“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 southern 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 along 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 offhand 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?”
Chapter 28
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 school . . . a girl who said, when the teacher asked her 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 confidante 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 parlor. “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. Dr. 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. Dr. 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.”
“I can’t exactly prevent her from associating with Jenny in school, Susan. I don’t really know anything against the child, though I feel sure she draws a long bow in telling of her relatives and adventures. However, D
i will probably soon get over this ‘crush’ and we’ll hear no more of Jenny Penny.”
They continued to hear of her, however. Jenny told Di she liked her best of all the girls in the Glen school and Di, feeling that a queen had stooped to her, responded adoringly. They became inseparable at recesses; they wrote notes to each other over the weekends; they gave and received “chews” of gum: they traded buttons and cooperated in dust piles; and finally Jenny asked Di to go home with her from school and stay all night with her.
Mother said, “No,” very decidedly and Di wept copiously.
“You’ve let me stay all night with Persis Ford,” she sobbed.
“That was . . . different,” said Anne, a little vaguely. She did not want to make a snob of Di, but all she had heard about the Penny family had made her realize that as friends for the Ingleside children they were quite out of the question and she had been considerably worried of late over the fascination Jenny so evidently possessed for Diana.
“I don’t see any difference,” wailed Di. “Jenny is just as much of a lady as Persis, so there! She never chews bought gum. She has a cousin who knows all the rules of etiquette and Jenny has learned them all from her. Jenny says we don’t know what etiquette is. And she has had the most exciting adventures.”
“Who says she has?” demanded Susan.
“She told me herself. Her folks aren’t rich but they have got very rich and respectable relatives. Jenny has an uncle who is a judge and a cousin of her mother’s is captain of the biggest vessel in the world. Jenny christened the ship for him when it was launched. We haven’t got an uncle who is a judge or an aunt who is a missionary to leopards either.”
“Lepers, dear, not leopards.”
“Jenny said leopards. I guess she ought to know since it is her aunt. And there are so many things at her house I want to see . . . her room is papered with parrots . . . and their parlour is full of stuffed owls . . . and they have a hooked rug with a house on it in the hall . . . and window blinds just covered with roses . . . and a real house to play in . . . her uncle built it for them . . . and her Gammy lives with them and is the oldest person in the world. Jenny says she lived before the flood. I may never have another chance to see a person who lived before the flood.”
“The grandmother is close on a hundred, I am told,” said Susan, “but if your Jenny said she lived before the flood she is fibbing. You would be likely to catch goodness knows what if you went to a place like that.”
“They’ve had everything they could have long ago,” protested Di. “Jenny says they’ve had mumps and measles and whooping-cough and scarlet fever all in one year.”
“I wouldn’t put it past them having the smallpox,” muttered Susan. “Talk of people being bewitched!”
“Jenny has to have her tonsils out,” sobbed Di. “But that isn’t catching, is it? Jenny had a cousin who died when she had her tonsils out . . . she bled to death without gaining conscious. So it is likely Jenny will too, if it runs in the family. She is delicate . . . she fainted three times last week. But she is quite prepared. And that is partly why she is so anxious to have me spend a night with her . . . so that I’d have it to remember after she passed away. Please, Mother. I’ll go without the new hat with ribbon streamers you promise me if you’ll let me.”
But Mother was adamant and Di betook herself to a tearful pillow. Nan had no sympathy for her . . . Nan “had no use” for Jenny Penny.
“I don’t know what has got into the child,” said Anne worriedly. “She has never behaved like this before. As you say, that Penny girl seems to have bewitched her.”
“You were quite right in refusing to let her go to a place so far beneath her, Mrs. Dr. dear.”
“Oh, Susan, I don’t want her to feel that anyone is ‘beneath’ her. But we must draw the line somewhere. It’s not Jenny so much . . . I think she’s harmless enough apart from her habit of exaggeration . . . but I’m told the boys are really dreadful. The Mowbray Narrows teacher is at her wits’-end with them.”
“Do they TRYannize over you like that?” asked Jenny loftily when Di told her she was not to be allowed to go. “I wouldn’t let anyone use me like that. I have too much spirit. Why, I sleep out of doors all night whenever I take the notion. I s’pose you’d never dream of doing that?”
Di looked wistfully at this mysterious girl who had “often slept out all night.” How wonderful!
“You don’t blame me for not going, Jenny? You know I want to go?”
