Book: Rainbow Valley

L >> Lucy Maud Montgomery >> Rainbow Valley




"They must come and see me soon. Tell them the doughnut jar is
always full."

"Oh, at supper they were planning a descent on you. They'll go
soon; but they must settle down to school again now. And the
twins are going to take music lessons."

"Not from the Methodist minister's wife, I hope?" said Miss
Cornelia anxiously.

"No--from Rosemary West. I was up last evening to arrange it
with her. What a pretty girl she is!"

"Rosemary holds her own well. She isn't as young as she once
was."

"I thought her very charming. I've never had any real
acquaintance with her, you know. Their house is so out of the
way, and I've seldom ever seen her except at church."

"People always have liked Rosemary West, though they don't
understand her," said Miss Cornelia, quite unconscious of the
high tribute she was paying to Rosemary's charm. "Ellen has
always kept her down, so to speak. She has tyrannized over her,
and yet she has always indulged her in a good many ways.
Rosemary was engaged once, you know--to young Martin Crawford.
His ship was wrecked on the Magdalens and all the crew were
drowned. Rosemary was just a child--only seventeen. But she was
never the same afterwards. She and Ellen have stayed very close
at home since their mother's death. They don't often get to
their own church at Lowbridge and I understand Ellen doesn't
approve of going too often to a Presbyterian church. To the
Methodist she NEVER goes, I'll say that much for her. That
family of Wests have always been strong Episcopalians. Rosemary
and Ellen are pretty well off. Rosemary doesn't really need to
give music lessons. She does it because she likes to. They are
distantly related to Leslie, you know. Are the Fords coming to
the harbour this summer?"

"No. They are going on a trip to Japan and will probably be away
for a year. Owen's new novel is to have a Japanese setting.
This will be the first summer that the dear old House of Dreams
will be empty since we left it."

"I should think Owen Ford might find enough to write about in
Canada without dragging his wife and his innocent children off to
a heathen country like Japan," grumbled Miss Cornelia. "_The
Life Book_ was the best book he's ever written and he got the
material for that right here in Four Winds."

"Captain Jim gave him the most of that, you know. And he
collected it all over the world. But Owen's books are all
delightful, I think."

"Oh, they're well enough as far as they go. I make it a point to
read every one he writes, though I've always held, Anne dearie,
that reading novels is a sinful waste of time. I shall write and
tell him my opinion of this Japanese business, believe ME. Does
he want Kenneth and Persis to be converted into pagans?"

With which unanswerable conundrum Miss Cornelia took her
departure. Susan proceeded to put Rilla in bed and Anne sat on
the veranda steps under the early stars and dreamed her
incorrigible dreams and learned all over again for the hundredth
happy time what a moonrise splendour and sheen could be on Four
Winds Harbour.



CHAPTER III. THE INGLESIDE CHILDREN

In daytime the Blythe children liked very well to play in the
rich, soft greens and glooms of the big maple grove between
Ingleside and the Glen St. Mary pond; but for evening revels
there was no place like the little valley behind the maple grove.
It was a fairy realm of romance to them. Once, looking from the
attic windows of Ingleside, through the mist and aftermath of a
summer thunderstorm, they had seen the beloved spot arched by a
glorious rainbow, one end of which seemed to dip straight down to
where a corner of the pond ran up into the lower end of the
valley.

"Let us call it Rainbow Valley," said Walter delightedly, and
Rainbow Valley thenceforth it was.

Outside of Rainbow Valley the wind might be rollicking and
boisterous. Here it always went gently. Little, winding, fairy
paths ran here and there over spruce roots cushioned with moss.
Wild cherry trees, that in blossom time would be misty white,
were scattered all over the valley, mingling with the dark
spruces. A little brook with amber waters ran through it from
the Glen village. The houses of the village were comfortably far
away; only at the upper end of the valley was a little
tumble-down, deserted cottage, referred to as "the old Bailey
house." It had not been occupied for many years, but a
grass-grown dyke surrounded it and inside was an ancient garden
where the Ingleside children could find violets and daisies and
June lilies still blooming in season. For the rest, the garden
was overgrown with caraway that swayed and foamed in the
moonshine of summer eves like seas of silver.

To the sought lay the pond and beyond it the ripened distance
lost itself in purple woods, save where, on a high hill, a
solitary old gray homestead looked down on glen and harbour.
There was a certain wild woodsiness and solitude about Rainbow
Valley, in spite of its nearness to the village, which endeared
it to the children of Ingleside.

