The Blue Castle, Part 13
Please enjoy this continued reading of "The Blue Castle", a delightful 1926 Canadian novel from author Lucy Maud Montgomery, best known for her 1908 book "Anne of Green Gables". Follow along as we hear how Valancy Stirling's dull life as a 29-year-old "old maid" is transformed by a life-changing medical diagnosis and subsequent foray into the world of romance, in search of the man and "Blue Castle" of her dreams!
Transcript
Hello there.
Thank you so much for joining me for this next part of the story of The Blue Castle,
Which is a 1926 novel from the Canadian author Lucy Maud Montgomery,
Who's best known for her book Anne of Green Gables.
Perhaps you've heard the preceding parts of this story,
Perhaps not.
Either way,
I'm sure there's enjoyment to be had listening to the tale.
So for now,
Let's take a moment here to have a nice deep exhale,
Letting go of the day,
Letting go of whatever we're bringing with us into this moment.
We can just relax now,
Get ourselves comfortable,
And enjoy the next part of The Blue Castle.
Chapter 31.
Autumn came,
Late September,
With cool nights.
They had to forsake the veranda,
Forsake the veranda,
But they kindled a fire in the big fireplace and sat before it with jest and laughter.
They left the doors open,
And Banjo and Good Luck came and went at pleasure.
Sometimes they sat gravely on the bare skin between Barney and Valancy.
Sometimes they slunk off into the mystery of the chill night outside.
The stars smouldered in the horizon mists through the old oriel.
The haunting,
Persistent croon of the pine trees filled the air.
The little waves began to make soft,
Sobbing splashes on the rocks below them in the rising winds.
They needed no light but the firelight that sometimes leapt up and revealed them,
Sometimes shrouded them in shadow.
When the night wind rose higher,
Barney would shut the door and light a lamp and read to her poetry and essays and gorgeous dim chronicles of ancient wars.
Barney never would read novels.
He vowed they bored him,
But sometimes she read them herself,
Curled up on the wolfskins,
Laughing aloud in peace.
For Barney was not one of those aggravating people who can never hear you smiling audibly over something you've read without inquiring placidly,
What is the joke?
October,
With a gorgeous pageant of colour around Mystaris,
Into which Valancy plunged her soul.
Never had she imagined anything so splendid.
A great,
Tinted peace.
Peace.
Blue,
Wind-winnowed skies,
Sunlight sleeping in the glades of that fairyland.
Long,
Dreamy,
Purple days,
Paddling idly in their canoe along shores and up the rivers of crimson and gold.
A sleepy,
Red hunter's moon.
Enchanted tempests that stripped the leaves from the trees and heaped them along the shores.
Flying shadows of clouds.
What had all the smug,
Opulent lands out front to compare with this?
November,
With uncanny witchery in its changed trees.
With murky red sunsets flaming in smoky crimson behind the westering hills.
With dear days when the austere woods were beautiful and gracious in a dignified serenity of folded hands and closed eyes.
Days full of a fine,
Pale sunshine that sifted through the late,
Leafless gold of the juniper trees and glimmered among the grey beaches,
Lighting up evergreen banks of moss and washing the colonnades of the pines.
Days with a high-sprung sky of flawless turquoise.
Days when an exquisite melancholy seemed to hang over the landscape and dream about the lake.
But days,
Too,
Of the wild blackness of great autumn storms,
Followed by dank,
Wet,
Streaming nights when there was witch laughter in the pines and fitful moans among the mainland trees.
What cared they?
Old Tom had built his roof well and his chimney drew.
Warm fire,
Books,
Comfort,
Safety from storm,
Our cats on the rug.
Moonlight,
Said Barney.
Would you be any happier now if you had a million dollars?
No,
Nor half so happy I'd be bored by conventions and obligations then.
December.
Early snows and Orion,
The pale fires of the Milky Way.
It was really winter now.
Wonderful,
Cold,
Starry winter.
Howver,
Lancey had always hated winter.
Dull,
Brief,
Uneventful days.
Long,
Cold,
Companionless nights.
Cousin Stickles with her back that had to be rubbed continually.
Cousin Stickles making weird noises,
Gargling her throat in the mornings.
