She would have preferred to wait until she had definitely decided to marry Allardyce before becoming a guest in his home. But Uncle Conrad and Aunt Helen both thought she should go and Esme had been so used all her life to doing exactly what her uncles and aunts on both sides thought she should do that she ran true to form in this as in many other things.
Besides, it was all but settled that she should marry Allardyce. Dr. Blythe, out at Glen St. Mary, who knew the family well, though he had never had anything to do with them in a professional way, told his wife it was a shame. He knew something about Allardyce Barry.
Of course he was considered a great catch. People thought he was a surprisingly great catch for a misty little thing like Esme to pick up. Even her own clan was amazed.
Sometimes Esme thought secretly ... she had a great many secret thoughts since she had no especial friend or confidant ... that her luck was rather too much for her. She liked Allardyce well enough as a friend ... but she did not know ... exactly ... how she was going to like him as a husband.
Was there anyone else? Decidedly not. It was folly to think about Francis. There never had been any Francis ... not really. Esme felt that even imaginative Mrs. Blythe ... who lived away out at Glen St. Mary but whom Esme had met several times and liked very much ... would feel quite sure about that.
Esme felt sure she ought to feel quite sure herself. Only ... she could never manage to feel quite sure. He had seemed so very real in those lovely, long-ago, stolen moments at Birken-trees in the moonlit garden.
Since her childhood she had never met Allardyce’s mother. The Barrys had lived abroad since the death of Allardyce’s father. It was only six months since they had come home and opened up Longmeadow for the summer.
All the girls were “after” Allardyce ... so Uncle Conrad said. All except Esme.
Perhaps that was why Allardyce had fallen in love with her. Or perhaps it was just because she was so different from anyone else. She was a pale, lovely thing, delicate and reserved. Her relatives always complained that they could “make nothing of her.” She seemed like a child of twilight. Grey things and starriness were of her. She moved gently and laughed seldom but her little air of sadness was beautiful and bewitching.
“She will never marry,” Anne Blythe told her husband. “She is really too exquisite for the realities of earth.”
“She will likely marry some brute who will misuse her,” said Dr. Blythe. “That kind always do.”
“Anyhow, he has very nice ears,” said Susan Baker, who never had had, so she averred, any chance of marriage.
Men who met Esme always wanted to make her laugh. Allardyce succeeded. That was why she liked him. He said so many whimsical things that one had to laugh.
And had not Francis, long ago, said whimsical things? She was almost sure although she could not remember them. She could only remember him.
“So the ugly ducking has turned out a swan,” twinkled Mrs. Barry when they met ... by way of setting Esme at ease.
But Esme, had Mrs. Barry but known it, was not in any special need of that. She was always quite mistress of herself under the fine aloofness which so many mistook for shyness ... so many except Mrs. Dr. Blythe and she lived too far away for frequent meetings.
And Esme did not quite like Mrs. Barry’s implication that she had been a plain child who had unaccountably grown up into beauty. She had not been a very pretty child, perhaps, but she had never been accounted an ugly one. And had not Francis once told her ...
Esme shook herself. There was no Francis ... never had been any Francis. She must remember that if she were going to marry Allardyce Barry and be chatelaine of this beautiful Longmeadow ... which was just a little too big and splendid and wonderful, now that it was re-opened.
Esme felt she would have been much more at home in a smaller place ... like Ingleside at Glen St. Mary for instance ... or ... or Birkentrees. She felt suddenly homesick for Birkentrees.
But nobody lived there now. It had been shut up and left to ruin, ever since Uncle John Dalley’s death ... owing to some legal tangle she never understood.
She hadn’t seen it for twelve years, although it was only three miles from Uncle Conrad’s place. She really had never wanted to see it again. She knew it must be weed-grown and deserted. And she knew she was a little afraid to see it ... without Aunt Hester.
Strange Aunt Hester! Esme, recalling her, shivered.
