Here again the need of money in hand, even for canvas, pressed upon Brooke, and like many another before her, she seized what came nearest to hand; and when the Cub discovered a head of Pam upon the cover of the sugar bucket, he straightway removed it from the closet to his room, thereby letting some very early ants into the sugar.
One great lesson in portrait art Brooke learned for herself in those lonely days, that whatever the care and detail of finish, the life and likeness is the work of but a few strokes.
Meanwhile the fox’s head on the bread-board stood on the mantel-shelf in the kitchen, watching Brooke as she went about her work, until she began to feel a mysterious kinship with the little doglike animal of the narrow eyes, and talked to it as if it was a human companion.
One day she had gone for a call at Mrs. Enoch Fenton’s, where, ever since that first January afternoon, she went when the tension of the mental and physical became too great, to be soothed and relaxed by the cripple’s cheerful common sense. She felt more than ever the absolute necessity of adding at once to the family income, as for the second time since their arrival she had been obliged to draw on the slender principal. Though the real motive for the visit was to consult the Deacon, indirectly, through his wife, about the likelihood of finding a man willing to cultivate the farm on shares, the talk drifted toward the topic of ways and means, in spite of Brooke’s constant resolve to keep such matters to herself.
“If you want to get folks’ money steady,” Mrs. Fenton said, pausing in her occupation of sewing a button on one of the Deacon’s blue hickory shirts, and using her thimble finger to point and emphasize her remarks, “you must give ’em something they want and need in exchange for it, and what they need most constant is something good to eat!”
Brooke smiled to herself, thinking of the pieman’s similar reasoning concerning his wife’s “revelation,” but did not in any way apply the matter personally until Mrs. Fenton’s next sentence.
“The jell and jam market is a good one, only it’s pretty well taken up, hereabouts, by Miss Ryerson at the Mill Farm, t’other side of Stonebridge. She puts up for nearly all the city people clear through to Gordon, and last year she added cherry bounce and blackberry brandy. Strange enough, too, made by your Great-grandmother West’s rule,—I suppose you know she accommodated wayfarers with meat and drink down at the farm, and being strictly temperance had a great name for her ginger-mint pop; the rule is in my book now. The old sign used to be in the far side of your attic, behind the four-poster—it was a fox chasin’ a goose, and I always heard it came from the old country; that reminds me, Enoch says that old bed is set up, and your father’s sleepin’ on it again—well, old times lets go hard sometimes.