Anne Of Avonlea

L >> Lucy Maud Montgomery >> Anne Of Avonlea


And the faithful little handmaiden dashed to the oven door with a sniff.

They went through the form of having tea as usual that night at Echo
Lodge; but nobody really ate anything. After tea Miss Lavendar went to
her room and put on her new forget-me-not organdy, while Anne did her
hair for her. Both were dreadfully excited; but Miss Lavendar pretended
to be very calm and indifferent.

"I must really mend that rent in the curtain tomorrow," she said
anxiously, inspecting it as if it were the only thing of any importance
just then. "Those curtains have not worn as well as they should,
considering the price I paid. Dear me, Charlotta has forgotten to dust
the stair railing AGAIN. I really MUST speak to her about it."

Anne was sitting on the porch steps when Stephen Irving came down the
lane and across the garden.

"This is the one place where time stands still," he said, looking around
him with delighted eyes. "There is nothing changed about this house or
garden since I was here twenty-five years ago. It makes me feel young
again."

"You know time always does stand still in an enchanted palace," said
Anne seriously. "It is only when the prince comes that things begin to
happen."

Mr. Irving smiled a little sadly into her uplifted face, all astar with
its youth and promise.

"Sometimes the prince comes too late," he said. He did not ask Anne
to translate her remark into prose. Like all kindred spirits he
"understood."

"Oh, no, not if he is the real prince coming to the true princess," said
Anne, shaking her red head decidedly, as she opened the parlor door.
When he had gone in she shut it tightly behind him and turned to
confront Charlotta the Fourth, who was in the hall, all "nods and becks
and wreathed smiles."

"Oh, Miss Shirley, ma'am," she breathed, "I peeked from the kitchen
window . . . and he's awful handsome . . . and just the right age for Miss
Lavendar. And oh, Miss Shirley, ma'am, do you think it would be much
harm to listen at the door?"

"It would be dreadful, Charlotta," said Anne firmly, "so just you come
away with me out of the reach of temptation."

"I can't do anything, and it's awful to hang round just waiting," sighed
Charlotta. "What if he don't propose after all, Miss Shirley, ma'am?
You can never be sure of them men. My older sister, Charlotta the
First, thought she was engaged to one once. But it turned out HE had a
different opinion and she says she'll never trust one of them again. And
I heard of another case where a man thought he wanted one girl awful bad
when it was really her sister he wanted all the time. When a man don't
know his own mind, Miss Shirley, ma'am, how's a poor woman going to be
sure of it?"

"We'll go to the kitchen and clean the silver spoons," said Anne.
"That's a task which won't require much thinking fortunately . . . for I
COULDN'T think tonight. And it will pass the time."

It passed an hour. Then, just as Anne laid down the last shining spoon,
they heard the front door shut. Both sought comfort fearfully in each
other's eyes.

"Oh, Miss Shirley, ma'am," gasped Charlotta, "if he's going away this
early there's nothing into it and never will be." They flew to the
window. Mr. Irving had no intention of going away. He and Miss Lavendar
were strolling slowly down the middle path to the stone bench.

"Oh, Miss Shirley, ma'am, he's got his arm around her waist," whispered
Charlotta the Fourth delightedly. "He must have proposed to her or she'd
never allow it."

Anne caught Charlotta the Fourth by her own plump waist and danced her
around the kitchen until they were both out of breath.

"Oh, Charlotta," she cried gaily, "I'm neither a prophetess nor the
daughter of a prophetess but I'm going to make a prediction. There'll
be a wedding in this old stone house before the maple leaves are red. Do
you want that translated into prose, Charlotta?"

"No, I can understand that," said Charlotta. "A wedding ain't poetry.
Why, Miss Shirley, ma'am, you're crying! What for?"

"Oh, because it's all so beautiful . . . and story bookish . . . and
romantic . . . and sad," said Anne, winking the tears out of her eyes.
"It's all perfectly lovely . . . but there's a little sadness mixed up in
it too, somehow."

