These two had worked side by side year after year on the farm; such comradeship in labor usually brings into consciousness again the primeval bond of Man against Nature—the brotherhood, at least, of the merely human. But while they had mingled their toil, sweat, hopes, and disappointments, their minds had never met. The father had never felt at home with his son; David, without knowing why—and many a sorrowful hour it had cost him—had never accepted as father the man who had brought him into the world. Each soon perceived that a distance separated them which neither could cross, though vainly both should try, and often both did try, to cross it.
As he sat in the chimney-corner to-night, his very look as he watched the door made it clear that he dreaded the entrance of his son; and to this feeling had lately been added deeper estrangement.
When David walked in, he took a seat in front of the fire. His mother followed, bringing the sugar-bowl and the honey, which she locked in a closet in the wall: the iron in her blood was parsimony. Then she seated herself under the mantelpiece on the opposite side and looked silently across at the face of her husband. (She was his second wife. His offspring by his first wife had died young. David was the only child of mature parents.) She looked across at him with the complacent expression of the wife who feels that she and her husband are one, even though their offspring may not be of them. The father looked at David; David looked into the fire. There was embarrassment all round.
"How are you feeling to-night, father?" he asked affectionately, a moment later, without lifting his eyes.
"I've been suffering a good deal. I think it's the weather."
"I'm sorry."
"Do you think it's going to snow?"
The husband had lived so long and closely with his wife, that the mechanism of their minds moved much like the two wall-clocks in adjoining rooms of the house; which ticked and struck, year after year, never quite together and never far apart. When David was first with one and then with another, he was often obliged to answer the same questions twice—sometimes thrice, since his mother alone required two identical responses. He replied now with his invariable and patient courtesy—yet scarcely patient, inasmuch as this did not try him.
"What made you so late?"
David explained again.