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The Landlord at Lion's Head — Complete

by William Dean Howells · English · Gutenberg #4645 · 651,039 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Landlord at Lion's Head — Complete

Author: William Dean Howells


        
Release date: October 23, 2004 [eBook #4645]
                Most recently updated: December 28, 2020

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/4645

Credits: Produced by David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LANDLORD AT LION'S HEAD — COMPLETE ***



Produced by David Widger





THE LANDLORD AT LION'S HEAD

By William Dean Howells




Part I.


BIBLIOGRAPHICAL

In those dim recesses of the consciousness where things have their
beginning, if ever things have a beginning, I suppose the origin of this
novel may be traced to a fact of a fortnight's sojourn on the western
shore of lake Champlain in the summer of 1891. Across the water in the
State of Vermont I had constantly before my eyes a majestic mountain
form which the earlier French pioneers had named “Le Lion Couchant,”
 but which their plainer-minded Yankee successors preferred to call
“The Camel's Hump.” It really looked like a sleeping lion; the head was
especially definite; and when, in the course of some ten years, I found
the scheme for a story about a summer hotel which I had long meant to
write, this image suggested the name of 'The Landlord at Lion's Head.' I
gave the title to my unwritten novel at once and never wished to change
it, but rejoiced in the certainty that, whatever the novel turned out to
be, the title could not be better.

I began to write the story four years later, when we were settled for
the winter in our flat on Central Park, and as I was a year in doing it,
with other things, I must have taken the unfinished manuscript to and
from Magnolia, Massachusetts, and Long Beach, Long Island, where I spent
the following summer. It was first serialized in Harper's Weekly and in
the London Illustrated News, as well as in an Australian newspaper--I
forget which one; and it was published as a completed book in 1896.

I remember concerning it a very becoming despair when, at a certain
moment in it, I began to wonder what I was driving at. I have always had
such moments in my work, and if I cannot fitly boast of them, I can at
least own to them in freedom from the pride that goes before a fall. My
only resource at such times was to keep working; keep beating harder
and harder at the wall which seemed to close me in, till at last I broke
through into the daylight beyond. In this case, I had really such a very
good grip of my characters that I need not have had the usual fear of
their failure to work out their destiny. But even when the thing was
done and I carried the completed manuscript to my dear old friend, the
late Henry Loomis Nelson, then editor of the Weekly, it was in more
fear of his judgment than I cared to show. As often happened with my
manuscript in such exigencies, it seemed to go all to a handful of
shrivelled leaves. When we met again and he accepted it for the Weekly,
with a handclasp of hearty welcome, I could scarcely gasp out my
unfeigned relief. We had talked the scheme of it over together; he had
liked the notion, and he easily made me believe, after my first dismay,
that he liked the result even better.

I myself liked the hero of the tale more than I have liked worthier
men, perhaps because I thought I had achieved in him a true rustic
New England type in contact with urban life under entirely modern
conditions. What seemed to me my esthetic success in him possibly
softened me to his ethical shortcomings; but I do not expect others to
share my weakness for Jeff Durgin, whose strong, rough surname had been
waiting for his personality ever since I had got it off the side of an
ice-cart many years before.

At the time the story was imagined Harvard had been for four years much
in the direct knowledge of the author, and I pleased myself in realizing
the hero's experience there from even more intimacy with the university
moods and manners than had supported me in the studies of an earlier
fiction dealing with them. I had not lived twelve years in Cambridge
without acquaintance such as even an elder man must make with the
undergraduate life; but it is only from its own level that this can
be truly learned, and I have always been ready to stand corrected by
undergraduate experience. Still, I have my belief that as a jay--the
word may now be obsolete--Jeff Durgin is not altogether out of drawing;
though this is, of course, the phase of his character which is one of
the least important. What I most prize in him, if I may go to the bottom
of the inkhorn, is the realization of that anti-Puritan quality which
was always vexing the heart of Puritanism, and which I had constantly
felt one of the most interesting facts in my observation of New England.

As for the sort of summer hotel portrayed in these pages, it was
materialized from an acquaintance with summer hotels extending over
quarter of a century, and scarcely to be surpassed if paralleled. I had
a passion for knowing about them and understanding their operation which
I indulged at every opportunity, and which I remember was satisfied as
to every reasonable detail at one of the pleasantest seaside hostelries
by one of the most intelligent and obliging of landlords. Yet, hotels
for hotels, I was interested in those of the hills rather than those of
the shores.

I worked steadily if not rapidly at the story. Often I went back over
it, and tore it to pieces and put it together again. It made me feel at
times as if I should never learn my trade, but so did every novel I have
written; every novel, in fact, has been a new trade. In, the case of
this one the publishers were hurrying me in the revision for copy to
give the illustrator, who was hurrying his pictures for the English and
Australian serializations.

KITTERY POINT, MAINE, July, 1909.




THE LANDLORD AT LION'S HEAD




I.

If you looked at the mountain from the west, the line of the summit was
wandering and uncertain, like that of most mountain-tops; but, seen from
the east, the mass of granite showing above the dense forests of the
lower slopes had the form of a sleeping lion. The flanks and haunches
were vaguely distinguished from the mass; but the mighty head, resting
with its tossed mane upon the vast paws stretched before it, was boldly
sculptured against the sky. The likeness could not have been more
perfect, when you had it in profile, if it had been a definite intention
of art; and you could travel far north and far south before the illusion
vanished. In winter the head was blotted by the snows; and sometimes
the vagrant clouds caught upon it and deformed it, or hid it, at other
seasons; but commonly, after the last snow went in the spring until
the first snow came in the fall, the Lion's Head was a part of the
landscape, as imperative and importunate as the Great Stone Face itself.

Long after other parts of the hill country were opened to summer
sojourn, the region of Lion's Head remained almost primitively solitary
and savage. A stony mountain road followed the bed of the torrent that
brawled through the valley at its base, and at a certain point a still
rougher lane climbed from the road along the side of the opposite height
to a lonely farm-house pushed back on a narrow shelf of land, with a
meagre acreage of field and pasture broken out of the woods that clothed
all the neighboring steeps. The farm-house level commanded the best view
of Lion's Head, and the visitors always mounted to it, whether they
came on foot, or arrived on buckboards or in buggies, or drove up in the
Concord stages from the farther and nearer hotels. The drivers of the
coaches rested their horses there, and watered them from the spring that
dripped into the green log at the barn; the passengers scattered about
the door-yard to look at the Lion's Head, to wonder at it and mock at
it, according to their several makes and moods. They could scarcely have
felt that they ever had a welcome from the stalwart, handsome woman who
sold them milk, if they wanted it, and small cakes of maple sugar if
they were very strenuous for something else. The ladies were not able to
make much of her from the first; but some of them asked her if it were
not rather lonely there, and she said that when you heard the catamounts
scream at night, and the bears growl in the spring, it did seem
lonesome. When one of them declared that if she should hear a catamount
scream or a bear growl she should die, the woman answered, Well, she
presumed we must all die some time. But the ladies were not sure of a
covert slant in her words, for they were spoken with the same look she
wore when she told them that the milk was five cents a glass, and the
black maple sugar three cents a cake. She did not change when she owned
upon their urgence that the gaunt man whom they glimpsed around the
corners of the house was her husband, and the three lank boys with him
were her sons; that the children whose faces watched them through the
writhing window panes were her two little girls; that the urchin who
stood shyly twisted, all but his white head and sunburned face, into her
dress and glanced at them with a mocking blue eye, was her youngest, and
that he was three years old. With like coldness of voice and face, she
assented to their conjecture that the space walled off in the farther
corner of the orchard was the family burial ground; and she said, with
no more feeling that the ladies could see than she had shown concerning
the other facts, that the graves they saw were those of her husband's
family and of the children she had lost there had been ten children, and
she had lost four. She did not visibly shrink from the pursuit of the
sympathy which expressed itself in curiosity as to the sickness they
had died of; the ladies left her with the belief that they had met a
character, and she remained with the conviction, briefly imparted to her
husband, that they were tonguey.

The summer folks came more and more, every year, with little variance in
the impression on either side. When they told her that her maple sugar
would sell better if the cake had an image of Lion's Head stamped on it,
she answered that she got enough of Lion's Head without wanting to see
it on all the sugar she made. But the next year the cakes bore a rude
effigy of Lion's Head, and she said that one of her boys had cut the
stamp out with his knife; she now charged five cents a cake for the
sugar, but her manner remained the same. It did not change when the
excursionists drove away, and the deep silence native to the place
fell after their chatter. When a cock crew, or a cow lowed, or a horse
neighed, or one of the boys shouted to the cattle, an echo retorted
from the granite base of Lion's Head, and then she had all the noise she
wanted, or, at any rate, all the noise there was most of the time. Now
and then a wagon passed on the stony road by the brook in the valley,
and sent up its clatter to the farm-house on its high shelf, but
there was scarcely another break from the silence except when the
coaching-parties came.

