Into the room crept Nan, eyes and nose crimson from crying.
“Mummy, I have to tell you . . . I can’t wait any longer. Mummy, I’ve cheated God.”
Anne thrilled again to the soft touch of a child’s little clinging hand . . . a child seeking help, and comfort in its bitter little problem. She listened while Nan sobbed out the whole story and managed to keep a straight face. Anne always had contrived to keep a straight face when a straight face was indicated, no matter how crazily she might laugh it over with Gilbert afterwards. She knew Nan’s worry was real and dreadful to her; and she also realized that this small daughter’s theology needed attention.
“Darling, you’re terribly mistaken about it all. God doesn’t make bargains. He gives . . . gives without asking anything from us in return except love. When you ask Father or me for something you want, we don’t make bargains with you . . . and God is ever and ever so much kinder than we are. And He knows so much better than we do what is good to give.”
“And He won’t . . . He won’t make you die, Mummy, because I didn’t keep my promise?”
“Certainly not, darling.”
“Mummy, even if I was mistooken about God . . . oughtn’t I to keep my bargain when I made it? I said I would, you know. Daddy says we should always keep our promises. Won’t I be disgraced forever if I don’t?”
“When I get quite well, dear, I’ll go with you some night . . . and stay outside the gate . . . and I don’t think you’ll be a bit afraid to go through the graveyard then. That will relieve your poor little conscience . . . and you won’t make any more foolish bargains with God?”
“No,” promised Nan, with a rather regretful feeling that she was giving up something that, with all its drawbacks, had been pleasantly exciting. But the sparkle had come back to her eyes and a bit of the old ginger to her voice.
“I’ll go and wash my face and then I’ll come back and kiss you, Mummy. And I’ll pick you all the snack-dragons I can find. It’s been dreadful without you, Mummy.”
“Oh, Susan,” said Anne when Susan brought in her supper, “what a world it is! What a beautiful, interesting, wonderful world! Isn’t it, Susan?”
“I will go so far,” admitted Susan, recalling the beautiful row of pies she had just left in the pantry, “as to say that it is very tolerable.”
Chapter 27
October was a very happy month at Ingleside that year, full of days when you just had to run and sing and whistle. Mother was about again, refusing to be treated as a convalescent any longer, making garden plans, laughing again . . . Jem always thought Mother had such a beautiful, joyous laugh . . . answering innumerable questions. “Mummy, how far is it from here to the sunset? . . . Mummy, why can’t we gather up the spilled moonlight? . . . Mummy, do the souls of dead people really come back on Hallowe’en? . . . Mummy, what causes the cause? . . . Mummy, wouldn’t you rather be killed by a rattlesnake than a tiger, because the tiger would mess you up and eat you? . . . Mummy, what is a cubby? . . . Mummy, is a widow really a woman whose dreams have come true? Wally Taylor said she was. . . . Mummy, what do little birds do when it rains hard? . . . Mummy, are we really a too romantic family?”
The last from Jem, who had heard in school that Mrs. Alec Davies had said so. Jem did not like Mrs. Alec Davies, because whenever she met him with Mother or Father she invariably dabbed her long forefinger at him and demanded, “Is Jemmy a good boy in school?” Jemmy! Perhaps they were a bit romantic. Susan must certainly have thought so when she discovered the boardwalk to the barn lavishly decorated with splotches of crimson paint. “We had to have them for our sham battle, Susan,” explained Jem. “They represent gobs of gore.”
At night there might be a line of wild geese flying across a low red moon and Jem when he saw them ached mysteriously to fly far away with them, too . . . to unknown shores and bring back monkeys . . . leopards . . . parrots . . . things like that . . . to explore the Spanish Main.
