“And soon the Pye girls will be cutting their hair down to the stubble,” Anne said with a tremulous smile. She turned away from the mirror and threw her arms around Diana. “Oh, what would I ever do without you? You’re the best friend I could ever hope for. I can face the whole school today, looking like I do, because I know you’ll be there beside me, and that you at least won’t laugh at me, even if all the slings and arrows of scorn are directed my way.”
Diana hugged Anne tightly in return. There was a small part of her that rejoiced in Anne’s butchered hair, and felt nastily triumphant over it, now Anne’s looks had come down rather far… at least where the latest style was concerned. “But that’s not the kind of friend I want to be,” Diana thought. “A Pye would be glad for other girls’ misfortunes. I’m not a Pye.”
“No,” a small voice seemed to whisper in her head. “You’re a Barry… just like Aunt Josephine.”
Diana released Anne and busied herself with fixing up her dressing table while Anne talked on about her fear of facing their school mates. Diana wasn’t listening to Anne. She was thinking about the letter Aunt Josephine had sent her at Christmastime… the advice the old lady had given her. “What you want in this world, you must reach out and take, for no one will hand it to you.”
If ever there was a time when Diana would be able to reach out and take all that she wanted—not only Gilbert’s attention, but greater affection and recognition from her schoolmates, too—then the time was now, when Anne was brought low. Diana had never acted on Aunt Josephine’s advice, for rash action was not Diana’s way. But she had re-read the letter countless times since Christmas, and thought long and carefully about the advice that letter contained.
“Can I really take, without regard for how it might feel to my dearest friend?” Diana asked herself as she and Anne went downstairs for Mrs. Barry’s promised scones. “Can I ever be so mean?”
The Shocking Fate of the Lily Maid
Diana, Anne, Ruby, and Jane hurried down the long, sunbaked hill below Orchard Slope—not the side of the hill that sported the farm’s famous apple, pear, and plum trees, but rather the south-facing side, which ran down to the long, blue arm of the Lake of Shining Waters. These fields were planted with Mr. Barry’s pumpkins and beans, as the hill provided ideal drainage for those crops. Sweet-smelling shadows of those young, tender vines, climbing so hopefully high up the frames of their wooden trellises, provided the girls with ample cover for their secretive mission.
It was a mission of romance, the seed of which had been germinating within their hearts since the end of the school year. Miss Stacy had assigned to the sixth reader class Tennyson’s immortal poem Lancelot and Elaine, and not a sixth-reader girl in Avonlea had escaped its enchantment. A full month had passed since the end of the term, yet the glories of Camelot and Avalon had not faded one bit in the girls’ collective imagination. In fact, passion for all things Arthurian had flourished, so that even when the girls were fishing or rowing or picking berries among the hedges, they still spoke in hushed, awed tones of Camelot, and played out scenes from Tennyson’s poem whenever they found the opportunity. Jane had ordered more stories of Camelot from her mother’s book catalogue, spending all the money she’d earned by selling her calves, and Carrie Sloane had hosted a fine birthday party at which the girls took turns reciting lines about the Lily Maid, while Carrie herself lay as if dead on a bier made of sofa cushions. Diana penned her own story about Camelot for the story club she and Anne had formed with their next-best friends. And Anne had declared that her life would be “entirely and undeniably of a better quality” if she had been born in Camelot instead of Canada.
Arthurian enthusiasms had long since reached fever pitch, and every new Camelot game dreamed up by an Avonlea girl was promptly countered by another girl with a game more complex, more dramatic, more thrilling. The stakes rose ever higher. But on that late July day, Diana and her friends had finally hit upon a game that no one in Avonlea would hope to best.
Down through the pumpkins and beans, the girls carried the implements of their glorification. Dina had salvaged from the rag bin her mother’s old black shawl, which had been ravaged by moths but still had a pretty, crocheted trim. Jane had supplied an ancient, slightly discolored piano cloth, which was a rather garish shade of yellow but was the most convincing substitute the girls could find for cloth-of-gold. And below them, at the foot of the hill, where a little gravelly spit extended into the water, lay the vehicle of their ascendancy: the tiny flat Mr. Barry used for duck hunting in the fall.
