Jane of Lantern Hill (21 page)

The letters came on the afternoon of the last of March. Jane was not at St. Agatha's…she had had a touch of sore throat the day before and mother thought it was wiser for her to stay home. But her throat was better now and Jane was reasonably happy. It was almost April…if not quite spring yet, at least the hope of spring. Just a little over two months and she would keep her tryst with June at Lantern Hill. Meanwhile, she was planning some additions to her garden…for one thing, a row of knightly hollyhocks along the dyke at the bottom. She would plant the seeds in August and they would bloom the
next
summer.

Grandmother and Aunt Gertrude and mother had all gone to Mrs. Morrison's bridge and tea, so Mary brought the afternoon mail to Jane, who pounced joyfully on three letters for herself. One from Polly…one from Shingle…one…Jane recognized Aunt Irene's copper-plate writing.

She read Polly's first…a good letter, full of fun and Lantern Hill jokes. There was one bit of news about dad in it…he was planning a trip to the States very soon…Boston or New York or somewhere…Polly seemed rather vague. And Polly wound up with a paragraph that gave Jane a good laugh…her last laughter for some time…the last laughter of her childhood, it always seemed to Jane, looking back on it from later years.

Mr. Julius Evans was awful mad last week,

wrote Polly.

A rat got drowned in his cask of new maple syrup and he made a terrible fuss over such a waste. But dad says he isn't sure it
was
wasted, so we are getting our syrup from Joe Baldwin's to be on the safe side.

Jane was still laughing over this when she opened Shingle's letter. A paragraph on the second page leaped to her eye.

Everybody is saying your dad is going to get a Yankee divorce and marry Lilian Morrow. Will she be your mother then? How do you like the idea? I guess she'll be your stepmother…only that sounds so funny when your own mother is still alive. Will your name be changed? Caraway says not…but they do such queer things in the States. Anyway, I hope it won't make any difference about you coming to Lantern Hill in the summer.

Jane felt literally sick and cold with agony as she dropped the letter and snatched up Aunt Irene's. She had been wondering what Aunt Irene could be writing to her about…she knew now.

The letter told Jane that Aunt Irene suspected that her brother Andrew intended going to the States and living there long enough to get a U.S. divorce.

Of course, it may not be true, lovey.
He
hasn't told me. But it is all over the country, and where there is so much smoke there must be some fire, and I think you ought to be prepared, lovey. I know that several of his friends advised him long ago to get a divorce. But as he never discussed it with
me
, I have given no advice for or against. For some reason I am at a loss to understand, he has shut me out of his confidence these past two years. But I have felt that the state of his affairs has long been very unsatisfactory. I'm sure you won't worry over this…I wouldn't have told you if I thought it would worry you. You have too much good sense…I've often remarked how old you were for your years. But of course, if it is true, it may make some difference to you. He might marry again.

If you have seen a candle flame blown out, you will know what Jane looked like as she went blindly to the window. It was a dark day with occasional showers of driving rain. Jane looked at the cruel, repellent, merciless street but did not see it. She had never felt such dreadful shame…such dreadful misery. Yet it seemed to her she ought to have known what was coming. There had been a hint or two last summer…she remembered Lilian Morrow's caressing “'Drew” and dad's pleasure in her company. And now…if this hideous thing were true, she would never spend a summer at Lantern Hill again. Would
they
dare to live at Lantern Hill? Lilian Morrow her mother! Nonsense! Nobody could be her mother except mother. The thing was unthinkable. But Lilian Morrow would be father's wife.

This had all been going on in these past weeks when she had been so happy, looking forward to June.

“I don't suppose I'll ever feel glad again,” thought Jane drearily. Everything was suddenly meaningless…she felt as if she were far removed from everything…as if she were looking at life and people and things through the big end of Timothy Salt's telescope. It seemed years since she had laughed over Polly's tale of Mr. Evans' wasted…or unwasted…maple syrup.

Jane walked the floor of her room all the rest of that afternoon. She dared not sit down for a moment. It seemed that as long as she kept moving, her pain marched with her and she could bear it. If she were to stop, it would crush her. But by dinner-time Jane's mind had begun to function again. She must know the truth and she knew what she must do to learn it. And it must be done at once.

She counted the money she had left from father's gift. Yes, there was just enough for a one-way ticket to the Island. Nothing left over for meals or a Pullman but that did not matter. Jane knew she would neither eat nor sleep until she knew. She went down to her dinner, which Mary had spread for her in the breakfast room, and tried to eat something lest Mary should notice.

Mary did.

“Your throat worse, Miss Victoria?”

“No, my throat is all right,” said Jane. Her voice sounded strange in her ears…as if it belonged to someone else. “Do you know what time mother and grandmother will be home, Mary?”

“Not till late, Miss Victoria. You know your grandmother and Aunt Gertrude are going to dinner at your Uncle William's, meeting some of your grandmother's old friends from the west, and your mother is going to a party. She won't be home till after midnight, but Frank goes for the old lady at eleven.”

