Anne of Ingleside (6 page)

‘I’ll take him over tomorrow,’ said Gilbert.

‘The youngsters will be looking forward to it,’ said Mrs Parker.

‘It’s very kind of you, I’m sure,’ said Anne.

‘It’s all for the best, no doubt,’ Susan told the Shrimp darkly in the kitchen.

‘It is very obliging of Mrs Parker to take Walter off our hands, Annie,’ said Aunt Mary Maria, when the Parkers had gone. ‘She told me she had taken quite a fancy to him. People
do
take such odd fancies, don’t they? Well, perhaps now for at least two weeks I’ll be able to go into the bathroom without trampling on a dead fish.’

‘A dead fish, Ay! You don’t mean –’

‘I mean exactly what I say, Annie. I always do. A dead fish! Did
you
ever step on a dead fish with your bare feet?’

‘No – o… but how…’

‘Walter caught a trout last night and put it in the bath-tub to keep it alive, Mrs Doctor dear,’ said Susan airily. ‘If it had stayed there it would have been all right, but somehow it got out and died in the night. Of course, if people
will
go about on bare feet…’

‘
I
make it a rule never to quarrel with anyone,’ said Aunt Mary Maria, getting up and leaving the room.

‘
I
am determined she shall not vex
me
, Mrs Doctor dear,’ said Susan.

‘Oh, Susan, she
is
getting on my nerves a bit… but of course I won’t mind so much when all this is over, and it
must
be nasty to tramp on a dead fish…’

‘Isn’t a dead fish better than a live one, Mummy? A dead fish wouldn’t squirm,’ said Di.

Since the truth must be told at all costs it must be admitted that the mistress and maid of Ingleside both giggled.

So that was that. But Anne wondered to Gilbert that night if Walter would be quite happy at Lowbridge.

‘He’s so very sensitive and imaginative,’ she said wistfully.

‘Too much so,’ said Gilbert, who was tired, after having had… to quote Susan… three babies that day. ‘Why, Anne, I believe that child is afraid to go upstairs in the dark. It will do him worlds of good to give and take with the Parker fry for a few days. He’ll come home a different child.’

Anne said nothing more. No doubt Gilbert was quite right. Walter was lonesome without Jem; and in view of what had happened when Shirley was born it would be just as well for Susan to have as little on her hands as possible beyond running the house and enduring Aunt Mary Maria… whose two weeks had already stretched to four.

Walter was lying awake in his bed trying to escape from the haunting thought that he was to go away next day by giving free rein to fancy. Walter had a very vivid imagination. It was to him a great white charger, like the one in the picture on the wall, on which he could gallop backward or forward in time and space. The Night was coming down… Night, like a tall, dark, bat-winged angel who lived in Mr Andrew Taylor’s woods on the south hill. Sometimes Walter welcomed her, sometimes he pictured her so vividly that he grew afraid of her. Walter dramatized and personified in his small world… the Wind who told him stories at night… the Frost that nipped the flowers in the garden… the Dew that fell so silverly and silently… the Moon which he felt sure he could catch if he could only go to the top of that far-away purple hill… the Mist that came in from the sea… the great Sea itself that was always changing and never changed… the dark, mysterious Tide. They were all entities to Walter. Ingleside and the Hollow and the maple grove and the Marsh and the harbour shore were full of elves and kelpies and dryads and mermaids and goblins. The black plaster-of-paris cat on the library mantelpiece was a fairy witch. It came alive at night and prowled about the house, grown to enormous size. Walter ducked his head under the bedclothes and shivered. He was always scaring himself with his own fancies. Perhaps Aunt Mary Maria was right when she said he was ‘far too nervous and high-strung’, though Susan would never forgive her for it. Perhaps Aunt Kitty MacGregor of the Upper Glen, who was reported to have ‘the second sight’, was right when, having once taken a deep look into Walter’s long-lashed, smoky grey eyes, she said he ‘did be having an old soul in a young body’. It might be that the old soul knew too much for the young brain to understand always.

Walter was told in the morning that Dad would take him to Lowbridge after dinner. He said nothing, but during dinner a choky sensation came over him and he dropped his eyes quickly to hide a sudden mist of tears. Not quickly enough, however.

‘You’re not going to
cry
, Walter?’ said Aunt Mary Maria, as if a six-year-old mite would be disgraced for ever if he cried. ‘If there’s anything I
do
despise it’s a cry-baby. And you haven’t eaten your meat.’

