Jackson brought to the floor the forefeet of his chair, which he had tilted from it in leaning back, and without other answer put his hand on the planchette. It began to fly over the large sheet of paper spread upon the table, in curves and angles and eccentrics.
“Feels pootty lively to-night,” said Whitwell, with a glance at Westover.
The little Canuck, as if he had now no further concern in the matter, sat down in a corner and smoked silently. Whitwell asked, after a moment’s impatience:
“Can’t you git her down to business, Jackson?”
Jackson gasped: “She’ll come down when she wants to.”
The little instrument seemed, in fact, trying to control itself. Its movements became less wild and large; the zigzags began to shape themselves into something like characters. Jackson’s wasted face gave no token of interest; Whitwell laid half his gaunt length across the table in the endeavor to make out some meaning in them; the Canuck, with his hands crossed on his stomach, smoked on, with the same gleam in his pipe and eye.
The planchette suddenly stood motionless.
“She done?” murmured Whitwell.
“I guess she is, for a spell, anyway,” said Jackson, wearily.
“Let’s try to make out what she says.” Whitwell drew the sheets toward himself and Westover, who sat next him. “You’ve got to look for the letters everywhere. Sometimes she’ll give you fair and square writin’, and then again she’ll slat the letters down every which way, and you’ve got to hunt ’em out for yourself. Here’s a B I’ve got. That begins along pretty early in the alphabet. Let’s see what we can find next.”
Westover fancied he could make out an F and a T.
Whitwell exulted in an unmistakable K and N; and he made sure of an I, and an E. The painter was not so sure of an S. “Well, call it an S,” said Whitwell. “And I guess I’ve got an O here, and an H. Hello! Here’s an A as large as life. Pootty much of a mixture.”
“Yes; I don’t see that we’re much better off than we were before,” said Westover.
“Well, I don’t know about that,” said Whitwell.
“Write ’em down in a row and see if we can’t pick out some sense. I’ve had worse finds than this; no vowels at all sometimes; but here’s three.”
He wrote the letters down, while Jackson leaned back against the wall, in patient quiet.
“Well, sir,” said Whitwell, pushing the paper, where he had written the letters in a line, to Westover, “make anything out of ’em?”
Westover struggled with them a moment. “I can make out one word-shaft.”
“Anything else?” demanded Whitwell, with a glance of triumph at Jackson.
Westover studied the remaining letters. “Yes, I get one other word- broken.”
“Just what I done! But I wanted you to speak first. It’s Broken Shaft. Jackson, she caught right onto what we was talkin’ about. This life,” he turned to Westover, in solemn exegesis, “is a broken shaft when death comes. It rests upon the earth, but you got to look for the top of it in the skies. That’s the way I look at it. What do you think, Jackson? Jombateeste?”
“I think anybody can’t see that. Better go and get some heye-glass.”
Westover remained in a shameful minority. He said, meekly: “It suggests a beautiful hope.”
Jackson brought his chair-legs down again, and put his hand on the planchette.
“Feel that tinglin’?” asked. Whitwell, and Jackson made yes with silent lips. “After he’s been workin’ the plantchette for a spell, and then leaves off, and she wants to say something more,” Whitwell explained to Westover, “he seems to feel a kind of tinglin’ in his arm, as if it was asleep, and then he’s got to tackle her again. Writin’ steady enough now, Jackson!” he cried, joyously. “Let’s see.” He leaned over and read, “Thomas Jefferson–” The planchette stopped, “My, I didn’t go to do that,” said Whitwell, apologetically. “You much acquainted with Jefferson’s writin’s?” he asked of Westover.
The painter had to own his ignorance of all except the diction that the government is best which governs least; but he was not in a position to deny that Jefferson had ever said anything about a broken shaft.
“It may have come to him on the other side,” said Whitwell.
“Perhaps,” Westover assented.
The planchette began to stir itself again. “She’s goin’ ahead !” cried Whitwell. He leaned over the table so as to get every letter as it was formed. “D–Yes! Death. Death is the Broken Shaft. Go on!” After a moment of faltering the planchette formed another letter. It was a U, and it was followed by an R, and so on, till Durgin had been spelled. “Thunder!” cried Whitwell. “If anything’s happened to Jeff!”
Jackson lifted his hand from the planchette.
“Oh, go on, Jackson!” Whitwell entreated. “Don’t leave it so!”
“I can’t seem to go on,” Jackson whispered, and Westover could not resist the fear that suddenly rose among them. But he made the first struggle against it. “This is nonsense. Or, if there’s any sense in it, it means that Jeff’s ship has broken her shaft and put back.”
Whitwell gave a loud laugh of relief. “That’s so! You’ve hit it, Mr. Westover.”
Jackson said, quietly: “He didn’t mean to start home till tomorrow. And how could he send any message unless he was–“
“Easily!” cried Westover. “It’s simply an instance of mental impression- of telepathy, as they call it.”
“That’s so!” shouted Whitwell, with eager and instant conviction.
Westover could see that Jackson still doubted. “If you believe that a disembodied spirit can communicate with you, why not an embodied spirit? If anything has happened to your brother’s ship, his mind would be strongly on you at home, and why couldn’t it convey its thought to you?”
“Because he ha’n’t started yet,” said Jackson.
Westover wanted to laugh; but they all heard voices without, which seemed to be coming nearer, and he listened with the rest. He made out Frank Whitwell’s voice, and his sister’s; and then another voice, louder and gayer, rose boisterously above them. Whitwell flung the door open and plunged out into the night. He came back, hauling Jeff Durgin in by the shoulder.
“Here, now,” he shouted to Jackson, “you just let this feller and plantchette fight it out together!”
“What’s the matter with plantchette ?” said Jeff, before he said to his brother, “Hello, Jackson!” and to the Canuck, “Hello, Jombateeste!” He shook hands conventionally with them both, and then with the painter, whom he greeted with greater interest. “Glad to see you here, Mr. Westover. Did I take you by surprise?” he asked of the company at large.
“No, sir,” said Whitwell. “Didn’t surprise us any, if you are a fortnight ahead of time,” he added, with a wink at the others.
“Well, I took a notion I wouldn’t wait for the cattle-ship, and I started back on a French boat. Thought I’d try it. They live well. But I hoped I should astonish you a little, too. I might as well waited.”
Whitwell laughed. “We heard from you–plantchette kept right round after you.”
“That so?” asked Jeff, carelessly.
“Fact. Have a good voyage?” Whitwell had the air of putting a casual question.
“First-rate,” said Jeff. “Plantchette say not?”
“No. Only about the broken shaft.”
“Broken shaft? We didn’t have any broken shaft. Plantchette’s got mixed a little. Got the wrong ship.”
After a moment of chop-fallenness, Whitwell said:
“Then somebody’s been makin’ free with your name. Curious how them devils cut up oftentimes.”
He explained, and Jeff laughed uproariously when he understood the whole case. “Plantchette’s been havin’ fun with you.”
Whitwell gave himself time for reflection. “No, sir, I don’t look at it that way. I guess the wires got crossed some way. If there’s such a thing as the spirits o’ the livin’ influencin’ plantchette, accordin’ to Mr. Westover’s say, here, I don’t see why it wa’n’t. Jeff’s being so near that got control of her and made her sign his name to somebody else’s words. It shows there’s something in it.”
“Well, I’m glad to come back alive, anyway,” said Jeff, with a joviality new to Westover. “I tell you, there a’n’t many places finer than old Lion’s Head, after all. Don’t you think so, Mr. Westover? I want to get the daylight on it, but it does well by moonlight, even.” He looked round at the tall girl, who had been lingering to hear the talk of planchette; at the backward tilt he gave his head, to get her in range, she frowned as if she felt his words a betrayal, and slipped out of the room; the boy had already gone, and was making himself heard in the low room overhead.
“There’s a lot of folks here this summer, mother says,” he appealed from the check he had got to Jackson. “Every room taken for the whole month, she says.”
“We’ve been pretty full all July, too,” said Jackson, blankly.
“Well, it’s a great business; and I’ve picked up a lot of hints over there. We’re not so smart as we think we are. The Swiss can teach us a thing or two. They know how to keep a hotel.”
“Go to Switzerland?” asked Whitwell.
“I slipped over into the edge of it.”
“I want to know! Well, now them Alps, now–they so much bigger ‘n the White Hills, after all?”
“Well, I don’t know about all of ’em,” said Jeff. “There may be some that would compare with our hills, but I should say that you could take Mount Washington up and set it in the lap of almost any one of the Alps I saw, and it would look like a baby on its mother’s knee.”
“I want to know!” said Whitwell again. His tone expressed disappointment, but impartiality; he would do justice to foreign superiority if he must. “And about the ocean. What about waves runnin? mountains high?”
“Well, we didn’t have it very rough. But I don’t believe I saw any waves much higher than Lion’s Head.” Jeff laughed to find Whitwell taking him seriously. “Won’t that satisfy you?”
“Oh, it satisfies me. Truth always does. But, now, about London. You didn’t seem to say so much about London in your letters, now. Is it so big as they let on? Big–that is, to the naked eye, as you may say?”
“There a’n’t any one place where you can get a complete bird’s-eye view of it,” said Jeff, “and two-thirds of it would be hid in smoke, anyway. You’ve got to think of a place that would take in the whole population of New England, outside of Massachusetts, and not feel as if it had more than a comfortable meal.”
Whitwell laughed for joy in the bold figure.
“I’ll tell you. When you’ve landed and crossed up from Liverpool, and struck London, you feel as if you’d gone to sea again. It’s an ocean– a whole Atlantic of houses.”
“That’s right!” crowed Whitwell. “That’s the way I thought it was. Growin’ any?”
Jeff hesitated. “It grows in the night. You’ve heard about Chicago growing?”
“Yes.”
“Well, London grows a whole Chicago every night.”
“Good!” said Whitwell. “That suits me. And about Paris, now. Paris strike you the same way?”
“It don’t need to,” said Jeff. “That’s a place where I’d like to live. Everybody’s at home there. It’s a man’s house and his front yard, and I tell you they keep it clean. Paris is washed down every morning; scrubbed and mopped and rubbed dry. You couldn’t find any more dirt than you could in mother’s kitchen after she’s hung out her wash. That so, Mr. Westover?”
Westover confirmed in general Jeff’s report of the cleanliness of Paris.
