The Blue Castle Read Online Free PDF Page A

Bertram, chuckled also, and Valancy disliked them a little more than ever. On the first day Claude Bertram had seen her in the store she had heard him whisper to Joe, “Who is that?” And Joe had said, “Valancy Stirling—one of the Deerwood old maids.” “Curable or incurable?” Claude had asked with a snicker, evidently thinking the question very clever. Valancy smarted anew with the sting of that old recollection.
    “Twenty-nine,” Uncle Benjamin was saying. “Dear me, Doss, you’re dangerously near the second corner and not even thinking of getting married yet. Twenty-nine. It seems impossible.”
    Then Uncle Benjamin said an original thing. Uncle Benjamin said, “How time does fly!”
    “ I think it CRAWLS,” said Valancy passionately. Passion was so alien to Uncle Benjamin’s conception of Valancy that he didn’t know what to make of her. To cover his confusion, he asked another conundrum as he tied up her beans—Cousin Stickles had remembered at the last moment that they must have beans. Beans were cheap and filling.
    “What two ages are apt to prove illusory?” asked Uncle Benjamin; and, not waiting for Valancy to “give it up,” he added, “Mir-age and marriage.”
    “M-i-r-a-g-e is pronounced MIRAZH,” said Valancy shortly, picking up her tea and her beans. For the moment she did not care whether Uncle Benjamin cut her out of his will or not. She walked out of the store while Uncle Benjamin stared after her with his mouth open. Then he shook his head.
    “Poor Doss is taking it hard,” he said.
    Valancy was sorry by the time she reached the next crossing. Why had she lost her patience like that? Uncle Benjamin would be annoyed and would likely tell her mother that Doss had been impertinent—“to ME!”—and her mother would lecture her for a week.
    “I’ve held my tongue for twenty years,” thought Valancy. “Why couldn’t I have held it once more?”
    Yes, it was just twenty, Valancy reflected, since she had first been twitted with her loverless condition. She remembered the bitter moment perfectly. She was just nine years old and she was standing alone on the school playground while the other little girls of her class were playing a game in which you must be chosen by a boy as his partner before you could play. Nobody had chosen Valancy—little, pale, black-haired Valancy, with her prim, long-sleeved apron and odd, slanted eyes.
    “Oh,” said a pretty little girl to her, “I’m so sorry for you. You haven’t got a beau.”
    Valancy had said defiantly, as she continued to say for twenty years, “I don’t WANT a beau.” But this afternoon Valancy once and for all stopped saying that.
    “I’m going to be honest with myself anyhow,” she thought savagely. “Uncle Benjamin’s riddles hurt me because they are true. I DO want to be married. I want a house of my own—I want a husband of my own—I want sweet, little fat BABIES of my own—” Valancy stopped suddenly aghast at her own recklessness. She felt sure that Rev. Dr. Stalling, who passed her at this moment, read her thoughts and disapproved of them thoroughly. Valancy was afraid of Dr. Stalling—had been afraid of him ever since the Sunday, twenty-three years before, when he had first come to St. Albans’. Valancy had been too late for Sunday School that day and she had gone into the church timidly and sat in their pew. No one else was in the church—nobody except the new rector, Dr. Stalling. Dr. Stalling stood up in front of the choir door, beckoned to her, and said sternly, “Little boy, come up here.”
    Valancy had stared around her. There was no little boy—there was no one in all the huge church but herself. This strange man with the blue glasses couldn’t mean her. She was not a boy.
    “Little boy,” repeated Dr. Stalling, more sternly still, shaking his forefinger fiercely at her, “come up here at once!”
    Valancy arose as if hypnotised and walked up the aisle. She was too terrified to do anything