The continuous clash and rush of the brook was like a part of the
silence, as the red of the farm-house and the barn was like a part of
the green of the fields and woods all round them: the black-green of
pines and spruces, the yellow-green of maples and birches, dense to
the tops of the dreary hills, and breaking like a bated sea around the
Lion's Head. The farmer stooped at his work, with a thin, inward-curving
chest, but his wife stood straight at hers; and she had a massive beauty
of figure and a heavily moulded regularity of feature that impressed
such as had eyes to see her grandeur among the summer folks. She was
forty when they began to come, and an ashen gray was creeping over the
reddish heaps of her hair, like the pallor that overlies the crimson of
the autumnal oak. She showed her age earlier than most fair people, but
since her marriage at eighteen she had lived long in the deaths of the
children she had lost. They were born with the taint of their father's
family, and they withered from their cradles. The youngest boy alone;
of all her brood, seemed to have inherited her health and strength.
The rest as they grew up began to cough, as she had heard her husband's
brothers and sisters cough, and then she waited in hapless patience the
fulfilment of their doom. The two little girls whose faces the ladies
of the first coaching-party saw at the farm-house windows had died away
from them; two of the lank boys had escaped, and in the perpetual exile
of California and Colorado had saved themselves alive. Their father
talked of going, too, but ten years later he still dragged himself
spectrally about the labors of the farm, with the same cough at sixty
which made his oldest son at twenty-nine look scarcely younger than
himself.




II.

One soft noon in the middle of August the farmer came in from the
corn-field that an early frost had blighted, and told his wife that they
must give it up. He said, in his weak, hoarse voice, with the catarrhal
catching in it, that it was no use trying to make a living on the farm
any longer. The oats had hardly been worth cutting, and now the corn was
gone, and there was not hay enough without it to winter the stock; if
they got through themselves they would have to live on potatoes. Have a
vendue, and sell out everything before the snow flew, and let the State
take the farm and get what it could for it, and turn over the balance
that was left after the taxes; the interest of the savings-bank mortgage
would soon eat that up.

The long, loose cough took him, and another cough answered it like an
echo from the barn, where his son was giving the horses their feed.
The mild, wan-eyed young man came round the corner presently toward the
porch where his father and mother were sitting, and at the same moment
a boy came up the lane to the other corner; there were sixteen years
between the ages of the brothers, who alone were left of the children
born into and borne out of the house. The young man waited till they
were within whispering distance of each other, and then he gasped:
“Where you been?”

The boy answered, promptly, “None your business,” and went up the steps
before the young man, with a lop-eared, liver-colored mongrel at his
heels. He pulled off his ragged straw hat and flung it on the floor of
the porch. “Dinner over?” he demanded.

His father made no answer; his mother looked at the boy's hands and
face, all of much the same earthen cast, up to the eaves of his thatch
of yellow hair, and said: “You go and wash yourself.” At a certain light
in his mother's eye, which he caught as he passed into the house with
his dog, the boy turned and cut a defiant caper. The oldest son sat down
on the bench beside his father, and they all looked in silence at the
mountain before them. They heard the boy whistling behind the house,
with sputtering and blubbering noises, as if he were washing his face
while he whistled; and then they heard him singing, with a muffled
sound, and sharp breaks from the muffled sound, as if he were singing
into the towel; he shouted to his dog and threatened him, and the
scuffling of his feet came to them through all as if he were dancing.

“Been after them woodchucks ag'in,” his father huskily suggested.

“I guess so,” said the mother. The brother did not speak; he coughed
vaguely, and let his head sink forward.

The father began a statement of his affairs.

The mother said: “You don't want to go into that; we been all over it
before. If it's come to the pinch, now, it's come. But you want to be
sure.”

The man did not answer directly. “If we could sell off now and get out
to where Jim is in Californy, and get a piece of land--” He stopped,
as if confronted with some difficulty which he had met before, but had
hoped he might not find in his way this time.

His wife laughed grimly. “I guess, if the truth was known, we're too
poor to get away.”

“We're poor,” he whispered back. He added, with a weak obstinacy:
“I d'know as we're as poor as that comes to. The things would fetch
something.”

“Enough to get us out there, and then we should be on Jim's hands,” said
the woman.

“We should till spring, maybe. I d'know as I want to face another winter
here, and I d'know as Jackson does.”

The young man gasped back, courageously: “I guess I can get along here
well enough.”

“It's made Jim ten years younger. That's what he said,” urged the
father.

The mother smiled as grimly as she had laughed. “I don't believe it 'll
make you ten years richer, and that's what you want.”

“I don't believe but what we should ha' done something with the place by
spring. Or the State would,” the father said, lifelessly.

The voice of the boy broke in upon them from behind. “Say, mother, a'n't
you never goin' to have dinner?” He was standing in the doorway, with a
startling cleanness of the hands and face, and a strange, wet sleekness
of the hair. His clothes were bedrabbled down the front with soap and
water.

His mother rose and went toward him; his father and brother rose like
apparitions, and slanted after her at one angle.

“Say,” the boy called again to his mother, “there comes a peddler.” He
pointed down the road at the figure of a man briskly ascending the lane
toward the house, with a pack on his back and some strange appendages
dangling from it.

The woman did not look round; neither of the men looked round; they all
kept on in-doors, and she said to the boy, as she passed him: “I got no
time to waste on peddlers. You tell him we don't want anything.”

The boy waited for the figure on the lane to approach. It was the figure
of a young man, who slung his burden lightly from his shoulders when he
arrived, and then stood looking at the boy, with his foot planted on the
lowermost tread of the steps climbing from the ground to the porch.




III.

The boy must have permitted these advances that he might inflict the
greater disappointment when he spoke. “We don't want anything,” he said,
insolently.

“Don't you?” the stranger returned. “I do. I want dinner. Go in and tell
your mother, and then show me where I can wash my hands.”

The bold ease of the stranger seemed to daunt the boy, and he stood
irresolute. His dog came round the corner of the house at the first word
of the parley, and, while his master was making up his mind what to do,
he smelled at the stranger's legs. “Well, you can't have any dinner,”
 said the boy, tentatively. The dog raised the bristles on his neck, and
showed his teeth with a snarl. The stranger promptly kicked him in the
jaw, and the dog ran off howling. “Come here, sir!” the boy called to
him, but the dog vanished round the house with a fading yelp.

“Now, young man,” said the stranger, “will you go and do as you're bid?
I'm ready to pay for my dinner, and you can say so.” The boy stared at
him, slowly taking in the facts of his costume, with eyes that climbed
from the heavy shoes up the legs of his thick-ribbed stockings and his
knickerbockers, past the pleats and belt of his Norfolk jacket, to the
red neckcloth tied under the loose collar of his flannel outing-shirt,
and so by his face, with its soft, young beard and its quiet eyes, to
the top of his braidless, bandless slouch hat of soft felt. It was one
of the earliest costumes of the kind that had shown itself in the hill
country, and it was altogether new to the boy. “Come,” said the wearer
of it, “don't stand on the order of your going, but go at once,” and he
sat down on the steps with his back to the boy, who heard these strange
terms of command with a face of vague envy.

The noonday sunshine lay in a thin, silvery glister on the slopes of the
mountain before them, and in the brilliant light the colossal forms of
the Lion's Head were prismatically outlined against the speckless sky.
Through the silvery veil there burned here and there on the densely
wooded acclivities the crimson torch of a maple, kindled before its
time, but everywhere else there was the unbroken green of the forest,
subdued to one tone of gray. The boy heard the stranger fetch his breath
deeply, and then expel it in a long sigh, before he could bring
himself to obey an order that seemed to leave him without the choice of
disobedience. He came back and found the stranger as he had left him.
“Come on, if you want your dinner,” he said; and the stranger rose and
looked at him.

“What's your name?” he asked.

“Thomas Jefferson Durgin.”

“Well, Thomas Jefferson Durgin, will you show me the way to the pump and
bring a towel along?”

“Want to wash?”

“I haven't changed my mind.”

“Come along, then.” The boy made a movement as if to lead the way
indoors; the stranger arrested him.

“Here. Take hold of this and put it out of the rush of travel
somewhere.” He lifted his burden from where he had dropped it in the
road and swung it toward the boy, who ran down the steps and embraced
it. As he carried it toward a corner of the porch he felt of the various
shapes and materials in it.

