Chapter 1

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_Title:_ The Jewel of Consistency
_Date of first publication:_ 1905
_Author:_ L. M. (Lucy Maud) Montgomery (1874-1942)
_Date first posted:_ Mar. 23, 2017
_Date last updated:_ Mar. 23, 2017
Faded Page eBook #20170335

This ebook was produced by: Alex White & the online Distributed
Proofreaders Canada team at http://www.pgdpcanada.net

The Jewel of Consistency
L. M. Montgomery
First published in _The Ladies’ World_, April 1905.

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.

The fir woods were all around, warm and resinous in that deep-tinted
sunshine of autumn, which seems to possess the power of extracting the
very essence of the odors that summer has stored up in wood and field
for the delectation of happy mortals who can wander over the hills in
the “ripe o’ the year.”

The woods, cleft asunder by the red gash of the main road, lay in a
great mellow over-silence, beneath which a score of finely-wakened
sounds made a sort of felicitous music. There was a faraway stir of
winds in the lazy branches and a faint, elfin-like rustle in the sere
grasses along the bleached snake fence that skirted the farther edge of
the brook. In the thicket of young saplings at the curve of the road
some squirrels were chattering fussily, and the chirping of myriad
crickets filled in all the pauses. Clear through all came the noise of
the brook over the pebbles by the gate—a friendly laughter that never
failed the summer through, from the melting April afternoons until the
ice of December throttled it. Stephen Winslow listened to it with
unconscious pleasure; he had heard it so often as he came around the
curve homeward that it seemed like the voice of an old comrade—that
quick leap of the water in a diamond dance of spray, then the long
gurgle of triumph, dying down into a placid murmur as the water gushed
out from the ferns and impearled grasses to cross the road under the
bridge, whose loose planks always rumbled with a noise like thunder in
the bowl of the woods when a carriage crossed it.

“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. Listen to that laugh, now. One would think the thing was
human. Laws, I’m lazy! Pris would laugh if she saw me now. It seems too
much of an undertaking to gee the critters out of this hollow. Fact!
Time you was giving up work, Stephen—time you was giving up.”

He 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,
but his grizzled hair, in sharp contradistinction, grew straight off his
forehead and stood up in a stiff, uncompromising bush all over his head.
His face was narrow and wrinkled, with mild, short-sighted blue eyes.
When he spoke his voice was as thin and squeaky as he looked himself.
Presently he chirruped to his horses and they lumbered through the water
and up the steep little rise to the turn. As he drove through the open
gate he began to sing. The result would have surprised anyone who did
not know him. His voice rose in an old Scotch love-song, clear, full and
strong, of astonishing power and compass. Stephen Winslow had enjoyed a
local fame as a singer all his life. He was proud that his voice had not
yet failed.

“Most everything else has,” he would say, whimsically. “I’ve lost my
beauty, as is plain to be seen—and my eyesight ain’t what it was—and
sad to say, I’m getting lazy. But the sing is all there yet—ain’t it,
hey? Guess they must have some choir work cut out for me in the New
Jerusalem.”

He sang lustily as his horses trotted over another loop of the brook and
began to climb the hill. Above him were the gray old buildings of the
homestead. Standing at the door, you might have thought yourself on some
lone clearing in the primeval woods. Owing to a trick of the landfall,
not another house was visible from the Winslow place.

[Illustration: “‘Laws, I’m lazy! Pris would laugh if she saw me now’”]

It crested a small, steep, circular hill. All around the base was a
valley, thick-set with feathery young firs, and beyond it the hills,
overgrown with trees, rose like the rim of a verdant basin. On their
outward slopes were the houses and farms of Roseneath, within ten
minutes’ walk. But their invisibility gave a sense and appearance of
isolation to the dwellers at the Winslow farm.

To be sure, the ventilator on Emmanuel Henderson’s barn might be seen
over the tree-tops to the north if one knew just where to look for it.
And Stephen, who was the most sociable soul on earth, was wont to
declare that, but for the ventilator, he would have sold out and moved
away years ago.

“I smoke my pipe along in the evenings on the back veranda and look at
Emmanuel’s ventilator. It’s company—yes, sir, it’s company. Ye wouldn’t
believe now!”

The little valley was full of cool green shadows, but the crest of the
hill was basking in sunshine as the team lumbered into the tidy back
yard. At the front of the house there was a large garden, its
gorgeousness of autumn flowering toned down by the dark green of cherry
trees that grew at haphazard all over it, as if someone had once stuck
them down on the peck-of-potatoes principle. A woman who was walking
about it, now came out through the narrow gate between the stiff,
berry-laden rowans, the ample skirt of her dark print dress gathered up
to cradle a lapful of glowing asters.

Stephen placidly rolled out the chorus of his ballad before he spoke or
moved. Then he scrambled down spryly and said:

“Yer old nuisance is back again, you see, Pris. S’pose yer thought I’d
tumbled into the brook. Fact was, I called at the store—and there! I
guess I needn’t say another word. You know my failing.”