Nan would not cry. Big girls of ten must not cry. But she felt indescribably dreary. Something precious and beautiful was gone . . . lost . . . a secret store of joy which, so she believed, could never be hers again. She found Ingleside filled with the delicious smell of spice cookies but she did not go into the kitchen to coax some out of Susan. At supper her appetite was noticeably poor, even though she read castor-oil in Susan’s eye. Anne had noticed that Nan had been very quiet ever since her return from the old MacAllister place . . . Nan, who sang literally from daylight to dark and after. Had the long walk on a hot day been too much for the child?
“Why that anguished expression, daughter?” she asked casually, when she went into the twins’ room at dusk with fresh towels and found Nan curled up on the window-seat, instead of being down stalking tigers in Equatorial jungles with the others in Rainbow Valley.
Nan hadn’t meant to tell anybody that she had been so silly. But somehow things told themselves to Mother.
“Oh, Mother, is everything in life a disappointment?”
“Not everything, dear. Would you like to tell me what disappointed you today?”
“Oh, Mummy, Thomasine Fair is . . . is good! And her nose turns up!”
“But why,” asked Anne in honest bewilderment, “should you care whether her nose turns up or down?”
It all came out then. Anne listened with her usual serious face, praying that she be not betrayed into a stifled shriek of laughter. She remembered the child she had been at old Green Gables. She remembered the Haunted Wood and two small girls who had been terribly frightened by their own pretending thereof. And she knew the dreadful bitterness of losing a dream.
“You musn’t take the vanishing of your fancies so much to heart, dear.”
“I can’t help it,” said Nan despairingly. “If I had my life to live over again I’d never imagine anything. And I never will again.”
“My foolish dear . . . my dear foolish dear, don’t say that. An imagination is a wonderful thing to have . . . but like every gift we must possess it and not let it possess us. You take your imaginings a wee bit too seriously. Oh, it’s delightful . . . I know that rapture. But you must learn to keep on this side of the borderline between the real and the unreal. Then the power to escape at will into a beautiful world of your own will help you amazingly through the hard places of life. I can always solve a problem more easily after I’ve had a voyage or two to the Islands of Enchantment.”
Nan felt her self-respect coming back to her with these words of comfort and wisdom. Mother did not think it so silly after all. And no doubt there was somewhere in the world a Wicked Beautiful Lady with Mysterious Eyes, even if she did not live in the GLOOMY HOUSE . . . which, now that Nan came to think of it, was not such a bad place after all, with its orange marigolds and its friendly spotted cat and its geraniums and poor dear Poppa’s picture. It was really rather a jolly place and perhaps some day she would go and see Thomasine Fair again and get some more of those nice cookies. She did not hate Thomasine any longer.
“What a nice mother you are!” she sighed, in the shelter and sanctuary of those beloved arms.
A violet-grey dusk was coming over the hill. The summer night darkened about them . . . a night of velvet and whispers. A star came out over the big apple tree. When Mrs. Marshall Elliott came and Mother had to go down Nan was happy again. Mother had said she was going to repaper their room with a lovely buttercup-yellow paper and get a new cedar chest for her and Di to keep things in. Only it would not be a cedar chest. It would be an enchanted treasure chest which could not be opened unless certain mystic words were pronounced. One word the Witch of the Snow might whisper to you, the cold and lovely white Witch of the Snow. A wind might tell you another, as it passed you . . . a sad grey wind that mourned. Sooner or later you would find all the words and open the chest, to find it filled with pearls and rubies and diamonds galore. Wasn’t galore a nice word?
Oh, the old magic had not gone. The world was still full of it.
Chapter 37
“Can I be your dearest friend this year?” asked Delilah Green, during that afternoon recess.
Delilah had very round, dark-blue eyes, sleek sugar-brown curls, a small rosy mouth, and a thrilling voice with a little quaver in it. Diana Blythe responded to the charm of that voice instantly.
It was known in the Glen school that Diana Blythe was rather at loose ends for a chum. For two years she and Pauline Reese had been cronies but Pauline’s family had moved away and Diana felt very lonely. Pauline had been a good sort. To be sure, she was quite lacking in the mystic charm that the now almost forgotten Jenny Penny had possessed but she was practical, full of fun, sensible. That last was Susan’s adjective and was the highest praise Susan could bestow. She had been entirely satisfied with Pauline as a friend for Diana.
