The Complete Works of L M Montgomery

by L. M. Montgomery

  “Dear me!” murmured Mrs. George, feeling the inadequacy of mere language. Was this a Penhallow method of courtship? “But WHY?”

  “They had a quarrel fifteen years ago,” said Mrs. Frederick patiently. “Nobody knows how it originated or anything about it except that Lucinda herself admitted it to us afterwards. But, in the first flush of her rage, she told Romney that she would never speak to him again as long as she lived. And HE said he would never speak to her until she spoke first — because, you see, as she was in the wrong she ought to make the first advance. And they never have spoken. Everybody in the connection, I suppose, has taken turns trying to reconcile them, but nobody has succeeded. I don’t believe that Romney has ever so much as THOUGHT of any other woman in his whole life, and certainly Lucinda has never thought of any other man. You will notice she still wears Romney’s ring. They’re practically engaged still, of course. And Romney said once that if Lucinda would just say one word, no matter what it was, even if it were something insulting, he would speak, too, and beg her pardon for his share in the quarrel — because then, you see, he would not be breaking his word. He hasn’t referred to the matter for years, but I presume that he is of the same mind still. And they are just as much in love with each other as they ever were. He’s always hanging about where she is — when other people are there, too, that is. He avoids her like a plague when she is alone. That was why he was stuck out in the blue room with us to-day. There doesn’t seem to be a particle of resentment between them. If Lucinda would only speak! But that Lucinda will not do.”

  “Don’t you think she will yet?” said Mrs. George.

  Mrs. Frederick shook her crimped head sagely.

  “Not now. The whole thing has hardened too long. Her pride will never let her speak. We used to hope she would be tricked into it by forgetfulness or accident — we used to lay traps for her — but all to no effect. It is such a shame, too. They were made for each other. Do you know, I get cross when I begin to thrash the whole silly affair over like this. Doesn’t it sound as if we were talking of the quarrel of two school-children? Of late years we have learned that it does not do to speak of Lucinda to Romney, even in the most commonplace way. He seems to resent it.”

  “HE ought to speak,” cried Mrs. George warmly. “Even if she were in the wrong ten times over, he ought to overlook it and speak first.”

  “But he won’t. And she won’t. You never saw two such determined mortals. They get it from their grandfather on the mother’s side — old Absalom Gordon. There is no such stubbornness on the Penhallow side. His obstinacy was a proverb, my dear — actually a proverb. What ever he said, he would stick to if the skies fell. He was a terrible old man to swear, too,” added Mrs. Frederick, dropping into irrelevant reminiscence. “He spent a long while in a mining camp in his younger days and he never got over it — the habit of swearing, I mean. It would have made your blood run cold, my dear, to have heard him go on at times. And yet he was a real good old man every other way. He couldn’t help it someway. He tried to, but he used to say that profanity came as natural to him as breathing. It used to mortify his family terribly. Fortunately, none of them took after him in that respect. But he’s dead — and one shouldn’t speak ill of the dead. I must go and get Mattie Penhallow to do my hair. I would burst these sleeves clean out if I tried to do it myself and I don’t want to dress over again. You won’t be likely to talk to Romney about Lucinda again, my dear Cecilia?”

  “Fifteen years!” murmured Mrs. George helplessly to the dahlias. “Engaged for fifteen years and never speaking to each other! Dear heart and soul, think of it! Oh, these Penhallows!”

  Meanwhile, Lucinda, serenely unconscious that her love story was being mouthed over by Mrs. Frederick in the dahlia garden, was dressing for the wedding. Lucinda still enjoyed dressing for a festivity, since the mirror still dealt gently with her. Moreover, she had a new dress. Now, a new dress — and especially one as nice as this — was a rarity with Lucinda, who belonged to a branch of the Penhallows noted for being chronically hard up. Indeed, Lucinda and her widowed mother were positively poor, and hence a new dress was an event in Lucinda’s existence. An uncle had given her this one — a beautiful, perishable thing, such as Lucinda would never have dared to choose for herself, but in which she revelled with feminine delight.

