The Complete Works of L M Montgomery

by L. M. Montgomery

  “Alice was always a creature of joy. This old garden rang with her laughter in those years. She seldom walked — she ran or danced. She only lived twenty years, but nineteen of them were so happy I’ve never pitied her over much. She had everything that makes life worth living — laughter and love, and at the last sorrow. James Milburn was her lover. It’s thirty-one years since his ship sailed out of that harbour and Alice waved him good-bye from this garden. He never came back. His ship was never heard of again.

  “When Alice gave up hope that it would be, she died of a broken heart. They say there’s no such thing; but nothing else ailed Alice. She stood at yonder gate day after day and watched the harbour; and when at last she gave up hope life went with it. I remember the day: she had watched until sunset. Then she turned away from the gate. All the unrest and despair had gone out of her eyes. There was a terrible peace in them — the peace of the dead. ‘He will never come back now, Abel,’ she said to me.

  “In less than a week she was dead. The others mourned her, but I didn’t, master. She had sounded the deeps of living and there was nothing else to linger through the years for. My grief had spent itself earlier, when I walked this garden in agony because I could not help her. But often, on these long warm summer afternoons, I seem to hear Alice’s laughter all over this garden; though she’s been dead so long.”

  He lapsed into a reverie which I did not disturb, and it was not until another day that I learned of the other memory that he cherished. He reverted to it suddenly as we sat again in the hop-vine arbour, looking at the glimmering radiance of the September sea.

  “Master, how many of us are sitting here?”

  “Two in the flesh. How many in the spirit I know not,” I answered, humouring his mood.

  “There is one — the other of the two I spoke of the day I told you about Alice. It’s harder for me to speak of this one.”

  “Don’t speak of it if it hurts you,” I said.

  “But I want to. It’s a whim of mine. Do you know why I told you of Alice and why I’m going to tell you of Mercedes? It’s because I want someone to remember them and think of them sometimes after I’m gone. I can’t bear that their names should be utterly forgotten by all living souls.

  “My older brother, Alec, was a sailor, and on his last voyage to the West Indies he married and brought home a Spanish girl. My father and mother didn’t like the match. Mercedes was a foreigner and a Catholic, and differed from us in every way. But I never blamed Alec after I saw her. It wasn’t that she was so very pretty. She was slight and dark and ivory-coloured. But she was very graceful, and there was a charm about her, master — a mighty and potent charm. The women couldn’t understand it. They wondered at Alec’s infatuation for her. I never did. I — I loved her, too, master, before I had known her a day. Nobody ever knew it. Mercedes never dreamed of it. But it’s lasted me all my life. I never wanted to think of any other woman. She spoiled a man for any other kind of woman — that little pale, dark-eyed Spanish girl. To love her was like drinking some rare sparkling wine. You’d never again have any taste for a commoner draught.

  “I think she was very happy the year she spent here. Our thrifty women-folk in Stillwater jeered at her because she wasn’t what they called capable. They said she couldn’t do anything. But she could do one thing well — she could love. She worshipped Alec. I used to hate him for it. Oh, my heart has been very full of black thoughts in its time, master. But neither Alec nor Mercedes ever knew. And I’m thankful now that they were so happy. Alec made this arbour for Mercedes — at least he made the trellis, and she planted the vines.

  “She used to sit here most of the time in summer. I suppose that’s why I like to sit here. Her eyes would be dreamy and far-away until Alec would flash his welcome. How that used to torture me! But now I like to remember it. And her pretty soft foreign voice and little white hands. She died after she had lived here a year. They buried her and her baby in the graveyard of that little chapel over the harbour where the bell rings every evening. She used to like sitting here and listening to it. Alec lived a long while after, but he never married again. He’s gone now, and nobody remembers Mercedes but me.”

  Abel lapsed into a reverie — a tryst with the past which I would not disturb. I thought he did not notice my departure, but as I opened the gate he stood up and waved his hand.