Then he said, “Come on!” again, and went before the guest through the
dim hall running midway of the house to the door at the rear. He left
him on a narrow space of stone flagging there, and ran with a tin basin
to the spring at the barn and brought it back to him full of the cold
water.

“Towel,” he said, pulling at the family roller inside the little porch
at the door; and he watched the stranger wash his hands and face, and
then search for a fresh place on the towel.

Before the stranger had finished the father and the elder brother came
out, and, after an ineffectual attempt to salute him, slanted away to
the barn together. The woman, in-doors, was more successful, when he
found her in the dining-room, where the boy showed him. The table was
set for him alone, and it affected him as if the family had been hurried
away from it that he might have it to himself. Everything was very
simple: the iron forks had two prongs; the knives bone handles; the dull
glass was pressed; the heavy plates and cups were white, but so was the
cloth, and all were clean. The woman brought in a good boiled dinner
of corned-beef, potatoes, turnips, and carrots from the kitchen, and a
teapot, and said something about having kept them hot on the stove for
him; she brought him a plate of biscuit fresh from the oven; then she
said to the boy, “You come out and have your dinner with me, Jeff,” and
left the guest to make his meal unmolested.

The room was square, with two north windows that looked down the lane he
had climbed to the house. An open door led into the kitchen in an
ell, and a closed door opposite probably gave access to a parlor or a
ground-floor chamber. The windows were darkened down to the lower sash
by green paper shades; the walls were papered in a pattern of brown
roses; over the chimney hung a large picture, a life-size pencil-drawing
of two little girls, one slightly older and slightly larger than the
other, each with round eyes and precise ringlets, and with her hand
clasped in the other's hand.

The guest seemed helpless to take his gaze from it, and he sat fallen
back in his chair at it when the woman came in with a pie.

“Thank you, I believe I don't want any dessert,” he said. “The fact is,
the dinner was so good that I haven't left any room for pie. Are those
your children?”

“Yes,” said the woman, looking up at the picture with the pie in her
hand. “They're the last two I lost.”

“Oh, excuse me--” the guest began.

“It's the way they appear in the spirit life. It's a spirit picture.”

“Oh, I thought there was something strange about it.”

“Well, it's a good deal like the photograph we had taken about a year
before they died. It's a good likeness. They say they don't change a
great deal at first.”

She seemed to refer the point to him for his judgment, but he answered
wide of it:

“I came up here to paint your mountain, if you don't mind, Mrs.
Durgin-Lion's Head, I mean.”

“Oh yes. Well, I don't know as we could stop you if you wanted to take
it away.” A spare glimmer lighted up her face.

The painter rejoined in kind: “The town might have something to say, I
suppose.”

“Not if you was to leave a good piece of intervale in place of it. We've
got mountains to spare.”

“Well, then, that's arranged. What about a week's board?”

“I guess you can stay if you're satisfied.”

“I'll be satisfied if I can stay. How much do you want?”

The woman looked down, probably with an inward anxiety between the
fear of asking too much and the folly of asking too little. She said,
tentatively: “Some of the folks that come over from the hotels say they
pay as much as twenty dollars a week.”

“But you don't expect hotel prices?”

“I don't know as I do. We've never had anybody before.”

The stranger relaxed the frown he had put on at the greed of her
suggestion; it might have come from ignorance or mere innocence. “I'm
in the habit of paying five dollars for farm board, where I stay several
weeks. What do you say to seven for a single week?”

“I guess that 'll do,” said the woman, and she went out with the pie,
which she had kept in her hand.




IV.

The painter went round to the front of the house and walked up and down
before it for different points of view. He ran down the lane some way,
and then came back and climbed to the sloping field behind the barn,
where he could look at Lion's Head over the roof of the house. He tried
an open space in the orchard, where he backed against the wall enclosing
the little burial-ground. He looked round at it without seeming to see
it, and then went back to the level where the house stood. “This is the
place,” he said to himself. But the boy, who had been lurking after
him, with the dog lurking at, his own heels in turn, took the words as a
proffer of conversation.

“I thought you'd come to it,” he sneered.

“Did you?” asked the painter, with a smile for the unsatisfied grudge in
the boy's tone. “Why didn't you tell me sooner?”

The boy looked down, and apparently made up his mind to wait until
something sufficiently severe should come to him for a retort. “Want I
should help you get your things?” he asked, presently.

“Why, yes,” said the painter, with a glance of surprise. “I shall be
much obliged for a lift.” He started toward the porch where his burden
lay, and the boy ran before him. They jointly separated the knapsack
from the things tied to it, and the painter let the boy carry the easel
and campstool which developed themselves from their folds and hinges,
and brought the colors and canvas himself to the spot he had chosen.
The boy looked at the tag on the easel after it was placed, and read the
name on it--Jere Westover. “That's a funny name.”

“I'm glad it amuses you,” said the owner of it.

Again the boy cast down his eyes discomfited, and seemed again resolving
silently to bide his time and watch for another chance.

Westover forgot him in the fidget he fell into, trying this and that
effect, with his head slanted one way and then slanted the other, his
hand held up to shut out the mountain below the granite mass of Lion's
Head, and then changed to cut off the sky above; and then both hands
lifted in parallel to confine the picture. He made some tentative
scrawls on his canvas in charcoal, and he wasted so much time that the
light on the mountain-side began to take the rich tone of the afternoon
deepening to evening. A soft flush stole into it; the sun dipped behind
the top south of the mountain, and Lion's Head stood out against the
intense clearness of the west, which began to be flushed with exquisite
suggestions of violet and crimson.

“Good Lord!” said Westover; and he flew at his colors and began to
paint. He had got his canvas into such a state that he alone could have
found it much more intelligible than his palette, when he heard the boy
saying, over his shoulder: “I don't think that looks very much like
it.” He had last been aware of the boy sitting at the grassy edge of the
lane, tossing small bits of earth and pebble across to his dog, which
sat at the other edge and snapped at them. Then he lost consciousness of
him. He answered, dreamily, while he found a tint he was trying for with
his brush: “Perhaps you don't know.” He was so sure of his effect that
the popular censure speaking in the boy's opinion only made him happier
in it.

“I know what I see,” said the boy.

“I doubt it,” said Westover, and then he lost consciousness of him
again. He was rapt deep and far into the joy of his work, and had no
thought but for that, and for the dim question whether it would be such
another day to-morrow, with that light again on Lion's Head, when he was
at last sensible of a noise that he felt he must have been hearing some
time without noting it. It was a lamentable, sound of screaming, as of
some one in mortal terror, mixed with wild entreaties. “Oh, don't, Jeff!
Oh, don't, don't, don't! Oh, please! Oh, do let us be! Oh, Jeff, don't!”

Westover looked round bewildered, and not able, amid the clamor of the
echoes, to make out where the cries came from. Then, down at the point
where the lane joined the road to the southward and the road lost itself
in the shadow of a woodland, he saw the boy leaping back and forth
across the track, with his dog beside him; he was shouting and his dog
barking furiously; those screams and entreaties came from within the
shadow. Westover plunged down the lane headlong, with a speed that
gathered at each bound, and that almost flung him on his face when he
reached the level where the boy and the dog were dancing back and forth
across the road. Then he saw, crouching in the edge of the wood, a
little girl, who was uttering the appeals he had heard, and clinging to
her, with a face of frantic terror, a child of five or six years;
her cries had grown hoarse, and had a hard, mechanical action as they
followed one another. They were really in no danger, for the boy held
his dog tight by his collar, and was merely delighting himself with
their terror.

The painter hurled himself upon him, and, with a quick grip upon his
collar, gave him half a dozen flat-handed blows wherever he could plant
them and then flung him reeling away.

“You infernal little ruffian!” he roared at him; and the sound of his
voice was enough for the dog; he began to scale the hill-side toward the
house without a moment's stay.

The children still crouched together, and Westover could hardly make
them understand that they were in his keeping when he bent over them
and bade them not be frightened. The little girl set about wiping
the child's eyes on her apron in a motherly fashion; her own were dry
enough, and Westover fancied there was more of fury than of fright in
her face. She seemed lost to any sense of his presence, and kept on
talking fiercely to herself, while she put the little boy in order, like
an indignant woman.

“Great, mean, ugly thing! I'll tell the teacher on him, that's what I
will, as soon as ever school begins. I'll see if he can come round with
that dog of his scaring folks! I wouldn't 'a' been a bit afraid if it
hadn't 'a' been for Franky. Don't cry any more, Franky. Don't you see
they're gone? I presume he thinks it smart to scare a little boy and a
girl. If I was a boy once, I'd show him!”

