LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

or what day we thought it on. But I feel sure Grandma thinks that sermons and Sunday School lessons are the only things you can think truly religious thoughts about. And when it comes to a difference of opinion between Grandma and teacher I don’t know what to do. In my heart” … Paul laid his hand on his breast and raised very serious blue eyes to Miss Lavendar’s immediately sympathetic face … “I agree with teacher. But then, you see, Grandma has brought father up HER way and made a brilliant success of him; and teacher has never brought anybody up yet, though she’s helping with Davy and Dora. But you can’t tell how they’ll turn out till they ARE grown up. So sometimes I feel as if it might be safer to go by Grandma’s opinions.”

      “I think it would,” agreed Anne solemnly. “Anyway, I daresay that if your Grandma and I both got down to what we really do mean, under our different ways of expressing it, we’d find out we both meant much the same thing. You’d better go by her way of expressing it, since it’s been the result of experience. We’ll have to wait until we see how the twins do turn out before we can be sure that my way is equally good.” After lunch they went back to the garden, where Paul made the acquaintance of the echoes, to his wonder and delight, while Anne and Miss Lavendar sat on the stone bench under the poplar and talked.

      “So you are going away in the fall?” said Miss Lavendar wistfully. “I ought to be glad for your sake, Anne … but I’m horribly, selfishly sorry. I shall miss you so much. Oh, sometimes, I think it is of no use to make friends. They only go out of your life after awhile and leave a hurt that is worse than the emptiness before they came.”

      “That sounds like something Miss Eliza Andrews might say but never Miss Lavendar,” said Anne. “NOTHING is worse than emptiness … and I’m not going out of your life. There are such things as letters and vacations. Dearest, I’m afraid you’re looking a little pale and tired.”

      “Oh … hoo … hoo … hoo,” went Paul on the dyke, where he had been making noises diligently … not all of them melodious in the making, but all coming back transmuted into the very gold and silver of sound by the fairy alchemists over the river. Miss Lavendar made an impatient movement with her pretty hands.

      “I’m just tired of everything … even of the echoes. There is nothing in my life but echoes … echoes of lost hopes and dreams and joys. They’re beautiful and mocking. Oh Anne, it’s horrid of me to talk like this when I have company. It’s just that I’m getting old and it doesn’t agree with me. I know I’ll be fearfully cranky by the time I’m sixty. But perhaps all I need is a course of blue pills.” At this moment Charlotta the Fourth, who had disappeared after lunch, returned, and announced that the northeast corner of Mr. John Kimball’s pasture was red with early strawberries, and wouldn’t Miss Shirley like to go and pick some.

      “Early strawberries for tea!” exclaimed Miss Lavendar. “Oh, I’m not so old as I thought … and I don’t need a single blue pill! Girls, when you come back with your strawberries we’ll have tea out here under the silver poplar. I’ll have it all ready for you with home-grown cream.”

      Anne and Charlotta the Fourth accordingly betook themselves back to Mr. Kimball’s pasture, a green remote place where the air was as soft as velvet and fragrant as a bed of violets and golden as amber.

      “Oh, isn’t it sweet and fresh back here?” breathed Anne. “I just feel as if I were drinking in the sunshine.”

      “Yes, ma’am, so do I. That’s just exactly how I feel too, ma’am,” agreed Charlotta the Fourth, who would have said precisely the same thing if Anne had remarked that she felt like a pelican of the wilderness. Always after Anne had visited Echo Lodge Charlotta the Fourth mounted to her little room over the kitchen and tried before her looking glass to speak and look and move like Anne. Charlotta could never flatter herself that she quite succeeded; but practice makes perfect, as Charlotta had learned at school, and she fondly hoped that in time she might catch the trick of that dainty uplift of chin, that quick, starry outflashing of eyes, that fashion of walking as if you were a bough swaying in the wind. It seemed so easy when you watched Anne. Charlotta the Fourth admired Anne wholeheartedly. It was not that she thought her so very handsome. Diana Barry’s beauty of crimson cheek and black curls was much more to Charlotta the Fourth’s taste than Anne’s moonshine charm of luminous gray eyes and the pale, everchanging roses of her cheeks.

