Anne's House of Dreams (2 page)

‘Oh, so that is why you said, “You’ve got a new clock at Green Gables, haven’t you?” I couldn’t imagine what you meant. I heard a vicious click as soon as you had spoken. I suppose it was the Pye receiver being hung up with profane energy. Well, never mind the Pyes. As Mrs Rachel says, “Pyes they always were and Pyes they always will be, world without end, amen.” I want to talk of pleasanter things. It’s all settled as to where my new home shall be.’

‘Oh, Anne, where? I do hope it’s near here.’

‘No-o-o, that’s the drawback. Gilbert is going to settle at Four Winds Harbour – sixty miles from here.’

‘Sixty! It might as well be six hundred,’ sighed Diana. ‘I never can get farther from home now than Charlottetown.’

‘You’ll have to come to Four Winds. It’s the most beautiful harbour on the Island. There’s a little village called Glen St Mary at its head, and Dr David Blythe has been practising there for fifty years. He is Gilbert’s great-uncle, you know. He is going to retire, and Gilbert is to take over his practice. Dr Blythe is going to keep his house, though, so we shall have to find a habitation for ourselves. I don’t know yet what it is, or where it will be in reality, but I have a little house o’ dreams all furnished in my imagination – a tiny, delightful castle in Spain.’

‘Where are you going for your wedding tour?’ asked Diana.

‘Nowhere. Don’t look horrified, Diana dearest. You suggest Mrs Harmon Andrews. She, no doubt, will remark condescendingly that people who can’t afford wedding “towers” are real sensible not to take them; and then she’ll remind me that Jane went to Europe for hers. I want to spend
my
honeymoon at Four Winds in my own dear house of dreams.’

‘And you’ve decided not to have any bridesmaid?’

‘There isn’t anyone to have. You and Phil and Priscilla and Jane all stole a march on me in the matter of marriage; and Stella is teaching in Vancouver. I have no other “kindred soul” and I won’t have a bridesmaid who isn’t.’

‘But you are going to wear a veil, aren’t you?’ asked Diana, anxiously.

‘Yes, indeed. I shouldn’t feel like a bride without one. I remember telling Matthew, that evening when he brought me to Green Gables, that I never expected to be a bride because I was so homely no one would ever want to marry me – unless some foreign missionary did. I had an idea then that foreign missionaries couldn’t afford to be finicky in the matter of looks if they wanted a girl to risk her life among cannibals. You should have seen the foreign missionary Priscilla married. He was as handsome and inscrutable as those day-dreams we once planned to marry ourselves, Diana; he was the best-dressed man I ever met, and he raved over Priscilla’s “ethereal, golden beauty”. But of course there are no cannibals in Japan.’

‘Your wedding dress is a dream, anyhow,’ sighed Diana rapturously. ‘You’ll look like a perfect queen in it – you’re so tall and slender. How
do
you keep so slim, Anne? I’m fatter than ever – I’ll soon have no waist at all.’

‘Stoutness and slimness seem to be matters of predestination,’ said Anne. ‘At all events, Mrs Harmon Andrews can’t say to you what she said to me when I came home from Summerside, “Well, Anne, you’re just about as skinny as ever.” It sounds quite romantic to be “slender”, but “skinny” has a very different tang.’

‘Mrs Harmon has been talking about your trousseau. She admits it’s as nice as Jane’s, although she says Jane married a millionaire and you are only marrying a “poor young doctor without a cent to his name”.’

Anne laughed.

‘My dresses
are
nice. I love pretty things. I remember the first party dress I ever had – the brown gloria Matthew gave me for our school concert. Before that everything I had was so ugly. It seemed to me that I stepped into a new world that night.’

‘That was the night Gilbert recited “Bingen on the Rhine”, and looked at you when he said, “There’s another,
not
a sister.” And you were so furious because he put your pink tissue rose in his breast pocket! You didn’t much imagine then that you would ever marry him.’

‘Oh, well, that’s another instance of predestination,’ laughed Anne, as they went down the garret stairs.

There was more excitement in the air of Green Gables than there had ever been before in all its history. Even Marilla was so excited that she couldn’t help showing it – which was little short of being phenomenal.

