"Will you be good enough to pay attention when I am speaking to you, Victoria?"
"I beg your pardon, grandmother."
"I am asking you what you wore this summer. I have looked into your trunk and the clothes you took with you don't seem to have been worn at all."
"Only the green linen jumper suit," said Jane. "I wore it to church and the ice-cream social. I had gingham dresses to wear at home. I kept house for father, you know."
Grandmother wiped her lips daintily with her napkin. It seemed as if she were wiping some disagreeable flavour off them.
"I am not inquiring about your rural activities" ... Jane saw grandmother looking at her hands.... "It will be wise for you to forget them...."
"But I'm going back next summer, grandmother...."
"Be kind enough not to interrupt me, Victoria. And as you must be tired after your journey, I would advise you to go to bed at once. Mary has prepared a bath for you. I suppose you will be rather glad to get into a real bath-tub once more."
When she had had the whole gulf for a bath-tub all summer!
"I must run over and see Jody first," said Jane ... and went. She could not forget her new freedom so quickly. Grandmother watched her go with tightening lips. Perhaps she realized that never again would Jane be quite the meek, overawed Victoria of the old days. She had grown in mind as well as in body.
Jane and Jody had a rapturous reunion. Jody had grown too. She was thinner and taller and her eyes were sadder than ever.
"Oh, Jane, I'm so glad you're back. It's been so long."
"I'm so glad you're still here, Jody. I was afraid Miss West might have sent you to the orphanage."
"She's always saying she will ... I guess she will yet. Did you really like the Island so much, Jane?"
"I just loved it," said Jane, glad that here was at least one person to whom she could talk freely about her Island and her father.
Jane was horribly homesick as she climbed the soft-carpeted stairway to bed. If she were only skipping up the bare, painted steps at Lantern Hill! Her old room had not grown any friendlier. She ran to the window, opened it and gazed out ... but not on starry hills and the moon shining on woodland fields. The clamour of Bloor Street assailed her ears. The huge old trees about 60 Gay were sufficient unto themselves ... they were not her friendly birches and spruces. A wind was trying to blow ... Jane felt sorry for it ... checked here, thwarted there. But it was blowing from the west. Would it blow right down to the Island ... to the velvety black night starred with harbour lights beyond Lantern Hill? Jane leaned out of the window and sent a kiss to dad on it.
"And now," remarked Jane to Victoria, "there will be only nine months to put in."
Chapter 29
"She will soon forget everything about Lantern Hill," said grandmother.
Mother wasn't so sure. She felt the change in Jane as did everybody. Uncle David's family thought Jane "much improved." Aunt Sylvia said Victoria had actually become able to get through a room without danger to the furniture. And Phyllis was a shade less patronizing, though with plenty of room for improvement yet.
"I heard you went barefoot down there," she said curiously.
"Of course," said Jane. "All the children do in summer."
"Victoria has gone quite P. E. Island," said grandmother with her bitter little smile, much as if she had said, "Victoria has gone quite savage." Grandmother had already learned a new way to get under Jane's skin. It was to say little biting things about the Island. Grandmother employed it quite mercilessly. She felt that Jane, in so many respects, had somehow slipped beyond her power to hurt. All the colour still went out of Jane in grandmother's presence but she was not thereby reduced to the old flabbiness. Jane had not been chatelaine of Lantern Hill and the companion of a keen, mature intellect all summer for nothing. A new spirit looked out of her hazel eyes ... something that was free and aloof ... something that was almost beyond grandmother's power to tame or hurt. All the venom of her stings seemed unable to touch this new Jane ... except when she sneered at the Island.
Because in a very real sense Jane was still living on the Island. This helped to take the edge off her first two weeks of unbearable homesickness. While she was practising her scales she was listening for the thunder of the breakers on Queen's Shore; while she ate her meals she was waiting for dad to come in from one of his long hikes with Happy trotting at his heels; when she was alone in the big gloomy house she was companioned by the Peters ... who could have imagined that a couple of cat's a thousand miles away could be such comforts? ... When she lay awake at night she was hearing all the sounds of her Island home. And while she was reading the Bible chapter to grandmother and Aunt Gertrude in that terrible, unchanged drawing-room, she was reading it to dad on the old Watch Tower.
"I should prefer a little more REVERENCE in reading the Bible, Victoria," said grandmother. Jane had been reading an old Hebrew war tale as father would have read it, with a trumpet clang of victory in her voice. Grandmother looked at her vindictively. It was plain that reading the Bible was no longer a penance to Jane. She seemed positively to enjoy it. And what could grandmother do about it?
Jane had made a list on the back of her arithmetic notebook of the months that must pass before her return to the Island, and smiled when she ticked off September.
She had felt very reluctant to go back to St Agatha's. But in a short time she found herself saying one day in amazement, "I like going to school."
She had always felt vaguely left out ... excluded at St Agatha's. Now, for some reason unknown to her, she no longer felt so. It was as if she had become a comrade and a leader overnight. The girls of her class looked up to her. The teachers began to wonder why they had never before suspected what a remarkable child Victoria Stuart was. Why, she was simply full of executive ability.
And her studies were no longer a tribulation. They had become a pleasure. She wanted to study as hard as she could, to catch up with dad. Dim ghosts of history ... exquisite, unhappy queens ... grim old tyrants ... had become real ... marked poems in the reader she and dad had read together were full of meaning for her ... the ancient lands where they had roamed in fancy were places she knew and loved. It was so easy to learn about them. Jane brought home no more bad reports. Mother was delighted but grandmother did not seem overly pleased. She picked up a letter one day which Jane was writing to Polly Jimmy John, glanced over it, dropped it with disdain:
"Phlox is not spelled f-l-o-x, Victoria. But I suppose it does not matter to your haphazard friends how you spell."
Jane blushed. She knew perfectly well how to spell phlox but there was so much to tell Polly ... to ask Polly ... so many messages to send to the people in that far, dear Island by the sea ... she just scribbled away furiously without thinking.
"Polly Garland is the best speller at Lantern Corners school," said Jane.
"Oh, I have no doubt ... no doubt whatever ... that she has all the backwoods virtues," said grandmother.
Grandmother's sneers could not poison Jane's delight in the letters she got from the Island. They came as thick as autumn leaves in Vallambroso. Somebody at Lantern Hill or Hungry Cove or the Corners was always writing to Jane. The Snowbeams sent composite letters, dreadfully spelled and blotted, written paragraph about. They possessed the knack of writing the most amusing things, illustrated along the edges with surprisingly well-done thumb-nail sketches by Shingle. Jane always wanted to shriek with laughter over the Snowbeam letters.
Elder Tommy had the mumps ... fancy Elder Tommy with the mumps ... Shingle had fancied it in a few sidesplitting curves.... The tail-board of Big Donald's cart had come out when he was going up Little Donald's hill and all his turnips had rolled out and down the hill and was he mad! The pigs had got into the Corners graveyard; Min's ma was making a silk quilt ... Jane immediately began saving patches for Min's ma's quilt.... Ding-dong's dog had torn the whole seat out of Andy Pearson's second best trousers, the frost had killed all the dahlias, Step-a-yard was having boils, there had been a lovely lot of funerals this fall, old Mrs Dougald MacKay had died and people who were at the funeral said she looked perfectly gorgeous, the Jimmy Johns' baby had laughed at last, the big tree on Big Donald's hill had blown down ... Jane was sorry for that, she had loved that tree.... "We miss you just awful, Jane.... Oh, Jane, we wish you could be here for Hallowe'en night."