  It was of pale green voile — a colour which brought out admirably the ruddy gloss of her hair and the clear brilliance of her skin. When she had finished dressing she looked at herself in the mirror with frank delight. Lucinda was not vain, but she was quite well aware of the fact of her beauty and took an impersonal pleasure in it, as if she were looking at some finely painted picture by a master hand.

  The form and face reflected in the glass satisfied her. The puffs and draperies of the green voile displayed to perfection the full, but not over-full, curves of her fine figure. Lucinda lifted her arm and touched a red rose to her lips with the hand upon which shone the frosty glitter of Romney’s diamond, looking at the graceful slope of her shoulder and the splendid line of chin and throat with critical approval.

  She noted, too, how well the gown became her eyes, bringing out all the deeper colour in them. Lucinda had magnificent eyes. Once Romney had written a sonnet to them in which he compared their colour to ripe blueberries. This may not sound poetical to you unless you know or remember just what the tints of ripe blueberries are — dusky purple in some lights, clear slate in others, and yet again in others the misty hue of early meadow violets.

  “You really look very well,” remarked the real Lucinda to the mirrored Lucinda. “Nobody would think you were an old maid. But you are. Alice Penhallow, who is to be married to-night, was a child of five when you thought of being married fifteen years ago. That makes you an old maid, my dear. Well, it is your own fault, and it will continue to be your own fault, you stubborn offshoot of a stubborn breed!”

  She flung her train out straight and pulled on her gloves.

  “I do hope I won’t get any spots on this dress to-night,” she reflected. “It will have to do me for a gala dress for a year at least — and I have a creepy conviction that it is fearfully spottable. Bless Uncle Mark’s good, uncalculating heart! How I would have detested it if he had given me something sensible and useful and ugly — as Aunt Emilia would have done.”

  They all went to “young” John Penhallow’s at early moonrise. Lucinda drove over the two miles of hill and dale with a youthful second cousin, by name, Carey Penhallow. The wedding was quite a brilliant affair. Lucinda seemed to pervade the social atmosphere, and everywhere she went a little ripple of admiration trailed after her like a wave. She was undeniably a belle, yet she found herself feeling faintly bored and was rather glad than otherwise when the guests began to fray off.

  “I’m afraid I’m losing my capacity for enjoyment,” she thought, a little drearily. “Yes, I must be growing old. That is what it means when social functions begin to bore you.”

  It was that unlucky Mrs. George who blundered again. She was standing on the veranda when Carey Penhallow dashed up.

  “Tell Lucinda that I can’t take her back to the Grange. I have to drive Mark and Cissy Penhallow to Bright River to catch the two o’clock express. There will be plenty of chances for her with the others.”

  At this moment George Penhallow, holding his rearing horse with difficulty, shouted for his wife. Mrs. George, all in a flurry, dashed back into the still crowded hall. Exactly to whom she gave her message was never known to any of the Penhallows. But a tall, ruddy-haired girl, dressed in pale green organdy — Anne Shirley from Avonlea — told Marilla Cuthbert and Rachel Lynde as a joke the next morning how a chubby little woman in a bright pink fascinator had clutched her by the arm, and gasped out: “Carey Penhallow can’t take you — he says you’re to look out for someone else,” and was gone before she could answer or turn around.

  Thus it was that Lucinda, when she came out to the veranda step, found herself unaccountably deserted. All the Grange Pe
nhallows were gone; Lucinda realized this after a few moments of bewildered seeking, and she understood that if she were to get to the Grange that night she must walk. Plainly there was nobody to take her.

  Lucinda was angry. It is not pleasant to find yourself forgotten and neglected. It is still less pleasant to walk home alone along a country road, at one o’clock in the morning, wearing a pale green voile. Lucinda was not prepared for such a walk. She had nothing on her feet save thin-soled shoes, and her only wraps were a flimsy fascinator and a short coat.

  “What a guy I shall look, stalking home alone in this rig,” she thought crossly.

  There was no help for it, unless she confessed her plight to some of the stranger guests and begged a drive home. Lucinda’s pride scorned such a request and the admission of neglect it involved. No, she would walk, since that was all there was to it; but she would not go by the main road to be stared at by all and sundry who might pass her. There was a short cut by way of a lane across the fields; she knew every inch of it, although she had not traversed it for years.

