“But couldn’t he come back anytime at all?” asked Jane anxiously.
“He wouldn’t be safe here twenty-four hours, for Uncle Jeff has fixed it so that he would be arrested at once for his crime if he tried. He understands that thoroughly.”
“And Minnick?” asked Jane breathlessly.
“Safe in the penitentiary, or on his way there, with crimes enough to his credit to keep him there for three or four lifetimes. He’s a slick one! Your father discovered that within a week of his coming to Dulaney’s.
“Now, Jane,” said Sherwood, his face suddenly blazing into a smile, “you’re to take that pucker off your brow and go straight to bed, or we can’t go to Happiness Hill tomorrow afternoon.”
Chapter 21
Happiness Hill was bathed in the glory of the spring sunshine as they turned into the wooded drive and rounded up toward the summit. There was a sweet spring spice in the air, and the sky was blue as blue.
“Blue as a bluebird’s wing,” said Jane with a laugh in her words. She was like a child let out of school, yet shy at intervals, watching Sherwood and wondering that he really belonged to her.
“What are you thinking about, dearest?” he said as he stopped the car just before they came out of the woods.
“I was thinking—” she said, then stopped, half-laughing. “Well, maybe you won’t want to know what I was thinking, but I was saying to myself, ‘And you, Jane Arleth, once thought that love would be marrying Lew Lauderdale, and you didn’t know the first thing about love in those days.’ I was thinking, John, how wonderful you are and how terrible it would be if I had to marry Lew!”
John frowned and then smiled. “Let’s forget him,” he said.
“Gladly,” said Jane, “but I’ve got to tell you about that last day first. I feel so ashamed about it sometimes that my face gets hot in the dark. I think I’ll have to clean my soul by getting it out of my mind. I didn’t dare tell Mother. She would have been so horrified.”
“Tell ahead, little girl, that’s what I’m for,” said John Sherwood, slipping his arm around Jane and drawing her close to him where his lips could touch her forehead now and then.
So Jane told the whole story of the last afternoon she had spent in the company of Lauderdale, and when she was done and looked up anxiously to see how Sherwood felt about it, she found him drinking in the beauty of her face with a contented look upon his own.
“Well?” she asked anxiously.
“Well,” he said smiling, “that’s that! One more selfish soul who thinks the world’s a garden for him to pluck the flowers and breathe their perfume—and then fling them down when he is through with them. I think I agree with Brother Tom, I’d like to punch his face; but I suppose the right way is to include him in our prayers, and then we won’t be bothered with him anymore. I guess the Lord can take care of him.”
“Oh, I’m so glad you love the Lord,” said Jane.
“So am I, dear!” said Sherwood with a great light in his face. “It’s like nothing that ever came into my life before, and the only thing that stands above my love for you. And now, shall we go into our house?”
They went up the stone steps. The debris had been largely cleared away, and much progress had been made in the building. The floors were in and covered with building paper to keep them from being scratched. The windows were glazed, and the whole building had taken on the air of a house. In some rooms the painters had been at work priming.
“It’s coming along nicely, isn’t it?” said John Sherwood, standing in the middle of the big entrance room that stretched across the whole length of the main front and opened out to the tiled porch with a series of high arched windows with leaded panes.
But Jane did not answer. She was still standing in the front door, which was really the back door, and staring across at the wall where they had pinned the note that day. There was no note there now, and no solid wall, but instead a second window arched to correspond with the other side of the arched doorway, making the whole side of the great beautiful room of glass.
“John!” she said in astonishment. “Look!”
“What’s the matter, dear? Haven’t they built it right?”
“But look! They’ve put the window in just as we said!”
“Well, didn’t I write the note and sign my initials to it? Why shouldn’t they make a change when the owner tells them to?”
“John!”
“Well, dearest?”
“Are you really the owner of this wonderful place?”
“No, dearest, but we are the owners!”
Jane clasped her hands over her heart and lifted her shining eyes to his. “Oh John, I’m almost too happy!”
“Jane, we’re standing in our own house and there’s no one around to hinder. Why shouldn’t I have a real kiss?”
Jane came over, pulled his face down to hers, laid her lips on his, and felt that mortal could ask nothing nearer to heaven than this.
“But now, Jane, come, we promised to go back after the family, you know, and take them for a ride. Come and see the rest of the house first. I want to make sure it’s just as you want it before the finishing is done.”
So they climbed the wide low stairs and went up to a broad landing in the arch of another great window with leaded panes, and there, suddenly Jane caught at John’s sleeve. “Wait,” she said, “I want to tell you something. I want you to know how wonderful it is of you to think about my dear family the way you do and to want to be with them. You don’t know how much dearer that makes you to me.”
“But darling, I love them myself. They’re wonderful people! You don’t know how much I’ve always wanted a family of my own, and now I’ve got one!”
“Oh, but that is precious to me!” said Jane, slipping her arm in his and looking off across the hills with happy eyes. “Do you know, I think that was what sent me home from the mountains that day, what Lew said about not wanting a family around when he came to see me, and the idea he had of my going away from them. Oh, it was terrible! I thought of it all the way home!”
