The Complete Anne of Green (121 page)

‘So he has got to be!’ screamed Geraldine.

‘I won’t be –’

‘You’ve got to be –’

‘Children!’ said Anne.

Something in her tone quelled them. They looked at her and saw a Miss Shirley they had not seen before. For the first time in their young lives they felt the force of authority.

‘You, Geraldine,’ said Anne quietly, ‘will go to bed for two hours. You, Gerald, will spend the same length of time in the hall closet. Not a word! You have behaved abominably, and you must take your punishment. Your mother left you in my charge, and you will obey me.’

‘Then punish us
together
,’ said Geraldine, beginning to cry.

‘Yes. You’ve no right to sep’rate us. We’ve never been sep’rated,’ muttered Gerald.

‘You will be now.’ Anne was still very quiet.

Meekly Geraldine took off her clothes and got into one of the cots in their room. Meekly Gerald entered the hall closet. It was a large, airy closet with a window and a chair, and nobody could have called the punishment an unduly severe one. Anne locked the door and sat down with a book by the hall window. At least, for two hours she would know a little peace of mind.

A peep at Geraldine a few minutes later showed her to be sound asleep, looking so lovely in her sleep that Anne almost repented her sternness. Well, a nap would be good for her, anyway. When she wakened she should be permitted to get up, even if the two hours had not expired.

At the end of an hour Geraldine was still sleeping. Gerald had been so quiet that Anne decided that he had taken his punishment like a man, and might be forgiven. After all, Ivy Trent was a vain little monkey, and had probably been very annoying.

Anne unlocked the closet door and opened it. There was no Gerald in the closet. The window was open, and the roof of the side porch was just beneath it. Anne’s lips tightened. She went downstairs and out into the yard. No sign of Gerald. She explored the woodshed and looked up and down the street. Still no sign.

She ran through the garden and through the gate into the lane that led through a patch of scrub woodland to the little pond in Mr Robert Creedmore’s field. Gerald was happily poling himself about on it in the small flat Mr Creedmore kept there. Just as Anne broke through the trees Gerald’s pole, which he had stuck rather deep in the mud, came away with unexpected ease at his third tug, and Gerald promptly shot heels over head backward into the water.

Anne gave an involuntary shriek of dismay, but there was no real cause for alarm. The pond at its deepest would not come up to Gerald’s shoulders, and the spot where he had gone into it was little deeper than his waist. He had somehow got on to his feet, and was standing there rather foolishly, with his aureole plastered drippingly down on his head, when Anne’s shriek was re-echoed behind her, and Geraldine, in her nightgown, tore through the trees and out to the edge of the little wooden platform to which the flat was commonly moored.

With a despairing shriek of ‘Gerald!’ she took a flying leap that landed her with a tremendous splash by Gerald’s side, and almost gave him another ducking.

‘Gerald, are you drowned?’ cried Geraldine. ‘Are you drowned, darling?’

‘No…. no… darling,’ Gerald assured her, through his chattering teeth.

They embraced and kissed passionately.

‘Children, come in here this minute!’ said Anne.

They waded to the shore. The September day, warm in the morning, had turned cold and windy in the late afternoon. They shivered terribly; their faces were blue. Anne, without a word of censure, hurried them home, took off their wet clothes, and put them into Mrs Raymond’s bed, with hotwater bottles at their feet. They still continued to shiver. Had they got a chill? Were they heading for pneumonia?

‘You should have taken better care of us, Miss Shirley,’ said Gerald, still chattering.

‘Course you should,’ said Geraldine.

A distracted Anne flew downstairs and telephoned for the doctor. By the time he came the twins had got warm, and he assured Anne that they were in no danger. If they stayed in bed till tomorrow they would be all right.

He met Mrs Raymond coming up from the station on the way back, and it was a pale, almost hysterical lady who presently rushed in.

‘Oh, Miss Shirley, how
could
you have let my little treasures get into such danger!’

‘That’s just what we told her, Mother,’ chorused the twins.

‘I trusted you. I told you –’

‘I hardly see how I was to blame, Mrs Raymond,’ said Anne, her eyes as cold as grey mist. ‘You will realize this, I think, when you are calmer. The children are quite all right. I simply sent for the doctor as a precautionary measure. If Gerald and Geraldine had obeyed me this would not have happened.’

