Anne of Ingleside

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 harbor 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” in 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 neighbor 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.”

“It is,” whispered Mrs. Bryan incredulously.

“Well, you know after Peter’s first wife died she told him she would never enter his house again until she came to his funeral and she’s kept her word,” said Camilla Blake. “She’s a sister of Peter’s first wife,”... in an explanatory aside to Anne, who looked curiously at Clara Wilson as she swept past them, unseeing, her smoldering topaz eyes staring straight ahead. She was a thin slip of a woman with a dark-browed, tragic face and black hair under one of the absurd bonnets elderly women still wore... a thing of feathers and “bugles” with a skimpy nose veil. She looked at and spoke to no one, as her long black taffeta skirt swished over the grass and up the verandah steps.

“There’s Jed Clinton at the door, putting on his funeral face,” said Camilla sarcastically. “He’s evidently thinking it is time we went in. It’s always been his boast that at his funerals everything goes according to schedule. He’s never forgiven Winnie Clow for fainting before the sermon. It wouldn’t have been so bad afterwards. Well, nobody is likely to faint at this funeral. Olivia isn’t the fainting kind.”

“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 Rev. 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 Jed will have a conniption.”

Anne paused to look at Peter Kirk on her way to a chair. She had…