A Guest
I am now going to tell you something so strange that it will require all your faith in my veracity to believe my story. It is not only true, nevertheless, but truth of which I have been an eyewitness.
It was a sweet summer evening, and my father asked me, as he sometimes did, to take a little ramble with him along the shore of the Lake of Shining Waters.
He looked sorrowful, and when I asked him whatever was the matter, he said, "I have had a letter from Mr. Blythe. He cannot return to Avonlea as soon as we had hoped."
This was dire news indeed. Mr. Blythe had written some months before that he was quite recovered and that he and Bertha would return to Avonlea in the summer. I had lost many and many an hour imagining my joyous reunion with my dear Bertha, and the happy days we would spend together. Such anticipation had furnished my day dreams for many weeks, and I was cruelly disappointed with the news that it was not to be.
"How soon do they come?" I asked.
"Not till autumn," my father answered. This was a further blow, but it did not account for my father's sorrowful air.
"What is it, Father?" I asked.
He took my hand and looked into my eyes with the most mournful expression. "Diana," he said, "I am so very sorry to tell you this. Bertha Blythe is dead."
I was very much shocked. Mr. Blythe had mentioned in his last letter, six or seven weeks before, that Bertha was perfectly well and looking forward to returning home to Avonlea. Oh, my dear friend! Though I had not seen her for three years, I had eagerly anticipated our reacquaintance. Bitter tears welled in my eyes, both for my friend's misfortune and for my own loss.
"Here's Mr. Blythe's letter," my father said, handing it to me. "I'm afraid he is in a very bad way."
We sat down on a rude bench, under a group of magnificent birch trees. The sun was setting with all its melancholy splendor behind the sylvan horizon, and the stream that led to the Lake of Shining Waters I have mentioned, wound through many a group of noble trees, almost at our feet, reflecting in its current the fading crimson of the sky. Mr. Blythe's letter was so extraordinary, so vehement, and in some places so self-contradictory, that I read it twice over-the second time aloud to my father and was still unable to account for it, except by supposing that grief had unsettled his mind.
It said,
"I have lost my darling daughter, Bertha. I did not understand the danger until it was far too late and now I have lost her!
The fiend who betrayed her has done it all. I thought I was receiving into my house innocence, gaiety, a charming companion for my lost Bertha. Heavens! what a fool have I been!
Oh, sweet Bertha! The cleverest of girls, and such a beauty. Never more shall I see your dead mother's hazel eyes reborn in your dear and beloved face!
I thank God my child died without a suspicion of the cause of her sufferings. She is gone without so much as conjecturing the nature of her illness, and the accursed passion of the agent of all this misery. I devote my remaining days to tracking and extinguishing a monster.
There is more — much more — to tell, but I dare not commit the awful particulars to paper. I will reveal all when I return to Avonlea. Farewell. Pray for me, dear friend."
The sun had now set, and it was twilight by the time I had returned Mr. Blythe's letter to my father.
It was a soft clear evening, and we loitered, speculating upon the possible meanings of the violent and incoherent sentences which I had just been reading. We walked round and round the pond, comforting one another as best we could.
We walked together until we came to the road, where a picturesque bridge crosses a narrow point in the pond. Beyond the bridge an abrupt eminence rises, covered with trees, and showing in the shadows some grey ivy-clustered rocks. Over the sward and low grounds a thin film of mist was stealing like smoke, marking the distances with a transparent veil; and here and there we could see the river faintly flashing in the moonlight.
No softer, sweeter scene could be imagined. The news I had just heard made it melancholy; but nothing could disturb its character of profound serenity, and the enchanted glory and vagueness of the prospect.
My father, who enjoyed the picturesque, and I, stood looking in silence over the expanse beneath us.
At this moment the sound of carriage wheels and hooves upon the road arrested our attention. Around a bend in the road emerged a small trap carrying two women, a lady of some eminence and a girl no older than myself, hurtling along through the red dust at a terrific speed. I do not know what had spooked the horse, but it came thundering along the road towards us with the speed of a hurricane.
When they reached the bridge, many things happened at once. The horse swerved, the carriage tipped, and a long-drawn scream came from the tumble of upturned equipage and petticoats.
Both Father and I ran toward the scene of utter confusion. The horse was on the ground, trapped in its traces, and the two ladies had been thrown wide. The elder lady did not seem to be injured and my father helped her to her feet, but the slender girl was laid out against the bank of the pond, having been rendered unconscious.
