Read Online White Narcissus by Raymond Knister - Free Book Online Page A

are a menace or … The bush is drier now than it was in those days. I remember it was all pools under the trees, brown with dead leaves. I thought you were going to fall into one when you became dizzy looking up.”
    “It’s later now … later in the year.”
    They walked forward. “And the land all about is drained now. How vast the bush seemed, and echoey then. Now we know how few acres it is, and how small a mystery.”
    They spoke of a girlhood and boyhood it seemed impossible to know would never return. It seemed that they had been nearer together then than now or at any time during the long siege of her. He remembered the first day Ada had goneto school at the little frame schoolhouse at the cross-roads, and how he and she had walked home on opposite sides of the road, along the ditch banks without a word. Soon they became friends and compared the lunches which they carried to school in tin pails, and shared them at noon. The teasing of the older children stopped this, and they did not pay much attention to each other during the day at school. But they always walked home together, until a new family moved to a neighbouring farm and provided Ada with the company of other girls. Later they walked together when the privilege of carrying her books had come to mean much to Richard.
    Through these years he had been scarcely aware of her parents save as a rumour in the mouths of other children. Grown people seemed to keep silence about them. They must have been utterly indifferent to anything the little girl did away from their sight. She never spoke of them, and you could not think of her with them. She seemed perfect alone, needing no one. She was neatly dressed at school, on occasion came to Sunday school with neighbour girls, and looked a distinct and exotic creature among them. Scarcely ever in his memory had he seen Mrs. Lethen. Once she had been driving past in a buggy with Ada, and picked him up. He had never forgotten the consciousness of her presence under the narrow buggy-top as they drove down the muddy road.
    Mr. Lethen was seen more, at threshing tables, in neighbours’ houses, at meetings of the municipal council, of the school ratepayers, and so forth. He was not disposed to take a keen interest in his duties as a citizen, but his neighbours, knowing him a man of intelligence and some education, from time to time pressed him into certain offices. He was known to have queer ideas, and by some this was laid to his being educated, and by others to his year-long misunderstandingwith his wife; while others took it as one of the reasons the two had not been able to get on together. More of the women, however, sympathized with him than the men. Farming indifferently, he pursued a casual course among his neighbours, as though there was nothing to be remarked about him, and it was quite ordinary to live a life with neither an impelling motive nor the warmth of family ties.
    He never appeared in public with Mrs. Lethen, and when it was necessary to have people in the house she was not present. On her side, she avoided association with other women, often did not answer knocks at the door, and one who came of an afternoon to call was likely to go away puzzled. It was something to be marvelled at that their life could continue in the community and the family take its part therein as an efficient unit, while Mrs. Lethen remained apart, indifferent, or malign, present-in-absence.
    Her hold on her daughter became more apparent as the girl grew up, and a second estrangement, Richard Milne recalled, had come between him and Ada Lethen. She seemed to grow away from him. Music had been her passion, and she had lent herself to it wholly. Her parents, indulgent or indifferent, had allowed her unchecked progress with elementary teachers, local girls returned from the Toronto conservatory, who insisted that Ada must “go on” with her “wonderful touch.” Who knew what triumph of musical splendour might yet be released? Music