Further Chronicles of Avonlea Page 4

here. The dining-room is too small. We must borrow Mrs.

  Bell's forks and spoons. She offered to lend them. I'd

  never have been willing to ask her. The damask table

  cloths with the ribbon pattern must be bleached to-

  morrow. Nobody else in Avonlea has such tablecloths.

  And we'll put the little dining-room table on the hall

  landing, upstairs, for the presents."

  Rachel was not thinking about the presents, or the

  housewifely details of the wedding. Her breath was

  coming quicker, and the faint blush on her smooth

  cheeks had deepened to crimson. She knew that a

  critical moment was approaching. With a steady hand she

  wrote the last name on her list and drew a line under

  it.

  "Well, have you finished?" asked her mother

  impatiently. "Hand it here and let me look over it to

  make sure that you haven't left anybody out that should

  be in."

  Rachel passed the paper across the table in silence.

  The room seemed to her to have grown very still. She

  could hear the flies buzzing on the panes, the soft

  purr of the wind about the low eaves and through the

  apple boughs, the jerky beating of her own heart. She

  felt frightened and nervous, but resolute.

  Mrs. Spencer glanced down the list, murmuring the names

  aloud and nodding approval at each. But when she came

  to the last name, she did not utter it. She cast a

  black glance at Rachel, and a spark leaped up in the

  depths of the pale eyes. On her face were anger,

  amazement, incredulity, the last predominating.

  The final name on the list of wedding guests was the

  name of David Spencer. David Spencer lived alone in a

  little cottage down at the Cove. He was a combination

  of sailor and fisherman. He was also Isabella Spencer's

  husband and Rachel's father.

  "Rachel Spencer, have you taken leave of your senses?

  What do you mean by such nonsense as this?"

  "I simply mean that I am going to invite my father to

  my wedding," answered Rachel quietly.

  "Not in my house," cried Mrs. Spencer, her lips as

  white as if her fiery tone had scathed them.

  Rachel leaned forward, folded her large, capable hands

  deliberately on the table, and gazed unflinchingly into

  her mother's bitter face. Her fright and nervousness

  were gone. Now that the conflict was actually on she

  found herself rather enjoying it. She wondered a little

  at herself, and thought that she must be wicked. She

  was not given to self-analysis, or she might have

  concluded that it was the sudden assertion of her own

  personality, so long dominated by her mother's, which

  she was finding so agreeable.

  "Then there will be no wedding, mother," she said.

  "Frank and I will simply go to the manse, be married,

  and go home. If I cannot invite my father to see me

  married, no one else shall be invited."

  Her lips narrowed tightly. For the first time in her

  life Isabella Spencer saw a reflection of herself

  looking back at her from her daughter's face - a

  strange, indefinable resemblance that was more of soul

  and spirit than of flesh and blood. In spite of her

  anger her heart thrilled to it. As never before, she

  realized that this girl was her own and her husband's

  child, a living bond between them wherein their

  conflicting natures mingled and were reconciled. She

  realized too, that Rachel, so long sweetly meek and

  obedient, meant to have her own way in this case - and

  would have it.

  "I must say that I can't see why you are so set on

  having your father see you married," she said with a

  bitter sneer. "He has never remembered that he is your

  father. He cares nothing about you - never did care."

  Rachel took no notice of this taunt. It had no power to

  hurt her, its venom being neutralized by a secret

  knowledge of her own in which her mother had no share.

  "Either I shall invite my father to my wedding, or I

  shall not have a wedding," she repeated steadily,

  adopting her mother's own effective tactics of

  repetition undistracted by argument.

  "Invite him then," snapped Mrs. Spencer, with the

  ungraceful anger of a woman, long accustomed to having

  her own way, compelled for once to yield. "It'll be

  like chips in porridge anyhow - neither good nor harm.

  He won't come."

  Rachel made no response. Now that the battle was over,

  and the victory won, she found herself tremulously on

  the verge of tears. She rose quickly and went upstairs

  to her own room, a dim little place shadowed by the

  white birches growing thickly outside - a virginal

  room, where everything bespoke the maiden. She lay down

  on the blue and white patchwork quilt on her bed, and

  cried softly and bitterly.

  Her heart, at this crisis in her life, yearned for her

  father, who was almost a stranger to her. She knew that

  her mother had probably spoken the truth when she said

  that he would not come. Rachel felt that her marriage

  vows would be lacking in some indefinable sacredness if

  her father were not by to hear them spoken.

  Twenty-five years before this, David Spencer and

  Isabella Chiswick had been married. Spiteful people

  said there could be no doubt that Isabella had married

  David for love, since he had neither lands nor money to

  tempt her into a match of bargain and sale. David was a

  handsome fellow, with the blood of a seafaring race in

  his veins.

  He had been a sailor, like his father and grandfather

  before him; but, when he married Isabella, she induced

  him to give up the sea and settle down with her on a

  snug farm her father had left her. Isabella liked

  farming, and loved her fertile acres and opulent

  orchards. She abhorred the sea and all that pertained

  to it, less from any dread of its dangers than from an

  inbred conviction that sailors were "low" in the social

  scale - a species of necessary vagabonds. In her eyes

  there was a taint of disgrace in such a calling. David

  must be transformed into a respectable, home-abiding

  tiller of broad lands.

