Jane of Lantern Hill (9 page)

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.

Jane said nothing at first. She could only look. She had never been there before but it seemed as if she had known it all her life. The song the sea-wind was singing was music native to her ears. She had always wanted to “belong” somewhere and she belonged here. At last she had a feeling of home.

“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?”

Magic! Why, the place was simply jammed with magic. You were falling over magic. Dad knew that. He was only talking for the sake of talking. When they went back Jane sat down on the big red sandstone slab which served as a doorstep, while dad went through the maple wood by a little twisted path the cows had made to see Jimmy John…otherwise Mr. J. J. Garland. The Garland house could be seen peeping around the corner of the maples…a snug, butter-colored farmhouse decently dressed in trees.

Jimmy John came back with dad, a little fat man with twinkling gray eyes. He hadn't been able to find the key, but they had seen the ground floor and he told them there were three rooms upstairs with a spool bed in one of them and a closet in each of them.

“And a boot-shelf under the stairs.”

They stood on the stone walk and looked at the house.

“What are you going to do with me?” said the house as plainly as ever a house spoke.

“What is your price?” said dad.

“Four hundred with the furniture thrown in for good measure,” said Jimmy John, winking at Jane. Jane winked rakishly back. After all, grandmother was a thousand miles away.

“Bang goes saxpence,” said dad. He did not try to “jew” Jimmy John down. That he could buy all this loveliness for four hundred dollars was enough luck.

Dad handed over fifty dollars and said the rest would be paid next day.

“The house is yours,” said Jimmy John with an air of making them a present of it. But Jane knew the house had always been theirs.

“The house…and the pond…and the harbor…and the gulf! A good buy,” said dad. “And half an acre of land. All my life I've wanted to own a bit of land…just enough to stand on and say, ‘This is mine.' And now, Jane, it's brillig.”

“Four o'clock in the afternoon.” Jane knew her
Alice
too well to be caught tripping on that.

Just as they were leaving, a pocket edition of Jimmy John, with a little impudent face, came tearing through the maple grove with the key, which had turned up in his absence. Jimmy John handed it to Jane with a bow. Jane clutched it tightly all the way back to Brookview. She loved it. Think what it would open for her!

They discovered they were hungry, having forgotten all about dinner, so they fished out Mrs. Meade's butter cookies and ate them.

“You'll let me do the cooking, dad?”

“Why, you'll have to.
I
can't.”

Jane glowed.

“I wish we could move in tomorrow, dad.”

“Why not? I can get some bedding and some food. We can go on from there.”

“I just can't bear to have this day go,” said Jane. “It doesn't seem as if there could ever be another so happy.”

“We've got tomorrow, Jane…let me see…we've got about ninety-five tomorrows.”

“Ninety-five,” gloated Jane.

“And we'll do just as we want to, inside of decency. We'll be clean but not too clean. We'll be lazy but not too lazy…just do enough to keep three jumps ahead of the wolf. And we'll never have in our house that devilish thing known as an intermittent alarm clock.”

“But we must have some kind of a clock,” said Jane.

“Timothy Salt down at the harbor mouth has an old ship's clock. I'll get him to lend it to us. It only goes when it feels like it, but what matter? Can you darn my socks, Jane?”

“Yes,” said Jane, who had never darned a sock in her life.

“Jane, we're sitting on the top of the world. It was a piece of amazing luck, your asking that man, Jane.”

“It wasn't luck. I
knew
he'd know,” said Jane. “And oh, dad, can we keep the house a secret till we've moved in?”

“Of course,” agreed dad. “From everyone except Aunt Irene. We'll have to tell her, of course.”

Jane said nothing. She had not known till dad spoke that it was really from Aunt Irene she wished to keep it secret.

Jane didn't believe she would sleep that night. How could one go to sleep with so many wonderful things to think of? And some that were very puzzling. How
could
two people like mother and dad hate each other? It didn't make sense. They were both so lovely in different ways. They must have loved each other once. What had changed them? If she, Jane, only knew the whole truth, perhaps she could do something about it.

But as she drifted off into dreams of spruce-shadowed red roads that all led to dear little houses, her last conscious thought was “I wonder if we can get our milk at the Jimmy Johns'.”

