“But look what you’ve given to me,” said Sherwood earnestly, taking her sweet face between his two hands, “given me a real home, when I had nothing, that’s what you’ve done for me, to say nothing of what all your dear family has done for me.”
As Jane buried her face in the great mass of crimson roses and drew in deep breaths of their spicy fragrance, she thought of the emerald serpent she might have been wearing now, and shuddered. And they all had their gifts for Sherwood. Mother gave him a little New Testament to carry in his pocket, although Mother had no idea how interested he had become in the Bible.
“I’ll carry it all the time,” he said and smiled at her as he tucked it in his vest pocket.
Father had found a pen for him of a special make that he had found convenient on a desk. Tom had brought a new contrivance for keeping the windshield of a car clean, and Betty Lou had picked out a wonderful blue necktie and paid for it with her own money. Jane had a beautiful pair of soft fur-lined gloves for him made especially for convenience in driving a car.
So the days passed full of joy, and the holidays and the New Year came and went.
Jane went back to her job feeling strong and fit, though she found herself avoiding the neighborhood of the safe, until one day Mr. Dulaney and a mechanic took her inside the safe to show her how it could be opened from inside, and also the new air shaft that had been completed.
“We aren’t running any more risks with our people,” said Mr. Dulaney, looking at her kindly, and after that Jane found her old horror passing away.
No more was said about the symphony concerts. Evidently the family expected her to continue to be away Friday evenings, but Jane went happily about the house from Friday to Friday giving no explanation, and the family accepted the new order of things and was content.
One Friday night, three weeks after Christmas, Sherwood dropped in with a box tucked mysteriously under his arm.
“I have a picture puzzle here for the family to work out,” he explained, taking off hat and coat and sitting down at the dining room table. “All get around and let’s try it. There are seven hundred pieces and it looks mighty interesting to me.”
They all drew around the table and Sherwood dumped out the box of tiny wooden pieces and began to turn them over, right side up.
“The first act is to separate them into colors,” he explained, “and then each take a color and go ahead.”
Even Mr. Arleth got into the game, and Tom proved very quick at the new work.
They were discussing whether a certain piece was outside edge when the doorbell rang.
Tom looked up alertly, cast a withering searching glance toward Jane, and grumbled. “Oh gee! That’s not that coddled egg come back, is it?” he complained.
But Jane was oblivious, trying to fit an arrow into its proper surroundings.
“I’ll go,” said Tom with a sudden purpose in his face. “I’ve got more done than anyone else. If it’s that half-wit, I’ll strangle him,” he muttered as he pulled the dining-room door half-shut and crossed the living room.
They heard a low-toned conversation, and then Tom came back with a black scowl on his face.
“It’s that cross-eyed, knock-kneed, high-hat, rotten old piece of cheese!” he stated angrily.
“My son!” said Mr. Arleth, sitting up and looking at his boy with shocked surprise. “What kind of language is that?”
“Well, he is, Dad, and he wants ta see Jane!”
“Oh Jinny!” wailed Betty Lou. “We are having such a nice time.”
“What do I tell the chump?” asked Tom impatiently.
Jane looked up and spoke coolly, though her cheeks were very bright and her eyes had a hard light in them. “You may tell him that I do not wish to see him,” said Jane, and her voice was like gracious icicles.
“Janey!” said her mother looking at her startled. “You can’t mean that—”
“Yes, I mean it, Mother.”
Tom was gone like a shot.
“But, daughter—is that courteous?” asked the gentle mother in pained surprise.
“Probably not,” answered Jane thoughtfully, “but it doesn’t really matter! I’m quite done with him, and I guess Tom will make him understand.”
Jane looked up from fitting in a lady’s slip that completed the picture of an old boat on a stream of water and found two glad gray eyes upon her, which fell instantly to hide their light from her, but she flashed a sudden smile at Sherwood and went on with her puzzle.
