“I think perhaps I will, if you will come over and talk to me occasionally,” Aunt Josephine said.
Diana saw Anne off, with many exclamations of astonishment. “You’ve done what no one else ever has,” she said to her glowing friend. “I never saw the beat of you, Anne Shirley.”
Then she took up her egg basket and went out to the coop to collect the day’s newly laid eggs. The sun was sinking warm and golden over snow-frosted firs; long shadows stretched blue and silver along the curve of the hill and pooled around the feet of the old white farmhouse.
Diana looked up from her task and then straightened in surprise. Aunt Josephine was coming toward her over the snowy yard, just as blue and silver herself as were the long fir shadows. She was wrapped in a long coat of dark, warm seal, and a matching hat covered her silvery-white hair bun. The cold had raised a tint of color to her sallow, wrinkled cheeks—enough color that for a moment Diana thought she could actually picture what Aunt Josephine must have looked like as a girl of twelve.
“Well, it has been quite a visit already,” the old lady said.
Diana lowered her face. “I am awfully sorry, Aunt Josephine. I never intended to be so wild.”
“No, I dare say you didn’t.” Her thin, old face warmed with an unexpected smile. Diana couldn’t help but smile back; Aunt Josephine had a remarkably friendly smile, on the very rare occasions she chose to use it. “That little redheaded friend of yours is something new under the sun.”
Diana could think of no response but half-nervous laughter.
“I believe I was too hard on you, child, and I said things I regret.”
Diana looked up suddenly at her great-aunt, wide-eyed and startled.
“I know I don’t look it, but I was a girl once, just like you. I do still remember how hard it can be.”
“How hard what can be?”
“Why, being a girl, of course. So many… expectations.” Aunt Josephine sighed. “So many people to please… your parents, your teachers, your friends. And suitors, later, when you’re older. Oh, I know I’m an old maid, but I did have my share of suitors in my time. Everyone thinks girls are all lace and frills and sweet smiles. And believe me, the expectations don’t change when you grow to womanhood. If anything, they only grow heavier and harsher.
“But we are more than that, Diana, though the world will never allow you to see it. You are more than that.” She reached out a hand and laid it gently on Diana’s shoulder. “There is a good spirit inside you; I can see it. And it’s a hard row to hoe, to find that balance between making others happy and remaining true.”
“True?” Diana said softly.
“True to yourself… to the person you are inside. To the real girl within you, who hides herself—for the sake of others, for the sake of all those expectations—beneath the pink ruffles and the perfect manners and the charming smile.”
Aunt Josephine reached into the sleeve of her seal coat, and a moment later she pulled a silver charm bracelet from her own wrist. She held it out to Diana, who took it in trembling fingers. Its shining links held tiny bangles of hearts and stars. It was such a sweetly girlish thing that Diana could hardly credit that stoic, stern old Aunt Josephine had worn it.
“You keep this, girl,” the old lady said gruffly. “Wear it and remember what I told you today: That you are more, no matter what the world tries to tell you. You’ll do that, won’t you?”
Diana looked up at her great-aunt with shining, grateful eyes. There was such warmth—and such conspiratorial mischief—beaming from the old lady’s face that Diana wondered how she’d ever found her intimidating before. “I will, Aunt Josephine. Thank you.”
They carried the basket of eggs back to the house together.
The Dangers of Imagination
“I think,” Diana said thoughtfully as she and Anne walked together along the line of the brook, “that my ideal husband would have dark hair, with at least a little curliness to it.”
Anne nodded in sober agreement. “I never can take a blond fellow seriously. They always look to me as if they wanted to laugh all the time. I suppose some girls might like a husband who laughs a lot, but I could never lose my heart to anyone who didn’t brood at least some of the time.”
