Anne of Ingleside - L. M. Montgomery [26]
‘Our baby has never been in the world before, Aunt Mary Maria,’ said Walter proudly. ‘Susan, may I kiss her… just once… please?’
‘That you may,’ said Susan, glaring after Aunt Mary Maria’s retreating back. ‘And now I’m going down to make a cherry pie for dinner. Mary Maria Blythe made one yesterday afternoon… I wish you could see it, Mrs Doctor dear. It looks like something the cat dragged in. I shall eat as much of it myself as I can rather than waste it, but such a pie shall never be set before the doctor as long as I have my health and strength and that you may tie to.’
‘It isn’t everybody that has your knack with pastry, you know,’ said Anne.
‘Mummy,’ said Walter, as the door closed behind a gratified Susan, ‘I think we are a very nice family, don’t you?’
A very nice family, Anne reflected happily as she lay in her bed, with the baby beside her. Soon she would be about with them again, light-footed as of yore, loving them, teaching them, comforting them. They would be coming to her with their little joys and sorrows, their budding hopes, their new fears, their little problems that seemed so big to them, and their little heart-breaks that seemed so bitter. She would hold all the threads of the Ingleside life in her hands again to weave into a tapestry of beauty. And Aunt Mary Maria should have no cause to say, as Anne had heard her say two days ago, ‘You look dreadful tired, Gilbert. Does anybody ever look after you?’
Downstairs Aunt Mary Maria was shaking her head despondently.
‘All new-born infants’ legs are crooked, I know, but, Susan, that child’s legs are much too crooked. Of course, we must not say so to poor Annie. Be sure you don’t mention it to Annie, Susan.’
Susan, for once, was beyond speech.
11
By the end of August Anne was herself again, looking forward to a happy autumn. Small Bertha Marilla grew in beauty day by day and was a centre of worship to adoring brothers and sisters.
‘I thought a baby would be something that yelled all the time,’ said Jem, rapturously letting the tiny fingers cling around his. ‘Bertie Shakespeare Drew told me so.’
‘I am not doubting that the Drew babies yell all the time, Jem, dear,’ said Susan. ‘Yell at the thought of having to be Drews, I presume. But Bertha Marilla is an Ingleside baby, Jem, dear.’
‘I wish I had been born at Ingleside, Susan,’ said Jem wistfully. He always felt sorry he hadn’t been. Di cast it up to him at times.
‘Don’t you find life here rather dull?’ an old Queens’ classmate from Charlottetown had asked Anne rather patronizingly one day.
Dull! Anne almost laughed in her caller’s face. Ingleside dull! With a delicious baby bringing new wonders every day… with visits from Diana and Little Elizabeth and Rebecca Dew to be planned for… with Mrs Sam Ellison of the Upper Glen on Gilbert’s hands with a disease only three people in the world had ever been known to have before… with Walter starting to school… with Nan drinking a whole bottle of perfume from Mother’s dressing-table… they thought it would kill her, but she was never a whit the worse; with a strange black cat having the unheard-of number of ten kittens in the back porch… with Shirley locking himself in the bathroom and forgetting how to unlock it… with the Shrimp getting rolled up in a sheet of fly-paper… with Aunt Mary Maria setting the curtains of her room on fire in the dead of night while prowling with a candle and rousing the household with appalling screams. Life dull!
For Aunt Mary Maria was still at Ingleside. Occasionally she would say pathetically, ‘Whenever you are tired of me just let me know… I’m used to looking after myself.’ There was only one thing to say to that, and of course Dr Gilbert always said it. Though he did not say it quite as heartily as at first. Even Gilbert’s ‘clannishness’ was beginning to wear a little thin; he was realizing rather helplessly… ‘manlike’, as Miss Cornelia sniffed… that Aunt Mary Maria was by way of becoming a problem in his household. He had ventured one day to give a slight hint as to how