Anne of Avonlea
place where she could rest. And she got just what she wanted, which is
something very few people do, I believe. She had four beautiful years
before she died. . . four years of perfect happiness, so I think she
was to be envied more than pitied. And then to shut your eyes and fall
asleep among roses, with the one you loved best on earth smiling down
at you . . . oh, I think it was beautiful!”
“She set out those cherry trees over there,” said Diana. “She told
mother she’d never live to eat their fruit, but she wanted to think
that something she had planted would go on living and helping to make
the world beautiful after she was dead.”
“I’m so glad we came this way,” said Anne, the shining-eyed. “This is
my adopted birthday, you know, and this garden and its story is the
birthday gift it has given me. Did your mother ever tell you what
Hester Gray looked like, Diana?”
“No . . . only just that she was pretty.”
“I’m rather glad of that, because I can imagine what she looked like,
without being hampered by facts. I think she was very slight and small,
with softly curling dark hair and big, sweet, timid brown eyes, and a
little wistful, pale face.”
The girls left their baskets in Hester’s garden and spent the rest of
the afternoon rambling in the woods and fields surrounding it,
discovering many pretty nooks and lanes. When they got hungry they had
lunch in the prettiest spot of all . . . on the steep bank of a
gurgling brook where white birches shot up out of long feathery
grasses. The girls sat down by the roots and did full justice to Anne’s
dainties, even the unpoetical sandwiches being greatly appreciated by
hearty, unspoiled appetites sharpened by all the fresh air and exercise
they had enjoyed. Anne had brought glasses and lemonade for her guests,
but for her own part drank cold brook water from a cup fashioned out of
birch bark. The cup leaked, and the water tasted of earth, as brook
water is apt to do in spring; but Anne thought it more appropriate to
the occasion than lemonade.
“Look do you see that poem?” she said suddenly, pointing.
“Where?” Jane and Diana stared, as if expecting to see Runic rhymes on
the birch trees.
“There . . . down in the brook . . . that old green, mossy log with the
water flowing over it in those smooth ripples that look as if they’d
been combed, and that single shaft of sunshine falling right athwart
it, far down into the pool. Oh, it’s the most beautiful poem I ever
saw.”
“I should rather call it a picture,” said Jane. “A poem is lines and
verses.”
“Oh dear me, no.” Anne shook her head with its fluffy wild cherry
coronal positively. “The lines and verses are only the outward garments
of the poem and are no more really it than your ruffles and flounces
are _you_, Jane. The real poem is the soul within them . . . and that
beautiful bit is the soul of an unwritten poem. It is not every day one
sees a soul . . . even of a poem.”
“I wonder what a soul . . . a person’s soul . . . would look like,”
said Priscilla dreamily.
“Like that, I should think,” answered Anne, pointing to a radiance of
sifted sunlight streaming through a birch tree. “Only with shape and
features of course. I like to fancy souls as being made of light. And
some are all shot through with rosy stains and quivers . . . and some
have a soft glitter like moonlight on the sea . . . and some are pale
and transparent like mist at dawn.”
“I read somewhere once that souls were like flowers,” said Priscilla.
“Then your soul is a golden narcissus,” said Anne, “and Diana’s is like
a red, red rose. Jane’s is an apple blossom, pink and wholesome and
sweet.”
“And your own is a white violet, with purple streaks in its heart,”
finished Priscilla.
Jane whispered to Diana that she really could not understand what they
were talking about. Could she?
The girls went home by the light of a calm golden sunset, their baskets
filled with narcissus blossoms from Hester’s garden, some of which Anne
carried to the cemetery next day and laid upon Hester’s grave. Minstrel
robins were whistling in the firs and the frogs were singing in the
marshes. All the basins among the hills were brimmed with topaz and
emerald light.
“Well, we have had a lovely time after all,” said Diana, as if she had
hardly expected to have it when she set out.
“It has been a truly golden day,” said Priscilla.
“I’m really awfully fond of the woods myself,” said Jane.
Anne said nothing. She was looking afar into the western sky and
thinking of little Hester Gray.
XIV
A Danger Averted
Anne, walking home from the post office one Friday evening, was joined
by Mrs. Lynde, who was as usual cumbered with all the cares of church
and state.
“I’ve just been down to Timothy Cotton’s to see if I could get Alice
Louise to help me for a few days,” she said. “I had her last week, for,
though she’s too slow to stop quick, she’s better than nobody. But
she’s sick and can’t come. Timothy’s sitting there, too, coughing and
complaining. He’s been dying for ten years and he’ll go on dying for
ten years more. That kind can’t even die and have done with it . . .
they can’t stick to anything, even to being sick, long enough to finish
it. They’re a terrible shiftless family and what is to become of them I
don’t know, but perhaps Providence does.”
Mrs. Lynde sighed as if she rather doubted the extent of Providential
knowledge on the subject.
“Marilla was in about her eyes again Tuesday, wasn’t she? What did the
specialist think of them?” she continued.
“He was much pleased,” said Anne brightly. “He says there is a great
improvement in them and he thinks the danger of her losing her sight
completely is past. But he says she’ll never be able to read much or do
any fine hand-work again. How are your preparations for your bazaar
coming on?”
The Ladies’ Aid Society was preparing for a fair and supper, and Mrs.
Lynde was the head and front of the enterprise.
