“Well, Master Swift, I do think I be wanted at home. My father’s not got Abel now; but it’s my mother that mostly wants me. I be bothered about mother, somehow,” said Jan, with an anxious look. “She do forget things so, and be so queer. She left the beer-tap running yesterday, and near two gallons of ale ran out; and this morning she put the kettle on, and no water in it. And she do cry terrible,” Jan added, breaking down himself. “But Abel says to me the day he was took ill, ‘Janny,’ he says, ‘look to mother.’ And so I will.”
“You’re a good lad, Jan,” said the schoolmaster. “Sit ye down and get your tea, and I’ll come back with ye to the mill. A bit of company does folk good that’s beside themselves with fretting.”
But the windmiller’s wife was beyond such simple cure. The overtasked brain was giving way, and though there were from time to time such capricious changes in her condition as led Jan to hope she was better, she became more and more imbecile to the end of her life.
To say that he was a devoted son is to give a very vague idea of his life at this time to those for whom filial duty takes the shape of compliance rather than of action, or to those who have no experience of domestic attendance on the infirm both of body and of mind.
It was not in moments of tender feeling, or at his prayers, or by Abel’s grave, that Jan recalled his foster-brother’s dying charge; but as he emptied slops, cleaned grates, or fastened Mrs. Lake’s black dress behind. Nor did gratitude flatter his zeal. “Boys do be so ackered with hooks and eyes,” the poor woman grumbled in her fretfulness, and then she sat down to bemoan herself that she had not a daughter left. She had got a trick of stopping short half way through her dressing, and giving herself up to tears, which led to Jan’s assisting at her toilette. He was soon expert enough with hooks and eyes, the more tedious matter was getting up her courage, which invariably failed her at the stage of her linsey-woolsey petticoat. But when Jan had hooked her up, and tied her apron on, and put a little shawl about her shoulders, and got her close-fitting cap set straight,—a matter about as easy as putting another man’s spectacles on his nose,—and seated her by the fire, the worst was over. Mrs. Lake always cheered up after breakfast, and Jan always to the very end hoped that this was the beginning of her getting better.