Anne's House of Dreams
his back. Anne--Anne--I can see it now. I shall always see it. Anne,
all I ask of heaven is that that recollection shall be blotted out of
my memory. O my God!”
“Leslie, don’t speak of it. I know the story--don’t go into details
that only harrow your soul up unavailingly. It WILL be blotted out.”
After a moment’s struggle, Leslie regained a measure of self-control.
“Then father’s health got worse and he grew despondent--his mind became
unbalanced--you’ve heard all that, too?”
“Yes.”
“After that I had just mother to live for. But I was very ambitious.
I meant to teach and earn my way through college. I meant to climb to
the very top--oh, I won’t talk of that either. It’s no use. You know
what happened. I couldn’t see my dear little heart-broken mother, who
had been such a slave all her life, turned out of her home. Of course,
I could have earned enough for us to live on. But mother COULDN’T
leave her home. She had come there as a bride--and she had loved
father so--and all her memories were there. Even yet, Anne, when I
think that I made her last year happy I’m not sorry for what I did. As
for Dick--I didn’t hate him when I married him--I just felt for him the
indifferent, friendly feeling I had for most of my schoolmates. I knew
he drank some--but I had never heard the story of the girl down at the
fishing cove. If I had, I COULDN’T have married him, even for mother’s
sake. Afterwards--I DID hate him--but mother never knew. She
died--and then I was alone. I was only seventeen and I was alone.
Dick had gone off in the Four Sisters. I hoped he wouldn’t be home
very much more. The sea had always been in his blood. I had no other
hope. Well, Captain Jim brought him home, as you know--and that’s all
there is to say. You know me now, Anne--the worst of me--the barriers
are all down. And you still want to be my friend?”
Anne looked up through the birches, at the white paper-lantern of a
half moon drifting downwards to the gulf of sunset. Her face was very
sweet.
“I am your friend and you are mine, for always,” she said. “Such a
friend as I never had before. I have had many dear and beloved
friends--but there is a something in you, Leslie, that I never found in
anyone else. You have more to offer me in that rich nature of yours,
and I have more to give you than I had in my careless girlhood. We are
both women--and friends forever.”
They clasped hands and smiled at each other through the tears that
filled the gray eyes and the blue.
CHAPTER 22
MISS CORNELIA ARRANGES MATTERS
Gilbert insisted that Susan should be kept on at the little house for
the summer. Anne protested at first.
“Life here with just the two of us is so sweet, Gilbert. It spoils it
a little to have anyone else. Susan is a dear soul, but she is an
outsider. It won’t hurt me to do the work here.”
“You must take your doctor’s advice,” said Gilbert. “There’s an old
proverb to the effect that shoemakers’ wives go barefoot and doctors’
wives die young. I don’t mean that it shall be true in my household.
You will keep Susan until the old spring comes back into your step, and
those little hollows on your cheeks fill out.”
“You just take it easy, Mrs. Doctor, dear,” said Susan, coming abruptly
in. “Have a good time and do not worry about the pantry. Susan is at
the helm. There is no use in keeping a dog and doing your own barking.
I am going to take your breakfast up to you every morning.”
“Indeed you are not,” laughed Anne. “I agree with Miss Cornelia that
it’s a scandal for a woman who isn’t sick to eat her breakfast in bed,
and almost justifies the men in any enormities.”
“Oh, Cornelia!” said Susan, with ineffable contempt. “I think you have
better sense, Mrs. Doctor, dear, than to heed what Cornelia Bryant
says. I cannot see why she must be always running down the men, even
if she is an old maid. _I_ am an old maid, but you never hear ME
abusing the men. I like ’em. I would have married one if I could. Is
it not funny nobody ever asked me to marry him, Mrs. Doctor, dear? I
am no beauty, but I am as good-looking as most of the married women you
see. But I never had a beau. What do you suppose is the reason?”
“It may be predestination,” suggested Anne, with unearthly solemnity.
Susan nodded.
“That is what I have often thought, Mrs. Doctor, dear, and a great
comfort it is. I do not mind nobody wanting me if the Almighty decreed
it so for His own wise purposes. But sometimes doubt creeps in, Mrs.
Doctor, dear, and I wonder if maybe the Old Scratch has not more to do
with it than anyone else. I cannot feel resigned THEN. But maybe,”
added Susan, brightening up, “I will have a chance to get married yet.
I often and often think of the old verse my aunt used to repeat:
There never was a goose so gray but sometime soon or late
Some honest gander came her way and took her for his mate!
A woman cannot ever be sure of not being married till she is buried,
Mrs. Doctor, dear, and meanwhile I will make a batch of cherry pies. I
notice the doctor favors ’em, and I DO like cooking for a man who
appreciates his victuals.”
Miss Cornelia dropped in that afternoon, puffing a little.
“I don’t mind the world or the devil much, but the flesh DOES rather
bother me,” she admitted. “You always look as cool as a cucumber,
Anne, dearie. Do I smell cherry pie? If I do, ask me to stay to tea.
Haven’t tasted a cherry pie this summer. My cherries have all been
stolen by those scamps of Gilman boys from the Glen.”
“Now, now, Cornelia,” remonstrated Captain Jim, who had been reading a
sea novel in a corner of the living room, “you shouldn’t say that about
those two poor, motherless Gilman boys, unless you’ve got certain
proof. Jest because their father ain’t none too honest isn’t any
reason for calling them thieves. It’s more likely it’s been the robins
took your cherries. They’re turrible thick this year.”