"Oh, of course there's a resk in marrying anybody," conceded Charlotta
the Fourth, "but, when all's said and done, Miss Shirley, ma'am, there's
many a worse thing than a husband."




XXIX

Poetry and Prose


For the next month Anne lived in what, for Avonlea, might be called
a whirl of excitement. The preparation of her own modest outfit for
Redmond was of secondary importance. Miss Lavendar was getting ready to
be married and the stone house was the scene of endless consultations
and plannings and discussions, with Charlotta the Fourth hovering on the
outskirts of things in agitated delight and wonder. Then the dressmaker
came, and there was the rapture and wretchedness of choosing fashions
and being fitted. Anne and Diana spent half their time at Echo Lodge and
there were nights when Anne could not sleep for wondering whether she
had done right in advising Miss Lavendar to select brown rather than
navy blue for her traveling dress, and to have her gray silk made
princess.

Everybody concerned in Miss Lavendar's story was very happy. Paul Irving
rushed to Green Gables to talk the news over with Anne as soon as his
father had told him.

"I knew I could trust father to pick me out a nice little second
mother," he said proudly. "It's a fine thing to have a father you can
depend on, teacher. I just love Miss Lavendar. Grandma is pleased, too.
She says she's real glad father didn't pick out an American for his
second wife, because, although it turned out all right the first time,
such a thing wouldn't be likely to happen twice. Mrs. Lynde says she
thoroughly approves of the match and thinks its likely Miss Lavendar
will give up her queer notions and be like other people, now that she's
going to be married. But I hope she won't give her queer notions up,
teacher, because I like them. And I don't want her to be like other
people. There are too many other people around as it is. YOU know,
teacher."

Charlotta the Fourth was another radiant person.

"Oh, Miss Shirley, ma'am, it has all turned out so beautiful. When Mr.
Irving and Miss Lavendar come back from their tower I'm to go up to
Boston and live with them . . . and me only fifteen, and the other girls
never went till they were sixteen. Ain't Mr. Irving splendid? He
just worships the ground she treads on and it makes me feel so queer
sometimes to see the look in his eyes when he's watching her. It beggars
description, Miss Shirley, ma'am. I'm awful thankful they're so fond
of each other. It's the best way, when all's said and done, though some
folks can get along without it. I've got an aunt who has been married
three times and says she married the first time for love and the last
two times for strictly business, and was happy with all three except at
the times of the funerals. But I think she took a resk, Miss Shirley,
ma'am."

"Oh, it's all so romantic," breathed Anne to Marilla that night. "If I
hadn't taken the wrong path that day we went to Mr. Kimball's I'd never
have known Miss Lavendar; and if I hadn't met her I'd never have taken
Paul there . . . and he'd never have written to his father about visiting
Miss Lavendar just as Mr. Irving was starting for San Francisco. Mr.
Irving says whenever he got that letter he made up his mind to send his
partner to San Francisco and come here instead. He hadn't heard anything
of Miss Lavendar for fifteen years. Somebody had told him then that
she was to be married and he thought she was and never asked anybody
anything about her. And now everything has come right. And I had a
hand in bringing it about. Perhaps, as Mrs. Lynde says, everything is
foreordained and it was bound to happen anyway. But even so, it's nice
to think one was an instrument used by predestination. Yes indeed, it's
very romantic."

"I can't see that it's so terribly romantic at all," said Marilla rather
crisply. Marilla thought Anne was too worked up about it and had plenty
to do with getting ready for college without "traipsing" to Echo Lodge
two days out of three helping Miss Lavendar. "In the first place two
young fools quarrel and turn sulky; then Steve Irving goes to the States
and after a spell gets married up there and is perfectly happy from all
accounts. Then his wife dies and after a decent interval he thinks he'll
come home and see if his first fancy'll have him. Meanwhile, she's been
living single, probably because nobody nice enough came along to want
her, and they meet and agree to be married after all. Now, where is the
romance in all that?"