“Of course I don’t blame you. Some girls wouldn’t put up with it, of course, but I s’pose you just can’t help it. We could have had fun. I’d planned we’d go fishing by moonlight in our back brook. We often do. I’ve caught trout that long. And we have the dearest little pigs and a new foal that’s just sweet and a litter of puppies. Well, I guess I must ask Sadie Taylor. Her father and mother let her call her soul her own.”
“My father and mother are very good to me,” protested Di loyally. “And my father is the best doctor in P. E. Island. Everyone says so.”
“Putting on airs because you have a father and mother and I have none,” said Jenny disdainfully. “Why, my father has wings and always wears a golden crown. But I don’t go about with my head in the air on that account, do I? Now, Di, I don’t want to quarrel with you but I hate to hear anyone bragging about their folks. It’s not etiket. And I have made up my mind to be a lady. When that Persis Ford you’re always talking of comes to Four Winds this summer I am not going to ‘sociate with her. There’s something queer about her ma, Aunt Lina says. She was married to a dead man and he come alive.”
“Oh, it wasn’t like that at all, Jenny. I know . . . Mother told me. . . . Aunt Leslie . . .”
“I don’t want to hear about her. Whatever it is, it’s something that’d better not be talked of, Di. There’s the bell.”
“Are you really going to ask Sadie?” choked Di, her eyes widening with hurt.
“Well, not right at once. I’ll wait and see. Maybe I’ll give you one more chance. But if I do it will be the last.”
A few days later Jenny Penny came to Di at recess.
“I heard Jem saying your pa and ma went away yesterday and wouldn’t be back till tomorrow night?”
“Yes, they went up to Avonlea to see Aunt Marilla.”
“Then it’s your chance.”
“My chance?”
“To stay all night with me.”
“Oh, Jenny . . . but I couldn’t.”
“Of course you can. Don’t be a ninny. They’ll never know.”
“But Susan wouldn’t let me . . .”
“You don’t have to ask her. Just come home with me from school. Nan can tell her where you’ve gone so she won’t be worried. And she won’t tell on you when your pa and ma come back. She’ll be too scared they’d blame her.”
Di stood in an agony of indecision. She knew perfectly well she should not go with Jenny, but the temptation was irresistible. Jenny turned the full battery of her extraordinary eyes upon Di.
“This is your last chance,” she said dramatically. “I can’t go on ‘sociating with anyone who thinks herself too good to visit me. If you don’t come we part forever.”
That settled it. Di, still in the thrall of Jenny Penny’s fascination, couldn’t face the thought of parting forever. Nan went home alone that afternoon to tell Susan that Di had gone to stay all night with that Jenny Penny.
Had Susan been her usual active self she would have gone straight to the Pennys and brought Di home. But Susan had strained her ankle that morning and while she could make shift to hobble around and get the children’s meals she knew she could never walk a mile down the Base Line road. The Pennys had no telephone and Jem and Walter flatly refused to go. They were invited to a mussel-bake at the lighthouse and nobody would eat Di at the Pennys’. Susan had to resign herself to the inevitable.
Di and Jenny went home across the fields, which made it little more than a quarter of a mile. Di, in spite of her prodd
ing conscience, was happy. They went through so much beauty . . . little bays of bracken, elfin haunted, in the bays of deep-green woods, a rustling windy hollow where you waded knee-deep in butter-cups, a winding lane under young maples, a brook that was a rainbow scarf of blossom, a sunny pasture field full of strawberries. Di, just wakening to a perception of the loveliness of the world, was enraptured and almost wished Jenny wouldn’t talk so much. That was all right at school but here Di wasn’t sure she wanted to hear about the time Jenny poisoned herself . . . ‘zackzidentally of course . . . by taking the wrong kind of medicine. Jenny painted her dying agonies finely but was somewhat vague as to the reason she hadn’t died after all. She had “lost conscious” but the doctor had managed to pull her back from the brink of the grave.
“Though I’ve never been the same since. Di Blythe, what are you staring at? I don’t believe you’ve been listening at all.”
“Oh, yes, I have,” said Di guiltily. “I do think you’ve had the most wonderful life, Jenny. But look at the view.”
“The view? What’s a view?”
“Why . . . why . . . something you’re looking at. That . . .” waving her hand at the panorama of meadow and woodland and cloud-smitten hill before them, with that sapphire dent of sea between the hills.
The Complete Works of L M Montgomery Page 149