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

Hannah Brewster’s house, two miles away, before the storm broke? Rilla thought she could do it alone easily enough, but with Jims it was another matter. Were his little legs good for it?

“We’ve got to try it,” said Rilla desperately. “We might stay in the siding until the thunderstorm is over; but it may keep on raining all night and anyway it will be pitch dark. If we can get to Hannah’s she will keep us all night.”

Hannah Brewster, when she had been Hannah Crawford, had lived in the Glen and gone to school with Rilla. They had been good friends then, though Hannah had been three years the older. She had married very young and had gone to live in Millward. What with hard work and babies and a ne’er-do-well husband, her life had not been an easy one, and Hannah seldom revisited her old home. Rilla had visited her once soon after her marriage, but had not seen her or even heard of her for years; she knew, however, that she and Jims would find welcome and harbourage in any house where rosy-faced, open-hearted, generous Hannah lived.

For the first mile they got on very well but the second one was harder. The road, seldom used, was rough and deep-rutted. Jims grew so tired that Rilla had to carry him for the last quarter. She reached the Brewster house, almost exhausted, and dropped Jims on the walk with a sigh of thankfulness. The sky was black with clouds; the first heavy drops were beginning to fall; and the rumble of thunder was growing very loud. Then she made an unpleasant discovery. The blinds were all down and the doors locked. Evidently the Brewsters were not at home. Rilla ran to the little barn. It, too, was locked. No other refuge presented itself. The bare whitewashed little house had not even a veranda or porch.

It was almost dark now and her plight seemed desperate.

“I’m going to get in if I have to break a window,” said Rilla resolutely. “Hannah would want me to do that. She’d never get over it if she heard I came to her house for refuge in a thunderstorm and couldn’t get in.”

Luckily she did not have to go to the length of actual housebreaking. The kitchen window went up quite easily. Rilla lifted Jims in and scrambled through herself, just as the storm broke in good earnest.

“Oh, see all the little pieces of thunder,” cried Jims in delight, as the hail danced in after them. Rilla shut the window and with some difficulty found and lighted a lamp. They were in a very snug little kitchen. Opening off it on one side was a trim, nicely furnished parlour, and on the other a pantry, which proved to be well stocked.

“I’m going to make myself at home,” said Rilla. “I know that is just what Hannah would want me to do. I’ll get a little snack for Jims and me, and then if the rain continues and nobody comes home I’ll just go upstairs to the spare room and go to bed. There is nothing like acting sensibly in an emergency. If I had not been a goose when I saw Jims fall off the train I’d have rushed back into the car and got some one to stop it. Then I wouldn’t have been in this scrape. Since I am in it I’ll make the best of it.

“This house,” she added, looking around, “is fixed up much nicer than when I was here before. Of course Hannah and Ted were just beginning housekeeping then. But somehow I’ve had the idea that Ted hasn’t been very prosperous. He must have done better than I’ve been led to believe, when they can afford furniture like this. I’m awfully glad for Hannah’s sake.”

The thunderstorm passed, but the rain continued to fall heavily. At eleven o’clock Rilla decided that nobody was coming home. Jims had fallen asleep on the sofa; she carried him up to the spare room and put him to bed. Then she undressed, put on a nightgown she found in the washstand drawer, and scrambled sleepily in between very nice lavender-scented sheets. She was so tired, after her adventures and exertions, that not even the oddity of her situation could keep her awake; she was sound asleep in a few minutes.

Rilla slept until eight o’clock the next morning and then wakened with startling suddenness. Somebody was saying in a harsh, gruff voice, “Here, you two, wake up. I want to know what this means.”

Rilla did wake up, promptly and effectually. She had never in all her life wakened up so thoroughly before. Standing in the room were three people, one of them a man, who were absolute strangers to her. The man was a big fellow with a bushy black beard and an angry scowl. Beside him was a woman—a tall, thin, angular person, with violently red hair and an indescribable hat. She looked even crosser and more amazed than the man, if that were possible. In the background was another woman—a tiny old lady who must have been at least eighty. She was, in spite of her tinyness, a very striking-looking personage; she was dressed in unrelieved black, had snow-white hair, a dead-white face, and snapping, vivid, coal-black eyes. She looked as amazed as the other two, but Rilla realized that she didn’t look cross.

Rilla also was realizing that something was wrong—fearfully wrong. Then the man said, more gruffly than ever, “Come now. Who are you and what business have you here?”

Rilla raised herself on one elbow, looking and feeling hopelessly bewildered and foolish. She heard the old black-and-white lady in the background chuckle to herself. “She must be real,” Rilla thought. “I can’t be dreaming her.” Aloud she gasped,

“Isn’t this Theodore Brewster’s place?”

“No,” said the big woman, speaking for the first time, “this place belongs to us. We bought it from the Brewsters last fall. They moved to Greenvale. Our name is Chapley.”

Poor Rilla fell back on her pillow, quite overcome.

