Jane--Our Stranger: A Novel

by Mary Borden

“Isn’t it queer,” she said. “How could she have known?”

But I understand now that Patience Forbes was the only one who did know. She must have been a shrewd woman. She must have followed Jane in her mind all those years, with extraordinary accuracy considering the little she had to go on. But she never betrayed her misgivings. There is only that sentence in her will to indicate what she thought.

She was an imposing woman, plain of face, careless of her appearance and masculine in build. Her nose was crooked, her neck scrawny and her hands large and bony. But she had an air of grandeur. When she tramped through the woods or across the open country that surrounded St. Mary’s Plains, her field glasses and her camera slung across her shoulder, she had in spite of her quaint bonnet and long black clothes the look of a grizzled amazon. She would walk twenty miles in a day and frequently did so. Many of the farmers round about knew her. They called her “the bird lady” and asked her in to their kitchens for a glass of milk and a slice of apple-pie, and often while sitting there with her bonnet strings untied and her dusty skirt turned up on her knees, she would receive gifts from sun-burned urchins who, knowing the object of her pilgrimages would bring to her in the battered straw crowns of their hats, rare birds’ eggs that they had discovered in the high branches of trees or the secret fastnesses of tangled thickets.

She was the dominating personality in her own home. Her mother and sisters were a little afraid of her. When her brother Bradford married and she announced that she was going to hold classes in the parlour of the Grey House and charge for them, they dared not object, although they would have preferred going without the comforts that Bradford’s shared income had provided rather than have a lot of strange people invading the house.

It was characteristic of the family that they never spoke to Jane of money and never gave her any idea that she was or ever would be an heiress. She made her own bed in the morning, and sometimes if she were not in too much of a hurry to get off to school she helped Aunt Minnie with the others. On Saturday mornings she darned her own stockings, or tried to, sitting on a low chair beside her grandmother, but this was by way of a lesson in keeping quiet. I am afraid she took it as a matter of course that Aunt Beth and her grandmother should mend her clothes for her.

She gave a great deal of trouble. Not only was she always getting into scrapes, but she was subject as well to storms of passion that sometimes, as she realized later, seriously frightened her grandmother. Her accidents—she had a great many little ones and one at least that was serious—were episodes marked in her memory as rather pleasant occasions that procured for her an extra amount of petting. There was a high bookcase at the top of the stairs in a dark corner of the upper hall, full of old and faded volumes. Here she spent hours together on Sunday afternoons, sitting on the top of a step-ladder that she dragged out of the housemaids’ cupboard. One day, finding among those dusty little books a copy of Dante’s “Vita Nuova,” she became so absorbed in the lovely poem, though it was only a lame translation in English verse, that she began chanting the lines to herself, unconsciously swaying backwards and forwards on her perch, until all at once the ladder gave way beneath her, and she fell to the floor, breaking her arm. The days that followed were among the happiest of her life. She was installed in her Uncle Bradford’s room that gave out onto the sunny back garden where a pear tree was in bloom. There, propped up in the middle of the great white bed, her arm in a sling and not hurting too much to spoil her voluptuous sense of her own importance, she seemed to herself a romantic figure, and received Fan with benevolent superiority, while deeply and deliciously she drank in with every feverish throb of her passionate little heart the tender devotion of the patient women who loved her. Her Aunt Patty slept on a cot beside her at night; her Aunt Minnie brought her meals to her on the daintiest of trays; her grandmother and her Aunt Beth came with their sewing to sit with her in the afternoon. Often when she felt herself dropping into a doze after lunch, before finally closing her eyes to give herself up to the sleep that was creeping over her so softly, she would for the pleasure of it open them again to look through her heavy eyelids at her grandmother’s head that she could see above the foot of the great bed outlined against the sunny light of the window; and she would see the little old lady lift a finger to her pursed lips and nod mysteriously smiling at Beth and glance towards the bed as much as to say—“The child is dropping off, we mustn’t make a sound.” And the child, with such a sense of security and peace as to convey to her in after years the memory of a heavenly instant, would let herself float blissfully out into the still waters of oblivion, knowing that she would surely find them there when she awoke.

She was given the book, “La Vita Nuova” for her own, and lay in bed dreaming of a poet who would one day love her as Dante had loved his Beatrice.

It was about this time that Mrs. Carpenter began working out her schemes with Philibert.

Jane was according to her own testimony subject to fits of such violent temper that she scarcely knew what she was doing. At such moments she frightened every one round her and herself as well. One evening stands out in her memory as peculiarly dreadful. The family were gathered in the drawing room before supper waiting for her, when she burst in on them, her face as white as a sheet, and flung herself on her Aunt Patty with the words—“I’ve killed a boy. Come quick. He was torturing a beast. He’s out in the garden lying quite still.” And shuddering from head to foot she dragged her aunt out after her. The boy was not dead, but lay as a matter-of-fact unconscious on the path near the back gate. Jane had knocked him down and half throttled him. There had been three boys shooting with sling shots at a lame cat to whose leg they had tied a tin can so that the wretched beast could not get out of range. Jane had seen them from the window and had rushed to the rescue. The affair made something of a stir in the town. It got into the papers. The boy had to be taken to a hospital. Jane’s Uncle Bradford needed all his influence to avert a public scandal. Unfortunately it was not the first case of Jane’s violence that had come to the knowledge of the neighbours. People talked of her as “that savage girl of Izzy’s” and told their children they were not to play with her any more. She was taken out of school for a time.

It is difficult to get at the exact meaning of this story. All that I know is what Jane has told me herself, and she may have exaggerated its social importance. At any rate, to her own mind it was an immense and horrible disgrace. She felt herself a monstrosity, and for weeks could not bear to go into the street. Her Aunt Patience too, had taken a very serious view of the affair. She sent for Jane to come to her in her study the next morning; the child was, I suppose, too nervous and shaken that night to listen to anything in the way of reprimand, and Aunt Patience showed her a riding whip on a peg in the corner against the wall. It was a cowboy quirt, a braided leather thing with a long lash.