Chapter XIV
The Summons
Anne was sitting with Ruby Gillis in the Gillis’ garden after the day had crept
lingeringly through it and was gone. It had been a warm, smoky summer
afternoon. The world was in a splendor of out-flowering. The idle valleys were
full of hazes. The woodways were pranked with shadows and the fields with the
purple of the asters.
Anne had given up a moonlight drive to the White Sands beach that she might
spend the evening with Ruby. She had so spent many evenings that summer,
although she often wondered what good it did any one, and sometimes went
home deciding that she could not go again.
Ruby grew paler as the summer waned; the White Sands school was given up
—“her father thought it better that she shouldn’t teach till New Year’s”—and the
fancy work she loved oftener and oftener fell from hands grown too weary for it.
But she was always gay, always hopeful, always chattering and whispering of
her beaux, and their rivalries and despairs. It was this that made Anne’s visits
hard for her. What had once been silly or amusing was gruesome, now; it was
death peering through a wilful mask of life. Yet Ruby seemed to cling to her,
and never let her go until she had promised to come again soon. Mrs. Lynde
grumbled about Anne’s frequent visits, and declared she would catch
consumption; even Marilla was dubious.
“Every time you go to see Ruby you come home looking tired out,” she said.
“It’s so very sad and dreadful,” said Anne in a low tone. “Ruby doesn’t seem
to realize her condition in the least. And yet I somehow feel she needs help—
craves it—and I want to give it to her and can’t. All the time I’m with her I feel
as if I were watching her struggle with an invisible foe—trying to push it back
with such feeble resistance as she has. That is why I come home tired.”
But tonight Anne did not feel this so keenly. Ruby was strangely quiet. She
said not a word about parties and drives and dresses and “fellows.” She lay in the
hammock, with her untouched work beside her, and a white shawl wrapped
about her thin shoulders. Her long yellow braids of hair—how Anne had envied
those beautiful braids in old schooldays!—lay on either side of her. She had