Hardly less so did Lucy find Brooke herself; perfectly free and frank in their daily intercourse, yet she neither offered nor asked special confidence. She brightened with all the charm of a born hostess when Stead came, and he gravitated toward her as naturally; yet when he left, even for six weeks’ stay, she exhibited no sign of loneliness and threw herself into her play, which she called the few hours she seized for painting, with fresh vigour, either working in the old carpenter’s shop, that by opening a trap door above had a fine north light, or going into the open fields to use Enoch Fenton’s colts, sheep, or oxen as studies.
It was not strange, however, that Lucy could not fathom the mind of either maid or man, for did they really know themselves? Stead was experiencing the conscious coming of a second youth, even before he was more than in the full vigour of middle life. The period of torpor through which he had passed was much like the indifference and languid, brooding time of adolescence before the bite of motive and passion awakens body and brain and clears the vision; and it was Brooke who blamelessly had brought all this to pass, Brooke, with her heroism of womanhood that was none the less subtle and acute because of its elusiveness.
Robert Stead loved her as a man loves but once, no matter how often he may marry, but this second passion was so different in its elements from the first that he did not recognize it as such, and consequently, unchecked, it doubled its hold, even while Lucy was unable to put two and two together, and piece a single palpable symptom.
In a state of rebellion bordering on disgust, Lucy, who heretofore had been the sort of woman that had usually obtained anything for which she had cared to try, and much for which she had not striven, turned her attention to the farmer-on-shares,—Walther, as she called him, who was undoubtedly a most filling and picturesque figure in the perfect series of pictures that grouped themselves between the homestead and the Moosatuk,—to find him not only difficult but impossible of approach, and try as she might, she had not yet succeeded in exchanging a word with him. At the same time many of his doings puzzled her, for though he was entirely his own master, by the very nature of the half-and-half agreement, and had nothing to do with the home garden or aught else about the place, his whole desire seemed to be of use and to serve its occupants, though unobtrusively.