“Oh, thank you—thank you,”
cried Anne, clasping the packet rapturously.
“That was all that was in the house,”
said her hostess. “The furniture was all
sold to pay the doctor bills, and Mrs. Thomas got your
ma’s clothes and little things. I reckon
they didn’t last long among that drove of Thomas
youngsters. They was destructive young animals,
as I mind ’em.”
“I haven’t one thing that belonged to
my mother,” said Anne, chokily. “I—I
can never thank you enough for these letters.”
“You’re quite welcome. Laws, but
your eyes is like your ma’s. She could
just about talk with hers. Your father was sorter
homely but awful nice. I mind hearing folks say
when they was married that there never was two people
more in love with each other—Pore creatures,
they didn’t live much longer; but they was awful
happy while they was alive, and I s’pose that
counts for a good deal.”
Anne longed to get home to read her precious letters;
but she made one little pilgrimage first. She
went alone to the green corner of the “old”
Bolingbroke cemetery where her father and mother were
buried, and left on their grave the white flowers
she carried. Then she hastened back to Mount
Holly, shut herself up in her room, and read the letters.
Some were written by her father, some by her mother.
There were not many—only a dozen in all—for
Walter and Bertha Shirley had not been often separated
during their courtship. The letters were yellow
and faded and dim, blurred with the touch of passing
years. No profound words of wisdom were traced
on the stained and wrinkled pages, but only lines
of love and trust. The sweetness of forgotten
things clung to them—the far-off, fond
imaginings of those long-dead lovers. Bertha
Shirley had possessed the gift of writing letters which
embodied the charming personality of the writer in
words and thoughts that retained their beauty and
fragrance after the lapse of time. The letters
were tender, intimate, sacred. To Anne, the sweetest
of all was the one written after her birth to the
father on a brief absence. It was full of a proud
young mother’s accounts of “baby”—her
cleverness, her brightness, her thousand sweetnesses.
“I love her best when she is asleep and better
still when she is awake,” Bertha Shirley had
written in the postscript. Probably it was the
last sentence she had ever penned. The end was
very near for her.
“This has been the most beautiful day of my
life,” Anne said to Phil that night. “I’ve
found my father and mother. Those letters
have made them real to me. I’m not
an orphan any longer. I feel as if I had opened
a book and found roses of yesterday, sweet and beloved,
between its leaves.”
Spring and Anne Return to Green Gables
The firelight shadows were dancing over the kitchen
walls at Green Gables, for the spring evening was
chilly; through the open east window drifted in the
subtly sweet voices of the night. Marilla was
sitting by the fire—at least, in body.
In spirit she was roaming olden ways, with feet grown
young. Of late Marilla had thus spent many an
hour, when she thought she should have been knitting
for the twins.
