“It does not do, Mrs. Dr. dear, to set your affections too much on a man,” remarked Susan solemnly.
“Mr. Grant is quite as much in love with Gertrude as she is with him, Susan. It is not he whom she distrusts — it is fate. She has a little mystic streak in her — I suppose some people would call her superstitious. She has an odd belief in dreams and we have not been able to laugh it out of her. I must own, too, that some of her dreams — but there, it would not do to let Gilbert hear me hinting such heresy. What have you found of much interest, Susan?”
Susan had given an exclamation.
“Listen to this, Mrs. Dr. dear. ‘Mrs. Sophia Crawford has given up her house at Lowbridge and will make her home in future with her niece, Mrs. Albert Crawford.’ Why that is my own cousin Sophia, Mrs. Dr. dear. We quarrelled when we were children over who should get a Sunday-school card with the words ‘God is Love,’ wreathed in rosebuds, on it, and have never spoken to each other since. And now she is coming to live right across the road from us.”
“You will have to make up the old quarrel, Susan. It will never do to be at outs with your neighbours.”
“Cousin Sophia began the quarrel, so she can begin the making up also, Mrs. Dr. dear,” said Susan loftily. “If she does I hope I am a good enough Christian to meet her half-way. She is not a cheerful person and has been a wet blanket all her life. The last time I saw her, her face had a thousand wrinkles — maybe more, maybe less — from worrying and foreboding. She howled dreadful at her first husband’s funeral but she married again in less than a year. The next note, I see, describes the special service in our church last Sunday night and says the decorations were very beautiful.”
“Speaking of that reminds me that Mr. Pryor strongly disapproves of flowers in church,” said Miss Cornelia. “I always said there would be trouble when that man moved here from Lowbridge. He should never have been put in as elder — it was a mistake and we shall live to rue it, believe me! I have heard that he has said that if the girls continue to ‘mess up the pulpit with weeds’ that he will not go to church.”
“The church got on very well before old Whiskers-on-the-moon came to the Glen and it is my opinion it will get on without him after he is gone,” said Susan.
“Who in the world ever gave him that ridiculous nickname?” asked Mrs. Blythe.
“Why, the Lowbridge boys have called him that ever since I can remember, Mrs. Dr. dear — I suppose because his face is so round and red, with that fringe of sandy whisker about it. It does not do for anyone to call him that in his hearing, though, and that you may tie to. But worse than his whiskers, Mrs. Dr. dear, he is a very unreasonable man and has a great many queer ideas. He is an elder now and they say he is very religious; but I can well remember the time, Mrs. Dr. dear, twenty years ago, when he was caught pasturing his cow in the Lowbridge graveyard. Yes, indeed, I have not forgotten that, and I always think of it when he is praying in meeting. Well, that is all the notes and there is not much else in the paper of any importance. I never take much interest in foreign parts. Who is this Archduke man who has been murdered?”
“What does it matter to us?” asked Miss Cornelia, unaware of the hideous answer to her question which destiny was even then preparing. “Somebody is always murdering or being murdered in those Balkan States. It’s their normal condition and I don’t really think that our papers ought to print such shocking things. The Enterprise is getting far too sensational with its big headlines. Well, I must be getting home. No, Anne dearie, it’s no use asking me to stay to supper. Marshall has got to thinking that if I’m not home for a meal it’s not worth eating — just like a man. So off I go. Merciful goodness, Anne dearie, what is the matter with that cat? Is he having a fit?” — this, as Doc suddenly bounded to the rug at Miss Cornelia’s feet, laid back his ears, swore at her, and then disappeared with one fierce leap through the window.
“Oh, no. He’s merely turning into Mr. Hyde — which means that we shall have rain or high wind before morning. Doc is as good as a barometer.”
“Well, I am thankful he has gone on the rampage outside this time and not into my kitchen,” said Susan. “And I am going out to see about supper. With such a crowd as we have at Ingleside now it behooves us to think about our meals betimes.”
CHAPTER II
DEW OF MORNING
Outside, the Ingleside lawn was full of golden pools of sunshine and plots of alluring shadows. Rilla Blythe was swinging in the hammock under the big Scotch pine, Gertrude Oliver sat at its roots beside her, and Walter was stretched at full length on the grass, lost in a romance of chivalry wherein old heroes and beauties of dead and gone centuries lived vividly again for him.
