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

unconcealed admiration in his eloquent eyes. “I was sure someone would be hanging about and it was just you I wanted to see, Rilla-my-Rilla.”

Rilla’s dream castle flashed into the landscape again. This was unmistakable enough certainly—not much doubt as to his meaning here.

“There aren’t—so many of us—to poke around as there used to be,” she said softly.

“No, that’s so,” said Ken gently. “Jem and Walter and the girls away— it makes a big blank, doesn’t it? But—” he leaned forward until his dark curls almost brushed her hair—“doesn’t Fred Arnold try to fill the blank occasionally. I’ve been told so.”

At this moment, before Rilla could make any reply, Jims began to cry at the top of his voice in the room whose open window was just above them— Jims, who hardly ever cried in the evening. Moreover, he was crying, as Rilla knew from experience, with a vim and energy that betokened that he had been already whimpering softly unheard for some time and was thoroughly exasperated. When Jims started in crying like that he made a thorough job of it. Rilla knew that there was no use to sit still and pretend to ignore him. He wouldn’t stop; and conversation of any kind was out of the question when such shrieks and howls were floating over your head. Besides, she was afraid Kenneth would think she was utterly unfeeling if she sat still and let a baby cry like that. He was not likely acquainted with Morgan’s invaluable volume.

She got up. “Jims has had a nightmare, I think. He sometimes has one and he is always badly frightened by it. Excuse me for a moment.”

Rilla flew upstairs, wishing quite frankly that soup tureens had never been invented. But when Jims, at sight of her, lifted his little arms entreatingly and swallowed several sobs, with tears rolling down his cheeks, resentment went out of her heart. After all, the poor darling was frightened. She picked him up gently and rocked him soothingly until his sobs ceased and his eyes closed. Then she essayed to lay him down in his crib. Jims opened his eyes and shrieked a protest. This performance was repeated twice. Rilla grew desperate. She couldn’t leave Ken down there alone any longer—she had been away nearly half an hour already. With a resigned air she marched downstairs, carrying Jims, and sat down on the veranda. It was, no doubt, a ridiculous thing to sit and cuddle a contrary war-baby when your best young man was making his farewell call, but there was nothing else to be done.

Jims was supremely happy. He kicked his little pink-soled feet rapturously out under his white nighty and gave one of his rare laughs. He was beginning to be a very pretty baby; his golden hair curled in silken ringlets all over his little round head and his eyes were beautiful.

“He’s a decorative kiddy all right, isn’t he?” said Ken.

“His looks are very well,” said Rilla, bitterly, as if to imply that they were much the best of him. Jims, being an astute infant, sensed trouble in the atmosphere and realized that it was up to him to clear it away. He turned his face up to Rilla, smiled adorably and said, clearly and beguilingly, “Will—Will.”

It was the very first time he had spoken a word or tried to speak. Rilla was so delighted that she forgot her grudge against him. She forgave him with a hug and kiss. Jims, understanding that he was restored to favour, cuddled down against her just where a gleam of light from the lamp in the living-room struck across his hair and turned it into a halo of gold against her breast.

Kenneth sat very still and silent, looking at Rilla—at the delicate, girlish silhouette of her, her long lashes, her dented lip, her adorable chin. In the dim moonlight, as she sat with her head bent a little over Jims, the lamplight glinting on her pearls until they glistened like a slender nimbus, he thought she looked exactly like the Madonna that hung over his mother’s desk at home. He carried that picture of her in his heart to the horror of the battlefields of France. He had had a strong fancy for Rilla Blythe ever since the night of the Four Winds dance; but it was when he saw her there, with little Jims in her arms, that he loved her and realized it. And all the while, poor Rilla was sitting, disappointed and humiliated, feeling that her last evening with Ken was spoiled and wondering why things always had to go so contrarily outside of books. She felt too absurd to try to talk. Evidently Ken was completely disgusted, too, since he was sitting there in such stony silence.

Hope revived momentarily when Jims went so thoroughly asleep that she thought it would be safe to lay him down on the couch in the living-room. But when she came out again Susan was sitting on the veranda, loosening her bonnet strings with the air of one who meant to stay where she was for some time.

“Have you got your baby to sleep?” she asked kindly.

Your baby! Really, Susan might have more tact.

“Yes,” said Rilla shortly.

Susan laid her parcels on the reed table, as one determined to do her duty. She was very tired but she must help Rilla out. Here was Kenneth Ford who had come to call on the family and they were all unfortunately out, and “the poor child” had had to entertain him alone. But Susan had come to her rescue—Susan would do her part no matter how tired she was.

