Anne of Ingleside - L. M. Montgomery [58]
‘But who would want to keep the fairies out, Mrs Mitchell?’
‘Now you’re talking like Anthony. I was only joking. O’ course I don’t believe in fairies… but if they did happen to exist I’ve heard they were pesky mischievous. Well, goodbye, Mrs Blythe. I’ll call round next week for the obitchery.’
23
‘You’ve let yourself in for it, Mrs Doctor dear,’ said Susan, who had overheard most of the conversation as she polished her silver in the pantry.
‘Haven’t I? But, Susan, I really do want to write that “obituary”. I liked Anthony Mitchell… what little I’ve seen of him… and I feel sure that he’d turn over in his grave if his obituary was like the run of the mill in the Daily Enterprise. Anthony had an inconvenient sense of humour.’
‘Anthony Mitchell was a real nice fellow when he was young, Mrs Doctor dear. Though a bit dreamy; they said. He didn’t hustle enough to suit Bessy Plummer, but he made a decent living and paid his debts. Of course he married the last girl he should have. But although Bessy Plummer looks like a comic valentine now, she was pretty as a picture then. Some of us, Mrs Doctor dear,’ concluded Susan with a sigh, ‘haven’t even that much to remember.’
‘Mummy,’ said Walter, ‘the snack-dragons are coming up thick all around the back porch. And a pair of robins are beginning to build a nest on the pantry window-sill. You’ll let them, won’t you, Mummy. You won’t open the window and scare them away?’
Anne had met Anthony Mitchell once or twice, though the little grey house between the spruce woods and the sea, with the great big willow-tree over it like a huge umbrella, where he lived, was in the lower Glen, and the doctor from Mowbray Narrows attended most of the people there. But Gilbert had bought hay from him now and then, and once when he had brought a load Anne had taken him all over her garden and they found out that they talked the same language. She had liked him… his lean, lined, friendly face, his brave, shrewd, yellowish-hazel eyes that had never faltered or been hoodwinked… save once, perhaps, when Bessy Plummer’s shallow and fleeting beauty had tricked him into a foolish marriage. Yet he never seemed unhappy or unsatisfied. As long as he could plough and garden and reap he was as contented as a sunny old pasture. His black hair was but lightly frosted with silver, and a ripe, serene spirit revealed itself in his rare but sweet smiles. His old fields had given him bread and delight, joy of conquest and comfort in sorrow. Anne was satisfied because he was buried near them. He might have ‘gone gladly’, but he had lived gladly, too. The Mowbray Narrows doctor had said that when he told Anthony Mitchell he could hold out to him no hope of recovery Anthony had smiled and replied, ‘Well, life is a trifle monotonous at times now I’m getting old. Death will be something of a change. I’m real curious about it, doctor.’ Even Mrs Anthony, among all her rambling absurdities, had dropped a few things that revealed the real Anthony. Anne wrote ‘The Old Man’s Grave’ a few evenings later by her room window, and read it over with a sense of satisfaction.
Make it where the winds may sweep
Through the pine boughs