Anne of Avonlea
with nothing but a little shawl on her. There was a lot of snow on the
walks and I feel sure she got a chill, ma’am. Ever since then I’ve
noticed her acting tired and lonesome like. She don’t seem to take an
interest in anything, ma’am. She never pretends company’s coming, nor
fixes up for it, nor nothing, ma’am. It’s only when you come she seems
to chirk up a bit. And the worst sign of all, Miss Shirley, ma’am . .
.” Charlotta the Fourth lowered her voice as if she were about to tell
some exceedingly weird and awful symptom indeed . . . “is that she
never gets cross now when I breaks things. Why, Miss Shirley, ma’am,
yesterday I bruk her green and yaller bowl that’s always stood on the
bookcase. Her grandmother brought it out from England and Miss Lavendar
was awful choice of it. I was dusting it just as careful, Miss Shirley,
ma’am, and it slipped out, so fashion, afore I could grab holt of it,
and bruk into about forty millyun pieces. I tell you I was sorry and
scared. I thought Miss Lavendar would scold me awful, ma’am; and I’d
ruther she had than take it the way she did. She just come in and
hardly looked at it and said, ‘It’s no matter, Charlotta. Take up the
pieces and throw them away.’ Just like that, Miss Shirley, ma’am . . .
‘take up the pieces and throw them away,’ as if it wasn’t her
grandmother’s bowl from England. Oh, she isn’t well and I feel awful
bad about it. She’s got nobody to look after her but me.”
Charlotta the Fourth’s eyes brimmed up with tears. Anne patted the
little brown paw holding the cracked pink cup sympathetically.
“I think Miss Lavendar needs a change, Charlotta. She stays here alone
too much. Can’t we induce her to go away for a little trip?”
Charlotta shook her head, with its rampant bows, disconsolately.
“I don’t think so, Miss Shirley, ma’am. Miss Lavendar hates visiting.
She’s only got three relations she ever visits and she says she just
goes to see them as a family duty. Last time when she come home she
said she wasn’t going to visit for family duty no more. ‘I’ve come home
in love with loneliness, Charlotta,’ she says to me, ‘and I never want
to stray from my own vine and fig tree again. My relations try so hard
to make an old lady of me and it has a bad effect on me.’ Just like
that, Miss Shirley, ma’am. ‘It has a very bad effect on me.’ So I don’t
think it would do any good to coax her to go visiting.”
“We must see what can be done,” said Anne decidedly, as she put the
last possible berry in her pink cup. “Just as soon as I have my
vacation I’ll come through and spend a whole week with you. We’ll have
a picnic every day and pretend all sorts of interesting things, and see
if we can’t cheer Miss Lavendar up.”
“That will be the very thing, Miss Shirley, ma’am,” exclaimed Charlotta
the Fourth in rapture. She was glad for Miss Lavendar’s sake and for
her own too. With a whole week in which to study Anne constantly she
would surely be able to learn how to move and behave like her.
When the girls got back to Echo Lodge they found that Miss Lavendar and
Paul had carried the little square table out of the kitchen to the
garden and had everything ready for tea. Nothing ever tasted so
delicious as those strawberries and cream, eaten under a great blue sky
all curdled over with fluffy little white clouds, and in the long
shadows of the wood with its lispings and its murmurings. After tea
Anne helped Charlotta wash the dishes in the kitchen, while Miss
Lavendar sat on the stone bench with Paul and heard all about his rock
people. She was a good listener, this sweet Miss Lavendar, but just at
the last it struck Paul that she had suddenly lost interest in the Twin
Sailors.
“Miss Lavendar, why do you look at me like that?” he asked gravely.
“How do I look, Paul?”
“Just as if you were looking through me at somebody I put you in mind
of,” said Paul, who had such occasional flashes of uncanny insight that
it wasn’t quite safe to have secrets when he was about.
“You do put me in mind of somebody I knew long ago,” said Miss Lavendar
dreamily.
“When you were young?”
“Yes, when I was young. Do I seem very old to you, Paul?”
“Do you know, I can’t make up my mind about that,” said Paul
confidentially. “Your hair looks old . . . I never knew a young person
with white hair. But your eyes are as young as my beautiful teacher’s
when you laugh. I tell you what, Miss Lavendar” . . . Paul’s voice and
face were as solemn as a judge’s . . . “I think you would make a
splendid mother. You have just the right look in your eyes . . . the
look my little mother always had. I think it’s a pity you haven’t any
boys of your own.”
“I have a little dream boy, Paul.”
“Oh, have you really? How old is he?”
“About your age I think. He ought to be older because I dreamed him
long before you were born. But I’ll never let him get any older than
eleven or twelve; because if I did some day he might grow up altogether
and then I’d lose him.”
“I know,” nodded Paul. “That’s the beauty of dream-people . . . they
stay any age you want them. You and my beautiful teacher and me myself
are the only folks in the world that I know of that have dream-people.
Isn’t it funny and nice we should all know each other? But I guess that
kind of people always find each other out. Grandma never has
dream-people and Mary Joe thinks I’m wrong in the upper story because I
have them. But I think it’s splendid to have them. _You_ know, Miss
Lavendar. Tell me all about your little dream-boy.”
“He has blue eyes and curly hair. He steals in and wakens me with a
kiss every morning. Then all day he plays here in the garden . . . and
I play with him. Such games as we have. We run races and talk with the
echoes; and I tell him stories. And when twilight comes . . .”
“_I_ know,” interrupted Paul eagerly. “He comes and sits beside you . .
