After Many Years

by Carolyn Strom Collins

  “No, thank the Lord, my heart’s all right,” said Salome, briskly. “My only trouble is rheumatism in the knee j’int. Ever have rheumatism in your knee j’int, Miss?”

  No, Aunt Lily’s knee joints were all right. In fact, Aunt Lily proved to be a remarkably healthy woman. Her wearied heart evidently found no difficulty in pumping sufficient blood through her body and her appetite, as suppertime showed, as anything but feeble.

  “When I can forget what might have been, I am happy,” she sighed, “I have had my romance, Mrs. Bruce. Alas, that it should be in the past tense! I once thought I had found my true soul mate, Mrs. Bruce, and I dreamed of happy, real marriage.”

  “What happened that you didn’t get married?” queried Salome, pricking up her ears. Salome is always rather interested in blighted romances, despite her grim exterior.

  “A misunderstanding, Miss Silversides. A misunderstanding that severed two fond hearts. He wedded another. Never since that sad day have I met a man who could stir the dead ashes of my heart to tingling life again. But let us not talk of my sorrows, dear friends. Will you tell me how to can peas?”

  When Aunt Lily went away I asked her to come again and she assured me that she would.

  “I think you will understand me—I have always been misunderstood,” she said. Then she trailed her blue draperies down the hill to the wood, looking, when kindly distance had lent enchantment, quite a graceful, romantic and attractive figure.

  “Did you ever hear such a lunatic, ma’am?” demanded Salome. “Her and her soulmates and her tired hearts! Her hair looks as if she’d swept it up with a broom and her nails weren’t cleaned and her stockings were scandalous dirty. And yet, for all, there’s something about the creature I like, ma’am.”

  That was the eventual verdict of our household upon Aunt Lily. In spite of everything there was a queer charm about her to which we succumbed. The same thing could be said of that absurd diary of hers, which she brought over to us during our second summer. It was as ridiculous and sentimental, and lackadaisical as Aunt Lily herself. And yet there was an odd fragrance about it that lingered in our memories. We could not, somehow, laugh quite as much over it as we wanted to.

  T. B. was also an early and frequent caller. He was thirteen years old, in our first summer at the Patch. He had thick, fair, thatch-like hair and deep blue eyes—the only intelligent eyes in the family. He was, it developed, much addicted to creeping and crawling things; he always had bugs, toads, frogs or snakes secreted about his anatomy. The only time he ever had a meal with us a small green snake slipped from the pocket of his ragged shirt and glided over the table.

  “Do you think he is human, ma’am?” Salome asked, with bated breath, after he was gone.

  “He is a born naturalist,” said Dick. He is making a special study of ants this summer, it appears. Snakes are only a side issue at present. If he could be educated he would amount to something.”

  There did not seem to be much likelihood of this. T. B. himself had no illusions on the subject.

  “There ain’t any chance for me—never was and never will be,” he once told me gloomily.

  “Perhaps your grandmother would help you,” I suggested.

  T. B. grinned.

  “Perhaps—when stones bleed,” he said scornfully. “I don’t s’pose the old beast has enough money. None of us knows how much she has got, she just doles it out. But she wouldn’t give me any if she had pecks. She hates me. If there’s any money left when she dies—s’posen she ever does die—Joe’s to get it. He’s her baby.”

  If Joseph—T. B. was the only one who ever called him Joe—was Granny’s favourite he was not the favourite of anybody else. However we of the Tansy Patch might differ concerning the other members of the Conway family we all united in cordially detesting Joseph. He was such a sly, smug little wretch—“a born hypocrite, that child is, ma’am,” declared Salome solemnly. We had no proof that it was really he who had cut off Doc’s whiskers, but there was no doubt that it was Joseph who painted poor Una’s legs with stripes of red and green paint one day. Una came home in tears, quickly followed by T. B. and Aunt Lily, the latter in tears also.

  “I would rather have lost my right hand than have this happen, dear Mrs. Bruce,” she wailed. “O, do not cherish it against us. Your friendship has been such a sweet boon to me. And turpentine will take it off—it can’t be very dry yet.”