‘All but the fat,’ said Walter, blinking valiantly, but not yet daring to look up. ‘I don’t like fat.’

‘When
I
was a child,’ said Aunt Mary Maria, ‘I was not allowed to have likes and dislikes. Well, Mrs Doctor Parker will probably cure you of some of your notions. She was a Winter, I think… or was she a Clark?… no, she must have been a Campbell. But the Winters and Campbells are all tarred with the same brush, and they don’t put up with any nonsense.’

‘Oh, please, Aunt Mary Maria, don’t frighten Walter about his visit to Lowbridge,’ said Anne, a little spark kindling far down in her eyes.

‘I’m sorry, Annie,’ said Aunt Mary Maria with great humility. ‘I should of course have remembered that
I
have no right to try to teach your children
anything
.’

‘Drat her hide,’ muttered Susan as she went out for the dessert… Walter’s favourite Queen pudding.

Anne felt miserably guilty. Gilbert had shot her a slightly reproachful glance as if to imply she might have been more patient with a poor lonely old lady.

Gilbert himself was feeling a bit seedy. The truth, as everyone knew, was that he had been terribly overworked all summer: and perhaps Aunt Mary Maria was more of a strain than he would admit. Anne made up her mind that in the autumn, if all was well, she would pack him off willy-nilly for a month’s snipe shooting in Nova Scotia.

‘How is your tea?’ she asked Aunt Mary Maria repentantly.

Aunt Mary Maria pursed her lips.

‘Too weak. But it doesn’t matter. Who cares whether a poor old woman gets her tea to her liking or not? Some folks, however, think I’m real good company.’

Whatever the connection between Aunt Mary Maria’s two sentences was Anne felt she was beyond ferreting it out just then. She had turned very pale.

‘I think I’ll go upstairs and lie down,’ she said a trifle faintly as she rose from the table. ‘And I think, Gilbert… perhaps you’d better not stay long in Lowbridge… and suppose you give Miss Carson a ring.’

She kissed Walter good-bye rather casually and hurriedly, very much as if she were not thinking about him at all. Walter
would not
cry. Aunt Mary Maria kissed him on the forehead – Walter hated to be moistly kissed on the forehead – and said:

‘Mind your table manners at Lowbridge, Walter. Mind you ain’t greedy. If you are, a Big Black Man will come along with a big black bag to pop naughty children into.’

It was perhaps as well that Gilbert had gone out to harness Grey Tom and did not hear this. He and Anne had always made a point of never frightening their children with such ideas or allowing anyone else to do it. Susan did hear it as she cleared the table, and Aunt Mary Maria never knew what a narrow escape she had of having the gravy boat and its contents flung at her head.

Generally Walter enjoyed a drive with Dad. He loved beauty, and the roads around Glen St Mary were beautiful. The road to Lowbridge was a double ribbon of dancing buttercups, with here and there the ferny green rim of an inviting grove. But today Dad didn’t seem to want to talk much and he drove Grey Tom as Walter never remembered seeing him driven before. When they reached Lowbridge he said a few hurried words aside to Mrs Parker and rushed out without bidding Walter good-bye. Walter had again hard work to keep from crying. It was only too plain that nobody loved him. Mother and Father used to, but they didn’t any longer.

The big, untidy Parker house at Lowbridge did not seem friendly to Walter. But perhaps no house would have seemed that just then. Mrs Parker took him out to the backyard, where shrieks of noisy mirth were resounding, and introduced him to the children, who seemed to fill it. Then she promptly went back to her sewing, leaving them to ‘get acquainted by themselves’… a proceeding that worked very well in nine cases out of ten. Perhaps she could not be blamed for failing to see that little Walter Blythe was the tenth. She liked him… her own children were jolly little lads… Fred and Opal were inclined to put on Montreal airs, but she felt quite sure they wouldn’t be unkind to anyone. Everything would go swimmingly. She was so glad she could help ‘poor Anne Blythe’ out, even if it was only by taking one of her children off her hands. Mrs Parker hoped ‘all would go well’. Anne’s friends were a good deal more worried over her than she was over herself, reminding each other of Shirley’s birth.