The altercation at the front door reached quite a length, but at last Tom reappeared. “He says he came down here to ask you ta marry him, Jinny. He says I’m ta tell you that and see what ya say. He’ll marry ya and think nothing of it, just like that! You don’t wanna marry a guy like that, do ya? If ya do I’m off ya for life! Do ya? Say quick!”
Jane’s cheeks were flaming now, and her eyes were flashing angrily, but there was a dimple at one corner of her mouth and a twitch to her lips as she answered furiously, “No! Never!” And then she burst into hysterical laughter and put her head down on her arms till she had conquered the tears that insisted on coming along with the laughter. But they all laughed with her, wild happy laughter that rose and fell and reached out to the little cold porch where the lofty condescending wooer stood and altercated with a possible brother-in-law.
But the front door slammed very soon, with a decided click of the lock afterward, and Tom came back grinning. “He wasn’t going to take no for an answer. He said he guessed I didn’t know who he was, and he seemed to think he better come in and join in the exercises, after he heard you all laughing. But I asked him who crowned him and a few other little things like that, and he concluded he’d better move on.”
After that everybody felt a great deal happier. It seemed as if something quite wonderful had happened, like Father getting a new job or Christmas coming; and Betty Lou stole close to her sister and whispered, “Oh Jinny, I’m so glad you don’t like him! He had such a horrid little mustache. I couldn’t bear to think of him belonging to you.”
And Jane bent down laughing and kissed her sister again and again.
The hour was late when the puzzle was done and stood out a perfect whole before them on the table, for Sherwood and Jane had wasted time, each glancing up when the other wasn’t looking and now and then catching one another on an off beat and finding something strange and new in each other’s eyes. There was almost a lilt in Sherwood’s voice when he said good-bye, and he held Jane’s hand in his much longer than was quite necessary.
Chapter 18
The days that followed were busy ones. A new order was being instituted in the office, and Jane and Sherwood were busy as bees. Often they didn’t see each other all day long, and Tom began to complain that John was never there in the evenings.
“He’s having to stay after hours,” Jane explained one night when Tom was especially disappointed. “There is something about the books I don’t understand, but it seems he’s had special experience along that line, and I guess Dulaney has just found it out. Anyway he keeps him busy in his office almost every afternoon. They were both there yet when I came home.”
“Yes,” said Mr. Arleth, “there’s been some trouble, but I guess it’s going to be straightened out all right! It’s just as well not to talk about it outside, you understand, don’t you, son?”
“Whaddaya think I am, Dad? A sewing society of old hens! Ya never heard me blab anything, did ya?”
“Say, son, I really don’t like the language you use these days!” objected the father. “You are studying hard and talking about college someday, but I’m afraid you’ll get a manner of speech fixed on you that will follow you all your days no matter how much education you get.”
“Oh, that’s awright, Dad,” said Tom with a grin, “I get my- self across, don’t I?” And he sent a paper arrow whizzing straight across in front of Betty Lou’s eyelashes, making her start and blink.
“Perhaps you do, son, but you don’t give a v
ery good impression of scholarship or culture. You make your mother and me ashamed of you sometimes. You never hear Sherwood talk that way.”
“Oh well, Dad, doncha worry! I may s’prise ya someday!”
February passed, with now and then a snatched hour of pleasure, Sherwood running in for a few minutes toward nine o’clock, and once taking Jane and Betty Lou to hear a wonderful concert given by a young violinist virtuoso.
Early in March there began to be rumors about the office. There was going to be a change in the firm. A new partner was to be taken in. Nobody seemed to have very accurate information. Even Mr. Arleth knew nothing except that there were to be changes.
Miss Tenney told Jane one day that she heard the new partner of the firm was to be Harold Dulaney. She heard Mr. Jefferson Dulaney didn’t want him in, but his brother, the “silent” one, insisted and it was going through. Miss Bronson averred she liked Harold Dulaney because he wasn’t “so awful high-hat” as his uncle and you could get a favor “off him” now and then.
