Anne of Ingleside (18 page)

‘I think Anthony Mitchell would have liked that,’ said Anne, flinging her window open to lean out to the spring. Already there were crooked little rows of young lettuce in the children’s garden; the sunset was soft and pink behind the maple grove; the Hollow rang with the faint, sweet laughter of children.

‘Spring is so lovely, I hate to go to sleep and miss any of it,’ said Anne.

Mrs Anthony Mitchell came up to get her ‘obitchery’ one afternoon the next week. Anne read it to her with a secret bit of pride; but Mrs Anthony’s face did not express unmixed satisfaction.

‘My, I call that real sprightly. You do put things so well. But… but… you didn’t say a word about him being in heaven. Weren’t you
sure
he is there?’

‘So sure that it wasn’t necessary to mention it, Mrs Mitchell.’

‘Well,
some
people might doubt. He… he didn’t go to church as often as he might… though he was a member in good standing. And it doesn’t tell his age… nor mention the flowers. Why, you just couldn’t count the wreaths on the coffin. Flowers are poetical enough I should think!’

‘I’m sorry…

‘Oh, I don’t blame you… not a mite do I blame you. You’ve done your best and it sounds beautiful. What do I owe you?’

‘Why… why…
nothing
, Mrs Mitchell. I couldn’t think of such a thing.’

‘Well, I thought likely you’d say that so I brung you up a bottle of my dandelion wine. It sweetens the stomach if you’re ever bothered with gas. I’d have brung a bottle of my yarb tea, too, only I was afraid the Doctor mightn’t approve. But if you’d like some and think you can smuggle it in unbeknownst to him you’ve only to say the word.’

‘No, no, thank you,’ said Anne rather flatly. She had not yet quite recovered from ‘sprightly’.

‘Just as you like. You’d be welcome to it. I’ll not be needing any more medicine myself this spring. When my second cousin, Malachi Plummer, died in the winter I asked his widow to give me the three bottles of medicine there was left over… they got it by the dozen. She was going to throw them out, but I was always one that could never bear to waste anything. I couldn’t take more than one bottle myself but I made our hired man take the other two. “If it doesn’t do you any good it won’t do you any harm,” I told him. I won’t say I’m not rather relieved you didn’t want any cash for the obitchery, for I’m rather short of ready money just now. A funeral is so expensive, though D. B. Martin is about the cheapest undertaker in these parts. I haven’t even got my black paid for yet. I won’t feel I’m really in mourning till it is. Luckily I hadn’t to get a new bunnit. This was the bunnit I had made for Mother’s funeral ten years ago. It’s kind of fortunate black becomes me, ain’t it? If you’d see Malachi Plummer’s widow now, with her saller face! Well, I must be stepping. And I’m much obliged to you, Mrs Blythe, even if… but I feel sure you did your best and it’s lovely poetry.’

‘Won’t you stay and have supper with us?’ asked Anne. ‘Susan and I are all alone… the doctor is away and the children are having their first picnic supper in the Hollow.’

‘I don’t mind,’ said Mrs Anthony, slipping willingly back into her chair. ‘I’ll be glad to set a spell longer. Somehow it takes so long to get rested when you get old. And,’ she added, with a smile of dreamy beatitude on her pink face, ‘didn’t I smell fried parsnips?’

Anne almost grudged the fried parsnips when the
Daily Enterprise
came out the next week. There, in the obituary column, was ‘The Old Man’s Grave’… with five verses instead of the original four! And the fifth verse was:

‘!!!’ said Ingleside.

‘I hope you didn’t mind me tacking on another verse,’ said Mrs Mitchell to Anne, the next Institute meeting. ‘I just wanted to praise Anthony, a little more… and my nephew, Johnny Plummer, writ it. He just sat down and scribbled it off quick as a wink. He’s like you… he doesn’t look clever but he can poetize. He got it through his mother… she was a Wickford. The Plummers haven’t a speck of poetry in them, not a speck.’

‘What a pity you didn’t think of getting him to write Mr Mitchell’s “obitchery” in the first place,’ said Anne coldly.

