Anne of Ingleside (31 page)

‘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 us 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.’

There was an eerie stir in the wind-torn firs behind Kirkwynd: far away a snow-squall whitened over a hill where a row of lombardies stabbed the grey sky. Everybody was hurrying to get away before it reached Mowbray Narrows.

‘Have I any right to be so happy when other women are so miserable?’ Anne wondered to herself as they drove home, remembering Olivia Kirk’s eyes as she thanked Clara Wilson.

Anne got up from her window. It was nearly twelve years ago now. Clara Wilson was dead and Olivia Kirk had gone to the coast, where she had married again. She had been much younger than Peter.

‘Time is kinder than we think,’ thought Anne. ‘It’s a dreadful mistake to cherish bitterness for years… hugging it to our hearts like a treasure. But I think the story of what happened at Peter Kirk’s funeral is one which Walter must never know. It was certainly no story for children.’

Rilla sat on the veranda steps at Ingleside with one knee crossed over the other… such adorable little fat brown knees!… very busy being unhappy. And if anyone asks why a petted little puss should be unhappy that inquirer must have forgotten her own childhood, when things that were the merest trifles to grown-ups were dark and dreadful tragedies to her. Rilla was lost in deeps of despair because Susan had told her she was going to bake one of her silver-and-gold cakes for the Orphanage social that evening and she, Rilla, must carry it to the church in the afternoon.

Don’t ask me why Rilla felt she would rather die than carry a cake through the village to the Glen St Mary Presbyterian Church. Tots get odd notions into their little pates at times, and somehow Rilla had got it into hers that it was a shameful and humiliating thing to be seen carrying a cake
anywhere
. Perhaps it was because, one day when she was only five, she had met old Tillie Pake carrying a cake down the street with all the little village boys yelping at her heels and making fun of her. Old Tillie lived down at the Harbour Mouth and was a very dirty, ragged old woman.

chanted the boys.

To be classed with Tillie Pake was something Rilla just could not bear. The idea had become lodged in her mind that you just ‘couldn’t be a lady’ and carry cakes about. So this was why she sat disconsolately on the steps and the dear little mouth, with one front tooth missing, was without its usual smile. Instead of looking as if she understood what daffodils were thinking about or as if she shared with the golden rose a secret they alone knew, she looked like one crushed for ever. Even her big hazel eyes that almost shut up when she laughed were mournful and tormented, instead of being the usual pools of allurement. ‘It’s the fairies that have touched your eyes,’ Aunt Kitty MacAllister told her once. Her father vowed she was a born charmer and had smiled at Dr Parker half an hour after she was born. Rilla could, as yet, talk better with her eyes than her tongue, for she had a decided lisp. But she would grow out of that, she was growing fast. Last year Daddy had measured her by a rose-bush; this year it was the phlox; soon it would be the hollyhocks and she would be going to school. Rilla had been very happy and well contented with herself until this terrible announcement of Susan’s. Really, Rilla told the sky indignantly, Susan had no sense of shame. To be sure, Rilla pronounced it ‘thenth of thame’, but the lovely, soft-blue sky looked as if it understood.

Mummy and Daddy had gone to Charlottetown that morning and all the other children were in school, so Rilla and Susan were alone at Ingleside. Ordinarily Rilla would have been delighted under such circumstances. She was never lonely; she would have been glad to sit there on the steps or on her own particular mossy green stone in Rainbow Valley, with a fairy kitten or two for company, and spin fancies about everything she saw… the corner of the lawn that looked like a merry little band of butterflies… the poppies floating over the garden… that great fluffy cloud all alone in the sky… the big bumble bees booming over the nasturtiums… the honeysuckle that hung down to touch her red-brown curls with a yellow finger… the wind that blew… where did it blow to?… Cock Robin, who was back again and strutting importantly along the railing of the veranda, wondering why Rilla would not play with him… Rilla, who could think of nothing but the terrible fact that she must carry a cake, a
cake,
through the village to the church for the old social they were getting up for the orphans. Rilla was dimly aware that the Orphanage was at Lowbridge and that poor children lived there who had no fathers or mothers. She felt terribly sorry for them. But not even for the orphanest of orphans was small Rilla Blythe willing to be seen in public
carrying a cake
.

Perhaps if it rained she wouldn’t have to go. It didn’t
look
like rain, but Rilla clasped her hands together… there was a dimple at the root of every finger… and said earnestly:

‘Plethe, dear God, make it rain hard. Make it rain pitchforkth. Or elth…’ Rilla thought of another saving possibility… ‘make Thusanth cake burn… burn to a crithp.’

Alas, when dinner-time came the cake, done to a turn, filled and iced, was sitting triumphantly on the kitchen table. It was a favourite cake of Rilla’s… ‘gold-and-silver cake’ did sound so
luxuriant
… but she felt that never again would she be able to eat a mouthful of it.

Still… wasn’t that thunder rolling over the low hills across the harbour? Perhaps God had heard her prayer, perhaps there would be an earthquake before it was time to go. Couldn’t she take a pain in her stomach if worst came to worst? No. Rilla shuddered. That would mean castor oil. Better the earthquake!

The rest of the children did not notice that Rilla, sitting in her own dear chair, with the saucy white duck worked in crewels on the back, was very quiet. Thelfith pigth! If Mummy had been home she would have noticed it. Mummy had seen right away how troubled she was that dreadful day when Dad’s picture had come out in the
Enterprise
. Rilla was crying bitterly in bed when Mummy came in and found out that Rilla thought it was only murderers that had their pictures in the papers. It had not taken Mummy long to put
that
to rights. Would Mummy like to see
her
daughter carrying a cake through the Glen like old Tillie Pake?

Rilla found it hard to eat any dinner, though Susan had put down her own lovely blue plate with the wreath of rosebuds on it that Aunt Rachel Lynde had sent her on her last birthday and which she was generally allowed to have only on Sundays. Blue plateth and rothbudth! When you had to do such a shameful thing! Still, the fruit puffs Susan had made for dessert
were
nice.

‘Thuthan, can’t Nan and Di take the cake after thcool?’ she pleaded.

‘Di is going home from school with Jessie Reese and Nan has a bone in her leg,’ said Susan, under the impression that she was being joky. ‘Besides, it would be too late. The committee wants all the cakes in by three so they can cut them up and arrange the tables before they go home to have their suppers. Why in the world don’t you want to go, Roly-poly? You always think it is such fun to go for the mail.’