"I suppose she didn't have a big mouth," said Jane wistfully.
Dad kept a straight face.
"Not too small a one, Jane. You couldn't imagine goddess Helen with a rosebud mouth, could you?"
"IS my mouth too big, dad?" implored Jane. "The girls at St Agatha's said it was."
"Not too big, Jane. A generous mouth ... the mouth of a giver, not a taker ... a frank, friendly mouth ... with very well-cut corners, Jane. No weakness about them ... you wouldn't have eloped with Paris, Jane, and made all that unholy mess. You would have been true to your vows, Jane ... in spirit as well as in letter, even in this upside-down world."
Jane had the oddest feeling that dad was thinking of mother, not of Argive Helen. But she was comforted by what he said about her mouth.
Dad did not always read from the masters. One day he took to the shore a thin little volume of poems by Bernard Freeman Trotter.
"I knew him overseas ... he was killed ... listen to his song about the poplars, Jane.
"And so I sing the poplars and when I come to die I will not look for jasper walls but cast about my eye For a row of wind-blown poplars against an English sky. "What will you want to see when you get to heaven,
Jane?"
"Lantern Hill," said Jane.
Dad laughed. It was so delightful to make dad laugh ... and so easy. Though a good many times Jane didn't know exactly what he was laughing at. Jane didn't mind that a bit ... but sometimes she wondered if mother had minded it.
One evening after dad had been spouting poetry until he was tired Jane said timidly, "Would you like to hear me recite, dad?"
She recited "The Little Baby of Mathieu." It was easy ... dad made such a good audience.
"You can do it, Jane. That was good. I must give you a bit of training along that line, too. I used to be rather good at interpreting the habitant myself."
"Someone she did not like used to be rather good at reading habitant poetry" ... Jane remembered who had said that. She understood another thing now.
Dad had rolled over to where he could see their house in a gap in the twilit dunes.
"I see the Jimmy Johns' light ... and the Snowbeam light at Hungry Cove ... but our house is dark. Let's go home and light it up, Jane. And is there any of that apple-sauce you made for supper left?"
So they went home together and dad lighted his petrol lamp and sat down at his desk to work on his epic of Methuselah ... or something else ... and Jane got a candle to light her to bed. She liked a candle better than a lamp. It went out so graciously ... the thin trail of smoke ... the smouldering wick, giving one wild little wink at you before it left you in the dark.
When dad had converted Jane to the Bible, he set about making history and geography come alive for her. She had told him she always found those subjects hard. But soon history no longer seemed a clutter of dates and names in some dim, cold antiquity but became a storied road of time when dad told her old tales of wonder and the pride of kings. When he told the simplest incident with the sound of the sea in his voice, it seemed to take on such a colouring of romance and mystery that Jane knew she could never forget it. Thebes ... Babylon ... Tyre ... Athens ... Galilee ... were places where real folks lived ... folks she knew. And, knowing them, it was easy to be interested in everything pertaining to them. Geography, which had once meant merely a map of the world, was just as fascinating.
"Let's go to India," dad would say ... and they went ... though Jane would sew buttons on dad's shirts all the way. Min's ma was hard on buttons. Soon Jane knew all the fair lands far, far away as she knew Lantern Hill ... or so it seemed to her after she had journeyed through them with father.
"Some day, Jane, you and I will really go and see them. The Land of the Midnight Sun ... doesn't that phrase fascinate you, Jane? ... far Cathay ... Damascus ... Samarkand ... Japan in cherry-blossom time ... Euphrates among its dead empires ... moonrise over Karnak ... lotus vales in Kashmir ... castles on the banks of the Rhine. There's a villa in the Apennines ... 'the cloudy Apennines' ... I want you to see, my Jane. Meanwhile, let's draw a chart of Lost Atlantis."
"Next year I'll be beginning French," said Jane. "I think I'll like that."
"You will. You'll wake up to the fascination of languages. Think of them as doors opening into a stately palace for you. You'll even like Latin, dead and all as it is. Isn't a dead language rather a sad thing, Janet? Once it lived and burned and glowed. People said loving things in it ... bitter things ... wise and silly things in it. I wonder who was the very last person to utter a sentence in living Latin. Jane, how many boots would a centipede need if a centipede needed boots?"
That was dad all over. Tender ... serious ... dreamy ... and then a tag of some delightful nonsense. But Jane knew just how grandmother would have liked that.
Sundays were interesting at Lantern Hill not only because of the Bible readings with dad but because she went to the Queen's Shore church with the Jimmy Johns in the mornings. Jane liked it tremendously. She put on the little green linen jumper dress grandmother had bought her and carried a hymn-book proudly. They went across the fields by a path that wound around the edge of Big Donald's woods, through a cool back pasture where sheep grazed, down the road past Min's ma's house, where Min joined them, and finally along a grassy lane to what was called "the little south church" ... a small white building set in a grove of beech and spruce where lovable winds seemed always purring. Anything less like St Barnabas's could hardly be imagined but Jane liked it. The windows were plain glass and you could see out of them right into the woods and past the big wild cherry-tree that grew close up to the church. Jane wished she could have seen it in blossom time. All the people had what Step-a-yard called their Sunday faces on and Elder Tommy Perkins looked so solemn and other-worldly that Jane found it almost impossible to believe that he was the same man as the jolly Tommy Perkins of weekdays. Mrs Little Donald always passed her a peppermint over the top of the pew and though Jane didn't like peppermints she seemed to like that one. There was, she reflected, something so nice and religious about its flavour.
For the first time Jane could join in the singing of the hymns and she did it lustily. Nobody at 60 Gay had ever supposed Jane could sing; but she found that she could at least follow a tune and was duly thankful therefor, as otherwise she would have felt like an outsider at the Jimmy Johns' "sing-songs" in their old orchard on Sunday evenings. In a way Jane thought the sing-songs the best part of Sunday. All the Jimmy Johns sang like linnets and everybody could have his or her favourite hymn in turn. They sang what Step-a-yard, who carried a tremendous bass, called "giddier" hymns than were sung in church, out of little dog-eared, limp- covered hymn-books. Sometimes the stay-at-home dog tried to sing, too. Beyond them was the beauty of a moonlit sea.
They always ended up with "God Save the King" and Jane went home, escorted to the door of Lantern Hill by all the Jimmy Johns and the three dogs who didn't stay at home. Once dad was sitting in the garden, on the stone seat Timothy Salt had built for her, smoking his Old Contemptible and "enjoying the beauty of the darkness," as he said. Jane sat down beside him and he put his arm around her. First Peter prowled darkly around them. It was so still they could hear the cows grazing in Jimmy John's field and so cool that Jane was glad of the warmth of father's tweed arm across her shoulders. Still and cool and sweet ... and in Toronto at that moment every one was gasping in a stifling heat wave, so the Charlottetown paper had said yesterday. But mother was with friends in Muskoka. It was poor Jody who would be smothering in that hot little attic room. If only Jody were here!