Book: Rainbow Valley

L >> Lucy Maud Montgomery >> Rainbow Valley




"Let me get you a cup," he said smiling. There was a cup near
by, if he had only known it, a cracked, handleless blue cup
secreted under the maple by the Rainbow Valley children; but he
did not know it, so he stepped out to one of the birch-trees and
stripped a bit of its white skin away. Deftly he fashioned this
into a three-cornered cup, filled it from the spring, and handed
it to Rosemary.

Rosemary took it and drank every drop to punish herself for her
fib, for she was not in the least thirsty, and to drink a fairly
large cupful of water when you are not thirsty is somewhat of an
ordeal. Yet the memory of that draught was to be very pleasant
to Rosemary. In after years it seemed to her that there was
something sacramental about it. Perhaps this was because of what
the minister did when she handed him back the cup. He stooped
again and filled it and drank of it himself. It was only by
accident that he put his lips just where Rosemary had put hers,
and Rosemary knew it. Nevertheless, it had a curious
significance for her. They two had drunk of the same cup. She
remembered idly that an old aunt of hers used to say that when
two people did this their after-lives would be linked in some
fashion, whether for good or ill.

John Meredith held the cup uncertainly. He did not know what to
do with it. The logical thing would have been to toss it away,
but somehow he was disinclined to do this. Rosemary held out her
hand for it.

"Will you let me have it?" she said. "You made it so knackily.
I never saw anyone make a birch cup so since my little brother
used to make them long ago--before he died."

"I learned how to make them when _I_ was a boy, camping out one
summer. An old hunter taught me," said Mr. Meredith. "Let me
carry your books, Miss West."

Rosemary was startled into another fib and said oh, they were not
heavy. But the minister took them from her with quite a
masterful air and they walked away together. It was the first
time Rosemary had stood by the valley spring without thinking of
Martin Crawford. The mystic tryst had been broken.

The little by-path wound around the marsh and then struck up the
long wooded hill on the top of which Rosemary lived. Beyond,
through the trees, they could see the moonlight shining across
the level summer fields. But the little path was shadowy and
narrow. Trees crowded over it, and trees are never quite as
friendly to human beings after nightfall as they are in daylight.
They wrap themselves away from us. They whisper and plot
furtively. If they reach out a hand to us it has a hostile,
tentative touch. People walking amid trees after night always
draw closer together instinctively and involuntarily, making an
alliance, physical and mental, against certain alien powers
around them. Rosemary's dress brushed against John Meredith as
they walked. Not even an absent-minded minister, who was after
all a young man still, though he firmly believed he had outlived
romance, could be insensible to the charm of the night and the
path and the companion.

It is never quite safe to think we have done with life. When we
imagine we have finished our story fate has a trick of turning
the page and showing us yet another chapter. These two people
each thought their hearts belonged irrevocably to the past; but
they both found their walk up that hill very pleasant. Rosemary
thought the Glen minister was by no means as shy and tongue-tied
as he had been represented. He seemed to find no difficulty in
talking easily and freely. Glen housewives would have been
amazed had they heard him. But then so many Glen housewives
talked only gossip and the price of eggs, and John Meredith was
not interested in either. He talked to Rosemary of books and
music and wide-world doings and something of his own history, and
found that she could understand and respond. Rosemary, it
appeared, possessed a book which Mr. Meredith had not read and
wished to read. She offered to lend it to him and when they
reached the old homestead on the hill he went in to get it.

The house itself was an old-fashioned gray one, hung with vines,
through which the light in the sitting-room winked in friendly
fashion. It looked down the Glen, over the harbour, silvered in
the moonlight, to the sand-dunes and the moaning ocean. They
walked in through a garden that always seemed to smell of roses,
even when no roses were in bloom. There was a sisterhood of
lilies at the gate and a ribbon of asters on either side of the
broad walk, and a lacery of fir trees on the hill's edge beyond
the house.

"You have the whole world at your doorstep here," said John
Meredith, with a long breath. "What a view--what an outlook! At
times I feel stifled down there in the Glen. You can breathe up
here."

"It is calm to-night," said Rosemary laughing. "If there were a
wind it would blow your breath away. We get 'a' the airts the
wind can blow' up here. This place should be called Four Winds
instead of the Harbour."

"I like wind," he said. "A day when there is no wind seems to me
DEAD. A windy day wakes me up." He gave a conscious laugh. "On
a calm day I fall into day dreams. No doubt you know my
reputation, Miss West. If I cut you dead the next time we meet
don't put it down to bad manners. Please understand that it is
only abstraction and forgive me--and speak to me."