“Yes, that day! I remember! I saw it in your eyes!”
“You remember? You saw it? What do you mean? John, sometimes you’re almost uncanny. What day do you mean?”
“The day I first saw you, dear, the day you came home from the mountains and looked as if you were eating your heart out all the way. You dropped your handbag at my feet, and I touched your blessed little hand when I gave it back to you, and my hands have never been quite the same since.” He swept her forehead with a kiss.
“You were there! You saw me! Why—John—!”
She looked up and met those same gray eyes looking deep into her own, and suddenly she knew. “Oh John, that’s who you’ve reminded me of always when you looked grave and grown up. I’ve noticed again and again and never could tell.”
“So I remind you of myself whenever I look grave and grown- up, do I? Well, I like that!” He laughed and kissed her again. “Well, I felt grave and grown-up that day, I’ll tell you. I was going away from the only two people I had in the world whom I really knew well, and I was practically sure I would see very little of them again, for my uncle had heart trouble and was liable to die at any moment, and my cousin was to marry an Englishman and go to England to live. Added to all that I was going to be put through a test under conditions that were somewhat trying, and under the eyes of a semi-relative who had always hated me for no better reason than that he knew that I belonged to the family and he did not—and therefore I would probably have precedence. Jane, I watched you all the way down over the rim of my paper, and I loved the little curl that slipped out on your cheek and that you kept shoving back. I wished you wouldn’t. I loved the curl in the back of your neck, but you didn’t know that was there, so you didn’t shove that back. I loved your graceful ankle and the pretty curve of your fingers and the little firm way you shut your lips and the round smoothness of your chin. And when you let me get a glimpse of your eyes, I loved them, too, an
d the clean natural color of your lips without lipstick and the curve of your cheek and the way you said ‘Thank you.’”
“Oh John, how could you see all that?”
“Very easily. It was good to look at. And can you imagine my joy when I found that this pearl of girls I had discovered and lost in the crowd at the station, drifted in the very next morning to teach me my new work?”
“Oh!” said Jane. “I teach you! How preposterous that seems.”
“You taught me a lot, and you taught me well, but you taught me first of all to love you better than my own life. But now, unless we expect to remain in our unfinished mansion all night tonight, we’d better be getting on and up. I want you to look over the rooms for the family and see if there should be any changes made before the work goes further. You don’t think Mother is going to be afraid to live out here, do you, dear?”
“Oh John, are you going to ask them to live with us? Won’t that be wonderful! I never dreamed anything so beautiful as this. To have Mother and the rest enjoying the beauty too and not having to be separated. Oh, I can never, never tell you how I love you for this!”
“Well, don’t try, dear, just realize that you and I are one, and what you feel I feel, and what I feel I hope you’ll feel, too. Then it’s all a very simple matter. It’s my joy to have them here always if they are willing to come. That’s the only thing I fear now, that they will feel unhappy perhaps at not having their own home. But I’ve tried to obviate that by fitting up some of those rooms downstairs in this gable of the house so that they can be used at any time for a separate dining room and kitchen, in case Mother should get homesick for her own things and want to play cook for a meal or two. There is even a big sliding door that will shut their part off entirely from the rest of the house in case they get tired of our noise, or if somebody gets sick and needs utter quiet. Do you think they will see it as we do?”
“Oh, I’m sure!” said Jane. “They’ll love it. I know Mother has often dreaded the thought of my getting married and going away, and Betty Lou, little as she is, has shed real tears over it—and sometimes so have I. We are especially close to each other, I guess. The only thing will be Father—he’s very independent. He’ll want to pay his part of things.”
“That shall be just as he wants it, with the proviso that we allot a large share on our side for the privilege of having them with us all the time. Remember, I’m going to be a son, and I’m sure we shan’t fuss about things like that.”
“Oh, it’s going to be wonderful!” sighed Jane in great content- ment as she looked about on the beautiful rooms. “And I’ve wanted Mother in the country for so long, and Betty Lou needs fresh air and freedom. Mother used to live in a beautiful home in the country when she was a girl.”
“That’s good, then she won’t be afraid of loneliness.”
“Oh no, she’s never lonely if we are all right.”
“There’s a good school over at Bethayres,” he said, “and someone can take Betty Lou over and go after her if they don’t run a school bus. We’ll have cars, of course, and a man who can drive when we don’t want to do it ourselves. And now, shall we go back and get them?”
So they made their wonderful plans and drove back eagerly to bring the family for their first glimpse of Happiness Hill.
“Well,” said Mother Arleth two hours later as she stood at the great bay window of the room that was to be hers soon and looked out over the wooded hills in their soft spring freshness and into a sky all green and gold with streaks of crimson flecking the horizon, “this is as near heaven as I’ll ever ask to get on this earth! If I’d known we were coming to this, I could have borne everything I went through sweetly.”
“You did, Mary!” said her old lover, looking into her quiet eyes. “But isn’t that just like us mortals? I expect that’s the way we’ll talk when we really see heaven. We’ll say, ‘If I had known it was this He had in store for me, I could have borne all and never faltered!’ For, ‘the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us.’ I only hope, Mary, that we shall not get our hearts so filled with all this earthly luxury that we shall even for a minute forget that.”