  “Jest wait till Granny goes to sleep and I’ll lambaste Joe within an inch of his life,” said T. B.

  He did, too. When Granny wakened from her nap she heard the sobbing Joe’s tale and shrieked objurgations at T. B. for an hour. T. B. sat on the fence and laughed at her; we could hear him and hear Granny also. Granny’s vocal powers had not failed with advancing years, and every word came over distinctly to the Tansy Patch through the clear evening air.

  “May you be eaten by pigs,” vociferated Granny, and we knew she was brandishing her stick at the graceless T. B. “I’ll bite your face off! I’ll tear your eyes out! I’ll rip your heart out! You blatant beast! You putrid pup!”

  “O, listen to that awesome woman ma’am,” said Salome, shuddering. “Ain’t it a wonder she isn’t struck dead?”

  But Granny was every inch alive—except that she could not walk, having what Aunt Lily called “paralatics in the hips.” She was confined to a chair, generally placed on the back verandah, whence she could command a view of the main road. From this point of vantage she could scream maledictions and shake her long, black stick at any person or objects which incurred her dislike or displeasure.

  Granny was of striking appearance. She had snow-white hair and dead-white face, and flashing black eyes. She still possessed all her teeth, but they were discoloured and fang-like; and when she drew her lips back and snarled she was certainly a rather wolf-like old dame. She always wore a frilled widow’s cap tied tightly under her chin, and was addicted to bare feet.

  It was war to the hilt between Granny and Salome from the start. Granny attacked first, without the slightest provocation. Salome had gone through the spruce wood to call the children home to dinner. Perhaps Granny found Salome’s expression rather trying. Salome always did look very well satisfied with herself. At least, something about her seemed to grate on Granny’s nerves.

  “Yah!” she shrieked vindictively, “your grandfather hanged himself in his horse stable. Go home, jail-bird, go home.”

  Outraged, Salome was too much overcome to attempt a reply. She came home almost in tears.

  “Ma’am, my grandfathers both died most respectable deaths.”

  “You mustn’t mind what Granny says, Salome,” I said soothingly.

  “Indeed, ma’am, nobody should mind what a lunatic says. But it is hard for a decent woman to have her grandfathers insulted. I do not mind the name she called me, ma’am, but she might respect the dead.”

  Granny respected nothing on earth. T. B., who, although he hated her, had a certain pride in her, told tales of her repartée. On one occasion a new minister had stopped on the road and accosted Granny over the fence. He was young and callow, and perhaps Granny’s eyes disconcerted him, for he certainly worded his question rather inanely.

  “Can you tell me, madam, where I am going?” he asked politely.

  “How should I know where you are going, gosling?” retorted Granny. Then she had burst into a series of chuckles which had completed his discomfiture. The poor young man drove hastily away, crimson of face, “looking like thirty cents,” declared T. B. with a relish.

  On another occasion Granny routed an automobile. One, filled with gay hotel guests, had stopped at the gate. Its driver had intended to ask for some water, but Granny did not allow him to utter a word.

  “Get out of this with your demon machine,” she yelled. She caught up the nearest missile, which happened to be her dinner plate, and hurled it at him. It missed his face by a hair’s
breadth and landed squarely, grease and all, in a fashionable lady’s silken lap. Granny followed this up by a series of fearsome yells and maledictions, of which the mildest were “May ye never have a night without a bad dream,” and “May ye always be looking for something and never finding it,” and—finally—“May ye all die to-night. I’ll pray for it, that I will.”

  The dismayed driver got his car away as quickly as possible and Granny laughed loud and long.

  “My old Granny’s the limit,” declared T. B.

  If Joseph was Granny’s favourite, poor Charity was her pet detestation. Charity was the oldest of the family; she was eighteen and a good-hearted, hard-working creature. Almost all the work that was done in that house was done by Charity. Consequently, she had little time for visiting, and her calls on us were few. She was a dark, rather stocky girl, but had her share of the family’s good looks. She had dusky red cheeks and a very pretty red mouth. Granny vowed that Charity was “a born fool”; Charity was very far from being that, but she certainly did not possess very much “gumption,” as Salome said. She had no taste in dress and went about one summer wearing an old rose gown with a bright scarlet hat.

