Part 9

"Come in, my child, come in," said the kind, welcoming voice as he saw the timid figure at the door.

And Jane-Anne came in with a nervous rush, but she did not forget to shut the door behind her.

She dropped on her knees beside him and seized his hand, kissing it passionately, much to his confusion. He was quite unaccustomed to violent manifestations of feeling, and his long residence in Scotland had increased his natural reserve.

"I know it's you who managed that I shouldn't go back, and I do want so to thank you. You don't know what I feel like. Please, sir, I will try to be useful. Anything you would like me to do----"

Very gently Mr. Wycherly withdrew his hand. "Suppose you sit on a chair," he suggested, "and we will have a chat together."

With stately courtesy, he placed a chair for Jane-Anne, and, seated again in his own revolving-chair, turned to face her.

As always, when much moved, she was very white, and to-night her great eyes were soft and dog-like in their devotion.

"By the way," said Mr. Wycherly, "I haven't forgotten your inquiry about the poem that you cannot remember, and I have marked in a volume of Wordsworth a number of verses dealing with mountains. Perhaps you would like to look through it at your leisure."

"Thank you, sir," Jane-Anne whispered.

"I know nothing," Mr. Wycherly continued, "more annoying than a half-remembered quotation. I sincerely hope that you will soon find it."

For a moment there was silence, then:

"Sir," Jane-Anne said earnestly, "are you very lonely now the young gentlemen have gone back to school?"

"I do miss them greatly of course."

"Do you remember, sir, when you came to see me, when I was in bed the first day I was here, you said when they went back that the sun set for you----"

"Did I?" said Mr. Wycherly, rather surprised at himself.

"You really did, sir, and I wondered whether--though the sun has set--whether you'd let me try--to be a little tiny star--just so you wouldn't feel quite so lonely."

Mr. Wycherly's hand still tingled with the touch of those soft unaccustomed girlish lips, nevertheless he held it out to her, saying, "That will be very kind of you."

Jane-Anne placed her own within it and she did not attempt to kiss Mr. Wycherly's hand again, but she looked at him as though she would read his very soul and asked: "Sir, have you ever heard anything about a place called Greece?"

Mr. Wycherly laughed. "For a considerable portion of my life," he replied, "I have heard about little else."

"Will you tell me things sometimes, sir? Will you?"

"I shall be most happy," said Mr. Wycherly. "You certainly ought to know as much as possible about your father's country--and there is so much to know."

"I have another name," she said suddenly and with apparent irrelevance. "Shall I tell it you? Very few people know."

"Do you mean Stavrides?" Mr. Wycherly asked.

"No, sir, not that; I have another Christian name. Allegra; don't you think it's very pretty?"

"Very," said Mr. Wycherly; "it is a beautiful name, but it isn't Greek."

"I'm called after somebody's daughter that died. I don't know who she was; mother knew. My daddie liked the name. I daresay I shall find out some day all about her."

"I daresay you will," said Mr. Wycherly, and looked hard at Jane-Anne.

"Which would you like to call me?" she asked.

"I shall call you Jane-Anne, not Allegra," Mr. Wycherly said decidedly.

"It's a pretty name," she said wistfully.

"It has rather sad associations for me," he added.

The clock upon the mantelpiece struck nine. Jane-Anne rose. "I must go, sir, now; good night, and thank you."

"Good night, my child. Get strong and rest you merry. And here is the Wordsworth; tell me when you find your poem."

She took from him a large brown volume that bristled with inserted slips of paper. He crossed the room and opened the door for her, and Jane-Anne went out with her head held high. "Just like he did for Mrs. Methuen," she reflected ecstatically.

When she had gone Mr. Wycherly went and stood at the window and looked out into the night. The sky was unclouded, of a deep, soft, soothing blue, and right in a line with his window shone one star.

"I wonder," he pondered, "what made him call her after Byron's daughter."

When Jane-Anne reached the kitchen, proudly bearing her volume of Wordsworth, she found her aunt sitting at the newly scrubbed kitchen table darning a stocking.

"What made you stop so long for?" Mrs. Dew inquired tartly, "hindering and worritin' the master. It don't take half an hour to say 'thank you, and my duty to you.'"