They “moved in” the next afternoon. Dad and Jane went to town in the forenoon and got a load of canned stuff and some bedding. Jane also got some gingham dresses and aprons. She knew none of the clothes grandmother had bought for her would be of any use at Lantern Hill. And she slipped into a bookstore unbeknown to dad and bought a
Cookery
for
Beginners.
Mother had given her a dollar when she left, and she was not going to take any chances.

They called to see Aunt Irene but Aunt Irene was out. Jane had her own reasons for being pleased about this but she kept them to herself. After dinner they tied Jane's trunk and suitcase on the running-boards and bounced off to Lantern Hill. Mrs. Meade gave them a box of doughnuts, three loaves of bread, a round pat of butter with a pattern of clover leaves on it, a jar of cream, a raisin pie, and three dried codfish.

“Put one in soak tonight and broil it for your breakfast in the morning,” she told Jane.

The house was still there. Jane had been half afraid it would be stolen in the night. It seemed so entirely desirable to her that she couldn't imagine anyone else not wanting it. She felt so sorry for Aunt Matilda Jollie who had had to die and leave it. It was hard to believe that, even in the golden mansions, Aunt Matilda Jollie wouldn't miss the house on Lantern Hill.

“Let me unlock the door, please, dad.” She was trembling with delight as she stepped over the threshold.

“This…this is home,” said Jane. Home…something she had never known before. She was nearer crying then than she had ever been in her life.

They ran over the house like a couple of children. There were three rooms upstairs…a quite large one to the north, which Jane decided at once must be father's.

“Wouldn't you like it yourself blithe spirit? The window looks over the gulf.”

“No, I want this dear little one at the back. I want a
little
room, dad. And the other one will do nicely for a guest room.”

“Do we need a guest room, Jane? Let me remind you that the measure of anyone's freedom is what he can do without.”

“Oh, but of course we need a guest room, dad.” Jane was quite tickled over the thought. “We'll have company sometimes, won't we?”

“There isn't a bed in it.”

“Oh, we'll get one somewhere. Dad, the house is
glad
to see us…glad to be lived in again. The chairs just
want
someone to sit on them!”

“Little sentimentalist!” jeered dad. But there was understanding laughter behind his eyes.

The house was surprisingly clean. Jane was to learn later that as soon as they knew Aunt Matilda Jollie's house was sold, Mrs. Jimmy John and Miranda Jimmy John had come over, got in at one of the kitchen windows and given the whole place a Dutch cleaning from top to bottom. Jane was almost sorry the house was clean. She would have liked to clean it. She wanted to do everything for it.

“I am as bad as Aunt Gertrude,” she thought. And a little glimmer of understanding of Aunt Gertrude came to her.

There was nothing to do just now but put the mattresses and clothes on the beds, the cans in the kitchen cupboard, and the butter and cream in the cellar. Dad hung Mrs. Meade's codfish on the nails behind the kitchen stove.

“We'll have sausages for supper,” Jane was saying.

“Janekin,” said dad, clutching his hair in dismay, “I forgot to buy a frying pan.”

“Oh, there's an iron frying pan in the bottom of the cupboard,” said Jane serenely. “And a three-legged cooking pot,” she added in triumph.

There was nothing about the house that Jane did not know by this time. Dad had kindled a fire in the stove and fed it with some of Aunt Matilda Jollie's wood, Jane keeping a watchful eye on him as he did it. She had never seen a fire made in a stove before, but she meant to know how to do it herself next time. The stove was a bit wobbly on one of its feet, but Jane found a piece of flat stone in the yard which fitted nicely under it and everything was shipshape. Dad went over to the Jimmy Johns' to borrow a pail of water…the well had to be cleaned out before they could use it…and Jane set the table with a red and white cloth like Mrs. Meade's and the dishes dad had got at the five-and-ten. She went out to the neglected garden and picked a bouquet of bleeding-heart and June lilies for the center. There was nothing to hold them, but Jane found a rusty old tin can somewhere, swathed it in a green silk scarf she had dug out of her trunk…it was an expensive silk scarf Aunt Minnie had given her…and arranged her flowers in it. She cut and buttered bread, she made tea and fried the sausages. She had never done anything of the kind before but she had not watched Mary for nothing.