Diana looked at Delilah doubtfully, then glanced across the playground at Laura Carr, who was also a new girl. Laura and she had spent the forenoon recess together and had found each other very agreeable. But Laura was rather plain, with freckles and unmanageable sandy hair. She had none of Delilah Green’s beauty and not a spark of her allure.
Delilah understood Diana’s look and a hurt expression crept over her face; her blue eyes seemed ready to brim with tears.
“If you love her you can’t love me. Choose between us,” said Delilah, holding out her hands dramatically. Her voice was more thrilling than ever . . . it positively sent a creep along Diana’s spine. She put her hands in Delilah’s and they looked at each other solemnly, feeling dedicated and sealed. At least, Diana felt that way.
“You’ll love me forever, won’t you?” asked Delilah passionately.
“Forever,” vowed Diana with equal passion.
Delilah slipped her arms around Diana’s waist and they walked down to the brook together. The rest of the Fourth class understood that an alliance had been concluded. Laura Carr gave a tiny sigh. She had liked Diana Blythe very much. But she knew she could not compete with Delilah.
“I’m so glad you’re going to let me love you,” Delilah was saying. “I’m so very affectionate . . . I just can’t help loving people. Please be kind to me, Diana. I am a child of sorrow. I was put under a curse at birth. Nobody . . . nobody loves me.”
Delilah somehow contrived to put ages of loneliness and loveliness into that “nobody.” Diana tightened her clasp.
“You’ll never have to say that after this, Delilah. I will always love you.”
“World without end?”
“World without end,” answered Diana. They kissed each other, as in a rite. Two boys on the fence whooped derisively, but who cared?
“You’ll like me ever so much better than Laura Carr,” said Delilah. “Now that we’re dear friends I can tell you what I wouldn’t have dreamed of telling you if you had picked her. She is deceitful. Dreadfully deceitful. She pretends to be your friend to your face and behind your back she makes fun of you and says the meanest things. A girl I know went to school with her at Mowbray’s Narrows and she told me. You’ve had a narrow escape. I’m so different from that . . . I am as true as gold, Diana.”
“I’m sure you are. But what did you mean by saying you were a child of sorrow, Delilah?”
Delilah’s eyes seemed to expand until they were absolutely enormous.
“I have a stepmother,” she whispered.
“A stepmother?”
“When your mother dies and your father marries again she is a stepmother,” said Delilah, with still more thrills in her voice. “Now you know it all, Diana. If you knew the way I am treated! But I never complain. I suffer in silence.”
If Delilah really suffered in silence it might be wondered where Diana got all the information she showered on the Ingleside folks during the next few weeks. She was in the throes of a wild passion of adoration and sympathy for and with sorrow-laden, persecuted Delilah, and she had to talk about her to anyone who would listen.
“I suppose this new infatuation will ru
n its course in due time,” said Anne. “Who is this Delilah, Susan? I don’t want the children to be little snobs . . . but after our experience with Jenny Penny . . .”
“The Greens are very respectable, Mrs. Dr. dear. They are well-known at Lowbridge. They moved into the old Hunter place this summer. Mrs. Green is the second wife and has two children of her own. I do not know much about her but she seems to have a slow, kind, easy way with her. I can hardly believe she uses Delilah as Di says.”
“Don’t put too much credence in everything Delilah tells you,” Anne warned Diana. “She may be prone to exaggerate a little. Remember Jenny Penny . . .”
“Why, Mother, Delilah isn’t a single bit like Jenny Penny,” said Di indignantly. “Not one bit. She is scrupulously truthful. If you only saw her, Mother, you’d know she couldn’t tell a lie. They all pick on her at home because she is so different. And she has such an affectionate nature. She has been persecuted from her birth. Her stepmother hates her. It just breaks my heart to hear of her sufferings. Why, Mother, she doesn’t get enough to eat, truly she doesn’t. She never knows what it is not to be hungry. Mother, they send her to bed without any supper lots of times and she cries herself to sleep. Did you ever cry because you were hungry, Mother?”
“Often,” said Mother.
Diana stared at her mother, all the wind taken out of the sails of her rhetorical question.
“I was often very hungry before I came to Green Gables — at the orphanage . . . and before. I’ve never cared to talk of those days.”
“Well, you ought to be able to understand Delilah, then,” said Di, rallying her confused wits. “When she is so hungry she just sits down and imagines things to eat. Just think of her imagining things to eat!”
“You and Nan do enough of that yourselves,” said Anne. But Di would not listen.
“Her sufferings are not only physical but spiritual. Why, she wants to be a missionary, Mother . . . to consecrate her life . . . and they all laugh at her.”