"The master set a chair for me and talked to me," Jane-Anne replied gloriously, "and when I came away he opened the door for me, just like he did for Mrs. Methuen when she came the other day, and he's lent me a great big poetry book. Look at it! Oh, aunt, I do believe the Almighty must be just like Mr. Wycherly."

Mrs. Dew nearly dropped her stocking. "Jane-Anne!" she exclaimed in tones of horrified amazement, "how you can stand there and say such things passes me. Go to bed this minute, you inyuman child. You ought to be ashamed of yourself, that you ought."

"But, aunt," Jane-Anne expostulated, "Miss Stukely, the lady that taught us Sundays, she said we must love God, be always loving Him, and always talking about Him; we couldn't think and talk too much about Him; the more we did it the fitter we'd be for heaven, and I've never seen anybody before as I'd like Him to be like--so where's the harm?"

The child spoke with breathless earnestness.

Mrs. Dew stared at her, intensely disapproving.

"How you can stand there," she repeated; "how you can have the face to stand there and talk about the Almighty bein' _like_ anybody, just as if He was your next door neighbour, turns me cold. Where's your respect? Where's your sense of decency? I'll have none of your revival ways here, I can tell you; quiet, respectable church I've always been, with none of such goin's on. It's quite enough for most of us to do our duty in that station of life without talking familiarly of lovin' and such. _Go_ to bed, I tell you, and let me hear no more of such fandanglements, and I'll come in ten minutes to fetch your candle and bring you that hot milk as is all over skin you've been so long. Now bustle about smartish."

Jane-Anne bustled.

Mrs. Dew leant back in her chair as one quite unable to cope with the force of circumstances.

"My stars! Good fathers!" exclaimed Mrs. Dew. "If that's the sort of thing they teaches at the Bainbridge it's more than time my niece was took away."

Very early next morning Jane-Anne crept out of bed, pulled up her blind, and seized the volume of poetry Mr. Wycherly had lent her. She read till her eyes ached and her head swam; she read without the smallest understanding or enjoyment, but with the greatest care and application, and though there was much about mountains there was nothing that struck the faintest chord of memory in Jane-Anne. Whatever it was that her father had repeated when he used to carry her about, it wasn't there. And yet she was certain about "the mountains." Yes, it was "the mountains."

"I'm afraid he'll have to look again," she said to herself. She had not the smallest doubt that Mr. Wycherly would help her.

It was a very hot May, and as the doctor had said she could not be too much in the fresh air, her aunt, that afternoon, put a little table and chair for her under the apple-tree, gave her some needle-work, and bidding her listen for any bell that might happen to ring, announced her intention of going out to do some household shopping. "Unless anyone calls to see the master it's unlikely that anyone'll come at all," said Mrs. Dew, "and the front door bell's that loud you'll hear it right enough if so be as you don't get moonin'. I shan't be more than a hour."

Shortly after Mrs. Dew's departure Mr. Wycherly came to his window and looked out.

There sat Jane-Anne at the little table covered by a heap of white sewing, and he thought what a pleasant picture she made in her stiff buff frock, so maidenly and sweet, so suitably and sensibly employed on this sunny afternoon in the midst of the green old garden, gay with tulips and fragrant wallflowers.

Suddenly Jane-Anne stooped down and took off her heavy shoes and there and then flung them one after another to the other side of the lawn. Then she removed her stockings. Mr. Wycherly gazed fascinated. What was the child about?

This was soon deplorably evident.

Jane-Anne was taking off her dress.

Mr. Wycherly felt that he ought to go away from that window, but he didn't. He stayed where he was and, what's more, he placed his eyeglasses upon his nose.

She gave herself a complicated kind of shake and the buff abomination fell about her feet in stiff expostulating folds.

Daintily and deliberately, she stepped out of it as though withdrawing her feet from something dirty and distasteful. She wore a skimpy little blue-and-white striped petticoat of cotton; body and skirt in one piece it reached just to her knees, but was sleeveless, and her long, slender arms were bare.

