Anne of Ingleside

  'I wasn't quilting,' said Anne, 'so I didn't hear any gossip.'

  'You never do, dearie,' said Miss Cornelia, who had lingered to help Susan bind the quilts. 'When you are at the quilt they never let themselves go. They think you don't approve of gossip.'

  'It all depends on the kind,' said Anne.

  'Well, nobody really said anything too terrible today. Most of the people they talked about were dead... or ought to be,' said Miss Cornelia, recalling the story of Abner Cromwell's abortive funeral with a grin. 'Only Mrs Millison had to drag in that gruesome old murder story again about Madge Carey and her husband. I remember it all. There wasn't a vestige of proof that Madge did it... except that a cat died after eating some of the soup. The animal had been sick for a week. If you ask me, Roger Carey died of appendicitis, though, of course, nobody knew they had appendixes then.'

  'And, indeed, I think it is a great pity they ever found out,' said Susan. 'The spoons are all intact, Mrs Doctor dear, and nothing happened to the tablecloth.'

  'Well, I must be getting home,' said Miss Cornelia. 'I'll send you up some spare ribs next week when Marshall kills the pig.'

  Walter was again sitting on the steps with eyes full of dreams. Dusk had fallen. Where, he wondered, had it fallen from? Did some great spirit with bat-like wings pour it all over the world from a purple jar? The moon was rising and three wind-twisted old spruces looked like three lean, humpbacked old witches hobbling up a hill against it. Was that a little faun with furry ears crouching in the shadows? Suppose he opened the door in the brick wall now wouldn't he step, not into the well-known garden, but into some strange land of faery, where princesses were waking from enchanted sleeps, where perhaps he might find and follow echo as he so often longed to do? One dared not speak. Something would vanish if one did.

  'Darling,' said Mother, coming out, 'you mustn't sit here any longer. It is getting cold. Remember your throat.'

  The spoken word had broken the spell. Some magic light had gone. The lawn was still a beautiful place, but it was no longer fairyland. Walter got up.

  'Mother, will you tell me what happened at Peter Kirk's funeral?'

  Anne thought for a moment... then shivered.

  'Not now, dear. Perhaps... some time...'

  35

  Anne, alone in her room... for Gilbert had been called out... sat down at her window for a few minutes of communion with the tenderness of the night and of enjoyment of the eerie charm of her moonlit room. 'Say what you will,' thought Anne, 'there is always something a little strange about a moonlit room. Its whole personality is changed. It is not so friendly... so human. It is remote and aloof and wrapped up in itself. Almost it regards you as an intruder.'

  She was a little tired after her busy day and everything was so beautifully quiet now... the children asleep, Ingleside restored to order. There was no sound in the house except a faint rhythmic thumping from the kitchen where Susan was setting her bread.

  But through the open window came the sounds of the night, every one of which Anne knew and loved. Low laughter drifted up from the harbour on the still air. Someone was singing down in the Glen and it sounded like the haunting notes of some song heard long ago. There were silvery moonlight paths over the water, but Ingleside was hooded in shadow. The trees were whispering 'dark sayings of old' and an owl was hooting in Rainbow Valley.

  'What a happy summer this has been,' thought Anne... and then recalled with a little pang something she had heard Aunt Highland Kitty of the Upper Glen say once... 'the same summer will never be coming twice.'

  Never quite the same. Another summer would come... but the children would be a little older and Rilla would be going to school... 'and I'll have no baby left,' thought Anne sadly. Jem was twelve now and there was already talk of 'the Entrance'... Jem, who but yesterday had been a wee baby in the old House of Dreams. Walter was shooting up and that very morning she had heard Nan teasing Di about some 'boy' in school; and Di had actually blushed and tossed her red head. Well, that was life. Gladness and pain... hope and fear... and change. Always change! You could not help it. You had to let the old go and take the new to your heart, learn to love it and then let it go in turn. Spring, lovely as it was, must yield to summer and summer lose itself in autumn. The birth... the bridal... the death...

  Anne suddenly thought of Walter asking to be told what had happened at Peter Kirk's funeral. She had not thought of it for years, but she had not forgotten it. Nobody who had been there, she felt sure, had forgotten it or ever would. Sitting there in the moonlight dusk she recalled it all.

  It had been in November... the first November they had spent at Ingleside... following a week of Indian summer days. The Kirks lived at Mowbray Narrows but came to the Glen church and Gilbert was their doctor; so he and Anne both went to the funeral.

