Opening the oven doors, she tested floor and side, adjusted dampers after Mrs. Peck’s custom, and then, shutting the loaves from sight, went away, feeling very much as if she had imprisoned some living thing in a fiery furnace, so much depended upon the outcome of the first venture.
An hour later Mrs. Peck, returning from a neighbourly call upon Mrs. Fenton, surprised Brooke in the act of taking the four freshly baked loaves from their pans. They were done to a nicety of golden brown, and she laid each one down carefully and paused a moment, sniffing the appetizing odour before covering them with a clean towel, lest too sudden cooling should make the crust seam.
“Tired, bean’t you!” ejaculated Mrs. Peck, whose principal comfort in the present was to lament and bewail a past of fabulous grandeur upon the like of which no living contemporary had ever set eyes. “I suppose you are thinking how little wunst you ever expected to hev to set to riz and knead and bake your own bread. Poor dear, I kin feel for you! I’ve been through it all—it’s turrible to feel yoursel’ downsot like I was after Mr. Peck died, and not through your own deserts!”
Brooke, who knew the good woman’s pet infirmity, hardly listened to her; there was another theme that filled her brain, almost shaping itself to rhythm, not of the past alone, but the present, the future—of all time, as old as life itself, the unending song of the man who sows, of the grain in the field that endures the winter and leaps upward, spears aloft, militant, at the bugle of spring; of the grain in the ear, of the molten gold of the harvest that goes to the mill, of the clear white flour that the man’s mate blends with the magic leaven to be bread for the house. And her heart took wing as she looked at the loaves, for if the weal of the land rests on the farmer’s plough, second only should stand the toil of the maker of bread.
There were only four loaves, it is true, but to Brooke they stood for a definite power—her first direct productive work.
Choosing one from the rest and half wrapping it in a white towel, she carried it to her mother, who was sitting beside her father, whose chair was placed close by the sunny window. For the two days past his lips had moved, though inarticulately, and his wife was doubly on the alert for a single spoken word.