“Let us go and see if we can find some more,” suggested Anne eagerly. “I’ll call Phil and—”
“Never mind Phil and the violets just now, Anne,” said Gilbert quietly, taking her hand in a clasp from which she could not free it. “There is something I want to say to you.”
“Oh, don’t say it,” cried Anne, pleadingly. “Don’t — PLEASE, Gilbert.”
“I must. Things can’t go on like this any longer. Anne, I love you. You know I do. I — I can’t tell you how much. Will you promise me that some day you’ll be my wife?”
“I — I can’t,” said Anne miserably. “Oh, Gilbert — you — you’ve spoiled everything.”
“Don’t you care for me at all?” Gilbert asked after a very dreadful pause, during which Anne had not dared to look up.
“Not — not in that way. I do care a great deal for you as a friend. But I don’t love you, Gilbert.”
“But can’t you give me some hope that you will — yet?”
“No, I can’t,” exclaimed Anne desperately. “I never, never can love you — in that way — Gilbert. You must never speak of this to me again.”
There was another pause — so long and so dreadful that Anne was driven at last to look up. Gilbert’s face was white to the lips. And his eyes — but Anne shuddered and looked away. There was nothing romantic about this. Must proposals be either grotesque or — horrible? Could she ever forget Gilbert’s face?
“Is there anybody else?” he asked at last in a low voice.
“No — no,” said Anne eagerly. “I don’t care for any one like THAT — and I LIKE you better than anybody else in the world, Gilbert. And we must — we must go on being friends, Gilbert.”
Gilbert gave a bitter little laugh.
“Friends! Your friendship can’t satisfy me, Anne. I want your love — and you tell me I can never have that.”
“I’m sorry. Forgive me, Gilbert,” was all Anne could say. Where, oh, where were all the gracious and graceful speeches wherewith, in imagination, she had been wont to dismiss rejected suitors?
Gilbert released her hand gently.
“There isn’t anything to forgive. There have been times when I thought you did care. I’ve deceived myself, that’s all. Goodbye, Anne.”
Anne got herself to her room, sat down on her window seat behind the pines, and cried bitterly. She felt as if something incalculably precious had gone out of her life. It was Gilbert’s friendship, of course. Oh, why must she lose it after this fashion?
“What is the matter, honey?” asked Phil, coming in through the moonlit gloom.
Anne did not answer. At that moment she wished Phil were a thousand miles away.
“I suppose you’ve gone and refused Gilbert Blythe. You are an idiot, Anne Shirley!”
“Do you call it idiotic to refuse to marry a man I don’t love?” said Anne coldly, goaded to reply.
“You don’t know love when you see it. You’ve tricked something out with your imagination that you think love, and you expect the real thing to look like that. There, that’s the first sensible thing I’ve ever said in my life. I wonder how I managed it?”
“Phil,” pleaded Anne, “please go away and leave me alone for a little while. My world has tumbled into pieces. I want to reconstruct it.”
“Without any Gilbert in it?” said Phil, going.
A world without any Gilbert in it! Anne repeated the words drearily. Would it not be a very lonely, forlorn place? Well, it was all Gilbert’s fault. He had spoiled their beautiful comradeship. She must just learn to live without it.
Chapter XXI
Roses of Yesterday
The fortnight Anne spent in Bolingbroke was a very pleasant one, with a little under current of vague pain and dissatisfaction running through it whenever she thought about Gilbert. There was not, however, much time to think about him. “Mount Holly,” the beautiful old Gordon homestead, was a very gay place, overrun by Phil’s friends of both sexes. There was quite a bewildering succession of drives, dances, picnics and boating parties, all expressively lumped together by Phil under the head of “jamborees”; Alec and Alonzo were so constantly on hand that Anne wondered if they ever did anything but dance attendance on that will-o’-the-wisp of a Phil. They were both nice, manly fellows, but Anne would not be drawn into any opinion as to which was the nicer.
“And I depended so on you to help me make up my mind which of them I should promise to marry,” mourned Phil.
“You must do that for yourself. You are quite expert at making up your mind as to whom other people should marry,” retorted Anne, rather caustically.
“Oh, that’s a very different thing,” said Phil, truly.
