“Do you really feel acquainted with your father?” whispered Sara Ray wonderingly. “It’s long since you saw him.”
“If I hadn’t seen him for a hundred years it wouldn’t make any difference that way,” laughed the Story Girl.
“S-s-h-s-s-h — they’re coming,” whispered Felicity excitedly.
And then they came — Beautiful Alice blushing and lovely, in the prettiest of pretty blue dresses, and the Awkward Man, so fervently happy that he quite forgot to be awkward. He lifted her out of the buggy gallantly and led her forward to us, smiling. We retreated before them, scattering our flowers lavishly on the path, and Alice Dale walked to the very doorstep of her new home over a carpet of blossoms. On the step they both paused and turned towards us, and we shyly did the proper thing in the way of congratulations and good wishes.
“It was so sweet of you to do this,” said the smiling bride.
“It was lovely to be able to do it for you, dearest,” whispered the Story Girl, “and oh, Miss Reade — Mrs. Dale, I mean — we all hope you’ll be so, so happy for ever.”
“I am sure I shall,” said Alice Dale, turning to her husband. He looked down into her eyes — and we were quite forgotten by both of them. We saw it, and slipped away, while Jasper Dale drew his wife into their home and shut the world out.
We scampered joyously away through the moonlit dusk. Uncle Blair joined us at the gate and the Story Girl asked him what he thought of the bride.
“When she dies white violets will grow out of her dust,” he answered.
“Uncle Blair says even queerer things than the Story Girl,” Felicity whispered to me.
And so that beautiful day went away from us, slipping through our fingers as we tried to hold it. It hooded itself in shadows and fared forth on the road that is lighted by the white stars of evening. It had been a gift of Paradise. Its hours had all been fair and beloved. From dawn flush to fall of night there had been naught to mar it. It took with it its smiles and laughter. But it left the boon of memory.
CHAPTER XXVII.
THE OLD ORDER CHANGETH
“I am going away with father when he goes. He is going to spend the winter in Paris, and I am to go to school there.”
The Story Girl told us this one day in the orchard. There was a little elation in her tone, but more regret. The news was not a great surprise to us. We had felt it in the air ever since Uncle Blair’s arrival. Aunt Janet had been very unwilling to let the Story Girl go. But Uncle Blair was inexorable. It was time, he said, that she should go to a better school than the little country one in Carlisle; and besides, he did not want her to grow into womanhood a stranger to him. So it was finally decided that she was to go.
“Just think, you are going to Europe,” said Sara Ray in an awe-struck tone. “Won’t that be splendid!”
“I suppose I’ll like it after a while,” said the Story Girl slowly, “but I know I’ll be dreadfully homesick at first. Of course, it will be lovely to be with father, but oh, I’ll miss the rest of you so much!”
“Just think how WE’LL miss YOU,” sighed Cecily. “It will be so lonesome here this winter, with you and Peter both gone. Oh, dear, I do wish things didn’t have to change.”
Felicity said nothing. She kept looking down at the grass on which she sat, absently pulling at the slender blades. Presently we saw two big tears roll down over her cheeks. The Story Girl looked surprised.
“Are you crying because I’m going away, Felicity?” she asked.
“Of course I am,” answered Felicity, with a big sob. “Do you think I’ve no f-f-eeling?”
“I didn’t think you’d care much,” said the Story Girl frankly. “You’ve never seemed to like me very much.”
“I d-don’t wear my h-heart on my sleeve,” said poor Felicity, with an attempt at dignity. “I think you m-might stay. Your father would let you s-stay if you c-coaxed him.”
“Well, you see I’d have to go some time,” sighed the Story Girl, “and the longer it was put off the harder it would be. But I do feel dreadfully about it. I can’t even take poor Paddy. I’ll have to leave him behind, and oh, I want you all to promise to be kind to him for my sake.”
We all solemnly assured her that we would.
“I’ll g-give him cream every m-morning and n-night,” sobbed Felicity, “but I’ll never be able to look at him without crying. He’ll make me think of you.”
