After Many Years

by Carolyn Strom Collins

  “I shall be—busy—too,” said Romney gloomily.

  “O, yes, you have your serial to finish.”

  Romney wondered how she knew he was writing a serial. He had never said anything to her about it.

  “Yes,” he said very briskly. “I must really hurry up with it. My time is nearly up: only three weeks more.”

  “And since we are both going to be so—busy—we may as well say a polite good-bye now,” said Miss Edgelow. She held out her hand. Romney took it, gave it the requisite friendly pressure, dropped it.

  “Good-bye, Miss Edgelow,” he said. He lifted his hat and went away whistling. Miss Edgelow, holding her head very high, went back to the Edgelow house.

  Old Jim was, as usual, reading in his library.

  “Romney Cooper has just told me that he can’t marry me.”

  “Did you ask him to, pray?”

  “I think I did.”

  “And he refused you.”

  “Practically.”

  “Then he has more sense than any Cooper ever had before,” said old Jim, returning to his book.

  “Nobody takes me seriously,” mourned Miss Edgelow. “I suppose I must be fundamentally light. Well, isn’t that better than destroying my husband’s sight with vitriol, Uncle Jim? Wouldn’t you rather have a wife who laughed at you than one who threw vitriol at you?”

  “My wife did neither,” said old Jim significantly.

  “But she died young,” thought Miss Edgelow. She did not say it aloud; there were some things it would not do to say to old Jim. She went up to her room and peeped out. There was a light in the tower room.

  “He is busy at his story,” said Miss Edgelow. “I don’t think he got much material for it from me this evening—of the kind he wanted, anyhow. I wonder what a subeditor’s salary is.”

  Then, oddly enough, Miss Edgelow lay down on her bed, buried her face in a pillow and cried.

  Romney was not writing. He was bunched moodily up in a chair. Aunt Elizabeth was knitting lace. Samuel was building a pen in the back yard for a couple of pet snakes. Samuel was very happy.

  Chapter VII

  Samuel was happier still for the next two weeks. Romney was his own again. He kept no more trysts in the Whispering Lane, but devoted himself to Samuel. They fished and swam and lounged together. The tower room was forsaken and Romney’s pen rusted on his inkstand.

  Sometimes he saw Miss Edgelow and her golden balls of fluff in the Edgelow garden, but she never looked his way. Quite often he heard her singing gayly. Soon after that he always whistled gayly. Peace and contentment apparently brooded over Hill o’ the Winds.

  Only Aunt Elizabeth was slightly worried. Romney’s appetite was poor. Her choicest delicacies did not tempt him; neither did Cousin Clorinda’s. Romney had been down to see Cousin Clorinda quite often through the summer, but he had never talked to her of Sylvia, and Cousin Clorinda could not ask him to. Now he went down on another cool, rainy evening when the fogs were coming in on the east wind and the valley was gray and hidden.

  “Beloved, how long can two weeks be?” he asked her.

  “That depends,” she said.

  “On what?”

  “In your case I think it would depend on Sylvia,” said Cousin Clorinda boldly and anxiously. She did not like Romney’s lack of appetite and hollowness of eye any better than Aunt Elizabeth.

  “There is no such lady as Sylvia,” said Romney. “She is such stuff as dreams are made of.”

  “What about Miss Edgelow then?”

  “An amusing young person. I haven’t been talking to her lately.”

  “For two weeks, to be exact,” said Cousin Clorinda. She rocked slowly in her chair and looked at him very maternally. Romney had a queer fleeting feeling that he would like to lay his head on her breast and cry as he used to do long ago when he got hurt, and have her stroke his head and say, “Never mind, be brave; you’ll soon feel better.”

  “Make a clean breast of it to me,” said Cousin Clorinda.

  “You weren’t very sympathetic the last time I tried to talk to you about her.”

  “I don’t suppose I’ll be sympathetic now either. But it’ll do you good to talk it out. What did you quarrel over?”

  “We didn’t quarrel. She just dismissed me. I suppose she had got all the amusement out of me that she expected—or wanted.”

