Sometimes it seemed to her that in a previous existence she had lived the life of the River Kingdom; perhaps it was the heredity moulded beside the Highland torrents that sang to her in the voice of the Moosatuk. On this last day of April, as she stood at the edge of the pasture, with wands of delicate cherry bloom waving softly between her and the river, like heralds ushering one into the presence of a monarch, the words from the song of the migrant bird, “Out of the South,” came to her lips, and she chanted them softly, watching the old horse holding a nose-to-nose conversation with a neighbour in the next field:—
“I have sought In far wild groves below the tropic line To leave old memories of this land of mine. I have fought This vague mysterious power that flings me forth Into the north. But all in vain, when flutes of April blow, The immemorial longing lures me, and I go!”
Then, abandoning for the time the fight against the lure of a voice beyond her ken and a memory in which sweetness and pain were inextricably blended, she gave herself wholly up to the spell of the present.
Another happening that day lent wings to her spirit, though the thing was both practical and humble. Bisbee, the stableman, upon the strength of having seen the Sign of the Fox when it was at the blacksmith’s being framed in iron (for the rings had not held), ordered a sign for his newly completed stable, offering the generous price (to him) of twenty-five dollars for it, he to furnish the wood.
“There’s a regular horse painter over in Gordon will do me a race-horse in a sulky, driver included, for fifteen,” said Bisbee, a big, jolly, liberal man, whose rosy cheeks plainly told that they were not made in New England; “but he’s done that same one fer everybody within ten miles. Besides, what sense in a race-horse sign fer a family stable, say I? Give me something safe and assuring, yet not too safe!”
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.