1 (9 page)

Aunt Irene made a fuss over dad. She purred over him … actually purred. And dad liked her purring and her honey-sweet phrases just as well as he had liked her cake. Jane saw that clearly.

“It isn’t really fair to the child to take her out to that Brookview boarding-house of yours,” said Aunt Irene.

“Who knows but I’ll get a house of my own for the summer?” said dad. “Do you think you could keep house for me, Jane?”

“Yes,” said Jane promptly. She COULD. She knew how a house should be kept even if she had never kept one. There are people who are born knowing things.

“Can you cook?” asked Aunt Irene, winking at dad, as if over some delicious joke. Jane was pleased to see that dad did not wink back. And he saved her the ordeal of replying.

“Any descendant of my mother’s can cook,” he said. “Come, my Jane, put on thy beautiful garments and let’s be on our way.”

As Jane came downstairs in her hat and coat she could not help hearing Aunt Irene in the dining-room.

“She’s got a secretive strain in her, Andrew, that I confess I don’t like.”

“Knows how to keep her own counsel, eh?” said dad.

“It’s more than that, Andrew. She’s deep … take my word for it, she’s deep. Old Lady Kennedy will never be dead while she is alive. But she is a very dear little girl for all that, Andrew … we can’t expect her to be faultless … and if there is anything I can do for her you have only to let me know. Be patient with her, Andrew. You know she’s never been taught how to love you.”

Jane fairly gritted her teeth. The idea of her having to be taught “how to love” dad! It was … why, it was funny! Jane’s annoyance with Aunt Irene dissolved in a little chuckle, as low-pitched and impish as an owl’s.

“DO be careful of poison ivy,” Aunt Irene called after them as they drove away. “I’m told there is so much of it in Brookview. DO take good care of her, Andrew.”

“You’ve got it wrong end foremost, Irene, like all women. Any one could see with half an eye that Jane is going to take care of ME.”

A blithe soul was Jane as they drove away. The glow at her heart went with her across the Island. She simply could not believe that only a few hours had elapsed since she had been the most miserable creature in the world. It was jolly to ride in a buggy, just behind a little red mare whose sleek hams Jane would have liked to bend forward and slap. She did not eat up the long red miles as a car would have done, but Jane did not want them eaten up. The road was full of lovely surprises … a glimpse of far-off hills that seemed made of opal dust … a whiff of wind that had been blowing over a clover field … brooks that appeared from nowhere and ran off into green shadowy woods where long branches of spicy fir hung over the laced water … great white cloud mountains towering up in the blue sky … a hollow of tipsy buttercups … a tidal river unbelievably blue. Everywhere she looked there was something to delight her. Everything seemed just on the point of whispering a secret of happiness. And there was something else … the sea tang in the air. Jane sniffed it for the first time … sniffed again … drank it in.

“Feel in my right-hand pocket,” said dad.

Jane explored and found a bag of caramels. At 60 Gay she was not allowed to eat candy between meals … but 60 Gay was a thousand miles away.

“We’re neither of us much for talking, it seems,” said dad.

“No, but I think we entertain each other very well,” said Jane, as distinctly as she could with her jaws stuck together with caramel.

Dad laughed. He had such a nice understanding laugh.

“I can talk a blue streak when the spirit moves me,” he said. “When it doesn’t I like people to let me be. You’re a girl after my own heart, Jane. I’m glad I was predestined to send for you. Irene argued against it. But I’m a stubborn dud, my Jane, when I take a notion into my noddle. It just occurred to me that I wanted to get acquainted with my daughter.”

Dad did not ask about mother. Jane was thankful he did not … and yet she knew it was all wrong that he did not. It was all wrong that mother had asked her not to speak of her to him. Oh, there were too many things all wrong but one thing was indisputably and satisfyingly right. She was going to spend a whole summer with dad and they were here together, driving over a road which had a life of its own that seemed to be running through her veins like quicksilver. Jane knew that she had never been in any place or any company that suited her so well.

The most delightful drive must end.

“We’ll soon be at Brookview,” said dad. “I’ve been living at Brookview this past year. It is still one of the quiet places of the earth. I’ve a couple of rooms over Jim Meade’s store. Mrs Jim Meade gives me my meals and thinks I’m a harmless lunatic because I write.”