“Robins!” said Miss Cornelia disdainfully. “Humph! Two-legged robins,
believe ME!”
“Well, most of the Four Winds robins ARE constructed on that
principle,” said Captain Jim gravely.
Miss Cornelia stared at him for a moment. Then she leaned back in her
rocker and laughed long and ungrudgingly.
“Well, you HAVE got one on me at last, Jim Boyd, I’ll admit. Just look
how pleased he is, Anne, dearie, grinning like a Chessy-cat. As for
the robins’ legs if robins have great, big, bare, sunburned legs, with
ragged trousers hanging on ’em, such as I saw up in my cherry tree one
morning at sunrise last week, I’ll beg the Gilman boys’ pardon. By the
time I got down they were gone. I couldn’t understand how they had
disappeared so quick, but Captain Jim has enlightened me. They flew
away, of course.”
Captain Jim laughed and went away, regretfully declining an invitation
to stay to supper and partake of cherry pie.
“I’m on my way to see Leslie and ask her if she’ll take a boarder,”
Miss Cornelia resumed. “I’d a letter yesterday from a Mrs. Daly in
Toronto, who boarded a spell with me two years ago. She wanted me to
take a friend of hers for the summer. His name is Owen Ford, and he’s
a newspaper man, and it seems he’s a grandson of the schoolmaster who
built this house. John Selwyn’s oldest daughter married an Ontario man
named Ford, and this is her son. He wants to see the old place his
grandparents lived in. He had a bad spell of typhoid in the spring and
hasn’t got rightly over it, so his doctor has ordered him to the sea.
He doesn’t want to go to the hotel--he just wants a quiet home place.
I can’t take him, for I have to be away in August. I’ve been appointed
a delegate to the W.F.M.S. convention in Kingsport and I’m going. I
don’t know whether Leslie’ll want to be bothered with him, either, but
there’s no one else. If she can’t take him he’ll have to go over the
harbor.”
“When you’ve seen her come back and help us eat our cherry pies,” said
Anne. “Bring Leslie and Dick, too, if they can come. And so you’re
going to Kingsport? What a nice time you will have. I must give you a
letter to a friend of mine there--Mrs. Jonas Blake.”
“I’ve prevailed on Mrs. Thomas Holt to go with me,” said Miss Cornelia
complacently. “It’s time she had a little holiday, believe ME. She
has just about worked herself to death. Tom Holt can crochet
beautifully, but he can’t make a living for his family. He never seems
to be able to get up early enough to do any work, but I notice he can
always get up early to go fishing. Isn’t that like a man?”
Anne smiled. She had learned to discount largely Miss Cornelia’s
opinions of the Four Winds men. Otherwise she must have believed them
the most hopeless assortment of reprobates and ne’er-do-wells in the
world, with veritable slaves and martyrs for wives. This particular
Tom Holt, for example, she knew to be a kind husband, a much loved
father, and an excellent neighbor. If he were rather inclined to be
lazy, liking better the fishing he had been born for than the farming
he had not, and if he had a harmless eccentricity for doing fancy work,
nobody save Miss Cornelia seemed to hold it against him. His wife was
a “hustler,” who gloried in hustling; his family got a comfortable
living off the farm; and his strapping sons and daughters, inheriting
their mother’s energy, were all in a fair way to do well in the world.
There was not a happier household in Glen St. Mary than the Holts’.
Miss Cornelia returned satisfied from the house up the brook.
“Leslie’s going to take him,” she announced. “She jumped at the
chance. She wants to make a little money to shingle the roof of her
house this fall, and she didn’t know how she was going to manage it. I
expect Captain Jim’ll be more than interested when he hears that a
grandson of the Selwyns’ is coming here. Leslie said to tell you she
hankered after cherry pie, but she couldn’t come to tea because she has
to go and hunt up her turkeys. They’ve strayed away. But she said, if
there was a piece left, for you to put it in the pantry and she’d run
over in the cat’s light, when prowling’s in order, to get it. You
don’t know, Anne, dearie, what good it did my heart to hear Leslie send
you a message like that, laughing like she used to long ago.
“There’s a great change come over her lately. She laughs and jokes
like a girl, and from her talk I gather she’s here real often.”
“Every day--or else I’m over there,” said Anne. “I don’t know what I’d
do without Leslie, especially just now when Gilbert is so busy. He’s
hardly ever home except for a few hours in the wee sma’s. He’s really
working himself to death. So many of the over-harbor people send for
him now.”
“They might better be content with their own doctor,” said Miss
Cornelia. “Though to be sure I can’t blame them, for he’s a Methodist.
Ever since Dr. Blythe brought Mrs. Allonby round folks think he can
raise the dead. I believe Dr. Dave is a mite jealous--just like a man.
He thinks Dr. Blythe has too many new-fangled notions! ‘Well,’ I says
to him, ‘it was a new-fangled notion saved Rhoda Allonby. If YOU’D
been attending her she’d have died, and had a tombstone saying it had
pleased God to take her away.’ Oh, I DO like to speak my mind to Dr.
Dave! He’s bossed the Glen for years, and he thinks he’s forgotten
more than other people ever knew. Speaking of doctors, I wish Dr.
Blythe’d run over and see to that boil on Dick Moore’s neck. It’s
getting past Leslie’s skill. I’m sure I don’t know what Dick Moore
wants to start in having boils for--as if he wasn’t enough trouble
without that!”
“Do you know, Dick has taken quite a fancy to me,” said Anne. “He
follows me round like a dog, and smiles like a pleased child when I
notice him.”
“Does it make you creepy?”