  “O, if only something would happen to one of them, ma’am, before they dislocate my eyes,” groaned Salome.

  One day, something did happen. A glad Salome told us of it.

  “Charity Conway won’t wear that dress again, ma’am. Yesterday when she was going to church she found a nest of five eggs in the field. So she put them in the pocket of her petticoat and when she got to church she forgot all about them and sat down on them and the dress is ruined, ma’am. It is a good thing, but I am sorry for poor Charity, too, for Granny is mad at her and says she won’t buy her another dress this summer.”

  Part II

  If Charity came to see us but seldom, Dorinda made up for it. Dorinda was a constant guest. Dorinda was sixteen and Dorinda wrote poetry—“bushels of it,” so said T. B.

  The first time Dorinda came she wanted to borrow some mutton tallow.

  “I have chapped hands and I find it difficult to write poetry with chapped hands.”

  “I should think you would, Miss,” said Salome; she got out the mutton tallow.

  Dorinda bored us to death with her poetry. It really was the most awful trash. One line, however, in a poem which Dorinda addressed to the returned soldiers of the Boer War, always shone like a star in our family memory: “Canada, like a maiden, welcomes back her sons.”

  But Salome thought it wasn’t quite decent!

  “If there was only a wood-pool near here!” sighed Dorinda, “I can write my best only by a wood-pool.”

  “Why not try the pond?” suggested Salome.

  “My Muse,” said Dorinda with dignity, “only inspires me by a wood-pool.”

  I cannot remember the names of all Dorinda’s poems. Some of them were “Lines on a Birch Tree,” “Lines to My Northern Birds,” “A Romantic Tail,” and “Lines Written on a Friend’s Tansy Patch.”

  Dorinda was stout but very good-looking. She had magnificent hair: great masses of silky brown curls. She always dressed it beautifully, too. But, like all mortals, Dorinda was not satisfied.

  “I wish I was sylph-like, Mrs. Bruce,” she sighed. “A poetess should be sylph-like.”

  The relations between Dorinda and Aunt Lily were not as cordial as their common addiction to literary pursuits might pre-suppose. There was some antagonism between them, the cause of which we never knew. But it resulted in T. B. hating Dorinda with an unbrotherly hatred and deriding her poems unmercifully.

  One little white blossom of pure affection bloomed in the arid desert of T. B.’s emotional life. He loved his Aunt. She sympathized with his pursuits and, in spite of her lackadaisical ways, was not afraid of his snakes. T. B. would not allow Granny to abuse Aunt Lily.

  “How did you stop it?” queried Salome anxiously.

  “The first time she turned her tongue loose on Aunt Lily I went up to her and bit her,” said T. B. coolly.

  “You ought to bite her oftener,” said Salome vindictively.

  “There ain’t none of the rest of us worth standing up for,” said T. B. “Granny’s tough biting.”

  T. B. figured conspicuously in Aunt Lily’s diary. She seemed to centre her maternal affection in him.

  “I wish I could educate T. B.,” she wrote, “but alas, I am poor. How bitter a thing is grinding poverty! My poor brother is a genius, but he makes no money. And I fear he will never find the treasure he seeketh. Like myself, he is misunderstood and unappreciated. My beloved T. B. lacks many things which should pertain to youth. I patched his best trousers to-day.”

  Many of T. B. speeches and exploits figured in the diary.

  “For, perhaps, in spite of all, he may be famous some day,” wrote Aunt Lily, “and then this neglected diary, written by a woman whose hopes in life have been blighted, will be of inestimable value to a biographer in search of material. I have noticed that the boyish pranks of great men are of surpassing interest. I could wish that T. B. used less slang. But English undefiled is seldom heard to-day. Alas, for it! I feel that T. B.’s association with the refined family who are now sojourning at the Tansy Patch may be of great help to him.”

