A/N: Before you read this chapter, go back and read chapter 2! I've changed it, and this one won't make any sense unless you go back and read!
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As winter approached, it seemed that everyone at Ingleside and associated with it fell sick with one malady or another. In fact, that season might be remembered as one of the sickliest seasons that dear place had ever known! One day Cathy Douglas came down to play and was not her usual merry, high-spirited self-- the next her eyes hurt and she had a headache-- and the day after that she could not come to play at all. Dr. Gilbert Blythe brought back the news that she was very ill with the measles. It isn't known whether he also brought those measles back with him, or if Cathy herself had passed it along to the Ingleside small fry.
They all had it, from Trudy on down. The small Annes were sickest, for just when it seemed they were getting better, both came down with the same case of bronchitis. That was also the time that Owen, on the first day he was allowed back out after his own convalescence, tripped on a pair of skates in the House of Dreams hall and broke his leg.
Aunt Nan and Uncle Jerry had 'flu, and Aunt Di wrote to say that Bertie and Teddy had gotten chicken pox from their own chums. Even Grandmother was laid up for weeks with a sore throat that turned into laryngitis-- which she deemed very unromantic indeed.
"I sound terrible when I talk," she whispered hoarsely. "It hurts me to have no voice-- for I do so love to talk."
"We know," said her progeny gravely--thatwas no secret.
But it was Uncle Bruce who was by far the sickest-- with a case of double pneumonia that was so serious he had to take the rest of the fall term off from Redmond and come home. Grandmother and Grandfather Meredith, who had inherited Auntie Nan's 'flu, were too sick to nurse him, so Cecilia, who had already had measles long ago, and had somehow escaped unscathed with only a slight common cold, went to the manse to help out.
"You're a capable little thing," said Uncle Bruce, as Cecilia changed the cold cloths on his head, straightened sheets, and plumped pillows. She had a sweet, concerned way of smiling that made the doses of medicine she administered with the precision of a station clock go down easier. "In a few more years, your Grandfather and Uncle Jem would do well to hire you."
"Women aren't doctors," Cecilia started to say, and then stopped. Dr. Marigold Woodruff from upper Harmony had set Owen's broken leg not two weeks ago--if she had been able to do it, why not Cecilia herself? She changed her mind.
"Perhaps they will," she said thoughtfully. "I like taking care of people, Uncle Bruce. It's nice to beneeded. And every day I see you looking better--and healthier--and when I think that maybe I had something to do with it, oh, it gives me such aprayerfulfeeling."
"I'm glad to hear you say that," Uncle Bruce chuckled. "I was all astir with consternation that you might be cross with me-- I've kept you from so many moonlight trysts you might have otherwise had."
He meant Sid. Oh, why was Uncle Bruce teasing? Cecilia hadn't expected it from him.
"I'm not allowed to go to Silver Bush until the younger ones have gotten over measles," she said shortly. "Sid's little sister, Cuddles, hasn't had them yet."
"You're plumping my pillows with a vengeance," Uncle Bruce yelped. "Call off your dogs, Cee. I was teasing--I was--and I'm sorry. I'll tell you a secret. We grownups are so prone to tease because we don't like the thought of growing older. Why, I remember when you were born! Shirley and Una were the happiest people on the Island that night-- I held you and you fit just into my hand, you were so small. And now you're grown--and older enough to have love affairs!Whata feeling! Oh, pity me, Cecilia-- instead of being cross."
"It's--not--a love affair--exactly," Cecilia said, almost restored to her good humor. The thought of Uncle Bruce growing old-- he was like a chum, not an uncle. "I mean, itis--but to hear youcallit a love affair makes it seem, I don't know--"
"Cheap and tawdry, somehow," Uncle Bruce finished for her. "So many people before in the world have had 'love affairs'-- but what you have, right now, is better and brighter than all that. At least, to you, it is. Oh, if all of Greece was rucked up over Paris and Helen, imagine how momentous their love seemed tothem!"
