Chapter 38 Anne of Ingleside by Lucy Montgomery
Diana was overjoyed. After all, Mother wasn't jealous . . . Mother wasn't possessive . . . Mother did understand.
Mother and Father were going up to Avonlea for the week-end and Mother had told her she could ask Delilah Green to spend Saturday and Saturday night at Ingleside.
"I saw Delilah at the Sunday School picnic," Anne told Susan. "She is a pretty, lady-like little thing . . . though of course she must exaggerate. Perhaps her stepmother is a little hard on her . . . and I've heard her father is rather dour and strict. She probably has some grievances and likes to dramatize them by way of getting sympathy."
Susan was a bit dubious.
"But at least anyone living in Laura Green's house will be clean," she reflected. Fine-tooth combs did not enter into this question.
Diana was full of plans for Delilah's entertainment.
"Can we have a roast chicken, Susan . . . with lots of stuffing? And pie. You don't know how that poor child longs to taste pie. They never have pies . . . her stepmother is too mean."
Susan was very nice about it. Jem and Nan had gone to Avonlea and Walter was down at the House of Dreams with Kenneth Ford. There was nothing to cast a shadow on Delilah's visit and it certainly seemed to go off very well. Delilah arrived Saturday morning very nicely dressed in pink muslin . . . at least the stepmother seemed to do her well in the matter of clothes. And she had, as Susan saw at a glance, irreproachable ears and nails.
"This is the day of my life," she said solemnly to Diana. "My, what a grand house this is! And them's the china dogs! Oh, they're wonderful!"
Everything was wonderful. Delilah worked the poor word to death. She helped Diana set the table for dinner and picked the little glass basket full of pink sweetpeas for a centrepiece.
"Oh, you don't know how I love to do something just because I like to do it," she told Diana. "Isn't there anything else I can do, please?"
"You can crack the nuts for the cake I'm going to make this afternoon," said Susan, who was herself falling under the spell of Delilah's beauty and voice. After all, perhaps Laura Green was a Tartar. You couldn't always go by what people seemed like in public. Delilah's plate was heaped with chicken and stuffing and gravy and she got a second piece of pie without hinting for it.
"I've often wondered what it would be like to have all you could eat for once. It is a wonderful sensation," she told Diana as they left the table.
They had a gay afternoon. Susan had given Diana a box of candy and Diana shared it with Delilah. Delilah admired one of Di's dolls and Di gave it to her. They cleaned out the pansy bed and dug up a few stray dandelions that had invaded the lawn. They helped Susan polish the silver and assisted her to get supper. Delilah was so efficient and tidy that Susan capitulated completely. Only two things marred the afternoon . . . Delilah contrived to spatter her dress with ink and she lost her pearl bead necklace. But Susan took the ink out nicely . . . some of the colour coming out too . . . with salts of lemon and Delilah said it didn't matter about the necklace. Nothing mattered except that she was at Ingleside with her dearest Diana.
"Aren't we going to sleep in the spare-room bed?" asked Diana when bedtime came. "We always put company in the spare-room, Susan."
"Your Aunt Diana is coming with your father and mother tomorrow night," said Susan. "The spare-room has been made up for her. You can have the Shrimp on your own bed and you couldn't have him in the spare-room."
"My, but your sheets smell nice!" said Delilah as they snuggled down.
"Susan always boils them with orris root," said Diana.
Delilah sighed.
"I wonder if you know what a lucky girl you are, Diana. If I had a home like you . . . but it's my lot in life. I just have to bear it."
Susan, on her nightly round of the house before retiring, came in and told them to stop chattering and go to sleep. She gave them two maple sugar buns apiece.
"I can never forget your kindness, Miss Baker," said Delilah, her voice quivering with emotion. Susan went to her bed reflecting that a nicer-mannered, more appealing little girl she had never seen. Certainly she had misjudged Delilah Green. Though at that moment it occurred to Susan that, for a child who never got enough to eat, the bones of the said Delilah Green were very well covered!
Delilah went home the next afternoon and Mother and Father and Aunt Diana came at night. On Monday the bolt fell from the proverbial blue. Diana, returning to school at the noon hour, caught her own name as she entered the school porch. Inside the schoolroom Delilah Green was the centre of a group of curious girls.
"I was so disappointed in Ingleside. After the way Di has bragged about her house I expected a mansion. Of course it's big enough, but some of the furniture is shabby. The chairs want to be recovered the worst way."
"Did you see the china dogs?" asked Bessy Palmer.
