The Complete Short Stories of Lucy Maud Montgomery. Lucy Maud Montgomery

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      Old Man Shaw’s Girl

      Table of Contents

      “Day after tomorrow — day after tomorrow,” said Old Man Shaw, rubbing his long slender hands together gleefully. “I have to keep saying it over and over, so as to really believe it. It seems far too good to be true that I’m to have Blossom again. And everything is ready. Yes, I think everything is ready, except a bit of cooking. And won’t this orchard be a surprise to her! I’m just going to bring her out here as soon as I can, never saying a word. I’ll fetch her through the spruce lane, and when we come to the end of the path I’ll step back casual-like, and let her go out from under the trees alone, never suspecting. It’ll be worth ten times the trouble to see her big, brown eyes open wide and hear her say, ‘Oh, daddy! Why, daddy!’”

      He rubbed his hands again and laughed softly to himself. He was a tall, bent old man, whose hair was snow white, but whose face was fresh and rosy. His eyes were a boy’s eyes, large, blue and merry, and his mouth had never got over a youthful trick of smiling at any provocation — and, oft-times, at no provocation at all.

      To be sure, White Sands people would not have given you the most favourable opinion in the world of Old Man Shaw. First and foremost, they would have told you that he was “shiftless,” and had let his bit of a farm run out while he pottered with flowers and bugs, or rambled aimlessly about in the woods, or read books along the shore. Perhaps it was true; but the old farm yielded him a living, and further than that Old Man Shaw had no ambition. He was as blithe as a pilgrim on a pathway climbing to the west. He had learned the rare secret that you must take happiness when you find it — that there is no use in marking the place and coming back to it at a more convenient season, because it will not be there then. And it is very easy to be happy if you know, as Old Man Shaw most thoroughly knew, how to find pleasure in little things. He enjoyed life, he had always enjoyed life and helped others to enjoy it; consequently his life was a success, whatever White Sands people might think of it. What if he had not “improved” his farm? There are some people to whom life will never be anything more than a kitchen garden; and there are others to whom it will always be a royal palace with domes and minarets of rainbow fancy.

      The orchard of which he was so proud was as yet little more than the substance of things hoped for — a flourishing plantation of young trees which would amount to something later on. Old Man Shaw’s house was on the crest of a bare, sunny hill, with a few staunch old firs and spruces behind it — the only trees that could resist the full sweep of the winds that blew bitterly up from the sea at times. Fruit trees would never grow near it, and this had been a great grief to Sara.

      “Oh, daddy, if we could just have an orchard!” she had been wont to say wistfully, when other farmhouses in White Sands were smothered whitely in apple bloom. And when she had gone away, and her father had nothing to look forward to save her return, he was determined she should find an orchard when she came back.

      Over the southward hill, warmly sheltered by spruce woods and sloping to the sunshine, was a little field, so fertile that all the slack management of a lifetime had not availed to exhaust it. Here Old Man Shaw set out his orchard and saw it flourish, watching and tending it until he came to know each tree as a child and loved it. His neighbours laughed at him, and said that the fruit of an orchard so far away from the house would all be stolen. But as yet there was no fruit, and when the time came for bearing there would be enough and to spare.

      “Blossom and me’ll get all we want, and the boys can have the rest, if they want ‘em worse’n they want a good conscience,” said that unworldly, unbusinesslike Old Man Shaw.

      On his way back home from his darling orchard he found a rare fern in the woods and dug it up for Sara — she had loved ferns. He planted it at the shady, sheltered side of the house and then sat down on the old bench by the garden gate to read her last letter — the letter that was only a note, because she was coming home soon. He knew every word of it by heart, but that did not spoil the pleasure of rereading it every half-hour.

      Old Man Shaw had not married until late in life, and had, so White Sands people said, selected a wife with his usual judgment — which, being interpreted, meant no judgment at all; otherwise, he would never have married Sara Glover, a mere slip of a girl, with big brown eyes like a frightened wood creature’s, and the delicate, fleeting bloom of a spring Mayflower.

      “The last woman in the world for a farmer’s wife — no strength or get-up about her.”

      Neither could White Sands folk understand what on earth Sara Glover had married him for.

      “Well, the fool crop was the only one that never failed.”

      Old Man Shaw — he was Old Man Shaw even then, although he was only forty — and his girl bride had troubled themselves not at all about White Sands opinions. They had one year of perfect happiness, which is always worth living for, even if the rest of life be a dreary pilgrimage, and then Old Man Shaw found himself alone again, except for little Blossom. She was christened Sara, after her dead mother, but she was always Blossom to her father — the precious little blossom whose plucking had cost the mother her life.

      Sara Glover’s people, especially a wealthy aunt in Montreal, had wanted to take the child, but Old Man Shaw grew almost fierce over the suggestion. He would give his baby to no one. A woman was hired to look after the house, but it was the father who cared for the baby in the main. He was as tender and faithful and deft as a woman. Sara never missed a mother’s care, and she grew up into a creature of life and light and beauty, a constant delight to all who knew her. She had a way of embroidering life with stars. She was dowered with all the charming characteristics of both parents, with a resilient vitality and activity which had pertained to neither of them. When she was ten years old she had packed all hirelings off, and kept house for her father for six delightful years — years in which they were father and daughter, brother and sister, and “chums.” Sara never went to school, but her father saw to her education after a fashion of his own. When their work was done they lived in the woods and fields, in the little garden they had made on the sheltered side of the house, or on the shore, where sunshine and storm were to them equally lovely and beloved. Never was comradeship more perfect or more wholly satisfactory.

      “Just wrapped up in each other,” said White Sands folk, half-enviously, half-disapprovingly.

      When Sara was sixteen Mrs. Adair, the wealthy aunt aforesaid, pounced down on White Sands in a glamour of fashion and culture and outer worldliness. She bombarded Old Man Shaw with such arguments that he had to succumb. It was a shame that a girl like Sara should grow up in a place like White Sands, “with no advantages and no education,” said Mrs. Adair scornfully, not understanding that wisdom and knowledge are two entirely different things.

      “At least let me give my dear sister’s child what I would have given my own daughter if I had had one,” she pleaded tearfully. “Let me take her with me and send her to a good СКАЧАТЬ