‘There’s never been a wedding in this house,’ she said, half apologetically, to Mrs Rachel Lynde. ‘When I was a child I heard an old minister say that a house was not a real home until it had been consecrated by a birth, a wedding, and a death. We’ve had deaths here – my father and mother died here as well as Matthew; and we’ve even had a birth here. Long ago, just after we moved into this house, we had a married hired man for a little while, and his wife had a baby here. But there’s never been a wedding before. It does seem so strange to think of Anne being married. In a way she just seems to me the little girl Matthew brought home here fourteen years ago. I can’t realize that she’s grown up. I shall never forget what I felt when I saw Matthew bringing in a
girl
. I wonder what became of the boy we would have got if there hadn’t been a mistake. I wonder what
his
fate was.’

‘Well, it was a fortunate mistake,’ said Mrs Rachel Lynde, ‘though, mind you, there was a time I didn’t think so – that evening I came up to see Anne and she treated us to such a scene. Many things have changed since then, that’s what.’

Mrs Rachel sighed, and then brisked up again. When weddings were in order Mrs Rachel was ready to let the dead past bury its dead.

‘I’m going to give Anne two of my cotton warp spreads,’ she resumed. ‘A tobacco-stripe one and an apple-leaf one. She tells me they’re getting to be real fashionable again. Well, fashion or no fashion, I don’t believe there’s anything prettier for a spare-room bed than a nice apple-leaf spread, that’s what. I must see about getting them bleached. I’ve had them sewed up in cotton bags ever since Thomas died, and no doubt they’re an awful colour. But there’s a month yet, and dew-bleaching will work wonders.’

Only a month! Marilla sighed and then said proudly:

‘I’m giving Anne that half-dozen braided rugs I have in the garret. I never supposed she’d want them – they’re so old-fashioned, and nobody seems to want anything but hooked mats now. But she asked me for them – said she’d rather have them than anything else for her floors. They
are
pretty. I made them of the nicest rags, and braided them in stripes. It was such company these last few winters. And I’ll make her enough blue-plum preserve to stock her jam closet for a year. It seems real strange. Those blue-plum trees hadn’t even a blossom for three years, and I thought they might as well be cut down. And this last spring they were white, and such a crop of plums I never remember at Green Gables.’

‘Well, thank goodness that Anne and Gilbert really are going to be married after all. It’s what I’ve always prayed for,’ said Mrs Rachel, in the tone of one who is comfortably sure that her prayers have availed much. ‘It was a great relief to find out that she really didn’t mean to take the Kingsport man. He was rich, to be sure, and Gilbert is poor – at least, to begin with; but then he’s an Island boy.’

‘He’s Gilbert Blythe,’ said Marilla contentedly. Marilla would have died the death before she would have put into words the thought that was always in the background of her mind whenever she had looked at Gilbert from his childhood up – the thought that, had it not been for her own wilful pride long, long ago, he might have been
her
son. Marilla felt that, in some strange way, his marriage with Anne would put right that old mistake. Good had come out of the evil of the ancient bitterness.

As for Anne herself, she was so happy that she almost felt frightened. The gods, so says the old superstition, do not like to behold too happy mortals. It is certain, at least, that some human beings do not. Two of that ilk descended upon Anne one violet dusk and proceeded to do what in them lay to prick the rainbow bubble of her satisfaction. If she thought she was getting any particular prize in young Dr Blythe, or if she imagined that he was still as infatuated with her as he might have been in his salad days, it was surely their duty to put the matter before her in another light. Yet these two worthy ladies were not enemies of Anne; on the contrary they were really quite fond of her, and would have defended her as their own young had anyone else attacked her. Human nature is not obliged to be consistent.

Mrs Inglis –
née
Jane Andrews, to quote from the
Daily Enterprise
– came with her mother and Mrs Jasper Bell. But in Jane the milk of human kindness had not been curdled by years of matrimonial bickerings. Her lines had fallen in pleasant places. In spite of the fact – as Mrs Rachel Lynde would say – that she had married a millionaire, her marriage had been happy. Wealth had not spoiled her. She was still the placid, amiable, pink-cheeked Jane of the old quartette, sympathizing with her old chum’s happiness and as keenly interested in all the dainty details of Anne’s trousseau as if it could rival her own silken and bejewelled splendours. Jane was not brilliant, and had probably never made a remark worth listening to in her life; but she never said anything that would hurt anyone’s feelings – which may be a negative talent but is likewise a rare and enviable one.

