The Blue Castle

hey 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.

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.