“THERE WAS MOUNTING ’MONG GRAEMES OF THE NETHERBY CLAN”
The Graham family was at breakfast, the same group assembled--with
the addition of Jan herself--as on that morning nearly half a year
before when Mr. Graham had struck consternation to it, individually and
collectively, by announcing Jan’s coming.
Susan no longer stood behind Jerry’s chair, for she no longer
misbehaved sufficiently to require special watchfulness, so Susan
supplemented the waitress in small tasks, and now brought in the mail
and laid it at Mr. Graham’s place.
Mr. Graham sorted it, handed three or four notes to his wife, gave
Sydney a notice from his school-club secretary, handed Jack the paper
with the adventure serial he was pursuing rather than perusing, smiled
as he gave Gladys a pink envelope suggestive of heliotrope and
addressed in a girl’s hand, and kept several letters for himself.
One of these he read with a lengthening face, and, when his eyes had
traveled down to the foot of the last page, looked over at Jan so
gravely that her heart gave an apprehensive bound, and Gwen exclaimed:
“There’s nothing wrong, is there, papa?”
“No--at least, yes, I think there is.--Nothing wrong at your home, Jan,
so don’t look so startled, child,” said Mr. Graham, smiling at Jan, who
was waiting his answer with wide, frightened eyes. “Your mother has not
been well, but she’s recovered now; this letter is from your father.”
“Mamma ill? What was it? Do you suppose she really is well again, Uncle
Howard? What does papa say?” cried Jan.
“He says--let me see. ‘Tell Jan not to feel the slightest anxiety; I am
not concealing anything from her; her mother is quite herself again,
except for a remnant of weakness. But--’ and the rest is what I do not
like to tell you, and still less to tell my own children.” And Mr.
Graham stopped, frowning hard at Jan.
“He wants Jan!” guessed Gwen, jumping at the thing she most dreaded.
“That’s precisely what he does want,” assented her father. “He says it
is now April, and the brief time left in school will not be serious
loss, and Jan’s mother is so hungry for a glimpse of her that he wants
us to send her back to Crescendo. He doesn’t say what he expects us to
do without her.”
A dead silence fell on the entire table. Gwen and Gladys stared aghast,
Viva turned crimson and began to cry soundlessly, while Jack looked as
though he would like to follow her example. Sydney and his mother both
pushed back their plates with a simultaneous movement, and Jan herself
seemed uncertain whether to be glad or sorry.
Jerry looked from one to the other; then suddenly her voice pierced the
stillness shrilly: “She’s my Jan, she’s my Jan! She san’t go away f’
ever’ n’ ever, amen,” she fairly shrieked, and was borne from the room
in a violent fit of coughing by the patient Susan.
“We can’t express our feelings in precisely the same way as Jerry,”
said Mrs. Graham, “but they are quite as much ours. You are our Jan,
and we really can not let you go.”
“O Jan! you won’t go, will you?” said Gladys reproachfully.
“If mamma wants me, and papa says to come, how can I help going?” asked
Jan.
“I suppose we must admit their claim,” said her uncle. “I’ll tell you
what I’ll do. I’ll write Jan’s father, begging him to spare her a
little while longer, and telling him how dear she is to each of us. If
he is hard-hearted enough to take her in spite of that, we’ll have to
send her to him, with a nice, strong little cable attached, to pull her
back by in a short time.”
“I don’t think we ought to let mamma wait while we write papa, and he
answers. That will take nearly a week, and if he says mamma has been
sick and wants me, I think I ought to go right away, don’t you?” asked
Jan.
“O Miss Lochinvar! You want to go?” said Sydney reproachfully.
“I want to go and stay at the same time,” said Jan truthfully. “I am
just as happy here as I can be, and I love you heaps and heaps, and
when I get back I’ll talk about every one of you until they’ll think
I can’t speak of anything else. But when I think of mamma--and all of
them--why I could fly! You know how you’d feel if you hadn’t seen any
of this family for six months.”
“There are such quantities of things to do,” said Gwen, speaking for
the first time, though there was no one else to whom the loss of
Miss Lochinvar meant so much as to her. “You haven’t been down to
Trinity nor to St. Paul’s--and you like places where great people are
buried. You’re so crazy about history you must at least see Alexander
Hamilton’s grave--and the Jumel house.”
