two months previously.
I was sitting by the window and Wilhelmina Mercer, Maggie Henderson, Susette Cross and Georgie Hall were in a little group just before me. I wasn’t listening to their chatter at all, but presently Georgie exclaimed teasingly:
“Miss Charlotte is laughing at us. I suppose she thinks we are awfully silly to be talking about beaux.”
The truth was that I was simply smiling over some very pretty thoughts that had come to me about the roses which were climbing over Mary Gillespie’s sill. I meant to inscribe them in the little blank book when I went home. Georgie’s speech brought me back to harsh realities with a jolt. It hurt me, as such speeches always did.
“Didn’t you ever have a beau, Miss Holmes?” said Wilhelmina laughingly.
Just as it happened, a silence had fallen over the room for a moment, and everybody in it heard Wilhelmina’s question.
I really do not know what got into me and possessed me. I have never been able to account for what I said and did, because I am naturally a truthful person and hate all deceit. It seemed to me that I simply could not say “No” to Wilhelmina before that whole roomful of women. It was TOO humiliating. I suppose all the prickles and stings and slurs I had endured for fifteen years on account of never having had a lover had what the new doctor calls “a cumulative effect” and came to a head then and there.
“Yes, I had one once, my dear,” I said calmly.
For once in my life I made a sensation. Every woman in that room stopped sewing and stared at me. Most of them, I saw, didn’t believe me, but Wilhelmina did. Her pretty face lighted up with interest.
“Oh, won’t you tell us about him, Miss Holmes?” she coaxed, “and why didn’t you marry him?”
“That is right, Miss Mercer,” said Josephine Cameron, with a nasty little laugh. “Make her tell. We’re all interested. It’s news to us that Charlotte ever had a beau.”
If Josephine had not said that, I might not have gone on. But she did say it, and, moreover, I caught Mary Gillespie and Adella Gilbert exchanging significant smiles. That settled it, and made me quite reckless. “In for a penny, in for a pound,” thought I, and I said with a pensive smile:
“Nobody here knew anything about him, and it was all long, long ago.”
“What was his name?” asked Wilhelmina.
“Cecil Fenwick,” I answered promptly. Cecil had always been my favorite name for a man; it figured quite frequently in the blank book. As for the Fenwick part of it, I had a bit of newspaper in my hand, measuring a hem, with “Try Fenwick’s Porous Plasters” printed across it, and I simply joined the two in sudden and irrevocable matrimony.
“Where did you meet him?” asked Georgie.
I hastily reviewed my past. There was only one place to locate Cecil Fenwick. The only time I had ever been far enough away from Avonlea in my life was when I was eighteen and had gone to visit an aunt in New Brunswick.
“In Blakely, New Brunswick,” I said, almost believing that I had when I saw how they all took it in unsuspectingly. “I was just eighteen and he was twenty-three.”
“What did he look like?” Susette wanted to know.
“Oh, he was very handsome.” I proceeded glibly to sketch my ideal. To tell the dreadful truth, I was enjoying myself; I could see respect dawning in those girls’ eyes, and I knew that I had forever thrown off my reproach. Henceforth I should be a woman with a romantic past, faithful to the one love of her life — a very, very different thing from an old maid who had never had a lover.
“He was tall and dark, with lovely, curly black hair and brilliant, piercing eyes. He had a splendid chin, and a fine nose, and the most fascinating smile!”
“What was he?” asked Maggie.
“A young lawyer,” I said, my choice of profession decided by an enlarged crayon portrait of Mary Gillespie’s deceased brother on an easel before me. He had been a lawyer.
“Why didn’t you marry him?” demanded Susette.
“We quarreled,” I answered sadly. “A terribly bitter quarrel. Oh, we were both so young and so foolish. It was my fault. I vexed Cecil by flirting with another man” — wasn’t I coming on!—”and he was jealous and angry. He went out West and never came back. I have never seen him since, and I do not even know if he is alive. But — but — I could never care for any other man.”
“Oh, how interesting!” sighed Wilhelmina. “I do so love sad love stories. But perhaps he will come back some day yet, Miss Holmes.”
“Oh, no, never now,” I said, shaking my head. “He has forgotten all about me, I dare say. Or if he hasn’t, he has never forgiven me.”
Mary Gillespie’s Susan Jane announced tea at this moment, and I was thankful, for my imagination was giving out, and I didn’t know what question those girls would ask next. But I felt already a change in the mental atmosphere surrounding me, and all through supper I was thrilled with a secret exultation. Repentant? Ashamed? Not a bit of it! I’d have done the same thing over again, and all I felt sorry for was that I hadn’t done it long ago.
When I got home that night Nancy looked at me wonderingly, and said:
“You look like a girl tonight, Miss Charlotte.”
“I feel like one,” I said laughing; and I ran to my room and did what I had never done before — wrote a second poem in the same day. I had to have some outlet for my feelings. I called it “In Summer Days of Long Ago,” and I worked Mary Gillespie’s roses and Cecil Fenwick’s eyes into it, and made it so sad and reminiscent and minor-musicky that I felt perfectly happy.
For the next two months all went well and merrily. Nobody ever said anything more to me about Cecil Fenwick, but the girls all chattered freely to me of their little love affairs, and I became a sort of general confidant for them. It just warmed up the cockles of my heart, and I began to enjoy the Sewing Circle famously. I got a lot of pretty new dresses and the dearest hat, and I went everywhere I was asked and had a good time.
But there is one thing you can be perfectly sure of. If you do wrong you are going to be punished for it sometime, somehow and somewhere. My punishment was delayed for two months, and then it descended on my head and I was crushed to the very dust.
Another new family besides the Mercers had come to Avonlea in the spring — the Maxwells. There were just Mr. and Mrs. Maxwell; they were a middle-aged couple and very well off. Mr. Maxwell had bought the lumber mills, and they lived up at the old Spencer place which had always been “the” place of Avonlea. They lived quietly, and Mrs. Maxwell hardly ever went anywhere because she was delicate. She was out when I called and I was out when she returned my call, so that I had never met her.
It was the Sewing Circle day again — at Sarah Gardiner’s this time. I was late; everybody else was there when I arrived, and the minute I entered the room I knew something had happened, although I couldn’t imagine what. Everybody looked at me in the strangest way. Of course, Wilhelmina Mercer was the first to set her tongue going.
“Oh, Miss Holmes, have you seen him yet?” she exclaimed.
“Seen whom?” I said non-excitedly, getting out my thimble and patterns.
“Why, Cecil Fenwick. He’s here — in Avonlea — visiting his sister,
Mrs. Maxwell.”
I suppose I did what they expected me to do. I dropped
everything I held, and Josephine Cameron said afterwards that
Charlotte Holmes would never be paler when she was in her coffin.
If they had just known why I turned so pale!
“It’s impossible!” I said blankly.
“It’s