Some phrases, like “the Spanish Main,” always sounded irresistibly alluring to Jem . . . “secrets of the sea” was another. To be caught in the deadly coils of a python and have a combat with a wounded rhinoceros was all in the day’s work with Jem. And the very word “dragon” gave him a tremendous thrill. His favourite picture, tacked on the wall at the foot of his bed, was of a knight in armour on a beautiful plump white horse, standing on its hind legs while its rider speared a dragon who had a lovely tail flowing behind him in kinks and loops, ending with a fork. A lady in a pink robe knelt peacefully and composedly in the background with clasped hands. There was no doubt in the world that the lady looked a good deal like Maybelle Reese for whose nine-year-old favour lances were already being shattered in the Glen school. Even Susan noticed the resemblance and teased the furiously blushing Jem about it. But the dragon was really a little disappointing . . . it looked so small and insignificant under the huge horse. There didn’t seem to be any special valour about spearing it. The dragons from which Jem rescued Maybelle in secret dreams were much more dragonish. He had rescued her last Monday from old Sarah Palmer’s gander. Peradventure . . . ah, “peradventure” had a good smack! . . . she had noticed the lordly air with which he had caught the hissing creature by its snaky neck and flung it over the fence. But a gander was somehow not nearly so romantic as a dragon.
It was an October of winds . . . small winds that purred in the valley and big ones that lashed the mapletops . . . winds that howled along the sandshore but crouched when they came to the rocks . . . crouched and sprang. The nights, with their sleepy red hunter’s moon, were cool enough to make the thought of a warm bed pleasant, the blueberry bushes turned scarlet, the dead ferns were a rich red-brown, sumacs burned behind the barn, green pastures lay here and there like patches on the sere harvest fields of the Upper Glen and there were gold and russet chrysanthemums in the spruce corner of the lawn. There were squirrels chattering joyfully everywhere and cricket fiddlers for fairy dances on a thousand hills. There were apples to be picked, carrots to be dug. Sometimes the boys went digging “cow-hawks” with Captain Malachi when the mysterious “tides” permitted . . . tides that came in to caress the land but slipped back to their own deep sea. There was a reek of leaf fires all through the Glen, a heap of big yellow pumpkins in the barn, and Susan made the first cranberry pies.
Ingleside rang with laughter from dawn to sunset. Even when the older children were in school Shirley and Rilla were big enough now to keep up the tradition of laughter. Even Gilbert laughed more than usual this fall. “I like a dad who can laugh,” Jem reflected. Dr. Bronson of Mowbray Narrows never laughed. He was said to have built up his practice entirely on his owlish look of wisdom; but Dad had a better practice still and people were pretty far gone when they couldn’t laugh over one of his jokes.
Anne was busy in her garden every warm day, drinking in colour like wine, where the late sunshine fell on crimson maples, revelling in the exquisite sadness of fleeting beauty. One gold-grey smoky afternoon she and Jem planted all the tulip bulbs, that would have a resurrection of rose and scarlet and purple and gold in June. “Isn’t it nice to be preparing for spring when you know you’ve got to face winter, Jem?” “And it’s nice to be making the garden beautiful,” said Jem. “Susan says it is God who makes everything beautiful but we can help Him out a bit, can’t we, Mums?”
“Always . . . always, Jem. He shares that privilege with us.”
Still, nothing is ever quite perfect. The Ingleside folks were worried over Cock Robin. They had been told that when the robins went away he would want to go too.
“Keep him shut up till all the rest are gone and the snow comes,” advised Captain Malachi. “Then he’ll kind of forget about it and be all right till spring.”
So Cock Robin was a sort of prisoner. He grew very restless. He flew aimlessly about the house or sat on the window-sill and looked wistfully out at his fellows who were preparing to follow who knew what mysterious call. His appetite failed and even worms and Susan’s nuttiest
nuts would not tempt him. The children pointed out to him all the dangers he might encounter . . . cold, hunger, friendlessness, storms, black nights, cats. But Cock Robin had felt or heard the summons and all his being yearned to answer.
Susan was the last to give in. She was very grim for several days. But finally, “Let him go,” she said. “It is against nature to hold him.”
They set him free the last day of October, after he had been mewed up for a month. The children kissed him good-bye with tears. He flew joyfully off, returning next morning to Susan’s sill for crumbs and then spreading his wings for the long flight. “He may come back to us in the spring, darling,” Anne said to the sobbing Rilla. But Rilla was not to be comforted.
“That ith too far away,” she sobbed.
