CHAPTER 22

MISS CORNELIA ARRANGES MATTERS

Gilbert insisted that Susan should be kept on at the little house for the summer. Anne protested at first.

“Life here with just the two of us is so sweet, Gilbert. It spoils it a little to have anyone else. Susan is a dear soul, but she is an outsider. It won’t hurt me to do the work here.”

“You must take your doctor’s advice,” said Gilbert. “There’s an old proverb to the effect that shoemakers’ wives go barefoot and doctors’ wives die young. I don’t mean that it shall be true in my household. You will keep Susan until the old spring comes back into your step, and those little hollows on your cheeks fill out.”

“You just take it easy, Mrs. Doctor, dear,” said Susan, coming abruptly¹ in. “Have a good time and do not worry about the pantry. Susan is at the helm. There is no use in keeping a dog and doing your own barking. I am going to take your breakfast up to you every morning.”

“Indeed you are not,” laughed Anne. “I agree with Miss Cornelia that it’s a scandal for a woman who isn’t sick to eat her breakfast in bed, and almost justifies² the men in any enormities.”

“Oh, Cornelia!” said Susan, with ineffable³ contempt. “I think you have better sense, Mrs. Doctor, dear, than to heed⁴ what Cornelia Bryant says. I cannot see why she must be always running down the men, even if she is an old maid. I am an old maid, but you never hear ME abusing the men. I like ’em. I would have married one if I could. Is it not funny nobody ever asked me to marry him, Mrs. Doctor, dear? I am no beauty, but I am as good-looking as most of the married women you see. But I never had a beau. What do you suppose is the reason?”

“It may be predestination,” suggested Anne, with unearthly solemnity.

Susan nodded.

“That is what I have often thought, Mrs. Doctor, dear, and a great comfort it is. I do not mind nobody wanting me if the Almighty⁵ decreed it so for His own wise purposes. But sometimes doubt creeps in, Mrs. Doctor, dear, and I wonder if maybe the Old Scratch has not more to do with it than anyone else. I cannot feel resigned THEN. But maybe,” added Susan, brightening up, “I will have a chance to get married yet. I often and often think of the old verse my aunt used to repeat:

There never was a goose so gray but sometime soon or late

Some honest gander came her way and took her for his mate!

A woman cannot ever be sure of not being married till she is buried, Mrs. Doctor, dear, and meanwhile I will make a batch⁶ of cherry pies. I notice the doctor favors ’em, and I DO like cooking for a man who appreciates his victuals⁷.”

Miss Cornelia dropped in that afternoon, puffing⁸ a little.

“I don’t mind the world or the devil much, but the flesh DOES rather bother me,” she admitted. “You always look as cool as a cucumber, Anne, dearie. Do I smell cherry pie? If I do, ask me to stay to tea. Haven’t tasted a cherry pie this summer. My cherries have all been stolen by those scamps of Gilman boys from the Glen.”

“Now, now, Cornelia,” remonstrated⁹ Captain Jim, who had been reading a sea novel in a corner of the living room, “you shouldn’t say that about those two poor, motherless Gilman boys, unless you’ve got certain proof. Jest because their father ain’t none too honest isn’t any reason for calling them thieves. It’s more likely it’s been the robins¹⁰ took your cherries. They’re turrible thick this year.”

“Robins!” said Miss Cornelia disdainfully. “Humph! Two-legged robins, believe ME!”

“Well, most of the Four Winds robins ARE constructed on that principle,” said Captain Jim gravely.

Miss Cornelia stared at him for a moment. Then she leaned back in her rocker and laughed long and ungrudgingly.

“Well, you HAVE got one on me at last, Jim Boyd, I’ll admit. Just look how pleased he is, Anne, dearie, grinning like a Chessy-cat. As for the robins’ legs if robins have great, big, bare, sunburned legs, with ragged¹¹ trousers hanging on ’em, such as I saw up in my cherry tree one morning at sunrise last week, I’ll beg the Gilman boys’ pardon. By the time I got down they were gone. I couldn’t understand how they had disappeared so quick, but Captain Jim has enlightened me. They flew away, of course.”

Captain Jim laughed and went away, regretfully declining an invitation to stay to supper and partake of cherry pie.

“I’m on my way to see Leslie and ask her if she’ll take a boarder,” Miss Cornelia resumed. “I’d a letter yesterday from a Mrs. Daly in Toronto, who boarded a spell with me two years ago. She wanted me to take a friend of hers for the summer. His name is Owen Ford¹², and he’s a newspaper man, and it seems he’s a grandson of the schoolmaster who built this house. John Selwyn’s oldest daughter married an Ontario man named Ford, and this is her son. He wants to see the old place his grandparents lived in. He had a bad spell of typhoid in the spring and hasn’t got rightly over it, so his doctor has ordered him to the sea. He doesn’t want to go to the hotel—he just wants a quiet home place. I can’t take him, for I have to be away in August. I’ve been appointed a delegate to the W.F.M.S. convention in Kingsport and I’m going. I don’t know whether Leslie’ll want to be bothered with him, either, but there’s no one else. If she can’t take him he’ll have to go over the harbor.”