Each girl held a basket over her arm, in which they were gathering the last round, carmine-red rosehips that had survived the winter. Marilla wanted the hard, shiny berries for her medicinal teas, and Anne and Diana had been only too glad to venture out to collect them, for the long, cold winter had at last given way to spring. The spikes of narcissi were pushing up from damp earth; dew watered the ferns in Violet Vale, renewing them to a vigorous green. All along the Avonlea Road, the new warmth in the air coaxed pearlescent mists from thickets and dells. The dry, brown carpet that had covered the fields since the end of the harvest was rolling back to reveal a new, plush blanket of grass. Choirs of birds filled the sky with constant song, and everywhere drifted the intoxicating perfume of flowers just beginning to bloom.
Perhaps it was the newness of the season, and the promise it made of a precious future, that caused the girls to turn their thoughts so seriously toward the kind of gentlemen they hoped to marry. They had agreed, as they set out together to collect the rosehips, that the morning should be given over to a rumination on each girl’s “romantic ideal.” Of course, they were only twelve years old, and marriage was a long way off. But on a day that overflowed with hints and glimpses of what was to come, it seemed an entirely prudent, even necessary, topic for discussion.
“No good hero in our favorite books ever laughs too much,” Diana said.
“Only with tragic bitterness. That seems like the only kind of laughing a man ought to do.” Anne paused a moment, considering what she’d just said. “Well,” she amended as she plucked a few more rosehips from the wall of a tangled thicket, “sometimes Matthew laughs a little, when it’s only the two of us together, and I don’t think it’s unseemly. But Matthew is different from a husband.”
“I think I should like a husband who has a little bit of badness in him,” Diana said meditatively.
“Oh, yes. That is a necessity. No one ever has great romantic adventures with a man who is quiet and predictable and does everything the respectable way.” Then Anne quoted the poem over which both girls had recently sighed and dreamed:
“He knew himself a villain, but he deemed
The rest no better than the thing he seemed,
And scorn’d the best as hypocrites who hid
Those deeds the bolder spirit plainly did.”
“Oh, Conrad!” Diana sighed all over again, feeling the faintness of a minor swoon. “Yes, that’s exactly the kind of husband for me.”
“Alas, corsairs are in short supply on Prince Edward Island,” Anne said, laughing.
“I feel like they ought to be everywhere, and all sorts of other romantic types, too, when you recite poetry like that, Anne. You have such a voice for it.”
Anne’s cheeks colored as pink as the flowers at her feet. “Do you really think so?”
“Of course,” Diana said heartily. “Why, you’ll be a great favorite at all the concerts as soon as other people start to realize how well you can perform.”
“You are too kind to me, Diana,” Anne replied somberly. “I am entirely too skinny to be taken seriously, and my freckles strip away any hope I might have of dignity. Don’t try to deny that I’m freckled. I know your denials come from the kindness of your heart, and I love you for it, but it’s like denying a hen has feathers.”
“If you mention your hair color, I swear I’ll scream,” Diana warned.
“It is true, though. No elocutionist ever had red hair.”
“That’s not true, Anne! It simply can’t be. Think of all the performers at all the concerts in the world. At least some of them must have hair like yours.”
“Let us not speak of it anymore today. I want to think only of Conrad. Besides, I still have a hope that someday my hair will darken to aubu
rn, and then I can be taken seriously. I cling to that dream with desperate but hopeful hands, Diana. Well, I suppose we have enough rosehips to satisfy Marilla now. If I stay away too long, she’ll get cross and tell me I daydream too much. Oh, look at this sweet path through the wood! Let’s take it instead of going all the way back to the foot bridge.”
Diana eyed the swath of woodland that separated Green Gables from Orchard Slope. “I don’t know, Anne. I don’t think I’ve ever been on that path before. Where does it lead?”
“It must let out just behind the lower cow pasture, near that big cabbage patch that’s gone wild… you know, the one that belongs to the vacant farm.”
“That’s an awful long way from your house,” Diana said anxiously, peering into the veils of dark, cold shadows that hung to either side of Anne’s “sweet,” fern-lined path. “And isn’t the wood here awful thick, too? It’s not exactly narrow, as it is down at the foot bridge.”