Cousin Stickles whining over the price of coal.
Her mother probing,
Questioning,
Ignoring.
Endless colds and bronchitis,
Or the dread of it,
Red Fern's liniment and purple pills.
But now,
She loved winter.
Winter was beautiful up back.
Almost intolerably beautiful.
Days of clear brilliance.
Evenings that were like cups of glamour.
The purest vintage of winter.
Winter's wine.
Nights with their fire of stars.
Cold,
Exquisite winter sunrises.
Lovely ferns of ice all over the windows of the Blue Castle.
Moonlight on birches in a silver thaw.
Ragged shadows on windy evenings.
Torn,
Twisted,
Fantastic shadows.
Great silences,
Austere and searching.
Jeweled,
Barbaric hills.
The sun suddenly breaking through grey clouds over long,
White,
Mysterious,
Icy grey twilights.
Broken by snow squalls.
When their cosy living room,
With its goblins of firelight and inscrutable cats,
Seemed cosier than ever.
Every hour brought a new revelation and wonder.
Barney ran Lady Jane into Roaring Abel's barn and taught Valancy how to snowshoe.
Valancy,
Who ought to be laid up with bronchitis.
But Valancy had not even a cold.
Later on in the winter,
Barney had a terrible one,
And Valancy nursed him through it with a dread of pneumonia in her heart.
But Valancy's colds seem to have gone where old moons go.
Which was luck,
For she hadn't even read Fern's liniment.
She had thoughtfully bought a bottle at the port,
And Barney had hurled it into frozen Miss Starwyce with a scowl.
Bring no more of that devilish stuff here.
He had ordered briefly.
It was the first and last time he had spoken harshly to Miss Starwyce.
He had spoken harshly to her.
They went for long tramps through the exquisite reticence of winter woods and the silver jungles of frosted trees,
And found loveliness everywhere.
At times,
They seemed to be walking through a spellbound world of crystal and pearl so white and radiant,
Where clearings and lakes and sky,
The air was so crisp and clear that it was half intoxicating.
Once,
They stood in a hesitation of ecstasy at the entrance of a narrow path between ranks of birches.
Every twig and spray was outlined in snow.
The undergrowth along its sides was a little fairy forest cut out of marble.
The shadows,
Cast by the pale sunshine,
Were fine and spiritual.
Come away,
Said Barney,
Turning.
We must not commit the desecration of tramping through there.
One evening,
They came upon a snowdrift far back in an old clearing,
Which was in the exact likeness of a beautiful woman's profile.
Seen too close by,
The resemblance was lost,
As in the fairy tale of the Castle of St.
John,
Seen from behind.
It was a shapeless oddity,
But at just the right distance and angle,
The outline was so perfect that when they came suddenly upon it,
Gleaming out against the dark background of spruce in the glow of that winter sunset,
They both exclaimed in amazement.
There was a low,
Noble brow,
A straight,
Classic nose,
Lips and chin and cheek curve,
Modelled as if some goddess of old time had sat to the sculptor,
And abreast of such cold,
Swelling purity as the very spirit of the winter woods might display.
All the beauty that old Greece and Rome sung,
Painted,
Taught,
Quoted Barney,
And to think,
No human eyes save ours have seen or will see it,
Breathed Valancy,
Who felt at times as if she were living in a book by John Foster.
As she looked around her,
She recalled some passages she had marked in the new Foster book Barney had brought her from the port,
With an adjuration not to expect him to read or listen to it.
All the tintings of winter woods are extremely delicate and elusive,
Recalled Valancy,
When the brief afternoon wanes and the sun just touches the tops of the hills,
There seems to be all over the woods an abundance,
Not of colour,
But of the spirit of colour.
There is really nothing but pure white,
After all,
But one has the impression of fairy-like blendings of rose and violet,
Opal and heliotrope on the slopes,
In the dingles,
And along the curves of the forest land.
You feel,
Sure,
The tint is there,
But when you look at it directly,
It is gone.
From the corner of your eye,
You are aware that it is lurking over yonder,
In a spot where there was nothing but pale purity a moment ago.
Only just when the sun is setting is there a fleeting moment of real colour.
