The Blue Castle / Лазоревый замок

“Oh, no, nothing serious,” agreed Valancy. She felt a little less humiliated. It was no wonder poor Dr. Trent had forgotten her at such a moment. Nevertheless, she felt very flat and discouraged as she went down the street.

Valancy went home by the short-cut of Lover's Lane. She did not often go through Lover's Lane – but it was getting near supper-time and it would never do to be late. Lover's Lane wound back of the village, under great elms and maples, and deserved its name. It was hard to go there at any time and not find some canoodling couple – or young girls in pairs, arms intertwined, earnestly talking over their little secrets. Valancy didn't know which made her feel more self-conscious and uncomfortable.

This evening she encountered both. She met Connie Hale and Kate Bayley, in new pink organdy dresses with flowers stuck coquettishly in their glossy, bare hair. Valancy had never had a pink dress or worn flowers in her hair. Then she passed a young couple she didn't know, dandering along, oblivious to everything but themselves. The young man's arm was around the girl's waist quite shamelessly. Valancy had never walked with a man's arm about her. She felt that she ought to be shocked – they might leave that sort of thing for the screening twilight, at least – but she wasn't shocked. In another flash of desperate, stark honesty she owned to herself that she was merely envious. When she passed them she felt quite sure they were laughing at her – pitying her —“there's that queer little old maid, Valancy Stirling. They say she never had a beau in her whole life” – Valancy fairly ran to get out of Lover's Lane. Never had she felt so utterly colourless and skinny and insignificant.

Just where Lover's Lane debouched on the street, an old car was parked. Valancy knew that car well – by sound, at least – and everybody in Deerwood knew it. This was before the phrase “tin Lizzie” had come into circulation – in Deerwood, at least; but if it had been known, this car was the tinniest of Lizzies – though it was not a Ford but an old Grey Slosson. Nothing more battered and disreputable could be imagined.

It was Barney Snaith's car and Barney himself was just scrambling up from under it, in overalls plastered with mud. Valancy gave him a swift, furtive look as she hurried by. This was only the second time she had ever seen the notorious Barney Snaith, though she had heard enough about him in the five years that he had been living “up back” in Muskoka. The first time had been nearly a year ago, on the Muskoka road. He had been crawling out from under his car then, too, and he had given her a cheerful grin as she went by – a little, whimsical grin that gave him the look of an amused gnome. He didn't look bad – she didn't believe he was bad, in spite of the wild yarns that were always being told of him. Of course he went tearing in that terrible old Grey Slosson through Deerwood at hours when all decent people were in bed – often with old “Roaring Abel,” who made the night hideous with his howls —“both of them dead drunk, my dear.” And every one knew that he was an escaped convict and a defaulting bank clerk and a murderer in hiding and an infidel and an illegitimate son of old Roaring Abel Gay and the father of Roaring Abel's illegitimate grandchild and a counterfeiter and a forger and a few other awful things. But still Valancy didn't believe he was bad. Nobody with a smile like that could be bad, no matter what he had done.

It was that night the Prince of the Blue Castle changed from a being of grim jaw and hair with a dash of premature grey to a rakish individual with overlong, tawny hair, dashed with red, dark-brown eyes, and ears that stuck out just enough to give him an alert look but not enough to be called flying jibs. But he still retained something a little grim about the jaw.

Barney Snaith looked even more disreputable than usual just now. It was very evident that he hadn't shaved for days, and his hands and arms, bare to the shoulders, were black with grease. But he was whistling gleefully to himself and he seemed so happy that Valancy envied him. She envied him his light-heartedness and his irresponsibility and his mysterious little cabin up on an island in Lake Mistawis – even his rackety old Grey Slosson. Neither he nor his car had to be respectable and live up to traditions. When he rattled past her a few minutes later, bareheaded, leaning back in his Lizzie at a raffish angle, his longish hair blowing in the wind, a villainous-looking old black pipe in his mouth, she envied him again. Men had the best of it, no doubt about that. This outlaw was happy, whatever he was or wasn't. She, Valancy Stirling, respectable, well-behaved to the last degree, was unhappy and had always been unhappy. So there you were.

Valancy was just in time for supper. The sun had clouded over, and a dismal, drizzling rain was falling again. Cousin Stickles had the neuralgia. Valancy had to do the family darning and there was no time for Magic of Wings.

