Anne of Windy Poplars - L. M. Montgomery [87]
Things seemed to change magically for Elizabeth the moment she got to Green Gables. For two weeks she lived in a world of romance. You couldn’t step outside the door without stepping into something romantic. Things were just bound to happen in Avonlea, if not today, then tomorrow. Elizabeth knew she hadn’t quite got into Tomorrow yet, but she knew she was on the very fringes of it.
Everything in and about Green Gables seemed to be acquainted with her. Even Marilla’s pink rosebud tea-set was like an old friend. The rooms looked at her as if she had always known and loved them; the very grass was greener than grass anywhere else; and the people who lived at Green Gables were the kind of people who lived in Tomorrow. She loved them and was beloved by them. Davy and Dora adored her and spoiled her; Marilla and Mrs Lynde approved of her. She was neat; she was ladylike, she was polite to her elders. They knew Anne did not like Mrs Campbell’s methods, but it was plain to be seen that she had trained her great-granddaughter properly.
‘Oh, I don’t want to sleep, Miss Shirley,’ Elizabeth whispered, when they were in bed in the little porch gable after a rapturous evening. ‘I don’t want to sleep away a single minute of these wonderful two weeks. I wish I could get along without any sleep while I’m here.’
For a while she didn’t sleep. It was heavenly to lie there and listen to the splendid low thunder Miss Shirley had told her was the sound of the sea. Elizabeth loved it, and the sigh of the wind round the eaves as well. Elizabeth had always been afraid of the night – who knew what queer thing might jump at you out of it? – but now she was afraid no longer. For the first time in her life the night seemed like a friend to her.
They would go to the shore tomorrow, Miss Shirley had promised, and have a dip in those silver-tipped waves they had seen breaking beyond the green dunes of Avonlea when they drove over the last hill. Elizabeth could see them coming in, one after the other. One of them was a great dark wave of sleep. It rolled right over here. Elizabeth drowned in it with a delicious sigh of surrender.
It’s… so… easy… to… love… God… here,’ was her last conscious thought.
But she lay awake for a while every night of her stay at Green Gables, long after Miss Shirley had gone to sleep, thinking over things. Why couldn’t life at the Evergreens be like life at Green Gables?
Elizabeth had never lived where she could make a noise if she wanted to. Everybody at the Evergreens had to move softly, speak softly, even, so Elizabeth felt, think softly. There were times when Elizabeth desired perversely to yell loud and long.
‘You may make all the noise you want to here,’ Anne had told her. But it was strange; she no longer wanted to yell, now that there was nothing to prevent her. She liked to go quietly, stepping gently among all the lovely things around her. But Elizabeth learned to laugh during that sojourn at Green Gables. And when she went back to Summerside she carried delightful memories with her, and left equally delightful ones behind her. To the Green Gables folks Green Gables seemed for months full of memories of little Elizabeth. For ‘little Elizabeth’ she was to them, in spite of the fact that Anne had solemnly introduced her as ‘Miss Elizabeth’. She was so tiny, so golden, so elf-like, that they couldn’t think of her as anything but little Elizabeth: little Elizabeth dancing in a twilit garden among the white June lilies; little Elizabeth coiled up on a bough of the big Duchess apple-tree reading fairytales, unlet and unhindered; little Elizabeth half drowned in a field of buttercups, where her golden head seemed just a larger buttercup; little Elizabeth chasing silver-green moths, or trying to count the fireflies in Lovers’ Lane; little Elizabeth listening to the bumblebees zooming in the Canterbury bells; little Elizabeth being fed with strawberries and