The girls reached the flat, which was pulled up onto the gravel, and clustered together for a moment, giggling and dancing from foot to foot in their excitement.
“Let’s begin,” Anne said solemnly, and the girls fell reverently silent. “First we must have our Elaine.”
“You must be Elaine, Anne,” Diana said. “I could never have the courage to float down there.”
Diana referred to the long stretch of lake water, with a slow-moving, eastward current, that would carry the flat eventually to the bridge, and then beyond it, where it would fetch up on another gravel strand that waited beyond. The girls had tested the current and the boat’s route several times already.
“Nor I,” Ruby added. “I don’t mind floating down when there’s two or three of us and we can sit up. But to lie down and pretend I was dead… I just couldn’t! I’d die really, of fright.”
Anne turned pleadingly to Jane, but Jane shook her head. “Of course it would be romantic, but I know I couldn’t keep still. I’d keep sitting up to see where I was, and that would spoil the effect.”
“So it must be you, Anne,” Diana repeated.
Anne threw up her hands in despair. “But it’s too ridiculous to have a redheaded Elaine! I would love to be Elaine, and I’m not afraid to float down, but it’s ridiculous just the same. Ruby is so fair and has such lovely, long, golden hair. Just look how short mine still is, and red, too. You know Elaine had ‘all her bright hair streaming down.’ A red-haired person can’t be a lily maid.”
“But your complexion is just as fair as Ruby’s,” Diana said. “And your hair is ever so much darker since you cut it. Why, I’d say it’s just about auburn now.”
That news cheered Anne considerably. “Do you really think so? I’ve sometimes thought it was darker, but I never dared to ask anyone for fear she would tell me it wasn’t. Do you really think it’s auburn now, Diana?”
“Yes, and it’s real pretty, too,” Diana said earnestly.
“Well, I’ll be Elaine, then,” said Anne, sufficiently mollified. “Ruby, you will have to be King Arthur, and Jane will be Guinevere, and Diana must be Lancelot. Now, let me see. The barge was ‘palled all its length in blackest samite.’”
Diana stepped forward with the old black shawl, and together she and Anne spread it along the bottom of the flat. If you shut your eyes to the moth holes, it looked property funereal. Anne stepped into the boat and lay down along its floor. She closed her eyes and folded her hands delicately over her heart.
Ruby shuffled nervously. “Oh, she does look really dead. It makes me feel frightened, girls. Do you suppose it’s wrong to act like this? Mrs. Lynde says that play-acting is abominably wicked.”
Anne opened her eyes and said sharply, “Ruby, you shouldn’t talk about Mrs. Lynde. It spoils the effect. This is hundreds of years before Mrs. Lynde was born, and it’s in Camelot, besides, not Avonlea. Jane,” Anne added in exasperation, “you arrange all of this. Elaine can’t do the talking when she’s supposed to be dead.”
Jane placed the piano cloth over Anne’s body, tucking it in just below her hands. Diana pulled up an iris from the pond’s reedy margin and tucked it into one of Anne’s limp hands in place of a snow-white lily. It would have to do.
“She looks perfect,” Diana whispered. “Oh, it gives me chills.”
“She’s all ready,” Jane agreed. “Now we must ‘kiss her quiet brows’ and say our lines.”
; Diana bent over the flat and kissed Anne’s freckled forehead. “Sister, farewell forever,” she said, in the most pitiful tones she could manage. Ruby placed her kiss, too. “Farewell, sweet sister.”
“Anne, for goodness sake, smile a little,” Jane said. “Elaine ‘lay as though she smiled.’”
Anne’s pale lips curved the slightest bit.
“That’s better. Now help me push the flat off, girls.”
Diana, Jane, and Ruby leaned into the bow of the boat and pushed with all their strength. The flat gave a loud scrape as it headed away from land. It hung for a moment in the shallows, rotating gently among the reeds and irises before the current took it and tugged it out toward the bridge. Anne did not sit up once.
“That’s that,” Jane said. “She’s on her way now.”
“Let’s run down to the other headland so we can see her arrive,” Diana said. She picked up the cracked old plate that was to serve as Lancelot’s shield, to be laid at the tragic maid’s feet in her eternal rest.
