The Blythes Are Quoted (6 page)

Curtis thought her little foible of family pride quite enchanting. She was so very human, this brown, sweet thing.

During the weeks that followed Curtis Burns sometimes thought he would go crazy. Sometimes he thought they were all crazy together. Dr. Blythe was away at some medical congress and Mr. Sheldon was laid up with bronchitis ... though his nurse had been heard to say that it was more imagination with him than anything else. But Emma Mowbray was noted for her impatience. She said he would not stay in bed and that was the main cause of his illness.

Curtis prowled ... he investigated ... he passed sleepless hours on guard ... he spent whole nights in the garret ... and he got nowhere. He knew, too, that his people were growing critical ... he should change his boarding place, they said, or move into the parsonage.

Things happened almost continually ... ridiculous and horrible things all jumbled up together. Twelve dozen eggs packed for market were found broken all over the kitchen floor. Lucia’s new sheer dress was found ruined in the closet of the guest room. She took it coolly ... she had never liked the dress, it seemed. The violin played and the cradle rocked. And at times the house seemed possessed by diabolical laughter. Several times all the furniture in the lower rooms was found piled in the middle of the floor ... involving a day’s work of restoration for Lucia, for Julia refused to have anything to do with “spook doings.” Outer doors, locked at night, were found wide open in the morning, although Long Alec slept with the keys under his pillow. The spigot was pulled out of the churn in the dairy and a week’s cream spilled on the floor. The guest room bed was tossed and tumbled as if slept in overnight. Pigs and calves were let out to riot in the garden. Ink was spattered all over the walls of the newly papered hall. Plentiful curses were scattered about. Voices sounded in that exasperating, commonplace garret. Finally, Lucia’s pet kitten ... a beautiful little Persian Curtis had brought her from Charlottetown ... was found hung on the back veranda, its poor little body dangling limply from the fretwork.

“I knew this would happen when you gave it to me,” said Lucia bitterly. “Four years ago Mrs. Blythe gave me a lovely pup. It was strangled. I’ve never dared to have a pet since. Everything I love dies or is destroyed. My white calf ... my dog ... my birch tree ... and now my kitten.”

For the most part Curtis carried on his investigations alone. Long Alec bluntly stated that he was fed up with spook stalking. He had had too many years of it and had given it up. As long as the ghosts left his roof over his head he would leave them alone. Once or twice Curtis got Mr. Sheldon, who had recovered from his illness, to watch with him. Nothing at all happened those nights ... except that a large key, very much resembling Long Alec’s kitchen key, fell out of the old man’s pocket once. Mr. Sheldon had picked it up rather hurriedly and said it was the old key of the parsonage door. He asked Dr. Blythe, who had returned, to share a vigil, but the doctor bluntly refused. The spooks, he said, were too clever for him.

Finally he had Henry Kildare.

Henry was quite confident at first.

“I’ll have that spook’s hide nailed to the barn door by morning, preacher,” he boasted.

But Henry capitulated in blind terror when he heard Winthrop Field’s voice talking in the garret.

“No more ghosting for me, preacher. Don’t tell
me
... I know old Winthrop’s voice well enough ... I worked here for three years. That’s him, as sure as sin. Preacher, you’d better get out of this house as soon as you can if you have to live in a tent. Believe me, it ain’t healthy.”

Henry Kildare’s reappearance in Mowbray Narrows had created quite a sensation. He was said to have made a fortune lumbering in British Columbia and announced that he could live on millionaire row for the rest of his life. He certainly threw money about freely enough. He stayed with a cousin but spent a good deal of time at the old Field place. They liked him there. He was a big, bluff, hearty man, not over-refined, rather handsome, generous, boastful. Alice was never tired of hearing his tales of the Coast. To her, imprisoned
within walls for years, it was as if she could look out into a wonderful freedom of adventure and peril. But Henry, who had fronted the northern silences, cold and terrors undauntedly, could not front the Field spooks. He flatly refused to spend another night in the house.

“Preacher, this place is full of devils ... not a doubt of it. That Anna Marsh doesn’t stay in her proper grave. Dr. Blythe can laugh all he likes ... but she never
would
behave herself ... and she drags old Winthrop out with her. Alec’d better give the place away if anyone would take it. I know I wouldn’t. I wish I could get Alice ... and Lucia ... out of it. They’ll be found strangled like the kitten some night ...”