  Three days later I went again to the old garden by the harbour shore. There was a red light on a distant sail. In the far west a sunset city was built around a great deep harbour of twilight. Palaces were there and bannered towers of crimson and gold. The air was full of music; there was one music of the wind and another of the waves, and still another of the distant bell from the chapel near which Mercedes slept. The garden was full of ripe odours and warm colours. The Lombardies around it were tall and sombre like the priestly forms of some mystic band. Abel was sitting in the hop-vine arbour; beside him Captain Kidd slept. I thought Abel was asleep, too; his head leaned against the trellis and his eyes were shut.

  But when I reached the arbour I saw that he was not asleep. There was a strange, wise little smile on his lips as if he had attained to the ultimate wisdom and were laughing in no unkindly fashion at our old blind suppositions and perplexities.

  Abel had gone on his Great Adventure.

  Akin To Love

  David Hartley had dropped in to pay a neighbourly call on Josephine Elliott. It was well along in the afternoon, and outside, in the clear crispness of a Canadian winter, the long blue shadows from the tall firs behind the house were falling over the snow.

  It was a frosty day, and all the windows of every room where there was no fire were covered with silver palms. But the big, bright kitchen was warm and cosy, and somehow seemed to David more tempting than ever before, and that is saying a good deal. He had an uneasy feeling that he had stayed long enough and ought to go. Josephine was knitting at a long gray sock with doubly aggressive energy, and that was a sign that she was talked out. As long as Josephine had plenty to say, her plump white fingers, where her mother’s wedding ring was lost in dimples, moved slowly among her needles. When conversation flagged she fell to her work as furiously as if a husband and half a dozen sons were waiting for its completion. David often wondered in his secret soul what Josephine did with all the interminable gray socks she knitted. Sometimes he concluded that she put them in the home missionary barrels; again, that she sold them to her hired man. At any rate, they were very warm and comfortable looking, and David sighed as he thought of the deplorable state his own socks were generally in.

  When David sighed Josephine took alarm. She was afraid David was going to have one of his attacks of foolishness. She must head him off someway, so she rolled up the gray sock, stabbed the big pudgy ball with her needles, and said she guessed she’d get the tea.

  David got up.

  “Now, you’re not going before tea?” said Josephine hospitably. “I’ll have it all ready in no time.”

  “I ought to go home, I s’pose,” said David, with the air and tone of a man dallying with a great temptation. “Zillah’ll be waiting tea for me; and there’s the stock to tend to.”

  “I guess Zillah won’t wait long,” said Josephine. She did not intend it at all, but there was a certain scornful ring in her voice. “You must stay. I’ve a fancy for company to tea.”

  David sat down again. He looked so pleased that Josephine went down on her knees behind the stove, ostensibly to get a stick of firewood, but really to hide her smile.

  “I suppose he’s tickled to death to think of getting a good square meal, after the starvation rations Zillah puts him on,” she thought.

  But Josephine misjudged David just as much as he misjudged her. She had really asked him to stay to tea out of pity, but David thought it was because she was lonesome, and he hailed that as an encouraging sign. And he was not thinking about getting a good meal either, although his dinner had been such a one as only Zillah Hartley could get up. As he leaned back in his cushi
oned chair and watched Josephine bustling about the kitchen, he was glorying in the fact that he could spend another hour with her, and sit opposite to her at the table while she poured his tea for him and passed him the biscuits, just as if — just as if —

  Here Josephine looked straight at him with such intent and stern brown eyes that David felt she must have read his thoughts, and he colored guiltily. But Josephine did not even notice that he was blushing. She had only paused to wonder whether she would bring out cherry or strawberry preserve; and, having decided on the cherry, took her piercing gaze from David without having seen him at all. But he allowed his thoughts no more vagaries.

