Anne of Windy Poplars - L. M. Montgomery [103]
I understand they were the ‘Royal Family’ in old days. The Pringles are mushrooms compared to them. And now there is left of them all only Miss Minerva, the sole survivor of six generations of Tomgallons. She lives alone in a huge house on Queen Street, a house with great chimneys, green shutters, and the only stained-glass windows in a private house in town. It is big enough for four families, and is occupied only by Miss Minerva, a cook, and a maid. It is very well kept up, but somehow whenever I walk past it I feel that it is a place which life has forgotten.
Miss Minerva goes out very little, excepting to the Anglican church, and I had never met her until a few weeks ago, when she came to a meeting of staff and trustees to make a formal gift of her father’s valuable library to the school. She looks exactly as you would expect a Minerva Tomgallon to look – tall and thin, with a long, narrow white face, a long, thin nose, and a long, thin mouth. That doesn’t sound very attractive; yet Miss Minerva is quite handsome in a stately aristocratic style, and is always dressed with great though somewhat old-fashioned elegance. She was quite a beauty when she was young, Rebecca Dew tells me, and her large black eyes are still full of fire and dark lustre. She suffers from no lack of words, and I don’t think I ever heard anyone enjoy making a presentation speech more.
Miss Minerva was especially nice to me, and yesterday I received a formal little note inviting me to have supper with her. When I told Rebecca Dew she opened her eyes as widely as if I had been invited to Buckingham Palace.
‘It’s a great honour to be asked to Tomgallon House,’ she said, in a rather awed tone. ‘I never heard of Miss Minerva asking any of the Principals there before. To be sure, they were all men, so I suppose it would hardly have been proper. Well, I hope she won’t talk you to death, Miss Shirley. The Tomgallons could all talk the hind-leg off a cat. And they liked to be in the front of things. Some folks think the reason Miss Minerva lives so retired is because now that she’s old she can’t take the lead as she used to do, and she won’t play second fiddle to anyone. What are you going to wear, Miss Shirley? I’d like to see you wear your cream silk gauze with your black velvet bolero. It’s so dressy.’
‘I’m afraid it would be rather too “dressy” for a quiet evening out,’ I said.
‘Miss Minerva would like it, I think. The Tomgallons all liked their company to be nicely arrayed. They say Miss Minerva’s grandfather once shut the door in the face of a woman who had been asked there to a ball, because she came in her second-best dress. He told her her best was none too good for the Tomgallons.’
Nevertheless, I think I’ll wear my green voile, and the ghosts of the Tomgallons must make the best of it.
I’m going to confess something I did last week, Gilbert. I suppose you’ll think I’m meddling again in other folks’ business. But I had to do something. I’ll not be in Summerside next year, and I can’t bear the thought of leaving little Elizabeth to the mercy of those two unloving old women who are growing bitterer and narrower every year. What kind of a girlhood will she have with them in that gloomy old place?
‘I wonder,’ she said to me wistfully, not long ago, ‘what it would be like to have a grandmother you weren’t afraid of?’
This is what I did. I wrote to her father. He lives in Paris, and I didn’t know his address, but Rebecca Dew had heard and remembered the name of the firm whose branch he runs there, so I took a chance and addressed him in care of it. I wrote as diplomatic a letter as I could, but I told him plainly that he ought to take Elizabeth. I told him how she longs for and dreams about him, and that Mrs Campbell was really too severe and strict with her. Perhaps nothing will come of it, but if I hadn’t written I would be for ever haunted by the conviction that I ought to have done it.
What made me think of it was Elizabeth telling me very seriously one day that she had ‘written a letter to God’, asking Him to