A thrush was singing in the apple-tree and a blackbird warbled loudly in a lilac bush trying to drown the thrush. They sang as though there were no such thing as winter in the world, and neither of them cared a whit for Jane-Anne and her disrobings.

Flinging her white arms above her head, she danced into the middle of the lawn on slim, twinkling white feet and continued to dance all over it with the greatest abandon and enjoyment, while her long black plaits bumped joyously. So light of foot, so variously graceful in her gracious suppleness, with such divine gravity and dainty decorum that Mr. Wycherly watching was fain to take his glasses off and wipe them, for suddenly he could not see as clearly as he wished. Her radiant face was pale, but her wide eyes were full of a gladness that seemed to mirror back the brightness of that May afternoon, and the little petticoat was like the sheath of a flower enfolding and displaying all this happy grace.

Loudly carolled the blackbird, lustily chirruped the thrush, and Jane-Anne danced to their orchestra, and while she danced her mind kept saying: "I've done with it; I've done with it. I shall never go back. Life is before me, a new life; a life full of wonders, and a bedroom to myself, with furniture like looking-glasses; a life with a kind, sensible, if worldly minded aunt, who gives to little girls delicious puddings that they like. A life with books in it, big books; not interesting, perhaps, but very grand and splendid to have lent one. A life that is to be lived under the same roof with a beautiful, kind old gentleman who will perhaps, by-and-bye, let me wait upon him. Oh, wonderful and delicious prospect, to wait upon Mr. Wycherly! To hand him his plate and to pour out--what should she pour out? Wine, she expected, though Miss Stukely said wine was wrong. Not, perhaps, for the gentry, for the _real_ gentry, as her aunt would say. How soft and warm the grass to the bare tripping feet! How kind of those birds to sing like that! How lovely it was to be young and light and to have got rid of heavy shoes and hot, uncomfortable frock. How----"

It was the front door bell.

Jane-Anne heard it and Mr. Wycherly did not.

There certainly was the making of a quick-change artist in Jane-Anne. In a twinkling she had found her shoes and stockings and put them on, and she ran to the house struggling into her dress as she ran.

"You have the Pyrrhic dance as yet, Where has the Pyrrhic phalanx gone?"

said Mr. Wycherly, wondering why she had stopped so suddenly.

*CHAPTER XI*

*THE CULT OF BRUEY*

"The instinct of imitation is implanted in man from childhood, one difference between him and other animals being that he is the most imitative of living creatures." _Poetics_, ARISTOTLE.

Jane-Anne was a true Athenian in that she was ever ready to run after any new thing, and during her last two terms at the Bainbridge the strongest influence in her life was that of her Sunday-school teacher, Miss Stukely.

Jane-Anne whole-heartedly admired Miss Stukely, and where she admired she invariably imitated. Miss Stukely was delicate, and Jane-Anne delighted in her own "crepitations" as being the sincerest sort of flattery of that lady.

Miss Stukely was slender, always elaborately dressed, gentle in manner, with white, heavily ringed hands. She was not, perhaps, beautiful in face, being somewhat sallow with a receding chin; but her expression was kindly, and Jane-Anne read into her face the spiritual excellencies the lady was most fond of extolling. She had a way of closing her eyes when she was most earnest in exhortation that Jane-Anne found very impressive. Moreover, she frequently used a gold-topped smelling bottle, and the possession of a similar restorative was just then Jane-Anne's most cherished aspiration.

To lean back in a chair while inhaling the vinegary fragrance of a cut-glass bottle, to lean back with closed eyes, in an aura of the faintness and exhaustion induced by strong emotion, was to Jane-Anne as the ecstatic vision of a mystic: a state of mind and body only to be attained by profound spiritual exaltation.

She learned by heart with ease. She could reel off any number of appropriate, or quite as often, inappropriate texts; and did so on the smallest provocation, greatly to the indignation of Mrs. Dew, who felt that she required no religious instruction at her niece's hands.

This facility greatly impressed Miss Stukely, who felt that in Jane-Anne she indeed found fertile soil for the good seed, and there was no question whatever that Jane-Anne fully deserved the prize she gained for "Bible-searching."

