hello, you. Here’s your parlour and I hope you’ll be satisfied now,” she said gaily. “What’s kept you so long? I thought you were never coming.”
This rather posed Emily after her tragic night, wherein she had buried her second friendship and wept over its grave. She was not prepared for so speedy a resurrection. As far as Ilse was concerned it seemed as if no quarrel had ever taken place.
“Why, that was yesterday,” she said in amazement, when Emily, rather distantly, referred to it. Yesterday and to-day were two entirely different things in Ilse’s philosophy. Emily accepted it — she found she had to. Ilse, it transpired, could no more help flying into tantrums now and then than she could help being jolly and affectionate between them. What amazed Emily, in whom things were bound to rankle for a time, was the way in which Ilse appeared to forget a quarrel the moment it was over. To be called a serpent and a crocodile one minute and hugged and darlinged the next was somewhat disconcerting until time and experience took the edge off it.
“Aren’t I nice enough between times to make up for it?” demanded Ilse. “Dot Payne never flies into tempers, but would you like her for a chum?”
“No, she’s too stupid,” admitted Emily.
“And Rhoda Stuart is never out of temper, but you got enough of her. Do you think I’d ever treat you as she did?”
No, Emily had no doubt on this point. Whatever Ilse was or was not, she was loyal and true.
And certainly Rhoda Stuart and Dot Payne compared to Ilse were “as moonlight unto sunlight and as water unto wine” — or would have been if Emily had as yet known anything more of her Tennyson than the Bugle Song.
“You can’t have everything,” said Ilse. “I’ve got Dad’s temper and that’s all there is to it. Wait till you see him in one of his rages.”
Emily had not seen this so far. She had often been down in the Burnley’s house but on the few occasions when Dr Burnley had been home he had ignored her save for a curt nod. He was a busy man, for, whatever his shortcomings were, his skill was unquestioned and the bounds of his practice extended far. By the sick-bed he was as gentle and sympathetic as he was brusque and sarcastic away from it. As long as you were ill there was nothing Dr Burnley would not do for you; once you were well he had apparently no further use for you. He had been absorbed all through July trying to save Teddy Kent’s life up at the Tansy Patch. Teddy was out of danger now and able to be up, but his improvement was not speedy enough to satisfy Dr Burnley. One day he held up Emily and Ilse, who were heading through the lawn to the pond, with fishing-hooks and a can of fat, abominable worms — the latter manipulated solely by Ilse — and ordered them to betake themselves up to the Tansy Patch and play with Teddy Kent.
“He’s lonesome and moping. Go and cheer him up,” said the doctor.
Ilse was rather loath to go. She liked Teddy, but it seemed she did not like his mother. Emily was secretly not averse. She had seen Teddy Kent but once, at Sunday-school the day before he was taken seriously ill, and she had liked his looks. It had seemed that he liked hers, too, for she caught him staring shyly at her over the intervening pews several times. He was very handsome, Emily decided. She liked his thick, dark-brown hair and his black-browed blue eyes, and for the first time it occurred to her that it might be rather nice to have a boy playmate, too. Not a “beau” of course. Emily hated the school jargon that called a boy your “beau” if he happened to give you a pencil or an apple and picked you out frequently for his partner in the games.
“Teddy’s nice but his mother is queer,” Ilse told her on their way to the Tansy Patch. “She never goes out anywhere — not even to church — but I guess it’s because of the scar on her face. They’re not Blair Water people — they’ve only been living at the Tansy Patch since last fall. They’re poor and proud and not many people visit them. But Teddy is awfully nice, so if his mother gives us some black looks we needn’t mind.”
Mrs Kent gave them no black looks, though her reception was rather distant. Perhaps she, too, had received some orders from the doctor. She was a tiny creature, with enormous masses of dull, soft, silky, fawn hair, dark, mournful eyes, and a broad scar running slantwise across her pale face. Without the scar she must have been pretty, and she had a voice as soft and uncertain as the wind in the tansy. Emily, with her instinctive faculty of sizing up people she met, felt that Mrs Kent was not a happy woman.
The Tansy Patch was east of the Disappointed House, between the Blair Water and the sand-dunes. Most people considered it a bare, lonely, neglected place, but Emily thought it was fascinating. The little clap-boarded house topped a small hill, over which tansy grew in a hard, flaunting, aromatic luxuriance, rising steeply and abruptly from a main road. A straggling rail fence, almost smothered in wild rosebushes, bounded the domain, and a sagging, illused little gate gave ingress from the road. Stones were let into the side of the hill for steps up to the front door. Behind the house was a tumbledown little barn, and a field of flowering buckwheat, creamy green, sloping down to the Blair Water. In front was a crazy veranda around which a brilliant band of red poppies held up their enchanted cups.
Teddy was unfeignedly glad to see them, and they had a happy afternoon together. There was some colour in Teddy’s clear olive skin when it ended and his dark-blue eyes were brighter. Mrs Kent took in these signs greedily and asked the girls to come back, with an eagerness that was yet not cordiality. But they had found the Tansy Patch a charming place and were glad to go again. For the rest of the vacation there was hardly a day
