Canfield seemed reluctant to assume the care of the child, even with Katie's help, and had suggested that I accompany her.
I backed the idea enthusiastically until I learned that Mrs. When Lydia Canfield wrote Mother, suggesting that Jane spend the summer with her, it was felt the change might do her good-take her out of herself a bit. I was very fond of Jane, and I tried to interest her in other things, such as the dolls Charlotte and I used to play with, or my bicycle, or any of the other oddments that remained around the house, but nothing roused more than a polite interest. She read, or sketched-she was quite gifted with her pencil-or just sat dreaming into space. She was bright and well-mannered and sweet, but she rarely laughed and I never saw her really play. My mother and father, Martha and Charles Amory, took Jane, and gave her warmth and love and security, but Jane was still unnaturally withdrawn. No one saw it happen, and John never regained consciousness, so the cause of the accident has always been a mystery.
John, grasping the reins and striving to control the animal, was dragged quite horribly for some distance. No one has ever been able to understand what the horse shied at, what frightened him so that he must have reared and turned, tipping the buggy and throwing Charlotte so hard against a great tree trunk that she died instantly. They had been driving their quiet old horse hitched to the buggy, for even though many people have automobiles now, Charlotte still liked the gentle pace of horse travel better than the dust and noise of motor cars. Jane had been orphaned the year before when her mother, my elder sister Charlotte, and her father, Mrs.
Canfield, with the almost equally elderly, if more friendly, maid, Katie, and with my niece, nine-year-old Jane Canfield, was less than appealing. The year was 1912, I was just eighteen, and the thought of leaving Martin Driscoll and being cooped up for the shining vacation months with elderly and quite awe-inspiring Mrs. Times when the chill within us comes not from fears we know, but from fears unknown-and forever unknowable.īut on that sunny June afternoon when Jane and I first arrived at her grandmother's house in Lynn, my greatest fear was that I should be overcome by loneliness and boredom before the summer was done. There are times when the midsummer sun strikes cold, and when the leaping flames of a hearthfire give no heat.
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