Homing

by Grace Livingston Hill

  It was the very next afternoon that Evadne put herself in her grandest battle array and started out to get her revenge. She began by trying to call up Kent, for she had intended to ring him in on it, too, but Kent was not in his office. He was out on business for the afternoon they said. That was the same answer they had given her for the last two days, and she felt there was intention in it, which made her all the more wrathful.

  She arrived at the button counter while Jane was waiting on two very nice ladies who were buying buttons and clasps for their fall outfits, and she stormed up to the counter and interrupted.

  “I want to speak to you, Miss Scarlett!” she demanded.

  Jane glanced up at the sound of the voice and gave her a startled glance.

  “Just a moment,” she answered.

  Evadne waited impatiently for as much as a full minute, then she repeated her request.

  “I’m busy just now,” Jane said quietly.

  “Well, that doesn’t make any difference,” said Evadne, raising her voice still higher. “I’m not going to wait on you all day. I’ve important things to do. I’ve something to say to you that won’t wait, and if you can’t stop what you’re doing and listen to me, I’ll say it now where everybody can hear. I’ve just come to tell you you can lay off my fiancé, that’s all. He belongs to me, and you’ve no right to try to take him over.”

  The button customers looked at her curiously and gave a startled glance at Jane, whose cheeks were rosy red, but whose demeanor was still quiet and controlled. Save for the color in her cheeks she paid no heed whatever to the tirade that was going on, but other people were giving plenty of attention, and Evadne had known they would.

  “Some people might not pay any attention to such actions on the part of a mere working girl, but I don’t feel that way. Such carryings on as there were last Saturday night and Sunday are not to be endured. I intend to see that there isn’t any more of it. I just thought it was fair to warn you that if you have anything whatever to do with him anymore, I shall go the limit in having you punished. You’re a menace to the public, and it is a benevolence to others to put you where you can’t do any more of it. A life sentence wouldn’t be too long for such as you!”

  By this time Mr. Clark had heard the loud voice from afar and had arrived on the scene. Ladies were rushing from this aisle and that to peer above one another’s heads and see what was happening now. Evadne was looking straight at Jane, for all the other salesgirls at that counter had hastily gone as far away as the limits of the counter would allow. Everybody else, too, was looking straight at Jane, whose face was calm and restrained but turning very white now. Mr. Clark’s eyes upon her, his lifted eyebrows almost demanded some explanation from Jane.

  But Jane only finished writing her slip for the buttons she had sold to the two ladies, who had charged their purchases and gone. Then she looked up straight at Evadne.

  “I don’t understand you,” she said coldly.

  “Oh, yes, you do!” taunted the angry girl, well knowing that she had the upper hand. “You understand me well enough. You know who it was you went walking off up the beach with Saturday night, and took to church all day Sunday. You knew perfectly well he was my fiancé, and you just exulted in taking him away from me and making me a laughingstock. And I’ll have my revenge, I swear I will!”

  Suddenly Mr. Clark stepped up to Evadne.

  “Excuse me, madam,” he said, “but wouldn’t it be better to wait until closing time and talk quietly with this girl, if you have to talk? You’ll be making yourself a laughingstock, doing it so publicly. And we really can’t allow this to go on in the store, you know.”

  “Very well, then, make this girl answer me. I told her I wished to speak with her privately and she was insolent. She said she was busy.”

  “That was her privilege of course when she was working.”

  “Oh, indeed! Well, if you are going to be insolent, too, I shall have to demand to see the owners of this store. For I intend to have an answer from this girl before I leave.”

  “Have you anything to say, Miss Scarlett?” asked Mr. Clark, with an almost pleading expression in his eyes.

  Jane swept him a grateful glance.

  “Yes,” said Jane, still quietly, and not looking in the least frightened. “I would just like to say this. If the gentleman to whom you refer as your fiancé is really so, surely you could trust a man such as he is! If you know him as well as you seem to think you do, you would know that he would never do anything unbecoming to the man who was your fiancé. That’s all, Mr. Clark. Would you like me to go off the floor?”