. _so_ . . . because of course at twelve he’d be too big to climb into
your lap . . . and lays his head on your shoulder . . . _so_ . . . and
you put your arms about him and hold him tight, tight, and rest your
cheek on his head . . . yes, that’s the very way. Oh, you _do_ know,
Miss Lavendar.”
Anne found the two of them there when she came out of the stone house,
and something in Miss Lavendar’s face made her hate to disturb them.
“I’m afraid we must go, Paul, if we want to get home before dark. Miss
Lavendar, I’m going to invite myself to Echo Lodge for a whole week
pretty soon.”
“If you come for a week I’ll keep you for two,” threatened Miss
Lavendar.
XXVIII
The Prince Comes Back to the Enchanted Palace
The last day of school came and went. A triumphant “semi-annual
examination” was held and Anne’s pupils acquitted themselves
splendidly. At the close they gave her an address and a writing desk.
All the girls and ladies present cried, and some of the boys had it
cast up to them later on that they cried too, although they always
denied it.
Mrs. Harmon Andrews, Mrs. Peter Sloane, and Mrs. William Bell walked
home together and talked things over.
“I do think it is such a pity Anne is leaving when the children seem so
much attached to her,” sighed Mrs. Peter Sloane, who had a habit of
sighing over everything and even finished off her jokes that way. “To
be sure,” she added hastily, “we all know we’ll have a good teacher
next year too.”
“Jane will do her duty, I’ve no doubt,” said Mrs. Andrews rather
stiffly. “I don’t suppose she’ll tell the children quite so many fairy
tales or spend so much time roaming about the woods with them. But she
has her name on the Inspector’s Roll of Honor and the Newbridge people
are in a terrible state over her leaving.”
“I’m real glad Anne is going to college,” said Mrs. Bell. “She has
always wanted it and it will be a splendid thing for her.”
“Well, I don’t know.” Mrs. Andrews was determined not to agree fully
with anybody that day. “I don’t see that Anne needs any more education.
She’ll probably be marrying Gilbert Blythe, if his infatuation for her
lasts till he gets through college, and what good will Latin and Greek
do her then? If they taught you at college how to manage a man there
might be some sense in her going.”
Mrs. Harmon Andrews, so Avonlea gossip whispered, had never learned how
to manage her “man,” and as a result the Andrews household was not
exactly a model of domestic happiness.
“I see that the Charlottetown call to Mr. Allan is up before the
Presbytery,” said Mrs. Bell. “That means we’ll be losing him soon, I
suppose.”
“They’re not going before September,” said Mrs. Sloane. “It will be a
great loss to the community . . . though I always did think that Mrs.
Allan dressed rather too gay for a minister’s wife. But we are none of
us perfect. Did you notice how neat and snug Mr. Harrison looked today?
I never saw such a changed man. He goes to church every Sunday and has
subscribed to the salary.”
“Hasn’t that Paul Irving grown to be a big boy?” said Mrs. Andrews. “He
was such a mite for his age when he came here. I declare I hardly knew
him today. He’s getting to look a lot like his father.”
“He’s a smart boy,” said Mrs. Bell.
“He’s smart enough, but” . . . Mrs. Andrews lowered her voice . . . “I
believe he tells queer stories. Gracie came home from school one day
last week with the greatest rigmarole he had told her about people who
lived down at the shore . . . stories there couldn’t be a word of truth
in, you know. I told Gracie not to believe them, and she said Paul
didn’t intend her to. But if he didn’t what did he tell them to her
for?”
“Anne says Paul is a genius,” said Mrs. Sloane.
“He may be. You never know what to expect of them Americans,” said Mrs.
Andrews. Mrs. Andrews’ only acquaintance with the word “genius” was
derived from the colloquial fashion of calling any eccentric individual
“a queer genius.” She probably thought, with Mary Joe, that it meant a
person with something wrong in his upper story.
Back in the schoolroom Anne was sitting alone at her desk, as she had
sat on the first day of school two years before, her face leaning on
her hand, her dewy eyes looking wistfully out of the window to the Lake
of Shining Waters. Her heart was so wrung over the parting with her
pupils that for a moment college had lost all its charm. She still felt
the clasp of Annetta Bell’s arms about her neck and heard the childish
wail, “I’ll _never_ love any teacher as much as you, Miss Shirley,
never, never.”
For two years she had worked earnestly and faithfully, making many
mistakes and learning from them. She had had her reward. She had taught
her scholars something, but she felt that they had taught her much more
. . . lessons of tenderness, self-control, innocent wisdom, lore of
childish hearts. Perhaps she had not succeeded in “inspiring” any
wonderful ambitions in her pupils, but she had taught them, more by her
own sweet personality than by all her careful precepts, that it was
good and necessary in the years that were before them to live their
lives finely and graciously, holding fast to truth and courtesy and
kindness, keeping aloof from all that savored of falsehood and meanness
and vulgarity. They were, perhaps, all unconscious of having learned
such lessons; but they would remember and practice them long after they
had forgotten the capital of Afghanistan and the dates of the Wars of
the Roses.
“Another chapter in my life is closed,” said Anne aloud, as she locked
her desk. She really felt very sad over it; but the romance in the idea
of that “closed chapter” did comfort her a little.
Anne spent a fortnight at Echo Lodge early in her vacation and
everybody concerned had a good time.
She took Miss Lavendar on a shopping expedition to town and persuaded
her to buy a new organdy dress; then came the excitement of cutting and