Anne of Ingleside - L. M. Montgomery [107]
Perhaps if it rained she wouldn’t have to go. It didn’t look like rain, but Rilla clasped her hands together… there was a dimple at the root of every finger… and said earnestly:
‘Plethe, dear God, make it rain hard. Make it rain pitchforkth. Or elth…’ Rilla thought of another saving possibility… ‘make Thusanth cake burn… burn to a crithp.’
Alas, when dinner-time came the cake, done to a turn, filled and iced, was sitting triumphantly on the kitchen table. It was a favourite cake of Rilla’s… ‘gold-and-silver cake’ did sound so luxuriant… but she felt that never again would she be able to eat a mouthful of it.
Still… wasn’t that thunder rolling over the low hills across the harbour? Perhaps God had heard her prayer, perhaps there would be an earthquake before it was time to go. Couldn’t she take a pain in her stomach if worst came to worst? No. Rilla shuddered. That would mean castor oil. Better the earthquake!
The rest of the children did not notice that Rilla, sitting in her own dear chair, with the saucy white duck worked in crewels on the back, was very quiet. Thelfith pigth! If Mummy had been home she would have noticed it. Mummy had seen right away how troubled she was that dreadful day when Dad’s picture had come out in the Enterprise. Rilla was crying bitterly in bed when Mummy came in and found out that Rilla thought it was only murderers that had their pictures in the papers. It had not taken Mummy long to put that to rights. Would Mummy like to see her daughter carrying a cake through the Glen like old Tillie Pake?
Rilla found it hard to eat any dinner, though Susan had put down her own lovely blue plate with the wreath of rosebuds on it that Aunt Rachel Lynde had sent her on her last birthday and which she was generally allowed to have only on Sundays. Blue plateth and rothbudth! When you had to do such a shameful thing! Still, the fruit puffs Susan had made for dessert were nice.
‘Thuthan, can’t Nan and Di take the cake after thcool?’ she pleaded.
‘Di is going home from school with Jessie Reese and Nan has a bone in her leg,’ said Susan, under the impression that she was being joky. ‘Besides, it would be too late. The committee wants all the cakes in by three so they can cut them up and arrange the tables before they go home to have their suppers. Why in the world don’t you want to go, Roly-poly? You always think it is such fun to go for the mail.’
Rilla was a bit of a roly-poly but she hated to be called that.
‘I don’t want to hurt my feelingth,’ she explained stiffly.
Susan laughed. Rilla was beginning to say things that made the family laugh. She never could understand why they laughed, because she was always in earnest. Only Mummy never laughed; she hadn’t laughed even when she found out that Rilla thought Daddy was a murderer.
‘The social is to make money for poor little boys and girls who haven’t any kind father or mother,’ explained Susan… as if she was a baby who didn’t understand!
‘I’m next thing to a norphan,’ said Rilla. ‘I’ve only got one father and mother.’
Susan just laughed again. Nobody understood.
‘You know your mother promised the committee that cake, pet. I have not time to take it myself and it must go. So put on your blue gingham and toddle off.’
‘My doll hath been tooken ill,’ said Rilla desperately. ‘I mutht put her to bed and thtay with her. Maybe itth ammonia.’
‘Your doll will do very well till you get back. You can go and come in half an hour,’ was Susan’s heartless response.
There was no hope. Even God had failed her… there wasn’t a sign of rain. Rilla, too near tears to protest any further, went up and put on her new smocked organdy and her Sunday hat, trimmed with daisies. Perhaps if she looked respectable people wouldn’t think she was like old Tillie Pake.
‘I think my fathe itth clean if you will kindly look behind my earth,’ she