Then the redness streams out over the snow and incarnadines the hills and rivers and smites the crest of the pines with flame.
Just a few minutes of transfiguration and revelation and it is gone.
I wonder if John Foster ever spent a winter in Mastawis,
Said Valancy.
Not likely,
Scoffed Barney.
People who write Tosh like that generally write it in a warm house on some smug city street.
You are too hard on John Foster,
Said Valancy severely.
No one could have written that little paragraph I read you last night without having seen it first.
You know he couldn't.
I don't listen to it,
Said Barney morosely.
You know I told you I wouldn't.
Then you've got to listen to it now,
Persisted Valancy.
She made him stand still on his snowshoes while she repeated it.
She is a rare artist,
This old mother nature,
Who works for the joy of working and not in any spirit of vain show.
Today the fir woods are a symphony of greens and greys,
So subtle that you cannot tell where one shade begins to be the other.
Grey trunk,
Green bough,
Grey-green moss above the white,
Grey-shadowed floor.
Yet the old gypsy doesn't like unrelieved monotones.
She must have a dash of colour.
See it,
A broken dead fir bough of a beautiful red-brown swinging among the beards of moss.
Good lord,
Did you learn all that follows books by heart,
Was Barney's disgusted reaction as he strode off.
John Foster's books were all that saved my soul alive the past five years,
Averred Valancy.
Oh Barney,
Look at that exquisite filigree of snow in the furrows of that old elm tree trunk.
When they came out to the lake,
They changed from snowshoes to skates and skated home.
For a wonder Valancy had learned when she was a little schoolgirl to skate on the pond behind the Deerwood school.
She never had any skates of her own,
But some of the other girls had lent her theirs,
And she seemed to have a natural knack of it.
Uncle Benjamin had once promised her a pair of skates for Christmas,
But when Christmas came,
He had given her rubbers instead.
She had never skated since she grew up,
But the old trick came back quickly,
And glorious were the hours she and Barney spent skimming over the White Lakes and past the dark islands where the summer cottages were closed and silent.
Tonight they flew down Miss Darwis before the wind in an exhilaration that crimsoned Valancy's cheeks under her white tam,
And at the end was her dear little house on the island of pines with a coating of snow on its roof,
Sparkling in the moonlight.
Its windows glinted impishly at her in the stay gleams.
It looks exactly like a picture book,
Doesn't it,
Said Barney.
They had a lovely Christmas.
No rush,
No scramble,
No niggling attempts to make ends meet,
No wild effort to remember whether she hadn't given the same kind of present to the same person two Christmases before,
No mob of last-minute shoppers,
No dreary family reunions where she sat mute and unimportant,
No attacks of nerves.
They decorated the blue castle with pine boughs,
And Valancy made delightful little tinsel stars and hung them up amid the greenery.
She cooked a dinner to which Barney did full justice,
While Good Luck and Banjo picked the bones.
A land that can produce a goose like that is an admirable land,
Vowed Barney.
Canada forever.
And they drank to the Union Jack a bottle of dandelion wine that cousin Georgiana had given Valancy along with the bedspread.
One never knows,
Cousin Georgiana had said solemnly,
When one may need a little stimulant.
Barney had asked Valancy what she wanted for a Christmas present.
Something frivolous and unnecessary,
Said Valancy,
Who had got a pair of galoshes last Christmas and two long-sleeved woollen undervests the year before and so on back.
To her delight,
Barney gave her a necklace of pearl beads.
Valancy had wanted a string of milky pearl pearl beads,
Like congealed moonshine,
All her life.
And these were so pretty.
All that worried her was that they were really too good.
They must have cost a great deal.
$15 at least.
Could Barney afford that?
She didn't know a thing about his finances.
She had refused to let him buy any of her clothes.
She had enough for that,
She told him,
As long as she would need clothes.
In a round black jar on the chimney piece,
Barney put money for their household expenses.
Always enough.
The jar was never empty,
Though Valancy never caught him replenishing it.
He couldn't have much,
Of course.
And that necklace.
But Valancy tossed care aside.
She would wear it and enjoy it.
It was the first pretty thing she had ever had.
Chapter 32.
New Year.
The old shabby,
Inglorious,
Outlived calendar came down.
