It wasn’t just empty praise, either. Jacqueline knew she was a great help—much more help, she told herself proudly, than little Caroline, afraid of boys and cows, could ever have been. With Nellie’s assistance, Jacqueline washed and dressed the babies, and made the beds, and swept and tidied up the rooms. She saw to it that Nellie kept the little ones quite out of earshot through the long day. She cooked—no pretty-pretend cooking at all, but great pans of her famous Johnny-cake, and stacks of toast, and quarts of apple-sauce, platters of scrambled eggs, and mounds of mashed potato, crocks full of sugar cookies, and when Aunt Martha found her the place in the recipe book, big sheets of soft gingerbread. She couldn’t make pie crust or white bread, but she stirred up Graham bread, after Aunt Martha had shown her how, and she had good luck with it.
“You’re a born cook, Jackie,” Aunt Martha told her.
Neil and Dickie were called upon to wash the dishes. That was their share of the extra work, caused by Grandma’s illness, so Aunt Martha said. Ralph for his part had to take on many outdoor jobs and responsibilities which had been Aunt Martha’s, and Aunt Martha meantime was doing night and day the work of two nurses, and half of her own outdoor work and of Grandma’s indoor work besides.
Life at the farm in those days was strenuous, you may well believe. Jacqueline hadn’t dreamed that any one could take in a day as many steps as she now took in Caroline’s old sneakers, nor could be so tired at night. But she went about her tasks uncomplaining, with a subdued manner which all the young folk shared. For Grandma, dear little spry Grandma, who had worked so hard, as Jacqueline realized, now that Grandma’s chores in part were hers, might never step-step it round the kitchen again. The doctor came twice a day, and Aunt Martha’s face had not even a twisted smile.
At first Jacqueline hadn’t time to think. She just did the things that had to be done. But as the days passed, and she grew tired and saw Aunt Martha growing tired, too, she asked herself: what’s the use? Money to hire nurses would relieve them both, and she had money—quite a lot of money. At least she had heard people at the school say she was an heiress, and she knew she had always been given plenty of money when she asked for it. She could ask for it now. She would go to the Gildersleeves.
No, she couldn’t go to the Gildersleeves, for there was her promise to Caroline. She wished she had never given it. She had known when she gave it, like a silly, that she was going to regret it. But just the same, a promise was a promise. It wouldn’t be fair now, when things were so hard at the farm, to ask Caroline to give up the piano, and the cool rooms, and the pretty frocks that she so loved, and never would have again, poor kid! and come and take her rightful place with the Conways.
Well, she wouldn’t go to the Gildersleeves, but she’d write home for money—a lot of money! She couldn’t write to Uncle Jimmie and Aunt Edie, for they were honeymooning all over the surface of Alaska, nor to Auntie Blair, for she was somewhere on the shores of the Great Lakes. But she could write to Auntie Blair’s father, Judge Blair, who with Aunt Edie shared her guardianship. Only he would address his reply—and the money!—to Jacqueline Gildersleeve, and Caroline would get them, because in Longmeadow Caroline was Jacqueline. That wouldn’t do at all. He must address his letter to Caroline Tait and then Jacqueline would receive it. But in order to get him to do such an extraordinary thing, she would have to explain to him how she happened to have become Caroline. Oh, shivering chimpanzees, and also woolly rhinoceroses! For Jacqueline was afraid of Judge Blair, if she was afraid of anybody, and besides, like a blundering grown-up, he would probably write straight off to the Gildersleeves and tell them everything that she had told him.
At last she decided that whatever she did, she would see Caroline first. Perhaps they could arrange something between them. Why couldn’t Judge Blair send the money to Jacqueline (that is, to Caroline), and Caroline take it, and give it to the real Jacqueline? Why, of course, that was the way out of her difficulties, and she need only see Caroline right straight off, and tell her about it.
It took Jacqueline some time to think this all out. She hadn’t had to do a great deal of thinking for herself in her life, and this problem was what her new Uncle Jimmie would have called “intrikut.” Besides she had to give a great many of her thoughts just now to the children, and the cooking, and Aunt Martha, who kept forgetting to eat, and poor Grandma, who was always there in the back of her mind, and the depth of her heart.
But the day came, after a week of dragging days that seemed a year, when the doctor looked quite cheerful after his morning visit, and said he wouldn’t need to come again until to-morrow. Aunt Martha turned from seeing him out at the door, with a smile that wasn’t a bit twisted, and when Jacqueline saw that smile, her head began to swim for joy, and her eyes went misty.