Anne of Ingleside - L. M. Montgomery [9]
‘I’m sure you handled the situation beautifully, Susan,’ said Anne gravely. ‘And I think it is time they all knew what we are hoping for.’
But the best of all was when Gilbert came to her, as she stood at her window, watching a fog creeping in from the sea, over the moonlit dunes and the harbour, right into the long narrow valley upon which Ingleside looked down and in which nestled the village of Glen St Mary.
‘To come back at the end of a hard day and find you! Are you happy, Annest of Annes?’
‘Happy!’ Anne bent to sniff a vaseful of apple-blossoms Jem had set on her dressing-table. She felt surrounded and encompassed by love. ‘Gilbert, dear, it’s been lovely to be Anne of Green Gables again for a week, but it’s a hundred times lovelier to come back and be Anne of Ingleside.’
4
‘Absolutely not,’ said Dr Blythe, in a tone Jem understood.
Jem knew there was no hope of Dad’s changing his mind or that Mother would try to change it for him. It was plain to be seen that on this point Mother and Dad were as one. Jem’s hazel eyes darkened with anger and disappointment as he looked at his cruel parents, glared at them, all the more glaringly that they were so maddening indifferent to his glares and went on eating their suppers as if nothing at all were wrong and out of joint. Of course, Aunt Mary Maria noticed his glares… nothing ever escaped Aunt Mary Maria’s mournful, pale-blue eyes… but she only seemed amused at them.
Bertie Shakespeare Drew had been up playing with Jem all the afternoon, Walter having gone down to the old House of Dreams to play with Kenneth and Persis Ford; and Bertie Shakespeare had told Jem that all the Glen boys were going down to the Harbour Mouth that evening to see Captain Bill Taylor tattoo a snake on his cousin Joe Drew’s arm. He, Bertie Shakespeare, was going and wouldn’t Jem come too? It would be such fun. Jem was at once crazy to go; and now he had been told that it was utterly out of the question.
‘For one reason among many,’ said Dad, ‘it’s much too far for you to go down to the Harbour Mouth with those boys. They won’t get back till late, and your bed-time is supposed to be at eight, son.’
‘I was sent to bed at seven every night of my life when I was a child,’ said Aunt Mary Maria.
‘You must wait till you are older, Jem, before you go so far away in the evenings,’ said Mother.
‘You said that last week,’ cried Jem indignantly, ‘and I am older now. You’d think I was a baby! Bertie’s going, and I’m just as old as him.’
‘There’s measles around,’ said Aunt Mary Maria darkly. ‘You might catch measles, James.’
Jem hated to be called James. And she always did it.
‘I want to catch measles –’ he muttered rebelliously. Then, catching Dad’s eye instead, subsided. Dad would never let anyone ‘talk back’ to Aunt Mary Maria. Jem hated Aunt Mary Maria. Aunt Diana and Aunt Marilla were such ducks of aunts, but an aunt like Aunt Mary Maria was something wholly new in Jem’s experience.
‘All right,’ he said defiantly, looking at Mother, so that nobody could suppose he was talking to Aunt Mary Maria, ‘if you don’t want to love me you don’t have to. But will you like it if I just go away ’n’ shoot tigers in Africa?’
‘There are no tigers in Africa, dear,’ said Mother gently.
‘Lions, then!’ shouted Jem. They were determined to put him in the wrong, were they? They were bound to laugh at him, were they? He’d show them! ‘You can’t say there’s no lions in Africa. There’s millions of lions in Africa. Africa’s just full of lions!’
Mother and Father only smiled again, much to Aunt Mary Maria’s disapproval. Impertinence in children should never be condoned.
‘Meanwhile,’ said Susan, torn between