The new one went up.
January was a month of storms.
It snowed for three weeks on end.
The thermometer went miles below zero and stayed there.
But,
As Barney and Valancy pointed out to each other,
There were no mosquitoes.
And the roar and crackle of their big fire drowned the howls of the north wind.
Good Luck and Banjo waxed fat and developed resplendent coats of thick,
Silky fur.
Nip and Tuck had gone,
But they'll come back in spring,
Promised Barney.
There was no monotony.
Sometimes they had dramatic little private spats that never even thought of becoming quarrels.
Sometimes roaring Abel dropped in for an evening or a whole day with his old tartan cap and his long red beard coated with snow.
He generally brought his fiddle and played for them,
To the delight of all except Banjo,
Who would go temporarily insane and retreat under Valancy's bed.
Sometimes Abel and Barney talked while Valancy made candy for them.
Sometimes they sat and smoked in silence,
A la Tennyson and Carlyle,
Until the blue castle reeked and Valancy fled to the open.
Sometimes they played checkers fiercely and silently the whole night through.
Sometimes they all ate the russet apples Abel had brought while the jolly old clock ticked the delightful minutes away.
A plate of apples,
An open fire,
And a jolly good book whereon to look are a fair substitute for heaven,
Bowed Barney.
Anyone can have the streets of gold.
Let's have another whack at Carman.
It was easier now for the Stirlings to believe Valancy of the dead.
Not even dim rumors of her having been over at the port came to trouble them,
Though she and Barney used to skate there occasionally to see a movie and eat hot dogs shamelessly at the corner stand afterwards.
Presumably none of the Stirlings ever thought about her,
Except cousin Georgiana,
Who used to lie awake worrying about poor Doss.
Did she have enough to eat?
Was that dreadful creature good to her?
Was she warm enough at nights?
Valancy was quite warm at nights.
She used to wake up and revel silently in the coziness of those winter nights on that little island in the frozen lake.
The nights of other winters had been so cold and long.
Valancy hated to wake up in them and think about the bleakness and emptiness of the day that had passed,
And the bleakness and emptiness of the day that would come.
Now,
She almost counted that night lost on which she didn't wake up and lie awake for half an hour just being happy,
While Barney's regular breathing went on beside her,
And through the open door the smouldering brands in the fireplace winked at her in the gloom.
It was very nice to feel a little lucky cat jump up on your bed in the darkness and snuggle down at your feet purring,
But Banjo would be sitting dowerly by himself out in front of the fire like a brooding demon.
At such moments Banjo was anything but canny,
But Valancy loved his uncanniness.
The side of the bed had to be right against the window.
There was no other place for it in the tiny room.
Valancy,
Lying there,
Could look out of the window through the big pine boughs that actually touched it away.
Up Miss Darwis,
White and lustrous as a pavement of pearl,
Or dark and terrible in the storm.
Sometimes the pine boughs tapped against the panes with friendly signals.
Sometimes she heard the little hissing whisper of snow against them right at her side.
Some nights the whole outer world seemed given over to the empery of silence.
Then came nights when there would be a majestic sweep of wind in the pines.
Nights of dear starlight when it whistled freakishly and joyously around the blue castle.
Brooding nights before storm when it crept along the floor of the lake with a low wailing cry of boding and mystery.
Valancy wasted many perfectly good sleeping hours in these delightful communings,
But she could sleep as long in the morning as she wanted to.
Nobody cared.
Barney cooked his own breakfast of bacon and eggs and then shut himself up in Bluebeard's chamber till suppertime.
Then they had an evening of reading and talk.
They talked about everything in this world and a good many things in other worlds.
They laughed over their own jokes until the blue castles re-echoed.
You do laugh beautifully,
Barney told her once.
It makes me want to laugh just to hear you laugh.
There's a trick about your laugh as if there were so much more fun back of it that you wouldn't let you wouldn't let out.
Did you laugh like that before you came to Mystarwis,
Moonlight?
I never laughed at all,
Really.
I used to giggle foolishly when I felt I was expected to,
But now the laugh just comes.
It struck Valancy more than once that Barney himself laughed a great deal oftener than he used to,
And that his laugh had changed.
