“‘Watch me flick that bug off Mrs. Preacher’s hat,’ I heard Jim Mowbray whisper . . . he was sitting right behind her. He leaned forward and aimed a blow at the bug . . . missed it, but side-swiped the hat and sent it skittering down the aisle clean to the communion railing. Jim almost had a conniption. When the minister saw his wife’s hat come sailing through the air he lost his place in his sermon, couldn’t find it again and gave up in despair. The choir sang the last hymn, dabbing at junebugs all the time. Jim went down and brought the hat back to Mrs. Loring. He expected a calling down, for she was said to be high-spirited. But she just stuck it on her pretty yellow head again and laughed at him. ‘If you hadn’t done that,’ she said, ‘Peter would have gone on for another twenty minutes and we’d all have been stark staring mad.’ Of course, it was nice of her not to be angry but people thought it wasn’t just the thing for her to say of her husband.”
“But you must remember how she was born,” said Martha Crothers.
“Why, how?”
“She was Bessy Talbot from up west. Her father’s house caught fire one night and in all the fuss and upheaval Bessy was born . . . out in the garden . . . under the stars.”
“How romantic!” said Myra Murray.
“Romantic! I call it barely respectable.”
“But think of being born under the stars!” said Myra dreamily. “Why, she ought to have been a child of the stars . . . sparkling . . . beautiful . . . brave . . . true . . . with a twinkle in her eyes.”
“She was all that,” said Martha, “whether the stars were accountable for it or not. And a hard time she had in Lowbridge where they thought a minister’s wife should be all prunes and prisms. Why, one of the elders caught her dancing around her baby’s cradle one day and he told her she ought not to rejoice over her son until she found out if he was elected or not.”
“Talking of babies, do you know what Mary Anna said the other day, ‘Ma,’ she said, ‘do queens have babies?’”
“That must have been Alexander Wilson,” said Mrs. Allan. “A born crab if ever there was one. He wouldn’t allow his family to speak a word at meal-times, I’ve heard. As for laughing . . . there never was any done in his house.”
“Think of a house without laughter!” said Myra.
“Why, it’s . . . sacrilegious.”
“Alexander used to take spells when he wouldn’t speak to his wife for three days at a time,” continued Mrs. Allan. “It was such a relief to her,” she added.
“Alexander Wilson was a good honest business man at least,” said Mrs. Grant Clow stiffly. The said Alexander was her fourth cousin and the Wilsons were clannish. “He left forty thousand dollars when he died.”
“Such a pity he had to leave it,” said Celia Reese.
“His brother Jeffry didn’t leave a cent,” said Mrs. Clow. “He was the ne’er-do-well of that family, I must admit. Goodness knows he did enough laughing. Spent everything he earned . . . hail-fellow-well-met with everyone . . . and died penniless. What did he get out of life with all his flinging about and laughing?”
“Not much perhaps,” said Myra, “but think of all he put into it. He was always giving . . . cheer, sympathy, friendliness, even money. He was rich in friends at least and Alexander never had a friend in his life.”
“Jeff’s friends didn’t bury him,” retorted Mrs. Allan. “Alexander had to do that . . . and put up a real fine tombstone for him, too. It cost a hundred dollars.”
“But when Jeff asked him for a loan of one hundred to pay for an operation that might have saved his life, didn’t Alexander refuse it?” asked Celia Drew.
“Come, come, we’re getting too uncharitable,” protested Mrs. Carr. “After all, we don’t live in a world of forget-me-nots and daisies and everyone has some faults.”
“Lem Anderson is marrying Dorothy Clark today,” said Mrs. Millison, thinking it was high time the conversation took a more cheerful line. “And it isn’t a year since he swore he would blow out his brains if Jane Elliott wouldn’t marry him.”
“Young men do say such odd things,” said Mrs. Chubb. “They’ve kept it very close . . . it never leaked out till three weeks ago that they were engaged. I was talking to his mother last week and she never hinted at a wedding so soon. I am not sure that I care much for a woman who can be such a Spinx.”
“I am surprised at Dorothy Clark taking him,” said Agatha Drew. “I thought last spring that she and Frank Clow were going to make a match of it.”
“I heard Dorothy say that Frank was the best match but she really couldn’t abide the thought of seeing that nose sticking out over the sheet every morning when she woke up.”
Mrs. Elder Baxter gave a spinsterish shudder and refused to join in the laughter.
