Anne of Ingleside - L. M. Montgomery [116]
Peppermints!
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 to seek, even though she read castor oil in Susan’s eye. Anne had noticed that Nan had been very quiet 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 pretendings thereof. And she knew the dreadful bitterness of losing a dream.
‘You mustn’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 Island 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