“And beautiful! You don’t know what a good-looking town is till you strike Paris. And they’re proud of it, too. Every man acts as if he owned it. They’ve had the statue of Alsace in that Place de la Concorde of yours, Mr. Whitwell, where they had the guillotine all draped in black ever since the war with Germany; and they mean to have her back, some day.”
“Great country, Jombateeste!” Whitwell shouted to the Canuck.
The little man roused himself from the muse in which he was listening and smoking. “Me, I’m Frantsh,” he said.
“Yes, that’s what Jeff was sayin’,” said Whitwell. “I meant France.”
“Oh,” answered Jombateeste, impatiently, “I thought you mean the Hunited State.”
“Well, not this time,” said Whitwell, amid the general laughter.
“Good for Jombateeste,” said Jeff. “Stand up for Canada every time, John. It’s the livest country, in the world three months of the year, and the ice keeps it perfectly sweet the other nine.”
Whitwell could not brook a diversion from the high and serious inquiry they had entered upon. “It must have made this country look pretty slim when you got back. How’d New York look, after Paris?”
“Like a pigpen,” said Jeff. He left his chair and walked round the table toward a door opening into the adjoining room. For the first time Westover noticed a figure in white seated there, and apparently rapt in the talk which had been going on. At the approach of Jeff, and before he could have made himself seen at the doorway, a tremor seemed to pass over the figure; it fluttered to its feet, and then it vanished into the farther dark of the room. When Jeff disappeared within, there was a sound of rustling skirts and skurrying feet and the crash of a closing door, and then the free rise of laughing voices without. After a discreet interval, Westover said: “Mr. Whitwell, I must say good-night. I’ve got another day’s work before me. It’s been a most interesting evening.”
“You must try it again,” said Whitwell, hospitably. “We ha’n’t got to the bottom of that broken shaft yet. You’ll see ‘t plantchette ‘ll have something more to say about it: Heigh, Jackson?” He rose to receive Westover’s goodnight; the others nodded to him.
As the painter climbed the hill to the hotel he saw two figures on the road below; the one in white drapery looked severed by a dark line slanting across it at the waist. In the country, he knew, such an appearance might mark the earliest stages of love-making, or mere youthful tenderness, in which there was nothing more implied or expected. But whatever the fact was, Westover felt a vague distaste for it, which, as it related itself to a more serious possibility, deepened to something like pain. It was probable that it should come to this between those two, but Westover rebelled against the event with a sense of its unfitness for which he could not give himself any valid reason; and in the end he accused himself of being a fool.
Two ladies sat on the veranda of the hotel and watched a cloud-wreath trying to lift itself from the summit of Lion’s Head. In the effort it thinned away to transparency in places; in others, it tore its frail texture asunder and let parts of the mountain show through; then the fragments knitted themselves loosely together, and the vapor lay again in dreamy quiescence.
The ladies were older and younger, and apparently mother and daughter. The mother had kept her youth in face and figure so admirably that in another light she would have looked scarcely the elder. It was the candor of the morning which confessed the fine vertical lines running up and down to her lips, only a shade paler than the girl’s, and that showed her hair a trifle thinner in its coppery brown, her blue eyes a little dimmer. They were both very graceful, and they had soft, caressing voices; they now began to talk very politely to each other, as if they were strangers, or as if strangers were by. They talked of the landscape, and of the strange cloud effect before them. They said that they supposed they should see the Lion’s Head when the cloud lifted, and they were both sure they had never been quite so near a cloud before. They agreed that this was because in Switzerland the mountains were so much higher and farther off. Then the daughter said, without changing the direction of her eyes or the tone of her voice, “The gentleman who came over from the station with us last night,” and the mother was aware of Jeff Durgin advancing toward the corner of the veranda where they sat.
“I hope you have got rested,” he said, with the jovial bluntness which was characteristic of him with women.
“Oh, yes indeed,” said the elder lady. Jeff had spoken to her, but had looked chiefly at the younger. “I slept beautifully. So quiet here, and with this delicious air! Have you just tasted it?”
“No; I’ve been up ever since daylight, driving round,” said Jeff. “I’m glad you like the air,” he said, after a certain hesitation. “We always want to have people do that at Lion’s Head. There’s no air like it, though perhaps I shouldn’t say so.”
“Shouldn’t?” the lady repeated.
“Yes; we own the air here–this part of it.” Jeff smiled easily down at the lady’s puzzled face.
“Oh! Then you are–are you a son of the house?”
“Son of the hotel, yes,” said Jeff, with increasing ease. The lady continued her question in a look, and he went on: “I’ve been scouring the country for butter and eggs this morning. We shall get all our supplies from Boston next year, I hope, but we depend on the neighbors a little yet.”
“How very interesting!” said the lady. “You must have a great many queer adventures,” she suggested in a provisional tone.
“Well, nothing’s queer to me in the hill country. But you see some characters here.” He nodded over his shoulder to where Whitwell stood by the flag-staff, waiting the morning impulse of the ladies. “There’s one of the greatest of them now.”
The lady put up a lorgnette and inspected Whitwell. “What are those strange things he has got in his hatband?”
“The flowers and the fungi of the season,” said Jeff. “He takes parties of the ladies walking, and that collection is what he calls his almanac.”
“Really?” cried the girl. “That’s charming!”
“Delightful!” said the mother, moved by the same impulse, apparently.
“Yes,” said Jeff. “You ought to hear him talk. I’ll introduce him to you after breakfast, if you like.”
“Oh, we should only be too happy,” said the mother, and her daughter, from her inflection, knew that she would be willing to defer her happiness.
But Jeff did not. “Mr. Whitwell !” he called out, and Whitwell came across the grass to the edge of the veranda. “I want to introduce you to Mrs. Vostrand–and Miss Vostrand.”
Whitwell took their slim hands successively into his broad, flat palm, and made Mrs. Vostrand repeat her name to him. “Strangers at Lion’s Head, I presume?” Mrs. Vostrand owned as much; and he added: “Well, I guess you won’t find a much sightlier place anywhere; though, accordin’ to Jeff’s say, here, they’ve got bigger mountains on the other side. Ever been in Europe?”
“Why, yes,” said Mrs. Vostrand, with a little mouth of deprecation. “In fact, we’ve just come home. We’ve been living there.”
“That so?” returned Whitwell, in humorous toleration. “Glad to get back, I presume?”
“Oh yes–yes,” said Mrs. Vostrand, in a sort of willowy concession, as if the character before her were not to be crossed or gainsaid.
“Well, it ‘ll do you good here,” said Whitwell. “‘N’ the young lady, too. A few tramps over these hills ‘ll make you look like another woman.” He added, as if he had perhaps made his remarks too personal to the girl, “Both of you.”
“Oh yes,” the mother assented, fervently. “We shall count upon your showing us all their-mysteries.”
Whitwell looked pleased. “I’ll do my best-whenever you’re ready.” He went on: “Why, Jeff, here, has just got back, too. Jeff, what was the name of that French boat you said you crossed on? I want to see if I can’t make out what plantchette meant by that broken shaft. She must have meant something, and if I could find out the name of the ship– Tell the ladies about it?” Jeff laughed, with a shake of the head, and Whitwell continued, “Why, it was like this,” and he possessed the ladies of a fact which they professed to find extremely interesting. At the end of their polite expressions he asked Jeff again: “What did you say the name was?”
“Aquitaine,” said Jeff, briefly.
“Why, we came on the Aquitaine!” said Mrs. Vostrand, with a smile for Jeff. “But how did we happen not to see one another?”
“Oh, I came second-cabin,” said Jeff. “I worked my way over on a cattle- ship to London, and, when I decided not to work my way back, I found I hadn’t enough money for a first-cabin passage. I was in a hurry to get back in time to get settled at Harvard, and so I came second-cabin. It wasn’t bad. I used to see you across the rail.”
“Well!” said Whitwell.
“How very–amusing!” said Mrs. Vostrand. “What a small world it is!” With these words she fell into a vagary; her daughter recalled her from it with a slight movement. “Breakfast? How impatient you are, Genevieve! Well!” She smiled the sweetest parting to Whitwell, and suffered herself to be led away by Jeff.
“And you’re at Harvard? I’m so interested! My own boy will be going there soon.”
“Well, there’s no place like Harvard,” said Jeff. “I’m in my Sophomore year now.”
“Oh, a Sophomore! Fancy!” cried Mrs. Vostrand, as if nothing could give her more pleasure. “My son is going to prepare at St. Mark’s. Did you prepare there?”
“No, I prepared at Lovewell Academy, over here.” Jeff nodded in a southerly direction.
“Oh, indeed!” said Mrs. Vostrand, as if she knew where Lovewell was, and instantly recognized the name of the ancient school.
They had reached the dining room, and Jeff pushed the screen-door open with one hand, and followed the ladies in. He had the effect of welcoming them like invited guests; he placed the ladies himself at a window, where he said Mrs. Vostrand would be out of the draughts, and they could have a good view of Lion’s Head.
He leaned over between them, when they were seated, to get sight of the mountain, and, “There!” he said. “That cloud’s gone at last.” Then, as if it would be modester in the proprietor of the view to leave them to their flattering raptures in it, he moved away and stood talking a moment with Cynthia Whitwell near the door of the serving-room. He talked gayly, with many tosses of the head and turns about, while she listened with a vague smile, motionlessly.
“She’s very pretty,” said Miss Vostrand to her mother.
“Yes. The New England type,” murmured the mother.
“They all have the same look, a good deal,” said the girl, glancing over the room where the waitresses stood ranged against the wall with their hands folded at their waists. “They have better faces than figures, but she is beautiful every way. Do you suppose they are all schoolteachers? They look intellectual. Or is it their glasses?”
“I don’t know,” said the mother. “They used to be; but things change here so rapidly it may all be different. Do you like it?”
“I think it’s charming here,” said the younger lady, evasively. “Everything is so exquisitely clean. And the food is very good. Is this corn-bread–that you’ve told me about so much?”
“Yes, this is corn-bread. You will have to get accustomed to it.”
“Perhaps it won’t take long. I could fancy that girl knowing about everything. Don’t you like her looks?”
“Oh, very much.” Mrs. Vostrand turned for another glance at Cynthia.
“What say?” Their smiling waitress came forward from the wall where she was leaning, as if she thought they had spoken to her.
“Oh, we were speaking–the young lady to whom Mr. Durgin was talking–she is–“
“She’s the housekeeper–Miss Whitwell.”