She made no sign of gratitude to Westover: as far as any recognition
from her was concerned, his intervention was something as impersonal as
if it had been a thunder-bolt falling upon her enemies from the sky.

“Where do you live?” he asked. “I'll go home with you if you'll tell me
where you live.”

She looked up at him in a daze, and Westover heard the Durgin boy
saying: “She lives right there in that little wood-colored house at the
other end of the lane. There ain't no call to go home with her.”

Westover turned and saw the boy kneeling at the edge of a clump of
bushes, where he must have struck; he was rubbing, with a tuft of grass,
at the dirt ground into the knees of his trousers.

The little, girl turned hawkishly upon him. “Not for anything you can
do, Jeff Durgin!”

The boy did not answer.

“There!” she said, giving a final pull and twitch to the dress of her
brother, and taking him by the hand tenderly. “Now, come right along,
Franky.”

“Let me have your other hand,” said Westover, and, with the little boy
between them, they set off toward the point where the lane joined the
road on the northward. They had to pass the bushes where Jeff Durgin was
crouching, and the little girl turned and made a face at him. “Oh, oh! I
don't think I should have done that,” said Westover.

“I don't care!” said the little girl. But she said, in explanation and
partial excuse: “He tries to scare all the girls. I'll let him know 't
he can't scare one!”

Westover looked up toward the Durgin house with a return of interest in
the canvas he had left in the lane on the easel. Nothing had happened
to it. At the door of the barn he saw the farmer and his eldest son
slanting forward and staring down the hill at the point he had come
from. Mrs. Durgin was looking out from the shelter of the porch, and she
turned and went in with Jeff's dog at her skirts when Westover came in
sight with the children.




V.

Westover had his tea with the family, but nothing was said or done to
show that any of them resented or even knew of what had happened to the
boy from him. Jeff himself seemed to have no grudge. He went out with
Westover, when the meal was ended, and sat on the steps of the porch
with him, watching the painter watch the light darken on the lonely
heights and in the lonely depths around. Westover smoked a pipe, and the
fire gleamed and smouldered in it regularly with his breathing; the boy,
on a lower' step, pulled at the long ears of his dog and gazed up at
him.

They were both silent till the painter asked: “What do you do here when
you're not trying to scare little children to death?”

The boy hung his head and said, with the effect of excusing a long
arrears of uselessness: “I'm goin' to school as soon as it commences.”

“There's one branch of your education that I should like to undertake
if I ever saw you at a thing like that again. Don't you feel ashamed of
yourself?”

The boy pulled so hard at the dog's ear that the dog gave a faint yelp
of protest.

“They might 'a' seen that I had him by the collar. I wa'n't a-goin' to
let go.”

“Well, the next time I have you by the collar I won't let go, either,”
 said the painter; but he felt an inadequacy in his threat, and he
imagined a superfluity, and he made some haste to ask: “who are they?”

“Whitwell is their name. They live in that little house where you
took them. Their father's got a piece of land on Zion's Head that he's
clearin' off for the timber. Their mother's dead, and Cynthy keeps
house. She's always makin' up names and faces,” added the boy. “She
thinks herself awful smart. That Franky's a perfect cry-baby.”

“Well, upon my word! You are a little ruffian,” said Westover, and he
knocked the ashes out of his pipe. “The next time you meet that poor
little creature you tell her that I think you're about the shabbiest
chap I know, and that I hope the teacher will begin where I left off
with you and not leave blackguard enough in you to--”

He stopped for want of a fitting figure, and the boy said: “I guess the
teacher won't touch me.”

Westover rose, and the boy flung his dog away from him with his foot.
“Want I should show you where to sleep?”

“Yes,” said Westover, and the boy hulked in before him, vanishing
into the dark of the interior, and presently appeared with a lighted
hand-lamp. He led the way upstairs to a front room looking down upon the
porch roof and over toward Zion's Head, which Westover could see dimly
outlined against the night sky, when he lifted the edge of the paper
shade and peered out.

The room was neat, with greater comfort in its appointments than he
hoped for. He tried the bed, and found it hard, but of straw, and not
the feathers he had dreaded; while the boy looked into the water-pitcher
to see if it was full; and then went out without any form of goodnight.

Westover would have expected to wash in a tin basin at the back door,
and wipe on the family towel, but all the means of toilet, such as
they were, he found at hand here, and a surprise which he had felt at
a certain touch in the cooking renewed itself at the intelligent
arrangements for his comfort. A secondary quilt was laid across the foot
of his bed; his window-shade was pulled down, and, though the window
was shut and the air stuffy within, there was a sense of cleanliness in
everything which was not at variance with the closeness.

The bed felt fresh when he got into it, and the sweet breath of the
mountains came in so cold through the sash he had lifted that he was
glad to pull the secondary quilt up over him. He heard the clock tick
in some room below; from another quarter came the muffled sound of
coughing; but otherwise the world was intensely still, and he slept deep
and long.




VI.

The men folks had finished their breakfast and gone to their farm-work
hours before Westover came down to his breakfast, but the boy seemed
to be of as much early leisure as himself, and was lounging on the
threshold of the back door, with his dog in waiting upon him. He gave
the effect of yesterday's cleanliness freshened up with more recent
soap and water. At the moment Westover caught sight of him, he heard his
mother calling to him from the kitchen, “Well, now, come in and get your
breakfast, Jeff,” and the boy called to Westover, in turn, “I'll tell
her you're here,” as he rose and came in-doors. “I guess she's got your
breakfast for you.”

Mrs. Durgin brought the breakfast almost as soon as Westover had found
his way to the table, and she lingered as if for some expression of his
opinion upon it. The biscuit and the butter were very good, and he said
so; the eggs were fresh, and the hash from yesterday's corned-beef could
not have been better, and he praised them; but he was silent about the
coffee.

“It a'n't very good,” she suggested.

“Why, I'm used to making my own coffee; I lived so long in a country
where it's nearly the whole of breakfast that I got into the habit of
it, and I always carry my little machine with me; but I don't like to
bring it out, unless--”

“Unless you can't stand the other folks's,” said the woman, with a
humorous gleam. “Well, you needn't mind me. I want you should have good
coffee, and I guess I a'n't too old to learn, if you want to show me.
Our folks don't care for it much; they like tea; and I kind of got out
of the way of it. But at home we had to have it.” She explained, to his
inquiring glance.

“My father kept the tavern on the old road to St. Albans, on the other
side of Lion's Head. That's where I always lived till I married here.”

“Oh,” said Westover, and he felt that she had proudly wished to account
for a quality which she hoped he had noticed in her cooking. He thought
she might be going to tell him something more of herself, but she only
said, “Well, any time you want to show me your way of makin' coffee,”
 and went out of the room.

That evening, which was the close of another flawless day, he sat again
watching the light outside, when he saw her come into the hallway with
a large shade-lamp in her hand. She stopped at the door of a room he had
not seen yet, and looked out at him to ask:

“Won't you come in and set in the parlor if you want to?”

He found her there when he came in, and her two sons with her; the
younger was sleepily putting away some school-books, and the elder
seemed to have been helping him with his lessons.

“He's got to begin school next week,” she said to Westover; and at the
preparations the other now began to make with a piece of paper and
a planchette which he had on the table before him, she asked, in the
half-mocking, half-deprecating way which seemed characteristic of her:
“You believe any in that?”

“I don't know that I've ever seen it work,” said the painter.

“Well, sometimes it won't work,” she returned, altogether mockingly now,
and sat holding her shapely hands, which were neither so large nor so
rough as they might have been, across her middle and watching her son
while the machine pushed about under his palm, and he bent his wan eyes
upon one of the oval-framed photographs on the wall, as if rapt in a
supernal vision. The boy stared drowsily at the planchette, jerking this
way and that, and making abrupt starts and stops. At last the young man
lifted his palm from it, and put it aside to study the hieroglyphics it
had left on the paper.

“What's it say?” asked his mother.

The young man whispered: “I can't seem to make out very clear. I guess I
got to take a little time to it,” he added, leaning back wearily in his
chair. “Ever seen much of the manifestations?” he gasped at Westover.

“Never any, before,” said the painter, with a leniency for the invalid
which he did not feel for his belief.

The young man tried for his voice, and found enough of it to say:
“There's a trance medium over at the Huddle. Her control says 't I can
develop into a writin' medium.” He seemed to refer the fact as a sort of
question to Westover, who could think of nothing to say but that it must
be very interesting to feel that one had such a power.

“I guess he don't know he's got it yet,” his mother interposed. “And
planchette don't seem to know, either.”

