Anne Of Ingleside √ (Project K.)

CHAPTER 11

By the end of August Anne was herself again, looking forward to a happy autumn. Small Bertha Marilla grew in beauty day by day and was a centre of worship to adoring brothers and sisters.

"I thought a baby would be something that yelled all the time," said Jem, rapturously letting the tiny fingers cling around his. "Bertie Shakespeare Drew told me so."

"I am not doubting that the Drew babies yell all the time, Jem dear," said Susan. "Yell at the thought of having to be Drews, I presume. But Bertha Marilla is an Ingleside baby, Jem dear."

"I wish I had been born at Ingleside, Susan," said Jem wistfully. He always felt sorry he hadn't been. Di cast it up to him at times.

"Don't you find life here rather dull?" an old Queen's classmate from Charlottetown had asked Anne rather patronizingly one day.

Dull! Anne almost laughed in her caller's face. Ingleside dull! With a delicious baby bringing new wonders every day . . . with visits from Diana and Little Elizabeth and Rebecca Dew to be planned for . . . with Mrs. Sam Ellison of the Upper Glen on Gilbert's hands with a disease only three people in the world had ever been known to have before . . . with Walter starting to school . . . with Nan drinking a whole bottle of perfume from Mother's dressing-table . . . they thought it would kill her but she was never a whit the worse . . . with a strange black cat having the unheard-of number of ten kittens in the back porch . . . with Shirley locking himself in the bathroom and forgetting how to unlock it . . . with the Shrimp getting rolled up in a sheet of fly-paper . . . with Aunt Mary Maria setting the curtains of her room on fire in the dead of night while prowling with a candle, and rousing the household with appalling screams. Life dull!

For Aunt Mary Maria was still at Ingleside. Occasionally she would say pathetically, "Whenever you are tired of me just let me know . . . I'm used to looking after myself." There was only one thing to say to that and of course Gilbert always said it. Though he did not say it quite as heartily as at first. Even Gilbert's "clannishness" was beginning to wear a little thin; he was realizing rather helplessly . . . "man-like" as Miss Cornelia sniffed . . . that Aunt Mary Maria was by way of becoming a bit of a problem in his household. He had ventured one day to give a slight hint as to how houses suffered if left too long without inhabitants; and Aunt Mary Maria agreed with him, calmly remarking that she was thinking of selling her Charlottetown house.

"Not a bad idea," encouraged Gilbert. "And I know a very nice little cottage in town for sale . . . a friend of mine is going to California . . . it's very like that one you admired so much where Mrs. Sarah Newman lives . . ."

"But lives alone," sighed Aunt Mary Maria.

"She likes it," said Anne hopefully.

"There's something wrong with anyone who likes living alone, Anne," said Aunt Mary Maria.

Susan repressed a groan with difficulty.

Diana came for a week in September. Then Little Elizabeth came . . . Little Elizabeth no longer . . . tall, slender, beautiful Elizabeth now. But still with the golden hair and wistful smile. Her father was returning to his office in Paris and Elizabeth was going with him to keep his house. She and Anne took long walks around the storied shores of the old harbour, coming home beneath silent, watchful autumn stars. They relived the old Windy Poplars life and retraced their steps in the map of fairyland which Elizabeth still had and meant to keep forever.

"Hanging on the wall of my room wherever I go," she said.

One day a wind blew through the Ingleside garden . . . the first wind of autumn. That night the rose of the sunset was a trifle austere. All at once the summer had grown old. The turn of the season had come.