not half as bad,” said Alec solemnly, “and that’s what makes me think it’s serious. Other times she’d be screaming and throwing herself all over the place. This time she’s lying still and mum. When Mrs. Douglas is mum she is pretty sick, you bet.”
“You don’t like old Mrs. Douglas?” said Anne curiously.
“I like cats as IS cats. I don’t like cats as is women,” was Alec’s cryptic reply.
Janet came home in the twilight.
“Mrs. Douglas is dead,” she said wearily. “She died soon after I got there. She just spoke to me once—’I suppose you’ll marry John now?’ she said. It cut me to the heart, Anne. To think John’s own mother thought I wouldn’t marry him because of her! I couldn’t say a word either — there were other women there. I was thankful John had gone out.”
Janet began to cry drearily. But Anne brewed her a hot drink of ginger tea to her comforting. To be sure, Anne discovered later on that she had used white pepper instead of ginger; but Janet never knew the difference.
The evening after the funeral Janet and Anne were sitting on the front porch steps at sunset. The wind had fallen asleep in the pinelands and lurid sheets of heat-lightning flickered across the northern skies. Janet wore her ugly black dress and looked her very worst, her eyes and nose red from crying. They talked little, for Janet seemed faintly to resent Anne’s efforts to cheer her up. She plainly preferred to be miserable.
Suddenly the gate-latch clicked and John Douglas strode into the garden. He walked towards them straight over the geranium bed. Janet stood up. So did Anne. Anne was a tall girl and wore a white dress; but John Douglas did not see her.
“Janet,” he said, “will you marry me?”
The words burst out as if they had been wanting to be said for twenty years and MUST be uttered now, before anything else.
Janet’s face was so red from crying that it couldn’t turn any redder, so it turned a most unbecoming purple.
“Why didn’t you ask me before?” she said slowly.
“I couldn’t. She made me promise not to — mother made me promise not to. Nineteen years ago she took a terrible spell. We thought she couldn’t live through it. She implored me to promise not to ask you to marry me while she was alive. I didn’t want to promise such a thing, even though we all thought she couldn’t live very long — the doctor only gave her six months. But she begged it on her knees, sick and suffering. I had to promise.”
“What had your mother against me?” cried Janet.
“Nothing — nothing. She just didn’t want another woman — ANY woman — there while she was living. She said if I didn’t promise she’d die right there and I’d have killed her. So I promised. And she’s held me to that promise ever since, though I’ve gone on my knees to her in my turn to beg her to let me off.”
“Why didn’t you tell me this?” asked Janet chokingly. “If I’d only KNOWN! Why didn’t you just tell me?”
“She made me promise I wouldn’t tell a soul,” said John hoarsely. “She swore me to it on the Bible; Janet, I’d never have done it if I’d dreamed it was to be for so long. Janet, you’ll never know what I’ve suffered these nineteen years. I know I’ve made you suffer, too, but you’ll marry me for all, won’t you, Janet? Oh, Janet, won’t you? I’ve come as soon as I could to ask you.”
At this moment the stupefied Anne came to her senses and realized that she had no business to be there. She slipped away and did not see Janet until the next morning, when the latter told her the rest of the story.
“That cruel, relentless, deceitful old woman!” cried Anne.
“Hush — she’s dead,” said Janet solemnly. “If she wasn’t — but she IS. So we mustn’t speak evil of her. But I’m happy at last, Anne. And I wouldn’t have minded waiting so long a bit if I’d only known why.”
“When are you to be married?”
“Next month. Of course it will be very quiet. I suppose people will talk terrible. They’ll say I made enough haste to snap John up as soon as his poor mother was out of the way. John wanted to let them know the truth but I said, ‘No, John; after all she was your mother, and we’ll keep the secret between us, and not cast any shadow on her memory. I don’t mind what people say, now that I know the truth myself. It don’t matter a mite. Let it all be buried with the dead’ says I to him. So I coaxed him round to agree with me.”
“You’re much more forgiving than I could ever be,” Anne said, rather crossly.
“You’ll feel differently about a good many things when you get to be my age,” said Janet tolerantly. “That’s one of the things we learn as we grow older — how to forgive. It comes easier at forty than it did at twenty.”
Chapter XXXV.
The Last Redmond Year Opens
“Here we are, all back again, nicely sunburned and rejoicing as a strong man to run a race,” said Phil, sitting down on a suitcase with a sigh of pleasure. “Isn’t it jolly to see this dear old Patty’s Place again — and Aunty — and the cats? Rusty has lost another piece of ear, hasn’t he?”
“Rusty would be the nicest cat in the world if he had no ears at all,” declared Anne loyally from her trunk, while Rusty writhed about her lap in a frenzy of welcome.
“Aren’t you glad to see us back, Aunty?” demanded Phil.
“Yes. But I wish you’d tidy things up,” said Aunt Jamesina plaintively, looking at the wilderness of trunks and suitcases by which the four laughing, chattering girls were surrounded. “You can talk just as well later on. Work first and then play used to be my motto when I was a girl.”
“Oh, we’ve just reversed that in this generation, Aunty. OUR motto is play your play and then dig in. You can do your work so much better if you’ve had a good bout of play first.”
“If you are going to marry a minister,” said Aunt Jamesina, picking up Joseph and her knitting and resigning herself to the inevitable with the charming grace that made her the queen of housemothers, “you will have to give up such expressions as ‘dig in.’”
“Why?” moaned Phil. “Oh, why must a minister’s wife be supposed to utter only prunes and prisms? I shan’t. Everybody on Patterson Street uses slang — that is to say, metaphorical language — and if I didn’t they would think me insufferably proud and stuck up.”
“Have you broken the news to your family?” asked Priscilla, feeding the Sarah-cat bits from her lunchbasket.
Phil nodded.
“How did they take it?”
“Oh, mother rampaged. But I stood rockfirm — even I, Philippa Gordon, who never before could hold fast to anything. Father was calmer. Father’s own daddy was a minister, so you see he has a soft spot in his heart for the cloth.
