After Many Years

by Carolyn Strom Collins

  “Wait a minute, child,” said Miss Brewster abruptly.

  She went out of the room, and soon returned with a tray in one hand and a hat and coat in the other. On the tray was a plate of cake and a glass of some warm drink.

  “Eat that, Maggie,” she said kindly, “and warm yourself well. You aren’t half-clothed. I should think you’d be in more danger of freezing to death this winter than that fat kitten. I’ll be good to him, never fear. When you have finished your lunch I’ll go a little way down the road with you. It’s too dark for you to be travelling around alone.”

  When Maggie had eaten her cake, Miss Brewster put on her hat and coat, and they walked down the road in silence. When Maggie discovered that her aunt evidently intended to go all the way home with her she began for the first time to wonder what her father and mother would think of it all.

  At first, when Miss Brewster and the frightened Maggie walked into the tiny kitchen, Mr. and Mrs. Taylor were too much taken by surprise to think or say anything. Before either of them found tongue, Miss Brewster spoke.

  “I never thought to cross your threshold, James, but I don’t mind acknowledging that I’ve been a fool. And I want you to forgive me. I’ve wanted it for years, but I’d never have come to tell you so if it hadn’t been for that mite of a child of yours. She has got genuine spunk in her. I’m pleased with her and I want to cultivate her acquaintance.”

  Maggie had listened to this speech with bewildered eyes, seeing which, her mother told her to go to bed. Maggie obeyed at once, so she did not hear any more of the conversation, which must have been a long one, for it was quite late when Miss Brewster took her leave.

  But Maggie did know that very soon after she and her father and mother all went to live in the big house with Aunt Jessie, where she had nice and good food and all the love her heart craved.

  Besides, she had Fluff, who lived to a green old age, and waxed fat and valiant; and though Maggie spoiled him atrociously, she was nothing to Aunt Jessie, who was guilty of such unheard-of indulgences as would have ruined any ordinary cat.

  But then, both Maggie and Aunt Jessie knew that Fluff was not an ordinary cat.

  Editors’ note: “Maggie’s Kitten” was published in the Western Christian Advocate on November 13, 1907. It was listed in the “Unverified Ledger Titles” section of the 1986 bibliography (as “Maggie’s Kilter”) and was found by Alan John Radmore.

  L. M. Montgomery loved cats and felt they had very human qualities. In her personal scrapbooks of mementoes, she pasted bits of fur from many of the cats that were her pets in Cavendish. She dedicated her novel Jane of Lantern Hill (1937) to her favourite cat, “Good Luck.”

  The Old Homestead

  (1907)

  Stephen Winslow backed his horses down to the brook to drink before turning in at his gate, as had been his lifelong custom. To-day he felt tired, and even after the animals had lifted their heads from the water he still sat there, leaning back contentedly against the sacks of flour piled up behind him.

  “I shouldn’t wonder if I missed that brook,’ said Stephen reflectively. “When you’ve heard a thing for sixty-odd years, it’s apt to ring in your dreams, maybe.”

  Stephen was a small, lean old man, half lost in loose clothes that seemed far too large for himself. His white beard combed into straggling locks by his nervous fingers, flowed in a patriarchal fashion over his breast. Presently he chirruped to his horses and they lumbered along through the water and up the steep little rise to the turn. As he drove through the open gate a woman came out of the house.

  “Well, everything is about wound up at last, Pris,” he said contentedly. “I went into Dan McCulloch’s on my way to the mill and we made the dicker. He’s rented the farm for a year. Laws, Pris, it makes me young again to think of it! Seems ’sif we were starting out in life all over again, don’t it now?”

  Priscilla smiled.

  “Maybe you’ll be wanting to get back before you’ve lived long in Redmond,” she said.

  Stephen chuckled, as if at a joke.

  “That was all the talk at the store to-day. Peter Shackleford says, says he: ‘Winslow, you’ll never be contented in city life. You’ll be wild to get back here afore next spring,’ says he, Shackleford-like, as if he knew it all.”

