Anne of Ingleside - L. M. Montgomery [74]
‘Keep him shut up till all the rest are gone and the snow comes,’ advised Captain Malachi. ‘Then he’ll kind of forget about it and be all right till spring.’
So Cock Robin was a sort of prisoner. He grew very restless. He flew aimlessly about the house or sat on the window-sill and looked wistfully out at his fellows who were preparing to follow who knew what mysterious call. His appetite failed, and even worms and Susan’s nuttiest nuts would not tempt him. The children pointed out to him all the dangers he might encounter… cold, hunger, friendlessness, storms, black nights, cats. But Cock Robin had felt or heard the summons and all his being yearned to answer.
Susan was the last to give in. She was very grim for several days. But finally…
‘Let him go,’ she said. ‘It is against nature to hold him.’
They set him free the last day of October, after he had been mewed up for a month. The children kissed him goodbye with tears. He flew joyfully off, returning next morning to Susan’s sill for crumbs, and then spreading his wings for the long flight. ‘He may come back to us in the spring, darling,’ Anne said to the sobbing Rilla. But Rilla was not to be comforted.
‘That ith too far away,’ she sobbed.
Anne smiled and sighed. The seasons that seemed so long to Baby Rilla were beginning to pass all too swiftly for her. Another summer was ended, lighted out of life by the ageless gold of Lombardy torches. Soon… all too soon… the children of Ingleside would be children no longer. But they were still hers… hers to welcome when they came home at night… hers to fill life with tender wonder and delight… hers to love and cheer and scold… a little. For sometimes they were very naughty, even though they hardly deserved to be called by Mrs Alec Davies ‘that pack of Ingleside demons’ when she heard that Bertie Shakespeare Drew had been slightly scorched while playing the part of a Red Indian burned at the stake in Rainbow Valley. It had taken Jem and Walter a little longer to untie him than they had bargained for. They got slightly singed too, but nobody pitied them.
November was a dismal month that year, a month of east wind and fog. Some days there was nothing but cold mist driving past or drifting over the grey sea beyond the bar. The shivering poplar-trees dropped their last leaves. The garden was dead and all its colour and personality had gone from it, except the asparagus bed, which was still a fascinating golden jungle. Walter had to desert his study roost in the maple-tree and learn his lessons in the house. It rained… and rained… and rained. ‘Will the world ever be dry again?’ moaned Di despairingly. Then there was a week steeped in the magic of Indian summer sunshine, and in the cold sharp evenings Mother would touch a match to the kindling in the grate, and Susan would have baked potatoes with supper.
The big fireplace was the centre of the home those evenings. It was the high spot of the day when they gathered around it after supper. Anne sewed and planned little winter wardrobes… ‘Nan must have a red dress, since she is so set on it’… and sometimes thought of Hannah, weaving her little coat every year for the small Samuel. Mothers were the same all through the centuries… a great sisterhood of love and service… the remembered and the unremembered alike.
Susan heard the children’s spellings and then they amused themselves as they liked. Walter, living in his world of imagination and beautiful dreams, was absorbed in writing a series of letters from the chipmunk who lived in Rainbow Valley to the chipmunk who lived behind the barn. Susan pretended to scoff at them when he read them to her, but she secretly made copies of them and sent them to Rebecca Dew.
‘I found these readable, Miss Dew, dear, though you may consider them too trivial to peruse. In that case I know you will pardon a doting old woman for troubling you with them. He is considered very clever in school, and at least these compositions