The Collected Works of Lucy Maud Montgomery: 20 Novels & 170+ Short Stories, Poems, Autobiography and Letters (Including Complete Anne Shirley Series, Chronicles of Avonlea & Emily Starr Trilogy). Lucy Maud Montgomery
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you want to be good?” asked Marilla, who had learned a great deal but had not yet learned the futility of asking such questions.
“Yes, I want to be good but not TOO good,” said Davy cautiously. “You don’t have to be very good to be a Sunday School superintendent. Mr. Bell’s that, and he’s a real bad man.”
“Indeed he’s not,” said Marila indignantly.
“He is … he says he is himself,” asseverated Davy. “He said it when he prayed in Sunday School last Sunday. He said he was a vile worm and a miserable sinner and guilty of the blackest ‘niquity. What did he do that was so bad, Marilla? Did he kill anybody? Or steal the collection cents? I want to know.”
Fortunately Mrs. Lynde came driving up the lane at this moment and Marilla made off, feeling that she had escaped from the snare of the fowler, and wishing devoutly that Mr. Bell were not quite so highly figurative in his public petitions, especially in the hearing of small boys who were always “wanting to know.”
Anne, left alone in her glory, worked with a will. The floor was swept, the beds made, the hens fed, the muslin dress washed and hung out on the line. Then Anne prepared for the transfer of feathers. She mounted to the garret and donned the first old dress that came to hand … a navy blue cashmere she had worn at fourteen. It was decidedly on the short side and as “skimpy” as the notable wincey Anne had worn upon the occasion of her debut at Green Gables; but at least it would not be materially injured by down and feathers. Anne completed her toilet by tying a big red and white spotted handkerchief that had belonged to Matthew over her head, and, thus accoutred, betook herself to the kitchen chamber, whither Marilla, before her departure, had helped her carry the feather bed.
A cracked mirror hung by the chamber window and in an unlucky moment Anne looked into it. There were those seven freckles on her nose, more rampant than ever, or so it seemed in the glare of light from the unshaded window.
“Oh, I forgot to rub that lotion on last night,” she thought. “I’d better run down to the pantry and do it now.”
Anne had already suffered many things trying to remove those freckles. On one occasion the entire skin had peeled off her nose but the freckles remained. A few days previously she had found a recipe for a freckle lotion in a magazine and, as the ingredients were within her reach, she straightway compounded it, much to the disgust of Marilla, who thought that if Providence had placed freckles on your nose it was your bounden duty to leave them there.
Anne scurried down to the pantry, which, always dim from the big willow growing close to the window, was now almost dark by reason of the shade drawn to exclude flies. Anne caught the bottle containing the lotion from the shelf and copiously anointed her nose therewith by means of a little sponge sacred to the purpose. This important duty done, she returned to her work. Any one who has ever shifted feathers from one tick to another will not need to be told that when Anne finished she was a sight to behold. Her dress was white with down and fluff, and her front hair, escaping from under the handkerchief, was adorned with a veritable halo of feathers. At this auspicious moment a knock sounded at the kitchen door.
“That must be Mr. Shearer,” thought Anne. “I’m in a dreadful mess but I’ll have to run down as I am, for he’s always in a hurry.”
Down flew Anne to the kitchen door. If ever a charitable floor did open to swallow up a miserable, befeathered damsel the Green Gables porch floor should promptly have engulfed Anne at that moment. On the doorstep were standing Priscilla Grant, golden and fair in silk attire, a short, stout gray-haired lady in a tweed suit, and another lady, tall stately, wonderfully gowned, with a beautiful, highbred face and large, black-lashed violet eyes, whom Anne “instinctively felt,” as she would have said in her earlier days, to be Mrs. Charlotte E. Morgan.
In the dismay of the moment one thought stood out from the confusion of Anne’s mind and she grasped at it as at the proverbial straw. All Mrs. Morgan’s heroines were noted for “rising to the occasion.” No matter what their troubles were, they invariably rose to the occasion and showed their superiority over all ills of time, space, and quantity. Anne therefore felt it was HER duty to rise to the occasion and she did it, so perfectly that Priscilla afterward declared she never admired Anne Shirley more than at that moment. No matter what her outraged feelings were she did not show them. She greeted Priscilla and was introduced to her companions as calmly and composedly as if she had been arrayed in purple and fine linen. To be sure, it was somewhat of a shock to find that the lady she had instinctively felt to be Mrs. Morgan was not Mrs. Morgan at all, but an unknown Mrs. Pendexter, while the stout little gray-haired woman was Mrs. Morgan; but in the greater shock the lesser lost its power. Anne ushered her guests to the spare room and thence into the parlor, where she left them while she hastened out to help Priscilla unharness her horse.
“It’s dreadful to come upon you so unexpectedly as this,” apologized Priscilla, “but I did not know till last night that we were coming. Aunt Charlotte is going away Monday and she had promised to spend today with a friend in town. But last night her friend telephoned to her not to come because they were quarantined for scarlet fever. So I suggested we come here instead, for I knew you were longing to see her. We called at the White Sands Hotel and brought Mrs. Pendexter with us. She is a friend of aunt’s and lives in New York and her husband is a millionaire. We can’t stay very long, for Mrs. Pendexter has to be back at the hotel by five o’clock.”
Several times while they were putting away the horse Anne caught Priscilla looking at her in a furtive, puzzled way.
“She needn’t stare at me so,” Anne thought a little resentfully. “If she doesn’t KNOW what it is to change a feather bed she might IMAGINE it.”
When Priscilla had gone to the parlor, and before Anne could escape upstairs, Diana walked into the kitchen. Anne caught her astonished friend by the arm.
“Diana Barry, who do you suppose is in that parlor at this very moment? Mrs. Charlotte E. Morgan … and a New York millionaire’s wife … and here I am like THIS … and NOT A THING IN THE HOUSE FOR DINNER BUT A COLD HAM BONE, Diana!”
By this time Anne had become aware that Diana was staring at her in precisely the same bewildered fashion as Priscilla had done. It was really too much.
“Oh, Diana, don’t look at me so,” she implored. “YOU, at least, must know that the neatest person in the world couldn’t empty feathers from one tick into another and remain neat in the process.”
“It … it … isn’t the feathers,” hesitated Diana. “It’s … it’s … your nose, Anne.”
“My nose? Oh, Diana, surely nothing has gone wrong with it!”
Anne rushed to the little looking glass over the sink. One glance revealed the fatal truth. Her nose was a brilliant scarlet!
Anne sat down on the sofa, her dauntless spirit subdued at last.
“What is the matter with it?” asked Diana, curiosity overcoming delicacy.
“I thought I was rubbing my freckle lotion on it, but I must have used that red dye Marilla has for marking the pattern on her rugs,” was the despairing response. “What shall I do?”
“Wash it off,” said Diana practically.
“Perhaps it won’t wash off. First I dye my hair; then I dye my nose. Marilla cut my hair off when I dyed it but that remedy would hardly be practicable in this case. Well, this is another punishment for vanity and I suppose I deserve it … though there’s not much comfort in THAT. It is really almost enough to make one believe in ill-luck, though Mrs. Lynde says there is no such thing, because everything is foreordained.”
Fortunately the dye washed off easily and Anne, somewhat consoled, betook herself to the east gable while Diana ran home. Presently Anne came down again, clothed and in her right mind. The muslin dress she had fondly hoped to wear was bobbing merrily about on the line outside, so she was forced to content herself with her black lawn. She had the fire on and the tea steeping when Diana returned;