Anne of Ingleside - L. M. Montgomery [110]
‘What is keeping you awake, pet?’ said Susan, coming in with a maple sugar bun.
‘Oh, Thuthan, I’m… I’m jutht tired of being me.’
Susan looked troubled. Come to think of it, the child had looked tired at supper.
‘And of course the doctor’s away. Doctors’ families die and shoemakers’ wives go barefoot,’ she thought. Then, aloud:
‘I am going to see if you have a temperature, my pet.’
‘No, no, Thuthan. It’th jutht… I’ve done thome-thing dreadful, Thuthan… Thatan made me do it… no, no, he didn’t, Thuthan… I did it mythelf. I… threw the cake into the creek.’
‘Land of hope and glory!’ said Susan blankly. ‘Whatever made you do that?’
‘Do what?’ It was Mother, home from town. Susan retreated gladly, thankful that Mrs Doctor had the situation in hand. Rilla sobbed out the whole story.
‘Darling, I don’t understand. Why did you think it was such a dreadful thing to take a cake to the church?’
‘I thought it wath jutht like old Tillie Pake, Mummy. And I’ve dithgrathed you… oh, Mummy, if you’ll forgive me I’ll never be tho naughty again… and I’ll tell the committee you did thend a cake…’
‘Never mind the committee, darling. They would have more than enough cakes… they always do. It’s not likely anyone would notice we didn’t send one. We just won’t talk of this to anybody. But always after this, Bertha Marilla Blythe, remember the fact that neither Susan nor Mother would ever ask you to do anything disgraceful.’
Life was sweet again. Daddy came to the door to say ‘Goodnight, Kittenkin,’ and Susan slipped in to say they were going to have a chicken-pie for dinner tomorrow.
‘With lotth of gravy, Thuthan?’
‘Lashings of it.’
‘And may I have a brown egg for breakfath, Thuthan. I don’t detherve it…’
‘You shall have two brown eggs if you want them. And now you must eat your bun and go to sleep, little pet.’
Rilla ate her bun, but before she went to sleep she slipped out of bed and knelt down. Very earnestly she said:
‘Dear God, pleathe make me a good and obedient child alwayth, no matter what I’m told to do. And bleth dear Mith Emmy and all the poor orphanth.’
37
The Ingleside children played together and walked together and had all kinds of adventures together; and each of them, in addition to this, had his and her own inner life of dream and fancy. Especially Nan, who from the very first had fashioned secret drama for herself out of everything she heard or saw or read, and sojourned in realms of wonder and romance quite unsuspected in her household circle. At first she wove patterns of pixy dances and elves in haunted valleys and dryads in birch-trees. She and the great willow at the gate had secrets only they knew, and the old empty Bailey house at the upper end of Rainbow Valley was the ruin of a haunted tower. For weeks she might be a king’s daughter imprisoned in a lonely castle by the sea… for months she was a nurse in a leper colony in India or some land ‘far, far away’. ‘Far, far away’ were still words of magic to Nan… like faint music over a windy hill.
As she grew older she built up her dramas about the real people she saw in her little life. Especially the people in church. Nan liked to look at the people in church because every one was so nicely dressed. It was almost miraculous. They looked so different from what they did on week-days.
The quiet, respectable occupants of the various family pews would have been amazed and perhaps a little horrified if they had known the romances the demure, brown-eyed maiden in the Ingleside pew was concocting about them. Black-browed, kind-hearted Annetta Millison would have been thunderstruck to know that Nan Blythe pictured her as a kidnapper of children, boiling them alive to make potions that would keep her young for ever. Nan pictured this so vividly that she was half frightened to death when she met Annetta Millison once, in a twilight lane astir with