Anne's House of Dreams - L. M. Montgomery [42]
‘Gilbert!’
‘If you had married Roy Gardner, now,’ continued Gilbert mercilessly, ‘you could have been “a leader in social and intellectual circles far away from Four Winds”.’
‘Gilbert Blythe!’
‘You know you were in love with him at one time, Anne.
‘Gilbert, that’s mean – “p’isen mean, just like all the men”, as Miss Cornelia says. I never was in love with him. I only imagined I was. You know that. You know I’d rather be your wife in our house of dreams and fulfilment than a queen in a palace.’
Gilbert’s answer was not in words; but I am afraid that both of them forgot poor Leslie speeding her lonely way across the fields to a house that was neither a palace nor the fulfilment of a dream.
The moon was rising over the sad, dark sea behind them and transfiguring it. Her light had not yet reached the harbour, the farther side of which was shadowy and suggestive, with dim coves and rich glooms and jewelling lights.
‘How the home lights shine out tonight through the dark!’ said Anne. ‘That string of them over the harbour looks like a necklace. And what a coruscation there is up at the Glen! Oh, look, Gilbert, there is ours. I’m so glad we left it burning. I hate to come home to a dark house. Our homelight, Gilbert! Isn’t it lovely to see?’
‘Just one of earth’s millions of homes, Anne-girl – but ours – ours – our beacon in “a naughty world”. When a fellow has a home and a dear little red-haired wife in it what more need he ask of life?’
‘Well, he might ask one thing more,’ whispered Anne happily. ‘Oh, Gilbert, it seems as if I just couldn’t wait for the spring.’
15
CHRISTMAS AT FOUR WINDS
At first Anne and Gilbert talked of going home to Avonlea for Christmas; but eventually they decided to stay in Four Winds. ‘I want to spend the first Christmas of our life together in our own home,’ decreed Anne.
So it fell out that Marilla and Mrs Rachel Lynde and the twins came to Four Winds for Christmas. Marilla had the face of a woman who had circumnavigated the globe. She had never been sixty miles away from home before; and she had never eaten a Christmas dinner anywhere save at Green Gables.
Mrs Rachel had made and brought her an enormous plum pudding. Nothing could have convinced Mrs Rachel that a college graduate of the younger generation could make a Christmas plum pudding properly; but she bestowed approval on Anne’s house.
‘Anne’s a good housekeeper,’ she said to Marilla in the spare room the night of their arrival. ‘I’ve looked into her bread box and her scrap pail. I always judge a housekeeper by those, that’s what. There’s nothing in the pail that shouldn’t have been thrown away, and no stale pieces in the bread box. Of course, she was trained up with you – but, then, she went to college afterwards. I notice she’s got my tobacco stripe quilt on the bed here, and that big round braided mat of yours before her living-room fire. It makes me feel right at home.’
Anne’s first Christmas in her own house was as delightful as she could have wished. The day was fine and bright; the first skim of snow had fallen on Christmas Eve and made the world beautiful; the harbour was still open and glittering.
Captain Jim and Miss Cornelia came to dinner. Leslie and Dick had been invited, but Leslie made excuse; they always went to Isaac West’s for Christmas, she said.
‘She’d rather have it so,’ Miss Cornelia told Anne. ‘She can’t bear taking Dick where there are strangers. Christmas is always a hard time for Leslie. She and her father used to make a lot of it.’
Miss Cornelia and Mrs Rachel did not take a very violent fancy to each other. ‘Two suns held not their courses in one sphere.’ But they did not clash at all, for Mrs Rachel was in the kitchen helping Anne and Marilla with the dinner, and it fell to Gilbert to entertain Captain Jim and Miss Cornelia – or rather to be entertained by them, for a dialogue between those two old friends and antagonists was assuredly never