Anne threaded her arm through Diana’s. “I’d almost think you were frightened. Of course there’s nothing to fear in a forest so close to home, Diana.”
“I suppose you’re right,” Diana said dubiously. But she did not go eagerly along as Anne started toward the forest. Her feet dragged and her heart pounded uncomfortably in her chest.
The wood was thick with old, stately spruces and firs. Their sap was running freely in response to the lengthening days, and the air beneath their boughs was crisp with the familiar scent—one Diana usually loved. But the shadows within the forest were so unlike the friendly sun that shone on the fields beyond that Diana felt nothing but menace among the evergreen trees, and their smell seemed to her like that of freshly turned grave dirt. She shivered, which did not go unnoticed by Anne. Anne’s eyes widened as she looked from side to side, trying in vain to peer beyond the margins of the path. All at once the birds stopped singing. That made both girls freeze in their tracks and stare up into the branches that arched blackly overhead.
“What was that?” Anne whispered. “Why have the birds gone silent?”
“A hawk must have flown overhead,” Diana said, practical as ever. But somehow she couldn’t bring herself to speak louder than a whisper, either.
“Was it truly a hawk? Or was it… something else?”
“Oh, don’t, Anne,” Diana pleaded. She gazed back the way they had come. The entrance to the wood was still plainly visible, glowing with lemon-bright sunlight. But it seemed a terribly long way off now. “Let’s go back. This land belongs to Mr. Bell, anyway; he probably doesn’t want us roaming around it.”
“Nonsense,” Anne said, but her voice was still faint and shaky. “Mr. Bell doesn’t mind that we play at Idlewild. He doesn’t do anything with his wood, anyway. He won’t mind us being here.”
Anne went on a few more steps, delving deeper into the eerie silence. Diana had no choice but to go along with her.
“Can’t you feel that chill creeping up your spine?” Anne whispered.
“Yes, I can, and I don’t like it one bit!”
“Don’t be afraid,” Anne said, sounding witless with fear herself. “Once I read in a book that spirits of the dead can’t hurt you. They can only touch you, but their touch just leaves a cold feeling on your skin. That’s all.”
Diana, who at that very moment was feeling an icy sensation all over her poor, trembling body, derived no comfort from this information. “Oh, don’t talk like that, Anne, please! Let’s just get through this dreadful place and out into the sunlight again.”
But it was in Anne’s nature to talk ever on. Once an idea had seized her imagination, she couldn’t keep it to herself. “When I was in the asylum, I knew an Irish girl and she told me that there is a spirit who knows when there is to be a death in the family. The spirit is a lady, all in white with a flowing veil. She walks up and down, up and down, wringing her hands and wailing inconsolably. But the only people who can hear her are the members of the family that’s about to be stricken. The girl I knew swore it was true. It’s not a legend.”
Diana swallowed hard and eyed the brook, which had emerged out of the gloom before them. Their path crossed it by means of several flat stones, well placed for stepping over. But Diana gasped when she examined the muddy bank. “Anne, look!” Small boot-prints—certainly small enough to have been made by the spirit of a lady in a long, white gown—were pressed clearly into the bank, going back and forth as if whoever—or whatever—had made them had been pacing in distress.
“It must be the White Lady,” Anne said, her voice thick with a thrill that might have been either triumph or terror.
“Let’s hurry across! I don’t want to stay here any longer.”
The girls hopped nimbly across the stepping-stones, spurred on by their unabated chills. When they reached the other side of the brook they clasped hands, each gripping the other as tightly as she could.
“Those dead branches there look just like a skeleton’s bones,” Diana murmured fearfully.
“On dark nights when there is no moon, perhaps the branches come to life and turn into real skeletons,” Anne suggested.
“That’s terrible, Anne! How can you say such a thing?”
“We can’t prove it doesn’t happen,” Anne said. “So it is probably better to assume it’s true, and stay out of the wood on moonless nights.”
They shuffled on a few more steps, gazing uneasily from left to right, into the impenetrable shadows of the spruces. Diana’s mouth was very dry, but still she felt compelled to speak. “One time I heard the boys at school talking about a specter they’d seen. It was a man who walked up and down a forest path.”
