Janet managed very well, with Martin trotting at her heels to tell her where things could be found. She heated the water, warmed the blankets, and even rummaged out the tea caddy and brewed a cup of hot tea for the weary mother.
"You are a real blessing, my dear," said the woman as she put down the empty cup. "This boy has been sick with croup all night and I had quite forgotten that I had no breakfast."
"Has his father gone for the doctor?" Janet asked, as she brought out a cushion for the baby, who seemed to be quieter now and almost ready to drop asleep.
"No," replied the woman briefly.
She offered no explanation. It was evidently not a thing to be expected that Anthony Crawford should take an interest in an ailing child.
As Janet went back and forth, she was struck by the surprising charm that the old house showed within, quite out of keeping with its littered door-yard and outward disrepair. The white woodwork had gone long unpainted, it was true, and the floors were worn and uneven, but there was an airy spaciousness in the rooms, a comfortable dignity in the old mahogany furniture, and the grace of real beauty in the curved white staircase with its dark, polished rail. Everything was spotlessly clean, from the faded rag rugs to the cracked panes of the windows. The kitchen was, to her, the place of chief delight, for it ran all across the back of the house, with a row of low windows wreathed in ivy and commanding a wide view across the meadow lands beside the river. There was a modern cooking stove at one end of the room, a cheap, hideous, ineffective affair, but at the other was still the old fireplace, with its swinging crane, its warming cupboards, and its broad, stone-flagged hearth.
The baby was so much better that his mother was actually able to smile and to lean back contentedly in the corner of the bench.
"He is better off out here in the air," she said. "I believe he will be able to sleep in a little while. Now if I just had a strip of flannel to wrap around his chest! You would have to go up into the garret to look for it, and maybe rummage in one or two of the boxes. But I believe there should be some in the big cedar chest back under the eaves."
Guided by the faithful Martin, Janet climbed the stairs to the garret, where, in the warm, dusty air that smelled of hot shingles and lavender, she went poking about, seeking the roll of flannel that Mrs. Crawford assured her was there. She could find everything else in the world—old clocks, spindle-legged chairs, a high-backed, mahogany sofa, and a spinning wheel. At last she discovered what she needed in a box far under the eaves, but in pulling it out so that she could raise the lid, she knocked down a row of pictures that leaned against it. She bent to pick them up and set them in order again, then stopped to stare at them with a gasp of delighted astonishment.
Janet loved beautiful things, especially pictures, and she could be sure, at one glance, that these were pictures such as one does not often see. She remembered being taken by her father to a famous gallery to see a landscape so much akin to the one before her that they had undoubtedly been painted by the same artist, a green hillside with sailing clouds above it, on a clear October day, "the sort that makes you feel that you can see a hundred miles," as Janet put it. There was another, a winding white road running up a wind-swept valley with the trees bowing to a storm and a spatter of rain slanting across the hill, there was a portrait of a fierce old lady and another of a man with lace ruffles and a satin coat. There was a long, cool wave, breaking upon a beach where the whiteness of the sun-splashed sand was so vivid as almost to hurt her eyes.