The Blythes Are Quoted (20 page)

The old house came out darkly against the sunset sky. Its grim shadow lay across the lawn and the spruce wood beyond it had turned black. There was an air of neglect over everything. Disputes among the heirs had prevented a sale.

But Esme was not interested in the house. She had come to walk on the secret paths of her enchanted garden once more and she hurried to the birch lane that led to it.

Dr. Gilbert Blythe, whizzing by in his car, saw her and recognized her.

“What on earth is that girl doing alone at that forsaken old place?” he wondered a little uneasily. He had heard tales that summer that Esme Dalley was “getting queer” like her Aunt Hester. The said tales emanated mostly from people who had said Allardyce Barry had “jilted” her.

Dr. Blythe wondered if he should stop and go over and offer her a drive home. But he had a serious case waiting for him in the Glen ... and besides he had a feeling that Esme would not come. Anne always said that Esme Dalley had an
iron will under all her sweetness and the doctor had a great deal of respect for the intuition of his wife.

Whatever Esme had come to Birkentrees for she would carry out her intention. So he went on. In after days he boasted that he had at least made one match by leaving things alone.

“I suppose you will never leave off twitting me,” said Anne.

“Oh, I am sure he does not mean to do that, Mrs. Dr. dear,” said Susan. “It is just his way. I am told the men are all like that ... though,” she added with a sigh, “I myself have never had any chance of proving it.”

The gate to the garden was no longer locked but hung open slackly. It all seemed smaller than Esme remembered it. There were only withered leaves and frosted stalks where she had danced with Francis ... where she had imagined or dreamed she had danced with Francis.

But it was still beautiful and eerie, full of the strange, deep shadows that come with the rising of the hunter’s moon. There was no noise but the sigh of the wind in the remote, pointed firs that had grown up of their own accord among the still golden maples in a corner.

Esme felt lonelier than she had ever felt in her life as she went down the grass-grown path to the river shore.

“There isn’t any
you
,” she whispered piteously, thinking of Francis. “There never was any you. What a little fool I have been! I suppose I shouldn’t have used Allardyce so. No wonder they were all so cross with me. No wonder Mrs. Barry was glad.”

For Esme had never heard the tales about Allardyce’s foreign life and the Italian or Russian princesses. To her Allardyce was still the man who made her laugh a little like Francis had ... the Francis who had never existed.

She wondered a little what had become of the picture of Great-uncle Francis when the Barrys had closed Longmeadow and gone abroad again ... this time it was said for good. Mrs. Barry had reported, so rumour ran, that they did not mean to return to Canada. Everything was so crude here ... and all the girls pursued Allardyce. She was afraid he would make some silly match. Esme Dalley had almost hooked him ... but thank the Lord she had failed. Allardyce had come to his senses in time.

Esme was thinking of the picture. Somehow, she would have liked to have it ... even if it were only the picture of a dream.

But when she got to the old stone wall ... most of which had fallen down ... she saw him coming up the steps from the river. The steps were very loose and some were missing altogether, so that he was picking his way a bit carefully. But he was just the same as she remembered him ... a little taller, perhaps, and dressed in a more modern fashion, but with the same thick brown hair and the same adventurous light in his blue eagle eyes. He and Jem Blythe were to share a German prison after some years but nobody dreamed anything about that then.

The long, dim river and the deserted garden and the pointed firs whirled around Esme.

She threw out her hands and would have fallen if he had not caught her as he sprang over the crumbling wall.

“Francis!” gasped Esme.

“Francis is my middle name but my friends call me Stephen,” he said, smiling ... the same frank, friendly, pleasant smile she remembered so well.

Esme recovered herself a little and drew away, but she was still trembling so violently that he kept his arm around her ... just as Francis had done.

“I am afraid I have frightened you,” he said gently. “I’m sorry my appearance was so abrupt. I know I’m not handsome but I didn’t think I was so ugly that I would scare a girl into nearly fainting.”

“It’s ... it’s not that,” said Esme, quite conscious now that she had made an awful fool of herself. Perhaps she
was
queer ... like Aunt Hester.

“Perhaps I’m trespassing ... but the place looked so deserted ... and they told me I could take this shortcut. Please forgive me for frightening you.”

“Who are you?” cried Esme wildly. Nothing mattered but that.

“A very humble individual ... Stephen Francis Barry at your service. My home is at the Coast but I came east a few days ago to take charge of the new biological station down at the harbour. I knew I had ... or once had ... some distant cousins over this way at a place called Longmeadow so I thought I’d come over this evening and hunt them up if they were still here. Somebody else told me they had gone abroad. What is the truth? ... as somebody called Pilate once said.”

Esme knew now who he was ... a western third cousin she had heard Allardyce speak of ... contemptuously enough.

“He works,” Allardyce had said, as if that were something shameful. “I’ve never seen him ... none of the family have ever been east ... too busy studying bugs, I suppose. Or else for lack of spondulicks. In any case our branch of the family have never had anything in common with them. I did hear Dr. Blythe had met one of them called Stephen or some such name when he was attending some medical congress in Vancouver and thought he was a very fine fellow. But my opinion and the good doctor’s do not often agree.”

Esme drew a little further away still, looking gravely at him. She had no idea how exquisitely lovely she looked in the velvet and shadow of the moonlight, but Stephen Barry had. He stood and looked at her as if he could never get enough of looking.

“It was not your sudden appearance that startled me,” said Esme gravely. “It was because you looked so much like somebody I once saw ... no, like somebody I dreamed I saw. A picture of Captain Francis Barry that used to be at Longmeadow.”

