Читать книгу Emily of New Moon онлайн

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Ellen could not find Mike for the very good reason that he was upstairs with Emily, held tightly in her arms, as she sat in the darkness on her little cot bed. Amid her agony and desolation there was a certain comfort in the feel of his soft fur and round velvety head.

Emily was not crying; she stared straight into the darkness, trying to face the awful thing Ellen had told her. She did not doubt it—something told her it was true. Why couldn’t she die, too? She couldn’t go on living without Father.

“If I was God I wouldn’t let things like this happen,” she said.

She felt it was very wicked of her to say such a thing—Ellen had told her once that it was the wickedest thing any one could do to find fault with God. But she didn’t care. Perhaps if she were wicked enough God would strike her dead and then she and Father could keep on being together.

But nothing happened—only Mike got tired of being held so tightly and squirmed away. She was all alone now, with this terrible burning pain that seemed all over her and yet was not of the body. She could never get rid of it. She couldn’t help it by writing about it in the old yellow account book. She had written there about her Sunday School teacher going away, and of being hungry when she went to bed, and Ellen telling her she must be half crazy to talk of Wind Women and flashes; and after she had written down all about them these things hadn’t hurt her any more. But this couldn’t be written about. She could not even go to Father for comfort, as she had gone when she burned her hand so badly, picking up the red-hot poker by mistake. Father had held her in his arms all that night and told her stories and helped her to bear the pain. But Father, so Ellen had said, was going to die in a week or two. Emily felt as if Ellen had told her this years and years ago. It surely couldn’t be less than an hour since she had been playing with the Wind Woman in the barrens and looking at the new moon in the pinky-green sky.