'Awful!' said Susan, with great gravity of countenance.
'Delilah says if she had a million dollars she'd give it all to me, Susan. Of course, I wouldn't take it, but it shows how good her heart is.'
'It is as easy to give away a million as a hundred if you have not got either,' was as far as Susan would go.
40
Diana was overjoyed. After all, Mother wasn't jealous... Mother wasn't possessive... Mother did understand.
Mother and Father were going up to Avonlea for the weekend and Mother had told her she could ask Delilah Green to spend Saturday and Saturday night at Ingleside.
'I saw Delilah at the Sunday School picnic,' Anne told Susan. 'She is a pretty, lady-like little thing... though of course she must exaggerate. Perhaps her stepmother is a little hard on her... and I've heard her father is rather dour and strict. She probably has some grievances and likes to dramatize them by way of getting sympathy.'
Susan was a bit dubious.
'But at least anyone living in Laura Green's house will be clean,' she reflected. Fine-tooth combs did not enter into this question.
Diana was full of plans for Delilah's entertainment.
'Can't we have a roast chicken, Susan... with lots of stuffing? And pie. You don't know how that poor child longs to taste pie. They never have pies... her stepmother is too mean.'
Susan was very nice about it. Jem and Nan had gone to Avonlea, and Walter was down at the House of Dreams with Kenneth Ford. There was nothing to cast a shadow on Delilah's visit and it certainly seemed to go off very well. Delilah arrived Saturday morning very nicely dressed in pink muslin... at least the stepmother seemed to do her well in the matter of clothes. And she had, as Susan saw at a glance, irreproachable ears and nails.
'This is the day of my life,' she said solemnly to Diana. 'My, what a grand house this is! And them's the china dogs! Oh, they're wonderful!'
Everything was wonderful. Delilah worked the poor word to death. She helped Diana set the table for dinner and picked the little glass basket full of pink sweet peas for a centre-piece.
'Oh, you don't know how I love to do something just because I like to do it,' she told Diana. 'Isn't there anything else I can do, please?'
'You can crack the nuts for the cake I'm going to make this afternoon,' said Susan, who was herself falling under the spell of Delilah's beauty and voice. After all, perhaps Laura Green was a Tartar. You couldn't always go by what people seemed like in public. Delilah's plate was heaped with chicken and stuffing and gravy and she got a second piece of pie without hinting for it.
'I've often wondered what it would be like to have all you could eat for once. It is a wonderful sensation,' she told Diana as they left the table.
They had a gay afternoon. Susan had given Diana a box of candy and Diana shared it with Delilah. Delilah admired one of Di's rings and Di gave it to her. They cleaned out the pansy bed and dug up a few stray dandelions that had invaded the lawn. They helped Susan polish the silver and assisted her to get supper. Delilah was so efficient and tidy that Susan capitulated completely. Only two things marred the afternoon... Delilah contrived to spatter her dress with ink and she lost her pearl bead necklace. But Susan took the ink out nicely... some of the colour coming out too... with salts of lemon, and Delilah said it didn't matter about the necklace.
Nothing mattered except that she was at Ingleside with her dearest Diana.
'Aren't we going to sleep in the spare-room bed?' asked Diana when bed-time came. 'We always put company in the spare room, Susan.'
'Your Aunt Diana is coming with your father and mother tomorrow night,' said Susan. 'The spare room has been made up for her. You can have the Shrimp on your own bed and you couldn't have him in the spare room.'
'My, but your sheets smell nice!' said Delilah as they snuggled down.
'Susan always boils them with orris root,' said Diana.
Delilah sighed.
'I wonder if you know what a lucky girl you are, Diana. If I had a home like you... but it's my lot in life. I just have to bear it.'
Susan, on her nightly round of the house before retiring, came in and told them to stop chattering and go to sleep. She gave them two maple sugar buns apiece.
'I can never forget your kindness, Miss Baker,' said Delilah, her voice quivering with emotion. Susan went to her bed reflecting that a nicer-mannered, more appealing little girl she had never seen. Certainly she had misjudged Delilah Green. Though at that moment it occurred to Susan that, for a child who never got enough to eat, the bones of the said Delilah Green were very well covered!