But the sweetest incident of Anne’s sojourn in Bolingbroke was the visit to her birthplace — the little shabby yellow house in an out-of-the-way street she had so often dreamed about. She looked at it with delighted eyes, as she and Phil turned in at the gate.
“It’s almost exactly as I’ve pictured it,” she said. “There is no honeysuckle over the windows, but there is a lilac tree by the gate, and — yes, there are the muslin curtains in the windows. How glad I am it is still painted yellow.”
A very tall, very thin woman opened the door.
“Yes, the Shirleys lived here twenty years ago,” she said, in answer to Anne’s question. “They had it rented. I remember ‘em. They both died of fever at onct. It was turrible sad. They left a baby. I guess it’s dead long ago. It was a sickly thing. Old Thomas and his wife took it — as if they hadn’t enough of their own.”
“It didn’t die,” said Anne, smiling. “I was that baby.”
“You don’t say so! Why, you have grown,” exclaimed the woman, as if she were much surprised that Anne was not still a baby. “Come to look at you, I see the resemblance. You’re complected like your pa. He had red hair. But you favor your ma in your eyes and mouth. She was a nice little thing. My darter went to school to her and was nigh crazy about her. They was buried in the one grave and the School Board put up a tombstone to them as a reward for faithful service. Will you come in?”
“Will you let me go all over the house?” asked Anne eagerly.
“Laws, yes, you can if you like. ‘Twon’t take you long — there ain’t much of it. I keep at my man to build a new kitchen, but he ain’t one of your hustlers. The parlor’s in there and there’s two rooms upstairs. Just prowl about yourselves. I’ve got to see to the baby. The east room was the one you were born in. I remember your ma saying she loved to see the sunrise; and I mind hearing that you was born just as the sun was rising and its light on your face was the first thing your ma saw.”
Anne went up the narrow stairs and into that little east room with a full heart. It was as a shrine to her. Here her mother had dreamed the exquisite, happy dreams of anticipated motherhood; here that red sunrise light had fallen over them both in the sacred hour of birth; here her mother had died. Anne looked about her reverently, her eyes with tears. It was for her one of the jeweled hours of life that gleam out radiantly forever in memory.
“Just to think of it — mother was younger than I am now when I was born,” she whispered.
When Anne went downstairs the lady of the house met her in the hall. She held out a dusty little packet tied with faded blue ribbon.
“Here’s a bundle of old letters I found in that closet upstairs when I came here,” she said. “I dunno what they are — I never bothered to look in ‘em, but the address on the top one is ‘Miss Bertha Willis,’ and that was your ma’s maiden name. You can take ’em if you’d keer to have ‘em.”
“Oh, thank you — thank you,” cried Anne, clasping the packet rapturously.
“That was all that was in the house,” said her hostess. “The furniture was all sold to pay the doctor bills, and Mrs. Thomas got your ma’s clothes and little things. I reckon they didn’t last long among that drove of Thomas youngsters. They was destructive young animals, as I mind ‘em.”
“I haven’t one thing th
at belonged to my mother,” said Anne, chokily. “I — I can never thank you enough for these letters.”
“You’re quite welcome. Laws, but your eyes is like your ma’s. She could just about talk with hers. Your father was sorter homely but awful nice. I mind hearing folks say when they was married that there never was two people more in love with each other — Pore creatures, they didn’t live much longer; but they was awful happy while they was alive, and I s’pose that counts for a good deal.”
Anne longed to get home to read her precious letters; but she made one little pilgrimage first. She went alone to the green corner of the “old” Bolingbroke cemetery where her father and mother were buried, and left on their grave the white flowers she carried. Then she hastened back to Mount Holly, shut herself up in her room, and read the letters. Some were written by her father, some by her mother. There were not many — only a dozen in all — for Walter and Bertha Shirley had not been often separated during their courtship. The letters were yellow and faded and dim, blurred with the touch of passing years. No profound words of wisdom were traced on the stained and wrinkled pages, but only lines of love and trust. The sweetness of forgotten things clung to them — the far-off, fond imaginings of those long-dead lovers. Bertha Shirley had possessed the gift of writing letters which embodied the charming personality of the writer in words and thoughts that retained their beauty and fragrance after the lapse of time. The letters were tender, intimate, sacred. To Anne, the sweetest of all was the one written after her birth to the father on a brief absence. It was full of a proud young mother’s accounts of “baby” — her cleverness, her brightness, her thousand sweetnesses.