But she never shivered when she thought of Francis. Sometimes she could feel her little childish hand in his big strong one yet. She never shivered but it frightened her a little. Suppose ... suppose ... she were to go like Aunt Hester!
She did not see the picture till the next afternoon. Then Allardyce showed her all over the house and when they came to what had been his father’s den it was hanging on the wall in the shadows.
Esme’s cool, white face flushed to a warm rose when she saw it and then turned whiter than ever.
“Who ... who is that?” she said faintly ... very much afraid of the answer.
“That,” said Allardyce carelessly ... he was not much interested in old things and had already made up his mind that he and Esme would not spend much of their time at Long-meadow. There was more fun to be had elsewhere. But it would be a very good place for his mother to spend her declining years. She had always been a little drag on Allardyce. Esme wouldn’t. She would do just as he told her ... go just where he wanted to go. And if there were other ... ladies ... she would never believe tales about them or make a fuss if she did. Dr. Blythe of Glen St. Mary could have told him a different story, but Allardyce did not know Dr. Blythe or would not have had much opinion of his views if he had. He had met Mrs. Blythe once ... and tried to flirt with her ... but he had not tried a second time and always shrugged his shoulders meaningly when he heard her name mentioned. He said red-headed women were his abomination.
“That,” said Allardyce, “was my great-uncle Francis Barry ... a daredevil young sea captain of the sixties. He was captain of a brigantine when he was only seventeen years old. Can you believe it? Took her down to Buenos Aires with a cargo of lumber and died there. They say it broke his mother’s heart. He was the apple of her eye. Luckily hearts don’t break so easily nowadays.”
“Don’t they?” said Esme.
“Of course not ... else how could anybody live? But she was a Dalley and there was always something a little queer about them, I’ve been told. Took things much harder than it does to do in this kind of a world. We’ve got to be hard-boiled or we go under. Uncle Francis was a dashing young blade by all accounts. But you’ll have to go to mother if you want family history. She revels in it. But what is the matter, Esme? You don’t look just right, honey. It’s too hot here. Let’s get out where the air is fresh. This old house has got musty through the years. I told mother so when she took a notion to come here. Though I’m glad she did since I’ve met you.”
Esme let him lead her to a vine-screened corner of the veranda. She felt a relief to feel a solid seat under her. She took hard hold of its arms for her comforting.
They at least were real ... the grassy lawns around her were real ... Allardyce was real ... too real.
And Francis was. Or had been real! She had just seen his picture!
But he had died in the sixties. And it was only fourteen years since she had danced with him in the little, locked garden at Birkentrees!
Oh, if she could have a talk about it with Mrs. Blythe! Esme felt that she would understand. Was she going crazy like queer Aunt Hester? In any case she felt that Allardyce ought to know. It was his right.
She had never said a word about it to a living soul. But he must know if she were going to marry him. Could she marry him after this? Would he want to marry her? But as to that she did not greatly care. Francis had been real ... sometime ... and that was all that mattered.
She told Allardyce the bare bones of it only but as she told it she lived over everything again in detail.
She had been only eigh
t. She was a child whose father and mother were dead and who lived around with various uncles and aunts.
She had come to spend the summer at Birkentrees, the old homestead of the clan. Uncle John Dalley lived there ... an oldish man, the oldest of the large family of which her father had been the youngest son.
Aunt Jane, who had never married, lived there, too, and Aunt Hester. Strange Aunt Hester! Aunt Jane was old ... at least Esme thought so ... but Aunt Hester was not very old ... no more than twenty-five, Esme had heard somebody say.
She had been strange in all the summers that Esme had spent at Birkentrees. Esme heard somebody say ... she was so quiet that she was always hearing people say things that they would never have dreamed of saying before a more talkative child ... that Aunt Hester’s lover had died when she was twenty. So much Esme, sitting on her little stool, her elbows on her chubby knees, her round chin cupped in her hands, had found out as the “grown-ups” laughed and gossiped. And Aunt Hester had never been “the same” since.
