The Blythes Are Quoted by L. M. Montgomery Read Free Book Online Page A

with him than anything else. But Emma Mowbray was noted for her impatience. She said he would not stay in bed and that was the main cause of his illness.
    Curtis prowled ... he investigated ... he passed sleepless hours on guard ... he spent whole nights in the garret ... and he got nowhere. He knew, too, that his people were growing critical ... he should change his boarding place, they said, or move into the parsonage.
    Things happened almost continually ... ridiculous and horrible things all jumbled up together. Twelve dozen eggs packed for market were found broken all over the kitchen floor. Lucia’s new sheer dress was found ruined in the closet of the guest room. She took it coolly ... she had never liked the dress, it seemed. The violin played and the cradle rocked. And at times the house seemed possessed by diabolical laughter. Several times all the furniture in the lower rooms was found piled in the middle of the floor ... involving a day’s work of restoration for Lucia, for Julia refused to have anything to do with “spook doings.” Outer doors, locked at night, were found wide open in the morning, although Long Alec slept with the keys under his pillow. The spigot was pulled out of the churn in the dairy and a week’s cream spilled on the floor. The guest room bed was tossed and tumbled as if slept in overnight. Pigs and calves were let out to riot in the garden. Ink was spattered all over the walls of the newly papered hall. Plentiful curses were scattered about. Voices sounded in that exasperating, commonplace garret. Finally, Lucia’s pet kitten ... a beautiful little Persian Curtis had brought her from Charlottetown ... was found hung on the back veranda, its poor little body dangling limply from the fretwork.
    “I knew this would happen when you gave it to me,” said Lucia bitterly. “Four years ago Mrs. Blythe gave me a lovely pup. It was strangled. I’ve never dared to have a pet since. Everything I love dies or is destroyed. My white calf ... my dog ... my birch tree ... and now my kitten.”
    For the most part Curtis carried on his investigations alone. Long Alec bluntly stated that he was fed up with spook stalking. He had had too many years of it and had given it up. As long as the ghosts left his roof over his head he would leave them alone. Once or twice Curtis got Mr. Sheldon, who had recovered from his illness, to watch with him. Nothing at all happened those nights ... except that a large key, very much resembling Long Alec’s kitchen key, fell out of the old man’s pocket once. Mr. Sheldon had picked it up rather hurriedly and said it was the old key of the parsonage door. He asked Dr. Blythe, who had returned, to share a vigil, but the doctor bluntly refused. The spooks, he said, were too clever for him.
    Finally he had Henry Kildare.
    Henry was quite confident at first.
    “I’ll have that spook’s hide nailed to the barn door by morning, preacher,” he boasted.
    But Henry capitulated in blind terror when he heard Winthrop Field’s voice talking in the garret.
    “No more ghosting for me, preacher. Don’t tell me ... I know old Winthrop’s voice well enough ... I worked here for three years. That’s him, as sure as sin. Preacher, you’d better get out of this house as soon as you can if you have to live in a tent. Believe me, it ain’t healthy.”
    Henry Kildare’s reappearance in Mowbray Narrows had created quite a sensation. He was said to have made a fortune lumbering in British Columbia and announced that he could live on millionaire row for the rest of his life. He certainly threw money about freely enough. He stayed with a cousin but spent a good deal of time at the old Field place. They liked him there. He was a big, bluff, hearty man, not over-refined, rather handsome, generous, boastful. Alice was never tired of hearing his tales of the Coast. To her, imprisonedwithin walls for years, it was as if she could look out into a wonderful freedom of adventure and peril.