Rainbow Valley
“I do not not believe _that_, Mrs. Dr. dear,” cried Susan, up in arms.
“That is just Walter’s way—to take the blame on himself. But you know
as well as I do, Mrs. Dr. dear, that that blessed child would never
have thought of riding on a pig, even if he does write poetry.”
“Oh, there’s no doubt the notion was hatched in Faith Meredith’s
brain,” said Miss Cornelia. “And I don’t say that I’m sorry that Amos
Drew’s old pigs did get their come-uppance for once. But the minister’s
daughter!”
“_And_ the doctor’s son!” said Anne, mimicking Miss Cornelia’s tone.
Then she laughed. “Dear Miss Cornelia, they’re only little children.
And you _know_ they’ve never yet done anything bad—they’re just
heedless and impulsive—as I was myself once. They’ll grow sedate and
sober—as I’ve done.”
Miss Cornelia laughed, too.
“There are times, Anne dearie, when I know by your eyes that _your_
soberness is put on like a garment and you’re really aching to do
something wild and young again. Well, I feel encouraged. Somehow, a
talk with you always does have that effect on me. Now, when I go to see
Barbara Samson, it’s just the opposite. She makes me feel that
everything’s wrong and always will be. But of course living all your
life with a man like Joe Samson wouldn’t be exactly cheering.”
“It is a very strange thing to think that she married Joe Samson after
all her chances,” remarked Susan. “She was much sought after when she
was a girl. She used to boast to me that she had twenty-one beaus and
Mr. Pethick.”
“What was Mr. Pethick?”
“Well, he was a sort of hanger-on, Mrs. Dr. dear, but you could not
exactly call him a beau. He did not really have any intentions.
Twenty-one beaus—and me that never had one! But Barbara went through
the woods and picked up the crooked stick after all. And yet they say
her husband can make better baking powder biscuits than she can, and
she always gets him to make them when company comes to tea.”
“Which reminds _me_ that I have company coming to tea to-morrow and I
must go home and set my bread,” said Miss Cornelia. “Mary said she
could set it and no doubt she could. But while I live and move and have
my being _I_ set my own bread, believe me.”
“How is Mary getting on?” asked Anne.
“I’ve no fault to find with Mary,” said Miss Cornelia rather gloomily.
“She’s getting some flesh on her bones and she’s clean and
respectful—though there’s more in her than _I_ can fathom. She’s a sly
puss. If you dug for a thousand years you couldn’t get to the bottom of
that child’s mind, believe _me!_ As for work, I never saw anything like
her. She _eats_ it up. Mrs. Wiley may have been cruel to her, but folks
needn’t say she made Mary work. Mary’s a born worker. Sometimes I
wonder which will wear out first—her legs or her tongue. I don’t have
enough to do to keep me out of mischief these days. I’ll be real glad
when school opens, for then I’ll have something to do again. Mary
doesn’t want to go to school, but I put my foot down and said that go
she must. I shall _not_ have the Methodists saying that I kept her out
of school while I lolled in idleness.”
CHAPTER XIII.
THE HOUSE ON THE HILL
There was a little unfailing spring, always icy cold and crystal pure,
in a certain birch-screened hollow of Rainbow Valley in the lower
corner near the marsh. Not a great many people knew of its existence.
The manse and Ingleside children knew, of course, as they knew
everything else about the magic valley. Occasionally they went there to
get a drink, and it figured in many of their plays as a fountain of old
romance. Anne knew of it and loved it because it somehow reminded her
of the beloved Dryad’s Bubble at Green Gables. Rosemary West knew of
it; it was her fountain of romance, too. Eighteen years ago she had sat
behind it one spring twilight and heard young Martin Crawford stammer
out a confession of fervent, boyish love. She had whispered her own
secret in return, and they had kissed and promised by the wild wood
spring. They had never stood together by it again—Martin had sailed on
his fatal voyage soon after; but to Rosemary West it was always a
sacred spot, hallowed by that immortal hour of youth and love. Whenever
she passed near it she turned aside to hold a secret tryst with an old
dream—a dream from which the pain had long gone, leaving only its
unforgettable sweetness.
The spring was a hidden thing. You might have passed within ten feet of
it and never have suspected its existence. Two generations past a huge
old pine had fallen almost across it. Nothing was left of the tree but
its crumbling trunk out of which the ferns grew thickly, making a green
roof and a lacy screen for the water. A maple-tree grew beside it with
a curiously gnarled and twisted trunk, creeping along the ground for a
little way before shooting up into the air, and so forming a quaint
seat; and September had flung a scarf of pale smoke-blue asters around
the hollow.
John Meredith, taking the cross-lots road through Rainbow Valley on his
way home from some pastoral visitations around the Harbour head one
evening, turned aside to drink of the little spring. Walter Blythe had
shown it to him one afternoon only a few days before, and they had had
a long talk together on the maple seat. John Meredith, under all his
shyness and aloofness, had the heart of a boy. He had been called Jack
in his youth, though nobody in Glen St. Mary would ever have believed
it. Walter and he had taken to each other and had talked unreservedly.
Mr. Meredith found his way into some sealed and sacred chambers of the
lad’s soul wherein not even Di had ever looked. They were to be chums
from that friendly hour and Walter knew that he would never be
frightened of the minister again.
