Rainbow Valley
“Up at the Harbour Head. We’ve only been home three days and in that
time he has spent three hours in his own bed and eaten two meals in his
own house.”
“Well, everybody who has been sick for the last six weeks has been
waiting for him to come home—and I don’t blame them. When that
over-harbour doctor married the undertaker’s daughter at Lowbridge
people felt suspicious of him. It didn’t look well. You and the doctor
must come down soon and tell us all about your trip. I suppose you’ve
had a splendid time.”
“We had,” agreed Anne. “It was the fulfilment of years of dreams. The
old world is very lovely and very wonderful. But we have come back very
well satisfied with our own land. Canada is the finest country in the
world, Miss Cornelia.”
“Nobody ever doubted that,” said Miss Cornelia, complacently.
“And old P.E.I. is the loveliest province in it and Four Winds the
loveliest spot in P.E.I.,” laughed Anne, looking adoringly out over the
sunset splendour of glen and harbour and gulf. She waved her hand at
it. “I saw nothing more beautiful than that in Europe, Miss Cornelia.
Must you go? The children will be sorry to have missed you.”
“They must come and see me soon. Tell them the doughnut jar is always
full.”
“Oh, at supper they were planning a descent on you. They’ll go soon;
but they must settle down to school again now. And the twins are going
to take music lessons.”
“Not from the Methodist minister’s wife, I hope?” said Miss Cornelia
anxiously.
“No—from Rosemary West. I was up last evening to arrange it with her.
What a pretty girl she is!”
“Rosemary holds her own well. She isn’t as young as she once was.”
“I thought her very charming. I’ve never had any real acquaintance with
her, you know. Their house is so out of the way, and I’ve seldom ever
seen her except at church.”
“People always have liked Rosemary West, though they don’t understand
her,” said Miss Cornelia, quite unconscious of the high tribute she was
paying to Rosemary’s charm. “Ellen has always kept her down, so to
speak. She has tyrannized over her, and yet she has always indulged her
in a good many ways. Rosemary was engaged once, you know—to young
Martin Crawford. His ship was wrecked on the Magdalens and all the crew
were drowned. Rosemary was just a child—only seventeen. But she was
never the same afterwards. She and Ellen have stayed very close at home
since their mother’s death. They don’t often get to their own church at
Lowbridge and I understand Ellen doesn’t approve of going too often to
a Presbyterian church. To the Methodist she _never_ goes, I’ll say that
much for her. That family of Wests have always been strong
Episcopalians. Rosemary and Ellen are pretty well off. Rosemary doesn’t
really need to give music lessons. She does it because she likes to.
They are distantly related to Leslie, you know. Are the Fords coming to
the harbour this summer?”
“No. They are going on a trip to Japan and will probably be away for a
year. Owen’s new novel is to have a Japanese setting. This will be the
first summer that the dear old House of Dreams will be empty since we
left it.”
“I should think Owen Ford might find enough to write about in Canada
without dragging his wife and his innocent children off to a heathen
country like Japan,” grumbled Miss Cornelia. “_The Life Book_ was the
best book he’s ever written and he got the material for that right here
in Four Winds.”
“Captain Jim gave him the most of that, you know. And he collected it
all over the world. But Owen’s books are all delightful, I think.”
“Oh, they’re well enough as far as they go. I make it a point to read
every one he writes, though I’ve always held, Anne dearie, that reading
novels is a sinful waste of time. I shall write and tell him my opinion
of this Japanese business, believe _me_. Does he want Kenneth and
Persis to be converted into pagans?”
With which unanswerable conundrum Miss Cornelia took her departure.
Susan proceeded to put Rilla in bed and Anne sat on the veranda steps
under the early stars and dreamed her incorrigible dreams and learned
all over again for the hundredth happy time what a moonrise splendour
and sheen could be on Four Winds Harbour.
CHAPTER III.
THE INGLESIDE CHILDREN
In daytime the Blythe children liked very well to play in the rich,
soft greens and glooms of the big maple grove between Ingleside and the
Glen St. Mary pond; but for evening revels there was no place like the
little valley behind the maple grove. It was a fairy realm of romance
to them. Once, looking from the attic windows of Ingleside, through the
mist and aftermath of a summer thunderstorm, they had seen the beloved
spot arched by a glorious rainbow, one end of which seemed to dip
straight down to where a corner of the pond ran up into the lower end
of the valley.
“Let us call it Rainbow Valley,” said Walter delightedly, and Rainbow
Valley thenceforth it was.
Outside of Rainbow Valley the wind might be rollicking and boisterous.
Here it always went gently. Little, winding, fairy paths ran here and
there over spruce roots cushioned with moss. Wild cherry trees, that in
blossom time would be misty white, were scattered all over the valley,
mingling with the dark spruces. A little brook with amber waters ran
through it from the Glen village. The houses of the village were
comfortably far away; only at the upper end of the valley was a little
tumble-down, deserted cottage, referred to as “the old Bailey house.”
It had not been occupied for many years, but a grass-grown dyke
surrounded it and inside was an ancient garden where the Ingleside
children could find violets and daisies and June lilies still blooming
in season. For the rest, the garden was overgrown with caraway that
swayed and foamed in the moonshine of summer eves like seas of silver.