The valley was full of dear, friendly hollows and the largest of
these was their favourite stamping ground. Here they were
assembled on this particular evening. There was a grove of young
spruces in this hollow, with a tiny, grassy glade in its heart,
opening on the bank of the brook. By the brook grew a silver
birch-tree, a young, incredibly straight thing which Walter had
named the "White Lady." In this glade, too, were the "Tree
Lovers," as Walter called a spruce and maple which grew so
closely together that their boughs were inextricably intertwined.
Jem had hung an old string of sleigh-bells, given him by the Glen
blacksmith, on the Tree Lovers, and every visitant breeze called
out sudden fairy tinkles from it.

"How nice it is to be back!" said Nan. "After all, none of the
Avonlea places are quite as nice as Rainbow Valley."

But they were very fond of the Avonlea places for all that. A
visit to Green Gables was always considered a great treat. Aunt
Marilla was very good to them, and so was Mrs. Rachel Lynde, who
was spending the leisure of her old age in knitting cotton-warp
quilts against the day when Anne's daughters should need a
"setting-out." There were jolly playmates there, too--"Uncle"
Davy's children and "Aunt" Diana's children. They knew all the
spots their mother had loved so well in her girlhood at old Green
Gables--the long Lover's Lane, that was pink-hedged in wild-rose
time, the always neat yard, with its willows and poplars, the
Dryad's Bubble, lucent and lovely as of yore, the Lake of Shining
Waters, and Willowmere. The twins had their mother's old
porch-gable room, and Aunt Marilla used to come in at night, when
she thought they were asleep, to gloat over them. But they all
knew she loved Jem the best.

Jem was at present busily occupied in frying a mess of small
trout which he had just caught in the pond. His stove consisted
of a circle of red stones, with a fire kindled in it, and his
culinary utensils were an old tin can, hammered out flat, and a
fork with only one tine left. Nevertheless, ripping good meals
had before now been thus prepared.

Jem was the child of the House of Dreams. All the others had
been born at Ingleside. He had curly red hair, like his
mother's, and frank hazel eyes, like his father's; he had his
mother's fine nose and his father's steady, humorous mouth. And
he was the only one of the family who had ears nice enough to
please Susan. But he had a standing feud with Susan because she
would not give up calling him Little Jem. It was outrageous,
thought thirteen-year-old Jem. Mother had more sense.

"I'm NOT little any more, Mother," he had cried indignantly, on
his eighth birthday. "I'm AWFUL big."

Mother had sighed and laughed and sighed again; and she never
called him Little Jem again--in his hearing at least.

He was and always had been a sturdy, reliable little chap. He
never broke a promise. He was not a great talker. His teachers
did not think him brilliant, but he was a good, all-round
student. He never took things on faith; he always liked to
investigate the truth of a statement for himself. Once Susan had
told him that if he touched his tongue to a frosty latch all the
skin would tear off it. Jem had promptly done it, "just to see
if it was so." He found it was "so," at the cost of a very sore
tongue for several days. But Jem did not grudge suffering in the
interests of science. By constant experiment and observation he
learned a great deal and his brothers and sisters thought his
extensive knowledge of their little world quite wonderful. Jem
always knew where the first and ripest berries grew, where the
first pale violets shyly wakened from their winter's sleep, and
how many blue eggs were in a given robin's nest in the maple
grove. He could tell fortunes from daisy petals and suck honey
from red clovers, and grub up all sorts of edible roots on the
banks of the pond, while Susan went in daily fear that they would
all be poisoned. He knew where the finest spruce-gum was to be
found, in pale amber knots on the lichened bark, he knew where
the nuts grew thickest in the beechwoods around the Harbour Head,
and where the best trouting places up the brooks were. He could
mimic the call of any wild bird or beast in Four Winds and he
knew the haunt of every wild flower from spring to autumn.

Walter Blythe was sitting under the White Lady, with a volume of
poems lying beside him, but he was not reading. He was gazing
now at the emerald-misted willows by the pond, and now at a flock
of clouds, like little silver sheep, herded by the wind, that
were drifting over Rainbow Valley, with rapture in his wide
splendid eyes. Walter's eyes were very wonderful. All the joy
and sorrow and laughter and loyalty and aspiration of many
generations lying under the sod looked out of their dark gray
depths.

