The Blythes Are Quoted (51 page)

“Perhaps she had a hoard of it somewhere,” suggested Phil. “What a jolly thing it would be to come across a box or roll of it when we go through her things!”

Mrs. Anderson, who had “gone through” old Aunt Ursula’s few “things” many times, frowned majestically. What a thing to say before Dr. Parsons! Of course he would tell Zoe Maylock and that was equivalent to telling all the countryside. She would give Phil a good talking-to when she got him alone. Though what good would that do now that it had been said?

“Maybe I shouldn’t say it, but I’ve always thought she may have helped Brother Will out a bit,” said Uncle Alec, with a deprecatory glance at the doctor. It was not just the thing, maybe, to hint that any Anderson was hard up, even before a distant relative. “He had a big family so you know he was chronically hard up.”

“Then some of
his
family should have looked after Aunt Ursula when she got past work. Or at least have helped a bit,” snapped Mrs. Anderson.

But she instantly composed herself. There was death in the house. And Dr. Parsons was there, too, which was about the same thing as Zoe Maylock being there. It was all nonsense having a doctor for old Aunt Ursula anyhow. No doctor could do her any good.

But then how people would have talked!

Yes, death was in the house ... a welcome guest to all and to none more welcome than to Ursula Anderson. She had longed for him for many years and now she knew he was near. Never was a bridegroom more welcome. She knew no living soul would regret her but that did not matter either.

The bare, dingy room, that had always been thought good enough for old Aunt Ursula, was full of shadows from the winking candle on the little stand by the bed. Aunt Ursula would never have anything but a candle. Lamps were dangerous and electric light something she could not or would not understand. The John Andersons had fixed the room up a little when they had to call in a doctor but it was very shabby still. A vaseful of faded artificial flowers on the bureau cast strange, exotic shadows of enormous blossoms and sprays on the stained, unpapered plaster above the bed. Emmy had been thankful that at last something had induced her mother to remove them from the niche in the wall on the stairway. She had always been so ashamed of them ... especially when Zoe Maylock came to the house. She had heard Zoe make fun of people who cherished artificial flowers.

The old dog lay on the worn rug beside the bed, his nose on his paws, his unwinking eyes fixed on the dying woman. He had lain there so for days.

Maggie McLean, who was supposed to be waiting on old Ursula, was asleep in her chair, just as Kathie Anderson had known it was likely she would be. Maggie owed a small debt to John Anderson or they would not have been able to get her. She knew that otherwise she would never be paid. How the Andersons had come down in the world! Maggie was old enough to remember them in the days of their prosperity. She even remembered the queer scandal at the time of old David Anderson’s funeral. Few people had believed it. They said Clarissa Wilcox was quite out of her head and the Wilcoxes had always hated the Andersons and nobody but Susan Baker at Ingleside took any stock in it. And the Blythes had soon squelched
her
.

She might as well take a nap. Ursula Anderson was unconscious or nearly so and she couldn’t do anything for her. But of course somebody must watch by the dying. In a way she felt sorry for old Ursula Anderson. She had had such a dull, drab life of it.

The wind moaned eerily in the old spruce by the window ... moaned and wailed and sometimes suddenly snarled and then died away to let the occasional spits of rain be heard. Occasionally the window rattled as if something that was impatient and overdue was trying to gain an entrance.

Ursula Anderson lay movelessly on the bed. You might have thought she was already dead had it not been for her large, sunken grey eyes. They had been dull and bleared for many years, but they were bright and clear again, burning with a steady flame in her dry, parched face.

A grey flannel nightgown was buttoned about her ugly, wattled throat. A coarse sweep of grey hair lay over the pillow ... she had an amazing lot of hair for such an old woman. Her gaunt old body was quiet and flat under the faded patchwork quilt and thin blankets. Her knotted, discoloured hands lay over them movelessly.

She knew she was dying and that everybody was in a hurry for her to die and that there was not a living creature that would regret her death ... except perhaps the old dog.

