Diana sat for a minute at her table, staring at the flower-printed card in thoughtful silence, working out what she must say and how she ought to say it. “If only Miss Stacy were here,” she told herself. Then she discarded that wish. “Even if she weren’t going away at the end of June, Miss Stacy won’t be around to help me forever. I must stand on my own sometime, and learn to be a real grown-up lady somehow.” This was as good a place to start as any, but oh, she feared the lesson would be hard!
With a long, careful breath to bolster her courage, Diana lit the lamp. Its amber glow suffused her bedroom, and for a minute she sat in its peaceful light, quietly ordering her thoughts. Then she picked up the piece of cardboard that lay beside the lamp and passed it between light and window, in the accustomed signal of days gone by. Five flashes. Come at once, for I have something important to tell you.
There was a light glowing in Anne’s east-gable bedroom, a small star burning steadily against the pale violet dusk. But perhaps Anne wouldn’t answer. “And wouldn’t that serve me right?” Diana asked herself. “How many times has Anne signaled for me, only I didn’t go, because I was too angry at her, too envious?”
She waited with a lump in her throat. And then, just when she thought Anne had decided to ignore Diana’s plea, the light at Green Gables flashed in return—five times.
Diana walked sedately down the orchard hill, through soft veils of early dusk. Crickets and tree frogs sang their evening songs, and above, in the cloudless sky, the first scattering of stars gleamed silver in a velvet-purple night. She moved so calmly, so resolutely, that it almost seemed amusing to her, to remember how, just hours before, she had run up that very path, blinded by tears and not knowing what she ought to do next. “How strange it is,” Diana thought, “that I could have changed so much in so short a time.” She would have laughed at the thought, had her nerves not been all a-twist with fear over what Anne might say when Diana made her confession.
Anne got to the little bridge over the brook just as Diana did. Her hair had grown out beautifully since the tragedy of the peddler’s dye. It flowed down around her shoulders like a cape of the softest silk. Its red color seemed rich and luxurious against the cool tones of dusk, and Anne, dressed in a new white blouse, seemed to glow as she came through the wood.
“You really are lovely; do you know that?” Diana said when they met. “You look just like a queen, stepping out of a poem. Like Guinevere coming out of Tennyson’s pages.” And she was pleased to feel, deep in her heart, that she meant every word, and gave the compliment without the least bit of envy. “Miss Stacy was right,” Diana thought as Anne clasped her hands in greeting. “I haven’t even humbled myself yet, but already I feel freer, better… at peace.” The realization gave Diana considerable courage.
“Don’t speak to me of Guinevere or Tennyson,” Anne said, laughing. “Sometimes at night I wake up from a nightmare, feeling water seeping up through my bed, and I am reminded of the lily maid.”
Diana smiled. “You know, the story of our near-fatal re-enactment of Lancelot and Elaine never made the rounds at school. We were all so embarrassed and horrified that none of us ever spoke a word about it.”
“It’s a secret we’ll take to our graves with us,” Anne said. “You and me, and Jane and Ruby.”
“And Gilbert,” Diana added.
Anne said nothing. But she didn’t rebuke Diana for mentioning his name, either. That, too, gave Diana courage, for now she knew that she could speak of him without inciting Anne’s anger. Although when she confessed her secret, Anne’s temper might still flare up…
Diana slipped the card from her pocket before her nerves could fail her. “Anne, I have something to tell you, and I’m afraid it’s truly dreadful.”
Anne’s pale brows raised in an expression of desperation. Her voice trembled a little as she said, “Dear me, Diana… after Miss Stacy’s announcement today, I’m not sure I can stand—”
“I kept this from you, Anne.” Diana thrust the card out, into the space between them, which seemed suddenly to yawn like a vast, black abyss. “It’s from long ago, when you fell off the roof and broke your ankle. I don’t know why I kept it, except that… well…”
Anne took the card wonderingly. There was just enough light left in the fading sky to read the print on the front. Then, quite slowly and with a hesitant air, she turned it over and read the name scrawled on the back. She said softly, “Gilbert.”
