He died in the doorway of the porch, one morning in early summer, with the newspaper in his hand.
The paper said that the Abbey Bank had failed. Every cent he and Marilla had saved was in it. The doctor said afterwards that it was the shock, and that his heart had been bad for years, which we knew and had been careful never to say in front of him. I was coming in from the garden with my arms full of flowers. I saw him stand there, and I saw his face, and then he fell, and Marilla and I both reached him too late.
I was sixteen. I had been at Green Gables five years. I had been, for all of them, the only person in the world Matthew was not shy of.
He never once told me what to do. That was Marilla’s department, and he left it to her with visible relief. What he did instead was notice. He noticed that the other girls had puffed sleeves and I had none, and he went into a shop full of women, which frightened him more than anything in the world, to buy the cloth for a dress with puffed sleeves. He noticed when I was unhappy before I did. He was proud of me in a way that asked for nothing back.
People say that you do not know what you have until you lose it. It is not true. I knew exactly what I had. What I did not know was how much of the house he had been holding up, quietly, by standing in it.
