Janet: Her Winter in Quebec/Chapter 19
CHAPTER NINETEEN
"DO you mean walk, or ride?"
"I meant to walk."
"To the toll-gate?"
"Why not? If need be, you can bring me home in a cab."
Janet departed without a word. When she came back, hat and coat in hand, she spoke.
"Rob," she said; "it's too jolly."
And Rob made swift answer,—
"No; just jolly enough."
Down in his secret heart, though, Rob felt assured that nothing was jolly enough to account for his mood, that first morning in March. Life's smile was broadened to a grin of sheer hilarity. Day, dressed and looking her old blithe self, had come to breakfast, that morning, for the first time. In honour of the great event, Mrs. Leslie had prepared an extra feast, and Ronald had delayed for half an hour his start down town, in order to share in the general rejoicing. There had been a box of violets from Sir George Porteous and, just as they were leaving the table, the postman had brought in the New York letters. There had been three of them, one for Ronald from Sidney, and two for Rob. The more bulky one he had laid aside to feast on at his leisure, for it was from Wade Winthrop, and the past three weeks had taught Rob that Wade Winthrop's letters were worthy to be read with care and more than once. The other was from Rob's New York doctor, short and crispy. Rob's hurried going from New York had left but one course open: the placing the case in the hands of a doctor in Quebec, who should keep in constant communication with the specialist at home. That morning's letter, called forth by the latest bulletin, brought news of the dismissal of the new masseuse, coupled with elaborate instructions for a series of daily walks, to begin at once and to increase as time went on. The letter closed with a succinct phrase: "I have done all I can. Now it is for you to finish up your perfect cure."
And, with that phrase still ringing in his head, Rob had risen and, coffee cup in hand, in an incoherent speech, he had proposed the health of Day, of the New York specialist and of the Exeter football team. That drunk and the chairs pushed back from the table, Rob had gone in search of his hat, then of Janet.
It had been nearly three o'clock in the morning when the cab, with Ronald and Rob inside, had driven from the ferry-house up Mountain Hill and into Saint Louis Street. Nevertheless, even at that unseemly hour, Janet's nose had been pressed against the window. A moment later, Janet's right hand had thrown open the door, her left had seized on Rob's cold wrist and dragged him into the warm, bright hall.
"She's really and truthfully better, and I'm so glad you've come! Are you dead, you poor thing? She's asleep; but she knew you were on the way," Janet whispered tempestuously. "Come to the library fire. I'll take your coat and things." And Rob, dazed by the light and warmth and welcome, by the sharp reaction from his fears, yielded and let her fuss over him and coddle him at will.
Nevertheless, in spite of the allaying of his active fears, his heart sank again when he learned how ill Day had been, how very ill she was then. There had been a sudden chill, followed by a total neglect of certain symptoms. Twenty-four hours later, Mrs. Argyle had come back from Montreal to find Day curled up on her bed, her eyes glittering with fever, her breath coming short, her cough incessant. The girl had made light of her cough, had maintained a sturdy silence regarding the dull pain that had settled on her whole body. Mrs. Argyle had waited until the next morning. Then she had sent for a doctor, and, later in the morning, she had telegraphed for her husband and Rob. Twenty-four hours later, the more alarming symptoms were in check; two weeks later, the disease and the consequent weakness were still dragging out their wonted course. Day's tardy yielding to the disease had retarded by just so much her yielding to its cure. By the end of the second week, she was still in her own room.
Thither Rob had followed her as soon as he was allowed to do so, and for as long. During the first days after his return, however, he was permitted in the room only for occasional five-minute calls. The calls, elaborately made on the points of his toes and with his heart in his throat, had sent him away from the room again in a mood of deepest depression. This was no Day he had ever known, this wan, white-faced thing with the weak voice and the lustreless eyes. He stood and stared down at her dumbly, then mumbled a word or two and fled from the room before the end of his allotted five minutes. Later, he walked his room for hours on end, or forced himself to dreary games of solitaire wherein his question yes or no was answered by the falling of the cards. And the questions always framed themselves on Day's recovery, and the answer was too often no. Still, the cards could never tell the truth; and, at least, they were better than trying to read. Then fate dealt him six noes in succession, and he rose to pace the floor again until it should be time for his next call.
In hours like this, Janet Leslie was his great source of consolation. Full of her old cordial friendliness, resolved at any cost to make amends for the black shadow she had thrown upon their past good times, the girl had adopted Rob Argyle as her own especial care. Mrs. Argyle was all absorbed in her attendance on the nurse and Day, Mrs. Leslie in her attendance upon Mrs. Argyle. Janet struck out upon a new line of usefulness and made up her resolute young mind that Rob needed attention as much as any of the rest. She gave it to him unreservedly. Now she came sweeping in upon him, abolished his cards and substituted a Latin exercise which she claimed she could not ferret out alone. Then she moved softly across the twilight-darkened room, to fall in step beside him and talk to him with a steady persistency which broke down his dreary mood. Again, when the tense quiet of the afternoon rest hour lay on the house, she coaxed him out for a turn on the terrace, or a ride around the loop in the flat-wheeled car that clanked a monotonous accompaniment to all their random talk. And Rob came in, refreshed and brightened, from all these little jaunts. Moreover, he carried the brightening with him, later, when he went in to visit Day.
