The Blue Castle

he ordeal was not so dreadful, after all. Dr. Trent was as gruff and
abrupt as usual, but he did not tell her her ailment was imaginary. After
he had listened to her symptoms and asked a few questions and made a
quick examination, he sat for a moment looking at her quite intently.
Valancy thought he looked as if he were sorry for her. She caught her
breath for a moment. Was the trouble serious? Oh, it couldn’t be,
surely—it really hadn’t bothered her much—only lately it had got a
little worse.

Dr. Trent opened his mouth—but before he could speak the telephone at
his elbow rang sharply. He picked up the receiver. Valancy, watching
him, saw his face change suddenly as he listened,
“’Lo—yes—yes—what?—yes—yes”—a brief interval—“My God!”

Dr. Trent dropped the receiver, dashed out of the room and upstairs
without even a glance at Valancy. She heard him rushing madly about
overhead, barking out a few remarks to somebody—presumably his
housekeeper. Then he came tearing downstairs with a club bag in his
hand, snatched his hat and coat from the rack, jerked open the street
door and rushed down the street in the direction of the station.

Valancy sat alone in the little office, feeling more absolutely foolish
than she had ever felt before in her life. Foolish—and humiliated. So
this was all that had come of her heroic determination to live up to
John Foster and cast fear aside. Not only was she a failure as a
relative and non-existent as a sweetheart or friend, but she was not
even of any importance as a patient. Dr. Trent had forgotten her very
presence in his excitement over whatever message had come by the
telephone. She had gained nothing by ignoring Uncle James and flying in
the face of family tradition.

For a moment she was afraid she was going to cry. It was all
so—ridiculous. Then she heard Dr. Trent’s housekeeper coming down the
stairs. Valancy rose and went to the office door.

“The doctor forgot all about me,” she said with a twisted smile.

“Well, that’s too bad,” said Mrs. Patterson sympathetically. “But it
wasn’t much wonder, poor man. That was a telegram they ’phoned over
from the Port. His son has been terribly injured in an auto accident in
Montreal. The doctor had just ten minutes to catch the train. I don’t
know what he’ll do if anything happens to Ned—he’s just bound up in the
boy. You’ll have to come again, Miss Stirling. I hope it’s nothing
serious.”

“Oh, no, nothing serious,” agreed Valancy. She felt a little less
humiliated. It was no wonder poor Dr. Trent had forgotten her at such a
moment. Nevertheless, she felt very flat and discouraged as she went
down the street.

Valancy went home by the short-cut of Lover’s Lane. She did not often
go through Lover’s Lane—but it was getting near supper-time and it
would never do to be late. Lover’s Lane wound back of the village,
under great elms and maples, and deserved its name. It was hard to go
there at any time and not find some canoodling couple—or young girls in
pairs, arms intertwined, earnestly talking over their little secrets.
Valancy didn’t know which made her feel more self-conscious and
uncomfortable.

This evening she encountered both. She met Connie Hale and Kate Bayley,
in new pink organdy dresses with flowers stuck coquettishly in their
glossy, bare hair. Valancy had never had a pink dress or worn flowers
in her hair. Then she passed a young couple she didn’t know, dandering
along, oblivious to everything but themselves. The young man’s arm was
around the girl’s waist quite shamelessly. Valancy had never walked
with a man’s arm about her. She felt that she ought to be shocked—they
might leave that sort of thing for the screening twilight, at least—but
she wasn’t shocked. In another flash of desperate, stark honesty she
owned to herself that she was merely envious. When she passed them she
felt quite sure they were laughing at her—pitying her—“there’s that
queer little old maid, Valancy Stirling. They say she never had a beau
in her whole life”—Valancy fairly ran to get out of Lover’s Lane. Never
had she felt so utterly colourless and skinny and insignificant.

Just where Lover’s Lane debouched on the street, an old car was parked.
Valancy knew that car well—by sound, at least—and everybody in Deerwood
knew it. This was before the phrase “tin Lizzie” had come into
circulation—in Deerwood, at least; but if it had been known, this car
was the tinniest of Lizzies—though it was not a Ford but an old Grey
Slosson. Nothing more battered and disreputable could be imagined.

