Anne of Ingleside - L. M. Montgomery [103]
‘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.