“You shouldn’t say such things before a young girl like Edith,” said Celia, winking around the quilt.
“Is Ada Clark engaged yet?” asked Emma Pollock.
“No, not exactly,” said Mrs. Milison. “Just hopeful. But she’ll land him yet. Those girls all have a knack of picking husbands. Her sister Pauline married the best farm over the harbour.”
“Pauline is pretty but she is full of silly notions as ever,” said Mrs. Milgrave. “Sometimes I think she’ll never learn any sense.”
“Oh, yes, she will,” said Myra Murray. “Some day she will have children of her own and she will learn wisdom from them . . . as you and I did.”
“Where are Lem and Dorothy going to live?” asked Mrs. Meade.
“Oh, Lem has bought a farm at the Upper Glen. The old Carey place, you know, where poor Mrs. Roger Carey murdered her husband.”
“Murdered her husband!”
“Oh, I’m not saying he didn’t deserve it, but everybody thought she went a little too far. Yes — weed-killer in his teacup . . . or was it his soup? Everybody knew it but nothing was ever done about it. The spool, please, Celia.”
“But do you mean to say, Mrs. Millison, that she was never tried . . . or punished?” gasped Mrs. Campbell.
“Well, nobody wanted to get a neighbour into a scrape like that. The Careys were well connected in the Upper Glen. Besides, she was driven to desperation. Of course nobody approves of murder as a habit but if ever a man deserved to be murdered Roger Carey did. She went to the States and married again. She’s been dead for years. Her second outlived her. It all happened when I was a girl. They used to say Roger Carey’s ghost walked.”
“Surely nobody believes in ghosts in this enlightened age,” said Mrs. Baxter.
“Why aren’t we to believe in ghosts?” demanded Tillie MacAllister. “Ghosts are interesting. I know a man who was haunted by a ghost that always laughed at him . . . sneering like. It used to make him so mad. The scissors, please, Mrs. MacDougall.”
The little bride had to be asked for the scissors twice and handed them over blushing deeply. She was not yet used to being called Mrs. MacDougall.
“The old Truax house over harbour was haunted for years . . . raps and knocks all over the place . . . a most mysterious thing,” said Christine Crawford.
“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 deathbed,” 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 Lilian 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. Dr. Blythe was said to be so fussy about what her children heard. Before their paralyzed 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 most of them, after all.
After supper they went home. Jane Burr walked as far as the village with Mrs. Simon Millison.
“I must remember all the fixings to tell ma,” said Jane wistfully, not knowing that Susan was counting the spoons. “She never gets out since she’s bed-rid but she loves to hear about things. That table will be a real treat to her.”
“It was just like a picture you’d seen in a magazine,” agreed Mrs. Simon with a sigh. “I can cook as good a supper as anyone, if I do say it, but I can’t fix up a table with a single prestige of style. As for that young Walter, I could spank his bottom with a relish. Such a turn as he gave me!”
“And I suppose Ingleside is strewn with dead characters?” the doctor was saying.
“I wasn’t quilting,” said Anne, “so I didn’t hear what was said.”
“You never do, dearie,” said Miss Cornelia, who had lingered to help Susan bind the quilts. “When you are at the quilt they never let themselves go. They think you don’t approve of gossip.”
“It all depends on the kind,” said Anne.
“Well, nobody really said anything too terrible today. Most of the people they talked about were dead . . . or ought to be,” said Miss Cornelia, recalling the story of Abner Cromwell’s abortive funeral with a grin. “Only Mrs. Millison had to drag in that gruesome old murder story again about Madge Carey and her husband. I remember it all. There wasn’t a vestige of proof that Madge did it . . . except that a cat died after eating some of the soup. The animal had been sick for a week. If you ask me, Roger Carey died of appendicitis . . . though of course nobody knew they had appendixes then.”
“And indeed I think it is a great pity they ever found out,” said Susan. “The spoons are all intact, Mrs. Dr. dear, and nothing happened to the tablecloth.”
“Well, I must be getting home,” said Miss Cornelia. “I’ll send you up some spare-ribs next week when Marshall kills the pig.”
Walter was again sitting on the steps with eyes full of dreams. Dusk had fallen. Where, he wondered, had it fallen from? Did some great spirit with bat-like wings pour it all over the world from a purple jar? The moon was rising and three wind-twisted old spruces looked like three lean, hump-backed old witches hobbling up a hill against it. Was that a little faun with furry ears crouching in the shadows? Suppose he opened the door in the brick wall now, wouldn’t he step, not into the well-known garden but into some strange land of faery, where princesses were waking from enchanted sleeps, where perhaps he might find and follow Echo as he so often longed to do? One dared not speak. Something would vanish if one did.