  Josephine set the table with her mother’s wedding china. She used it because it was the anniversary of her mother’s wedding day, but David thought it was out of compliment to him. And, as he knew quite well that Josephine prized that china beyond all her other earthly possessions, he stroked his smooth-shaven, dimpled chin with the air of a man to whom is offered a very subtly sweet homage.

  Josephine whisked in and out of the pantry, and up and down cellar, and with every whisk a new dainty was added to the table. Josephine, as everybody in Meadowby admitted, was past mistress in the noble art of cookery. Once upon a time rash matrons and ambitious young wives had aspired to rival her, but they had long ago realised the vanity of such efforts and dropped comfortably back to second place.

  Josephine felt an artist’s pride in her table when she set the teapot on its stand and invited David to sit in. There were pink slices of cold tongue, and crisp green pickles and spiced gooseberry, the recipe for which Josephine had invented herself, and which had taken first prize at the Provincial Exhibition for six successive years; there was a lemon pie which was a symphony in gold and silver, biscuits as light and white as snow, and moist, plummy cubes of fruit cake. There was the ruby-tinted cherry preserve, a mound of amber jelly, and, to crown all, steaming cups of tea, in flavour and fragrance unequalled.

  And Josephine, too, sitting at the head of the table, with her smooth, glossy crimps of black hair and cheeks as rosy clear as they had been twenty years ago, when she had been a slender slip of girlhood and bashful young David Hartley had looked at her over his hymn-book in prayer-meeting and tramped all the way home a few feet behind her, because he was too shy to go boldly up and ask if he might see her home.

  All taken together, what wonder if David lost his head over that tea-table and determined to ask Josephine the same old question once more? It was eighteen years since he had asked it for the first time, and two years since the last. He would try his luck again; Josephine was certainly more gracious than he remembered her to ever have been before.

  When the meal was over Josephine cleared the table and washed the dishes. When she had taken a dry towel and sat down by the window to polish her china David understood that his opportunity had come. He moved over and sat down beside her on the sofa by the window.

  Outside the sun was setting in a magnificent arch of light and colour over the snow-clad hills and deep blue St. Lawrence gulf. David grasped at the sunset as an introductory factor.

  “Isn’t that fine, Josephine?” he said admiringly. “It makes me think of that piece of poetry that used to be in the old Fifth Reader when we went to school. D’ye mind how the teacher used to drill us up in it on Friday afternoons? It begun

  ‘Slow sinks more lovely ere his race is run Along Morea’s hills the setting sun.’”

  Then David declaimed the whole passage in a sing-song tone, accompanied by a few crude gestures recalled from long-ago school-boy elocution. Josephine knew what was coming. Every time David proposed to her he had begun by reciting poetry. She twirled her towel around the last plate resignedly. If it had to come, the sooner it was over the better. Josephine knew by experience that there was no heading David off, despite his shyness, when he had once got along as far as the poetry.

  “But it’s going to be for the last time,” she said determinedly. “I’m going to settle this question so decidedly to-night that there’ll never be a repetition.”

  When David had finished his quotation he laid his hand on Josephine’s plump arm.

  “Josephine,” he said huskily, “I s’pose you couldn’t — could you now? — make up your mind to have me. I wish you would, Josephine — I wish you would. Don’t you think you could, Josephine?”

  Josephine folded up her towel, crossed her hands on it, and looked her wooer squarely in the eyes.

  “David Hartley,” she said deliberately, “what makes you go on asking me to marry you every once in a while when I’ve told you times out of mind that I can’t and won’t?”

  “Because I can’t help hoping that you’ll change your mind through time,” David replied meekly.

  “Well, you just listen to me. I will not marry you. That is in the first place. And in the second, this is to be final. It has to be. You are never to ask me this again under any circumstances. If you do I will not answer you — I will not let on I hear you at all; but (and Josephine spoke very slowly and impressively) I will never speak to you again — never. We are good friends now, and I like you real well, and like to have you drop in for a neighbourly chat as often as you wish to, but there’ll be an end, short and sudden, to that, if you don’t mind what I say.”