“I hope not,” said Mother, slipping her hand into Father’s and looking off to the eternal hills and the sunset again.
“There went a bluebird!” said Tom. “Did you see that? Gee, John, it’s great to have a brother like you!”
It was almost dark when they finally picked their way back to the cars and drove home to Flora Street, to plan about the wedding, which John insisted must be early in the fall, just as soon as the new house could be finished and furnished.
“And meantime, can’t we tarry occasionally in the dear little shed by the sea?” asked John joyously.
“You, the proprietor and owner of that magnificent mansion we have just visited, you are willing to endure discomfort and primitive conditions another summer when you could have the best hotel in the country?” exclaimed Arleth, looking at his prospective son-in- law with pride.
“I sure am!” said the young man eagerly. “I’ve been thinking of buying it and giving it a touch or two of paint that would preserve it in all its primitive perfectness, the only really restful, quiet seashore resort I ever knew. Besides, Tom and I have got to build a boat!”
Just at that crucial instant, the irony of fate brought a telephone call, and Tom, who happened to be nearest, answered it. A nasal voice that struck terror to the heart of Mother and Betty Lou came jangling over the wire.
“Oh, hello, kiddo!” it said. “Is that you? What’s been eattin’ ya? Why don’t ya come around enny more? Got a hot time on ta-morra night. Goin’ ta make whoopee! Get busy and toddle along!”
“Can’t possibly make it, Beth!” said Tom in clear, ringing tones. “Doncha know I’m a man now? You go getcha a toy and be a good child. I haven’t got time fer trifles. I’m busy. Besides, I’m moving away soon! Gub-by!” And he hung up with a clip and turned to Sherwood. “What’s that ya said, John, about building a boat? What kind? When?”
Chapter 22
The little stone church in Bethayres was bright with autumn foliage. It almost looked as if the trees from outside the windows had crept in and nestled around the altar, for when the windows were stretched wide, it was like being in an enchanted forest.
There were hedges of great heavy-headed chrysanthemums along the altar rail, yellow and white, touching their blossoms and nodding across the chancel to one another, like phalanxes of lovely faces waiting for the procession. There were golden and white chrysanthemums tied with big satin bows on the ends of the pews to mark the reserved seats for the family.
The organ was playing softly when the people from New York came in, Gayle Gilder and Carol Reeves, and the rest, fluttering in in the brightness of the autumn afternoon. And because they were strangers with a fairly good opinion of their own worth, they thought it nothing amiss to talk among themselves as they filed in on the bride’s side of the church and looked around.
“It’s lovely, isn’t it, Gayle?” said Carol, taking in the artistic arrangement. “Quite unusual that arrangement of flowers in the chancel. I suppose Jane did it herself. She’s awfully clever, you know.”
“But don’t you think, Carol, that it’s kind of odd that she didn’t ask us to be bridesmaids? That she didn’t ask you at least to be her maid of honor? She’s been friends with you so long. I should think you’d be hurt.”
“Well, I don’t know,” said Carol. “I suppose she felt she couldn’t afford the expense of a big wedding. She wrote me that it was to be a very simple little ceremony in the church, and then a quiet reception at their new house. I suppose it will be a dumb crush in a tiny house. From what Lew said, she seemed to be going with a young clerk from their office. I imagine they’re poor as Job’s turkey. Strange, isn’t it, a girl like Jane, who could have had any of the men in our crowd? Yes, she could, Gayle. They were all quite mad about her. She’s clever, you
know, and that counts a lot with men.”
“And now she’ll settle down to cooking and housekeeping, I suppose, and maybe have to do her own washing. My eye! I wouldn’t be in her shoes for anything.”
“I shouldn’t be surprised to hear she’d kept her job,” said Carol. “She’s that kind. She likes to work. Eats it up! Awfully good-looking ushers, aren’t they? I wonder where they picked them up.”
“Oh, almost anybody can look well in good clothes,” said Gayle.
Then Sally put in, leaning across the two to speak to Rex Blodgett. “Rex, look over to the right. Isn’t that Lorna Steele? It is, I’m sure. She was married last winter to an English lord who owns a castle. That must be him. I wonder if she’ll recognize us. We met her at the tournament last summer, you know. She’s a niece of the Dulaneys’. And—oh, there is Mr. Dulaney himself! I wonder how they happen to be here. They’re on the groom’s side, too.”
“See that lovely woman in gray!” whispered Carol, as Mary Arleth came up the aisle on the arm of one of the ushers, all of them men from the office. “She must be the bride’s mother! I never supposed Jane’s mother looked like that. Jane always spoke of her home and people as being very plain. I thought she would be quite a common woman.”
“There! There comes the groom! Mercy! He’s stunning- looking, isn’t he? I guess Jane picked him for his looks. Poor but beautiful!” Gayle giggled. “My soul! But I’d almost marry him myself. Hasn’t he got poise? He’s no common clerk, Carol, I’ve seen him somewhere. Where have I seen him? Somewhere with Lorna perhaps, haven’t I?”
Happiness Hill Page 27