"Oh, I don't think there's anything the matter with Phil's mind,"
said Anne, hiding a smile. "It's just her way of talking."
Aunt Jamesina shook her head.
"Well, I hope so, Anne. I do hope so, because I love her. But _I_
can't understand her -- she beats me. She isn't like any of the
girls I ever knew, or any of the girls I was myself."
"How many girls were you, Aunt Jimsie?"
"About half a dozen, my dear."
Chapter XX
Gilbert Speaks
"This has been a dull, prosy day," yawned Phil, stretching
herself idly on the sofa, having
previously dispossessed two
exceedingly
indignant cats.
Anne looked up from Pickwick Papers. Now that spring
examinations were over she was treating herself to Dickens.
"It has been a prosy day for us," she said
thoughtfully, "but to
some people it has been a wonderful day. Some one has been
rapturously happy in it. Perhaps a great deed has been done
somewhere today -- or a great poem written -- or a great man born.
And some heart has been broken, Phil."
"Why did you spoil your pretty thought by tagging that last
sentence on, honey?" grumbled Phil. "I don't like to think of
broken hearts -- or anything
unpleasant."
"Do you think you'll be able to shirk
unpleasant things all your
life, Phil?"
"Dear me, no. Am I not up against them now? You don't call Alec and
Alonzo pleasant things, do you, when they simply
plague my life out?"
"You never take anything
seriously, Phil."
"Why should I? There are enough folks who do. The world needs
people like me, Anne, just to amuse it. It would be a terrible
place if EVERYBODY were
intellectual and serious and in deep,
deadly
earnest. MY
mission is, as Josiah Allen says, `to charm
and allure.' Confess now. Hasn't life at Patty's Place been
really much brighter and pleasanter this past winter because
I've been here to
leaven you?"
"Yes, it has," owned Anne.
"And you all love me -- even Aunt Jamesina, who thinks I'm stark mad.
So why should I try to be different? Oh, dear, I'm so
sleepy. I was
awake until one last night,
reading a harrowing ghost story. I read
it in bed, and after I had finished it do you suppose I could get out
of bed to put the light out? No! And if Stella had not fortunately
come in late that lamp would have burned good and bright till morning.
When I heard Stella I called her in, explained my predicament, and got
her to put out the light. If I had got out myself to do it I knew
something would grab me by the feet when I was getting in again.
By the way, Anne, has Aunt Jamesina
decided what to do this summer?"
"Yes, she's going to stay here. I know she's doing it for the
sake of those
blessed cats, although she says it's too much
trouble to open her own house, and she hates visiting."
"What are you
reading?"
"Pickwick."
"That's a book that always makes me hungry," said Phil. "There's so
much good eating in it. The characters seem always to be reveling
on ham and eggs and milk punch. I generally go on a
cupboard rummage
after
reading Pickwick. The mere thought
reminds me that I'm starving.
Is there any tidbit in the
pantry, Queen Anne?"
"I made a lemon pie this morning. You may have a piece of it."
Phil dashed out to the
pantry and Anne betook herself to the
orchard in company with Rusty. It was a moist, pleasantly-
odorous night in early spring. The snow was not quite all gone
from the park; a little dingy bank of it yet lay under the pines
of the harbor road, screened from the influence of April suns.
It kept the harbor road muddy, and chilled the evening air.
But grass was growing green in sheltered spots and Gilbert
had found some pale, sweet arbutus in a
hidden corner.
He came up from the park, his hands full of it.
Anne was sitting on the big gray
boulder in the
orchard looking
at the poem of a bare, birchen bough
hanging against the pale red
sunset with the very
perfection of grace. She was building a
castle in air -- a
wondrousmansion whose sunlit courts and
stately halls were steeped in Araby's
perfume, and where she
reigned queen and chatelaine. She frowned as she saw Gilbert
coming through the
orchard. Of late she had managed not to be
left alone with Gilbert. But he had caught her fairly now; and
even Rusty had deserted her.
Gilbert sat down beside her on the
boulder and held out his Mayflowers.
"Don't these
remind you of home and our old schoolday picnics, Anne?"
Anne took them and buried her face in them.
"I'm in Mr. Silas Sloane's barrens this very minute," she said rapturously.
"I suppose you will be there in
reality in a few days?"
"No, not for a
fortnight. I'm going to visit with Phil in Bolingbroke
before I go home. You'll be in Avonlea before I will."
"No, I shall not be in Avonlea at all this summer, Anne. I've been
offered a job in the Daily News office and I'm going to take it."
"Oh," said Anne
vaguely. She wondered what a whole Avonlea summer
would be like without Gilbert. Somehow she did not like the prospect.
"Well," she concluded
flatly, "it is a good thing for you, of course."
"Yes, I've been hoping I would get it. It will help me out next year."
"You mustn't work too HARD," said Anne, without any very clear
idea of what she was
saying. She wished
desperately that Phil
would come out. "You've
studied very
constantly this winter.
Isn't this a
delightful evening? Do you know, I found a cluster
of white violets under that old twisted tree over there today?
I felt as if I had discovered a gold mine."
"You are always discovering gold mines," said Gilbert -- also absently.
"Let us go and see if we can find some more," suggested Anne
eagerly.
"I'll call Phil and -- "
"Never mind Phil and the violets just now, Anne," said Gilbert quietly,
taking her hand in a clasp from which she could not free it. "There is
something I want to say to you."