Rilla was the “baby” of the Blythe family and was in a chronic state of secret indignation because nobody believed she was grown up. She was so nearly fifteen that she called herself that, and she was quite as tall as Di and Nan; also, she was nearly as pretty as Susan believed her to be. She had great, dreamy, hazel eyes, a milky skin dappled with little golden freckles, and delicately arched eyebrows, giving her a demure, questioning look which made people, especially lads in their teens, want to answer it. Her hair was ripely, ruddily brown and a little dent in her upper lip looked as if some good fairy had pressed it in with her finger at Rilla’s christening. Rilla, whose best friends could not deny her share of vanity, thought her face would do very well, but worried over her figure, and wished her mother could be prevailed upon to let her wear longer dresses. She, who had been so plump and roly-poly in the old Rainbow Valley days, was incredibly slim now, in the arms-and-legs period. Jem and Shirley harrowed her soul by calling her “Spider.” Yet she somehow escaped awkwardness. There was something in her movements that made you think she never walked but always danced. She had been much petted and was a wee bit spoiled, but still the general opinion was that Rilla Blythe was a very sweet girl, even if she were not so clever as Nan and Di.
Miss Oliver, who was going home that night for vacation, had boarded for a year at Ingleside. The Blythes had taken her to please Rilla who was fathoms deep in love with her teacher and was even willing to share her room, since no other was available. Gertrude Oliver was twenty-eight and life had been a struggle for her. She was a striking-looking girl, with rather sad, almond-shaped brown eyes, a clever, rather mocking mouth, and enormous masses of black hair twisted about her head. She was not pretty but there was a certain charm of interest and mystery in her face, and Rilla found her fascinating. Even her occasional moods of gloom and cynicism had allurement for Rilla. These moods came only when Miss Oliver was tired. At all other times she was a stimulating companion, and the gay set at Ingleside never remembered that she was so much older than themselves. Walter and Rilla were her favourites and she was the confidante of the secret wishes and aspirations of both. She knew that Rilla longed to be “out” — to go to parties as Nan and Di did, and to have dainty evening dresses and — yes, there is no mincing matters — beaux! In the plural, at that! As for Walter, Miss Oliver knew that he had written a sequence of sonnets “to Rosamond” — i.e., Faith Meredith — and that he aimed at a Professorship of English literature in some big college. She knew his passionate love of beauty and his equally passionate hatred of ugliness; she knew his strength and his weakness.
Walter was, as ever, the handsomest of the Ingleside boys. Miss Oliver found pleasure in looking at him for his good looks — he was so exactly like what she would have liked her own son to be. Glossy black hair, brilliant dark grey eyes, faultless features. And a poet to his fingertips! That sonnet sequence was really a remarkable thing for a lad of twenty to write. Miss Oliver was no partial critic and she knew that Walter Blythe had a wonderful gift.
Rilla loved Walter with all her heart. He never teased her as Jem and Shirley did. He never called her “Spider.” His pet name for her was “Rilla-my-Rilla” — a little pun on her real name, Marilla. She had been named after Aunt Marilla of Green Gables, but Aunt Marilla had died before Rilla was old enoug
h to know her very well, and Rilla detested the name as being horribly old-fashioned and prim. Why couldn’t they have called her by her first name, Bertha, which was beautiful and dignified, instead of that silly “Rilla”? She did not mind Walter’s version, but nobody else was allowed to call her that, except Miss Oliver now and then. “Rilla-my-Rilla” in Walter’s musical voice sounded very beautiful to her — like the lilt and ripple of some silvery brook. She would have died for Walter if it would have done him any good, so she told Miss Oliver. Rilla was as fond of italics as most girls of fifteen are — and the bitterest drop in her cup was her suspicion that he told Di more of his secrets than he told her.