“I love her best when she is asleep and better still when she is awake,” Bertha Shirley had written in the postscript. Probably it was the last sentence she had ever penned. The end was very near for her.
“This has been the most beautiful day of my life,” Anne said to Phil that night. “I’ve FOUND my father and mother. Those letters have made them REAL to me. I’m not an orphan any longer. I feel as if I had opened a book and found roses of yesterday, sweet and beloved, between its leaves.”
Chapter XXII
Spring and Anne Return to Green Gables
The firelight shadows were dancing over the kitchen walls at Green Gables, for the spring evening was chilly; through the open east window drifted in the subtly sweet voices of the night. Marilla was sitting by the fire — at least, in body. In spirit she was roaming olden ways, with feet grown young. Of late Marilla had thus spent many an hour, when she thought she should have been knitting for the twins.
“I suppose I’m growing old,” she said.
Yet Marilla had changed but little in the past nine years, save to grow something thinner, and even more angular; there was a little more gray in the hair that was still twisted up in the same hard knot, with two hairpins — WERE they the same hairpins? — still stuck through it. But her expression was very different; the something about the mouth which had hinted at a sense of humor had developed wonderfully; her eyes were gentler and milder, her smile more frequent and tender.
Marilla was thinking of her whole past life, her cramped but not unhappy childhood, the jealously hidden dreams and the blighted hopes of her girlhood, the long, gray, narrow, monotonous years of dull middle life that followed. And the coming of Anne — the vivid, imaginative, impetuous child with her heart of love, and her world of fancy, bringing with her color and warmth and radiance, until the wilderness of existence had blossomed like the rose. Marilla felt that out of her sixty years she had lived only the nine that had followed the advent of Anne. And Anne would be home tomorrow night.
The kitchen door opened. Marilla looked up expecting to see Mrs. Lynde. Anne stood before her, tall and starry-eyed, with her hands full of Mayflowers and violets.
“Anne Shirley!” exclaimed Marilla. For once in her life she was surprised out of her reserve; she caught her girl in her arms and crushed her and her flowers against her heart, kissing the bright hair and sweet face warmly. “I never looked for you till tomorrow night. How did you get from Carmody?”
“Walked, dearest of Marillas. Haven’t I done it a score of times in the Queen’s days? The mailman is to bring my trunk tomorrow; I just got homesick all at once, and came a day earlier. And oh! I’ve had such a lovely walk in the May twilight; I stopped by the barrens and picked these Mayflowers; I came through Violet-Vale; it’s just a big bowlful of violets now — the dear, sky-tinted things. Smell them, Marilla — drink them in.”
Marilla sniffed obligingly, but she was more interested in Anne than in drinking violets.
“Sit down, child. You must be real tired. I’m going to get you some supper.”
“There’s a darling moonrise behind the hills tonight, Marilla, and oh, how the frogs sang me home from Carmody! I do love the music of the frogs. It seems bound up with all my happiest recollections of old spring evenings. And it always reminds me of the night I came here first. Do you remember it, Marilla?”
“Well, yes,” said Marilla with emphasis. “I’m not likely to forget it ever.”
“They used to sing so madly in the marsh and brook that year. I would listen to them at my window in the dusk, and wonder how they could seem so glad and so sad at the same time. Oh, but it’s good to be home again! Redmond was splendid and Bolingbroke delightful — but Green Gables is HOME.”
“Gilbert isn’t coming home this summer, I hear,” said Marilla.
“No.” Something in Anne’s tone made Marilla glance at her sharply, but Anne was apparently absorbed in arranging her violets in a bowl. “See, aren’t they sweet?” she went on hurriedly. “The year is a book, isn’t it, Marilla? Spring’s pages are written in Mayflowers and violets, summer’s in roses, autumn’s in red maple leaves, and winter in holly and evergreen.”
“Did Gilbert do well in his examinations?” persisted Marilla.
“Excellently well. He led his class. But where are the twins and Mrs. Lynde?”
“Rachel and Dora are over at Mr. Harrison’s. Davy is down at Boulters’. I think I hear him coming now.”