"Oh, there isn't any, when you put it that way," gasped Anne, rather
as if somebody had thrown cold water over her. "I suppose that's how
it looks in prose. But it's very different if you look at it through
poetry . . . and _I_ think it's nicer . . ." Anne recovered herself and
her eyes shone and her cheeks flushed . . . "to look at it through
poetry."

Marilla glanced at the radiant young face and refrained from further
sarcastic comments. Perhaps some realization came to her that after all
it was better to have, like Anne, "the vision and the faculty divine"
. . . that gift which the world cannot bestow or take away, of looking at
life through some transfiguring . . . or revealing? . . . medium, whereby
everything seemed apparelled in celestial light, wearing a glory and
a freshness not visible to those who, like herself and Charlotta the
Fourth, looked at things only through prose.

"When's the wedding to be?" she asked after a pause.

"The last Wednesday in August. They are to be married in the garden
under the honeysuckle trellis . . . the very spot where Mr. Irving
proposed to her twenty-five years ago. Marilla, that IS romantic, even
in prose. There's to be nobody there except Mrs. Irving and Paul and
Gilbert and Diana and I, and Miss Lavendar's cousins. And they will
leave on the six o'clock train for a trip to the Pacific coast. When
they come back in the fall Paul and Charlotta the Fourth are to go up to
Boston to live with them. But Echo Lodge is to be left just as it is. . .
only of course they'll sell the hens and cow, and board up the windows
. . . and every summer they're coming down to live in it. I'm so glad. It
would have hurt me dreadfully next winter at Redmond to think of that
dear stone house all stripped and deserted, with empty rooms . . . or far
worse still, with other people living in it. But I can think of it now,
just as I've always seen it, waiting happily for the summer to bring
life and laughter back to it again."

There was more romance in the world than that which had fallen to
the share of the middle-aged lovers of the stone house. Anne stumbled
suddenly on it one evening when she went over to Orchard Slope by the
wood cut and came out into the Barry garden. Diana Barry and Fred Wright
were standing together under the big willow. Diana was leaning against
the gray trunk, her lashes cast down on very crimson cheeks. One hand
was held by Fred, who stood with his face bent toward her, stammering
something in low earnest tones. There were no other people in the world
except their two selves at that magic moment; so neither of them saw
Anne, who, after one dazed glance of comprehension, turned and sped
noiselessly back through the spruce wood, never stopping till she gained
her own gable room, where she sat breathlessly down by her window and
tried to collect her scattered wits.

"Diana and Fred are in love with each other," she gasped. "Oh, it does
seem so . . . so . . . so HOPELESSLY grown up."

Anne, of late, had not been without her suspicions that Diana was
proving false to the melancholy Byronic hero of her early dreams. But
as "things seen are mightier than things heard," or suspected, the
realization that it was actually so came to her with almost the shock of
perfect surprise. This was succeeded by a queer, little lonely feeling
. . . as if, somehow, Diana had gone forward into a new world, shutting
a gate behind her, leaving Anne on the outside.

"Things are changing so fast it almost frightens me," Anne thought,
a little sadly. "And I'm afraid that this can't help making some
difference between Diana and me. I'm sure I can't tell her all my
secrets after this . . . she might tell Fred. And what CAN she see in
Fred? He's very nice and jolly . . . but he's just Fred Wright."

It is always a very puzzling question . . . what can somebody see in
somebody else? But how fortunate after all that it is so, for if
everybody saw alike . . . well, in that case, as the old Indian said,
"Everybody would want my squaw." It was plain that Diana DID see
something in Fred Wright, however Anne's eyes might be holden. Diana
came to Green Gables the next evening, a pensive, shy young lady, and
told Anne the whole story in the dusky seclusion of the east gable. Both
girls cried and kissed and laughed.

