So would the Millers, the Kents, and Mr. Priest disperse from their beloved island.
The latter was like the dust on the road. All summer he had been fading - his features ashen, his patience short, the cynical spark in his eyes reduced to the faintest glimmer. He still made appearances in that ghostly hour of dusk, each time looking more like he was part of the gray shadows or the withering leaves.
One evening Mr. Priest failed to come. The next day, his sister's housekeeper 'phoned up that he had a cold. In a week they learned it was not a cold - it was pneumonia. The young Blair Water doctor assured them there was no cause for alarm, but Dr. Burnley came for dinner one night and averred that "at Dean Priest's age, ... and considering the lifestyle he's lead, he may not last through the dawn."
Starr gave him a mute gaze and her features went blank. She felt that she should be looking shocked -stricken. But she only felt indifferent. Was this heartache? Or was her heart made of stone?
She stole away after supper as was her habit. There was no cause to linger at the table, especially now that she did not speak. She paced about the garden paths, by the gate which he had haunted and loved. Where was he now - how was it that he would never haunt it again? And where was the girl who had lingered there, in the torment of hope, in the beginning of spring? She was not that girl.
But she was determined to pursue her passion to its end. So as the darkness fell she stole away through the familiar paths, cross-lots to the Elena Priest's homestead, hoping no-one would notice her absence.
In that half-hour she relived all her girlhood.
Ever since she could remember, there was that bitter despair that he loved her mother - beautiful, talented, brilliant - that she could never amount to anything in her mother's shadow. In vain she struggled to write poetry. In vain she had read them aloud in the gloaming hours by the gate. Oh! She had never tried to fish for compliments, she had never lead him to believe they were her own. She was not so presumptuous. No- she pretended she was reading aloud from a novel, or a song-book. But nary a comment did Mr. Priest deign. Starr concluded she could never be a writer and writhed many hours in humiliation.
She recalled when she had thought of wearing one of Ilse Juliets pretty dresses to trick him into believing she was grown-up. A girl in one of mother's stories had done so, losing her tongue-tiedness in the guise of her sister's glamour. She had smuggled into Ilse Juliet's closet and fingered the many silken garments. Here was one of daisy-besprinkled blue - here a red corduroy embroidered with silvery vines - here an enchanting muslim with spiralling egyptian print. She donned the wrap - and the reflection in the gilt-framed glass with its green coppery tint - was something she would never forget. She looked willowy and intriguing - she smiled at the-stranger-in-the-glass, and the smile was alluring. The creamy muslim and the dark pattern brought out the shadowy tints in her hair - gave ground to the dark pools in her eyes. She even dared dab the golden hoops Emily Beatrice had left on the dressing table, on her little pink shells of ears. The portrait in the oval frame was perfect. But not her - not herself! She shuddered and tore it all off and fled to the garret, as if she had already been found out ignominously. She could never pretend to be her willowy, golden sister.
She had wished sometimes that she could be like Ilse Juliet - with the witty, outspoken ally of an Emily Beatrice always by her side. Ilse Juliet never had to face Mr. Priest alone. Not that she would have minded; she was so lovely to look at that people forgave her for being shy. But then she reminded herself how Mr. Priest loved mother, and "had no use" for Mrs. Miller, so she consoled herself that he preferred the dark ladies over the fair ones.
All her life she had been consoling herself in this fashion - whenever any situation was intolerable, she imagined his cynical smile at her tormentors, his meed of praise at her ability to bear it! It was so real. She loved his brand of sarcasm, she loved the scenarios where she vanquished victoriously with his dark looks as her armour.
And now he was to go out of her world. Could he- really be going - without any word of acknowledgement for her?
She alighted the steps of the Priest home, and shrank before the doorbell. She didn't dare ring it. What would Miss Elena Priest think of her, a little unrelated damsel here at this hour of the night? No - she did not have the courage to do it. It was like the day she had tried to try on the dress. She would be found out, and laughed at.
But it had been grey all her journey, and now it began to pour. Before she crossed the driveway the August rain was pelting down, apropos of a thunderstorm.
She was caught like a cat in a tree.
Gingerly she stole around the house, staying close below the eaves, spying into the bay windows. Elena and her maid were washing the dishes in the kitchen, with her back turned. She crept under their window, close to the bushes, making sure not to be seen. But she cut her knee against a rosebush thorn.
