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.
“He's got to begin school next week,” she said to Westover; and at the preparations the other now began to make with a piece of paper and a planchette which he had on the table before him, she asked, in the half-mocking, half-deprecating way which seemed characteristic of her: “You believe any in that?”
“I don't know that I've ever seen it work,” said the painter.
“Well, sometimes it won't work,” she returned, altogether mockingly now, and sat holding her shapely hands, which were neither so large nor so rough as they might have been, across her middle and watching her son while the machine pushed about under his palm, and he bent his wan eyes upon one of the oval-framed photographs on the wall, as if rapt in a supernal vision. The boy stared drowsily at the planchette, jerking this way and that, and making abrupt starts and stops. At last the young man lifted his palm from it, and put it aside to study the hieroglyphics it had left on the paper.
“What's it say?” asked his mother.
The young man whispered: “I can't seem to make out very clear. I guess I got to take a little time to it,” he added, leaning back wearily in his chair. “Ever seen much of the manifestations?” he gasped at Westover.
“Never any, before,” said the painter, with a leniency for the invalid which he did not feel for his belief.
The young man tried for his voice, and found enough of it to say: “There's a trance medium over at the Huddle. Her control says 't I can develop into a writin' medium.” He seemed to refer the fact as a sort of question to Westover, who could think of nothing to say but that it must be very interesting to feel that one had such a power.
“I guess he don't know he's got it yet,” his mother interposed. “And planchette don't seem to know, either.”
“We ha'n't given it a fair trial yet,” said the young man, impartially, almost impassively.
“Wouldn't you like to see it do some of your sums, Jeff?” said the mother to the drowsy boy, blinking in a corner. “You better go to bed.”
The elder brother rose. “I guess I'll go, too.”
The father had not joined their circle in the parlor, now breaking up by common consent.
Mrs. Durgin took up her lamp again and looked round on the appointments of the room, as if she wished Westover to note them, too: the drab wallpaper, the stiff chairs, the long, hard sofa in haircloth, the high bureau of mahogany veneer.
“You can come in here and set or lay down whenever you feel like it,” she said. “We use it more than folks generally, I presume; we got in the habit, havin' it open for funerals.”
VII.
Four or five days of perfect weather followed one another, and Westover worked hard at his picture in the late afternoon light he had chosen for it. In the morning he tramped through the woods and climbed the hills with Jeff Durgin, who seemed never to do anything about the farm, and had a leisure unbroken by anything except a rare call from his mother to help her in the house. He built the kitchen fire, and got the wood for it; he picked the belated pease and the early beans in the garden, and shelled them; on the Monday when the school opened he did a share of the family wash, which seemed to have been begun before daylight, and Westover saw him hanging out the clothes before he started off with his books. He suffered no apparent loss of self-respect in these employments, and, while he still had his days free, he put himself at Westover's disposal with an effect of unimpaired equality. He had expected, evidently, that Westover would want to fish or shoot, or at least join him in the hunt for woodchucks, which he still carried on with abated zeal for lack of his company when the painter sat down to sketch certain bits that struck him. When he found that Westover cared for nothing in the way of sport, as people commonly understand it, he did not openly contemn him. He helped him get the flowers he studied, and he learned to know true mushrooms from him, though he did not follow his teaching in eating the toadstools, as his mother called them, when they brought them home to be cooked.
If it could not be said that he shared the affection which began to grow up in Westover from their companionship, there could be no doubt of the interest he took in him, though it often seemed the same critical curiosity which appeared in the eye of his dog when it dwelt upon the painter. Fox had divined in his way that Westover was not only not to be molested, but was to be respectfully tolerated, yet no gleam of kindness ever lighted up his face at sight of the painter; he never wagged his tail in recognition of him; he simply recognized him and no more, and he remained passive under Westover's advances, which he had the effect of covertly referring to Jeff, when the boy was by, for his approval or disapproval; when he was not by, the dog's manner implied a reservation of opinion until the facts could be submitted to his master.
On the Saturday morning which was the last they were to have together, the three comrades had strayed from the vague wood road along one of the unexpected levels on the mountain slopes, and had come to a standstill in a place which the boy pretended not to know his way out of. Westover doubted him, for he had found that Jeff liked to give himself credit for woodcraft by discovering an escape from the depths of trackless wildernesses.
“I guess you know where we are,” he suggested.
“No, honestly,” said the boy; but he grinned, and Westover still doubted him.
“Hark! What's that?” he said, hushing further speech from him with a motion of his hand. It was the sound of an axe.
“Oh, I know where we are,” said Jeff. “It's that Canuck chopping in Whitwell's clearing. Come along.”
He led the way briskly down the mountain-side now, stopping from time to time and verifying his course by the sound of the axe. This came and went, and by-and-by it ceased altogether, and Jeff crept forward with a real or feigned uncertainty. Suddenly he stopped. A voice called, “Heigh, there!” and the boy turned and fled, crashing through the underbrush at a tangent, with his dog at his heels.
Westover looked after them, and then came forward. A lank figure of a man at the foot of a poplar, which he had begun to fell, stood waiting him, one hand on his axe-helve and the other on his hip. There was the scent of freshly smitten bark and sap-wood in the air; the ground was paved with broad, clean chips.
“Good-morning,” said Westover.
“How are you?” returned the other, without moving or making any sign of welcome for a moment. But then he lifted his axe and struck it into the carf on the tree, and came to meet Westover.
As he advanced he held out his hand. “Oh, you're the one that stopped that fellow that day when he was tryin' to scare my children. Well, I thought I should run across you some time.”
