Lucy Montgomery - Emily's Quest

"But Aunt Elizabeth said people would think me crazy if they saw me roaming around alone at this hour of the night. And Aunt Laura made me take a drink of hot black currant decoction lest I might have taken cold. Only Cousin Jimmy partly understood.

"'You went out to escape. I know,' he whispered.

'My soul has pastured with the stars Upon the meadowlands of space.'

I whispered in return."

"FEB. 26, 19... "Jasper Frost has been coming out here from Shrewsbury of late. I don't think he will come any more... after our conversation of last night. He told me he loved me with a love 'that would last through eternity.' But I thought an eternity with Jasper would be rather long. Aunt Elizabeth will be a little disappointed, poor dear. She likes Jasper and the Frosts are 'a good family.' I like him, too, but he is too prim and bandboxy.

"'Would you like a slovenly beau?' demanded Aunt Elizabeth.

"This posed me. Because I wouldn't.

"'Surely there's a happy medium,' I protested.

"'A girl shouldn't be too particular when she is'... I feel sure Aunt Elizabeth was going to say 'nearly twenty-four.' But she changed it to 'not ENTIRELY perfect herself.'

"I wish Mr. Carpenter had been alive to hear Aunt Elizabeth's italics. They were killing."

"MARCH 1, 19...

"A wonderful music of night is coming to my window from Lofty John's bush. No, NOT Lofty John's bush any more.

"Emily Byrd Starr's bush!

"I bought it to-day, with the proceeds of my latest serial. And it is mine... mine... mine. All the lovely things in it are mine... its moonlit vistas... the grace of its one big elm against the starlight... its shadowy little dells... its June-bells and ferns... its crystalline spring... its wind music sweeter than an old Cremona. No one can ever cut it down or desecrate it in any way.

"I am so happy. The wind is my comrade and the evening star my friend."

"MARCH 23, 19...

"Is there any sound in the world sadder and weirder than the wail of the wind around the eaves and past the windows on a stormy night? It sounds as if the broken-hearted cries of fair, unhappy women who died and were forgotten ages ago were being re-echoed in the moaning wind of to-night. All my own past pain finds a voice in it as if it were moaning a plea for re-entrance into the soul that has cast it out. There are strange sounds in that night wind clamouring there at my little window. I hear the cries of old sorrows in it... and the moans of old despairs... and the phantom songs of dead hopes. The night wind is the wandering soul of the past. It has no share in the future... and so it is mournful."

"APRIL 10, 19...

"This morning I felt more like myself than I have for a long time. I was out for a walk over the Delectable Mountain. It was a very mild, still, misty morning with lovely pearl-grey skies and smell of spring in the air. Every turn and twist on that hill-road was an old friend to me. And everything was so young. April couldn't be old. The young spruces were so green and companionable with pearl-like beads of moisture fringing their needles.

"'You are mine,' called the sea beyond Blair Water.

"'We have a share in her,' said the hills.

"'She is my sister,' said a jolly little fir-tree.

"Looking at them the flash came... my old supernal moment that has come so sadly seldom these past dreary months. Will I lose it altogether as I grow old? Will nothing but 'the light of common day' be mine then?

"But at least it came to me this morning and I felt my immortality. After all, freedom is a matter of the soul.

'Nature never did betray the heart that loved her.'

"She has always a gift of healing for us if we come humbly to her. Corroding memories and discontents vanished. I felt suddenly that some old gladness was yet waiting for me, just around the curve of the hill.

"The frogs are singing to-night. Why is FROG such a funny, dear, charming, absurd word?"

"MAY 15, 19...

"I know that when I am dead I shall sleep peaceably enough under the grasses through the summer and autumn and winter but when spring comes my heart will throb and stir in my sleep and call wistfully to all the voices calling far and wide in the world above me. Spring and morning were laughing to each other to-day and I went out to them and made a third.

"Ilse wrote to-day... a stingy little letter as far as news went... and spoke of coming home.

"'I'm homesick,' she wrote. 'Are the wild birds still singing in the Blair Water woods and are the waves still calling beyond the dunes? I want them. And oh, to see the moon rise over the harbour as we watched it do scores of times when we were children. And I want to see you. Letters are so unsatisfactory. There are so many things I'd like to talk over with you. Do you know I felt a little OLD to-day. It was a curious sensation.'

"She never mentioned Teddy's name. But she asked 'Is it true that Perry Miller is engaged to Judge Elmsley's daughter?'

"I don't think it is. But the mere report shows where Perry has climbed to already."

On her twenty-fourth birthday Emily opened and read the letter she had written "from herself at fourteen to herself at twenty-four." It was not the amusing performance she had once expected it to be. She sat long at her window with the letter in her hand, watching the light of yellow, sinking stars over the bush that was still called Lofty John's oftener than not, from old habit. What would pop out when she opened that letter? A ghost of first youth? Of ambition? Of vanished love? Of lost friendship? Emily felt she would rather burn the letter than read it. But that would be cowardly. One must face things... even ghosts. With a sudden quick movement she cut open the envelope and took out the letter.

A whiff of old fragrance came with it. Folded in it were some dried rose-leaves... crisp brown things that crumbled to dust under her touch. Yes, she remembered that rose... Teddy had brought it to her one evening when they had been children together and he had been so proud of that first red rose that bloomed on a little house rose-bush Dr. Burnley had given him... the only rose that ever did bloom on it, for that matter. His mother had resented his love for the little plant. One night it was accidentally knocked off the window-sill and broken. If Teddy thought or knew there was any connection between the two facts he never said so. Emily had kept the rose as long as possible in a little vase on her study table; but the night she had written her letter she had taken the limp, faded thing and folded it... with a kiss... between the sheets of paper. She had forgotten that it was there; and now it fell in her hand, faded, unbeautiful, like the rose-hopes of long ago, yet with some faint bitter-sweetness still about it. The whole letter seemed full of it... whether of sense or spirit she could hardly tell.

This letter was, she sternly told herself, a foolish, romantic affair. Something to be laughed at. Emily carefully laughed at some parts of it. How crude... how silly... how sentimental... how amusing! Had she really ever been young and callow enough to write such flowery exultant nonsense? And one would have thought, too, that fourteen regarded twenty-four as verging on venerable.

"Have you written your great book?" airily asked Fourteen in conclusion. "Have you climbed to the very top of the Alpine Path? Oh, Twenty-four, I'm envying you. It must be splendid to be YOU. Are you looking back patronizingly and pityingly to ME? You wouldn't swing on a gate now, would you? Are you a staid old married woman with several children, living in the Disappointed House with One-You-Know-Of? Only DON'T be stodgy, I implore you, dear Twenty-four. And do be dramatic. I love dramatic things and people. Are you Mrs. ... ... ... ... ... ... ? What name will fill those blanks? Oh, dear Twenty-four, I put into this letter for you a kiss... and a handful of moonshine... and the soul of a rose... and some of the green sweetness of the old hill field... and a whiff of wild violets. I hope you are happy and famous and lovely; and I hope you haven't quite forgotten