"Why do you suppose, Mrs. Dr. dear, that Nan must go twice around the living-room every day without walking on the floor?”
"Without walking on the floor! How does she manage it, Susan?”
"By jumping from one piece of furniture to the other, including the fender. She slipped on that yesterday and pitched head-first into the coal-scuttle. Mrs. Dr. dear, do you suppose she needs a dose of worm medicine?”
That year was always referred to in the Ingleside chronicles as the one in which Dad ALMOST had pneumonia and Mother HAD it. One night, Anne, who already had a nasty cold, went with Gilbert to a party in Charlottetown ... wearing a new and very becoming dress and Jem's string of pearls. She looked so well in it that all the children who had come in to see her before she left thought it was wonderful to have a mother you could be so proud of.
"Such a nice swishy pettycoat," sighed Nan. "When I grow up will I have tafty petticoats like that, Mummy?”
"I doubt if girls will be wearing petticoats at all by that time,” said Dad. "I'll back water, Anne, and admit that dress is a stunner even if I didn't approve of the sequins. Now, don't try to vamp me, woman. I've paid you all the compliments I'm going to tonight. Remember what we read in the Medical Journal today ...
'Life is nothing more than delicately balanced organic chemistry,' and let it make you humble and modest. Sequins, indeed! Taffeta petticoat, forsooth. We're nothing but 'a fortuitous concatenation of atoms.' The great Dr. Von Bemburg says so.”
"Don't quote that horrible Von Bemburg to me. He must have a bad case of chronic indigestion. HE may be a concatenation of atoms, but I am not.”
In a few days thereafter Anne was a very sick "concatenation of atoms" and Gilbert a very anxious one. Susan went about looking harassed and tired, and the trained nurse came and went with an anxious face, and a nameless shadow suddenly swooped and spread and darkened at Ingleside. The children were not told of the seriousness of their mother's illness and even Jem did not realize it fully. But they all felt the chill and the fear and went softly and unhappily. For once there was no laughter in the maple grove and no games in Rainbow Valley. But the worst of all was that they were not allowed to see Mother. No Mother meeting them with smiles when they came home, no Mother slipping in to kiss them goodnight, no Mother to soothe and sympathize and understand, no Mother to laugh over jokes with ... nobody ever laughed like Mother. It was far worse than when she was away, because then you knew she was coming back ... and now you knew ... just NOTHING. Nobody would tell you anything ... they just put you off.
Nan came home from school very pale over something Amy Taylor had told her.
"Susan, is Mother ... Mother isn't ... she isn't going to DIE, Susan?”
"Of course not," said Susan, too sharply and quickly. Her hands trembled as she poured out Nan's glass of milk. "Who has been talking to you?”
"Amy. She said ... oh, Susan, she said she thought Mother would make such a sweet-looking corpse!”
"Never you mind what she said, my pet. The Taylors all have wagging tongues. Your blessed Mother is sick enough but she is going to pull through and that you may tie to. Do you not know that your father is at the helm?”
"God wouldn't let Mother die, would he, Susan?" asked a white- lipped Walter, looking at her with the grave intentness that made it very hard for Susan to utter her comforting lies. She was terribly afraid they WERE lies. Susan was a badly frightened woman. The nurse had shaken her head that afternoon. The doctor had refused to come down to supper.
"I suppose the Almighty knows what He's about," muttered Susan as she washed the supper dishes ... and broke three of them ... but for the first time in her honest, simple life she doubted it.
Nan wandered unhappily around. Dad was sitting by the library table with his head in his hands. The nurse went in and Nan heard her say she thought the crisis would come that night.
"What is a crisis?" she asked Di.
"I think it is what a butterfly hatches out of," said Di cautiously.
"Let's ask Jem.”
Jem knew, and told them before he went upstairs to shut himself in his room. Walter had disappeared ... he was lying face downward under the White Lady in Rainbow Valley ... and Susan had taken Shirley and Rilla off to bed. Nan went out alone and sat down on the steps. Behind her in the house was a terrible unaccustomed quiet. Before her the Glen was brimming with evening sunshine, but the long red road was misty with dust and the bent grasses in the harbour fields were burned white in the drouth. It had not rained for weeks and the flowers drooped in the garden ... the flowers Mother had loved.
Nan was thinking deeply. Now, if ever, was the time to bargain with God. What would she promise to do if He made Mother well?
It must be something tremendous ... something that would make it worth His while. Nan remembered what Dicky Drew had said to Stanley Reese in school one day, "I dare you to walk through the graveyard after night." Nan had shuddered at the time. How could ANYBODY walk through the graveyard after night ... how could anyone even THINK of it? Nan had a horror of the graveyard not a soul in Ingleside suspected. Amy Taylor had once told her it was full of dead people ... "and they don't always STAY dead," said Amy darkly and mysteriously. Nan could hardly bring herself to walk past it alone in broad daylight.
Far away the trees on a misty golden hill were touching the sky.
Nan had often though if she could get to that hill she could touch the sky, too. God lived just on the other side of it ... He might hear you better there. But she could not get to that hill ... she must just do the best she could here at Ingleside.
She clasped her little sunburned paws and lifted her tear-stained face to the sky.
"Dear God," she whispered, "if you make Mother get well I'll WALK THROUGH THE GRAVEYARD AFTER NIGHT. O dear God, PLEASE, PLEASE.
And if You do this I won't bother You for ever so long again.”
Chapter 26
It was life, not death, that came at the ghostliest hour of the night to Ingleside. The children, sleeping at last, must have felt even in their sleep that the Shadow had withdrawn as silently and swiftly as it had come. For when they woke, to a day dark with welcome rain, there was sunshine in their eyes. They hardly needed to be told the good news by a Susan who had grown ten years younger. The crisis was past and Mother was going to live.
It was Saturday, so there was no school. They could not stir outside ... even though they loved to be out in the rain. This downpour was too much for them ... and they had to be very quiet inside. But they had never felt happier. Dad, almost sleepless for a week, had flung himself on the spare-room bed for a long deep slumber ... but not before he had sent a long-distance message to a green-gabled house in Avonlea where two old ladies had been trembling every time the telephone rang.
Susan, whose heart of late had not been in her desserts, concocted a glorious "orange shuffle" for dinner, promised a jam roly-poly for supper, and baked a double batch of butterscotch cookies. Cock Robin chirped all over the place. The very chairs looked as if they wanted to dance. The flowers in the garden lifted up their faces bravely again as the dry earth welcomed the rain. And Nan, amid all her happiness, was trying to face the consequences of her bargain with God.
She had no thought of trying to back out of it, but she kept putting it off, hoping she could get a little more courage for it.
The very thought of it "made her blood curdle," as Amy Taylor was so found of saying. Susan knew there was something the matter with the child and administered castor-oil, with no visible improvement.