A "Shadowy Tryst" in Cavendish

This entry gives a thrilling feeling of Holiday joy.  Yet, it has nothing at all to do with a Holiday.

  I suppose it is the wonderful feeling of  a "homecoming" that Maud's experience evokes...

Sunday, June 27, 1915

The Manse, Cavendish, PEI

"...Last night I had a very dear, very sad, very strange and unlooked for experience."

"When I was on the Island before, I shrank from the very thought of going near my old home. This year I felt the same until last night. I was on the manse veranda. The dew was falling. In the south-east a large, hazy, full moon was rising. To my left lay the dark trees that screened the old house from sight. Suddenly an irresistible longing took possession of me to go to it once more--in that pale enchantment of moonlight when one might chance to slip back through some magic loophole into the olden years. I could not withstand it. I slipped over to the church grounds and through the old gap in the fence through which I used to go to church. I walked along the meadow edge where the foot path used to be, past the grove of spruces, and on till the old house lay before me in a soft, silvery shadow. I turned aside for a moment to the old well and looked down it. The ferns that always lined its sides had grown completely across it.....

...How lovely and lonely it all was, and yet how unreal. I seemed to be in a dream--and yet it seemed the only waking. Oh, as long as that moonlit magic worked the past was mine once more--the old past, before the last sad years I had spent in the old home. Oh, beloved old place, that half hour I spent with you last night was worth the coming from a far land. You were glad, I think to have me back--me, who loved you so. For there is not one living now but me who loves you--not one. As I stood there I seemed to feel a presence enfolding me as if it claimed me--as if something that had been forsaken and desolate were once more rejoicing in my affection. Have not old homesteads souls that cling to them until they crumble to dust?...

... Certainly, all the pleasures and joys of my real life seemed to grow pale and fade into nothingness beside the strange enchantment of that shadowy tryst."

The Selected Journals of LM Montgomery, Vol II, Rubio & Waterston, pp. 168-169