      “But I’d rather look like you than be pretty,” she told Anne sincerely.

      Anne laughed, sipped the honey from the tribute, and cast away the sting. She was used to taking her compliments mixed. Public opinion never agreed on Anne’s looks. People who had heard her called handsome met her and were disappointed. People who had heard her called plain saw her and wondered where other people’s eyes were. Anne herself would never believe that she had any claim to beauty. When she looked in the glass all she saw was a little pale face with seven freckles on the nose thereof. Her mirror never revealed to her the elusive, ever-varying play of feeling that came and went over her features like a rosy illuminating flame, or the charm of dream and laughter alternating in her big eyes.

      While Anne was not beautiful in any strictly defined sense of the word she possessed a certain evasive charm and distinction of appearance that left beholders with a pleasurable sense of satisfaction in that softly rounded girlhood of hers, with all its strongly felt potentialities. Those who knew Anne best felt, without realizing that they felt it, that her greatest attraction was the aura of possibility surrounding her… the power of future development that was in her. She seemed to walk in an atmosphere of things about to happen.

      As they picked, Charlotta the Fourth confided to Anne her fears regarding Miss Lavendar. The warmhearted little handmaiden was honestly worried over her adored mistress’ condition.

      “Miss Lavendar isn’t well, Miss Shirley, ma’am. I’m sure she isn’t, though she never complains. She hasn’t seemed like herself this long while, ma’am … not since that day you and Paul were here together before. I feel sure she caught cold that night, ma’am. After you and him had gone she went out and walked in the garden for long after dark with nothing but a little shawl on her. There was a lot of snow on the walks and I feel sure she got a chill, ma’am. Ever since then I’ve noticed her acting tired and lonesome like. She don’t seem to take an interest in anything, ma’am. She never pretends company’s coming, nor fixes up for it, nor nothing, ma’am. It’s only when you come she seems to chirk up a bit. And the worst sign of all, Miss Shirley, ma’am …” Charlotta the Fourth lowered her voice as if she were about to tell some exceedingly weird and awful symptom indeed … “is that she never gets cross now when I breaks things. Why, Miss Shirley, ma’am, yesterday I bruk her green and yaller bowl that’s always stood on the bookcase. Her grandmother brought it out from England and Miss Lavendar was awful choice of it. I was dusting it just as careful, Miss Shirley, ma’am, and it slipped out, so fashion, afore I could grab holt of it, and bruk into about forty millyun pieces. I tell you I was sorry and scared. I thought Miss Lavendar would scold me awful, ma’am; and I’d ruther she had than take it the way she did. She just come in and hardly looked at it and said, ‘It’s no matter, Charlotta. Take up the pieces and throw them away.’ Just like that, Miss Shirley, ma’am … ‘take up the pieces and throw them away,’ as if it wasn’t her grandmother’s bowl from England. Oh, she isn’t well and I feel awful bad about it. She’s got nobody to look after her but me.”

      Charlotta the Fourth’s eyes brimmed up with tears. Anne patted the little brown paw holding the cracked pink cup sympathetically.

      “I think Miss Lavendar needs a change, Charlotta. She stays here alone too much. Can’t we induce her to go away for a little trip?”

      Charlotta shook her head, with its rampant bows, disconsolately.

      “I don’t think so, Miss Shirley, ma’am. Miss Lavendar hates visiting. She’s only got three relations she ever visits and she says she just goes to see them as a family duty. Last time when she come home she said she wasn’t going to visit for family duty no more. ‘I’ve come home in love with loneliness, Charlotta,’ she says to me, ‘and I never want to stray from my own vine and fig tree again. My relations try so hard

Скачать книгу