Then would come the solicitude. She would be taken to Dr. Marsh, and when Dr. Marsh confirmed Dr. Trent’s diagnosis she would be taken to specialists in Toronto and Montreal. Uncle Benjamin would foot the bill with a splendid gesture of munificence in thus assisting the widow and orphan, and talk forever after of the shocking fees specialists charged for looking wise and saying they couldn’t do anything. And when the specialists could do nothing for her Uncle James would insist on her taking Purple Pills—“I’ve known them to effect a cure when all the doctors had given up”—and her mother would insist on Redfern’s Blood Bitters, and Cousin Stickles would insist on rubbing her over the heart every night with Redfern’s Liniment on the grounds that it might do good and couldn’t do harm; and everybody else would have some pet dope for her to take. Dr. Stalling would come to her and say solemnly, “You are very ill. Are you prepared for what may be before you?”—almost as if he were going to shake his forefinger at her, the forefinger that had not grown any shorter or less knobbly with age. And she would be watched and checked like a baby and never let do anything or go anywhere alone. Perhaps she would not even be allowed to sleep alone lest she die in her sleep. Cousin Stickles or her mother would insist on sharing her room and bed. Yes, undoubtedly they would.
It was this last thought that really decided Valancy. She could not put up with it and she wouldn’t. As the clock in the hall below struck twelve Valancy suddenly and definitely made up her mind that she would not tell anybody. She had always been told, ever since she could remember, that she must hide her feelings. “It is not ladylike to have feelings,” Cousin Stickles had once told her disapprovingly. Well, she would hide them with a vengeance.
But though she was not afraid of death she was not indifferent to it. She found that she resented it; it was not fair that she should have to die when she had never lived. Rebellion flamed up in her soul as the dark hours passed by—not because she had no future but because she had no past.
“I’m poor—I’m ugly—I’m a failure—and I’m near death,” she thought. She could see her own obituary notice in the Deerwood Weekly Times, copied into the Port Lawrence Journal. “A deep gloom was cast over Deerwood, etc., etc.”—“leaves a large circle of friends to mourn, etc., etc., etc.”—lies, all lies. Gloom, forsooth! Nobody would miss her. Her death would not matter a straw to anybody. Not even her mother loved her—her mother who had been so disappointed that she was not a boy—or at least, a pretty girl.
Valancy reviewed her whole life between midnight and the early spring dawn. It was a very drab existence, but here and there an incident loomed out with a significance out of all proportion to its real importance. These incidents were all unpleasant in one way or another. Nothing really pleasant had ever happened to Valancy.
“I’ve never had one wholly happy hour in my life—not one,” she thought. “I’ve just been a colourless nonentity. I remember reading somewhere once that there is an hour in which a woman might be happy all her life if she could but find it. I’ve never found my hour—never, never. And I never will now. If I could only have had that hour I’d be willing to die.”
Those significant incidents kept bobbing up in her mind like unbidden ghosts, without any sequence of time or place. For instance, that time when, at sixteen, she had blued a tubful of clothes too deeply. And the time when, at eight, she had “stolen” some raspberry jam from Aunt Wellington’s pantry. Valancy never heard the last of those two misdemeanours. At almost every clan gathering they were raked up against her as jokes. Uncle Benjamin hardly ever missed retelling the raspberry jam incident—he had been the one to catch her, her face all stained and streaked.
“I have really done so few bad things that they have to keep harping on the old ones,” thought Valancy. “Why, I’ve never even had a quarrel with anyone. I haven’t an enemy. What a spineless thing I must be not to have even one enemy!”
There was that incident of the dust-pile at school when she was seven. Valancy always recalled it when Dr. Stalling referred to the text, “To him that hath shall be given and from him that hath not shall be taken even that which he hath.” Other people might puzzle over that text but it never puzzled Valancy. The whole relationship between herself and Olive, dating from the day of the dust-pile, was a commentary on it.
She had been going to school a year, but Olive, who was a year younger, had just begun and had about her all the glamour of “a new girl” and an exceedingly pretty girl at that. It was at recess and all the girls, big and little, were out on the road in front of the school making dust-piles. The aim of each girl was to have the biggest pile. Valancy was good at making dust-piles—there was an art in it—and she had secret hopes of leading. But Olive, working off by herself, was suddenly discovered to have a larger dust-pile than anybody. Valancy felt no jealousy. Her dust-pile
