Rainbow Valley, Lucy Maud Montgomery [short novels to read txt] 📗

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.