She passed through the still kitchen, where old Sophy sat by the warm, bright range. There were potatoes baking, and Sophy’s famous pudding. “How good everything smells,” said Jane.
She smiled at Sophy and went on. The wind was blowing and the sky was clear. There had been no snow, but there were little pools of ice about, and Jane took each one with a slide. She felt a tingling sense of youth and excitation. Back of the garage was a shadowy grove of tall pines which sang and sighed as the wind swept them. There was a young moon above the pines. It seemed to Jane that her soul was lifted to it. She flung up her arms to the moon, and the yellow cape billowed about her.
The shed where the chickens were kept was back of the garage. When Jane opened the door, her old Persian cat, Merrymaid, came out to her, and a puff-ball of a kitten. Jane snapped on the lights in the chicken-house and the biddies stirred. When she snapped them off again, she heard them settle back to sheltered slumber.
The kitten danced ahead of her, and the old cat danced too, as the wind whirled her great tail about. “We won’t go in the house—we won’t go in the house,” said Jane, in a sort of conversational chant, as the pussies followed her down a path which led through the pines. She often walked at this hour—and she loved it best on nights like this.
She felt poignantly the beauty of it—the dark pines and the little moon above them—the tug of the wind at her cloak like a riotous playmate.
Baldy was not the only poet in the family, but Jane’s love of beauty was inarticulate. She would never be able to write it on paper or draw it with a pencil.
Down the path she went, the two pussy-cats like small shadows in her wake, until suddenly a voice came out of the dark.
“I believe it is little Jane Barnes.”
She stopped. “Oh, is that you, Evans? Isn’t it a heavenly night?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Don’t talk that way.”
“Why not?”
“Because an evening like this is like wine—it goes to my head.”
“You are like wine,” he told her. “Jane, how do you do it?”
“Do what?”
“Hold the pose of youth and joy and happiness?”
“You know it isn’t a pose. I just feel that way, Evans.”
“My dear, I believe you do.”
He limped a little as he walked beside her. He was tall and gaunt. Almost grotesquely tall. Yet when he had gone to war he had not seemed in the least grotesque. He had been tall but not thin, and he had gone in all the glory of his splendid youth.
There was no glory left. He was twenty-seven. He had fought and he would fight again for the same cause. But his youth was dead, except when he was with Jane. She revived him, as he said, like wine.
“I was coming over,” he began, and broke off as a sibilant sound interrupted him.
“Oh, are the cats with you? Well, Rusty must take the road,” he laughed as the little old dog trotted to neutral ground at the edge of the grove. Rusty was friends with Merrymaid, except when there were kittens about. He knew enough to avoid her in days of anxious motherhood.
Jane picked up the kitten. “They would come.”
“All animals follow you. You’re sort of a domestic Circe—with your dogs and chickens and pussy-cats in the place of tigers and lions and leopards.”
“I’d love to have lived in Eden,” said Jane, unexpectedly, “before Eve and Adam sinned. What it must have meant to have all those great beasts mild-mannered and purring under your hand like this kitten. What a dreadful thing happened, Evans, when fear came into the world.”
“What makes you say that now, Jane?” His voice was sharp.
“Shouldn’t I have said it? Oh, Evans, you can’t think I had you in mind——”
“No,” with a touch of weariness, “but you are the only one, really, who knows what a coward I am——”
“Evans, you’re not.”
“You’re good to say it, but that’s what I came over for. I am up against it again, Jane. Some cousins are on from New York—they’re at the New Willard—and Mother and I went in to see them last night. They have invited us to go back with them. They’ve a big house east of Fifth Avenue, and they want us as their guests indefinitely. They think it will do me a lot of good—get me out of myself, they call it. But I can’t see it. Since I came home—every time I think of facing mobs of people”—again his voice grew sharp—“I’m clutched by something I can’t describe. It is perfectly unreasonable, but I can’t help it.”
For a moment they walked in silence, then he went on—“Mother’s very keen about it. She thinks it will set me up. But I want to stay here—and I thought if you’d talk to her, she’ll listen to you, Jane—she always does.”
“Does she know how you feel about it?”
“No, I think not. I’ve never told her. I’ve only spilled over to you now and then. It would hurt Mother, no end, to know how changed I am.”
Jane laid her hand on his arm. “You’re not. Brace up, old dear. You aren’t dead yet.” As she lifted her head to look up at him, the hood of her cape slipped back, and the wind blew her soft, thick hair against his cheek. “But I’ll talk to your mother if you want me to. She is a great darling.”
Jane meant what she said; she was really very fond of Mrs. Follette. And in this she was unlike the rest of the folk in Sherwood. Mrs. Follette was extremely unpopular in the Park.
They had reached the kitchen door. “Won’t you come in?” Jane said.
“No, I’ve got to get back. I only ran over for a moment. I have to have a daily sip of you, Jane.”
“Baldy’s bringing a steak for dinner. Help us eat it.”
“Sorry, but Mother would be alone.”
“When shall I talk to her?”
“There’s no hurry. The cousins are staying on for the opening of Congress. Jane dear, don’t despise me——” His voice broke.
“Evans, as if I could.”
Again her hand was on his arm. He laid his own over it. “You’re the best ever, Janey,” he said, huskily—and presently he went away.
Jane, going in, found that Baldy had telephoned. “He kain’t git here until seven,” Sophy told her.
“You had better run along home,” Jane told her. “I’ll cook the steak when it comes.”
Sophy was old and she was tired. Life hadn’t been easy. The son who was to have been the prop of her old age had been killed in France. There was a daughter’s daughter who had gone north and who now and then sent money. Old Sophy did not know where her granddaughter got the money, but it was good to have it when it came. But it was not enough, so old Sophy worked.
“I hates to leave you here alone, Miss Janey.”
“Oh, run along, Sophy. Baldy will come before I know it.”
So Sophy went and Jane waited. Seven o’clock arrived, with the dinner showing signs of deterioration. Jane sat at the front window and watched. The old cat watched, too, perched on the sill, and gazing out into the dark with round, mysterious eyes. The kitten slept