Walter looked. A baby! A plump, roly-poly baby, with silky damp curls all over her head and such tiny cunning hands.
"Is she not a beauty?" said Susan proudly. "Look at her eyelashes ... never did I see such long eyelashes on a baby. And her pretty little ears. I always look at their ears first.”
Walter hesitated.
"She's sweet, Susan ... oh, look at her darling little curly toes! ... but ... isn't she rather small?”
Susan laughed.
"Eight pounds is not small, lamb. And she has begun to take notice already. That child was not an hour old when she raised her head and LOOKED at the doctor. I have never seen the like of it in all my life.”
"She's going to have red hair," said the doctor in a tone of satisfaction. "Lovely red-gold hair like her mother's.”
"And hazel eyes like her father's," said the doctor's wife jubilantly.
"I don't see why one of us can't have yellow hair," said Walter dreamily, thinking of Alice.
"Yellow hair! Like the Drews!" said Susan in measureless contempt.
"She looks so cunning when she is asleep," crooned the nurse. "I never saw a baby that crinkled its eyes like that when it went to sleep.”
"She is a miracle. All our babies were sweet, Gilbert, but she is the sweetest of them all.”
"Lord love you," said Aunt Mary Maria with a sniff, "there's been a few babies in the world before, you know, Annie.”
"OUR baby has never been in the world before, Aunt Mary Maria,” said Walter proudly. "Susan, may I kiss her ... just once ... please?”
"That you may," said Susan, glaring after Aunt Mary Maria's retreating back. "And now I'm going down to make a cherry pie for dinner. Mary Maria Blythe made one yesterday afternoon ... I wish you could see it, Mrs. Dr. dear. It looks like something the cat dragged in. I shall eat as much of it myself as I can, rather than waste it, but such a pie shall never be set before the doctor as long as I have my health and strength and that you may tie to.”
"It isn't everybody that has your knack with pastry, you know,” said Anne.
"Mummy," said Walter, as the door closed behind a gratified Susan, "I think we are a very nice family, don't you?”
A very nice family, Anne reflected happily as she lay in her bed, with the baby beside her. Soon she would be about with them again, light-footed as of yore, loving them, teaching them, comforting them. They would be coming to her with their little joys and sorrows, their budding hopes, their new fears, their little problems that seemed so big to them and their little heart-breaks that seemed so bitter. She would hold all the threads of the Ingleside life in her hands again to weave into a tapestry of beauty. And Aunt Mary Maria should have no cause to say, as Anne had heard her say two days ago, "You look dreadful tired, Gilbert.
Does ANYBODY ever look after you?”
Downstairs Aunt Mary Maria was shaking her head despondently and saying, "All newborn infants' legs are crooked, I know, but, Susan, that child's legs are much TOO crooked. Of course we must not say so to poor Annie. Be sure you don't mention it to Annie, Susan.”
Susan, for once, was beyond speech.
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.
"It's early for fall," said Aunt Mary Maria in a tone that implied the fall had insulted her.
But the fall was beautiful, too. There was the joy of winds blowing in from a darkly blue gulf and the splendour of harvest moons. There were lyric asters in the Hollow and children laughing in an apple-laden orchard, clear serene evenings on the high hill pastures of the Upper Glen and silvery mackerel skies with dank birds flying across them; and, as the days shortened, little grey mists stealing over the dunes and up the harbour.
With the falling leaves Rebecca Dew came to Ingleside to make a visit promised for years. She came for a week but was prevailed upon to stay two ... none being so urgent as Susan. Susan and Rebecca Dew seemed to discover at first sight that they were kindred spirits ... perhaps because they both loved Anne ... perhaps because they both hated Aunt Mary Maria.
There came an evening in the kitchen when, as the rain dripped down on the dead leaves outside and the wind cried around the eaves and corners of Ingleside, Susan poured out all her woes to sympathetic Rebecca Dew. The doctor and his wife had gone out to make a call, the small fry were all cosy in their beds, and Aunt Mary Maria fortunately out of the way with a headache ... "just like a band of iron round my brain," she had moaned.