To the sought lay the pond and beyond it the ripened distance lost
itself in purple woods, save where, on a high hill, a solitary old gray
homestead looked down on glen and harbour. There was a certain wild
woodsiness and solitude about Rainbow Valley, in spite of its nearness
to the village, which endeared it to the children of Ingleside.
The valley was full of dear, friendly hollows and the largest of these
was their favourite stamping ground. Here they were assembled on this
particular evening. There was a grove of young spruces in this hollow,
with a tiny, grassy glade in its heart, opening on the bank of the
brook. By the brook grew a silver birch-tree, a young, incredibly
straight thing which Walter had named the “White Lady.” In this glade,
too, were the “Tree Lovers,” as Walter called a spruce and maple which
grew so closely together that their boughs were inextricably
intertwined. Jem had hung an old string of sleigh-bells, given him by
the Glen blacksmith, on the Tree Lovers, and every visitant breeze
called out sudden fairy tinkles from it.
“How nice it is to be back!” said Nan. “After all, none of the Avonlea
places are quite as nice as Rainbow Valley.”
But they were very fond of the Avonlea places for all that. A visit to
Green Gables was always considered a great treat. Aunt Marilla was very
good to them, and so was Mrs. Rachel Lynde, who was spending the
leisure of her old age in knitting cotton-warp quilts against the day
when Anne’s daughters should need a “setting-out.” There were jolly
playmates there, too—“Uncle” Davy’s children and “Aunt” Diana’s
children. They knew all the spots their mother had loved so well in her
girlhood at old Green Gables—the long Lover’s Lane, that was
pink-hedged in wild-rose time, the always neat yard, with its willows
and poplars, the Dryad’s Bubble, lucent and lovely as of yore, the Lake
of Shining Waters, and Willowmere. The twins had their mother’s old
porch-gable room, and Aunt Marilla used to come in at night, when she
thought they were asleep, to gloat over them. But they all knew she
loved Jem the best.
Jem was at present busily occupied in frying a mess of small trout
which he had just caught in the pond. His stove consisted of a circle
of red stones, with a fire kindled in it, and his culinary utensils
were an old tin can, hammered out flat, and a fork with only one tine
left. Nevertheless, ripping good meals had before now been thus
prepared.
Jem was the child of the House of Dreams. All the others had been born
at Ingleside. He had curly red hair, like his mother’s, and frank hazel
eyes, like his father’s; he had his mother’s fine nose and his father’s
steady, humorous mouth. And he was the only one of the family who had
ears nice enough to please Susan. But he had a standing feud with Susan
because she would not give up calling him Little Jem. It was
outrageous, thought thirteen-year-old Jem. Mother had more sense.
“I’m _not_ little any more, Mother,” he had cried indignantly, on his
eighth birthday. “I’m _awful_ big.”
Mother had sighed and laughed and sighed again; and she never called
him Little Jem again—in his hearing at least.
He was and always had been a sturdy, reliable little chap. He never
broke a promise. He was not a great talker. His teachers did not think
him brilliant, but he was a good, all-round student. He never took
things on faith; he always liked to investigate the truth of a
statement for himself. Once Susan had told him that if he touched his
tongue to a frosty latch all the skin would tear off it. Jem had
promptly done it, “just to see if it was so.” He found it was “so,” at
the cost of a very sore tongue for several days. But Jem did not grudge
suffering in the interests of science. By constant experiment and
observation he learned a great deal and his brothers and sisters
thought his extensive knowledge of their little world quite wonderful.
Jem always knew where the first and ripest berries grew, where the
first pale violets shyly wakened from their winter’s sleep, and how
many blue eggs were in a given robin’s nest in the maple grove. He
could tell fortunes from daisy petals and suck honey from red clovers,
and grub up all sorts of edible roots on the banks of the pond, while
Susan went in daily fear that they would all be poisoned. He knew where
the finest spruce-gum was to be found, in pale amber knots on the
lichened bark, he knew where the nuts grew thickest in the beechwoods
around the Harbour Head, and where the best trouting places up the
brooks were. He could mimic the call of any wild bird or beast in Four
Winds and he knew the haunt of every wild flower from spring to autumn.
Walter Blythe was sitting under the White Lady, with a volume of poems
lying beside him, but he was not reading. He was gazing now at the
emerald-misted willows by the pond, and now at a flock of clouds, like
little silver sheep, herded by the wind, that were drifting over
Rainbow Valley, with rapture in his wide splendid eyes. Walter’s eyes
were very wonderful. All the joy and sorrow and laughter and loyalty
and aspiration of many generations lying under the sod looked out of
their dark gray depths.
Walter was a “hop out of kin,” as far as looks went. He did not
resemble any known relative. He was quite the handsomest of the
Ingleside children, with straight black hair and finely modelled
features. But he had all his mother’s vivid imagination and passionate
love of beauty. Frost of winter, invitation of spring, dream of summer
and glamour of autumn, all meant much to Walter.
In school, where Jem was a chieftain, Walter was not thought highly of.
He was supposed to be “girly” and milk-soppish, because he never fought
and seldom joined in the school sports, preferring to herd by himself
in out of the way corners and read books—especially “po’try books.”
Walter loved the poets and pored over their pages from the time he