‘I don’t feel as if I ought to let you give it up,’ said Marilla, referring to the scholarship.
‘But you can’t prevent me. I’m sixteen and a half, “obstinate as a mule”, as Mrs Lynde once told me,’ laughed Anne. ‘Oh, Marilla, don’t you go pitying me. I don’t like to be pitied, and there is no need for it. I’m heart glad over the very thought of staying at dear Green Gables. Nobody could love it as you and I do — so we must keep it.’
‘You blessed girl!’ said Marilla, yielding, ‘I feel as if you’d give me new life. I guess I ought to stick out and make you go to college — but I know I can’t, so I ain’t going to try. I’ll make it up to you though, Anne.’
When it became noised abroad in Avonlea that Anne Shirley had given up the idea of going to college and intended to stay home and teach there was a good deal of discussion over it. Most of the good folks, not knowing about Marilla’s eyes, thought she was foolish. Mrs Allan did not. She told Anne so in approving words that brought tears of pleasure to the girl’s eyes. Neither did good Mrs Lynde. She came up one evening and found Anne and Marilla sitting at the front door in the warm, scented summer dusk. They liked to sit there when the twilight came down and the white moths flew about in the garden and the odour of mint filled the dewy air.
Mrs Rachel deposited her substantial person upon the stone bench by the door, behind which grew a row of tall pink and yellow hollyhocks, with a long breath of mingled weariness and relief.
‘I declare I’m glad to sit down. I’ve been on my feet all day, and two hundred pounds is a good bit for two feet to carry round. It’s a great blessing not to be fat, Marilla. I hope you appreciate it. Well, Anne, I hear you’ve given up your notion of going to college. I was real glad to hear it. You’ve got as much education now as a woman can be comfortable with. I don’t believe in girls going to college with the men and cramming their heads full of Latin and Greek and all that nonsense.‘
‘But I’m going to study Latin and Greek just the same, Mrs Lynde,’ said Anne laughing. ‘I’m going to take my Arts course right here at Green Gables, and study everything that I would at college.’
Mrs Lynde lifted her hands in holy horror.
‘Anne Shirley, you’ll kill yourself.’
‘Not a bit of it. I shall thrive on it. Oh, I’m not going to overdo things. As “Josiah Allen’s wife” says, I shall be “mejum”. But I’ll have lots of spare time in the long winter evenings, and I’ve no vocation for fancy work. I’m going to teach over at Carmody, you know.’
‘I don’t know it. I guess you’re going to teach right here in Avonlea. The trustees have decided to give you the school.’
‘Mrs Lynde!’ cried Anne, springing to her feet in her surprise. ‘Why, I thought they had promised it to Gilbert Blythe!’
‘So they did. But as soon as Gilbert heard that you had applied for it he went to them — they had a business meeting at the school last night, you know — and told them that he withdrew his application, and suggested that they accept yours. He said he was going to teach at White Sands. Of course he gave up the school just to oblige you, because he knew how much you wanted to stay with Marilla, and I must say I think it was real kind and thoughtful in him, that’s what. Real self-sacrificing, too, for he’ll have his board to pay at White Sands, and everybody knows he’s got to earn his own way through college. So the trustees decided to take you. I was tickled to death when Thomas came home and told me.’
‘I don’t feel that I ought to take it,’ murmured Anne. ‘I mean — I don’t think I ought to let Gilbert make such a sacrifice for — for me.’
‘I guess you can’t prevent him now. He’s signed papers with the White Sands trustees. So it wouldn’t do him any good now if you were to refuse. Of course you’ll take the school. You’ll get along all right, now that there are no Pyes going. Josie was the last of them, and a good thing she was, that’s what. There’s been some Pye or other going to Avonlea school for the last twenty years, and I guess their mission in life was to keep school-teachers reminded that earth isn’t their home. Bless my heart! What does all that winking and blinking at the Barry gable mean?’