Curtis was thoroughly exasperated. It seemed just as impossible that any one person in the house could have done all the things as that any person out of the house could have done them. Sometimes, so befuddled and bamboozled did he feel, that he was almost tempted to believe that the place
was
haunted. If not, he was being made a fool of. Either conclusion was intolerable. It was tacitly understood that the occurrences were not to be talked of outside, except with Dr. Blythe or Mr. Sheldon. He could never get any satisfaction out of the former and little out of Mr. Sheldon, who spent a good deal of his time with his books in the parsonage, sometimes reading there till late at night. But all his talks and guesses and researches left him exactly where he was at first ... except that he decided that Mr. Sheldon, recalling Epworth Rectory,
did
believe in the ghosts and that Dr. Blythe, for some undiscoverable reason, seemed to look upon the whole thing as a sort of joke ... heaven knew why.

Curtis developed insomnia and couldn’t sleep even when the house was quiet. He lost his keen interest in his work ... he was under an obsession. Both Dr. Blythe and Mr. Sheldon
noticed it and advised him to find another boarding house. By this time Curtis knew he could not do this. For by now he knew he loved Lucia.

He realized this one night when the banging of the big front door had aroused him from some late studies. He put his book aside and went downstairs. The door was shut but not locked as it had been when the household retired. As he tried the knob Lucia came out of the dining room, carrying a small lamp. She was crying ... he had never seen Lucia cry before, although once or twice he had suspected tears. Her hair hung over her shoulder in a thick braid. It made her look like a child ... a tired, broken-hearted child. And then all at once he knew what she meant to him.

“What is the matter, Lucia?” he asked gently, unconscious that for the first time he had used her Christian name.

“Look,” sobbed Lucia, holding the lamp up in the dining room doorway.

At first Curtis could not exactly understand what had happened. The room seemed to be a perfect maze of ... of ... what was it? Coloured yarns! They crossed and recrossed it. They were wound in and out of the furniture ... around the chair rungs ... about the table legs. The room looked like a huge spider’s web.

“My afghan,” said Lucia. “My new afghan! I finished it yesterday. It’s completely ravelled out ... I’ve been working at it since New Year’s. Oh, I’m a fool to mind this ... so many worse things have happened. But I have so little time to do anything like that. And the malice of it! Who is it that hates me so? Don’t tell me a ghost would do anything like this!”

She broke away from Curtis’ outstretched hand and ran upstairs still sobbing. Curtis stood rather dazedly in the hall.
He knew now that he had loved her from their first meeting. He could have laughed at himself for his long blindness. Love her ... of course he loved her ... he had known it the moment he had seen the tears in her brave, sweet eyes. Lucia in tears ... tears that he had no right or power to wipe away. The thought was unbearable.

Alice called to him as he passed her door. He unlocked it and went in. The fresh, sweet wind of night was blowing through her window and a faint light was breaking behind the church.

“I’ve had a rather bad night,” said Alice. “But it has been quiet, hasn’t it? Except for the door, of course.”

“Quiet enough,” said Curtis grimly. “Our ghost has amused himself with a nice, quiet job. Ravelling out Lucia’s afghan. Miss Harper, I am at my wit’s end.”

“It
must
be Julia who has done this. She was very sulky all day yesterday. Lucia had scolded her about something. This is her revenge.”

“It couldn’t be Julia. She went home for the night. But I’m going to make one last effort. You said once, I remember, that an idea had occurred to you. What was the idea?”

Alice made a restless gesture with her hands.

“And I also said that it was too incredible to be put into words. I repeat that. If it has never occurred to you yourself I will not utter it.”

“It ... it is not Long Alec?”

“Long Alec? Absurd.”

He could not move her and he went back to his own room with his head in a whirl.

“There are only two things I am sure of,” he said, as he watched the beginnings of sunrise. “Twice two are four ... and I’m going to marry Lucia.”

Lucia, it developed, had a different opinion. When Curtis asked her to be his wife she told him that it was utterly impossible.

“Why? Don’t you ... can’t you care for me? I am sure I could make you happy.”

Lucia looked at him with a deepening colour.

“I could ... yes, I could. I owe it to you to tell you that. And there is no use denying it ... one should never deny the truth. But as things are I cannot marry ... you must see that for yourself. I cannot leave Alec and Alice.”

