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
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
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