Mrs Louisa was just in time to see Jane and the lion ambling up Mr Tanner's pasture on their way to the hay-barn. She stood there and watched Jane open the door ... urge the lion in ... shut it and bolt it. Then she sat down on the rhubarb patch, and Mattie had to get the neighbours to carry her back to bed.
Jane went into the store on her way back and asked Julius Evans, who was still leaning palely over the collection of fly-spotted jugs on his counter, to call Charlottetown and let the circus people know that their lion was safe in Mr Tanner's barn. She found her dad in the kitchen at Lantern Hill looking rather strange.
"Jane, it's the wreck of a fine man that you see before you," he said hollowly.
"Dad ... what is the matter?"
"Matter, says she, with not a quiver in her voice. You don't know ... I hope you never will know ... what it is like to look casually out of a kitchen window, where you are discussing the shamefully low price of eggs with Mrs Davy Gardiner, and see your daughter ... your only daughter ... stepping high, wide and handsome through the landscape with a lion. You think you've suddenly gone mad ... you wonder what was in that glass of raspberry shrub Mrs Gardiner gave you to drink. Poor Mrs Davy! As she remarked pathetically to me, the sight jarred her slats. She may get over it, Jane, but I fear she will never be the same woman again."
"He was only a tame old lion," said Jane impatiently. "I don't know why people are making such a fuss over it."
"Jane, my adored Jane, for the sake of your poor father's nerves, don't go leading any more lions about the country, tame or otherwise."
"But it's not a thing that's likely to happen again, dad," said Jane reasonably.
"No, that is so," said dad, in apparent great relief. "I perceive that it is not likely to become a habit. Only, Janelet, if you some day take a notion to acquire an ichthyosaurus for a family pet, give me a little warning, Jane. I'm not as young as I used to be."
Jane couldn't understand the sensation the affair made. She hadn't the least notion she was a heroine.
"I was frightened of him at first," she told the Jimmy Johns. "But not after he yawned."
"You'll be too proud to speak to us now, I s'pose," said Caraway Snowbeam wistfully, when Jane's picture came out in the papers. Jane and the barn and the lion had all been photographed ... separately. Everybody who had seen them became important. And Mrs Louisa Lyons was a rapturous woman. Her picture was in the paper, too, and also a picture of the rhubarb patch.
"Now I can die happy," she told Jane. "If Mrs Parker Crosby had got her picture in the paper and I hadn't, I couldn't have stood it. I'm sure I don't know what they did put her picture in for. She didn't see you and the lion ... she only saw me. Well, there are some folks who are never contented unless they're in the limelight."
Jane was to go down in Queen's Shore history as the girl who thought nothing of roaming round the country with a lion or two for company.
"A girl absolutely without fear," said Step-a-yard, bragging everywhere of his acquaintance with her.
"I realized the first time I saw her that she was superior," said Uncle Tombstone. Mrs Snowbeam reminded everybody that she had always said that Jane Stuart was a child who would stick at nothing. When Ding-dong Bell and Punch Garland would be old men, they would be saying to each other, "Remember the time Jane Stuart and us drove that lion into the Tanner barn? Didn't we have a nerve?"
Chapter 38
A letter from Jody, blotted with tears, gave Jane a bad night in late August. It was to the effect that she was really going to be sent to an orphanage at last.
"Miss West is going to sell her boarding-house in October and retire," wrote Jody. "I've cried and cried, Jane. I hate the idea of going into an orfanage and I'll never see you, Jane, and oh, Jane, it isn't fair. I don't mean Miss West isn't fair but something isn't."
Jane, too, felt that something wasn't being fair. And she felt that 60 Gay without her back yard confabs with Jody would be just a little more intolerable than it ever had been. But that didn't matter as much as poor Jody's unhappiness. Jane thought Jody might really have an easier time in an orphanage than she had as the little unpaid drudge at 58 Gay, but still she didn't like the idea any better than Jody did. She looked so downhearted that Step-a- yard noticed it when he came over with some fresh mackerel for her which he had brought from the harbour.
"Do for your dinner to-morrow, Jane."
"To-morrow is the day for corned beef and cabbage," said Jane in a scandalized voice. "But we'll have them the day after. That's Friday anyhow. Thank you, Step-a-yard."
"Anything troubling you, Miss Lion-tamer?"
Jane opened her heart to him.
"You just don't know what poor Jody's life's been," she concluded.
Step-a-yard nodded.
"Put upon and overworked and knocked about from pillar to post, I reckon. Poor kid."
"And nobody to love her but me. If she goes to an orphanage, I'll never see her."
"Well, now." Step-a-yard scratched his head reflectively. "We must put our heads together, Jane, and see what can be done about it. We must think hard, Jane, we must think hard."
Jane thought hard to no effect but Step-a-yard's meditations were more fruitful.
"I've been thinking," he told Jane next day, "what a pity it is the Titus ladies couldn't adopt Jody. They've been wanting to adopt a child for a year now but they can't agree on what kind of a child they want. Justina wants a girl and Violet wants a boy, though they'd both prefer twins of any sex. But suitable twins looking for parents are kind of scarce, so they've given up that idea. Violet wants a dark complected one with brown eyes and Justina wants a fair one with blue eyes. Violet wants one ten years old and Justina wants one about seven. How old is Jody?"
"Twelve, like me."
Step-a-yard looked gloomy.
"I dunno. That sounds too old for them. But it wouldn't do any harm to put it up to them. You never can tell what them two girls will do."
"I'll see them to-night right after supper," resolved Jane.
She was so excited that she salted the apple sauce and no one could eat it. As soon as the supper dishes were out of the way ... and that night they were not proud of the way they were washed ... Jane was off.
There was a wonderful sunset over the harbour, and Jane's cheeks were red from the stinging kisses of the wind by the time she reached the narrow perfumed Titus lane where the trees seemed trying to touch you. Beyond was the kind, old, welcoming house, mellowed in the sunshine of a hundred summers, and the Titus ladies were sitting before a beechwood fire in their kitchen. Justina was knitting and Violet was clipping creamy bits of toffee from a long, silvery twist, made from a recipe Jane had never yet been able to wheedle out of them.
"Come in, dear. We are glad to see you," said Justina, kindly and sincerely, though she looked a little apprehensively over Jane's shoulder, as if she feared a lion might be skulking in the shadows. "It was such a cool evening we decided to have a fire. Sit down, dear. Violet, give her some toffee. She is growing very tall, isn't she?"
"And handsome," said Violet. "I like her eyes, don't you, sister?"
The Titus ladies had a curious habit of talking Jane over before her face as if she wasn't there. Jane didn't mind ... though they were sometimes not so complimentary.
"I prefer blue eyes, as you know," said Justina, "but her hair is beautiful."
"Hardly dark enough for my taste," said Violet. "I have always admired black hair."