It had become wholesome.
She rarely heard the little cynical cynical note in it now.
Could a man laugh like that who had crimes on his conscience?
Yet Barney must have done something.
Valancy had indifferently made up her mind as to what he had done.
She concluded he was a defaulting bank cashier.
She had found in one of Barney's books an old clipping cut from a Montreal paper in which a vanished defaulting cashier was described.
The description applied to Barney as well as to half a dozen other men Valancy knew,
And from some casual remarks he had dropped from time to time.
She concluded he knew Montreal rather well.
Valancy had it all figured out in the back of her mind.
Barney had been in a bank.
He was tempted to take some money to speculate,
Meaning,
Of course,
To put it back.
He had got in deeper and deeper until he found there was nothing for it but flight.
It had happened so to scores of men.
He had,
Valancy was absolutely certain,
Never meant to do wrong.
Of course,
The name of the man in the clipping was Bernard Craig,
But Valancy had always thought Snaith was an alias.
Valancy had only one unhappy night that winter.
It came in late March when most of the snow had gone and Nip and Tuck had returned.
Barney had gone off in the afternoon for a long woodland tramp,
Saying he would be back by dark if all went well.
Soon after he had gone,
It had begun to snow.
The wind rose,
And presently Miss Darwis was in the grip of one of the worst storms of the winter.
It tore up the lake and struck at the little house.
The dark,
Angry woods on the mainland scowled at Valancy,
Menace in the toss of their boughs,
Threats in their windy gloom,
Terror in the roar of their hearts.
The trees on the island crouched in fear.
Valancy spent the night huddled on the rug before the fire,
Her face buried in her hands,
When she was not vainly peering from the oriel in a futile effort to see through the furious smoke of wind and snow that had once been blue-dimpled Miss Darwis.
Where was Barney?
Lost on the merciless lakes?
Sinking,
Exhausted in the drifts of the pathless woods?
Valancy died a hundred deaths that night and paid in full for all the happiness of her blue castle.
When morning came,
The storm broke and cleared.
The sun shone gloriously over Miss Darwis,
And at noon Barney came home.
Valancy saw him from the oriel as he came around a wooded point,
Slender and black against the glistening white world.
She did not run to meet him.
Something happened to her knees and she dropped down on Banjo's chair.
Luckily Banjo got out from under in time,
His whiskers bristling with indignation.
Barney found her there,
Her head buried in her hands.
Barney,
I thought you were dead,
She whispered.
Barney hooted.
After two years on the Klondike,
Did you think a baby storm like this could get me?
I spent the night in that old lumber shanty over by Muskoka.
A bit cold,
But snug enough.
Little goose,
Your eyes look like burnt holes in a blanket.
Did you sit up here all night worrying over an old woodsman like me?
Yes,
Said Valancy.
I couldn't help it.
The storm seemed so wild.
Anybody might have been lost in it.
When I saw you come round the point there,
Something happened to me.
I don't know what,
It was as if I had died and come back to life.
I can't describe it any other way.
Chapter 33 Spring Miss Darwis,
Black and sullen for a week or two,
Then flaming in sapphire and turquoise,
Lilac and rose again.
Laughing through the oriel,
Caressing its amethyst islands,
Rippling under winds soft as silk.
Frogs,
Little green wizards of swamp and pool,
Singing everywhere in the long twilights and long into the nights.
Islands,
Fairy-like in a green haze.
The evanescent beauty of wild young trees in early leaf.
Frost-like loveliness of the new foliage of juniper trees.
The woods putting on a fashion of spring flowers,
Dainty,
Spiritual things akin to the soul of the wilderness.
Red mist on the maples,
Willows decked out with glossy silver pussies.
All the forgotten violets of Miss Darwis,
Blooming again,
Lure of April moons.
Think how many thousands of springs have been here on Miss Darwis,
And all of them beautiful,
Said Valancy.
Oh Barney,
Look at that wild plum.
I will,
I must quote from John Foster.
There's a passage in one of his books,
I've re-read it a hundred times.
He must have written it before a tree just like that.
Behold,
The young wild plum tree,
Which has adorned herself,
After immemorial fashion,
In a wedding veil of fine lace.
