Anne’s House of Dreams
by
Lucy Maud Montgomery
“To Laura, in memory of the olden time.”
CONTENTS
Chapter
1 IN THE GARRET OF GREEN GABLES
2 THE HOUSE OF DREAMS
3 THE LAND OF DREAMS AMONG
4 THE FIRST BRIDE OF GREEN GABLES
5 THE HOME COMING
6 CAPTAIN JIM
7 THE SCHOOLMASTER’S BRIDE
8 MISS CORNELIA BRYANT COMES TO CALL
9 AN EVENING AT FOUR WINDS POINT
10 LESLIE MOORE
11 THE STORY OF LESLIE MOORE
12 LESLIE COMES OVER
13 A GHOSTLY EVENING
14 NOVEMBER DAYS
15 CHRISTMAS AT FOUR WINDS
16 NEW YEAR’S EVE AT THE LIGHT
17 A FOUR WINDS WINTER
18 SPRING DAYS
19 DAWN AND DUSK
20 LOST MARGARET
21 BARRIERS SWEPT AWAY
22 MISS CORNELIA ARRANGES MATTERS
23 OWEN FORD COMES
24 THE LIFE-BOOK OF CAPTAIN JIM
25 THE WRITING OF THE BOOK
26 OWEN FORD’S CONFESSION
27 ON THE SAND BAR
28 ODDS AND ENDS
29 GILBERT AND ANNE DISAGREE
30 LESLIE DECIDES
31 THE TRUTH MAKES FREE
32 MISS CORNELIA DISCUSSES THE AFFAIR
33 LESLIE RETURNS
34 THE SHIP O’DREAMS COMES TO HARBOR
35 POLITICS AT FOUR WINDS
36 BEAUTY FOR ASHES
37 MISS CORNELIA MAKES A STARTLING ANNOUNCEMENT
38 RED ROSES
39 CAPTAIN JIM CROSSES THE BAR
40 FAREWELL TO THE HOUSE OF DREAMS
CHAPTER 1
IN THE GARRET OF GREEN GABLES
“Thanks be, I’m done with geometry, learning or teaching it,” said Anne
Shirley, a trifle vindictively, as she thumped a somewhat battered
volume of Euclid into a big chest of books, banged the lid in triumph,
and sat down upon it, looking at Diana Wright across the Green Gables
garret, with gray eyes that were like a morning sky.
The garret was a shadowy, suggestive, delightful place, as all garrets
should be. Through the open window, by which Anne sat, blew the sweet,
scented, sun-warm air of the August afternoon; outside, poplar boughs
rustled and tossed in the wind; beyond them were the woods, where
Lover’s Lane wound its enchanted path, and the old apple orchard which
still bore its rosy harvests munificently. And, over all, was a great
mountain range of snowy clouds in the blue southern sky. Through the
other window was glimpsed a distant, white-capped, blue sea--the
beautiful St. Lawrence Gulf, on which floats, like a jewel, Abegweit,
whose softer, sweeter Indian name has long been forsaken for the more
prosaic one of Prince Edward Island.
Diana Wright, three years older than when we last saw her, had grown
somewhat matronly in the intervening time. But her eyes were as black
and brilliant, her cheeks as rosy, and her dimples as enchanting, as in
the long-ago days when she and Anne Shirley had vowed eternal
friendship in the garden at Orchard Slope. In her arms she held a
small, sleeping, black-curled creature, who for two happy years had
been known to the world of Avonlea as “Small Anne Cordelia.” Avonlea
folks knew why Diana had called her Anne, of course, but Avonlea folks
were puzzled by the Cordelia. There had never been a Cordelia in the
Wright or Barry connections. Mrs. Harmon Andrews said she supposed
Diana had found the name in some trashy novel, and wondered that Fred
hadn’t more sense than to allow it. But Diana and Anne smiled at each
other. They knew how Small Anne Cordelia had come by her name.
