In accordance with her resolution to make the best of things, she set about making the shack more comfortable and homelike. There were many of those things which, small in themselves, count for much, that her busy brain planned to do during the time taken up in the necessary overhauling. This cleaning-up process had taken several days, interrupted as it was by the ordinary daily routine.
To her unaccustomed hand, the task of preparing three hearty meals a day was a matter that consumed a large amount of time, but gradually, day by day, she found herself systematizing her task and becoming less inexpert. To be sure she made many mistakes; once, indeed, in a fit of preoccupation, while occupied in rearranging the bedroom, burning up the entire dinner.
Upon his return, her husband had found her red-eyed and apologetic.
"Oh, well!" he said. "It ain't worth crying over. What is the saying? 'Hell wasn't built in a day'?"
Nora screamed with laughter. "I think you're mixing two old saws. Rome wasn't built in a day and Hell is paved with good intentions."
"Well," he laughed good-naturedly, "they both seem to hit the case."
He certainly was unfailingly good-tempered. Not that there were not times when Nora did not have to remind herself of her new resolution and he, for his part, exercise all his forbearance. But in the main, things went more smoothly than either had dared to hope from their inauspicious beginning.
The thing that Nora found hardest to bear was that he never lost a certain masterful manner. It was a continual reminder that she had been defeated. Then, too, he had a maddening way of rewarding her for good conduct which was equally hard to bear, until she realized that it was perfectly unconscious on his part.
For example: after she had struggled for a week with her makeshift kitchen outfit, small in the beginning but greatly reduced by her destructive outburst on the night of their arrival, he had, without saying a word to her of his intentions, driven over to Prentice and laid in an entire new stock of crockery and several badly needed pots and pans.
Nora had found it hard to thank him. If they had been labeled "For a Good Child" she could not have felt more humiliated. And what was equally trying, he seemed to have divined her thoughts, for his smile, upon receiving her halting thanks, had not been without a touch of malicious amusement.
On the other hand, all her little efforts to beautify the little house and make it more livable met with his enthusiastic approval and support. He was as delighted as a child with everything she did, and often, when baffled for the moment by some lack of material for carrying out some proposed scheme, he came to the rescue with an ingenious suggestion which solved the vexed problem at once.
And so, gradually, to the no small wonder of her neighbor, Mrs. Sharp, the shack began to take on an air of homely brightness and comfort which that lady's more pretentious place lacked, even after a residence of thirteen years.
Curtains tied back with gay ribands, taken from an old hat and refurbished, appeared at the windows; the old tin syrup cans, pasted over with dark green paper, were made to disgorge their mouldy stores and transform themselves into flower-pots holding scarlet geraniums; even the disreputable, rakish old rocking chair assumed a belated air of youth and respectability, wearing as it did a cushion of discreetly patterned chintz; and the packing-box table hid its deficiencies under a simple cloth. All these magic transformations Nora had achieved with various odds and ends which she found in her trunk.
Not to be outdone, Frank had contributed a well-made shelf to hold Nora's precious books and a sort of cupboard for her sewing basket and, for the crowning touch, had with much labor contrived some rough chairs to take the place of the packing-box affairs of unpleasant memory.
As has been said, Mrs. Sharp came, saw and wondered; but she had her own theory, all the same, which she confided to her husband.
All these little but significant changes, the result of their co-operative effort, had not been the work of days, but of weeks. By the time they had all been accomplished, the winter was practically over and spring was at hand. Looking back on it, it seemed impossibly short, although there had been times, in spite of her manifold occupations, when it had seemed to Nora that it was longer than any winter she had ever known. She looked forward to the coming spring with both pleasure and dread.
Through many a dark winter day she had pictured to herself how beautiful the prairie must be, clad in all the verdant livery of the most wonderful of the seasons. And yet it would mean a new solitude and loneliness to her, her husband, of necessity, being away through all the long daylight hours. She began to understand Gertie's dread of having no one to speak to. She avoided asking herself the question as to whether it was loneliness in general or the particular loneliness of missing her husband that she dreaded.
But she was obliged to admit to herself that the winter had wrought more transformations than were to be seen in the little shack.
CHAPTER XV
It had all come about so subtilely and gradually that she was almost unaware of it herself, this inward change in herself. Nora had by nature a quick and active mind, but she had also many inherited prejudices. It is a truism that it is much harder to unlearn than to learn, and for her it was harder, in the circumstances, than for the average person. Not that she was more set in her ways than other people, but that she had accepted from her childhood a definite set of ideas as to the proper conduct of life; a code, in other words, from which she had never conceived it possible to depart. People did certain things, or they did not; you played the game according to certain prescribed rules, or you didn't play it with decent people, that was all there was to it. One might as well argue that there was no difference between right and wrong as to say that this was not so.
Of course there were plenty of people on the face of the earth who thought otherwise, such as Chinese, Aborigines, Turks, and all sorts of unpleasant natives of uncivilized countries--Nora lumped them together without discrimination or remorse--but no one planned to pass their lives among them. And as for the sentiment that Trotter had enunciated one day at her brother's, that Canada was a country where everybody was as good as everybody else, that was, of course, utter nonsense. It was because the country was raw and new that such silly notions prevailed. No society could exist an hour founded upon any such theory.
And yet, here she was living with a man on terms of equality whom, when measured up with the standards she was accustomed to, failed impossibly. And yet, did he? That is, did he, in the larger sense? That he was woefully deficient in all the little niceties of life, that he was illiterate and ignorant could not be denied. But he was no man's fool, and, as far as his light shone, he certainly lived up to it. That was just it. He had a standard of his own.
She compared him with her brother, and with other men she had known and respected. Was he less honest? less brave? less independent? less scrupulous in his dealings with his fellowmen? To all these questions she was obliged to answer "No." And he was proud, too, and ambitious; ambitious to carve out a fortune with his own hands, beholden to neither man nor circumstances for the achievement. Certainly there was much that was fine about him.
And, as far as his treatment of herself was concerned, after that first terrible struggle for mastery, she had had nothing to complain of. He had been patient with her ignorance and her lack of capabilities in all the things that the women in this new life were so proficient in. Did she not, perhaps, fall as far below his standard as he did before hers? There was certainly something to be said on both sides.