  “I don’t know that I care a great deal myself,” said Priscilla placidly. “But I’m tired of this lonesome life too, now that the children have all gone. I’m sure of myself, but I’m not so sure of you, Father. You are as full of enthusiasm as a boy over moving to the city, but perhaps you won’t find it all you expect, and you may feel discontented.”

  “No, I won’t, Pris,” protested Stephen. “I’ve thought it all out, I tell you. There’ll be no hankering for Roseneath on my part. You’ll more likely be homesick yourself.”

  Stephen and Priscilla Winslow had decided to sell or rent their farm and move to Redmond for the remainder of their days. Their three children were settled there and they wished to be near them. Gordon, the oldest, was president of the university. Besides the natural tie, there was a bond of intellectual comradeship between him and his mother, from whom he had inherited his most marked characteristics. Theodore, commonly called Ted, was a prominent Redmond lawyer, and Edith, who was the youngest, had recently been graduated from college and was the teacher of mathematics in the Redmond seminary.

  By Christmas they were settled down.

  “I’m glad it’s finished,” said Priscilla. “I’ve had enough of shopping and ‘harmonizing.’ I must say I like the result, though. Don’t you, Father?”

  “Yes,” piped Stephen with alacrity. In his heart he was wondering if he would ever feel like anything but a visitor in this fine new house of his. But he would not say so to Priscilla. He was ashamed and alarmed to find that he was longing for Roseneath—“after all my bragging,” he reflected sheepishly. He grew more ashamed as the winter went by. He could not feel like anything but a stranger in the city. He missed his old cronies at the store. He had been wont to laugh at them to Priscilla but he had, in reality, enjoyed his simple preeminence among them. He had been looked up to as a clever, well-read man. Now, he did not like being a nobody. Above all, Priscilla must never suspect it—Priscilla, who so evidently enjoyed the new life as fully as she had predicted.

  When April came his homesickness grew worse. The spring air wakened in him a keen desire to get back to the farm and its old, homely ways. One day it overpowered him.

  “Things’ll be wakening up in Roseneath by now,” he thought. “These evenings the store’ll be full. Wish’t I could drop in. S’pose Dan’ll be getting ready to work the farm. Wonder what he’ll put in the south hill field? ’Tought to be wheat, but like as not he’ll sow it with oats.”

  Presently Priscilla came in, flushed and bright-eyed. “Father,” she said abruptly, “do you think you can get along without me for a couple of days next week? The—the Mothers’ Council meets in St. Andrew’s then, and I’ve been appointed one of the delegates.”

  “Think of that, now!” said Stephen admiringly. “Of course you must go. I’ll be all right. I’ll be as jolly as a sand-boy.”

  “If I go I will leave here Tuesday morning and not be back until Wednesday evening. Why, Father, what’s the matter?”

  Stephen sat bolt upright with an exclamation.

  “Nothing, nothing,” he said hastily, as he subsided. “I just thought of something I’d—I’d forgotten. But it’s of no importance. Yes, you were saying you’d go on Tuesday, Pris. Well, all right, all right.”

  Left alone, the weazened little figure in the wicker chair sat up and slapped its right leg smartly thrice.

  “I’ll do it,” said Stephen excitedly. “I’ll do it! She’ll never know. I’ll come back Tuesday night.”

  He was silent for a minute, then added explosively: “I am dod-gasted sick of the town!”

  Early Tu
esday morning he went to the station with her and saw her off on the St. Andrew’s flyer. His own train did not leave until later. It landed him at Roseneath station in the mid-forenoon.

  Roseneath proper was three miles from the station, and Stephen started to walk it, over the long, moist road that wound and twisted up to the wooded hills, through the young green saplings.

  He stood with his arms on the yard gate, feasting his eyes on the gray buildings and gardens. There was a lonely, deserted look about the place that hurt him, but it was home. He would spend the whole afternoon here. He would go over the farm in its length and breadth and visit every field and nook.

  He was down on his knees by the day-lily plot when he heard the eastern gate swing back with its old peculiar creak. Stephen hastily got upon his feet. A woman was coming through it. “I’ll be dod-gasted if it ’taint Priscilla,” he said, helplessly.

