He shook his head. “Then afterwards—” much was comprised in that one word and Jack’s tone, “afterwards we started off together, my Dad and me. He said he’d try and get a job on some farm with me, but nobody wanted him this time of year, and with me too. And he said one morning he wished he didn’t have me bothering around. When I woke up on the freight yesterday morning, he wasn’t there. Guess he must have dropped off. Maybe he can get a job now.”
So it slipped out, Jack’s personal history, and the father and daughter wondered at his sturdy acceptance of life’s discipline. Only nine, but already he faced the world as his own master, fearless and optimistic. All through that first evening he sat in the kitchen on the high stool, playing tunes he had learned from his father. Tommy was entranced and begged him to teach him how to play.
After supper the girls and Tommy drew up their chairs around the dining room table as usual. Here every night the three younger ones prepared their lessons for the next day. Jean generally read or sat with her father awhile, but tonight she answered Peg Moffat’s letter. It was read over twice, the letter that blended in so curiously with the coming of the cousins from New York.
Ever since Jean could remember she had drawn pictures. No one guessed how she loved the paintings in New York’s art galleries. They had seemed so real to her, the face of a Millet peasant lad crossing a stubble field at dawn; a Breton girl knitting as she walked homeward behind some straying sheep; one of Frans Hals’ Flemish boys, his chin pressed close to his violin, his deep eyes looking at you from under the brim of his hat.
Once she had read of Albrecht Dürer, painting his masterpieces while he starved. How the people whispered after his death that he had used his heart’s blood to mix with his wonderful pigments. Of course it was only a story, but Jean remembered it. When she saw a picture that seemed to hold one and speak its message of beauty, she would say to herself, “There is Dürer’s secret.”
And some day, if she ever could put on canvas the dreams that came to her, she meant to use the same secret.
“I do think Socrates was an old bore,” said Kit, yawning and stretching her arms, after a struggle with her homework. “Always mixing in and contradicting everybody and starting something. No wonder his wife was cranky.”
“He died beautifully,” Doris replied. “Something about a sunset and all his friends around him.”
“If you’ve finished your homework, why don’t you go to bed?” Jean told them. She finished her letter alone. It was not easy to write it. Peg wanted her to come down for the spring term. She could board with her if she liked. Expenses were very light.
Any expense would be heavy if piled on the monthly budget of Woodhow. Jean knew that. So she wrote back with a heartache behind the plucky refusal, and stepped out on the moonlit porch for a minute. It was clear and cold after the light snowfall. The stars were very faint. From the river came the sound of the waterfall.