“I believe, too, she ain’t busy just now—not more’n ordinarily busy, I mean,” Jane hastened to add quickly. “As I remember it, the Bartons’ baby’s just come, an’ the Wheeler one ain’t due yet; so I guess Melviny’s yours for the askin’. An’ if you can get her, you’ll have a whole team.”
“I don’t know whether Aunt Ellen——” began Lucy uneasily, but Jane interrupted her:
“Oh, it ain’t to be expected your aunt will want her,” she cut in serenely. “She won’t want anybody. ’Twill drive her well-nigh crazy to think of spendin’ the money. But ’tain’t right for you to try to do all there is to be done alone, an’ you mustn’t undertake it. Just go right ahead an’ get somebody in, whether your aunt likes it or not. That’s the way I’d do if it was Martin. Besides, ’tain’t as if Melviny was different. She fits in 208 anywhere. She warn’t ever known not to. She asks no questions an’ has got no opinions. She just sorter goes along as if she was walkin’ in her sleep, turnin’ neither to the right nor to the left. Whatever house she’s in, it’s all the same to her. I believe she’d jog up to a patient with a breakfast tray if the stairs was burnin’ under her. Nothin’ moves her.”
There was a rippling laugh from Lucy.
“We’d have to have somebody like that,” she said.
“You certainly would,” agreed Jane. “That’s why I feel Melviny’s just the one for you.”
“It is so good of you to be interested.”
“Bless your heart, I reckon the whole town’s interested in Miss Webster bein’ took down,” confessed Jane naively. “But I don’t deserve no credit for this plan; ’twas Martin’s idea.”
“Mar—your brother’s?”
“Yes. Martin’s awful upset ’bout your aunt bein’ sick,” announced Jane. “He must ’a’ heard it in the village when he was there this mornin’, for the minute he got back he sent me over to urge you to get somebody in. ’Course he wouldn’t come himself. That would be too much to expect. But he 209 actually said that if you decided to fetch Melviny he’d go and get her—an’ from him that means a heap. I ’most fell over backwards when he suggested it, for you know how Martin feels toward your aunt.”