Anne of Avonlea
making it together, while the happy Charlotta the Fourth basted and
swept up clippings. Miss Lavendar had complained that she could not
feel much interest in anything, but the sparkle came back to her eyes
over her pretty dress.
“What a foolish, frivolous person I must be,” she sighed. “I’m
wholesomely ashamed to think that a new dress . . . even it is a
forget-me-not organdy . . . should exhilarate me so, when a good
conscience and an extra contribution to Foreign Missions couldn’t do
it.”
Midway in her visit Anne went home to Green Gables for a day to mend
the twins’ stockings and settle up Davy’s accumulated store of
questions. In the evening she went down to the shore road to see Paul
Irving. As she passed by the low, square window of the Irving sitting
room she caught a glimpse of Paul on somebody’s lap; but the next
moment he came flying through the hall.
“Oh, Miss Shirley,” he cried excitedly, “you can’t think what has
happened! Something so splendid. Father is here . . . just think of
that! Father is here! Come right in. Father, this is my beautiful
teacher. _You_ know, father.”
Stephen Irving came forward to meet Anne with a smile. He was a tall,
handsome man of middle age, with iron-gray hair, deep-set, dark blue
eyes, and a strong, sad face, splendidly modeled about chin and brow.
Just the face for a hero of romance, Anne thought with a thrill of
intense satisfaction. It was so disappointing to meet someone who ought
to be a hero and find him bald or stooped, or otherwise lacking in
manly beauty. Anne would have thought it dreadful if the object of Miss
Lavendar’s romance had not looked the part.
“So this is my little son’s ‘beautiful teacher,’ of whom I have heard
so much,” said Mr. Irving with a hearty handshake. “Paul’s letters have
been so full of you, Miss Shirley, that I feel as if I were pretty well
acquainted with you already. I want to thank you for what you have done
for Paul. I think that your influence has been just what he needed.
Mother is one of the best and dearest of women; but her robust,
matter-of-fact Scotch common sense could not always understand a
temperament like my laddie’s. What was lacking in her you have
supplied. Between you, I think Paul’s training in these two past years
has been as nearly ideal as a motherless boy’s could be.”
Everybody likes to be appreciated. Under Mr. Irving’s praise Anne’s
face “burst flower like into rosy bloom,” and the busy, weary man of
the world, looking at her, thought he had never seen a fairer, sweeter
slip of girlhood than this little “down east” schoolteacher with her
red hair and wonderful eyes.
Paul sat between them blissfully happy.
“I never dreamed father was coming,” he said radiantly. “Even Grandma
didn’t know it. It was a great surprise. As a general thing . . .” Paul
shook his brown curls gravely . . . “I don’t like to be surprised. You
lose all the fun of expecting things when you’re surprised. But in a
case like this it is all right. Father came last night after I had gone
to bed. And after Grandma and Mary Joe had stopped being surprised he
and Grandma came upstairs to look at me, not meaning to wake me up till
morning. But I woke right up and saw father. I tell you I just sprang
at him.”
“With a hug like a bear’s,” said Mr. Irving, putting his arms around
Paul’s shoulder smilingly. “I hardly knew my boy, he had grown so big
and brown and sturdy.”
“I don’t know which was the most pleased to see father, Grandma or I,”
continued Paul. “Grandma’s been in kitchen all day making the things
father likes to eat. She wouldn’t trust them to Mary Joe, she says.
That’s _her_ way of showing gladness. _I_ like best just to sit and
talk to father. But I’m going to leave you for a little while now if
you’ll excuse me. I must get the cows for Mary Joe. That is one of my
daily duties.”
When Paul had scampered away to do his “daily duty” Mr. Irving talked
to Anne of various matters. But Anne felt that he was thinking of
something else underneath all the time. Presently it came to the
surface.
“In Paul’s last letter he spoke of going with you to visit an old . . .
friend of mine . . . Miss Lewis at the stone house in Grafton. Do you
know her well?”
“Yes, indeed, she is a _very_ dear friend of mine,” was Anne’s demure
reply, which gave no hint of the sudden thrill that tingled over her
from head to foot at Mr. Irving’s question. Anne “felt instinctively”
that romance was peeping at her around a corner.
Mr. Irving rose and went to the window, looking out on a great, golden,
billowing sea where a wild wind was harping. For a few moments there
was silence in the little dark-walled room. Then he turned and looked
down into Anne’s sympathetic face with a smile, half-whimsical,
half-tender.
“I wonder how much you know,” he said.
“I know all about it,” replied Anne promptly. “You see,” she explained
hastily, “Miss Lavendar and I are very intimate. She wouldn’t tell
things of such a sacred nature to everybody. We are kindred spirits.”