  It had been, she remembered, a mild, calm, pearl-grey day. All around them had been the lonely brown-and-purple landscape of November, with patches of sunlight here and there on upland and slope where the sun shone through a rift in the clouds. 'Kirkwynd' was so near the shore that a breath of salt wind blew through the grim firs behind it. It was a big, prosperous-looking house, but Anne always thought that the gable of the L looked exactly like a long, narrow, spiteful face.

  Anne paused to speak to a little knot of women on the stiff flowerless lawn. They were all good hardworking souls to whom a funeral was a not unpleasant excitement.

  'I forgot to bring a handkerchief,' Mrs Bryan Blake was saying plaintively. 'Whatever will I do when I cry?'

  'Why will you have to cry?' bluntly asked her sister-in-law, Camilla Blake. Camilla had no use for women who cried too easily. 'Peter Kirk is no relation to you and you never liked him.'

  'I think it is proper to cry at a funeral,' said Mrs Blake stiffly. 'It shows feeling when a neighbour has been summoned to his long home.'

  'If nobody cries at Peter's funeral except those who liked him there won't be many wet eyes,' said Mrs Curtis Rodd drily. 'That is the truth and why mince it? He was a pious old humbug and I know it if nobody else does. Who is that coming in at the little gate? Don't... don't tell me it's Clara Wilson.'

  'It is,' whispered Mrs Bryan incredulously.

  'Well, you know after Peter's first wife died she told him she would never enter his house again until she came to his funeral and she's kept her word,' said Camilla Blake. 'She's a sister of Peter's first wife'... in an explanatory aside to Anne, who looked curiously at Clara Wilson as she swept past them, unseeing, her smouldering topaz eyes staring straight ahead. She was a thin slip of a woman with a dark-browed, tragical face and black hair under one of the absurd bonnets elderly women still wore, a thing of feathers and 'bugles' with a skimpy nose veil. She looked at and spoke to no one, as her long black taffeta skirt swished over the grass and up the veranda steps.

  'There's Jed Clinton at the door, putting on his funeral face,' said Camilla sarcastically. 'He's evidently thinking it is time we went in. It's always been his boast that at his funerals everything goes according to schedule. He's never forgiven Winnie Clow for fainting before the sermon. It wouldn't have been so bad afterwards. Well, nobody is likely to faint at this funeral. Olivia isn't the fainting kind.'

  'Jed Clinton... the Lowbridge undertaker,' said Mrs Reese. 'Why didn't they have the Glen man?'

  'Who? Carter Flagg? Why, woman dear, Peter and him have been at daggers drawn all their lives. Carter wanted Amy Wilson, you know.'

  'A good many wanted her,' said Camilla. 'She was a very pretty girl, with her coppery red hair and inky black eyes. Though people thought Clara the handsomer of the two then. It's odd she never married. There's the minister at last... and the Reverend Mr Owen of Lowbridge with him. Of course, he is Olivia's cousin. All right, except that he puts too many "Oh's" in his prayers. We'd better go in or Jeds will have a conniption.'

  Anne paused to look at Peter Kirk on her way to a chair. She had never liked him. 'He has a cruel face,' she thought, the first time she had ever seen him. Ha
ndsome, yes... but with cold steely eyes even then becoming pouchy, and the thin, pinched, merciless mouth of a miser. He was known to be selfish and arrogant in his dealings with his fellow-men in spite of his profession of piety and his unctuous prayers. 'Always feels his importance,' she had heard someone say once. Yet, on the whole, he had been respected and looked up to.

  He was as arrogant in his death as in his life, and there was something about the too-long fingers clasped over his still breast that made Anne shudder. She thought of a woman's heart being held in them and glanced at Olivia Kirk, sitting opposite to her in her mourning. Olivia was a tall, fair, handsome woman with large blue eyes... 'no ugly women for me,' Peter Kirk had said once... and her face was composed and expressionless. There was no apparent trace of tears... but then Olivia had been a Random and the Randoms were not emotional. At least she sat decorously and the most heart-broken widow in the world could not have worn heavier weeds.

