“I’d like this picture if I may have it,” she said firmly.
“I guess you can have it,” condescended Phyllis. She thought Jane “dumber” than ever. How she did pity such a dumb girl! “I guess nobody here wants that picture. I don’t like it a bit. He looks as if he was laughing at you behind his eyes.”
Which was a bit of surprising insight on the part of Phyllis. That was just how Kenneth Howard did look. Only it was nice laughter. Jane felt she wouldn’t mind a bit being laughed at like that. She cut the picture carefully out, carried it home, and hid it under the pile of handkerchiefs in her top bureau drawer. She could hardly have told why she did not want to show it to anybody. Perhaps she did not want any one to ridicule the picture as Phyllis had done. Perhaps it was just because there seemed some strange bond between her and it . . . something too beautiful to be talked about to any one, even mother. Not that there was much chance of talking to mother about anything just now. Never had mother been so brilliant, so gay, so beautifully dressed, so constantly on the go to parties and teas and bridges. Even the goodnight kiss had become a rare thing . . . or Jane thought it had. She did not know that always when her mother came in late, she tiptoed into Jane’s room and dropped a kiss on Jane’s russet hair . . . lightly so as not to waken her. Sometimes she cried when she went back to her own room but not often, because it might show at breakfast and old Mrs Robert Kennedy did not like people who cried o’ nights in her house.
For three weeks the picture and Jane were the best of friends. She took it out and looked at it whenever she could . . . she told it all about Jody and about her tribulations with her homework and about her love for mother. She even told it her moon secret. When she lay lonely in her bed, the thought of it was company. She kissed it good night and took a peep at it the first thing in the morning.
Then Aunt Gertrude found it.
The moment Jane came in from St Agatha’s that day she knew something was wrong. The house, which always seemed to be watching her, was watching her more closely than ever, with a mocking, triumphant malice. Great-grandfather Kennedy scowled more darkly than ever at her from the drawing-room wall. And grandmother was sitting bolt-upright in her chair flanked by mother and Aunt Gertrude. Mother was twisting a lovely red rose to pieces in her little white hands but Aunt Gertrude was staring at the picture grandmother was holding.
“My picture!” cried Jane aloud.
Grandmother looked at Jane. For once her cold blue eyes were on fire.
“Where did you get this?” she said.
“It’s mine,” cried Jane. “Who took it out of my drawer? Nobody had any business to do that.”
“I don’t think I like your manner, Victoria. And we are not discussing a problem in ethics. I asked a question.”
Jane looked down at the floor. She had no earthly idea why it seemed such a crime to have Kenneth Howard’s picture but she knew she was not going to be allowed to have it any more. And it seemed to Jane that she just could not bear that.
“Will you be kind enough to look at me, Victoria? And to answer my question? You are not tongue-tied, by any chance, I suppose.”
Jane looked up with stormy and mutinous eyes.
“I cut it out of a paper . . . out of Saturday Evening.”
“That rag!” Grandmother’s tone consigned Saturday Evening to unfathomable depths of contempt. “Where did you see it?”
“At Aunt Sylvia’s,” retorted Jane, plucking up spirit.
“Why did you cut this out?”
“Because I liked it.”
“Do you know who Kenneth Howard is?”
“No.”
“‘No, grandmother,’ if you please. Well, I think it is hardly necessary to keep the picture of a man you don’t know in your bureau drawer. Let us have no more of such absurdity.”
Grandmother lifted the picture in both hands. Jane sprang forward and caught her arm.
“Oh, grandmother, don’t tear it up. You mustn’t. I want it terribly.”
The moment she said it, she knew she had made a mistake. There had never been much chance of getting the picture back but what little there had been was now gone.
