“Ah, but this mirror can’t be tricked, Mrs. Lynde. It’s telling me plainly, ‘You’re not as young as you once were,’” said Anne whimsically.
“You’ve kept your complexion very well,” said Mrs. Lynde consolingly. “Of course you never had much colour to lose.”
“At any rate, I’ve never a hint of a second chin yet,” said Anne gaily. “And my old room remembers me, Mrs. Lynde. I’m glad . . . it would hurt me so if I ever came back and found it had forgotten me. And it’s wonderful to see the moon rising over the Haunted Wood again.”
“It looks like a great big piece of gold in the sky, doesn’t it?” said Mrs. Lynde, feeling that she was taking a wild, poetical flight and thankful that Marilla wasn’t there to hear.
“Look at those pointed firs coming out against it . . . and the birches in the hollow still holding their arms up to the silver sky. They’re big trees now . . . they were just baby things when I came here . . . that does make me feel a bit old.”
“Trees are like children,” said Mrs. Lynde. “It’s dreadful the way they grow up the minute you turn your back on them. Look at Fred Wright . . . he’s only thirteen but he’s nearly as tall as his father. There’s a hot chicken pie for supper and I made some of my lemon biscuits for you. You needn’t be a mite afraid to sleep in that bed. I aired the sheets today . . . and Marilla didn’t know I did it and gave them another airing . . . and Millie didn’t know either of us did and gave them a third. I hope Mary Maria Blythe will get out tomorrow . . . she always enjoys a funeral so.”
“Aunt Mary Maria . . . Gilbert always calls her that although she is only his father’s cousin . . . always calls me ‘Annie,’” shuddered Anne. “And the first time she saw me after I was married she said, ‘It’s so strange Gilbert picked you. He could have had so many nice girls.’ Perhaps that’s why I’ve never liked her . . . and I know Gilbert doesn’t either, though he’s too clannish to admit it.”
“Will Gilbert be staying up long?”
“No. He has to go back tomorrow night. He left a patient in a very critical condition.”
“Oh, well, I suppose there isn’t much to keep him in Avonlea now, since his mother went last year. Old Mr. Blythe never held up his head after her death . . . just hadn’t anything left to live for. The Blythes were always like that . . . always set their affections too much on earthly things. It’s real sad to think there are none of them left in Avonlea. They were a fine old stock. But then . . . there’s any amount of Sloanes. The Sloanes are still Sloanes, Anne, and will be for ever and ever, world without end, amen.”
“Let there be as many Sloanes as there will, I’m going out after supper to walk all over the old orchard by moonlight. I suppose I’ll have to go to bed finally . . . though I’ve always thought sleeping on moonlight nights a waste of time . . . but I’m going to wake early to see the first faint morning light steal over the Haunted Wood. The sky will turn to coral and the robins will be strutting around . . . perhaps a little grey sparrow will light on the windowsill . . . and there’ll be gold and purple pansies to look at . . .”
“But the rabbits has et up all the June lily bed,” said Mrs. Lynde sadly, as she waddled downstairs, feeling secretly relieved that there need be no more talk about the moon. Anne had always been a bit queer that way. And there did not any longer seem to be much use in hoping she would outgrow it.
Diana came down the walk to meet Anne. Even in the moonlight you saw that her hair was still black and her cheeks rosy and her eyes bright. But the moonlight could not hide that she was something stouter than in years agone . . . and Diana had never been what Avonlea folks called “skinny.”
“Don’t worry, darling . . . I haven’t come to stay. . . .”
“As if I’d worry over that,” said Diana reproachfully. “You know I’d far rather spend the evening with you than go to the reception. I feel I haven’t seen half enough of you and now you’re going back day after tomorrow. But Fred’s brother, you know . . . we’ve just got to go.”
“Of course you have. And I just ran up for a moment. I came the old way, Di . . . past the Dryad’s Bubble . . . through the Haunted Wood . . . past your bowery old garden . . . and along by Willowmere. I even stopped to watch the willows upside down in the water as we always used to do. They’ve grown so.”
“Everything has,” said Diana with a sigh. “When I look at young Fred! We’ve all changed so . . . except you. You never change, Anne. How do you keep so slim? Look at me!”
