Rainbow Valley
could first read. Their music was woven into his growing soul—the music
of the immortals. Walter cherished the ambition to be a poet himself
some day. The thing could be done. A certain Uncle Paul—so called out
of courtesy—who lived now in that mysterious realm called “the States,”
was Walter’s model. Uncle Paul had once been a little school boy in
Avonlea and now his poetry was read everywhere. But the Glen schoolboys
did not know of Walter’s dreams and would not have been greatly
impressed if they had. In spite of his lack of physical prowess,
however, he commanded a certain unwilling respect because of his power
of “talking book talk.” Nobody in Glen St. Mary school could talk like
him. He “sounded like a preacher,” one boy said; and for this reason he
was generally left alone and not persecuted, as most boys were who were
suspected of disliking or fearing fisticuffs.
The ten year old Ingleside twins violated twin tradition by not looking
in the least alike. Anne, who was always called Nan, was very pretty,
with velvety nut-brown eyes and silky nut-brown hair. She was a very
blithe and dainty little maiden—Blythe by name and blithe by nature,
one of her teachers had said. Her complexion was quite faultless, much
to her mother’s satisfaction.
“I’m so glad I have one daughter who can wear pink,” Mrs. Blythe was
wont to say jubilantly.
Diana Blythe, known as Di, was very like her mother, with gray-green
eyes that always shone with a peculiar lustre and brilliancy in the
dusk, and red hair. Perhaps this was why she was her father’s
favourite. She and Walter were especial chums; Di was the only one to
whom he would ever read the verses he wrote himself—the only one who
knew that he was secretly hard at work on an epic, strikingly
resembling “Marmion” in some things, if not in others. She kept all his
secrets, even from Nan, and told him all hers.
“Won’t you soon have those fish ready, Jem?” said Nan, sniffing with
her dainty nose. “The smell makes me awfully hungry.”
“They’re nearly ready,” said Jem, giving one a dexterous turn. “Get out
the bread and the plates, girls. Walter, wake up.”
“How the air shines to-night,” said Walter dreamily. Not that he
despised fried trout either, by any means; but with Walter food for the
soul always took first place. “The flower angel has been walking over
the world to-day, calling to the flowers. I can see his blue wings on
that hill by the woods.”
“Any angels’ wings I ever saw were white,” said Nan.
“The flower angel’s aren’t. They are a pale misty blue, just like the
haze in the valley. Oh, how I wish I could fly. It must be glorious.”
“One does fly in dreams sometimes,” said Di.
“I never dream that I’m flying exactly,” said Walter. “But I often
dream that I just rise up from the ground and float over the fences and
the trees. It’s delightful—and I always think, ‘This _isn’t_ a dream
like it’s always been before. _This_ is real’—and then I wake up after
all, and it’s heart-breaking.”
“Hurry up, Nan,” ordered Jem.
Nan had produced the banquet-board—a board literally as well as
figuratively—from which many a feast, seasoned as no viands were
elsewhere, had been eaten in Rainbow Valley. It was converted into a
table by propping it on two large, mossy stones. Newspapers served as
tablecloth, and broken plates and handleless cups from Susan’s discard
furnished the dishes. From a tin box secreted at the root of a spruce
tree Nan brought forth bread and salt. The brook gave Adam’s ale of
unsurpassed crystal. For the rest, there was a certain sauce,
compounded of fresh air and appetite of youth, which gave to everything
a divine flavour. To sit in Rainbow Valley, steeped in a twilight half
gold, half amethyst, rife with the odours of balsam-fir and woodsy
growing things in their springtime prime, with the pale stars of wild
strawberry blossoms all around you, and with the sough of the wind and
tinkle of bells in the shaking tree tops, and eat fried trout and dry
bread, was something which the mighty of earth might have envied them.
“Sit in,” invited Nan, as Jem placed his sizzling tin platter of trout
on the table. “It’s your turn to say grace, Jem.”
“I’ve done my part frying the trout,” protested Jem, who hated saying
grace. “Let Walter say it. He _likes_ saying grace. And cut it short,
too, Walt. I’m starving.”
But Walter said no grace, short or long, just then. An interruption
occurred.
“Who’s coming down from the manse hill?” said Di.
CHAPTER IV.
THE MANSE CHILDREN
Aunt Martha might be, and was, a very poor housekeeper; the Rev. John
Knox Meredith might be, and was, a very absent-minded, indulgent man.
But it could not be denied that there was something very homelike and
lovable about the Glen St. Mary manse in spite of its untidiness. Even
the critical housewives of the Glen felt it, and were unconsciously
mellowed in judgment because of it. Perhaps its charm was in part due
to accidental circumstances—the luxuriant vines clustering over its
gray, clap-boarded walls, the friendly acacias and balm-of-gileads that
crowded about it with the freedom of old acquaintance, and the
beautiful views of harbour and sand-dunes from its front windows. But
these things had been there in the reign of Mr. Meredith’s predecessor,
when the manse had been the primmest, neatest, and dreariest house in
the Glen. So much of the credit must be given to the personality of its
new inmates. There was an atmosphere of laughter and comradeship about
it; the doors were always open; and inner and outer worlds joined
hands. Love was the only law in Glen St. Mary manse.
