THE INGLESIDE CHILDREN
In daytime the Blythe children liked very well to play in the rich,
soft greens and glooms of the big maple grove between Ingleside and the
Glen St. Mary pond; but for evening revels there was no place like the
little valley behind the maple grove. It was a fairy realm of romance
to them. Once, looking from the attic windows of Ingleside, through the
mist and aftermath of a summer thunderstorm, they had seen the beloved
spot arched by a glorious rainbow, one end of which seemed to dip
straight down to where a corner of the pond ran up into the lower end
of the valley.
“Let us call it Rainbow Valley,” said Walter delightedly, and Rainbow
Valley thenceforth it was.
Outside of Rainbow Valley the wind might be rollicking and boisterous.
Here it always went gently. Little, winding, fairy paths ran here and
there over spruce roots cushioned with moss. Wild cherry trees, that in
blossom time would be misty white, were scattered all over the valley,
mingling with the dark spruces. A little brook with amber waters ran
through it from the Glen village. The houses of the village were
comfortably far away; only at the upper end of the valley was a little
tumble-down, deserted cottage, referred to as “the old Bailey house.”
It had not been occupied for many years, but a grass-grown dyke
surrounded it and inside was an ancient garden where the Ingleside
children could find violets and daisies and June lilies still blooming
in season. For the rest, the garden was overgrown with caraway that
swayed and foamed in the moonshine of summer eves like seas of silver.
To the sought lay the pond and beyond it the ripened distance lost
itself in purple woods, save where, on a high hill, a solitary old gray
homestead looked down on glen and harbour. There was a certain wild
woodsiness and solitude about Rainbow Valley, in spite of its nearness
to the village, which endeared it to the children of Ingleside.
The valley was full of dear, friendly hollows and the largest of these
was their favourite stamping ground. Here they were assembled on this
particular evening. There was a grove of young spruces in this hollow,
with a tiny, grassy glade in its heart, opening on the bank of the
brook. By the brook grew a silver birch-tree, a young, incredibly
straight thing which Walter had named the “White Lady.” In this glade,
too, were the “Tree Lovers,” as Walter called a spruce and maple which
grew so closely together that their boughs were inextricably
intertwined. Jem had hung an old string of sleigh-bells, given him by
the Glen blacksmith, on the Tree Lovers, and every visitant breeze
called out sudden fairy tinkles from it.
“How nice it is to be back!” said Nan. “After all, none of the Avonlea
places are quite as nice as Rainbow Valley.”
But they were very fond of the Avonlea places for all that. A visit to
Green Gables was always considered a great treat. Aunt Marilla was very
good to them, and so was Mrs. Rachel Lynde, who was spending the
leisure of her old age in knitting cotton-warp quilts against the day
when Anne’s daughters should need a “setting-out.” There were jolly
playmates there, too—“Uncle” Davy’s children and “Aunt” Diana’s
children. They knew all the spots their mother had loved so well in her
girlhood at old Green Gables—the long Lover’s Lane, that was
pink-hedged in wild-rose time, the always neat yard, with its willows
and poplars, the Dryad’s Bubble, lucent and lovely as of yore, the Lake
of Shining Waters, and Willowmere. The twins had their mother’s old
porch-gable room, and Aunt Marilla used to come in at night, when she
thought they were asleep, to gloat over them. But they all knew she
loved Jem the best.
Jem was at present busily occupied in frying a mess of small trout
which he had just caught in the pond. His stove consisted of a circle
of red stones, with a fire kindled in it, and his culinary utensils
were an old tin can, hammered out flat, and a fork with only one tine
left. Nevertheless, ripping good meals had before now been thus
prepared.
Jem was the child of the House of Dreams. All the others had been born
at Ingleside. He had curly red hair, like his mother’s, and frank hazel
eyes, like his father’s; he had his mother’s fine nose and his father’s
steady, humorous mouth. And he was the only one of the family who had
ears nice enough to please Susan. But he had a standing feud with Susan
because she would not give up calling him Little Jem. It was
outrageous, thought thirteen-year-old Jem. Mother had more sense.
“I’m _not_ little any more, Mother,” he had cried indignantly, on his
eighth birthday. “I’m _awful_ big.”
Mother had sighed and laughed and sighed again; and she never called
him Little Jem again—in his hearing at least.
He was and always had been a sturdy, reliable little chap. He never
broke a promise. He was not a great talker. His teachers did not think
him brilliant, but he was a good, all-round student. He never took
things on faith; he always liked to investigate the truth of a
statement for himself. Once Susan had told him that if he touched his
tongue to a frosty latch all the skin would tear off it. Jem had
promptly done it, “just to see if it was so.” He found it was “so,” at
the cost of a very sore tongue for several days. But Jem did not grudge
suffering in the interests of science. By constant experiment and
observation he learned a great deal and his brothers and sisters
thought his extensive knowledge of their little world quite wonderful.
Jem always knew where the first and ripest berries grew, where the
first pale violets shyly wakened from their winter’s sleep, and how
many blue eggs were in a given robin’s nest in the maple grove. He
could tell fortunes from daisy petals and suck honey from red clovers,
and grub up all sorts of edible roots on the banks of the pond, while
Susan went in daily fear that they would all be poisoned. He knew where
the finest spruce-gum was to be found, in pale amber knots on the
lichened bark, he knew where the nuts grew thickest in the beechwoods
around the Harbour Head, and where the best trouting places up the
brooks were. He could mimic the call of any wild bird or beast in Four
Winds and he knew the haunt of every wild flower from spring to autumn.