Cecilia, who had read that age-old story of love, remembered a funny anecdote about May Binnie, who hadn't, and related it to Uncle Bruce just then. Imagine thinking Paris, and Helen, and Agamemnon were characters in a soap opera!
Uncle Bruce faintly smiled, but Cecilia could not help noticing that he didn't really seem to be listening. His eyes had a very faraway look in them. All this talking had probably tired him out. Some nurse she was! What if he had a relapse?
"I'll get you a glass of water and then tiptoe out," she murmured, but Uncle Bruce caught her by the arm.
"No," he said, in a voice that was harder than his jocular tone of moments earlier. "Stay, Cecilia. If you leave me here, I'll be alone with ghosts-- and that isn't a pleasant thing to be. You don't have to talk to me--I don't want to talk and I don't want to be talked to. Just sit, and keep the ghosts at bay."
So Cecilia sat, as silent as he bade her be. Uncle Bruce said something only once-- a word in tones so low that she could not be sure she heard it. She racked her brain to think of what could have suddenly made him so melancholy-- she went all over their conversation-- and arrived again and again at the same tremulous conclusion.
"I wonder," she said to herself, as her patient fell into a fitful sleep, "If Uncle Bruce has ever been in love?" Because the word Uncle Bruce had murmured sounded like another name from Greek myth-- not that of fateful Helen, butPenelope.
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Cecilia did not even mind running errands for Uncle Bruce while he was still laid up in bed. He had gotten well enough to sit up in bed, and to be cranky and bored. Twice a week he had Cecilia go to the market and buy two gallons of buttermilk. A medical student friend of his at Redmond had said there was no better way to boost your strength than to drink 5 glasses of buttermilk a day, though Uncle Jem and Grandfather were skeptical. But Uncle Bruce was so tired of sitting in bed that he would have tried anything!
More often than that, though, he dispatched Cecilia to the library in nearby Carlisle. Uncle Bruce read copiously and voraciously-- he read three pages for every one Cecilia finished! He would pick up a book before breakfast and put it back on the shelf before dinner, then start another. And it was necessary for her to go all the way to Carlisle, he said, because he'd read everything worth reading in the Four Winds branch years ago. And as the route to the library led her straight past Silver Bush, Cecilia was glad to go. She liked to look up at the solid, quiet house, andthinkof Sid, even if she could not go into the warm kitchen and see him.
It was a long walk in the growing-frostier air. They had all had such bad luck with their health that summer that the aunts were wondering what the old doctor was thinking, letting the child walk so far in such cold! Why, they might as well expose her to pneumonia germs directly! But Dr. Gilbert Blythe had noticed the girl drooping over her supper plate one day, and said to his wife,
"I don't like it at all-- she has that same wan look as Una had."
So Cecilia was allowed out in the fresh air as much as she wanted, to build up her strength. As long as she wore her flannels, and a muffler, of course.
She spent a long time perusing the shelves for her own leisure before she tackled the long list of books that Uncle Bruce had sent her for. She disdained the fairy stories that had once captivated her-- she thought herself too grown up now to read them. Though a truly grownup person knows that one never grows out of fairytales. The dime romance novels she laughed at outright. They were such--trash! Not fit to be in the same room asrealbooks. How terrible of those authors to make love sound so cheap--and tawdry--andcommon!
Instead Cecilia gravitated to the medical books. She had started looking though them to find remedies for Uncle Bruce's night cough-- and she kept reading through them because they were sointeresting. She had just finished a book on the diseases of the liver, and this week had found another on intestinal parasites. Aunts Nan and Rilla would have been horrified to know what she was reading, Aunt Nan especially, but Cecilia was not at all squeamish about what she read. It fascinated her. Imagine-- there was a whole different worldinsideyour body as well as out! Anyway, she managed to keep the books secret, and talked them over with Aunt Faith, who had been a nurse, and vowed to keep her secret, too.