It was Barney Snaith’s car and Barney himself was just scrambling up
from under it, in overalls plastered with mud. Valancy gave him a
swift, furtive look as she hurried by. This was only the second time
she had ever seen the notorious Barney Snaith, though she had heard
enough about him in the five years that he had been living “up back” in
Muskoka. The first time had been nearly a year ago, on the Muskoka
road. He had been crawling out from under his car then, too, and he had
given her a cheerful grin as she went by—a little, whimsical grin that
gave him the look of an amused gnome. He didn’t look bad—she didn’t
believe he was bad, in spite of the wild yarns that were always being
told of him. Of course he went tearing in that terrible old Grey
Slosson through Deerwood at hours when all decent people were in
bed—often with old “Roaring Abel,” who made the night hideous with his
howls—“both of them dead drunk, my dear.” And every one knew that he
was an escaped convict and a defaulting bank clerk and a murderer in
hiding and an infidel and an illegitimate son of old Roaring Abel Gay
and the father of Roaring Abel’s illegitimate grandchild and a
counterfeiter and a forger and a few other awful things. But still
Valancy didn’t believe he was bad. Nobody with a smile like that could
be bad, no matter what he had done.

It was that night the Prince of the Blue Castle changed from a being of
grim jaw and hair with a dash of premature grey to a rakish individual
with overlong, tawny hair, dashed with red, dark-brown eyes, and ears
that stuck out just enough to give him an alert look but not enough to
be called flying jibs. But he still retained something a little grim
about the jaw.

Barney Snaith looked even more disreputable than usual just now. It was
very evident that he hadn’t shaved for days, and his hands and arms,
bare to the shoulders, were black with grease. But he was whistling
gleefully to himself and he seemed so happy that Valancy envied him.
She envied him his light-heartedness and his irresponsibility and his
mysterious little cabin up on an island in Lake Mistawis—even his
rackety old Grey Slosson. Neither he nor his car had to be respectable
and live up to traditions. When he rattled past her a few minutes
later, bareheaded, leaning back in his Lizzie at a raffish angle, his
longish hair blowing in the wind, a villainous-looking old black pipe
in his mouth, she envied him again. Men had the best of it, no doubt
about that. This outlaw was happy, whatever he was or wasn’t. She,
Valancy Stirling, respectable, well-behaved to the last degree, was
unhappy and had always been unhappy. So there you were.

Valancy was just in time for supper. The sun had clouded over, and a
dismal, drizzling rain was falling again. Cousin Stickles had the
neuralgia. Valancy had to do the family darning and there was no time
for Magic of Wings.

“Can’t the darning wait till tomorrow?” she pleaded.

“Tomorrow will bring its own duties,” said Mrs. Frederick inexorably.

Valancy darned all the evening and listened to Mrs. Frederick and
Cousin Stickles talking the eternal, niggling gossip of the clan, as
they knitted drearily at interminable black stockings. They discussed
Second Cousin Lilian’s approaching wedding in all its bearings. On the
whole, they approved. Second Cousin Lilian was doing well for herself.

“Though she hasn’t hurried,” said Cousin Stickles. “She must be
twenty-five.”

“There have not—fortunately—been many old maids in our connection,”
said Mrs. Frederick bitterly.

Valancy flinched. She had run the darning needle into her finger.

Third Cousin Aaron Gray had been scratched by a cat and had
blood-poisoning in his finger. “Cats are most dangerous animals,” said
Mrs. Frederick. “I would never have a cat about the house.”

She glared significantly at Valancy through her terrible glasses. Once,
five years ago, Valancy had asked if she might have a cat. She had
never referred to it since, but Mrs. Frederick still suspected her of
harbouring the unlawful desire in her heart of hearts.

Once Valancy sneezed. Now, in the Stirling code, it was very bad form
to sneeze in public.

“You can always repress a sneeze by pressing your finger on your upper
lip,” said Mrs. Frederick rebukingly.

Half-past nine o’clock and so, as Mr. Pepys would say, to bed. But
First Cousin Stickles’ neuralgic back must be rubbed with Redfern’s
Liniment. Valancy did that. Valancy always had to do it. She hated the
smell of Redfern’s Liniment—she hated the smug, beaming, portly,
be-whiskered, be-spectacled picture of Dr. Redfern on the bottle. Her
fingers smelled of the horrible stuff after she got into bed, in spite
of all the scrubbing she gave them.

Valancy’s day of destiny had come and gone. She ended it as she had
begun it, in tears.