CHAPTER XXIX

Valancy toiled not, neither did she spin. There was really very little

work to do. She cooked their meals on a coal-oil stove, performing all

her little domestic rites carefully and exultingly, and they ate out on

the verandah that almost overhung the lake. Before them lay Mistawis,

like a scene out of some fairy tale of old time. And Barney smiling his

twisted, enigmatical smile at her across the table.

“What a view old Tom picked out when he built this shack!” Barney would

say exultantly.

Supper was the meal Valancy liked best. The faint laughter of winds was

always about them and the colours of Mistawis, imperial and spiritual,

under the changing clouds were something that cannot be expressed in

mere words. Shadows, too. Clustering in the pines until a wind shook

them out and pursued them over Mistawis. They lay all day along the

shores, threaded by ferns and wild blossoms. They stole around the

headlands in the glow of the sunset, until twilight wove them all into

one great web of dusk.

The cats, with their wise, innocent little faces, would sit on the

verandah railing and eat the tidbits Barney flung them. And how good

everything tasted! Valancy, amid all the romance of Mistawis, never

forgot that men had stomachs. Barney paid her no end of compliments on

her cooking.

“After all,” he admitted, “there’s something to be said for square

meals. I’ve mostly got along by boiling two or three dozen eggs hard at

once and eating a few when I got hungry, with a slice of bacon once in

a while and a jorum of tea.”

Valancy poured tea out of Barney’s little battered old pewter teapot of

incredible age. She had not even a set of dishes—only Barney’s

mismatched chipped bits—and a dear, big, pobby old jug of robin’s-egg

blue.

After the meal was over they would sit there and talk for hours—or sit

and say nothing, in all the languages of the world, Barney pulling away

at his pipe, Valancy dreaming idly and deliciously, gazing at the

far-off hills beyond Mistawis where the spires of firs came out against

the sunset. The moonlight would begin to silver the Mistawis dusk. Bats

would begin to swoop darkly against the pale, western gold. The little

waterfall that came down on the high bank not far away would, by some

whim of the wildwood gods, begin to look like a wonderful white woman

beckoning through the spicy, fragrant evergreens. And Leander would

begin to chuckle diabolically on the mainland shore. How sweet it was

to sit there and do nothing in the beautiful silence, with Barney at

the other side of the table, smoking!

There were plenty of other islands in sight, though none were near

enough to be troublesome as neighbours. There was one little group of

islets far off to the west which they called the Fortunate Isles. At

sunrise they looked like a cluster of emeralds, at sunset like a

cluster of amethysts. They were too small for houses; but the lights on

the larger islands would bloom out all over the lake, and bonfires

would be lighted on their shores, streaming up into the wood shadows

and throwing great, blood-red ribbons over the waters. Music would

drift to them alluringly from boats here and there, or from the

verandahs on the big house of the millionaire on the biggest island.

“Would you like a house like that, Moonlight?” Barney asked once,

waving his hand at it. He had taken to calling her Moonlight, and

Valancy loved it.

“No,” said Valancy, who had once dreamed of a mountain castle ten times

the size of the rich man’s “cottage” and now pitied the poor

inhabitants of palaces. “No. It’s too elegant. I would have to carry it

with me everywhere I went. On my back like a snail. It would own

me—possess me, body and soul. I like a house I can love and cuddle and

boss. Just like ours here. I don’t envy Hamilton Gossard ‘the finest

summer residence in Canada.’ It is magnificent, but it isn’t my Blue

Castle.”

Away down at the far end of the lake they got every night a glimpse of

a big, continental train rushing through a clearing. Valancy liked to

watch its lighted windows flash by and wonder who was on it and what

hopes and fears it carried. She also amused herself by picturing Barney

and herself going to the dances and dinners in the houses on the

islands, but she did not want to go in reality. Once they did go to a

masquerade dance in the pavilion at one of the hotels up the lake, and

had a glorious evening, but slipped away in their canoe, before

unmasking time, back to the Blue Castle.

“It was lovely—but I don’t want to go again,” said Valancy.

So many hours a day Barney shut himself up in Bluebeard’s Chamber.

Valancy never saw the inside of it. From the smells that filtered

through at times she concluded he must be conducting chemical

experiments—or counterfeiting money. Valancy supposed there must be

smelly processes in making counterfeit money. But she did not trouble

herself about it. She had no desire to peer into the locked chambers of

Barney’s house of life. His past and his future concerned her not. Only

this rapturous present. Nothing else mattered.

Once he went away and stayed away two days and nights. He had asked

Valancy if she would be afraid to stay alone and she had said she would

not. He never told her where he had been. She was not afraid to be

alone, but she was horribly lonely. The sweetest sound she had ever

heard was Lady Jane’s clatter through the woods when Barney returned.

And then his signal whistle from the shore. She ran down to the landing

rock to greet him—to nestle herself into his eager arms—they _did_ seem

eager.

“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?