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edwindvinas
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Dataset card Data Studio Files
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“Have you missed me, Moonlight?” Barney was whispering.
“It seems a hundred years since you went away,” said Valancy.
“I won’t leave you again.”
“You must,” protested Valancy, “if you want to. I’d be miserable if I
thought you wanted to go and didn’t, because of me. I want you to feel
perfectly free.”
Barney laughed—a little cynically.
“There is no such thing as freedom on earth,” he said. “Only different
kinds of bondages. And comparative bondages. _You_ think you are free
now because you’ve escaped from a peculiarly unbearable kind of
bondage. But are you? You love me—_that’s_ a bondage.”
“Who said or wrote that ‘the prison unto which we doom ourselves no
prison is’?” asked Valancy dreamily, clinging to his arm as they
climbed up the rock steps.
“Ah, now you have it,” said Barney. “That’s all the freedom we can hope
for—the freedom to choose our prison. But, Moonlight,”—he stopped at
the door of the Blue Castle and looked about him—at the glorious lake,
the great, shadowy woods, the bonfires, the twinkling
lights—“Moonlight, I’m glad to be home again. When I came down through
the woods and saw my home lights—mine—gleaming out under the old
pines—something I’d never seen before—oh, girl, I was glad—glad!”
But in spite of Barney’s doctrine of bondage, Valancy thought they were
splendidly free. It was amazing to be able to sit up half the night and
look at the moon if you wanted to. To be late for meals if you wanted
to—she who had always been rebuked so sharply by her mother and so
reproachfully by Cousin Stickles if she were one minute late. Dawdle
over meals as long as you wanted to. Leave your crusts if you wanted
to. Not come home at all for meals if you wanted to. Sit on a sun-warm
rock and paddle your bare feet in the hot sand if you wanted to. Just
sit and do nothing in the beautiful silence if you wanted to. In short,
do any fool thing you wanted to whenever the notion took you. If _that_
wasn’t freedom, what was?
CHAPTER XXX
They didn’t spend all their days on the island. They spent more than
half of them wandering at will through the enchanted Muskoka country.
Barney knew the woods as a book and he taught their lore and craft to
Valancy. He could always find trail and haunt of the shy wood people.
Valancy learned the different fairy-likenesses of the mosses—the charm
and exquisiteness of woodland blossoms. She learned to know every bird
at sight and mimic its call—though never so perfectly as Barney. She
made friends with every kind of tree. She learned to paddle a canoe as
well as Barney himself. She liked to be out in the rain and she never
caught cold.
Sometimes they took a lunch with them and went berrying—strawberries
and blueberries. How pretty blueberries were—the dainty green of the
unripe berries, the glossy pinks and scarlets of the half ripes, the
misty blue of the fully matured! And Valancy learned the real flavour
of the strawberry in its highest perfection. There was a certain sunlit
dell on the banks of Mistawis along which white birches grew on one
side and on the other still, changeless ranks of young spruces. There
were long grasses at the roots of the birches, combed down by the winds
and wet with morning dew late into the afternoons. Here they found
berries that might have graced the banquets of Lucullus, great
ambrosial sweetnesses hanging like rubies to long, rosy stalks. They
lifted them by the stalk and ate them from it, uncrushed and virgin,
tasting each berry by itself with all its wild fragrance ensphered
therein. When Valancy carried any of these berries home that elusive
essence escaped and they became nothing more than the common berries of
the market-place—very kitchenly good indeed, but not as they would have
been, eaten in their birch dell until her fingers were stained as pink
as Aurora’s eyelids.
Or they went after water-lilies. Barney knew where to find them in the
creeks and bays of Mistawis. Then the Blue Castle was glorious with
them, every receptacle that Valancy could contrive filled with the
exquisite things. If not water lilies then cardinal flowers, fresh and
vivid from the swamps of Mistawis, where they burned like ribbons of
flame.
Sometimes they went trouting on little nameless rivers or hidden brooks
on whose banks Naiads might have sunned their white, wet limbs. Then
all they took with them were some raw potatoes and salt. They roasted
the potatoes over a fire and Barney showed Valancy how to cook the
trout by wrapping them in leaves, coating them with mud and baking them
in a bed of hot coals. Never were such delicious meals. Valancy had
such an appetite it was no wonder she put flesh on her bones.
Or they just prowled and explored through woods that always seemed to
be expecting something wonderful to happen. At least, that was the way
Valancy felt about them. Down the next hollow—over the next hill—you
would find it.
“We don’t know where we’re going, but isn’t it fun to go?” Barney used
to say.