Children's Book Classics - Kate Douglas Wiggin Edition: 11 Novels & 120+ Short Stories for Children. Kate Douglas Wiggin
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quills again this winter! I will not! It’s wicked, WICKED to expect me to! Oh! How I wish there never had been any porcupines in the world, or that all of them had died before silly, hateful people ever thought of trimming hat with them! They curl round and tickle my ear! They blow against my cheek and sting it like needles! They do look outlandish, you said so yourself a minute ago. Nobody ever had any but only just me! The only porcupine was made into the only quills for me and nobody else! I wish instead of sticking OUT of the nasty beasts, that they stuck INTO them, same as they do into my cheek! I suffer, suffer, suffer, wearing them and hating them, and they will last forever and forever, and when I’m dead and can’t help myself, somebody’ll rip them out of my last year’s hat and stick them on my head, and I’ll be buried in them! Well, when I am buried THEY will be, that’s one good thing! Oh, if I ever have a child I’ll let her choose her own feathers and not make her wear ugly things like pigs’ bristles and porcupine quills!”
With this lengthy tirade Rebecca vanished like a meteor, through the door and down the street, while Miranda Sawyer gasped for breath, and prayed to Heaven to help her understand such human whirlwinds as this Randall niece of hers.
This was at three o’clock, and at half-past three Rebecca was kneeling on the rag carpet with her head in her aunt’s apron, sobbing her contrition.
“Oh! Aunt Miranda, do forgive me if you can. It’s the only time I’ve been bad for months! You know it is! You know you said last week I hadn’t been any trouble lately. Something broke inside of me and came tumbling out of my mouth in ugly words! The porcupine quills make me feel just as a bull does when he sees a red cloth; nobody understands how I suffer with them!”
Miranda Sawyer had learned a few lessons in the last two years, lessons which were making her (at least on her “good days”) a trifle kinder, and at any rate a juster woman than she used to be. When she alighted on the wrong side of her four-poster in the morning, or felt an extra touch of rheumatism, she was still grim and unyielding; but sometimes a curious sort of melting process seemed to go on within her, when her whole bony structure softened, and her eyes grew less vitreous. At such moments Rebecca used to feel as if a superincumbent iron pot had been lifted off her head, allowing her to breath freely and enjoy the sunshine.
“Well,” she said finally, after staring first at Rebecca and then at the porcupine quills, as if to gain some insight into the situation, “well, I never, sence I was born int’ the world, heerd such a speech as you’ve spoke, an’ I guess there probably never was one. You’d better tell the minister what you said and see what he thinks of his prize Sunday-school scholar. But I’m too old and tired to scold and fuss, and try to train you same as I did at first. You can punish yourself this time, like you used to. Go fire something down the well, same as you did your pink parasol! You’ve apologized and we won’t say no more about it today, but I expect you to show by extry good conduct how sorry you be! You care altogether too much about your looks and your clothes for a child, and you’ve got a temper that’ll certainly land you in state’s prison some o’ these days!”
Rebecca wiped her eyes and laughed aloud. “No, no, Aunt Miranda, it won’t, really! That wasn’t temper; I don’t get angry with PEOPLE; but only, once in a long while, with things; like those,—cover them up quick before I begin again! I’m all right! Shower’s over, sun’s out!”
Miss Miranda looked at her searchingly and uncomprehendingly. Rebecca’s state of mind came perilously near to disease, she thought.
“Have you seen me buyin’ any new bunnits, or your Aunt Jane?” she asked cuttingly. “Is there any particular reason why you should dress better than your elders? You might as well know that we’re short of cash just now, your Aunt Jane and me, and have no intention of riggin’ you out like a Milltown fact’ry girl.”
“Oh-h!” cried Rebecca, the quick tears starting again to her eyes and the color fading out of her cheeks, as she scrambled up from her knees to a seat on the sofa beside her aunt. “Oh-h! How ashamed I am! Quick, sew those quills on to the brown turban while I’m good! If I can’t stand them I’ll make a neat little gingham bag and slip over them!”
And so the matter ended, not as it customarily did, with cold words on Miss Miranda’s part and bitter feelings on Rebecca’s, but with a gleam of mutual understanding.
Mrs. Cobb, who was a master hand at coloring, dipped the offending quills in brown dye and left them to soak in it all night, not only making them a nice warm color, but somewhat weakening their rocky spines, so that they were not quite as rampantly hideous as before, in Rebecca’s opinion.
Then Mrs. Perkins went to her bandbox in the attic and gave Miss Dearborn some pale blue velvet, with which she bound the brim of the brown turban and made a wonderful rosette, out of which the porcupine’s defensive armor sprang, buoyantly and gallantly, like the plume of Henry of Navarre.
Rebecca was resigned, if not greatly comforted, but she had grace enough to conceal her feelings, now that she knew economy was at the root of some of her aunt’s decrees in matters of dress; and she managed to forget the solferino breast, save in sleep, where a vision of it had a way of appearing to her, dangling from the ceiling, and dazzling her so with its rich color that she used to hope the milliner would sell it that she might never be tempted with it when she passed the shop window.
One day, not long afterward, Miss Miranda borrowed Mr. Perkins’s horse and wagon and took Rebecca with her on a drive to Union, to see about some sausage meat and head cheese. She intended to call on Mrs. Cobb, order a load of pine wood from Mr. Strout on the way, and leave some rags for a rug with old Mrs. Pease, so that the journey could be made as profitable as possible, consistent with the loss of time and the wear and tear on her second-best black dress.
The red-winged black hat was forcibly removed from Rebecca’s head just before starting, and the nightmare turban substituted.
“You might as well begin to wear it first as last,” remarked Miranda, while Jane stood in the side door and sympathized secretly with Rebecca.
“I will!” said Rebecca, ramming the stiff turban down on her head with a vindictive grimace, and snapping the elastic under her long braids; “but it makes me think of what Mr. Robinson said when the minister told him his mother-in-law would ride in the same buggy with him at his wife’s funeral.”
“I can’t see how any speech of Mr. Robinson’s, made years an’ years ago, can have anything to do with wearin’ your turban down to Union,” said Miranda, settling the lap robe over her knees.
“Well, it can; because he said: Have it that way, then, but it’ll spile the hull blamed trip for me!’”
Jane closed the door suddenly, partly because she experienced a desire to smile (a desire she had not felt for years before Rebecca came to the brick house to live), and partly because she had no wish to overhear what her sister would say when she took in the full significance of Rebecca’s anecdote, which was a favorite one with Mr. Perkins.
It was a cold blustering day with a high wind that promised to bring an early fall of snow. The trees were stripped bare of leaves, the ground was hard, and the wagon wheels rattled noisily over the thank-you-ma’ams.
“I’m glad I wore my Paisley shawl over my cloak,” said Miranda. “Be you warm enough, Rebecca? Tie that white rigolette tighter round your neck. The wind fairly blows through my bones. I most wish t we’d waited till a pleasanter day, for this Union road is all up hill or down, and we shan’t get over the ground fast, it’s so rough. Don’t forget, when you go into Scott’s, to say I want all the trimmin’s when they send me the pork, for mebbe I can try out a little mite o’ lard. The last load o’ pine’s gone turrible quick; I must see if “Bijah Flagg can’t get us some cut-rounds at the mills, when he hauls for Squire Bean next time. Keep your mind on your drivin’, Rebecca, and don’t look at the trees and the sky so much. It’s the same sky and same trees that have been here right along. Go awful slow down this hill and walk the hoss over Cook’s Brook bridge, for I always suspicion it’s goin’ to break down under me, an’ I shouldn’t want to be dropped into that fast runnin’