Welcome to sleep stories with Steph It is time to relax.
And fully let go.
There is nothing you need to be doing now.
And know where you need to go.
Close your eyes.
And feel yourself sink into the support beneath you.
And let all the worries of the day go.
Drift away.
This is your time.
And your space.
Take a deep breath in through your nose.
And let it out with a long sigh.
That's it!
There is nothing you need to be doing now.
And know where you need to go.
Happy listening.
Chapter 29 Balancy toiled not.
Neither did she spin.
There was really very little work to do.
She cooked their meals on a coal-oil stove,
Performing all her little domestic rites carefully and exultingly,
And they ate out on the veranda that almost overhung the lake.
Before them lay Miss Stowers,
Like a scene out of some fairy tale of old time,
And Barney,
Smiling his twisted,
Enigmatical smile at her across the table.
What an old view Tom picked out when he built this shack,
Arnie would say exultantly.
Supper was the meal Valancy liked best.
The faint laughter of winds was always about them,
And the colours,
Imperial and spiritual,
Under the changing clouds,
Was something that cannot be expressed in mere words.
Shadows too.
Clustering in the pines until a wind shook them out and pursued them over,
Miss Stowers.
They lay all day long along the shores,
Threaded by ferns and wild blossoms.
They stall around the headlands in the glow of the sunset until twilight wove them all into one great web of dusk.
The cats with their wise,
Innocent little faces would sit on the veranda railing and eat the tidbits Barney flung them.
And how good everything tasted.
Balancy,
Amid all the romance of Mastowis,
Never forgot men had stomachs.
Barney paid her no end of compliments on her cooking.
After all,
He admitted.
There's something to be said for square meals.
I mostly got along boiling two or three dozen eggs hard at once and eating a few when I got hungry,
With a slice of bacon once in a while.
Valancy poured tea out of Barney's little battered old pewter teapot.
She had not even a set of dishes,
Only his mismatched chipped bits and a dear old big poppy old jug of robin's egg blue.
After the meal was over they would sit there and talk for hours or say nothing in all the languages of the world.
Barney pulled away at his pipe and Valancy dreamed idly and deliciously,
Gazing at the far-off hills where the spires of furs came out against the sunset.
The moonlight would begin to silver the dusk.
Bats would begin to swoop darkly against the pale western gold.
The little waterfall that came down on the high bank not far away would,
By some whim of the Wildwood gods,
Begin to look like a wonderful white woman beckoning through the spicy,
Fragrant evergreens.
And the islander would begin to chuckle diabolically on the mainland shore.
How sweet it was to sit there and do nothing in the beautiful silence,
With Barney at the other side of the table smoking.
There were plenty of other islands in sight.
Though none were near enough to be troublesome as neighbours.
There was one little group of islets far off to the west.
They called them the Fortunate Isles.
At sunrise,
They look like a cluster of emeralds.
At sunset,
Like a cluster of amethysts.
They were too small for houses but the lights on the larger islands would bloom out all over the lake.
And bonfires would be lighted on their shores,
Streaming up into the wood shadows and throwing great blood-red ribbons over the waters.
Music would drift to them alluringly from boats here and there,
Or from the verandas on the big house of the millionaire on the biggest island.
Would you like a house like that,
Moonlight?
Barney said once,
Waving his hat at it.
He'd taken to calling her Moonlight and Valancy loved it.
Who once dreamed of a mountain castle ten times the size of the rich man's cottage,
And now pitied the poor inhabitants of such palaces.
It's far too elegant.
I'd have to carry it with me everywhere I went,
On my back like a snail.
It would own me,
Possess me,
Body and soul.
I like a house I can love and cuddle and boss.
Just like ours here.
I don't envy Hamilton Gossard,
The finest summer residence in Canada.
It is magnificent.
But it isn't my blue castle.
Away down at the far end of the lake they got every night a glimpse of a big continental train that rushed through a clearing.
Fallency liked to watch its lighted windows flash by and wonder who was on it and what hopes and fears it carried.
She also amused herself by picturing Barney and herself going to the dances and dinners in the houses on the island.
But she didn't want to go in reality.
Once they did go to a masquerade dance in the pavilion.
And had a glorious evening.
But slipped away then in their canoe before unmasking time.
Back to their blue castle.
It was lovely,
But I don't want to go again.
It's advancing.
So many hours a day Barney shut himself up in Bluebeard's chamber.
Fallency never saw the inside of that.
From the smells that filtered through at times,
She concluded he must be conducting chemical experiments or counterfeiting money.
She supposed there must be a smelly process in making counterfeit money,
But she didn't trouble herself about it.
She had no desire to peer into the locked chambers of Barney's house of life.
His past and future concerned her not.
Only this rapturous present.
Nothing else mattered to her.
Once Barney went away and stayed two whole days and nights.
He asked Valancy if she would be afraid to stay alone,
And she said she would not.
He never told her where he'd been.
Valancy was not afraid to be alone,
But she was horribly lonely.
The sweetest sound she ever heard was Lady Jane's clatter through the woods when Barney returned.
And then his signal whistle from the shore.
She ran down to the landing rock to greet him,
To nestle herself into his eager arms.
And Barney's arms did seem eager.
Have you missed me,
Moonlight?
He whispered.
Seems like a hundred years since you went away.
Said Valancy.
I won't leave you again.
You must.
Protested Valancy if you want to.
I'd be miserable if I thought you wanted to and didn't because of me.
I want you to feel perfectly free.
Barney laughed a little.
Cynically,
She thought.
There's no such thing as freedom on earth,
He said,
Only different kinds of bondages and comparative bondages.
You think you're free now because you've escaped from a peculiarly unbearable kind of bondage.
But are you?
You love me,
That's a bondage.
Who said or wrote that the prison unto which we doom ourselves no prison is?
Asked Valancy dreamily,
Clinging to his arm.
Ah,
Now you have it,
" said Barney.
That's all the freedom we can hope for.
The freedom to choose our prison.
But moonlight.
.
.
He stopped at the door of the blue castle and looked about him.
At the glorious lake,
The great shadowy woods,
The bonfires and the twinkling lights.
I'm glad to be home again.
And I came down through the woods and saw my home lights.
Mine,
Gleaming out under the old pines.
Something I'd never seen before.
Girl,
I was very glad.
But in spite of Barney's doctrine of bondage.
Valancy thought the two of them were splendidly free.
It was amazing to be able to sit up half the night and look at the moon if you wanted to.
To be late for meals if you wanted to.
She who had always been rebuked so sharply by her mother.
And so reproachfully by Cousin Stickles if she were even one minute late.
Dawdle over meals as long as you wanted to.
Leave your crusts if you wanted to.
Not come home at all for meals if you wanted to.
Sit on a sand wall rock.
And paddle your bare feet in the hot sand if you wanted to.
Just sit and do nothing in the beautiful silence if you wanted to.
In short,
Do any fool thing you wanted to.
Whenever the notion.
Talk you.
If that wasn't freedom,
Valancy thought.
Then what was?