“You always hated geometry,” said Diana with a retrospective smile. “I
should think you’d be real glad to be through with teaching, anyhow.”
“Oh, I’ve always liked teaching, apart from geometry. These past three
years in Summerside have been very pleasant ones. Mrs. Harmon Andrews
told me when I came home that I wouldn’t likely find married life as
much better than teaching as I expected. Evidently Mrs. Harmon is of
Hamlet’s opinion that it may be better to bear the ills that we have
than fly to others that we know not of.”
Anne’s laugh, as blithe and irresistible as of yore, with an added note
of sweetness and maturity, rang through the garret. Marilla in the
kitchen below, compounding blue plum preserve, heard it and smiled;
then sighed to think how seldom that dear laugh would echo through
Green Gables in the years to come. Nothing in her life had ever given
Marilla so much happiness as the knowledge that Anne was going to marry
Gilbert Blythe; but every joy must bring with it its little shadow of
sorrow. During the three Summerside years Anne had been home often for
vacations and weekends; but, after this, a bi-annual visit would be as
much as could be hoped for.
“You needn’t let what Mrs. Harmon says worry you,” said Diana, with the
calm assurance of the four-years matron. “Married life has its ups and
downs, of course. You mustn’t expect that everything will always go
smoothly. But I can assure you, Anne, that it’s a happy life, when
you’re married to the right man.”
Anne smothered a smile. Diana’s airs of vast experience always amused
her a little.
“I daresay I’ll be putting them on too, when I’ve been married four
years,” she thought. “Surely my sense of humor will preserve me from
it, though.”
“Is it settled yet where you are going to live?” asked Diana, cuddling
Small Anne Cordelia with the inimitable gesture of motherhood which
always sent through Anne’s heart, filled with sweet, unuttered dreams
and hopes, a thrill that was half pure pleasure and half a strange,
ethereal pain.
“Yes. That was what I wanted to tell you when I ’phoned to you to come
down today. By the way, I can’t realize that we really have telephones
in Avonlea now. It sounds so preposterously up-to-date and modernish
for this darling, leisurely old place.”
“We can thank the A. V. I. S. for them,” said Diana. “We should never
have got the line if they hadn’t taken the matter up and carried it
through. There was enough cold water thrown to discourage any society.
But they stuck to it, nevertheless. You did a splendid thing for
Avonlea when you founded that society, Anne. What fun we did have at
our meetings! Will you ever forget the blue hall and Judson Parker’s
scheme for painting medicine advertisements on his fence?”
“I don’t know that I’m wholly grateful to the A. V. I. S. in the
matter of the telephone,” said Anne. “Oh, I know it’s most
convenient--even more so than our old device of signalling to each
other by flashes of candlelight! And, as Mrs. Rachel says, ‘Avonlea
must keep up with the procession, that’s what.’ But somehow I feel as
if I didn’t want Avonlea spoiled by what Mr. Harrison, when he wants to
be witty, calls ‘modern inconveniences.’ I should like to have it kept
always just as it was in the dear old years. That’s foolish--and
sentimental--and impossible. So I shall immediately become wise and
practical and possible. The telephone, as Mr. Harrison concedes, is ‘a
buster of a good thing’--even if you do know that probably half a dozen
interested people are listening along the line.”
“That’s the worst of it,” sighed Diana. “It’s so annoying to hear the
receivers going down whenever you ring anyone up. They say Mrs. Harmon
Andrews insisted that their ’phone should be put in their kitchen just
so that she could listen whenever it rang and keep an eye on the dinner
at the same time. Today, when you called me, I distinctly heard that
queer clock of the Pyes’ striking. So no doubt Josie or Gertie was
listening.”
“Oh, so that is why you said, ‘You’ve got a new clock at Green Gables,
haven’t you?’ I couldn’t imagine what you meant. I heard a vicious
click as soon as you had spoken. I suppose it was the Pye receiver
being hung up with profane energy. Well, never mind the Pyes. As Mrs.