They found Ellen West in the sitting room when they went in. She
laid her glasses down on the book she had been reading and looked
at them in amazement tinctured with something else. But she
shook hands amiably with Mr. Meredith and he sat down and talked
to her, while Rosemary hunted out his book.

Ellen West was ten years older than Rosemary, and so different
from her that it was hard to believe they were sisters. She was
dark and massive, with black hair, thick, black eyebrows and eyes
of the clear, slaty blue of the gulf water in a north wind. She
had a rather stern, forbidding look, but she was in reality very
jolly, with a hearty, gurgling laugh and a deep, mellow, pleasant
voice with a suggestion of masculinity about it. She had once
remarked to Rosemary that she would really like to have a talk
with that Presbyterian minister at the Glen, to see if he could
find a word to say to a woman when he was cornered. She had her
chance now and she tackled him on world politics. Miss Ellen,
who was a great reader, had been devouring a book on the Kaiser
of Germany, and she demanded Mr. Meredith's opinion of him.

"A dangerous man," was his answer.

"I believe you!" Miss Ellen nodded. "Mark my words, Mr.
Meredith, that man is going to fight somebody yet. He's ACHING
to. He is going to set the world on fire."

"If you mean that he will wantonly precipitate a great war I
hardly think so," said Mr. Meredith. "The day has gone by for
that sort of thing."

"Bless you, it hasn't," rumbled Ellen. "The day never goes by
for men and nations to make asses of themselves and take to the
fists. The millenniun isn't THAT near, Mr. Meredith, and YOU
don't think it is any more than I do. As for this Kaiser, mark
my words, he is going to make a heap of trouble"--and Miss Ellen
prodded her book emphatically with her long finger. "Yes, if he
isn't nipped in the bud he's going to make trouble. WE'LL live
to see it--you and I will live to see it, Mr. Meredith. And who
is going to nip him? England should, but she won't. WHO is
going to nip him? Tell me that, Mr. Meredith."

Mr. Meredith couldn't tell her, but they plunged into a
discussion of German militarism that lasted long after Rosemary
had found the book. Rosemary said nothing, but sat in a little
rocker behind Ellen and stroked an important black cat
meditatively. John Meredith hunted big game in Europe with
Ellen, but he looked oftener at Rosemary than at Ellen, and Ellen
noticed it. After Rosemary had gone to the door with him and
come back Ellen rose and looked at her accusingly.

"Rosemary West, that man has a notion of courting you."

Rosemary quivered. Ellen's speech was like a blow to her. It
rubbed all the bloom off the pleasant evening. But she would not
let Ellen see how it hurt her.

"Nonsense," she said, and laughed, a little too carelessly. "You
see a beau for me in every bush, Ellen. Why he told me all about
his wife to-night--how much she was to him--how empty her death
had left the world."

"Well, that may be HIS way of courting," retorted Ellen. "Men
have all kinds of ways, I understand. But don't forget your
promise, Rosemary."

"There is no need of my either forgetting or remembering it,"
said Rosemary, a little wearily. "YOU forget that I'm an old
maid, Ellen. It is only your sisterly delusion that I am still
young and blooming and dangerous. Mr. Meredith merely wants to
be a friend--if he wants that much itself. He'll forget us both
long before he gets back to the manse."

"I've no objection to your being friends with him," conceded
Ellen, "but it musn't go beyond friendship, remember. I'm always
suspicious of widowers. They are not given to romantic ideas
about friendship. They're apt to mean business. As for this
Presbyterian man, what do they call him shy for? He's not a bit
shy, though he may be absent-minded--so absent-minded that he
forgot to say goodnight to ME when you started to go to the door
with him. He's got brains, too. There's so few men round here
that can talk sense to a body. I've enjoyed the evening. I
wouldn't mind seeing more of him. But no philandering, Rosemary,
mind you--no philandering."

Rosemary was quite used to being warned by Ellen from
philandering if she so much as talked five minutes to any
marriageable man under eighty or over eighteen. She had always
laughed at the warning with unfeigned amusement. This time it
did not amuse her--it irritated her a little. Who wanted to
philander?

"Don't be such a goose, Ellen," she said with unaccustomed
shortness as she took her lamp. She went upstairs without saying
goodnight.

Ellen shook her head dubiously and looked at the black cat.

"What is she so cross about, St. George?" she asked. "When you
howl you're hit, I've always heard, George. But she promised,
Saint--she promised, and we Wests always keep our word. So it
won't matter if he does want to philander, George. She promised.
I won't worry."

