Lucy Montgomery - Emily's Quest

Emily sat as if turned to stone, her white face framed in the vines that clustered round her window. He was there... Teddy was there... in Lofty John's bush... waiting for her... calling to her as of old. Expecting her!

Almost she had sprung to her feet... almost she had run downstairs and out to the shadows... the beautiful, perfumed shadows where he was waiting for her. But...

Was he only trying to see if he still had the old power over her?

He had gone away two years ago without even a written word of farewell. Would the Murray pride condone that? Would the Murray pride run to meet the man who had held her of so little account? The Murray pride would not. Emily's young face took on lines of stubborn determination in the dim light. She would not go. Let him call as he might. "Whistle and I'll come to you, my lad," indeed! No more of that for Emily Byrd Starr. Teddy Kent need not imagine that he could come and go as went the years and find her meekly waiting to answer his lordly signal.

Again the call came... twice. He was there... so close to her. In a moment if she liked, she could be beside him... her hands in his... his eyes looking into hers... perhaps...

He had gone away without saying good-bye to her!

Emily rose deliberately and lighted her lamp. She sat down at her desk near the window, took up her pen and fell to writing... or a semblance of writing. Steadily she wrote... next day she found sheets covered with aimless repetitions of old poems learned in school-days... and as she wrote she listened. Would the call come again? Once more? It did not. When she was quite sure it was not coming again she put out her light and lay down on her bed with her face in the pillow. Pride was quite satisfied. She had shown him she was not to be whistled off and on. Oh, how thankful she felt that she had been firm enough not to go. For which reason, no doubt, her pillow was wet with savage tears.

He came next night... with Ilse... in his new car. And there was handshaking and gaiety and laughter... oh, a great deal of laughter. Ilse was looking radiant in a big yellow hat trimmed with crimson roses. One of those preposterous hats only Ilse could get away with. How unlike the neglected, almost ragged Ilse of olden days. Yet just as lovable as ever. Nobody could help loving Ilse. Teddy was charming, too... with just the right amount of mingled interest and detachment an old resident coming back to childhood's home would naturally feel. Interested in everything and everybody. Oh, yes, indeed, hugely! Ilse tells me you're bringing out a book. Capital. What's it about? Must get a copy. Blair Water quite unchanged. Delightful to come back to a place where time seems to stand still.

Emily almost thought she must have dreamed the whistle in Lofty John's bush.

But she went for a drive to Priest Pond with him and Ilse... and made quite a sensation, for cars were still great novelties thereabouts. And they had a merry, delightful time... then and for the few remaining days of their visit. Ilse had meant to stay three weeks but found she could stay only five days. And Teddy, who seemed to be master of his own time, decided to stay no longer, too. And they both came over to say good-bye to Emily and all went for a farewell moonlit spin... and laughed a great deal... and Ilse, with a hug, declared it was just like old times and Teddy agreed.

"If only Perry had been round," he amended. "I'm sorry not to have seen old Perry. They tell me he is getting on like a house afire."

Perry had gone to the Coast on business for his firm. Emily bragged a little about him and his success. Teddy Kent need not suppose he was the only one who was arriving.

"Are his manners any better than they used to be?" asked Ilse.

"His manners are good enough for us simple Prince Edward Islanders," said Emily, nastily.

"Oh, well, I admit I never saw him pick his teeth in public," conceded Ilse. "Do you know"... with a sly, sidelong glance at Teddy which Emily instantly noticed... "once I fancied myself quite in love with Perry Miller."

"Lucky Perry!" said Teddy with what seemed a quiet smile of satisfied understanding.

Ilse did not kiss Emily good-bye, but she shook hands very cordially as did Teddy. Emily was thanking her stars, in genuine earnest this time, that she had not gone to Teddy when he whistled... if he ever had whistled. They drove gaily off down the lane. But when a few moments later Emily turned into New Moon there were flying footsteps behind her and she was enveloped in a silken embrace.

"Emily darling, good-bye. I love you as much as ever... but everything is so horribly changed... and we can never find the Islands of Enchantment again. I wish I hadn't come home at all... but say you love me and always will. I couldn't bear it if you didn't."

"Of course I'll always love you, Ilse."

They kissed lingeringly... almost sadly... among the faint, cold, sweet perfumes of night. Ilse went down the lane to where Teddy was purring and scintillating for her... or his car was... and Emily went into New Moon where her two old aunts and Cousin Jimmy were waiting for her.

"I wonder if Ilse and Teddy will ever be married," said Aunt Laura.

"It's time Ilse was settling down," said Aunt Elizabeth.

"Poor Ilse," said Cousin Jimmy inexplainably.

One late, lovely autumn day in November Emily walked home from the Blair Water post-office with a letter from Ilse and a parcel. She was athrill with an intoxication of excitement that easily passed for happiness. The whole day had been a strangely, unreasonably delightful one of ripe sunshine on the sere hills, faint, grape- like bloom on the faraway woods and a soft, blue sky with little wisps of grey cloud like cast-off veils. Emily had wakened in the morning from a dream of Teddy... the dear, friendly Teddy of the old days... and all day she had been haunted by an odd sense of his nearness. It seemed as if his footstep sounded at her side and as if she might come upon him suddenly when she rounded a spruce- fringed curve in the red road or went down into some sunny hollow where the ferns were thick and golden... find him smiling at her with no shadow of change between them, the years of exile and alienation forgotten. She had not really thought much about him for a long while. The summer and autumn had been busy... she was hard at work on a new story... Ilse's letters had been few and scrappy. Why this sudden, irrational sense of his nearness? When she got Ilse's fat letter she was quite sure there was some news of Teddy in it.

But it was the little parcel that was responsible for her excitement. It was stamped with the sign manual of the House of Wareham and Emily knew what it must hold. Her book... her Moral of the Rose.

She hurried home by the cross-lots road... the little old road over which the vagabond wandered and the lover went to his lady and children to joy and tired men home... the road that linked up eventually with the pasture field by the Blair Water and the Yesterday Road. Once in the grey-boughed solitude of the Yesterday Road Emily sat down in a bay of brown bracken and opened her parcel.

There lay her book. HER book, spleet-new from the publishers. It was a proud, wonderful, thrilling moment. The crest of the Alpine Path at last? Emily lifted her shining eyes to the deep blue November sky and saw peak after peak of sunlit azure still towering beyond. Always new heights of aspiration. One could never reach the top really. But what a moment when one reached a plateau and outlook like this! What a reward for the long years of toil and endeavour and disappointment and discouragement.

But oh, for her unborn Seller of Dreams!

The excitement at New Moon that afternoon almost equalled Emily's own. Cousin Jimmy gave up unblushingly his plan of finishing the ploughing of the hill field to sit at home and gloat over the book. Aunt Laura cried... of course... and Aunt Elizabeth looked indifferent, merely remarking in a tone of surprise that it was bound like a real book. Evidently Aunt Elizabeth had been expecting paper covers. But she made some rather foolish mistakes in her quilt patches that afternoon and she did not once ask Jimmy why he wasn't ploughing. And when some callers dropped in later on The Moral of the Rose was mysteriously on the parlour table, though it had been up on Emily's desk when Aunt Elizabeth saw the automobile drive into the yard. Aunt Elizabeth never mentioned it and neither of the callers noticed it. When they went away Aunt Elizabeth said witheringly that John Angus had less sense than ever he had and that for her part, if SHE were Cousin Margaret, she would NOT wear clothes twenty years too young for her.