Walter was a "hop out of kin," as far as looks went. He did not
resemble any known relative. He was quite the handsomest of the
Ingleside children, with straight black hair and finely modelled
features. But he had all his mother's vivid imagination and
passionate love of beauty. Frost of winter, invitation of
spring, dream of summer and glamour of autumn, all meant much to
Walter.

In school, where Jem was a chieftain, Walter was not thought
highly of. He was supposed to be "girly" and milk-soppish,
because he never fought and seldom joined in the school sports,
preferring to herd by himself in out of the way corners and read
books--especially "po'try books." Walter loved the poets and
pored over their pages from the time he could first read. Their
music was woven into his growing soul--the music of the
immortals. Walter cherished the ambition to be a poet himself
some day. The thing could be done. A certain Uncle Paul--so
called out of courtesy--who lived now in that mysterious realm
called "the States," was Walter's model. Uncle Paul had once
been a little school boy in Avonlea and now his poetry was read
everywhere. But the Glen schoolboys did not know of Walter's
dreams and would not have been greatly impressed if they had. In
spite of his lack of physical prowess, however, he commanded a
certain unwilling respect because of his power of "talking book
talk." Nobody in Glen St. Mary school could talk like him. He
"sounded like a preacher," one boy said; and for this reason he
was generally left alone and not persecuted, as most boys were
who were suspected of disliking or fearing fisticuffs.

The ten year old Ingleside twins violated twin tradition by not
looking in the least alike. Anne, who was always called Nan, was
very pretty, with velvety nut-brown eyes and silky nut-brown
hair. She was a very blithe and dainty little maiden--Blythe by
name and blithe by nature, one of her teachers had said. Her
complexion was quite faultless, much to her mother's
satisfaction.

"I'm so glad I have one daughter who can wear pink," Mrs. Blythe
was wont to say jubilantly.

Diana Blythe, known as Di, was very like her mother, with
gray-green eyes that always shone with a peculiar lustre and
brilliancy in the dusk, and red hair. Perhaps this was why she
was her father's favourite. She and Walter were especial chums;
Di was the only one to whom he would ever read the verses he
wrote himself--the only one who knew that he was secretly hard at
work on an epic, strikingly resembling "Marmion" in some things,
if not in others. She kept all his secrets, even from Nan, and
told him all hers.

"Won't you soon have those fish ready, Jem?" said Nan, sniffing
with her dainty nose. "The smell makes me awfully hungry."

"They're nearly ready," said Jem, giving one a dexterous turn.
"Get out the bread and the plates, girls. Walter, wake up."

"How the air shines to-night," said Walter dreamily. Not that he
despised fried trout either, by any means; but with Walter food
for the soul always took first place. "The flower angel has been
walking over the world to-day, calling to the flowers. I can see
his blue wings on that hill by the woods."

"Any angels' wings I ever saw were white," said Nan.

"The flower angel's aren't. They are a pale misty blue, just
like the haze in the valley. Oh, how I wish I could fly. It
must be glorious."

"One does fly in dreams sometimes," said Di.

"I never dream that I'm flying exactly," said Walter. "But I
often dream that I just rise up from the ground and float over
the fences and the trees. It's delightful--and I always think,
'This ISN'T a dream like it's always been before. THIS is
real'--and then I wake up after all, and it's heart-breaking."

"Hurry up, Nan," ordered Jem.

Nan had produced the banquet-board--a board literally as well as
figuratively--from which many a feast, seasoned as no viands were
elsewhere, had been eaten in Rainbow Valley. It was converted
into a table by propping it on two large, mossy stones.
Newspapers served as tablecloth, and broken plates and handleless
cups from Susan's discard furnished the dishes. From a tin box
secreted at the root of a spruce tree Nan brought forth bread and
salt. The brook gave Adam's ale of unsurpassed crystal. For the
rest, there was a certain sauce, compounded of fresh air and
appetite of youth, which gave to everything a divine flavour. To
sit in Rainbow Valley, steeped in a twilight half gold, half
amethyst, rife with the odours of balsam-fir and woodsy growing
things in their springtime prime, with the pale stars of wild
strawberry blossoms all around you, and with the sough of the
wind and tinkle of bells in the shaking tree tops, and eat fried
trout and dry bread, was something which the mighty of earth
might have envied them.

"Sit in," invited Nan, as Jem placed his sizzling tin platter of
trout on the table. "It's your turn to say grace, Jem."

"I've done my part frying the trout," protested Jem, who hated
saying grace. "Let Walter say it. He LIKES saying grace. And
cut it short, too, Walt. I'm starving."

