Anne of Avonlea - Lucy Maud Montgomery (popular ebook readers txt) 📗

must be delightful to come into the world with the mayflowers and violets. You would always feel that you were their foster sister. But since I didn’t, the next best thing is to celebrate my birthday in the spring. Priscilla is coming over Saturday and Jane will be home. We’ll all four start off to the woods and spend a golden day making the acquaintance of the spring. We none of us really know her yet, but we’ll meet her back there as we never can anywhere else. I want to explore all those fields and lonely places anyhow. I have a conviction that there are scores of beautiful nooks there that have never really been SEEN although they may have been LOOKED at. We’ll make friends with wind and sky and sun, and bring home the spring in our hearts.”

“It SOUNDS awfully nice,” said Diana, with some inward distrust of Anne’s magic of words. “But won’t it be very damp in some places yet?”

“Oh, we’ll wear rubbers,” was Anne’s concession to practicalities. “And I want you to come over early Saturday morning and help me prepare lunch. I’m going to have the daintiest things possible . . . things that will match the spring, you understand . . . little jelly tarts and lady fingers, and drop cookies frosted with pink and yellow icing, and buttercup cake. And we must have sandwiches too, though they’re NOT very poetical.”

Saturday proved an ideal day for a picnic . . . a day of breeze and blue, warm, sunny, with a little rollicking wind blowing across meadow and orchard. Over every sunlit upland and field was a delicate, flower-starred green.

Mr. Harrison, harrowing at the back of his farm and feeling some of the spring witch-work even in his sober, middle-aged blood, saw four girls, basket laden, tripping across the end of his field where it joined a fringing woodland of birch and fir. Their blithe voices and laughter echoed down to him.

“It’s so easy to be happy on a day like this, isn’t it?” Anne was saying, with true Anneish philosophy. “Let’s try to make this a really golden day, girls, a day to which we can always look back with delight. We’re to seek for beauty and refuse to see anything else. ‘Begone, dull care!’ Jane, you are thinking of something that went wrong in school yesterday.”

“How do you know?” gasped Jane, amazed.

“Oh, I know the expression . . . I’ve felt it often enough on my own face. But put it out of your mind, there’s a dear. It will keep till Monday . . . or if it doesn’t so much the better. Oh, girls, girls, see that patch of violets! There’s something for memory’s picture gallery. When I’m eighty years old . . . if I ever am . . . I shall shut my eyes and see those violets just as I see them now. That’s the first good gift our day has given us.”

“If a kiss could be seen I think it would look like a violet,” said Priscilla.

Anne glowed.

“I’m so glad you SPOKE that thought, Priscilla, instead of just thinking it and keeping it to yourself. This world would be a much more interesting place . . . although it IS very interesting anyhow . . . if people spoke out their real thoughts.”

“It would be too hot to hold some folks,” quoted Jane sagely.

“I suppose it might be, but that would be their own faults for thinking nasty things. Anyhow, we can tell all our thoughts today because we are going to have nothing but beautiful thoughts. Everybody can say just what comes into her head. THAT is conversation. Here’s a little path I never saw before. Let’s explore it.”

The path was a winding one, so narrow that the girls walked in single file and even then the fir boughs brushed their faces. Under the firs were velvety cushions of moss, and further on, where the trees were smaller and fewer, the ground was rich in a variety of green growing things.

“What a lot of elephant’s ears,” exclaimed Diana. “I’m going to pick a big bunch, they’re so pretty.”

“How did such graceful feathery things ever come to have such a dreadful name?” asked Priscilla.

“Because the person who first named them either had no imagination at all or else far too much,” said Anne, “Oh, girls, look at that!”

“That” was a shallow woodland pool in the center of a little open glade where the path ended. Later on in the season it would be dried up and its place filled with a rank growth of ferns; but now it was a glimmering placid sheet, round as a saucer and clear as crystal. A ring of slender young birches encircled it and little ferns fringed its margin.

“HOW sweet!” said Jane.

“Let us dance around it like wood-nymphs,” cried Anne, dropping her basket and extending her hands.

But the dance was not a success for the ground was boggy and Jane’s rubbers came off.

“You can’t be a wood-nymph if you have to wear rubbers,” was her decision.

“Well, we must name this place before we leave it,” said Anne, yielding to the indisputable logic of facts. “Everybody suggest a name and we’ll draw lots. Diana?”

“Birch Pool,” suggested Diana promptly.

“Crystal Lake,” said Jane.

Anne, standing behind them, implored Priscilla with her eyes not to perpetrate another such name and Priscilla rose to the occasion with “Glimmer-glass.” Anne’s selection was “The Fairies’ Mirror.”

The names were written on strips of birch bark with a pencil Schoolma’am Jane produced from her pocket, and placed in Anne’s hat. Then Priscilla shut her eyes and drew one. “Crystal Lake,” read Jane triumphantly. Crystal Lake it was, and if Anne thought that chance had played the pool a shabby trick she did not say so.