Anne smiled and sighed. The seasons that seemed so long to Baby Rilla were beginning to pass all too quickly for her. Another summer was ended, lighted out of life by the ageless gold of Lombardy torches. Soon . . . all too soon . . . the children of Ingleside would be children no longer. But they were still hers . . . hers to welcome when they came home at night . . . hers to fill life with wonder and delight . . . hers to love and cheer and scold . . . a little. For sometimes they were very naughty, even though they hardly deserved to be called by Mrs. Alec Davies “that pack of Ingleside demons” when she heard that Bertie Shakespeare Drew had been slightly scorched while playing the part of a Red Indian burned at the stake in Rainbow Valley. It had taken Jem and Walter a little longer to untie him than they had bargained for. They got slightly singed, too, but nobody pitied them.
November was a dismal month that year . . . a month of east wind and fog. Some days there was nothing but cold mist driving past or drifting over the grey sea beyond the bar. The shivering poplar trees dropped their last leaves. The garden was dead and all its colour and personality had gone from it . . . except the asparagus-bed, which was still a fascinating golden jungle. Walter had to desert his study roost in the maple tree and learn his lessons in the house. It rained . . . and rained . . . and rained. “Will the world ever be dry again?” moaned Di despairingly. Then there was a week steeped in the magic of Indian summer sunshine, and in the cold sharp evenings Mother would touch a match to the kindling in the grate and Susan would have baked potatoes with supper.
The big fireplace was the centre of the home those evenings. It was the high spot of the day when they gathered around it after supper. Anne sewed and planned little winter wardrobes . . . “Nan must have a red dress, since she is so set on it” . . . and sometimes thought of Hannah, weaving her little coat every year for the small Samuel. Mothers were the same all through the centuries . . . a great sisterhood of love and service . . . the remembered and the unremembered alike.
Susan heard the children’s spellings and then they amused themselves as they liked. Walter, living in his world of imagination and beautiful dreams, was absorbed in writing a series of letters from the chipmunk who lived in Rainbow Valley to the chipmunk who lived behind the barn. Susan pretended to scoff at them when he read them to her, but she secretly made copies of them and sent them to Rebecca Dew.
“I found these readable, Miss Dew dear, though you may consider them too trivial to peruse. In that case I know you will pardon a doting old woman for troubling you with them. He is considered very clever in school and at least these compositions are not poetry. I might also add that Little Jem made ninety-nine in his arithmetic examination last week and nobody can understand why the other mark was cut off. Perhaps I should not say so, Miss Dew dear, but it is my conviction that that child is born for greatness. We may not live to see it but he may yet be Premier of Canada.”
The Shrimp basked in the glow and Nan’s kitten, Pussywillow, which always suggested some dainty exquisite little lady in black and silver, climbed everybody’s legs impartially. “Two cats, and mouse tracks everywhere in the pantry,” was Susan’s disapproving parenthesis. The children talked over their little adventures together and the wail of the distant ocean came through the cold autumn night.
Sometimes Miss Cornelia dropped in for a short call while her husband exchanged opinions in Carter Flagg’s store. Little pitchers pricked up their long ears then, for Miss Cornelia always had the latest gossip and they always heard the most interesting things about people. It would be such fun next Sunday to sit in church and look at the said people, savouring what you knew about them, prim and proper as they looked.
“My, but you’re cosy here, Anne dearie. It’s a real keen night and starting to snow. Is the doctor out?”
“Yes. I hated to see him go . . . but they telephoned from the Harbour Head that Mrs. Brooker Shaw insisted on seeing him,” said Anne, while Susan swiftly and stealthily removed from the hearth-rug a huge fishbone the Shrimp had brought in, praying that Miss Cornelia had not noticed it.
“She’s no more sick than I am,” said Susan bitterly. “But I hear she has got a new lace nightgown and no doubt she wants her doctor to see her in it. Lace nightgowns!”
“Her daughter Leona brought it home from Boston for her. She came Friday evening, with four trunks,” said Miss Cornelia. “I can remember her starting off to the States nine years ago, lugging a broken old Gladstone bag with things oozing out of it. That was when she was feeling pretty blue over Phil Turner’s jilting her. She tried to hide it but everyone knew. Now she’s back to ‘nurse her mother,’ so she says. She’ll be trying to flirt with the doctor, I warn you, Anne dearie. But I don’t suppose it will matter to him even if he is a man. And you’re not like Mrs. Dr. Bronson at Mowbray Narrows. She is very jealous of her husband’s female patients, I am told.”