  She gathered up the green voile as trimly as possible, slipped around the house in the kindly shadows, picked her way across the side lawn, and found a gate which opened into a birch-bordered lane where the frosted trees shone with silvery-golden radiance in the moonlight. Lucinda flitted down the lane, growing angrier at every step as the realization of how shamefully she seemed to have been treated came home to her. She believed that nobody had thought about her at all, which was tenfold worse than premeditated neglect.

  As she came to the gate at the lower end of the lane a man who was leaning over it started, with a quick intake of his breath, which, in any other man than Romney Penhallow, or for any other woman than Lucinda Penhallow, would have been an exclamation of surprise.

  Lucinda recognized him with a great deal of annoyance and a little relief. She would not have to walk home alone. But with Romney Penhallow! Would he think she had contrived it so purposely?

  Romney silently opened the gate for her, silently latched it behind her, and silently fell into step beside her. Down across a velvety sweep of field they went; the air was frosty, calm and still; over the world lay a haze of moonshine and mist that converted East Grafton’s prosaic hills and fields into a shimmering fairyland. At first Lucinda felt angrier than ever. What a ridiculous situation! How the Penhallows would laugh over it!

  As for Romney, he, too, was angry with the trick impish chance had played him. He liked being the butt of an awkward situation as little as most men; and certainly to be obliged to walk home over moonlit fields at one o’clock in the morning with the woman he had loved and never spoken to for fifteen years was the irony of fate with a vengeance. Would she think he had schemed for it? And how the deuce did she come to be walking home from the wedding at all?

  By the time they had crossed the field and reached the wild cherry lane beyond it, Lucinda’s anger was mastered by her saving sense of humour. She was even smiling a little maliciously under her fascinator.

  The lane was a place of enchantment — a long, moonlit colonnade adown which beguiling wood nymphs might have footed it featly. The moonshine fell through the arching boughs and made a mosaic of silver light and clear-cut shadow for the unfriendly lovers to walk in. On either side was the hovering gloom of the woods, and around them was a great silence unstirred by wind or murmur.

  Midway in the lane Lucinda was attacked by a sentimental recollection. She thought of the last time Romney and she had walked home together through this very lane, from a party at “young” John’s. It had been moonlight then too, and — Lucinda checked a sigh — they had walked hand in hand. Just here, by the big gray beech, he had stopped her and kissed her. Lucinda wondered if he were thinking of it, too, and stole a look at him from under the lace border of her fascinator.

  But he was striding moodily along with his hands in his pockets, and his hat pulled down over his eyes, passing the old beech without a glance at it. Lucinda checked another sigh, gathered up an escaped flutter of voile, and marched on.

  Past the lane a range of three silvery harvest fields sloped down to Peter Penhallow’s brook — a wide, shallow stream bridged over in the olden days by the mossy trunk of an ancient fallen tree. When Lucinda and Romney arrived at the brook they gazed at the brawling water blankly. Lucinda remembered that she must not speak to Romney just in time to prevent an exclamation of dismay. There was no tree! There was no bridge of any kind over the brook!

  Here was a predicament! But before Lucinda could do more than despairingly ask herself what was to be done now, Romney answered — not in words, but in deeds. He coolly picked Lucinda up in his arms, as if she had been a child instead of a full grown woman of no mean avoirdupois, and began to wade with her through the water.

  Lucinda gasped helplessly. She could not forbid him and she was so choked with rage over his presumption that she could not have spoken in any case. Then came the catastrophe. Romney’s foot slipped on a treacherous round stone — there was a tremendous splash — and Romney and Lucinda Penhallow were sitting down in the middle of Peter Penhallow’s brook.

  Lucinda was the first to regain her feet. About her clung in heart-breaking limpness the ruined voile. The remembrance of all her wrongs that night rushed over her soul, and her eyes blazed in the moonlight. Lucinda Penhallow had never been so angry in her life.

  “YOU D — D IDIOT!” she said, in a voice that literally shook with rage.

  Romney meekly scrambled up the bank after her.