The people of his congregation said that Mr. Meredith spoiled his
children. Very likely he did. It is certain that he could not bear to
scold them. “They have no mother,” he used to say to himself, with a
sigh, when some unusually glaring peccadillo forced itself upon his
notice. But he did not know the half of their goings-on. He belonged to
the sect of dreamers. The windows of his study looked out on the
graveyard but, as he paced up and down the room, reflecting deeply on
the immortality of the soul, he was quite unaware that Jerry and Carl
were playing leap-frog hilariously over the flat stones in that abode
of dead Methodists. Mr. Meredith had occasional acute realizations that
his children were not so well looked after, physically or morally, as
they had been before his wife died, and he had always a dim
sub-consciousness that house and meals were very different under Aunt
Martha’s management from what they had been under Cecilia’s. For the
rest, he lived in a world of books and abstractions; and, therefore,
although his clothes were seldom brushed, and although the Glen
housewives concluded, from the ivory-like pallor of his clear-cut
features and slender hands, that he never got enough to eat, he was not
an unhappy man.
If ever a graveyard could be called a cheerful place, the old Methodist
graveyard at Glen St. Mary might be so called. The new graveyard, at
the other side of the Methodist church, was a neat and proper and
doleful spot; but the old one had been left so long to Nature’s kindly
and gracious ministries that it had become very pleasant.
It was surrounded on three sides by a dyke of stones and sod, topped by
a gray and uncertain paling. Outside the dyke grew a row of tall fir
trees with thick, balsamic boughs. The dyke, which had been built by
the first settlers of the Glen, was old enough to be beautiful, with
mosses and green things growing out of its crevices, violets purpling
at its base in the early spring days, and asters and golden-rod making
an autumnal glory in its corners. Little ferns clustered companionably
between its stones, and here and there a big bracken grew.
On the eastern side there was neither fence nor dyke. The graveyard
there straggled off into a young fir plantation, ever pushing nearer to
the graves and deepening eastward into a thick wood. The air was always
full of the harp-like voices of the sea, and the music of gray old
trees, and in the spring mornings the choruses of birds in the elms
around the two churches sang of life and not of death. The Meredith
children loved the old graveyard.
Blue-eyed ivy, “garden-spruce,” and mint ran riot over the sunken
graves. Blueberry bushes grew lavishly in the sandy corner next to the
fir wood. The varying fashions of tombstones for three generations were
to be found there, from the flat, oblong, red sandstone slabs of old
settlers, down through the days of weeping willows and clasped hands,
to the latest monstrosities of tall “monuments” and draped urns. One of
the latter, the biggest and ugliest in the graveyard, was sacred to the
memory of a certain Alec Davis who had been born a Methodist but had
taken to himself a Presbyterian bride of the Douglas clan. She had made
him turn Presbyterian and kept him toeing the Presbyterian mark all his
life. But when he died she did not dare to doom him to a lonely grave
in the Presbyterian graveyard over-harbour. His people were all buried
in the Methodist cemetery; so Alec Davis went back to his own in death
and his widow consoled herself by erecting a monument which cost more
than any of the Methodists could afford. The Meredith children hated
it, without just knowing why, but they loved the old, flat, bench-like
stones with the tall grasses growing rankly about them. They made jolly
seats for one thing. They were all sitting on one now. Jerry, tired of
leap frog, was playing on a jew’s-harp. Carl was lovingly poring over a
strange beetle he had found; Una was trying to make a doll’s dress, and
Faith, leaning back on her slender brown wrists, was swinging her bare
feet in lively time to the jew’s-harp.
Jerry had his father’s black hair and large black eyes, but in him the
latter were flashing instead of dreamy. Faith, who came next to him,
wore her beauty like a rose, careless and glowing. She had golden-brown
eyes, golden-brown curls and crimson cheeks. She laughed too much to
please her father’s congregation and had shocked old Mrs. Taylor, the
disconsolate spouse of several departed husbands, by saucily
declaring—in the church-porch at that—“The world _isn’t_ a vale of
tears, Mrs. Taylor. It’s a world of laughter.”
Little dreamy Una was not given to laughter. Her braids of straight,
dead-black hair betrayed no lawless kinks, and her almond-shaped,
dark-blue eyes had something wistful and sorrowful in them. Her mouth
had a trick of falling open over her tiny white teeth, and a shy,
meditative smile occasionally crept over her small face. She was much
more sensitive to public opinion than Faith, and had an uneasy
consciousness that there was something askew in their way of living.
She longed to put it right, but did not know how. Now and then she
dusted the furniture—but it was so seldom she could find the duster
because it was never in the same place twice. And when the
clothes-brush was to be found she tried to brush her father’s best suit
on Saturdays, and once sewed on a missing button with coarse white
thread. When Mr. Meredith went to church next day every female eye saw
that button and the peace of the Ladies’ Aid was upset for weeks.
Carl had the clear, bright, dark-blue eyes, fearless and direct, of his
dead mother, and her brown hair with its glints of gold. He knew the
secrets of bugs and had a sort of freemasonry with bees and beetles.
Una never liked to sit near him because she never knew what uncanny
creature might be secreted about him. Jerry refused to sleep with him
because Carl had once taken a young garter snake to bed with him; so
Carl slept in his old cot, which was so short that he could never
stretch out, and had strange bed-fellows. Perhaps it was just as well