Emily of New Moon: Chapters 18–26

Consternation reigned at New Moon. Everybody was desperately unhappy. Aunt Laura cried.

Aunt Elizabeth was so cantankerous that there was no living with her.

For it had all originated in her disregard of New Moon tradition in making calls on Lofty John, and Aunt Elizabeth did not mince matters in telling her so.

Every day Aunt Elizabeth said something imputing the whole blame to her and the child grew morbidly sensitive about it.

If she had had any hope that it would do any good she would have swallowed Murray pride and Starr pride and every other kind of pride and gone on her knees to Lofty John to entreat him to hold his revengeful hand.

Mrs. Kent was known to be an “English Church” woman and though Teddy went to the Presbyterian Sunday School, that fact gave him scanty standing among bred-in-the-bone Presbyterian circles.

Very likely Father Cassidy would refuse to interfere with Lofty John, who was a good Catholic, while she was, in his opinion, a heretic.

He was big and broad-shouldered, with brown eyes and brown hair; and his very face was so deeply tanned from his inveterate habit of going about bareheaded in merciless sunshine, that it was brown, too.

Excitement had brought a wildrose hue to her face, the sunlight brought out the watered-silk gloss of her black hair; her eyes were softly dark and limpid; but it was at her ears Father Cassidy suddenly bent to look.

“Kind av,” he agreed amiably.

“And you see ministers and priests can’t do their own swearing. They have to keep cats to do it for them. I never knew any cat that could sware as genteelly and effectively as the B’y.”

Emily told him the whole tale from beginning to end—the old Murray-Sullivan feud, her erstwhile friendship with Lofty John, the Big Sweet apple, the unhappy consequence, and Lofty John’s threatened revenge.

He’s a reasonable creature, if you know how to take him—which means to flatter his vanity judiciously.

“No matter. This, then, is a national affair, with far-reaching issues, therefore an appeal to the Supreme Pontiff is quite in order. What you want,” Father Cassidy nodded solemnly, “is a dispensation from Rome.”

“Nat millan O ste dolman bote ta Shrewsbury fernas ta poo litanos,” said Emily glibly. “That means, ‘Next summer I am going to Shrewsbury woods to pick strawberries.’ I yelled that across the playground to Ilse the other day at recess and oh, how everybody stared.”

That evening on her way home from school, Lofty John himself overtook her in his buggy and for the first time since the night of the apple stopped and accosted her.

“Will ye take a lift, Miss Emily av New Moon?” he said affably.

I’ve seen our lofty friend and I feel sure your green outpost of fairyland will be saved for your moonlit revels. I know you do dance there by light o’ moon when mortals are snoring.

The latter, however, caused her to issue an edict that Emily was not to “slide.”

The bang was tacitly permitted, and she felt that her looks were greatly improved thereby.

Emily removed the latter from its wrappings, spurning it aside with her foot.

Emily seemed to be rendered speechless.

But at this moment Perry bounded out of the spruce copse, his face white with rage, and seized his Aunt Tom most disrespectfully by the shoulder.

“Now, b’y dear,” quavered Aunt Tom deprecatingly.

She wrote a scathing epistle to Great-Aunt Nancy on a letter-bill in which she did not mince her opinions as to that ancient lady’s knowledge of the rules of epistolary etiquette; the letter was folded up and stowed away on the little shelf under the sofa but it served its purpose in blowing off steam and Emily had ceased to think about the matter when a letter came from Great-Aunt Nancy in July.

Aunt Elizabeth knew nothing of it all; she would promptly have put a stop to the whole thing, for she thought play-acting exceedingly wicked; but Aunt Laura was privy to the plot, and Cousin Jimmy and Lofty John had already attended a moonlight rehearsal.

A sequestered side road, fringed thickly with young maples and birches, led down to Wyther Grange.

But Aunt Nancy was white-haired and yellow-skinned and wrinkled and shrunken, though her brown eyes were still bright and shrewd.

“I wonder if anybody will be sorry when you die,” she thought, looking intently at Caroline’s wizened old face.

"...Caroline, I wish you didn’t have a wart on your nose.”
“I wish you had one on your tongue,” said Caroline waspishly.

And if the windows were hermetically sealed they kept out spooks as well as night air.

She was so tired that sometimes she dozed fitfully off only to be awakened in a few minutes in panic horror, by the rustling and muffled moans behind her bed.

What had become of Ilse’s mother? Even in her own desperate plight Emily asked herself that question.

Dean Priest never forgot that smile—and the steadfast child-eyes looking out through it from the little face that seemed so perilously near the brink.

She always called him “Jarback” rather contemptuously, while Caroline scrupulously called him Dean.

Emily knew he had been to college, that he was thirty-six years old—which to Emily seemed a venerable age—and well-off; that he had a malformed shoulder and limped slightly; that he cared for nothing save books nor ever had; that he lived with an older brother and travelled a great deal; and that the whole Priest clan stood somewhat in awe of his ironic tongue.

Aunt Nancy had called him a “cynic.” Emily did not know what a cynic was but it sounded interesting.

In spite of his twisted shoulder there was about him a certain aloof dignity of presence which was characteristic of many of the Priests and which was often mistaken for pride.

He also discovered pretty nearly everything else about her in that charming walk back to Priest Pond in the fir-scented dusk, with Tweed walking between them, his nose touching his master’s hand softly every now and then, while the robins in the trees above them whistled blithely in the afterlight.

“What worries me about writing novels,” confided Emily, “is the love talk in them. I’m sure I’ll never be able to write it. I’ve tried,” she concluded candidly, “and I can’t think of anything to say.”