Pushing through the undergrowth beyond, the girls came out to the young green seclusion of Mr. Silas Sloane’s back pasture. Across it they found the entrance to a lane striking up through the woods and voted to explore it also. It rewarded their quest with a succession of pretty surprises. First, skirting Mr. Sloane’s pasture, came an archway of wild cherry trees all in bloom. The girls swung their hats on their arms and wreathed their hair with the creamy, fluffy blossoms. Then the lane turned at right angles and plunged into a spruce wood so thick and dark that they walked in a gloom as of twilight, with not a glimpse of sky or sunlight to be seen.

“This is where the bad wood elves dwell,” whispered Anne. “They are impish and malicious but they can’t harm us, because they are not allowed to do evil in the spring. There was one peeping at us around that old twisted fir; and didn’t you see a group of them on that big freckly toadstool we just passed? The good fairies always dwell in the sunshiny places.”

“I wish there really were fairies,” said Jane. “Wouldn’t it be nice to have three wishes granted you . . . or even only one? What would you wish for, girls, if you could have a wish granted? I’d wish to be rich and beautiful and clever.”

“I’d wish to be tall and slender,” said Diana.

“I would wish to be famous,” said Priscilla. Anne thought of her hair and then dismissed the thought as unworthy.

“I’d wish it might be spring all the time and in everybody’s heart and all our lives,” she said.

“But that,” said Priscilla, “would be just wishing this world were like heaven.”

“Only like a part of heaven. In the other parts there would be summer and autumn . . . yes, and a bit of winter, too. I think I want glittering snowy fields and white frosts in heaven sometimes. Don’t you, Jane?”

“I . . . I don’t know,” said Jane uncomfortably. Jane was a good girl, a member of the church, who tried conscientiously to live up to her profession and believed everything she had been taught. But she never thought about heaven any more than she could help, for all that.

“Minnie May asked me the other day if we would wear our best dresses every day in heaven,” laughed Diana.

“And didn’t you tell her we would?” asked Anne.

“Mercy, no! I told her we wouldn’t be thinking of dresses at all there.”

“Oh, I think we will . . . a LITTLE,” said Anne earnestly. “There’ll be plenty of time in all eternity for it without neglecting more important things. I believe we’ll all wear beautiful dresses . . . or I suppose RAIMENT would be a more suitable way of speaking. I shall want to wear pink for a few centuries at first . . . it would take me that long to get tired of it, I feel sure. I do love pink so and I can never wear it in THIS world.”

Past the spruces the lane dipped down into a sunny little open where a log bridge spanned a brook; and then came the glory of a sunlit beechwood where the air was like transparent golden wine, and the leaves fresh and green, and the wood floor a mosaic of tremulous sunshine. Then more wild cherries, and a little valley of lissome firs, and then a hill so steep that the girls lost their breath climbing it; but when they reached the top and came out into the open the prettiest surprise of all awaited them.

Beyond were the “back fields” of the farms that ran out to the upper Carmody road. Just before them, hemmed in by beeches and firs but open to the south, was a little corner and in it a garden . . . or what had once been a garden. A tumbledown stone dyke, overgrown with mosses and grass, surrounded it. Along the eastern side ran a row of garden cherry trees, white as a snowdrift. There were traces of old paths still and a double line of rosebushes through the middle; but all the rest of the space was a sheet of yellow and white narcissi, in their airiest, most lavish, wind-swayed bloom above the lush green grasses.

“Oh, how perfectly lovely!” three of the girls cried. Anne only gazed in eloquent silence.

“How in the world does it happen that there ever was a garden back here?” said Priscilla in amazement.

“It must be Hester Gray’s garden,” said Diana. “I’ve heard mother speak of it but I never saw it before, and I wouldn’t have supposed that it could be in existence still. You’ve heard the story, Anne?”

“No, but the name seems familiar to me.”

“Oh, you’ve seen it in the graveyard. She is buried down there in the poplar corner. You know the little brown stone with the opening gates carved on it and ‘Sacred to the memory of Hester Gray, aged twenty-two.’ Jordan Gray is buried right beside her but there’s no stone to him. It’s a wonder Marilla never told you about it, Anne. To be sure, it happened thirty years ago and everybody has forgotten.”

“Well, if there’s a story we must have it,” said Anne. “Let’s sit right down here among the narcissi and Diana will tell it. Why, girls, there are hundreds of them . . . they’ve spread over everything. It looks as if the garden were carpeted with moonshine and sunshine combined. This is a discovery worth making. To think that I’ve lived within a mile of this place for six years and have never seen it before! Now, Diana.”

“Long ago,” began Diana, “this farm belonged to old Mr. David Gray. He didn’t live on it . . . he lived where Silas Sloane lives now. He had one son, Jordan, and he went up to Boston one winter to work and while he was there he fell in love with a girl named Hester Murray. She was working in a store and she hated it. She’d been brought up in the country and she always wanted to get back. When Jordan asked her to marry