Anne's House of Dreams (17 page)

‘Gilbert’ whispered Anne imploringly, ‘the baby – is all right – isn’t she? Tell me – tell me.’

Gilbert was a long while in turning round; then he bent over Anne and looked in her eyes. Marilla, listening fearfully outside the door, heard a pitiful, heart-broken moan, and fled to the kitchen where Susan was weeping.

‘Oh, the poor lamb – the poor lamb! How can she bear it, Miss Cuthbert? I am afraid it will kill her. She has been that built up and happy, longing for that baby, and planning for it. Cannot anything be done nohow, Miss Cuthbert?’

‘I’m afraid not, Susan. Gilbert says there is no hope. He knew from the first the little thing couldn’t live.’

‘And it is such a sweet baby,’ sobbed Susan. ‘I never saw one so white – they are mostly red or yallow. And it opened its big eyes as if it was months old. The little, little thing! Oh, the poor young Mrs Doctor!’

At sunset the little soul that had come with the dawning went away, leaving heartbreak behind it. Miss Cornelia took the wee white lady from the kindly but stranger hands of the nurse, and dressed the tiny waxen form in the beautiful dress Leslie had made for it. Leslie had asked her to do that. Then she took it back and laid it beside the poor, broken, tear-blinded little mother.

‘The Lord has given and the Lord has taken away, dearie,’ she said through her own tears. ‘Blessed be the name of the Lord.’

Then she went away, leaving Anne and Gilbert alone together with their dead.

The next day the small white Joy was laid in a velvet casket which Leslie had lined with apple-blossoms, and taken to the graveyard of the church across the harbour. Miss Cornelia and Marilla put all the little love-made garments away, together with the ruffled basket which had been befrilled and belaced for dimpled limbs and downy head. Little Joy was never to sleep there; she had found a colder, narrower bed.

‘This has been an awful disappointment to me,’ sighed Miss Cornelia. ‘I’ve looked forward to this baby – and I did want it to be a girl, too.’

‘I can only be thankful that Anne’s life was spared,’ said Marilla, with a shiver, recalling those hours of darkness when the girl she loved was passing through the valley of the shadow.

‘Poor, poor lamb! Her heart is broken,’ said Susan.

‘I
envy
Anne,’ said Leslie suddenly and fiercely, ‘and I’d envy her even if she had died! She was a mother for one beautiful day. I’d gladly give my life for
that
!’

‘I wouldn’t talk like that, Leslie, dearie,’ said Miss Cornelia deprecatingly. She was afraid that the dignified Miss Cuthbert would think Leslie quite terrible.

Anne’s convalescence was long, and made bitter for her by many things. The bloom and sunshine of the Four Winds world grated harshly on her; and yet, when the rain fell heavily, she pictured it beating so mercilessly down on that little grave across the harbour; and when the wind blew around the leaves she heard sad voices in it she had never heard before.

Kindly callers hurt her, too, with the well-meant platitudes with which they strove to cover the nakedness of bereavement. A letter from Phil Blake was an added sting. Phil had heard of the baby’s birth, but not of its death, and she wrote Anne a congratulatory letter of sweet mirth which hurt her horribly.

‘I would have laughed over it so happily if I had my baby,’ she sobbed to Marilla. ‘But when I haven’t it just seems like wanton cruelty – though I know Phil wouldn’t hurt me for the world. Oh, Marilla, I don’t see how I can
ever
be happy again –
everything
will hurt me all the rest of my life.’

‘Time will help you,’ said Marilla, who was racked with sympathy but could never learn to express it in other than age-worn formulas.

‘It doesn’t seem
fair
,’ said Anne rebelliously. ‘Babies are born and live where they are not wanted – where they will be neglected – where they will have no chance. I would have loved my baby so – and cared for it so tenderly – and tried to give her every chance for good. And yet I wasn’t allowed to keep her.’

‘It was God’s will, Anne,’ said Marilla, helpless before the riddle of the universe – the
why
of undeserved pain. ‘And little Joy is better off.’

‘I can’t believe
that
,’ cried Anne bitterly. Then, seeing that Marilla looked shocked, she added passionately, ‘Why should she be born at all – why should anyone be born at all – if she’s better off dead? I
don’t
believe it is better for a child to die at birth than to live its life out – and love and be loved – and enjoy and suffer – and do its work – and develop a character that would give it a personality in eternity. And how do you know it was God’s will? Perhaps it was just a thwarting of His purpose by the Power of Evil. We can’t be expected to be resigned to
that
.’