“Pretty well . . . and that reminds me. Mrs. Allan thinks it would be
nice to fix up a booth like an old-time kitchen and serve a supper of
baked beans, doughnuts, pie, and so on. We’re collecting old-fashioned
fixings everywhere. Mrs. Simon Fletcher is going to lend us her
mother’s braided rugs and Mrs. Levi Boulter some old chairs and Aunt
Mary Shaw will lend us her cupboard with the glass doors. I suppose
Marilla will let us have her brass candlesticks? And we want all the
old dishes we can get. Mrs. Allan is specially set on having a real
blue willow ware platter if we can find one. But nobody seems to have
one. Do you know where we could get one?”
“Miss Josephine Barry has one. I’ll write and ask her if she’ll lend it
for the occasion,” said Anne.
“Well, I wish you would. I guess we’ll have the supper in about a
fortnight’s time. Uncle Abe Andrews is prophesying rain and storms for
about that time; and that’s a pretty sure sign we’ll have fine
weather.”
The said “Uncle Abe,” it may be mentioned, was at least like other
prophets in that he had small honor in his own country. He was, in
fact, considered in the light of a standing joke, for few of his
weather predictions were ever fulfilled. Mr. Elisha Wright, who labored
under the impression that he was a local wit, used to say that nobody
in Avonlea ever thought of looking in the Charlottetown dailies for
weather probabilities. No; they just asked Uncle Abe what it was going
to be tomorrow and expected the opposite. Nothing daunted, Uncle Abe
kept on prophesying.
“We want to have the fair over before the election comes off,”
continued Mrs. Lynde, “for the candidates will be sure to come and
spend lots of money. The Tories are bribing right and left, so they
might as well be given a chance to spend their money honestly for
once.”
Anne was a red-hot Conservative, out of loyalty to Matthew’s memory,
but she said nothing. She knew better than to get Mrs. Lynde started on
politics. She had a letter for Marilla, postmarked from a town in
British Columbia.
“It’s probably from the children’s uncle,” she said excitedly, when she
got home. “Oh, Marilla, I wonder what he says about them.”
“The best plan might be to open it and see,” said Marilla curtly. A
close observer might have thought that she was excited also, but she
would rather have died than show it.
Anne tore open the letter and glanced over the somewhat untidy and
poorly written contents.
“He says he can’t take the children this spring . . . he’s been sick
most of the winter and his wedding is put off. He wants to know if we
can keep them till the fall and he’ll try and take them then. We will,
of course, won’t we Marilla?”
“I don’t see that there is anything else for us to do,” said Marilla
rather grimly, although she felt a secret relief. “Anyhow they’re not
so much trouble as they were . . . or else we’ve got used to them. Davy
has improved a great deal.”
“His _manners_ are certainly much better,” said Anne cautiously, as if
she were not prepared to say as much for his morals.
Anne had come home from school the previous evening, to find Marilla
away at an Aid meeting, Dora asleep on the kitchen sofa, and Davy in
the sitting room closet, blissfully absorbing the contents of a jar of
Marilla’s famous yellow plum preserves . . . “company jam,” Davy called
it . . . which he had been forbidden to touch. He looked very guilty
when Anne pounced on him and whisked him out of the closet.
“Davy Keith, don’t you know that it is very wrong of you to be eating
that jam, when you were told never to meddle with anything in _that_
closet?”
“Yes, I knew it was wrong,” admitted Davy uncomfortably, “but plum jam
is awful nice, Anne. I just peeped in and it looked so good I thought
I’d take just a weeny taste. I stuck my finger in . . .” Anne groaned .
. . “and licked it clean. And it was so much gooder than I’d ever
thought that I got a spoon and just _sailed in_.”
Anne gave him such a serious lecture on the sin of stealing plum jam
that Davy became conscience stricken and promised with repentant kisses
never to do it again.
“Anyhow, there’ll be plenty of jam in heaven, that’s one comfort,” he
said complacently.
Anne nipped a smile in the bud.
“Perhaps there will . . . if we want it,” she said, “But what makes you
think so?”
“Why, it’s in the catechism,” said Davy.
“Oh, no, there is nothing like _that_ in the catechism, Davy.”
“But I tell you there is,” persisted Davy. “It was in that question
Marilla taught me last Sunday. ‘Why should we love God?’ It says,
‘Because He makes preserves, and redeems us.’ Preserves is just a holy
way of saying jam.”
“I must get a drink of water,” said Anne hastily. When she came back it
cost her some time and trouble to explain to Davy that a certain comma
in the said catechism question made a great deal of difference in the
meaning.
“Well, I thought it was too good to be true,” he said at last, with a
sigh of disappointed conviction. “And besides, I didn’t see when He’d
find time to make jam if it’s one endless Sabbath day, as the hymn
says. I don’t believe I want to go to heaven. Won’t there ever be any
Saturdays in heaven, Anne?”
“Yes, Saturdays, and every other kind of beautiful days. And every day
in heaven will be more beautiful than the one before it, Davy,” assured
Anne, who was rather glad that Marilla was not by to be shocked.
Marilla, it is needless to say, was bringing the twins up in the good
old ways of theology and discouraged all fanciful speculations
thereupon. Davy and Dora were taught a hymn, a catechism question, and
two Bible verses every Sunday. Dora learned meekly and recited like a
little machine, with perhaps as much understanding or interest as if
she were one. Davy, on the contrary, had a lively curiosity, and