‘Yes, isn’t it? But I didn’t know he could write poetry and I’d set my heart on it for Anthony’s sendoff. Then his mother showed me a poem he’d writ on a squirrel drowned in a pail of maple syrup… a really touching thing. But yours was real nice, too, Mrs Blythe. I think the two combined together made something out of the common, don’t you?’

‘I do,’ said Anne.

The Ingleside children were having bad luck with pets. The wriggly curly little black pup Dad brought home from Charlottetown one day just walked out the next week and disappeared into the blue. Nothing was ever seen or heard of him again, and, though there were whispers of a sailor from the Harbour Head having been seen taking a small black pup on board his ship the night she sailed, his fate remained one of the deep and dark unsolved mysteries of the Ingleside chronicles. Walter took it harder than Jem, who had not yet quite forgotten his anguish over Gyp’s death and was not ever again going to let himself love a dog not wisely but too well. Then Tiger Tom, who lived in the barn and was never allowed in the house because of his thieving propensities but got a good deal of petting for all that, was found stark and stiff on the barn floor and had to be buried with pomp and circumstance in the Hollow. Finally Jem’s rabbit, Bun, which he had bought from Joe Russell for a quarter, sickened and died. Perhaps its death was hastened by a dose of patent medicine Jem gave him, perhaps not. Joe had advised it and Joe ought to know. But Jem felt as if he had murdered Bun.

‘
Is
there a curse on Ingleside?’ he demanded gloomily, when Bun had been laid to rest beside Tiger Tom. Walter wrote an epitaph for him, and he and Jem and the twins wore black ribbons tied round their arms for a week, to the horror of Susan, who deemed it sacrilege. Susan was not inconsolable for the loss of Bun, who had got out once and worked havoc in her garden. Still less did she approve of two toads Walter brought in and put in the cellar. She put one of them out when evening came but could not find the other, and Walter lay awake and worried.

‘Maybe they were husband and wife,’ he thought. ‘Maybe they’re awful lonely and unhappy now they’re separated. It was the little one Susan put out, so I guess she was the lady toad and maybe she’s frightened to death all alone in that big yard without anyone to protect her… just like a widow.’

Walter couldn’t endure thinking about the widow’s woes so he slipped down to the cellar to hunt for the gentleman toad, but only succeeded in knocking down a pile of Susan’s discarded tinware with a resulting racket that might have wakened the dead. It woke only Susan, however, who came marching down with a candle, the fluttering flame of which cast the weirdest shadows on her gaunt face.

‘Walter Blythe, whatever are you doing?’

‘Susan, I’ve got to find that toad,’ said Walter desperately. ‘Susan, just think how you would feel without your husband if you had one.’

‘What on earth are you talking about?’ demanded the justifiably mystified Susan.

At this point the gentleman toad, who had evidently given himself up for lost when Susan appeared on the scene, hopped out into the open from behind Susan’s crock of dill pickles. Walter pounced on him and slipped him out through the window, where it is to be hoped he rejoined his supposed love and lived happily ever afterwards.

‘You know you shouldn’t have brought these creatures into the cellar,’ said Susan sternly. ‘What would they live on?’

‘Of course I meant to catch insects for them,’ said Walter, aggrieved. ‘I wanted to
study
them.’

‘There is simply no being up to them,’ moaned Susan, as she followed an indignant young Blythe up the stairs. And she did not mean the toads.

They had better luck with their robin. They had found him, little more than a baby, on the doorstep after a June night storm of wind and rain. He had a grey back and a mottled breast and bright eyes, and from the first he seemed to have complete confidence in all the Ingleside people, not even excepting the Shrimp, who never attempted to molest him, not even when Cock Robin hopped saucily up to his plate and helped himself. They fed him on worms at first, and he had such an appetite that Shirley spent most of his time digging them. He stored the worms in cans and left them around the house, much to Susan’s disgust, but she would have endured more than that for Cock Robin, who lighted so fearlessly on her work-worn finger and chirruped in her very face. Susan had taken a great fancy to Cock Robin and thought it worth mentioning in a letter to Rebecca Dew that his breast was beginning to change to a beautiful rusty red.