“We ha'n't given it a fair trial yet,” said the young man, impartially,
almost impassively.

“Wouldn't you like to see it do some of your sums, Jeff?” said the
mother to the drowsy boy, blinking in a corner. “You better go to bed.”

The elder brother rose. “I guess I'll go, too.”

The father had not joined their circle in the parlor, now breaking up by
common consent.

Mrs. Durgin took up her lamp again and looked round on the appointments
of the room, as if she wished Westover to note them, too: the drab
wallpaper, the stiff chairs, the long, hard sofa in haircloth, the high
bureau of mahogany veneer.

“You can come in here and set or lay down whenever you feel like it,”
 she said. “We use it more than folks generally, I presume; we got in the
habit, havin' it open for funerals.”




VII.

Four or five days of perfect weather followed one another, and Westover
worked hard at his picture in the late afternoon light he had chosen for
it. In the morning he tramped through the woods and climbed the hills
with Jeff Durgin, who seemed never to do anything about the farm, and
had a leisure unbroken by anything except a rare call from his mother to
help her in the house. He built the kitchen fire, and got the wood for
it; he picked the belated pease and the early beans in the garden, and
shelled them; on the Monday when the school opened he did a share of
the family wash, which seemed to have been begun before daylight, and
Westover saw him hanging out the clothes before he started off with
his books. He suffered no apparent loss of self-respect in these
employments, and, while he still had his days free, he put himself
at Westover's disposal with an effect of unimpaired equality. He had
expected, evidently, that Westover would want to fish or shoot, or at
least join him in the hunt for woodchucks, which he still carried on
with abated zeal for lack of his company when the painter sat down to
sketch certain bits that struck him. When he found that Westover cared
for nothing in the way of sport, as people commonly understand it, he
did not openly contemn him. He helped him get the flowers he studied,
and he learned to know true mushrooms from him, though he did not follow
his teaching in eating the toadstools, as his mother called them, when
they brought them home to be cooked.

If it could not be said that he shared the affection which began to grow
up in Westover from their companionship, there could be no doubt of
the interest he took in him, though it often seemed the same critical
curiosity which appeared in the eye of his dog when it dwelt upon the
painter. Fox had divined in his way that Westover was not only not to be
molested, but was to be respectfully tolerated, yet no gleam of kindness
ever lighted up his face at sight of the painter; he never wagged his
tail in recognition of him; he simply recognized him and no more, and he
remained passive under Westover's advances, which he had the effect of
covertly referring to Jeff, when the boy was by, for his approval or
disapproval; when he was not by, the dog's manner implied a reservation
of opinion until the facts could be submitted to his master.

On the Saturday morning which was the last they were to have together,
the three comrades had strayed from the vague wood road along one of the
unexpected levels on the mountain slopes, and had come to a standstill
in a place which the boy pretended not to know his way out of. Westover
doubted him, for he had found that Jeff liked to give himself credit
for woodcraft by discovering an escape from the depths of trackless
wildernesses.

“I guess you know where we are,” he suggested.

“No, honestly,” said the boy; but he grinned, and Westover still doubted
him.

“Hark! What's that?” he said, hushing further speech from him with a
motion of his hand. It was the sound of an axe.

“Oh, I know where we are,” said Jeff. “It's that Canuck chopping in
Whitwell's clearing. Come along.”

He led the way briskly down the mountain-side now, stopping from time
to time and verifying his course by the sound of the axe. This came and
went, and by-and-by it ceased altogether, and Jeff crept forward with
a real or feigned uncertainty. Suddenly he stopped. A voice called,
“Heigh, there!” and the boy turned and fled, crashing through the
underbrush at a tangent, with his dog at his heels.

Westover looked after them, and then came forward. A lank figure of a
man at the foot of a poplar, which he had begun to fell, stood waiting
him, one hand on his axe-helve and the other on his hip. There was the
scent of freshly smitten bark and sap-wood in the air; the ground was
paved with broad, clean chips.

“Good-morning,” said Westover.

“How are you?” returned the other, without moving or making any sign of
welcome for a moment. But then he lifted his axe and struck it into the
carf on the tree, and came to meet Westover.

As he advanced he held out his hand. “Oh, you're the one that stopped
that fellow that day when he was tryin' to scare my children. Well,
I thought I should run across you some time.” He shook hands with
Westover, in token of the gratitude which did not express itself in
words. “How are you? Treat you pretty well up at the Durgins'? I guess
so. The old woman knows how to cook, anyway. Jackson's about the best
o' the lot above ground, though I don't know as I know very much against
the old man, either. But that boy! I declare I 'most feel like takin'
the top of his head off when he gets at his tricks. Set down.”

Whitwell, as Westover divined the man to be, took a seat himself on
a high stump, which suited his length of leg, and courteously waved
Westover to a place on the log in front of him. A long, ragged beard of
brown, with lines of gray in it, hung from his chin and mounted well up
on his thin cheeks toward his friendly eyes. His mustache lay sunken on
his lip, which had fallen in with the loss of his upper teeth. From the
lower jaw a few incisors showed at this slant and that as he talked.

“Well, well!” he said, with the air of wishing the talk to go on, but
without having anything immediately to offer himself.

Westover said, “Thank you,” as he dropped on the log, and Whitwell
added, relentingly: “I don't suppose a fellow's so much to blame, if
he's got the devil in him, as what the devil is.”

He referred the point with a twinkle of his eyes to Westover, who said:
“It's always a question, of course, whether it's the devil. It may be
original sin with the fellow himself.”

“Well, that's something so,” said Whitwell, with pleasure in the
distinction rather than assent. “But I guess it ain't original sin in
the boy. Got it from his gran'father pootty straight, I should say,
and maybe the old man had it secondhand. Ha'd to say just where so much
cussedness gits statted.”

“His father's father?” asked Westover, willing to humor Whitwell's
evident wish to philosophize the Durgins' history.

“Mother's. He kept the old tavern stand on the west side of Lion's Head,
on the St. Albans Road, and I guess he kept a pootty good house in the
old times when the stages stopped with him. Ever noticed how a man on
the mean side in politics always knows how to keep a hotel? Well, it's
something curious. If there was ever a mean side to any question, old
Mason was on it. My folks used to live around there, and I can remember
when I was a boy hangin' around the bar-room nights hearin' him
argue that colored folks had no souls; and along about the time the
fugitive-slave law was passed the folks pootty near run him out o' town
for puttin' the United States marshal on the scent of a fellow that
was breakin' for Canada. Well, it was just so when the war come. It was
known for a fact that he was in with them Secesh devils up over the line
that was plannin' a raid into Vermont in '63. He'd got pootty low down
by that time; railroads took off all the travel; tavern 'd got to be
a regular doggery; old man always drank some, I guess. That was a good
while after his girl had married Durgin. He was dead against it, and it
broke him up consid'able when she would have him: Well, one night the
old stand burnt up and him in it, and neither of 'em insured.”

Whitwell laughed with a pleasure in his satire which gave the monuments
in his lower jaw a rather sinister action. But, as if he felt a rebuke
in Westover's silence, he added: “There ain't anything against Mis'
Durgin. She's done her part, and she's had more than her share of hard
knocks. If she was tough, to sta't with, she's had blows enough to
meller her. But that's the way I account for the boy. I s'pose--I'd
oughtn't to feel the way I do about him, but he's such a pest to the
whole neighborhood that he'd have the most pop'la' fune'l. Well, I guess
I've said enough. I'm much obliged to you, though, Mr.--”

“Westover,” the painter suggested. “But the boy isn't so bad all the
time.”

“Couldn't be,” said Whitwell, with a cackle of humorous enjoyment. “He
has his spells of bein' decent, and he's pootty smart, too. But when the
other spell ketches him it's like as if the devil got a-hold of him,
as I said in the first place. I lost my wife here two-three years along
back, and that little girl you see him tormentin', she's a regular
little mother to her brother; and whenever Jeff Durgin sees her with
him, seems as if the Old Scratch got into him. Well, I'm glad I didn't
come across him that day. How you gittin' along with Lion's Head? Sets
quiet enough for you?” Whitwell rose from the stump and brushed the
clinging chips from his thighs. “Folks trouble you any, lookin' on?”

“Not yet,” said Westover.

“Well, there ain't a great many to,” said Whitwell, going back to his
axe. “I should like to see you workin' some day. Do' know as I ever saw
an attist at it.”

“I should like to have you,” said Westover. “Any time.”

“All right.” Whitwell pulled his axe out of the carf, and struck it in
again with a force that made a wide, square chip leap out. He looked
over his shoulder at Westover, who was moving away. “Say, stop in some
time you're passin'. I live in that wood-colored house at the foot of
the Durgins' lane.”