‘Oh, Anne, don’t talk so,’ said Marilla, genuinely alarmed lest Anne were drifting into deep and dangerous waters. ‘We can’t understand – but we must have faith – we
must
believe that all is for the best. I know you find it hard to think so, just now. But try to be brave – for Gilbert’s sake. He’s so worried about you. You aren’t getting strong as fast as you should.’

‘Oh, I know I’ve been very selfish,’ sighed Anne. ‘I love Gilbert more than ever – and I want to live for his sake. But it seems as if part of me was buried over there in that little harbour graveyard – and it hurts so much that I’m afraid of life.’

‘It won’t hurt so much always, Anne.’

‘The thought that it may stop hurting sometimes hurts me worse than all else, Marilla.’

‘Yes, I know, I’ve felt that too, about other things. But we all love you, Anne. Captain Jim has been up every day to ask for you – and Mrs Moore haunts the place – and Miss Bryant spends most of her time, I think, cooking up nice things for you. Susan doesn’t like it very well. She thinks she can cook as well as Miss Bryant.’

‘Dear Susan! Oh, everybody has been so dear and good and lovely to me, Marilla. I’m not ungrateful – and perhaps – when this horrible ache grows a little less – I’ll find that I can go on living.’

Anne found that she could go on living; the day came when she even smiled again over one of Miss Cornelia’s speeches. But there was something in the smile that had never been in Anne’s smile before and would never be absent from it again.

On the first day she was able to go for a drive Gilbert took her down to Four Winds Point, and left her there while he rowed over the channel to see a patient at the fishing village. A rollicking wind was scudding across the harbour and the dunes, whipping the water into white-caps and washing the sand shore with long lines of silvery breakers.

‘I’m real proud to see you here again, Mistress Blythe,’ said Captain Jim. ‘Sit down – sit down. I’m afeared it’s mighty dusty here today – but there’s no need of looking at dust when you can look at such scenery, is there?’

‘I don’t mind the dust,’ said Anne, ‘but Gilbert says I must keep in the open air. I think I’ll go and sit on the rocks down there.’

‘Would you like company or would you rather be alone?’

‘If by company you mean yours I’d much rather have it than be alone,’ said Anne, smiling. Then she sighed. She had never before minded being alone. Now she dreaded it. When she was alone now she felt so dreadfully alone.

‘Here’s a nice little spot where the wind can’t get at you,’ said Captain Jim, when they reached the rocks. ‘I often sit here. It’s a great place jest to sit and dream.’

‘Oh – dreams,’ sighed Anne. ‘I can’t dream now, Captain Jim – I’m done with dreams.’

‘Oh, no, you’re not, Mistress Blythe – oh, no, you’re not,’ said Captain Jim meditatively. ‘I know how you feel jest now – but if you keep on living you’ll get glad again, and the first thing you know you’ll be dreaming again – thank the good Lord for it! If it wasn’t for our dreams they might as well bury us. How’d we stand living if it wasn’t for our dream of immortality? And that’s a dream that’s
bound
to come true, Mistress Blythe. You’ll see your little Joyce again some day.’

‘But she won’t be my baby,’ said Anne, with trembling lips. ‘Oh, she may be, as Longfellow says, “a fair maiden clothed with celestial grace” – but she’ll be a stranger to me.’

‘God will manage better’n
that
, I believe,’ said Captain Jim.

They were both silent for a little time. Then Captain Jim said very softly:

‘Mistress Blythe, may I tell you about lost Margaret?’

‘Of course,’ said Anne gently. She did not know who ‘lost Margaret’ was, but she felt that she was going to hear the romance of Captain Jim’s life.

‘I’ve often wanted to tell you about her,’ Captain Jim went on. ‘Do you know why, Mistress Blythe? It’s because I want somebody to remember and think of her some time after I’m gone. I can’t bear that her name should be forgotten by all living souls. And now nobody remembers lost Margaret but me.’