"I'm so happy," said Diana, "but it does seem ridiculous to think of me
being engaged."

"What is it really like to be engaged?" asked Anne curiously.

"Well, that all depends on who you're engaged to," answered Diana, with
that maddening air of superior wisdom always assumed by those who are
engaged over those who are not. "It's perfectly lovely to be engaged to
Fred . . . but I think it would be simply horrid to be engaged to anyone
else."

"There's not much comfort for the rest of us in that, seeing that there
is only one Fred," laughed Anne.

"Oh, Anne, you don't understand," said Diana in vexation. "I didn't
mean THAT . . . it's so hard to explain. Never mind, you'll understand
sometime, when your own turn comes."

"Bless you, dearest of Dianas, I understand now. What is an imagination
for if not to enable you to peep at life through other people's eyes?"

"You must be my bridesmaid, you know, Anne. Promise me that . . .
wherever you may be when I'm married."

"I'll come from the ends of the earth if necessary," promised Anne
solemnly.

"Of course, it won't be for ever so long yet," said Diana, blushing.
"Three years at the very least . . . for I'm only eighteen and mother says
no daughter of hers shall be married before she's twenty-one. Besides,
Fred's father is going to buy the Abraham Fletcher farm for him and he
says he's got to have it two thirds paid for before he'll give it to him
in his own name. But three years isn't any too much time to get ready
for housekeeping, for I haven't a speck of fancy work made yet. But I'm
going to begin crocheting doilies tomorrow. Myra Gillis had thirty-seven
doilies when she was married and I'm determined I shall have as many as
she had."

"I suppose it would be perfectly impossible to keep house with only
thirty-six doilies," conceded Anne, with a solemn face but dancing eyes.

Diana looked hurt.

"I didn't think you'd make fun of me, Anne," she said reproachfully.

"Dearest, I wasn't making fun of you," cried Anne repentantly. "I
was only teasing you a bit. I think you'll make the sweetest little
housekeeper in the world. And I think it's perfectly lovely of you to be
planning already for your home o'dreams."

Anne had no sooner uttered the phrase, "home o'dreams," than it
captivated her fancy and she immediately began the erection of one of
her own. It was, of course, tenanted by an ideal master, dark, proud,
and melancholy; but oddly enough, Gilbert Blythe persisted in hanging
about too, helping her arrange pictures, lay out gardens, and accomplish
sundry other tasks which a proud and melancholy hero evidently
considered beneath his dignity. Anne tried to banish Gilbert's image
from her castle in Spain but, somehow, he went on being there, so
Anne, being in a hurry, gave up the attempt and pursued her aerial
architecture with such success that her "home o'dreams" was built and
furnished before Diana spoke again.

"I suppose, Anne, you must think it's funny I should like Fred so well
when he's so different from the kind of man I've always said I would
marry . . . the tall, slender kind? But somehow I wouldn't want Fred to be
tall and slender . . . because, don't you see, he wouldn't be Fred then.
Of course," added Diana rather dolefully, "we will be a dreadfully pudgy
couple. But after all that's better than one of us being short and fat
and the other tall and lean, like Morgan Sloane and his wife. Mrs. Lynde
says it always makes her think of the long and short of it when she sees
them together."

"Well," said Anne to herself that night, as she brushed her hair before
her gilt framed mirror, "I am glad Diana is so happy and satisfied.
But when my turn comes . . . if it ever does . . . I do hope there'll be
something a little more thrilling about it. But then Diana thought so
too, once. I've heard her say time and again she'd never get engaged any
poky commonplace way . . . he'd HAVE to do something splendid to win her.
But she has changed. Perhaps I'll change too. But I won't . . . and
I'm determined I won't. Oh, I think these engagements are dreadfully
unsettling things when they happen to your intimate friends."