"They're nothing wonderful. They haven't even got hair. I told Diana right on the spot I was disappointed."
Diana was standing "rooted to the ground" . . . or at least to the porch floor. She did not think about eavesdropping . . . she was simply too dumfounded to move.
"I'm sorry for Diana," went on Delilah. "The way her parents neglect their family is something scandalous. Her mother is an awful gadabout. The way she goes off and leaves them young ones is terrible with only that old Susan to look after them . . . and she's half cracked. She'll land them all in the poorhouse yet. The waste that goes on in her kitchen you wouldn't believe. The doctor's wife is too gay and lazy to cook even when she is home, so Susan has it all her own way. She was going to give us our meals in the kitchen but I just up and said to her, 'Am I company or am I not?' Susan said if I gave her any sass she'd shut me up in the back closet. I said, 'You don't dare to,' and she didn't. 'You can overcrow the Ingleside children, Susan Baker, but you can't overcrow me,' I said to her. Oh, I tell you I stood up to Susan. I wouldn't let her give Rilla soothing-syrup. 'Don't you know it's poison to children?' I said.
"She took it out on me at meals though. The mean little helpings she gives you! There was chicken but I only got the Pope's nose and nobody even asked me to take the second piece of pie. But Susan would have let me sleep in the spare-room though and Di wouldn't hear to it . . . just out of pure meanness. She's so jealous. But still I'm sorry for her. She told me Nan pinches her something scandalous. Her arms are black and blue. We slept in her room and a mangy old tomcat was lying on the foot of the bed all night. It wasn't haygeenic and I told Di so. And my pearl necklace disappeared. Of course I'm not saying Susan took it. I believe she's honest . . . but it's funny. And Shirley threw an ink-bottle at me. It ruined my dress but I don't care. Ma'll have to get me a new one. Well, anyhow, I dug all the dandelions out of their lawn for them and polished up the silver. You should have seen it. I don't know when it has been cleaned before. I tell you Susan takes it easy when the doctor's wife's away. I let her see I saw through her. 'Why don't you ever wash the potato pot, Susan?' I asked her. You should of seen her face. Look at my new ring, girls. A boy I know at Lowbridge give it to me."
"Why, I've seen Diana Blythe wearing that ring often," said Peggy MacAllister contemptuously.
"And I don't believe one single word you've been saying about Ingleside, Delilah Green," said Laura Carr.
Before Delilah could reply Diana, who had recovered her powers of locomotion and speech, dashed into the schoolroom.
"Judas!" she said. Afterwards she thought repentantly that it had not been a very ladylike thing to say. But she had been stung to the heart and when your feelings are all stirred up you can't pick and choose your words.
"I ain't Judas!" muttered Delilah, flushing, probably for the first time in her life.
"You are! There isn't one spark of sincerity in you! Don't you ever speak to me again as long as you live!"
Diana rushed out of the schoolhouse and ran home. She couldn't stay in school that afternoon . . . she just couldn't! The Ingleside front door was banged as it had never been banged before.
"Darling, what is the matter?" asked Anne, interrupted in her kitchen conference with Susan by a weeping daughter who flung herself stormily against the maternal shoulder.
The whole story was sobbed out, somewhat disjointedly.
"I've been hurt in all my finer feelings, Mother. And I'll never believe in anyone again!"
"My dear, all your friends won't be like this. Pauline wasn't."
"This is twice," said Diana bitterly, still smarting under the sense of betrayal and loss. "There isn't going to be any third time."
"I'm sorry Di has lost her faith in humanity," said Anne rather ruefully, when Di had gone upstairs. "This is a real tragedy for her. She has been unlucky in some of her chums. Jenny Penny . . . and now Delilah Green. The trouble is Di always falls for the girls who can tell interesting stories. And Delilah's martyr pose was very alluring."
"If you ask me, Mrs. Dr. dear, that Green child is a perfect minx," said Susan, all the more implacably because she had been so neatly fooled herself by Delilah's eyes and manners. "The idea of her calling our cats mangy! I am not saying that there are not such things as tomcats, Mrs. Dr. dear, but little girls should not talk of them. I am no lover of cats, but the Shrimp is seven years old and should at least be respected. And as for my potato pot . . ."
But Susan really couldn't express her feelings about the potato pot.
In her own room Di was reflecting that perhaps it was not too late to be "best friends" with Laura Carr after all. Laura was true, even if she wasn't very exciting. Di sighed. Some colour had gone out of life with her belief in Delilah's piteous lot.