“Yes, I believe you are. Well, I am going to ask a favor of you. I
would like to go and see Miss Lavendar if she will let me. Will you ask
her if I may come?”
Would she not? Oh, indeed she would! Yes, this was romance, the very,
the real thing, with all the charm of rhyme and story and dream. It was
a little belated, perhaps, like a rose blooming in October which should
have bloomed in June; but none the less a rose, all sweetness and
fragrance, with the gleam of gold in its heart. Never did Anne’s feet
bear her on a more willing errand than on that walk through the
beechwoods to Grafton the next morning. She found Miss Lavendar in the
garden. Anne was fearfully excited. Her hands grew cold and her voice
trembled.
“Miss Lavendar, I have something to tell you . . . something very
important. Can you guess what it is?”
Anne never supposed that Miss Lavendar _could_ guess; but Miss
Lavendar’s face grew very pale and Miss Lavendar said in a quiet, still
voice, from which all the color and sparkle that Miss Lavendar’s voice
usually suggested had faded.
“Stephen Irving is home?”
“How did you know? Who told you?” cried Anne disappointedly, vexed that
her great revelation had been anticipated.
“Nobody. I knew that must be it, just from the way you spoke.”
“He wants to come and see you,” said Anne. “May I send him word that he
may?”
“Yes, of course,” fluttered Miss Lavendar. “There is no reason why he
shouldn’t. He is only coming as any old friend might.”
Anne had her own opinion about that as she hastened into the house to
write a note at Miss Lavendar’s desk.
“Oh, it’s delightful to be living in a storybook,” she thought gaily.
“It will come out all right of course . . . it must . . . and Paul will
have a mother after his own heart and everybody will be happy. But Mr.
Irving will take Miss Lavendar away . . . and dear knows what will
happen to the little stone house . . . and so there are two sides to
it, as there seems to be to everything in this world.” The important
note was written and Anne herself carried it to the Grafton post
office, where she waylaid the mail carrier and asked him to leave it at
the Avonlea office.
“It’s so very important,” Anne assured him anxiously. The mail carrier
was a rather grumpy old personage who did not at all look the part of a
messenger of Cupid; and Anne was none too certain that his memory was
to be trusted. But he said he would do his best to remember and she had
to be contented with that.
Charlotta the Fourth felt that some mystery pervaded the stone house
that afternoon . . . a mystery from which she was excluded. Miss
Lavendar roamed about the garden in a distracted fashion. Anne, too,
seemed possessed by a demon of unrest, and walked to and fro and went
up and down. Charlotta the Fourth endured it till patience ceased to be
a virtue; then she confronted Anne on the occasion of that romantic
young person’s third aimless peregrination through the kitchen.
“Please, Miss Shirley, ma’am,” said Charlotta the Fourth, with an
indignant toss of her very blue bows, “it’s plain to be seen you and
Miss Lavendar have got a secret and I think, begging your pardon if I’m
too forward, Miss Shirley, ma’am, that it’s real mean not to tell me
when we’ve all been such chums.”
“Oh, Charlotta dear, I’d have told you all about it if it were my
secret . . . but it’s Miss Lavendar’s, you see. However, I’ll tell you
this much . . . and if nothing comes of it you must never breathe a
word about it to a living soul. You see, Prince Charming is coming
tonight. He came long ago, but in a foolish moment went away and
wandered afar and forgot the secret of the magic pathway to the
enchanted castle, where the princess was weeping her faithful heart out
for him. But at last he remembered it again and the princess is waiting
still. . . because nobody but her own dear prince could carry her off.”
“Oh, Miss Shirley, ma’am, what is that in prose?” gasped the mystified
Charlotta.
Anne laughed.
“In prose, an old friend of Miss Lavendar’s is coming to see her
tonight.”
“Do you mean an old beau of hers?” demanded the literal Charlotta.
“That is probably what I do mean . . . in prose,” answered Anne
gravely. “It is Paul’s father . . . Stephen Irving. And goodness knows
what will come of it, but let us hope for the best, Charlotta.”
“I hope that he’ll marry Miss Lavendar,” was Charlotta’s unequivocal
response. “Some women’s intended from the start to be old maids, and
I’m afraid I’m one of them, Miss Shirley, ma’am, because I’ve awful
little patience with the men. But Miss Lavendar never was. And I’ve
been awful worried, thinking what on earth she’d do when I got so big
I’d _have_ to go to Boston. There ain’t any more girls in our family
and dear knows what she’d do if she got some stranger that might laugh
at her pretendings and leave things lying round out of their place and
not be willing to be called Charlotta the Fifth. She might get someone
who wouldn’t be as unlucky as me in breaking dishes but she’d never get
anyone who’d love her better.”
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