“What would you think of a man who would go to a funeral … his father’s funeral … in overalls?” asked Pringle.
What would they think of next? Mrs. Cyrus was crying openly and Esme was quite calm with despair. Nothing mattered any more. She turned and looked squarely at Dr. Carter, whom she had lost forever. For once in her life she was stung into saying a really clever thing.
“What,” she asked quietly, “would you think of a man who spent a whole day hunting for the kittens of a poor cat who had been shot, because he couldn’t bear to think of them starving to death?”
A strange silence descended on the room. Trix and Pringle looked suddenly ashamed of themselves. And then Mrs. Cyrus piped up, feeling it her wifely duty to back up Esme’s unexpected defense of her father.
“And he can crochet so beautifully … he made the loveliest centerpiece for the parlor table last winter when he was laid up with lumbago.”
Every one has some limit of endurance and Cyrus Taylor had reached his. He gave his chair such a furious backward push that it shot instantly across the polished floor and struck the table on which the vase stood. The table went over and the vase broke in the traditional thousand pieces. Cyrus, his bushy white eyebrows fairly bristling with wrath, stood up and exploded at last.
“I don’t crochet, woman! Is one contemptible doily going to blast a man’s reputation forever? I was so bad with that blamed lumbago I didn’t know what I was doing. And I’m deaf, am I, Miss Shirley? I’m deaf?”
“She didn’t say you were, Papa,” cried Trix, who was never afraid of her father when his temper was vocal.
“Oh, no, she didn’t say it. None of you said anything! You didn’t say I was sixty-eight when I’m only sixty-two, did you? You didn’t say I wouldn’t let your mother have a dog! Good Lord, woman, you can have forty thousand dogs if you want to and you know it! When did I ever deny you anything you wanted … when?”
“Never, Poppa, never,” sobbed Mrs. Cyrus brokenly. “And I never wanted a dog. I never even thought of wanting a dog, Poppa.”
“When did I open your letters? When have I ever kept a diary? A diary! When did I ever wear overalls to anybody’s funeral? When did I pasture a cow in the graveyard? What aunt of mine is in the poorhouse? Did I ever throw a roast at anybody? Did I ever make you live on fruit and eggs?”
“Never, Poppa, never,” wept Mrs. Cyrus. “You’ve always been a good provider … the best.”
“Didn’t you tell me you wanted goloshes last Christmas?”
“Yes, oh, yes; of course I did, Poppa. And my feet have been so nice and warm all winter.”
“Well, then!” Cyrus threw a triumphant glance around the room. His eyes encountered Anne’s. Suddenly the unexpected happened. Cyrus chuckled. His cheeks actually dimpled. Those dimples worked a miracle with his whole expression. He brought his chair back to the table and sat down.
“I’ve got a very bad habit of sulking, Dr. Carter. Every one has some bad habit … that’s mine. The only one. Come, come, Momma, stop crying. I admit I deserved all I got except that crack of yours about crocheting. Esme, my girl, I won’t forget that you were the only one who stood up for me. Tell Maggie to come and clear up that mess … I know you’re all glad the darn thing is smashed … and bring on the pudding.”
Anne could never have believed that an evening which began so terribly could end up so pleasantly. Nobody could have been more genial or better company than Cyrus: and there was evidently no aftermath of reckoning, for when Trix came down a few evenings later it was to tell Anne that she had at last scraped up enough courage to tell her father about Johnny.
“Was he very dreadful, Trix?”
“He … he wasn’t dreadful at all,” admitted Trix sheepishly. “He just snorted and said it was about time Johnny came to the point after hanging around for two years and keeping every one else away. I think he felt he couldn’t go into another spell of sulks so soon after the last one. And you know, Anne, between sulks Papa really is an old duck.”
“I think he is a great deal better father to you than you deserve,” said Anne, quite in Rebecca Dew’s manner. “You were simply outrageous at that dinner, Trix.”
“Well, you know you started it,” said Trix. “And good old Pringle helped a bit. All’s well that ends well … and thank goodness I’ll never have to dust that vase again.”
Chapter XI
(Extract from letter to Gilbert two weeks later.)
“Esme Taylor’s engagement to Dr. Lennox Carter is announced. By all I can gather from various bits of local gossip I think he decided that fatal Friday night that he wanted to protect her, and save her from her father and her family … and perhaps from her friends! Her plight evidently appealed to his sense of chivalry. Trix persists in thinking I was the means of bringing it about and perhaps I did take a hand, but I don’t think I’ll ever try an experiment like that again. It’s too much like picking up a lightning flash by the tail.
“I really don’t know what got into me, Gilbert. It must have been a hangover from my old detestation of anything savoring of Pringleism. It does seem old now. I’ve almost forgotten it. But other folks are still wondering. I hear Miss Valentine Courtaloe says she isn’t at all surprised I have won the Pringles over, because I have ‘such a way with me’; and the minister’s wife thinks it is an answer to the prayer she put up. Well, who knows but that it was?
“Jen Pringle and I walked part of the way home from school yesterday and talked of ‘ships and shoes and sealing wax’ … of almost everything but geometry. We avoid that subject. Jen knows I don’t know too much about geometry, but my own wee bit of knowledge about Captain Myrom balances that. I lent Jen my Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. I hate to lend a book I love … it never seems quite the same when it comes back to me … but I love Foxe’s Martyrs only because dear Mrs. Allan gave it to me for a Sunday-school prize years ago. I don’t like reading about martyrs because they always make me feel petty and ashamed … ashamed to admit I hate to get out of bed on frosty mornings and shrink from a visit to the dentist!
“Well, I’m glad Esme and Trix are both happy. Since my own little romance is in flower I am all the more interested in other people’s. A nice interest, you know. Not curious or malicious but just glad there’s such a lot of happiness spread about.
“It’s still February and ‘on the convent roof the snows are sparkling to the moon’ … only it isn’t a convent … just the roof of Mr. Hamilton’s barn. But I’m beginning to think, ‘Only a few more weeks till spring … and a few more weeks then till summer … and holidays … and Green Gables … and golden sunlight on Avonlea meadows … and a gulf that will be silver at dawn and sapphire at noon and crimson at sunset … and you.’
“Little Elizabeth and I have no end of plans for spring. We are such good friends. I take her milk every evening and once in so long she is allowed to go for a walk with me. We have discovered that our birthdays are on the same day and Elizabeth flushed ‘divinest rosy red’ with the excitement of it. She is so sweet when she blushes. Ordinarily she is far too pale and doesn’t get any pinker because of the new milk. Only when we come back from our twilight trysts with evening winds does she have a lovely rose color in her little cheeks. Once she asked me gravely, ‘Will I have a lovely creamy skin like yours when I grow up, Miss Shirley, if I put buttermilk on my face every night?’ Buttermilk seems to be the preferred cosmetic in Spook’s Lane. I have discovered that Rebecca