  “Tell me every word both of you said,” ordered Cousin Clorinda. Romney did. He had no difficulty in remembering them; they were all too deeply impressed. Cousin Clorinda listened and rocked gently. After he had finished she continued to rock so long that Romney wondered if she meant to say anything at all. Finally she said: “Poor girl!”

  “Poor—what?”

  “Poor girl,” repeated Cousin Clorinda.

  “Why do you pity her?” cried Romney, aggrieved.

  “Because it must be very hard to be as deeply in love as she is with a young man so utterly insensate and blind and pig-headed as you,” said Cousin Clorinda calmly.

  “Why, thank you.” Romney was very sarcastic. “Thank you. I haven’t received so many compliments for a long time. Insensate?”

  “Yes, insensate. A girl like Dorcas Edgelow practically offers herself to you and you practically flout her.”

  “Cousin Clorinda!”

  “Blind because you can’t see that she’s dying for you. Pig-headed because you would rather destroy her happiness and your own than ask Jim Edgelow’s heiress to marry you.”

  “Dearest, you are simply darkening counsel by words without knowledge. Miss Edgelow doesn’t care a snap of her lovely, slender fingers for me. I came to you for the bread of comfort, Cousin Clorinda, and you give me the stone of ridicule.”

  “Go back to Hill o’ the Winds; go to Dorcas Edgelow; say to her: ‘I love you. Will you marry me?’ Then if she says ‘no’ come back to me and I’ll give you all the comfort and sympathy you can desire.”

  “I can’t do that,” said Romney stubbornly. “Besides, I have done it—practically, as you say. I’ve told her I loved Sylvia. She knows well enough who Sylvia is.”

  “Yes, and immediately after telling her you informed her that you were too poor to marry her. Romney, are you really so very poor?”

  “I am. Worse, I’m in debt to my doctor. I’ve been depending on paying him off with the cash I’d get for my serial this fall. And now I can’t get it written, not in a salable way anyhow. Job’s turkey was a capitalist compared to me.”

  “And have you no chance of promotion?”

  “Not at present. Not for years, if ever. I suppose the truth is I’m lacking in enterprise, Cousin Clorinda. I’m not a pusher. And I’ve dilly-dallied a bit, I know—drifted. You see, it didn’t seem to matter. As long as I could pay my own way and enjoy life after my own fashion I was contented. I didn’t believe I’d ever really meet Sylvia. So I’ve rather been sidetracked.”

  “Get back to the main line and hustle,” said Cousin Clorinda.

  “Too late. I can’t ask her to wait for years for me. Besides, she wouldn’t.”

  “Then forget her.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Then for goodness’ sake,” said Cousin Clorinda in exasperation, “try some of my ginger snaps.”

  So, after all, Romney didn’t get much sympathy from Cousin Clorinda. He went back to Hill o’ the Winds feeling that she thought him a rather poor sort of critter. Well, so he was. He was a failure, an utter, arrant failure. He had failed in everything in which a man ought to succeed. No wonder Sylvia laughed at him! No wonder Sylvia mocked him! He even wondered that she thought him worthwhile flirting with. How deep her eyes were, how perfect the curve of her throat, how kissable the sweet red curve of her mouth! Romney groaned.

  “Matter?” queried Samuel, appearing suddenly halfway up the Hill, his wet, laughing face dimly visible in t
he rainy twilight. “Sick?”

  “No. But you will be here in this cold east rain with nothing on your back but a torn shirt. Hustle home and dry yourself! You have a cold now.”

  “O, I’m a fish,” said Samuel. “Rain never hurts me, no more’n a frog. But you had new ammonia. You gotter be careful.”

  “I’m not going to be careful,” said Romney recklessly. “It would have been better for me if the pneumonia had made an end of me. Samuel, were you ever so unhappy that every beat of your heart hurt you?”

  “Nope,” said Samuel laconically. “You feeling that way?” he added uneasily.

  “Samuel,” said Romney, “if I could just be snuffed out to-night—like a candle—I’d like it.”

  “All on account o’ that Edgelow skirt, I s’pose,” said Samuel, less disdainfully than usual, however. A close observer might have thought that he felt a trifle less satisfied with himself than before.

  “Samuel,” said Romney, “never fall in love.”

