Anne of Ingleside - L. M. Montgomery [77]
They all went to the door to see Miss Cornelia off. Walter’s dark grey eyes peered out into the stormy night.
‘I wonder where Cock Robin is tonight, and if he misses us,’ he said wistfully. Perhaps Cock Robin had gone to that mysterious place Mrs Elliott was always referring to as the Silent Land.
‘Cock Robin is in a land of sunshine,’ said Anne. ‘He’ll be back in the spring, I feel quite sure, and that’s only five months away. Chickabids, you should all have been in bed long ago.’
‘Susan,’ Di was saying in the pantry, ‘would you like to have a baby? I know where you could get one, brand new.’
‘Ah, now, where?’
‘They have a new one at Amy’s. Amy says the angels brought it and she thinks they might have had more sense. They’ve eight children now, not counting it. I heard you say yesterday that it made you lonesome to see Rilla getting so big… you’d no baby now. I’m sure Mrs Taylor would give you hers.’
‘The things children think of! It runs in the Taylors to have big families. Andrew Taylor’s father never could tell off-hand how many children he had… always had to stop and reckon them up. But I do not think I will take any outside babies on just yet.’
‘Susan, Amy Taylor says you are an old maid. Are you, Susan?’
‘Such has been the lot an all-wise Providence has ordained for me,’ said Susan unflinchingly.
‘Do you like being an old maid, Susan?’
‘I cannot truthfully say I do, my pet. But,’ added Susan, remembering the lot of some wives she knew, ‘I have learned that there are compensations. Now take your father’s apple-pie to him and I’ll bring his tea. The poor man must be faint from hunger.’
‘Mother, we’ve got the loveliest home in the world, haven’t we?’ said Walter as he went sleepily upstairs. ‘Only… don’t you think it would improve it if we had a few ghosts?’
‘Ghosts?’
‘Yes. Jerry Palmer’s house is full of ghosts. He saw one… a tall lady in white with a skeleton hand. I told Susan about it and she said he was either fibbing or there was something the matter with his stomach.’
‘Susan was right. As for Ingleside, nobody but happy people have ever lived here… so you see, we’re not ghostable. Now say your prayers and go to sleep.’
‘Mother, I guess I was naughty last night. I said, “Give us tomorrow our daily bread,” instead of today. It seemed more logical. Do you think God minded, Mother?’
30
Cock Robin did come back when Ingleside and Rainbow Valley burned again with the green, evasive flames of spring and brought a bride with him. The two built a nest in Walter’s apple-tree and Cock Robin resumed all his old habits, but his bride was shyer or less venturesome and would never let anyone come very near her. Susan thought Cock Robin’s return a positive miracle, and wrote Rebecca Dew about it that very night.
The spotlight in the little drama of life at Ingleside shifted from time to time, now falling on this one, now on that. They had got through the winter without anything very much out of the way happening to anyone, and in June it was Di’s turn to have an adventure.
A new girl had begun coming to the Glen school… a girl who said, when the teacher asked her name, ‘I am Jenny Penny,’ as one might say, ‘I am Queen Elizabeth,’ or ‘I am Helen of Troy.’ You felt the minute she said it that not to know Jenny Penny argued yourself unknown, and not to be condescended to by Jenny Penny meant you didn’t exist at all. At least, that was how Diana Blythe felt about it, even if she couldn’t have put it into those exact words.
Jenny Penny had nine years to Di’s eight, but from the first she took rank with the ‘big girls’ of ten and eleven. They found they could not snub or ignore her. She was not pretty, but her appearance was striking… everybody looked at her twice. She had a round, creamy face, with a soft glossless cloud of soot-black hair about it and enormous dusky blue eyes with long tangled black lashes. When she slowly raised those lashes and looked at you with those scornful eyes you felt that you were a worm honoured in not being stepped on. You liked better to be snubbed