“Have you gone completely mad, Victoria?” said grandmother . . . to whom nobody had ever said, “You mustn’t,” in her whole life before. “Take your hand off my arm, please. As for this . . .” grandmother tore the picture deliberately into four pieces and threw them on the fire. Jane, who felt as if her heart were being torn with it, was on the point of a rebellious outburst when she happened to glance at mother. Mother was pale as ashes, standing there with the leaves of the rose she had torn to pieces strewing the carpet around her feet. There was such a dreadful look of pain in her eyes that Jane shuddered. The look was gone in a moment but Jane could never forget that it had been there. And she knew she could not ask mother to explain the mystery of the picture. For some reason she could not guess at, Kenneth Howard meant suffering to mother. And somehow that fact stained and spoiled all her beautiful memories of communion with the picture.
“No sulks now. Go to your room and stay there till I send for you,” said grandmother, not altogether liking Jane’s expression. “And remember that people who belong here do not read Saturday Evening.”
Jane had to say it. It really said itself.
“I don’t belong here,” said Jane. Then she went to her room, which was huge and lonely again, with no Kenneth Howard smiling at her from under the handkerchiefs.
And this was another thing she could not talk over with mother. She felt just like one big ache as she stood at her window for a long time. It was a cruel world . . . with the very stars laughing at you . . . twinkling mockingly at you.
“I wonder,” said Jane slowly, “if any one was ever happy in this house.”
Then she saw the moon . . . the new moon, but not the thin silver crescent the new moon usually was. This was just on the point of sinking into a dark cloud on the horizon and it was large and dull red. If ever a moon needed polishing up this one did. In a moment Jane had slipped away from all her sorrows . . . two hundred and thirty thousand miles away. Luckily grandmother had no power over the moon.
CHAPTER 8
Then there was the affair of the recitation.
They were getting up a school programme at St Agatha’s to which only the families of the girls were invited. There were to be a short play, some music and a reading or two. Jane had secretly hoped to be given a part in the play, even if it were only one of the many angels who came and went in it, with wings and trailing white robes and home-made haloes. But no such good luck. She suspected that it was because she was rather bony and awkward for an angel.
Then Miss Semple asked her if she would recite.
Jane jumped at the idea. She knew she could recite rather well. Here was a chance to make mother proud of her and show grandmother that all the money she was spending on Jane’s education was not being wholly wasted.
Jane picked a poem she had long liked in spite, or perhaps because, of its habitant English, “The Little Baby of Mathieu,” and plunged enthusiastically into learning it. She practised it in her room . . . she murmured lines of it everywhere until grandmother asked her sharply what she was muttering about all the time. Then Jane shut up like a clam. Nobody must suspect . . . it was to be a “surprise” to them all. A proud and glad surprise for mother. And perhaps even grandmother might feel a little pleased with her if she did well. Jane knew she would meet with no mercy if she didn’t do well.
Grandmother took Jane down to a room in Marlborough’s big department store . . . a room that had panelled walls, velvety carpets and muted voices . . . a room that Jane didn’t like, somehow. She always felt smothered in it. And grandmother got her a new dress for the concert. It was a very pretty dress . . . you had to admit grandmother had a taste in dresses. A dull green silk that brought out the russet glow of Jane’s hair and the gold-brown of her eyes. Jane liked herself in it and was more anxious than ever to please grandmother with
her recitation.
She was terribly worried the night before the concert. Wasn’t she a little hoarse? Suppose it got worse? It did not . . . it was all gone the next day. But when Jane found herself on the concert platform facing an audience for the first time, a nasty little quiver ran down her spine. She had never supposed there would be so many people. For one dreadful moment she thought she was not going to be able to utter a word. Then she seemed to see Kenneth Howard’s eyes, crinkling with laughter at her. “Never mind them. Do your stuff for me,” he seemed to be saying. Jane got her mouth open.
The St Agatha staff were quite amazed. Who could have supposed that shy, awkward Victoria Stuart could recite any poem so well, let alone a habitant one? Jane herself was feeling the delight of a certain oneness with her audience . . . a realization that she had captured them . . . that she was delighting them . . . until she came to the last verse. Then she saw mother and grandmother just in front of her. Mother, in her lovely new blue fox furs, with the little wine hat Jane loved tilted on one side of her head, was looking more frightened than proud, and grandmother . . . Jane had seen that expression too often to mistake it. Grandmother was furious.
