The Complete Short Stories of Lucy Maud Montgomery. Lucy Maud Montgomery
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dress was an event in Lucinda’s existence. An uncle had given her this one — a beautiful, perishable thing, such as Lucinda would never have dared to choose for herself, but in which she revelled with feminine delight.
It was of pale green voile — a colour which brought out admirably the ruddy gloss of her hair and the clear brilliance of her skin. When she had finished dressing she looked at herself in the mirror with frank delight. Lucinda was not vain, but she was quite well aware of the fact of her beauty and took an impersonal pleasure in it, as if she were looking at some finely painted picture by a master hand.
The form and face reflected in the glass satisfied her. The puffs and draperies of the green voile displayed to perfection the full, but not overfull, curves of her fine figure. Lucinda lifted her arm and touched a red rose to her lips with the hand upon which shone the frosty glitter of Romney’s diamond, looking at the graceful slope of her shoulder and the splendid line of chin and throat with critical approval.
She noted, too, how well the gown became her eyes, bringing out all the deeper colour in them. Lucinda had magnificent eyes. Once Romney had written a sonnet to them in which he compared their colour to ripe blueberries. This may not sound poetical to you unless you know or remember just what the tints of ripe blueberries are — dusky purple in some lights, clear slate in others, and yet again in others the misty hue of early meadow violets.
“You really look very well,” remarked the real Lucinda to the mirrored Lucinda. “Nobody would think you were an old maid. But you are. Alice Penhallow, who is to be married tonight, was a child of five when you thought of being married fifteen years ago. That makes you an old maid, my dear. Well, it is your own fault, and it will continue to be your own fault, you stubborn offshoot of a stubborn breed!”
She flung her train out straight and pulled on her gloves.
“I do hope I won’t get any spots on this dress tonight,” she reflected. “It will have to do me for a gala dress for a year at least — and I have a creepy conviction that it is fearfully spottable. Bless Uncle Mark’s good, uncalculating heart! How I would have detested it if he had given me something sensible and useful and ugly — as Aunt Emilia would have done.”
They all went to “young” John Penhallow’s at early moonrise. Lucinda drove over the two miles of hill and dale with a youthful second cousin, by name, Carey Penhallow. The wedding was quite a brilliant affair. Lucinda seemed to pervade the social atmosphere, and everywhere she went a little ripple of admiration trailed after her like a wave. She was undeniably a belle, yet she found herself feeling faintly bored and was rather glad than otherwise when the guests began to fray off.
“I’m afraid I’m losing my capacity for enjoyment,” she thought, a little drearily. “Yes, I must be growing old. That is what it means when social functions begin to bore you.”
It was that unlucky Mrs. George who blundered again. She was standing on the veranda when Carey Penhallow dashed up.
“Tell Lucinda that I can’t take her back to the Grange. I have to drive Mark and Cissy Penhallow to Bright River to catch the two o’clock express. There will be plenty of chances for her with the others.”
At this moment George Penhallow, holding his rearing horse with difficulty, shouted for his wife. Mrs. George, all in a flurry, dashed back into the still crowded hall. Exactly to whom she gave her message was never known to any of the Penhallows. But a tall, ruddy-haired girl, dressed in pale green organdy — Anne Shirley from Avonlea — told Marilla Cuthbert and Rachel Lynde as a joke the next morning how a chubby little woman in a bright pink fascinator had clutched her by the arm, and gasped out: “Carey Penhallow can’t take you — he says you’re to look out for someone else,” and was gone before she could answer or turn around.
Thus it was that Lucinda, when she came out to the veranda step, found herself unaccountably deserted. All the Grange Penhallows were gone; Lucinda realized this after a few moments of bewildered seeking, and she understood that if she were to get to the Grange that night she must walk. Plainly there was nobody to take her.
Lucinda was angry. It is not pleasant to find yourself forgotten and neglected. It is still less pleasant to walk home alone along a country road, at one o’clock in the morning, wearing a pale green voile. Lucinda was not prepared for such a walk. She had nothing on her feet save thin-soled shoes, and her only wraps were a flimsy fascinator and a short coat.
“What a guy I shall look, stalking home alone in this rig,” she thought crossly.
There was no help for it, unless she confessed her plight to some of the stranger guests and begged a drive home. Lucinda’s pride scorned such a request and the admission of neglect it involved. No, she would walk, since that was all there was to it; but she would not go by the main road to be stared at by all and sundry who might pass her. There was a short cut by way of a lane across the fields; she knew every inch of it, although she had not traversed it for years.
She gathered up the green voile as trimly as possible, slipped around the house in the kindly shadows, picked her way across the side lawn, and found a gate which opened into a birch-bordered lane where the frosted trees shone with silvery-golden radiance in the moonlight. Lucinda flitted down the lane, growing angrier at every step as the realization of how shamefully she seemed to have been treated came home to her. She believed that nobody had thought about her at all, which was tenfold worse than premeditated neglect.
As she came to the gate at the lower end of the lane a man who was leaning over it started, with a quick intake of his breath, which, in any other man than Romney Penhallow, or for any other woman than Lucinda Penhallow, would have been an exclamation of surprise.
Lucinda recognized him with a great deal of annoyance and a little relief. She would not have to walk home alone. But with Romney Penhallow! Would he think she had contrived it so purposely?
Romney silently opened the gate for her, silently latched it behind her, and silently fell into step beside her. Down across a velvety sweep of field they went; the air was frosty, calm and still; over the world lay a haze of moonshine and mist that converted East Grafton’s prosaic hills and fields into a shimmering fairyland. At first Lucinda felt angrier than ever. What a ridiculous situation! How the Penhallows would laugh over it!
As for Romney, he, too, was angry with the trick impish chance had played him. He liked being the butt of an awkward situation as little as most men; and certainly to be obliged to walk home over moonlit fields at one o’clock in the morning with the woman he had loved and never spoken to for fifteen years was the irony of fate with a vengeance. Would she think he had schemed for it? And how the deuce did she come to be walking home from the wedding at all?
By the time they had crossed the field and reached the wild cherry lane beyond it, Lucinda’s anger was mastered by her saving sense of humour. She was even smiling a little maliciously under her fascinator.
The lane was a place of enchantment — a long, moonlit colonnade adown which beguiling wood nymphs might have footed it featly. The moonshine fell through the arching boughs and made a mosaic of silver light and clear-cut shadow for the unfriendly lovers to walk in. On either side was the hovering gloom of the woods, and around them was a great silence unstirred by wind or murmur.
Midway in the lane Lucinda was attacked by a sentimental recollection. She thought of the last time Romney and she had walked home together through this very lane, from a party at “young” John’s. It had been moonlight then too, and — Lucinda checked a sigh — they had walked hand in hand. Just here, by the big gray beech, he had stopped her and kissed her. Lucinda wondered if he were thinking of it, too, and stole a look at him from under the lace border of her fascinator.
But he was striding moodily along with his hands in his pockets, and his hat pulled down over his eyes, passing the old beech without a glance at it. Lucinda checked another sigh, gathered up an escaped flutter of voile, and marched on.
Past the lane a range of three silvery harvest fields sloped down to Peter Penhallow’s brook — a wide, shallow stream bridged over in the olden days by the mossy trunk of an ancient fallen tree.