“Well,” Diana resumed shakily, “I guess I kept it from you partly because you would get so wild if anyone brought him up… but also because… because I like him, Anne. I always have, an awful lot. And I’ve always felt so… so envious, because he likes you, and not me.”
Anne looked up from the card. Something fleeting and indefinable passed across her face, twisting her sensitive features into the briefest frown of pain or anger… or perhaps confusion. But it was gone in a flash, replaced by a grin that shone as bright as mid-day.
“Dear Diana,” she laughed. “I was awful to Gilbert, wasn’t I? And oh, it was so nice and friendly of him to wish me well while I was stuck in bed with my bad ankle. He is a very nice boy after all, isn’t he? I did him wrong all those years. Yes, I think I can be friends with him after all… he did save me from a watery grave, so it’s the least I can do. But there’s nothing for you to worry about, Diana. Friends is all I ever shall be with Gilbert Blythe. I haven’t the slightest interest in him… not in that way. No, it’s Conrad the corsair for me—a suitably gloomy, attractively dark and mysterious man. I’ll find him someday, I dare say, but not in Avonlea.”
“But the card,” Diana said. “It was wrong of me to open it, and wrong to keep it.”
“You didn’t mean any malice by it, Diana. I know that. Don’t think of it any longer, dear. It means nothing. You’re entirely forgiven… not that you need to ask my forgiveness.”
“And the envy, Anne. Oh, how I have envied you! So many times, and not only over Gilbert. Over… over everything! Everything you have, everything you are. It has all but eaten me up inside, and left me feeling miserable and low.”
“But it’s all forgotten now. We swore a solemn oath of friendship… remember? We may have been just foolish little girls at the time, but I took that oath seriously, Diana. I still do. You are dearer to me than any silly little card, or any boy, or any fleeting envy. Come, dry your tears. It has been a very hard day, hasn’t it? I’ve been crying all afternoon, too.”
Laughing with the relief of forgiveness, and feeling more light and peaceful inside than she had for years, Diana threw her arms around Anne. They held each other tightly in the choruses of dusk.
“I can’t believe Miss Stacy is going away,” Diana said mournfully when at last they broke apart.
“Nor can I. It seems like the most dreadful thing that has ever happened to me, Diana… to us. And somehow I must be ready for the entrance exam at the end of June. How can I study and prepare when I feel so broken up over Miss Stacy? Avonlea won’t be the same place without her. Oh, that reminds me: I wrote to your aunt Josephine to ask if I might stay at Beechwood for the exam. I think that will do me more good than to get up before the dawn and drive over. Driving such a long way always makes me feel tired. She told me I am welcome to stay at Beechwood while I’m taking the exams.”
“I wish I could go with you,” Diana said, “to see Aunt Josephine again, if for no other reason. I’ve kept up a correspondence with her, you know, Anne. She really is amusing. I didn’t know such an old lady could be such good fun to write to, but she is. She’s not quite a ‘kindred spirit,’ as you would say,” Diana added, thinking of the hard advice Josephine had given in her very first letter, “but I still find her endlessly fascinating. I really do wish I could have a life just like hers, with a mansion in town and no obligations other than my very own affairs.”
“I probably should not have any company before the exam,” Anne said gently. “But if I could have anyone with me, it would be you.”
Anne cast a lingering glance over her shoulder, at the light still burning from her bedroom window. Her books were there, no doubt, and two years’ worth of notes, painstakingly recorded in preparation for the entrance exam. “I should return home, I suppose,” Anne said regretfully. “I have work still to do before I go to sleep… or try to sleep, after Miss Stacy’s news. Good night, my dearest of Dianas. Don’t dwell any longer on the past. It’s behind us, and only the future lies ahead now.”
When they parted ways, Diana was smiling. For despite the day’s high emotions, she found that Miss Stacy was right. Peace did come from an unburdened heart. And although the song of the frogs and the whisper of the brook made her feel a little bit lonely, it was a pleasant kind of lonesomeness… the kind Diana knew she could bear quite comfortably.
Glad of the peace, Diana did not go straight home. She wandered along the line of the brook, following it toward the lake. The evening was plush and gentle. She held out her hands as she walked, allowing the tall grasses to tickle her palms, and cast her thoughts out dreamily before her.
