So Brooke had eagerly accepted the commission, for with the return of Keith West, two or three hours a day for work had become a joyful possibility, and she conceived the idea of painting the heads of two horses upon the sign-board he had sent up. One must represent a staid family horse, and the other a more speedy roadster, and as she looked across the pasture, the natural position of the two gossips by the stone fence gave her the motive in a flash. If she only had the board there, she might sketch in the grouping at once, she thought, and the light also was exactly as she would wish it. The sign was in the barn, but it was too heavy for her to carry, and Adam had gone up to Windy Hill for the day, to do double work, as Robert Stead was expecting Dr. Russell to go on their annual trouting excursion to Stony Guzzle the next day. Well, there was no help for it, but still Brooke gazed about as if expecting help would fall from the skies or spring Jack-in-a-box fashion from the ground. It was the latter that happened, for at that moment the head of the farmer-on-shares appeared above the fence of the potato field, where he had just completed his task of planting, and was about to follow along the little brook to the road.
As Brooke hesitated to ask him to do an errand that certainly had nothing to do with farming, he paused involuntarily. Meanwhile Brooke thought, “I can surely ask it as a courtesy such as any man would do me,” and said, “Good morning, Mr. Maarten” (she did not call him by his Christian name as she would have one distinctly in service, for instinct hinted to her that he might have been driven to his present vocation by hard luck), “would you do me a favour?”
Instantly the tools and potato bag were dropped, but he did not take the advantage of coming nearer, as he might easily have done.
Then Brooke explained her need in the frank way she had of taking people into her confidence, yet without gush or familiarity, that had always been one of her charms; and Maarten hastened to the barn while she went to the house for her chalk and sketching stool.
In an hour, after several false starts, Brooke had compassed the grouping and outline, though there was one curve in the neck of the young horse that displeased her. Hearing the pieman’s whistle out on the road, and remembering that this was the day when she was to accompany him on his route to “Sister-in-law Sairy Ann’s,” and knowing that Maarten would naturally have gone home to his dinner,—for he never brought it in a pail like other labourers, her informant being Enoch Fenton, who said he table-boarded at the best place in Gilead, and paid six dollars a week, and most likely had a big head,—she was demurring as to how she should get the sign back, for to leave it might tempt the cows to lick the chalk off. At this point she became conscious, through one of those swift half glances that tell so many tales, that Maarten was waiting a little beyond, and not only waiting, but watching her eagerly. Therefore, taking advantage of the circumstance, she laughingly apologized for asking two favours in one day, but would he carry the sign back to the little harness room, long disused, with a door of its own on the pasture side of the barn, where the sign could be kept free from hay dust?—adding, half aloud, as she took a final look at her work, “There is something wrong about the line of old Billy’s neck; it could not possibly twist like that.”
Point of view frequently has as much to do with our estimate of a thing as the value of the thing itself. Therefore Brooke’s progress of fifteen miles through the hill country in the pieman’s wagon brought her in touch with an entirely different side of the world of the woods than if she had driven over the same way with a party of guests who chattered inconsequently, or gone on horseback in the company of Stead, as she had done once or twice lately, for even the mild-mannered old horse required guiding and attention that banished the spirit of revery.
The pieman had covered his wares carefully, and rolled up the curtains all around, while the horse, dragging the loaded cart, proceeded perforce at a walk, so that Brooke, seated on a low chair, travelled with all the leisurely ease of an old-time queen in a palanquin. This pace brought her close to every feature of the Masque of Spring, face to face with the reality of it, and she could anticipate, and then realize, every detail in its fulness.
Her charioteer also was as much a child of nature and a part of it all as the big gray squirrels that raced along the fence-tops, while his simple and positive faith in the goodness of all created things, and his intense love and kinship with the wild brotherhood, opened a new world to Brooke, banishing for the time all care and responsibility and replacing it with the wholesome pleasure of the hour, born of the pure joy of mere living. When one has known trouble, and then felt this touch of peace, is it not the new Revelation of God, fitted to meet the needs and greeds of to-day, even as nineteen centuries ago the single-hearted Messenger brought his spiritual message to the material Oriental world?
They would travel a mile, perhaps, in entire silence, the pieman merely pulling up now and then, and pointing with his whip to a warm spot, where a group of silver-green ferns slowly unfolded and stretched their winter-cramped paws, or else, with finger raised, caution silence while the song of some elusive bird thrilled the air,—“Whitethroat,” “Fox-sparrow,” or “Oven-bird,” being his only words. Then a settlement of half a dozen houses, and a period of bustle, barter, and exchange of news would interrupt, and so on until, as the “peepers” began to tune up, and the sun called the warmth of the day swiftly after him, they turned into Sairy Ann’s yard.
After a keenly relished supper, Brooke and her guide stole out to the edge of a strip of woods that separated some grass meadows from a brawling trout stream running its downhill course a dozen miles before the Moosatuk received it. There, seated on a log, they waited as the twilight began to cast its mysterious spell. Presently a strange cry sounded through the gloom, was repeated, and echoed by others a second and a third time. Next a rush of wings, as if a bird was flung suddenly into the air, opening its wings at the same time. A sharp whirring sound followed, increasing as the wings that made it vanished skyward. Bending forward to watch the wonderful flight, until eye could not see it, in a moment Brooke was startled by the falling as of a bolt from the clouds close beside her, followed by a sweet musical whistle.