Anne of Ingleside - L. M. Montgomery [10]
Gingerbread and whipped cream was Jem’s favourite dessert. But tonight it had no charm to soothe his stormy soul.
‘I don’t want any,’ he said sulkily. He got up and marched away from the table, turning at the door to hurl a final defiance.
‘I ain’t going to bed till nine o’clock anyhow. And when I’m grown up I’m never going to bed. I’m going to stay up all night, every night, and get tattooed all over. I’m just going to be as bad as bad can be. You’ll see.’
‘ “I’m not” would be so much better than “ain’t”, dear,’ said Mother.
Could nothing make them feel?
‘I suppose nobody wants my opinion, Annie, but if I had talked to my parents like that when I was a child I would have been whipped within an inch of my life,’ said Aunt Mary Maria. ‘I think it is a great pity the birch rod is so neglected now in some homes.’
‘Little Jem is not to blame,’ snapped Susan, seeing that Dr and Mrs Doctor were not going to say anything. But if Mary Maria Blythe was going to get away with that, she, Susan, would know the reason why. ‘Bertie Shakespeare Drew put him up to it, filling him up with what fun it would be to see Joe Drew tattooed. He was here all the afternoon and sneaked into the kitchen and took the best aluminium saucepan to use as a helmet. Said they were playing soldiers. Then they made boats out of shingles and got soaked to the bone sailing them in the Hollow brook. And after that they went hopping about the yard for a solid hour, making the weirdest noises, pretending they were frogs. Frogs! No wonder Little Jem is tired out and not himself. He is the best-behaved child that ever lived when he is not worn to a frazzle and that you may tie to.’
Aunt Mary Maria said nothing aggravatingly. She never talked to Susan Baker at meal-times, thus expressing her disapproval over Susan being allowed to ‘sit with the family’ at all.
Anne and Susan had thrashed that out before Aunt Mary Maria had come. Susan, who ‘knew her place’, never sat or expected to sit with the family when there was company at Ingleside.
‘But Aunt Mary Maria isn’t company,’ said Anne. ‘She’s just one of the family, and so are you, Susan.’
In the end Susan gave in, not without a secret satisfaction that Mary Maria Blythe would see that she was no common hired girl. Susan had never met Aunt Mary Maria, but a niece of Susan’s, the daughter of her sister Matilda, had worked for her in Charlottetown and had told Susan all about her.
‘I am not going to pretend to you, Susan, that I’m overjoyed at the prospect of a visit from Aunt Mary Maria, especially just now,’ said Anne frankly. ‘But she has written Gilbert asking if she may come for a few weeks… and you know how the doctor is about such things…
‘As he has a perfect right to be,’ said Susan staunchly. ‘What’s a man to do but stand by his own flesh and blood? But as for a few weeks… well, Mrs Doctor dear, I don’t want to look on the dark side of things… but my sister Matilda’s sister-in-law come to visit her for a few weeks and stayed for twenty years.’
‘I don’t think we need dread anything like that, Susan,’ smiled Anne. ‘Aunt Mary Maria has a very nice home of her own in Charlottetown. But she is finding it very big and lonely. Her mother died two years ago, you know… she was eighty-five, and Aunt Mary Maria was very good to her and misses her very much. Let’s make her visit as pleasant as we can, Susan.’
‘I’ll do what in me lies, Mrs Doctor dear. Of course, we must put another board in the table, but after all is said and done it’s better to be lengthening the table than shortening it down.’
‘We mustn’t have flowers on the table, Susan, because I understand they give her asthma. And pepper makes her sneeze, so we’d better not have it. She is subject to frequent bad headaches, too, so we must really