Ingleside rang with laughter from dawn to sunset. Even when the older children were in school Shirley and Rilla were big enough now to keep up the tradition of laughter. Even Gilbert laughed more than usual this autumn. 'I like a dad who can laugh,' Jem reflected. Dr Bronson of Mowbray Narrows never laughed. He was said to have built up his practice entirely on his owlish look of wisdom; but Dad had a better practice still, and people were pretty far gone when they couldn't laugh over one of his jokes.
Anne was busy in her garden every warm day, drinking in colour like wine, where the late sunshine fell on crimson maples, revelling in the exquisite sadness of fleeting beauty. One gold-grey, smoky afternoon she and Jem planted all the tulip bulbs, that would have a resurrection of rose and scarlet and purple and gold in June. 'Isn't it nice to be preparing for spring when you know you've got to face the winter, Jem?' 'And it's nice to be making the garden beautiful,' said Jem. 'Susan says it is God who makes everything beautiful, but we can help Him out a bit, can't we, Mums?'
'Always... always, Jem. He shares that privilege with us.'
Still, nothing is ever quite perfect. The Ingleside folks were worried over Cock Robin. They had been told that when the robins went away he would want to go too.
'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 are not poetry. I might also add that little Jem made ninety-nine in his arithmetic examination last week and nobody can understand why the other mark was cut off. Perhaps I should not say so, Miss Dew, dear, but it is my conviction that that child is born for greatness. We may not live to see it, but he may yet be the Premier of Canada.'
The Shrimp basked in the glow, and Nan's kitten, Pussy-willow, which always suggested some dainty exquisite little lady in black and silver, climbed everybody's legs impartially. 'Two cats, and mouse tracks everywhere in the pantry,' was Susan's disapproving parenthesis; the children talked over their little adventures together, and the wail of the distant ocean came through the cold autumn night.
Sometimes Miss Cornelia dropped in for a short call while her husband exchanged opinions in Carter Flagg's store. Little pitchers pricked up their long ears then for Miss Cornelia always had the latest gossip and they always heard the most interesting things about people. It would be such fun next Sunday to sit in church and look at the said people, savouring what you knew about them, prim and proper as they looked.
'My, but you're cosy here, Anne, dearie. It's a real keen night and starting to snow. Is the Doctor out?'
'Yes. I hated to see him go... but they telephoned from the Harbour Head that Mrs Brooker Shaw insisted on seeing him,' said Anne, while Susan swiftly and stealthily removed from the hearthrug a huge fishbone the Shrimp had brought in, praying that Miss Cornelia had not noticed it.
'She's no more sick than I am,' said Susan bitterly. 'But I hear she had got a new lace nightgown and no doubt she wants her doctor to see her in it. Lace nightgowns!'
'Her daughter Leona brought it home from Boston for her. She came Friday evening, with four trunks,' said Miss Cornelia. 'I can remember her starting off to the States nine years ago, lugging a broken old Gladstone bag with things oozing out of it. That was when she was feeling pretty blue over Phil Turner's jilting her. She tried to hide it, but everyone knew. Now she's back to "nurse her mother", so she says. She'll be trying to flirt with the Doctor. I warn you, Anne, dearie. But I don't suppose it will matter to him even if he is a man. And you're not like Mrs Doctor Bronson at Mowbray Narrows. She is very jealous of her husband's female patients, I am told.'
'And of the trained nurses,' said Susan.
'Well, some of those trained nurses are far too pretty for their job,' said Miss Cornelia. 'There's Janie Arthur now, she's taking a rest between cases and trying to keep her two young men from finding out about each other.'
'Pretty as she is, she is no spring chicken now,' said Susan firmly, 'and it would be far better for her to make a choice and settle down. Look at her Aunt Eudora... she said she didn't intend to marry till she got through flirting, and behold the result. Even yet she tries to flirt with every man in sight, though she is forty-five if she is a day. That is what comes of forming a habit. Did you ever hear, Mrs Doctor dear, what she said to her cousin Fanny when she got married? "You're taking my leavings," she said. I am informed there was a shower of sparks and they have ne
ver spoken since.'
'Life and death are in the power of the tongue,' murmured Anne absently.
'A true word, dearie. Speaking of that, I wish Mr Stanley would be a little more judicious in his sermons. He has offended Wallace Young, and Wallace is going to leave the church. Everyone says the sermon last Sunday was preached at him,'
'If a minister preaches a sermon that hits home to some particular individual people always suppose he meant it for that very person,' said Anne. 'A hand-me-down cap is bound to fit somebody's head, but it doesn't follow that it was made for him.'
'Sound sense,' approved Susan. 'And I have no use for Wallace Young. He let a firm paint ads. on his cows three years ago. That is too economical in my opinion.'
'His brother David is going to be married at last,' said Miss Cornelia. 'He's been a long time making up his mind which was cheaper, marrying or hiring. "Ye can keep a house without a woman, but it's hard sledding, Cornelia," he said to me once after his mother died. I had an idea that he was feeling his way, but he got no encouragement from me. And at last he's going to marry Jessie King.'
'Jessie King! But I thought he was supposed to be courting Mary North.'
