Chapter 37 Anne of Ingleside by Lucy Montgomery
"Can I be your dearest friend this year?" asked Delilah Green, during that afternoon recess.
Delilah had very round, dark-blue eyes, sleek sugar-brown curls, a small rosy mouth, and a thrilling voice with a little quaver in it. Diana Blythe responded to the charm of that voice instantly.
It was known in the Glen school that Diana Blythe was rather at loose ends for a chum. For two years she and Pauline Reese had been cronies but Pauline's family had moved away and Diana felt very lonely. Pauline had been a good sort. To be sure, she was quite lacking in the mystic charm that the now almost forgotten Jenny Penny had possessed but she was practical, full of fun, sensible. That last was Susan's adjective and was the highest praise Susan could bestow. She had been entirely satisfied with Pauline as a friend for Diana.
Diana looked at Delilah doubtfully, then glanced across the playground at Laura Carr, who was also a new girl. Laura and she had spent the forenoon recess together and had found each other very agreeable. But Laura was rather plain, with freckles and unmanageable sandy hair. She had none of Delilah Green's beauty and not a spark of her allure.
Delilah understood Diana's look and a hurt expression crept over her face; her blue eyes seemed ready to brim with tears.
"If you love her you can't love me. Choose between us," said Delilah, holding out her hands dramatically. Her voice was more thrilling than ever . . . it positively sent a creep along Diana's spine. She put her hands in Delilah's and they looked at each other solemnly, feeling dedicated and sealed. At least, Diana felt that way.
"You'll love me forever, won't you?" asked Delilah passionately.
"Forever," vowed Diana with equal passion.
Delilah slipped her arms around Diana's waist and they walked down to the brook together. The rest of the Fourth class understood that an alliance had been concluded. Laura Carr gave a tiny sigh. She had liked Diana Blythe very much. But she knew she could not compete with Delilah.
"I'm so glad you're going to let me love you," Delilah was saying. "I'm so very affectionate . . . I just can't help loving people. Please be kind to me, Diana. I am a child of sorrow. I was put under a curse at birth. Nobody . . . nobody loves me."
Delilah somehow contrived to put ages of loneliness and loveliness into that "nobody." Diana tightened her clasp.
"You'll never have to say that after this, Delilah. I will always love you."
"World without end?"
"World without end," answered Diana. They kissed each other, as in a rite. Two boys on the fence whooped derisively, but who cared?
"You'll like me ever so much better than Laura Carr," said Delilah. "Now that we're dear friends I can tell you what I wouldn't have dreamed of telling you if you had picked her. She is deceitful. Dreadfully deceitful. She pretends to be your friend to your face and behind your back she makes fun of you and says the meanest things. A girl I know went to school with her at Mowbray's Narrows and she told me. You've had a narrow escape. I'm so different from that . . . I am as true as gold, Diana."
"I'm sure you are. But what did you mean by saying you were a child of sorrow, Delilah?"
Delilah's eyes seemed to expand until they were absolutely enormous.
"I have a stepmother," she whispered.
"A stepmother?"
"When your mother dies and your father marries again she is a stepmother," said Delilah, with still more thrills in her voice. "Now you know it all, Diana. If you knew the way I am treated! But I never complain. I suffer in silence."
If Delilah really suffered in silence it might be wondered where Diana got all the information she showered on the Ingleside folks during the next few weeks. She was in the throes of a wild passion of adoration and sympathy for and with sorrow-laden, persecuted Delilah, and she had to talk about her to anyone who would listen.
"I suppose this new infatuation will run its course in due time," said Anne. "Who is this Delilah, Susan? I don't want the children to be little snobs . . . but after our experience with Jenny Penny . . ."
"The Greens are very respectable, Mrs. Dr. dear. They are well-known at Lowbridge. They moved into the old Hunter place this summer. Mrs. Green is the second wife and has two children of her own. I do not know much about her but she seems to have a slow, kind, easy way with her. I can hardly believe she uses Delilah as Di says."
"Don't put too much credence in everything Delilah tells you," Anne warned Diana. "She may be prone to exaggerate a little. Remember Jenny Penny . . ."
"Why, Mother, Delilah isn't a single bit like Jenny Penny," said Di indignantly. "Not one bit. She is scrupulously truthful. If you only saw her, Mother, you'd know she couldn't tell a lie. They all pick on her at home because she is so different. And she has such an affectionate nature. She has been persecuted from her birth. Her stepmother hates her. It just breaks my heart to hear of her sufferings. Why, Mother, she doesn't get enough to eat, truly she doesn't. She never knows what it is not to be hungry. Mother, they send her to bed without any supper lots of times and she cries herself to sleep. Did you ever cry because you were hungry, Mother?"
"Often," said Mother.
Diana stared at her mother, all the wind taken out of the sails of her rhetorical question.
"I was often very hungry before I came to Green Gables--at the orphanage . . . and before. I've never cared to talk of those days."
