CHAPTER XXXI

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?”

October—with a gorgeous pageant of color around Mistawis, into which

Valancy plunged her soul. Never had she imagined anything so splendid.

A great, tinted peace. Blue, wind-winnowed skies. Sunlight sleeping in

the glades of that fairyland. Long dreamy purple days paddling idly in

their canoe along shores and up the rivers of crimson and gold. A

sleepy, red hunter’s moon. Enchanted tempests that stripped the leaves

from the trees and heaped them along the shores. Flying shadows of

clouds. What had all the smug, opulent lands out front to compare with

this?

November—with uncanny witchery in its changed trees. With murky red

sunsets flaming in smoky crimson behind the westering hills. With dear

days when the austere woods were beautiful and gracious in a dignified

serenity of folded hands and closed eyes—days full of a fine, pale

sunshine that sifted through the late, leafless gold of the

juniper-trees and glimmered among the grey beeches, lighting up

evergreen banks of moss and washing the colonnades of the pines. Days

with a high-sprung sky of flawless turquoise. Days when an exquisite

melancholy seemed to hang over the landscape and dream about the lake.

But days, too, of the wild blackness of great autumn storms, followed

by dank, wet, streaming nights when there was witch-laughter in the

pines and fitful moans among the mainland trees. What cared they? Old

Tom had built his roof well, and his chimney drew.

“Warm fire—books—comfort—safety from storm—our cats on the rug.

Moonlight,” said Barney, “would you be any happier now if you had a

million dollars?”

“No—nor half so happy. I’d be bored by conventions and obligations

then.”

December. Early snows and Orion. The pale fires of the Milky Way. It

was really winter now—wonderful, cold, starry winter. How Valancy had

always hated winter! Dull, brief, uneventful days. Long, cold,

companionless nights. Cousin Stickles with her back that had to be

rubbed continually. Cousin Stickles making weird noises gargling her

throat in the mornings. Cousin Stickles whining over the price of coal.

Her mother, probing, questioning, ignoring. Endless colds and

bronchitis—or the dread of it. Redfern’s Liniment and Purple Pills.

But now she loved winter. Winter was beautiful “up back”—almost

intolerably beautiful. Days of clear brilliance. Evenings that were

like cups of glamour—the purest vintage of winter’s wine. Nights with

their fire of stars. Cold, exquisite winter sunrises. Lovely ferns of

ice all over the windows of the Blue Castle. Moonlight on birches in a

silver thaw. Ragged shadows on windy evenings—torn, twisted, fantastic

shadows. Great silences, austere and searching. Jewelled, barbaric

hills. The sun suddenly breaking through grey clouds over long, white

Mistawis. Icy-grey twilights, broken by snow-squalls, when their cosy

living-room, with its goblins of firelight and inscrutable cats seemed

cosier than ever. Every hour brought a new revelation and wonder.

Barney ran Lady Jane into Roaring Abel’s barn and taught Valancy how to

snowshoe—Valancy, who ought to be laid up with bronchitis. But Valancy

had not even a cold. Later on in the winter Barney had a terrible one

and Valancy nursed him through it with a dread of pneumonia in her

heart. But Valancy’s colds seemed to have gone where old moons go.

Which was luck—for she hadn’t even Redfern’s Liniment. She had

thoughtfully bought a bottle at the Port and Barney had hurled it into

frozen Mistawis with a scowl.

“Bring no more of that devilish stuff here,” he had ordered briefly. It

was the first and last time he had spoken harshly to her.

They went for long tramps through the exquisite reticence of winter

woods and the silver jungles of frosted trees, and found loveliness

everywhere.

At times they seemed to be walking through a spellbound world of

crystal and pearl, so white and radiant were clearings and lakes and

sky. The air was so crisp and clear that it was half intoxicating.

Once they stood in a hesitation of ecstasy at the entrance of a narrow

path between ranks of birches. Every twig and spray was outlined in

snow. The undergrowth along its sides was a little fairy forest cut out

of marble. The shadows cast by the pale sunshine were fine and

spiritual.

“Come away,” said Barney, turning. “We must not commit the desecration

of tramping through there.”

One evening they came upon a snowdrift far back in an old clearing

which was in the exact likeness of a beautiful woman’s profile. Seen

too close by, the resemblance was lost, as in the fairy-tale of the

Castle of St. John. Seen from behind, it was a shapeless oddity. But at

just the right distance and angle the outline was so perfect that when

they came suddenly upon it, gleaming out against the dark background of

spruce in the glow of that winter sunset they both exclaimed in

amazement. There was a low, noble brow, a straight, classic nose, lips

and chin and cheek-curve modelled as if some goddess of old time had

sat to the sculptor, and a breast of such cold, swelling purity as the

very spirit of the winter woods might display.

“‘All the beauty that old Greece and Rome, sung painted, taught,’”

quoted Barney.