“A bit matronish of course,” laughed Anne. “But you’ve escaped the middle-aged spread so far, Di. As for my not changing . . . well, Mrs. H. B. Donnell agrees with you. She told me at the funeral that I didn’t look a day older. But Mrs. Harmon Andrews doesn’t. She said, ‘Dear me, Anne, how you’ve failed!’ It’s all in the beholder’s eye . . . or conscience. The only time I feel I’m getting along a bit is when I look at the pictures in the magazines. The heroes and heroines in them are beginning to look too young to me. But never mind, Di . . . we’re going to be girls again tomorrow. That’s what I’ve come up to tell you. We’re going to take an afternoon and evening off and visit all our old haunts . . . every one of them. We’ll walk over the spring fields and through those ferny old woods. We’ll see all the old familiar things we loved and hills where we’ll find our youth again. Nothing ever seems impossible in spring, you know. We’ll stop feeling parental and responsible and be as giddy as Mrs. Lynde really thinks me still in her heart of hearts. There’s really no fun in being sensible all the time, Diana.”
“My, how like you that sounds! And I’d love to. But . . .”
“There aren’t any buts. I know you’re thinking, ‘Who’ll get the men’s supper?’”
“Not exactly. Anne Cordelia can get the men’s supper as well as I can, if she is only eleven,” said Diana proudly. “She was going to, anyway. I was going to the Ladies’ Aid. But I won’t. I’ll go with you. It will be like having a dream come true. You know, Anne, lots of evenings I sit down and just pretend we’re little girls again. I’ll take our supper with us . . .”
“And we’ll eat it back in Hester Gray’s garden . . . I suppose Hester Gray’s garden is still there?”
“I suppose so,” said Diana doubtfully. “I’ve never been there since I was married. Anne Cordelia explores a lot . . . but I always tell her she mustn’t go too far from home. She loves prowling about the woods . . . and one day when I scolded her for talking to herself in the garden she said she wasn’t talking to herself . . . she was talking to the spirit of the flowers. You know that dolls’ tea-set with the tiny pink rosebuds you sent her for her ninth birthday. There isn’t a piece broken . . . she’s so careful. She only uses it when the Three Green People come to tea with her. I can’t get out of her who she thinks they are. I declare in some ways, Anne, she’s far more like you than she is like me.”
“Perhaps there’s more in a name than Shakespeare allowed. Don’t grudge Anne Cordelia her fancies, Diana. I’m always sorry for children who don’t spend a few years in fairyland.”
“Olivia Sloane is our teacher now,” said Diana doubtfully. “She’s a B.A., you know, and just took the school for a year to be near her mother. She says children should be made to face realities.”
“Have I lived to hear you taking up with Sloanishness, Diana Wright?”
“No . . . no . . . NO! I don’t like her a bit . . . She has such round staring blue eyes like all that clan. And I don’t mind Anne Cordelia’s fancies. They’re pretty . . . just like yours used to be. I guess she’ll get enough ‘reality’ as life goes on.”
“Well, it’s settled then. Come down to Green Gables about two and we’ll have a drink of Marilla’s red currant wine . . . she makes it now and then in spite of the minister and Mrs. Lynde . . . just to make us feel real devilish.”
“Do you remember the day you set me drunk on it?” giggled Diana, who did not mind “devilish” as she would if anybody but Anne used it. Everybody knew Anne didn’t really mea
n things like that. It was just her way.
“We’ll have a real do-you-remember day tomorrow, Diana. I won’t keep you any longer . . . there’s Fred coming with the buggy. Your dress is lovely.”
“Fred made me get a new one for the wedding. I didn’t feel we could afford it since we built the new barn, but he said he wasn’t going to have his wife looking like someone that was sent for and couldn’t go when everybody else would be dressed within an inch of her life. Wasn’t that just like a man?”
“Oh, you sound just like Mrs. Elliott at the Glen,” said Anne severely. “You want to watch that tendency. Would you like to live in a world where there were no men?”
“It would be horrible,” admitted Diana. “Yes, yes, Fred, I’m coming. Oh, all right! Till tomorrow then, Anne.”