  Priscilla it was. She did not see Stephen until she came round the last cherry tree on the path.

  “Father!” she exclaimed.

  They stood and looked at each other in silence for a few moments. Stephen’s brain worked in a succession of jerks. He had begun to understand things before Priscilla had recovered herself.

  “Priscilla, Priscilla,” he said solemnly, but with a twinkle in his mild. “Where are the mothers?”

  Priscilla had to laugh.

  “They’re at St. Andrew’s, no doubt, Father. You know I didn’t tell you I was going there. I just said the council met there and I was appointed one of the delegates. I never meant to go. I meant to come here, but I couldn’t bear to admit to you that I was so crazy for Roseneath that I had to start off in mud and mire for it. And after all our talk last fall, too! How did you find out I came here?”

  “I didn’t know you did come,” he answered. “I thought you was safe in St. Andrew’s. I came on my own account, because I was so homesick I couldn’t stand it a day longer, and because I was lit’rally dying to get out of sight and sound of that town, if only for a day.”

  “Why, Father,” said Priscilla, in astonishment, “you don’t mean to say that you are not contented in town! Why, you seemed so interested in everything—I thought you were just as happy as you expected to be!”

  “All put on, Pris, all put on,” said Stephen. “I’ve hated it—name o’ goodness, what a relief it is to say it at last! But I wouldn’t let on for the world for fear you’d laugh at me and say you told me so, for all my brag. I didn’t think you were hankering for Roseneath. You seemed so taken up with everything in town and as busy and happy as if you were just in the place that fitted you,”

  “O, I just pretended, to hide the truth from you,” cried Priscilla. “I—I—couldn’t bear to admit how disappointed I was after being so sure of myself. I wanted to be back here. Why, Father, I missed the loneliness of it! I just wanted to feel lonely again, with all my heart. And the worst of it was, it came between us. I was determined you should not suspect what I felt like. I don’t care now, when you’re feeling the same way. So I came out to-day. I brought a lunch with me, and I meant to stay all night at the Hendersons’. I’ve been all over the farm already. I wish we’d never left it. We were old fools to run after new things at our time of life. Good as they are, it’s too late.”

  “We can come back, Pris,” said Stephen eagerly.

  “O, if we only could!” cried Priscilla. “But the children—”

  “Never mind the children! See here, Pris. It’s not going to do them any good for us to be miserable. They’ll be willing enough to let us come when they find out how we feel. And we’ll come, whether or so, We’re our own bosses yet, I guess, Pris. We’ll move out as soon as come good roads. Won’t them Shacklefords cackle with delight over my back-down! But I don’t care a mite since you’re in it, too. I can just snap my fingers at the whole world.”

  He laughed squeakily with joy. Priscilla smiled and drew a long breath.

  Editors’ note: This story was not listed in the 1986 bibliography. It was found in The Kentuckian (November 14, 1907) by Christy Woster and Alan John Radmore. It is an abbreviated version of Montgomery’s story “The Jewel of Consistency,” published in Ladies’ World (April 1905), which is available online in the Ryrie-Campbell collection.

  Other Montgomery stories published in November 1907 included “Aunt Susanna’s Thanksgiving Dinner” (in Housewife); “The Old Fowler Clock” (in Boys’ World); and “The Genesis of the Doughnut Club” (in Epworth Herald).

  The Pineapple Apron

  (1908)

  All the girls in our class that winter were crazy over lace patterns. The fifth class girls were making patchwork quilts and the third class were collecting postage stamps; but we went in for crocheting lace, and our greatest ambition was to get a pattern nobody else had. We felt so triumphant when we succeeded, and so vexed and mortified when some other girl came out with it, too. Only we never showed that we were vexed; we just said we were tired of that pattern, it was getting so common, and we never did any more of it.

  We took our lace to school and worked at recesses. Josie Pate was actually caught crocheting under her desk in school hours once but she never did it again, for the teacher made her copy out the pattern and give it to every other girl in the class.