  “Oh, Josephine, ain’t that rather hard?” protested David feebly. It seemed terrible to be cut off from all hope with such finality as this.

  “I mean every word of it,” returned Josephine calmly. “You’d better go home now, David. I always feel as if I’d like to be alone for a spell after a disagreeable experience.”

  David obeyed sadly and put on his cap and overcoat. Josephine kindly warned him not to slip and break his legs on the porch, because the floor was as icy as anything; and she even lighted a candle and held it up at the kitchen door to guide him safely out. David, as he trudged sorrowfully homeward across the fields, carried with him the mental picture of a plump, sonsy woman, in a trim dress of plum-coloured homespun and ruffled blue-check apron, haloed by candlelight. It was not a very romantic vision, perhaps, but to David it was more beautiful than anything else in the world.

  When David was gone Josephine shut the door with a little shiver. She blew out the candle, for it was not yet dark enough to justify artificial light to her thrifty mind. She thought the big, empty house, in which she was the only living thing, was very lonely. It was so still, except for the slow tick of the “grandfather’s clock” and the soft purr and crackle of the wood in the stove. Josephine sat down by the window.

  “I wish some of the Sentners would run down,” she said aloud. “If David hadn’t been so ridiculous I’d have got him to stay the evening. He can be good company when he likes — he’s real well-read and intelligent. And he must have dismal times at home there with nobody but Zillah.”

  She looked across the yard to the little house at the other side of it, where her French-Canadian hired man lived, and watched the purple spiral of smoke from its chimney curling up against the crocus sky. Would she run over and see Mrs. Leon Poirier and her little black-eyed, brown-skinned baby? No, they never knew what to say to each other.

  “If ’twasn’t so cold I’d go up and see Ida,” she said. “As it is, I guess I’d better fall back on my knitting, for I saw Jimmy Sentner’s toes sticking through his socks the other day. How setback poor David did look, to be sure! But I think I’ve settled that marrying notion of his once for all and I’m glad of it.”

  She said the same thing next day to Mrs. Tom Sentner, who had come down to help her pick her geese. They were at work in the kitchen with a big tubful of feathers between them, and on the table a row of dead birds, which Leon had killed and brought in. Josephine was enveloped in a shapeless print wrapper, and had an apron tied tightly around her head to keep the down out of her beautiful hair, of which she was rather proud.

  “What do you think, Ida?” she said, with a hearty laugh at the recollection. “David Hartley was here to tea last night, a
nd asked me to marry him again. There’s a persistent man for you. I can’t brag of ever having had many beaux, but I’ve certainly had my fair share of proposals.”

  Mrs. Tom did not laugh. Her thin little face, with its faded prettiness, looked as if she never laughed.

  “Why won’t you marry him?” she said fretfully.

  “Why should I?” retorted Josephine. “Tell me that, Ida Sentner.”

  “Because it is high time you were married,” said Mrs. Tom decisively. “I don’t believe in women living single. And I don’t see what better you can do than take David Hartley.”

  Josephine looked at her sister with the interested expression of a person who is trying to understand some mental attitude in another which is a standing puzzle to her. Ida’s evident wish to see her married always amused Josephine. Ida had married very young and for fifteen years her life had been one of drudgery and ill-health. Tom Sentner was a lazy, shiftless fellow. He neglected his family and was drunk half his time. Meadowby people said that he beat his wife when “on the spree,” but Josephine did not believe that, because she did not think that Ida could keep from telling her if it were so. Ida Sentner was not given to bearing her trials in silence.

  Had it not been for Josephine’s assistance, Tom Sentner’s family would have stood an excellent chance of starvation. Josephine practically kept them, and her generosity never failed or stinted. She fed and clothed her nephews and nieces, and all the gray socks whose destination puzzled David so much went to the Sentners.