Anne of Ingleside - L. M. Montgomery [69]
Nan was thinking deeply. Now, if ever, was the time to bargain with God. What would she promise to do if He made Mother well? It must be something tremendous… something that would make it worth His while. Nan remembered what Dicky Drew had said to Stanley Reese in school one day: ‘I dare you to walk through the graveyard after night.’ Nan had shuddered at the time. How could anybody walk through the graveyard after night… how could anyone even think of it? Nan had a horror of the graveyard not a soul in Ingleside suspected. Amy Taylor had once told her it was full of dead people… ‘and they don’t always stay dead,’ said Amy darkly and mysteriously. Nan could hardly bring herself to walk past it alone in broad daylight.
Far away the trees on a misty golden hill were touching the sky. Nan had often thought if she could get to that hill she could touch the sky, too. God lived just on the other side of it… He might hear you better there. But she could not get to that hill… she must just do the best she could here at Ingleside.
She clasped her little sunburned paws and lifted her tearstained face to the sky.
‘Dear God,’ she whispered, ‘if you make Mother well I’ll walk through the graveyard after night. Oh, dear God, please, please. And if You do this I won’t bother You for ever so long again.’
27
It was life, not death, that came at the ghostliest hour of the night to Ingleside. The children, sleeping at last, must have felt even in their sleep that the Shadow had withdrawn as silently and swiftly as it had come. For when they woke, to a day dark with welcome rain, there was sunshine in their eyes. They hardly needed to be told the good news by a Susan who had grown ten years younger. The crisis was past and Mother was going to live.
It was Saturday, so there was no school. They could not stir outside… even though they loved to be out in the rain. This downpour was too much for them… and they had to be very quiet inside. But they had never felt happier. Dad, almost sleepless for a week, had flung himself on the spare-room bed for a long deep slumber… but not before he had sent a long-distance message to a green-gabled house in Avonlea where two old ladies had been trembling every time the telephone rang.
Susan, whose heart of late had not been in her desserts, concocted a glorious ‘orange shuffle’ for dinner, promised a jam roly-poly for supper, and baked a double batch of butterscotch cookies. Cock Robin chirped all over the place. The very chairs looked as if they wanted to dance. The flowers in the garden lifted up their faces bravely again as the dry earth welcomed the rain. And Nan, amid all her happiness, was trying to face the consequences of her bargain with God.
She had no thought of trying to back out of it, but she kept putting it off, hoping she would get a little more courage for it. The very thought of it ‘made her blood curdle’, as Amy Taylor was so fond of saying. Susan saw there was something the matter with the child and administered castor oil, with no visible improvement. Nan took the dose quietly, though she could not help thinking that Susan gave her castor oil much oftener since that earlier bargain. But what was castor oil compared to walking through the graveyard after dark? Nan simply did not see how she could ever do it. But she must.
Mother was still so weak that nobody was allowed to see her save for a brief peep. And then she looked so white and thin. Was it because she, Nan, was not keeping her bargain?
‘We must give her time,’ said Susan.
How could you give anyone time, Nan wondered. But she knew why Mother was not getting well faster. Nan set her little pearly teeth. Tomorrow was Saturday again, and tomorrow night she would do what she had promised to do.
It rained again all the next forenoon, and Nan could not help a feeling of relief. If it was going to be a rainy night, nobody, not even God,