The fingers of wood pixies must have woven it,
For nothing like it ever came from an earthly loom.
I vow the tree is conscious of its loveliness.
It is bridling before our very eyes,
As if its beauty were not the most ephemeral thing in the woods,
As it is the rarest and most exceeding for today it is,
And tomorrow it is not.
Every south wind purring through the boughs,
Will winnow away a shower of slender petals,
But what matter?
Today it is queen of the wild places,
And it is always today in the woods.
I'm sure you feel much better since you've got that out of your system,
Said Barney heartlessly.
Here's a patch of dandelions,
Said Valancy,
Unsubdued.
Dandelions shouldn't grow in the woods though.
They haven't any sense of the fitness of things at all.
They are too cheerful and and self-satisfied.
They haven't any of the mystery and reserve of the real woodflowers.
In short,
They've no secrets,
Said Barney,
But wait a bit.
The woods will have their own way,
Even with those obvious dandelions.
In a little while,
All that obtrusive yellowness and complacency will be gone,
And we'll find here misty phantom-like globes hovering over those long grasses in full harmony with the traditions of the forest.
That sounds John Foster-ish,
Teased Valancy.
What have I done that deserved a slam like that,
Complained Barney.
One of the earliest signs of spring was the renaissance of Lady Jane.
Barney put her on roads that no other car would look at,
And they went through Deerwood,
In mud to the axles.
They passed several stirlings who groaned and reflected that now spring was come,
They would encounter that shameless pair everywhere.
Everywhere.
Valancy,
Prowling about Deerwood shops,
Met Uncle Benjamin on the street,
But he did not realise until he had gone two blocks further on that the girl in the scarlet collared blanket coat,
With cheeks reddened in the sharp April air and the fringe of black hair over laughing slanted eyes,
Was Valancy.
When he did realise it,
Uncle Benjamin was indignant.
Yet,
What business had Valancy to look like,
Like,
Like a young girl?
The way of the transgressor was hard,
Had to be scriptural and proper.
Yet,
Valancy's path couldn't be hard.
She wouldn't look like that,
If it were.
There was something wrong.
It was almost enough to make a man turn modernist.
Modernist.
Barney and Valancy clanged on to the port,
So that it was dark when they went through Deerwood again.
At her old home,
Valancy,
Seized with a sudden impulse,
Got out,
Opened the little gate,
And tiptoed around to the sitting-room window.
There sat her mother and cousin Stickles,
Drearily,
Grimly,
Knitting.
Baffling and inhuman as ever.
If they had looked the least bit lonesome,
Valancy would have gone in.
But they did not.
Valancy would not disturb them for worlds.
For worlds.
Chapter 34.
Valancy had two wonderful moments that spring.
One day,
Coming home through the woods with her arms full of trailing arbiters and creeping spruce,
She met a man who she knew must be Alan Tierney.
Alan Tierney,
The celebrated painter of beautiful women.
He lived in New York in winter,
But he owned an island cottage at the northern end of Mistawis,
To which he always came the minute the ice was out of the lake.
He was reputed to be a lonely,
Eccentric man.
He never flattered his sitters.
There was no need to,
For he would not paint anyone who required flattery.
To be painted by Alan Tierney was all the cachet of beauty a woman could desire.
Valancy had heard so much about him that she couldn't help turning her head back over her shoulder for another shy,
Curious look at him.
A shaft of pale spring sunlight fell through a great pine,
Athwart her bare black head and her slanted eyes.
She wore a pale green sweater and had bound a fillet of linier vine about her hair.
The feathery fountain of trailing spruce overflowed her arms and fell around her.
Alan Tierney's eyes lighted up.
I've had a caller,
Said Barney the next afternoon,
When Valancy had returned from another flower quest.
Who?
Valancy was surprised,
But indifferent.
She began filling a basket with arbutus.
Arbutus?
Alan Tierney?
He wants to paint you,
Moonlight.
Me?
Valancy dropped her basket and her arbutus.
You're laughing at me,
Barney.
I'm not.
That's what Tierney came for.
To ask my permission to paint my wife.
As the spirit of Muskoka or something like that?
But,
But,
Stammered Valancy,
Alan Tierney never paints any but,
Any but,
Beautiful women,
Finished Barney.