XXX

A Wedding at the Stone House

The last week in August came. Miss Lavendar was to be married in it.
Two weeks later Anne and Gilbert would leave for Redmond College. In a
week's time Mrs. Rachel Lynde would move to Green Gables and set up
her lares and penates in the erstwhile spare room, which was already
prepared for her coming. She had sold all her superfluous household
plenishings by auction and was at present reveling in the congenial
occupation of helping the Allans pack up. Mr. Allan was to preach his
farewell sermon the next Sunday. The old order was changing rapidly to
give place to the new, as Anne felt with a little sadness threading all
her excitement and happiness.

"Changes ain't totally pleasant but they're excellent things," said Mr.
Harrison philosophically. "Two years is about long enough for things
to stay exactly the same. If they stayed put any longer they might grow
mossy."

Mr. Harrison was smoking on his veranda. His wife had self-sacrificingly
told that he might smoke in the house if he took care to sit by an
open window. Mr. Harrison rewarded this concession by going outdoors
altogether to smoke in fine weather, and so mutual goodwill reigned.

Anne had come over to ask Mrs. Harrison for some of her yellow dahlias.
She and Diana were going through to Echo Lodge that evening to help Miss
Lavendar and Charlotta the Fourth with their final preparations for the
morrow's bridal. Miss Lavendar herself never had dahlias; she did not
like them and they would not have suited the fine retirement of her
old-fashioned garden. But flowers of any kind were rather scarce in
Avonlea and the neighboring districts that summer, thanks to Uncle Abe's
storm; and Anne and Diana thought that a certain old cream-colored stone
jug, usually kept sacred to doughnuts, brimmed over with yellow dahlias,
would be just the thing to set in a dim angle of the stone house stairs,
against the dark background of red hall paper.

"I s'pose you'll be starting off for college in a fortnight's time?"
continued Mr. Harrison. "Well, we're going to miss you an awful lot,
Emily and me. To be sure, Mrs. Lynde'll be over there in your place.
There ain't nobody but a substitute can be found for them."

The irony of Mr. Harrison's tone is quite untransferable to paper. In
spite of his wife's intimacy with Mrs. Lynde, the best that could be
said of the relationship between her and Mr. Harrison even under the new
regime, was that they preserved an armed neutrality.

"Yes, I'm going," said Anne. "I'm very glad with my head . . . and very
sorry with my heart."

"I s'pose you'll be scooping up all the honors that are lying round
loose at Redmond."

"I may try for one or two of them," confessed Anne, "but I don't care so
much for things like that as I did two years ago. What I want to get out
of my college course is some knowledge of the best way of living life
and doing the most and best with it. I want to learn to understand and
help other people and myself."

Mr. Harrison nodded.

"That's the idea exactly. That's what college ought to be for, instead
of for turning out a lot of B.A.'s, so chock full of book-learning
and vanity that there ain't room for anything else. You're all right.
College won't be able to do you much harm, I reckon."

Diana and Anne drove over to Echo Lodge after tea, taking with them all
the flowery spoil that several predatory expeditions in their own and
their neighbors' gardens had yielded. They found the stone house agog
with excitement. Charlotta the Fourth was flying around with such vim
and briskness that her blue bows seemed really to possess the power of
being everywhere at once. Like the helmet of Navarre, Charlotta's blue
bows waved ever in the thickest of the fray.

"Praise be to goodness you've come," she said devoutly, "for there's
heaps of things to do . . . and the frosting on that cake WON'T harden
. . . and there's all the silver to be rubbed up yet . . . and the
horsehair trunk to be packed . . . and the roosters for the chicken
salad are running out there beyant the henhouse yet, crowing, Miss
Shirley, ma'am. And Miss Lavendar ain't to be trusted to do a thing. I
was thankful when Mr. Irving came a few minutes ago and took her off for
a walk in the woods. Courting's all right in its place, Miss Shirley,
ma'am, but if you try to mix it up with cooking and scouring
everything's spoiled. That's MY opinion, Miss Shirley, ma'am."