“Darling,” said Mother coming out, “you mustn’t sit here any longer. It is getting cold. Remember your throat.”
The spoken word had broken the spell. Some magic light had gone. The lawn was still a beautiful place but it was no longer fairyland. Walter got up.
“Mother, will you tell me what happened at Peter Kirk’s funeral?”
Anne thought for a moment . . . then shivered.
“Not now, dear. Perhaps . . . sometime. . . .”
Chapter 33
Anne, alone in her room . . . for Gilbert had been called out . . . sat down at her window for a few minutes of communion with the tenderness of the night and of enjoyment of the eerie charm of her moonlit room. Say what you will, thought Anne, there is always something a little strange about a moonlit room. Its whole personality is changed. It is not so friendly . . . so human. It is remote and aloof and wrapped up in itself. Almost it regards you as an intruder.
She was a little tired after her busy day and everything was so beautifully quiet now . . . the children asleep, Ingleside restored to order. There was no sound in the house except a faint rhythmic thumping from the kitchen where Susan was setting her bread.
But through the open window came the sounds of the night, every one of which Anne knew and loved. Low laughter drifted up from the harbour on the still air. Someone was singing down in the Glen and it sounded like the haunting notes of some song heard a long ago. There were silvery moonlight paths over the water but Ingleside was hooded in shadow. The trees were whispering “dark sayings of old” and an owl was hooting in Rainbow Valley.
“‘What a happy summer this has been,” thought Anne . . . and then recalled with a little pang something she had heard Aunt Highland Kitty of the Upper Glen say once . . . “the same summer will never be coming twice.”
Never quite the same. Another summer would come . . . but the children would be a little older and Rilla would be going to school . . . “and I’ll have no baby left,” thought Anne sadly. Jem was twelve now and there was already talk of “the Entrance” . . . Jem who but yesterday had been a wee baby in the old House of Dreams. Walter was shooting up and that very morning she had heard Nan teasing Di about some “boy” i
n school; and Di had actually blushed and tossed her red head. Well, that was life. Gladness and pain . . . hope and fear . . . and change. Always change! You could not help it. You had to let the old go and take the new to your heart . . . learn to love it and then let it go in turn. Spring, lovely as it was, must yield to summer and summer lose itself in autumn. The birth . . . the bridal . . . the death. . . .
Anne suddenly thought of Walter asking to be told what had happened at Peter Kirk’s funeral. She had not thought of it for years, but she had not forgotten it. Nobody who had been there, she felt sure, had forgotten it or ever would. Sitting there in the moonlit dusk she recalled it all.
It had been in November . . . the first November they had spent at Ingleside . . . following a week of Indian summer days. The Kirks lived at Mowbray Narrows but came to the Glen church and Gilbert was their doctor; so he and Anne both went to the funeral.
It had been, she remembered, a mild, calm, pearl-grey day. All around them had been the lonely brown-and-purple landscape of November, with patches of sunlight here and there on upland and slope where the sun shone through a rift in the clouds. “Kirkwynd” was so near the shore that a breath of salt wind blew through the grim firs behind it. It was a big, prosperous-looking house but Anne always thought that the gable of the L looked exactly like a long, narrow, spiteful face.
Anne paused to speak to a little knot of women on the stiff flowerless lawn. They were all good hardworking souls to whom a funeral was a not unpleasant excitement.
“I forgot to bring a handkerchief,” Mrs. Bryan Blake was saying plaintively. “Whatever will I do when I cry?”
“Why will you have to cry?” bluntly asked her sister-in-law, Camilla Blake. Camilla had no use for women who cried too easily. “Peter Kirk is no relation to you and you never liked him.”
“I think it is proper to cry at a funeral,” said Mrs. Blake stiffly. “It shows feeling when a neighbour has been summoned to his long home.”
“If nobody cries at Peter’s funeral except those who liked him there won’t be many wet eyes,” said Mrs. Curtis Rodd dryly. “That is the truth and why mince it? He was a pious old humbug and I know it if nobody else does. Who is that coming at the little gate? Don’t . . . don’t tell me it’s Clara Wilson.”
The Complete Works of L M Montgomery Page 154