“Well, I’m not going right away,” said the Story Girl, more cheerfully. “Not till the last of October. So we have over a month yet to have a good time in. Let’s all just determine to make it a splendid month for the last. We won’t think about my going at all till we have to, and we won’t have any quarrels among us, and we’ll just enjoy ourselves all we possibly can. So don’t cry any more, Felicity. I’m awfully glad you do like me and am sorry I’m going away, but let’s all forget it for a month.”
Felicity sighed, and tucked away her damp handkerchief.
“It isn’t so easy for me to forget things, but I’ll try,” she said disconsolately, “and if you want any more cooking lessons before you go I’ll be real glad to teach you anything I know.”
This was a high plane of self-sacrifice for Felicity to attain. But the Story Girl shook her head.
“No, I’m not going to bother my head about cooking lessons this last month. It’s too vexing.”
“Do you remember the time you made the pudding—” began Peter, and suddenly stopped.
“Out of sawdust?” finished the Story Girl cheerfully. “You needn’t be afraid to mention it to me after this. I don’t mind any more. I begin to see the fun of it now. I should think I do remember it — and the time I baked the bread before it was raised enough.”
“People have made worse mistakes than that,” said Felicity kindly.
“Such as using tooth-powd—” but here Dan stopped abruptly, remembering the Story Girl’s plea for a beautiful month. Felicity coloured, but said nothing — did not even LOOK anything.
“We HAVE had lots of fun together one way or another,” said Cecily, retrospectively.
“Just think how much we’ve laughed this last year or so,” said the Story Girl. “We’ve had good times together; but I think we’ll have lots more splendid years ahead.”
“Eden is always behind us — Paradise always before,” said Uncle Blair, coming up in time to hear her. He said it with a sigh that was immediately lost in one of his delightful smiles.
“I like Uncle Blair so much better than I expected to,” Felicity confided to me. “Mother says he’s a rolling stone, but there really is something very nice about him, although he says a great many things I don’t understand. I suppose the Story Girl will have a very gay time in Paris.”
“She’s going to school and she’ll have to study hard,” I said.
“She says she’s going to study for the stage,” said Felicity. “Uncle Roger thinks it is all right, and says she’ll be very famous some day. But mother thinks it’s dreadful, and so do I.”
“Aunt Julia is a concert singer,” I said.
“Oh, that’s very different. But I hope poor Sara will get on all right,” sighed Felicity. “You never know what may happen to a person in those foreign countries. And everybody says Paris is such a wicked place. But we must hope for the best,” she concluded in a resigned tone.
That evening the Story Girl and I drove the cows to pasture after milking, and when we came home we sought out Uncle Blair in the orchard. He was sauntering up and down Uncle Stephen’s Walk, his hands clasped behind him and his beautiful, youthful face uplifted to the western sky where waves of night were breaking on a dim primrose shore of sunset.
“See that star over there in the south-west?” he said, as we joined him. “The one just above that pine? An evening star shining over a dark pine tree is the whitest thing in the universe — because it is LIVING whiteness — whiteness possessing a soul. How full this old orchard is of twilight! Do you know, I have been trysting here with ghosts.�
�
“The Family Ghost?” I asked, very stupidly.
“No, not the Family Ghost. I never saw beautiful, broken-hearted Emily yet. Your mother saw her once, Sara — that was a strange thing,” he added absently, as if to himself.
“Did mother really see her?” whispered the Story Girl.
“Well, she always believed she did. Who knows?”
“Do you think there are such things as ghosts, Uncle Blair?” I asked curiously.
“I never saw any, Beverley.”
“But you said you were trysting with ghosts here this evening,” said the Story Girl.
“Oh, yes — the ghosts of the old years. I love this orchard because of its many ghosts. We are good comrades, those ghosts and I; we walk and talk — we even laugh together — sorrowful laughter that has sorrow’s own sweetness. And always there comes to me one dear phantom and wanders hand in hand with me — a lost lady of the old years.”