Davy burst in, saw Anne, stopped, and then hurled himself upon her with a joyful yell.
“Oh, Anne, ain’t I glad to see you! Say, Anne, I’ve grown two inches since last fall. Mrs. Lynde measured me with her tape today, and say, Anne, see my front tooth. It’s gone. Mrs. Lynde tied one end of a string to it and the other end to the door, and then shut the door. I sold it to Milty for two cents. Milty’s collecting teeth.”
“What in the world does he want teeth for?” asked Marilla.
“To make a necklace for playing Indian Chief,” explained Davy, climbing upon Anne’s lap. “He’s got fifteen already, and everybody’s else’s promised, so there’s no use in the rest of us starting to collect, too. I tell you the Boulters are great business people.”
“Were you a good boy at Mrs. Boulter’s?” asked Marilla severely.
“Yes; but say, Marilla, I’m tired of being good.”
“You’d get tired of being bad much sooner, Davy-boy,” said Anne.
“Well, it’d be fun while it lasted, wouldn’t it?” persisted Davy. “I could be sorry for it afterwards, couldn’t I?”
“Being sorry wouldn’t do away with the consequences of being bad, Davy. Don’t you remember the Sunday last summer when you ran away from Sunday School? You told me then that being bad wasn’t worth while. What were you and Milty doing today?”
“Oh, we fished and chased the cat, and hunted for eggs, and yelled at the echo. There’s a great echo in the bush behind the Boulter barn. Say, what is echo, Anne; I want to know.”
“Echo is a beautiful nymph, Davy, living far away in the woods, and laughing at the world from among the hills.”
“What does she look like?”
“Her hair and eyes are dark, but her neck and arms are white as snow. No mortal can ever see how fair she is. She is fleeter than a deer, and that mocking voice of hers is all we can k
now of her. You can hear her calling at night; you can hear her laughing under the stars. But you can never see her. She flies afar if you follow her, and laughs at you always just over the next hill.”
“Is that true, Anne? Or is it a whopper?” demanded Davy staring.
“Davy,” said Anne despairingly, “haven’t you sense enough to distinguish between a fairytale and a falsehood?”
“Then what is it that sasses back from the Boulter bush? I want to know,” insisted Davy.
“When you are a little older, Davy, I’ll explain it all to you.”
The mention of age evidently gave a new turn to Davy’s thoughts for after a few moments of reflection, he whispered solemnly:
“Anne, I’m going to be married.”
“When?” asked Anne with equal solemnity.
“Oh, not until I’m grown-up, of course.”
“Well, that’s a relief, Davy. Who is the lady?”
“Stella Fletcher; she’s in my class at school. And say, Anne, she’s the prettiest girl you ever saw. If I die before I grow up you’ll keep an eye on her, won’t you?”
“Davy Keith, do stop talking such nonsense,” said Marilla severely.
“’Tisn’t nonsense,” protested Davy in an injured tone. “She’s my promised wife, and if I was to die she’d be my promised widow, wouldn’t she? And she hasn’t got a soul to look after her except her old grandmother.”
“Come and have your supper, Anne,” said Marilla, “and don’t encourage that child in his absurd talk.”
Chapter XXIII
Paul Cannot Find the Rock People
Life was very pleasant in Avonlea that summer, although Anne, amid all her vacation joys, was haunted by a sense of “something gone which should be there.” She would not admit, even in her inmost reflections, that this was caused by Gilbert’s absence. But when she had to walk home alone from prayer meetings and A.V.I.S. pow-wows, while Diana and Fred, and many other gay couples, loitered along the dusky, starlit country roads, there was a queer, lonely ache in her heart which she could not explain away. Gilbert did not even write to her, as she thought he might have done. She knew he wrote to Diana occasionally, but she would not inquire about him; and Diana, supposing that Anne heard from him, volunteered no information. Gilbert’s mother, who was a gay, frank, light-hearted lady, but not overburdened with tact, had a very embarrassing habit of asking Anne, always in a painfully distinct voice and always in the presence of a crowd, if she had heard from Gilbert lately. Poor Anne could only blush horribly and murmur, “not very lately,” which was taken by all, Mrs. Blythe included, to be merely a maidenly evasion.
The Complete Works of L M Montgomery Page 72