Next to Janet, to his surprise, in these days of dreary waiting, he turned to Ronald. His turning was not wholly due to Ronald's greeting, at the end of that tragic night of ice and storm. In his mood, that night, Rob Argyle would have sworn undying regard for anyone who brought good news of Day. Ronald's face had been enough to tell that, for Ronald himself, the news brought no impersonal gladness. Nevertheless, in the days which followed his return, Rob was studying Ronald as never before, studying him in the light of his long talks with Wade Winthrop and with Sidney Stayre. Up to that time, although he had had some vague realization that Ronald had been disappointed by the sudden reversing of all his plans, Rob had had no real notion of how bitter that disappointment was. To his mind, college meant little for a fellow who did not care to go in for athletics. If the grind were all, or if society, he could do those of an evening, after he had clambered down from his office stool. Lacking, too, all knowledge of the Leslies in their more prosperous days, he had had scanty comprehension of how great in comparison was their present shabbiness, their present need for scrimping. Until his last long talk with Wade, he had supposed it was from careless choice, not stern necessity, that Ronald wore a last-year tie and forewent a hemstitched border to his handkerchiefs. He had made summary comment, one night, on Ronald's tastelessness in the minor articles of dress. Even now, he laughed to himself as he recalled Sidney's swift denunciations of his comment. Janet, in the snow-bound library, had been scarcely more vehement, more sweeping. Nevertheless, now that he was back in Quebec and face to face with the tall young Canadian, Rob could realize to the full how much such petty denials could have the power to exasperate him. To Rob Argyle, denied in nothing save a concrete knowledge of the value of money, it seemed that it would be far easier to give up a year in Europe than to wear clothing of a past year's cut. To wear it at all took some backbone. To wear it and, still hating it, to treat it with seeming unconsciousness, in Rob's eyes, amounted to the heroic. And, if it were so in the matter of clothes, how about some other things?
In his long, idle days of waiting, Rob pondered much upon the question. Strange to say, he had never discussed with Day this phase of Ronald's life. Rob had avoided the subject from the inherent masculine hatred of petty gossip, Day from a sense that Ronald's confidence had closed her lips, when otherwise she might have spoken. Now at last, however, there seemed to have come home to Rob the consciousness of just what Ronald Leslie's present life might be meaning to him.
"We're all alike," he remarked to himself, one night. "None of us are quite satisfied with what we get out of the grab bag. I hanker for the gridiron, Ronald hankers for the fleshpots. Even Blanchard has his hankerings. Good old Jack! I wonder what's become of him."
The wonder was answered, next day, when Rob was summoned to the telephone. Blanchard, back from his run to the south, had called him up to ask for Day first, then for Rob himself. And Rob had said to his father, as he had left the telephone,—
"Funny thing how you happen on a man and, all at once, feel you're going to know him always! You'll never understand how good that fellow was to me, nor what a gentleman he really is."
Nevertheless, in his more active gratitude to Blanchard, Rob had some shreds left over to give to Ronald Leslie. Even more than Janet, Ronald shared his anxiety for Day, his loneliness without her. Night after night, long after Janet was in bed, the two young fellows sat before the library fire, while Ronald told over to Rob all of Day's doings during the weeks he had been away, told him, too, of the bright, blithe comradeship of the early fall when, sick and sore of heart, tired of his unwonted confinement in the office, Day's gayety had helped to hold him steady on his feet. And Rob, in his turn, talked of New York, of Wade and of Sidney, and of their liking for Ronald. And at last, one night, Rob turned his steady, true blue eyes from the fire and fixed them upon Ronald's face.
"Old man," he said; "I'm not sure I've always been quite fair to you. Maybe you weren't always fair to me. We're of two races, you know, two sorts. Still—let's shake hands on it, and start again."
That had been a week before. And now, with Janet at his side, Rob was walking out the Grande Allée, past the cabstand just outside the Louis Gate, past the Parliament Buildings and on to the crest of the little ridge where Montcalm drew up his soldiers, on that far-off, fateful September day.
Janet caught her breath a little, as she went down the gentle slope beyond.
"It's funny," she said; "but I never come out here, without thinking I see it all. When I was a little bit of a girl, before I knew they fought on foot, I used to think I could hear their horses galloping. But just think, Rob Argyle! Right here in the city, where we go to walk and where our friends all live, those two great nations had their last pitched battle. Doesn't it make you shiver?"
Rob turned up the collar of his coat.
"Not half so much as this beastly wind does," he returned prosaically.
Janet frowned. Her father had been an historian spoiled in the making. The girl's earliest bedtime stories had concerned themselves with that battle-ground.
"How tiresome you are!" she said, with a little laugh. "I suppose it is because I was born here that I care for it. I never pass that field," her finger pointed towards the left; "without thinking that Wolfe was shot there in his brand-new uniform, nor come inside the Louis Gate without remembering the French woman standing there who cried out that her general was killed. It's no use. You strangers never feel it." She began to laugh again. "Did Day write you about the afternoon we took Sir George Porteous out to the Cove?"
