CHAPTER XVII

“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.