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

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СКАЧАТЬ When they got out, Salome was already halfway up her lane, running wildly. In her heart was room for but one agonized thought. Would Lionel Hezekiah be drowned before she reached him?

      She opened the gate of the yard, and panted across it just as a tall, grim-faced woman came around the corner of the house and stood rooted to the ground in astonishment at the sight that met her eyes.

      But Salome saw nobody. She flung herself against the hogshead and looked in, sick with terror at what she might see. What she did see was Lionel Hezekiah sitting on the bottom of the hogshead in water that came only to his waist. He was looking rather dazed and bewildered, but was apparently quite uninjured.

      The yard was full of people, but nobody had as yet said a word; awe and wonder held everybody in spellbound silence. Judith was the first to speak. She pushed through the crowd to Salome. Her face was blanched to a deadly whiteness; and her eyes, as Mrs. William Blair afterwards declared, were enough to give a body the creeps.

      “Salome,” she said in a high, shrill, unnatural voice, “where is your crutch?”

      Salome came to herself at the question. For the first time, she realized that she had walked, nay, run, all that distance from the church alone and unaided. She turned pale, swayed, and would have fallen if Judith had not caught her.

      Old Dr. Blair came forward briskly.

      “Carry her in,” he said, “and don’t all of you come crowding in, either. She wants quiet and rest for a spell.”

      Most of the people obediently returned to the church, their sudden loosened tongues clattering in voluble excitement. A few women assisted Judith to carry Salome in and lay her on the kitchen lounge, followed by the doctor and the dripping Lionel Hezekiah, whom the minister had lifted out of the hogshead and to whom nobody now paid the slightest attention.

      Salome faltered out her story, and her hearers listened with varying emotions.

      “It’s a miracle,” said Sam Lawson in an awed voice.

      Dr. Blair shrugged his shoulders. “There is no miracle about it,” he said bluntly. “It’s all perfectly natural. The disease in the hip has evidently been quite well for a long time; Nature does sometimes work cures like that when she is let alone. The trouble was that the muscles were paralyzed by long disuse. That paralysis was overcome by the force of a strong and instinctive effort. Salome, get up and walk across the kitchen.”

      Salome obeyed. She walked across the kitchen and back, slowly, stiffly, falteringly, now that the stimulus of frantic fear was spent; but still she walked. The doctor nodded his satisfaction.

      “Keep that up every day. Walk as much as you can without tiring yourself, and you’ll soon be as spry as ever. No more need of crutches for you, but there’s no miracle in the case.”

      Judith Marsh turned to him. She had not spoken a word since her question concerning Salome’s crutch. Now she said passionately:

      “It WAS a miracle. God has worked it to prove His existence for me, and I accept the proof.”

      The old doctor shrugged his shoulders again. Being a wise man, he knew when to hold his tongue.

      “Well, put Salome to bed, and let her sleep the rest of the day. She’s worn out. And for pity’s sake let some one take that poor child and put some dry clothes on him before he catches his death of cold.”

      That evening, as Salome Marsh lay in her bed in a glory of sunset light, her heart filled with unutterable gratitude and happiness, Judith came into the room. She wore her best hat and dress, and she held Lionel Hezekiah by the hand. Lionel Hezekiah’s beaming face was scrubbed clean, and his curls fell in beautiful sleekness over the lace collar of his velvet suit.

      “How do you feel now, Salome?” asked Judith gently.

      “Better. I’ve had a lovely sleep. But where are you going, Judith?”

      “I am going to church,” said Judith firmly, “and I am going to take Lionel Hezekiah with me.”

      The End of a Quarrel

      Table of Contents

      Nancy Rogerson sat down on Louisa Shaw’s front doorstep and looked about her, drawing a long breath of delight that seemed tinged with pain. Everything was very much the same; the square garden was as charming bodge-podge of fruit and flowers, and gooseberry bushes and tiger lilies, a gnarled old apple tree sticking up here and there, and a thick cherry copse at the foot. Behind was a row of pointed firs, coming out darkly against the swimming pink sunset sky, not looking a day older than they had looked twenty years ago, when Nancy had been a young girl walking and dreaming in their shadows. The old willow to the left was as big and sweeping and, Nancy thought with a little shudder, probably as caterpillary, as ever. Nancy had learned many things in her twenty years of exile from Avonlea, but she had never learned to conquer her dread of caterpillars.

      “Nothing is much changed, Louisa,” she said, propping her chin on her plump white hands, and sniffing at the delectable odour of the bruised mint upon which Louisa was trampling. “I’m glad; I was afraid to come back for fear you would have improved the old garden out of existence, or else into some prim, orderly lawn, which would have been worse. It’s as magnificently untidy as ever, and the fence still wobbles. It CAN’T be the same fence, but it looks exactly like it. No, nothing is much changed. Thank you, Louisa.”

      Louisa had not the faintest idea what Nancy was thanking her for, but then she had never been able to fathom Nancy, much as she had always liked her in the old girlhood days that now seemed much further away to Louisa than they did to Nancy. Louisa was separated from them by the fulness of wifehood and motherhood, while Nancy looked back only over the narrow gap that empty years make.

      “You haven’t changed much yourself, Nancy,” she said, looking admiringly at Nancy’s trim figure, in the nurse’s uniform she had donned to show Louisa what it was like, her firm, pink-and-white face and the the glossy waves of her golden brown hair. “You’ve held your own wonderfully well.”

      “Haven’t I?” said Nancy complacently. “Modern methods of massage and cold cream have kept away the crowsfeet, and fortunately I had the Rogerson complexion to start with. You wouldn’t think I was really thirty-eight, would you? Thirty-eight! Twenty years ago I thought anybody who was thirty-eight was a perfect female Methuselah. And now I feel so horribly, ridiculously young, Louisa. Every morning when I get up I have to say solemnly to myself three times, ‘You’re an old maid, Nancy Rogerson,’ to tone myself down to anything like a becoming attitude for the day.”

      “I guess you don’t mind being an old maid much,” said Louisa, shrugging her shoulders. She would not have been an old maid herself for anything; yet she inconsistently envied Nancy her freedom, her wide life in the world, her unlined brow, and carefree lightness of spirit.

      “Oh, but I do mind,” said Nancy frankly. “I hate being an old maid.”

      “Why don’t you get married, then?” asked Louisa, paying an unconscious tribute to Nancy’s perennial chance by her use of the present tense.

      Nancy shook her head.

      “No, that wouldn’t СКАЧАТЬ