  The air was cloyed with the perfume of the flowers that banked the coffin... for Peter Kirk who had never known flowers existed. His lodge had sent a wreath, the Church had sent one, the Conservative Association had sent one, the School Trustees had sent one, the Cheese Board had sent one. His one, long-alienated son had sent nothing, but the Kirk clan at large had sent a huge anchor of white roses with 'Harbour at Last' in red rosebuds across it, and there was one from Olivia herself... a pillow of calla lilies. Camilla Blake's face twitched as she looked at it, and Anne remembered that she had once heard Camilla say that she had been at Kirkwynd soon after Peter's second marriage when Peter had fired out of the window a potted calla lily which the bride had brought with her. He wasn't, so he said, going to have his house cluttered up with weeds.

  Olivia had apparently taken it very coolly and there had been no more calla lilies at Kirkwynd. Could it be possible that Olivia... but Anne looked at Mrs Kirk's placid face and dismissed the suspicion. After all, it was generally the florist who suggested the flowers.

  The choir sang, 'Death like a narrow sea divides that heavenly land from ours', and Anne caught Camilla's eye and knew they were both wondering just how Peter Kirk would fit into that heavenly land. Anne could almost hear Camilla saying, 'Fancy Peter Kirk with a harp and halo if you dare.'

  The Reverend Mr Owen read a chapter and prayed, with many 'Oh's' and many entreaties that sorrowing hearts might be comforted. The Glen minister gave an address which many privately considered entirely too fulsome, even allowing for the fact that you had to say something good of the dead. To hear Peter Kirk called an affectionate father and a tender husband, a kind neighbour and an earnest Christian was, they felt, a misuse of language. Camilla took refuge behind her handkerchief, not to shed tears, and Stephen MacDonald cleared his throat once or twice. Mrs Bryan must have borrowed a handkerchief from someone, for she was weeping into it, but Olivia's down-dropped blue eyes remained tearless.

  Jed Clinton drew a breath of relief. All had gone beautifully. Another hymn... the customary parade for a last look at 'the remains'... and another successful funeral would be added to his long list.

  There was a slight disturbance in a corner of the large room, and Clara Wilson made her way through the maze of chairs to the tables beside the casket. She turned there and faced the assembly. Her absurd bonnet had slipped a trifle to one side and a loose end of her heavy black hair had escaped from its coil and hung down on her shoulder. But nobody thought Clara Wilson looked absurd. Her long sallow face was flushed, her haunted, tragic eyes were flaming. She was a woman possessed. Bitterness, like some gnawing incurable disease, seemed to pervade her being.

  'You have listened to a pack of lies... you people who have come here "to pay your respects"... or glut your curiosity, which ever it was. Now I shall tell you the truth about Peter Kirk. I am no hypocrite... I never feared him living and I do not fear him now that he is dead. Nobody has ever dared to tell the truth about him to his face, but it is going to be told now... here at his funeral, where he has been called a good husband and a kind neighbour. A good husband! He married my sister Amy... my beautiful sister, Amy. You all know how sweet and lovely she was. He made her life a misery to her. He tortured and humiliated her... he liked to do it. Oh, he went to church regularly... and made long prayers... and paid his debts. But he was a bully... his very dog ran when he heard him coming.

  'I told Amy she would repent marrying him. I helped her make her wedding dress... I'd rather have made her shroud. She was wild about him then, poor thing, but she hadn't been his wife a week before she knew what he was. His mother had been a slave and he expected his wife to be one. "There will be no arguments in my household," he told her. She hadn't the spirit to argue... her heart was broken. Oh, I know what she went through, my poor pretty darling. He crossed her in everything. She couldn't have a flower-garden... she couldn't even have a kitten... I gave her one and he drowned it. She had to account to him for every cent she spent. Did ever any of you see her in a decent stitch of clothes? He would fault her for wearing her best hat if it looked like rain. Rain couldn't hurt any hat she had, poor soul. Her that loved pretty clothes! He was always sneering at her people. He never laughed in his life... did any of you ever hear him really laugh? He smiled... oh, yes he always smiled, calmly and sweetly, when he was doing the most maddening things. He smiled when he told her after her little baby was born dead that she might as well have died, too, if she couldn't have anything but dead brats. She died after ten years of it... and I was glad she had escaped him. I told him then I'd never enter his house again till I came to his funeral. Some of you heard me. I've kept my word and now I've come and told the truth about him. It is the truth... you know it'... she pointed fiercely at Stephen Macdonald... 'you know it'... the long finger darted at Camilla Blake... 'you know it'... Olivia Kirk did not move a muscle... 'you know it'... the poor minister himself felt as if that finger stabbed completely through him. 'I cried at Peter Kirk's wedding, but I told him I'd laugh at his funeral. And I'm going to do it.'