“Oh, indeed! She seems so young–“
“I guess she knows what to do-o-o,” the waitress chanted. “We think she’s about ri-i-ght.” She smiled tolerantly upon the misgiving of the stranger, if it was that, and then retreated when the mother and daughter began talking together again.
They had praised the mountain with the cloud off, to Jeff, very politely, and now the mother said, a little more intimately, but still with the deference of a society acquaintance: “He seems very gentlemanly, and I am sure he is very kind. I don’t quite know what to do about it, do you?”
“No, I don’t. It’s all strange to me, you know.”
“Yes, I suppose it must be. But you will get used to it if we remain in the country. Do you think you will dislike it?”
“Oh no! It’s very different.”
“Yes, it’s different. He is very handsome, in a certain way.” The daughter said nothing, and the mother added: “I wonder if he was trying to conceal that he had come second-cabin, and was not going to let us know that he crossed with us?”
“Do you think he was bound to do so?”
“No. But it was very odd, his not mentioning it. And his going out on a cattle-steamer?” the mother observed.
“Oh, but that’s very chic, I’ve heard,” the daughter replied. “I’ve heard that the young men like it and think it a great chance. They have great fun. It isn’t at all like second-cabin.”
“You young people have your own world,” the mother answered, caressingly.
XVI.
Westover met the ladies coming out of the dining-room as he went in rather late to breakfast; he had been making a study of Lion’s Head in the morning light after the cloud lifted from it. He was always doing Lion’s Heads, it seemed to him; but he loved the mountain, and he was always finding something new in it.
He was now seeing it inwardly with so exclusive a vision that he had no eyes for these extremely pretty women till they were out of sight. Then he remembered noticing them, and started with a sense of recognition, which he verified by the hotel register when he had finished his meal. It was, in fact, Mrs. James W. Vostrand, and it was Miss Vostrand, whom Westover had know ten years before in Italy. Mrs. Vostrand had then lately come abroad for the education of her children, and was pausing in doubt at Florence whether she should educate them in Germany or Switzerland. Her husband had apparently abandoned this question to her, and he did not contribute his presence to her moral support during her struggle with a problem which Westover remembered as having a tendency to solution in the direction of a permanent stay in Florence.
In those days he liked Mrs. Vostrand very much, and at twenty he considered her at thirty distinctly middle-aged. For one winter she had a friendly little salon, which was the most attractive place in Florence to him, then a cub painter sufficiently unlicked. He was aware of her children being a good deal in the salon: a girl of eight, who was like her mother, and quite a savage little boy of five, who may have been like his father. If he was, and the absent Mr. Vostrand had the same habit of sulking and kicking at people’s shins, Westover could partly understand why Mrs. Vostrand had come to Europe for the education of her children. It all came vividly back to him, while he went about looking for Mrs. Vostrand and her daughter on the verandas and in the parlors. But he did not find them, and he was going to send his name to their rooms when he came upon Jeff Durgin figuring about the office in a fresh London conception of an outing costume.
“You’re very swell,” said Westover, halting him to take full note of it.
“Like it? Well, I knew you’d understand what it meant. Mother thinks it’s a little too rowdy-looking. Her idea is black broadcloth frock-coat and doeskin trousers for a gentleman, you know.” He laughed with a young joyousness, and then became serious. “Couple of ladies here, somewhere, I’d like to introduce you to. Came over with me from the depot last night. Very nice people, and I’d like to make it pleasant for them–get up something–go somewhere–and when you see their style you can judge what it had better be. Mrs. Vostrand and her daughter.”
“Thank you,” said Westover. “I think I know them already at least one of them. I used to go to Mrs. Vostrand’s house in Florence.”
“That so? Well, fact is, I crossed with them; but I came second-cabin, because I’d spent all my money, and I didn’t get acquainted with them on the ship, but we met in the train coming up last night. Said they had heard of Lion’s Head on the other side from friends. But it was quite a coincidence, don’t you think? I’d like to have them see what this neighborhood really is; and I wish, Mr. Westover, you’d find out, if you can, what they’d like. If they’re for walking, we could get Whitwell to personally conduct a party, and if they’re for driving, I’d like to show them a little mountain-coaching myself.”
“I don’t know whether I’d better not leave the whole thing to you, Jeff,” Westover said, after a moment’s reflection. “I don’t see exactly how I could bring the question into a first interview.”
“Well, perhaps it would be rather rushing it. But, if I get up something, you’ll come, Mr. Westover?”
“I will, with great pleasure,” said Westover, and he went to make his call.
A half-hour later he was passing the door of the old parlor which Mrs. Durgin still kept for hers, on his way up to his room, when a sound of angry voices came out to him. Then the voice of Mrs. Durgin defined itself in the words: “I’m not goin’ to have to ask any more folks for their rooms on your account, Jeff Durgin–Mr. Westover! Mr. Westover, is that you?” her voice broke off to call after him as he hurried by, “Won’t you come in here a minute?”
He hesitated, and then Jeff called, “Yes, come in, Mr. Westover.”
The painter found him sitting on the old hair-cloth sofa, with his stick between his hands and knees, confronting his mother, who was rocking excitedly to and fro in the old hair-cloth easy-chair.
“You know these folks that Jeff’s so crazy about?” she demanded.
“Crazy!” cried Jeff, laughing and frowning at the same time. “What’s crazy in wanting to go off on a drive and choose your own party?”
“Do you know them?” Mrs. Durgin repeated to Westover.
“The Vostrands? Why, yes. I knew Mrs. Vostrand in Italy a good many years ago, and I’ve just been calling on her and her daughter, who was a little girl then.”
“What kind of folks are they?”
“What kind? Really! Why, they’re very charming people–“
“So Jeff seems to think. Any call to show them any particular attention?”
“I don’t know if I quite understand–“
“Why, it’s just this. Jeff, here, wants to make a picnic for them, or something, and I can’t see the sense of it. You remember what happened at that other picnic, with that Mrs. Marven”–Jeff tapped the floor with his stick impatiently, and Westover felt sorry for him–“and I don’t want it to happen again, and I’ve told Jeff so. I presume he thinks it ‘ll set him right with them, if they’re thinkin’ demeaning of him because he came over second-cabin on their ship.”
Jeff set his teeth and compressed his lips to bear as best he could, the give-away which his mother could not appreciate in its importance to him:
“They’re not the kind of people to take such a thing shabbily,” said Westover. “They didn’t happen to mention it, but Mrs. Vostrand must have got used to seeing young fellows in straits of all kinds during her life abroad. I know that I sometimes made the cup of tea and biscuit she used to give me in Florence do duty for a dinner, and I believe she knew it.”
Jeff looked up at Westover with a grateful, sidelong glance.
His mother said: “Well, then, that’s all right, and Jeff needn’t do anything for them on that account. And I’ve made up my mind about one thing: whatever the hotel does has got to be done for the whole hotel. It can’t pick and choose amongst the guests.” Westover liked so little the part of old family friend which he seemed, whether he liked it or not, to bear with the Durgins, that he would gladly have got away now, but Mrs. Durgin detained him with a direct appeal. “Don’t you think so, Mr. Westover?”
Jeff spared him the pain of a response. “Very well,” he said to his mother; “I’m not the hotel, and you never want me to be. I can do this on my own account.”
“Not with my coach and not with my hosses,” said his mother.
Jeff rose. “I might as well go on down to Cambridge, and get to work on my conditions.”
“Just as you please about that,” said Mrs. Durgin, with the same impassioned quiet that showed in her son’s handsome face and made it one angry red to his yellow hair. “We’ve got along without you so far, this summer, and I guess we can the rest of the time. And the sooner you work off your conditions the better, I presume.”
The next morning Jeff came to take leave of him, where Westover had pitched his easel and camp-stool on the slope behind the hotel.
“Why, are you really going?” he asked. “I was in hopes it might have blown over.”
“No, things don’t blow over so easy with mother,” said Jeff, with an embarrassed laugh, but no resentment. “She generally means what she says.”
“Well, in this case, Jeff, I think she was right.”
“Oh, I guess so,” said Jeff, pulling up a long blade of grass and taking it between his teeth. “Anyway, it comes to the same thing as far as I’m concerned. It’s for her to say what shall be done and what sha’n’t be done in her own house, even if it is a hotel. That’s what I shall do in mine. We’re used to these little differences; but we talk it out, and that’s the end of it. I shouldn’t really go, though, if I didn’t think I ought to get in some work on those conditions before the thing begins regularly. I should have liked to help here a little, for I’ve had a good time and I ought to be willing to pay for it. But she’s in good hands. Jackson’s well–for him–and she’s got Cynthia.”
The easy security of tone with which Jeff pronounced the name vexed Westover. “I suppose your mother would hardly know how to do without her, even if you were at home,” he said, dryly.
“Well, that’s a fact,” Jeff assented, with a laugh for the hit. “And Jackson thinks the world of her. I believe he trusts her judgment more than he does mother’s about the hotel. Well, I must be going. You don’t know where Mrs. Vostrand is going to be this winter, I suppose?”
“No, I don’t,” said Westover. He could not help a sort of blind resentment in the situation. If he could not feel that Jeff was the best that could be for Cynthia, he had certainly no reason to regret that his thoughts could be so lightly turned from her. But the fact anomalously incensed him as a slight to the girl, who might have been still more sacrificed by Jeff’s constancy. He forced himself to add: “I fancy Mrs. Vostrand doesn’t know herself.”
“I wish I didn’t know where I was going to be,” said Jeff. “Well, good- bye, Mr. Westover. I’ll see you in Boston.”
“Oh, good-bye.” The painter freed himself from his brush and palette for a parting handshake, reluctantly.
Jeff plunged down the hill, waving a final adieu from the corner of the hotel before he vanished round it.
Mrs. Vostrand and her daughter were at breakfast when Westover came in after the early light had been gone some time. They entreated him to join them at their table, and the mother said: “I suppose you were up soon enough to see young Mr. Durgin off. Isn’t it too bad he has to go back to college when it’s so pleasant in the country?”
“Not bad for him,” said Westover. “He’s a young man who can stand a great deal of hard work.” Partly because he was a little tired of Jeff, and partly because he was embarrassed in their presence by the reason of his going, he turned the talk upon the days they had known together.
