“I shall never try any beautifying messes again,” she said, darkly resolute. “They may do for careful, deliberate people; but for anyone so hopelessly given over to making mistakes as I seem to be it’s tempting fate to meddle with them.”
XXI. Sweet Miss Lavendar
School opened and Anne returned to her work, with fewer theories but considerably more experience. She had several new pupils, six-and seven-year-olds just venturing, round-eyed, into a world of wonder. Among them were Davy and Dora. Davy sat with Milty Boulter, who had been going to school for a year and was therefore quite a man of the world. Dora had made a compact at Sunday School the previous Sunday to sit with Lily Sloane; but Lily Sloane not coming the first day, she was temporarily assigned to Mirabel Cotton, who was ten years old and therefore, in Dora’s eyes, one of the “big girls.”
“I think school is great fun,” Davy told Marilla when he got home that night. “You said I’d find it hard to sit still and I did … you mostly do tell the truth, I notice … but you can wriggle your legs about under the desk and that helps a lot. It’s splendid to have so many boys to play with. I sit with Milty Boulter and he’s fine. He’s longer than me but I’m wider. It’s nicer to sit in the back seats but you can’t sit there till your legs grow long enough to touch the floor. Milty drawed a picture of Anne on his slate and it was awful ugly and I told him if he made pictures of Anne like that I’d lick him at recess. I thought first I’d draw one of him and put horns and a tail on it, but I was afraid it would hurt his feelings, and Anne says you should never hurt anyone’s feelings. It seems it’s dreadful to have your feelings hurt. It’s better to knock a boy down than hurt his feelings if you MUST do something. Milty said he wasn’t scared of me but he’d just as soon call it somebody else to ‘blige me, so he rubbed out Anne’s name and printed Barbara Shaw’s under it. Milty doesn’t like Barbara ‘cause she calls him a sweet little boy and once she patted him on his head.”
Dora said primly that she liked school; but she was very quiet, even for her; and when at twilight Marilla bade her go upstairs to bed she hesitated and began to cry.
“I’m … I’m frightened,” she sobbed. “I … I don’t want to go upstairs alone in the dark.”
“What notion have you got into your head now?” demanded Marilla. “I’m sure you’ve gone to bed alone all summer and never been frightened before.”
Dora still continued to cry, so Anne picked her up, cuddled her sympathetically, and whispered,
“Tell Anne all about it, sweetheart. What are you frightened of?”
“Of … of Mirabel Cotton’s uncle,” sobbed Dora. “Mirabel Cotton told me all about her family today in school. Nearly everybody in her family has died … all her grandfathers and grandmothers and ever so many uncles and aunts. They have a habit of dying, Mirabel says. Mirabel’s awful proud of having so many dead relations, and she told me what they all died of, and what they said, and how they looked in their coffins. And Mirabel says one of her uncles was seen walking around the house after he was buried. Her mother saw him. I don’t mind the rest so much but I can’t help thinking about that uncle.”
Anne went upstairs with Dora and sat by her until she fell asleep. The next day Mirabel Cotton was kept in at recess and “gently but firmly” given to understand that when you were so unfortunate as to possess an uncle who persisted in walking about houses after he had been decently interred it was not in good taste to talk about that eccentric gentleman to your deskmate of tender years. Mirabel thought this very harsh. The Cottons had not much to boast of. How was she to keep up her prestige among her schoolmates if she were forbidden to make capital out of the family ghost?
September slipped by into a gold and crimson graciousness of October. One Friday evening Diana came over.
“I’d a letter from Ella Kimball today, Anne, and she wants us to go over to tea tomorrow afternoon to meet her cousin, Irene Trent, from town. But we can’t get one of our horses to go, for they’ll all be in use tomorrow, and your pony is lame … so I suppose we can’t go.”
“Why can’t we walk?” suggested Anne. “If we go straight back through the woods we’ll strike the West Grafton road not far from the Kimball place. I was through that way last winter and I know the road. It’s no more than four miles and we won’t have to walk home, for Oliver Kimball will be sure to drive us. He’ll be only too glad of the excuse, for he goes to see Carrie Sloane and they say his father will hardly ever let him have a horse.”
It was accordingly arranged that they should walk, and the following afternoon they set out, going by way of Lover’s Lane to the back of the Cuthbert farm, where they found a road leading into the heart of acres of glimmering beech and maple woods, which were all in a wondrous glow of flame and gold, lying in a great purple stillness and peace.
“It’s as if the year were kneeling to pray in a vast cathedral full of mellow stained light, isn’t it?” said Anne dreamily. “It doesn’t seem right to hurry through it, does it? It seems irreverent, like running in a church.”
“We MUST hurry though,” said Diana, glancing at her watch. “We’ve left ourselves little enough time as it is.”
“Well, I’ll walk fast but don’t ask me to talk,” said Anne, quickening her pace. “I just want to drink the day’s loveliness in … I feel as if she were holding it out to my lips like a cup of airy wine and I’ll take a sip at every step.”
Perhaps it was because she was so absorbed in “drinking it in” that Anne took the left turning when they came to a fork in the road. She should have taken the right, but ever afterward she counted it the most fortunate mistake of her life. They came out finally to a lonely, grassy road, with nothing in sight along it but ranks of spruce saplings.
“Why, where are we?” exclaimed Diana in bewilderment. “This isn’t the West Grafton road.”
“No, it’s the base line road in Middle Grafton,” said Anne, rather shamefacedly. “I must have taken the wrong turning at the fork. I don’t know where we are exactly, but we must be all of three miles from Kimballs’ still.”
“Then we can’t get there by five, for it’s half past four now,” said Diana, with a despairing look at her watch. “We’ll arrive after they have had their tea, and they’ll have all the bother of getting ours over again.”
“We’d better turn back and go home,” suggested Anne humbly. But Diana, after consideration, vetoed this.
“No, we may as well go and spend the evening, since we have come this far.”
A few yards further on the girls came to a place where the road forked again.
“Which of these do we take?” asked Diana dubiously.
Anne shook her head.
“I don’t know and we can’t afford to make any more mistakes. Here is a gate and a lane leading right into the wood. There must be a house at the other side. Let us go down and inquire.”
“What a romantic old lane this it,” said Diana, as they walked along its twists and turns. It ran under patriarchal old firs whose branches met above, creating a perpetual gloom in which nothing except moss could grow. On either hand were brown wood floors, crossed here and there by fallen lances of sunlight. All was very still and remote, as if the world and the cares of the world were far away.
“I feel as if we were walking through an enchanted forest,” said Anne in a hushed tone. “Do you suppose we’ll ever find our way back to the real world again, Diana? We shall presently come to a palace with a spellbound princess in it, I think.”
Around the next turn they came in sight, not indeed