CHAPTER 37
Hitherto Jane’s career at Lantern Hill had been quite unspectacular. Even when she was seen barefooted, nailing shingles on a barn roof, it made only a local sensation, and nobody but Mrs. Solomon Snowbeam said much about it. Mrs. Snowbeam was shocked. There was nothing, she said again, that child would stick at.
And then, all at once, Jane made the headlines. The Charlottetown papers gave her the front page for two days, and even the Toronto dailies gave her a column, with a picture of Jane and the lion…some lion…thrown in. The sensation at 60 Gay must be imagined. Grandmother was very bitter…“just like a circus girl”…and said it was exactly what might have been expected. Mother thought, but did not say, that no one could really have expected to hear of Jane ambling about P. E. Island leading lions by the mane.
There had been rumors about the lion for a couple of days. A small circus had come to Charlottetown and a whisper got about that their lion had escaped. Certainly people who went to the circus saw no lion. There was a good deal of excitement. Once a monkey had escaped from a circus, but what was that to a lion? It did not seem certain that anyone had actually seen the lion, but several were reported to have seen him…here, there, and the other place, miles apart. Calves and young pigs were said to have disappeared. There was even a yarn that a short-sighted old lady in the Royalty had patted him on the head and said, “Nice dog-glums.” But that was never substantiated. The Royalty people indignantly denied that there were any lions at loose ends. Such yarns were bad for tourist traffic.
“I’ve no chance of seeing it,” said Mrs. Louisa Lyons mournfully. “That’s what comes of being bed-rid. You miss everything.”
Mrs. Louisa had been an invalid for three years and was reputed not to have put a foot under her without assistance in all that time, but it was not thought she missed much of what went on in the Corners and Queen’s Shore and Harbor Head for all that.
“I don’t believe there is any lion,” said Jane, who had been shopping at the Corners and had dropped in to see Mrs. Lyons. Mrs. Lyons was very fond of Jane and had only one grudge against her. She could never pick anything out of her about her father and mother and Lilian Morrow. And not for any lack of trying.
“Closer than a clam, that girl is when she wants to be,” complained Mrs. Louisa.
“Then how did such a yarn start?” she demanded of Jane.
“Most people think the circus people never had a lion…or it died…and they want to cover it up because the people who came to see a lion would be disappointed and mad.”
“But they’ve offered a reward for it.”
“They’ve only offered twenty-five dollars. If they had really lost a lion, they’d offer more than that.”
“But it’s been seen.”
“I think folks just imagined they saw it,” said Jane.
“And I can’t even imagine it,” groaned Mrs. Louisa. “And it’s no use to pretend I imagined it. Everyone knows a lion wouldn’t come upstairs to my room. If I could see it, I’d likely have my name in the paper. Martha Tolling has had her name in the paper twice this year. Some people have all the luck.”
“Martha Tolling’s sister died in Summerside last week.”
“What did I tell you?” said Mrs. Louisa in an aggrieved tone. “Now she’ll be wearing mourning. I never have a chance to wear mourning. Nobody has died in our family for years. And black always did become me. Ah well, Jane, you have to take what you get in this world and that’s what I’ve always said. Thank you for dropping in. I’ve always said to Mattie, ‘There’s something about Jane Stuart I like, say what you will. If her father is queer, it isn’t her fault.’ Mind that turn of the stairs, Jane. I haven’t been down it for over a year but someone is going to break her neck there sometime.”
It happened the next day…a golden August afternoon when Jane and Polly and Shingle and Caraway and Punch and Min and Ding-dong and Penny and Young John had gone in a body to pick blueberries in the barrens at the Harbor Head and were returning by a short cut across the back pastures of the Corners farms. In a little wood glen, full of goldenrod, where Martin Robbin’s old haybarn stood, they met the lion face to face.
He was standing right before them among the golden-rod, in the shadows of the spruces. For one moment they all stood frozen in their tracks. Then, with a simultaneous yell of terror…Jane yelled with the best of them…they dropped their pails, bolted through the goldenrod, and into the barn. The lion ambled after them. More yells. No time to close the ramshackle old door. They flew up a wobbly ladder which collapsed and fell as Young John scrambled to safety beside the others on the crossbeam, too much out of breath to yell again.
The lion came to the door, stood there a minute in the sunshine, slowly switching his tail back and forth. Jane, recovering her poise, noticed that he was somewhat mangy and lank, but he was imposing enough in the narrow doorway and nobody could reasonably deny that he was a lion.
“He’s coming in,” groaned Ding-dong.
“Can lions climb?” gasped Shingle.
“I…I…don’t think so,” said Polly, through her chattering teeth.
“Cats can…and lions are just big cats,” said Punch.
