The Blue Castle

utumn 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.