“Can't the darning wait till tomorrow?” she pleaded.

“Tomorrow will bring its own duties,” said Mrs. Frederick inexorably.

Valancy darned all the evening and listened to Mrs. Frederick and Cousin Stickles talking the eternal, niggling gossip of the clan, as they knitted drearily at interminable black stockings. They discussed Second Cousin Lilian's approaching wedding in all its bearings. On the whole, they approved. Second Cousin Lilian was doing well for herself.

“Though she hasn't hurried,” said Cousin Stickles. “She must be twenty-five.”

“There have not – fortunately – been many old maids in our connection,” said Mrs. Frederick bitterly.

Valancy flinched. She had run the darning needle into her finger.

Third Cousin Aaron Gray had been scratched by a cat and had blood-poisoning in his finger. “Cats are most dangerous animals,” said Mrs. Frederick. “I would never have a cat about the house.”

She glared significantly at Valancy through her terrible glasses. Once, five years ago, Valancy had asked if she might have a cat. She had never referred to it since, but Mrs. Frederick still suspected her of harbouring the unlawful desire in her heart of hearts.

Once Valancy sneezed. Now, in the Stirling code, it was very bad form to sneeze in public.

“You can always repress a sneeze by pressing your finger on your upper lip,” said Mrs. Frederick rebukingly.

Half-past nine o'clock and so, as Mr. Pepys would say, to bed. But First Cousin Stickles' neuralgic back must be rubbed with Redfern's Liniment. Valancy did that. Valancy always had to do it. She hated the smell of Redfern's Liniment – she hated the smug, beaming, portly, be-whiskered, be-spectacled picture of Dr. Redfern on the bottle. Her fingers smelled of the horrible stuff after she got into bed, in spite of all the scrubbing she gave them.

Valancy's day of destiny had come and gone. She ended it as she had begun it, in tears.

Chapter VII

There was a rosebush on the little Stirling lawn, growing beside the gate. It was called “Doss's rosebush.” Cousin Georgiana had given it to Valancy five years ago and Valancy had planted it joyfully. She loved roses. But – of course – the rosebush never bloomed. That was her luck. Valancy did everything she could think of and took the advice of everybody in the clan, but still the rosebush would not bloom. It throve and grew luxuriantly, with great leafy branches untouched of rust or spider; but not even a bud had ever appeared on it. Valancy, looking at it two days after her birthday, was filled with a sudden, overwhelming hatred for it. The thing wouldn't bloom: very well, then, she would cut it down. She marched to the tool-room in the barn for her garden knife and she went at the rosebush viciously. A few minutes later horrified Mrs. Frederick came out to the verandah and beheld her daughter slashing insanely among the rosebush boughs. Half of them were already strewn on the walk. The bush looked sadly dismantled.

“Doss, what on earth are you doing? Have you gone crazy?”

“No,” said Valancy. She meant to say it defiantly, but habit was too strong for her. She said it deprecatingly. “I – I just made up my mind to cut this bush down. It is no good. It never blooms – never will bloom.”

“That is no reason for destroying it,” said Mrs. Frederick sternly. “It was a beautiful bush and quite ornamental. You have made a sorry-looking thing of it.”

“Rose trees should bloom,” said Valancy a little obstinately.

“Don't argue with me, Doss. Clear up that mess and leave the bush alone. I don't know what Georgiana will say when she sees how you have hacked it to pieces. Really, I'm surprised at you. And to do it without consulting me!”

“The bush is mine,” muttered Valancy.

“What's that? What did you say, Doss?”

“I only said the bush was mine,” repeated Valancy humbly.

Mrs. Frederick turned without a word and marched back into the house. The mischief was done now. Valancy knew she had offended her mother deeply and would not be spoken to or noticed in any way for two or three days. Cousin Stickles would see to Valancy's bringing-up but Mrs. Frederick would preserve the stony silence of outraged majesty.

Valancy sighed and put away her garden knife, hanging it precisely on its precise nail in the tool-shop. She cleared away the severed branches and swept up the leaves. Her lips twitched as she looked at the straggling bush. It had an odd resemblance to its shaken, scrawny donor, little Cousin Georgiana herself.