The last verse, which should have been the climax, went rather flat. Jane felt like a candle-flame blown out, though the applause was hearty and prolonged, and Miss Semple behind the scenes whispered, “Excellent, Victoria, excellent.”
But there were no compliments on the road home. Not a word was said . . . that was the dreadful part of it. Mother seemed too frightened to speak and grandmother preserved a stony silence. But when they got home she said:
“Who put you up to that, Victoria?”
“Put me up to what?” said Jane in honest bewilderment.
“Please don’t repeat my questions, Victoria. You know perfectly well what I mean.”
“Is it my recitation? No one. Miss Semple asked me to recite, and I picked the recitation myself because I liked it,” said Jane. It might even be said she retorted it. She was hurt . . . angry . . . a little “pepped up” because of her success. “I thought it would please you. But you are never pleased with anything I do.”
“Don’t be cheaply theatrical, please,” said grandmother. “And in future if you have to recite,” very much as she might have said, “if you have to have smallpox” . . . “please choose poems in decent English. I do not care for patois.”
Jane didn’t know what patois was, but it was all too evident that she had made a mess of things somehow.
“Why was grandmother so angry, mummy?” she asked piteously, when mother came in to kiss her good night, cool, slim and fragrant, in a dress of rose crêpe with little wisps of lace over the shoulders. Mother’s blue eyes seemed to mist a little.
“Someone she . . . did not like . . . used to be . . . very good at reading habitant poetry. Never mind, heart’s delight. You did splendidly. I was proud of you.”
She bent down and took Jane’s face in her hands. Mother had such a dear way of doing that.
So, in spite of everything, Jane went very happily through the gates of sleep. After all, it does not take much to make a child happy.
CHAPTER 9
The letter was a bolt from the blue. It came one dull morning in early April . . . but such a bitter, peevish, unlovely April . . . more like March in its disposition than April. It was Saturday, so there would be no St Agatha’s and when Jane wakened in her big black walnut bed she wondered just how she would put in the day because mother was going to a bridge and Jody was sick with a cold.
Jane lay a little while, looking through the window, where she could see only dull grey sky and old tree tops having a fight with the wind. She knew that in the yard below the window on the north there was still a lingering bank of dirty grey snow. Jane thought dirty snow must be the dreariest thing in the world. She hated this shabby end of winter. And she hated the bedroom where she had to sleep alone. She wished she and mother could sleep together. They could have such lovely times talking to each other with no one else to hear, after they went to bed or early in the morning. And how lovely it would be when you woke up in the night to hear mother’s soft breathing beside you and cuddle to her just a wee bit, carefully, so as not to disturb her.
But grandmother would not let mother sleep with her.
“It is unhealthy for two people to sleep in the same bed,” grandmother had said with her chill, unsmiling smile. “Surely in a house of this size everybody can have a room to herself. There are many people in the world who would be grateful for such a privilege.”
Jane thought she might have liked the room better if it had been smaller. She always felt lost in it. Nothing in it seemed to be related to her. It always seemed hostile, watchful, vindictive. And yet Jane always felt that if she were allowed to do things for it . . . sweep it, dust it, put flowers in it . . . she would begin to love it, huge as it was. Everything in it was huge . . . a huge black walnut wardrobe like a prison, a huge chest of drawers, a huge walnut bedstead, a huge mirror over the massive black marble mantelpiece . . . except a tiny cradle which was always kept in the alcove by the fireplace . . . a cradle that grandmother had been rocked in. Fancy grandmother a baby! Jane just couldn’t.
Jane got out of bed and dressed herself under the stare of several old dead grands and greats hung on the walls. Below on the lawn robins were hopping about. Robins always made Jane laugh . . . they were so saucy, so sleek, so important, strutting over the grounds of 60 Gay just as if it were any common yard. Much they cared for grandmothers!