  “No, Miss Scarlett, stay where you are and go on with your work. Madam, I shall be glad to take you up to Mr. Windle if he is not too busy at present to see customers of the store.”

  Mr. Clark led the angry Evadne away, into another aisle, and the customers closed in around the button counter, stretching their necks to see who this girl was, but Jane had disappeared into the tiny wrapping cubbyhole behind Hilda, with her hands on her hot cheeks, taking deep breaths and praying in her heart for help.

  She got it, too, and presently came out calmly and went to work again.

  “My, but you are swell!” whispered Louise, fluttering up to her between sales. “I wish I could be cool like that and carry off a situation. I would have gone all to pieces and got furious. I would have slapped her old painted face for her. That’s what she oughtta have got. Say, did you really snitch her man from her?”

  Jane laughed.

  “Of course not,” she said. “What an idea! Forget it, Louise. I’m sorry I had to be the cause of a disturbance in the store, that’s all. Say, are there any more of those blue enamel buttons with the rhinestones in them?” And Louise was turned aside and went hunting blue enamel buttons. But Jane had come to the place where she had begun to tremble and wanted to sit down and cry. However, she remembered that she had a stronghold that would not fail her, and went on to the end of the day.

  That night when Jane came out of the store she found Kent waiting for her, and her heart forgot its worries and joy flooded her face.

  But a few minutes later he looked at her keenly.

  “What has happened today?” he asked. “You look pale. Are you not feeling well?”

  “Oh, I’m perfectly all right,” smiled Jane.

  “No, something is the matter! Now tell me everything. Anything disagreeable happen in the store?”

  She looked at him startled and then grinned.

  “Yes,” she said. “I’ve been accused of carrying off a girl’s sweetheart! What do you think of that! Perhaps you won’t want to have anything to do with me anymore.”

  “Darling!” he murmured in a low tone. “Tell me. What was it?”

  “I’ve told you. Just that. A girl came into the store and openly accused me before everybody of stealing her fiancé.”

  “Who was it?” There was a hard-set look about Kent’s mouth.

  “I’d rather not tell you, if you don’t mind.”

  “But I must know. Was I that fiancé?”

  “Yes.”

  “I thought so. And the girl was Evadne Laverock?”

  “How did you know?”

  “Because that’s just the kind of thing she would do. Oh, if only I had never seen her! It’s my foolishness that brought this on you. I should have the public shame, not you. Anyway, I should have guarded you against this by telling you all about her in the first place, though I didn’t realize there was anything much to tell. Not yet anyway. We had more important things to say. Well, here’s the truth in a nutshell. I pretty well lost my head over her last summer, and thought I was in love for a few weeks, though we were never engaged. She had too many lovers, and when I protested she only laughed, and we had a disagreement. When I told her I wished she would stop drinking and swearing and smoking and live a quiet respectable life she got very angry and ran off to Europe for six months with never a word to me, thank God, all that time. By the time she came bac
k I had begun to get my eyes open, and I knew I did not love her and never would. So that’s the story. I am not her fiancé and never was, though one night when she looked particularly charming I almost told her I loved her. Almost, not quite, for somebody else came along and interrupted, and was I glad afterward that she did! But oh, I’m ashamed that I ever had anything to do with her. You should have known it at once when I told you of my love, only it didn’t seem at all important to me then. I know I never really loved her at all, and I thank God that she’s out of my life forever!”

  Jane smiled at him.

  “Thank you for telling me. I knew it must be something like that or you never would have told me you loved me,” she said, giving him a trusting look.

  He crushed her hand softly in his.

  “I knew you’d be like that,” he said. “That’s one of the reasons why I love you so. And now, let’s forget her for a while, and then by and by I want you to tell me all about it, where I can be sorry and comfort you in a proper way. I have my car near here and I thought maybe you’d like to take a ride, then we’ll have dinner together somewhere. Will you go?”

  “Oh, yes!” said Jane. “How lovely!”

