"Good Lord!" said Westover; and he flew at his colors and began to paint. He had got his canvas into such a state that he alone could have found it much more intelligible than his palette, when he heard the boy saying, over his shoulder: "I don"t think that looks very much like it." He had last been aware of the boy sitting at the gra.s.sy edge of the lane, tossing small bits of earth and pebble across to his dog, which sat at the other edge and snapped at them. Then he lost consciousness of him. He answered, dreamily, while he found a tint he was trying for with his brush: "Perhaps you don"t know." He was so sure of his effect that the popular censure speaking in the boy"s opinion only made him happier in it.
"I know what I see," said the boy.
"I doubt it," said Westover, and then he lost consciousness of him again. He was rapt deep and far into the joy of his work, and had no thought but for that, and for the dim question whether it would be such another day to-morrow, with that light again on Lion"s Head, when he was at last sensible of a noise that he felt he must have been hearing some time without noting it. It was a lamentable, sound of screaming, as of some one in mortal terror, mixed with wild entreaties. "Oh, don"t, Jeff!
Oh, don"t, don"t, don"t! Oh, please! Oh, do let us be! Oh, Jeff, don"t!"
Westover looked round bewildered, and not able, amid the clamor of the echoes, to make out where the cries came from. Then, down at the point where the lane joined the road to the southward and the road lost itself in the shadow of a woodland, he saw the boy leaping back and forth across the track, with his dog beside him; he was shouting and his dog barking furiously; those screams and entreaties came from within the shadow. Westover plunged down the lane headlong, with a speed that gathered at each bound, and that almost flung him on his face when he reached the level where the boy and the dog were dancing back and forth across the road. Then he saw, crouching in the edge of the wood, a little girl, who was uttering the appeals he had heard, and clinging to her, with a face of frantic terror, a child of five or six years; her cries had grown hoa.r.s.e, and had a hard, mechanical action as they followed one another. They were really in no danger, for the boy held his dog tight by his collar, and was merely delighting himself with their terror.
The painter hurled himself upon him, and, with a quick grip upon his collar, gave him half a dozen flat-handed blows wherever he could plant them and then flung him reeling away.
"You infernal little ruffian!" he roared at him; and the sound of his voice was enough for the dog; he began to scale the hill-side toward the house without a moment"s stay.
The children still crouched together, and Westover could hardly make them understand that they were in his keeping when he bent over them and bade them not be frightened. The little girl set about wiping the child"s eyes on her ap.r.o.n in a motherly fashion; her own were dry enough, and Westover fancied there was more of fury than of fright in her face. She seemed lost to any sense of his presence, and kept on talking fiercely to herself, while she put the little boy in order, like an indignant woman.
"Great, mean, ugly thing! I"ll tell the teacher on him, that"s what I will, as soon as ever school begins. I"ll see if he can come round with that dog of his scaring folks! I wouldn"t "a" been a bit afraid if it hadn"t "a" been for Franky. Don"t cry any more, Franky. Don"t you see they"re gone? I presume he thinks it smart to scare a little boy and a girl. If I was a boy once, I"d show him!"
She made no sign of grat.i.tude to Westover: as far as any recognition from her was concerned, his intervention was something as impersonal as if it had been a thunder-bolt falling upon her enemies from the sky.
"Where do you live?" he asked. "I"ll go home with you if you"ll tell me where you live."
She looked up at him in a daze, and Westover heard the Durgin boy saying: "She lives right there in that little wood-colored house at the other end of the lane. There ain"t no call to go home with her."
Westover turned and saw the boy kneeling at the edge of a clump of bushes, where he must have struck; he was rubbing, with a tuft of gra.s.s, at the dirt ground into the knees of his trousers.
The little, girl turned hawkishly upon him. "Not for anything you can do, Jeff Durgin!"
The boy did not answer.
"There!" she said, giving a final pull and twitch to the dress of her brother, and taking him by the hand tenderly. "Now, come right along, Franky."
"Let me have your other hand," said Westover, and, with the little boy between them, they set off toward the point where the lane joined the road on the northward. They had to pa.s.s the bushes where Jeff Durgin was crouching, and the little girl turned and made a face at him. "Oh, oh! I don"t think I should have done that," said Westover.
"I don"t care!" said the little girl. But she said, in explanation and partial excuse: "He tries to scare all the girls. I"ll let him know "t he can"t scare one!"
Westover looked up toward the Durgin house with a return of interest in the canvas he had left in the lane on the easel. Nothing had happened to it. At the door of the barn he saw the farmer and his eldest son slanting forward and staring down the hill at the point he had come from. Mrs. Durgin was looking out from the shelter of the porch, and she turned and went in with Jeff"s dog at her skirts when Westover came in sight with the children.
V.
Westover had his tea with the family, but nothing was said or done to show that any of them resented or even knew of what had happened to the boy from him. Jeff himself seemed to have no grudge. He went out with Westover, when the meal was ended, and sat on the steps of the porch with him, watching the painter watch the light darken on the lonely heights and in the lonely depths around. Westover smoked a pipe, and the fire gleamed and smouldered in it regularly with his breathing; the boy, on a lower" step, pulled at the long ears of his dog and gazed up at him.