“I beg your pardon,” she said. “I—I—thought the Brewsters lived here. Mrs. Brewster is a friend of mine. I am Rilla Blythe—Dr. Blythe’s daughter from Glen St. Mary. I—I was going to town with my— my—this little boy—and he fell off the train—and I jumped off after him—and nobody knew of it. I knew we couldn’t get home last night and a storm was coming up—so we came here and when we found nobody at home—we—we—just got in through the window and—and— made ourselves at home.”

“So it seems,” said the woman sarcastically.

“A likely story,” said the man.

“We weren’t born yesterday,” added the woman.

Madam Black-and-White didn’t say anything; but when the other two made their pretty speeches she doubled up in a silent convulsion of mirth, shaking her head from side to side and beating the air with her hands.

Rilla, stung by the disagreeable attitude of the Chapleys, regained her self-possession and lost her temper. She sat up in bed and said in her haughtiest voice, “I do not know when you were born, or where, but it must have been somewhere where very peculiar manners were taught. If you will have the decency to leave my room—er—this room—until I can get up and dress I shall not transgress upon your hospitality”—Rilla was killingly sarcastic—“any longer. And I shall pay you amply for the food we have eaten and the night’s lodging I have taken.”

The black-and-white apparition went through the motion of clapping her hands, but not a sound did she make. Perhaps Mr. Chapley was cowed by Rilla’s tone—or perhaps he was appeased at the prospect of payment; at all events, he spoke more civilly.

“Well, that’s fair. If you pay up it’s all right.”

“She shall do no such thing as pay you,” said Madam Black-and-White in a surprisingly clear, resolute, authoritative tone of voice. “If you haven’t got any shame for yourself, Robert Chapley, you’ve got a motherin-law who can be ashamed for you. No strangers shall be charged for room and lodging in any house where Mrs. Matilda Pitman lives. Remember that, though I may have come down in the world, I haven’t quite forgot all decency for all that. I knew you was a skinflint when Amelia married you, and you’ve made her as bad as yourself. But Mrs. Matilda Pitman has been boss for a long time, and Mrs. Matilda Pitman will remain boss. Here you, Robert Chapley, take yourself out of here and let that girl get dressed. And you, Amelia, go downstairs and cook a breakfast for her.”

Never, in all her life, had Rilla seen anything like the abject meekness with which those two big people obeyed that mite. They went without word or look of protest. As the door closed behind them Mrs. Matilda Pitman laughed silently, and rocked from side to side in her merriment.

“Ain’t it funny?” she said. “I mostly lets them run the length of their tether, but sometimes I has to pull them up, and then I does it with a jerk. They don’t dast aggravate me, because I’ve got considerable hard cash, and they’re afraid I won’t leave it all to them. Neither I will. I’ll leave ‘em some, but some I won’t, just to vex ‘em. I haven’t made up my mind where I will leave it but I’ll have to, soon, for at eighty a body is living on borrowed time. Now, you can take your time about dressing, my dear, and I’ll go down and keep them mean scallawags in order. That’s a handsome child you have there. Is he your brother?”

“No, he’s a little war-baby I’ve been taking care of, because his mother died and his father was overseas,” answered Rilla in a subdued tone.

“War-baby! Humph! Well, I’d better skin out before he wakes up or he’ll likely start crying. Children don’t like me—never did. I can’t recollect any youngster ever coming near me of its own accord. Never had any of my own. Amelia was my step-daughter. Well, it’s saved me a world of bother. If kids don’t like me I don’t like them, so that’s an even score. But that certainly is a handsome child.”

Jims chose this moment for waking up. He opened his big brown eyes and looked at Mrs. Matilda Pitman unblinkingly. Then he sat up, dimpled deliciously, pointed to her and said solemnly to Rilla, “Pwitty lady, Willa, pwitty lady.”

Mrs. Matilda Pitman smiled. Even eighty-odd is sometimes vulnerable in vanity. “I’ve heard that children and fools tell the truth,” she said. “I was used to compliments when I was young—but they’re scarcer when you get as far along as I am. I haven’t had one for years. It tastes good. I s’pose now, you monkey, you wouldn’t give me a kiss.”

Then Jims did a quite surprising thing. He was not a demonstrative youngster and was chary with kisses even to the Ingleside people. But without a word he stood up in bed, his plump little body encased only in his undershirt, ran to the footboard, flung his arms about Mrs. Matilda Pitman’s neck, and gave her a bear hug, accompanied by three or four hearty, ungrudging smacks.

“Jims,” protested Rilla, aghast at this liberty.

“You leave him be,” ordered Mrs. Matilda Pitman, setting her bonnet straight.

“Laws I like to see some one that isn’t skeered of me. Everybody is— you are, though you’re trying to hide it. And why? Of course Robert and Amelia are because I make ‘em skeered on purpose. But folks always are— no matter how civil I be to them. Are you going to keep this child?”

“I’m afraid not. His father is coming home before long.”

“Is he any good—the father, I mean?”

“Well—he’s kind and nice—but he’s poor—and I’m afraid he always will be,”