Upstairs, in her room, Rosemary sat for a long while looking out
of the window across the moonlit garden to the distant, shining
harbour. She felt vaguely upset and unsettled. She was suddenly
tired of outworn dreams. And in the garden the petals of the
last red rose were scattered by a sudden little wind. Summer was
over--it was autumn.



CHAPTER XIV. MRS. ALEC DAVIS MAKES A CALL

John Meredith walked slowly home. At first he thought a little
about Rosemary, but by the time he reached Rainbow Valley he had
forgotten all about her and was meditating on a point regarding
German theology which Ellen had raised. He passed through
Rainbow Valley and knew it not. The charm of Rainbow Valley had
no potency against German theology. When he reached the manse he
went to his study and took down a bulky volume in order to see
which had been right, he or Ellen. He remained immersed in its
mazes until dawn, struck a new trail of speculation and pursued
it like a sleuth hound for the next week, utterly lost to the
world, his parish and his family. He read day and night; he
forgot to go to his meals when Una was not there to drag him to
them; he never thought about Rosemary or Ellen again. Old Mrs.
Marshall, over-harbour, was very ill and sent for him, but the
message lay unheeded on his desk and gathered dust. Mrs.
Marshall recovered but never forgave him. A young couple came to
the manse to be married and Mr. Meredith, with unbrushed hair, in
carpet slippers and faded dressing gown, married them. To be
sure, he began by reading the funeral service to them and got
along as far as "ashes to ashes and dust to dust" before he
vaguely suspected that something was wrong.

"Dear me," he said absently, "that is strange--very strange."

The bride, who was very nervous, began to cry. The bridegroom,
who was not in the least nervous, giggled.

"Please, sir, I think you're burying us instead of marrying us,"
he said.

"Excuse me," said Mr. Meredith, as it it did not matter much. He
turned up the marriage service and got through with it, but the
bride never felt quite properly married for the rest of her life.

He forgot his prayer-meeting again--but that did not matter, for
it was a wet night and nobody came. He might even have forgotten
his Sunday service if it had not been for Mrs. Alec Davis. Aunt
Martha came in on Saturday afternoon and told him that Mrs. Davis
was in the parlour and wanted to see him. Mr. Meredith sighed.
Mrs. Davis was the only woman in Glen St. Mary church whom he
positively detested. Unfortunately, she was also the richest,
and his board of managers had warned Mr. Meredith against
offending her. Mr. Meredith seldom thought of such a worldly
matter as his stipend; but the managers were more practical.
Also, they were astute. Without mentioning money, they contrived
to instil into Mr. Meredith's mind a conviction that he should
not offend Mrs. Davis. Otherwise, he would likely have
forgotten all about her as soon as Aunt Martha had gone out. As
it was, he turned down his Ewald with a feeling of annoyance and
went across the hall to the parlour.

Mrs. Davis was sitting on the sofa, looking about her with an air
of scornful disapproval.

What a scandalous room! There were no curtains on the window.
Mrs. Davis did not know that Faith and Una had taken them down
the day before to use as court trains in one of their plays and
had forgotten to put them up again, but she could not have
accused those windows more fiercely if she had known. The blinds
were cracked and torn. The pictures on the walls were crooked;
the rugs were awry; the vases were full of faded flowers; the
dust lay in heaps--literally in heaps.

"What are we coming to?" Mrs. Davis asked herself, and then
primmed up her unbeautiful mouth.

Jerry and Carl had been whooping and sliding down the banisters
as she came through the hall. They did not see her and continued
whooping and sliding, and Mrs. Davis was convinced they did it on
purpose. Faith's pet rooster ambled through the hall, stood in
the parlour doorway and looked at her. Not liking her looks, he
did not venture in. Mrs. Davis gave a scornful sniff. A pretty
manse, indeed, where roosters paraded the halls and stared people
out of countenance.

"Shoo, there," commanded Mrs. Davis, poking her flounced,
changeable-silk parasol at him.

Adam shooed. He was a wise rooster and Mrs. Davis had wrung the
necks of so many roosters with her own fair hands in the course
of her fifty years that an air of the executioner seemed to hang
around her. Adam scuttled through the hall as the minister came
in.

