Anne's House of Dreams - L. M. Montgomery [62]
‘Well, you have got one on me at last, Jim Boyd, I’ll admit. Just look how pleased he is, Anne, dearie, grinning like a Chessy-cat. As for the robins’ legs, if robins have great, big, bare, sunburned legs, with ragged trousers hanging on ’em, such as I saw up in my cherry-tree one morning at sunrise last week, I’ll beg the Gilman boys’ pardon. By the time I got down they were gone. I couldn’t understand how they had disappeared so quick, but Captain Jim has enlightened me. They flew away, of course.’
Captain Jim laughed and went away, regretfully declining an invitation to stay to supper and partake of cherry pie.
‘I’m on my way to see Leslie and ask her if she’ll take a boarder,’ Miss Cornelia resumed. ‘I’d a letter yesterday from a Mrs Daly in Toronto, who boarded a spell with me two years ago. She wanted me to take a friend of hers for the summer. His name is Owen Ford, and he’s a newspaper man, and it seems he’s a grandson of the schoolmaster who built this house. John Selwyn’s oldest daughter married an Ontario man named Ford, and this is her son. He wants to see the old place his grandparents lived in. He had a bad spell of typhoid in the spring and hasn’t got rightly over it, so his doctor has ordered him to the sea. He doesn’t want to go to the hotel – he just wants a quiet home place. I can’t take him, for I have to be away in August. I’ve been appointed a delegate to the W.F.M.S. convention in Kingsport and I’m going. I don’t know whether Leslie’ll want to be bothered with him, either, but there’s no one else. If she can’t take him he’ll have to go over the harbour.’
‘When you’ve seen her come back and help us eat our cherry pies,’ said Anne. ‘Bring Leslie and Dick, too, if they can come. And so you’re going to Kingsport? What a nice time you will have. I must give you a letter to a friend of mine there – Mrs Jonas Blake.’
‘I’ve prevailed on Mrs Thomas Holt to go with me,’ said Miss Cornelia complacently. ‘It’s time she had a little holiday, believe me. She has just about worked herself to death. Tom Holt can crochet beautifully, but he can’t make a living for his family. He never seems to be able to get up early enough to do any work, but I notice he can always get up early to go fishing. Isn’t that like a man?’
Anne smiled. She had learned to discount largely Miss Cornelia’s opinions of the Four Winds men. Otherwise she must have believed them the most hopeless assortment of reprobates and ne’er-do-wells in the world, with veritable slaves and martyrs for wives. This particular Tom Holt, for example, she knew to be a kind husband, a much-loved father, and an excellent neighbour. If he were rather inclined to be lazy, liking better the fishing he had been born for than the farming he had not, and if he had a harmless eccentricity for doing fancy work, nobody save Miss Cornelia seemed to hold it against him. His wife was a ‘hustler’, who gloried in hustling; his family got a comfortable living off the farm; and his strapping sons and daughters, inheriting their mother’s energy, were all in a fair way to do well in the world. There was not a happier household in Glen St Mary than the Holts.
Miss Cornelia returned satisfied from the house up the brook.
‘Leslie’s going to take him,’ she announced. ‘She jumped at the chance. She wants to make a little money to shingle the roof of her house this fall, and she didn’t know how she was going to manage it. I expect Captain Jim’ll be more than interested when he hears that a grandson of the Selwyns is coming here. Leslie said to tell you she hankered after cherry pie, but she couldn’t come to tea because she has to go and hunt up her turkeys. They’ve strayed away. But she said, if there was a piece left, for you to put it in the pantry and she’d run over in the cat’s light, when prowling’s in order, to get it. You don’t know, Anne, dearie, what good it did my heart to hear Leslie send you a message like that, laughing like she used to long ago. There’s a great change come over her lately. She laughs and jokes like a girl, and from her talk I gather