Jane slipped down the hall to mother’s room at the far end. She was not supposed to do this. It was understood at 60 Gay that mother must not be disturbed in the mornings. But mother, for a wonder, had not been out the night before and Jane knew she would be awake. Not only was she awake but Mary was just bringing in her breakfast tray. Jane would have loved to do this for mother but she was never allowed.
Mother was sitting up in bed wearing the daintiest breakfast jacket of tea-rose crêpe de Chine edged with cobwebby beige lace. Her cheeks were just the colour of her jacket and her eyes were fresh and dewy. Mother, Jane reflected proudly, looked as lovely when she got up in the mornings as she did before she went to bed.
Mother had chilled melon balls in orange juice instead of cereal, and she shared them with Jane. She offered half of her toast, too, but Jane knew she must save some appetite for her own breakfast and refused it. They had a lovely time, laughing and talking beautiful nonsense, very quietly, so as not to be overheard. Not that either of them ever put this into words; but both knew.
“I wish it could be like this every morning,” thought Jane. But she did not say so. She had learned that whenever she said anything like that mother’s eyes darkened with pain and she would not hurt mother for the world. She could never forget the time she had heard mother crying in the night.
She had wakened up with toothache and had crept down to mother’s room to see if mother had any toothache drops. And, as she opened the door ever so softly, she heard mother crying in a dreadful smothered sort of way. Then grandmother had come along the hall with her candle.
“Victoria, what are you doing here?”
“I have toothache,” said Jane.
“Come with me and I will get you some drops,” said grandmother coldly.
Jane went . . . but she no longer minded the toothache. Why was mother crying? It couldn’t be possible she was unhappy . . . pretty, laughing mother. The next morning at breakfast mother looked as if she had never shed a tear in her life. Sometimes Jane wondered if she had dreamed it.
Jane put the lemon verbena salts into the bath water for mother and got a pair of new stockings, thin as dew gossamers, out of the drawer for her. She loved to do things for mother and there was so little she could do.
She had breakfast alone with grandmother, Aunt Gertrude having had hers already. It is not pleasant to eat a meal alone with a person you do not like. And Mary had forgotten to put salt in the oatmeal.
“Your shoe-lace is untied, Victoria.”
That was the only thing grandmother said during the meal. The house was dark. It was a sulky day that now and then brightened up a little and then turned sulkier than ever. The mail came at ten. Jane was not interested in it. There was never anything for her. Sometimes she thought it would be nice and exciting to get a letter from somebody. Mother always got no end of letters . . . invitations and advertisements. This morning Jane carried the mail into the library where grandmother and Aunt Gertrude and mother were sitting. Jane noticed among the letters one addressed to her mother in a black spiky handwriting which Jane was sure she had never seen before. She hadn’t the least idea that that letter was going to change her whole life.
Grandmother took the letters from her and looked them over as she always did.
“Did you close the vestibule door, Victoria?”
“Yes.”
“Yes what?”
“Yes, grandmother.”
“You left it open yesterday. Robin, here is a letter from Mrs Kirby . . . likely about that bazaar. Remember it is my wish that you have nothing to do with it. I do not approve of Sarah Kirby. Gertrude, here is one for you from Cousin Mary in Winnipeg. If it is about that silver service she avers my mother left her, tell her I consider the matter closed. Robin, here is . . .”
Grandmother stopped abruptly. She had picked up the black-handed letter and was looking at it as if she had picked up a snake. Then she looked at her daughter.
“This is from . . . him,” she said.
Mother dropped Mrs Kirby’s letter and turned so white that Jane involuntarily sprang towards her but was barred by grandmother’s outstretched arm.
“Do you wish me to read it for you, Robin?”
Mother trembled piteously but she said, “No . . . no . . . let me . . .”
Grandmother handed the letter over with an offended air and mother opened it with shaking hands. It did not seem as if her face could turn whiter than it was, but it did as she read it.
The Complete Works of L M Montgomery Page 513