  I don’t know that we “helped” T. B. very much, but Salome tried to do him good in a spiritual way. She was much horrified to find that T. B. was a skeptic and prided himself on it. Accordingly, Salome took to lending him books and tracts and bribing him to read them, with doughnuts. One of them was the Memoir of Susanna B. Morton, an account of the life and early death of a child of extraordinary piety. Salome used to read it and weep over it Sunday afternoons. T. B. enjoyed the book, but scarcely, I fear, in the way Salome desired.

  “Ain’t Susanna a holy terror?” he would say to me with a grin. T. B. had a sense of humor and that book tickled it.

  Una, too, told him sweetly that she meant to pray for him but this roused T. B.’s dander instantly.

  “You ain’t! Don’t you dast! I won’t be prayed for,” he shouted.

  “O, T. B., aren’t you afraid of going to the bad place?” whispered poor Una, quite aghast.

  “Nix on that” he said contemptuously. “I don’t believe there’s any hell or heaven either. When you die that’s the end of you.”

  “Wouldn’t you like to go on living?” asked Dick, who enjoyed drawing T. B. out.

  “Nope. There’s no fun in it,” said the youthful misanthrope. “Heaven’s a dull place from all the accounts I’ve heard of it. I’d like a heaven full of snakes and ants and things, though. There’d be some sense in that kind.”

  “How are your ants coming on?” I queried.

  T. B. was transformed in a moment. He sat up, eager, alert, bright-eyed.

  “They’re durned int’resting,” he exclaimed. “I sat all day yesterday and watched their doings in that nest below the garden. Say, but they’re quarrelsome little cusses—some of ’em like to start a fight ’thout any reason, far’s I can see. And some of ’em are cowards. They gits so scared they just double theirselves up into a ball and let the other fellow bang ’em round. They won’t put up no fight. Some of ’em are lazy and won’t work. I’ve watched ’em shirking. And there was one ant died o’ grief ’cause another ant got killed—wouldn’t eat, wouldn’t work—just died. Tell you, I wish humans was as interesting as ants. Well, so long. I must be gitting home to dinner.”

  Always in the winter, which we spent in our town home, the children kept up a correspondence with T. B. He wrote very interesting letters, too, allowing for eccentricities of grammar and spelling. Aunt Lily wrote me wondrous underlined epistles, full of sentiment, and Dorinda sent us a poem every week—on “Memories of Other Days” or some kindred subject. We often wondered what life must be in the house beyond the spruces in winter, when Granny must perforce be cooped up indoors. Salome shuddered over th
e thought of it.

  It was not until our fourth and last summer at the Tansy Patch that we were ever asked to partake of a meal in the Conway establishment. One day, not long before our final departure, T. B. came over and gravely handed us a formal invitation, in Aunt Lily’s handwriting, on a soiled, gilt-edged correspondence card. We were asked to supper the next evening at seven o’clock. Salome got one, too.

  “Surely, ma’am, you’ll never try to eat a meal in that house!” she exclaimed. “Why, I have heard that they’ve been known to mix up cakes in the wash-pan, ma’am. And remember the dog and the soup, ma’am.”

  “But they threw the soup out,” said Una.

  “I think Mr. Bruce and I must go,” I said. “I do not want to hurt Aunt Lily’s feelings. But you can please yourself about going, Salome.”

  Salome drew a deep breath.

  “I’d rather go to supper with the king of the Cannibal Islands, ma’am,” she said. “But if you are determined to go, I’ll go, too, and we’ll all be poisoned together.”

  I really believe Salome was curious. She wanted to see what sort of meal “them lunatics” would put up.

  We all got a surprise. The Conway supper table was as pretty a one as I have ever sat down to. The linen was spotless. The china and silver old and good—evidently relics of Granny’s palmy days. The decorations of ferns and wildflowers were charming, and the awful lamp, with its hideous red globe, which stood on a corner table, cast a very becoming rose light over everything.

  “You see, we can put on style when we want to,” said T. B. slyly.

  All the family were dressed up for the occasion. “Paw” in a dark suit and white shirt, was handsome and presentable. Aunt Lily for once had her hair done nicely and she and the girls, in their pretty muslins, looked quite charming. Even Granny had on a new black silk and a fresh cap; if she could only have held her tongue, she might have passed for a decidedly handsome and aristocratic old dame. But that Granny could not do.