She would have liked to have him lie on the bed beside her but Maggie McLean would not allow that. Sometimes she looked into his kind old eyes with a long steady look, such as they had often exchanged. She was glad she was dying and she was glad Maggie McLean was asleep. She was living over her whole life ... the life for which those in the parlour below were pitying her, as she very well knew. And she would not have exchanged lives with one of them. Now and then she laughed ... a little, low, soundless laugh. She would not have wakened Maggie McLean for worlds. Maggie would have fussed around, wanting to do something for her. And she did not want anything done, except to be left to die in peace.

But now and then she shuddered.

She knew she had become very ugly ... but she had not been ugly in youth, though no one had ever thought her pretty. She had just been one of “those Anderson girls,” with no beauty except her long, thick, sloe-black hair. She had soft, large, grey eyes and creamy skin and lovely hands. Yes, she had had lovely hands ... he had often told her so ... the most beautiful hands he had ever seen ... and he had seen the hands of queens. Her sisters were counted pretty girls but they had fat, pudgy hands. She had never received a compliment about hers, except from him. It was faces and figures people looked at.

Her hands were very ugly now ... they had grown warped and roughened by constant sewing and by age. Yet even now they were better shaped than Maggie McLean’s. She had been rather small and thin in her youth and nobody had ever paid much attention to her amid her dashing, handsome sisters. She had never tried to attract attention and it was quite true she had never had a beau. It was equally true that she had never wanted one ... though nobody would have believed such a statement. None of the youths of Lowbridge or Glen St. Mary or Mowbray Narrows had attracted her in the least. They did not think or talk as she did ... or would have done if any of them had ever tried to talk to her.

She had spent her childhood and early youth under her mother’s thumb and she was supposed to have no opinions of her own. Sometimes she thought they might have been surprised if they had known her thoughts ... surprised and shocked.

Then there had come a change. The old grey eyes darkened and quivered and glowed as she thought of it. Her Aunt Nan had written and asked for “one of the girls” to spend a year with her after her only daughter had gone to India as a missionary. Aunt Nan lived in a little fishing village and summer resort many miles down the coast and was a widow. Ursula had never seen her. But she was chosen to go because none of her sisters would consent to bury themselves alive in Half Moon Cove for a year.

But Ursula had been glad to go. She liked what she had heard about Half Moon Cove and she liked what her father had said about his sister Nan. Ursula gathered the impression that Aunt Nan was very different from all her other aunts ... that she was still and quiet like herself.

“Didn’t talk a man to death,” she had heard her father say once.

There was not a great deal to do at Aunt Nan’s and Ursula had spent much of her time down at the shore among the dunes. The summer colony was much further down and few of them ever strayed so far. It was there she had met him, painting. He was the guest of a wealthy family who were summering at the next Cove but who never came near Half Moon. There were no amusements there.

He was a young Englishman ... an artist already on the way to the worldwide fame he afterwards achieved. It was said his older brother had a title ... which was likely the reason he had been asked to be the guest of the Lincolns. They were certainly not artistic.

But to Ursula he was just Larry ... and her lover. She loved his paintings but the brother with a title meant nothing to her.

“You are the most unworldly creature I’ve ever met in my life,” Larry had told her once. “The things that mean so much to most people seem to mean absolutely nothing to you. I don’t believe you belong to this world at all.”

Never had she known, or even dreamed, of anyone so utterly charming. They had loved each other from their first meeting. Ursula knew it could never have been any other way. She did not doubt he had loved and been loved by many women before her but she felt no jealousy of them. He was too wonderful to love any woman very long, especially an insignificant little thing like her. But, for the time being, he did love her. She knew that beyond a doubt. For that one enchanted summer he loved her and nothing could ever take that from her. And nobody in the world but herself knew it. She would never tell his name even to Aunt Nan. Poor old Maggie McLean pitied her ... but Maggie McLean had never been loved like that. Kathie Anderson pitied her ... but Kathie did not even know the meaning of love. She had married John to escape being an old maid and she thought nobody knew it while everybody knew it and laughed about it.

But nobody knew her, Ursula’s, secret. Of that she was sure.

She knew he could never marry her ... the idea never entered her head ... or, for that matter, his. Yet all his life he remembered little Ursula ... remembered her when beautiful and brilliant women caressed him. There was something about her he never found in any other woman. Sometimes he thought that was really why he never married.

