The Blythes Are Quoted (36 page)

Pat had a feeling that both Barney and Barbara Anne wished he and the Squaw Baby were miles away. And, strangely enough, he did not resent it.

But there was one thing he
must
find out first. Then he would ask the Squaw Baby if she would like to go and see the kittens.

“Where is Barbara Anne going?” he persisted. “There is no place across the road but Sometyme.”

Both Barney and Barbara fairly shouted with laughter.

“We’ll have to let her live here ... with us ... at Sometyme, I suppose,” said Barney. “Would you be willing to have her here?”

“I’d love it,” said Pat gravely. “Will the Squaw Baby come, too?”

“I’m afraid her father and mother would not want to give her up,” said Barney. “But I think you will see enough of her for all that ... too much perhaps.”

“Nonsense!” said Pat.

He had never dared to say “nonsense” to anyone in his life before. But one could say things at Sometyme. And what was the Squaw Baby saying?

“Let’s go and have a look at the kittens,” she said. “Perhaps momma will let me have one though Walter Blythe has been promised the prettiest. I don’t like Walter Blythe, do you?”

“Why don’t you like him?” asked Pat, feeling that he loved Walter Blythe with all his heart.

“He doesn’t care whether I stick my tongue out at him or not,” said the Squaw Baby.

They went to see the kittens, leaving Barney and Barbara Anne looking at each other ... at least as long as they were in sight.

“What a fight you’ll have with the Brewsters!” said Barbara Anne.

“I can fight the whole world and lick it now,” said Barney.

Lincoln Burns had put up a sign at his road gate, telling people they were welcome to an apple from his big orchard. That showed you the kind of man he was, as Anne Blythe said.

And everybody agreed he had been good to his mother. Not many sons would have put up with her as patiently as he had. He had waited on her for years and done most of the housework into the bargain, for no “girl” would ever stay long ... couldn’t stand the old lady’s tongue. But then he had always been easygoing ... “the late Lincoln Burns” as he was called, because he was never on time for anything, and had an amiable habit of ambling into church just as the sermon was over. He had never been known to be “put out” over anything. Hadn’t enough snap to get mad, Susan Baker of Ingleside used to say.

And now Mrs. Burns had died ... to the surprise of everybody. One really couldn’t expect her to do anything so decisive as dying. For the last ten years she had hung between life and death, a peevish, unreasonable, fretful invalid. People said Dr. Blythe must have made a fortune out of her.

Now she was lying in state in the old parlour, while the white flakes of a late, unseasonable spring snow shower were coming softly down outside, veiling with misty loveliness the unlovely landscape of early spring. Their beauty pleased Lincoln, who liked things like that. He was feeling very lonely, although few except Dr. and Mrs. Blythe would have believed
it. Everybody, including his mother, thought this death would have been a relief to him.

“You’ll soon be shed of the trouble I’m making you, as Susan Baker says,” she said to him the night before she died, as she had said it off and on for ten years ... and as Susan Baker had never said ... “Knowing the creature all too well, Mrs. Dr. dear,” she said, “she’ll live to ninety.”

But Susan was wrong. And Lincoln was glad he had said, “Now, ma, you know I don’t think it any trouble to do anything I can for you.”

Yes, he realized that he was going to be very lonely. Ma had given a sort of meaning and purpose to his life: now that she was gone he felt frightfully adrift and rudderless. And Helen would be at him soon to get married ... he knew she would. Ma had protected him from Helen although she had always pretended to think that he was wild to get married.

“You’re just waiting till I’m dead to do it,” she used to reproach him.

It was quite useless for Lincoln to assure her earnestly that he had no intention of marrying.

“Who’d have an old bachelor like me?” he used to say, trying to be jocular.

“There’s lots would jump at you,” snapped Mrs. Burns. “And when I’m gone one of them will pounce on you. Dr. Blythe has changed my medicine again. Sometimes I think he’s longing to get me off his hands ... and maybe get Susan Baker off, too. They say Mrs. Blythe is a renowned matchmaker.”

“I’m not young,” said Lincoln with a laugh, “but Susan Baker is a bit old for me.”

“She’s only fifteen years older. She thinks I don’t know her age but I do. And you’re so easygoing you’d marry anyone
that up and asked you, jest to be rid of the trouble of refusing her. I dunno what I’ve done to ever have had such an easygoing son.”

