Further Chronicles of Avonlea<\/a>![\"\"](\"http:\/\/ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com\/e\/ir?t=thesheivari-20&l=as2&o=1&a=1503149927\")
<\/i> – “The Materializing of Cecil” – by L.M. Montgomery <\/b><\/p>\nI was sitting by the window and Wilhelmina Mercer, Maggie Henderson, Susette Cross, and Georgie Hall were in a little group just before me. I wasn’t listening to their chatter at all, but presently Georgie exclaimed teasingly:<\/p>\n
“Miss Charlotte is laughing at us. I suppose she thinks we are awfully silly to be talking about beaux.”<\/p>\n
The truth was that I was simply smiling over some very pretty thoughts that had come to me about the roses which were climbing over Mary Gillespie’s sill. I meant to inscribe them in the little blank book when I went home. Georgie’s speech brought me back to harsh realities with a jolt. It hurt me, as such speeches always did.<\/p>\n
“Didn’t you ever have a beau, Miss Holmes?” said Wilhelmina laughingly.<\/p>\n
Just as it happened, a silence had fallen over the room for a moment, and everybody in it heard Wilhelmina’s question.<\/p>\n
I really do not know what got into me and possessed me. I have never been able to account for what I said and did, because I am naturally a truthful person and hate all deceit. It seemed to me that I simply could not say “No” to Wilhelmina before that whole roomful of women. It was too<\/i> humiliating. I suppose all the prickles and stings and slurs I had endured for fifteen years on account of never having had a lover had what the new doctor calls “a cumulative effect” and came to a head then and there.<\/p>\n
“Yes, I had one once, my dear,” I said calmly.<\/p>\n
For once in my life I made a sensation. Every woman in that room stopped sewing and stared at me. Most of them, I saw, didn’t believe me, but Wilhelmina did. Her pretty face lighted up with interest.<\/p>\n
“Oh, won’t you tell us about him, Miss Holmes?” she coaxed, “and why you didn’t marry him?”<\/p>\n
“That is right, Miss Mercer,” said Josephine Cameron, with a nasty little laugh. “Make her tell. We’re all interested. It’s news to us that Charlotte ever had a beau.”<\/p>\n
If Josephine had not said that, I might not have gone on. But she did say it, and moreover, I caught Mary Gillespie and Adella Gilbert exchanging significant smiles. That settled it, and made me quite reckless. “In for a penny, in for a pound,” thought I, and I said with a pensive smile:<\/p>\n
“Nobody here knew anything about him, and it was all long, long ago.”<\/p>\n
“What was his name?” asked Wilhelmina.<\/p>\n
“Cecil Fenwick,” I answered promptly. Cecil had always been my favorite name for a man; it figured quite frequently in the blank book. As for the Fenwick part of it, I had a bit of newspaper in my hand, measuring a hem, with “Try Fenwick’s Porous Plasters” printed across it, and I simply joined the two in sudden and irrevocable matrimony.<\/p>\n
“Where did you meet him?” asked Georgie.<\/p>\n
I hastily reviewed my past. There was only one place to locate Cecil Fenwick. The only time I had ever been far enough away from Avonlea in my life was when I was eighteen and had gone to visit an aunt in New Brunswick.<\/p>\n
“In Blakely, New Brunswick,” I said, almost believeing that I had when I saw how they all took it in unsuspectingly. “I was just eighteen and he was twenty-three.”<\/p>\n
“What did he look like?” Susette wanted to know.<\/p>\n
“Oh, he was very handsome.” I proceeded glibly to sketch my ideal. To tell the dreadful truth, I was enjoying myself; I could see respect dawning in those girls’ eyes, and I knew that I had forever thrown off my reproach. Henceforth I should be a woman with a romantic past, faithful to the one love of her life – a very, very different thing from an old maid who had never had a lover.<\/p>\n
“He was tall and dark, with lovely, curly black hair and brilliant, piercing eyes. He had a splendid chin, and a fine nose, and the most fascinating smile!”<\/p>\n
“What was he?” asked Maggie.<\/p>\n
“A young lawyer,” I said, my choice of profession decided by an enlarged crayon portrait of Mary Gillespie’s deceased brother on an easel before me. He had been a lawyer.<\/p>\n
“Why didn’t you marry him?” demanded Susette.<\/p>\n
“We quarreled,” I answered sadly. “A terribly bitter quarrel. Oh, we were both so young and so foolish. It was my fault. I vexed Cecil by flirting with another man” — wasn’t I coming on! — “and he was jealous and angry. He went out West and never came back. I have never seen him since, and I do not even know if he is alive. But — but — I could never care for another man.”<\/p>\n
“Oh, how interesting!” sighed Wilhelmina. “I do so love sad stories. But perhaps he will come back some day yet, Miss Holmes.”<\/p>\n
“Oh, no, never now,” I said, shaking my head. “He has forgotten all about me, I dare say. Or if he hasn’t, he has never forgiven me.”<\/p>\n
Mary Gillespie’s Susan Jane announced tea at this moment, and I was thankful, for my imagination was giving out, and I didn’t know what question those girls would ask next. But I felt already a change in the mental atmosphere surrounding me, and all through supper I was thrilled with a secret exultation. Repentant? Ashamed? Not a bit of it! I’d have done the same thing over again, and all I felt sorry for was that I hadn’t done it long ago.<\/p>\n
When I got home that night Nancy looked at me wonderingly and said:<\/p>\n
“You look like a girl to-night, Miss Charlotte.”<\/p>\n
“I feel like one,” I said, laughing, and I ran to my room and did what I had never done before — wrote a second poem in the same day. I had to have some outlet for my feelings. I called it “In Summer Days of Love Ago”, and I worked Mary Gillespie’s roses and Cecil Fenwick’s eyes into it, and made it so sad and reminiscent and minor-musicky that I felt perfectly happy.<\/p>\n
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Further Chronicles of Avonlea<\/a>