  For five years all went well enough. If, at times,

  David's longing for the sea troubled him, he stifled

  it, and listened not to its luring voice. He and

  Isabella were very happy; the only drawback to their

  happiness lay in the regretted fact that they were

  childless.

  Then, in the sixth year, came a crisis and a change.

  Captain Barrett, an old crony of David's, wanted him to

  go with him on a voyage as mate. At the suggestion all

  David's long-repressed craving for the wide blue wastes

  of the ocean, and the wind whistling through the spars

  with the salt foam in its breath, broke forth with a

  passion all the more intense for that very repression.

  He must go on that voya
ge with James Barrett - he must!

  That over, he would be contented again; but go he must.

  His soul struggled within him like a fettered thing.

  Isabella opposed the scheme vehemently and unwisely,

  with mordant sarcasm and unjust reproaches. The latent

  obstinacy of David's character came to the support of

  his longing - a longing which Isabella, with five

  generations of land-loving ancestry behind her, could

  not understand at all.

  He was determined to go, and he told Isabella so.

  "I'm sick of plowing and milking cows," he said hotly.

  "You mean that you are sick of a respectable life,"

  sneered Isabella.

  "Perhaps," said David, with a contemptuous shrug of his

  shoulders. "Anyway, I'm going."

  "If you go on this voyage, David Spencer, you need

  never come back here," said Isabella resolutely.

  David had gone; he did not believe that she meant it.

  Isabella believed that he did not care whether she

  meant it or not. David Spencer left behind him a woman,

  calm outwardly, inwardly a seething volcano of anger,

  wounded pride, and thwarted will.

  He found precisely the same woman when he came home,

  tanned, joyous, tamed for a while of his wanderlust,

  ready, with something of real affection, to go back to

  the farm fields and the stock-yard.

  Isabella met him at the door, smileless, cold-eyed,

  set-lipped.

  "What do you want here?" she said, in the tone she was

  accustomed to use to tramps and Syrian peddlers.

  "Want!" David's surprise left him at a loss for words.

  "Want! Why, I - I - want my wife. I've come home."

  "This is not your home. I'm no wife of yours. You made

  your choice when you went away," Isabella had replied.

  Then she had gone in, shut the door, and locked it in

  his face.

  David had stood there for a few minutes like a man

  stunned. Then he had turned and walked away up the lane

  under the birches. He said nothing - then or at any

  other time. From that day no reference to his wife or

  her concerns ever crossed his lips.

  He went directly to the harbor, and shipped with

  Captain Barrett for another voyage. When he came back

  from that in a month's time, he bought a small house

  and had it hauled to the "Cove," a lonely inlet from

  which no other human habitation was visible. Between

  his sea voyages he lived there the life of a recluse;

  fishing and playing his violin were his only

  employments. He went nowhere and encouraged no

  visitors.

  Isabella Spencer also had adopted the tactics of

  silence. When the scandalized Chiswicks, Aunt Jane at

  their head, tried to patch up the matter with argument

  and entreaty, Isabella met them stonily, seeming not to

  hear what they said, and making no response. She

  worsted them totally. As Aunt Jane said in disgust,

  "What can you do with a woman who won't even talk ?"

  Five months after David Spencer had been turned from

  his wife's door, Rachel was born. Perhaps, if David had

  come to them then, with due penitence and humility,

  Isabella's heart, softened by the pain and joy of her

  long and ardently desired motherhood might have cast

  out the rankling venom of resentment that had poisoned

  it and taken him back into it. But David had not come;

  he gave no sign of knowing or caring that his once

  longed-for child had been born.

  When Isabella was able to be about again, her pale face

  was harder than ever; and, had there been about her any

  one discerning enough to notice it, there was a subtle

  change in her bearing and manner. A certain nervous

  expectancy, a fluttering restlessness was gone.

  Isabella had ceased to hope secretly that her husband

  would yet come back. She had in her secret soul thought

  he would; and she had meant to forgive him when she had

  humbled him sufficiently, and when he had abased

  himself as she considered he should. But now she knew

  that he did not mean to sue for her forgiveness; and

  the hate that sprang out of her old love was a rank and

  speedy and persistent growth.

  Rachel, from her earliest recollection, had been

  vaguely conscious of a difference between her own life

  and the lives of her playmates. For a long time it

  puzzled her childish brain. Finally, she reasoned it

  out that the difference consisted in the fact that they

  had fathers and she, Rachel Spencer, had none - not

  even in the graveyard, as Carrie Bell and Lilian

  Boulter had. Why was this? Rachel went straight to her

  mother, put one little dimpled hand on Isabella

  Spencer's knee, looked up with great searching blue

  eyes, and said gravely,

  "Mother, why haven't I got a father like the other

  little girls?"

  Isabella Spencer laid aside her work, took the seven

  year old child on her lap, and told her the whole story

  in a few direct and bitter words that imprinted

  themselves indelibly on Rachel's remembrance. She

  understood clearly and hopelessly that she could never

  have a father - that, in this respect, she must always

  be unlike other people.

