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two homes—the ugly red brick box of a home, on Elm Street, and the Blue
Castle in Spain. Valancy had lived spiritually in the Blue Castle ever
since she could remember. She had been a very tiny child when she found
herself possessed of it. Always, when she shut her eyes, she could see
it plainly, with its turrets and banners on the pine-clad mountain
height, wrapped in its faint, blue loveliness, against the sunset skies
of a fair and unknown land. Everything wonderful and beautiful was in
that castle. Jewels that queens might have worn; robes of moonlight and
fire; couches of roses and gold; long flights of shallow marble steps,
with great, white urns, and with slender, mist-clad maidens going up
and down them; courts, marble-pillared, where shimmering fountains fell
and nightingales sang among the myrtles; halls of mirrors that
reflected only handsome knights and lovely women—herself the loveliest
of all, for whose glance men died. All that supported her through the
boredom of her days was the hope of going on a dream spree at night.
Most, if not all, of the Stirlings would have died of horror if they
had known half the things Valancy did in her Blue Castle.
For one thing she had quite a few lovers in it. Oh, only one at a time.
One who wooed her with all the romantic ardour of the age of chivalry
and won her after long devotion and many deeds of derring-do, and was
wedded to her with pomp and circumstance in the great, banner-hung
chapel of the Blue Castle.
At twelve, this lover was a fair lad with golden curls and heavenly
blue eyes. At fifteen, he was tall and dark and pale, but still
necessarily handsome. At twenty, he was ascetic, dreamy, spiritual. At
twenty-five, he had a clean-cut jaw, slightly grim, and a face strong
and rugged rather than handsome. Valancy never grew older than
twenty-five in her Blue Castle, but recently—very recently—her hero had
had reddish, tawny hair, a twisted smile and a mysterious past.
I don’t say Valancy deliberately murdered these lovers as she outgrew
them. One simply faded away as another came. Things are very convenient
in this respect in Blue Castles.
But, on this morning of her day of fate, Valancy could not find the key
of her Blue Castle. Reality pressed on her too hardly, barking at her
heels like a maddening little dog. She was twenty-nine, lonely,
undesired, ill-favoured—the only homely girl in a handsome clan, with
no past and no future. As far as she could look back, life was drab and
colourless, with not one single crimson or purple spot anywhere. As far
as she could look forward it seemed certain to be just the same until
she was nothing but a solitary, little withered leaf clinging to a
wintry bough. The moment when a woman realises that she has nothing to
live for—neither love, duty, purpose nor hope—holds for her the
bitterness of death.
“And I just have to go on living because I can’t stop. I may have to
live eighty years,” thought Valancy, in a kind of panic. “We’re all
horribly long-lived. It sickens me to think of it.”
She was glad it was raining—or rather, she was drearily satisfied that
it was raining. There would be no picnic that day. This annual picnic,
whereby Aunt and Uncle Wellington—one always thought of them in that
succession—inevitably celebrated their engagement at a picnic thirty
years before, had been, of late years, a veritable nightmare to
Valancy. By an impish coincidence it was the same day as her birthday
and, after she had passed twenty-five, nobody let her forget it.
Much as she hated going to the picnic, it would never have occurred to
her to rebel against it. There seemed to be nothing of the
revolutionary in her nature. And she knew exactly what every one would
say to her at the picnic. Uncle Wellington, whom she disliked and
despised even though he had fulfilled the highest Stirling aspiration,
“marrying money,” would say to her in a pig’s whisper, “Not thinking of
getting married yet, my dear?” and then go off into the bellow of
laughter with which he invariably concluded his dull remarks. Aunt
Wellington, of whom Valancy stood in abject awe, would tell her about
Olive’s new chiffon dress and Cecil’s last devoted letter. Valancy
would have to look as pleased and interested as if the dress and letter
had been hers or else Aunt Wellington would be offended. And Valancy
had long ago decided that she would rather offend God than Aunt
Wellington, because God might forgive her but Aunt Wellington never
would.
Aunt Alberta, enormously fat, with an amiable habit of always referring
to her husband as “he,” as if he were the only male creature in the
world, who could never forget that she had been a great beauty in her
youth, would condole with Valancy on her sallow skin—
“I don’t know why all the girls of today are so sunburned. When _I_ was
a girl my skin was roses and cream. I was counted the prettiest girl in
Canada, my dear.”
Perhaps Uncle Herbert wouldn’t say anything—or perhaps he would remark
jocularly, “How fat you’re getting, Doss!” And then everybody would
laugh over the excessively humorous idea of poor, scrawny little Doss
getting fat.
Handsome, solemn Uncle James, whom Valancy disliked but respected
because he was reputed to be very clever and was therefore the clan
oracle—brains being none too plentiful in the Stirling connection—would
probably remark with the owl-like sarcasm that had won him his
reputation, “I suppose you’re busy with your hope-chest these days?”
And Uncle Benjamin would ask some of his abominable conundrums, between
wheezy chuckles, and answer them himself.
“What is the difference between Doss and a mouse?