“Don’t touch me!” she cried passionately. “Don’t touch me! You—you—you liked hearing that story!”
She rushed out of the room. Aunt Nancy looked ashamed for a moment. For the first time it occurred to her that her scandal-loving old tongue had done a black thing. Then she shrugged her shoulders.
“She can’t go through life in cotton wool. Might as well learn spades are spades now as ever. I would have thought she’d have heard it all long ago if Blair Water gossip is what it used to be. If she goes home and tells this I’ll have the indignant virgins of New Moon coming down on me in holy horror as a corrupter of youth. Caroline, don’t you ask me to tell you any more family horrors before my niece, you scandalous old woman. At your age! I’m surprised at you!”
Aunt Nancy and Caroline returned to their knitting and their spicy reminiscences, and upstairs in the Pink Room Emily lay face downwards on her bed and cried for hours. It was so horrible—Ilse’s mother had run away and left her little baby. To Emily that was the awful thing—the strange, cruel, heartless thing that Ilse’s mother had done. She could not bring herself to believe it—there was some mistake somewhere—there was.
“Perhaps she was kidnapped,” said Emily, trying desperately to explain it. “She just went on board to look around—and he weighed anchor and carried her off. She couldn’t have gone away of her own accord and left her dear little baby.”
The story haunted Emily in good earnest. She could think of nothing else for days. It took possession of her and worried and gnawed at her with an almost physical pain. She dreaded going back to New Moon and meeting Ilse with this consciousness of a dark secret which she must hide from her. Ilse knew nothing. She had asked Ilse once where her mother was buried and Ilse had said, “Oh, I don’t know. At Shrewsbury, I guess—that’s where all the Mitchells are buried.”
Emily wrung her slim hands together. She was as sensitive to ugliness and pain as she was to beauty and pleasure, and this thing was both hideous and agonizing. Yet she could not keep from thinking about it, day and night. Life at Wyther Grange suddenly went stale. Aunt Nancy and Caroline all at once gave up talking family history, even harmless history, before her. And as it was painful repression for them, they did not encourage her hanging round. Emily began to feel that they were glad when she was out of hearing, so she kept away and spent most of her days wandering on the bay shore. She could not compose any poetry—she could not write in her Jimmy-book—she could not even write to her father. Something seemed to hang between her and her old delights. There was a drop of poison in every cup. Even the filmy shadows on the great bay, the charm of its fir-hung cliffs and its little purple islets that looked like outposts of fairyland, could not bring to her the old “fine, careless rapture.” She was afraid she could never be happy again—so intense had been her reaction to her first revelation of the world’s sin and sorrow. And under it all, persisted the same incredulity—Ilse’s mother couldn’t have done it—and the same helpless longing to prove she couldn’t have done it. But how could it be proved? It couldn’t. She had solved one “mystery” but she had stumbled into a darker one—the reason why Beatrice Burnley had never come back on that summer twilight of long ago. For, all the evidence of facts to the contrary notwithstanding, Emily persisted in her secret belief that whatever the reason was, it was not that she had gone away in The Lady of Winds when that doomed ship sailed out into the starlit wonder of the gulf beyond Blair Harbour.