“He thinks I’m not grown up enough to understand,” she had once lamented rebelliously to Miss Oliver, “but I am! And I would never tell them to a single soul — not even to you, Miss Oliver. I tell you all my own — I just couldn’t be happy if I had any secret from you, dearest — but I would never betray his. I tell him everything — I even show him my diary. And it hurts me dreadfully when he doesn’t tell me things. He shows me all his poems, though — they are marvellous, Miss Oliver. Oh, I just live in the hope that some day I shall be to Walter what Wordsworth’s sister Dorothy was to him. Wordsworth never wrote anything like Walter’s poems — nor Tennyson, either.”
“I wouldn’t say just that. Both of them wrote a great deal of trash,” said Miss Oliver dryly. Then, repenting, as she saw a hurt look in Rilla’s eye, she added hastily,
“But I believe Walter will be a great poet, too — some day — and you will have more of his confidence as you grow older.”
“When Walter was in the hospital with typhoid last year I was almost crazy,” sighed Rilla, a little importantly. “They never told me how ill he really was until it was all over — father wouldn’t let them. I’m glad I didn’t know — I couldn’t have borne it. I cried myself to sleep every night as it was. But sometimes,” concluded Rilla bitterly — she liked to speak bitterly now and then in imitation of Miss Oliver—”sometimes I think Walter cares more for Dog Monday than he does for me.”
Dog Monday was the Ingleside dog, so called because he had come into the family on a Monday when Walter had been reading Robinson Crusoe. He really belonged to Jem but was much attached to Walter also. He was lying beside Walter now with nose snuggled against his arm, thumping his tail rapturously whenever Walter gave him an absent pat. Monday was not a collie or a setter or a hound or a Newfoundland. He was just, as Jem said, “plain dog” — very plain dog, uncharitable people added. Certainly, Monday’s looks were not his strong point. Black spots were scattered at random over his yellow carcass, one of them, apparently, blotting out an eye. His ears were in tatters, for Monday was never successful in affairs of honour. But he possessed one talisman. He knew that not all dogs could be handsome or eloquent or victorious, but that every dog could love. Inside his homely hide beat the most affectionate, loyal, faithful heart of any dog since dogs were; and something looked out of his brown eyes that was nearer akin to a soul than any theologian would allow. Everybody at Ingleside was fond of him, even Susan, although his one unfortunate propensity of sneaking into the spare room and going to sleep on the bed tried her affection sorely.
On this particular afternoon Rilla had no quarrel on hand with existing conditions.
“Hasn’t June been a delightful month?” she asked, looking dreamily afar at the little quiet silvery clouds hanging so peacefully over Rainbow Valley. “We’ve had such lovely times — and such lovely weather. It has just been perfect every way.”
“I don’t half like that,” said Miss Oliver, with a sigh. “It’s ominous — somehow. A perfect thing is a gift of the gods — a sort of compensation for what is coming afterwards. I’ve seen that so often that I don’t care to hear people say they’ve had a perfect time. June has been delightful, though.”
“Of course, it hasn’t been very exciting,” said Rilla. “The only exciting thing that has happened in the Glen for a year was old Miss Mead fainting in Church. Sometimes I wish something dramatic would happen once in a while.”
“Don’t wish it. Dramatic things always have a bitterness for some one. What a nice summer all you gay creatures will have! And me moping at Lowbridge!”
“You’ll be over often, won’t you? I think there’s going to be lots of fun this summer, though I’ll just be on the fringe of things as usual, I suppose. Isn’t it horrid when people think you’re a little girl when you’re not?”
“There’s plenty of time for you to be grown up, Rilla. Don’t wish your youth away. It goes too quickly. You’ll begin to taste life soon enough.”
“Taste life! I want to eat it,” cried Rilla, laughing. “I want everything — everything a girl can have. I’ll be fifteen in another month, and then nobody can say I’m a child any longer. I heard someone say once that the years from fifteen to nineteen are the best years in a girl’s life. I’m going to make them perfectly splendid — just fill them with fun.”
“There’s no use thinking about what you’re going to do — you are tolerably sure not to do it.”
“Oh, but you do get a lot of fun out of the thinking,” cried Rilla.
“You think of nothing but fun, you monkey,” said Miss Oliver indulgently, reflecting that Rilla’s chin was really the last word in chins. “Well, what else is fifteen for? But have you any notion of going to college this fall?”
