Anne of Ingleside - L. M. Montgomery [105]
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