I knelt beside her, fearing that she might be dead. What a striking personage she was! Pale as alabaster, with hair the color of a flaming sunset, with a graceful form I admired more than any I had beheld before. I felt myself drawn to her immediately, though we were as yet strangers.
My father joined us, pressing his fingers to the girl's wrist and discovering a pulse, faint and irregular but undoubtedly still distinguishable.
"She's alive," my father assured the woman, who clasped her hands in a momentary transport of gratitude. "Come, we must take her to Orchard Slope."
I dashed along the road, calling out for our hired man to come see to the horse, and raising the alarm at Orchard Slope. My father followed along behind, carrying the girl while the woman wrung her hands and moaned piteously.
When Father had settled the girl on the sofa in our sitting room and Mother had brought a cloth to sponge her brow, I was surprised to see that the woman's agitation did not abate. She paced up and down the room, wailing, even as the girl began to stir.
"Well, this is a pretty pass," she said. "I must — must — be on the next train if I mean to make the ferry and I must — must — make the ferry! Tonight! The child is in no fit state to be moved and there is no time! I dare not delay. Please, where is the nearest inn? Perhaps if I can install her there and come back for her after my business is concluded . . ."
I plucked my father by the coat, and whispered earnestly in his ear: "Oh! Father, pray ask her to let her stay with us — it would be so delightful. Do, pray."
My father frowned, but nodded. "Please, ma'am," he said. "We would be pleased to have your daughter as a guest at Orchard Slope until you are able to arrange for her safe removal elsewhere."
The woman stopped and stared at my father. "She's not . . ." she began, but caught my eye and thought better of whatever it was she had meant to say.
"I cannot do that, sir," she replied instead. "It would be a terrible trespass upon your hospitality."
"No, indeed," my father said with earnest animation. "It would be a very great kindness at the moment when we most need it. My daughter has just been disappointed by a cruel misfortune, in a visit from which she had long anticipated a great deal of happiness. There is no inn closer than White Sands and I cannot allow you to transport the girl in her present condition. If you cannot delay your journey, you must leave her here with us. I assure you that we will care for her as if she were our own until you return."
The woman appeared to consider the matter. There was something odd and calculating in her expression as she scrutinized the girl, who was blinking up in some confusion, her luminous gray-green eyes wide with surprise at finding herself in unfamiliar surroundings.
Mother pressed a cup of tea to the girl's lips. She sipped slowly and seemed to revive.
"What is your name, dear?" Mother asked.
The girl hesitated for a moment.
"Will you please call me Carmilla?" she said eagerly.
"Call you Carmilla? Is that your name?"
"No!" the woman cried abruptly. "Not this foolishness again. Her name is Anne. Anne Shirley."
The vehemence of this declaration surprised me not a little. It seemed clear that the woman did not desire us to know her charge's true identity, nor their relation to one another, which was indeed a curious state of affairs.
It was clear that the woman was eager to be on her way, but there was something very peculiar in her manner. She beckoned slightly to my father, and withdrew two or three steps with him out of hearing; and talked to him with a fixed and stern countenance, not at all like that with which she had hitherto spoken.
I was unspeakably curious to learn what she said, almost in his ear, with so much earnestness and rapidity.
When she had said what she meant to say, my father nodded gravely. What could she have told him, and would I be able to persuade him to reveal what he knew? Already, my mind was turning toward the possibilities, dizzying in their profusion. Was our guest perhaps a princess fleeing an unwanted marriage? An heiress whose identity must be concealed to protect her from kidnap and ransom? The secret child of some eminent person who could not claim her before the world?
The woman crossed to the sofa, where the red-haired girl lay in languid repose. The woman kneeled at her side for a moment and whispered what I took for a benediction in her ear. Then, with a hasty kiss, she stepped through our door and hurried for her carriage. She bounded onto the seat and gave us one last nod in farewell. Then, with a crack of her whip, the carriage lurched forward, the horse breaking suddenly into a furious canter that threatened soon again to become a gallop, and the carriage whirled away.
When she had vanished, all attention turned back to our guest.
"Please," the girl pleaded, "please do call me Carmilla. It can't matter much to you what you call me if I'm only going to be here a little while, can it? And Anne is such an unromantic name."
"Anne is a real good plain sensible name," Mother said, gathering up the tea things. "You've no need to be ashamed of it."
Presently, Mother went to the kitchen to deposit the tea tray and Father retired to his office, leaving me alone with our guest. I knelt beside the sofa an clasped her slender, white hand to my breast.
"Dearest Carmilla," I said, my voice thick with passion, "welcome to Orchard Slope."