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Once or twice night overtook them, too far from their Blue Castle to
get back. But Barney made a fragrant bed of bracken and fir boughs and
they slept on it dreamlessly, under a ceiling of old spruces with moss
hanging from them, while beyond them moonlight and the murmur of pines
blended together so that one could hardly tell which was light and
which was sound.
There were rainy days, of course, when Muskoka was a wet green land.
Days when showers drifted across Mistawis like pale ghosts of rain and
they never thought of staying in because of it. Days when it rained in
right good earnest and they had to stay in. Then Barney shut himself up
in Bluebeard’s Chamber and Valancy read, or dreamed on the wolfskins
with Good Luck purring beside her and Banjo watching them suspiciously
from his own peculiar chair. On Sunday evenings they paddled across to
a point of land and walked from there through the woods to the little
Free Methodist church. One felt really too happy for Sunday. Valancy
had never really liked Sundays before.
And always, Sundays and weekdays, she was with Barney. Nothing else
really mattered. And what a companion he was! How understanding! How
jolly! How—how Barney-like! That summed it all up.
Valancy had taken some of her two hundred dollars out of the bank and
spent it in pretty clothes. She had a little smoke-blue chiffon which
she always put on when they spent the evening at home—smoke-blue with
touches of silver about it. It was after she began wearing it that
Barney began calling her Moonlight.
“Moonlight and blue twilight—that is what you look like in that dress.
I like it. It belongs to you. You aren’t exactly pretty, but you have
some adorable beauty-spots. Your eyes. And that little kissable dent
just between your collar bones. You have the wrist and ankle of an
aristocrat. That little head of yours is beautifully shaped. And when
you look backward over your shoulder you’re maddening—especially in
twilight or moonlight. An elf maiden. A wood sprite. You belong to the
woods, Moonlight—you should never be out of them. In spite of your
ancestry, there is something wild and remote and untamed about you. And
you have such a nice, sweet, throaty, summery voice. Such a nice voice
for love-making.”
“Shure an’ ye’ve kissed the Blarney Stone,” scoffed Valancy. But she
tasted these compliments for weeks.
She got a pale green bathing-suit, too—a garment which would have given
her clan their deaths if they had ever seen her in it. Barney taught
her how to swim. Sometimes she put her bathing-dress on when she got up
and didn’t take it off until she went to bed—running down to the water
for a plunge whenever she felt like it and sprawling on the sun-warm
rocks to dry.
She had forgotten all the old humiliating things that used to come up
against her in the night—the injustices and the disappointments. It was
as if they had all happened to some other person—not to her, Valancy
Snaith, who had always been happy.
“I understand now what it means to be born again,” she told Barney.
Holmes speaks of grief “staining backward” through the pages of life;
but Valancy found her happiness had stained backward likewise and
flooded with rose-colour her whole previous drab existence. She found
it hard to believe that she had ever been lonely and unhappy and
afraid.
“When death comes, I shall have lived,” thought Valancy. “I shall have
had my hour.”
And her dust-pile!
One day Valancy had heaped up the sand in the little island cove in a
tremendous cone and stuck a gay little Union Jack on top of it.
“What are you celebrating?” Barney wanted to know.
“I’m just exorcising an old demon,” Valancy told him.
CHAPTER XXXI
Autumn came. Late September with cool nights. They had to forsake the
verandah; but they kindled a fire in the big fireplace and sat before
it with jest and laughter. They left the doors open, and Banjo and Good
Luck came and went at pleasure. Sometimes they sat gravely on the
bearskin rug between Barney and Valancy; sometimes they slunk off into
the mystery of the chill night outside. The stars smouldered in the
horizon mists through the old oriel. The haunting, persistent croon of
the pine-trees filled the air. The little waves began to make soft,
sobbing splashes on the rocks below them in the rising winds. They
needed no light but the firelight that sometimes leaped up and revealed
them—sometimes shrouded them in shadow. When the night wind rose higher
Barney would shut the door and light a lamp and read to her—poetry and
essays and gorgeous, dim chronicles of ancient wars. Barney never would
read novels: he vowed they bored him. But sometimes she read them
herself, curled up on the wolf skins, laughing aloud in peace. For
Barney was not one of those aggravating people who can never hear you
smiling audibly over something you’ve read without inquiring placidly,
“What is the joke?”