Mr. Meredith still wore slippers and dressing gown, and his dark
hair still fell in uncared-for locks over his high brow. But he
looked the gentleman he was; and Mrs. Alec Davis, in her silk
dress and beplumed bonnet, and kid gloves and gold chain looked
the vulgar, coarse-souled woman she was. Each felt the
antagonisn of the other's personality. Mr. Meredith shrank, but
Mrs. Davis girded up her loins for the fray. She had come to the
manse to propose a certain thing to the minister and she meant to
lose no time in proposing it. She was going to do him a favour--
a great favour--and the sooner he was made aware of it the
better. She had been thinking about it all summer and had come
to a decision at last. This was all that mattered, Mrs. Davis
thought. When she decided a thing it WAS decided. Nobody else
had any say in the matter. That had always been her attitude.
When she had made her mind up to marry Alec Davis she had married
him and that was the end to it. Alec had never known how it
happened, but what odds? So in this case--Mrs. Davis had
arranged everything to her own satisfaction. Now it only
remained to inform Mr. Meredith.

"Will you please shut that door?" said Mrs. Davis, unprimming her
mouth slightly to say it, but speaking with asperity. "I have
something important to say, and I can't say it with that racket
in the hall."

Mr. Meredith shut the door meekly. Then he sat down before Mrs.
Davis. He was not wholly aware of her yet. His mind was still
wrestling with Ewald's arguments. Mrs. Davis sensed this
detachment and it annoyed her.

"I have come to tell you, Mr. Meredith," she said aggressively,
"that I have decided to adopt Una."

"To--adopt--Una!" Mr. Meredith gazed at her blankly, not
understanding in the least.

"Yes. I've been thinking it over for some time. I have often
thought of adopting a child, since my husband's death. But it
seemed so hard to get a suitable one. It is very few children I
would want to take into MY home. I wouldn't think of taking a
home child--some outcast of the slums in all probability. And
there is hardly ever any other child to be got. One of the
fishermen down at the harbour died last fall and left six
youngsters. They tried to get me to take one, but I soon gave
them to understand that I had no idea of adopting trash like
that. Their grandfather stole a horse. Besides, they were all
boys and I wanted a girl--a quiet, obedient girl that I could
train up to be a lady. Una will suit me exactly. She would be a
nice little thing if she was properly looked after--so different
from Faith. I would never dream of adopting Faith. But I'll
take Una and I'll give her a good home, and up-bringing, Mr.
Meredith, and if she behaves herself I'll leave her all my money
when I die. Not one of my own relatives shall have a cent of it
in any case, I'm determined on that. It was the idea of
aggravating them that set me to thinking of adopting a child as
much as anything in the first place. Una shall be well dressed
and educated and trained, Mr. Meredith, and I shall give her
music and painting lessons and treat her as if she was my own."

Mr. Meredith was wide enough awake by this time. There was a
faint flush in his pale cheek and a dangerous light in his fine
dark eyes. Was this woman, whose vulgarity and consciousness of
money oozed out of her at every pore, actually asking him to give
her Una--his dear little wistful Una with Cecilia's own dark-blue
eyes--the child whom the dying mother had clasped to her heart
after the other children had been led weeping from the room.
Cecilia had clung to her baby until the gates of death had shut
between them. She had looked over the little dark head to her
husband.

"Take good care of her, John," she had entreated. "She is so
small--and sensitive. The others can fight their way--but the
world will hurt HER. Oh, John, I don't know what you and she are
going to do. You both need me so much. But keep her close to
you--keep her close to you."

These had been almost her last words except a few unforgettable
ones for him alone. And it was this child whom Mrs. Davis had
coolly announced her intention of taking from him. He sat up
straight and looked at Mrs. Davis. In spite of the worn dressing
gown and the frayed slippers there was something about him that
made Mrs. Davis feel a little of the old reverence for "the
cloth" in which she had been brought up. After all, there WAS a
certain divinity hedging a minister, even a poor, unworldly,
abstracted one.

"I thank you for your kind intentions, Mrs. Davis," said Mr.
Meredith with a gentle, final, quite awful courtesy, "but I
cannot give you my child."

Mrs. Davis looked blank. She had never dreamed of his refusing.

"Why, Mr. Meredith," she said in astonishment. "You must be
cr--you can't mean it. You must think it over--think of all the
advantages I can give her."

"There is no need to think it over, Mrs. Davis. It is entirely
out of the question. All the worldly advantages it is in your
power to bestow on her could not compensate for the loss of a
father's love and care. I thank you again--but it is not to be
thought of."

Disappointment angered Mrs. Davis beyond the power of old habit
to control. Her broad red face turned purple and her voice
trembled.

"I thought you'd be only too glad to let me have her," she
sneered.

"Why did you think that?" asked Mr. Meredith quietly.