“My mother?” said the Story Girl very softly.
“Yes, your mother. Here, in her old haunts, it is impossible for me to believe that she can be dead — that her LAUGHTER can be dead. She was the gayest, sweetest thing — and so young — only three years older than you, Sara. Yonder old house had been glad because of her for eighteen years when I met her first.”
“I wish I could remember her,” said the Story Girl, with a little sigh. “I haven’t even a picture of her. Why didn’t you paint one, father?”
“She would never let me. She had some queer, funny, half-playful, half-earnest superstition about it. But I always meant to when she would become willing to let me. And then — she died. Her twin brother Felix died the same day. There was something strange about that, too. I was holding her in my arms and she was looking up at me; suddenly she looked past me and gave a little start. ‘Felix!’ she said. For a moment she trembled and then she smiled and looked up at me again a little beseechingly. ‘Felix has come for me, dear,’ she said. ‘We were always together before you came — you must not mind — you must be glad I do not have to go alone.’ Well, who knows? But she left me, Sara — she left me.”
There was that in Uncle Blair’s voice that kept us silent for a time. Then the Story Girl said, still very softly:
“What did mother look like, father? I don’t look the least little bit like her, do I?”
“No, I wish you did, you brown thing. Your mother’s face was as white as a wood-lily, with only a faint dream of rose in her cheeks. She had the eyes of one who always had a song in her heart — blue as a mist, those eyes were. She had dark lashes, and a little red mouth that quivered when she was very sad or very happy like a crimson rose too rudely shaken by the wind. She was as slim and lithe as a young, white-stemmed birch tree. How I loved her! How happy we were! But he who accepts human love must bind it to his soul with pain, and she is not lost to me. Nothing is ever really lost to us as long as we remember it.”
Uncle Blair looked up at the evening star. We saw that he had forgotten us, and we slipped away, hand in hand, leaving him alone in the memory-haunted shadows of the old orchard.
CHAPTER XXVIII.
THE PATH TO ARCADY
October that year gathered up all the spilled sunshine of the summer and clad herself in it as in a garment. The Story Girl had asked us to try to make the last month together beautiful, and Nature seconded our efforts, giving us that most beautiful of beautiful things — a gracious and perfect moon of falling leaves. There was not in all that vanished October one day that did not come in with auroral splendour and go out attended by a fair galaxy of evening stars — not a day when there were not golden lights in the wide pastures and purple hazes in the ripened distances. Never was anything so gorgeous as the maple trees that year. Maples are trees that have primeval fire in their souls. It glows out a little in their early youth, before the leaves open, in the redness and rosy-yellowness of their blossoms, but in summer it is carefully hidden under a demure, silver-lined greenness. Then when autumn comes, the maples give up trying to be sober and flame out in all the barbaric splendour and gorgeousness of their real nature, making of the hills things out of an Arabian Nights dream in the golden prime of good Haroun Alraschid.
You may never know what scarlet and crimson really are until you see them in their perfection on an October hillside, under the unfathomable blue of an autumn sky. All the glow and radiance and joy at earth’s heart seem to have broken loose in a splendid determination to express itself for once before the frost of winter chills her beating pulses. It is the year’s carnival ere the dull Lenten days of leafless valleys and penitential mists come.
The time of apple-picking had come around once more and we worked joyously. Uncle Blair picked apples with us, and between him and the Story Girl it was an October never to be forgotten.
“Will you go far afield for a walk with me to-day?” he said to her and me, one idle afternoon of opal skies, pied meadows and misty hills.
It was Saturday and Peter had gone home; Felix and Dan were helping Uncle Alec top turnips; Cecily and Felicity were making cookies for Sunday, so the Story Girl and I were alone in Uncle Stephen’s Walk.