“I certainly have made an awful-looking thing of it,” thought Valancy.

But she did not feel repentant – only sorry she had offended her mother. Things would be so uncomfortable until she was forgiven. Mrs. Frederick was one of those women who can make their anger felt all over a house. Walls and doors are no protection from it.

“You'd better go uptown and git the mail,” said Cousin Stickles, when Valancy went in. “I can't go – I feel all sorter peaky and piny this spring. I want you to stop at the drugstore and git me a bottle of Redfern's Blood Bitters. There's nothing like Redfern's Bitters for building a body up. Cousin James says the Purple Pills are the best, but I know better. My poor dear husband took Redfern's Bitters right up to the day he died. Don't let them charge you more'n ninety cents. I kin git it for that at the Port. And what have you been saying to your poor mother? Do you ever stop to think, Doss, that you kin only have one mother?”

“One is enough for me,” thought Valancy undutifully, as she went uptown.

She got Cousin Stickles' bottle of bitters and then she went to the post-office and asked for her mail at the General Delivery. Her mother did not have a box. They got too little mail to bother with it. Valancy did not expect any mail, except the Christian Times, which was the only paper they took. They hardly ever got any letters. But Valancy rather liked to stand in the office and watch Mr. Carewe, the grey-bearded, Santa-Clausy old clerk, handing out letters to the lucky people who did get them. He did it with such a detached, impersonal, Jove-like air, as if it did not matter in the least to him what supernal joys or shattering horrors might be in those letters for the people to whom they were addressed. Letters had a fascination for Valancy, perhaps because she so seldom got any. In her Blue Castle exciting epistles, bound with silk and sealed with crimson, were always being brought to her by pages in livery of gold and blue, but in real life her only letters were occasional perfunctory notes from relatives or an advertising circular.

Consequently she was immensely surprised when Mr. Carewe, looking even more Jovian than usual, poked a letter out to her. Yes, it was addressed to her plainly, in a fierce, black hand: “Miss Valancy Stirling, Elm Street, Deerwood” – and the postmark was Montreal. Valancy picked it up with a little quickening of her breath. Montreal! It must be from Doctor Trent. He had remembered her, after all.

Valancy met Uncle Benjamin coming in as she was going out and was glad the letter was safely in her bag.

“What,” said Uncle Benjamin, “is the difference between a donkey and a postage-stamp?”

“I don't know. What?” answered Valancy dutifully.

“One you lick with a stick and the other you stick with a lick. Ha, ha!”

Uncle Benjamin passed in, tremendously pleased with himself.

Cousin Stickles pounced on the Times when Valancy got home, but it did not occur to her to ask if there were any letters. Mrs. Frederick would have asked it, but Mrs. Frederick's lips at present were sealed. Valancy was glad of this. If her mother had asked if there were any letters Valancy would have had to admit there was. Then she would have had to let her mother and Cousin Stickles read the letter and all would be discovered.

Her heart acted strangely on the way upstairs, and she sat down by her window for a few minutes before opening her letter. She felt very guilty and deceitful. She had never before kept a letter secret from her mother. Every letter she had ever written or received had been read by Mrs. Frederick. That had never mattered. Valancy had never had anything to hide. But this did matter. She could not have any one see this letter. But her fingers trembled with a consciousness of wickedness and unfilial conduct as she opened it – trembled a little, too, perhaps, with apprehension. She felt quite sure there was nothing seriously wrong with her heart but – one never knew.

Dr. Trent's letter was like himself – blunt, abrupt, concise, wasting no words. Dr. Trent never beat about the bush. “Dear Miss Sterling” – and then a page of black, positive writing. Valancy seemed to read it at a glance; she dropped it on her lap, her face ghost-white.

Dr. Trent told her that she had a very dangerous and fatal form of heart disease – angina pectoris – evidently complicated with an aneurism – whatever that was – and in the last stages. He said, without mincing matters, that nothing could be done for her. If she took great care of herself she might live a year – but she might also die at any moment – Dr. Trent never troubled himself about euphemisms. She must be careful to avoid all excitement and all severe muscular efforts. She must eat and drink moderately, she must never run, she must go upstairs and uphill with great care. Any sudden jolt or shock might be fatal. She was to get the prescription he enclosed filled and carry it with her always, taking a dose whenever her attacks came on. And he was hers truly, H. B. Trent.

