Chronicles of Avonlea

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"Oh, Aunt Judith won't let me go," said Lionel Hezekiah
despondingly. "Aunt Judith doesn't believe there is any God or
any bad place. Teddy Markham says she doesn't. He says she's
an awful wicked woman 'cause she never goes to church. So you
must be wicked too, Aunt Salome, 'cause you never go. Why
don't you?"

"Your--your Aunt Judith won't let me go," faltered Salome,
more perplexed than she had ever been before in her life.

"Well, it doesn't seem to me that you have much fun on
Sundays," remarked Lionel Hezekiah ponderingly. "I'd have more
if I was you. But I s'pose you can't 'cause you're ladies. I'm
glad I'm a man. Look at Abel Blair, what splendid times he has
on Sundays. He never goes to church, but he goes fishing, and
has cock-fights, and gets drunk. When I grow up, I'm going to
do that on Sundays too, since I won't be going to church. I
don't want to go to church, but I'd like to go to Sunday
school."

Salome listened in agony. Every word of Lionel Hezekiah's
stung her conscience unbearably. So this was the result of her
weak yielding to Judith; this innocent child looked upon her
as a wicked woman, and, worse still, regarded old, depraved
Abel Blair as a model to be imitated. Oh! was it too late to
undo the evil? When Judith returned, Salome blurted out the
whole story. "Lionel Hezekiah must go to Sunday school," she
concluded appealingly.

Judith's face hardened until it was as if cut in stone.

"No, he shall not," she said stubbornly. "No one living in my
household shall ever go to church or Sunday school. I gave in
to you when you wanted to teach him to say his prayers, though
I knew it was only foolish superstition, but I sha'n't yield
another inch. You know exactly how I feel on this subject,
Salome; I believe just as father did. You know he hated
churches and churchgoing. And was there ever a better, kinder,
more lovable man?"

"Mother believed in God; mother always went to church,"
pleaded Salome.

"Mother was weak and superstitious, just as you are," retorted
Judith inflexibly. "I tell you, Salome, I don't believe there
is a God. But, if there is, He is cruel and unjust, and I hate
Him."

"Judith!" gasped Salome, aghast at the impiety. She half
expected to see her sister struck dead at her feet.

"Don't 'Judith' me!" said Judith passionately, in the strange
anger that any discussion of the subject always roused in her.
"I mean every word I say. Before you got lame I didn't feel
much about it one way or another; I'd just as soon have gone
with mother as with father. But, when you were struck down
like that, I knew father was right."

For a moment Salome quailed. She felt that she could not, dare
not, stand out against Judith. For her own sake she could not
have done so, but the thought of Lionel Hezekiah nerved her to
desperation. She struck her thin, bleached little hands wildly
together.

"Judith, I'm going to church to-morrow," she cried. "I tell
you I am, I won't set Lionel Hezekiah a bad example one day
longer. I'll not take him; I won't go against you in that, for
it is your bounty feeds and clothes him; but I'm going
myself."

"If you do, Salome Marsh, I'll never forgive you," said
Judith, her harsh face dark with anger; and then, not trusting
herself to discuss the subject any longer, she went out.

Salome dissolved into her ready tears, and cried most of the
night. But her resolution did not fail. Go to church she
would, for that dear baby's sake.

Judith would not speak to her at breakfast, and this almost
broke Salome's heart; but she dared not yield. After
breakfast, she limped painfully into her room, and still more
painfully dressed herself. When she was ready, she took a
little old worn Bible out of her box. It had been her
mother's, and Salome read a chapter in it every night,
although she never dared to let Judith see her doing it.

When she limped out into the kitchen, Judith looked up with a
hard face. A flame of sullen anger glowed in her dark eyes,
and she went into the sitting-room and shut the door, as if by
that act she were shutting her sister for evermore out of her
heart and life. Salome, strung up to the last pitch of nervous
tension, felt intuitively the significance of that closed
door. For a moment she wavered--oh, she could not go against
Judith! She was all but turning back to her room when Lionel
Hezekiah came running in, and paused to look at her
admiringly.

"You look just bully, Aunt Salome," he said. "Where are you
going?"

"Don't use that word, Lionel Hezekiah," pleaded Salome. "I'm
going to church."

"Take me with you," said Lionel Hezekiah promptly. Salome
shook her head.

"I can't, dear. Your Aunt Judith wouldn't like it. Perhaps she
will let you go after a while. Now do be a good boy while I am
away, won't you? Don't do any naughty things."
"I won't do them if I know they're naughty," conceded Lionel
Hezekiah. "But that's just the trouble; I don't know what's
naughty and what ain't. Prob'ly if I went to Sunday school I'd
find out."

Salome limped out of the yard and down the lane bordered by
its asters and goldenrod. Fortunately the church was just
outside the lane, across the main road; but Salome found it
hard to cover even that short distance. She felt almost
exhausted when she reached the church and toiled painfully up
the aisle to her mother's old pew. She laid her crutch on the
seat, and sank into the corner by the window with a sigh of
relief.