VIII.

In a little sunken place, behind a rock, some rods away, Westover found
Jeff lurking with his dog, both silent and motionless. “Hello?” he said,
inquiringly.

“Come back to show you the way,” said the boy. “Thought you couldn't
find it alone.”

“Oh, why didn't you say you'd wait?” The boy grinned. “I shouldn't think
a fellow like you would want to be afraid of any man, even for the fun
of scaring a little girl.” Jeff stopped grinning and looked interested,
as if this was a view of the case that had not occurred to him. “But
perhaps you like to be afraid.”

“I don't know as I do,” said the boy, and Westover left him to the
question a great part of the way home. He did not express any regret or
promise any reparation. But a few days after that, when he had begun
to convoy parties of children up to see Westover at work, in the late
afternoon, on their way home from school, and to show the painter off to
them as a sort of family property, he once brought the young Whitwells.
He seemed on perfect terms with them now, and when the crowd of larger
children hindered the little boy's view of the picture, Jeff, in his
quality of host, lifted him under his arms and held him up so that he
could look as long as he liked.

The girl seemed ashamed of the good understanding before Westover. Jeff
offered to make a place for her among the other children who had looked
long enough, but she pulled the front of her bonnet across her face and
said that she did not want to look, and caught her brother by the hand
and ran away with him. Westover thought this charming, somewhat; he
liked the intense shyness which the child's intense passion had hidden
from him before.

Jeff acted as host to the neighbors who came to inspect the picture, and
they all came, within a circuit of several miles around, and gave
him their opinions freely or scantily, according to their several
temperaments. They were mainly favorable, though there was some frank
criticism, too, spoken over the painter's shoulder as openly as if he
were not by. There was no question but of likeness; all finer facts were
far from them; they wished to see how good a portrait Westover had made,
and some of them consoled him with the suggestion that the likeness
would come out more when the picture got dry.

Whitwell, when he came, attempted a larger view of the artist's work,
but apparently more out of kindness for him than admiration of the
picture. He said he presumed you could not always get a thing like that
just right the first time, and that you had to keep trying till you did
get it; but it paid in the end. Jeff had stolen down from the house with
his dog, drawn by the fascination which one we have injured always has
for us; when Whitwell suddenly turned upon him and asked, jocularly,
“What do you think, Jeff?” the boy could only kick his dog and drive it
home, as a means of hiding his feelings.

He brought the teacher to see the picture the last Friday before the
painter went away. She was a cold-looking, austere girl, pretty enough,
with eyes that wandered away from the young man, although Jeff used all
his arts to make her feel at home in his presence. She pretended to have
merely stopped on her way up to see Mrs. Durgin, and she did not venture
any comment on the painting; but, when Westover asked something about
her school, she answered him promptly enough as to the number and ages
and sexes of the school-children. He ventured so far toward a joke with
her as to ask if she had much trouble with such a tough subject as Jeff,
and she said he could be good enough when he had a mind. If he could get
over his teasing, she said, with the air of reading him a lecture, she
would not have anything to complain of; and Jeff looked ashamed, but
rather of the praise than the blame. His humiliation seemed complete
when she said, finally: “He's a good scholar.”

On the Tuesday following, Westover meant to go. It was the end of his
third week, and it had brought him into September. The weather since he
had begun to paint Lion's Head was perfect for his work; but, with the
long drought, it had grown very warm. Many trees now had flamed into
crimson on the hill-slopes; the yellowing corn in the fields gave out
a thin, dry sound as the delicate wind stirred the blades; but only the
sounds and sights were autumnal. The heat was oppressive at midday, and
at night the cold had lost its edge. There was no dew, and Mrs. Durgin
sat out with Westover on the porch while he smoked a final pipe there.
She had come to join him for some fixed purpose, apparently, and she
called to her boy, “You go to bed, Jeff,” as if she wished to be alone
with Westover; the men folks were already in bed; he could hear them
cough now and then.

“Mr. Westover,” the woman began, even as she swept her skirts forward
before she sat down, “I want to ask you whether you would let that
picture of yours go on part board? I'll give you back just as much as
you say of this money.”

He looked round and saw that she had in the hand dropped in her lap the
bills he had given her after supper.

“Why, I couldn't, very well, Mrs. Durgin--” he began.

“I presume you'll think I'm foolish,” she pursued. “But I do want that
picture; I don't know when I've ever wanted a thing more. It's just
like Lion's Head, the way I've seen it, day in and day out, every summer
since I come here thirty-five years ago; it's beautiful!”

“Mrs. Durgin,” said Westover, “you gratify me more than I can tell you.
I wish--I wish I could let you have the picture. I--I don't know what to
say--”

“Why don't you let me have it, then? If we ever had to go away from
here--if anything happened to us--it's the one thing I should want to
keep and take with me. There! That's the way I feel about it. I can't
explain; but I do wish you'd let me have it.”

Some emotion which did not utter itself in the desire she expressed made
her voice shake in the words. She held out the bank-notes to him, and
they rustled with the tremor of her hand.

“Mrs. Durgin, I suppose I shall have to be frank with you, and you
mustn't feel hurt. I have to live by my work, and I have to get as much
as I can for it--”

“That's what I say. I don't want to beat you down on it. I'll give you
whatever you think is right. It's my money, and my husband feels just as
I do about it,” she urged.

“You don't quite understand,” he said, gently. “I expect to have an
exhibition of my pictures in Boston this fall, and I hope to get two or
three hundred dollars for Lion's Head.”

“I've been a proper fool,” cried the woman, and she drew in a long
breath.

“Oh, don't mind,” he begged; “it's all right. I've never had any offer
for a picture that I'd rather take than yours. I know the thing can't be
altogether bad after what you've said. And I'll tell you what! I'll have
it photographed when I get to Boston, and I'll send you a photograph of
it.”

“How much will that be?” Mrs. Durgin asked, as if taught caution by her
offer for the painting.

“Nothing. And if you'll accept it and hang it up here somewhere I shall
be very glad.”

“Thank you,” said Mrs. Durgin, and the meekness, the wounded pride, he
fancied in her, touched him.

He did not know at first how to break the silence which she let follow
upon her words. At last he said:

“You spoke, just now, about taking it with you. Of course, you don't
think of leaving Lion's Head?”

She did not answer for so long a time that he thought she had not
perhaps heard him or heeded what he said; but she answered, finally:
“We did think of it. The day you come we had about made up our minds to
leave.”

“Oh!”

“But I've been thinkin' of something since you've been here that I
don't know but you'll say is about as wild as wantin' to buy a
three-hundred-dollar picture with a week's board.” She gave a short,
self-scornful laugh; but it was a laugh, and it relieved the tension.

“It may not be worth any more,” he said, glad of the relief.

“Oh, I guess it is,” she rejoined, and then she waited for him to prompt
her.

“Well?”

“Well, it's this; and I wanted to ask you, anyway. You think there'd be
any chance of my gettin' summer folks to come here and board if I was
to put an advertisement in a Boston paper? I know it's a lonesome place,
and there ain't what you may call attractions. But the folks from the
hotels, sometimes, when they ride over in a stage to see the view,
praise up the scenery, and I guess it is sightly. I know that well
enough; and I ain't afraid but what I can do for boarders as well as
some, if not better. What do you think?”

“I think that's a capital idea, Mrs. Durgin.”

“It's that or go,” she said. “There ain't a livin' for us on the farm
any more, and we got to do somethin'. If there was anything else I could
do! But I've thought it out and thought it out, and I guess there ain't
anything I can do but take boarders--if I can get them.”

“I should think you'd find it rather pleasant on some accounts. Your
boarders would be company for you,” said Westover.

“We're company enough for ourselves,” said Mrs. Durgin. “I ain't ever
been lonesome here, from the first minute. I guess I had company enough
when I was a girl to last me the sort that hotel folks are. I presume
Mr. Whitwell spoke to you about my father?”

“Yes; he did, Mrs. Durgin.”

“I don't presume he said anything that wa'n't true. It's all right. But
I know how my mother used to slave, and how I used to slave myself; and
I always said I'd rather do anything than wait on boarders; and now I
guess I got to come to it. The sight of summer folks makes me sick! I
guess I could 'a' had 'em long ago if I'd wanted to. There! I've said
enough.” She rose, with a sudden lift of her powerful frame, and stood a
moment as if expecting Westover to say something.

He said: “Well, when you've made your mind up, send your advertisement
to me, and I'll attend to it for you.”

“And you won't forget about the picture?”

“No; I won't forget that.”

