Lucy Montgomery - A Tangled Web

Of course she didn't sleep. It would be a pity to waste a moment of such a night sleeping. It was nicer to lie awake thinking of Noel. Even planning a little bit about her wedding. It was to be in the fall. Her wedding-dress... satin as creamy as her own skin... "Your skin is like the petal of a white narcissus," Noel had told her... shimmering silk stockings... laces like sea-foam... one of those slender platinum wedding-rings... "the lovely Mrs Noel Gibson"... "one of the season's most charming brides"... a little house somewhere... perhaps one of those darling new bungalows... with yellow curtains like sunshine on its windows and yellow plates like circles of sunshine on its breakfast-table. With Noel opposite.

"Little love." She could hear him as he said it under the apple tree, looking down into the pools of darkness that were her eyes. How wonderful and unbelievable it was that out of a whole world of beautiful girls, his for the asking, he should have chosen HER.

Just once she thought of the old Moon Man's warning... "Don't be too happy." That poor old crazy Moon Man. As if one could be too happy! As if God didn't like to see you happy! Why, people were made for happiness.

"I'll always love this night," thought Gay. "The eighth of June... it will always be the dearest date of the year. I'll always celebrate it in some dear secret little way of my own."

And they would always be together... always. On rough paths and smooth. Dawns and twilights would be more beautiful because they would be together.

"If I were dead," thought Gay, "and Noel came and looked at me I'd live again."

Next day Nan rang Gay up on the telephone.

"I think I like your Noel," Nan said, drawlingly. "I think I'll take him from you."

Gay laughed triumphantly.

"You can't," she said.

V

Gay was not the only one of the clan who kept vigil that night. Neither Donna nor Peter slept. Mrs David Dark and Mrs Palmer Dark lay awake in their shame beside snoring spouses, wondering dumbly why life should be so hard for decent women who had always tried to do what was right. Virginia was awake worrying. Mrs Toynbee Dark was awake nursing her venom. Pauline Dark was awake wondering if Hugh would really get that divorce. Thora Dark waited anxiously for a drunken, abusive husband to come home. The Sams slept, although both, did they but know it, had cause to be wakeful. Hugh Dark and Roger Penhallow slept soundly. Even William Y. slept, with a poultice on his nose. On the whole, the men seemed to have the best of it, unless Aunt Becky, sleeping so dreamlessly in her grave in the trim Rose River churchyard, evened things up for the women.

Joscelyn was not sleeping either. She went to bed and tossed restlessly for hours. Finally she rose softly, dressed, and slipped out of the house to the shore. The hollows among the dunes were filled with moonlight. The cool wind nestled in the grasses on the red "capes," bringing whiffs of the faint, cold, sweet perfumes of night. There was a wash of gleaming ripples all along the shore and a mist mirage over the harbour. Far out she heard the heart-breaking call of the sea that had called for thousands of years.

She felt old and cold and silly and empty. Suppose Hugh really loved Pauline and wanted to be free. Very well. Why not? Did not SHE love Frank Dark? Why could she not think philosophically, "Well, if Hugh gets a divorce I will be free, too, and perhaps Frank will come back"... no, she could not think that. Such a thought seemed to tarnish and cheapen the high flame of love she had nursed in her heart for years.

Dawn was breaking over the dunes and little shudders were running through the sand-hill grasses when she went back to the house. She had not dreamed of meeting any one at that early hour, but who should come trotting across Al Griscom's silent white pasture of morning dew but Aunty But, bent two-double, with her head wrapped in a grey shawl, out of which her bright little eyes peered curiously at Joscelyn. She seemed at once incredibly old and elfinly young.

"You're up early, Mrs Dark."

Joscelyn hated to be called Mrs Dark, just as she hated to take a letter out of the post-office addressed to "Mrs Hugh Dark." Once when she had had to sign some legal document "Joscelyn Dark," she had thrown down the pen and risen with lips as white as snow. Aunty But was the only one of the clan who ever addressed her as "Mrs Dark." And there was no use in snubbing Aunty But.

"And you, too, Aunty."

"Eh, but I've never been in bed at all. I've been up at Forest Myers' all night. A little girl there... a fine baby but got the Myers mouth, I'm afraid."

"And Alice?"

"Alice is fine but awful sorry for herself. Yet she didn't have a bad time at all. No caterwauling to speak of. It's a pleasure to help a woman like that to a baby. I might have done the same for you in that house up there"... Aunty But waved her hand at distant Treewoofe, taking shape in the pale grey light that was creeping over the hill... "if you hadn't behaved as you did. I brought babies into that house many a time... I was there when Clara Treewoofe was born. Such a time! Old Cornelius... but he was young Cornelius then... was crazy wild. You'd have thought nobody'd ever had a baby before. Finally I had to decoy him to the cellar and lock him up, or that child would never have got born. Poor Mrs Cornelius couldn't rightly give her mind to it for the racket Cornelius was making. Clara was the last baby at Treewoofe. It's high time there was some more. But there may be. I'm hearing Hugh is going to get a Yankee divorce. If that's so, Pauline won't let him slip through her fingers a second time. But she'll never have the babies you'd have had, Joscelyn. She hasn't the figger for it."

VI

Little Brian Dark had to walk home from the funeral because his Uncle Duncan took a notion to go on to town.

"Mind ye get the stones picked off the gore-field before milking," he told him.

Brian never had a day to play... never even half a day. He was very tired, for he had picked stones all the afternoon since early morning; and he was hungry. To be sure, he was always hungry; but the hunger in his heart was worse than any physical hunger. And there was no monument to his mother. Would he ever be able, when he grew up, to earn enough money to get one?

When he reached Duncan Dark's ugly yellow house among its lean trees, he took off his shabby "best suit," put on his ragged work- garb, and went out to the gore to pick stones. He picked stones until milking-time, his back aching as well as his heart. Then he helped Mr Conway milk the cows. Mr Conway was the only hired man Brian had ever heard of who was called "Mr." Mr Conway said he wouldn't work for any one who wouldn't call him "Mr." He was as good as any master, by gosh. Brian rather liked Mr Conway, who looked more like a poet gone to seed than a hired man. He had a shock of wavy, dark auburn hair, a drooping moustache and goatee, and round, brilliant, brown eyes. He was a stranger from Nova Scotia and called himself a Bluenose. Brian often wondered why, for Mr Conway's nose was far from blue. Red in fact.

When milking was over, Aunt Alethea, a tall, fair, slatternly woman, with a general air of shrewishness about her, told him to go down to Little Friday Cove and see if he could get a codfish from one of the Sams.

"Be smart about it, too," she admonished him. "None of your dawdling, or the Moon Man will cotch you."

What the Moon Man would do when he "cotched" him she never specified, perhaps reasoning that the unknown was always more terrible than the known. Brian's private opinion was that he would boil him in oil and pick his bones. He was more afraid of the Moon Man now than of the devil. He had once been dreadfully afraid of the devil. Somebody had told him that when a boy had no father, the devil was his father and would come along some night and carry him off. He had been sick with horror many a night after that. But Mr Conway had told him there was no devil and emphasized it with so many "By goshes" that Brian believed him. He wanted to believe him. But Mr Conway by-goshed heaven away, too, and that was not so good because it meant he would never see his mother again. Mr Conway didn't go so far as to say there was no God. He even admitted there probably was. Somebody had to run things, though he was making a poor job of it.