Anne paused by the Dryad’s Bubble on her way back. She loved that old brook so. Every trill of her childhood’s laughter that it had ever caught, it had held and now seemed to give out again to her listening ears. Her old dreams . . . she could see them reflected in the clear Bubble . . . old vows . . . old whispers . . . the brook kept them all and murmured of them . . . but there was no one to listen save the wise old spruces in the Haunted Wood that had been listening so long.
Chapter 2
“Such a lovely day . . . made for us,” said Diana. “I’m afraid it’s a pet day, though . . . there’ll be rain tomorrow.”
“Never mind. We’ll drink its beauty today, even if its sunshine is gone tomorrow. We’ll enjoy each other’s friendship today even if we are to be parted tomorrow. Look at those long, golden-green hills . . . those mist-blue valleys. They’re ours, Diana . . . I don’t care if that furthest hill is registered in Abner Sloan’s name . . . it’s ours today. There’s a west wind blowing . . . I always feel adventurous when a west wind blows . . . and we’re going to have a perfect ramble.”
They had. All the old dear spots were revisited: Lover’s Lane, the Haunted Wood, Idlewild, Violet Vale, the Birch Path, Crystal Lake. There were some changes. The little ring of birch saplings in Idlewild, where they had had a playhouse long ago, had grown into big trees; the Birch Path, long untrodden, was matted with bracken; the Crystal Lake had entirely disappeared, leaving only a damp mossy hollow. But Violet Vale was purple with violets and the seedling apple tree Gilbert had once found far back in the woods was a huge tree peppered over with tiny, crimson-tipped blossom-buds.
They walked bareheaded. Annie’s hair still gleamed like polished mahogany in the sunlight and Diana’s was still glossy black. They exchanged gay and understanding, warm and friendly, glances. Sometimes they walked in silence . . . Anne always maintained that two people as sympathetic as she and Diana could feel each other’s thoughts. Sometimes they peppered their conversation with do-you-remembers. “Do you remember the day you fell through the Cobb duckhouse on the Tory Road?” . . . “Do you remember when we jumped on Aunt Josephine?” . . . “Do you remember our Story Club?” . . . “Do you remember Mrs. Morgan’s visit when you stained your nose red?” . . . “Do you remember how we signalled to each other from our windows with candles?” . . . “Do you remember the fun we had at Miss Lavender’s wedding and Charlotta’s blue bows?” . . . “Do you remember the Improvement Society?” It almost seemed to them they could hear their old peals of laughter echoing down the years.
The A. V. I. S. was, it seemed, dead. It had petered out soon after Anne’s marriage.
“They just couldn’t keep it up, Anne. The young people in Avonlea now are not what they were in our day.”
“Don’t talk as if ‘our day’ were ended, Diana. We’re only fifteen years old and kindred spirits. The air isn’t just full of light . . . it is light. I’m not sure that I haven’t sprouted wings.”
“I feel just that way, too,” said Diana, forgetting that she had tipped the scale at one hundred and fifty-five that morning. “I often feel that I’d love to be turned into a bird for a little while. It must be wonderful to fly.”
Beauty was all around them. Unsuspected tintings glimmered in the dark demesnes of the woods and glowed in their alluring by-ways. The spring sunshine sifted through the young green leaves. Gay trills of song were everywhere. There were little hollows where you felt as if you were bathing in a pool of liquid gold. At every turn some fresh spring scent struck their faces . . . spice ferns . . . fir balsam . . . the wholesome odour of newly ploughed fields. There was a lane curtained with wild-cherry blossoms . . . a grassy old field full of tiny spruce trees just starting in life and looking like elvish things that had squatted down among the grasses . . . brooks not yet “too broad for leaping” . . . star-flowers under the firs . . . sheets of curly young ferns . . . and a birch tree whence some vandal had torn away the white-skin wrapper in several places, exposing the tints of the bark below. Anne looked at it so long that Diana wondered. She did not see what Anne did . . . tints ranging from purest creamy white, through exquisite golden tones, growing deeper and deeper until the inmost layer revealed the deepest richest brown as if to tell that all birches, so maiden-like and cool exteriorly, had yet warm-hued feelings.
“The primeval fire of earth at their hearts,” murmured Anne.