Delilah went home the next afternoon, and Mother and Father and Aunt Diana came at night. On Monday the bolt fell from the proverbial blue. Diana, returning to school at noon hour, caught her own name as she entered the school porch. Inside the schoolroom Delilah Green was the centre of a group of curious little girls.
'I was so disappointed in Ingleside. After the way Di has bragged about her house I expected a mansion. Of course it's big enough, but some of the furniture is shabby. The chairs want to be recovered the worst way.'
'Did you see the china dogs?' asked Bessy Palmer.
'They're nothing wonderful. They haven't even got hair. I told Diana right on the spot I was disappointed.'
Diana was standing 'rooted to the ground'... or at least to the porch floor. She did not think about eavesdropping... she was simply too dumbfounded to move.
'I'm sorry for Diana,' went on Delilah. 'The way her parents neglect their family is something scandalous. Her mother is an awful gadabout. The way she goes off and leaves them young ones is terrible with only that old Susan to look after them... and she's half cracked! She'll land them all in the poorhouse yet. The waste that goes on in her kitchen you wouldn't believe. The doctor's wife is too gay and lazy to cook even when she is home, so Susan has it all her own way. She was going to give us our meals in the kitchen but I just up and said to her, "Am I company or am I not?" Susan said if I gave her any sass she'd shut me up in the back closet. I said, "You don't dare to" and she didn't. "You can overcrow the Ingleside children, Susan Baker, but you can't overcrow me," I said to her. Oh, I tell you I stood up to Susan. I wouldn't let her give Rilla soothing syrup. "Don't you know it's poison to children?" I said. She took it out on me at meals though. The mean little helpings she gives you! There was chicken but I only got the Pope's nose and nobody even asked me to take the second piece of pie. But Susan would have let me sleep in the spare room though, and Di wouldn't hear to it... just out of pure meanness. She's so jealous. But still I'm sorry for her. She told me Nan pinches her something scandalous. Her arms are black and blue. We slept in her room and a mangy old tom cat was lying on the foot of the bed all night. It wasn't haygeenic and I told Di so. And my pearl necklace disappeared. Of course I'm not saying Susan took it. I believe she's honest... but it's funny. And Shirley threw an inkbottle at me. It ruined my dress but I don't care. Ma'll have to get me a new one. Well, anyhow, I dug all the dandelions out of their lawn for them and polished up the silver. You should have seen it. It don't know when it has been cleaned before. I tell you Susan takes it easy when the doctor's wife's away. I let her see I saw through her. "Why don't you ever wash the potato pot, Susan?" I asked her. You should of seen her face. Look at my new ring, girls. A boy I know at Lowbridge give it to me.'
'Why, I've seen Diana Blythe wearing that ring often,' said Peggy MacAllister contemptuously.
'And I don't believe one single word you've been saying about Ingleside, Delilah Green,' said Laura Carr.
Before Delilah could reply Diana, who had recovered her powers of locomotion and speech, dashed into the schoolroom.
'Judas!' she said. Afterwards she thought repentantly that it had not been a very lady-like thing to say. But she had been stung to the heart, and when your feelings are all stirred up you can't pick and choose your words.
'I ain't Judas,' muttered Delilah, flushing, probably for the first time in her life.
'You are! There isn't one spark of sincerity in you! Don't you ever speak to me again as long as you live.'
Diana rushed out of the schoolhouse and ran home. She couldn't stay in school that afternoon... she just couldn't! The Ingleside front door was banged as it had never been banged before.
'Darling, what is the matter?' asked Anne, interrupted in her kitchen conference with Susan by a weeping daughter who flung herself stormily against the maternal shoulder.
The whole story was sobbed out, somewhat disjointedly.
'I've been hurt in all my finer feelings, Mother. And I'll never believe in anyone again.'
'My dear, all your friends won't be like this. Pauline wasn't.'
'This is twice,' said Diana bitterly, still smarting under the sense of betrayal and loss. 'There isn't going to be any third time.'
'I'm sorry Di has lost her faith in humanity,' said Anne rather ruefully, when Di had gone upstairs. 'This is a real tragedy for her. She has been unlucky in some of her chums. Jenny Penny... and now Delilah Green. The trouble is Di always falls for the girls who can tell interesting stories. And Delilah's martyr pose was very alluring.'