We liked to be alone together that last month, to think the long, long thoughts of youth and talk about our futures. There had grown up between us that summer a bond of sympathy that did not exist between us and the others. We were older than they — the Story Girl was fifteen and I was nearly that; and all at once it seemed as if we were immeasurably older than the rest, and possessed of dreams and visions and forward-reaching hopes which they could not possibly share or understand. At times we were still children, still interested in childish things. But there came hours when we seemed to our two selves very grown up and old, and in those hours we talked our dreams and visions and hopes, vague and splendid, as all such are, over together, and so began to build up, out of the rainbow fragments of our childhood’s companionship, that rare and beautiful friendship which was to last all our lives, enriching and enstarring them. For there is no bond more lasting than that formed by the mutual confidences of that magic time when youth is slipping from the sheath of childhood and beginning to wonder what lies for it beyond those misty hills that bound the golden road.
“Where are you going?” asked the Story Girl.
“To ‘the woods that belt the gray hillside’ — ay, and overflow beyond it into many a valley purple-folded in immemorial peace,” answered Uncle Blair. “I have a fancy for one more ramble in Prince Edward Island woods before I leave Canada again. But I would not go alone. So come, you two gay youthful things to whom all life is yet fair and good, and we will seek the path to Arcady. There will be many little things along our way to make us glad. Joyful sounds will ‘come ringing down the wind;’ a wealth of gypsy gold will be ours for the gathering; we will learn the potent, unutterable charm of a dim spruce wood and the grace of flexile mountain ashes fringing a lonely glen; we will tryst with the folk of fur and feather; we’ll hearken to the music of gray old firs. Come, and you’ll have a ramble and an afternoon that you will both remember all your lives.”
We did have it; never has its remembrance faded; that idyllic afternoon of roving in the old Carlisle woods with the Story Girl and Uncle Blair gleams in my book of years, a page of living beauty. Yet it was but a few hours of simplest pleasure; we wandered pathlessly through the sylvan calm of those dear places which seemed that day to be full of a great friendliness; Uncle Blair sauntered along behind us, whistling softly; sometimes he talked to himself; we delighted in those brief reveries of his; Uncle Blair was the only man I have ever known who could, when he so willed, “talk like a book,” and do it without seeming ridiculous; perhaps it was because he had the knack of choosing “fit audience, though few,” and the proper time to appeal to that audience.
We went across the fields, intending to skirt the woods at the back of Uncle Alec’s farm and find a lane that cut through Uncle Roger’s woods; but before we came to it we stumbled on a sly, winding little path quite by
accident — if, indeed, there can be such a thing as accident in the woods, where I am tempted to think we are led by the Good People along such of their fairy ways as they have a mind for us to walk in.
“Go to, let us explore this,” said Uncle Blair. “It always drags terribly at my heart to go past a wood lane if I can make any excuse at all for traversing it: for it is the by-ways that lead to the heart of the woods and we must follow them if we would know the forest and be known of it. When we can really feel its wild heart beating against ours its subtle life will steal into our veins and make us its own for ever, so that no matter where we go or how wide we wander in the noisy ways of cities or over the lone ways of the sea, we shall yet be drawn back to the forest to find our most enduring kinship.”
“I always feel so SATISFIED in the woods,” said the Story Girl dreamily, as we turned in under the low-swinging fir boughs. “Trees seem such friendly things.”
“They are the most friendly things in God’s good creation,” said Uncle Blair emphatically. “And it is so easy to live with them. To hold converse with pines, to whisper secrets with the poplars, to listen to the tales of old romance that beeches have to tell, to walk in eloquent silence with self-contained firs, is to learn what real companionship is. Besides, trees are the same all over the world. A beech tree on the slopes of the Pyrenees is just what a beech tree here in these Carlisle woods is; and there used to be an old pine hereabouts whose twin brother I was well acquainted with in a dell among the Apennines. Listen to those squirrels, will you, chattering over yonder. Did you ever hear such a fuss over nothing? Squirrels are the gossips and busybodies of the woods; they haven’t learned the fine reserve of its other denizens. But after all, there is a certain shrill friendliness in their greeting.”
The Complete Works of L M Montgomery Page 415