The next morning he made ready for an early start, and in his
preparations he had the zealous and even affectionate help of Jeff
Durgin. The boy seemed to wish him to carry away the best impression
of him, or, at least, to make him forget all that had been sinister or
unpleasant in his behavior. They had been good comrades since the first
evil day; they had become good friends even; and Westover was touched
by the boy's devotion at parting. He helped the painter get his pack
together in good shape, and he took pride in strapping it on Westover's
shoulders, adjusting and readjusting it with care, and fastening it so
that all should be safe and snug. He lingered about at the risk of being
late for school, as if to see the last of the painter, and he waved his
hat to him when Westover looked back at the house from half down the
lane. Then he vanished, and Westover went slowly on till he reached
that corner of the orchard where the slanting gravestones of the family
burial-ground showed above the low wall. There, suddenly, a storm burst
upon him. The air rained apples, that struck him on the head, the back,
the side, and pelted in violent succession on his knapsack and canvases,
camp-stool and easel. He seemed assailed by four or five skilful
marksmen, whose missiles all told.

When he could lift his face to look round he heard a shrill, accusing
voice, “Oh, Jeff Durgin!” and he saw another storm of apples fly through
the air toward the little Whitwell girl, who dodged and ran along the
road below and escaped in the direction of the schoolhouse. Then the
boy's face showed itself over the top of one of the gravestones, all
agrin with joy. He waited and watched Westover keep slowly on, as if
nothing had happened, and presently he let some apples fall from his
hands and walked slowly back to the house, with his dog at his heels.

When Westover reached the level of the road and the shelter of the woods
near Whitwell's house, he unstrapped his load to see how much harm had
been done to his picture. He found it unhurt, and before he had got the
burden back again he saw Jeff Durgin leaping along the road toward the
school-house, whirling his satchel of books about his head and shouting
gayly to the girl, now hidden by the bushes at the other end of the
lane: “Cynthy! Oh, Cynthy! Wait for me! I want to tell you something!”




IX.

Westover, received next spring the copy for an advertisement from Mrs.
Durgin, which she asked to have him put in some paper for her. She said
that her son Jackson had written it out, and Westover found it so well
written that he had scarcely to change the wording. It offered the best
of farm-board, with plenty of milk and eggs, berries and fruit, for
five dollars a week at Lion's Head Farm, and it claimed for the farm the
merit of the finest view of the celebrated Lion's Head Mountain. It
was signed, as her letter was signed, “Mrs. J. M. Durgin,” with her
post-office address, and it gave Westover as a reference.

The letter was in the same handwriting as the advertisement, which he
took to be that of Jackson Durgin. It enclosed a dollar note to pay for
three insertions of the advertisement in the evening Transcript, and
it ended, almost casually: “I do not know as you have heard that my
husband, James Monroe Durgin, passed to spirit life this spring. My son
will help me to run the house.”

This death could not move Westover more than it had apparently moved
the widow. During the three weeks he had passed under his roof, he had
scarcely exchanged three words with James Monroe Durgin, who remained to
him an impression of large, round, dull-blue eyes, a stubbly upper
lip, and cheeks and chin tagged with coarse, hay-colored beard. The
impression was so largely the impression that he had kept of the
dull-blue eyes and the gaunt, slanted figure of Andrew Jackson Durgin
that he could not be very distinct in his sense of which was now the
presence and which the absence. He remembered, with an effort, that the
son's beard was straw-colored, but he had to make no effort to recall
the robust effect of Mrs. Durgin and her youngest son. He wondered now,
as he had often wondered before, whether she knew of the final violence
which had avenged the boy for the prolonged strain of repression Jeff
had inflicted upon himself during Westover's stay at the farm. After
several impulses to go back and beat him, to follow him to school and
expose him to the teacher, to write to his mother and tell her of his
misbehavior, Westover had decided to do nothing. As he had come off
unhurt in person and property, he could afford to be more generously
amused than if he had suffered damage in either. The more he thought of
the incident, the more he was disposed to be lenient with the boy,
whom he was aware of having baffled and subdued by his superior wit and
virtue in perhaps intolerable measure. He could not quite make out
that it was an act of bad faith; there was no reason to think that the
good-natured things the fellow had done, the constant little offices of
zeal and friendliness, were less sincere than this violent outbreak.

The letter from Lion's Head Farm brought back his three weeks there very
vividly, and made Westover wish he was going there for the summer. But
he was going over to France for an indefinite period of work in the only
air where he believed modern men were doing good things in the right
way. He W a sale in the winter, and he had sold pictures enough to
provide the means for this sojourn abroad; though his lion's Head
Mountain had not brought the two hundred and fifty or three hundred
dollars he had hoped for. It brought only a hundred and sixty; but the
time had almost come already when Westover thought it brought too much.
Now, the letter from Mrs. Durgin reminded him that he had never sent her
the photograph of the picture which he had promised her. He encased the
photograph at once, and wrote to her with many avowals of contrition for
his neglect, and strong regret that he was not soon to see the original
of the painting again. He paid a decent reverence to the bereavement
she had suffered, and he sent his regards to all, especially his comrade
Jeff, whom he advised to keep out of the apple-orchard.

Five years later Westover came home in the first week of a gasping
August, whose hot breath thickened round the Cunarder before she got
half-way up the harbor. He waited only to see his pictures through the
custom-house, and then he left for the mountains. The mountains meant
Lion's Head for him, and eight hours after he was dismounting from the
train at a station on the road which had been pushed through on a new
line within four miles of the farm. It was called Lion's Head House now,
as he read on the side of the mountain-wagon which he saw waiting at the
platform, and he knew at a glance that it was Jeff Durgin who was coming
forward to meet him and take his hand-bag.

The boy had been the prophecy of the man in even a disappointing degree.
Westover had fancied him growing up to the height of his father and
brother, but Jeff Durgin's stalwart frame was notable for strength
rather than height. He could not have been taller than his mother, whose
stature was above the standard of her sex, but he was massive without
being bulky. His chest was deep, his square shoulders broad, his
powerful legs bore him with a backward bulge of the calves that showed
through his shapely trousers; he caught up the trunks and threw them
into the baggage-wagon with a swelling of the muscles on his short,
thick arms which pulled his coat-sleeves from his heavy wrists and
broad, short hands.

He had given one of these to Westover to shake when they met, but with
something conditional in his welcome, and with a look which was not so
much furtive as latent. The thatch of yellow hair he used to wear was
now cropped close to his skull, which was a sort of dun-color; and it
had some drops of sweat along the lighter edge where his hat had shaded
his forehead. He put his hat on the seat between himself and Westover,
and drove away from the station bareheaded, to cool himself after his
bout with the baggage, which was following more slowly in its wagon.
There was a good deal of it, and there were half a dozen people--women,
of course--going to Lion's Head House. Westover climbed to the place
beside Jeff to let them have the other two seats to themselves, and
to have a chance of talking; but the ladies had to be quieted in
their several anxieties concerning their baggage, and the letters and
telegrams they had sent about their rooms, before they settled down to
an exchange of apprehensions among themselves, and left Jeff Durgin free
to listen to Westover.

“I don't know but I ought to have telegraphed you that I was coming,”
 Westover said; “but I couldn't realize that you were doing things on the
hotel scale. Perhaps you won't have room for me?”

“Guess we can put you up,” said Jeff.

“No chance of getting my old room, I suppose?”

“I shouldn't wonder. If there's any one in it, I guess mother could
change 'em.”

“Is that so?” asked Westover, with a liking for being liked, which his
tone expressed. “How is your mother?”

Jeff seemed to think a moment before he answered:

“Just exactly the same.”

“A little older?”

“Not as I can see.”

“Does she hate keeping a hotel as badly as she expected?”

“That's what she says,” answered Jeff, with a twinkle. All the time,
while he was talking with Westover, he was breaking out to his horses,
which he governed with his voice, trotting them up hill and down, and
walking them on the short, infrequent levels, in the mountain fashion.

Westover almost feared to ask: “And how is Jackson?”

“First-rate--that is, for him. He's as well as ever he was, I guess,
and he don't appear a day older. You've changed some,” said Jeff, with a
look round at Westover.

“Yes; I'm twenty-nine now, and I wear a heavier beard.” Westover noticed
that Jeff was clean shaved of any sign of an approaching beard, and
artistically he rejoiced in the fellow's young, manly beauty, which was
very regular and sculpturesque. “You're about eighteen?”

“Nearer nineteen.”

“Is Jackson as much interested in the other world as he used to be?”

“Spirits?”

“Yes.”