'If you ask me, Mrs Doctor dear, that Green child is a perfect minx,' said Susan, all the more implacably because she had been so nearly fooled herself by Delilah's eyes and manners. 'The idea of her calling our cats mangy! I am not saying that there are not such things as tom cats, Mrs Doctor dear, but little girls should not talk of them. I am no lover of cats, but the Shrimp is seven years old and should at least be respected. And as for my potato pot...'
But Susan really couldn't express her feelings about the potato pot!
In her room Di was reflecting that perhaps it was not too late to be 'best friends' with Laura Carr after all. Laura was true, even if she wasn't very exciting. Di sighed. Some colour had gone out of life with her belief in Delilah's piteous lot.
41
A bitter east wind was snarling around Ingleside like a shrewish old woman. It was one of those chill, drizzly, late August days that take the heart out of you, one of those days when everything goes wrong... what in old Avonlea days had been called 'a Jonah day'. The new pup Gilbert had brought home for the boys had gnawed the enamel off the dining-table leg... Susan had found that the moths had been having a Roman holiday in the blanket closet... Nan's new kitten had ruined the choicest fern... Jem and Bertie Shakespeare had been making the most abominable racket in the garret all the afternoon with tin pails for drums... Anne herself had broken a painted glass lamp shade. But somehow it had done her just good to hear it smash! Rilla had earache and Shirley had a mysterious rash on his neck which worried Anne but at which Gilbert only glanced casually and said in an absent-minded voice that he didn't think it meant anything. Of course it didn't mean anything to him! Shirley was only his own son. And it didn't matter to him either that he had invited the Trents to dinner one evening last week and forgotten to tell Anne until they arrived. She and Susan had had an extra busy day and had planned a pick-up supper. And Mrs Trent with the reputation of being Charlottetown's smartest hostess! Where were Walter's stockings with the black tops and the blue toes? 'Do you think, Walter, that you could, just for once, put a thing where it belongs? Nan, I don't know where the Seven Seas are. For mercy's sake stop asking questions! I don't wonder they poisoned Socrates. They ought to have.'
Walter and Nan stared. Never had they heard their mother speak in such a tone before. Walter's look annoyed Anne still more.
'Diana, is it necessary to be forever reminding you not to twist your legs around the piano stool? Shirley, if you haven't got that new magazine all sticky with jam! And perhaps somebody would be kind enough to tell me where the prisms of the hanging lamp have gone!'
Nobody could tell her... Susan having unhooked them and taken them out to wash them... and Anne whisked herself upstairs to escape from the grieved eyes of her children. In her own room she paced up and down feverishly. What was the matter with her? Was she turning into one of those peevish creatures who had no patience with anybody? Everything annoyed her these days. A little mannerism of Gilbert's she had never minded before got on her nerves. She was sick and tired of never-ending, monotonous duties... sick and tired of catering to her family's whims. Once everything she did for her house and household gave her delight. Now she did not seem to care what she did. She felt all the time like a creature in a nightmare, trying to overtake someone with fettered feet.
The worst of it all was that Gilbert never noticed that there was any change in her. He was busy night and day and seemed to care for nothing but his work. The only thing he had said at dinner that day had been, 'Pass the mustard, please.'
'I can talk to the chairs and tables, of course,' thought Anne bitterly. 'We're just getting to be a sort of habit with each other... nothing else. He never noticed that I had on a new dress last night. And it's so long since he called me "Anne-girl" that I've forgotten when. Well, I suppose all marriages come to this in the end. Probably most women go through this. He just takes me for granted. His work is the only thing that means anything to him now. Where is my handkerchief?'
Anne got her handkerchief and sat down in her chair to torture herself luxuriantly. Gilbert didn't love her any more. When he kissed her he kissed her absently... just 'habit'. All the glamour was gone. Old jokes they had laughed together over came up in recollection, charged with tragedy now. How could she ever have thought them funny? Monty Turner, who kissed his wife systematically once a week... made a memorandum to remind him. (Would any wife want such kisses?) Curtis Ames, who met his wife in a new bonnet and didn't know her. Mrs Clancy Dare, who had said, 'I don't care an awful lot about my husband, but I'd miss him if he wasn't around.' (I suppose Gilbert would miss me if I weren't around! Has it come to that with us?) Nat Elliott, who told his wife after ten years of marriage, 'If you must know I'm just tired of being married.' (And we've been married fifteen years!) Well, perhaps all men were like that. Probably Miss Cornelia would say that they were. After a time they were hard to hold. (If my husband has to be 'held' I don't want to hold him.) But there was Mrs Theodore Clow, who had said proudly at a Ladies' Aid, 'We've been married twenty years and my husband loves me as much as he did on our wedding day.' But perhaps she was deceiving herself or only 'keeping face' - and she looked every day of her age and more. (I wonder if I am beginning to look old.)