But Walter said no grace, short or long, just then. An
interruption occurred.

"Who's coming down from the manse hill?" said Di.



CHAPTER IV. THE MANSE CHILDREN

Aunt Martha might be, and was, a very poor housekeeper; the Rev.
John Knox Meredith might be, and was, a very absent-minded,
indulgent man. But it could not be denied that there was
something very homelike and lovable about the Glen St. Mary manse
in spite of its untidiness. Even the critical housewives of the
Glen felt it, and were unconsciously mellowed in judgment because
of it. Perhaps its charm was in part due to accidental
circumstances--the luxuriant vines clustering over its gray,
clap-boarded walls, the friendly acacias and balm-of-gileads that
crowded about it with the freedom of old acquaintance, and the
beautiful views of harbour and sand-dunes from its front windows.
But these things had been there in the reign of Mr. Meredith's
predecessor, when the manse had been the primmest, neatest, and
dreariest house in the Glen. So much of the credit must be given
to the personality of its new inmates. There was an atmosphere
of laughter and comradeship about it; the doors were always open;
and inner and outer worlds joined hands. Love was the only law
in Glen St. Mary manse.

The people of his congregation said that Mr. Meredith spoiled his
children. Very likely he did. It is certain that he could not
bear to scold them. "They have no mother," he used to say to
himself, with a sigh, when some unusually glaring peccadillo
forced itself upon his notice. But he did not know the half of
their goings-on. He belonged to the sect of dreamers. The
windows of his study looked out on the graveyard but, as he paced
up and down the room, reflecting deeply on the immortality of the
soul, he was quite unaware that Jerry and Carl were playing
leap-frog hilariously over the flat stones in that abode of dead
Methodists. Mr. Meredith had occasional acute realizations that
his children were not so well looked after, physically or
morally, as they had been before his wife died, and he had always
a dim sub-consciousness that house and meals were very different
under Aunt Martha's management from what they had been under
Cecilia's. For the rest, he lived in a world of books and
abstractions; and, therefore, although his clothes were seldom
brushed, and although the Glen housewives concluded, from the
ivory-like pallor of his clear-cut features and slender hands,
that he never got enough to eat, he was not an unhappy man.

If ever a graveyard could be called a cheerful place, the old
Methodist graveyard at Glen St. Mary might be so called. The new
graveyard, at the other side of the Methodist church, was a neat
and proper and doleful spot; but the old one had been left so
long to Nature's kindly and gracious ministries that it had
become very pleasant.

It was surrounded on three sides by a dyke of stones and sod,
topped by a gray and uncertain paling. Outside the dyke grew a
row of tall fir trees with thick, balsamic boughs. The dyke,
which had been built by the first settlers of the Glen, was old
enough to be beautiful, with mosses and green things growing out
of its crevices, violets purpling at its base in the early spring
days, and asters and golden-rod making an autumnal glory in its
corners. Little ferns clustered companionably between its
stones, and here and there a big bracken grew.

On the eastern side there was neither fence nor dyke. The
graveyard there straggled off into a young fir plantation, ever
pushing nearer to the graves and deepening eastward into a thick
wood. The air was always full of the harp-like voices of the
sea, and the music of gray old trees, and in the spring mornings
the choruses of birds in the elms around the two churches sang of
life and not of death. The Meredith children loved the old
graveyard.

Blue-eyed ivy, "garden-spruce," and mint ran riot over the sunken
graves. Blueberry bushes grew lavishly in the sandy corner next
to the fir wood. The varying fashions of tombstones for three
generations were to be found there, from the flat, oblong, red
sandstone slabs of old settlers, down through the days of weeping
willows and clasped hands, to the latest monstrosities of tall
"monuments" and draped urns. One of the latter, the biggest and
ugliest in the graveyard, was sacred to the memory of a certain
Alec Davis who had been born a Methodist but had taken to himself
a Presbyterian bride of the Douglas clan. She had made him turn
Presbyterian and kept him toeing the Presbyterian mark all his
life. But when he died she did not dare to doom him to a lonely
grave in the Presbyterian graveyard over-harbour. His people
were all buried in the Methodist cemetery; so Alec Davis went
back to his own in death and his widow consoled herself by
erecting a monument which cost more than any of the Methodists
could afford. The Meredith children hated it, without just
knowing why, but they loved the old, flat, bench-like stones with
the tall grasses growing rankly about them. They made jolly
seats for one thing. They were all sitting on one now. Jerry,
tired of leap frog, was playing on a jew's-harp. Carl was
lovingly poring over a strange beetle he had found; Una was
trying to make a doll's dress, and Faith, leaning back on her
slender brown wrists, was swinging her bare feet in lively time
to the jew's-harp.

