Anne of Windy Poplars - L. M. Montgomery [9]
‘Nobody knows what I’ve gone through on account of That Cat – nobody!’ Rebecca has assured me.
The widows are going to wear well. Every day I like them better. Aunt Kate doesn’t believe in reading novels, but informs me that she does not propose to censor my reading matter. Aunt Chatty loves novels. She has a ‘hidy-hole’ where she keeps them – she smuggles them in from the town library – together with a pack of cards for solitaire and anything else she doesn’t want Aunt Kate to see. It is in a chair seat which nobody but Aunt Chatty knows is more than a chair seat. She has shared the secret with me, because, I strongly suspect, she wants me to aid and abet her in the aforesaid smuggling. There shouldn’t really be any need for hidy-holes at Windy Willows, for I never saw a house with so many mysterious cupboards, though, to be sure, Rebecca Dew won’t let them be mysterious. She is always cleaning them out ferociously. ‘A house can’t keep itself clean,’ she says sorrowfully, when either of the widows protests. I am sure she would make short work of a novel or a pack of cards if she found them. They are both a horror to her orthodox soul. Rebecca Dew says cards are the devil’s books, and novels even worse. The only things Rebecca ever reads, apart from her Bible, are the Society columns of the Montreal Guardian. She loves to pore over the houses and furniture and doings of millionaires.
‘Just fancy soaking in a golden bath-tub, Miss Shirley!’ she said wistfully.
But she’s really an old duck. She has produced from somewhere a comfortable old wing chair of faded brocade that just fits my kinks, and says, ‘This is your chair. We’ll keep it for you.’ And she won’t let Dusty Miller sleep on it, lest I get hairs on my school skirt, and give the Pringles something to talk about.
The whole three are very much interested in my circlet of pearls, and what it signifies. Aunt Kate showed me her engagement ring set with turquoises. She can’t wear it because it has grown too small. But poor Aunt Chatty owned to me with tears in her eyes that she had never had an engagement ring. Her husband thought it ‘an unnecessary expenditure’. She was in my room at the time, giving her face a bath in buttermilk. She does it every night to preserve her complexion, and has sworn me to secrecy because she doesn’t want Aunt Kate to know it.
‘She would think it ridiculous in a woman of my age. And I am sure Rebecca Dew thinks that no Christian woman should try to be beautiful. I used to slip down to the kitchen to do it after Kate had gone to sleep, but I was always afraid of Rebecca Dew coming down. She has ears like a cat’s even when she is asleep. If I could just slip in here every night and do it… Oh, thank you, my dear.’
I have found out a little about our neighbours at the Evergreens. Mrs Campbell (who was a Pringle!) is eighty. I haven’t seen her, but from what I can gather she is a very grim old lady. She has a maid, Martha Monkman, almost as ancient and grim as herself, who is generally referred to as ‘Mrs Campbell’s Woman’. And she has her great-granddaughter, little Elizabeth Grayson, living with her. Elizabeth – on whom I have never laid eyes in spite of my two weeks’ sojourn – is eight years old, and goes to the public school by the ‘back way’, a short cut through the backyards,