Valancy sat for a long while by her window. Outside was a world drowned in the light of a spring afternoon – skies entrancingly blue, winds perfumed and free, lovely, soft, blue hazes at the end of every street. Over at the railway station a group of young girls was waiting for a train; she heard their gay laughter as they chattered and joked. The train roared in and roared out again. But none of these things had any reality. Nothing had any reality except the fact that she had only another year to live.

When she was tired of sitting at the window she went over and lay down on her bed, staring at the cracked, discoloured ceiling. The curious numbness that follows on a staggering blow possessed her. She did not feel anything except a boundless surprise and incredulity – behind which was the conviction that Dr. Trent knew his business and that she, Valancy Stirling, who had never lived, was about to die.

When the gong rang for supper Valancy got up and went downstairs mechanically, from force of habit. She wondered that she had been let alone so long. But of course her mother would not pay any attention to her just now. Valancy was thankful for this. She thought the quarrel over the rosebush had been really, as Mrs. Frederick herself might have said, Providential. She could not eat anything, but both Mrs. Frederick and Cousin Stickles thought this was because she was deservedly unhappy over her mother's attitude, and her lack of appetite was not commented on. Valancy forced herself to swallow a cup of tea and then sat and watched the others eat, with an odd feeling that years had passed since she had sat with them at the dinner-table. She found herself smiling inwardly to think what a commotion she could make if she chose. Let her merely tell them what was in Dr. Trent's letter and there would be as much fuss made as if – Valancy thought bitterly – they really cared two straws about her.

“Dr. Trent's housekeeper got word from him today,” said Cousin Stickles, so suddenly that Valancy jumped guiltily. Was there anything in thought waves? “Mrs. Judd was talking to her uptown. They think his son will recover, but Dr. Trent wrote that if he did he was going to take him abroad as soon as he was able to travel and wouldn't be back here for a year at least.”

“That will not matter much to us,” said Mrs. Frederick majestically. “He is not our doctor. I would not” – here she looked or seemed to look accusingly right through Valancy —”have him to doctor a sick cat.”

“May I go upstairs and lie down?” said Valancy faintly. “I – I have a headache.”

“What has given you a headache?” asked Cousin Stickles, since Mrs. Frederick would not. The question had to be asked. Valancy could not be allowed to have headaches without interference.

“You ain't in the habit of having headaches. I hope you're not taking the mumps. Here, try a spoonful of vinegar.”

“Piffle!” said Valancy rudely, getting up from the table. She did not care just then if she were rude. She had had to be so polite all her life.

If it had been possible for Cousin Stickles to turn pale she would have. As it was not, she turned yellower.

“Are you sure you ain't feverish, Doss? You sound like it. You go and get right into bed,” said Cousin Stickles, thoroughly alarmed, “and I'll come up and rub your forehead and the back of your neck with Redfern's Liniment.”

Valancy had reached the door, but she turned. “I won't be rubbed with Redfern's Liniment!” she said.

Cousin Stickles stared and gasped. “What – what do you mean?”

“I said I wouldn't be rubbed with Redfern's Liniment,” repeated Valancy. “Horrid, sticky stuff! And it has the vilest smell of any liniment I ever saw. It's no good. I want to be left alone, that's all.”

Valancy went out, leaving Cousin Stickles aghast.

“She's feverish – she must be feverish,” ejaculated Cousin Stickles.

Mrs. Frederick went on eating her supper. It did not matter whether Valancy was or was not feverish. Valancy had been guilty of impertinence to her.

Chapter VIII

Valancy did not sleep that night. She lay awake all through the long dark hours – thinking – thinking. She made a discovery that surprised her: she, who had been afraid of almost everything in life, was not afraid of death. It did not seem in the least terrible to her. And she need not now be afraid of anything else. Why had she been afraid of things? Because of life. Afraid of Uncle Benjamin because of the menace of poverty in old age. But now she would never be old – neglected – tolerated. Afraid of being an old maid all her life. But now she would not be an old maid very long. Afraid of offending her mother and her clan because she had to live with and among them and couldn't live peaceably if she didn't give in to them. But now she hadn't. Valancy felt a curious freedom.