  Peggy Reid was my chum, and we always lent our patterns to each other at first. One day Peggy came to school with an elegant new spotted muslin apron on, trimmed with the sweetest edging in a brand-new design. She said her aunt out west had sent it to her, and all the girls were in raptures over it. I thought it real mean in Peggy never to have shown it to me, and she must have had it quite a while to have crocheted such a long piece of lace; for the apron was frilled and the lace sewn on the frill, and Peggy hasn’t much spare time, for there are six children in her family younger than she is, and she is only twelve.

  I didn’t say anything, however, for I thought that perhaps Peggy would offer to show me the pattern when we walked home from school that night. But she never so much as mentioned it, and so, of course, I didn’t either. Peggy told Julia Simmonds the next day that I was real jealous of her new apron, because I’d never said a word about it. Julia told me, of course—Julia is the worst tell-tale in school—and I felt that Peggy had acted mean right through. I was pretty cool and dignified to her after that, I can tell you; but I didn’t stop speaking to her, of course, for I wouldn’t have shown for anything that I cared whether she gave me the pattern or not. Meanwhile, all the other girls seemed to be constantly discovering new patterns, but I hadn’t a bit of luck that way.

  Then a really brilliant idea struck me—all at once, one day in geography class, when I was trying to bound Brazil. It was: “why not invent a pattern of your very own?” I was so excited I could hardly wait until school was out, and then I raced home and shut myself up in the garret.

  I can’t tell you what a time I had inventing that pattern. It took me three weeks. I got right down to the foot of my class and lost marks in everything because I was thinking of it all the time. Mother said it wasn’t safe to send me on an errand, because I was sure to make a muddle of it; some nights I actually couldn’t sleep. But in the end I succeeded. It was a pineapple design, but not a bit like any of the other pineapple patterns the girls had, and it was really sweetly pretty. None of the other girls had ever thought of such a thing.

  I decided I wouldn’t tell them at first that I had invented it; it would be fun to see them trying to get it, and hunting old magazines through, and writing away to all their friends for it—and I knowing all the time that there was no other copy of it in the world.

  I crocheted enough of it to trim an apron, and then one day I wore the apron to school. The girls were wild over the lace, and said it was the prettiest pineapple pattern they had ever seen but Peggy never so much as referred to it.

  Of course, nobody could get the pattern, and soon it got around that there was some mystery about it
. Peggy told Julia that someone would soon get hold of it, and when Julia told me, I said it wouldn’t be Peggy Reid, anyhow. Julia told Peggy that, and Peggy said she could find out that pattern in a fortnight, if it was worth finding out, but it wasn’t. I walked home from school with Maggie Brown that night.

  The next day was washing day, and mother washed my pineapple apron and hung it out on the line. It was a lovely moonlight night when we went to bed—clear as day—but before morning it was quite a snowstorm. When I went out to bring the clothes in after breakfast, my pineapple apron was gone. Mother said it must have blown away; I looked everywhere but couldn’t find it.

  Peggy wasn’t in school all the next week. She was sick with a cold, but I didn’t know that, or, of course, I would have gone over to see her. I thought she just had to stay home to help her mother. She often had to.

  But one morning when I went to school, there was Peggy in the midst of a group of girls, all laughing and talking. As soon as I went in, Josie Pate called out: “You said nobody would ever get your pineapple pattern, Alice, but Peggy has.”

  Then they all stood back, and there was Peggy looking so triumphant, wearing an apron trimmed with my pineapple-pattern lace.

  O, I can tell you I just flared up. It was really too much.

  “Peggy Reid, you took my apron off the line, and that is how you got the pattern,” I cried. “You couldn’t have got it any other way, because I invented that pattern myself!”

  Of course, I didn’t mean that Peggy stole the apron. I meant she’d just borrowed it without asking to get the pattern, and a pretty mean thing I thought it. Peggy turned red, and then she turned white.

  “I guess I’m not a thief, Alice Morley,” she snapped out. “I don’t know where your old apron is, and I don’t care. You’re just mad because I’ve got the pattern when you said I couldn’t, and I don’t believe you made it out of your own head.”