Mrs. Vostrand was very willing to talk of her past, even apart from his, and she told him of her sojourn in Europe since her daughter had left school. They spent their winters in Italy and their summers in Switzerland, where it seemed her son was still at his studies in Lausanne. She wished him to go to Harvard, she said, and she supposed he would have to finish his preparation at one of the American schools; but she had left the choice entirely to Mr. Vostrand.
This seemed a strange event after twelve years’ stay in Europe for the education of her children, but Westover did not feel authorized to make any comment upon it. He fell rather to thinking how very pleasant both mother and daughter were, and to wondering how much wisdom they had between them. He reflected that men had very little wisdom, as far as he knew them, and he questioned whether, after all, the main difference between men and women might not be that women talked their follies and men acted theirs. Probably Mrs. Vostrand, with all her babble, had done fewer foolish things than her husband, but here Westover felt his judgment disabled by the fact that he had never met her husband; and his mind began to wander to a question of her daughter, whom he had there before him. He found himself bent upon knowing more of the girl, and trying to eliminate her mother from the talk, or, at least, to make Genevieve lead in it. But apparently she was not one of the natures that like to lead; at any rate, she remained discreetly in abeyance, and Westover fancied she even respected her mother’s opinions and ideas. He thought this very well for both of them, whether it was the effect of Mrs. Vostrand’s merit or Miss Vostrand’s training. They seemed both of one exquisite gentleness, and of one sweet manner, which was rather elaborate and formal in expression. They deferred to each other as politely as they deferred to him, but, if anything, the daughter deferred most.
XVII.
The Vostrands did not stay long at Lion’s Head. Before the week was out Mrs. Vostrand had a letter summoning them to meet her husband at Montreal, where that mysterious man, who never came into the range of Westover’s vision, somehow, was kept by business from joining them in the mountains.
Early in October the painter received Mrs. Vostrand’s card at his studio in Boston, and learned from the scribble which covered it that she was with her daughter at the Hotel Vendome. He went at once to see them there, and was met, almost before the greetings were past, with a prayer for his opinion.
“Favorable opinion?” he asked.
“Favorable? Oh yes; of course. It’s simply this. When I sent you my card, we were merely birds of passage, and now I don’t know but we are– What is the opposite of birds of passage?”
Westover could not think, and said so.
“Well, it doesn’t matter. We were walking down the street, here, this morning, and we saw the sign of an apartment to let, in a window, and we thought, just for amusement, we would go in and look at it.”
“And you took it?”
“No, not quite so rapid as that. But it was lovely; in such a pretty ‘hotel garni’, and so exquisitely furnished! We didn’t really think of staying in Boston; we’d quite made up our minds on New York; but this apartment is a temptation.”
“Why not yield, then?” said Westover. “That’s the easiest way with a temptation. Confess, now, that you’ve taken the apartment already!”
“No, no, I haven’t yet,” said Mrs. Vostrand.
“And if I advised not, you wouldn’t?”
“Ah, that’s another thing!”
“When are you going to take possession, Mrs. Vostrand?”
“Oh, at once, I suppose–if we do!”
“And may I come in when I’m hungry, just as I used to do in Florence, and will you stay me with flagons in the old way?”
“There never was anything but tea, you know well enough.”
“The tea had rum in it.”
“Well, perhaps it will have rum in it here, if you’re very good.”
“I will try my best, on condition that you’ll make any and every possible use of me. Mrs. Vostrand, I can’t tell you how very glad I am you’re going to stay,” said the painter, with a fervor that made her impulsively put out her hand to him. He kept it while he could add, “I don’t forget –I can never forget–how good you were to me in those days,” and at that she gave his hand a quick pressure. “If I can do anything at all for you, you will let me, won’t you. I’m afraid you’ll be so well provided for that there won’t be anything. Ask them to slight you, to misuse you in something, so that I can come to your rescue.”
“Yes, I will,” Mrs. Vostrand promised. “And may we come to your studio to implore your protection?”
“The sooner the better.” Westover got himself away with a very sweet friendship in his heart for this rather anomalous lady, who, more than half her daughter’s life, had lived away from her daughter’s father, upon apparently perfectly good terms with him, and so discreetly and self-respectfully that no breath of reproach had touched her. Until now, however, her position had not really concerned Westover, and it would not have concerned him now, if it had not been for a design that formed itself in his mind as soon as he knew that Mrs. Vostrand meant to pass the winter in Boston. He felt at once that he could not do things by halves for a woman who had once done them for him by wholes and something over, and he had instantly decided that he must not only be very pleasant to her himself, but he must get his friends to be pleasant, too. His friends were some of the nicest people in Boston; nice in both the personal and the social sense; he knew they would not hesitate to sacrifice themselves for him in a good cause, and that made him all the more anxious that the cause should be good beyond question.
Since his last return from Paris he had been rather a fad as a teacher, and his class had been kept quite strictly to the ladies who got it up and to such as they chose to let enter it. These were not all chosen for wealth or family; there were some whose gifts gave the class distinction, and the ladies were glad to have them. It would be easy to explain Mrs. Vostrand to these, but the others might be more difficult; they might have their anxieties, and Westover meant to ask the leader of the class to help him receive at the studio tea he had at once imagined for the Vostrands, and that would make her doubly responsible.
He found himself drawing a very deep and long breath before he began to mount the many stairs to his studio, and wishing either that Mrs. Vostrand had not decided to spend the winter in Boston, or else that he were of a slacker conscience and could wear his gratitude more lightly. But there was some relief in thinking that he could do nothing for a month yet. He gained a degree of courage by telling the ladies, when he went to find them in their new apartment, that he should want them to meet a few of his friends at tea as soon as people began to get back to town; and he made the most of their instant joy in accepting his invitation.
His pleasure was somehow dashed a little, before he left them, by the announcement of Jeff Durgin’s name.
“I felt bound to send him my card,” said Mrs. Vostrand, while Jeff was following his up in the elevator. “He was so very kind to us the day we arrived at Zion’s Head; and I didn’t know but he might be feeling a little sensitive about coming over second-cabin in our ship; and–“
“How like you, Mrs. Vostrand !” cried Westover, and he was now distinctly glad he had not tried to sneak out of doing something for her. “Your kindness won’t be worse wasted on Durgin than it was on me, in the old days, when I supposed I had taken a second-cabin passage for the voyage of life. There’s a great deal of good in him; I don’t mean to say he got through his Freshman year without trouble with the college authorities, but the Sophomore year generally brings wisdom.”
“Oh,” said Mrs. Vostrand, “they’re always a little wild at first, I suppose.”
Later, the ladies brought Jeff with them when they came to Westover’s studio, and the painter perceived that they were very good friends, as if they must have met several times since he had seen them together. He interested himself in the growing correctness of Jeff’s personal effect. During his Freshman year, while the rigor of the unwritten Harvard law yet forbade him a silk hat or a cane, he had kept something of the boy, if not the country boy. Westover had noted that he had always rather a taste for clothes, but in this first year he did not get beyond a derby-hat and a sack-coat, varied toward the end by a cutaway. In the outing dress he wore at home he was always effective, but there was something in Jeff’s figure which did not lend itself to more formal fashion; something of herculean proportion which would have marked him of a classic beauty perhaps if he had not been in clothes at all, or of a yeomanly vigor and force if he had been clad for work, but which seemed to threaten the more worldly conceptions of the tailor with danger. It was as if he were about to burst out of his clothes, not because he wore them tight, but because there was somehow more of the man than the citizen in him; something native, primitive, something that Westover could not find quite a word for, characterized him physically and spiritually. When he came into the studio after these delicate ladies, the robust Jeff Durgin wore a long frockcoat, with a flower in his button-hole, and in his left hand he carried a silk hat turned over his forearm as he must have noticed people whom he thought stylish carrying their hats. He had on dark-gray trousers and sharp-pointed enamelled- leather shoes; and Westover grotesquely reflected that he was dressed, as he stood, to lead Genevieve Vostrand to the altar.
Westover saw at once that when he made his studio tea for the Vostrands he must ask Jeff; it would be cruel, and for several reasons impossible, not to do so, and he really did not see why he should not. Mrs. Vostrand was taking him on the right ground, as a Harvard student, and nobody need take him on any other. Possibly people would ask him to teas at their own houses, from Westover’s studio, but he could not feel that he was concerned in that. Society is interested in a man’s future, not his past, as it is interested in a woman’s past, not her future.
But when he gave his tea it went off wonderfully well in every way, perhaps because it was one of the first teas of the fall. It brought people together in their autumnal freshness before the winter had begun to wither their resolutions to be amiable to one another, to dull their wits, to stale their stories, or to give so wide a currency to their sayings that they could not freely risk them with every one.
Westover had thought it best to be frank with the leading lady of his class, when she said she should be delighted to receive for him, and would provide suitable young ladies to pour: a brunette for the tea, and a blonde for the chocolate. She took his scrupulosity very lightly when he spoke of Mrs. Vostrand’s educational sojourn in Europe; she laughed and said she knew the type, and the situation was one of the most obvious phases of the American marriage.
He protested in vain that Mrs. Vostrand was not the type; she laughed again, and said, Oh, types were never typical. But she was hospitably gracious both to her and to Miss Genevieve; she would not allow that the mother was not the type when Westover challenged her experience, but she said they were charming, and made haste to get rid of the question with the vivid demand: “But who was your young friend who ought to have worn a lion-skin and carried a club?”
Westover by this time disdained palliation. He said that Jeff was the son of the landlady at Lion’s Head Mountain, which he had painted so much, and he was now in his second year at Harvard, where he was going to make a lawyer of himself; and this interested the lady. She asked if he had talent, and a number of other things about him and about his mother; and Westover permitted himself to be rather graphic in telling of his acquaintance with Mrs. Durgin.
XVIII.
After all, it was rather a simple-hearted thing of Westover to have either hoped or feared very much for the Vostrands. Society, in the sense of good society, can always take care of itself, and does so perfectly. In the case of Mrs. Vostrand some ladies who liked Westover and wished to be civil to him asked her and her daughter to other afternoon teas, shook hands with them at their coming, and said, when they went, they were sorry they must be going so soon. In the crowds people recognized them now and then, both of those who had met them at Westover’s studio, and of those who had met them at Florence and Lausanne. But if these were merely people of fashion they were readily, rid of the Vostrands, whom the dullest among them quickly perceived not to be of their own sort, somehow. Many of the ladies of Westover’s class made Genevieve promise to let them paint her; and her beauty and her grace availed for several large dances at the houses of more daring spirits, where the daughters made a duty of getting partners for her, and discharged it conscientiously. But there never was an approach to more intimate hospitalities, and toward the end of February, when good society in Boston goes southward to indulge a Lenten grief at Old Point Comfort, Genevieve had so many vacant afternoons and evenings at her disposal that she could not have truthfully pleaded a previous engagement to the invitations Jeff Durgin made her. They were chiefly for the theatre, and Westover saw him with her and her mother at different plays; he wondered how Jeff had caught on to the notion of asking Mrs. Vostrand to come with them.