This prize was the history of one "Bruey," "a little worker for Christ," whose winning personality (Miss Stukely was fond of the word "winning," generally using it in the sense of a successful gainer of souls) seized upon Jane-Anne's imagination till she lived and walked and had her being in that character.

Bruey was just her own age, had "great dark eyes" (Jane-Anne was pleasantly conscious of possessing similar orbs), had palpitations. Jane-Anne couldn't quite achieve these, but felt that crepitations were nearly as good and that she was, at all events, near the rose, if not the royal flower herself.

Bruey had no father (another resemblance) and a mother, who, though an industrious church-worker, was perhaps not quite as understanding and sympathetic as she might have been. Put Mrs. Dew in place of the mother and there you are!

Bruey always read her Bible seated upon a box in her bedroom window; "a folded rug upon this box made it soft and comfortable for a seat." Here she studied the scriptures and said her prayers, watching the sunset the while. She always kept a pencil by her and marked the texts she found most helpful, and Jane-Anne's Bible already was scored heavily in hundreds of places. Its newness (being a prize) was rather afflicting, so she wetted her thumb and doubled down the corners to hasten its look of age and constant use.

The box and the window were denied to Jane-Anne at the Bainbridge, for twelve girls slept in a dormitory where the ledges of the windows were five feet from the ground, and no box of any sort was permitted in an apartment of almost superhuman neatness.

At Jeune Street, too, the room was so small that the window was blocked up by a chest of drawers far too heavy for Jane-Anne to move.

But the moment she came to Holywell she perceived glorious possibilities of Bruey-ness in the fine big bedroom her aunt had given up to her. It is true that the dressing-table stood in the window, but it was an old-fashioned, spindle-legged affair with swing looking-glass attached, quite light and easy to move, and the moment that Jane-Anne could get about without assistance she pulled it back into the room, dragged her empty tin box under the window, and having no shawl, folded her dressing-gown on the top to make it "soft and comfortable for a seat."

As a matter of fact it did nothing of the kind, the box was dinted and lumpy and very hard, but what cared Jane-Anne? Bruey's box was covered with chintz, but that, she felt, was a very minor detail. The main properties were all there--box, window, Bible, little girl.

That the window did not face towards the west was disappointing; that very little sky was to be seen owing to the presence of a tall house just across the yard was rather annoying. Still, there was the box and there was the window, and there was Jane-Anne, ready to throw herself into the part of Bruey with the utmost abandon.

She even improved upon Bruey, grafting on to the character certain attributes of Miss Stukely.

That morning, Mrs. Dew had turned out the kitchen cupboard, and among discarded bottles and boxes Jane-Anne had found a tiny phial that had contained vanilla essence. This she secretly pocketed. She tore a piece off her sponge, thrust it into the little bottle and then hied her to the bath-room where there was some Scrubbs' Ammonia. In a trice the bits of sponge in the bottle were saturated with that pungent fluid. Behold Jane-Anne equipped with a smelling bottle, quite as efficacious if not so handsome as Miss Stukely's.

She sought her bower at seven o'clock, while her aunt was safely engaged in the final preparations for Mr. Wycherly's dinner. She had no time for reading and meditation at bed-time, for Mrs. Dew always came to take away the candle. Her aunt mistrusted Jane-Anne ever since she had set her hair on fire one evening in Jeune Street. When she reached her room she found that her box had been put back in the corner and her dressing-gown was hanging behind the door. This constantly happened.

Jane-Anne muttered something that sounded like "interfering old thing" and hastened to arrange it all again. This didn't take long, and once the stage was set she mounted the box, and gazed out into the uninspiring stone-cutter's yard with a suitable expression of "winning tenderness." Next she closed her eyes wearily and distantly inhaled the Scrubbs' Ammonia in the vanilla bottle. It restored her and she opened her Bible haphazard with a sanctimonious Jack-Horner sort of expression on her thin, eager little face.

She opened at the book of Job.

Now this was unexplored country. Genesis she knew; Kings and Chronicles, and the greater part of the New Testament she had read. But somehow the book of Job hadn't entered into Miss Stukely's scheme of salvation, and Jane-Anne's only acquaintance with Job so far had been in her aunt's phrase, "you'd try the patience of Job," and she had vaguely pictured him as a meek old gentleman tormented by a large family of unruly children.