“Great-uncle Frank? Granddad always told me I looked like him. I wish I could see it. Do I really look as much like this Francis as all that?”

“You look exactly like him.”

“Then no wonder you took me for a ghost. And you? I think I must have dreamed you years ago. You have just stepped out of my dream. Won’t you be unconventional and tell me who you are?”

“I am Esme Dalley.”

Even in the moonlight she could see his face fall.

“Esme Dalley! Oh, I’ve heard ... Allardyce’s young lady! ...”

“No, no, no!” Esme cried it almost violently. “And there is nobody at Longmeadow. It is shut up and is for sale. Allardyce and his mother have gone abroad for good, I believe.”

“You believe? Don’t you know? Aren’t you his ... his fiancee?”

“No!” cried Esme again. For some mysterious reason she could not bear to have him think that. “There is no truth in that report. Allardyce and I are nothing but friends ... hardly even that,” she added, in her desire to be strictly truthful and recalling her last interview with Allardyce. “Besides, as I have told you, he and his mother have gone to Europe and are not expected to return.”

“Too bad,” said Stephen quite cheerfully. “I had counted on seeing them. I’m to be here a couple of months and relations liven things up a bit. Still ... there are compensations. I’ve seen you, ‘moving in moonlight through a haunted hour’ to me. Are you quite sure you are not a ghost, little Esme Dalley?”

Esme laughed ... delightful laughter.

“Quite sure. But I came here to meet a ghost ... I’ll tell you all about it sometime.”

She felt quite sure he would not laugh as Allardyce had done. And he would not try to explain it away. Besides, somehow or other, it mattered no longer whether it could be explained away or not. They would just forget it together.

“Let’s sit down here on this old stone wall and you can tell me all about it now,” said Stephen.

It was just about that time that Dr. Blythe was saying to his wife,

“I met Stephen Barry for a moment today. He is to be in Charlottetown for a few months. He is really a splendid fellow. I wish he and Esme Dalley would meet and fall in love. They would just suit each other.”

“Who is matchmaking now?” asked Anne sleepily.

“Trust a woman to have the last word,” retorted the doctor.

When the pale east glows like a rosy pearl

And a lyric dawn-wind is out in the meadows,

The morning comes like a lithe-limbed girl

Adance with a drift of filmy shadows;

Frolicking over the beaded dew,

Peeping the boughs of the pineland through,

And the laughter born of a myriad rills

Attends her over the dappled hills.

She sings a song that is glad and gay

With the heart o’ morning’s gayness and gladness,

She bids us forget the yesterday

With all its travail of failure and sadness;

Her little feet on the broidered heath

Are white as the daisies that spring beneath ...

A virgin nymph of the wild is she ...

An unwon, alluring divinity.

The noon is a drowsy sorceress,

Poppy crowned in a haunted valley,

Wooing us all with a mute caress

To loiter with her where the south winds dally;

Idly she weaveth a golden spell,

Soft as a song and sweet as a bell;

Idly she beckoneth ... come away,

We shall be hers for this one ripe day.

Perfume of incense and musk and rose

Hangs on the breath of her honeyed kisses,

All the magic the summer knows

Is ours at once in her wealth of blisses;

She offers to us her cup of dreams

Filled from her nectared Arcadian streams,

Under the dome of the slumberous sky

Drink we and let the world go by.

Evening comes as an angel fair

Over the hills of western glory,

With a mist of starshine upon her hair

In her lucent eyes a remembered story;

Walking graciously over the lands,

Benediction and peace in her hands,

Holding close to her ivory breast

Dear memories like infants hushed to rest.

Under the purring pines she sings

Where the clear, cold dews are limpidly falling,

Hers is the wisdom of long-loved things,

Lo, in her voice we may hear them calling.

She will teach us the holy mystery

Of the darkness glimmering o’er the lea,

And we shall know ere we fall asleep

That our souls are given to her to keep.

Anne Blythe

ANNE
:- “It should be signed ‘Anne Shirley.’ I wrote it in my teens.”

DR. BLYTHE
:- “So you had poetic aspirations then ... and never told me?”

ANNE
:- “I wrote it at Patty’s Place. And we were not on the best of terms those last two years, you remember? Would you have married me if you had known?”

DR. BLYTHE
,
teasingly:
- “Oh, probably. But I should have been scared to death. I knew you wrote stories ... but poetry is a different matter.”

SUSAN
,
taking all this literally:
- “The idea!”

Through the shriek of the city comes to me

A whisper of some old ecstasy,

Dusk on the meadows and dusk on the sea;

Apple-blossoms cool with night,

Grey ghost-mists by the harbour light,

And a new moon setting sad and fair

Behind a hill that has knelt in prayer.

I had forgotten that far spruce hill

With its wind of darkness blowing chill,

Haunt of owl and of whippoorwill.

But now I think of it and know

That it has my heart wherever I go,

There with the friendship of wind and star,

Where one can believe the Green Folk are.

People rush by me mad and fleet

But I am not on this haggard street,

I am out where the shadows and silences meet

Round an old grey house that is dear to me

Between the hills and the calling sea,

Where one in the twilight magic may

Find a lost and lovely yesterday.

Red are the poppies there that blow

Spilling their silk on the paths I know,

White are the lilies as hillside snow.

And the roses that wait by the open door

Are waiting just to be friends once more,

The bluebells are ringing an elfin chime

And nobody there is a slave of time.

There once again I could be alone

With the night as kind as a friend well-known ...

I think I shall go and find my own.

With a dream for compass I’ll steal away

To the hill that kneels and the house that is grey,

Where the sea and the dunes and the fir trees hold

A secret worth more than my tarnished gold
.