Anne of Ingleside - L. M. Montgomery [60]
A wonderful husband, companion and aid,
One who was better the Lord never made.
A wonderful husband, tender and true,
One in a million, dear Anthony, was you.
‘!!!’ said Ingleside.
‘I hope you didn’t mind me tacking on another verse,’ said Mrs Mitchell to Anne, the next Institute meeting. ‘I just wanted to praise Anthony, a little more… and my nephew, Johnny Plummer, writ it. He just sat down and scribbled it off quick as a wink. He’s like you… he doesn’t look clever but he can poetize. He got it through his mother… she was a Wickford. The Plummers haven’t a speck of poetry in them, not a speck.’
‘What a pity you didn’t think of getting him to write Mr Mitchell’s “obitchery” in the first place,’ said Anne coldly.
‘Yes, isn’t it? But I didn’t know he could write poetry and I’d set my heart on it for Anthony’s sendoff. Then his mother showed me a poem he’d writ on a squirrel drowned in a pail of maple syrup… a really touching thing. But yours was real nice, too, Mrs Blythe. I think the two combined together made something out of the common, don’t you?’
‘I do,’ said Anne.
24
The Ingleside children were having bad luck with pets. The wriggly curly little black pup Dad brought home from Charlottetown one day just walked out the next week and disappeared into the blue. Nothing was ever seen or heard of him again, and, though there were whispers of a sailor from the Harbour Head having been seen taking a small black pup on board his ship the night she sailed, his fate remained one of the deep and dark unsolved mysteries of the Ingleside chronicles. Walter took it harder than Jem, who had not yet quite forgotten his anguish over Gyp’s death and was not ever again going to let himself love a dog not wisely but too well. Then Tiger Tom, who lived in the barn and was never allowed in the house because of his thieving propensities but got a good deal of petting for all that, was found stark and stiff on the barn floor and had to be buried with pomp and circumstance in the Hollow. Finally Jem’s rabbit, Bun, which he had bought from Joe Russell for a quarter, sickened and died. Perhaps its death was hastened by a dose of patent medicine Jem gave him, perhaps not. Joe had advised it and Joe ought to know. But Jem felt as if he had murdered Bun.
‘Is there a curse on Ingleside?’ he demanded gloomily, when Bun had been laid to rest beside Tiger Tom. Walter wrote an epitaph for him, and he and Jem and the twins wore black ribbons tied round their arms for a week, to the horror of Susan, who deemed it sacrilege. Susan was not inconsolable for the loss of Bun, who had got out once and worked havoc in her garden. Still less did she approve of two toads Walter brought in and put in the cellar. She put one of them out when evening came but could not find the other, and Walter lay awake and worried.
‘Maybe they were husband and wife,’ he thought. ‘Maybe they’re awful lonely and unhappy now they’re separated. It was the little one Susan put out, so I guess she was the lady toad and maybe she’s frightened to death all alone in that big yard without anyone to protect her… just like a widow.’
Walter couldn’t endure thinking about the widow’s woes so he slipped down to the cellar to hunt for the gentleman toad, but only succeeded in knocking down a pile of Susan’s discarded tinware with a resulting racket that might have wakened the dead. It woke only Susan, however, who came marching down with a candle, the fluttering flame of which cast the weirdest shadows on her gaunt face.
‘Walter Blythe, whatever are you doing?’
‘Susan, I’ve got to find that toad,’ said Walter desperately. ‘Susan, just think how you would feel without your husband if you had one.’
‘What on earth are you talking about?’ demanded the justifiably mystified Susan.
At this point the gentleman toad, who had evidently given himself up for lost when Susan appeared