The girls ran along the lake’s shore to the bridge. There they paused to satisfy themselves that Anne was still drifting exactly as she ought to. “Oh, it’s better than I’d hoped it would be,” Diana said. “She looks awfully romantic, lying so still. It’s like we really are in Camelot!”
“Come on, girls,” Jane said, and led them on. “We have to be waiting when she arrives.”
They hurried up the road and crossed through the woods, turning back toward the pond and the little headland that would receive the lily maid’s mournful barge. The girls waited there, puffing to catch their breath and gazing out eagerly at the water. A big willow leaned out over the pond, blocking all view of the bridge, except for the pylons at its northern edge and one end of its railing. But any moment now, the boat would come drifting in through the curtain of willow leaves with Elaine inside it.
“I don’t care what Mrs. Lynde says,” Ruby confided. “This is the most exciting thing we’ve ever done, girls. Oh, wait until Carrie and the others hear! They’ll just die of envy.”
“This is a moment we shall remember all our years,” Diana said, trying her best to sound grand and dignified, as Anne always sounded at times like these.
“I do hope word spreads fast,” Jane said. “I try to be humble, but this really is the best Camelot game anyone has ever played, and it would be bully to know that everybody else knows we invented it.”
“Do you think others will copy us?” Diana asked. “I shouldn’t like that. Then it will be a commonplace game. I want it to remain something special, and something only we did.”
“We’ll be famous,” Ruby said giddily. “They’ll still be talking about this by the time school starts. Why, maybe Miss Stacy will be so impressed with our dedication to the lessons that she’ll let us pick what we’re to read next.”
“It must be more Camelot stories,” Jane said, and Diana and Ruby both agreed.
At that moment, something stirred the curtain of willows. The girls turned toward it expectantly, but whatever had moved there was not the flat they thought to see. It skimmed too low along the water. In fact, it was sinking as it came through the green veil of leaves. The girls stared in stunned silence, wondering just what they’d seen slip below the lake’s surface. And then, each girl in the same moment realized that it was the boat—Anne’s boat—and that it had vanished into the lake’s depths, taking their friend with it.
Jane gave a long, ragged gasp and covered her mouth with trembling fingers. Diana let Lancelot’s shield fall; it shattered on the rocks below. And Ruby, flapping her hands wildly in a display of mindless panic, screamed as loudly and as shrilly as ever a girl had screamed.
“Anne! Oh, Anne,” Diana shouted, running down to the water line. “Can you hear me? Where are you, Anne?”
“She’s sunk!” Jane cried. “She’s sunk and drowned!”
Ruby, having shrieked as piercingly and for as long as she could manage, began to run uselessly from here to there, babbling in terror. “Mrs. Lynde was right! It was wicked to play-act! Oh, we’re real sinners and we’re all going to pay for it now! I tried to warn you girls but you wouldn’t listen! Mrs. Lynde told us! She was right, she was right! And now Anne’s dead, dead, dead!”
Jane, conscious of the fact that someone might hear Ruby’s hysterics and then the girls would be in even deeper trouble than they already were, caught Ruby in her arms and clamped her hand over her mouth until Ruby had calmed somewhat. Diana was crouched on the lake’s edge, sobbing into the hem of her skirt, with no thought in her mind but one: Anne was gone… forever. What would Diana ever do without her?
When Jane could be sure of Ruby’s relative quiet, she released her. “Come on now, girls. Pull yourselves together! If there’s any hope for Anne, we must go get help right away. Don’t lose your heads. Diana’s home is the nearest. We must run back and get her father. He’ll know what to do.”
Clutching one another’s hands with cold, hard, terrified grips, the three girls ran back through the woods, down the road, and over the bridge toward Orchard Slope. If they hadn’t been so headlong in their fear—and if their eyes hadn’t been half-blinded by tears—they might have noticed a solitary boat rowing easily up the middle of the lake, toward the landing whence the lily maid had embarked on her unfortunate journey. Sitting stiffly in that boat, quite alive but soaked from head to foot, was Anne Shirley, with Gilbert plying the oars.
Diana, Jane, and Ruby scrambled up the pumpkin patch, sobbing and gasping for breath, but found Orchard Slope utterly abandoned. Not even Minnie May was at home; the family, thinking Diana off at Green Gables for the afternoon, had gone into town to shop for needful things.