She had elected to come early so that she might get there
before the rest of the people. The church was as yet empty,
save for a class of Sunday school children and their teacher
in a remote corner, who paused midway in their lesson to stare
with amazement at the astonishing sigh of Salome Marsh limping
into church.

The big building, shadowy from the great elms around it, was
very still. A faint murmur came from the closed room behind
the pulpit where the rest of the Sunday school was assembled.
In front of the pulpit was a stand bearing tall white
geraniums in luxuriant blossom. The light fell through the
stained-glass window in a soft tangle of hues upon the floor.
Salome felt a sense of peace and happiness fill her heart.
Even Judith's anger lost its importance. She leaned her head
against the window-sill, and gave herself up to the flood of
tender old recollections that swept over her.

Memory went back to the years of her childhood when she had
sat in this pew every Sunday with her mother. Judith had come
then, too, always seeming grown up to Salome by reason of her
ten years' seniority. Her tall, dark, reserved father never
came. Salome knew that the Carmody people called him an
infidel, and looked upon him as a very wicked man. But he had
not been wicked; he had been good and kind in his own odd way.

The gently little mother had died when Salome was ten years
old, but so loving and tender was Judith's care that the child
did not miss anything out of her life. Judith Marsh loved her
little sister with an intensity that was maternal. She herself
was a plain, repellent girl, liked by few, sought after by no
man; but she was determined that Salome should have everything
that she had missed--admiration, friendship, love. She would
have a vicarious youth in Salome's.

All went according to Judith's planning until Salome was
eighteen, and then trouble after trouble came. Their father,
whom Judith had understood and passionately loved, died;
Salome's young lover was killed in a railroad accident; and
finally Salome herself developed symptoms of the hip-disease
which, springing from a trifling injury, eventually left her a
cripple. Everything possible was done for her. Judith, falling
heir to a snug little fortune by the death of the old aunt for
whom she was named, spared nothing to obtain the best medical
skill, and in vain. One and all, the great doctors failed.

Judith had borne her father's death bravely enough in spite of
her agony of grief; she had watched her sister pining and
fading with the pain of her broken heart without growing
bitter; but when she knew at last that Salome would never walk
again save as she hobbled painfully about on her crutch, the
smouldering revolt in her soul broke its bounds, and
overflowed her nature in a passionate rebellion against the
Being who had sent, or had failed to prevent, these
calamities. She did not rave or denounce wildly; that was not
Judith's way; but she never went to church again, and it soon
became an accepted fact in Carmody that Judith Marsh was as
rank an infidel as her father had been before her; nay, worse,
since she would not even allow Salome to go to church, and
shut the door in the minister's face when he went to see her.

"I should have stood out against her for conscience' sake,"
reflected Salome in her pew self-reproachfully. "But, O dear,
I'm afraid she'll never forgive me, and how can I live if she
doesn't? But I must endure it for Lionel Hezekiah's sake; my
weakness has perhaps done him great harm already. They say
that what a child learns in the first seven years never leaves
him; so Lionel Hezekiah has only another year to get set right
about these things. Oh, if I've left it till too late!"

When the people began to come in, Salome felt painfully the
curious glances directed at her. Look where she would, she met
them, unless she looked out of the window; so out of the
window she did look unswervingly, her delicate little face
burning crimson with self-consciousness. She could see her
home and its back yard plainly, with Lionel Hezekiah making
mud-pies joyfully in the corner. Presently she saw Judith come
out of the house and stride away to the pine wood behind it.
Judith always betook herself to the pines in time of mental
stress and strain.

Salome could see the sunlight shining on Lionel Hezekiah's
bare head as he mixed his pies. In the pleasure of watching
him she forgot where she was and the curious eyes turned on
her.

Suddenly Lionel Hezekiah ceased concocting pies, and betook
himself to the corner of the summer kitchen, where he
proceeded to climb up to the top of the storm-fence and from
there to mount the sloping kitchen roof. Salome clasped her
hands in agony. What if the child should fall? Oh! why had
Judith gone away and left him alone? What if--what if--and
then, while her brain with lightning-like rapidity pictured
forth a dozen possible catastrophes, something really did
happen. Lionel Hezekiah slipped, sprawled wildly, slid down,
and fell off the roof, in a bewildering whirl of arms and
legs, plump into the big rain-water hogshead under the spout,
which was generally full to the brim with rain-water, a
hogshead big and deep enough to swallow up half a dozen small
boys who went climbing kitchen roofs on a Sunday.

Then something took place that is talked of in Carmody to this
day, and even fiercely wrangled over, so many and conflicting
are the opinions on the subject. Salome Marsh, who had not
walked a step without assistance for fifteen years, suddenly
sprang to her feet with a shriek, ran down the aisle, and out
of the door!

Every man, woman, and child in the Carmody church followed
her, even to the minister, who had just announced his text.
When they got out, Salome was already half-way 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."

XII. The End of a Quarrel

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 goose-berry 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
care-free 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 suit me either. I don't want to be married.
Do you remember that story Anne Shirley used to tell long ago
of the pupil who wanted to be a widow because 'if you were
married your husband bossed you and if you weren't married
people called you an old maid?' Well, 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 low-lying 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.

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