Anne of Ingleside - L. M. Montgomery [100]
‘The old Truax house over the harbour was haunted for years… raps and knocks all over the place… a most mysterious thing,’ said Christine Marsh.
‘All the Truaxes had bad stomachs,’ said Mrs Baxter.
‘Of course if you don’t believe in ghosts they can’t happen,’ said Mrs MacAllister sulkily. ‘But my sister worked in a house in Nova Scotia that was haunted by chuckles of laughter.’
‘What a jolly ghost!’ said Myra. ‘I shouldn’t mind that.’
‘Likely it was owls,’ said the determinedly sceptical Mrs Baxter.
‘My mother seen angels around her death-bed,’ said Agatha Drew with an air of plaintive triumph.
‘Angels ain’t ghosts,’ said Mrs Baxter.
‘Speaking of mothers, how is your Uncle Parker, Tillie?’ asked Mrs Chubb.
‘Very poorly by spells. We don’t know what is going to come of it. It’s holding us all up… about our winter clothes, I mean. But I said to my sister the other day when we were talking it over, “We’d better get black dresses, anyhow,” I said, “and then it’s no matter what happens.” ’
‘Do you know what Mary Anna said the other day? She said, “Ma, I’m going to stop asking God to make my hair curly. I’ve asked Him every night for a week and He hasn’t done a thing.” ’
‘I’ve been asking Him something for twenty years,’ bitterly said Mrs Bruce Duncan, who had not spoken before or lifted her dark eyes from the quilt. She was noted for her beautiful quilting… perhaps because she was never diverted by gossip from setting each stitch precisely where it should be.
A brief hush fell over the circle. They could all guess what she had asked for, but it was not a thing to be discussed at a quilting. Mrs Duncan did not speak again.
‘Is it true that May Flagg and Billy Carter have broken up and that he is going with one of the over-harbour MacDougalls?’ asked Martha Crothers, after a decent interval.
‘Yes. Nobody knows what happened though.’
‘It’s sad… what little things break off matches sometimes,’ said Candace Crawford. ‘Take Dick Pratt and Lillian MacAllister… he was just starting to propose to her at a picnic when his nose began to bleed. He had to go to the brook, and he met a strange girl there who lent him her handkerchief. He fell in love, and they were married in two weeks’ time.’
‘Did you hear what happened to Big Jim MacAllister last Saturday night in Milt Cooper’s store at the Harbour Head?’ asked Mrs Simon, thinking it time somebody introduced a more cheerful topic than ghosts and jiltings. ‘He had got into the habit of setting on the stove all summer. But Saturday night was cold and Milt had lit a fire. So when poor Big Jim sat down… well, he scorched his…’
Mrs Simon would not say what he had scorched, but she patted a portion of her anatomy silently.
‘His bottom,’ said Walter gravely, poking his head through the creeper screen. He honestly thought that Mrs Simon could not remember the right word.
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