Chapter 2

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-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 girl in a handsome clan, with
no past and no future. As far as she could look back, life was drab and
colourless, with not one single crimson or purple spot anywhere. As far
as she could look forward it seemed certain to be just the same until
she was nothing but a solitary, little withered leaf clinging to a
wintry bough. The moment when a woman realises that she has nothing to
live for—neither love, duty, purpose nor hope—holds for her the
bitterness of death.

“And I just have to go on living because I can’t stop. I may have to
live eighty years,” thought Valancy, in a kind of panic. “We’re all
horribly long-lived. It sickens me to think of it.”

She was glad it was raining—or rather, she was drearily satisfied that
it was raining. There would be no picnic that day. This annual picnic,
whereby Aunt and Uncle Wellington—one always thought of them in that
succession—inevitably celebrated their engagement at a picnic thirty
years before, had been, of late years, a veritable nightmare to Valancy.
By an impish coincidence it was the same day as her birthday and, after
she had passed twenty-five, nobody let her forget it.

Much as she hated going to the picnic, it would never have occurred to
her to rebel against it. There seemed to be nothing of the revolutionary
in her nature. And she knew exactly what every one would say to her at
the picnic. Uncle Wellington, whom she disliked and despised even though
he had fulfilled the highest Stirling aspiration, “marrying money,”
would say to her in a pig’s whisper, “Not thinking of getting married
yet, my dear?” and then go off into the bellow of laughter with which he
invariably concluded his dull remarks. Aunt Wellington, of whom Valancy
stood in abject awe, would tell her about Olive’s new chiffon dress and
Cecil’s last devoted letter. Valancy would have to look as pleased and
interested as if the dress and letter had been hers or else Aunt
Wellington would be offended. And Valancy had long ago decided that she
would rather offend God than Aunt Wellington, because God might forgive
her but Aunt Wellington never would.

Aunt Alberta, enormously fat, with an amiable habit of always referring
to her husband as “he,” as if he were the only male creature in the
world, who could never forget that she had been a great beauty in her
youth, would condole with Valancy on her sallow skin—

“I don’t know why all the girls of today are so sunburned. When _I_ was
a girl my skin was roses and cream. I was counted the prettiest girl in
Canada, my dear.”

Perhaps Uncle Herbert wouldn’t say anything—or perhaps he would remark
jocularly, “How fat you’re getting, Doss!” And then everybody would
laugh over the excessively humorous idea of poor, scrawny little Doss
getting fat.

Handsome, solemn Uncle James, whom Valancy disliked but respected
because he was reputed to be very clever and was therefore the clan
oracle—brains being none too plentiful in the Stirling
connection—would probably remark with the owl-like sarcasm that had won
him his reputation, “I suppose you’re busy with your hope-chest these
days?”

And Uncle Benjamin would ask some of his abominable conundrums, between
wheezy chuckles, and answer them himself.

“What is the difference between Doss and a mouse?

“The mouse wishes to harm the cheese and Doss wishes to charm the he’s.”

Valancy had heard him ask that riddle fifty times and every time she
wanted to throw something at him. But she never did. In the first place,
the Stirlings simply did not throw things; in the second place, Uncle
Benjamin was a wealthy and childless old widower and Valancy had been
brought up in the fear and admonition of his money. If she offended him
he would cut her out of his will—supposing she were in it. Valancy did
not want to be cut out of Uncle Benjamin’s will. She had been poor all
her life and knew the galling bitterness of it. So she endured his
riddles and even smiled tortured little smiles over him.