“What are we to do?” Diana moaned. “Oh, Anne is surely drowned by now, if she wasn’t already!”
“We’ve killed her!” Ruby shrieked. “It’s all our fault! They’ll hang us for murderers!”
“Is anyone at home at Green Gables?” Jane asked, squinting toward the other farm. It seemed impossibly far away.
“I don’t know,” Diana said. “Even if there is, won’t it be too late? Oh, Jane! Oh, Anne!”
“We’ve got to try,” Jane said grimly.
“Murderers!” Ruby screamed again, flapping her hands wildly.
Jane pushed her down on the porch step. “You sit there, and don’t move until we come back for you. She’s useless when she’s in hysterics,” she added to Diana. “Now let’s run across to Green Gables as fast as we can go. Maybe there’s help to be had there.”
Diana and Jane left Ruby to cling to the porch post and flew down the hill toward the Haunted Wood. But when they reached Green Gables, with painful stitches in their sides and their breath burning in their throats, they found that house quiet and still, too.
“We must go back ourselves,” Jane said. “There is little we can do, but at least… at least we can go back and hope, and pray.”
They returned along the road, running when their legs could manage, and walking quickly when exhaustion overcame them. The whole time, bitter thoughts chased behind Diana, nipping at her heels. How could Diana have ever considered being ruthless, as Aunt Josephine had advised her? She loved Anne far too much to ever hurt her. She knew that now… now that it was far too late… now that she had killed Anne! “Oh, I would take back every envious moment and every bad thought I ever had about Anne, my own dear bosom friend, if I could just have her back again,” Diana prayed fervently. But it was too late. Fate’s stamp had fallen, and Diana would be forever marked by regret and woe.
As Diana and Jane rounded the curve in the road, they saw a lone figure coming toward them, walking awkwardly down the center of the lane in the stiff-limbed gait of one who is thoroughly soaked, through and through. In a heartbeat, Diana took in every detail: the long black shawl and piano scarf draped over one shoulder, the familiar blue dress, the mop of red curls—darkened by lake water—and the black velvet bow clinging soddenly to the crown.
“Anne!” Diana shrieked
with the force of her relief and gratitude. She and Jane ran to Anne with renewed energy and threw their arms around her, heedless of her wet clothing.
“Oh, Anne,” Diana panted, loath to release her friend from her desperate embrace, “how did you escape?”
Anne’s teeth chattered, from a chill or excitement or both. “I climbed up one of the bridge piles, and Gilbert Blythe came along in Mr. Andrews’s dory, and brought me to land.”
Now that the girls knew their friend was not in fact dead, and that they were not murderers, their sense of romance was instantly restored. “Oh, Anne, how splendid of him!” Jane exclaimed. “Why, it’s so romantic. Of course you’ll speak to him after this.”
Anne’s chin lifted, though any aim she had for haughtiness was spoiled by her wretched state. “Of course I won’t. And I don’t ever want to hear the word ‘romantic’ again, Jane Andrews.” Seeing the flush on her friends’ cheeks, Anne’s wrath softened somewhat. “I’m awfully sorry you were so frightened, girls. It is all my fault. I feel sure I was born under an unlucky star.”
“But it was lucky that Gilbert came along when he did,” Diana insisted. “Anne, how can you deny it now?”
“Deny what?”
Diana exchanged an uneasy look with Jane. She knew it would be easier—better—to remain silent on the subject. But after all she had been through—thinking her friend drowned, and then the bitter repentance of her jealousies, the renouncement of her longing for Gilbert—Diana simply couldn’t hold back her words. “How can you deny Gilbert? Oh, Anne, it is so romantic; it’s just like a scene from our favorite stories. It’s like a scene out of Camelot, in fact.”
Anne sniffed dismissively and refused to meet Diana’s eye.
“I think Anne and Gilbert are destined,” Diana said to Jane. “Speaking of fortunes in the stars.”
And even though it tugged ferociously at her heart to say it, Diana knew it was the truth. “I cannot even think about standing between them,” she told herself. “I can’t get in love’s way.”
Diana of Orchard Slope Page 23