"Well, you ought to be able to understand Delilah, then," said Di, rallying her confused wits. "When she is so hungry she just sits down and imagines things to eat. Just think of her imagining things to eat!"
"You and Nan do enough of that yourselves," said Anne. But Di would not listen.
"Her sufferings are not only physical but spiritual. Why, she wants to be a missionary, Mother . . . to consecrate her life . . . and they all laugh at her."
"Very heartless of them," agreed Anne. But something in her voice made Di suspicious.
"Mother, why will you be so sceptical?" she demanded reproachfully.
"For the second time," smiled Mother, "I must remind you of Jenny Penny. You believed in her, too."
"I was only a child then and it was easy to fool me," said Diana in her stateliest manner. She felt that Mother was not her usual sympathetic and understanding self in regard to Delilah Green. After that Diana talked only to Susan about her, since Nan merely nodded when Delilah's name was mentioned. "Just jealousy," thought Diana sadly.
Not that Susan was so markedly sympathetic either. But Diana just had to talk to somebody about Delilah and Susan's derision did not hurt like Mother's. You wouldn't expect Susan to understand fully. But Mother had been a girl . . . Mother had loved Aunt Diana . . . Mother had such a tender heart. How was it that the account of poor darling Delilah's ill-treatment left her so cold?
"Maybe she's a little jealous, too, because I love Delilah so much," reflected Diana sagely. "They say mothers do get like that. Kind of possessive."
"It makes my blood boil to hear of the way her stepmother treats Delilah," Di told Susan. "She is a martyr, Susan. She never has anything but a little porridge for breakfast and supper . . . a very little bit of porridge. And she isn't allowed sugar on the porridge. Susan, I've given up taking sugar on mine because it made me feel guilty."
"Oh, so that's why. Well, sugar has gone up a cent, so maybe it is just as well."
Diana vowed she wouldn't tell Susan anything more about Delilah, but next evening she was so indignant she couldn't help herself.
"Susan, Delilah's mother chased her last night with a red-hot teakettle. Think of if, Susan. Of course Delilah says she doesn't do that very often . . . only when she is greatly exasperated. Mostly she just locks Delilah in a dark garret . . . a haunted garret. The ghosts that poor child has seen, Susan! It can't be healthy for her. The last time they shut her in the garret she saw the weirdest little black creature sitting on the spinning-wheel, humming."
"What kind of a creature," asked Susan gravely. She was beginning to enjoy Delilah's tribulations and Di's italics, and she and Mrs. Dr. laughed over them in secret.
"I don't know . . . it was just a creature. It almost drove her to suicide. I am really afraid she will be driven to it yet. You know, Susan, she had an uncle who committed suicide twice."
"Was not once enough?" asked Susan heartlessly.
Di went off in a huff, but next day she had to come back with another tale of woe.
"Delilah has never had a doll, Susan. She did so hope she would get one in her stocking last Christmas. And what do you think she found instead, Susan? A switch! They whip her almost every day, you know. Think of that poor child being whipped, Susan."
"I was whipped several times when I was young and I am none the worse of it now," said Susan, who would have done goodness knows what if anyone had ever tried to whip an Ingleside child.
"When I told Delilah about our Christmas trees, she wept, Susan. She never had a Christmas tree. But she is bound she is going to have one this year. She had found an old umbrella with nothing but the ribs and she is going to set it in a pail and decorate it for a Christmas tree. Isn't that pathetic, Susan?"
"Are there not plenty of young spruces handy? The back of the old Hunter place has practically gone spruce of late years," said Susan. "I do wish that girl was called anything but Delilah. Such a name for a Christian child!"
"Why, it is in the Bible, Susan. Delilah is very proud of her Bible name. Today in school, Susan, I told Delilah we were going to have chicken for dinner tomorrow and she said . . . what do you think she said, Susan?"
"I am sure I could never guess," said Susan emphatically. "And you have no business to be talking in school."
"Oh, we don't. Delilah says we must never break any of the rules. Her standards are very high. We write each other letters in our scribblers and exchange them. Well, Delilah said, 'Could you bring me a bone, Diana?' It brought tears to my eye. I'm going to take her a bone . . . with a lot of meat on it. Delilah needs good food. She has to work like a slave . . . a slave, Susan. She has to do all the housework . . . well, nearly all anyway. And if it isn't done right she is savagely shaken . . . or made to eat in the kitchen with the servants."
"The Greens have only one little French hired boy."
"Well, she has to eat with him. And he sits in his sockfeet and eats in his shirtsleeves. Delilah says she doesn't mind those things now when she has me to love her. She has no one to love her but me, Susan?"
"Awful!" said Susan, with great gravity of countenance.
"Delilah says if she had a million dollars she'd give it all to me, Susan. Of course I wouldn't take it but it shows how good her heart is."
"It is as easy to give away a million as a hundred if you have not got either," was as far as Susan would go.