The International Limited left at ten. Jane had all the time she needed. She went upstairs and packed a small hand grip with some necessities and a box of gingersnaps that were on her bedroom table. The darkness outside the window seemed to look in at her menacingly. The rain spat against the panes. The wind was very lonely in the leafless elms. Once Jane had thought the rain and the wind were friends of hers, but they seemed enemies now. Everything hurt her. Everything in her life seemed uprooted and withered. She put on her hat and coat, picked up her bag, went to mother's room and pinned a little note on a pillow, and crept down the stairs. Mary and Frank were having their dinner in the kitchen and the door was shut. Very quietly Jane telephoned for a taxi; when it came, she was waiting outside for it. She went down the steps of 60 Gay and out of the grim iron gates for the last time.

“The Union Station,” she told the taxi-driver. They moved swiftly away over the wet street that looked like a black river with drowned lights in it. Jane was going to ask for the truth from the only one who could tell it to her…her father.

Jane left Toronto Wednesday night. On Friday night she reached the Island. The train whirled over the sodden land. Her Island was not beautiful now. It was just like every other place in the ugliness of very early spring. The only beautiful things were the slim white birches on the dark hills. Jane had sat bolt upright all the time of her journey, night and day, subsisting on what gingersnaps she could force herself to swallow. She hardly moved but she felt all the time as if she were running…running…trying to catch up with someone on a road…someone who was getting further ahead all the time.

She did not go on to Charlottetown. She got off at West Trent, a little siding where the train stopped when it was asked to. It was only five miles from there to Lantern Hill. Jane could hear plainly the roar of the distant ocean. Once she would have thrilled to it…that sonorous music coming through the windy, dark gray night on the old North Shore. Now she did not notice it.

It had been raining but it was fine now. The road was hard and rough and dotted with pools of water. Jane walked through them unheedingly. Presently there were dark spires of fir trees against a moonrise. The puddles on the road turned to pools of silver fire. The houses she passed seemed alien…remote…as if they had closed their doors to her. The spruces seemed to turn cold shoulders on her. Far away over the pale moonlit landscape was a wooded hill with the light of a house she knew on it. Would there be a light at Lantern Hill or would dad be gone?

A dog of her acquaintance stopped to speak to her, but Jane ignored him. Once a car bumped past her, picking her out with its lights and splashing her from head to foot with mud. It was Joe Weekes who, being a cousin of Mrs. Meade, had the family trick of malapropisms, and told his skeptical wife when he got home that he had met either Jane Stuart or her operation on the road. Jane felt like an apparition. It seemed to her that she had been walking forever…must go on walking forever…through this ghostly world of cold moonlight.

There was Little Donald's house with a light in the parlor. The curtains were red, and when they were drawn at night, the light shone rosily through them. Then Big Donald's light…and at last the lane to Lantern Hill.

There was a light in the kitchen!

Jane was trembling as she went up the rutted lane and across the yard, past the forlorn and muddy garden where the poppies had once trembled in silken delight, to the window. What a sadly different home-coming from what she had planned!

She looked in. Dad was reading by the table. He wore his shabby old tweed suit and the nice gray tie with tiny red flecks in it, which Jane had picked out for him last summer. The Old Contemptible was in his mouth and his legs were cocked up on the sofa where two dogs and First Peter were sleeping. Silver Penny was stretched out against the warm base of the gasoline lamp on the table. In the corner was a sinkful of dirty dishes. Even at that moment a fresh pang tore Jane's heart at the sight.

A moment later an amazed Andrew Stuart looked up to see his daughter standing before him…wet-footed, mud-splashed, white-faced, with her eyes so terribly full of misery that a hideous fear flashed into his mind. Was her mother…?

“Good heavens, Jane!”

Literally sick from fear, Jane bluntly put the question she had come so far to ask.

“Father, are you going to get a divorce and marry Miss Morrow?”

Dad stared at her for a moment. Then, “No!” he shouted. And again, “No…no…no! Jane, who told you such a thing?”

Jane drew a breath, trying to realize that the long nightmare was over. She couldn't…not just at first.

“Aunt Irene wrote me. She said you were going to Boston. She said…”

“Irene! Irene is always getting silly notions in her head. She means well, but…Jane, listen, once for all. I am the husband of one wife and I'll never be anything else.”

Dad broke off and stared at Jane.

Jane, who never cried, was crying.

He swept her into his arms.

“Jane, you darling little idiot! How could you believe such stuff? I like Lilian Morrow…I've always liked her. And I could never love her in a thousand years…Going to Boston? Of course I'm going to Boston. I've great news for you, Jane. My book has been accepted after all. I'm going to Boston to arrange the details with my publishers. Darling, do you mean to tell me that you walked from West Trent? How lucky I hung a moon out! But you are just sopping. What you need is a brew of good hot cocoa, and I'm going to make it for you. Look pleasant, dogs. Purr, Peter. Jane has come home.”