“Alice could come with us. I would be very glad to have such a woman in my home. She would be a constant inspiration to me.”

Which was, perhaps, not the most tactful thing in the world for a wooer to say!

“No. Such an arrangement would not be fair to you. You do not know ...”

It was useless to plead or argue, although Curtis did both. Lucia was a Field, Mrs. Blythe told him, when he carried his woes to her.

“And to think ... if it were not for me,” said Alice bitterly.

“It isn’t only you ... I have told you how glad I would be to have you with us. No, it is just as much Alec ... and those infernal spooks.”

“S-sh ... don’t let Deacon Kirk ... or Mr. Sheldon hear you,” said Alice whimsically. “They would both think ‘infernal’ a most improper word for a minister to use outside of the pulpit. I’m sorry, Mr. Burns ... sorry for you and sorrier for Lucia. I’m afraid she won’t change her mind. We Fields do not, when we have once made it up. Your only hope is to run the ghost to earth.”

Nobody, it seemed, could do that. Curtis bitterly owned himself defeated. Two weeks of moonlit and peaceful nights followed. Mr. Sheldon was again away. When the dark nights returned the manifestations began anew.

This time Curtis seemed to have become the special object of the “ha’nt’s” hatred. Repeatedly he found his sheets wet or well sanded when he got into bed at night. Twice on going to don his ministerial suit on Sunday mornings he found all the buttons cut off. And the special anniversary sermon he had prepared with such care vanished from his desk Saturday night before he had time to memorize it. As a result he made rather a mess of things before a crowded church next day and was young and human enough to feel bitterly about it.

“You’d better go away, Mr. Burns,” advised Alice. “That is unselfish advice if ever any was given, for I shall miss you more than words can say. But you must. Mr. Sheldon told me so and I have heard that Dr. Blythe says it is your only chance. You haven’t Lucia’s phlegm or Alec’s stubbornness ... or even my faith in a locked door. They won’t leave you alone now they have begun on you. Look how they have persecuted Lucia for years.”

“I can’t go away and leave her in such a predicament,” said Curtis stubbornly.

“I believe you are as obstinate as the Fields themselves,” said Alice, with a faint smile. “What good can you do? I really think you’d have a better chance with Lucia if you did go away. She would find out what you really meant to her then ... if you mean anything.”

“Sometimes I think I don’t,” said Curtis despondently.

“Oh, I don’t know. I’ve heard Mrs. Blythe say ...”

“I wish Mrs. Blythe would mind her own business,” said Curtis angrily.

“Well, she won’t ... it isn’t in her. But I mustn’t talk scandal. I seem to be the only person in Mowbray Narrows or Glen St. Mary who doesn’t like Mrs. Blythe ... or any of the Ingleside people. Perhaps I’ve always heard them praised too highly. That sometimes has the effect of turning you against people, don’t you think, Mr. Burns?”

“Yes, very often. But as for Lucia ...”

“Oh, I know you care a great deal for her. But Mr. Burns, don’t expect Lucia to love you as you love her. The Fields don’t. They are rather cool-blooded, you know. Mrs. Blythe is perfectly right there. And I’ve heard Dr. Blythe said Long Alec had really no more feeling than one of his turnips. Perhaps he never said it ... you know what gossip is, as I’ve said before. Look at Alec ... he’s fond of Edna Pollock ... he’d like to marry her ... but he doesn’t lose sleep or appetite over it.”

“Wise man!”

“Now you sound like Dr. Blythe. But Lucia is like that, too. She’d make a dear little wife for you ... Mrs. Blythe has been saying that ever since you came here, I’m told ... she’d be faithful and devoted ... who knows that better than I? ... but she won’t break her heart over it if she can’t marry you.”

Curtis scowled.

“You don’t like to hear that ... you want to be loved more romantically and passionately. But it’s true. Why, they tell me even Dr. Blythe was a second choice. But they are said to be very happy, though once in a while ... but I’m verging on gossip again. But what I’ve said about the Fields is true. I shouldn’t have said it ... they’ve been kindness itself to me. But I know I can trust you, Mr. Curtis.”

There were times when Curtis was compelled to think that Alice was right in her summing up of Lucia. To his ardent
nature Lucia did seem too composed and resigned. But the thought of giving her up was torture.