Groans and headshakings followed this remark. Apparently none of the women present felt any confidence in the ability of their respective men to run the domestic machinery.
“Well, Mis’ Erlock was a mighty good housekeeper herself,” observed one of them. “And I reckon Jake thinks it wouldn’t be showing proper respect to her memory to let everything go at loose ends now she’s gone. I tell you, Jake’s an uncommon good man in more ways than one. ’Tain’t everybody that would stay single as long as he has, but that’s just what I expected from the feelings he showed at the funeral, and it coming so long afterward too.”
A murmur of assent showed that the speaker was not the only one who remembered the emotion of the bereaved man on that mournful occasion, which, as had been suggested, occurred some time after his wife’s death, the delay of the sermon devoted to her memory being occasioned, as often happens in country districts of the West and South, by the absence of the preacher proper, whose extended circuit gives him but a portion of the year in one place.
“Well, ’twas to his credit, of course,” observed an elderly woman who was shelling peas; “but I must say I don’t like this way of putting off the funeral so long. I think burying people and preaching about ’em ought to go together, and if you can’t have your own preacher, you’d better put up with somebody else, or go without.”
“I don’t know about that,” said the young woman with the baby. “It looks to me as if folks were in a mighty hurry to get the last word said when they can’t wait for the right one to say it. I shouldn’t want my husband to be so keen to get through with it all, if ’twas me that was taken.”
“Maybe you’d want him to do like the man that took his second wife to hear his first wife’s funeral,” retorted the other.
The defender of local custom admitted, in the midst of a general laugh, that this was carrying it too far, and then the conversation turned on the probability of Jake Erlock’s marrying again, the various suitable persons to be found should he feel so inclined, and the importance in general of men having some one to take care of them, and of women having men and their houses to take care of.
The subject which, with its ramifications, seemed fairly inexhaustible was making Kate Northmore yawn and had fairly driven Esther from the room, when a young man with a bright, sunburned face and a pair of straight, broad shoulders looked in at the window.
“My, how good it smells in here!” he exclaimed in a voice that went well with the face. “What all are we going to have for dinner, Aunt Jenny?”
Mrs. Elwell, who was testing the heat of the oven on a plump bare arm, turned a flushed face and motherly smile on the speaker.