Jeff’s introductions at Westover’s tea had not been many, and they had not availed him at all. He had been asked to no Boston houses, and when other students, whom he knew, were going in to dances, the whole winter he was socially as quiet, but for the Vostrands, as at the Mid-year Examinations. Westover could not resent the neglect of society in his case, and he could not find that he quite regretted it; but he thought it characteristically nice of Mrs. Vostrand to make as much of the friendless fellow as she fitly could. He had no doubt but her tact would be equal to his management in every way, and that she could easily see to it that he did not become embarrassing to her daughter or herself.
One day, after the east wind had ceased to blow the breath of the ice- fields of Labrador against the New England coast, and the buds on the trees along the mall between the lawns of the avenue were venturing forth in a hardy experiment of the Boston May, Mrs. Vostrand asked Westover if she had told him that Mr. Vostrand was actually coming on to Boston. He rejoiced with her in this prospect, and he reciprocated the wish which she said Mr. Vostrand had always had for a meeting with himself.
A fortnight later, when the leaves had so far inured themselves to the weather as to have fully expanded, she announced another letter from Mr. Vostrand, saying that, after all, he should not be able to come to Boston, but hoped to be in New York before she sailed.
“Sailed!” cried Westover.
“Why, yes! Didn’t you know we were going to sail in June? I thought I had told you!”
“No–“
“Why, yes. We must go out to poor Checco, now; Mr. Vostrand insists upon that. If ever we are a united family again, Mr. Westover–if Mr. Vostrand can arrange his business, when Checco is ready to enter Harvard –I mean to take a house in Boston. I’m sure I should be contented to live nowhere else in America. The place has quite bewitched me–dear old, sober, charming Boston! I’m sure I should like to live here all the rest of my life. But why in the world do people go out of town so early? Those houses over there have been shut for a whole month past!”
They were sitting at Mrs. Vostrand’s window looking out on the avenue, where the pale globular electrics were swimming like jelly-fish in the clear evening air, and above the ranks of low trees the houses on the other side were close-shuttered from basement to attic.
Westover answered: “Some go because they have such pleasant houses at the shore, and some because they want to dodge their taxes.”
“To dodge their taxes?” she repeated, and he had to explain how if people were in their country-houses before the 1st of May they would not have to pay the high personal tax of the city; and she said that she would write that to Mr. Vostrand; it would be another point in favor of Boston. Women, she declared, would never have thought of such a thing; she denounced them as culpably ignorant of so many matters that concerned them, especially legal matters. “And you think,” she asked, “that Mr. Durgin will be a good lawyer? That he will-distinguish himself?”
Westover thought it rather a short-cut to Jeff from the things they had been talking of, but if she wished to speak of him he had no reason to oppose her wish. “I’ve heard it’s all changed a good deal. There are still distinguished lawyers, and lawyers who get on, but they don’t distinguish themselves in the old way so much, and they get on best by becoming counsel for some powerful corporation.”
“And you think he has talent?” she pursued. “For that, I mean.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” said Westover. “I think he has a good head. He can do what he likes within certain limits, and the limits are not all on the side I used to fancy. He baffles me. But of late I fancy you’ve seen rather more of him than I have.”
“I have urged him to go more to you. But,” said Mrs. Vostrand, with a burst of frankness, “he thinks you don’t like him.”
“He’s wrong,” said Westover. “But I might dislike him very much.”
“I see what you mean,” said Mrs. Vostrand, “and I’m glad you’ve been so frank with me. I’ve been so interested in Mr. Durgin, so interested! Isn’t he very young?”
The question seemed a bit of indirection to Westover. But he answered directly enough. “He’s rather old for a Sophomore, I believe. He’s twenty-two.”
“And Genevieve is twenty. Mr. Westover, may I trust you with something?”
“With everything, I hope, Mrs. Vostrand.”
“It’s about Genevieve. Her father is so opposed to her making a foreign marriage. It seems to be his one great dread. And, of course, she’s very much exposed to it, living abroad so much with me, and I feel doubly bound on that account to respect her father’s opinions, or even prejudices. Before we left Florence–in fact, last winter–there was a most delightful young officer wished to marry her. I don’t know that she cared anything for him, though he was everything that I could have wished: handsome, brilliant, accomplished, good family; everything but rich, and that was what Mr. Vostrand objected to; or, rather, he objected to putting up, as he called it, the sum that Captain Grassi would have had to deposit with the government before he was allowed to marry. You know how it is with the poor fellows in the army, there; I don’t understand the process exactly, but the sum is something like sixty thousand francs, I believe; and poor Gigi hadn’t it: I always called him Gigi, but his name is Count Luigi de’ Popolani Grassi; and he is descended from one of the old republican families of Florence. He is so nice! Mr. Vostrand was opposed to him from the beginning, and as soon as he heard of the sixty thousand francs, he utterly refused. He called it buying a son-in-law, but I don’t see why he need have looked at it in that light. However, it was broken off, and we left Florence–more for poor Gigi’s sake than for Genevieve’s, I must say. He was quite heart- broken; I pitied him.”
Her voice had a tender fall in the closing words, and Westover could fancy how sweet she would make her compassion to the young man. She began several sentences aimlessly, and he suggested, to supply the broken thread of her discourse rather than to offer consolation, while her eyes seemed to wander with her mind, and ranged the avenue up and down: “Those foreign marriages are not always successful.”
“No, they are not,” she assented. “But don’t you think they’re better with Italians than with Germans, for instance.”
“I don’t suppose the Italians expect their wives to black their boots, but I’ve heard that they beat them, sometimes.”
“In exaggerated cases, perhaps they do,” Mrs. Vostrand admitted. “And, of course,” she added, thoughtfully, “there is nothing like a purely American marriage for happiness.”
Westover wondered how she really regarded her own marriage, but she never betrayed any consciousness of its variance from the type.
XIX.
A young couple came strolling down the avenue who to Westover’s artistic eye first typified grace and strength, and then to his more personal perception identified themselves as Genevieve Vostrand and Jeff Durgin.
They faltered before one of the benches beside the mall, and he seemed to be begging her to sit down. She cast her eyes round till they must have caught the window of her mother’s apartment; then, as if she felt safe under it, she sank into the seat and Jeff put himself beside her. It was quite too early yet for the simple lovers who publicly notify their happiness by the embraces and hand-clasps everywhere evident in our parks and gardens; and a Boston pair of social tradition would not have dreamed of sitting on a bench in Commonwealth Avenue at any hour. But two such aliens as Jeff and Miss Vostrand might very well do so; and Westover sympathized with their bohemian impulse.
Mrs. Vostrand and he watched them awhile, in talk that straggled away from them, and became more and more distraught in view of them. Jeff leaned forward, and drew on the ground with the point of his stick; Genevieve held her head motionless at a pensive droop. It was only their backs that Westover could see, and he could not, of course, make out a syllable of what was effectively their silence; but all the same he began to feel as if he were peeping and eavesdropping. Mrs. Vostrand seemed not to share his feeling, and there was no reason why he should have it if she had not. He offered to go, but she said, No, no; he must not think of it till Genevieve came in; and she added some banalities about her always scolding when she had missed one of his calls; they would be so few, now, at the most.
“Why, do you intend to go so soon?” he asked.
She did not seem to hear him, and he could see that she was watching the young people intently. Jeff had turned his face up toward Genevieve, without lifting his person, and was saying something she suddenly shrank back from. She made a start as if to rise, but he put out his hand in front of her, beseechingly or compellingly, and she sank down again. But she slowly shook her head at what he was saying, and turned her face toward him so that it gave her profile to the spectators. In that light and at that distance it was impossible to do more than fancy anything fateful in the words which she seemed to be uttering; but Westover chose to fancy this. Jeff waited a moment in apparent silence, after she had spoken. He sat erect and faced her, and this gave his profile, too. He must have spoken, for she shook her head again; and then, at other words from him, nodded assentingly. Then she listened motionlessly while he poured a rapid stream of visible but inaudible words. He put out his hand, as if to take hers, but she put it behind her; Westover could see it white there against the belt of her dark dress.
Jeff went on more vehemently, but she remained steadfast, slowly shaking her head. When he ended she spoke, and with something of his own energy; he made a gesture of submission, and when she rose he rose, too. She stood a moment, and with a gentle and almost entreating movement she put out her hand to him. He stood looking down, with both his hands resting on the top of his stick, as if ignoring her proffer. Then he suddenly caught her hand, held it a moment; dropped it, and walked quickly away without looking back. Genevieve ran across the lawn and roadway toward the house.
“Oh, must, you go?” Mrs. Vostrand said to Westover. He found that he had probably risen in sympathy with Jeff’s action. He was not aware of an intention of going, but he thought he had better not correct Mrs. Vostrand’s error.
“Yes, I really must, now,” he said.
“Well, then,” she returned, distractedly, “do come often.”
He hurried out to avoid meeting Genevieve. He passed her, on the public stairs of the house, but he saw that she did not recognize him in the dim light.
Late that night he was startled by steps that seemed to be seeking their way up the stairs to his landing, and then by a heavy knock on his door. He opened it, and confronted Jeff Durgin.
“May I come in, Mr. Westover?” he asked, with unwonted deference.
“Yes, come in,” said Westover, with no great relish, setting his door open, and then holding onto it a moment, as if he hoped that, having come in, Jeff might instantly go out again.
His reluctance was lost upon Jeff, who said, unconscious of keeping his hat on: “I want to talk with you–I want to tell you something–“
“All right. Won’t you sit down?”
At this invitation Jeff seemed reminded to take his hat off, and he put it on the floor beside his chair. “I’m not in a scrape, this time–or, rather, I’m in the worst kind of a scrape, though it isn’t the kind that you want bail for.”
“Yes,” Westover prompted.
“I don’t know whether you’ve noticed–and if you haven’t it don’t make any difference–that I’ve seemed to–care a good deal for Miss Vostrand?”
