Anne of Avonlea
town. But we can’t get one of our horses to go, for they’ll all be in
use tomorrow, and your pony is lame . . . so I suppose we can’t go.”
“Why can’t we walk?” suggested Anne. “If we go straight back through
the woods we’ll strike the West Grafton road not far from the Kimball
place. I was through that way last winter and I know the road. It’s no
more than four miles and we won’t have to walk home, for Oliver Kimball
will be sure to drive us. He’ll be only too glad of the excuse, for he
goes to see Carrie Sloane and they say his father will hardly ever let
him have a horse.”
It was accordingly arranged that they should walk, and the following
afternoon they set out, going by way of Lover’s Lane to the back of the
Cuthbert farm, where they found a road leading into the heart of acres
of glimmering beech and maple woods, which were all in a wondrous glow
of flame and gold, lying in a great purple stillness and peace.
“It’s as if the year were kneeling to pray in a vast cathedral full of
mellow stained light, isn’t it?” said Anne dreamily. “It doesn’t seem
right to hurry through it, does it? It seems irreverent, like running
in a church.”
“We _must_ hurry though,” said Diana, glancing at her watch. “We’ve
left ourselves little enough time as it is.”
“Well, I’ll walk fast but don’t ask me to talk,” said Anne, quickening
her pace. “I just want to drink the day’s loveliness in . . . I feel as
if she were holding it out to my lips like a cup of airy wine and I’ll
take a sip at every step.”
Perhaps it was because she was so absorbed in “drinking it in” that
Anne took the left turning when they came to a fork in the road. She
should have taken the right, but ever afterward she counted it the most
fortunate mistake of her life. They came out finally to a lonely,
grassy road, with nothing in sight along it but ranks of spruce
saplings.
“Why, where are we?” exclaimed Diana in bewilderment. “This isn’t the
West Grafton road.”
“No, it’s the base line road in Middle Grafton,” said Anne, rather
shamefacedly. “I must have taken the wrong turning at the fork. I don’t
know where we are exactly, but we must be all of three miles from
Kimballs’ still.”
“Then we can’t get there by five, for it’s half past four now,” said
Diana, with a despairing look at her watch. “We’ll arrive after they
have had their tea, and they’ll have all the bother of getting ours
over again.”
“We’d better turn back and go home,” suggested Anne humbly. But Diana,
after consideration, vetoed this.
“No, we may as well go and spend the evening, since we have come this
far.”
A few yards further on the girls came to a place where the road forked
again.
“Which of these do we take?” asked Diana dubiously.
Anne shook her head.
“I don’t know and we can’t afford to make any more mistakes. Here is a
gate and a lane leading right into the wood. There must be a house at
the other side. Let us go down and inquire.”
“What a romantic old lane this it,” said Diana, as they walked along
its twists and turns. It ran under patriarchal old firs whose branches
met above, creating a perpetual gloom in which nothing except moss
could grow. On either hand were brown wood floors, crossed here and
there by fallen lances of sunlight. All was very still and remote, as
if the world and the cares of the world were far away.
“I feel as if we were walking through an enchanted forest,” said Anne
in a hushed tone. “Do you suppose we’ll ever find our way back to the
real world again, Diana? We shall presently come to a palace with a
spellbound princess in it, I think.”
Around the next turn they came in sight, not indeed of a palace, but of
a little house almost as surprising as a palace would have been in this
province of conventional wooden farmhouses, all as much alike in
general characteristics as if they had grown from the same seed. Anne
stopped short in rapture and Diana exclaimed, “Oh, I know where we are
now. That is the little stone house where Miss Lavendar Lewis lives . .
. Echo Lodge, she calls it, I think. I’ve often heard of it but I’ve
never seen it before. Isn’t it a romantic spot?”
“It’s the sweetest, prettiest place I ever saw or imagined,” said Anne
delightedly. “It looks like a bit out of a story book or a dream.”
The house was a low-eaved structure built of undressed blocks of red
Island sandstone, with a little peaked roof out of which peered two
dormer windows, with quaint wooden hoods over them, and two great
chimneys. The whole house was covered with a luxuriant growth of ivy,
finding easy foothold on the rough stonework and turned by autumn
frosts to most beautiful bronze and wine-red tints.
Before the house was an oblong garden into which the lane gate where
the girls were standing opened. The house bounded it on one side; on
the three others it was enclosed by an old stone dyke, so overgrown
with moss and grass and ferns that it looked like a high, green bank.
On the right and left the tall, dark spruces spread their palm-like
branches over it; but below it was a little meadow, green with clover
aftermath, sloping down to the blue loop of the Grafton River. No other
house or clearing was in sight . . . nothing but hills and valleys
covered with feathery young firs.
“I wonder what sort of a person Miss Lewis is,” speculated Diana as
they opened the gate into the garden. “They say she is very peculiar.”
“She’ll be interesting then,” said Anne decidedly. “Peculiar people are
always that at least, whatever else they are or are not. Didn’t I tell
you we would come to an enchanted palace? I knew the elves hadn’t woven
magic over that lane for nothing.”
“But Miss Lavendar Lewis is hardly a spellbound princess,” laughed
Diana. “She’s an old maid . . . she’s forty-five and quite gray, I’ve
heard.”
“Oh, that’s only part of the spell,” asserted Anne confidently. “At
heart she’s young and beautiful still . . . and if we only knew how to
unloose the spell she would step forth radiant and fair again. But we
don’t know how . . . it’s always and only the prince who knows that . .