“And of the trained nurses,” said Susan.
“Well, some of those trained nurses are far too pretty for their job,” said Miss Cornelia. “There’s Janie Arthur now; she’s taking a rest between cases and trying to keep her two young men from finding out about each other.”
“Pretty as she is, she is no spring chicken now,” said Susan firmly, “and it would be far better for her to make a choice and settle down. Look at her Aunt Eudora . . . She said she didn’t intend to marry till she got through flirting, and behold the result. Even yet she tries to flirt with every man in sight though she is forty-five if she is a day. That is what comes of forming a habit. Did you every hear, Mrs. Dr. dear, what she said to her cousin Fanny when she got married? ‘You’re taking my leavings,’ she said. I am informed there was a shower of sparks and they have never spoken since.”
“Life and death are in the power of the tongue,” murmured Anne absently.
“A true word, dear. Speaking of that, I wish Mr. Stanley would be a little more judicious in his sermons. He has offended Wallace Young and Wallace is going to leave the church. Everyone says the sermon last Sunday was preached at him.”
“If a minister preaches a sermon that hits home to some particular individual people always suppose he meant it for that very person,” said Anne. “A hand-me-down cap is bound to fit somebody’s head but it doesn’t follow that it was made for him.”
“Sound sense,” approved Susan. “And I have no use for Wallace Young. He let a firm paint ads on his cows three years ago. That is too economical, in my opinion.”
“His brother David is going to be married at last,” said Miss Cornelia. “He’s been a long time making up his mind which was cheaper — marrying or hiring. ‘Ye can keep a house without a woman but it’s hard sledding, Cornelia,’ he said to me once after his mother died. I had an idea that he was feeling his way but he got no encouragement from me. And at last he’s going to marry Jessie King.”
“Jessie King! But I thought he was supposed to be courting Mary North.”
“He says he wasn’t going to marry any woman who eats cabbage. But there’s a story going around that he proposed to her and she boxed his ears. And Jessie King is reported to have said that she would have liked a better looking man but that he’d have to do. Well, of course it is any port in a storm for some folks.”
“I do not think, Mrs. Marshall Elliott, that people in these parts say half the things they are reported to have said,” rebuked Susan. “It is my opinion that Jessie King will make David Young a far better wife than he deserves . . . though as far as outward seeming goes I will admit he looks like something that washed in with the tide.”
“Do you know that Alden and Stella have a little daughter?” asked Anne.
“So I understand. I hope Stella will be a little more sensible over it than Lisette was over her. Would you believe it, Anne dear, Lisette positively cried because her cousin Dora’s baby walked before Stella did?”
“We mothers are a foolish race,” smiled Anne. “I remember that I felt perfectly murderous when little Bob Taylor, who was the same age as Jem to a day, cut three teeth before Jem cut one.”
“Bob Taylor’s got to have an operation on his tonsils,” said Miss Cornelia.
“Why don’t we ever have operations, Mother?” demanded Walter and Di together in injured tones. They so often said the same thing together. Then they linked their fingers and made a wish. “We think and feel the same about everything,” Di was wont to explain earnestly.
“Shall I ever forget Elsie Taylor’s marriage?” said Miss Cornelia reminiscently. “Her best friend, Maisie Millison, was to play the wedding march. She played the Dead March in Saul in place of it. Of course she always said she made a mistake because she was so flustered but people had their own opinion. She wanted Mac Moorside for herself. A good-looking rogue with a silver tongue . . . always saying to women just what he thought they’d like to hear. He made Elsie’s life miserable. Ah well, Anne dearie, they’ve both passed long since into the Silent Land and Maisie’s been married to Harley Russell for years and everybody has forgotten that he proposed to her expecting her to say ‘No’ and she said ‘Yes’ instead. Harley has forgotten it himself . . . just like a man. He thinks he has got the best wife in the world and congratulates himself on being clever enough to get her.”
The Complete Works of L M Montgomery Page 148