"Oh, don't say it," cried Anne, pleadingly. "Don't -- PLEASE, Gilbert."
"I must. Things can't go on like this any longer. Anne, I love you.
You know I do. I -- I can't tell you how much. Will you promise me
that some day you'll be my wife?"
"I -- I can't," said Anne
miserably. "Oh, Gilbert -- you --
you've spoiled everything."
"Don't you care for me at all?" Gilbert asked after a very
dreadful pause, during which Anne had not dared to look up.
"Not -- not in that way. I do care a great deal for you as a friend.
But I don't love you, Gilbert."
"But can't you give me some hope that you will -- yet?"
"No, I can't," exclaimed Anne
desperately. "I never, never can
love you -- in that way -- Gilbert. You must never speak of this
to me again."
There was another pause -- so long and so
dreadful that Anne was
driven at last to look up. Gilbert's face was white to the lips.
And his eyes -- but Anne shuddered and looked away. There was
nothing
romantic about this. Must proposals be either grotesque
or --
horrible? Could she ever forget Gilbert's face?
"Is there anybody else?" he asked at last in a low voice.
"No -- no," said Anne
eagerly. "I don't care for any one like
THAT -- and I LIKE you better than anybody else in the world,
Gilbert. And we must -- we must go on being friends, Gilbert."
Gilbert gave a bitter little laugh.
"Friends! Your friendship can't satisfy me, Anne. I want your love
-- and you tell me I can never have that."
"I'm sorry. Forgive me, Gilbert," was all Anne could say.
Where, oh, where were all the
gracious and
graceful speeches
wherewith, in
imagination, she had been wont to dismiss
rejected suitors?
Gilbert released her hand gently.
"There isn't anything to
forgive. There have been times when I thought
you did care. I've deceived myself, that's all. Goodbye, Anne."
Anne got herself to her room, sat down on her window seat behind
the pines, and cried
bitterly. She felt as if something incalculably
precious had gone out of her life. It was Gilbert's friendship,
of course. Oh, why must she lose it after this fashion?
"What is the matter, honey?" asked Phil, coming in through
the
moonlit gloom.
Anne did not answer. At that moment she wished Phil were a
thousand miles away.
"I suppose you've gone and refused Gilbert Blythe. You are an idiot,
Anne Shirley!"
"Do you call it idiotic to refuse to marry a man I don't love?"
said Anne
coldly, goaded to reply.
"You don't know love when you see it. You've tricked something
out with your
imagination that you think love, and you expect the
real thing to look like that. There, that's the first sensible
thing I've ever said in my life. I wonder how I managed it?"
"Phil," pleaded Anne, "please go away and leave me alone for
a little while. My world has tumbled into pieces. I want to
reconstruct it."
"Without any Gilbert in it?" said Phil, going.
A world without any Gilbert in it! Anne
repeated the words drearily.
Would it not be a very
lonely,
forlorn place? Well, it was all
Gilbert's fault. He had spoiled their beautiful comradeship.
She must just learn to live without it.
Chapter XXI
Roses of Yesterday
The
fortnight Anne spent in Bolingbroke was a very pleasant one,
with a little under current of vague pain and dissatisfaction
running through it
whenever she thought about Gilbert. There was
not, however, much time to think about him. "Mount Holly," the
beautiful old Gordon
homestead, was a very gay place, overrun by
Phil's friends of both sexes. There was quite a bewildering
succession of drives, dances, picnics and boating parties, all
expressively lumped together by Phil under the head of "jamborees";
Alec and Alonzo were so
constantly on hand that Anne wondered if
they ever did anything but dance attendance on that will-o'-the-wisp
of a Phil. They were both nice, manly fellows, but Anne would not
be drawn into any opinion as to which was the nicer.
"And I depended so on you to help me make up my mind which of them I
should promise to marry," mourned Phil.
"You must do that for yourself. You are quite
expert at making
up your mind as to whom other people should marry," retorted Anne,
rather caustically.
"Oh, that's a very different thing," said Phil, truly.
But the sweetest
incident of Anne's
sojourn in Bolingbroke was the
visit to her
birthplace -- the little
shabby yellow house in an
out-of-the-way street she had so often dreamed about. She looked
at it with
delighted eyes, as she and Phil turned in at the gate.
"It's almost exactly as I've pictured it," she said. "There is
no
honeysuckle over the windows, but there is a lilac tree by the
gate, and -- yes, there are the
muslin curtains in the windows.
How glad I am it is still painted yellow."
A very tall, very thin woman opened the door.
"Yes, the Shirleys lived here twenty years ago," she said, in
answer to Anne's question. "They had it rented. I remember 'em.
They both died of fever at onct. It was turrible sad. They left
a baby. I guess it's dead long ago. It was a
sickly thing. Old
Thomas and his wife took it -- as if they hadn't enough of their own."
"It didn't die," said Anne, smiling. "I was that baby."
"You don't say so! Why, you have grown," exclaimed the woman,
as if she were much surprised that Anne was not still a baby.
"Come to look at you, I see the
resemblance. You're complected
like your pa. He had red hair. But you favor your ma in your
eyes and mouth. She was a nice little thing. My darter went to
school to her and was nigh crazy about her. They was buried in
the one grave and the School Board put up a tombstone to them as
a
reward for
faithful service. Will you come in?"
"Will you let me go all over the house?" asked Anne
eagerly.