Jane set her lips and said very little. She was worried about Sherwood. He looked thin and pale. When he came out to see them, he had no appetite and he was sometimes a bit absentminded as if he were thinking of something else, although he still had his glorious smile that lit up his eyes like a picture and made her wonder again who it was he had always reminded her of.
“You are working too hard!” she charged him one day when he finished in time to take her home in his flivver. “I should think Dulaney would see he is keeping you too busy. You are invaluable to him. I wonder if he knows it or just accepts your work as if you were anybody.”
“Well, am I not anybody?” asked Sherwood drolly, turning on her his happy smile.
“Don’t they say anything about promoting you?” she asked suddenly. “You’ve been here almost a year.”
“Well, they’ve mentioned it a time or two,” he said evasively. “Say, tomorrow is Saturday. If you think I need a rest, how about our running out to Happiness Hill to see if anything has happened out there, like wildflowers, or a new nest for a bluebird?”
“Lovely!” said Jane with her eyes sparkling.
“I can’t get off much before four o’clock, but I’ll come for you as soon as I can.”
“All right!” she said happily and wondered why the sky suddenly looked so happy in the spring sunset in spite of the keen air that was still blowing.
Jane chattered all the way, telling him bits of gossip from the office that Miss Tenney had whispered, and how there was a rumor that the new man of the firm was to be taken from the rank of old workers.
“It might easily be Mr. Gates or Mr. Halstead, you know,” she said thoughtfully, “though they never seem quite in a class with the Dulaneys, do you think? Of course they’ve been there a long time, and I heard Mr. Halstead had come into a lot of money. Maybe he’s putting it into the firm. He wouldn’t be bad in authority, I suppose, but he’s always seemed a little bit stupid to me. However, I don’t suppose it will make much difference to me or Father so long as Mr. Jefferson Dulaney lives. Do you think it would with you?”
“Might!” said Sherwood noncommittally. And then they turned into the lane that led through the wood to the top of the hill.
“Someone else has been here!” declared Jane, startled, looking down at the well-worn ruts.
“Looks that way, doesn’t it?” said Sherwood, looking over the side of the car. “Not very smooth driving.”
“Perhaps the gypsies have found it. It would make a lovely place for a gypsy camp, wouldn’t it? I’d like to be a gypsy.”
“Take me with you?” asked Sherwood playfully.
“Oh surely!” said Jane.
And then they emerged from the wood upon a strange scene. Jane sat in startled dismay and looked.
“Well, what do you know about that! Somebody certainly has been here!” said Sherwood, stopping the car. “Let’s get out and see what it’s like.”
In a daze Jane got out and stood silent.
Great piles of rough gray stone lay about on the edges of the woods. A mortar bed was almost in front of her, and a cement mixer occupied the foreground not far away. The top of the hill showed a long rectangular foundation wall now almost up to the first floor, and strings and stakes showed where the line was set for the next day’s work.
“Somebody is building at last,” stated Jane unnecessarily, in a thin flat voice, trying not to feel that she had lost something she never had. “We can’t come here anymore.”
“Oh, I don’t know why we can’t!” said Sherwood. “Any- body’s free to watch a new house and look it over, at least until the folks move in. And—why—they might even be somebody we know.”
“Not a chance!” Jane laughed.
“Well, let’s look it over and see whether they’ve followed our plan. Come around this way. Look out for that mortar bed.”
Slowly Jane picked her way over stones and lumber and came around to the front.
“Why,” she said at last, “it’s almost exactly where we put our stakes. See!” excitedly, “that sycamore tree was where I spotted our line!”
“Well,” said Sherwood, looking at it carefully, “perhaps they thought we had good judgment and it gave them an idea.”
“Oh,” said Jane with a half sigh, “it was just the obvious place for a house like that, of course, and the obvious kind of a house for a hill like this. I suppose we weren’t original at all, only—I did love it, and I hate to have it taken away from us.”
