Read Online A Tangled Web by L. M. Montgomery - Free Book Online

John nearly blew the roof off with one of his famous sneezes and half the women jumped nervously. Uncle Pippin absentmindedly began to hum Nearer My God to Thee, but was squelched by a glare from William Y. Oswald Dark suddenly came to the open window and looked in at these foolish and distracted people.
    â€œSatan has just passed the door,” he said in his intense dramatic fashion.
    â€œWhat a blessing he didn’t come in,” said Uncle Pippin imperturbably. But Rachel Penhallow was disturbed. It had seemed so real when the Moon Man said it. She wished Uncle Pippin would not be so flippant and jocose. Every one again wondered why Ambrosine didn’t come in with the jug. Had she taken a weak spell? Couldn’t she find it? Had she dropped and broken it on the garret floor?
    Then Ambrosine entered, like a priestess bearing a chalice. She placed the jug on the little round table between the two rooms. A sigh of relieved tension went over the assemblage, succeeded by an almost painful stillness. Ambrosine went back and sat down at Aunt Becky’s right hand. Miss Jackson was sitting on the left.
    â€œGood gosh,” whispered Stanton Grundy to Uncle Pippin, “did you ever see three such ugly women living together in your life?”
    That night at three o’clock Uncle Pippin woke up and thought of a marvelous retort he might have made to Stanton Grundy. But at the time he could think of absolutely nothing to say. So he turned his back on Stanton and gazed at the jug, as everyone else was doing—some covetously, a few indifferently, all with the interest natural to this exhibition of an old family heirloom they had been hearing about all their lives and had had few and far between opportunities for seeing.
    Nobody thought the jug very beautiful in itself. Taste must have changed notably in a hundred years if anybody had ever thought it beautiful. Yet it was undoubtedly a delectable thing, with its history and its legend, and even Tempest Dark leaned forward to get a better view of it. A thing like that, he reflected, deserved a certain reverence because it was the symbol of a love it had outlasted on earth and so had a sacredness of its own.
    It was an enormous, pot-bellied thing of a type that had been popular in pre-Victorian days. George the Fourth had been king when the old Dark jug came into being. Half its nose was gone and a violent crack extended around its middle. The decorations consisted of pink-gilt scrolls, green and brown leaves and red and blue roses. On one side was a picture of two convivial tars, backed with the British Ensign and the Union Jack, who had evidently been imbibing deeply of the cup which cheers and inebriates, and who were expressing the feelings of their inmost hearts in singing the verse printed above them:
    â€œThus smiling at peril at sea or on shore
    We ’ ll box the old compass right cheerly,
    Pass the grog, boys, about, with a song or two more,
    Then we’ll drink to the girls we love dearly.”
    On the opposite side the designer of the jug, whose strong point had not been spelling, had filled in the vacant place with a pathetic verse from Byron:
    â€œThe man is doomed to sail
    With the blast of the gale
    Through billows attalantic to steer.
    As he bends o’er the wave
    Which may soon be his grave
    He remembers his home with a tear.”
    Rachel Penhallow felt a tear start to her eyes and roll down her long face as she read it. It had been, she thought mournfully, so sadly prophetic.
    In the middle of the jug, below its broken nose, was a name and date. Harriet Dark, Aldboro, 1826, surrounded by a wreath of pink and green tied with a true-lover’s knot. The jug was full of old potpourri and the room was instantly filled with its faint fragrance—a delicate spicy smell, old-maidishly sweet, virginally elusive, yet with such penetrating, fleeting suggestions of warm passion and torrid emotions. Everybody in the room suddenly felt