I going to live without him? I’ve nothing to live for now. First his mother … now him.”
“He was a dear little lad,” said Anne tenderly.
“That he was. Little Teddy … Theodore, his mother named him … her ‘gift of Gods’ she said he was. And he was so patient and never complained. Once he smiled up in my face and said, ‘Dad, I think you’ve been mistaken in one thing … just one. I guess there is a heaven, isn’t there? Isn’t there, Dad?’ I said to him, yes, there was… . God forgive me for ever trying to teach him anything else. He smiled again, contented like, and said, ‘Well, Dad, I’m going there and Mother and God are there, so I’ll be pretty well off. But I’m worried about you, Dad. You’ll be so awful lonesome without me. But just do the best you can and be polite to folks and come to us by and by.’ He made me promise I’d try, but when he was gone I couldn’t stand the blankness of it. I’d have gone mad if you hadn’t brought me this. It won’t be so hard now.”
He talked about his Little Fellow for some time, as if he found relief and pleasure in it. His reserve and gruffness seemed to have fallen from him like a garment. Finally Lewis produced the small faded photograph of himself and showed it to him.
“Have you ever seen anybody who looked like that, Mr. Armstrong?” asked Anne.
Mr. Armstrong peered at it in perplexity.
“It’s awful like the Little Fellow,” he said at last. “Whose might it be?”
“Mine,” said Lewis, “when I was seven years old. It was because of the strange resemblance to Teddy that Miss Shirley made me bring it to show you. I thought it possible that you and I or the Little Fellow might be some distant relation. My name is Lewis Allen and my father was George Allen. I was born in New Brunswick.”
James Armstrong shook his head. Then he said,
“What was your mother’s name?”
“Mary Gardiner.”
James Armstrong looked at him for a moment in silence.
“She was my half-sister,” he said at last. “I hardly knew her … never saw her but once. I was brought up in an uncle’s family after my father’s death. My mother married again and moved away. She came to see me once and brought her little daughter. She died soon after and I never saw my half-sister again. When I came over to the Island to live, I lost all trace of her. You are my nephew and the Little Fellow’s cousin.”
This was surprising news to a lad who had fancied himself alone in the world. Lewis and Anne spent the whole evening with Mr. Armstrong and found him to be a well-read and intelligent man. Somehow, they both took a liking to him. His former inhospitable reception was quite forgotten and they saw only the real worth of the character and temperament below the unpromising shell that had hitherto concealed them.
“Of course the Little Fellow couldn’t have loved his father so much if it hadn’t been so,” said Anne, as she and Lewis drove back to Windy Poplars through the sunset.
When Lewis Allen went the next weekend to see his uncle, the latter said to him,
“Lad, come and live with me. You are my nephew and I can do well for you … what I’d have done for my Little Fellow if he’d lived. You’re alone in the world and so am I. I need you. I’ll grow hard and bitter again if I live here alone. I want you to help me keep my promise to the Little Fellow. His place is empty. Come you and fill it.”
“Thank you, Uncle; I’ll try,” said Lewis, holding out his hand.
“And bring that teacher of yours here once in a while. I like that girl. The Little Fellow liked her. ‘Dad,’ he said to me, ‘I didn’t think I’d ever like anybody but you to kiss me, but I liked it when she did. There was something in her eyes, Dad.’”
Chapter IV
“The old porch thermometer says it’s zero and the new side-door one says it’s ten above,” remarked Anne, one frosty December night. “So I don’t know whether to take my muff or not.”
“Better go by the old thermometer,” said Rebecca Dew cautiously. “It’s probably more used to our climate. Where are you going this cold night, anyway?”
“I’m going round to Temple Street to ask Katherine Brooke to spend the Christmas holidays with me at Green Gables.”
“You’ll spoil your holidays, then,” said Rebecca Dew solemnly. “She’d go about snubbing the angels, that one … that is, if she ever condescended to enter heaven. And the worst of it is, she’s proud of her bad manners … thinks it shows her strength of mind no doubt!”
“My brain agrees with every word you say but my heart simply won’t,” said Anne. “I feel, in spite of everything, that Katherine Brooke is only a shy, unhappy girl under her disagreeable rind. I can never make any headway with her in Summerside, but if I can get her to Green Gables I believe it will thaw her out.”
“You won’t get her. She won’t go,” predicted Rebecca Dew. “Probably she’ll take it as an insult to be asked … think you’re offering her charity. We asked her here once to Christmas dinner … the year afore you came … you remember, Mrs. MacComber, the year we had two turkeys give us and didn’t know how we was to get ‘em et … and all she said was, ‘No, thank you. If there’s anything I hate, it’s the word Christmas!’”
“But that is so dreadful … hating Christmas! Something has to be done, Rebecca Dew. I’m going to ask her and I’ve a queer feeling in my thumbs that tells me she will come.”
“Somehow,” said Rebecca Dew reluctantly, “when you say a thing is going to happen, a body believes it will. You haven’t got a second sight, have you? Captain MacComber’s mother had it. Useter give me the creeps.”
“I don’t think I have anything that need give you creeps. It’s only just … I’ve had a feeling for some time that Katherine Brooke is almost crazy with loneliness under her bitter outside and that my invitation will come pat to the psychological moment, Rebecca Dew.”
“I am not a B.A.,” said Rebecca with awful humility, “and I do not deny your right to use words I cannot always understand. Neither do I deny that you can wind people round your little finger. Look how you managed the Pringles. But I do say I pity you if you take that iceberg and nutmeg grater combined home with you for Christmas.”
Anne was by no means as confident as she pretended to be during her walk to Temple Street. Katherine Brooke had really been unbearable of late. Again and again Anne, rebuffed, had said, as grimly as Poe’s raven, “Nevermore.” Only yesterday Katherine had been positively insulting at a staff meeting. But in an unguarded moment Anne had seen something looking out of the older girl’s eyes … a passionate, half-frantic something like a caged creature mad with discontent. Anne spent the first half of the night trying to decide whether to invite Katherine Brooke to Green Gables or not. Finally she fell asleep with her mind irrevocably made up.
Katherine’s landlady showed Anne into the parlor and shrugged a fat shoulder when she asked for Miss Brooke.