“Very heartless of them,” agreed Anne. But something in her voice made Di suspicious.
“Mother, why will you be so sceptical?” she demanded reproachfully.
“For the second time,” smiled Mother, “I must remind you of Jenny Penny. You believed in her, too.”
“I was only a child then and it was easy to fool me,” said Diana in her stateliest manner. She felt that Mother was not her usual sympathetic and understanding self in regard to Delilah Green. After that Diana talked only to Susan about her, since Nan merely nodded when Delilah’s name was mentioned. “Just jealousy,” thought Diana sadly.
Not that Susan was so markedly sympathetic either. But Diana just had to talk to somebody about Delilah and Susan’s derision did not hurt like Mother’s. You wouldn’t expect Susan to understand fully. But Mother had been a girl . . . Mother had loved Aunt Diana . . . Mother had such a tender heart. How was it that the account of poor darling Delilah’s ill-treatment left her so cold?
“Maybe she’s a little jealous, too, because I love Delilah so much,” reflected Diana sagely. “They say mothers do get like that. Kind of possessive.”
“It makes my blood boil to hear of the way her stepmother treats Delilah,” Di told Susan. “She is a martyr, Susan. She never has anything but a little porridge for breakfast and supper . . . a very little bit of porridge. And she isn’t allowed sugar on the porridge. Susan, I’ve given up taking sugar on mine because it made me feel guilty.”
“Oh, so that’s why. Well, sugar has gone up a cent, so maybe it is just as well.”
Diana vowed she wouldn’t tell Susan anything more about Delilah, but next evening she was so indignant she couldn’t help herself.
“Susan, Delilah’s mother chased her last night with a red-hot teakettle. Think of if, Susan. Of course Delilah says she doesn’t do that very often . . . only when she is greatly exasperated. Mostly she just locks Delilah in a dark garret . . . a haunted garret. The ghosts that poor child has seen, Susan! It can’t be healthy for her. The last time they shut her in the garret she saw the weirdest little black creature sitting on the spinning-wheel, humming.”
“What kind of a creature,” asked Susan gravely. She was beginning to enjoy Delilah’s tribulations and Di’s italics, and she and Mrs. Dr. laughed over them in secret.
“I don’t know . . . it was just a creature. It almost drove her to suicide. I am really afraid she will be driven to it yet. You know, Susan, she had an uncle who committed suicide twice.”
“Was not once enough?” asked Susan heartlessly.
Di went off in a huff, but next day she had to come back with another tale of woe.
“Delilah has never had a doll, Susan. She did so hope she would get one in her stocking last Christmas. And what do you think she found instead, Susan? A switch! They whip her almost every day, you know. Think of that poor child being whipped, Susan.”
“I was whipped several times when I was young and I am none the worse of it now,” said Susan, who would have done goodness knows what if anyone had ever tried to whip an Ingleside child.
“When I told Delilah about our Christmas trees, she wept, Susan. She never had a Christmas tree. But she is bound she is going to have one this year. She had found an old umbrella with nothing but the ribs and she is going to set it in a pail and decorate it for a Christmas tree. Isn’t that pathetic, Susan?”
“Are there not plenty of young spruces handy? The back of the old Hunter place has practically gone spruce of late years,” said Susan. “I do wish that girl was called anything but Delilah. Such a name for a Christian child!”
“Why, it is in the Bible, Susan. Delilah is very proud of her Bible name. Today in school, Susan, I told Delilah we were going to have chicken for dinner tomorrow and she said . . . what do you think she said, Susan?”
“I am sure I could never guess,” said Susan emphatically. “And you have no business to be talking in school.”
“Oh, we don’t. Delilah says we must never break any of the rules. Her standards are very high. We write each other letters in our scribblers and exchange them. Well, Delilah said, ‘Could you bring me a bone, Diana?’ It brought tears to my eye. I’m going to take her a bone . . . with a lot of meat on it. Delilah needs good food. She has to work like a slave . . . a slave, Susan. She has to do all the housework . . . well, nearly all anyway. And if it isn’t done right she is savagely shaken . . . or made to eat in the kitchen with the servants.”
“The Greens have only one little French hired boy.”
“Well, she has to eat with him. And he sits in his sockfeet and eats in his shirtsleeves. Delilah says she doesn’t mind those things now when she has me to love her. She has no one to love her but me, Susan?”
“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.
Chapter 38
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 week-end 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 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 sweetpeas for a centrepiece.
“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 dolls 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.
The Complete Works of L M Montgomery Page 158