Westover saw no reason why he should not be frank, and said: “Too much, I’ve fancied sometimes, for a student in his Sophomore year.”
“Yes, I know that. Well, it’s over, whether it was too much or too little.” He laughed in a joyless, helpless way, and looked deprecatingly at Westover. “I guess I’ve been making a fool of myself–that’s all.”
“It’s better to make a fool of one’s self than to make a fool of some one else,” said Westover, oracularly.
“Yes,” said Jeff, apparently finding nothing more definite in the oracle than people commonly find in oracles. “But I think,” he went on, with a touch of bitterness, “that her mother might have told me that she was engaged–or the same as engaged.”
“I don’t know that she was bound to take you seriously, or to suppose you took yourself so, at your age and with your prospects in life. If you want to know”–Westover faltered, and then went on–“she began to be kind to you because she was afraid that you might think she didn’t take your coming home second-cabin in the right way; and one thing led to another. You mustn’t blame her for what’s happened.”
Westover defended Mrs. Vostrand, but he did not feel strong in her defence; he was not sure that Durgin was quite wrong, absurd as he had been. He sat down and looked up at his visitor under his brows.
“What are you here for, Jeff? Not to complain of Mrs. Vostrand?”
Jeff gave a short, shamefaced laugh. “No, it’s this you’re such an old friend of Mrs. Vostrand’s that I thought she’d be pretty sure to tell you about it; and I wanted to ask–to ask–that you wouldn’t say anything to mother.”
“You are a boy! I shouldn’t think of meddling with your affairs,” said Westover; he got up again, and Jeff rose, too.
Before noon the next day a district messenger brought Westover a letter which he easily knew, from, the now belated tall, angular hand, to be from Mrs. Vostrand. It announced on a much criss-crossed little sheet that she and Genevieve were inconsolably taking a very sudden departure, and were going on the twelve-o’clock train to New York, where Mr. Vostrand was to meet them. “In regard to that affair which I mentioned last night, he withdraws his objections (we have had an overnight telegram), and so I suppose all will go well. I cannot tell you how sorry we both are not to see you again; you have been such a dear, good friend to us; and if you don’t hear from us again at New York, you will from the other side. Genevieve had some very strange news when she came in, and we both feel very sorry for the poor young fellow. You must console him from us all you can. I did not know before how much she was attached to Gigi: but it turned out very fortunately that she could say she considered herself bound to him, and did everything to save Mr. D.’s feelings.”
XX.
Westover was not at Lion’s Head again till the summer before Jeff’s graduation. In the mean time the hotel had grown like a living thing. He could not have imagined wings in connection with the main edifice, but it had put forth wings–one that sheltered a new and enlarged dining- room, with two stories of chambers above, and another that hovered a parlor and ball-room under a like provision of chambers. An ell had been pushed back on the level behind the house; the barn had been moved farther to the southward, and on its old site a laundry built, with quarters for the help over it. All had been carefully, frugally, yet sufficiently done, and Westover was not surprised to learn that it was all the effect of Jackson Durgin’s ingenuity and energy. Mrs. Durgin confessed to having no part in it; but she had kept pace, with Cynthia Whitwell’s help, in the housekeeping. As Jackson had cautiously felt his way to the needs of their public in the enlargement and rearrangement of the hotel, the two housewives had watchfully studied, not merely the demands, but the half-conscious instincts of their guests, and had responded to them simply and adequately, in the spirit of Jackson’s exterior and structural improvements. The walls of the new rooms were left unpapered and their floors uncarpeted; there were thin rugs put down; the wood-work was merely stained. Westover found that he need not to ask especially for some hot dish at night; there was almost the abundance of a dinner, though dinner was still at one o’clock.
Mrs. Durgin asked him the first day if he would not like to go into the serving-room and see it while they were serving dinner. She tried to conceal her pride in the busy scene–the waitresses pushing in through one valve of the double-hinged doors with their empty trays, and out through the other with the trays full laden; delivering their dishes with the broken victual at the wicket, where the untouched portions were put aside and the rest poured into the waste; following in procession along the reeking steamtable, with its great tanks of soup and vegetables, where, the carvers stood with the joints and the trussed fowls smoking before them, which they sliced with quick sweeps of their blades, or waiting their turn at the board where the little plates with portions of fruit and dessert stood ready. All went regularly on amid a clatter of knives and voices and dishes; and the clashing rise and fall of the wire baskets plunging the soiled crockery into misty depths, whence it came up clean and dry without the touch of finger or towel. Westover could not deny that there were elements of the picturesque in it, so that he did not respond quite in kind to Jeff’s suggestion–“Scene for a painter, Mr. Westover.”
The young fellow followed satirically at his mother’s elbow, and made a mock of her pride in it, trying to catch Westover’s eye when she led him through the kitchen with its immense range, and introduced him to a new chef, who wiped his hand on his white apron to offer it to Westover.
“Don’t let him get away without seeing the laundry, mother,” her son jeered at a final air of absent-mindedness in her, and she defiantly accepted his challenge.
“Jeff’s mad because he wasn’t consulted,” she explained, “and because we don’t run the house like his one-horse European hotels.”
“Oh, I’m not in it at all, Mr. Westover,” said the young fellow. “I’m as much a passenger as you are. The only difference is that I’m allowed to work my passage.”
“Well, one thing,” said his mother, “is that we’ve got a higher class of boarders than we ever had before. You’ll see, Mr. Westover, if you stay on here till August. There’s a class that boards all the year round, and that knows what a hotel is–about as well as Jeff, I guess. You’ll find ’em at the big city houses, the first of the winter, and then they go down to Floridy or Georgy for February and March; and they get up to Fortress Monroe in April, and work along north about the middle of May to them family hotels in the suburbs around Boston; and they stay there till it’s time to go to the shore. They stay at the shore through July, and then they come here in August, and stay till the leaves turn. They’re folks that live on their money, and they’re the very highest class, I guess. It’s a round of gayety with ’em the whole year through.”
Jeff, from the vantage of his greater worldly experience, was trying to exchange looks of intelligence with Westover concerning those hotel- dwellers whom his mother revered as aristocrats; but he did not openly question her conceptions. “They’ve told me how they do, some of the ladies have,” she went on. “They’ve got the money for it, and they know how to get the most for their money. Why, Mr. Westover, we’ve got rooms in this house, now, that we let for thirty-five to fifty dollars a week for two persons, and folks like that take ’em right along through August and September, and want a room apiece. It’s different now, I can tell you, from what it was when folks thought we was killin’ ’em if we wanted ten or twelve dollars.”
Westover had finished his dinner before this tour of the house began, and when it was over the two men strolled away together.
“You see, it’s on the regular American lines,” Jeff pursued, after parting with his mother. “Jackson’s done it, and he can’t imagine anything else. I don’t say it isn’t well done in its way, but the way’s wrong; it’s stupid and clumsy.” When they were got so far from the hotel as to command a prospect of its ungainly mass sprawled upon the plateau, his smouldering disgust burst out: “Look at it! Did you ever see anything like it? I wish the damned thing would burn up–or down!”
Westover was aware in more ways than one of Jeff’s exclusion from authority in the place, where he was constantly set aside from the management as if his future were so definitely dedicated to another calling that not even his advice was desired or permitted; and he could not help sympathizing a little with him when he chafed at his rejection. He saw a great deal of him, and he thought him quite up to the average of Harvard’s Seniors in some essentials. He had been sobered, apparently, by experience; his unfortunate love-affair seemed to have improved him, as the phrase is.
They had some long walks and long talks together, and in one of them Jeff opened his mind, if not his heart, to the painter. He wanted to be the Landlord of the Lion’s Head, which he believed he could make the best hotel in the mountains. He knew, of course, that he could not hope to make any changes that did not suit his mother and his brother, as long as they had the control, but he thought they would let him have the control sooner if his mother could only be got to give up the notion of his being a lawyer. As nearly as he could guess, she wanted him to be a lawyer because she did not want him to be a hotel-keeper, and her prejudice against that was because she believed that selling liquor made her father a drunkard.
“Well, now you know enough about me, Mr. Westover, to know that drink isn’t my danger.”
“Yes, I think I do,” said Westover.
“I went a little wild in my Freshman year, and I got into that scrape, but I’ve never been the worse for liquor since; fact is, I never touch it now. There isn’t any more reason why I should take to drink because I keep a hotel than Jackson; but just that one time has set mother against it, and I can’t seem to make her understand that once is enough for me. Why, I should keep a temperance house, here, of course; you can’t do anything else in these days. If I was left to choose between hotel- keeping and any other life that I know of, I’d choose it every time,” Jeff went on, after a moment of silence. “I like a hotel. You can be your own man from the start; the start’s made here, and I’ve helped to make it. All you’ve got to do is to have common-sense in the hotel business, and you’re sure to succeed. I believe I’ve got common-sense, and I believe I’ve got some ideas that I can work up into a great success. The reason that most people fail in the hotel business is that they waste so much, and the landlord that wastes on his guests can’t treat them well. It’s got so now that in the big city houses they can’t make anything on feeding people, and so they try to make it up on the rooms. I should feed them well–I believe I know how–and I should make money on my table, as they do in Europe.
“I’ve thought a good many things out; my mind runs on it all the time; but I’m not going to bore you with it now.”
“Oh, not at all,” said Westover. “I’d like to know what your ideas are.”
Well, some time I’ll tell you. But look here, Mr. Westover, I wish if mother gets to talking about me with you that you’d let her know how I feel. We can’t talk together, she and I, without quarrelling about it; but I guess you could put in a word that would show her I wasn’t quite a fool. She thinks I’ve gone crazy from seeing the way they do things in Europe; that I’m conceited and unpatriotic, and I don’t know what all.” Jeff laughed as if with an inner fondness for his mother’s wrong- headedness.
“And would you be willing to settle down here in the country for the rest of your life, and throw away your Harvard training on hotel-keeping?”
“What do the other fellows do with their Harvard training when they go into business, as nine-tenths of them do? Business is business, whether you keep a hotel or import dry-goods or manufacture cotton or run a railroad or help a big trust to cheat legally. Harvard has got to take a back seat when you get out of Harvard. But you don’t suppose that keeping a summer hotel would mean living in the country the whole time, do you? That’s the way mother does, but I shouldn’t. It isn’t good for the hotel, even. If I had such a place as Lion’s Head, I should put a man and his family into it for the winter to look after it, and I should go to town myself–to Boston or New York, or I might go to London or Paris. They’re not so far off, and it’s so easy to get to them that you can hardly keep away.” Jeff laughed, and looked up at Westover from the log where he sat, whittling a pine stick; Westover sat on the stump from which the log had been felled eight or ten years before.