. and Miss Lavendar’s prince hasn’t come yet. Perhaps some fatal
mischance has befallen him . . . though _that’s_ against the law of all
fairy tales.”
“I’m afraid he came long ago and went away again,” said Diana. “They
say she used to be engaged to Stephen Irving . . . Paul’s father . . .
when they were young. But they quarreled and parted.”
“Hush,” warned Anne. “The door is open.”
The girls paused in the porch under the tendrils of ivy and knocked at
the open door. There was a patter of steps inside and a rather odd
little personage presented herself . . . a girl of about fourteen, with
a freckled face, a snub nose, a mouth so wide that it did really seem
as if it stretched “from ear to ear,” and two long braids of fair hair
tied with two enormous bows of blue ribbon.
“Is Miss Lewis at home?” asked Diana.
“Yes, ma’am. Come in, ma’am. I’ll tell Miss Lavendar you’re here,
ma’am. She’s upstairs, ma’am.”
With this the small handmaiden whisked out of sight and the girls, left
alone, looked about them with delighted eyes. The interior of this
wonderful little house was quite as interesting as its exterior.
The room had a low ceiling and two square, small-paned windows,
curtained with muslin frills. All the furnishings were old-fashioned,
but so well and daintily kept that the effect was delicious. But it
must be candidly admitted that the most attractive feature, to two
healthy girls who had just tramped four miles through autumn air, was a
table, set out with pale blue china and laden with delicacies, while
little golden-hued ferns scattered over the cloth gave it what Anne
would have termed “a festal air.”
“Miss Lavendar must be expecting company to tea,” she whispered. “There
are six places set. But what a funny little girl she has. She looked
like a messenger from pixy land. I suppose she could have told us the
road, but I was curious to see Miss Lavendar. S . . . s . . . sh, she’s
coming.”
And with that Miss Lavendar Lewis was standing in the doorway. The
girls were so surprised that they forgot good manners and simply
stared. They had unconsciously been expecting to see the usual type of
elderly spinster as known to their experience . . . a rather angular
personage, with prim gray hair and spectacles. Nothing more unlike Miss
Lavendar could possibly be imagined.
She was a little lady with snow-white hair beautifully wavy and thick,
and carefully arranged in becoming puffs and coils. Beneath it was an
almost girlish face, pink cheeked and sweet lipped, with big soft brown
eyes and dimples . . . actually dimples. She wore a very dainty gown of
cream muslin with pale-hued roses on it . . . a gown which would have
seemed ridiculously juvenile on most women of her age, but which suited
Miss Lavendar so perfectly that you never thought about it at all.
“Charlotta the Fourth says that you wished to see me,” she said, in a
voice that matched her appearance.
“We wanted to ask the right road to West Grafton,” said Diana. “We are
invited to tea at Mr. Kimball’s, but we took the wrong path coming
through the woods and came out to the base line instead of the West
Grafton road. Do we take the right or left turning at your gate?”
“The left,” said Miss Lavendar, with a hesitating glance at her tea
table. Then she exclaimed, as if in a sudden little burst of
resolution,
“But oh, won’t you stay and have tea with me? Please, do. Mr. Kimball’s
will have tea over before you get there. And Charlotta the Fourth and I
will be so glad to have you.”
Diana looked mute inquiry at Anne.
“We’d like to stay,” said Anne promptly, for she had made up her mind
that she wanted to know more of this surprising Miss Lavendar, “if it
won’t inconvenience you. But you are expecting other guests, aren’t
you?”
Miss Lavendar looked at her tea table again, and blushed.
“I know you’ll think me dreadfully foolish,” she said. “I _am_ foolish
. . . and I’m ashamed of it when I’m found out, but never unless I _am_
found out. I’m not expecting anybody . . . I was just pretending I was.
You see, I was so lonely. I love company . . . that is, the right kind
of company . . . but so few people ever come here because it is so far
out of the way. Charlotta the Fourth was lonely too. So I just
pretended I was going to have a tea party. I cooked for it . . . and
decorated the table for it . . . and set it with my mother’s wedding
china . . . and I dressed up for it.”
Diana secretly thought Miss Lavendar quite as peculiar as report had
pictured her. The idea of a woman of forty-five playing at having a tea
party, just as if she were a little girl! But Anne of the shining eyes
exclaimed joyfuly,
“Oh, do _you_ imagine things too?”
That “too” revealed a kindred spirit to Miss Lavendar.
“Yes, I do,” she confessed, boldly. “Of course it’s silly in anybody as
old as I am. But what is the use of being an independent old maid if
you can’t be silly when you want to, and when it doesn’t hurt anybody?
A person must have some compensations. I don’t believe I could live at
times if I didn’t pretend things. I’m not often caught at it though,
and Charlotta the Fourth never tells. But I’m glad to be caught today,
for you have really come and I have tea all ready for you. Will you go
up to the spare room and take off your hats? It’s the white door at the
head of the stairs. I must run out to the kitchen and see that
Charlotta the Fourth isn’t letting the tea boil. Charlotta the Fourth
is a very good girl but she _will_ let the tea boil.”
Miss Lavendar tripped off to the kitchen on hospitable thoughts intent
and the girls found their way up to the spare room, an apartment as
white as its door, lighted by the ivy-hung dormer window and looking,