If it had not rained on a certain May morning Valancy Stirling’s whole
life would have been entirely different. She would have gone, with the
rest of her clan, to Aunt Wellington’s engagement picnic and Dr. Trent
would have gone to Montreal. But it did rain and you shall hear what
happened to her because of it.
Valancy wakened early, in the lifeless, hopeless hour just preceding
dawn. She had not slept very well. One does not sleep well, sometimes,
when one is twenty-nine on the morrow, and unmarried, in a community
and connection where the unmarried are simply those who have failed to
get a man.
Deerwood and the Stirlings had long since relegated Valancy to hopeless
old maidenhood. But Valancy herself had never quite relinquished a
certain pitiful, shamed, little hope that Romance would come her way
yet—never, until this wet, horrible morning, when she wakened to the
fact that she was twenty-nine and unsought by any man.
Ay, there lay the sting. Valancy did not mind so much being an old
maid. After all, she thought, being an old maid couldn’t possibly be as
dreadful as being married to an Uncle Wellington or an Uncle Benjamin,
or even an Uncle Herbert. What hurt her was that she had never had a
chance to be anything but an old maid. No man had ever desired her.
The tears came into her eyes as she lay there alone in the faintly
greying darkness. She dared not let herself cry as hard as she wanted
to, for two reasons. She was afraid that crying might bring on another
attack of that pain around the heart. She had had a spell of it after
she had got into bed—rather worse than any she had had yet. And she was
afraid her mother would notice her red eyes at breakfast and keep at
her with minute, persistent, mosquito-like questions regarding the
cause thereof.
“Suppose,” thought Valancy with a ghastly grin, “I answered with the
plain truth, ‘I am crying because I cannot get married.’ How horrified
Mother would be—though she is ashamed every day of her life of her old
maid daughter.”
But of course appearances should be kept up. “It is not,” Valancy could
hear her mother’s prim, dictatorial voice asserting, “it is not
maidenly to think about men.”
The thought of her mother’s expression made Valancy laugh—for she had a
sense of humour nobody in her clan suspected. For that matter, there
were a good many things about Valancy that nobody suspected. But her
laughter was very superficial and presently she lay there, a huddled,
futile little figure, listening to the rain pouring down outside and
watching, with a sick distaste, the chill, merciless light creeping
into her ugly, sordid room.
She knew the ugliness of that room by heart—knew it and hated it. The
yellow-painted floor, with one hideous, “hooked” rug by the bed, with a
grotesque, “hooked” dog on it, always grinning at her when she awoke;
the faded, dark-red paper; the ceiling discoloured by old leaks and
crossed by cracks; the narrow, pinched little washstand; the
brown-paper lambrequin with purple roses on it; the spotted old
looking-glass with the crack across it, propped up on the inadequate
dressing-table; the jar of ancient potpourri made by her mother in her
mythical honeymoon; the shell-covered box, with one burst corner, which
Cousin Stickles had made in her equally mythical girlhood; the beaded
pincushion with half its bead fringe gone; the one stiff, yellow chair;
the faded old motto, “Gone but not forgotten,” worked in coloured yarns
about Great-grandmother Stirling’s grim old face; the old photographs
of ancient relatives long banished from the rooms below. There were
only two pictures that were not of relatives. One, an old chromo of a
puppy sitting on a rainy doorstep. That picture always made Valancy
unhappy. That forlorn little dog crouched on the doorstep in the
driving rain! Why didn’t some one open the door and let him in? The
other picture was a faded, passe-partouted engraving of Queen Louise
coming down a stairway, which Aunt Wellington had lavishly given her on
her tenth birthday. For nineteen years she had looked at it and hated
it, beautiful, smug, self-satisfied Queen Louise. But she never dared
destroy it or remove it. Mother and Cousin Stickles would have been
aghast, or, as Valancy irreverently expressed it in her thoughts, would
have had a fit.
Every room in the house was ugly, of course. But downstairs appearances
were kept up somewhat. There was no money for rooms nobody ever saw.
Valancy sometimes felt that she could have done something for her room
herself, even without money, if she were permitted. But her mother had
negatived every timid suggestion and Valancy did not persist. Valancy
never persisted. She was afraid to. Her mother could not brook
opposition. Mrs. Stirling would sulk for days if offended, with the
airs of an insulted duchess.
The only thing Valancy liked about her room was that she could be alone
there at night to cry if she wanted to.
But, after all, what did it matter if a room, which you used for
nothing except sleeping and dressing in, were ugly? Valancy was never
permitted to stay alone in her room for any other purpose. People who
wanted to be alone, so Mrs. Frederick Stirling and Cousin Stickles
believed, could only want to be alone for some sinister purpose. But
her room in the Blue Castle was everything a room should be.
Valancy, so cowed and subdued and overridden and snubbed in real life,
was wont to let herself go rather splendidly in her day-dreams. Nobody
in the Stirling clan, or its ramifications, suspected this, least of
all her mother and Cousin Stickles. They never knew that Valancy had
two homes—the ugly red brick box of a home, on Elm Street, and the Blue
Castle in Spain. Valancy had lived spiritually in the Blue Castle ever
since she could remember. She had been a very tiny child when she found
herself possessed of it. Always, when she shut her eyes, she could see
it plainly, with its turrets and banners on the pine-clad mountain
height, wrapped in its faint, blue loveliness, against the sunset skies
of a fair and unknown land. Everything wonderful and beautiful was in
that castle. Jewels that queens might have worn; robes of moonlight and
fire; couches of roses and gold; long flights of shallow marble steps,
with great, white urns, and with slender, mist-clad maidens going up
and down them; courts, marble-pillared, where shimmering fountains fell
and nightingales sang among the myrtles; halls of mirrors that
reflected only handsome knights and lovely women—herself the loveliest
of all, for whose glance men died. All that supported her through the
boredom of her days was the hope of going on a dream spree at night.
Most, if not all, of the Stirlings would have died of horror if they
had known half the things Valancy did in her Blue Castle.
For one thing she had quite a few lovers in it. Oh, only one at a time.
One who wooed her with all the romantic ardour of the age of chivalry
and won her after long devotion and many deeds of derring-do, and was
wedded to her with pomp and circumstance in the great, banner-hung
chapel of the Blue Castle.
At twelve, this lover was a fair lad with golden curls and heavenly
blue eyes. At fifteen, he was tall and dark and pale, but still
necessarily handsome. At twenty, he was ascetic, dreamy, spiritual. At
twenty-five, he had a clean-cut jaw, slightly grim, and a face strong
and rugged rather than handsome. Valancy never grew older than
twenty-five in her Blue Castle, but recently—very recently—her hero had
had reddish, tawny hair, a twisted smile and a mysterious past.
I don’t say Valancy deliberately murdered these lovers as she outgrew
them. One simply faded away as another came. Things are very convenient
in this respect in Blue Castles.
But, on this morning of her day of fate, Valancy could not find the key
of her Blue Castle. Reality pressed on her too hardly, barking at her
heels like a maddening little dog. She was twenty-nine, lonely,
undesired, ill-favoured—the only homely