“No — nor any other fall. I don’t want to. I never cared for all those ologies and isms Nan and Di are so crazy about. And there’s five of us going to college already. Surely that’s enough. There’s bound to be one dunce in every family. I’m quite willing to be a dunce if I can be a pretty, popular, delightful one. I can’t be clever. I have no talent at all, and you can’t imagine how comfortable it is. Nobody expects me to do anything so I’m never pestered to do it. And I can’t be a housewifely, cookly creature, either. I hate sewing and dusting, and when Susan couldn’t teach me to make biscuits nobody could. Father says I toil not neither do I spin. Therefore, I must be a lily of the field,” concluded Rilla, with another laugh.
“You are too young to give up your studies altogether, Rilla.”
“Oh, mother will put me through a course of reading next winter. It will polish up her B.A. degree. Luckily I like reading. Don’t look at me so sorrowfully and so disapprovingly, dearest. I can’t be sober and serious — everything looks so rosy and rainbowy to me. Next month I’ll be fifteen — and next year sixteen — and the year after that seventeen. Could anything be more enchanting?”
“Rap wood,” said Gertrude Oliver, half laughingly, half seriously. “Rap wood, Rilla-my-Rilla.”
CHAPTER III
MOONLIT MIRTH
Rilla, who still buttoned up her eyes when she went to sleep so that she always looked as if she were laughing in her slumber, yawned, stretched, and smiled at Gertrude Oliver. The latter had come over from Lowbridge the previous evening and had been prevailed upon to remain for the dance at the Four Winds lighthouse the next night.
“The new day is knocking at the window. What will it bring us, I wonder.”
Miss Oliver shivered a little. She never greeted the days with Rilla’s enthusiasm. She had lived long enough to know that a day may bring a terrible thing.
“I think the nicest thing about days is their unexpectedness,” went on Rilla. “It’s jolly to wake up like this on a golden-fine morning and wonder what surprise packet the day will hand you. I always day-dream for ten minutes before I get up, imagining the heaps of splendid things that may happen before night.”
“I hope something very unexpected will happen today,” said Gertrude. “I hope the mail will bring us news that war has been averted between Germany and France.”
“Oh — yes,” said Rilla vaguely. “It will be dreadful if it isn’t, I suppose. But it won’t really matter much to us, will it? I think a war would be so exciting. The Boer war was, they say, but I don’t remember anything about it, of course. Miss Oliver, shall
I wear my white dress tonight or my new green one? The green one is by far the prettier, of course, but I’m almost afraid to wear it to a shore dance for fear something will happen to it. And will you do my hair the new way? None of the other girls in the Glen wear it yet and it will make such a sensation.”
“How did you induce your mother to let you go to the dance?”
“Oh, Walter coaxed her over. He knew I would be heart-broken if I didn’t go. It’s my first really-truly grown-up party, Miss Oliver, and I’ve just lain awake at nights for a week thinking it over. When I saw the sun shining this morning I wanted to whoop for joy. It would be simply terrible if it rained tonight. I think I’ll wear the green dress and risk it. I want to look my nicest at my first party. Besides, it’s an inch longer than my white one. And I’ll wear my silver slippers too. Mrs. Ford sent them to me last Christmas and I’ve never had a chance to wear them yet. They’re the dearest things. Oh, Miss Oliver, I do hope some of the boys will ask me to dance. I shall die of mortification — truly I will, if nobody does and I have to sit stuck up against the wall all the evening. Of course Carl and Jerry can’t dance because they’re the minister’s sons, or else I could depend on them to save me from utter disgrace.”
“You’ll have plenty of partners — all the over-harbour boys are coming — there’ll be far more boys than girls.”
“I’m glad I’m not a minister’s daughter,” laughed Rilla. “Poor Faith is so furious because she won’t dare to dance tonight. Una doesn’t care, of course. She has never hankered after dancing. Somebody told Faith there would be a taffy-pull in the kitchen for those who didn’t dance and you should have seen the face she made. She and Jem will sit out on the rocks most of the evening, I suppose. Did you know that we are all to walk down as far as that little creek below the old House of Dreams and then sail to the lighthouse? Won’t it just be absolutely divine?”
The Complete Works of L M Montgomery Page 187