Three weeks had now passed since Miss Keith’s departure, and the daily toil of each had been punctuated by a series of unexpected events.
Much as Brooke had dreaded the going of her executive kinswoman, it was in a sense a relief. She was well aware that until she was entirely thrown upon her own resources it would be impossible to judge her strength or plan definitely for the future; and now that the move had been made, this planning was the next hill to climb. It was impossible for Brooke to have a quiet moment, except when she was alone in her room at night, so long as Miss Keith was in the house; for the estimable woman was continually remembering some important bit of advice, relative to the year’s rotation of work in the garden or the “putting up” of the fruit. One of the last details that she impressed upon Brooke in showing her baskets of various bulbs and a large store of the seeds of sweet peas, nasturtiums, and other hardy annual flowers, all neatly put up in paper bags, was to sow plenty of them in long rows like vegetables, because as she said “the rich folks were always stopping to see the view as they drove from Stonebridge to Gordon, and often sent in and begged to buy the old-fashioned flowers, because their gardens had not room for them.”
Brooke promised, but the matter passed quickly from her overcrowded mind; for, interpreted by Miss Keith, the work of the mistress of the West homestead would have kept at least six Plymouth-Rock-ribbed housewives at work from rise until set of sun. Very different indeed was it from Mrs. Enoch Fenton’s soothing advice, “Dearie, just begin by doing what you must, and let the rest sort of slip off your hands until the Lord gives ’em the knack to handle it.”
When the rockaway, driven by Larsen, at last came to the door with the Cub as honorary footman to see Miss Keith off and make sure that none of her twelve pieces of wonderfully assorted baggage went astray, she broke down completely, yet did not seem comforted or pleased with Brooke’s invitation to return if she changed her mind about matrimony, the final sniff that followed the sincere and cordial offer being more of scorn than of grief.
Mrs. Lawton was now fast shaking off the state of being in a waking dream, in which she lived since the night of the calamity; and, once Miss Keith had gone, both mother and daughter began to taste the quiet joys of a companionship that the forced separation of the last few years of conventional city life had not only left undeveloped but unknown.
Their intercourse was none the less sustaining because the things that they discussed were the bread-and-butter affairs of every day—whether the invalid should have chicken or mutton broth, and as to whether it was possible to make many of the dishes they desired with only half the ingredients the cook-book demanded, Mrs. Lawton’s experience of long ago and Brooke’s common sense deciding in the affirmative.
In fact, the young mistress had not been working side by side with Mrs. Peck (who came to “accommodate” and instruct the day after Miss Keith left) a week before she was sure of what she had always suspected, that fully three-quarters of modern recipes for cooking are merely competitive struggles to see how much good material can be crammed into something totally unsuitable for the human stomach.
Gradually, as the first week drew to a close, it happened that, after the Cub and Brooke had helped establish their father in his wheel-chair for the day, Mrs. Lawton went to and fro about the lower floor, dusting, adjusting, wiping dishes, watering the plants, and doing the thousand and one little things that make a woman a part of her home. Then later in the day she would wheel Adam Lawton into the kitchen perhaps, and, taking out her work-basket, do some of the sewing that was imperative to make the garments of the past even possible for present use. As to Adam Lawton himself, he was more alert and did not seem to doze as constantly as before, while his eyes wandered from object to object with a changeful expression unlike the apathy of his first conscious period.
Before the seven days were completely rounded, three things had happened. Brooke heard her mother hum a snatch of the ballad “Jock o’Hazeldean,” as she snipped withered leaves from the plants in the kitchen window; she saw her father stroke Tatters’ head and finger his ears with his well hand; and Robert Stead, who now left their mail as he returned with his own from the village every morning, brought her, together with some belated foreign New Year’s cards, a flat, square package, spattered with foreign postmarks, addressed in an unknown hand, in care of Charlie Ashton, and evidently remailed by him.
In a perfectly unobtrusive and matter-of-course way, without so much as by your leave, the silent man had established a more or less silent intercourse with the Lawton family as a whole. He must pass the house on his daily horseback trip to the village, and the fact that he brought their morning mail or did a bit of marketing was a courtesy that could not be construed into an obligation, and the lending of a magazine, novel, or gardening book soon came to be a matter of course.