Anne of Ingleside - L. M. Montgomery [80]
‘Oh, it wasn’t like that at all, Jenny, I know… Mother told me… Aunt Leslie…’
‘I don’t want to hear about her. Whatever it is, it’s something that’d better not be talked of, Di. There’s the bell.’
‘Are you really going to ask Sadie?’ choked Di, her eyes widening with hurt.
‘Well, not right at once. I’ll wait and see. Maybe I’ll give you one more chance. But if I do it will be the last.’
A few days later Jenny Penny came to Di at recess.
‘I heard Jem saying your pa and ma went away yesterday and wouldn’t be back till tomorrow night?’
‘Yes, they went up to Avonlea to see Aunt Marilla.’
‘Then it’s your chance.’
‘My chance?’
‘To stay all night with me.’
‘Oh, Jenny… but I couldn’t.’
‘Of course you can. Don’t be a ninny. They’ll never know.’
‘But Susan wouldn’t let me…’
‘You don’t have to ask her. Just come home with me from school. Nan can tell her where you’ve gone, so she won’t be worried. And she won’t tell on you when your pa and ma come back. She’ll be scared they’d blame her.’
Di stood in an agony of indecision. She knew perfectly well she should not go with Jenny, but the temptation was irresistible. Jenny turned the full battery of her extraordinary eyes full upon Di.
‘This is your last chance,’ she said dramatically. ‘I can’t go on ’sociating with anyone who thinks herself too good to visit me. If you don’t come we part for ever.’
That settled it. Di, still in the thrall of Jenny Penny’s fascination, couldn’t face the thought of parting for ever. Nan went home alone that afternoon to tell Susan that Di had gone to stay all night with that Jenny Penny.
Had Susan been her usual active self she would have gone straight to the Pennys’ and brought Di home. But Susan had strained her ankle that morning, and while she could make shift to hobble around and get the children’s meals she knew she could never walk a mile down the Base Line road. The Pennys had no telephone, and Jem and Walter flatly refused to go. They were invited to a mussel-bake at the lighthouse and nobody would eat Di at the Pennys’. Susan had to resign herself to the inevitable.
Di and Jenny went home across the fields, which made it little more than a quarter of a mile. Di, in spite of her prodding conscience was happy. They went through so much beauty… little bays of bracken, elfin haunted, in the edges of deep-green woods, a rustling windy hollow where you waded knee-deep in buttercups, a winding lane under young maples, a brook that was a rainbow scarf of blossom, a sunny pasture field full of strawberries. Di, just wakening to a perception of the loveliness of the world, was enraptured and almost wished Jenny wouldn’t talk so much. That was all right at school, but here Di wasn’t sure she wanted to hear about the time Jenny poisoned herself… ‘zackzidentally’ of course… by taking the wrong kind of medicine. Jenny painted her dying agonies finely but was somewhat vague as to the reason she hadn’t died after all. She had ‘lost conscious’ but the doctor had managed to pull her back from the brink of the grave.
‘Though I’ve never been the same since. Di Blythe, what are you staring at? I don’t believe you’ve been listening at all.’
‘Oh, yes, I have,’ said Di guiltily. ‘I do think you’ve had the most wonderful life, Jenny. But look at the view.’
‘The view? What’s a view?’
‘Why… why… something you’re looking at. That…’ waving her hand at the panorama of meadow and woodland and cloud-smitten hill before them, with that sapphire dent of sea between the hills.
Jenny sniffed.
‘Just a lot of old trees and cows. I’ve seen it a hundred times. You’re awfully funny by spells, Di Blythe. I don’t want to hurt your feelings, but sometimes I think you’re not all there, I really do. But I s’pose you can’t help it. They say your ma is always raving like that. Well, there’s our place.’
Di gazed at the Penny house and lived through her first shock of disillusionment. Was this the ‘mansion’ Jenny had talked of? It was big enough certainly and had the five bay windows; but it was woefully in need of painting and much of the ‘wooden lace’ was missing.