With sigh, Cecilia noticed it was beginning to get dark, and that she had better get going if she wanted to be at Ingleside for supper. She found the first three books that Uncle Bruce had wanted, but the fourth she could not find. She might never have found it --and that was the one out of all the books that Uncle Bruce had really wanted-- if she had not heard a muffled sniffling from behind one of the shelves. Cautiously she approached, peeked around, and saw a woman sitting on the floor with her legs crossed like a Turk, weeping into the pages ofDavid Copperfield.
With a shock Cecilia realized this wild-eyed, red-faced woman was Miss Branston. She would gladly have sneaked away-- Miss Branston had never been her favorite person-- but at that moment her old schoolteacher gave a great sniff and looked up, meeting her pupil's eyes.
"Well, what?" said Miss Branston crossly. "What do you want? And why is it that you Blythes are always every where? You can't make a mud-pie in these parts without a Blythe or Meredith-- or heaven forbid, a Ford!-- poking his nose in it. It is a shapely nose, I'll admit it, not like my own hook, but the whole lot of you should learn to keep it where it belongs!"
Cecilia gathered herself up.
"I amverysorry," she said coldly. "I was only looking for a book, and had no idea whatsoever that you were here."
"Aren't we proud!" said Miss Branston sarcastically. "Well, what book is it? I suppose you've looked everywhere and can't find it. Don't worry! I'll find it for you, I'm used to doing things for other people, always, and never for myself."
"It'sDavid Copperfield," said Cecilia hotly, feeling that she was being treated very unfairly. She hadn't doneanythingto make Miss Branston mad, and it wasn't fair of her to take her anger out on innocent bystanders. "Butyouare hogging the only copy."
Miss Branston looked like she would cry again.
"I'm sorry," she said, fresh tears in her eyes. "Only-- I am in such abadmood. Bad badbad--I'd have to say it a hundred times to tell you how really terrible I feel. Here--" she gave forth the tome. "I have this book at home-- it's my favorite-- but I couldn't bear to be at home to read it. My mother is ill, you know, and I am the one who has to take care of her. One of my sisters has just gotten married-- the other will have a baby before the month is out-- and what have I? I always thought I would have more somehow, out of life, than a bed in my mother's home and a corner on the library floor. I had to escape, you see. Cecilia-- Cecilia Blythe-- promise once you have figured out what it is you want to do with your life you will go out anddoit-- and always go forward, andnever back."
"I-- promise," said Cecilia haltingly, afraid of Miss Branston's wild eyes.
"How is your mother?" asked Miss Branston quietly. "I expected you to be back in Montreal by now."
"She is--fine," Cecilia lied. "I expectedyouto be back by now, too."
"So did I," said Miss Branston. "Oh, so did I! Here, go on and take the book and let us part ways-- I'm making you feel bad, and you're not making me feel any better. I'd better be going before I have you pondering the whims of the universe, too. Well,takeit, child! Didn't I just tell you I have one at home? Iamglad to see you reading arealbook instead of the trash your peers are reading. That's one thing that gives me some hope in the future."
"I'm not reading it--I still haven't finishedSilas Marnerfrom last school term," Cecilia admitted. "This is for my Uncle Bruce-- he's sick in bed."
Cecilia's fingers had almost touched the cover of the book, but Miss Branston yanked it back.
"Bruce Meredith wants it!" She threw the book on the floor and stamped it, hard, once, and then tucked it under her arm again. "Tell him he shan't have it-- he shan't-- he's always gotten everything he wanted but he shan't have this! Run away, Cecilia! And God forbid your soul should ever look like mine."
"There is such unhappiness in the world," said Cecilia to herself on the way home. "It makes the world a very uncomfortable place, at times! Well, Uncle Bruce shall have to be happy withOliver Twist, instead. Oh,whatcould have made Miss Branston say such things? And why does she hate Uncle Bruce so?"