Most children were afraid of her but Esme was not. She liked Aunt Hester, who had haunted, tragic eyes and did little but wander up and down the long birch lane of Birkentrees and talk to herself, or to someone she fancied was there with her. This, thought Esme, was what made people call her “queer.”
She had a dead white face and strange, jet-black hair, just as Esme had. Only at that time Esme’s hair always fell over her amber eyes in a neglected fringe, giving her a doggy sort of look.
Sometimes she even ventured to slip one of her little, slender hands ... even at eight Esme had very beautiful hands ... into Aunt Hester’s cold one and walk silently with her.
“I wouldn’t dare do that for a million dollars,” one of the visiting cousins had said to her extravagantly.
But Aunt Hester did not seem to mind it at all ... although as a rule she resented anyone’s company.
“I walk among the shadows,” she told Esme. “They are better company than I find in the sunlight. But you should like the sunlight. I liked it once.”
“I do like the sunlight,” said Esme, “but there is something about the shadows that I like, too.”
“Well, if you like the shadows come with me if you want to,” said Aunt Hester.
Esme loved Birkentrees. And most of all she loved the little garden which she was never allowed to enter ... which nobody, as far as she knew, ever entered.
It was locked up. There was a high fence around it and a rusty padlock on the gate. Nobody would ever tell her why it was locked up but Esme gathered that there was something strange about it. None of the servants would ever go near it after nightfall.
Yet it looked harmless enough, as far as could be seen through the high fence screened with roses and vines run wild.
Esme would have liked to explore it ... or thought she would. But one summer twilight, when she was lingering near it, she suddenly felt something strange in the air about her.
She could not have told what it was ... could not have described her sensations. But she felt as if the garden was drawing her to it!
Her breath came in quick little gasps. She wanted to yield but she was afraid to. Little fine beads broke out on her forehead. She trembled. There was no one in sight, not even queer Aunt Hester.
Esme put her hands over her eyes and ran blindly to the house.
“Whatever is the matter, Esme?” asked tall, grim, kind Aunt Jane, meeting her in the hall.
“The ... the garden wants me,” cried Esme, hardly knowing what she said ... and certainly not what she meant.
Aunt Jane looked a little grey.
“You had better not play too near that ... that place again,” she said.
The warning was needless. Yet Esme continued to love it.
One of the servants told her it was “haunted.” Esme did not then know what “haunted” meant. When she asked Aunt Jane the latter looked angrier than Esme had ever seen her look and told her she must not listen to the foolish gossip of servants.
There came a summer when she found Aunt Hester much changed. Esme had expected this. She had heard the older people say that Hester was “much better” ... so much happier and more contented. Perhaps, they said, she might “come all right” yet.
Certainly Aunt Hester looked happier. She never walked in the birch lane now or talked to herself. Instead, she sat most of the time by the lily pool with the face of one who listened and waited. Esme felt at once that Aunt Hester was simply waiting. And for what?
But in her secret soul Esme felt that the grown-ups were all wrong. Aunt Hester did look happier ... but she was not really any “better.” But Esme did not say so to anyone. She knew her opinion did not count for anything with anybody. She was “only a child.”
But before she had been very long at Birkentrees Esme found out what it was for which Aunt Hester was waiting.
One night she was out on the lawn when she should have been asleep. But Aunt Jane was away and old Mrs. Thompson, the housekeeper, was in bed with a headache. So there was no one to look after Esme ... who thought she was quite able to look after herself.
There were people who did not agree with her. Dr. and Mrs. Blythe, passing by on their way home to Glen St. Mary from Charlottetown, did not.
“They should not allow that child to associate so much with Hester Dalley,” said the doctor.
“I’ve often felt that way myself,” said Anne Blythe, “and yet why shouldn’t she?”
“Minds act and react on each other,” said the doctor, rather shortly. “At least, some minds. It mightn’t hurt Nan or Diana a mite ... but the Dalleys are different. Most of them never know what is reality and what is imagination.”
