The Stone Angel by Margaret Laurence Read Free Book Online

“Anyway, he’s past twenty—it’s too late for him. Besides, I need him here. I never had the chance to go to college, yet I’ve got on all right. Matt can learn all he needs right here, if he’s minded to do so. It’s not the same for you—there’s no woman here to teach you how to dress and behave like a lady.”
    Such a barrage of arguments managed to convince me with no difficulty. When it came to saying good-by to Matt, at first I avoided his eyes, but then I thought—
why on earth should I?
So I looked at him squarely and said good-by so evenly and calmly you’d have thought I was going over to South Wachakwa or Freehold and would be back that evening. Later, in the train, I cried, thinking of him, but, of course, he never knew that, and I’d have been the last to tell him.
    When I returned after two years, I knew embroidery,and French, and menu-planning for a five-course meal, and poetry, and how to take a firm hand with servants, and the most becoming way of dressing my hair. Hardly ideal accomplishments for the kind of life I’d ultimately find myself leading, but I had no notion of that then. I was Pharaoh’s daughter reluctantly returning to his roof, the square brick palace so oddly antimacassared in the wilderness, back to the hill where his monument stood, more dear to him, I believe, than the brood mare who lay beneath because she’d proved no match for his stud.
    Father looked me over, my bottle-green costume and feathered hat. I wished he’d find some fault, tell me I’d been extravagant, not nod and nod as though I were a thing and his.
    “It was worth every penny for the two years,” he said. “You’re a credit to me. Everyone will be saying that by tomorrow. You’ll not work in the store. It wouldn’t do. You can look after the accounts and the ordering—that can be done at home. You’d not believe how the store’s grown since you’ve been away. I entertain now—just a few friends for dinner, nothing too elaborate. I find it’s well worth while. It’s good to have you back, and looking smart. Dolly’s quite passable as cook, but as for hostess—it’s beyond her.”
    “I want to teach,” I said. “I can get the South Wachakwa school.”
    Both of us were blunt as bludgeons. We hadn’t a scrap of subtlety between us. Some girls would have spent a week preparing him. Not I. It never occurred to me.
    “Do you think I sent you down East for two solid years just so you could take a one-room school?” he cried.“Anyway, no daughter of mine is going out there alone. You’ll not teach, miss.”
    “Morag MacCulloch teaches,” I said. “If the minister’s daughter can, why can’t I?”
    “I always suspected Dougall MacCulloch was a fool,” Father said, “and now I know it.”
    “Why?” I blazed. “Why?”
    We were standing at the foot of the stairs. My father put his hands around the newel post and gripped it as though it were a throat. How I feared his hands, and him, but I’d as lief have died as let him know.
    “You think I’d allow you to go to South Wachakwa and board with God knows who? You think I’d let you go to the kind of dances they have there, and let all the farm boys paw you?”
    Standing there rigidly on the bottom step, buttoned and armored in my long dark green, I glared at him.
    “You think I’d allow that? What do you think of me?”
    He held tightly to the newel post, his hands working at the smooth golden wood.
    “You know nothing,” he said in an almost inaudible voice. “Men have terrible thoughts.”
    It never seemed peculiar to me then that he said thoughts, not deeds. Only now, when I recall it. If he had kept to his pattern then, laid down the law in no uncertain terms, I’d have been angry and that’s all. But he did not. He reached out and took my hand and held it. His own hand tightened painfully, and for the merest instant the bones in my fingers hurt.
    “Stay,” he said.
    Perhaps it was only the momentary pain made me do