Jane of Lantern Hill
Page 8
“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 faraway view of green pastures to the south. The table in the center of the room was covered with a gay red and white checkered cloth. There was a fat, squat little beanpot 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 the most of the talking. It was all about people Jane had never heard of, but somehow she liked to listen to it. 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 anyone 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 washstand were very cheap, the bed an iron one enameled in white, the floor painted brown. But there was a gorgeous hooked jug 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 parlor 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.”
CHAPTER 15
“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’ today?” 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 violet 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 Adjustments 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 color. 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.”
&nb
sp; 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 harbor. And when they reached the top of the hill, there before them lay something greater and bluer still than 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.”
“But you didn’t like me,” said Jane, before she thought.
“Not like you! Who told you that?”
“Grandmother.” She had not been forbidden to mention grandmother’s name to him.
“The old…” dad checked himself. A mask seemed to fall over his face.
“Let us not forget we are house-hunting, Jane,” he said coolly.
For a little while Jane felt no interest in house-hunting. She didn’t know what to believe or whom to believe. She thought dad liked her now…but did he? Perhaps he was just pretending. Then she remembered how he had kissed her.
“He does like me now,” she thought. “Perhaps he didn’t like me when I was born but I know he does now.” And she was happy again.
CHAPTER 16
House-hunting, Jane decided, was jolly. Perhaps it was really more the pleasure of the driving and talking and being silent with dad that was jolly, for most of the houses on dad’s list were not interesting. The first house they looked at was too big; the second was too small.
“After all, we must have room to swing the cat,” said dad.
“Have you a cat?” demanded Jane.
“No. But we can get one if you like. I hear the kitten crop is tops this year. Do you like cats?”
“Yes.”
“Then we’ll have a bushel of them.”
“No,” said Jane, “two.”
“And a dog. I don’t know how you feel about dogs, Jane, but if you’re going to have a cat, I must have a dog. I haven’t had a dog since…”
He stopped short again, and again Jane had the feeling that he had been just on the point of saying something she wanted very much to hear.
The third house looked attractive. It was just at the turn of a wooded road dappled with sunshine through the trees. But on inspection it proved hopeless. The floors were cut and warped and slanted in all directions. The doors didn’t hang right. The windows wouldn’t open. There was no pantry.
There was too much gingerbread about the fourth house, dad said, and neither of them looked twice at the fifth…a dingy, square, unpainted building with a litter of rusty cans, old pails, fruit baskets, rags, and rubbish all over its yard.
“The next on my list is the old Jones house,” said dad.
It was not so easy to find the old Jones house. The new Jones house fronted the road boldly, but you had to go past it and away down a deep-rutted, neglected lane to find the old one. You could see the gulf from the kitchen window. But it was too big, and both dad and Jane felt that the view of the back of the Jones barns and pig-sty was not inspiring. So they bounced up the lane again, feeling a little dashed.
The sixth house seemed to be all a house should be. It was a small bungalow, new and white, with a red roof and dormer windows. The yard was trim, though treeless; there was a pantry and a nice cellar and good floors. And it had a wonderful view of the gulf.
Dad looked at Jane.
“Do you sense any magic about this, my Jane?”
“Do you?” challenged Jane.
Dad shook his head.
“Absolutely none. And, as magic is indispensable, no can do.”
They drove away, leaving the man who owned the house wondering who them two lunatics were. What on earth was magic? He must see the carpenter who had built the house and find out why he hadn’t put any in it.
Two more houses were impossible.
“I suppose were a pair of fools, Jane. We’ve looked at all the houses I’ve heard of that are for sale…and what’s to be done now? Go back and eat our words and buy the bungalow?”
“Let’s ask this man who is coming along the road if he knows of any house we haven’t seen,” said Jane composedly.
“The Jimmy Johns have one, I hear,” said the man. “Over on Lantern Hill. The house their Aunt Matilda Jollie lived in. There’s some of her furniture in it too, I hear. You’d likely git it reasonable if you jewed him down a bit. It’s two miles to Lantern Hill and you go by Queen’s Shore.”
The Jimmy Johns and a Lantern Hill and an Aunt Matilda Jollie! Jane’s thumbs pricked. Magic was in the offing.
Jane saw the house first…at least she saw the upstairs window in its gable end winking at her over the top of a hill. But they had to drive around the hill and up a winding lane between two dykes, with little ferns growing out of the stones and young spruces starting up along them at intervals.
And then, right before them, was the house…their house!
“Dear, don’t let your eyes pop quite out of your head,” warned dad.
It squatted right against a little steep hill whose toes were lost in bracken. It was small…you could have put half a dozen of it inside of 60 Gay. It had a garden, with a stone dyke at the lower end of it to keep it from sliding down the hill, a paling and a gate, with two tall white birches leaning over it, and a flat-stone walk up to the only door, which had eight small panes of glass in its upper half. The door was locked but they could see in at the windows. There was a good-sized room on one side of the door, stairs going up right in front of it, and two small rooms on the other side whose windows looked right into the side of the hill where ferns grew as high as your waist, and there were stones lying about covered with velvet green moss.
There was a bandy-legged old cook-stove in the kitchen, a table, and some chairs. And a dear little glass-paned cupboard in the corner fastened with a wooden button.
On one side of the house was a clover field and on the other a maple grove, sprinkled with firs and spruces, and separated from the house lot by an old, lichen-covered board fence. There was an apple tree in the corner of the yard, with pink petals falling softly, and a clump of old spruces outside of the garden gate.
“I like the pattern of this place,” said Jane.
“Do you suppose it’s possible that the view goes with the house?” said dad.
Jane had been so taken up with her house that she had not looked at the view at all. Now she turned her eyes on it and lost her breath over it. Never, never had she seen…had she dreamed anything so wonderful.
Lantern Hill was at the apex of a triangle of land which had the gulf for its base and Queen’s Harbor for one of its sides. There were silver and lilac sand dunes between them and the sea, extending into a bar across the harbor where great, splendid, blue and white waves were racing to the long sun-washed shore. Across the channel a white lighthouse stood up against the sky and on the other side of the harbor were the shadowy crests of purple hills that dreamed with their arms around each other. And over it all the indefinable charm of a Prince Edward Island landscape.
Just below Lantern Hill, skirted by spruce barrens on the harbor side and a pasture field on the other, was a little pond…absolutely the bluest thing that Jane had ever seen.
“Now, that is my idea of a pond,” said dad.
“Well, what about it?” said dad.
Jane was so sure the house was listening that she shook her finger at him.
“Sh…sh,” she said.
“Let’s go down to the shore and talk it over,” said dad.
It was about fifteen minutes’ walk to the outside shore. They sat down on the bone-white body of an old tree that had drifted from heaven knew where. The snapping salty breeze whipped their faces; the surf creamed along the shore; the wee sand-peeps flitted fearlessly past them. “How clean salt air is!” thought Jane.
“Jane, I have a suspicion that the roof leaks.”
“You can put some shingles on it.”
“There’s a lot of burdocks in the yard.”
“We can root them out.”
“The house may have once been white, but…”
“It can be white again.”
“The paint on the front door is blistered.”
“Paint doesn’t cost very much, does it?”
“The shutters are broken.”
“Let’s fix them.”
“The plaster is cracked.”
“We can paper over it.”
“Who knows if there’s a pantry, Jane?”
“There are shelves in one of the little rooms on the right. I can use that for a pantry. The other little room would do you for a study. You’d have to have some place to write, wouldn’t you?”
“She’s got it all planned out,” dad told the Atlantic. But added,
“That big maple wood is a likely place for owls.”
“Who’s afraid of owls?”
“And what about magic, my Jane?”