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?