“That wouldn’t take long; besides New York will be here when she
returns, for I would put her in the safe-deposit vaults and lock her
up, if I didn’t think she would come back in the fall,” said her uncle.
“Then you would rather not have me write, asking an extension of
time--a stay of proceedings, little Miss Lochinvar?”
“I think when papa says he wants me, and mamma is longing for me, it
means just that, and it would not be right to keep them waiting,” said
Jan, wishing she were not obliged to choose.
“It’s a shame, a shame!” cried Jack, emotion, so long suppressed, so
far mastering him that two tears would find their way out, though he
tried to hope that they would be mistaken for coffee.
“Well, Jack, here’s a chance to be noble. There are people who would
rather another had a treasure than possess it themselves,” smiled Mrs.
Graham.
“That’s goody-goody people!” said Jack wrathfully, not in a frame of
mind to admire virtue utterly beyond his reach.
“They’re better than baddy-baddy people at least,” said Gwen. “If Jan
must go, let’s not make it worse.--When would she have to start, papa?”
“Her father doesn’t say. I think we are entitled to a little time in
which to get used to the amputation,” said Mr. Graham. “I won’t let her
go under a week.”
“Then we’ll make it a lively week,” said Gwen with a quiver in her
voice indicating no especial liveliness in the speaker. Mrs. Graham
pushed back her chair, and the children all rose; there had been no
more thought of breakfast since the dreadful tidings had fallen upon
them that they were to lose Jan.
It was the week of the Easter holidays, so there was nothing to
prevent her cousins from devoting themselves to Jan for the short time
remaining.
The three girls retired to Jan’s room to have a cry and feel better,
though that was not consciously the object of the tears. Tommy Traddles
came stretching and purring to meet them, and Jan caught him to her
heart.
“O my poor, dear Tommy Traddles!” she cried. “He has got so handsome,
and strong, and loving! And he does play hide and seek so beautifully
with me. Will you promise to take just as good care of him as I do,
Gwen and Gladys? And will you swear--honest, true, black and blue--not
to let him get left behind to starve in the streets when you go to the
country?”
“Now, Jan, if you suppose we’d be the sort of people to turn an animal
out! Of all the mean, selfish things to do! It makes me furious to
see the poor creatures who are used to being petted wandering around
frightened, sick, and hungry! I don’t see why you ask us such a
thing as that! We don’t have to swear it,” said Gwen, with genuine
indignation.
“Well, I beg your pardon. I know you wouldn’t, but so many people are
careless,” said Jan contritely. “Syd will look after Drom. And now I’m
going to pack.”
“If you touch one thing I’ll go crazy!” exclaimed Gladys energetically.
“I could not stand it! I won’t believe you’re going. Get on your things
and come down to your stuffy historical graves, but don’t you pack! You
haven’t the least, dimmest idea of how Gwen and I feel--you don’t care
one bit for leaving us!”
Jan turned and flung her arms around Gwen and Gladys with a face as
variable as the month, all smiles and tears. “O my dears, my dears!
Yes, I do!” she cried. “I wish I were twins! Can’t you understand how
glad I’ll be to see dear old Crescendo and my precious family, and yet
how I want, and want, and want you? I’d like to go and stay at the same
time.”
“And we only want you to stay, you see,” said Gwen, trying to smile.
“It’s almost like losing my eyes over again, Janet Lochinvar! You have
been such a dear old darling, and done so much for me!”
“Not as much as for me,” said Gladys mournfully. “I’m another girl.”
“Never mind if you are, Gladys; you’re nicer all the time,” said Jan.
“So try to bear up.”
“We’ll go down and see St. Paul’s, and then we’ll go to Trinity,”
announced Gladys, rising with the air of one ready to sacrifice herself
for the public weal. “And we’ll rally around you every minute that’s
left.”
“Syd, Jack, will you go with us down in town to explore mustiness for
Jan?” called Gwen up the stairs. And the boys threw themselves on the
banisters, and slid down promptly, ready for any expedition.