Lincoln might have told her it was a piece of luck for her that she had. But he did not. He did not even think of it.

“Ma looks nice, don’t she?” he said to Helen, who had come in.

Mrs. Marsh had been crying ... why, nobody knew. She thought Lincoln very unfeeling because he had not cried.

“Beautiful ...” she sobbed. “Beautiful ... and so natural.”

Lincoln did not think his mother looked natural. Her face was too smooth and peaceful for that. But he thought she looked curiously young. As long as he could remember she had looked old and wrinkled and cross. For the first time he understood why his father had married her. She had been really ill and she had really suffered. Even Susan Baker admitted that and Dr. Blythe knew it.

Lincoln sighed. Yes, life was going to be dull without ma. And difficult.

“What are you going to do now, Lincoln?” asked his sister, after the funeral was over and everybody had gone but Helen, who had stayed to get him some supper. Mrs. Blythe had offered to let Susan Baker stay and help her but Helen had as little use for Susan Baker as Susan Baker had for her. The Bakers and the Burns had never “pulled.” Besides, it was well-known that Susan Baker lamented her old maidishness. Besides, Mrs. Blythe was a well-known matchmaker. Besides, Lincoln was so easygoing.

It was the question Lincoln had been dreading. But he thought Helen might have waited a little before bringing such a matter up. But Helen was never one to put things off. There was nothing easygoing about her.

“I guess I’ll have to do as they do up in Avonlea,” he said mildly.

Helen bit.

“What do they do up in Avonlea?”

“They do the best they can,” said Lincoln, still more mildly.

“Oh, do grow up,” said Helen stiffly. “I don’t think it is decent to be joking like that before poor ma is cold in her grave.”

“I didn’t mean it for a joke,” said Lincoln. He had meant it for a snub. And it wasn’t original, either. He had heard Dr. Blythe say it more than once.

“But you never had any feeling, Lincoln. And it’s no joke the way you’re left. I don’t know of anyone you could get as housekeeper. Lincoln, you’ve just
got
to marry. You ought to have been married these ten years.”

“Who’d have come in with ma?”

“Lots would. You’ve just made ma an excuse for being too lazy to go courting. I know you, Lincoln.”

Lincoln did not think she knew him at all, in spite of relationship and neighbourhood. But then they had always taken different views of the business of living. Helen wanted to make the business prosperous. Lincoln wanted to make it beautiful. To him it did not matter so much if the wheat crop failed as long as the autumn brought asters and goldenrod.

Like other men in Mowbray Narrows he was accustomed to walk around his farm every Sunday. But it was not, as with them, to see how his roots and pastures were and how the sheep were coming on. Instead it was for the sake of his own dear woods at the back ... little fields with young spruces all round them ... grey, windy pastures of twilight ... or a lane where shadows blew about.

“That man has the right idea of living,” Anne Blythe had once said to her husband.

“He isn’t very practical,” said Susan Baker, “but I suppose a man with a mother like his must have some consolation.”

“Lena Mills would have you,” went on Helen, “or Jen Craig ... though she is cross-eyed ... or even Sara Viles might ... she’s none too young. But you can’t afford to be particular. Just take my advice, Lincoln. Start right out and get yourself a wife. It will make a new man of you.”

“But I don’t want to be made a new man of,” protested Lincoln plaintively. “It might be inconvenient, as Dr. Blythe says.”

Helen ignored him. That was the only way to do with Lincoln. If you gave him a chance he would talk nonsense by the hour ... about his garden ... or the partridges that came every winter evening to the same maple tree and senseless things like that, instead of market prices and potato bugs.

“You must get married and that is all there is to it, Lincoln. I don’t care who it is as long as she’s respectable. You can’t go on farming and cooking your own meals. It’s made an old woman of you already. Think of the comfort of coming in tired to a good meal and a tidy house.”

Yes, Lincoln sometimes had thought of it. He admitted to himself that the idea was attractive enough. But there were other things than comfort and a tidy house, as Dr. Blythe had once warned him, when some gossip had got around.

And these things Helen knew nothing about. He remembered driving past Ingleside on a cool autumn night. A delicious odour of frying meat floated out. No doubt Susan Baker was preparing the doctor’s supper. No meal he had ever really eaten had given him as much pleasure as that odour ... that banquet of fancy.

And, as Mrs. Blythe had once said in his hearing, there was never any aftermath of satiety or indigestion. “You may tire of reality ... but you never tire of dreams,” Mrs. Blythe had said.