  She swished furiously about and bent over the casket. Wrongs that had festered for years had been avenged. She had wreaked her hatred at last. Her whole body vibrated with triumph and satisfaction as she looked down at the cold quiet face of the dead man. Everybody listened for the burst of vindictive laughter. It did not come. Clara Wilson's angry face suddenly changed... twisted... crumpled up like a child's. Clara Wilson was... crying.

  She turned, with the tears streaming down her ravaged cheeks, to leave the room. But Olivia Kirk rose before her and laid a hand on her arm. For a moment the two women looked at each other.

  The room was engulfed in a silence that seemed like a personal presence.

  'Thank you, Clara Wilson,' said Olivia Kirk. Her face was as inscrutable as ever, but there was an undertone in her calm, even voice that made Anne shudder. She felt as if a pit had suddenly opened before her eyes. Clara Wilson might hate Peter Kirk, alive and dead, but Anne felt that her hatred was a pale thing compared to Olivia Kirk's.

  Clara went out, weeping, passing an infuriated Jed with a spoiled funeral on his hands. The minister, who had intended to announce for a last hymn, 'Asleep in Jesus', thought better of it and simply pronounced a tremulous benediction.

  Jed did not make the usual announcement that friends and relatives might now take a parting look at 'the remains'. The only decent thing to do, he felt, was to shut down the cover of the casket at once and bury Peter Kirk out of sight as soon as possible.

  Anne drew a long breath as she went down the veranda steps. How lovely the cold fresh air was after that stifling, perfumed room where two women's bitterness had been as their torment.

  The afternoon had grown colder and greyer. Little groups here and there on the lawn were discussing the affair with muted voices. Clara Wilson could still be seen crossing a sere pasture field on her way home.

  'Well, didn't that beat all?' said Nelson Craig dazedly.

  'Shocking... shocking!' said Elder Baxter.

  'Why didn't some of u
s stop her?' demanded Henry Reese.

  'Because you all wanted to hear what she had to say,' retorted Camilla.

  'It wasn't... decorous,' said Uncle Sandy MacDougall. He had got hold of a word that pleased him and rolled it under his tongue. 'Not decorous. A funeral should be decorous whatever else it may be... decorous.'

  'Gosh, ain't life funny?' said Augustus Palmer.

  'I mind when Peter and Amy began keeping company,' mused old James Porter. 'I was courting my woman that same winter. Clara was a fine-looking bit of goods then. And what a cherry-pie she could make!'

  'She was always a bitter-tongued girl,' said Boyce Warren. 'I suspected there'd be dynamite of some kind when I saw her coming, but I didn't dream it would take that form. And Olivia! Would you have thought it? Weemen are a queer lot.'

  'It will make quite a story for the rest of our lives,' said Camilla. 'After all, I suppose if things like this never happened history would be dull stuff.'

  A demoralized Jed had got his pall-bearers rounded up and the casket carried out. As the hearse drove down the lane, followed by the slow-moving procession of buggies, a dog was heard howling heart-brokenly in the barn. Perhaps, after all, one living creature mourned Peter Kirk.

  Stephen MacDonald joined Anne as she waited for Gilbert. He was a tall Upper Glen man with the head of an old Roman emperor. Anne had always liked him.

  'Smells like snow,' he said. 'It always seems to me that November is a homesick time. Does it ever strike you that way, Mrs Blythe?'

  'Yes. The year is looking back sadly to her lost spring.'

  'Spring... spring! Mrs Blythe, I'm getting old. I find myself imagining that the seasons are changing. Winter isn't what it was... I don't recognize summer... and spring... there are no springs now. At least, that's how we feel when folks we used to know don't come back to share them with us. Poor Clara Wilson now... what did you think of it all?'

  'Oh, it was heart-breaking. Such hatred...'

  'Ye-e-e-s. You see, she was in love with Peter herself long ago... terribly in love. Clara was the handsomest girl in Mowbray Narrows then... little dark curls all round her cream-white face... but Amy was a laughing, lilting thing. Peter dropped Clara and took up with Amy. It's strange the way we're made, Mrs Blythe.'