“Dear me, how you have grown up,” she said, looking at Ken’s six feet of khaki uniform without the least awe. Susan had grown used to khaki now, and at sixty-four even a lieutenant’s uniform is just clothes and nothing else. “It is an amazing thing how fast children do grow up. Rilla here, now, is almost fifteen.”

“I’m going on seventeen, Susan,” cried Rilla almost passionately. She was a whole month past sixteen. It was intolerable of Susan.

“It seems just the other day that you were all babies,” said Susan, ignoring Rilla’s protest. “You were really the prettiest baby I ever saw, Ken, though your mother had an awful time trying to cure you of sucking your thumb. Do you remember the day I spanked you?”

“No,” said Ken.

“Oh well, I suppose you would be too young—you were only about four and you were here with your mother and you insisted on teasing Nan until she cried. I had tried several ways of stopping you but none availed, and I saw that a spanking was the only thing that would serve. So I picked you up and laid you across my knee and lambasted you well. You howled at the top of your voice but you left Nan alone after that.”

Rilla was writhing. Hadn’t Susan any realization that she was addressing an officer of the Canadian Army? Apparently she had not. Oh, what would Ken think? “I suppose you do not remember the time your mother spanked you either,” continued Susan, who seemed to be bent on reviving tender reminiscences that evening. “I shall never, no never, forget it. She was up here one night with you when you were about three, and you and Walter were playing out in the kitchen yard with a kitten. I had a big puncheon of rainwater by the spout which I was reserving for making soap. And you and Walter began quarrelling over the kitten. Walter was at one side of the puncheon standing on a chair, holding the kitten, and you were standing on a chair at the other side. You leaned across that puncheon and grabbed the kitten and pulled. You were always a great hand for taking what you wanted without too much ceremony. Walter held on tight and the poor kitten yelled but you dragged Walter and the kitten half over and then you both lost your balance and tumbled into that puncheon, kitten and all. If I had not been on the spot you would both have been drowned. I flew to the rescue and hauled you all three out before much harm was done, and your mother, who had seen it all from the upstairs window, came down and picked you up, dripping as you were, and gave you a beautiful spanking. Ah,” said Susan with a sigh, “those were happy old days at Ingleside.”

“Must have been,” said Ken. His voice sounded queer and stiff. Rilla supposed he was hopelessly enraged. The truth was he dared not trust his voice lest it betray his frantic desire to laugh.

“Rilla here, now,” said Susan, looking affectionately at that unhappy damsel, “never was much spanked. She was a real well-behaved child for the most part. But her father did spank her once. She got two bottles of pills out of his office and dared Alice Clow to see which of them could swallow all the pills first, and if her father had not happened in the nick of time those two children would have been corpses by night. As it was, they were both sick enough shortly after. But the doctor spanked Rilla then and there and he made such a thorough job of it that she never meddled with anything in his office afterwards. We hear a great deal nowadays of something that is called ‘moral persuasion,’ but in my opinion a good spanking and no nagging afterwards is a much better thing.”

Rilla wondered viciously whether Susan meant to relate all the family spankings. But Susan had finished with the subject and branched off to another cheerful one.

“I remember little Tod MacAllister over-harbour killed himself that very way, eating up a whole box of fruitatives because he thought they were candy. It was a very sad affair. He was,” said Susan earnestly, “the very cutest little corpse I ever laid my eyes on. It was very careless of his mother to leave the fruitatives where he could get them, but she was well-known to be a heedless creature. One day she found a nest of five eggs as she was going across the fields to church with a brand new blue silk dress on. So she put them in the pocket of her petticoat and when she got to church she forgot all about them and sat down on them and her dress was ruined, not to speak of the petticoat. Let me see— would not Tod be some relation of yours? Your great grandmother West was a MacAllister. Her brother Amos was a MacDonaldite in religion. I am told he used to take the jerks something fearful. But you look more like your great grandfather West than the MacAllisters. He died of a paralytic stroke quite early in life.”

“Did you see anybody at the store?” asked Rilla desperately, in the faint hope of directing Susan’s conversation into more agreeable channels.

“Nobody except Mary Vance,” said Susan, “and she was stepping round as brisk as the Irishman’s flea.”

What terrible similes Susan used! Would Kenneth think she acquired them from the family!

“To hear Mary talk about Miller Douglas you would think he was the only Glen boy who had enlisted,” Susan went on. “But of course she always did brag and she has some good qualities I am willing to admit, though I did not think so that time she chased Rilla here through the village with a dried codfish till the poor child fell, heels over head, into the puddle before Carter Flagg’s store.”

Rilla went cold all over with wrath and shame. Were there any more disgraceful scenes in her past that Susan could rake up? As for Ken, he could have howled over Susan’s speeches, but he would not so insult