Rachel says, ‘Pyes they always were and Pyes they always will be, world
without end, amen.’ I want to talk of pleasanter things. It’s all
settled as to where my new home shall be.”
“Oh, Anne, where? I do hope it’s near here.”
“No-o-o, that’s the drawback. Gilbert is going to settle at Four Winds
Harbor--sixty miles from here.”
“Sixty! It might as well be six hundred,” sighed Diana. “I never can
get further from home now than Charlottetown.”
“You’ll have to come to Four Winds. It’s the most beautiful harbor on
the Island. There’s a little village called Glen St. Mary at its head,
and Dr. David Blythe has been practicing there for fifty years. He is
Gilbert’s great-uncle, you know. He is going to retire, and Gilbert is
to take over his practice. Dr. Blythe is going to keep his house,
though, so we shall have to find a habitation for ourselves. I don’t
know yet what it is, or where it will be in reality, but I have a
little house o’dreams all furnished in my imagination--a tiny,
delightful castle in Spain.”
“Where are you going for your wedding tour?” asked Diana.
“Nowhere. Don’t look horrified, Diana dearest. You suggest Mrs.
Harmon Andrews. She, no doubt, will remark condescendingly that people
who can’t afford wedding ‘towers’ are real sensible not to take them;
and then she’ll remind me that Jane went to Europe for hers. I want to
spend MY honeymoon at Four Winds in my own dear house of dreams.”
“And you’ve decided not to have any bridesmaid?”
“There isn’t any one to have. You and Phil and Priscilla and Jane all
stole a march on me in the matter of marriage; and Stella is teaching
in Vancouver. I have no other ‘kindred soul’ and I won’t have a
bridesmaid who isn’t.”
“But you are going to wear a veil, aren’t you?” asked Diana, anxiously.
“Yes, indeedy. I shouldn’t feel like a bride without one. I remember
telling Matthew, that evening when he brought me to Green Gables, that
I never expected to be a bride because I was so homely no one would
ever want to marry me--unless some foreign missionary did. I had an
idea then that foreign missionaries couldn’t afford to be finicky in
the matter of looks if they wanted a girl to risk her life among
cannibals. You should have seen the foreign missionary Priscilla
married. He was as handsome and inscrutable as those daydreams we once
planned to marry ourselves, Diana; he was the best dressed man I ever
met, and he raved over Priscilla’s ‘ethereal, golden beauty.’ But of
course there are no cannibals in Japan.”
“Your wedding dress is a dream, anyhow,” sighed Diana rapturously.
“You’ll look like a perfect queen in it--you’re so tall and slender.
How DO you keep so slim, Anne? I’m fatter than ever--I’ll soon have no
waist at all.”
“Stoutness and slimness seem to be matters of predestination,” said
Anne. “At all events, Mrs. Harmon Andrews can’t say to you what she
said to me when I came home from Summerside, ‘Well, Anne, you’re just
about as skinny as ever.’ It sounds quite romantic to be ‘slender,’
but ‘skinny’ has a very different tang.”
“Mrs. Harmon has been talking about your trousseau. She admits it’s as
nice as Jane’s, although she says Jane married a millionaire and you
are only marrying a ‘poor young doctor without a cent to his name.’”
Anne laughed.
“My dresses ARE nice. I love pretty things. I remember the first
pretty dress I ever had--the brown gloria Matthew gave me for our
school concert. Before that everything I had was so ugly. It seemed
to me that I stepped into a new world that night.”
“That was the night Gilbert recited ‘Bingen on the Rhine,’ and looked
at you when he said, ‘There’s another, NOT a sister.’ And you were so
furious because he put your pink tissue rose in his breast pocket! You
didn’t much imagine then that you would ever marry him.”
“Oh, well, that’s another instance of predestination,” laughed Anne, as
they went down the garret stairs.