“And to think no human eyes save ours have seen or will see it,”

breathed Valancy, who felt at times as if she were living in a book by

John Foster. As she looked around her she recalled some passages she

had marked in the new Foster book Barney had brought her from the

Port—with an adjuration not to expect _him_ to read or listen to it.

“‘All the tintings of winter woods are extremely delicate and

elusive,’” recalled Valancy. “‘When the brief afternoon wanes and the

sun just touches the tops of the hills, there seems to be all over the

woods an abundance, not of colour, but of the spirit of colour. There

is really nothing but pure white after all, but one has the impression

of fairy-like blendings of rose and violet, opal and heliotrope on the

slopes—in the dingles and along the curves of the forest-land. You feel

sure the tint is there, but when you look at it directly it is gone.

From the corner of your eye you are aware that it is lurking over

yonder in a spot where there was nothing but pale purity a moment ago.

Only just when the sun is setting is there a fleeting moment of real

colour. Then the redness streams out over the snow and incarnadines the

hills and rivers and smites the crest of the pines with flame. Just a

few minutes of transfiguration and revelation—and it is gone.’

“I wonder if John Foster ever spent a winter in Mistawis,” said

Valancy.

“Not likely,” scoffed Barney. “People who write tosh like that

generally write it in a warm house on some smug city street.”

“You are too hard on John Foster,” said Valancy severely. “No one could

have written that little paragraph I read you last night without having

seen it first—you know he couldn’t.”

“I didn’t listen to it,” said Barney morosely. “You know I told you I

wouldn’t.”

“Then you’ve got to listen to it now,” persisted Valancy. She made him

stand still on his snowshoes while she repeated it.

“‘She is a rare artist, this old Mother Nature, who works “for the joy

of working” and not in any spirit of vain show. Today the fir woods are

a symphony of greens and greys, so subtle that you cannot tell where

one shade begins to be the other. Grey trunk, green bough, grey-green

moss above the white, grey-shadowed floor. Yet the old gypsy doesn’t

like unrelieved monotones. She must have a dash of colour. See it. A

broken dead fir bough, of a beautiful red-brown, swinging among the

beards of moss.’”

“Good Lord, do you learn all that fellow’s books by heart?” was

Barney’s disgusted reaction as he strode off.

“John Foster’s books were all that saved my soul alive the past five

years,” averred Valancy. “Oh, Barney, look at that exquisite filigree

of snow in the furrows of that old elm-tree trunk.”

When they came out to the lake they changed from snowshoes to skates

and skated home. For a wonder Valancy had learned, when she was a

little schoolgirl, to skate on the pond behind the Deerwood school. She

never had any skates of her own, but some of the other girls had lent

her theirs and she seemed to have a natural knack of it. Uncle Benjamin

had once promised her a pair of skates for Christmas, but when

Christmas came he had given her rubbers instead. She had never skated

since she grew up, but the old trick came back quickly, and glorious

were the hours she and Barney spent skimming over the white lakes and

past the dark islands where the summer cottages were closed and silent.

Tonight they flew down Mistawis before the wind, in an exhilaration

that crimsoned Valancy’s cheeks under her white tam. And at the end was

her dear little house, on the island of pines, with a coating of snow

on its roof, sparkling in the moonlight. Its windows glinted impishly

at her in the stray gleams.

“Looks exactly like a picture-book, doesn’t it?” said Barney.

They had a lovely Christmas. No rush. No scramble. No niggling attempts

to make ends meet. No wild effort to remember whether she hadn’t given

the same kind of present to the same person two Christmases before—no

mob of last-minute shoppers—no dreary family “reunions” where she sat

mute and unimportant—no attacks of “nerves.” They decorated the Blue

Castle with pine boughs, and Valancy made delightful little tinsel

stars and hung them up amid the greenery. She cooked a dinner to which

Barney did full justice, while Good Luck and Banjo picked the bones.

“A land that can produce a goose like that is an admirable land,” vowed

Barney. “Canada forever!” And they drank to the Union Jack a bottle of

dandelion wine that Cousin Georgiana had given Valancy along with the

bedspread.

“One never knows,” Cousin Georgiana had said solemnly, “when one may

need a little stimulant.”

Barney had asked Valancy what she wanted for a Christmas present.

“Something frivolous and unnecessary,” said Valancy, who had got a pair

of goloshes last Christmas and two long-sleeved, woolen undervests the

year before. And so on back.

To her delight, Barney gave her a necklace of pearl beads. Valancy had

wanted a string of milky pearl beads—like congealed moonshine—all her

life. And these were so pretty. All that worried her was that they were

really too good. They must have cost a great deal—fifteen dollars, at

least. Could Barney afford that? She didn’t know a thing about his

finances. She had refused to let him buy any of her clothes—she had

enough for that, she told him, as long as she would need clothes. In a

round, black jar on the chimney-piece Barney put money for their

household expenses—always enough. The jar was never empty, though

Valancy never caught him replenishing it. He couldn’t have much, of

course, and that necklace—but Valancy tossed care aside. She would wear

it and enjoy it. It was the first pretty thing she had ever had.