Anne of Ingleside - L. M. Montgomery [61]
‘You know you shouldn’t have brought these creatures into the cellar,’ said Susan sternly. ‘What would they live on?’
‘Of course I meant to catch insects for them,’ said Walter, aggrieved. ‘I wanted to study them.’
‘There is simply no being up to them,’ moaned Susan, as she followed an indignant young Blythe up the stairs. And she did not mean the toads.
They had better luck with their robin. They had found him, little more than a baby, on the doorstep after a June night storm of wind and rain. He had a grey back and a mottled breast and bright eyes, and from the first he seemed to have complete confidence in all the Ingleside people, not even excepting the Shrimp, who never attempted to molest him, not even when Cock Robin hopped saucily up to his plate and helped himself. They fed him on worms at first, and he had such an appetite that Shirley spent most of his time digging them. He stored the worms in cans and left them around the house, much to Susan’s disgust, but she would have endured more than that for Cock Robin, who lighted so fearlessly on her work-worn finger and chirruped in her very face. Susan had taken a great fancy to Cock Robin and thought it worth mentioning in a letter to Rebecca Dew that his breast was beginning to change to a beautiful rusty red.
‘Do not think that my intellect is weakening, I beg of you, Miss Dew, dear,’ she wrote. ‘I suppose it is very silly to be so fond of a bird, but the human heart has its weaknesses. He is not imprisoned like a canary… something I could never abide, Miss Dew, dear… but ranges at will through house and garden and sleeps on a bow by Walter’s study platform up in the big apple-tree looking into Rilla’s window. Once when they took him to the Hollow he flew away but returned at eventide to their great joy, and, I must in all candour add, to my own.’
The Hollow was ‘the Hollow’ no longer. Walter had begun to feel that such a delightful spot deserved a name more in keeping with its romantic possibilities. One rainy afternoon they had to play in the garret, but the sun broke out in the early evening and flooded the Glen with splendour.
‘Oh, look at the nithe wainbow,’ cried Rilla, who always talked with a charming little lisp.
It was the most magnificent rainbow they had ever seen. One end seemed to rest on the very spire of the Presbyterian church, while the other dropped down into the reedy corner of the pond that ran into the upper end of the valley. And Walter then and there named it Rainbow Valley.
Rainbow Valley had become a world in itself to the children of Ingleside. Little winds played there ceaselessly and bird-songs re-echoed from dawn to dark. White birches glimmered all over it and from one of them… the White Lady… Walter pretended that a little dryad came out every night to talk to them. A maple-tree and a spruce-tree, growing so closely together that their boughs intertwined, he named ‘The Tree Lovers’ and an old string of sleigh-bells he had hung upon them made elfin and aerial when the wind shook them. A dragon guarded the stone bridge they had built across the brook. The trees that met over it could be swart Paynims at need and the rich green mosses along the banks were carpets, none finer, from Samarcand. Robin Hood and his merry men lurked on all sides; three water sprites dwelt in the spring; the deserted old Barclay house at the Glen end, with its grass-grown dyke and its garden overgrown with caraway, was easily transformed into a beleaguered castle. The Crusader’s sword has long been rust, but the Ingleside butcher knife was a blade forged in fairyland, and whenever Susan missed the cover of her roasting-pan she knew that it was serving as a shield for a plumed and glittering knight on high adventure bent in Rainbow Valley. Sometimes they played pirates, to please Jem, who at ten years was beginning to like