  So he put her into his car, and they drove out along a sunlit way into the near country, where the long shadows were beginning to fall across road and grass, and the night seemed wide in its preparation for the sunset that was coming soon. At last they drew up before the old Scarlett mansion!

  Jane, who had been watching the houses along the other side of the road, suddenly looked up and saw it, recognized its likeness at once and exclaimed in wonder: “Why, there is a house just like my grandfather’s old home! Isn’t that wonderful? And why are we stopping here? Do you know the owner?”

  “Yes, I know the owner fairly well,” said Kent, “though I haven’t known her long. But I thought perhaps you would like to look at the house, it seemed so lovely, and so like the picture you showed us of your grandfather’s.”

  “Yes, indeed!” said Jane eagerly, not suspecting in the least. “How very nice of her to let us see it. Do you mean we may go inside?”

  “Oh, yes. That’s what she said.”

  “But I’ve just my working clothes on!” protested Jane, looking down at herself.

  “Oh, that won’t matter,” said Kent. “She won’t be noticing your clothes.”

  They started up the brick walk and suddenly Jane stopped abruptly, looking off at the little rustic teahouse on the far side of the lawn.

  “Oh!” she said excitedly. “It is my grandfather’s house! It must be! There is the teahouse I remember, and isn’t that a swing beyond it? But how could it be? Grandfather’s house wasn’t anywhere near here, was it? It was in a town called Hawthorne, near some city, I can’t remember the name.”

  Kent was smiling and watching her with delight.

  “This is Hawthorne,” he said. “Or used to be called that until it was incorporated into the city. And this was your grandfather’s house, but isn’t anymore, because now it is yours! That is, if you want to keep it. It was not sold as you supposed. It passed to your Uncle Harold, and he in turn left it to his brother’s child, evidently not knowing exactly where you were. The man who wants to buy it has friends living out here, and he wants to pull it down and build it over into a modern house. He wants to begin at once!”

  “How dreadful!” said Jane. “May I go inside?”

  “That is what we came for,” said Kent, slipping his arm inside hers and falling into step by her side.

  He took out a key and unlocked the door and Jane stepped within the wide, beautiful hall of her ancestral home.

  An hour later they came slowly down the stairs, after having gone from room to room examining everything, and arrived back in the big living room, Jane sitting down in an old handsome chair opposite an oil painting of her grandmother when she was a bride.

  “Oh, it is all so lovely!” she said plaintively. “I wish I could keep it. It is just as it used to be when I was little, and it would be wonderful to have it. But of course I never could.”

  “But why not?” asked Kent tenderly. “There seems to be no reason in the world why you shouldn’t. Just because a man wants to buy it is no reason why you should sell something you want to keep.”

  “But,” she said sadly, her eyes wide and earnest, “it costs a lot of money to keep a house, I’ve always heard. Just taxes are a big item, I know. I’ve heard people talk about them. Mrs. Forbes is worried now about the taxes on her little house, and what would this be? Something awful! I could never hope to make enough money to pay even a tenth of the taxes. And there would likely be repairs someday! No, it wouldn’t be right for me to keep it!”

  “Young lady, have you forgotten,” said Kent, watching her amusedly, “that you’ve taken me on for life? Do you count it nothing that I would be your husband, and as that, I might naturally be counted on to help you out with your taxes now and then if it ever became necessary?”

  “Oh!” she gasped, her cheeks turning pink. “I hadn’t thought that far. But, of course, you are a young man and just beginning. It wouldn’t be right for you to be hampered by a burden of debt and taxes and things. No, I’m sure it wouldn’t be right. I must not be so selfish!”

  “Well, bless your heart, you darling, unselfish child! There’s nothing like that to be in your scheme of things. The inheritance will carry the house many times over. Neither you nor I will have a cent to pay. The house was not all that was left to you in the will. There is quite a large fortune that was left you besides. There will be plenty to cover all expenses the house could make, and not be noticed out of what is left. I did not know until this morning how much it would be. I thought perhaps there was only a few thousand besides the house. But now I know, I am ashamed that I am daring to marry a rich wife. Of course, I have a nice little sum put away myself, enough to start on, but not as much as you have. And so, in the face of this knowledge I could not do less than offer to let you off if you want to be let.”

