Anne of Ingleside - L. M. Montgomery [27]
‘Not a bad idea,’ encouraged Gilbert. ‘And I know a very nice little cottage in town for sale… a friend of mine is going to California… it’s very like that one you admired so much where Mrs Sarah Newman lives…’
‘But lives alone,’ sighed Aunt Mary Maria.
‘She likes it,’ said Anne hopefully.
‘There’s something wrong with anyone who likes living alone, Annie,’ said Aunt Mary Maria.
Susan repressed a groan with difficulty.
Diana came for a week in September. Then Little Elizabeth came… Little Elizabeth no longer… tall, slender, beautiful Elizabeth now. But still with the golden hair and wistful smile. Her father was returning to his office in Paris and Elizabeth was going with him to keep his house. She and Anne took long walks around the storied shores of the old harbour, coming home beneath silent, watchful autumn stars. They relived the old Windy Willows life and retraced their steps in the map of fairyland which Elizabeth still had and meant to keep for ever.
‘Hanging on the wall of my room wherever I go,’ she said.
One day a wind blew through the Ingleside garden, the first wind of autumn. That night the rose of the sunset was a trifle austere. All at once the summer had grown old. The turn of the season had come.
‘It’s early for fall,’ said Aunt Mary Maria in a tone that implied that the fall had insulted her.
But the fall was beautiful, too. There was the joy of winds blowing in from a darkly blue gulf and the splendour of harvest moons. There were lyric asters in the Hollow and children laughing in an apple-laden orchard, clear serene evenings on the high hill pastures of the Upper Glen and silvery mackerel skies with dark birds flying across them; and, as the days shortened, little grey mists stealing over the dunes and up the harbour.
With the falling leaves Rebecca Dew came to Ingleside to make a visit promised for years. She came for a week but was prevailed upon to stay two, none being so urgent as Susan. Susan and Rebecca Dew seemed to discover at first sight that they were kindred spirits… perhaps because they both loved Anne, perhaps because they both hated Aunt Mary Maria.
There came an evening in the kitchen when, as the rain dripped down on the dead leaves outside and the wind cried around the eaves and corners of Ingleside, Susan poured out all her woes to sympathetic Rebecca Dew. The doctor and his wife had gone out to make a call, the small fry were all cosy in their beds, and Aunt Mary Maria fortunately out of the way with a headache… ‘just like a band of iron round my brain’, she had moaned.
‘Anyone,’ remarked Rebecca Dew, opening the oven door and depositing her feet comfortably in the oven, ‘who eats as much fried mackerel as that woman did for supper deserves to have a headache. I do not deny I ate my share… for I will say, Miss Baker, I never knew anyone who could fry mackerel like you… but I did not eat four pieces.’
‘Miss Dew, dear,’ said Susan earnestly, laying down her knitting and gazing imploringly into Rebecca’s little black eyes. ‘You have seen something of what Mary Maria Blythe is like in the time you have been here. But you do not know the half… no, nor yet the quarter. Miss Dew, dear, I feel that I can trust you. May I open my heart to you in strict confidence?’
‘You may, Miss Baker.’
‘That woman came here in June and it is my opinion she means to stay here the rest of her life. Everyone in this house detests her… even the doctor has no use for her now, hide it as he will and does. But he is clannish and says his father’s cousin must not be made to feel unwelcome in his house. I have begged,’ said Susan, in a tone which seemed to imply she had done it on her knees, ‘I have begged Mrs Doctor to put her foot down and say Mary Maria Blythe must go. But Mrs Doctor is too soft-hearted… and so we are helpless, Miss Dew… completely helpless.’
‘I wish I had the handling of her,’ said Rebecca Dew, who had smarted considerably