“I never believed before that it was possible to get really acquainted
with a minister,” he told his mother that night.
John Meredith drank from his slender white hand, whose grip of steel
always surprised people who were unacquainted with it, and then sat
down on the maple seat. He was in no hurry to go home; this was a
beautiful spot and he was mentally weary after a round of rather
uninspiring conversations with many good and stupid people. The moon
was rising. Rainbow Valley was wind-haunted and star-sentinelled only
where he was, but afar from the upper end came the gay notes of
children’s laughter and voices.
The ethereal beauty of the asters in the moonlight, the glimmer of the
little spring, the soft croon of the brook, the wavering grace of the
brackens all wove a white magic round John Meredith. He forgot
congregational worries and spiritual problems; the years slipped away
from him; he was a young divinity student again and the roses of June
were blooming red and fragrant on the dark, queenly head of his
Cecilia. He sat there and dreamed like any boy. And it was at this
propitious moment that Rosemary West stepped aside from the by-path and
stood beside him in that dangerous, spell-weaving place. John Meredith
stood up as she came in and saw her—_really_ saw her—for the first
time.
He had met her in his church once or twice and shaken hands with her
abstractedly as he did with anyone he happened to encounter on his way
down the aisle. He had never met her elsewhere, for the Wests were
Episcopalians, with church affinities in Lowbridge, and no occasion for
calling upon them had ever arisen. Before to-night, if anyone had asked
John Meredith what Rosemary West looked like he would not have had the
slightest notion. But he was never to forget her, as she appeared to
him in the glamour of kind moonlight by the spring.
She was certainly not in the least like Cecilia, who had always been
his ideal of womanly beauty. Cecilia had been small and dark and
vivacious—Rosemary West was tall and fair and placid, yet John Meredith
thought he had never seen so beautiful a woman.
She was bareheaded and her golden hair—hair of a warm gold, “molasses
taffy” colour as Di Blythe had said—was pinned in sleek, close coils
over her head; she had large, tranquil, blue eyes that always seemed
full of friendliness, a high white forehead and a finely shaped face.
Rosemary West was always called a “sweet woman.” She was so sweet that
even her high-bred, stately air had never gained for her the reputation
of being “stuck-up,” which it would inevitably have done in the case of
anyone else in Glen St. Mary. Life had taught her to be brave, to be
patient, to love, to forgive. She had watched the ship on which her
lover went sailing out of Four Winds Harbour into the sunset. But,
though she watched long, she had never seen it coming sailing back.
That vigil had taken girlhood from her eyes, yet she kept her youth to
a marvellous degree. Perhaps this was because she always seemed to
preserve that attitude of delighted surprise towards life which most of
us leave behind in childhood—an attitude which not only made Rosemary
herself seem young, but flung a pleasing illusion of youth over the
consciousness of every one who talked to her.
John Meredith was startled by her loveliness and Rosemary was startled
by his presence. She had never thought she would find anyone by that
remote spring, least of all the recluse of Glen St. Mary manse. She
almost dropped the heavy armful of books she was carrying home from the
Glen lending library, and then, to cover her confusion, she told one of
those small fibs which even the best of women do tell at times.
“I—I came for a drink,” she said, stammering a little, in answer to Mr.
Meredith’s grave “good evening, Miss West.” She felt that she was an
unpardonable goose and she longed to shake herself. But John Meredith
was not a vain man and he knew she would likely have been as much
startled had she met old Elder Clow in that unexpected fashion. Her
confusion put him at ease and he forgot to be shy; besides, even the
shyest of men can sometimes be quite audacious in moonlight.
“Let me get you a cup,” he said smiling. There was a cup near by, if he
had only known it, a cracked, handleless blue cup secreted under the
maple by the Rainbow Valley children; but he did not know it, so he
stepped out to one of the birch-trees and stripped a bit of its white
skin away. Deftly he fashioned this into a three-cornered cup, filled
it from the spring, and handed it to Rosemary.
Rosemary took it and drank every drop to punish herself for her fib,
for she was not in the least thirsty, and to drink a fairly large
cupful of water when you are not thirsty is somewhat of an ordeal. Yet
the memory of that draught was to be very pleasant to Rosemary. In
after years it seemed to her that there was something sacramental about
it. Perhaps this was because of what the minister did when she handed
him back the cup. He stooped again and filled it and drank of it
himself. It was only by accident that he put his lips just where
Rosemary had put hers, and Rosemary knew it. Nevertheless, it had a
curious significance for her. They two had drunk of the same cup. She
remembered idly that an old aunt of hers used to say that when two
people did this their after-lives would be linked in some fashion,
whether for good or ill.
John Meredith held the cup uncertainly. He did not know what to do with
it. The logical thing would have been to toss it away, but somehow he
was disinclined to do this. Rosemary held out her hand for it.
“Will you let me have it?” she said. “You made it so knackily. I never
saw anyone make a birch cup so since my little brother used to make
them long ago—before he died.”
“I learned how to make them when _I_ was a boy, camping out one summer.
An old hunter taught me,” said Mr. Meredith. “Let me carry your books,
Miss West.”
Rosemary was startled into another fib and said oh, they were not