‘I thought a
teacher
would have a little authority over children,’ said Mrs Raymond bitterly.

‘Other children, perhaps, but not young demons,’ thought Anne. She said only, ‘Since you are here, Mrs Raymond, I think I will go home. I don’t think I can be of any further service, and I have some school work to do this evening.’

As one child the twins hurled themselves out of bed and flung their arms around her.

‘I hope there’ll be a funeral every week,’ cried Gerald, ‘’cause I like you, Miss Shirley, and I hope you’ll come and look after us every time Mother goes away.’

‘So do I,’ said Geraldine.

‘I like you ever so much better than Miss Prouty.’

‘Oh, ever so much!’ said Geraldine.

‘Will you put us in a story?’ demanded Gerald.

‘Oh, do!’ said Geraldine.

‘I’m sure you
meant
well,’ said Mrs Raymond tremulously.

‘Thank you,’ said Anne icily, trying to detach the twins’ clinging arms.

‘Oh, don’t let’s quarrel about it!’ begged Mrs Raymond, her enormous eyes filling with tears. ‘I
can’t
endure quarrelling with anybody.’

‘Certainly not.’ Anne was at her stateliest, and Anne
could
be very stately. ‘I don’t think there is the slightest necessity for quarrelling. I think Gerald and Geraldine have quite enjoyed the day, though I don’t suppose poor little Ivy Trent did.’

Anne went home feeling years older.

‘To think I ever thought Davy was mischievous!’ she reflected.

She found Rebecca in the twilit garden gathering late pansies.

‘Rebecca Dew, I used to think the adage, “Children should be seen and not heard” entirely too harsh. But I see its points now.’

‘My poor darling, I’ll get you a nice supper,’ said Rebecca Dew. And did
not
say, ‘I told you so.’

5

Extract from a letter to Gilbert

Mrs Raymond came down last night, and, with tears in her eyes, begged me to forgive her for her hasty behaviour. ‘If you knew a mother’s heart, Miss Shirley, you would not find it hard to forgive.’

I didn’t find it hard to forgive, as it was. There is really something about Mrs Raymond I can’t help liking, and she was a duck about the Dramatic Club. Just the same, I did
not
say, ‘Any Saturday you want to be away I’ll look after your offspring.’ One learns by experience, even a person so incorrigibly optimistic and trustful as myself.

I find that a certain section of Summerside society is at present very much exercised over the loves of Jarvis Morrow and Dovie Westcott, who, as Rebecca Dew says, ‘have been engaged for over a year, but can’t get any forrader’. Aunt Kate, who is a distant aunt of Dovie’s – to be exact, I think she’s the aunt of a second cousin of Dovie’s on the mother’s side – is deeply interested in the affair, because she thinks Jarvis is such an excellent match for Dovie, and also, I suspect, because she hates Franklin Westcott, and would like to see him routed horse, foot, and artillery. Not that Aunt Kate would admit she ‘hated’ anybody, but Mrs Franklin Westcott was a very dear girlhood friends of hers, and Aunt Kate solemnly avers that he murdered her.

I
am interested in it, partly because I’m very fond of Jarvis and moderately fond of Dovie, and partly, I begin to suspect, because I am an inveterate meddler in other people’s business – always with excellent intentions, of course.

The situation is briefly this: Franklin Westcott is a tall, sombre, hard-bitten merchant, close and unsociable. He lives in a big, old-fashioned house called Elmcroft just outside the town on the upper harbour road. I have met him once or twice, but really know very little about him, except that he has an uncanny habit of saying something and then going off into a long chuckle of soundless laughter. He has never gone to church since hymns came in, and he insists on having all his windows open even in winter storms. I confess to a sneaking sympathy with him in this, but I am probably the only person in Summerside who would. He has got into the habit of being a leading citizen, and nothing municipal dares to be done without his approval.

His wife is dead. It is common report that she was a slave, unable to call her soul her own. Franklin told her, it is said, when he brought her home that he would be master.

Dovie, whose real name is Sibyl, is his only child, a very pretty, plump, lovable girl of nineteen, with a red mouth always falling a little open over her small white teeth, glints of chestnut in her brown hair, alluring blue eyes, and sooty lashes so long you wonder if they can be real. Jen Pringle says it is her eyes Jarvis is really in love with. Jen and I have actually talked the affair over. Jarvis is her favourite cousin.