And finally, after traversing a little wood glen full of toadstools, they found Hester Gray’s garden. Not so much changed. It was still very sweet with dear flowers. There were still plenty of June lilies, as Diana called the narcissi. The row of cherry trees had grown older but was a drift of snowy bloom. You could still find the central rose walk, and the old dyke was white with strawberry blossoms and blue with violets and green with baby fern. They ate their picnic supper in a corner of it, sitting on some old mossy stones, with a lilac tree behind them flinging purple banners against a low-hanging sun. Both were hungry and both did justice to their own good cooking.
“How nice things taste out of doors!” sighed Diana comfortably. “That chocolate cake of yours, Anne . . . well, words fail me, but I must get the recipe. Fred would adore it. He can eat anything and stay thin. I’m always saying I’m not going to eat any more cake . . . because I’m getting fatter every year. I’ve such a horror of getting like great-aunt Sarah . . . she was so fat she always had to be pulled up when she had sat down. But when I see a cake like that . . . and last night at the reception . . . well, they would all have been so offended if I didn’t eat.”
“Did you have a nice time?”
“Oh, yes, in a way. But I fell into Fred’s Cousin Henrietta’s clutches . . . and it’s such a delight to her to tell all about her operations and her sensations while going through them and how soon her appendix would have burst if she hadn’t had it out. ‘I had fifteen stitches put in it. Oh, Diana, the agony I suffered!’ Well, she enjoyed it if I didn’t. And she has suffered, so why shouldn’t she have the fun of talking about it now? Jim was so funny . . . I don’t know if Mary Alice liked it altogether. . . . Well, just one teeny piece . . . may as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb, I suppose . . . a mere sliver can’t make much difference. . . . One thing he said . . . that the very night before the wedding he was so scared he felt he’d have to take the boat-train. He said all grooms felt just the same if they’d be honest about it. You don’t suppose Gilbert and Fred felt like that, do you, Anne?”
“I’m sure they didn’t.”
“That’s what Fred said when I asked him. He said all he was scared of was that I’d change my mind at the last moment like Rose Spencer. But you can never really tell what a man may be thinking. Well, there’s no use worrying over it now. What a lovely time we’ve had this afternoon! We seem to have lived so many old happinesses over. I wish you didn’t have to go tomorrow, Anne.”
“Can’t you come down for a visit to Ingleside sometime this summer, Diana? Before . . . well, before I’ll not be wanting visitors for a while.”
“I’d love to. But it seems impossible to get away from home in the summer. There’s always so much to do.”
“Rebecca Dew is coming at long last, of which I’m glad . . . and I�
��m afraid Aunt Mary Maria is, too. She hinted as much to Gilbert. He doesn’t want her any more than I do . . . but she is ‘a relation’ and so his latchstring must be always out for her.”
“Perhaps I’ll get down in the winter. I’d love to see Ingleside again. You have a lovely home, Anne . . . and a lovely family.”
“Ingleside is nice . . . and I do love it now. I once thought I would never love it. I hated it when we went there first . . . hated it for its very virtues. They were an insult to my dear House of Dreams. I remember saying piteously to Gilbert when we left it, ‘We’ve been so happy here. We’ll never be so happy anywhere else.’ I revelled in a luxury of homesickness for a while. Then . . . I found little rootlets of affection for Ingleside beginning to sprout out. I fought against it . . . I really did . . . but at last I had to give in and admit I loved it. And I’ve loved it better every year since. It isn’t too old a house . . . too old houses are sad. And it isn’t too young . . . too young houses are crude. It’s just mellow. I love every room in it. Every one has some fault but also some virtue . . . something that distinguishes it from all the others . . . gives it a personality. I love all those magnificent trees on the lawn. I don’t know who planted them but every time I go upstairs I stop on the landing . . . you know that quaint window on the landing with the broad deep seat . . . and sit there looking out for a moment and say, ‘God bless the man who planted those trees whoever he was.’ We’ve really too many trees about the house but we wouldn’t give up one.”
“That’s just like Fred. He worships that big willow south of the house. It spoils the view from the parlour windows, as I’ve told him again and again, but he only says, ‘Would you cut a lovely thing like that down even if it does shut out the view?’ So the willow stays . . . and it is lovely. That’s why we’ve called our place Lone Willow Farm. I love the name Ingleside. It’s such a nice, homey name.”
The Complete Works of L M Montgomery Page 132