Walter Blythe was sitting under the White Lady, with a volume of poems
lying beside him, but he was not reading. He was gazing now at the
emerald-misted willows by the pond, and now at a flock of clouds, like
little silver sheep, herded by the wind, that were drifting over
Rainbow Valley, with rapture in his wide splendid eyes. Walter’s eyes
were very wonderful. All the joy and sorrow and laughter and loyalty
and aspiration of many generations lying under the sod looked out of
their dark gray depths.
Walter was a “hop out of kin,” as far as looks went. He did not
resemble any known relative. He was quite the handsomest of the
Ingleside children, with straight black hair and finely modelled
features. But he had all his mother’s vivid imagination and passionate
love of beauty. Frost of winter, invitation of spring, dream of summer
and glamour of autumn, all meant much to Walter.
In school, where Jem was a chieftain, Walter was not thought highly of.
He was supposed to be “girly” and milk-soppish, because he never fought
and seldom joined in the school sports, preferring to herd by himself
in out of the way corners and read books—especially “po’try books.”
Walter loved the poets and pored over their pages from the time he
could first read. Their music was woven into his growing soul—the music
of the immortals. Walter cherished the ambition to be a poet himself
some day. The thing could be done. A certain Uncle Paul—so called out
of courtesy—who lived now in that mysterious realm called “the States,”
was Walter’s model. Uncle Paul had once been a little school boy in
Avonlea and now his poetry was read everywhere. But the Glen schoolboys
did not know of Walter’s dreams and would not have been greatly
impressed if they had. In spite of his lack of physical prowess,
however, he commanded a certain unwilling respect because of his power
of “talking book talk.” Nobody in Glen St. Mary school could talk like
him. He “sounded like a preacher,” one boy said; and for this reason he
was generally left alone and not persecuted, as most boys were who were
suspected of disliking or fearing fisticuffs.
The ten year old Ingleside twins violated twin tradition by not looking
in the least alike. Anne, who was always called Nan, was very pretty,
with velvety nut-brown eyes and silky nut-brown hair. She was a very
blithe and dainty little maiden—Blythe by name and blithe by nature,
one of her teachers had said. Her complexion was quite faultless, much
to her mother’s satisfaction.
“I’m so glad I have one daughter who can wear pink,” Mrs. Blythe was
wont to say jubilantly.
Diana Blythe, known as Di, was very like her mother, with gray-green
eyes that always shone with a peculiar lustre and brilliancy in the
dusk, and red hair. Perhaps this was why she was her father’s
favourite. She and Walter were especial chums; Di was the only one to
whom he would ever read the verses he wrote himself—the only one who
knew that he was secretly hard at work on an epic, strikingly
resembling “Marmion” in some things, if not in others. She kept all his
secrets, even from Nan, and told him all hers.
“Won’t you soon have those fish ready, Jem?” said Nan, sniffing with
her dainty nose. “The smell makes me awfully hungry.”
“They’re nearly ready,” said Jem, giving one a dexterous turn. “Get out
the bread and the plates, girls. Walter, wake up.”
“How the air shines to-night,” said Walter dreamily. Not that he
despised fried trout either, by any means; but with Walter food for the
soul always took first place. “The flower angel has been walking over
the world to-day, calling to the flowers. I can see his blue wings on
that hill by the woods.”
“Any angels’ wings I ever saw were white,” said Nan.
“The flower angel’s aren’t. They are a pale misty blue, just like the
haze in the valley. Oh, how I wish I could fly. It must be glorious.”
“One does fly in dreams sometimes,” said Di.
“I never dream that I’m flying exactly,” said Walter. “But I often
dream that I just rise up from the ground and float over the fences and
the trees. It’s delightful—and I always think, ‘This _isn’t_ a dream
like it’s always been before. _This_ is real’—and then I wake up after
all, and it’s heart-breaking.”
“Hurry up, Nan,” ordered Jem.
Nan had produced the banquet-board—a board literally as well as
figuratively—from which many a feast, seasoned as no viands were
elsewhere, had been eaten in Rainbow Valley. It was converted into a
table by propping it on two large, mossy stones. Newspapers served as
tablecloth, and broken plates and handleless cups from Susan’s discard
furnished the dishes. From a tin box secreted at the root of a spruce
tree Nan brought forth bread and salt. The brook gave Adam’s ale of
unsurpassed crystal. For the rest, there was a certain sauce,
compounded of fresh air and appetite of youth, which gave to everything
a divine flavour. To sit in Rainbow Valley, steeped in a twilight half
gold, half amethyst, rife with the odours of balsam-fir and woodsy
growing things in their springtime prime, with the pale stars of wild
strawberry blossoms all around you, and with the sough of the wind and
tinkle of bells in the shaking tree tops, and eat fried trout and dry
bread, was something which the mighty of earth might have envied them.
“Sit in,” invited Nan, as Jem placed his sizzling tin platter of trout
on the table. “It’s your turn to say grace, Jem.”
“I’ve done my part frying the trout,” protested Jem, who hated saying
grace. “Let Walter say it. He _likes_ saying grace. And cut it short,
too, Walt. I’m starving.”
But Walter said no grace, short or long, just then. An interruption
occurred.
“Who’s coming down from the manse hill?” said Di.