“What do you write, dad?” asked Jane, thinking of “Peaceful Adjustment of International Difficulties.”

“A little of everything, Jane. Stories … poems … essays … articles on all subjects. I even wrote a novel once. But I couldn’t find a publisher. So I went back to my pot-boilers. Behold a mute inglorious Milton in your dad. To you, Jane, I will confide my dearest dream. It is to write an epic on the life of Methuselah. What a subject! Here we are.”

“Here” was a corner where two roads crossed and in the corner was a building which was a store at one end and a dwelling place at the other. The store end was open to the road but the house end was fenced off with a paling and a spruce hedge. Jane learned at once and for ever the art of getting out of a buggy and they went through a little white gate, with a black wooden decoy duck on one of its posts, and up a red walk edged with ribbon grass and big quahaug shells.

“Woof, woof,” went a friendly little brown and white dog sitting on the steps. A nice gingery smell of hot cookies floated out of the door as an elderly woman came out … a trim body wearing a white apron edged with six-inch-deep crochet lace and with the reddest cheeks Jane had ever seen on anybody in her life.

“Mrs Meade, this is Jane,” said dad, “and you see now why I shall have to shave every morning after this.”

“Dear child,” said Mrs Meade and kissed her. Jane liked her kiss better than Aunt Irene’s.

Mrs Meade at once gave Jane a slice of bread and butter and strawberry jam to “stay her stomach” till supper. It was wild-strawberry jam and Jane had never tasted wild-strawberry jam in her life before. The supper table was spread in a spotless kitchen where all the big windows were filled with flowering geraniums and begonias with silver-spotted leaves.

“I like kitchens,” thought Jane.

Through another door that opened into a garden was a far-away view of green pastures to the south. The table in the centre of the room was covered with a gay red and white checked cloth. There was a fat, squat little bean-pot full of golden-brown beans before Mr Meade who gave Jane a liberal helping, besides a big square of fluffy cornmeal cake. Mr Meade looked very much like a cabbage in spectacles and flying jibs but Jane liked him.

Nobody found fault with Jane for things done or left undone. Nobody made her feel silly and crude and always in the wrong. When she finished her johnny-cake Mr Meade put another slice on her plate without even asking her if she wanted it.

“Eat all you like but pocket nothing,” he told her solemnly.

The brown and white dog sat beside her, looking up with hungry hopeful eyes. Nobody took any notice when Jane fed him bits of johnny-cake.

Mr and Mrs Meade did most of the talking. It was all about people Jane had never heard of, but somehow she liked to listen. When Mrs Meade said in a solemn tone that poor George Baldwin was very ill with an ulster in his stomach, Jane’s eyes and dad’s laughed to each other though their faces remained as solemn as Mrs Meade’s. Jane felt warm and pleasant all over. It was jolly to have someone to share a joke with. Fancy laughing with your eyes at any one in 60 Gay! She and mother exchanged glimmers but they never dared laugh.

The east was paling to moonrise when Jane went to bed in Mrs Meade’s spare-room. The bureau and the wash-stand were very cheap, the bed an iron one enamelled in white, the floor painted brown. But there was a gorgeous hooked rug of roses and ferns and autumn leaves on it, the prim starched lace curtains were as white as snow, the wallpaper was so pretty … silver daisy clusters on a creamy ground with circles of pale blue ribbon round them … and there was a huge scarlet geranium with scented velvety leaves on a stand before one of the windows.

There was something friendly about the room. Jane slept like a top and was up and down in the morning when Mrs Meade was lighting the kitchen fire. Mrs Meade gave Jane a big fat doughnut to stay her stomach till breakfast and sent her out into the garden to wait till dad came down. It lay in the silence of the dewy morning. The wind was full of wholesome country smells. The little flower-beds were edged with blue forget-me-nots and in one corner was a big clump of early, dark red peonies. Violets and plots of red and white daisies grew under the parlour windows. In a near field cows were cropping gold-green grass and a dozen little fluffy chicks were running about. A tiny yellow bird was tilting on a spirea spray. The brown and white dog came out and followed Jane about. A funny, two-wheeled cart, such as Jane had never seen before, went by on the road and the driver, a lank youth in overalls, waved to her as to an old friend. Jane promptly waved back with what was left of her doughnut.

