“‘To do something, to get to work, and not lie dead in the midst of life.’ He sat quite still for ten minutes or more, matching his finger-tips together in thought, and then he said, ‘If you have will enough, and courage, as I believe, we’ll have you downstairs and back at work again within a year.’ Then he told me of the chair, and how I could be fastened in it to keep from falling, and learn to use the wheels for legs, as a child does how to walk. Bless him! it all came true. At first, to be sure, I was afraid, and banged about, and my arms were tired to aching, and I often cried. But Enoch took such comfort, seeing me at table even, that it was a nerve tonic. And gradually, as I strengthened, he had the doors widened, and the sills done away with, and everything set within my reach, until, when the year was up and a little more, I turned off all my work except the washing, and cooked the dinner for the doctor the next time he chanced in.
“When the weather is seasonable, too, I get all about the yard, and now I really feel ambitious to go down to see your father when the roads are settled. You see it was a special Providence that I hit my back just the spot I did, for if it had been higher up, or on my head, it might have paralyzed my arms. Yes, there’s always something to the mercy side, if we only stop to reckon up.”
The sun was setting when Brooke left Mrs. Fenton, for she had been there for two hours. The south-western sky was all aglow as the sun broke its way through the dusky clouds of falling night, and like it, the heart of the young woman glowed within her breast. Free of health and of limb, what might she not will and do, ah, if only she could become, even as that woman in the wheel-chair, one of the world’s workers!
As she walked swiftly down the road, the long shafts of light and the wind gusts also, sinking to rest, played with her hair; and at the turn she met Silent Stead, who was returning from Gilead. Thinking the opportunity had come to recognize his kindness, she stopped, half turning to the roadway; but he, either through offishness or suspecting her design, passed on with a mere greeting.
Not piqued, because she remembered Dr. Russell’s warning, Brooke went her way, smiling to herself in amusement; and when she neared the farm she broke into a run, Tatters barking and gambolling about her, so that Miss Keith, who came to the door at the sound, was forced to confess, though much against her will, that, in spite of his years of service to herself, Tatters had “transferred himself.”
Meanwhile, by a strange perversity of fate, the radiant face of the girl whom Robert Stead had passed by so curtly on the road, turned homeward with him, all unbidden, now smiling at him from between Manfred’s mobile ears, sitting opposite him at his table, and even permeating the smoke wreaths from his pipe that coiled, as in a vision, around her head in fantastic tresses.