‘Do not think that my intellect is weakening, I beg of you, Miss Dew, dear,’ she wrote. ‘I suppose it is very silly to be so fond of a bird, but the human heart has its weaknesses. He is not imprisoned like a canary… something I could never abide, Miss Dew, dear… but ranges at will through house and garden and sleeps on a bow by Walter’s study platform up in the big apple-tree looking into Rilla’s window. Once when they took him to the Hollow he flew away but returned at eventide to their great joy, and, I must in all candour add, to my own.’

The Hollow was ‘the Hollow’ no longer. Walter had begun to feel that such a delightful spot deserved a name more in keeping with its romantic possibilities. One rainy afternoon they had to play in the garret, but the sun broke out in the early evening and flooded the Glen with splendour.

‘Oh, look at the nithe wainbow,’ cried Rilla, who always talked with a charming little lisp.

It was the most magnificent rainbow they had ever seen. One end seemed to rest on the very spire of the Presbyterian church, while the other dropped down into the reedy corner of the pond that ran into the upper end of the valley. And Walter then and there named it Rainbow Valley.

Rainbow Valley had become a world in itself to the children of Ingleside. Little winds played there ceaselessly and bird-songs re-echoed from dawn to dark. White birches glimmered all over it and from one of them… the White Lady… Walter pretended that a little dryad came out every night to talk to them. A maple-tree and a spruce-tree, growing so closely together that their boughs intertwined, he named ‘The Tree Lovers’ and an old string of sleigh-bells he had hung upon them made elfin and aerial when the wind shook them. A dragon guarded the stone bridge they had built across the brook. The trees that met over it could be swart Paynims at need and the rich green mosses along the banks were carpets, none finer, from Samarcand. Robin Hood and his merry men lurked on all sides; three water sprites dwelt in the spring; the deserted old Barclay house at the Glen end, with its grass-grown dyke and its garden overgrown with caraway, was easily transformed into a beleaguered castle. The Crusader’s sword has long been rust, but the Ingleside butcher knife was a blade forged in fairyland, and whenever Susan missed the cover of her roasting-pan she knew that it was serving as a shield for a plumed and glittering knight on high adventure bent in Rainbow Valley. Sometimes they played pirates, to please Jem, who at ten years was beginning to like a tang of gore in his amusements, but Walter always balked at walking the plank, which Jem thought the best of the performance. Sometimes he wondered if Walter really was enough of a stalwart to be a buccaneer, though he smothered the thought loyally and had more than one pitched and successful battle with boys in school who called Walter ‘Sissy Blythe’… or had called him that until they found out it meant a set-to with Jem, who had a most disconcerting knack with his fists.

Jem was sometimes allowed now to go down to the Harbour Mouth of an evening to buy fish. It was an errand he delighted in, for it meant that he could sit in Captain Malachi Russell’s cabin at the foot of a bent-covered field close to the harbour, and listen to Captain Malachi and his cronies, who had once been daredevil young sea captains, spinning yarns. Every one of them had something to tell when tales were going round. Old Oliver Reese… who was actually suspected of being a pirate in his youth… had been taken captive by a cannibal king… Sam Elliott had been through the San Francisco earthquake… ‘Bold William’ MacDougall had had a lurid fight with a shark… Andy Baker had been caught in a waterspout. Moreover, Andy could spit straighter, as he averred, than any man in Four Winds. Hook-nosed, lean-jawed Captain Malachi, with his bristly grey moustache, was Jem’s favourite. He had been captain of a brigantine when he was only seventeen, sailing to Buenos Aires with cargoes of lumber. He had an anchor tattooed on each cheek and he had a wonderful old watch you wound with a key. When he was in good humour he let Jem wind it, and when he was in very good humour he would take Jem out cod-fishing or digging clams at low tide, and when he was in his best humour he would show Jem the many ship models he had carved. Jem thought they were romance itself. Among them was a Viking boat, with a striped square sail and a fearsome dragon in front… a caravel of Columbus… the
Mayflower
… a rakish craft called
The Flying Dutchman
… and no end of beautiful brigantines and schooners and barques and clipper ships and timber droghers.