Anne of Ingleside - L. M. Montgomery [11]
‘Good grief! Well, I’ve never noticed you and the doctor making much noise. And if I want to yell I can go to the middle of the maple bush; but if our poor children have to keep quiet all the time because of Mary Maria Blythe’s headaches… you’ll excuse me for saying I think it’s going a little too far, Mrs Doctor dear.’
‘It’s just for a few weeks, Susan.’
‘Let us hope so. Oh, well, Mrs Doctor dear, we just have to take the lean streaks with the fat in this world,’ was Susan’s final word.
So Aunt Mary Maria came, demanding immediately upon her arrival if they had had the chimneys cleaned recently. She had, it appeared, a great dread of fire. ‘And I’ve always said that the chimneys of this house aren’t nearly tall enough. I hope my bed has been well aired, Annie. Damp bed linen is terrible.’
She took possession of the Ingleside guest-room… and incidentally of all the other rooms in the house except Susan’s. Nobody hailed her arrival with frantic delight. Jem, after one look at her, slipped out to the kitchen and whispered to Susan, ‘Can we laugh while she’s here, Susan?’ Walter’s eyes brimmed with tears at sight of her and he had to be hustled ignominiously out of the room. The twins did not wait to be hustled, but ran of their own accord. Even the Shrimp, Susan averred, went and had a fit in the backyard. Only Shirley stood his ground, gazing fearlessly at her out of his round brown eyes from the safe anchorage of Susan’s lap and arm. Aunt Mary Maria thought the Ingleside children had very bad manners. But what could you expect when they had a mother who ‘wrote for the papers’ and a father who thought they were perfection just because they were his children and a hired girl like Susan Baker who never knew her place. But she, Mary Maria Blythe, would do her best for poor Cousin John’s grandchildren as long as she was at Ingleside.
‘Your grace is much too short, Gilbert,’ she said disapprovingly at her first meal. ‘Would you like me to say grace for you while I am here? It will be a better example to your family.’
Much to Susan’s horror Gilbert said he would, and Aunt Mary Maria said grace at supper. ‘More like a prayer than a grace,’ Susan sniffed over her dishes. Susan privately agreed with her niece’s description of Mary Maria Blythe. ‘She always seems to be smelling a bad smell, Aunt Susan. Not an unpleasant odour… just a bad smell.’ Gladys had a way of putting things, Susan reflected. And yet, to anyone less prejudiced than Susan, Miss Mary Maria Blythe was not ill-looking for a lady of fifty-five. She had what she believed were ‘aristocratic features’, framed by always sleek grey crimps which seemed to insult Susan’s spiky little knob of grey hair. She dressed very nicely, wore long jet earrings in her ears and fashionably high-boned net collars on her lean throat.
‘At least, we don’t need to be ashamed of her appearance,’ reflected Susan. But what Aunt Mary Maria would have thought if she had known Susan was consoling herself on such grounds must be left to the imagination.
5
Anne was cutting a vaseful of June lilies for her room and another of Susan’s peonies for Gilbert’s desk in the library… the milky-white peonies with the blood-red neck at their hearts, like a god’s kiss. The air was coming alive after the unusually hot June day and one could hardly tell whether the harbour were silver or gold.
‘There’s going to be a wonderful sunset tonight, Susan,’ she said, looking in at the kitchen window as she passed it.
‘I cannot admire the sunset until I have got my dishes washed, Mrs Doctor dear,’ protested Susan.
‘It will be gone by that time, Susan. Look at that enormous white cloud towering up over the Hollow, with its rosy pink top. Wouldn’t you like to fly up and light on it?’
Susan had a vision of herself flying up over the glen, dish-cloth in hand, to that cloud. It did not appeal to her. But allowances must be made for Mrs Doctor just now.
‘There’s a new, vicious kind of bug eating the rose-bushes,’ went on Anne. ‘I must spray them tomorrow. I’d like to do it tonight… this