Anne's House of Dreams - L. M. Montgomery [24]
‘I’ve a bit of temper myself,’ sighed Anne.
‘It’s well you have, dearie. You won’t be half so likely to be trodden on, believe me! My, how that golden glow of yours is blooming! Your garden looks fine. Poor Elizabeth always took such care of it.’
‘I love it,’ said Anne. ‘I’m glad it’s so full of old-fashioned flowers. Speaking of gardening, we want to get a man to dig up that little lot beyond the fir-grove and set it out with strawberry plants for us. Gilbert is so busy he will never get time for it this fall. Do you know anyone we can get?’
‘Well, Henry Hammond up at the Glen goes out doing jobs like that. He’ll do, maybe. He’s always a heap more interested in his wages than in his work, just like a man, and he’s so slow in the uptake that he stands still for five minutes before it dawns on him that he’s stopped. His father threw a stump at him when he was small. Nice gentle missile, wasn’t it? So like a man! Course, the boy never got over it. But he’s the only one I can recommend at all. He painted my house for me last spring. It looks real nice now, don’t you think?’
Anne was saved by the clock striking five.
‘Lord, is it that late!’ exclaimed Miss Cornelia. ‘How time does slip by when you’re enjoying yourself! Well, I must betake myself home.’
‘No, indeed! You are going to stay and have tea with us,’ said Anne eagerly.
‘Are you asking me because you think you ought to, or because you really want to?’ demanded Miss Cornelia.
‘Because I really want to.’
‘Then I’ll stay. You belong to the race that knows Joseph.’
‘I know we are going to be friends,’ said Anne, with the smile that only they of the household of faith ever saw.
‘Yes, we are, dearie. Thank goodness, we can choose our friends. We have to take our relatives as they are, and be thankful if there are no penitentiary birds among them. Not that I’ve many – none nearer than second cousins. I’m a kind of lonely soul, Mrs Blythe.’
There was wistful note in Miss Cornelia’s voice.
‘I wish you would call me Anne,’ exclaimed Anne impulsively. ‘It would seem more homey. Every one in Four Winds, except my husband, calls me Mrs Blythe, and it makes me feel like a stranger. Do you know that your name is very near being the one I yearned after when I was a child? I hated “Anne” and I called myself “Cordelia” in imagination.’
‘I like Anne. It was my mother’s name. Old-fashioned names are the best and sweetest in my opinion. If you’re going to get tea you might send the young doctor to talk to me. He’s been lying on the sofa in that office ever since I came, laughing fit to kill over what I’ve been saying.’
‘How did you know?’ cried Anne, too aghast at this instance of Miss Cornelia’s uncanny prescience to make a polite denial.
‘I saw him sitting beside you when I came up the lane, and I know men’s tricks,’ retorted Miss Cornelia. ‘There, I’ve finished my little dress, dearie, and the eighth baby can come as soon as it pleases.’
9
AN EVENING AT FOUR WINDS POINT
It was late September when Anne and Gilbert were able to pay Four Winds light their promised visit. They had often planned to go, but something always occurred to prevent them. Captain Jim had ‘dropped in’ several times at the little house.
‘I don’t stand on ceremony, Mistress Blythe,’ he told Anne. ‘It’s a real pleasure to me to come here, and I’m not going to deny myself jest because you haven’t got down to see me. There oughtn’t to be no bargaining like that among the race that knows Joseph. I’ll come when