How blue and high the sky was! Jane liked the country sky. “P. E. Island is a lovely place,” thought Jane, not at all grudgingly. She picked a pink cabbage rose and shook the dew from it all over her face. Fancy washing your face with a rose! And then she remembered how she had prayed that she might not come here.

“I think,” said Jane decidedly, “that I should apologize to God.”

“We must go and buy us a house soon, duck,” said dad, jumping right into the middle of the subject as Jane was to find was his habit.

Jane turned it over in her mind.

“Is ‘soon’ to-day?” she asked.

Dad laughed.

“Might as well be. This happens to be one of the days when I like myself reasonably well. We’ll start as soon as Jed brings our car.”

Jed did not bring the car till noon so they had dinner before they set out, and Mrs Meade gave Jane a bag of butter cookies to stay their stomachs till supper-time.

“I like Mrs Meade,” Jane told dad, a pleasant warmth filling her soul as she realized that here was somebody she did like.

“She’s the salt of the earth,” agreed dad, “even if she does think the violet ray is a girl.”

The violet ray might have been a girl for anything Jane knew to the contrary … or cared. It was enough to know that dad and she were off in a car that would have given Frank a conniption at sight, bouncing along red roads that were at once friendly and secretive, through woods that were so gay and bridal with wild cherry-trees sprinkled through them and over hills where velvet cloud-shadows rolled until they seemed to vanish in little hollows filled with blue. There were houses on every side in that pleasant land and they were going to buy one… . “Let’s buy a house, Jane” … just like that, as one might have said, “Let’s buy a basket.” Delightful!

“As soon as I knew you were coming I began inquiring about possible houses. I’ve heard of several. We’ll take a look at them all before we decide. What kind of a house would you like, Jane?”

“What kind of a house can you afford?” said Jane gravely.

Dad chuckled.

“She’s got some of the little common sense still left in the world,” he told the sky. “We can’t pay a fancy price, Jane. I’m not a plutocrat. On the other hand, neither am I on relief. I sold quite a lot of stuff last winter.”

“‘Peaceful Adjustment of International Difficulties’,” murmured Jane.

“What’s that?”

Jane told him. She told him how she had liked Kenneth Howard’s picture and cut it out. But she did not tell him that grandmother had torn it, nor about the look in mother’s eyes.

“Saturday Evening is a good customer of mine. But let us return to our muttons. Subject to the fluctuations of the market, what kind of a house would you like, my Jane?”

“Not a big one,” said Jane, thinking of the enormous 60 Gay. “A little house … with some trees around it … young trees.”

“White birches?” said dad. “I rather fancy a white birch or two. And a few dark green spruces for contrast. And the house must be green and white to match the trees. I’ve always wanted a green and white house.”

“Couldn’t we paint it?” asked Jane.

“We could. Clever of you to think of that, Jane. I might have turned down our predestined house just because it was mud colour. And we must have at least one window where we can see the gulf.”

“Will it be near the gulf?”

“It must be. We’re going up to the Queen’s Shore district. All the houses I’ve heard about are up there.”

“I’d like it to be on a hill,” said Jane wistfully.

“Let’s sum up … a little house, white and green or to be made so … with trees, preferably birch and spruce … a window looking seaward … on a hill. That sounds very possible … but there is one other requirement. There must be magic about it, Jane … lashings of magic … and magic houses are scarce, even on the Island. Have you any idea at all what I mean, Jane?”

Jane reflected.

“You want to feel that the house is YOURS before you buy it,” she said.

“Jane,” said dad, “you are too good to be true.”

He was looking at her closely as they went up a hill after crossing a river so blue that Jane had exclaimed in rapture over it … a river that ran into a bluer harbour. And when they reached the top of the hill, there before them lay something greater and bluer still that Jane knew must be the gulf.

“Oh!” she said. And again, “Oh!”

“This is where the sea begins. Like it, Jane?”

Jane nodded. She could not speak. She had seen Lake Ontario, pale blue and shimmering, but this … this? She continued to look at it as if she could never have enough of it.

“I never thought anything could be so blue,” she whispered.

“You’ve seen it before,” said dad softly. “You may not know it but it’s in your blood. You were born beside it, one sweet, haunted April night … you lived by it for three years. Once I took you down and dipped you in it, to the horror of … of several people. You were properly baptized before that in the Anglican church in Charlottetown … but that was your real baptism. You are the sea’s child and you have come home.”