Montagu and Mr. Wycherly had dipped into "Home Influence" anywhere. This was a new way of reading to her, and she felt she must at once do likewise. So into the end of the book of Job she thrust and started at the words, "Canst thou bind the sweet influences of the Pleiades or loose the bonds of Orion," and read on aloud.

Now, there was in Jane-Anne a fine feeling for the beautiful and she liked the sound of it greatly, her voice growing stronger and more impressive as she read. Especially was she carried away by the description of the horse: "_He paweth in the valley and rejoiceth in his strength; he goeth on to meet the armed men.... He swalloweth the ground with fierceness and rage: neither believeth he that it is the sound of the trumpet. He saith among the trumpets, Ha, ha; and he smelleth the battle afar off, the thunder of the captains and the shouting._"

By this time, quite unconsciously, she had raised her voice very considerably, and she stopped in great confusion as her aunt bounced into the room demanding anxiously: "What ever is the matter? Who're you a-calling out to?"

"I'm only reading to myself," Jane-Anne mumbled.

"Well, I wish you'd read a bit quieter," said Mrs. Dew, "frightening a body to death with 'ha-ha-in's' and sech. An' what are you doin' sitting on that there box as I put away this very afternoon? Why can't you leave it be in the corner?"

Jane-Anne made no reply. It is disconcerting to be snatched suddenly from all the exciting panoply of a battle-field to a mere discussion as to the position of boxes. She felt bewildered and unreal.

"Why don't you answer me?" Mrs. Dew asked impatiently.

"I was reading," Jane-Anne repeated stupidly.

"An' a very bad light to read in," said Mrs. Dew. "You come down into the kitchen an' give me a hand with the master's dinner instead of sittin' hollerin' there, and you put back that box in its proper place."

While Jane-Anne was washing up she remembered with contrition that she had not marked a single text.

In two particulars only did she feel that she could never hope to emulate Bruey. Firstly, because Bruey died in the last chapter of her palpitations. Now nothing was more opposed to Jane-Anne's aims than that she should succumb to her crepitations. Secondly, she felt that she could not hope even to approach Bruey's noble self-abnegation in the matter of hats.

Bruey at first taught her Sunday class wearing a beautiful best hat adorned with roses; but on a senior teacher pointing out that this embellishment might have a bad effect upon the morals of her infant scholars, she begged her mother to remove the offending garniture and replace it by a simple ribbon.

Never, Jane-Anne was assured, could she attain to such heights of self-denial. She never had possessed a hat with roses, but if she ever did--not all the Sunday-school teachers in creation should wrest them from her. On that point her determination was rooted. She would follow Bruey in all else but death-beds and hats. At present she felt that her hat would not excite any emotion save loathing in no matter how frivolous a breast. But if ever the day came--after all, Miss Stukely had hydrangeas in her hat--and there was no need to model herself slavishly on Bruey.

Much as she loved Mr. Wycherly, he caused her some heart-searching. She adored him. To her, he seemed to combine in his own person every kind and gracious and beautiful quality; but so far he had not said any "good words" to her except that twice he had murmured, "God bless you." Not one text had he quoted when they spake together, nor had he asked her any of those searching intimate questions as to her spiritual condition, that she found so exciting and so wonderfully easy to answer satisfactorily.

She had the true mystic's sense of nearness to the unseen; and in giving to the lonely child this feeling of fellowship with the saints, this serene confidence in Heaven's interference in her affairs, Miss Stukely and Bruey, between them, had bestowed on her a real and precious gift.

But they had also created a mental pose. They had imbued her with a sense of pious security that armed her against endeavour. What she did easily she did well. What she disliked and found difficult she did not try to do at all, and any unpleasantness resulting from such inactivity she looked upon as a "cross." So long as she was meek and patient under rebuke; so long as she turned the other cheek to the smiter and bore no malice, she felt that she had done all that could be expected of her.

For instance, in the matter of the box, it seemed absolutely vital to her that she should read her Bible and meditate in Bruey's fashion no matter how the constant disturbance of the said box annoyed her aunt.