  Samuel thought this warning totally unnecessary. But he was worried. He knew Romney well enough by this time to know that the more airily he talked of anything the more deeply he felt. When Romney was indifferent he talked quite earnestly. Samuel, when he went to bed that night, wished that after all he had not told Miss Edgelow certain things. He wished it hard for quite a while and then he gave up wishing anything except that he might get warm and stop shivering. Next day his uncle sent for the doctor.

  Samuel was sick for a week before Miss Edgelow heard of his illness through her uncle’s housekeeper. She went right down to the hollow. Romney was there, waiting on him. Samuel would have no one else, though they had brought a nurse up from Clifton. He was delirious but he always knew Romney.

  “Pneumonia?” asked Miss Edgelow.

  Romney nodded. He looked worn and ill himself, for he had not slept much during the week and he was worried over Samuel. He didn’t know how fond of Samuel he was until the doctor looked grave over the child.

  “Yes, double pneumonia. We’re doing all we can for him. But he’s worried over something. It’s against him.”

  “What is it?”

  “We don’t know. He keeps saying, ‘I wish I hadn’t told her,’ and begging me to put things straight. I promise to do so, but I haven’t an idea what he means and I don’t think he has any confidence that I’m doing what I promise.”

  “Can I see him?”

  “O, yes. But it isn’t likely he’ll recognize you.”

  Samuel was lying on his bed, staring at the ceiling with dull, fevered eyes. It was not clear whether he recognized Miss Edgelow or not. But he appealed to her.

  “They was all lies, you know. You’ll tell her, won’t you?”

  “Yes, yes, dear.”

  She was very gentle and motherly as she took Samuel’s thin, strangely white and clean little paw. Romney saw a look on her face, an expression of her spirit that he had never seen before.

  “He never said one of those things. I made ’em up. Tell her that. You’ll get it straighter than he would. He’d mix it all up. He talks all round things. He never goes to the point. You tell her.”

  “I’ll tell her. I’ll make her understand,” promised Miss Edgelow.

  “What’ll they do to me for telling lies?” queried Samuel.

  “Who, dear?”

  “The fellers up there,” Samuel pointed to the ceiling. “God and the rest.”

  “O! O, they’ll forgive you, dear, if you’re sorry.”

  “I am sorry. I wisht I hadn’t. It’s made him want to be snuffed out. I don’t want him to be snuffed out. You won’t—” Samuel gripped her hand “—you won’t let her snuff him out, will you?”

  “She shall not snuff him out,” promised Miss Edgelow solemnly.

  “I made Pink Raymer up, too,” said Samuel. “There ain’t no Pink Raymer, only in a book. I took him out of the book. You’ll put him back in the book, won’t you?”

  “Yes, dear.”

  “And shut the cover tight?”

  “Yes.”

  “Now, mind, you mustn’t let her snuff him out,” said Samuel.

  The nurse came in then and Miss Edgelow went out. She did not look at Romney. She paid very little attention to Romney for the next week, though she saw him every day when she came to see Samuel. Samuel was delirious at times yet, but he had evidently given up worrying. Only when he saw Miss Edgelow he always said, “You won’t let her snuff him out, will you?” and Miss Edgelow always replied, “No, I won’t let her snuff him out.”

  But she never looked at Romney.

  On the evening of the day when Samuel “took the turn” for the better, Romney went to the Whispering Lane. It was three weeks since he had walked there. Miss Edgelow was standing in the shadow of the beeches. Their gloom threw still darker shadows on her glossy hair and deepened the luster of her long blue eyes. She had a kitten on her shoulder and her dress was a young-leaf green with a scarlet girdle. Beyond her were tossing young maples whitening in the wind, with glimpses of the purple valley beyond them.

  Romney came up close to her and looked down at her. He was tired and pale but there was an air of triumph about him.

  “Your name isn’t Sylvia—” he began.

  “But it is,” said Miss Edgelow. “Sylvia Dorcas Edgelow. I am always called Sylvia at home. Uncle Jim hates the name. He has always called me Dorcas.”

  Romney tried again.

  “You are your uncle’s heiress, and I—”

  “I am not. Uncle Jim hasn’t ever had any intention of leaving me a cent. His will was made years ago; he has left everything to found a library in Clifton. He thinks I don’t know that but I do. Old Cousin Mary told me.”