“That doesn’t sound too overwhelmingly terrifying,” Anne said bravely.
“But, Anne, the man didn’t have a head!”
“Oh!” Anne breathed in stricken admiration. “That is certainly terrifying, then. But where did the boys see it? Not here, I hope.”
“They didn’t say. They only said ‘a forest path.’ Somewhere here in Avonlea.”
“Then it could indeed be this very path.”
“Oh, Anne, I’m awful scared! What if we were to look behind us, and see a headless man coming along the path?”
Both girls froze at that thought and stood in tense, quivering silence for a moment, straining their ears to listen for whatever might be creeping along behind. Heart racing, Diana longed to glance behind her, yet also knew that she simply could not. If she were to try, really try, her body would rebel and she would remain facing forward. And yet… anything at all might be slinking along the path in their wake, stretching toward them bony hands toward them, reaching out to brush them with a spectral touch that would leave only an icy chill on the skin…
A twig snapped somewhere in the forest. With twin gasps, Anne and Diana leaped into a run, hurrying along the path as fast as their shivering legs would carry them.
“I once heard a story about a little murdered child,” Anne said when they’d slowed to a brisk, urgent walk.
“Don’t, Anne!” Diana begged.
“It was desperate for affection, and wanted someone to solve the mystery of its killing, and so whenever people entered the wood where its poor bones lay forgotten, it crept up behind them and laid its tiny, cold fingers on the back of your hand… ”
Diana jerked Anne to a halt so quickly that Anne nearly dropped her basket of rosehips. “Look; what’s that?” Diana was staring off to the left of the path, toward a little fern-fringed clearing that had formed in a hollow where once, many years before, a grand old spruce had stood. It now lay prone along the forest floor, felled by a storm, with the skeletal tangle of its roots exposed.
“What?” Anne asked, peering into the shadows.
“I saw something move,” Diana said, her jaw chattering.
“Maybe it was a bird or a squirrel.”
“No,” Diana breathed. “No, it was much bigger. And oh, Anne… it was white!”
At that moment, the terrible thing Diana had seen moved again. As tall as a
woman, thin and gaunt, it drifted out into the ferny clearing with a slow, deliberate glide, moving straight toward the girls.
Both of them screamed shrilly, let go of each other’s hands, and ran like deer toward Green Gables. They were gasping for breath and sobbing with terror when they burst from the wood, out into the soothing sunlight of the lower cow pasture, and there they locked their arms around one another and wept and gibbered until their fear had abated. Neither of them noticed the sprightly twists and banners of white mist that drifted along the fence line, quite pretty and utterly harmless… and even if they had noticed, it is doubtful whether they would have realized, in their badly shaken state, that the white thing that had pursued them beneath the spruces had been only a stray curl of springtime fog.
Summertime
As June came to an end, so too did the school year. The children had fidgeted the day away, none of them completing any serious work on their final lessons—not even Anne or Gilbert, who took learning so very seriously. Diana had whiled away the day drawing flowers and fairies with big butterfly wings on her slate, and dreaming of the final bell, when she would step out into the full sun of summer with the entire mid-year vacation ahead of her to savor and enjoy.
But just before he sent Prissy out to ring the bell, Mr. Phillips stepped up to the lectern with a pale, sober, terribly pensive look on his face. Sensing a fateful announcement, the restless class fell quiet.
“The time has come for us to part,” Mr. Phillips said. “As the school year closes, so closes a chapter in all our lives, each of us as individuals. I am pleased to say that all of you have succeeded in passing your final examinations, and so will advance when the new school year begins this autumn.” There was a happy murmur around the room at that, but Mr. Phillips did not so much as smile, and accordingly the class went silent again. The schoolmaster resumed: “This chapter ends for me, too. The school board has not renewed me, and so I am free to return to my studies at the college, and pursue greater knowledge.”
Diana of Orchard Slope Page 17