“People always told me that I had too much imagination,” said Anne.
“This is a different kind of imagination. And Esme Dalley is a very impressionable child ... far too much so, indeed. If she were my daughter I confess I should feel a little anxious about her. But she has no parents to look after her and nobody appears to think there is any harm in letting her associate so much with her Aunt Hester.”
“And is there?” asked Anne. “I had no parents to remember either, you know.”
“But you had a good deal of common sense mixed up with your imagination, Anne-girl,” said the doctor, smiling at her ... the smile that always made Anne’s heart beat a little faster, in
spite of years of wifehood and motherhood.
“Gilbert, is Hester Dalley really out of her mind?”
“Ask a psychiatrist that, not me,” smiled Gilbert. “I don’t think she could be certified as insane. At least, nobody has ever tried. Perhaps she is quite sane and it is the rest of the world who are insane. And some people hold that everyone is a little insane, on some point or other. Susan thinks lots of people crazy whom you and I regard as quite normal.”
“Susan says Hester Dalley is ‘cracked,’” said Anne.
“Well, we’ll leave it at that, since we can’t do anything about it,” said Gilbert. “Only, I repeat my opinion that if Esme Dalley were my niece or daughter I would see to it that she was not too much with her Aunt Hester.”
“Without being able to give a single good reason for such an opinion,” taunted Anne.
“Exactly ... just like a woman,” riposted the doctor.
Meanwhile Esme was thinking it would be wicked to sleep on such a beautiful night. It was a night that belonged to the fairies ... a night drenched in the glimmer and glamour of a magnificent full moon. And while she sat alone by the lily pond, with old dog Gyp for company, Aunt Hester came gliding over the lawn.
She was wonderfully gowned in white and had pearls in her black hair. She looked, thought Esme, like a bride she had once seen.
“Oh, Aunty, how beautiful you are!” cried Esme ... all at once realizing that Aunt Hester was still a young woman. “Why don’t you always dress like that?”
“This was to have been my wedding dress,” said Aunt Hester. “They keep it locked away from me. But I know how to g
et it when I want it.”
“It is lovely ... and so are you,” said Esme, to whom fashion as yet meant nothing.
“Am I lovely?” said Aunt Hester. “I am glad. I want to be beautiful tonight, little Esme. If I share a secret with you will you keep it very faithfully?”
Oh, wouldn’t she! Esme thought it would be wonderful to share a secret only they two knew.
“Come, then.”
Aunt Hester held out her hand and Esme took it. They went across the lawn and through the long moonlit lane of birches. Old Gyp followed them, but when they came to the locked gate of the little, old garden, he drew back with a growl. The hair on his back rose like bristles.
“Gyppy, come on,” said Esme. But Gyp drew back a little further.
“Why does he act like that?” asked Esme. She had never seen Gyp behave like that before.
Aunt Hester made no answer. She merely unlocked the padlock with a rusty old key that seemed to turn as easily as if it had never known rust.
Esme drew back.
“Are we going in there?” she whispered timidly.
“Yes. Why not?”
“I ... am a little ... afraid,” confessed Esme.
“You need not be afraid. Nothing will harm you.”
“Then why do they keep the garden always locked?”
“Because they know no better,” said Aunt Hester scornfully. “Long, long ago little Janet Dalley went in there ... and never came out again. I suppose that is why they keep the garden locked. As if she couldn’t have come out if she had wanted to!”
“Why did she never come out again?” whispered Esme.
“Who knows? Perhaps she liked the company she found there better than what she left behind.”
Esme thought this was just one of Aunt Hester’s “queer” sayings.
“Perhaps she fell over the stone wall into the river,” she said. “Only, if that was so, why was her little body never found?”
“No one has to stay in the garden against her will,” said Aunt Hester impatiently. “You need not be afraid to come into the garden with me, Esme.”