DEW OF MORNING
Outside, the Ingleside lawn was full of golden pools of sunshine and
plots of alluring shadows. Rilla Blythe was swinging in the hammock
under the big Scotch pine, Gertrude Oliver sat at its roots beside her,
and Walter was stretched at full length on the grass, lost in a romance
of chivalry wherein old heroes and beauties of dead and gone centuries
lived vividly again for him.
Rilla was the "baby" of the Blythe family and was in a chronic state of
secret indignation because nobody believed she was grown up. She was so
nearly fifteen that she called herself that, and she was quite as tall
as Di and Nan; also, she was nearly as pretty as Susan believed her to
be. She had great, dreamy, hazel eyes, a milky skin dappled with little
golden freckles, and delicately arched eyebrows, giving her a demure,
questioning look which made people, especially lads in their teens,
want to answer it. Her hair was ripely, ruddily brown and a little dent
in her upper lip looked as if some good fairy had pressed it in with
her finger at Rilla's christening. Rilla, whose best friends could not
deny her share of vanity, thought her face would do very well, but
worried over her figure, and wished her mother could be prevailed upon
to let her wear longer dresses. She, who had been so plump and
roly-poly in the old Rainbow Valley days, was incredibly slim now, in
the arms-and-legs period. Jem and Shirley harrowed her soul by calling
her "Spider." Yet she somehow escaped awkwardness. There was something
in her movements that made you think she never walked but always
danced. She had been much petted and was a wee bit spoiled, but still
the general opinion was that Rilla Blythe was a very sweet girl, even
if she were not so clever as Nan and Di.
Miss Oliver, who was going home that night for vacation, had boarded
for a year at Ingleside. The Blythes had taken her to please Rilla who
was fathoms deep in love with her teacher and was even willing to share
her room, since no other was available. Gertrude Oliver was
twenty-eight and life had been a struggle for her. She was a
striking-looking girl, with rather sad, almond-shaped brown eyes, a
clever, rather mocking mouth, and enormous masses of black hair twisted
about her head. She was not pretty but there was a certain charm of
interest and mystery in her face, and Rilla found her fascinating. Even
her occasional moods of gloom and cynicism had allurement for Rilla.
These moods came only when Miss Oliver was tired. At all other times
she was a stimulating companion, and the gay set at Ingleside never
remembered that she was so much older than themselves. Walter and Rilla
were her favourites and she was the confidante of the secret wishes and
aspirations of both. She knew that Rilla longed to be "out"--to go to
parties as Nan and Di did, and to have dainty evening dresses and--yes,
there is no mincing matters--beaux! In the plural, at that! As for
Walter, Miss Oliver knew that he had written a sequence of sonnets "to
Rosamond"--i.e., Faith Meredith--and that he aimed at a Professorship
of English literature in some big college. She knew his passionate love
of beauty and his equally passionate hatred of ugliness; she knew his
strength and his weakness.
Walter was, as ever, the handsomest of the Ingleside boys. Miss Oliver
found pleasure in looking at him for his good looks--he was so exactly
like what she would have liked her own son to be. Glossy black hair,
brilliant dark grey eyes, faultless features. And a poet to his
fingertips! That sonnet sequence was really a remarkable thing for a
lad of twenty to write. Miss Oliver was no partial critic and she knew
that Walter Blythe had a wonderful gift.
Rilla loved Walter with all her heart. He never teased her as Jem and
Shirley did. He never called her "Spider." His pet name for her was
"Rilla-my-Rilla"--a little pun on her real name, Marilla. She had been
named after Aunt Marilla of Green Gables, but Aunt Marilla had died
before Rilla was old enough to know her very well, and Rilla detested
the name as being horribly old-fashioned and prim. Why couldn't they
have called her by her first name, Bertha, which was beautiful and
dignified, instead of that silly "Rilla"? She did not mind Walter's
version, but nobody else was allowed to call her that, except Miss
Oliver now and then. "Rilla-my-Rilla" in Walter's musical voice sounded
very beautiful to her--like the lilt and ripple of some silvery brook.
She would have died for Walter if it would have done him any good, so
she told Miss Oliver. Rilla was as fond of italics as most girls of
fifteen are--and the bitterest drop in her cup was her suspicion that
he told Di more of his secrets than he told her.
"He thinks I'm not grown up enough to understand," she had once
lamented rebelliously to Miss Oliver, "but I am! And I would never tell
them to a single soul--not even to you, Miss Oliver. I tell you all my
own--I just couldn't be happy if I had any secret from you,
dearest--but I would never betray his. I tell him everything--I even
show him my diary. And it hurts me dreadfully when he doesn't tell me
things. He shows me all his poems, though--they are marvellous, Miss
Oliver. Oh, I just live in the hope that some day I shall be to Walter
what Wordsworth's sister Dorothy was to him. Wordsworth never wrote
anything like Walter's poems--nor Tennyson, either."