“When you’ve seen her come back and help us eat our cherry pies,” said Anne. “Bring Leslie and Dick, too, if they can come. And so you’re going to Kingsport? What a nice time you will have. I must give you a letter to a friend of mine there—Mrs. Jonas Blake.”

“I’ve prevailed on Mrs. Thomas Holt to go with me,” said Miss Cornelia complacently¹³. “It’s time she had a little holiday, believe ME. She has just about worked herself to death. Tom Holt can crochet¹⁴ beautifully, but he can’t make a living for his family. He never seems to be able to get up early enough to do any work, but I notice he can always get up early to go fishing. Isn’t that like a man?”

Anne smiled. She had learned to discount largely Miss Cornelia’s opinions of the Four Winds men. Otherwise she must have believed them the most hopeless assortment¹⁵ of reprobates¹⁶ and ne’er-do-wells in the world, with veritable slaves and martyrs¹⁷ for wives. This particular Tom Holt, for example, she knew to be a kind husband, a much loved father, and an excellent neighbor. If he were rather inclined to be lazy, liking¹⁸ better the fishing he had been born for than the farming he had not, and if he had a harmless eccentricity¹⁹ for doing fancy work, nobody save Miss Cornelia seemed to hold it against him. His wife was a “hustler,” who gloried in hustling²⁰; his family got a comfortable living off the farm; and his strapping²¹ sons and daughters, inheriting their mother’s energy, were all in a fair way to do well in the world. There was not a happier household in Glen St. Mary than the Holts’.

Miss Cornelia returned satisfied from the house up the brook²².

“Leslie’s going to take him,” she announced. “She jumped at the chance. She wants to make a little money to shingle²³ the roof of her house this fall, and she didn’t know how she was going to manage it. I expect Captain Jim’ll be more than interested when he hears that a grandson of the Selwyns’ is coming here. Leslie said to tell you she hankered after cherry pie, but she couldn’t come to tea because she has to go and hunt up her turkeys. They’ve strayed away. But she said, if there was a piece left, for you to put it in the pantry and she’d run over in the cat’s light, when prowling’s in order, to get it. You don’t know, Anne, dearie, what good it did my heart to hear Leslie send you a message like that, laughing like she used to long ago.

“There’s a great change come over her lately. She laughs and jokes like a girl, and from her talk I gather she’s here real often.”

“Every day—or else I’m over there,” said Anne. “I don’t know what I’d do without Leslie, especially just now when Gilbert is so busy. He’s hardly ever home except for a few hours in the wee sma’s. He’s really working himself to death. So many of the over-harbor people send for him now.”

“They might better be content with their own doctor,” said Miss Cornelia. “Though to be sure I can’t blame them, for he’s a Methodist. Ever since Dr. Blythe brought Mrs. Allonby round folks think he can raise the dead. I believe Dr. Dave is a mite²⁴ jealous—just like a man. He thinks Dr. Blythe has too many new-fangled notions! 'Well,’ I says to him, 'it was a new-fangled notion saved Rhoda Allonby. If YOU’D been attending her she’d have died, and had a tombstone saying it had pleased God to take her away.’ Oh, I DO like to speak my mind to Dr. Dave! He’s bossed the Glen for years, and he thinks he’s forgotten more than other people ever knew. Speaking of doctors, I wish Dr. Blythe’d run over and see to that boil on Dick Moore’s neck. It’s getting past Leslie’s skill. I’m sure I don’t know what Dick Moore wants to start in having boils for—as if he wasn’t enough trouble without that!”

“Do you know, Dick has taken quite a fancy to me,” said Anne. “He follows me round like a dog, and smiles like a pleased child when I notice him.”

“Does it make you creepy?”

“Not at all. I rather like poor Dick Moore. He seems so pitiful and appealing, somehow.”

“You wouldn’t think him very appealing if you’d see him on his cantankerous²⁵ days, believe ME. But I’m glad you don’t mind him—it’s all the nicer for Leslie. She’ll have more to do when her boarder comes. I hope he’ll be a decent creature. You’ll probably like him—he’s a writer.”

“I wonder why people so commonly suppose that if two individuals are both writers they must therefore be hugely congenial,” said Anne, rather scornfully. “Nobody would expect two blacksmiths to be violently attracted toward each other merely because they were both blacksmiths.”

Nevertheless, she looked forward to the advent²⁶ of Owen Ford with a pleasant sense of expectation. If he were young and likeable he might prove a very pleasant addition to society in Four Winds. The latch-string of the little house was always out for the race of Joseph.