“Oh, don’t talk,” whispered Min. “It may excite him. Perhaps if we keep perfectly quiet he will go away.”
The lion did not seem to have any intention of going away. He came in, looked about him, and lay down in a patch of sunshine with the air of a lion who had any amount of spare time.
“He don’t seem cross,” muttered Ding-dong.
“Maybe he isn’t hungry,” said Young John.
“Don’t excite him,” implored Min.
“He isn’t paying any attention to us,” said Jane. “We needn’t have run…I don’t believe he’d have hurt us.”
“You run as fast as us,” said Penny Snowbeam. “I’ll bet you was as scared as any of us.”
“Of course I was. It was all so sudden. Young John, stop shaking like that. You’ll fall off the beam.”
“I’m…I’m…scared,” blubbered Young John shamelessly.
“You laughed at me last night and said I’d be scared to pass a patch of cabbages,” said Caraway venomously. “Now look at yourself.”
“None of your lip. A lion isn’t a cabbage,” whimpered Young John.
“Oh you will excite him,” wailed Min in despair.
The lion suddenly yawned. Why, thought Jane, he looks exactly like that jolly old lion in the movie news. Jane shut her eyes.
“Is she praying?” whispered Ding-dong.
Jane was thinking. It was absolutely necessary for her to get home soon if she were going to have dad’s favorite scalloped potatoes for his supper. Young John was looking absolutely green. Suppose he got sick? She believed the lion was only a tired, harmless old animal. The circus people had said he was gentle as a lamb. Jane opened her eyes.
“I am going down to take that lion up to the Corners and shut him up in George Tanner’s empty barn,” she said. “That is, unless you’ll all come down with me and slip out and shut him up here.”
“Oh, Jane…you wouldn’t…you couldn’t…”
The lion gave a rap or two on the floor with his tail…The protests died away in strangled yelps.
“I’m going,” said Jane. “I tell you, he’s tame as tame. But you stay here quietly till I get him well away. And don’t yell, any of you.”
With bulging eyes and bated breath, the whole gang watched Jane slide along the beam to the wall where she climbed nimbly down to the floor. She marched up to the lion and said, “Come.”
The lion came.
Five minutes later Jake MacLean looked out of the door of his blacksmith shop and saw Jane Stuart go past leading a lion by the mane…“within spitting distance,” as he solemnly averred later. When Jane and the lion…who seemed to be getting on very well with each othe
r…had disappeared around the back of the shop, Jake sat down on a block and wiped the perspiration from his brow with a bandanna.
“I know I’m not quite sane by times, but I didn’t think I was that far gone,” he said.
Julius Evans, looking out of his store-window, didn’t believe what he saw either. It couldn’t be…it simply wasn’t happening. He was dreaming…or drunk…or crazy. Ay, that was it…crazy. Hadn’t there been a year when his father’s cousin was in the asylum? Those things ran in families…you couldn’t deny it. Anything was easier than to believe that he had seen Jane Stuart go up the side-lane by his store towing a lion.
Mattie Lyons ran up to her mother’s room, uttering piteous little gasps and cries.
“What’s the matter?” demanded Mrs. Louisa. “Screeching like you was demented!”
“Oh, ma, ma, Jane Stuart’s bringing a lion here!”
Mrs. Louisa got out of bed and got to the window just in time to see the lion’s tail disappear with a switch around the back porch.
“I’ve got to see what she’s up to!” Leaving the distracted Mattie wringing her hands by the bed, Mrs. Louisa got herself out of the room and down the staircase with its dangerous turn as nimbly as she had ever done in her best days. Mrs. Parker Crosby, who lived next door and had a weak heart, nearly died of shock when she saw Mrs. Louisa skipping across her back yard.
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 neighbors 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 someday 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 orphanage 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 backyard 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 harbor.
“Do for your dinner tomorrow, Jane.”
“Tomorrow 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 tonight 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 harbor, and Jane’s chee
ks 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 beech wood 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.”
“The only kind of hair that is really beautiful is curling, red-gold hair,” said Justina. “Her cheekbones are rather high, but her insteps are admirable.”
“She is very brown,” sighed Violet. “But they tell me that is fashionable now. We were very careful of our complexions when we were girls. Our mother, you remember, always made us wear sunbonnets when we went out of doors…pink sunbonnets.”
“Pink sunbonnets! They were blue,” said Justina.
“Pink,” said Violet positively.
“Blue,” said Justina, just as positively.
They argued for ten minutes over the color of the sunbonnets. When Jane saw they were getting rather warm over it, she mentioned that Miranda Garland was going to be married in two weeks’ time. The Titus ladies forgot the sunbonnets in their excitement.