Then Captain Jim told the story – an old, old forgotten story, for it was over fifty years since Margaret had fallen asleep one day in her father’s dory and drifted – or so it was supposed, for nothing was ever certainly known as to her fate – out of the channel, beyond the bar, to perish in the black thunder-squall which had come up so suddenly that long-ago summer afternoon. But to Captain Jim those fifty years were but as yesterday when it is past.

‘I walked the shore for months after that,’ he said sadly, ‘looking to find her dear, sweet little body; but the sea never give her back to me. But I’ll find her some time, Mistress Blythe – I’ll find her some time. She’s waiting for me. I wish I could tell you jest how she looked, but I can’t. I’ve seen a fine, silvery mist hanging over the bar at sunrise that seemed like her – and then again I’ve seen a white birch in the woods back yander that made me think of her. She had pale brown hair and a little white, sweet face, and long slender fingers like yours, Mistress Blythe, only browner, for she was a shore girl. Sometimes I wake up in the night and hear the sea calling to me in the old way, and it seems as if lost Margaret called in it. And when there’s a storm and the waves are sobbing and moaning I hear her lamenting among them. And when they laugh on a gay day it’s
her
laugh – lost Margaret’s sweet, roguish little laugh. The sea took her from me, but some day I’ll find her Mistress Blythe. It can’t keep us apart for ever.’

‘I am glad you have told me about her,’ said Anne. ‘I have often wondered why you had lived all your life alone.’

‘I couldn’t ever care for anyone else. Lost Margaret took my heart with her – out there,’ said the old lover, who had been faithful for fifty years to his drowned sweetheart. ‘You won’t mind if I talk a good deal about her, will you, Mistress Blythe? It’s a pleasure to me – for all the pain went out of her memory years ago and left its blessing. I know you’ll never forget her, Mistress Blythe. And if the years, as I hope, bring other little folks to your home, I want you to promise me that you’ll tell
them
the story of lost Margaret, so that her name won’t be forgotten among humankind.’

‘Anne,’ said Leslie, breaking abruptly a short silence, ‘you don’t know how
good
it is to be sitting here with you again – working – and talking – and being silent together.’

They were sitting among the blue-eyed grasses on the bank of the brook in Anne’s garden. The water sparkled and crooned past them; the birches threw dappled shadows over them; roses bloomed along the walks. The sun was beginning to be low, and the air was full of woven music. There was one music of the wind in the firs behind the house, and another of the waves on the bar, and still another from the distant bell of the church near which the wee white lady slept. Anne loved that bell, though it brought sorrowful thoughts now.

She looked curiously at Leslie, who had thrown down her sewing and spoken with a lack of restraint that was very unusual with her.

‘On that horrible night when you were so ill,’ Leslie went on, ‘I kept thinking that perhaps we’d have no more talks and walks and
works
together. And I realized just what your friendship had come to mean to me – just what
you
meant – and just what a hateful little beast I had been.’

‘Leslie! Leslie! I never allow anyone to call my friends names.’

‘It’s true. That’s exactly what I am – a hateful little beast. There’s something I’ve
got
to tell you, Anne. I suppose it will make you despise me, but I
must
confess it. Anne, there have been times this past winter and spring when I have
hated
you.’

‘I knew it,’ said Anne calmly.

‘You
knew
it?’

‘Yes, I saw it in your eyes.’

‘And yet you went on liking me and being my friend.’

‘Well, it was only now and then you hated me, Leslie. Between times you loved me, I think.’

‘I certainly did. But that other horrid feeling was always there, spoiling it, back in my heart. I kept it down – sometimes I forgot it – but sometimes it would surge up and take possession of me. I hated you because I
envied
you – oh, I was sick with envy of you at times. You had a dear little home – and love – and happiness – and glad dreams – everything I wanted – and never had – and never could have. Oh, never could have!
That
was what stung. I wouldn’t have envied you if I had had any
hope
that life would ever be different for me. But I hadn’t – I hadn’t – and it didn’t seem
fair
. It made me rebellious and it hurt me – and so I hated you at times. Oh, I was so ashamed of it – I’m dying of shame now – but I couldn’t conquer it. That night, when I was afraid you mightn’t live – I thought I was going to be punished for my wickedness – and I loved you so then. Anne, Anne, I never had anything to love since my mother died, except Dick’s old dog – and it’s so dreadful to have nothing to love – life is so
empty
– and there’s
nothing
worse than emptiness and I might have loved you so much – and that horrible thing had spoiled it –’