"Because nobody ever supposed you cared anything about any of
your children," retorted Mrs. Davis contemptuously. "You neglect
them scandalously. It is the talk of the place. They aren't fed
and dressed properly, and they're not trained at all. They have
no more manners than a pack of wild Indians. You never think of
doing your duty as a father. You let a stray child come here
among them for a fortnight and never took any notice of her--a
child that swore like a trooper I'm told. YOU wouldn't have
cared if they'd caught small-pox from her. And Faith made an
exhibition of herself getting up in preaching and making that
speech! And she rid a pig down the street--under your very eyes
I understand. The way they act is past belief and you never lift
a finger to stop them or try to teach them anything. And now
when I offer one of them a good home and good prospects you
refuse it and insult me. A pretty father you, to talk of loving
and caring for your children!"

"That will do, woman!" said Mr. Meredith. He stood up and looked
at Mrs. Davis with eyes that made her quail. "That will do," he
repeated. "I desire to hear no more, Mrs. Davis. You have said
too much. It may be that I have been remiss in some respects in
my duty as a parent, but it is not for you to remind me of it in
such terms as you have used. Let us say good afternoon."

Mrs. Davis did not say anything half so amiable as good
afternoon, but she took her departure. As she swept past the
minister a large, plump toad, which Carl had secreted under the
lounge, hopped out almost under her feet. Mrs. Davis gave a
shriek and in trying to avoid treading on the awful thing, lost
her balance and her parasol. She did not exactly fall, but she
staggered and reeled across the room in a very undignified
fashion and brought up against the door with a thud that jarred
her from head to foot. Mr. Meredith, who had not seen the toad,
wondered if she had been attacked with some kind of apoplectic or
paralytic seizure, and ran in alarm to her assistance. But Mrs.
Davis, recovering her feet, waved him back furiously.

"Don't you dare to touch me," she almost shouted. "This is some
more of your children's doings, I suppose. This is no fit place
for a decent woman. Give me my umbrella and let me go. I'll
never darken the doors of your manse or your church again."

Mr. Meredith picked up the gorgeous parasol meekly enough and
gave it to her. Mrs. Davis seized it and marched out. Jerry and
Carl had given up banister sliding and were sitting on the edge
of the veranda with Faith. Unfortunately, all three were singing
at the tops of their healthy young voices "There'll be a hot time
in the old town to-night." Mrs. Davis believed the song was
meant for her and her only. She stopped and shook her parasol at
them.

"Your father is a fool," she said, "and you are three young
varmints that ought to be whipped within an inch of your lives."

"He isn't," cried Faith. "We're not," cried the boys. But Mrs.
Davis was gone.

"Goodness, isn't she mad!" said Jerry. "And what is a 'varmint'
anyhow?"

John Meredith paced up and down the parlour for a few minutes;
then he went back to his study and sat down. But he did not
return to his German theology. He was too grievously disturbed
for that. Mrs. Davis had wakened him up with a vengeance. WAS
he such a remiss, careless father as she had accused him of
being? HAD he so scandalously neglected the bodily and spiritual
welfare of the four little motherless creatures dependent on him?
WERE his people talking of it as harshly as Mrs. Davis had
declared? It must be so, since Mrs. Davis had come to ask for
Una in the full and confident belief that he would hand the child
over to her as unconcernedly and gladly as one might hand over a
strayed, unwelcome kitten. And, if so, what then?

John Meredith groaned and resumed his pacing up and down the
dusty, disordered room. What could he do? He loved his children
as deeply as any father could and he knew, past the power of Mrs.
Davis or any of her ilk, to disturb his conviction, that they
loved him devotedly. But WAS he fit to have charge of them? He
knew--none better--his weaknesses and limitations. What was
needed was a good woman's presence and influence and common
sense. But how could that be arranged? Even were he able to get
such a housekeeper it would cut Aunt Martha to the quick. She
believed she could still do all that was meet and necessary. He
could not so hurt and insult the poor old woman who had been so
kind to him and his. How devoted she had been to Cecilia! And
Cecilia had asked him to be very considerate of Aunt Martha. To
be sure, he suddenly remembered that Aunt Martha had once hinted
that he ought to marry again. He felt she would not resent a
wife as she would a housekeeper. But that was out of the
question. He did not wish to marry--he did not and could not
care for anyone. Then what could he do? It suddenly occurred to
him that he would go over to Ingleside and talk over his
difficulties with Mrs. Blythe. Mrs. Blythe was one of the few
women he never felt shy or tongue-tied with. She was always so
sympathetic and refreshing. It might be that she could suggest
some solution of his problems. And even if she could not Mr.
Meredith felt that he needed a little decent human companionship
after his dose of Mrs. Davis--something to take the taste of her
out of his soul.

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