Anne of Ingleside - L. M. Montgomery [104]
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