‘Diana is signalling for me to go over,’ laughed Anne. ‘You know we keep up the old custom. Excuse me while I run over and see what she wants.’
Anne ran down the clover slope like a deer, and disappeared in the firry shadows of the Haunted Wood. Mrs Lynde looked after her indulgently.
‘There’s a good deal of the child about her yet in some ways.’
‘There’s a good deal more of the woman about her in others,’ retorted Marilla, with a momentary return of her old crispness.
But crispness was no longer Marilla’s distinguishing characteristic. As Mrs Lynde told her Thomas that night.
‘Marilla Cuthbert has got mellow. That’s what.’
Anne went to the little Avonlea graveyard the next evening to put fresh flowers on Matthew’s grave and water the Scotch rose-bush. She lingered there until dusk, liking the peace and calm of the little place, with its poplars whose rustle was like low, friendly speech, and its whispering grasses growing at will among the graves. When she finally left it and walked down the long hill that sloped to the Lake of Shining Waters it was past sunset and all Avonlea lay before her in a dreamlike afterlight — ‘a haunt of ancient peace’. There was a freshness in the air as of a wind that had blown over honey-sweet fields of clover. Home lights twinkled out here and there among the homestead trees. Beyond lay the sea, misty and purple, with its haunting, unceasing murmur. The west was a glory of soft mingled hues, and the pond reflected them all in still softer shadings. The beauty of it all thrilled Anne’s heart, and she gratefully opened the gates of her soul to it.
‘Dear old world,’ she murmured, ‘you are very lovely, and I am glad to be alive in you.’
Half-way down the hill a tall lad came whistling out of a gate before the Blythe homestead. It was Gilbert, and the whistle died on his lips as he recognized Anne. He lifted his cap courteously, but he would have passed on in silence, if Anne had not stopped and held out her hand.
‘Gilbert,’ she said, with scarlet cheeks, ‘I want to thank you for giving up the school for me. It was very good of you — and I want you to know that I appreciate it.’
Gilbert took the offered hand eagerly.
‘It wasn’t particularly good of me at all, Anne. I was pleased to be able to do you some small service. Are we going to be friends after this? Have you really forgiven me my old fault?’
Anne laughed and tried unsuccessfully to withdraw her hand.
‘I forgave you that day by the pond landing, although I didn’t know it. What a stubborn little goose I was. I’ve been — I may as well make a complete confession — I’ve been sorry ever since.’
‘We are going to be the best of friends,’ said Gilbert, jubilantly. ‘We were born to be good friends, Anne. You’ve thwarted destiny long enough. I know we can help each other in many ways. You are going to keep up your studies, aren’t you? So am I. Come, I’m going to walk home with you.’
Marilla looked curiously at Anne when the latter entered the kitchen.
‘Who was that came up the lane with you, Anne?’
‘Gilbert Blythe,’ answered Anne, vexed to find herself blushing. ‘I met him on Barry’s Hill.’
‘I didn’t think you and Gilbert Blythe were such good friends that you’d stand for half an hour at the gate talking to him,’ said Marilla, with a dry smile.
‘We haven’t been — we’ve been good enemies. But we have decided that it will be much more sensible to be good friends in future. Were we really there half an hour? It seemed just a few minutes. But, you see, we have five years’ lost conversations to catch up with, Marilla.’
Anne sat long at her window that night companioned by a glad content. The wind purred softly in the cherry boughs, and the mint breaths came up to her. The stars twinkled over the pointed firs in the hollow and Diana’s light gleamed through the old gap.
Anne’s horizons had closed in since the night she had sat there after coming home from Queen’s; but if the path set before her feet was to be narrow she knew that flowers of quiet happiness would bloom along it. The joys of sincere work and worthy aspiration and congenial friendship were to be hers; nothing could rob her of her birthright of fancy or her ideal world of dreams. And there was always the bend in the road!
‘“God’s in His heaven, all’s right with the world,”’ whispered Anne softly.
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Anne of Green Gables (Penguin) Page 31