“Hullo,” a voice called from the road.
Diana looked up suddenly, glad the twilight concealed her blushing. She hadn’t known that she wasn’t alone. Her wanderings had carried her almost all the way to the Newbridge road. The road was well lit by the rising half-moon, and there in the middle of it stood a familiar figure. No, not tall Gilbert with his dark, curling hair and roguish smile. This was a stouter figure, with a red, laughing face. It was Fred Wright, with a pail in one hand and a fishing pole slung over his shoulder. Diana felt a tingle at her wrist and recalled the pink heart charm that Fred had given her, long ago at the Christmas concert. She had never taken the charm off her bracelet, though it held no sentimental value. She had simply never thought to do it.
“Fred,” Diana said with a self-conscious laugh. “Isn’t it late to be out fishing?”
“It is late,” he said, grinning bashfully as Diana came up to meet him. “I’m afraid I let time get away from me. I don’t mind telling you, Diana… I was so upset over Miss Stacy’s leaving us that I had to get out alone with my thoughts. And, well, my thoughts got the better of me, I suppose.”
“I felt the same way,” Diana confided. Then she hesitated. She did not know Fred Wright at all—not any more than she knew the rest of her school mates. Her friendship with Anne was sacred to her, and even some of the girls from school could be trusted with her secrets—Jane and Ruby, for example. But a boy? If she told a boy too much, he would only make fun of her, or use it against her later, to tease and torment her. That was what boys always did. Even a boy as nice as Fred couldn’t be entirely trusted.
Then Diana recalled Miss Stacy’s long-ago advice: “When we can be honest about the way we feel… when we hold nothing back… then we can be sure that others see us most clearly.” Diana heard the charms on her bracelet tinkle quietly in the evening breeze, and she suddenly felt that she might like it if Fred—nice, friendly Fred, who always seemed like he was about to laugh—saw her most clearly. If nothing else, Diana reasoned, it would be good practice for getting to know Gilbert better… which she was free to do, now that she had aired her feelings to Anne.
So she took the risk. “Fred, I’ve had an awful day. I cried so much about Miss Stacy that I fell on the way home from school and ripped my stocking. And then I had to… well, I had to tell Anne all about a wrong I did her long ago—confess to an old sin, I guess you could say. I felt dreadful about it, and even though Anne forgave me, I still feel sort of wicked. But you can be sure I’ll never do a bad turn to one of my friends again; I’ve learned my lesson. Oh, but it has been a miserable time. Do you think I’m a fool for crying so much over Miss Stacy? So much that I fell over like a perfect oaf?”
Fred laughed, but there was no nastiness in it. “Not at all! I had a bully cry down by the lake. Boys do cry sometimes, you know… though we pretend like we don’t.” The grin slid off his face in a sudden show of apprehension. “But you won’t tell anybody about that, will you, Diana? Only it’s hard to keep face in front of the fellows sometimes, and they’d never let me live it down if they knew.”
“I won’t tell a soul,” Diana promised.
“My mother says boys do cry, even though they tell each other not to, but sometimes I get to believing that none of the other boys ever do it. They always seem so fearless and strong. Most of the time I feel… well…” Fred trailed off, shuffling his feet, his laughing smile entirely gone now. It seemed to Diana that Fred felt he’d confessed too much.
She spoke quickly, to reassure him. “Do you feel as if you’re standing in their shadows? Like no one will really see you because of how splendid the rest of them are?”
“Yes,” Fred said slowly, his grin returning. “Yes, that’s exactly how I feel, but you said it better than I ever could.”
“I know just what that feels like,” Diana said. And there in the road, with the half-moon shining down on them, Diana spilled out all her feelings to her newfound friend, Fred Wright. Most of her feelings, anyhow. She told him all about Anne—how much she loved her, and how much she also envied her—and told him, too, of her bitter disappointment in the matter of the Queen’s class. “I’m glad for Anne, and I know she’ll do well at the entrance exam. But there is still a part of me that wishes I could have what she has. I don’t feel angry over it anymore, though, and I’m glad about that.”