  “You have been brought up in luxury and—”

  “I was brought up in comfort and father gave me a year at school in Paris. After I came back I graduated in domestic science at Macdonald. I can make bread, I can make my own clothes…the number of useful things I can do is quite appalling.”

  “I am poor but—”

  “Honest.”

  “Sylvia, you must stop interrupting me! I cannot allow my wife to interrupt me.”

  “You are too poor to keep a wife.”

  “I’m not. I have a letter here in my pocket—hear it crackling?—from Clifford Hughes, offering me the head-editorship of the four magazines he owns. The salary will keep us very comfortably. Besides, ‘to him that hath shall be given.’ Aunt Elizabeth told me this morning that she had made her will when she took that trip down to Clifton last week and had left everything she owned to me, except the Chippendale sideboard, which is to go to Doctor John, and the coloured egg dish, which is to go to Cousin Clorinda. As it happens, the sideboard and the coloured egg dish are the only things of Aunt Elizabeth’s I’ve ever coveted. But it means something to me to know that some day my—my—let us say my grandchildren will inherit this old place. So now will you be good?”

  “Have you finished your serial?” asked Miss Edgelow inconsequently.

  “No. I’m working it up to the grand climax now, though. It’s coming out better than I expected. How did you know about it?”

  “Samuel told me. He also told me you experimented with girls and put their reactions into your stories. At least, he did not use those words, but that is what he implied.”

  “Little beast! But I did put you in that serial, Sylvia. Only you were so unmanageable after I had got you in, you persisted in snuffing the hero out.”

  “Well, you know—” Sylvia looked straight into his eyes “—I promised Samuel I wouldn’t do that anymore.”

  It might have been an hour or a hundred years afterward that Romney said: “I want to kiss each of your freckles one by one. It will take some time.”

  “Aren’t you afraid to marry me?” asked Sylvia. “There is the curse, you know.”
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  “You will be a happy woman. A curse is worked out in four generations. You are the fifth. It has spent its force, as all evil things must do. The Edgelow tradition of unhappiness will vanish with the old feud. You will not disappear nor go insane nor throw vitriol at your husband.”

  “And you,” said Sylvia, “will not open my letters, nor give me a silk dress I don’t want and refuse me a new hat I do, nor jilt me?”

  “It’s a bargain,” said Romney.

  Old Jim Edgelow was reading in his library.

  “Uncle Jim,” said Sylvia, “I am going to marry Romney Cooper in six weeks’ time.”

  She was really afraid. Nobody ever knew just how old Jim would react to anything. But old Jim Edgelow had been governed by contraries all his life. He loved to disappoint people. He would rather disappoint them agreeably than not at all. He shut his book, took off his glasses, and said: “Marry him then and be hanged to you! It will infuriate old Elizabeth Cooper, anyhow.”

  “She didn’t seem very angry,” said Sylvia.

  “What! Does she know of it already?”

  “O, yes. We went right to her as soon as we became engaged. She said, ‘God bless you.’ It was old-fashioned, of course,” said Sylvia meditatively, “but I think I liked it.”

  Uncle Jim replaced his glasses and opened his book.

  “Those whom Elizabeth Cooper has joined together let not James Edgelow put asunder,” he said.

  Editors’ note: This story, really more of a “novelette,” was published in the March 17, 1923, issue of Love Story magazine and was illustrated by P. J. Monahan. It is listed in the “Unverified Ledger Titles” in the 1986 bibliography. It was found by Donna Campbell and is available to view in the Ryrie-Campbell Collection.

  The character of “Cousin Clorinda” in “Hill o’ the Winds” may remind some readers of other characters in Montgomery’s fiction, such as “Miss Cornelia Bryant” in Anne’s House of Dreams and “Mrs. Ellen Churchill” in her story “The Matchmaker” in this volume. As for Cousin Clorinda’s style of dress, Montgomery was pondering the changes in fashion at that time and remarked in her journal on February 6, 1923, that “My day for the frilly gowns of organdy and lace is over—henceforth I must wear the richer hues and materials of the matron.” She was forty-nine years of age at the time.