Of course he couldn’t have married her. The very idea was absurd. And yet ... what great artist had married his cook? On his deathbed Sir Lawrence thought of Ursula and of no other woman, not even the Princess What’s-her-name, who would have taken him, they said, if he had ever asked her.

They had loved each other through lingering days and soft emerald evenings and nights of crystal splendour. She had not forgotten one of them. He had said mad, sweet things to her ... she had not forgotten one of them either ... those old words of love spoken so many years ago. Fancy anyone saying such things to Maggie McLean, snoring in her chair!

Her hair was grey and coarse now. But she remembered the day he pulled the pins out of it and buried his face in the sleek flow of it.

Then she remembered the moonrises they had watched together on that far shore, where the bones of old vessels were bleaching. He revelled in the windy nights ... but she had liked the calm nights better. She recalled the dim hills and the mysterious dunes ... the fishing boats sailing in ... and always his tender, passionate words. Maggie McLean would have felt insulted if anyone had spoken to her like that. Poor old Maggie, snoring away there, who had never lived. How Ursula pitied her!

She lifted her withered hands for a moment and then let them drop back on the quilt.

He must have painted her hands a hundred times. The hands of his pictures were famous. He had never been tired of exclaiming over the wonder of them ... “a kiss on the tip of every sweet finger,” he would whisper. Only old despised Ursula Anderson knew that people had gazed on those hands in scores of European art galleries. She had a collection of engravings of his pictures in a ragged old box which she carried everywhere with her. Nobody knew why. But then Ursula had always been queer. The only time she had ever come near to quarrelling with Kathie Anderson was one housecleaning time when Kathie had wanted to burn the box. It was full of nothing but faded, ragged old pictures, she said.

“What on earth do you see in them, Ursula?” she said. “If you are so fond of pictures there are some old chromos and mottoes you can have ...”

“Have they hands like those?” Ursula had asked quietly.

Kathie Anderson shrugged her shoulders and gave it up. After all, old people grew very childish. You had to indulge them. Hands, indeed. And most of the women were very ugly in spite of their titles.

Then the season had ended ... the cool September winds began to blow across the haunted dunes ... Larry had gone away, promising to write ... but he had never written. For a time life had wrung Ursula in its merciless hands. She had to tell Aunt Nan. There was no one else to whom she dared go. She could never go home to her self-righteous father and mother. Better to slip down to the dunes some night and end it all. She was very glad now she had not done so. It might have hurt Larry if he had ever heard of it. She would suffer anything rather than do that.

And Aunt Nan had been very good to her after the first shock was over. She was full of pity and did not blame Ursula too much.

“I should have looked after you better,” she mourned. “But then of course I thought an Anderson ... and now that scoundrel has led you astray.”

Ursula hid her anger for Larry’s sake. She knew Aunt Nan blamed an entirely different man. But a strange little flame came into her tired grey eyes.

“I wasn’t led astray,” she said. “I am not such a weakling. I knew what I was doing ... and I’m not sorry ... I’m not sorry.”

Aunt Nan could not understand. But she stood by Ursula staunchly. She kept Ursula with her on one excuse or another ... and had an old woman she could trust in for the birth ... since the Anderson name must be saved at all costs. Ursula nearly died ... even Aunt Nan thought it would be better if she had ... but Ursula was very glad that she managed to live.

The baby was a little girl with Ursula’s grey eyes and Larry’s golden hair. Aunt Nan had arranged for its adoption. The James Burnleys in Charlottetown were wealthy people who had long wanted to adopt a child. Aunt Nan had gone to school with Isabel Burnley. The Burnleys took the child gladly ... its mother was a young friend of hers, Aunt Nan told them, who had been unfortunate.

Ursula thought she could not bear it but for Larry’s sake she consented. And she wanted the child to have a good home. She went back to Lowbridge, a little quieter and more insignificant than before. The Andersons, who had been hoping she would pick up some kind of a husband when she was away, did not welcome her very effusively. They tried to patch up a marriage with her and an old widower of Glen St. Mary but to Ursula all men seemed common or unbearable after Larry.