Anne Shirley (Complete 14 Book Collection). Люси Мод Монтгомери
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I don’t believe he wanted to come. Anne, I’m horribly afraid Jonas doesn’t really care anything about me. And I’m trying to decide whether I’ll pine away and die, or go on and get my B.A. and be sensible and useful.”
“You couldn’t possibly be sensible and useful, Phil, so you’d better pine away and die,” said Anne cruelly.
“Heartless Anne!”
“Silly Phil! You know quite well that Jonas loves you.”
“But — he won’t TELL me so. And I can’t MAKE him. He LOOKS it, I’ll admit. But speak-to-me-only-with-thine-eyes isn’t a really reliable reason for embroidering doilies and hemstitching tablecloths. I don’t want to begin such work until I’m really engaged. It would be tempting Fate.”
“Mr. Blake is afraid to ask you to marry him, Phil. He is poor and can’t offer you a home such as you’ve always had. You know that is the only reason he hasn’t spoken long ago.”
“I suppose so,” agreed Phil dolefully. “Well” — brightening up—”if he WON’T ask me to marry him I’ll ask him, that’s all. So it’s bound to come right. I won’t worry. By the way, Gilbert Blythe is going about constantly with Christine Stuart. Did you know?”
Anne was trying to fasten a little gold chain about her throat. She suddenly found the clasp difficult to manage. WHAT was the matter with it — or with her fingers?
“No,” she said carelessly. “Who is Christine Stuart?”
“Ronald Stuart’s sister. She’s in Kingsport this winter studying music. I haven’t seen her, but they say she’s very pretty and that Gilbert is quite crazy over her. How angry I was when you refused Gilbert, Anne. But Roy Gardner was foreordained for you. I can see that now. You were right, after all.”
Anne did not blush, as she usually did when the girls assumed that her eventual marriage to Roy Gardner was a settled thing. All at once she felt rather dull. Phil’s chatter seemed trivial and the reception a bore. She boxed poor Rusty’s ears.
“Get off that cushion instantly, you cat, you! Why don’t you stay down where you belong?”
Anne picked up her orchids and went downstairs, where Aunt Jamesina was presiding over a row of coats hung before the fire to warm. Roy Gardner was waiting for Anne and teasing the Sarah-cat while he waited. The Sarah-cat did not approve of him. She always turned her back on him. But everybody else at Patty’s Place liked him very much. Aunt Jamesina, carried away by his unfailing and deferential courtesy, and the pleading tones of his delightful voice, declared he was the nicest young man she ever knew, and that Anne was a very fortunate girl. Such remarks made Anne restive. Roy’s wooing had certainly been as romantic as girlish heart could desire, but — she wished Aunt Jamesina and the girls would not take things so for granted. When Roy murmured a poetical compliment as he helped her on with her coat, she did not blush and thrill as usual; and he found her rather silent in their brief walk to Redmond. He thought she looked a little pale when she came out of the coeds’ dressing room; but as they entered the reception room her color and sparkle suddenly returned to her. She turned to Roy with her gayest expression. He smiled back at her with what Phil called “his deep, black, velvety smile.” Yet she really did not see Roy at all. She was acutely conscious that Gilbert was standing under the palms just across the room talking to a girl who must be Christine Stuart.
She was very handsome, in the stately style destined to become rather massive in middle life. A tall girl, with large dark-blue eyes, ivory outlines, and a gloss of darkness on her smooth hair.
“She looks just as I’ve always wanted to look,” thought Anne miserably. “Roseleaf complexion — starry violet eyes — raven hair — yes, she has them all. It’s a wonder her name isn’t Cordelia Fitzgerald into the bargain! But I don’t believe her figure is as good as mine, and her nose certainly isn’t.”
Anne felt a little comforted by this conclusion.
Chapter XXVII.
Mutual Confidences
March came in that winter like the meekest and mildest of lambs, bringing days that were crisp and golden and tingling, each followed by a frosty pink twilight which gradually lost itself in an elfland of moonshine.
Over the girls at Patty’s Place was falling the shadow of April examinations. They were studying hard; even Phil had settled down to text and notebooks with a doggedness not to be expected of her.
“I’m going to take the Johnson Scholarship in Mathematics,” she announced calmly. “I could take the one in Greek easily, but I’d rather take the mathematical one because I want to prove to Jonas that I’m really enormously clever.”
“Jonas likes you better for your big brown eyes and your crooked smile than for all the brains you carry under your curls,” said Anne.
“When I was a girl it wasn’t considered ladylike to know anything about Mathematics,” said Aunt Jamesina. “But times have changed. I don’t know that it’s all for the better. Can you cook, Phil?”
“No, I never cooked anything in my life except a gingerbread and it was a failure — flat in the middle and hilly round the edges. You know the kind. But, Aunty, when I begin in good earnest to learn to cook don’t you think the brains that enable me to win a mathematical scholarship will also enable me to learn cooking just as well?”
“Maybe,” said Aunt Jamesina cautiously. “I am not decrying the higher education of women. My daughter is an M.A. She can cook, too. But I taught her to cook BEFORE I let a college professor teach her Mathematics.”
In mid-March came a letter from Miss Patty Spofford, saying that she and Miss Maria had decided to remain abroad for another year.
“So you may have Patty’s Place next winter, too,” she wrote. “Maria and I are going to run over Egypt. I want to see the Sphinx once before I die.”
“Fancy those two dames ‘running over Egypt’! I wonder if they’ll look up at the Sphinx and knit,” laughed Priscilla.
“I’m so glad we can keep Patty’s Place for another year,” said Stella. “I was afraid they’d come back. And then our jolly little nest here would be broken up — and we poor callow nestlings thrown out on the cruel world of boardinghouses again.”
“I’m off for a tramp in the park,” announced Phil, tossing her book aside. “I think when I am eighty I’ll be glad I went for a walk in the park tonight.”
“What do you mean?” asked Anne.
“Come with me and I’ll tell you, honey.”
They captured in their ramble all the mysteries and magics of a March evening. Very still and mild it was, wrapped in a great, white, brooding silence — a silence which was yet threaded through with many little silvery sounds which you could hear if you hearkened as much with your soul as your ears. The girls wandered down a long pineland aisle that seemed to lead right out into the heart of a deep-red, overflowing winter sunset.
“I’d go home and write a poem this blessed minute if I only knew how,” declared Phil, pausing in an open space where a rosy light was staining the green tips of the pines. “It’s all so wonderful here — this great, white stillness, and those dark trees that always seem to be thinking.”
“‘The woods were God’s first temples,’” quoted Anne softly. “One can’t help feeling reverent and adoring in such a place. I always feel so near Him when I walk among the pines.”
“Anne, I’m the happiest girl in the world,” confessed Phil suddenly.
“So Mr. Blake has asked you to marry him at last?” said Anne calmly.
“Yes.