  "Your father cares nothing for you," said Isabella

  Spencer in conclusion. "He never did care. You must

  never speak of him to anybody again."

  Rachel slipped silently from her mother's knee and ran

  out to the Springtime garden with a full heart. There

  she cried passionately over her mother's last words. It

  seemed to her a terrible thing that her father should

  not love her, and a cruel thing that she must never

  talk of him.

  Oddly enough, Rachel's sympathies were all with her

  father, in as far as she could understand the old

  quarrel. She did not dream of disobeying her mother and

  she did not disobey her. Never again did the child

  speak of her father; but Isabella had not forbidden her

  to think of him, and thenceforth Rachel thought of him

  constantly - so constantly that, in some strange way,

  he seemed to become an unguessed-of part of her inner

  life - the unseen, ever-present companion in all her

  experiences.

  She was an imaginative child, and in fancy she made the

  acquaintance of her father. She had never seen him, but

  he was more real to her than most of the people she had

  seen. He played and talked with her as her mother never

  did; he walked with her in the orchard and field and

  garden; he sat by her pillow in the twilight; to him

  she whispered secrets she told to none other.

  Once her mother asked her impatiently why she talked so

  much to herself.

  "I am not talking to myself. I am talking to a very

  dear friend of mine," Rachel answered gravely.

  "Silly child," laughed her mother, half tolerantly,

  half disapprovingly.

  Two years later something wond
erful had happened to

  Rachel. One summer afternoon she had gone to the harbor

  with several of her little playmates. Such a jaunt was

  a rare treat to the child, for Isabella Spencer seldom

  allowed her to go from home with anybody but herself.

  And Isabella was not an entertaining companion. Rachel

  never particularly enjoyed an outing with her mother.

  The children wandered far along the shore; at last they

  came to a place that Rachel had never seen before. It

  was a shallow cove where the waters purred on the

  yellow sands. Beyond it, the sea was laughing and

  flashing and preening and alluring, like a beautiful,

  coquettish woman. Outside, the wind was boisterous and

  rollicking; here, it was reverent and gentle. A white

  boat was hauled up on the skids, and there was a queer

  little house close down to the sands, like a big shell

  tossed up by the waves. Rachel looked on it all with

  secret delight; she, too, loved the lonely places of

  sea and shore, as her father had done. She wanted to

  linger awhile in this dear spot and revel in it.

  "I'm tired, girls," she announced. "I'm going to stay

  here and rest for a spell. I don't want to go to Gull

  Point. You go on yourselves; I'll wait for you here."

  "All alone?" asked Carrie Bell, wonderingly.

  "I'm not so afraid of being alone as some people are,"

  said Rachel, with dignity.

  The other girls went on, leaving Rachel sitting on the

  skids, in the shadow of the big white boat. She sat

  there for a time dreaming happily, with her blue eyes

  on the far, pearly horizon, and her golden head leaning

  against the boat.

  Suddenly she heard a step behind her. When she turned

  her head a man was standing beside her, looking down at

  her with big, merry, blue eyes. Rachel was quite sure

  that she had never seen him before; yet those eyes

  seemed to her to have a strangely familiar look. She

  liked him. She felt no shyness nor timidity, such as

  usually afflicted her in the presence of strangers.

  He was a tall, stout man, dressed in a rough fishing

  suit, and wearing an oilskin cap on his head. His hair

  was very thick and curly and fair; his cheeks were

  tanned and red; his teeth, when he smiled, were very

  even and white. Rachel thought he must be quite old,

  because there was a good deal of gray mixed with his

  fair hair.

  "Are you watching for the mermaids?" he said.

  Rachel nodded gravely. From any one else she would have

  scrupulously hidden such a thought.

  "Yes, I am," she said. "Mother says there is no such

  thing as a mermaid, but I like to think there is. Have

  you ever seen one?"

  The big man sat down on a bleached log of driftwood and

  smiled at her.

  "No, I'm sorry to say that I haven't. But I have seen

  many other very wonderful things. I might tell you

  about some of them, if you would come over here and sit

  by me."

  Rachel went unhesitatingly. When she reached him he

  pulled her down on his knee, and she liked it.

  "What a nice little craft you are," he said. "Do you

  suppose, now, that you could give me a kiss?"

  As a rule, Rachel hated kissing. She could seldom be

  prevailed upon to kiss even her uncles - who knew it

  and liked to tease her for kisses until they aggravated

  her so terribly that she told them she couldn't bear

  men. But now she promptly put her arms about this

  strange man's neck and gave him a hearty smack.

  "I like you," she said frankly.

  She felt his arms tighten suddenly about her. The blue

  eyes looking into hers grew misty and very tender.

  Then, all at once, Rachel knew who he was. He was her

  father. She did not say anything, but she laid her

  curly head down on his shoulder and felt a great

  happiness, as of one who had come into some longed-for

  haven.

  If David Spencer realized that she understood he said

  nothing. Instead, he began to tell her fascinating

  stories of far lands he had visited, and strange things

  he had seen. Rachel listened entranced, as if she were

  hearkening to a fairy tale. Yes, he was just as she had