A SPECIAL PROVIDENCE
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 liking
it. To be sure, Miss Brownell did not improve on acquaintance; but
the other girls no longer tormented her--indeed, to her amazement,
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 tiff she got a dig about baby
aprons and Murray pride, there was no more hostility, 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 lucidity and irony 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 aisle instead of giggles. Emily allowed them
all to enter the outer court of her temple of friendship but only
Rhoda was admitted to the inner shrine. 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
bonnet; Captain George, the dashing, bronzed sea-captain, coming home
with the spotted 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 stifle
the longing 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 drawn any nearer to the child. This hurt Emily always;
but Aunt Laura and Cousin Jimmy loved her and she had Saucy Sal and
Rhoda, fields creamy with clover, soft dark trees against amber skies,
and the madcap music the Wind Woman made in the firs behind the barns
when she blew straight up from the gulf; 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 slate 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 behold these sacred productions. Sometimes she let Rhoda read
them, though Rhoda rasped her by giggling 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 itch for writing tingling 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 precept, how the _Bugle
Song_ should be read.
Standing on the platform Miss Brownell, who was not devoid of a
superficial, elocutionary knack, read those three wonderful verses.
Emily, who should have been 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 misty
passes--the mere sound of the words seemed to make an exquisite 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 clatter, she
rushed up the aisle, she caught Miss Brownell’s arm.
“Oh, teacher,” she cried with passionate 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 breach 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 resounding slap on her face.
“Go right back to your seat and mind your own business, Emily Starr,”
said Miss Brownell, her cold eyes malignant with her fury.
Emily, thus dashed to earth, moved back to her seat in a daze. Her
smitten cheek was crimson, but the wound was in her heart. One
moment ago in the seventh heaven--and now _this_--pain, humiliation,
misunderstanding! She could not bear it. What had she done to deserve
it? She had never been slapped in her life before. The degradation
and the injustice ate into her soul. She could not cry--this was “a
grief too deep for tears”--she went home from school in a suppressed
anguish of bitterness and shame and resentment--an anguish that had no
outlet, 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, horrid 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 seething volcano
of wounded feeling and misery 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-room
bookcase to look in its lower compartment 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 rummaging 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 gathering 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,’ 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,” gasped 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 vex Aunt Elizabeth. This
was the quiet corner of the dormer window, where shadows always moved
about, softly and swingingly, and beautiful mosaics 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 fluffy
rolls, all ready for spinning, and hanks of untwisted yarn. Sometimes
Aunt Laura spun on the great wheel at the other end of the garret and
Emily loved the whirr of it.
In the recess 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 feverishly.
“Dear Father”--and then she poured out her tale of the day--of her
rapture and her pain--writing heedlessly and intently until the sunset
faded into dim, star-litten twilight. 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 mattered it? Emily, in the
delightful 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 curiously 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” snugly
on a little shelf formed by a board nailed across it underneath.
Emily had discovered this one day when playing in the garret and had
noted 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 confession 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 help 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 rites. 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 awfully
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 about 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 smuggle 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 ware 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 of 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 turnover when Aunt Elizabeth’s back is turned. Aunt Elizabeth
says apple turnovers 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 frays 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 feel 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 slippers, 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
like 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 Bower, and the big apple tree by the old
orchard gate the Praying Tree because it holds up its long boughs
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 decided 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 Elizabeth 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 fatten 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 missionary book
on the Paciffic Islands, pictures very interesting because of the way
the heathen chiefs arange their hair. After they became Christians
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, also 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 Mighty Wonders which is good and improving. Alice
in Wonderland, which is perfectly lovely, and the Memoirs 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 spoke 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 ridicule. 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 pin them to this letter so you can read
them too. Good night my beloved Father.
“Yours most obedient humble servant,
“_Emily B. Starr._
“P. S. I think Aunt Laura loves me. I like to be loved, Father dear.
“_E. B. S._”