“There might be other hills,” suggested Sherwood pleasantly. “Perhaps we could hunt one somewhere else!”
“Oh well.” Jane laughed. “Of course it’s silly! But it was fun to plan it. Come, let’s go down over by the hemlocks and see if there are any hepaticas. I thought I saw some plants last fall.”
They came up the hill again presently with a handful of tiny pink anemones, Sherwood’s hand under Jane’s elbow, helping her up.
“Well, I don’t see why we shouldn’t keep on pretending we’re building it,” said Sherwood thoughtfully. “It’s just as good a game as taking it out, and a lot less expensive.”
“We will!” said Jane heartily. “Only what will we do when they don’t make it the way we think they ought?”
“Well, I hadn’t considered that, but we might leave a note here suggesting changes they could make,” said Sherwood.
Then they laughed together like two children and walked again around the foundation, studying its convolutions and whether it should have been wider for the length or longer for the width, and all at once they came to a halt up on the top of the front foundation to watch a gorgeous sunset that was being spread in the sky over the valley for their benefit. And when it began to fade, Sherwood remembered it was getting chilly. He most unexpectedly jumped down and lifted Jane bodily from the wall, carrying her across the few feet and depositing her safely in the flivver.
“Oh!” said Jane, quite taken off her guard. But Sherwood acted as if it were quite a common custom to carry young ladies around in one’s arms. He slammed the car door in a matter-of-fact way and went around to his own seat, starting the car at once.
Jane sat quite still with her cheeks pink, but that might have been merely a reflection from the sunset, and she wondered why she all at once felt so happy.
They drove home rather silently, and Sherwood did not come in that night. He said he had an appointment, but would she hold next Saturday afternoon so they could go again to see how their house was getting on?
Jane, walking up the little brick path to her home, wondered why her heart was in such a tumult and what it was that worried her. Was it because Sherwood was working too hard? At supper she asked Tom to talk to him about it. The result was that Tom went out after supper and brought him back to the house about nine o’clock with another picture puzzle but a decidedly absentminded manner and a bright light in his rather tired grown-up eyes. How was it that Sherwood’s eyes could look so different at different times
? Jane wondered.
It was rumored now that the changes at the office were coming in the spring, not fall, as had been at first supposed. Carpenters were at work changing office partitions. The personnel department, as it was said, was to occupy the north end of the great outer office. Jane wondered where her father’s special office would be. It would be pleasant to have him near where she could sometimes see him.
They did not go soon again to see the new house being built on Happiness Hill, as Sherwood had called it. Sherwood had to go to New England suddenly to see his cousin who was very ill and wanted to consult him about something. He was gone three days, and when he came back he was busier than ever.
Once while Sherwood was away, Tom drove the family to a Sunday afternoon service over at Bethayres, and off to the left Jane could see the gray stonework rising into a house among the trees on Happiness Hill, but she did not speak of it to anyone, and it seemed to bring a lump in her throat to think about it.
Not until far along in May did Sherwood get another chance to drive out on a Saturday afternoon, and then it was late, almost five o’clock when they started, and Betty Lou had made them promise to be back by half past six to eat the chicken pot pie when it was just right. So they had to hurry.
The house was up to the top of the second-story windows now, and they could walk about on boards laid over the floor beams. It seemed strange and almost uncanny to see the house they had dreamed rising out of the hillside. Jane walked to the middle of the big downstairs reception room and stood looking about.
“John, it’s exactly as we planned it. See! The breakfast room in that corner looking east, and the big arched window here, and the stairs with that big landing looking out toward Bethayres! It’s our dream come true exactly!”
“So it is,” said Sherwood, walking over to the big window opening and looking down the valley at the tender green of young foliage. “See that cherry tree in blossom down there, next to the red budding maples. Isn’t that a picture?”