Conceded.
QED Mistress Barney Snaith is a beautiful woman.
Nonsense,
Said Valancy,
Stooping to retrieve her arbutus.
You know that's nonsense,
Barney.
I know I'm a heap better looking than I was a year ago,
But I'm not beautiful.
Alan Tierney never makes a mistake,
Said Barney.
You forget,
Moonlight,
That there are different kinds of beauty.
Your imagination is obsessed by the very obvious type of your cousin,
Olive.
Oh,
I've seen her.
She's a stunner,
But you'd never catch Alan Tierney wanting to paint her in the horrible but expressive slang phrase.
She keeps all her goods in the shop window.
But in your subconscious mind,
You have a conviction that nobody can be beautiful who doesn't look like Olive.
Also,
You remember your face as it was in the days when your soul was not allowed to shine through it.
Tierney said something about the curve of your cheek as you looked back over your shoulder.
You know,
I've told you it was distracting,
And he's quite batty about your eyes.
If I wasn't absolutely sure it was solely professional,
He's really a crabbed old bachelor,
You know,
I'd be jealous.
Well,
I don't want to be painted,
Said Valancy.
I hope you told him that.
I couldn't tell him that.
I didn't know what you wanted,
But I told him I didn't want my wife painted,
Hung up in a salon for the mob to stare at,
Belonging to another man,
For,
Of course,
I couldn't buy the picture.
So even if you had wanted to be painted,
Moonlight,
Your tyrannous husband would not have permitted it.
Tierney was a bit squiffy.
He isn't used to being turned down like that.
His requests are almost like royalties.
But we are outlaws,
Laughed Valancy.
We bow to no decrees.
We acknowledge no sovereignty.
In her heart,
She thought unashamedly,
I wish Olive could know that Alan Tierney wanted to paint me.
Me!
Little old maid Valancy Stirling that was.
Her second wonder moment came one evening in May.
She realised that Barney actually liked her.
She had always hoped he did,
But sometimes she had a little disagreeable,
Haunting dread that he was just kind and nice and chummy out of pity,
Knowing that she hadn't long to live,
She hadn't long to live,
And determined she should have a good time as long as she did live.
But away back in his mind,
Rather looking forward to freedom again,
With no intrusive woman creature in his island fastness,
And no chattering thing beside him in his woodland prowls,
She knew he could never love her.
She did not even want him to.
If he loved her,
He would be unhappy when she died.
Valancy never flinched from the plain word,
No passing away for her,
And she did not want him to be the least unhappy.
But neither did she want him to be glad or relieved.
She wanted him to like her and miss her as a good chum.
But she had never been sure until this night that he did.
They had walked over the hills in the sunset.
They had the delight of discovering a virgin spring in a ferny hollow and had drunk together from it out of a birchbark cup.
They had come to an old tumble-down rail fence and sat on it for a long time.
They didn't talk much,
But Valancy had a curious sense of oneness.
She knew that she couldn't have felt that if he hadn't liked her.
You nice little thing,
Said Barney suddenly.
Oh,
You nice little thing.
Sometimes I feel you're too nice to be real,
That I'm just dreaming you.
Why can't I die now,
This very minute,
When I am so happy,
Thought Valancy.
Well,
It couldn't be so very long now.
Somehow,
Valancy had always felt she would live out the year Dr.
Trent had allotted.
She had not been careful.
She had never tried to be,
But somehow she had always counted on living out her year.
She had not let herself think about it at all.
But now,
Sitting here beside Barney,
With her hand in his,
A sudden realisation came to her.
She had not had a heart attack for a long while,
Two months at least.
The last one she had had was two or three nights before Barney was out in the storm.
Since then,
She had not remembered she had a heart.
Well,
No doubt it betokened the nearness of the end.
Nature had given up the struggle.
There would be no more pain.
I'm afraid heaven will be very dull after this past year,
Thought Valancy.
But perhaps one will not remember.
Would that be nice?
Nice?
No.
No.
I don't want to forget Barney.
I'd rather be miserable in heaven remembering him than happy forgetting him.
And I'll always remember,
Through all eternity,
That he really really liked me.