They were both silent till the painter asked: "What do you do here when you"re not trying to scare little children to death?"
The boy hung his head and said, with the effect of excusing a long arrears of uselessness: "I"m goin" to school as soon as it commences."
"There"s one branch of your education that I should like to undertake if I ever saw you at a thing like that again. Don"t you feel ashamed of yourself?"
The boy pulled so hard at the dog"s ear that the dog gave a faint yelp of protest.
"They might "a" seen that I had him by the collar. I wa"n"t a-goin" to let go."
"Well, the next time I have you by the collar I won"t let go, either,"
said the painter; but he felt an inadequacy in his threat, and he imagined a superfluity, and he made some haste to ask: "who are they?"
"Whitwell is their name. They live in that little house where you took them. Their father"s got a piece of land on Zion"s Head that he"s clearin" off for the timber. Their mother"s dead, and Cynthy keeps house. She"s always makin" up names and faces," added the boy. "She thinks herself awful smart. That Franky"s a perfect cry-baby."
"Well, upon my word! You are a little ruffian," said Westover, and he knocked the ashes out of his pipe. "The next time you meet that poor little creature you tell her that I think you"re about the shabbiest chap I know, and that I hope the teacher will begin where I left off with you and not leave blackguard enough in you to--"
He stopped for want of a fitting figure, and the boy said: "I guess the teacher won"t touch me."
Westover rose, and the boy flung his dog away from him with his foot.
"Want I should show you where to sleep?"
"Yes," said Westover, and the boy hulked in before him, vanishing into the dark of the interior, and presently appeared with a lighted hand-lamp. He led the way upstairs to a front room looking down upon the porch roof and over toward Zion"s Head, which Westover could see dimly outlined against the night sky, when he lifted the edge of the paper shade and peered out.
The room was neat, with greater comfort in its appointments than he hoped for. He tried the bed, and found it hard, but of straw, and not the feathers he had dreaded; while the boy looked into the water-pitcher to see if it was full; and then went out without any form of goodnight.
Westover would have expected to wash in a tin basin at the back door, and wipe on the family towel, but all the means of toilet, such as they were, he found at hand here, and a surprise which he had felt at a certain touch in the cooking renewed itself at the intelligent arrangements for his comfort. A secondary quilt was laid across the foot of his bed; his window-shade was pulled down, and, though the window was shut and the air stuffy within, there was a sense of cleanliness in everything which was not at variance with the closeness.
The bed felt fresh when he got into it, and the sweet breath of the mountains came in so cold through the sash he had lifted that he was glad to pull the secondary quilt up over him. He heard the clock tick in some room below; from another quarter came the m.u.f.fled sound of coughing; but otherwise the world was intensely still, and he slept deep and long.
VI.
The men folks had finished their breakfast and gone to their farm-work hours before Westover came down to his breakfast, but the boy seemed to be of as much early leisure as himself, and was lounging on the threshold of the back door, with his dog in waiting upon him. He gave the effect of yesterday"s cleanliness freshened up with more recent soap and water. At the moment Westover caught sight of him, he heard his mother calling to him from the kitchen, "Well, now, come in and get your breakfast, Jeff," and the boy called to Westover, in turn, "I"ll tell her you"re here," as he rose and came in-doors. "I guess she"s got your breakfast for you."
Mrs. Durgin brought the breakfast almost as soon as Westover had found his way to the table, and she lingered as if for some expression of his opinion upon it. The biscuit and the b.u.t.ter were very good, and he said so; the eggs were fresh, and the hash from yesterday"s corned-beef could not have been better, and he praised them; but he was silent about the coffee.
"It a"n"t very good," she suggested.
"Why, I"m used to making my own coffee; I lived so long in a country where it"s nearly the whole of breakfast that I got into the habit of it, and I always carry my little machine with me; but I don"t like to bring it out, unless--"
"Unless you can"t stand the other folks"s," said the woman, with a humorous gleam. "Well, you needn"t mind me. I want you should have good coffee, and I guess I a"n"t too old to learn, if you want to show me.
Our folks don"t care for it much; they like tea; and I kind of got out of the way of it. But at home we had to have it." She explained, to his inquiring glance.
"My father kept the tavern on the old road to St. Albans, on the other side of Lion"s Head. That"s where I always lived till I married here."
"Oh," said Westover, and he felt that she had proudly wished to account for a quality which she hoped he had noticed in her cooking. He thought she might be going to tell him something more of herself, but she only said, "Well, any time you want to show me your way of makin" coffee,"
and went out of the room.
That evening, which was the close of another flawless day, he sat again watching the light outside, when he saw her come into the hallway with a large shade-lamp in her hand. She stopped at the door of a room he had not seen yet, and looked out at him to ask:
"Won"t you come in and set in the parlor if you want to?"
He found her there when he came in, and her two sons with her; the younger was sleepily putting away some school-books, and the elder seemed to have been helping him with his lessons.