Rilla of Ingleside - Lucy Maud Montgomery (the gingerbread man read aloud .TXT) 📗

and a little amused, impertinent smile appeared on her lips and hovered there during the rest of the interview.

On one of Rilla’s feet was a smart little steel-buckled shoe and a filmy blue silk stocking. The other was clad in a stout and rather shabby boot and black lisle!

Poor Rilla! She had changed, or begun to change her boots and stockings after she had put on her dress. This was the result of doing one thing with your hands and another with your brain. Oh, what a ridiculous position to be in—and before Irene Howard of all people—Irene, who was staring at Rilla’s feet as if she had never seen feet before! And once she had thought Irene’s manner perfection! Everything that Rilla had prepared to say vanished from her memory. Vainly trying to tuck her unlucky foot under her chair, she blurted out a blunt statement.

“I have come to athk a favour of you, Irene.”

There—lisping! Oh, she had been prepared for humiliation but not to this extent! Really, there were limits!

“Yes?” said Irene in a cool, questioning tone, lifting her shallowly-set, insolent eyes to Rilla’s crimson face for a moment and then dropping them again as if she could not tear them from their fascinated gaze at the shabby boot and the gallant shoe.

Rilla gathered herself together. She would not lisp—she would be calm and composed.

“Mrs. Channing cannot come because her son is ill in Kingsport, and I have come on behalf of the committee to ask you if you will be so kind as to sing for us in her place.” Rilla enunciated every word so precisely and carefully that she seemed to be reciting a lesson.

“It’s something of a fiddler’s invitation, isn’t it?” said Irene, with one of her disagreeable smiles.

“Olive Kirk asked you to help when we first thought of the concert and you refused,” said Rilla.

“Why, I could hardly help—then—could I?” asked Irene plaintively. “After you ordered me never to speak to you again? It would have been very awkward for us both, don’t you think?”

Now for the humble pie.

“I want to apologize to you for saying that, Irene.” said Rilla steadily. “I should not have said it and I have been very sorry ever since. Will you forgive me?”

“And sing at your concert?” said Irene sweetly and insultingly.

“If you mean,” said Rilla miserably, “that I would not be apologizing to you if it were not for the concert perhaps that is true. But it is also true that I have felt ever since it happened that I should not have said what I did and that I have been sorry for it all winter. That is all I can say. If you feel you can’t forgive me I suppose there is nothing more to be said.”

“Oh, Rilla dear, don’t snap me up like that,” pleaded Irene. “Of course I’ll forgive you—though I did feel awfully about it—how awfully I hope you’ll never know. I cried for weeks over it. And I hadn’t said or done a thing!”

Rilla choked back a retort. After all, there was no use in arguing with Irene, and the Belgians were starving.

“Don’t you think you can help us with the concert,” she forced herself to say. Oh, if only Irene would stop looking at that boot! Rilla could just hear her giving Olive Kirk an account of it.

“I don’t see how I really can at the last moment like this,” protested Irene. “There isn’t time to learn anything new.”

“Oh, you have lots of lovely songs that nobody in the Glen ever heard before,” said Rilla, who knew Irene had been going to town all winter for lessons and that this was only a pretext. “They will all be new down there.”

“But I have no accompanist,” protested Irene.

“Una Meredith can accompany you,” said Rilla.

“Oh, I couldn’t ask her,” sighed Irene. “We haven’t spoken since last fall. She was so hateful to me the time of our Sunday-school concert that I simply had to give her up.”

Dear, dear, was Irene at feud with everybody? As for Una Meredith being hateful to anybody, the idea was so farcical that Rilla had much ado to keep from laughing in Irene’s very face.

“Miss Oliver is a beautiful pianist and can play any accompaniment at sight,” said Rilla desperately. “She will play for you and you could run over your songs easily tomorrow evening at Ingleside before the concert.”

“But I haven’t anything to wear. My new evening-dress isn’t home from Charlottetown yet, and I simply cannot wear my old one at such a big affair. It is too shabby and old-fashioned.”

“Our concert,” said Rilla slowly, “is in aid of Belgian children who are starving to death. Don’t you think you could wear a shabby dress once for their sake, Irene?”

“Oh, don’t you think those accounts we get of the conditions of the Belgians are very much exaggerated?” said Irene. “I’m sure they can’t be actually starving you know, in the twentieth century. The newspapers always colour things so highly.”

Rilla concluded that she had humiliated herself enough. There was such a thing as self-respect. No more coaxing, concert or no concert. She got up, boot and all.

“I am sorry you can’t help us, Irene, but since you cannot we must do the best we can.”

Now this did not suit Irene at all. She desired exceedingly to sing at that concert, and all her hesitations were merely by way of enhancing the boon of her final consent. Besides, she really wanted to be friends with Rilla again. Rilla’s whole-hearted, ungrudging adoration had been very sweet incense to her. And Ingleside was a very charming house to visit, especially when a handsome college student like Walter was home. She stopped looking at Rilla’s feet.

“Rilla, darling, don’t be so abrupt. I really want to help you, if I can manage it. Just sit down and let’s talk it over.”

“I’m sorry, but I can’t. I have to be home soon—Jims has to be settled for the night, you know.”

“Oh, yes—the baby you are bringing up by the book. It’s perfectly sweet of you to do it when you hate children so. How cross you were just because I kissed him! But we’ll forget all that and be chums again, won’t we? Now, about the concert—I dare say I can run into town on the morning train after my dress, and out again on the afternoon one in plenty of time for the concert, if you’ll ask Miss Oliver to play for me. I couldn’t—she’s so dreadfully haughty and supercilious that she simply paralyses poor little me.”

Rilla did not waste time or breath defending Miss Oliver. She coolly thanked Irene, who had suddenly become very amiable and gushing, and got away. She was very thankful the interview was over. But she knew now that she and Irene could never be the friends they had been. Friendly, yes—but friends, no. Nor did she wish it. All winter she had felt under her other and more serious worries, a little feeling of regret for her lost chum. Now it was suddenly gone. Irene was not as Mrs. Elliott would say, of the race that knew Joseph. Rilla did not say or think that she had outgrown Irene. Had the thought occurred to her she would have considered it absurd when she was not yet seventeen and Irene was twenty. But it was the truth. Irene was just what she had been a year ago—just what she would always be. Rilla Blythe’s nature in that year had changed and matured and deepened. She found herself seeing through Irene with a disconcerting clearness—discerning under all her superficial sweetness, her pettiness, her vindictiveness, her insincerity, her essential cheapness. Irene had lost for ever her faithful worshipper.

But not until Rilla had traversed the Upper Glen Road and found herself in the moon-dappled solitude of Rainbow Valley did she fully recover her composure of spirit. Then she stopped under a tall wild plum that was ghostly white and fair in its misty spring bloom and laughed.

“There is only one thing of importance just now—and that is that the Allies win the war,” she said aloud. “Therefore, it follows without dispute that the fact that I went to see Irene Howard with odd shoes and stockings on is of no importance whatever. Nevertheless, I, Bertha Marilla Blythe, swear solemnly with the moon as witness”—Rilla lifted her hand dramatically to the said moon—“that I will never leave my room again without looking carefully at both my feet.”