  Jane looked at him aghast. Then suddenly when she saw the look in his own eyes, the hunger, the longing, the delight in her, she sprang from her chair and dashed across the room.

  “Kent!” she cried as her arms went around his neck, and she laid her lips on his lips, his forehead, his eyes. “This from you! To think I should have to endure such a ghastly thought twice in one day. First from the Laverock woman demanding that I give you up, and next from you, suggesting that you don’t want me!”

  “Jane! Did I say that? Oh Jane, can I ever forgive myself that I let you in for such an awful experience!” His arms were around her now, and his head bowed with shame. But Jane was at peace, with her face nestled in his breast, and his lips on her hair.

  “Oh, joy, joy, joy!” she breathed at last when they finally went reluctantly toward the door, in the gathering dusk, his arms still about her. “I never dreamed that there was joy in the world like this! Much less that I should ever have it!”

  “Nor I, either!” he said tenderly. “I never dreamed there was such a girl in this world as you, not in these days! Oh, what a fool I was ever to think I could be satisfied with anything less! And now,” said Kent as they started back to the city, “will you go to a nice, quiet hotel somewhere and stay till we get married? Or do you want to go back to that pestiferous rooming house tonight?”

  Jane thought for a minute, and then she shook her head.

  “No. No hotel!” she said decidedly. “I’ll go back to the rooming house, for now anyway. I want to lie on the hard little bed and think there is a softer one coming. I want to look around that bare little room and know I’ve a whole home all beautiful and ready! I’ve been so used to telling myself my home was over in another world, in my Father’s house, that I didn’t think I’d ever have any other nice one down here. I thought maybe I could someday get a more comfortable room, when I was older and needed to save myself, but I didn’t see how I could get it for a long, long time, if ever. So I’ll enjoy anticipatin
g it for a little while before I go anywhere, and get used to the idea before I change. It’s been rather a long, hard way, and I might not bear such a sudden change.”

  She laughed as she said it, but Kent looked at her tenderly and said, “You dear!”

  Yet as they drew nearer to the rooming house he looked up at its looming gloomy windows and sighed.

  “I can’t bear to think of you in that gloomy place, even for a night. I wish you’d let me take you home to the shore, to Mother.”

  Jane shook her head decidedly.

  “Not tonight!” she said. “And not to your mother yet, either! Oh, I haven’t had a chance yet to stop and think what your mother will say, or what your sister will think! I’m not the kind of girl they would want for you!”

  “They’ll be happy as two clams!” said Kent. “Trust me. Don’t I know? And so will Dad! I could see he liked you wonderfully well. They’ll all be so glad I’m off Evadne for life they won’t know how to stop rejoicing. They hated her. But that brings back my shame. I should never have gone with a girl like that, even for a day, and somehow back in my mind, I knew it all the time. I’m so glad God took hold of me and opened my eyes in time. But don’t you worry about my family. They like you all right already, and wait till they really know you. They’ll take you right into their hearts.”

  “I don’t know,” said Jane a little sadly, shaking her head. “They may not have liked Miss Laverock, but you know I’m a still different kind of a girl. You should have a well-educated girl who is used to the ways of the world. Your mother will feel so, I’m sure.”

  “No, she won’t!” said Kent vehemently. “She recognizes your exquisite culture. As for the ways of the world, have you forgotten that you and I are not of this world anymore?”

  She gave him a sudden bright smile and nestled her hand in his, and he stooped over and kissed her tenderly.

  “All right,” he said resignedly, “go on up to your desolate little cubby hole if you must for tonight, but believe me I’m going to take you home to Mother just as soon as possible. And I’m going right home and tell the folks now so that bugaboo will be out of the way forever, and you won’t need to worry any more about your position with them. Good night. I’ll see you tomorrow!”