Anne of Ingleside (30 page)

An appalled silence descended on the quilters. Had Walter Blythe been there all the time? Everyone was raking her recollection of the tales told to recall if any of them had been too terribly unfit for the ears of youth. Mrs Doctor Blythe was said to be so fussy about what her children heard. Before their paralysed tongues recovered Anne had come out and asked them to come to supper.

‘Just ten minutes more, Mrs Blythe. We’ll have both quilts finished then,’ said Elizabeth Kirk.

The quilts were finished, taken out, shaken, held up, and admired.

‘I wonder who’ll sleep under them,’ said Myra Murray.

‘Perhaps a new mother will hold her first baby under one of them,’ said Anne.

‘Or little children cuddle under them on a cold prairie night,’ said Miss Cornelia unexpectedly.

‘Or some poor old rheumatic body be cosier for them,’ said Mrs Meade.

‘I hope nobody
dies
under them,’ said Mrs Baxter sadly.

‘Do you know what Mary Anna said before I came?’ said Mrs Donald as they filed into the dining-room. ‘She said, “Ma, don’t forget you must eat
everything
on your plate.” ’

Whereupon they all sat down and ate and drank to the glory of God, for they had done a good afternoon’s work and there was very little malice in most of them after all.

After supper they went home. Jane Burr walked as far as the village with Mrs Simon Millison.

‘I must remember all the fixings to tell Ma,’ said Jane wistfully, not knowing that Susan was counting the spoons. ‘She never gets out since she’s bed-rid, but she loves to hear about things. That table will be a real treat to her.’

‘It was just like a picture you’d see in a magazine,’ agreed Mrs Simon with a sigh. ‘I can cook as good a supper as anyone, if I do say it, but I can’t fix up a table with a single
prestige
of style. As for that young Walter, I could spank
his
bottom with a relish. Such a turn as he gave me!’

‘And I suppose Ingleside is strewn with dead characters?’ the Doctor was saying.

‘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…’

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. Handsome, 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.