Jerry had his father's black hair and large black eyes, but in
him the latter were flashing instead of dreamy. Faith, who came
next to him, wore her beauty like a rose, careless and glowing.
She had golden-brown eyes, golden-brown curls and crimson cheeks.
She laughed too much to please her father's congregation and had
shocked old Mrs. Taylor, the disconsolate spouse of several
departed husbands, by saucily declaring--in the church-porch at
that--"The world ISN'T a vale of tears, Mrs. Taylor. It's a
world of laughter."

Little dreamy Una was not given to laughter. Her braids of
straight, dead-black hair betrayed no lawless kinks, and her
almond-shaped, dark-blue eyes had something wistful and sorrowful
in them. Her mouth had a trick of falling open over her tiny
white teeth, and a shy, meditative smile occasionally crept over
her small face. She was much more sensitive to public opinion
than Faith, and had an uneasy consciousness that there was
something askew in their way of living. She longed to put it
right, but did not know how. Now and then she dusted the
furniture--but it was so seldom she could find the duster because
it was never in the same place twice. And when the clothes-brush
was to be found she tried to brush her father's best suit on
Saturdays, and once sewed on a missing button with coarse white
thread. When Mr. Meredith went to church next day every female
eye saw that button and the peace of the Ladies' Aid was upset
for weeks.

Carl had the clear, bright, dark-blue eyes, fearless and direct,
of his dead mother, and her brown hair with its glints of gold.
He knew the secrets of bugs and had a sort of freemasonry with
bees and beetles. Una never liked to sit near him because she
never knew what uncanny creature might be secreted about him.
Jerry refused to sleep with him because Carl had once taken a
young garter snake to bed with him; so Carl slept in his old cot,
which was so short that he could never stretch out, and had
strange bed-fellows. Perhaps it was just as well that Aunt
Martha was half blind when she made that bed. Altogether they
were a jolly, lovable little crew, and Cecilia Meredith's heart
must have ached bitterly when she faced the knowledge that she
must leave them.

"Where would you like to be buried if you were a Methodist?"
asked Faith cheerfully.

This opened up an interesting field of speculation.

"There isn't much choice. The place is full," said Jerry. "I'D
like that corner near the road, I guess. I could hear the teams
going past and the people talking."

"I'd like that little hollow under the weeping birch," said Una.
"That birch is such a place for birds and they sing like mad in
the mornings."

"I'd take the Porter lot where there's so many children buried.
_I_ like lots of company," said Faith. "Carl, where'd you?"

"I'd rather not be buried at all," said Carl, "but if I had to be
I'd like the ant-bed. Ants are AWF'LY int'resting."

"How very good all the people who are buried here must have
been," said Una, who had been reading the laudatory old epitaphs.
"There doesn't seem to be a single bad person in the whole
graveyard. Methodists must be better than Presbyterians after
all."

"Maybe the Methodists bury their bad people just like they do
cats," suggested Carl. "Maybe they don't bother bringing them to
the graveyard at all."

"Nonsense," said Faith. "The people that are buried here weren't
any better than other folks, Una. But when anyone is dead you
mustn't say anything of him but good or he'll come back and ha'nt
you. Aunt Martha told me that. I asked father if it was true
and he just looked through me and muttered, 'True? True? What
is truth? What IS truth, O jesting Pilate?' I concluded from
that it must be true."

"I wonder if Mr. Alec Davis would come back and ha'nt me if I
threw a stone at the urn on top of his tombstone," said Jerry.

"Mrs. Davis would," giggled Faith. "She just watches us in
church like a cat watching mice. Last Sunday I made a face at
her nephew and he made one back at me and you should have seen
her glare. I'll bet she boxed HIS ears when they got out. Mrs.
Marshall Elliott told me we mustn't offend her on any account or
I'd have made a face at her, too!"

"They say Jem Blythe stuck out his tongue at her once and she
would never have his father again, even when her husband was
dying," said Jerry. "I wonder what the Blythe gang will be
like."

"I liked their looks," said Faith. The manse children had been
at the station that afternoon when the Blythe small fry had
arrived. "I liked Jem's looks ESPECIALLY."

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