Ruby sank back on her pillows and sobbed convulsively. Anne pressed her hand in an agony of sympathy — silent sympathy, which perhaps helped Ruby more than broken, imperfect words could have done; for presently she grew calmer and her sobs ceased.
“I’m glad I’ve told you this, Anne,” she whispered. “It has helped me just to say it all out. I’ve wanted to all summer — every time you came. I wanted to talk it over with you — but I COULDN’T. It seemed as if it would make death so SURE if I SAID I was going to die, or if any one else said it or hinted it. I wouldn’t say it, or even think it. In the daytime, when people were around me and everything was cheerful, it wasn’t so hard to keep from thinking of it. But in the night, when I couldn’t sleep — it was so dreadful, Anne. I couldn’t get away from it then. Death just came and stared me in the face, until I got so frightened I could have screamed.
“But you won’t be frightened any more, Ruby, will you? You’ll be brave, and believe that all is going to be well with you.”
“I’ll try. I’ll think over what you have said, and try to believe it. And you’ll come up as often as you can, won’t you, Anne?”
“Yes, dear.”
“It — it won’t be very long now, Anne. I feel sure of that. And I’d rather have you than any one else. I always liked you best of all the girls I went to school with. You were never jealous, or mean, like some of them were. Poor Em White was up to see me yesterday. You remember Em and I were such chums for three years when we went to school? And then we quarrelled the time of the school concert. We’ve never spoken to each other since. Wasn’t it silly? Anything like that seems silly NOW. But Em and I made up the old quarrel yesterday. She said she’d have spoken years ago, only she thought I wouldn’t. And I never spoke to her because I was sure she wouldn’t speak to me. Isn’t it strange how people misunderstand each other, Anne?”
“Most of the trouble in life comes from misunderstanding, I think,” said Anne. “I must go now, Ruby. It’s getting late — and you shouldn’t be out in the damp.”
“You’ll come up soon again.”
“Yes, very soon. And if there’s anything I can do to help you I’ll be so glad.”
“I know. You HAVE helped me already. Nothing seems quite so dreadful now. Good night, Anne.”
“Good night, dear.”
Anne walked home very slowly in the moonlight. The evening had changed something for her. Life held a different meaning, a deeper purpose. On the surface it would go on just the same; but the deeps had been stirred. It must not be with her as with poor butterfly Ruby. When she came to the end of one life it must not be to face the next with the shrinking terror of something wholly different — something for which accustomed thought and ideal and aspiration had unfitted her. The little things of life, sweet and excellent in their place, must not be the things lived for; the highest must be sought and followed; the life of heaven must be begun here on earth.
That good night in the garden was for all time. Anne never saw Ruby in life again. The next night the A.V.I.S. gave a farewell party to Jane Andrews before her departure for the West. And, while light feet danced and bright eyes laughed and merry tongues chattered, there came a summons to a soul in Avonlea that might not be disregarded or evaded. The next morning the word went from house to house that Ruby Gillis was dead. She had died in her sleep, painlessly and calmly, and on her face was a smile — as if, after all, death had come as a kindly friend to lead her over the threshold, instead of the grisly phantom she had dreaded.
Mrs. Rachel Lynde said emphatically after the funeral that Ruby Gillis was the handsomest corpse she ever laid eyes on. Her loveliness, as she lay, white-clad, among the delicate flowers that Anne had placed about her, was remembered and talked of for years in Avonlea. Ruby had always been beautiful; but her beauty had been of the earth, earthy; it had had a certain insolent quality in it, as if it flaunted itself in the beholder’s eye; spirit had never shone through it, intellect had never refined it. But death had touched it and consecrated it, bringing out delicate modelings and purity of outline never seen before — doing what life and love and great sorrow and deep womanhood joys might have done for Ruby. Anne, looking down through a mist of tears, at her old playfellow, thought she saw the face God had meant Ruby to have, and remembered it so always.
Mrs. Gillis called Anne aside into a vacant room before the funeral procession left the house, and gave her a small packet.
“I want you to have this,” she sobbed. “Ruby would have liked you to have it. It’s the embroidered centerpiece she was working at. It isn’t quite finished — the needle is sticking in it just where her poor little fingers put it the last time she laid it down, the afternoon before she died.”
“There’s always a piece of unfinished work left,” said Mrs. Lynde, with tears in her eyes. “But I suppose there’s always some one to finish it.”
“How difficult it is to realize that one we have always known can really be dead,” said Anne, as she and Diana walked home. “Ruby is the first of our schoolmates to go. One by one, sooner or later, all the rest of us must follow.”
“Yes, I suppose so,” said Diana uncomfortably. She did not want to talk of that. She would have preferred to have discussed the details of the funeral — the splendid white velvet casket Mr. Gillis had insisted on having for Ruby—”the Gillises must always make a splurge, even at funerals,” quoth Mrs. Rachel Lynde — Herb Spencer’s sad face, the uncontrolled, hysteric grief of one of Ruby’s sisters — but Anne would not talk of these things. She seemed wrapped in a reverie in which Diana felt lonesomely that she had neither lot nor part.
“Ruby Gillis was a great girl to laugh,” said Davy suddenly. “Will she laugh as much in heaven as she did in Avonlea, Anne? I want to know.”
“Yes, I think she will,” said Anne.
“Oh, Anne,” protested Diana, with a rather shocked smile.
“Well, why not, Diana?” asked Anne seriously. “Do you think we’ll never laugh in heaven?”
“Oh — I — I don’t know” floundered Diana. “It doesn’t seem just right, somehow. You know it’s rather dreadful to laugh in church.”
“But heaven won’t be like church — all the time,” said Anne.
“I hope it ain’t,” said Davy emphatically. “If it is I don’t want to go. Church is awful dull. Anyway, I don’t mean to go for ever so long. I mean to live to be a hundred years old, like Mr. Thomas Blewett of White Sands. He says he’s lived so long ‘cause he always smoked tobacco and it killed all the germs. Can I smoke tobacco pretty soon, Anne?”
“No, Davy, I hope you’ll never use tobacco,” said Anne absently.
“What’ll you feel like if the germs kill me then?” demanded Davy.
Chapter XV.
A Dream Turned Upside Down
“Just one more week and we go back to Redmond,” said Anne. She was happy at the thought of returning to work, classes and Redmond friends. Pleasing visions were also being woven around Patty’s Place. There was a warm pleasant sense of home in the thought of it, even though she had never lived there.
But the summer had been a very happy one, too — a time of glad living with summer suns and skies, a time of keen delight in wholesome things; a time of renewing and deepening of old friendships; a time in which she had learned to live more nobly, to work more patiently,