Anne of Avonlea: Chapters 25–30

One blithe June morning, a fortnight after Uncle Abe’s storm, Anne came slowly through the Green Gables yard from the garden, carrying in her hands two blighted stalks of white narcissus.

“Look, Marilla,” she said sorrowfully, holding up the flowers before the eyes of a grim lady, with her hair coifed in a green gingham apron, who was going into the house with a plucked chicken, “these are the only buds the storm spared...and even they are imperfect..."

I am his wife. Oh, you may well look surprised. I suppose he has been masquerading as a bachelor and breaking hearts right and left.

Davy brightened up as the insidious comfort of the plum jam stole into his soul.

By the table sat Mr. Harrison in his working clothes, which on Friday had been noted for sundry rents and tatters but which were now neatly patched and brushed.

But I s’pose, Anne, to be fair, I was cantankerous too. I didn’t try to improve as I might have done...I just got cranky and disagreeable when she found fault.

Thomas Lynde faded out of life as quietly and unobtrusively as he had lived it.

“She’s feeling calmer and more composed,” answered Marilla, sitting down on Anne’s bed...a proceeding which betokened some unusual mental excitement, for in Marilla’s code of household ethics to sit on a bed after it was made up was an unpardonable offense.

We’ve been neighbors for forty-five years and we’ve never had a quarrel...though we came rather near it that time you flew at Mrs. Rachel for calling you homely and redhaired.

People opined that they wouldn’t get on together. They were both “too fond of their own way,” and many doleful predictions were made, none of which disturbed the parties in question at all.

They had come to a clear and distinct understanding of the respective duties and rights of their new arrangements and meant to abide by them.

She says she has slipped through the birch grove back of the manse nearly every night to the graveyard and sung a little lullaby to it.

She went home and wrote him a perfectly scathing refusal; and she says his father and mother have taken turns watching him ever since for fear he’ll drown himself in the river; but Ruby says they needn’t be afraid; for in the Deportment of Courtship and Marriage it told how a rejected lover should behave and there’s nothing about drowning in THAT.

It became her perfectly, bringing out all the delicate, flower-like tints of her face and the gloss and burnish of her hair.

“Take me with you,” entreated Davy.

“Yes, just the best kind of a day,” answered Miss Lavendar, rousing herself from her reverie.

“Just as if you were looking through me at somebody I put you in mind of,” said Paul, who had such occasional flashes of uncanny insight that it wasn’t quite safe to have secrets when he was about.

A triumphant “semi-annual examination” was held and Anne’s pupils acquitted themselves splendidly.

Gracie came home from school one day last week with the greatest rigmarole he had told her about people who lived down at the shore...stories there couldn’t be a word of truth in, you know.

Mrs. Andrews’ only acquaintance with the word “genius” was derived from the colloquial fashion of calling any eccentric individual “a queer genius.”

Perhaps she had not succeeded in “inspiring” any wonderful ambitions in her pupils, but she had taught them, more by her own sweet personality than by all her careful precepts, that it was good and necessary in the years that were before them to live their lives finely and graciously, holding fast to truth and courtesy and kindness, keeping aloof from all that savored of falsehood and meanness and vulgarity.

Perhaps she had not succeeded in “inspiring” any wonderful ambitions in her pupils, but she had taught them, more by her own sweet personality than by all her careful precepts, that it was good and necessary in the years that were before them to live their lives finely and graciously, holding fast to truth and courtesy and kindness, keeping aloof from all that savored of falsehood and meanness and vulgarity.

She took Miss Lavendar on a shopping expedition to town and persuaded her to buy a new organdy dress; then came the excitement of cutting and making it together, while the happy Charlotta the Fourth basted and swept up clippings.

Mr. Irving rose and went to the window, looking out on a great, golden, billowing sea where a wild wind was harping.

“How did you know? Who told you?” cried Anne disappointedly, vexed that her great revelation had been anticipated.

Charlotta the Fourth endured it till patience ceased to be a virtue; then she confronted Anne on the occasion of that romantic young person’s third aimless peregrination through the kitchen.

“I hope that he’ll marry Miss Lavendar,” was Charlotta’s unequivocal response.

Marilla thought Anne was too worked up about it and had plenty to do with getting ready for college without “traipsing” to Echo Lodge two days out of three helping Miss Lavendar.

They are to be married in the garden under the honeysuckle trellis...the very spot where Mr. Irving proposed to her twenty-five years ago.

Diana came to Green Gables the next evening, a pensive, shy young lady, and told Anne the whole story in the dusky seclusion of the east gable.

But I’m going to begin crocheting doilies tomorrow. Myra Gillis had thirty-seven doilies when she was married and I’m determined I shall have as many as she had.

“Well,” said Anne to herself that night, as she brushed her hair before her gilt framed mirror, “I am glad Diana is so happy and satisfied..."

She had sold all her superfluous household plenishings by auction and was at present reveling in the congenial occupation of helping the Allans pack up.

They found the stone house agog with excitement.

Charlotta the Fourth was flying around with such vim and briskness that her blue bows seemed really to possess the power of being everywhere at once.

Like the helmet of Navarre, Charlotta’s blue bows waved ever in the thickest of the fray.

She braided her hair in innumerable plaits and took her weary little bones off to bed.

But alas, the morning did look unpropitious. Below the window Miss Lavendar’s garden, which should have been a glory of pale virgin sunshine, lay dim and windless; and the sky over the firs was dark with moody clouds.

The garden was a pool of late golden sunshine, with butterflies hovering and bees booming; but the little house had already that indefinable air of desolation which always follows a festivity.

Four years of earnest, happy work...and then the guerdon of a useful knowledge gained and a sweet heart won.