Jane Journeys On

by Ruth Comfort Mitchell

But for the most part her mood was one of amazing gentleness and serenity, with that insistent desire for being good enough and worthy enough for the glory about to descend upon her. She made little pilgrimages to all the people they had helped together,—to Ethel and Jerry and Billiken in Rochester, snugly prosperous and happy, with a little Jerry, now, whose ears flanged exactly as his father's did; to Chicago, to confer with little Miss Marjorie and the Roderick Frosts about the making of the old house where Roderick IV was born into a Maternity Home, and to gladden the good little Stranger's Friend with a fat check for her work, and to puncture Mrs. Mussel's gloom with substantial gifts and the bright and bonny refurnishing of the Christian room for girls such as Edna Miles pretended to be; to catch up with the girl who had taken her "Crowded Hour" to success, always on tour now, in one of her playlets, and married to the brother of "Brother" ("Brother" himself having given up and gone to make the long fight on the desert). She went, fur-bundled and red-cheeked, to spend a week-end with Deacon Gillespie and "Angerleek" at Three Meadows, and found one of the daughters at home, and the old man told her that two of the sons were coming for their summer vacations. Angelique was animated with timid cheer; he'd been different, gentler, since Danny....

Jane went back to New York with June in her heart. Was not this a part of her life with Michael since he had sent her to that lean, clean island to snare back her soul? This was part of the harvest they had sown together, for everything she had done since coming to know him had been shared with him. There came a moment, of course, when her sense of sanctification broke like a bubble. "I feel like the Elsie Books," she said, grinning her boy's grin at herself. "I'd better go home and let Mrs. Wetherby put me in my place!"

But even in her Vermont village she found balm. They might hold, with Mrs. Hills, that "Praise to the face is open disgrace," and be chary of effusions, but Jane Vail was the brightest jewel in their crown, and it was only the deafest and dimmest old ladies who asked her if she was still going on with her literary work.

Mrs. Wetherby, although she would never forgive Jane to her dying day, was clearly thankful to have Martin all to herself. She fed him to repletion and washed and ironed his silk shirts with her own hands, and she loved to say at meetings of The Ladies' Aid or The Tuesday Club, "Well, Marty says his mother's his girl!" Martin himself was heavily cheerful; he could see that Edward R. Hunter was pretty much tied down. It would not be very long, now, before there was no "Asst." in front of the "Cashier" on his door at the bank.

The Hunters had now what the humorist, Edward R., called "almost three children," and they were building on a new nursery which would be, without doubt, a hot, pink one. They had a little way of saying, "What have you been writing lately, Janey?" which conveyed, pleasantly but unmistakably, that people with their full and busy lives could not be expected to keep up with all the lighter current literature. Sarah Farraday, her earnest, blonde face a little lined and sharpened, had more piano pupils than she could possibly manage; two of her older girls were taking the beginners for her, and there was a recital almost every month in the burlapped studio where once the chubby driving horses had been housed. And in the old, elm-shaded house where the middle-aged maid still held sway, and where Aunt Lydia Vail had lived and died in her plump and pleasant creed, Jane and Sarah spent the night together, and this time there was no sprightly talk of Michael Daragh or Rodney Harrison and no pungent comparisons of them and their feelings for her; she was not talking now, the nimble-tongued Miss Vail, but the friend of her youth looked long at her glowing face, her deeply joyful eyes, and wondered, and sighed a little, and went back to talk of her most brilliant pupils and the worrying way her mother had of taking hard colds and keeping them....

Jane came away from her village with an entirely clear conscience; no one needed her there. She was her own woman, without let or hindrance, with a shining sense of good work and good works she could wait for the joy which was coming as certainly as the morning.

Then she came in late, one evening, to find Michael Daragh at the dinner table, a little browned and warmed from good sea air, and Emma Ellis was there—Mrs. Hills having telephoned and asked her to come to dinner and welcome home the wanderer—and at once the old life, the old routine, the old world, seemed to open and swallow him completely.

Lying wide-eyed in the dark, hours later, Jane told herself that even in the midst of the watching boarders his look and word for her had been filled with meaning; that it was inevitable that he should take Emma Ellis home to Hope House; that there had been no opportunity to ask her to wait up for him; that she had done the only possible thing in taking a bright and cheery leave of Mrs. Hills and coming up to her rooms. She had waited an hour in her sitting room—Michael Daragh had often dropped in for a chat before she went to Mexico—but when at last she heard his feet upon the stairs, they had carried him steadily on and up to his own floor.

And the next day and the day after that she told herself that it was perfectly natural for Hope House and Agnes Chatterton and kindred calls to fill his every hour. She was waiting happily and surely, and a special delivery letter from Rodney Harrison hardly registered on her consciousness when Mabel brought it up to her one afternoon. It was a brief letter, turgid, almost fierce in its tone. Rodney Harrison was not going to be put off any longer, it appeared. He would meet Jane at the theater that evening (where she must go to pass upon the performance of a new character-man in her second gay little play) and then she was going to supper with him, and to drive in his new speedster, and to make up her mind—no, not that, he'd made it up for her, once and for all—but to settle this matter definitely and right. She read it with an indulgent smile and put it down on her desk. Good old Rodney ... good old man-she-met-on-the-boat....

Her telephone rang at her elbow. She had had a soft little sleigh bell substituted for the harsh, commercial clang and even the most utilitarian call took on a tone of revelry, but now it had an especially gay and lilting sound, she thought. Michael Daragh's voice over the wire lacked its usual quality of serenity; he sounded unsure of himself; almost—shy, and Jane's grip on the receiver grew taut and her cheeks flamed.