“You are modern,” he said.
“That’s what I should do at first. But I don’t believe I should have Lion’s Head very long before I had another hotel–in Florida, or the Georgia uplands, or North Carolina, somewhere. I should take my help back and forth; it would be as easy to run two hotels as one-easier! It would keep my hand in. But if you want to know, I’d rather stick here in the country, year in and year out, and run Lion’s Head, than to be a lawyer and hang round trying to get a case for nine or ten years. Who’s going to support me? Do you suppose I want to live on mother till I’m forty? She don’t think of that. She thinks I can go right into court and begin distinguishing myself, if I can fight the people off from sending me to Congress. I’d rather live in the country, anyway. I think town’s the place for winter, or two-three months of it, and after that I haven’t got any use for it. But mother, she’s got this old-fashioned ambition to have me go to a city and set up there. She thinks that if I was a lawyer in Boston I should be at the top of the heap. But I know better than that, and so do you; and I want you to give her some little hint of how it really is: how it takes family and money and a lot of influence to get to the top in any city.”
It occurred to Westover, and not for the first time, that the frankest thing in Jeff Durgin was his disposition to use his friends. It seemed to him that Jeff was always asking something of him, and it did not change the fact that in this case he thought him altogether in the right. He said that if Mrs. Durgin spoke to him of the matter he would not keep the light from her. He looked behind him, now, for the first time, in recognition of the place where they had stopped. “Why, this is Whitwell’s Clearing.”
“Didn’t you know it?” Jeff asked. “It changes a good deal every year, and you haven’t been here for awhile, have you?”
“Not since Mrs. Marven’s picnic,” said Westover, and he added, quickly, to efface the painful association which he must have called up by his heedless words:
“The woods have crowded back upon it so. It can’t be more than half its old size.”
“No,” Jeff assented. He struck his heel against a fragment of the pine bough he had been whittling, and drove it into the soft ground beside the log, and said, without looking up from it: “I met that woman at a dance last winter. It wasn’t her dance, but she was running it as if it were, just the way she did with the picnic. She seemed to want to let bygones be bygones, and I danced with her daughter. She’s a nice girl. I thought mother did wrong about that.” Now he looked at Westover. “She couldn’t help it, but it wasn’t the thing to do. A hotel is a public house, and you can’t act as if it wasn’t. If mother hadn’t known how to keep a hotel so well in other ways, she might have ruined the house by not knowing in a thing like that. But we’ve got some of the people with us this year that used to come here when we first took farm- boarders; mother don’t know that they’re ever so much nicer, socially, than the people that take the fifty-dollar rooms.” He laughed, and then he said, seriously: “If I ever had a son, I don’t believe I should let my pride in him risk doing him mischief. And if you’ve a mind to let her understand that you believe I’m set against the law for good and all–“
“I guess I shall not be your ambassador, so far as that. Why don’t you tell her yourself?”
“She won’t believe me,” said Jeff, with a laugh. “She thinks I don’t know my mind. And I don’t like the way we differ when we differ. We differ more than we mean to. I don’t pretend to say I’m always right. She was right about that other picnic–the one I wanted to make for Mrs. Vostrand. I suppose,” he ended, unexpectedly, “that you hear from them, now and then?”
“No, I don’t. I haven’t heard from them for a year; not since–You knew Genevieve was married?”
“Yes, I knew that,” said Jeff, steadily.
“I don’t quite make it all out. Mr. Vostrand was very much opposed to it, Mrs. Vostrand told me; but he must have given way at last; and he must have put up the money.” Jeff looked puzzled, and Westover explained. “You know the officers in the Italian army–and all the other armies in Europe, for that matter–have to deposit a certain sum with the government before they can marry and in the case of Count Grassi, Mr. Vostrand had to furnish the money.”
Jeff said, after a moment: “Well, she couldn’t help that.”
“No, the girl wasn’t to blame. I don’t know that any one was to blame. But I’m afraid our girls wouldn’t marry many titles if their fathers didn’t put up the money.”
“Well, I don’t see why they shouldn’t spend their money that way as well as any other,” said Jeff, and this proof of his impartiality suggested to Westover that he was not only indifferent to the mercenary international marriages, which are a scandal to so many of our casuists, but had quite outlived his passion for the girl concerned in this.
“At any rate,” Jeff added, “I haven’t got anything to say against it. Mr. Westover, I’ve always wanted to say one thing to you. Then I came to your room that night, I wanted to complain of Mrs. Vostrand for not letting me know about the engagement; and I wasn’t man enough to acknowledge that what you said would account for their letting me make a fool of myself. But I believe I am now, and I want to say it.”
“I’m glad you can see it in that way,” said Westover, “and since you do, I don’t mind saying that I think Mrs. Vostrand might have been a little franker with you without being less kind. She was kind, but she wasn’t quite frank.”
“Well, it’s all over now,” said Jeff, and he rose up and brushed the whittlings from his knees. “And I guess it’s just as well.”
XXI.
That afternoon Westover saw Jeff helping Cynthia Whitwell into his buckboard, and then, after his lively horse had made some paces of a start, spring to the seat beside her, and bring it to a stand. “Can I do anything for you over at Lovewell, Mr. Westover?” he called, and he smiled toward the painter. Then he lightened the reins on the mare’s back; she squared herself for a start in earnest, and flashed down the sloping hotel road to the highway below, and was lost to sight in the clump of woods to the southward.
“That’s a good friend of yours, Cynthy,” he said, leaning toward the girl with a simple comfort in her proximity. She was dressed in a pale-pink color, with a hat of yet paler pink; without having a great deal of fashion, she had a good deal of style. She looked bright and fresh; there was a dash of pink in her cheeks, which suggested the color of the sweetbrier, its purity and sweetness, and if there was something in Cynthia’s character and temperament that suggested its thorns too, one still could not deny that she was like that flower. She liked to shop, and she liked to ride after a good horse, as the neighbors would have said; she was going over to Lovewell to buy a number of things, and Jeff Durgin was driving her there with the swift mare that was his peculiar property. She smiled upon him without the usual reservations she contrived to express in her smiles.
“Well, I don’t know anybody I’d rather have for my friend than Mr. Westover.” She added: “He acted like a friend the very first time I saw him.”
Jeff laughed with shameless pleasure in the reminiscence her words suggested. “Well, I did get my come-uppings that time. And I don’t know but he’s been a pretty good friend to me, too. I’m not sure he likes me; but Mr. Westover is a man that could be your friend if he didn’t like you.”
“What have you done to make him like you?” asked the girl.
“Nothing!” said Jeff, with a shout of laughter in his conviction. “I’ve done a lot of things to make him despise me from the start. But if you like a person yourself, you want him to like you whether you deserve it or not.”
“I don’t know as I do.”
“You say that because you always deserve it. You can’t tell how it is with a fellow like me. I should want you to like me, Cynthy, whatever you thought of me.” He looked round into her face, but she turned it away.
They had struck the level, long for the hill country, at the foot of the hotel road, and the mare, that found herself neither mounting nor descending a steep, dropped from the trot proper for an acclivity into a rapid walk.
“This mare can walk like a Kentucky horse,” said Jeff. “I believe I could teach her single-foot.” He added, with a laugh, “If I knew how,” and now Cynthia laughed with him.
“I was just going to say that.”
“Yes, you don’t lose many chances to give me a dig, do you?”
“Oh, I don’t know as I look for them. Perhaps I don’t need to.” The pine woods were deep on either side. They whispered in the thin, sweet wind, and gave out their odor in the high, westering sun. They covered with their shadows the road that ran velvety between them.
“This is nice,” said Jeff, letting himself rest against the back of the seat. He stretched his left arm along the top, and presently it dropped and folded itself about the waist of the girl.
“You may take your arm away, Jeff,” she said, quietly.
“Why?”
“Because it has no right there, for one thing!” She drew herself a little aside and looked round at him. “You wouldn’t put it round a town girl if you were riding with her.”
“I shouldn’t be riding with her: Girls don’t go buggy-riding in town any more,” said Jeff, brutally.
“Then I shall know what to do the next time you ask me.”
“Oh, they’d go quick enough if I asked them up here in the country. Etiquette don’t count with them when they’re on a vacation.”
“I’m not on a vacation; so it counts with me. Please take your arm away,” said Cynthia.
“Oh, all right. But I shouldn’t object to your putting your arm around me.”
“You will never have the chance.”
“Why are you so hard on me, Cynthy ?” asked Jeff. “You didn’t used to be so.”
“People change.”
“Do I?”
“Not for the better.”
Jeff was dumb. She was pleased with her hit, and laughed. But her laugh did not encourage him to put his arm round her again. He let the mare walk on, and left her to resume the conversation at whatever point she would.
She made no haste to resume it. At last she said, with sufficient apparent remoteness from the subject they had dropped: “Jeff, I don’t know whether you want me to talk about it. But I guess I ought to, even if it isn’t my place exactly. I don’t think Jackson’s very well, this summer.”
Jeff faced round toward her. “What makes you think he isn’t well?”
“He’s weaker. Haven’t you noticed it?”
“Yes, I have noticed that. He’s worked down; that’s all.”
“No, that isn’t all. But if you don’t think so–“
“I want to know what you think, Cynthy,” said Jeff, with the amorous resentment all gone from his voice. “Sometimes folks outside notice the signs more–I don’t mean that you’re an outsider, as far as we’re concerned–“
She put by that point. “Father’s noticed it, too; and he’s with Jackson a good deal.”
“I’ll look after it. If he isn’t so well, he’s got to have a doctor. That medium’s stuff can’t do him any good. Don’t you think he ought to have a doctor?”
“Oh yes.”
“You don’t think a doctor can do him much good?”
“He ought to have one,” said the girl, noncommittally.
“Cynthia, I’ve noticed that Jackson was weak, too; and it’s no use pretending that he’s simply worked down. I believe he’s worn out. Do you think mother’s ever noticed it?”
“I don’t believe she has.”
“It’s the one thing I can’t very well make up my mind to speak to her about. I don’t know what she would do.” He did not say, “If she lost Jackson,” but Cynthia knew he meant that, and they were both silent. “Of course,” he went on, “I know that she places a great deal of dependence upon you, but Jackson’s her main stay. He’s a good man, and he’s a good son. I wish I’d always been half as good.”