(In passing, you wouldn’t believe how fond Jen is of me, and I of Jen. She’s really the cutest thing.)

Franklin Westcott has never allowed Dovie to have any beaux, and when Jarvis Morrow began to ‘pay her attention’ he forbade him the house, and told Dovie there was to be no more ‘running round with that fellow’. But the mischief had been done. Dovie and Jarvis were already fathoms deep in love.

Everybody in town is in sympathy with the lovers. Franklin Westcott is really unreasonable. Jarvis is a successful young lawyer, of good family, with good prospects, and a very nice, decent lad in himself.

‘Nothing could be more suitable,’ declares Rebecca Dew. ‘Jarvis Morrow could have
any
girl he wanted in Summerside. Franklin Westcott has just made up his mind that Dovie is to be an old maid. He wants to be sure of a housekeeper when Aunt Maggie dies.’

‘Isn’t there anyone who has any influence with him?’ I asked.

‘Nobody can argue with Franklin Westcott. He’s too sarcastical. And if you get the better of him he throws a tantrum. I’ve never seen him in one of his tantrums, but I’ve heard Miss Prouty describe how he acted one time she was there sewing. He got mad over something, nobody knew what. He just grabbed everything in sight and flung it out of the window. Milton’s poems went flying clean over the fence into George Clarke’s lily-pond. He’s always kind of had a grudge at life. Miss Prouty says her mother told her that the yelps of him when he was born passed anything she ever heard. I suppose God has some reason for making men like that, but you’d wonder. No, I can’t see any chance for Jarvis and Dovie unless they elope. It’s a kind of low-down thing to do, though there’s been a terrible lot of romantic nonsense talked about eloping. But this is a case where anybody would excuse it.’

I don’t know what to do, but I must do something. I simply can’t sit still and see people make a mess of their lives under my very nose, no matter how many tantrums Franklin Westcott takes. Jarvis Morrow is not going to wait for ever. Rumour has it that he is getting out of patience already, and has been seen savagely digging Dovie’s name out of a tree on which he had cut it. There is an attractive Palmer girl who is reported to be throwing herself at his head, and his sister is said to have said that his mother has said that
her
son has no need to dangle for years at any girl’s apron-string.

Really, Gilbert, I’m quite unhappy about it.

It’s moonlight, tonight, beloved: moonlight on the willows of the yard, moonlit dimples all over the harbour, where a phantom ship is drifting outward, moonlight on the old graveyard, on my own private valley, on the Storm King. And it will be moonlight in Lovers’ Lane and on the Lake of Shining Waters and the old Haunted Wood and Violet Vale. There should be fairy dances on the hills tonight. But, Gilbert dear, moonlight with no one to share it is just – just
moonshine
.

I wish I could take little Elizabeth for a walk. She loves a moonlight walk. We had some delightful ones when she was at Green Gables. But at home Elizabeth never sees moonlight except from the window.

I am beginning to be a little worried about her, too. She is going on ten now, and those two old ladies haven’t the least idea what she needs, spiritually and emotionally. As long as she has good food and good clothes they cannot imagine her needing anything more. And it will be worse with every succeeding year. ‘What kind of a girlhood will the poor child have?

6

Jarvis Morrow walked home from the High School Commencement with Anne and told her his woes.

‘You’ll have to run away with her, Jarvis. Everybody says so. As a rule I don’t approve of elopements’ (I said that like a teacher of forty years’ experience, thought Anne, with an unseen grin), ‘but there are exceptions to all rules.’

‘It takes two to make a bargain, Anne. I can’t elope alone. Dovie is so frightened of her father I can’t get her to agree. And it wouldn’t be an elopement, really. She’d just come to my sister Julia’s – Mrs Stevens, you know – some evening. I’d have the minister there, and we could be married respectably enough to please anybody, and go over to spend our honeymoon with Aunt Bertha in Kingsport. Simple as that. But I can’t get Dovie to chance it. The poor darling has been giving in to her father’s whims and crotchets so long she hasn’t any will-power left.’

‘You’ll simply have to make her do it, Jarvis.’

‘Great Peter, you don’t suppose I haven’t tried, do you, Anne? I’ve begged till I was black in the face. When she’s with me she’ll almost promise it, but the minute she’s home again she sends me word she can’t. It seems odd, Anne, but the poor child is really fond of her father, and she can’t bear the thought of his never forgiving her.’