Anne of Windy Poplars - L. M. Montgomery [22]
‘That was – sad,’ said Anne idiotically. She knew she was expected to say something whenever Miss Valentine paused expectantly, but it seemed absolutely impossible to think of anything appropriate.
‘Cousin Ida Courtaloe is here. She was the prettiest thing I ever saw in my life – and the gayest. But fickle as a breeze, my dear, fickle as a breeze… Cousin Vernon Courtaloe is here. Him and Elsie Pringle – down there – were madly in love with each other at one time, and were to have been married; but first one thing and then another postponed it, and finally neither of them wanted it.’
When the Courtaloe plots were exhausted Miss Valentine’s reminiscences became a bit spicier. It did not make so much difference if you weren’t a Courtaloe.
‘Old Mrs Russell Pringle is here. I often wonder if she’s in heaven or not.’
‘But why?’ gasped a rather shocked Anne.
‘Well, she always hated her sister, Mary Ann, who had died a few months before. “If Mary Ann is in heaven I won’t stay there,” says she. And she was a woman who always kept her word, my dear. Pringle-like. She was born a Pringle, and married her cousin Russell… This is Mrs Dan Pringle – Janetta Bird. Seventy to a day when she died. Folks say she would have thought it wrong to die a day older than threescore and ten, because that is the Bible limit. People do say such funny things, don’t they? I’ve heard that dying was the only thing she ever dared do without asking her husband. Do you know, my dear, what he did once when she bought a hat he didn’t like?’
‘I can’t imagine.’
‘He et it,’ said Miss Valentine solemnly. ‘Of course it was only a small hat – lace and flowers, no feathers. Still, it must have been rather indigestible. I understand he had gnawing pains in his stomach for quite a time. Of course, I didn’t see him eat it, but I’ve always been assured the story was true. Do you suppose it was?’
‘I’d believe anything of a Pringle,’ said Anne bitterly.
Miss Valentine pressed her arm sympathetically. ‘I feel for you, indeed I do. It’s terrible the way they’re treating you. But Summerside isn’t all Pringle, Miss Shirley.’
‘Sometimes I think it is,’ said Anne, with a rueful smile.
‘No, it isn’t. And there are plenty of people would like to see you get the better of them. Don’t you give in to them, no matter what they do. It’s just the old Satan that’s got into them. But they hang together so, and Miss Sarah did want that nephew of theirs to get the school… This is where Stephen Pringle is buried. They couldn’t get his eyes closed. He was buried with them wide open.’
Anne shivered. She had a dreadful vision of the dead Pringle lying under the sod, still staring balefully upward at her out of eyes that had never been closed.
‘He was killed, you know,’ said Miss Valentine. ‘Fell from a ladder he was climbing. It was said’ – Miss Valentine lowered her voice creepily among the gathering shadows – ‘that his cousin, Black Joe Card – Stephen’s mother was a Card – fixed one of the steps so he would fall. He and Joe were courting the same girl. I never believed it myself. People say such terrible things, don’t they? But it certainly made Black Joe more interesting. I used to look at him in church and wonder if it was true. Perhaps it was, and that was why Stephen’s eyes couldn’t be closed… Helen Avery is here. She died twice – at least, they thought she died, but she revived when they were laying her out. Next time she died – four years later – her husband was away, but he telegraphed home, “Make sure she is dead before you go to any expense”… The Nathan Pringles are here. Nathan always believed his wife was trying to poison him, but he didn’t seem to mind. He said it made life kind of exciting. Once he kind of suspected she’d put arsenic in his porridge. He went out and fed it to the pig. The pig died three weeks afterwards.