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

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СКАЧАТЬ that is precisely my opinion. I’d like to be a widow. Then I’d have the freedom of the unmarried, with the kudos of the married. I could eat my cake and have it, too. Oh, to be a widow!”

      “Nancy!” said Louisa in a shocked tone.

      Nancy laughed, a mellow gurgle that rippled through the garden like a brook.

      “Oh, Louisa, I can shock you yet. That was just how you used to say ‘Nancy’ long ago, as if I’d broken all the commandments at once.”

      “You do say such queer things,” protested Louisa, “and half the time I don’t know what you mean.”

      “Bless you, dear coz, half the time I don’t myself. Perhaps the joy of coming back to the old spot has slightly turned my brain, I’ve found my lost girlhood here. I’m NOT thirty-eight in this garden — it is a flat impossibility. I’m sweet eighteen, with a waist line two inches smaller. Look, the sun is just setting. I see he has still his old trick of throwing his last beams over the Wright farmhouse. By the way, Louisa, is Peter Wright still living there?”

      “Yes.” Louisa threw a sudden interested glance at the apparently placid Nancy.

      “Married, I suppose, with half a dozen children?” said Nancy indifferently, pulling up some more sprigs of mint and pinning them on her breast. Perhaps the exertion of leaning over to do it flushed her face. There was more than the Rogerson colour in it, anyhow, and Louisa, slow though her mental processes might be in some respects, thought she understood the meaning of a blush as well as the next one. All the instinct of the matchmaker flamed up in her.

      “Indeed he isn’t,” she said promptly. “Peter Wright has never married. He has been faithful to your memory, Nancy.”

      “Ugh! You make me feel as if I were buried up there in the Avonlea cemetery and had a monument over me with a weeping willow carved on it,” shivered Nancy. “When it is said that a man has been faithful to a woman’s memory it generally means that he couldn’t get anyone else to take him.”

      “That isn’t the case with Peter,” protested Louisa. “He is a good match, and many a woman would have been glad to take him, and would yet. He’s only forty-three. But he’s never taken the slightest interest in anyone since you threw him over, Nancy.”

      “But I didn’t. He threw me over,” said Nancy, plaintively, looking afar over the lowlying fields and a feathery young spruce valley to the white buildings of the Wright farm, glowing rosily in the sunset light when all the rest of Avonlea was scarfing itself in shadows. There was laughter in her eyes. Louisa could not pierce beneath that laughter to find if there were anything under it.

      “Fudge!” said Louisa. “What on earth did you and Peter quarrel about?” she added, curiously.

      “I’ve often wondered,” parried Nancy.

      “And you’ve never seen him since?” reflected Louisa.

      “No. Has he changed much?”

      “Well, some. He is gray and kind of tired-looking. But it isn’t to be wondered at — living the life he does. He hasn’t had a housekeeper for two years — not since his old aunt died. He just lives there alone and cooks his own meals. I’ve never been in the house, but folks say the disorder is something awful.”

      “Yes, I shouldn’t think Peter was cut out for a tidy housekeeper,” said Nancy lightly, dragging up more mint. “Just think, Louisa, if it hadn’t been for that old quarrel I might be Mrs. Peter Wright at this very moment, mother to the aforesaid supposed half dozen, and vexing my soul over Peter’s meals and socks and cows.”

      “I guess you are better off as you are,” said Louisa.

      “Oh, I don’t know.” Nancy looked up at the white house on the hill again. “I have an awfully good time out of life, but it doesn’t seem to satisfy, somehow. To be candid — and oh, Louisa, candour is a rare thing among women when it comes to talking of the men — I believe I’d rather be cooking Peter’s meals and dusting his house. I wouldn’t mind his bad grammar now. I’ve learned one or two valuable little things out yonder, and one is that it doesn’t matter if a man’s grammar is askew, so long as he doesn’t swear at you. By the way, is Peter as ungrammatical as ever?”

      “I — I don’t know,” said Louisa helplessly. “I never knew he WAS ungrammatical.”

      “Does he still say, ‘I seen,’ and ‘them things’?” demanded Nancy.

      “I never noticed,” confessed Louisa.

      “Enviable Louisa! Would that I had been born with that blessed faculty of never noticing! It stands a woman in better stead than beauty or brains. I used to notice Peter’s mistakes. When he said ‘I seen,’ it jarred on me in my salad days. I tried, oh, so tactfully, to reform him in that respect. Peter didn’t like being reformed — the Wrights always had a fairly good opinion of themselves, you know. It was really over a question of syntax we quarrelled. Peter told me I’d have to take him as he was, grammar and all, or go without him. I went without him — and ever since I’ve been wondering if I were really sorry, or if it were merely a pleasantly sentimental regret I was hugging to my heart. I daresay it’s the latter. Now, Louisa, I see the beginning of the plot far down in those placid eyes of yours. Strangle it at birth, dear Louisa. There is no use in your trying to make up a match between Peter and me now — no, nor in slyly inviting him up here to tea some evening, as you are even this moment thinking of doing.”

      “Well, I must go and milk the cows,” gasped Louisa, rather glad to make her escape. Nancy’s power of thought-reading struck her as uncanny. She felt afraid to remain with her cousin any longer, lest Nancy should drag to light all the secrets of her being.

      Nancy sat long on the steps after Louisa had gone — sat until the night came down, darkly and sweetly, over the garden, and the stars twinkled out above the firs. This had been her home in girlhood. Here she had lived and kept house for her father. When he died, Curtis Shaw, newly married to her cousin Louisa, bought the farm from her and moved in. Nancy stayed on with them, expecting soon to go to a home of her own. She and Peter Wright were engaged.

      Then came their mysterious quarrel, concerning the cause of which kith and kin on both sides were left in annoying ignorance. Of the results they were not ignorant. Nancy promptly packed up and left Avonlea seven hundred miles behind her. She went to a hospital in Montreal and studied nursing. In the twenty years that followed she had never even revisited Avonlea. Her sudden descent on it this summer was a whim born of a moment’s homesick longing for this same old garden. She had not thought about Peter. In very truth, she had thought little about Peter for the last fifteen years. She supposed that she had forgotten him. But now, sitting on the old doorstep, where she had often sat in her courting days, with Peter lounging on a broad stone at her feet, something tugged at her heartstrings. She looked over the valley to the light in the kitchen of the Wright farmhouse, and pictured Peter sitting there, lonely and uncared for, with naught but the cold comfort of his own providing.

      “Well, he should have got married,” she said snappishly. “I am not going to worry because he is a lonely old bachelor when all these years I have supposed him a comfy Benedict. Why doesn’t he hire him a housekeeper, at least? He can afford it; the place looks prosperous. Ugh! I’ve a fat bank account, and I’ve seen almost everything in the world worth seeing; but I’ve got several carefully hidden gray hairs and a horrible conviction that grammar isn’t one of the essential things in life after all. Well, I’m not going СКАЧАТЬ