A sudden hush had fallen over the backyard, a yard which ran off into a big, bowery apple orchard. Walter stood looking gravely and shyly at the Parker children and their Johnson cousins from Montreal. Bill Parker was ten, a ruddy, round-faced urchin who ‘took after’ his mother and seemed very old and big in Walter’s eyes. Andy Parker was nine, and Lowbridge children could have told you that he was ‘the nasty Parker one’ and was nicknamed ‘Pig’ for reasons good. Walter did not like his looks from the first… his short-cropped fair bristles, his impish freckled face, his bulging blue eyes. Fred Johnson was Bill’s age, and Walter didn’t like him either, though he was a good-looking chap with tawny curls and black eyes. His nine-year-old sister, Opal, had curls and black eyes, too… snapping black eyes. She stood with her arm about tow-headed, eight-year-old Cora Parker and they both looked Walter over condescendingly. If it had not been for Alice Parker Walter might very conceivably have turned and fled.

Alice was seven; Alice had the loveliest little ripples of golden curls all over her head: Alice had eyes as blue and soft as the violets in the Hollow: Alice had pink, dimpled cheeks: Alice wore a little frilled yellow dress in which she looked like a dancing buttercup: Alice smiled at him as if she had known him all her life; Alice was a friend.

Fred opened the conversation.

‘Hello, sonny,’ he said condescendingly.

Walter felt the condescension at once and retreated into himself.

‘My name is Walter,’ he said distinctly.

Fred turned to the others with a well-done air of amazement.
He’d
show this country lad!

‘He says his name is
Walter
,’ he told Bill with a comical twist of his mouth.

‘He says his name is
Walter
,’ Bill told Opal in turn.

‘He says his name is
Walter
,’ Opal told the delighted Andy.

‘He says his name is
Walter
,’ Andy told Cora.

‘He says his name is
Walter
,’ Cora giggled to Alice.

Alice said nothing. She just looked admiringly at Walter, and her look enabled him to bear up when all the rest chanted together. ‘He says his name is
Walter
,’ and then burst into shrieks of derisive laughter.

‘What fun the dear little folks are having,’ thought Mrs Parker complacently over her shirring.

‘I heard Mom say you believed in fairies,’ Andy said, leering impudently.

Walter gazed levelly at him. He was not going to be downed before Alice.

‘There
are
fairies,’ he said stoutly.

‘There ain’t,’ said Andy.

‘There
are
,’ said Walter.

‘He says there are
fairies
,’ Andy told Fred.

‘He says there are
fairies
,’ Fred told Bill… and they went through the whole performance again.

It was torture to Walter, who had never been made fun of before and couldn’t take it. He bit his lips to keep the tears back. He must not cry before Alice.

‘How would you like to be pinched black and blue?’ demanded Andy, who had made up his mind that Walter was a sissy and that it would be good fun to tease him.

‘Pig, hush!’ ordered Alice terribly… very terribly, although very quietly and sweetly and gently. There was something in her tone that even Andy dared not flout.

‘Course I didn’t meant it,’ he muttered, shamefacedly.

The wind veered a bit in Walter’s favour and they had a fairly amiable game of tag in the orchard. But when they trooped noisily into supper Walter was again overwhelmed with homesickness. It was so terrible that for one awful moment he was afraid he was going to cry before them all… even Alice, who, however, gave his arm such a friendly little nudge as they sat down that it helped him. But he could not eat anything… he simply could not. Mrs Parker, for whose methods there was certainly something to be said, did not worry him about it, comfortably concluding that his appetite would be better in the morning, and the others were too much occupied in eating and talking to take much notice of him. Walter wondered why the whole family shouted so at each other, ignorant of the fact that they had not yet had time to get out of the habit since the recent death of a very deaf and sensitive old grandmother. The noise made his head ache. Oh, at home now they would be eating supper too. Mother would be smiling from the head of the table, Father would be joking with the twins, Susan would be pouring cream into Shirley’s mug of milk, Nan would be sneaking titbits to the Shrimp. Even Aunt Mary Maria, as part of the home circle, seemed suddenly invested with a soft, tender radiance. Who would have rung the Chinese gong for supper? It was his week to do it and Jem was away. If he could only find a place to cry in! But there seemed to be no place where you could indulge in tears at Lowbridge. Besides… there was Alice… Walter gulped down a whole glassful of ice water and found that it helped.

‘Our cat takes fits,’ Andy said suddenly, kicking him under the table.

‘So does ours,’ said Walter. The Shrimp had had two fits. And he wasn’t going to have the Lowbridge cats rated higher than the Ingleside cats.