But she was still horribly afraid of one thing – the fuss the whole jamfry of them would make when she told them. Valancy shuddered at the thought of it. She couldn't endure it. Oh, she knew so well how it would be. First there would be indignation – yes, indignation on the part of Uncle James because she had gone to a doctor – any doctor – without consulting HIM. Indignation on the part of her mother for being so sly and deceitful —”to your own mother, Doss.” Indignation on the part of the whole clan because she had not gone to Dr. Marsh.

Then would come the solicitude. She would be taken to Dr. Marsh, and when Dr. Marsh confirmed Dr. Trent's diagnosis she would be taken to specialists in Toronto and Montreal. Uncle Benjamin would foot the bill with a splendid gesture of munificence in thus assisting the widow and orphan, and talk forever after of the shocking fees specialists charged for looking wise and saying they couldn't do anything. And when the specialists could do nothing for her Uncle James would insist on her taking Purple Pills —“I've known them to effect a cure when all the doctors had given up” – and her mother would insist on Redfern's Blood Bitters, and Cousin Stickles would insist on rubbing her over the heart every night with Redfern's Liniment on the grounds that it might do good and couldn't do harm; and everybody else would have some pet dope for her to take. Dr. Stalling would come to her and say solemnly, “You are very ill. Are you prepared for what may be before you?” – almost as if he were going to shake his forefinger at her, the forefinger that had not grown any shorter or less knobbly with age. And she would be watched and checked like a baby and never let do anything or go anywhere alone. Perhaps she would not even be allowed to sleep alone lest she die in her sleep. Cousin Stickles or her mother would insist on sharing her room and bed. Yes, undoubtedly they would.

It was this last thought that really decided Valancy. She could not put up with it and she wouldn't. As the clock in the hall below struck twelve Valancy suddenly and definitely made up her mind that she would not tell anybody. She had always been told, ever since she could remember, that she must hide her feelings. “It is not ladylike to have feelings,” Cousin Stickles had once told her disapprovingly. Well, she would hide them with a vengeance.

But though she was not afraid of death she was not indifferent to it. She found that she resented it; it was not fair that she should have to die when she had never lived. Rebellion flamed up in her soul as the dark hours passed by – not because she had no future but because she had no past.

“I'm poor – I'm ugly – I'm a failure – and I'm near death,” she thought. She could see her own obituary notice in the Deerwood Weekly Times, copied into the Port Lawrence Journal. “A deep gloom was cast over Deerwood, etc., etc.” —”leaves a large circle of friends to mourn, etc., etc., etc.” – lies, all lies. Gloom, forsooth! Nobody would miss her. Her death would not matter a straw to anybody. Not even her mother loved her – her mother who had been so disappointed that she was not a boy – or at least, a pretty girl.

Valancy reviewed her whole life between midnight and the early spring dawn. It was a very drab existence, but here and there an incident loomed out with a significance out of all proportion to its real importance. These incidents were all unpleasant in one way or another. Nothing really pleasant had ever happened to Valancy.

“I've never had one wholly happy hour in my life – not one,” she thought. “I've just been a colourless nonentity. I remember reading somewhere once that there is an hour in which a woman might be happy all her life if she could but find it. I've never found my hour – never, never. And I never will now. If I could only have had that hour I'd be willing to die.”

Those significant incidents kept bobbing up in her mind like unbidden ghosts, without any sequence of time or place. For instance, that time when, at sixteen, she had blued a tubful of clothes too deeply. And the time when, at eight, she had “stolen” some raspberry jam from Aunt Wellington's pantry. Valancy never heard the last of those two misdemeanours. At almost every clan gathering they were raked up against her as jokes. Uncle Benjamin hardly ever missed re-telling the raspberry jam incident – he had been the one to catch her, her face all stained and streaked.

“I have really done so few bad things that they have to keep harping on the old ones,” thought Valancy. “Why, I've never even had a quarrel with any one. I haven't an enemy. What a spineless thing I must be not to have even one enemy!”

There was that incident of the dust-pile at school when she was seven. Valancy always recalled it when Dr. Stalling referred to the text, “To him that hath shall be given and from him that hath not shall be taken even that which he hath.” Other people might puzzle over that text but it never puzzled Valancy. The whole relationship between herself and Olive, dating from the day of the dust-pile, was a commentary on it.