'He says he wasn't going to marry any woman who eats cabbage. But there's a story going round that he proposed to her and she boxed his ears. And Jessie King is reported to have said that she would have liked a better-looking man, but that he'd have to do. Well, of course, it is any port in a storm for some folks.'
'I do not think, Mrs Marshall Elliott, that people in these parts say half the things they are reported to have said,' rebuked Susan. 'It is my opinion that Jessie King will make David Young a far better wife than he deserves... though as far as outward seeming goes, I will admit he looks like something that washed in with the tide.'
'Do you know that Alden and Stella have a little daughter?' asked Anne.
'So I understand. I hope Stella will be a little more sensible over it than Lisette was over her. Would you believe, Anne, dearie, Lisette positively cried because her cousin Dora's baby walked before Stella did?'
'We mothers are a foolish race,' smiled Anne. 'I remember that I felt perfectly murderous when little Bob Taylor, who was the same age as Jem to a day, cut three teeth before Jem cut one.'
'Bob Taylor's got to have an operation on his tonsils,' said Miss Cornelia.
'Why don't we ever have operations, Mother?' demanded Walter and Di together in injured tones. They so often said the same thing together. Then they linked their fingers and made a wish. 'We think and feel the same about everything,' Di was wont to explain earnestly.
'Shall I ever forget Elsie Taylor's marriage?' said Miss Cornelia reminiscently. 'Her best friend, Maisie Millison, was to play the Wedding March. She played the Dead March in Saul in place of it. Of course she always said she made a mistake because she was so flustered, but people had their own opinion. She wanted Mac Moorside for herself. A good-looking rogue with a silver tongue... always saying to women just what he thought they'd like to hear. He made Elsie's life miserable. Ah, well, Anne, dearie, they've both passed long since into the Silent Land, and Maisie's been married to Harley Russell for years, and everybody has forgotten that he proposed to her, expecting her to say "No" and she said "Yes" instead. Harley has forgotten it himself... just like a man. He thinks he has got the best wife in the world and congratulates himself on being clever enough to get her.'
'Why did he propose to her if he wanted her to say "No"? It seems to me a very strange proceeding,' said Susan, immediately adding with crushing humility, 'But of course I would not be expected to know anything about that.'
'His father ordered him to. He didn't want to, but he thought it was quite safe. There's the Doctor now.'
As Gilbert came in a little flurry of snow blew in with him. He threw off his coat and sat gladly down to his own fireside.
'I'm later than I expected to be.'
'No doubt the new lace nightgown was very attractive,' said Anne, with an impish grin at Miss Cornelia.
'What are you talking about? Some feminine joke beyond my coarse masculine perception, I suppose. I went on to the Upper Glen to see Walter Cooper.'
'It's a mystery how that man does hang on,' said Miss Cornelia.
'I've no patience with him,' smiled Gilbert. 'He ought to have been dead long ago. A year ago I gave him two months, and here he is ruining my reputation by keeping on living.'
'If you knew the Coopers as well as I do you wouldn't risk predictions on them. Don't you know his grandfather came back to life after they'd dug the grave and got the coffin? The undertaker wouldn't take it back either. However, I understand Walter Cooper is having lots of fun rehearsing his own funeral... just like a man. Well, there's Marshall's bells... and this jar of pickled pears is for you, Anne, dearie.'
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 by her than courted by any other: and to be selected as a temporary confidant of Jenny Penny's was an honour almost too great to be borne. For Jenny Penny's confidences were exciting. Evidently the Pennys were no common people. Jenny's Aunt Lina, it appeared, possessed a wonderful gold and garnet necklace which had been given her by an uncle who was a millionaire. One of her cousins had a diamond ring that cost a thousand dollars, and another cousin had won a prize in elocution over seventeen hundred competitors. She had an aunt who was a missionary and worked among the leopards in India. In short, the Glen schoolgirls, for a time at least, accepted Jenny Penny at her own valuation, looked up to her with mingled admiration and envy, and talked so much about her at their supper tables that their elders were finally constrained to take notice.
'Who is this little girl Di seems so taken up with, Susan?' asked Anne one evening, after Di had been telling of 'the mansion' Jenny lived in, with white wooden lace around its roof, five bay windows, a wonderful birch grove behind it, and a red marble mantelpiece in the parlour. 'Penny is a name I've never heard in Four Winds. Do you know anything about them?'
'They are a new family that have moved to the old Conway farm on the Base Line, Mrs Doctor dear. Mr Penny is said to be a carpenter who couldn't make a living carpentering... being too busy, as I understand, trying to prove there is no God... and has decided to try farming. From all I can make out, they are a queer lot. The young ones do just as they like. He says he was bossed to death when he was a kid and his children are not going to be. That is why this Jenny one is coming to the Glen school. They are nearer the Mowbray Narrows school and the other children go there, but Jenny made up her mind to come to the Glen. Half the Conway farm is in this district, so Mr Penny pays rates to both schools, and of course he can send his children to both if he likes. Though it seems this Jenny is his niece, not his daughter. Her father and mother are dead. They say it was George Andrew Penny who put the sheep in the basement of the Baptist church at Mowbray Narrows. I do not say they are not respectable, but they are all so unkempt, Mrs Doctor dear... and the house is topsy-turvy... and, if I may presume to advise, you do not want Diana mixed up with a monkey tribe like that.'