Anne of Windy Poplars - L. M. Montgomery [63]
This was surprising news to a lad who had fancied himself alone in the world. Lewis and Anne spent the whole evening with Mr Armstrong, and found him to be a well-read and intelligent man. Somehow they both took a liking to him. His former inhospitable reception was quite forgotten, and they saw only the real worth of the character and temperament below the unpromising shell that had hitherto concealed it.
‘Of course, the Little Fellow couldn’t have loved his father so much if it hadn’t been so,’ said Anne, as she and Lewis drove back to Windy Willows through the sunset.
When Lewis Allen went the next week-end to see his uncle the latter said to him, ‘Lad, come and live with me. You are my nephew, and I can do well for you – what I’d have done for my Little Fellow if he’d lived. You’re alone in the world, and so am I. I need you. I’ll grow hard and bitter again if I live here alone. I want you to help me keep my promise to the Little Fellow. His place is empty. Come you and fill it.’
‘Thank you, Uncle. I’ll try,’ said Lewis, holding out his hand.
‘And bring that teacher of yours here once in a while. I like that girl. The Little Fellow liked her. “Dad,” he said to me, “I didn’t think I’d ever like anybody but you to kiss me, but I liked it when she did. There was something in her eyes, Dad.”’
4
‘The old porch thermometer says it’s zero and the new side-door one says it’s ten above,’ remarked Anne one frosty December night, ‘so I don’t know whether to take my muff or not.’
‘Better go by the old thermometer,’ said Rebecca Dew cautiously. ‘It’s probably more used to our climate. Where are you going this cold night, anyway?’
‘I’m going round to Temple Street to ask Katherine Brooke to spend the Christmas holidays with me at Green Gables.’
‘You’ll spoil your holidays, then,’ said Rebecca Dew solemnly. ‘She’d go about snubbing the angels, that one – that is, if she ever condescended to enter heaven. And the worst of it is, she’s proud of her bad manners. Thinks it shows her strength of mind, no doubt!’
‘My brain agrees with every word you say, but my heart simply won’t,’ said Anne. ‘I feel, in spite of everything, that Katherine Brooke is only a shy, unhappy girl under her disagreeable rind. I can never make any headway with her in Summerside, but if I can get her to Green Gables I believe it will thaw her out.’
‘You won’t get her. She won’t go,’ predicted Rebecca Dew. ‘Probably she’ll take it as an insult to be asked; think you’re offering her charity. We asked her here once to Christmas dinner, the year afore you came – you remember, Mrs MacComber, the year we had two turkeys give us, and didn’t know how we was to get ’em et – and all she said was, “No, thank you. If there’s anything I hate it’s the word ‘Christmas’.”’
‘But that is so dreadful – hating Christmas! Something has to be done, Rebecca Dew. I’m going to ask her, and I’ve a queer feeling in my thumbs that tells me she will come.’
‘Somehow,’ said Rebecca Dew reluctantly, ‘when you say a thing is going to happen a body believes it will. You haven’t got second sight, have you? Captain MacComber’s mother had it. Useter give me the creeps.’
‘I don’t think I have anything that need give you creeps. It’s only just… I’ve had a feeling for some time that Katherine Brooke is almost crazy with loneliness under her bitter outside, and that my invitation will come pat to the psychological moment, Rebecca Dew.’
‘I am not a B.A.,’ said Rebecca, with awful humility, ‘and I do not deny your right to use words I cannot always understand. Neither do I deny that you can wind people round your little finger. Look how you managed the Pringles. But I do say I pity you if you take that iceberg and nutmeg-grater combined home with you for Christmas.’
Anne was by no means