Cynthia did not protest against his self-reproach as he possibly hoped she would. She said: “I think Jackson’s got a very good mind. He reads a great deal, and he’s thought a great deal, and when it comes to talking, I never heard any one express themselves better. The other night, we were out looking at the stars–I came part of the way home with him; I didn’t like to let him go alone, he seemed so feeble and he got to showing me Mars. He thinks it’s inhabited, and he’s read all that the astronomers say about it, and the seas and the canals that they’ve found on it. He spoke very beautifully about the other life, and then he spoke about death.” Cynthia’s voice broke, and she pulled her handkerchief out of her belt, and put it to her eyes. Jeff’s heart melted in him at the sight; he felt a tender affection for her, very unlike the gross content he had enjoyed in her presence before, and he put his arm round her again, but this time almost unconsciously, and drew her toward him. She did not repel him; she even allowed her head to rest a moment on his shoulder; though she quickly lifted it, and drew herself away, not resentfully, it seemed, but for her greater freedom in talking.
“I don’t believe he’s going to die,” Jeff said, consolingly, more as if it were her brother than his that he meant. “But he’s a very sick man, and he’s got to knock off and go somewhere. It won’t do for him to pass another winter here. He must go to California, or Colorado; they’d be glad to have him there, either of them; or he can go to Florida, or over to Italy. It won’t matter how long he stays–“
“What are you talking about, Jeff Durgin?” Cynthia demanded, severely.” What would your mother do? What would she do this winter?”
“That brings me to something, Cynthia,” said Jeff, “and I don’t want you to say anything till I’ve got through. I guess I could help mother run the place as well as Jackson, and I could stay here next winter.”
“You?”
“Now, you let me talk! My mind’s made up about one thing: I’m not going to be a lawyer. I don’t want to go back to Harvard. I’m going to keep a hotel, and, if I don’t keep one here at Lion’s Head, I’m going to keep it somewhere else.”
“Have you told your mother?”
“Not yet: I wanted to hear what you would say first.”
“I? Oh, I haven’t got anything to do with it,” said Cynthia.
“Yes, you have! You’ve got everything to do with it, if you’ll say one thing first. Cynthia, you know how I feel about you. It’s been so ever since we were boy and girl here. I want you to promise to marry me. Will you?”
The girl seemed neither surprised nor very greatly pleased; perhaps her pleasure had spent itself in that moment of triumphant expectation when she foresaw what was coming, or perhaps she was preoccupied in clearing the way in her own mind to a definite result.
“What do you say, Cynthia?” Jeff pursued, with more injury than misgiving in his voice at her delay in answering. “Don’t you-care for me?”
“Oh yes, I presume I’ve always done that–ever since we were boy and girl, as you say. But—-“
“Well?” said Jeff, patiently, but not insecurely.
“Have you?”
“Have I what?”
“Always cared for me.”
He could not find his voice quite as promptly as before. He cleared his throat before he asked: “Has Mr. Westover been saying anything about me?”
“I don’t know what you mean, exactly; but I presume you do.”
“Well, then–I always expected to tell you–I did have a fancy for that girl, for Miss Vostrand, and I told her so. It’s like something that never happened. She wouldn’t have me. That’s all.”
“And you expect me to take what she wouldn’t have?”
“If you like to call it that. But I should call it taking a man that had been out of his head for a while, and had come to his senses again.”
“I don’t know as I should ever feel safe with a man that had been out of his head once.”
“You wouldn’t find many men that hadn’t,” said Jeff, with a laugh that was rather scornful of her ignorance.
“No, I presume not,” she sighed. “She was beautiful, and I believe she was good, too. She was very nice. Perhaps I feel strangely about it. But, if she hadn’t been so nice, I shouldn’t have been so willing that you should have cared for her.”
“I suppose I don’t understand,” said Jeff, “but I know I was hard hit. What’s the use? It’s over. She’s married. I can’t go back and unlive it all. But if you want time to think–of course you do–I’ve taken time enough–“
He was about to lift the reins on the mare’s back as a sign to her that the talk was over for the present, and to quicken her pace, when Cynthia put out her hand and laid it on his, and said with a certain effect of authority: “I shouldn’t want you should give up your last year in Harvard.”
“Just as you say, Cynthy;” and in token of intelligence he wound his arm round her neck and kissed her. It was not the first kiss by any means; in the country kisses are not counted very serious, or at all binding, and Cynthia was a country girl; but they both felt that this kiss sealed a solemn troth between them, and that a common life began for them with it.
XXII.
Cynthia came back in time to go into the dining-room and see that all was in order there for supper before the door opened. The waitresses knew that she had been out riding, as they called it, with Jeff Durgin; the fact had spread electrically to them where they sat in a shady angle of the hotel listening to one who read a novel aloud, and skipped all but the most exciting love parts. They conjectured that the pair had gone to Lovewell, but they knew nothing more, and the subtlest of them would not have found reason for further conjecture in Cynthia’s behavior, when she came in and scanned the tables and the girls’ dresses and hair, where they stood ranged against the wall. She was neither whiter nor redder than usual, and her nerves and her tones were under as good control as a girl’s ever are after she has been out riding with a fellow. It was not such a great thing, anyway, to ride with Jeff Durgin. First and last, nearly all the young lady boarders had been out with him, upon one errand or another to Lovewell.
After supper, when the girls had gone over to their rooms in the helps’ quarters, and the guests had gathered in the wide, low office, in the light of the fire kindled on the hearth to break the evening chill, Jeff joined Cynthia in her inspection of the dining-room. She always gave it a last look, to see that it was in perfect order for breakfast, before she went home for the night. Jeff went home with her; he was impatient of her duties, but he was in no hurry when they stole out of the side door together under the stars, and began to stray sidelong down the hill over the dewless grass.
He lingered more and more as they drew near her father’s house, in the abandon of a man’s love. He wished to give himself solely up to it, to think and to talk of nothing else, after a man’s fashion. But a woman’s love is no such mere delight. It is serious, practical. For her it is all future, and she cannot give herself wholly up to any present moment of it, as a man does.
“Now, Jeff,” she said, after a certain number of partings, in which she had apparently kept his duty clearly in mind, “you had better go home and tell your mother.”
“Oh, there’s time enough for that,” he began.
“I want you to tell her right away, or there won’t be anything to tell.”
“Is that so?” he joked back. “Well, if I must, I must, I suppose. But I didn’t think you’d take the whip-hand so soon, Cynthia.”
“Oh, I don’t ever want to take the whip-hand with you, Jeff. Don’t make me!”
“Well, I won’t, then. But what are you in such a hurry to have mother know for? She’s not going to object. And if she does–“
“It isn’t that,” said the girl, quickly. “If I had to go round a single day with your mother hiding this from her, I should begin to hate you. I couldn’t bear the concealment. I shall tell father as soon as I go in.”
“Oh, your father ‘ll be all right, of course.”
“Yes, he’ll be all right, but if he wouldn’t, and I knew it, I should have to tell him, all the same. Now, good-night. Well, there, then; and there! Now, let me go!”
She paused for a moment in her own room, to smooth her tumbled hair, and try to identify herself in her glass. Then she went into the sitting- room, where she found her father pulled up to the table, with his hat on, and poring over a sheet of hieroglyphics, which represented the usual evening with planchette.
“Have you been to help Jackson up?” she asked.
“Well, I wanted to, but he wouldn’t hear of it. He’s feelin’ ever so much better to-night, and he wanted to go alone. I just come in.”
“Yes, you’ve got your hat on yet.”
Whitwell put his hand up and found that his daughter was right. He laughed, and said: “I guess I must ‘a’ forgot it. We’ve had the most interestin’ season with plantchette that I guess we’ve about ever had. She’s said something here–“
“Well, never mind; I’ve got something more important to say than plantchette has,” said Cynthia, and she pulled the sheet away from under her father’s eyes.
This made him look up at her. “Why, what’s happened?”
“Nothing. Jeff Durgin has asked me to marry him.”
“He has!” The New England training is not such as to fit people for the expression of strong emotion, and the best that Whitwell found himself able to do in view of the fact was to pucker his mouth for a whistle which did not come.
“Yes–this afternoon,” said Cynthia, lifelessly. The tension of her nerves relaxed in a languor which was evident even to her father, though his eyes still wandered to the sheet she had taken from him.
“Well, you don’t seem over and above excited about it. Did–did your– What did you say–“
“How should I know what I said? What do you think of it, father?”
“I don’t know as I ever give the subject much attention,” said the philosopher. “I always meant to take it out of him, somehow, if he got to playin’ the fool.”
“Then you wanted I should accept him?”
“What difference ‘d it make what I wanted? That what you done?”
“Yes, I’ve accepted him,” said the girl, with a sigh. “I guess I’ve always expected to.”
“Well, I thought likely it would come to that, myself. All I can say, Cynthy, is ‘t he’s a lucky feller.”
Whitwell leaned back, bracing his knees against the table, which was one of his philosophic poses. “I have sometimes believed that Jeff Durgin was goin’ to turn out a blackguard. He’s got it in him. He’s as like his gran’father as two peas, and he was an old devil. But you got to account in all these here heredity cases for counteractin’ influences. The Durgins are as good as wheat, right along, all of ’em; and I guess Mis’ Durgin’s mother must have been a pretty good woman too. Mis’ Durgin’s all right, too, if she has got a will of her own.” Whitwell returned from his scientific inquiry to ask: “How ‘ll she take it?”
“I don’t know,” said Cynthia, dreamily, but without apparent misgiving. “That’s Jeff’s lookout.”
“So ’tis. I guess she won’t make much fuss. A woman never likes to see her son get married; but you’ve been a kind of daughter to her so long. Well, I guess that part of it ‘ll be all right. Jackson,” said Whitwell, in a tone of relief, as if turning from an irrelevant matter to something of real importance, “was down here to-night tryin’ to ring up some them spirits from the planet Mars. Martians, he calls ’em. His mind’s got to runnin’ a good deal on Mars lately. I guess it’s this apposition that they talk about that does it. Mars comin’ so much nearer the earth by a million of miles or so, it stands to reason that he should be more influenced by the minds on it. I guess it’s a case o’ that telepathy that Mr. Westover tells about. I judge that if he kept at it before Mars