‘So Gilbert didn’t go back on you after all,’ said Mrs Harmon Andrews, contriving to convey an expression of surprise in her tone. ‘Well, the Blythes generally keep their word when they’ve once passed it, no matter what happens. Let me see – you’re twenty-five, aren’t you, Anne? When I was a girl twenty-five was the first corner. But you look quite young. Red-headed people always do.’

‘Red hair is very fashionable now,’ said Anne, trying to smile, but speaking rather coldly. Life had developed in her a sense of humour which helped her over many difficulties; but as yet nothing had availed to steel her against a reference to her hair.

‘So it is – so it is,’ conceded Mrs Harmon. ‘There’s no telling what queer freaks fashion will take. Well, Anne, your things are very pretty, and very suitable to your position in life, aren’t they, Jane? I hope you’ll be very happy. You have my best wishes, I’m sure. A long engagement doesn’t often turn out well. But, of course, in your case it couldn’t be helped.’

‘Gilbert looks very young for a doctor. I’m afraid people won’t have much confidence in him,’ said Mrs Jasper Bell gloomily. Then she shut her mouth tightly, as if she had said what she considered it her duty to say and held her conscience clear. She belonged to the type which always has a stringy black feather in its hat and straggling locks of hair on its neck.

Anne’s surface pleasure in her pretty bridal things was temporarily shadowed; but the deeps of happiness below could not thus be disturbed; and the little stings of Mesdames Bell and Andrews were forgotten when Gilbert came later, and they wandered down to the birches of the brook, which had been saplings when Anne had come to Green Gables, but were now tall, ivory columns in a fairy palace of twilight and stars. In their shadows Anne and Gilbert talked in lover-fashion of their new home and their new life together.

‘I’ve found a nest for us, Anne.’

‘Oh, where? Not right in the village, I hope. I wouldn’t like that altogether.’

‘No. There was no house to be had in the village. This is a little white house on the harbour shore, halfway between Glen St Mary and Four Winds Point. It’s a little out of the way, but when we get a phone in that won’t matter so much. The situation is beautiful. It looks to the sunset and has the great blue harbour before it. The sand-dunes aren’t very far away – the sea-winds blow over them and the sea-spray drenches them.’

‘But the house itself, Gilbert –
our
first home? What is it like?’

‘Not very large, but large enough for us. There’s a splendid living-room with a fireplace in it downstairs, and a dining-room that looks out on the harbour, and a little room that will do for my office. It is about sixty years old – the oldest house in Four Winds. But it has been kept in pretty good repair, and was all done over about fifteen years ago – shingled, plastered, and re-floored. It was well built to begin with. I understand that there was some romantic story connected with its building, but the man I rented it from didn’t know it. He said Captain Jim was the only one who could spin that old yarn now.’

‘Who is Captain Jim?’

‘The keeper of the lighthouse on Four Winds Point. You’ll love that Four Winds light, Anne. It’s a revolving one, and it flashes like a magnificent star through the twilights. We can see it from our living-room windows and our front door.’

‘Who owns the house?’

‘Well, it’s the property of the Glen St Mary Presbyterian Church now, and I rented it from the trustees. But it belonged until lately to a very old lady, Miss Elizabeth Russell. She died last spring, and as she had no near relatives – she left her property to the Glen St Mary Church. Her furniture is still in the house, and I bought most of it – for a mere song, you might say, because it was all so old-fashioned that the trustees despaired of selling it. Glen St Mary folks prefer plush brocade and sideboards with mirrors and ornamentations, I fancy. But Miss Russell’s furniture is very good and I feel sure you’ll like it, Anne.’

‘So far, good,’ said Anne, nodding cautious approval. ‘But, Gilbert, people cannot live by furniture alone. You haven’t yet mentioned one very important thing. Are there
trees
about this house?’

‘Heaps of them, O dryad! There is a big grove of fir-trees behind it, two rows of Lombardy poplars down the lane, and a ring of white birches around a very delightful garden. Our front door opens right into the garden, but there is another entrance – a little gate hung between two firs. The hinges are on one trunk and the catch on the other. Their boughs form an arch overhead.’

‘Oh, I’m so glad! I couldn’t live where there were no trees – something vital in me would starve. Well, after that, there’s no use asking you if there’s a brook anywhere near.
That
would be expecting too much.’