That night Lincoln paced up and down between his barn and his house, through the mild spring night until late. He envied Dr. Blythe.

He always liked to be out in the night ... to stand on his hill and watch the stars in a beautiful aloneness ... to pace up and down under dim stately trees that were of some kin to him ... to enjoy the beauty of darkness or the fine blue crystal of moonlight.

If he married any of the women he knew, would he be able to do this? And he was terribly afraid he would have to marry. Helen had made up her mind to it and would give him no peace. She would contrive it in some way.

Well, in a way she might be right. It might be better if he were married. But he didn’t know anybody he liked well enough to bother courting. Lena Mills ... yes, she was a nice girl ... “a capable girl,” as he had once heard Susan Baker call her ... Lincoln shuddered. Jen Craig was all right, too, but the Craigs were always terrible keen after the money, and one of Jen’s eyes was crossed. He felt Jen would make him sell his beautiful hardwood grove and plough up his caraway-misted old orchard ... the one Mrs. Blythe admired so because she said it reminded her so much of her old home in Avonlea.

Lincoln knew he would do anything a woman insisted on his doing.

“A fine chap, that Lincoln Burns,” Gilbert Blythe had said to his wife one time, “but no backbone.”

“Well, Dr. dear,” said Susan, “that is the way he is made and he can’t help it.”

Sara Viles? Oh, yes, Sara was a nice girl ... a thin, brown girl with brown eyes, very clever and sarcastic. Interesting. But he was a bit afraid of her cleverness and sarcasm. She always made him feel stupid. Mrs. Dr. Blythe was clever and could be sarcastic but Lincoln felt sure she never made the doctor feel stupid.

It all came back to the fact that he was sure nobody would ever understand him as well as he understood himself.

Yet ... it was plain Helen had made up her mind that he was to marry one of them. How was he to escape? He almost made up his mind that he would consult the doctor or Mrs. Blythe. Yet he doubted very much if even they would be a match for Helen.

Suddenly into his mind came a memory ... of a dim yesterday that everybody but he had forgotten.

He had been ten or eleven and had gone with ma on a visit to Uncle Charlie Taprell who lived at Hunter’s Cove. The visit had been an agony to the shy lad. He had sat stiffly on the edge of a hard chair in an ugly room ... such an ugly room! The mantelpiece was crowded with ugly vases and the walls were covered with ugly chromos and the furniture was cluttered with ugly roses. And ma had sincerely admired everything very much.

And his three cousins, Lily and Edith and Maggie, had all sat together on the sofa and laughed at him. They were not ugly ... they were considered very pretty little girls, with round, rosy cheeks and round, bright eyes. But Lincoln did not admire them; he was afraid of them and kept his eyes resolutely fixed on a huge purple rose at his feet.

“Oh, ain’t you the bashful one!” giggled Edith. “Which of us girls are you going to marry when you grow up?” asked Lily. Then they all giggled and the grown-ups roared.

“I’m going to get ma’s tape measure and measure his mouth,” said Maggie.

“Why don’t you talk to your cousins, Lincoln?” said his mother fretfully. “They’ll think you’ve got no manners at all.”

“Maybe the cat’s got his tongue,” giggled Lily.

Lincoln stood up, desperate, hunted.

“I’d like to go out, ma,” he said. “This place is too fine for me.”

“You can go to the shore if you like,” said his Aunt Sophy, who rather liked him. “Now, Catherine, what could happen to him? He ain’t a baby. My girls are too fond of teasing. I often tell them so. They don’t understand.”

That was the matter with all the world. Nobody understood. Lincoln never changed his opinion.

He drew a long breath of relief when he got out of the house. Between it and the Cove was a grove of ragged old spruces and beyond it a field where all the buttercups in the world seemed to be blowing. Halfway through it Lincoln met her ... a little girl perhaps a year or so younger than himself ... a girl who looked at him shyly out of soft, grey-blue eyes ... the colour of the harbour on a golden-cloudy day ... but who did not laugh at him.

Lincoln, who was afraid of all little girls, did not feel in the least afraid of her. They went down to the sandshore, shyly but happily, and made sand pies. He could not even remember whether she were pretty or not but she had a soft, sweet little voice and beautiful, slim brown hands. He found out her name was Janet and that she lived in the little white house at the other side of the spruce grove.