Starr crept on - she couldn't linger. Finally - here was his room - he had insisted on spreading the window wide open, much to the shock of his niece. "Night air at a deathbed!" she had said direly to her maid. The maid nodded solemnly, sharing Elena Priest's horror.
Starr had never seen a deathbed before. Mr. Priest lay there in the black bed with the carved posts, that he had ordered to be brought home from one of his Arabian voyages. There was a vase on the table full of some white flowers that glimmered spectrally through the dusk. Starr wished she had thought of bringing him an armful of flowers. She imagined herself heaping on him all the wood lilies from the garden of the Disappointed House, that she had heard him praise, and had always thought of as a symbol of her love for him.
On the wall above the flowers hung a miniature of girl who looked familiar. It was a photo taken of Mother when she was seventeen - with her hair twisted in a funny old candogan braid, and a full skirt of a silky-gray tint, gazing at a red rose. It must be what her mother had called her "ashes-of-roses" evening gown. Starr writhed at the portrait - it was so intimate and possessive as if it slyly flaunted its complete ownership of Mr. Priest. But something in her laughed at herself for her ridiculous folly.
He was lying in the old-fashioned, canopy-top bed which had been his deceased brother-in-law's. His face on the pillow was a face of yellow wax. His eye - his mocking green eyes, which had been, so they said, an inheritance from his Irish mother, were hidden under wrinkled lids. His long-fingered, crooked, rather evil hands were lying on the spread. . The deep dimple was in his chin that Starr had always wanted to put her finger teasingly into. His majestic white hair swept back from his brow. He was barely coherent man but he did not seem infantile even as he lay there, sick and dying. And, thought Starr with a shudder, he still gave you the uncanny feeling that he knew too much about you.
She was trembling in the wet and cold, and her knees were bleeding. She was furious with herself. Soon Elena would come in to tend him, and the night was dark behind her.
She scrambled quickly into the window and made herself kneel by his bed, as if she were a wraith in a penitent ritual.
"Mr. Priest." she said aloud, though barely above a whisper. "Mr. Priest. I love you! I have loved you all my life." she found herself believing each word less as she said it, but now that she had begun the words bubbled forth as if she was possessed. "Ever since I could remember, I knew - we were the only ones who could understand each other. Mother - mother - she stood in our way. Oh, Mr. Priest, tell me that - "
She picked up the hand and there was a terrible coldness to it. Suddenly, the dim room felt horribly still. She felt alone.
Starr could not remember how she got away. She ran pass the homelights and to the Tansy Patch barn where she knew she would find him. She had not gone there since she had discovered his drawings, but she knew all the same that he trysted there, and it had always comforted her that she knew where he was.
"I - don't love him. I killed him. And he could be my father!" she implored as she grasped Burnley's hands - or he, hers.
Burnley looked at her - her sopping hair, her feet of mud and blood, her wild, terrifed face. "Mr. Priest?" he asked, in his matter-of-fact voice, but in his eyes Starr saw kindness - protectiveness - perfect understanding. He proceeded to wipe her bleeding knees with his bare arms, having nothing else to help with.
"You loved him?" he went on, with a sort of tender choking voice.
"I thought I did, but now he's dead."
"Do you mean - he had really passed away? If that's true - we'd better tell our mum's."
He took Starr to the Disappointed House, she clinging to him all the way. Aunt Emily and his mother sat in the living room, where driftwood flames reflected weirdly in the glow of the gazing ball. "Starr says Mr. Priest is dead," he told them, because Starr was incapable of speaking for herself.
The two grown-ups said little but did much, phoning for news and bandaging and warming Starr up. All the while, Starr held Burnley's hand tightly.
---
Starr was sick with pneumonia for two weeks. She was delirious but she remembered none of it. When she woke up, it was in an entirely different world.
Her father and sister had come home. Burnley told her how Ilse Juliet and Emily Beatrice had held hands in terror on the living room couch, the night Dr. Burnley and the young doctor both agreed she should be moved to the hospital. Only Aunt Emily averred nothing could be better than the Blair Water air - "'externals have always been my salvation,' I heard her tell Uncle Teddy. There was one winter when she was bedridden for months, she says, and the doctors gave up on her, but Nature made her recover."
The girls crowded her room with the late roses from the garden, but Burnley brought her wildflowers. The asters of the golden deeps - the tansy that she missed so dearly. He even set up branches of crimson leaves in a little black jug by her bedside. That token of autumn pleased Starr the most. She loved the changing of the seasons, and hated the thought of being in bed and missing that magic moment of transformation.