“You know,” Fred said solemnly, “that is just the way I feel about Gil. Gilbert Blythe, I mean. Life seems to come so easy for him. He does well in school, the girls are all gone on him… it seems he has everything a fellow could want. But I always try to be a good chum to Gil in spite of my envy, because after all, I like him.”
Mrs. Barry’s voice came suddenly from Orchard Slope, away up the hill, calling thinly across the night. “Diana! Diana!” There was a note of panic in it.
Diana turned quickly and shouted, “I’m coming, Mother!” Then she spun and impulsively took Fred’s hand. “I must go now. But it was so nice to talk to you. Let’s be friends, Fred. I think you’re a really splendid boy.”
Diana ran up the hill toward home, leaving Fred, stunned but not displeased, to stare in amazement after her. When at last he hitched his fishing pole back over his shoulder and sauntered on toward home, he was whistling a jaunty tune, and every bad feeling from that fraught day had been forgotten.
An Argument Won
“Where were you?” Mrs. Barry asked sharply when Diana came inside. “It is long past dark, Diana. You had me worried sick.”
“I was only down by the road,” Diana said, and instantly knew it had been a mistake. Mrs. Barry was familiar with the shared haunts between Orchard Slope and Green Gables. For Diana to have come from the direction of the road meant that she had not been with Anne… at least, not for the whole evening.
“What were you doing on the road in the dark of night?” Mrs. Barry’s voice was dangerously low. “Tell me at once, Diana.”
“I was only… speaking to a friend, Mother.” Diana felt her cheeks color.
Mrs. Barry did not fail to notice. “A friend? A boy, don’t you mean?”
Diana felt her anger flare up like flames before the bellows. She could have burst out with an accusation, or a tearful storm to leave her mother shaking her head in rueful dismay. She would have done just that, on any previous day. But this day’s events had changed Diana for the better. Though she was not yet a grown woman, she wasn’t a child any longer, either. In one eventful June day, she had faced sudden loss, confession, forgiveness, and the unexpected baring of her soul to a near-stranger. She could never go back and be the Diana she had been before.
It took every ounce of her will, but Diana managed to control herself. She neither sauced her mother, nor behaved icily toward her. She thought of Miss Stacy—always so admirably in control of herself, al
ways genteel and approachable, even when she put her foot down in the classroom. She thought of Aunt Josephine, insistent upon taking what she wanted from life, and making no apologies for it. And most of all, she thought of Anne. Confident, bold, and with an inborn—perhaps overblown—sense of righteousness, Anne Shirley had never failed to stand in opposition to anyone she perceived as unjust. If ever there was a time for Diana to be like dear, oft-envied Anne, this was it.
Diana faced her mother squarely and stood firm. She willed her cheeks not to color and looked Mrs. Barry straight in the eye. “Mother,” she said calmly, “I do think it is possible for boys to also be friends. But you have nothing to worry about. Even if I wanted a tryst with Fred Wright, I wouldn’t keep it in the middle of the road. You are getting angry about nothing, and your anger is unjust.”
Mrs. Barry gasped. “How dare you speak to me in such a way!”
“I haven’t spoken to you with any disrespect,” Diana said. “And I have no desire to quarrel with you. Arguing never solves anything, does it? I am going up to my room now, Mother. I would be glad to speak to you more when your temper has calmed.”
With that, Diana walked steadily past her gaping mother and climbed the stairs to her room. When she reached the landing, and was sure Mrs. Barry couldn’t see her face, Diana broke into a triumphant grin. But she didn’t clatter up the rest of the stairs with a victorious sprint, even though she sorely wanted to. She made herself move with all the dignity and assurance of Anne, Josephine, and Miss Stacy formed miraculously into one black-haired, dark-eyed, fifteen-year-old girl’s body.
Diana occupied herself for an hour or two with a novel, reading by the light of her lamp. Now and then she gazed across the darkness to Green Gables, where Anne’s light still burned, too. “Anne must cram for her examination, but I get to enjoy myself with Charlotte E. Morgan’s latest,” Diana thought contentedly. “Perhaps my lot in life isn’t so bad, after all.”
Diana of Orchard Slope Page 27