"I wouldn't say just that. Both of them wrote a great deal of trash,"
said Miss Oliver dryly. Then, repenting, as she saw a hurt look in
Rilla's eye, she added hastily,
"But I believe Walter will be a great poet, too--some day--and you will
have more of his confidence as you grow older."
"When Walter was in the hospital with typhoid last year I was almost
crazy," sighed Rilla, a little importantly. "They never told me how ill
he really was until it was all over--father wouldn't let them. I'm glad
I didn't know--I couldn't have borne it. I cried myself to sleep every
night as it was. But sometimes," concluded Rilla bitterly--she liked to
speak bitterly now and then in imitation of Miss Oliver--"sometimes I
think Walter cares more for Dog Monday than he does for me."
Dog Monday was the Ingleside dog, so called because he had come into
the family on a Monday when Walter had been reading Robinson Crusoe. He
really belonged to Jem but was much attached to Walter also. He was
lying beside Walter now with nose snuggled against his arm, thumping
his tail rapturously whenever Walter gave him an absent pat. Monday was
not a collie or a setter or a hound or a Newfoundland. He was just, as
Jem said, "plain dog"--very plain dog, uncharitable people added.
Certainly, Monday's looks were not his strong point. Black spots were
scattered at random over his yellow carcass, one of them, apparently,
blotting out an eye. His ears were in tatters, for Monday was never
successful in affairs of honour. But he possessed one talisman. He knew
that not all dogs could be handsome or eloquent or victorious, but that
every dog could love. Inside his homely hide beat the most
affectionate, loyal, faithful heart of any dog since dogs were; and
something looked out of his brown eyes that was nearer akin to a soul
than any theologian would allow. Everybody at Ingleside was fond of
him, even Susan, although his one unfortunate propensity of sneaking
into the spare room and going to sleep on the bed tried her affection
sorely.
On this particular afternoon Rilla had no quarrel on hand with existing
conditions.
"Hasn't June been a delightful month?" she asked, looking dreamily afar
at the little quiet silvery clouds hanging so peacefully over Rainbow
Valley. "We've had such lovely times--and such lovely weather. It has
just been perfect every way."
"I don't half like that," said Miss Oliver, with a sigh. "It's
ominous--somehow. A perfect thing is a gift of the gods--a sort of
compensation for what is coming afterwards. I've seen that so often
that I don't care to hear people say they've had a perfect time. June
has been delightful, though."
"Of course, it hasn't been very exciting," said Rilla. "The only
exciting thing that has happened in the Glen for a year was old Miss
Mead fainting in Church. Sometimes I wish something dramatic would
happen once in a while."
"Don't wish it. Dramatic things always have a bitterness for some one.
What a nice summer all you gay creatures will have! And me moping at
Lowbridge!"
"You'll be over often, won't you? I think there's going to be lots of
fun this summer, though I'll just be on the fringe of things as usual,
I suppose. Isn't it horrid when people think you're a little girl when
you're not?"
"There's plenty of time for you to be grown up, Rilla. Don't wish your
youth away. It goes too quickly. You'll begin to taste life soon
enough."
"Taste life! I want to eat it," cried Rilla, laughing. "I want
everything--everything a girl can have. I'll be fifteen in another
month, and then nobody can say I'm a child any longer. I heard someone
say once that the years from fifteen to nineteen are the best years in
a girl's life. I'm going to make them perfectly splendid--just fill
them with fun."
"There's no use thinking about what you're going to do--you are
tolerably sure not to do it."
"Oh, but you do get a lot of fun out of the thinking," cried Rilla.
"You think of nothing but fun, you monkey," said Miss Oliver
indulgently, reflecting that Rilla's chin was really the last word in
chins. "Well, what else is fifteen for? But have you any notion of
going to college this fall?"
"No--nor any other fall. I don't want to. I never cared for all those
ologies and isms Nan and Di are so crazy about. And there's five of us
going to college already. Surely that's enough. There's bound to be one
dunce in every family. I'm quite willing to be a dunce if I can be a
pretty, popular, delightful one. I can't be clever. I have no talent at
all, and you can't imagine how comfortable it is. Nobody expects me to
do anything so I'm never pestered to do it. And I can't be a
housewifely, cookly creature, either. I hate sewing and dusting, and
when Susan couldn't teach me to make biscuits nobody could. Father says
I toil not neither do I spin. Therefore, I must be a lily of the
field," concluded Rilla, with another laugh.
"You are too young to give up your studies altogether, Rilla."
"Oh, mother will put me through a course of reading next winter. It
will polish up her B.A. degree. Luckily I like reading. Don't look at
me so sorrowfully and so disapprovingly, dearest. I can't be sober and
serious--everything looks so rosy and rainbowy to me. Next month I'll
be fifteen--and next year sixteen--and the year after that seventeen.
Could anything be more enchanting?"
"Rap wood," said Gertrude Oliver, half laughingly, half seriously. "Rap
wood, Rilla-my-Rilla."