Burnley spent as many hours by Starr as his mother would allow. He told her all the news from their favourite woodland haunts, and relayed to her all the family gossip. But there was one piece of news she was not allowed to hear until she got well, so Burnley kept his counsel vigilantly. He was overjoyed that she wanted to talk to him - what did it matter if they couldn't talk about, what he wanted to talk about most? They had a lifetime ahead of them - thank God he gave her life!
One evening Aunt Emily said to Starr, "there is something we need to talk about when we wake up tomorrow." Her face was sorrowful, almost afraid of her baby daughter. Burnley, with his uncanny ability for reading others' hearts, knew what she meant.
And he told her himself that very evening.
"Mr. Priest is dead, Starr. Did you know that? He died while - before you became ill." He watched her intently, afraid of what her reaction would be, and gripping her hand very firmly and tenderly.
"No-o - I mean, yes." Starr said, confusedly and bravely. "I remember it now - I thought it was a bad dream. I saw him dead."
"Yes, you did." Burnley reminisced. "You had gone to look for him - because you were in love with him?"
"Yes - I - ever since I was a little girl, I had imagined myself in love with him."
"Ever since I saw you this summer I've loved you, Starr. Tell me it was only imagination."
Starr blushed sweetly. "Oh - maybe - but Burnley, what was worst was that Adela told me he was my father. And she told me - but I can't tell you this, nevermind."
"Oh, yes, you can. You can tell me anything."
"It's too cruel."
"Adela's an idiot. Don't believe her. She said that Mr. Priest is your father, but he isn't, you look like your father's mother - there's a portrait of her I found in the Tansy barn. Is that why you've been acting strange to your mother, Starr?"
"And to you, because she said you might be my - my father's son."
"Is that all? What nonsense, what a malicious thing she is. My silly, silly girl, you're 'another, not a sister' to me." he said endearingly and nestled his head on her little neck.
Abruptly he got up. "My girl - won't you ask your mother all about it? She's been worried sick about you. And I was afraid you would be upset you had missed his funeral."
"Oh, I'm glad I couldn't go, Burnley. I couldn't bear it."
"Bear what?" Emily asked with her habitual detached concern, as she stepped into the doorway. Burnley squeezed Starr's hand warmly. "Promise. Promise, you must tell her everything." He went out and left mother and daughter alone to their ghosts.
It was not easy for Starr, cool and aloof herself, to speak to her reserved mother. Haltingly she told her mother the whole story from the beginning, in broken words, omitting many of her confused feelings. But the story was still intact. Emily listened patiently and understood more than Starr could put into words.
"I have never loved Mr. Priest that way." Emily answered. "Though I promised to marry him once - it was out of pity, and I couldn't do it in the end because I belonged to your father. Mr. Priest and I furnished this house together in our engagement, but your father and I furnished it long ago in imagination as children. I saved his life here - though I never like to think of that - time."
"Just like how Burnley has saved my life." Starr thought.
"It was a horrible thing to see Mr. Priest, his dead face." Starr said. "I think it will always seem like a nightmare to me."
"I - know." Emily agreed. "My earliest memory was of my mother's funeral. I remember it distinctly. Mother was lying just before me in a long, black box. Father was crying--and I couldn't think why--and I wondered why Mother looked so white and wouldn't open her eyes. And I leaned down and touched her cheek--and oh, it was so cold. It made me shiver. And somebody in the room said, 'Poor little thing!' and I was frightened and put my face down on father's shoulder."
"That is why - I wish I had never seen it, mother! I may have gone on loving him forever, remembering him as -"
"I know - without the kiss of death on his brow."
"Mother - you understand, you understand so well. I'm sorry I was jealous of you."
"I'm glad, too - I wouldn't liked to have you hate me, my child, and there were times this summer when I thought that you did."
"No, mother - I was so unjust - I see that now." Starr swallowed hard.
"I should have understood better." Emily said regretfully.
"But we aren't easy people to understand, you and I." Starr said confidentially. "That's partly why I admire you and want to be like you, so much."
Emily laughed, pleased. "Starr, my little child - you will be great one day, in your own way, whether you become a novelist or otherwise. As my father said of me, so I shall say of you 'She will love deeply--she will suffer terribly--she will have glorious moments to compensate--as I have had.' May God bless you and keep you, my little Starr."
She held her in her arms until she fell asleep.
THE END.
passages lifted from "Retribution" in The Road to Yesterday by L. M. Montgomery