Rob shook his head. In spite of the biting wind and of his endeavours to stand upright on the slippery pavements, his whole attention had been concentrated upon Janet, upon her eager face and upon her enthusiasm of the moment before.
"She didn't? It was worth a letter. You see, I know the ground, every inch of it, and love it," she explained. "My father nearly wrote a book about it; and he used to bring me here and talk to me, until I almost felt as if it were my very own, like something that had happened to me. Ronald and I brought Day out here, just before you came, last fall. It's a splendid walk, out across the Plains, and through the woods and over some fences, till you come to the path. Day loved it, and she thought it would be fun to take Sir George. We went out on snowshoes, and he had a fearful time, lost his shoes off, every other step. And, when we got him there and expected him to be thrilled, what do you think he said?"
Again Rob shook his head. He was still watching the eager face, still held by the eager flow of words.
"He said," Janet giggled, as she took on Sir George's level voice; "'Came up here, by George? Why didn't the poor chap wait and build some steps?'"
"Look here, Janet," Rob said suddenly, as they turned away from the simple shaft that marks Wolfe's victorious death; "why don't you write about it all? I don't mean now, of course; but sometime."
Janet's colour came, and went. Then she lowered her eyes, while, half unconsciously, she laid her hand on Rob's arm to steady him over the uneven path which leads back to the Grande Allée.
"I used to think I would," she said slowly. "But now I can't."
"Why not?"
"Because—it went, with all the rest of it."
Her cadence was a falling one. In it, Rob read the presence of a secret he had never guessed.
"What went?" he asked.
"Shall we take the car? No? You are sure you can walk back? I mean my little plan," she answered, with her eyes still on the ground.
"What plan?" he asked again.
"Didn't you know? I thought Sidney might have told you. She is going to college; just the last day or two we were together, she began to talk to me about it, to tease my mother to say I might go, too. Mother wouldn't say. I suppose now that she couldn't; but, the night after I came home, the very night before—"
"Yes, I know," Rob assented gently, for the little quaver in Janet's resolute young voice struck sadly on his ears.
Janet swallowed hard, for a moment.
"That very last night," she went on bravely, then; "I had a talk with my father. He was so dear. He always was, but most so then. He told me he wasn't sure he could arrange it; but that he wished he could. And then he told me—"
This time, although the quaver came again, Rob made no effort to speak. His eyes were dark, dark blue, as he looked out across the distant southern mountains. Janet broke the silence, suddenly, resolutely.
"He told me it had always been his dream to have one of his children finish up his work and write the book. He had supposed it would be Ronald, for boys are usually the ones who do such things; but Ronald was all for science and that sort of thing. And now, if I felt I could do it, would love to do it, he would give me all the training I could get, to fit me for it. All the next night and day, I dreamed about it, dreamed and thought. I was just sitting down to write to Sidney, when—when Ronald came and told us."
Rob's left hand had been buried in the fur-lined pocket of his coat. He took it out and, regardless of who saw him, gave Janet's hand a hearty squeeze.
"You'll do it yet," he said.
She shook her head.
I can't."
Rob laughed at her tone.
"I never heard you say that till now, Janet," he admonished her, with a swift return to his wonted buoyancy. "A fellow can do anything he tries, if he grits his teeth and goes to work."
"A fellow can't make money, where there isn't any," she answered him.
"I'm not so sure of that. Besides, it doesn't take much," Rob reassured her optimistically.
"Not much, if you have a lot," she responded quaintly; "but a great deal, when you haven't any. Besides, your colleges cost more than ours."
"Then go to yours," Rob advised her promptly. But she shook her head.
"You want to go with Sidney, I suppose. You know Day is going, too. She'll go to Smith."
"That is Sidney's College," Janet assented listlessly. "It's where I wanted, meant to go."
"But, if McGill is cheaper?"
She roused herself and spoke with spirit.
"I don't want McGill. My father didn't, either. If I am to do his work, I must learn to see all sides, not sit down and look at it from a hummock on the Cove Fields. If I go to McGill, I shall see our side and nothing else. I love my Canada; it's the best country in the world. Still, I won't do my father's work, unless I can do it in the very best way, and the only way to do that is to learn to look at it from a little farther off."
In the enthusiasm of the moment, Janet's girlishness had fallen from her. She spoke with the purpose, with the steady fire of a grown-up woman. Rob, looking down upon her as she tramped forward at his side, was conscious, in that moment, of a new-born admiration, less for what Janet was than for what she might be in the future years. At last he spoke, and his voice was full of hearty approbation.
"I think you'll make it in the end, Janet. Something will come up to help you put it through."
"But I don't want to be helped," she made undaunted answer.
Laughing a little, Rob held up his stick before her.
"Sometimes a little help is useful," he told her gayly. "At least, it steadies us until we can get back on our feet again." Then the laughter left his eyes, and he looked down at her with the kindly smile of an older brother. "Go on, Janet," he bade her gravely. "You'll win out in the end, if you'll only stick to your plan." And, years afterward, they laughed together over his prophecy and its fulfilment.