The Blue Castle by Lucy Maud Montgomery Page A

country.”
    “WHO say?” asked Valancy.
    Uncle Wellington knotted his ugly forehead at her. What had got into this confounded girl, anyway? He ignored the question.
    “He has the identical look of a jail-bird,” snapped Uncle Benjamin. “I noticed it the first time I saw him.”
     
    “‘A fellow by the hand of nature marked, Quoted and sighed to do a deed of shame’,”
     
    declaimed Uncle James. He looked enormously pleased over the managing to work that quotation in at last. He had been waiting all his life for the chance.
    “One of his eyebrows is an arch and the other is a triangle,” said Valancy. “Is THAT why you think him so villainous?”
    Uncle James lifted HIS eyebrows. Generally when Uncle James lifted his eyebrows the world came to an end. This time it continued to function.
    “How do YOU know his eyebrows so well, Doss?” asked Olive, a trifle maliciously. Such a remark would have covered Valancy with confusion two weeks ago, and Olive knew it.
    “Yes, how?” demanded Aunt Wellington.
    “I’ve seen him twice and I looked at him closely,” said Valancy composedly. “I thought his face the most interesting one I ever saw.”
    “There is no doubt there is something fishy in the creature’s past life,” said Olive, who began to think she was decidedly out of the conversation, which had centred so amazingly around Valancy. “But he can hardly be guilty of EVERYTHING he’s accused of, you know.”
    Valancy felt annoyed with Olive. Why should SHE speak up in even this qualified defence of Barney Snaith? What had she to do with him? For that matter, what had Valancy? But Valancy did not ask herself this question.
    “They say he keeps dozens of cats in that hut up back on Mistawis,” said Second Cousin Sarah Taylor, by way of appearing not entirely ignorant of him.
    Cats. It sounded quite alluring to Valancy, in the plural. She pictured an island in Muskoka haunted by pussies.
    “That alone shows there is something wrong with him,” decreed Aunt Isabel.
    “People who don’t like cats,” said Valancy, attacking her dessert with a relish, “always seem to think that there is some peculiar virtue in not liking them.”
    “The man hasn’t a friend except Roaring Abel,” said Uncle Wellington. “And if Roaring Abel had kept away from him, as everybody else did, it would have been better for—for some members of his family.”
    Uncle Wellington’s rather lame conclusion was due to a marital glance from Aunt Wellington reminding him of what he had almost forgotten—that there were girls at the table.
    “If you mean,” said Valancy passionately, “that Barney Snaith is the father of Cecily Gay’s child, he ISN’T. It’s a wicked lie.”
    In spite of her indignation Valancy was hugely amused at the expression of the faces around that festal table. She had not seen anything like it since the day, seventeen years ago, when at Cousin Gladys’ thimble party, they discovered that she had got—SOMETHING— in her head at school. LICE in her head! Valancy was done with euphemisms.
    Poor Mrs. Frederick was almost in a state of collapse. She had believed—or pretended to believe—the Valancy still supposed that children were found in parsley beds.
    “Hush—hush!” implored Cousin Stickles.
    “I don’t mean to hush,” said Valancy perversely. “I’ve hush-hushed all my life. I’ll scream if I want to. Don’t make me want to. And stop talking nonsense about Barney Snaith.”
    Valancy didn’t exactly understand her own indignation. What did Barney Snaith’s imputed crimes and misdemeanours matter to her? And why, out of them all, did it seem most intolerable that he should have been poor, pitiful little Cecily Gay’s false lover? For it DID seem intolerable to her. She did not mind when they called him a thief and a counterfeiter and jail-bird; but she could not endure to think that he had loved and ruined Cecily Gay. She recalled his face on the two occasions of their chance