For the first time her years felt like a weight. She went to the mirror and looked at herself critically. There were some tiny crows-feet around her eyes, but they were only visible in a strong light. Her chin lines were yet unblurred. She had always been pale. Her hair was thick and wavy, without a grey thread. But did anybody really like red hair? Her nose was still definitely good. Anne patted it as a friend, recalling certain moments of life when her nose was all that carried her through. But Gilbert just took her nose for granted now. It might be crooked or pug for all it mattered to him. Likely he had forgotten that she had a nose. Like Mrs Dare, he might miss it if it wasn't there.
'Well, I must go and see to Rilla and Shirley,' thought Anne drearily. 'At least, they need me still, poor darlings. What made me so snappish with them? Oh, I suppose they're all saying behind my back, "How cranky poor Mother is getting!" '
It continued to rain and the wind continued to wail. The fantasia of tin pans in the garret had stopped, but the ceaseless chirping of a solitary cricket in the living-room nearly drove her mad.
The noon mail brought her two letters. One was from Marilla... but Anne sighed as she folded it up. Marilla's handwriting was getting so frail and shaky. The other letter was from Mrs Barrett Fowler of Charlottetown, whom Anne knew very slightly. And Mrs Barrett Fowler wanted Dr and Mrs Blythe to dine with her next Tuesday night at seven o'clock 'to meet your old friend, Mrs Andrew Dawson of Winnipeg, nee Christine Stuart'.
Anne dropped the letter. A flood of old memories poured over her... some of them decidedly unpleasant. Christine Stuart of Redmond... the girl to whom people had once said Gilber
t was engaged... the girl of whom she had once been so bitterly jealous... yes, she admitted it now, twenty years after... she had been jealous... she had hated Christine Stuart. She had not thought of Christine for years, but she remembered her distinctly. A tall, ivory-white girl with great dark-blue eyes and blue-black masses of hair. And a certain air of distinction. But with a long nose... yes, definitely a long nose. Handsome... oh, you couldn't deny that Christine had been very handsome. She remembered hearing many years ago that Christine had 'married well' and gone west.
Gilbert came in for a hurried bite of supper... there was an epidemic of measles in the Upper Glen... and Anne silently handed him Mrs Fowler's letter.
'Christine Stuart! Of course we'll go. I'd like to see her for old time's sake,' he said, with the first appearance of animation he had shown for weeks. 'Poor girl, she has had her own troubles. She lost her husband four years ago, you know.'
Anne didn't know. And how came Gilbert to know? Why had he never told her? And had he forgotten that next Tuesday was the anniversary of their own wedding day? A day on which they had never accepted any invitation, but went off on a little bat of their own. Well, she wouldn't remind him. He could see his Christine if he wanted to. What had a girl at Redmond once said to her darkly? 'There was a good deal more between Gilbert and Christine than you ever knew, Anne.' She had merely laughed at it at the time... Claire Hallett was a spiteful thing. But perhaps there had been something in it. Anne suddenly remembered, with a little chill of the spirit, that not long after her marriage she had found a small photograph of Christine in an old pocket-book of Gilbert's. Gilbert had seemed quite indifferent and said he'd wondered where that old snap had got to. But... was it one of those unimportant things that are significant of things tremendously important? Was it possible... had Gilbert ever loved Christine? Was she, Anne, only a second choice? The consolation prize?
'Surely I'm not... jealous,' thought Anne, trying to laugh. It was all very ridiculous. What more natural than that Gilbert should like the idea of meeting an old Redmond friend? What more natural than that a busy man, married for fifteen years, should forget times and seasons and days and months? Anne wrote to Mrs Fowler, accepting her invitation... and then put in the three days before Tuesday hoping desperately that somebody in the Upper Glen would start having a baby Tuesday afternoon about half-past five.
Anne of Ingleside Page 27
