The Blythes Are Quoted Read Online Free Page B

Gnarled apple trees, from which sounded faint, delicate notes of birds, bent over plots of old-fashioned flowers ... thickets of white and fragrant sweet-clover, beds of mint and southernwood, pansies, honeysuckles, and blush roses. There was an old mossy path, bordered by clamshells running up to the front door. Beyond were comfortable barns and a pasture fieldlying in the coolness of the evening, sprinkled over with the ghosts of dandelions. A wholesome, friendly old place. Nothing spookish about it. Mr. Sheldon was a saint, but he was very old. Old people believed things too easily.
    Curtis Burns had been boarding at the old Field place for five weeks and nothing had happened ... except that he had fallen fathoms deep in love with Lucia Field. And he did not know that this had happened. Nobody knew it except Mrs. Dr. Blythe ... and perhaps Alice Harper, who seemed to see things invisible to others with those clear, beautiful eyes of hers.
    She and Curtis were close friends. Like everyone else he was racked alternately with inexpressible admiration for her courage and spirit and fierce pity for her sufferings and helplessness. In spite of her thin, lined face she had a strange look of youth, partly owing to her short golden hair, which everyone admired, and partly to the splendour of her large eyes, which always seemed to have a laugh at the back of them ... though she never laughed. She had a sweet smile with a hint of roguishness in it ... especially when Curtis told her a joke. He was good at telling a joke ... better than a minister should be, some of his Mowbray Narrows parishioners thought ... but he carried a new one to Alice every day.
    She never complained, though there were occasional days when she moaned ceaselessly in almost unendurable agony and could see no one except Alec and Lucia. Some heart weakness made drugs dangerous and little could be done to relieve her but in such attacks she could not bear to be alone.
    On such days Curtis was left largely to the tender mercies of Julia Marsh ... who served his meals properly but whom he could not bear. She was a rather handsome creature, though her clear red-and-white face was marred andrendered sinister by a birthmark ... a deep red band across one cheek.
    Her eyes were small and amber-hued, her reddish-brown hair was splendid and untidy, and she moved with a graceful stealthiness of motion and limb like a cat in the twilight. She was a great talker, save on days when she took tantrums and became possessed of a silent devil. Then not a word could be got out of her and she glowered and lowered like a thunderstorm.
    Lucia did not seem to mind these moods ... Lucia took everything that came to her with a sweet undisturbed serenity ... but Curtis seemed to feel them all over the house. At such times Julia seemed to him a baffling, inhuman creature who might do anything. Sometimes Curtis was sure she was at the bottom of the spook business; at other times he was just as sure it was Jock MacCree. He had even less use for Jock than Julia and could not understand why Lucia and Long Alec seemed actually to have an affection for the uncanny fellow.
    Jock was fifty and looked a hundred in some ways. He had staring, filmy grey eyes, lank black hair and a curiously protruding lip, with a skinny sallow face. The lip gave his face a singularly disagreeable profile. He was always arrayed in a motley collection of garments ... of his own choice it would seem, not of necessity or Long Alec’s decree ... and spent most of his time carrying food to and looking after Long Alec’s innumerable pigs. He made money for Long Alec out of the pigs but of other work he could be trusted with nothing.
    When alone by himself he sang old Scotch songs in a surprisingly sweet, true voice but with something peculiar in its timbre. So Jock was musical, Curtis noted, remembering the violin. But he had never heard of him being able to play it.
    Jock’s speaking voice was high-pitched and childish