The next day Andrew Stuart sent for the doctor, and a few hours later the nurse came. The word went around Queen's Shore and the Corners that Jane Stuart was very ill with a dangerous type of pneumonia.

Jane could never remember anything of those first days very clearly. She was delirious almost from the beginning of her illness. Faces came and went dimly…dad's in anguish…a grave, troubled doctor…a white-capped nurse…finally another face…only
that
must be a dream…mother couldn't be there…not even if Jane could smell the faint perfume of her hair. Mother was in faraway Toronto.

As for her own whereabouts, Jane did not know where she was…she only knew that she was a lost wind seeking some lost word forever. Not till she found that word could she stop being a wind and be Jane Stuart again. Once, it seemed to her, she heard a woman crying wildly and someone saying, “There is still hope, dearest, there is still a little hope.” And again…long afterwards…“There will be a change, one way or another, tonight.”

“And then,” said Jane, so clearly and distinctly that she startled everyone in the room, “I shall find my lost word.”

Jane didn't know how long it was after that to the day when she understood that she was Jane again and no longer a lost wind.

“Am I dead?” she wondered. She lifted her arms feebly and looked at them. They had grown terribly thin, and she could hold them up only a second, but she concluded that she was alive.

She was alone…not in her own little room at Lantern Hill, but in father's. She could see through the window the gulf sparkling and the sky so softly, so ethereally blue over the haunted dunes. Somebody…Jane found out later it had been Jody…had found the first mayflowers and put them in a vase on the table by her bed.

“I'm…sure…the house…is listening,” thought Jane.

To what was it listening? To two people who seemed to be sitting on the stairs outside. Jane felt that she ought to know who they were, but the knowledge just escaped her. Fitful sentences came to her, though they were uttered in muted tones. At the time they meant nothing to Jane, but she remembered them…remembered them always.

“Darling, I didn't mean a word of those dreadful things I said…” “If I had got your letter…” “My poor little love…” “Have you ever thought of me in all those years?”…“Have I thought of anything else, loveliest?”…“When your wire came…mother said I mustn't…she was terrible…as if anything could keep me from Jane…” “We were just two very foolish people…is it too late to be wise, Robin?”

Jane wanted to hear the answer to that question…wanted to dreadfully…somehow she felt that it would be of tremendous importance to everybody in the world. But a wind came in from the sea and blew the door shut.

“I'll never know now,” she whispered piteously to the nurse when she came in.

“Know what, dear?”

“What she said…the woman on the stairs…her voice was so like mother's…”

“It was your mother, dear. Your father wired for her as soon as I came. She has been here right along…and if you're good and don't get excited, you can have just a peep at her this evening.”

“So,” said Jane feebly, “mother must have stood up to grandmother for once.”

But it was several days later when Jane was allowed to have her first real talk with father and mother. They came in together, hand in hand, and stood looking down at her. Jane knew that there were three tremendously happy people in the room. Never had she seen either of them looking like that. They seemed to have drunk from some deep well of life, and the draught had made them young lovers again.

“Jane,” said dad, “two foolish people have learned a little wisdom.”

“It was all my fault that we didn't learn it long ago,” said mother. There was a sound of tears in her voice and a sound of laughter.

“Woman!” What a delightful way dad had of saying “woman”! And mother's laugh…was it a laugh or a chime of bells? “I will not have you casting slurs at my wife. Your fault indeed! I will not have one particle of the blame taken away from me. Look at her, Jane…look at my little golden love. How did you ever have the luck to pick such a mother, Jane? The moment I saw her I fell in love with her all over again. And now we will all go in search of ten lost years.”

“And will we live here at Lantern Hill?” asked Jane.

“Always, when we're not living somewhere else. I'm afraid with two women on my hands I'll never get my epic on Methuselah's life finished now, Jane. But there will be compensations. I think a honeymoon is coming to us. As soon as you're on the hoof, Superior Jane, we'll all take a little run up to Boston. I have to see about that book of mine, you know. Then a summer here and in the fall…the truth is, Jane, I've been offered the assistant editorship of
Saturday
Evening,
with a healthy salary. I had meant to refuse, but I think I'll have to accept. What about it, Jane? The winters in Toronto…the summers at Lantern Hill?”

“And we'll never have to say good-bye again. Oh dad! But…”

“But me no buts. What is troubling you, dearest dear?”

“We…we won't have to live at 60 Gay?”

“Not by a jugful! A house we must have, of course. How you live is much more important that where you live…but we must have a roof over us.”

Jane thought of the little stone house in Lakeside Gardens. It had not been sold yet. They would buy it. It would live…they would give it life. Its cold windows would shine with welcoming lights. Grandmother, stalking about 60 Gay, like a bitter old queen, her eyes bright with venom, forgiving or unforgiving as she chose, could never make trouble for them again. There would be no more misunderstanding. She, Jane, understood them both and could interpret them to each other. And have an eye on the housekeeping as well. It all fitted in as if it had been planned ages ago.

“Oh, dad,” cried this happiest of all Janes, “I know the very house.”

“You would,” said dad.