Emily of New Moon: Chapters 6–11

Sleeping with Aunt Elizabeth seemed a very formidable thing. But she dared not protest.

Elizabeth Murray involuntarily remembered the ashamed, smothered feeling of relief when old Archibald Murray had died—the handsome, intolerant, autocratic old man who had ruled his family with a rod of iron all his life and had made existence at New Moon miserable with the petulant tyranny of the five years of invalidism that had closed his career.

“Emily, you must understand right now that you are to be grateful and obedient and show your appreciation of what is being done for you. I won’t have tears and repining. What would you have done if you had no friends to take you in? Answer me that.”

All we require of you is to be a good and contented child and to conduct yourself with becoming prudence and modesty.

Far and wide she wandered in enchanted reverie until she coasted the shore of dreams and fell soundly asleep on the fat, hard pillow, while the Wind Woman sang softly and luringly in the vines that clustered over New Moon.

A large, untidy lawn, overgrown with unpruned shrubs and trees, straggled right down to the pond, where enormous willows drooped over the water.

She breathed in the tang of fir-balsam and saw the shimmer of gossamers high up in the boughs, and everywhere the frolic of elfin lights and shadows.

“There is a spell woven round this garden. The blight shall spare it and the green worm pass it by. Drought dares not invade it and the rain comes here gently.”

“I guess I saw it when Aunt Ruth pulled me out from under the table,” said Emily ruefully.

And yet it rankled, Emily—it rankled. He never forgave his wife with a whole heart.

The big flat stone was inscribed with one of the long, discursive epitaphs of an older day.

But beneath the epitaph was no scriptural verse or pious psalm.

Emily lifted miserable eyes and in her extremity fell back on a phrase of her father’s.

A red spot suddenly appeared in Miss Brownell’s sallow cheek.

And they resented the level way she looked at them, with that disdainful face under cloudy black hair, instead of being shy and drooping as became an interloper on probation.

“Then what can you do?” said the freckled-one in a contemptuous tone.

They thought it a manifestation of Murray pride in an uncommon accomplishment.

There was much whispering and plotting after she had gone in, a conference with some of the boys, and a handing over of bedizened pencils and chews of gum for value received.

Miss Brownell granted Rhoda’s request quite graciously and Emily transferred her goods and chattels to Rhoda’s seat.

Besides, Emily was quite able to give “digs” herself, as she learned more about the girls and their weak points, and she could give them with such merciless lucidity and irony that the others soon learned not to provoke them.

Emily always felt a certain hankering to know more of Ilse, but it did not seem likely to be gratified.

She still had terrible hours when she was overwhelmed by grief for her father and when all the splendours of New Moon could not stifle the longing for the shabby little house in the hollow where they had loved each other so.

That was the day, the ill-starred day, when Miss Brownell elected to show the fifth class, by example as well as precept, how the Bugle Song should be read.

Standing on the platform Miss Brownell, who was not devoid of a superficial, elocutionary knack, read those three wonderful verses.

Angry with this breach of her strict discipline—angry with this unseemly display of interest in a third class atom whose attention should have been focused on long division.

Jennie Strang even went as far as bluntly to offer Emily a beautiful white box with a gorgeous picture of Queen Victoria on the cover, to keep her pencils in, if she would procure her an invitation.

She was not going to listen to disparaging remarks about her friends.

But Emily sailed past her with a head held very high and scorn on every lineament.

She hated to go to Sunday School because she thought the other girls exulted in her humiliation and her estrangement from Rhoda.

If one of them walked home with her she thought it was out of condescending pity because she was friendless.

“I think I must have been put under a curse at birth,” she reflected disconsolately.

Aunt Elizabeth had a more prosaic idea to account for Emily’s languor and lack of appetite. She had come to the conclusion that Emily’s heavy masses of hair “took from her strength” and that she would be much stronger and better if it were cut off.

Aunt Elizabeth had a more prosaic idea to account for Emily’s languor and lack of appetite. She had come to the conclusion that Emily’s heavy masses of hair “took from her strength” and that she would be much stronger and better if it were cut off.

She had had, while she was speaking, an uncanny feeling of wearing somebody else’s face instead of her own.

Aunt Elizabeth was inexorable. No Murray must be seen barefooted away from home—and on they went.

This seemed to Emily a superfluous question and she did not answer it.

There was such a large connection of dead Murrays. The glasses of their frames gave out weird reflections of the spectral threads of light struggling through the slat blinds.

In spite of her fright she began to dramatize it and felt Aunt Elizabeth’s remorse so keenly that she decided only to be unconscious and come back to life when everybody was sufficiently scared and penitent.

A beam of sunlight struck through a small break in one of the slats of the blind and fell directly athwart the picture of Grandfather Murray hanging over the mantel-piece.

Then she paused for breath, exultant. She was full of a fearful joy with an elfin delight running through it.