Emily of New Moon: Chapters 12–17

When Ilse had to pause for breath in her diatribes, Emily, sitting on a big stone with her knees crossed, her eyes black and her cheeks crimson, interjected little sarcastic retorts that infuriated Ilse still further.

Ilse was crimson, too, and her eyes were pools of scintillating, tawny fire.

Emily accepted it—she found she had to. Ilse, it transpired, could no more help flying into tantrums now and then than she could help being jolly and affectionate between them.

By the sickbed he was as gentle and sympathetic as he was brusque and sarcastic away from it.

It had seemed that he liked hers, too, for she caught him staring shyly at her over the intervening pews several times.

Emily hated the school jargon that called a boy your “beau” if he happened to give you a pencil or an apple and picked you out frequently for his partner in the games.

A straggling rail fence, almost smothered in wild rosebushes, bounded the domain, and a sagging, ill-used little gate gave ingress from the road.

Teddy was unfeignedly glad to see them, and they had a happy afternoon together.

Teddy and Ilse sang school ditties, and Ilse recited, and Emily told stories; or they sat in happy silence, each anchored in some secret port of dreams, while the cats chased each other madly over the hill and through the tansy, tearing round and round the house like possessed creatures.

They were palpitating with nervous, stealthy life.

“Aunt Elizabeth does not aprove of Teddy,” Emily wrote in one of her letters to her father—which epistles were steadily mutiplying on the old garret sofa shelf.

Still, she was doomed to suffer enough that night from an entirely different cause, to balance all her little peccadillos.

There was no need to write to Father—she would see him soon—but Ilse must have her letter—dear, loving, jolly, hot-tempered Ilse, who, just the day before had shrieked insulting epithets after her and who would be haunted by remorse all her life for it.

As for Emily—well, Aunt Laura gave her that emetic in short order and two minutes later Emily had no doubt at all that she was dying then and there—and the sooner the better.

When she had finally cut him down and buried him with obloquy—the tears streaming down her face out of sympathy for Mrs. Lofty John—she forgave him.

He was an odd, ridiculous figure enough, bent and wrinkled and unkempt, gesticulating awkwardly as he recited.

Old Kelly had come round through Blair Water every fortnight from May to November for thirty years, perched on the seat of a bright red pedlar’s wagon and behind a dusty, ambling, red pony of that peculiar gait and appearance pertaining to the ponies of country pedlars—a certain placid, unhasting leanness as of a nag that has encountered troubles of his own and has lived them down by sheer patience and staying power.

When she reached the bank of the little creek where Lofty John’s brook ran into Blair Water, she heard piteous shrieks; and there, marooned on a tiny islet of sere marsh grass in the creek, was an unhappy little beast, its soaking fur plastered against its sides, shivering and trembling in the wind of the sharp autumnal day.

This happened only when the deeps of her being were stirred by some peculiarly poignant emotion. Just now she was in an agony of pity and anger.

But to see the Murray look suddenly superimposed like a mask over alien features, was such a shock to her nerves that she could not stand up against it.

He had a cheery, impudent, clean-cut face, with keen, grey eyes and plenty of tawny curls.

Nobody had as yet told Emily how very winsome that shy, sudden, up-glance of hers was.

He thrust his hands into his ragged pockets and stared at Emily so fixedly that she dropped her eyes in confusion—thereby doing further damage with those demure lids and silken fringes.

Miss Brownell was hearing the geography class at the other side of the room, the pleasant sunshine was showering in over them through the big window, and everything seemed propitious for a flight with the muses.

This was a boon reserved for those pupils who had found favour in Miss Brownell’s cold eyes—and Emily had never been one of those.

Fractions were utterly forgotten—what had numerators and denominators to do with those curving bosoms of white snow—that heavenly blue—those crossed dark fir tips against the pearly skies—those ethereal woodland aisles of pearl and gold?

Emily was lost to her world—so lost that she did not know the geography class had scattered to their respective seats and that Miss Brownell, catching sight of Emily’s entranced gaze sky-wards as she searched for a rhyme, was stepping softly towards her.

Nothing was more terrible to her than the thought of having her beloved “poems” read by stranger eyes—cold, unsympathetic, derisive, stranger eyes.

Miss Brownell held up the slate and read Emily’s poem aloud, in a sing-song nasal voice, with absurd intonations and gestures that made it seem a very ridiculous thing.

But at all events they should not get her poems—not one of them, no matter what they did to her. As soon as she got home from school she flew to the garret and secreted them on the shelf of the old sofa.

There seemed something baleful and poisonous in her very glance.

“Can’t,” said Perry laconically.

“Can’t,” repeated Perry, winking audaciously at Miss Brownell.

“Jimmy,” implored poor Elizabeth Murray, surrendering at discretion. She could not cope with the situation.

She was determined to regain ascendancy and Emily must be thoroughly humbled.

The memory of this moment would always be with Emily—she could never forget that she had knelt in abasement.

Miss Brownell hardly ever gives me good deportment marks now and Aunt Elizabeth is much displeased on Friday nights but Aunt Laura understands.

I have three cantos of The White Lady finished.

Teddy made a splendid suit of armor out of old barrel staves and then Perry made a better one out of old tin boilers hammered flat with a broken saucepan for a helmit.

But Cousin Jimmy came in just as he was asking me if I knew my catechism and said “Catechism, is it? Lawful heart, man, listen to that poor dum beast. Get up if you’re a Christian.”