Jan stood, awe-struck, beside the tomb where Alexander Hamilton
was laid to sleep after his tragic end, and where now the hurrying
thousands of the modern city surge up the narrow, steep street skirting
his resting-place in the pursuit of a little of the success he sought,
attained, and which slipped through his fingers at last.
Still more was she thrilled by the old-time pew in St. Paul’s where
Washington sat praying in his strong heart for the nation struggling
into life. Gwen shared her enthusiasm, and Sydney understood, though he
pretended to laugh at it. But Gladys declared she could not see what
there was to get excited about. Suppose Washington _had_ sat in
that pew, what then? He was a real man, who really lived; he had to
sit somewhere. If it hadn’t been there, it would have been somewhere
else--what was there to make a fuss about? Gladys’s prosaic mind, which
had not a grain of the poet’s nor the student’s element in its make-up,
tolerated, but could not share her cousin’s raptures.
The Graham quartet dutifully escorted Jan up to the Jumel house, and
up to Columbia Library, and to see the tablet commemorating the battle
of Harlem Heights, but in turn they demanded of her less improving,
and more amusing pilgrimages. They took her down to Manhattan Beach to
see the ocean for the first time, and Miss Lochinvar had to admit that
nothing in the West could equal that stupendous first sight of the
breakers rolling in from England, and tumbling at her feet--though she
retracted the admission with a possible reservation in favor of the
Yellowstone, which she had not seen. And at last there were no more
expeditions, but three days of absolute devotion to one another, in
which Jan packed, while the others watched her rearrange her treasures,
and tried to keep up the cheerfulness which they had agreed must speed
their parting guest, though it was a cheerfulness veiled in deep purple.
Jan had to have a large new trunk to supplement the shabby little one
with which she arrived, for many and marvelous were the contributions
the Grahams poured into Jan’s hands to take to the children in
Crescendo.
All the girls--and most of the boys--whom Jan had known since her
arrival came often to see her, for to the surprise, not only of herself
but her cousins, who did not realize that outsiders had felt modest
Janet’s charm, Miss Lochinvar seemed to have won everybody’s affection.
“Come and see me in Crescendo,” she said to them all with boundless
hospitality, and Gladys felt no dismay at the thought that they might
take her at her word; so thoroughly had she learned true values.
Gwen and Gladys grudged a moment spent on visitors; the moments were
growing so few in which they should see Jan’s pretty face, and watch it
cloud at the thought of parting or break into dimples over something
pleasant. Even Cena North and Dorothy Schuyler were in the way, though
the latter was the one to whom Gwen looked for consolation when she
should be bereft of Jan.
At last the night came when for the last time Jan should lie down in
her pretty room, and all the cousins hung around her till the latest
possible moment--even Jerry being allowed to sit up until she fell
asleep in Jan’s lap.
“We’ll keep a diary and send it to each other twice a week--that’s
settled,” said Gwen. “And I want to tell you one thing, Jan. I know now
I was a silly to think North & Company would publish my novel, and I
was a greater silly to think I could write a novel, and the greatest
silly of all to think that it was nicer to be famous than a lovely,
homely girl. If you like to know that you turned your cousin from a
goose into a girl with a grain of sense, you may have that pleasure.”
“And here’s another,” said Gladys. “You know I’m not quite as bad a
goose as I was, and it’s all your doing.”
Sydney said nothing then, but when, later, Jan went up to say good
night to Drom, he put out his hand. “I may not get a chance to tell
you to-morrow when they’re all around,” he said, “but I’m getting on
better at school--working better and all that--and I don’t see much of
the wild boys, and I’m getting on fine working with the professor up at
college. And father says I may take up civil engineering if I like, so
I guess I’ll go to college after all. And if you hadn’t come and made
things pleasant here I don’t believe I’d have been anywhere. I thought
you might like to know.”
“It’s all because you are so good to me that you fancy I’ve done
things. I never did a thing, but just be a humdrum, every-day little
girl,” said Jan.
“Nothing but be Janet Howe--Miss Lochinvar, I mean; we know,” said
Sydney. And Jan ran down-stairs to cry a little and laugh a little that
on the morrow she was to set out for Crescendo, and to be glad and
grateful that the clan of Graham rated her so inexplicably high.