Anne and Diana worked so heartily that by ten o'clock even Charlotta
the Fourth was satisfied. She braided her hair in innumerable plaits and
took her weary little bones off to bed.

"But I'm sure I shan't sleep a blessed wink, Miss Shirley, ma'am, for
fear that something'll go wrong at the last minute . . . the cream won't
whip . . . or Mr. Irving'll have a stroke and not be able to come."

"He isn't in the habit of having strokes, is he?" asked Diana, the
dimpled corners of her mouth twitching. To Diana, Charlotta the Fourth
was, if not exactly a thing of beauty, certainly a joy forever.

"They're not things that go by habit," said Charlotta the Fourth with
dignity. "They just HAPPEN . . . and there you are. ANYBODY can have a
stroke. You don't have to learn how. Mr. Irving looks a lot like an
uncle of mine that had one once just as he was sitting down to dinner
one day. But maybe everything'll go all right. In this world you've just
got to hope for the best and prepare for the worst and take whatever God
sends."

"The only thing I'm worried about is that it won't be fine tomorrow,"
said Diana. "Uncle Abe predicted rain for the middle of the week, and
ever since the big storm I can't help believing there's a good deal in
what Uncle Abe says."

Anne, who knew better than Diana just how much Uncle Abe had to do with
the storm, was not much disturbed by this. She slept the sleep of the
just and weary, and was roused at an unearthly hour by Charlotta the
Fourth.

"Oh, Miss Shirley, ma'am, it's awful to call you so early," came wailing
through the keyhole, "but there's so much to do yet . . . and oh, Miss
Shirley, ma'am, I'm skeered it's going to rain and I wish you'd get up
and tell me you think it ain't." Anne flew to the window, hoping against
hope that Charlotta the Fourth was saying this merely by way of rousing
her effectually. But alas, the morning did look unpropitious. Below the
window Miss Lavendar's garden, which should have been a glory of pale
virgin sunshine, lay dim and windless; and the sky over the firs was
dark with moody clouds.

"Isn't it too mean!" said Diana.

"We must hope for the best," said Anne determinedly. "If it only doesn't
actually rain, a cool, pearly gray day like this would really be nicer
than hot sunshine."

"But it will rain," mourned Charlotta, creeping into the room, a figure
of fun, with her many braids wound about her head, the ends, tied up
with white thread, sticking out in all directions. "It'll hold off till
the last minute and then pour cats and dogs. And all the folks will get
sopping . . . and track mud all over the house . . . and they won't be
able to be married under the honeysuckle . . . and it's awful unlucky
for no sun to shine on a bride, say what you will, Miss Shirley, ma'am.
_I_ knew things were going too well to last."

Charlotta the Fourth seemed certainly to have borrowed a leaf out of
Miss Eliza Andrews' book.

It did not rain, though it kept on looking as if it meant to. By noon
the rooms were decorated, the table beautifully laid; and upstairs was
waiting a bride, "adorned for her husband."

"You do look sweet," said Anne rapturously.

"Lovely," echoed Diana.

"Everything's ready, Miss Shirley, ma'am, and nothing dreadful has
happened YET," was Charlotta's cheerful statement as she betook herself
to her little back room to dress. Out came all the braids; the resultant
rampant crinkliness was plaited into two tails and tied, not with two
bows alone, but with four, of brand-new ribbon, brightly blue. The two
upper bows rather gave the impression of overgrown wings sprouting from
Charlotta's neck, somewhat after the fashion of Raphael's cherubs. But
Charlotta the Fourth thought them very beautiful, and after she had
rustled into a white dress, so stiffly starched that it could stand
alone, she surveyed herself in her glass with great satisfaction . . . a
satisfaction which lasted until she went out in the hall and caught
a glimpse through the spare room door of a tall girl in some softly
clinging gown, pinning white, star-like flowers on the smooth ripples of
her ruddy hair.