“It's good to get my legs under my own table again,” said dad, as they sat down to supper.

“I suppose,” thought Jane wickedly, “if grandmother could see me eating in the kitchen…and liking it…she would say it was just my low tastes.”

Aloud all she said was…but she nearly burst with pride as she said it…“How do you take your tea, dad?”

There was a tangle of sunbeams on the bare white floor. They could see the maple wood through the east window, the gulf and the pond and the dunes through the north, the harbor through the west. Winds of the salt seas were blowing in. Swallows were swooping through the evening air. Everything she looked at belonged to dad and her. She was mistress of this house…her right there was none to dispute. She could do just as she wanted to without making excuses for anything. The memory of that first meal together with dad in Aunt Matilda Jollie's house was to be “a thing of beauty and a joy forever.” Dad was so jolly. He talked to her just as if she were grown up. Jane felt sorry for anyone who didn't have her father.

Dad wanted to help her wash the dishes but Jane would have none of it. Wasn't she to be the housekeeper? She knew how Mary washed dishes. She had always wanted to wash dishes…it must be such fun to make dirty plates clean. Dad had bought a dishpan that day, but neither of them had thought about a dishcloth or dish towels. Jane got two new undervests out of her trunk and slit them open.

At sunset Jane and dad went down to the outside shore…as they were to do almost every night of that enchanted summer. All along the silvery curving sand ran a silvery curving wave. A dim, white-sailed vessel drifted past the bar of the shadowy dunes. The revolving light across the channel was winking at them. A great headland of gold and purple ran out behind it. At sunset that cape became a place of mystery to Jane. What lay behind it? “Magic seas in fairylands forlorn?” Jane couldn't remember where she had heard or read that phrase but it suddenly came alive for her.

Dad smoked a pipe…which he called his “Old Contemptible”…and said nothing. Jane sat beside him in the shadow of the bones of an old vessel and said nothing. There was no need to say anything. When they went back to the house they discovered that though dad had gotten three lamps, he had forgotten to get any coal-oil for them or any gasoline for his study lamp.

“Well, I suppose we can go to bed in the dark for once.”

No need of that. Indefatigable Jane remembered she had seen a piece of an old tallow candle in the cupboard drawer. She cut it in two, stuck the pieces in the necks of two old glass bottles, likewise salvaged from the cupboard, and what would you ask more?

Jane looked about her tiny room, her heart swelling with satisfaction. There was as yet only the spool bed and a little table in it; the ceiling was stained with old leaks and the floor was slightly uneven. But this was the first room to be her very own, where she need never feel that someone was peeping at her through the keyhole. She undressed, blew out her candle, and looked out of the window, from which she could almost have touched the top of the steep little hill. The moon was up and had already worked its magic with the landscape. A mile away the lights of the little village at Lantern Corners shone. To the right of the window a young birch tree seemed a-tiptoe trying to peer over the hill. Soft, velvety shadows moved among the bracken.

“I am going to pretend this is a magic window,” thought Jane, “and sometime when I look out of it I shall see a wonderful sight. I shall see mother coming up that road, looking for the lights of Lantern Hill.”

Dad had picked a good mattress, and Jane was bone-tired after her strenuous day. But how lovely it was to lie in this comfortable little “spool” bed…neither Jane nor the Jimmy Johns knew that Aunt Matilda Jollie had been offered fifty dollars by a collector for that bed…and watch the moonlight patterning the walls with birch leaves and know that dad was just across the little “landing” from you, and that outside were free hills and wide, open fields where you could run wherever you liked, none daring to make you afraid, spruce barrens and shadowy sand dunes, instead of an iron fence and locked gates. And how quiet it all was…no honking, no glaring lights. Jane had pushed the window open and the scent of fern came in. Also a strange, soft faraway sound…the moaning call of the sea. The night seemed to be filled with it. Jane heard it and something deep down in her responded to it with a thrill that was between anguish and rapture. Why was the sea calling? What was its secret sorrow?

Jane was just dropping off to sleep when a terrible remembrance tore through her mind. She had forgotten to put the codfish to soak.

Two minutes later the codfish was soaking.