Anne of Windy Poplars - L. M. Montgomery [15]
I remembered Elizabeth had never laughed once during our talk. I feel that she hasn’t learned how. That great house is so still and lonely and laughterless. It looks dull and gloomy even now when the world is a riot of autumn colour. Little Elizabeth is doing too much listening to lost whispers.
I think one of my missions in Summerside will be to teach her how to laugh.
Your tenderest, most faithful friend,
ANNE SHIRLEY
P.S. More of Aunt Chatty’s grandmother!
3
Windy Willows
Spook’s Lane
S’side
October 25
GILBERT DEAR,
What do you think? I’ve been to supper at Maplehurst! Miss Ellen herself wrote the invitation. Rebecca Dew was really excited; she had never believed they would take any notice of me. And she was quite sure it was not out of friendliness.
‘They have some sinister motive, that I’m certain of,’ she exclaimed.
I really had some such feeling in my own mind.
‘Be sure you put on your best,’ ordered Rebecca Dew.
So I put on my pretty cream challie dress with the purple violets in it and did my hair the new way with the dip in the forehead. It’s very becoming.
The ladies of Maplehurst are positively delightful in their own way, Gilbert. I could love them if they’d let me. Maplehurst is a proud, exclusive house which draws its trees round it and won’t associate with common houses. It has a big white wooden woman off the bow of old Captain Abraham’s famous ship, the Go and Ask Her, in the orchard, and billows of southernwood about the front steps, which were brought out from the old country over a hundred years ago by the first emigrating Pringle. They have another ancestor who fought at the battle of Minden, and his sword is hanging on the parlour wall beside Captain Abraham’s portrait. Captain Abraham was their father, and they are evidently tremendously proud of him.
They have stately mirrors over the old black fluted mantels, a glass case with wax flowers in it, pictures full of the beauty of the ships of long ago, a hair-wreath containing the hair of every known Pringle, big conch shells, and a quilt on the spare-room bed quilted in infinitesimal fans.
We sat in the parlour on mahogany Sheraton chairs. It was hung with silver-striped wallpaper. Heavy brocade curtains at the windows. Marble-topped tables, one bearing a beautiful model of a ship with crimson hull and snow-white sails – the Go and Ask Her. An enormous chandelier, all glass dingle-dangles, suspended from the ceiling. A round mirror with a clock in the centre – something Captain Abraham had brought home from ‘foreign parts’. It was wonderful. I’d like something like it in our house of dreams.
The very shadows were eloquent and traditional. Miss Ellen showed me millions – more or less – of Pringle photographs, many of them daguerreotypes in leather cases. A big tortoiseshell cat came in, jumped on my knee, and was at once whisked out to the kitchen by Miss Ellen. She apologized to me. But I expect she had previously apologized to the cat in the kitchen.
Miss Ellen did most of the talking. Miss Sarah, a tiny thing in a black silk dress and starched petticoat, with snow-white hair, and eyes as black as her dress, thin, veined hands folded on her lap amid fine lace ruffles, sad, lovely, gentle, looked almost too fragile to talk. And yet I got the impression, Gilbert, that every Pringle of the clan, including Miss Ellen herself, danced to her piping.
We had a delicious supper. The water was cold, the linen beautiful, the dishes and glassware thin. We were waited on by a maid quite as aloof and aristocratic as themselves. But Miss Sarah pretended to be