  “I’m awfully sorry, Lucinda,” he said, striving with uncertain success to keep a suspicious quiver of laughter out of his tone. “It was wretchedly clumsy of me, but that pebble turned right under my foot. Please forgive me — for that — and for other things.”

  Lucinda deigned no answer. She stood on a flat stone and wrung the water from the poor green voile. Romney surveyed her apprehensively.

  “Hurry, Lucinda,” he entreated. “You will catch your death of cold.”

  “I never take cold,” answered Lucinda, with chattering teeth. “And it is my dress I am thinking of — was thinking of. You have more need to hurry. You are sopping wet yourself and you know you are subject to colds. There — come.”

  Lucinda picked up the stringy train, which had been so brave and buoyant five minutes before, and started up the field at a brisk rate. Romney came up to her and slipped his arm through hers in the old way. For a time they walked along in silence. Then Lucinda began to shake with inward laughter. She laughed silently for the whole length of the field; and at the line fence between Peter Penhallow’s land and the Grange acres she paused, threw back the fascinator from her face, and looked at Romney defiantly.

  “You are thinking of — THAT,” she cried, “and I am thinking of it. And we will go on, thinking of it at intervals for the rest of our lives. But if you ever mention it to me I’ll never forgive you, Romney Penhallow!”

  “I never will,” Romney promised. There was more than a suspicion of laughter in his voice this time, but Lucinda did not choose to resent it. She did not speak again until they reached the Grange gate. Then she faced him solemnly.

  “It was a case of atavism,” she said. “Old Grandfather Gordon was to blame for it.”

  At the Grange almost everybody was in bed. What with the guests straggling home at intervals and hurrying sleepily off to their rooms, nobody had missed Lucinda, each set supposing she was with some other set. Mrs. Frederick, Mrs. Nathaniel and Mrs. George alone were up. The perennially chilly Mrs. Nathaniel had kindled a fire of chips in the blue room grate to warm her feet before retiring, and the three women were discussing the wedding in subdued tones when the door opened and the stately form of Lucinda, stately even in the dragged voile, appeared, with the damp Romney behind her.

  “Lucinda Penhallow!” gasped they, one and all.

  “I was left to walk home,” said Lucinda coolly. “So Romney and I came across the fields. There was no bridge over the brook, and whe
n he was carrying me over he slipped and we fell in. That is all. No, Cecilia, I never take cold, so don’t worry. Yes, my dress is ruined, but that is of no consequence. No, thank you, Cecilia, I do not care for a hot drink. Romney, do go and take off those wet clothes of yours immediately. No, Cecilia, I will NOT take a hot footbath. I am going straight to bed. Good night.”

  When the door closed on the pair the three sisters-in-law stared at each other. Mrs. Frederick, feeling herself incapable of expressing her sensations originally, took refuge in a quotation:

  “‘Do I sleep, do I dream, do I wonder and doubt? Is things what they seem, or is visions about?’”

  “There will be another Penhallow wedding soon,” said Mrs. Nathaniel, with a long breath. “Lucinda has spoken to Romney AT LAST.”

  “Oh, WHAT do you suppose she said to him?” cried Mrs. George.

  “My dear Cecilia,” said Mrs. Frederick, “we shall never know.”

  They never did know.

  Old Man Shaw’s Girl

  “Day after to-morrow — day after to-morrow,” said Old Man Shaw, rubbing his long slender hands together gleefully. “I have to keep saying it over and over, so as to really believe it. It seems far too good to be true that I’m to have Blossom again. And everything is ready. Yes, I think everything is ready, except a bit of cooking. And won’t this orchard be a surprise to her! I’m just going to bring her out here as soon as I can, never saying a word. I’ll fetch her through the spruce lane, and when we come to the end of the path I’ll step back casual-like, and let her go out from under the trees alone, never suspecting. It’ll be worth ten times the trouble to see her big, brown eyes open wide and hear her say, ‘Oh, daddy! Why, daddy!’”

  He rubbed his hands again and laughed softly to himself. He was a tall, bent old man, whose hair was snow white, but whose face was fresh and rosy. His eyes were a boy’s eyes, large, blue and merry, and his mouth had never got over a youthful trick of smiling at any provocation — and, oft-times, at no provocation at all.