“I guess he keeps it up with Mr. Whitwell. He don't say much about it
at home. He keeps all the books, and helps mother run the house. She
couldn't very well get along without him.”

“And where do you come in?”

“Well, I look after the transportation,” said Jeff, with a nod toward
his horses--“when I'm at home, that is. I've been at the Academy in
Lovewell the last three winters, and that means a good piece of the
summer, too, first and last. But I guess I'll let mother talk to you
about that.”

“All right,” said Westover. “What I don't know about education isn't
worth knowing.”

Jeff laughed, and said to the off horse, which seemed to know that he
was meant: “Get up, there!”

“And Cynthia? Is Cynthia at home?” Westover asked.

“Yes; they're all down in the little wood-colored house yet. Cynthia
teaches winters, and summers she helps mother. She has charge of the
dining-room.”

“Does Franky cry as much as ever?”

“No, Frank's a fine boy. He's in the house, too. Kind of bell-boy.”

“And you haven't worked Mr. Whitwell in anywhere?”

“Well, he talks to the ladies, and takes parties of 'em
mountain-climbing. I guess we couldn't get along without Mr. Whitwell.
He talks religion to 'em.” He cast a mocking glance at Westover over his
shoulder. “Women seem to like religion, whether they belong to church or
not.”

Westover laughed and asked: “And Fox? How's Fox?”

“Well,” said Jeff, “we had to give Fox away. He was always cross with
the boarders' children. My brother was on from Colorado, and he took Fox
back with him.”

“I didn't suppose,” said Westover, “that I should have been sorry to
miss Fox. But I guess I shall be.”

Jeff seemed to enjoy the implication of his words. “He wasn't a bad dog.
He was stupid.”

When they arrived at the foot of the lane, mounting to the farm,
Westover saw what changes had been made in the house. There were large
additions, tasteless and characterless, but giving the rooms that were
needed. There was a vulgar modernity in the new parts, expressed with a
final intensity in the four-light windows, which are esteemed the last
word of domestic architecture in the country. Jeff said nothing as
they approached the house, but Westover said: “Well, you've certainly
prospered. You're quite magnificent.”

They reached the old level in front of the house, artificially widened
out of his remembrance, with a white flag-pole planted at its edge, and
he looked up at the front of the house, which was unchanged, except that
it had been built a story higher back of the old front, and discovered
the window of his old room. He could hardly wait to get his greetings
over with Mrs. Durgin and Jackson, who both showed a decorous pleasure
and surprise at his coming, before he asked:

“And could you let me have my own room, Mrs. Durgin?”

“Why, yes,” she said, “if you don't want something a little nicer.”

“I don't believe you've got anything nicer,” Westover said.

“All right, if you think so,” she retorted. “You can have the old room,
anyway.”




X.

Westover could not have said he felt very much at home on his first
sojourn at the farm, or that he had cared greatly for the Durgins.
But now he felt very much at home, and as if he were in the hands of
friends.

It was toward the close of the afternoon that he arrived, and he went
in promptly to the meal that was served shortly after. He found that the
farm-house had not evolved so far in the direction of a hotel as to have
reached the stage of a late dinner. It was tea that he sat down to,
but when he asked if there were not something hot, after listening to
a catalogue of the cold meats, the spectacled waitress behind his chair
demanded, with the air of putting him on his honor:

“You among those that came this afternoon?”

Westover claimed to be of the new arrivals.

“Well, then, you can have steak or chops and baked potatoes.”

He found the steak excellent, though succinct, and he looked round in
the distinction it conferred upon him, on the older guests, who were
served with cold ham, tongue, and corned-beef. He had expected to
be appointed his place by Cynthia Whitwell, but Jeff came to the
dining-room with him and showed him to the table he occupied, with an
effect of doing him special credit.

From his impressions of the berries, the cream, the toast, and the tea,
as well as the steak, he decided that on the gastronomic side there
could be no question but the Durgins knew how to keep a hotel; and his
further acquaintance with the house and its appointments confirmed him
in his belief. All was very simple, but sufficient; and no guest could
have truthfully claimed that he was stinted in towels, in water, in
lamp-light, in the quantity or quality of bedding, in hooks for clothes,
or wardrobe or bureau room. Westover made Mrs. Durgin his sincere
compliments on her success as they sat in the old parlor, which she had
kept for herself much in its former state, and she accepted them with
simple satisfaction.

“But I don't know as I should ever had the courage to try it if it
hadn't been for you happening along just when you did,” she said.

“Then I'm the founder of your fortunes?”

“If you want to call them fortunes. We don't complain It's been a fight,
but I guess we've got the best of it. The house is full, and we're
turnin' folks away. I guess they can't say that at the big hotels they
used to drive over from to see Lion's Head at the farm.” She gave a low,
comfortable chuckle, and told Westover of the struggle they had made.
It was an interesting story and pathetic, like all stories of human
endeavor the efforts of the most selfish ambition have something of this
interest; and the struggle of the Durgins had the grace of the wish to
keep their home.

“And is Jeff as well satisfied as the rest?” Westover asked, after other
talk and comment on the facts.

“Too much so,” said Mrs. Durgin. “I should like to talk with you about
Jeff, Mr. Westover; you and him was always such friends.”

“Yes,” said Westover; “I shall be glad if I can be of use to you.”

“Why, it's just this. I don't see why Jeff shouldn't do something
besides keep a hotel.”

Westover's eyes wandered to the photograph of his painting of Lion's
Head which hung over the mantelpiece, in what he felt to be the place of
the greatest honor in the whole house, and a sudden fear came upon him
that perhaps Jeff had developed an artistic talent in the belief of his
family. But he waited silently to hear.

“We did think that before we got through the improvements last spring a
year ago we should have to get the savings-bank to put a mortgage on the
place; but we had just enough to start the season with, and we thought
we would try to pull through. We had a splendid season, and made money,
and this year we're doin' so well that I ain't afraid for the future any
more, and I want to give Jeff a chance in the world. I want he should go
to college.”

Westover felt all the boldness of the aspiration, but it was at least
not in the direction of art. “Wouldn't you rather miss him in the
management?”

“We should, some. But he would be here the best part of the summer, in
his vacations, and Jackson and I are full able to run the house without
him.”

“Jackson seems very well,” said Westover, evasively.

“He's better. He's only thirty-four years old. His father lived to be
sixty, and he had the same kind. Jeff tell you he had been at Lovewell
Academy?”

“Yes; he did.”

“He done well there. All his teachers that he ever had,” Mrs. Durgin
went on, with the mother-pride that soon makes itself tiresome to the
listener, “said Jeff done well at school when he had a mind to, and at
the Academy he studied real hard. I guess,” said Mrs. Durgin, with her
chuckle, “that he thought that was goin' to be the end of it. One thing,
he had to keep up with Cynthy, and that put him on his pride. You seen
Cynthy yet?”

“No. Jeff told me she was in charge of the diningroom.”

“I guess I'm in charge of the whole house,” said Mrs. Durgin. “Cynthy's
the housekeeper, though. She's a fine girl, and a smart girl,” said Mrs.
Durgin, with a visible relenting from some grudge, “and she'll do well
wherever you put her. She went to the Academy the first two winters Jeff
did. We've about scooped in the whole Whitwell family. Franky's here,
and his father's--well, his father's kind of philosopher to the lady
boarders.” Mrs. Durgin laughed, and Westover laughed with her. “Yes, I
want Jeff should go to college, and I want he should be a lawyer.”

Westover did not find that he had anything useful to say to this; so he
said: “I've no doubt it's better than being a painter.”

“I'm not so sure; three hundred dollars for a little thing like that.”
 She indicated the photograph of his Lion's Head, and she was evidently
so proud of it that he reserved for the moment the truth as to the
price he had got for the painting. “I was surprised when you sent me a
photograph full as big. I don't let every one in here, but a good many
of the ladies are artists themselves-amateurs, I guess--and first and
last they all want to see it. I guess they'll all want to see you, Mr.
Westover. They'll be wild, as they call it, when they know you're in the
house. Yes, I mean Jeff shall go to college.”

“Bowdoin or Dartmouth?” Westover suggested.

“Well, I guess you'll think I'm about as forth-putting as I was when
I wanted you to give me a three-hundred-dollar picture for a week's
board.”

“I only got a hundred and sixty, Mrs. Durgin,” said Westover,
conscientiously.

“Well, it's a shame. Any rate, three hundred's the price to all my
boarders. My, if I've told that story once, I guess I've told it fifty
times!”

Mrs. Durgin laughed at herself jollily, and Westover noted how
prosperity had changed her. It had freed her tongue, it has brightened
her humor, it had cheered her heart; she had put on flesh, and her
stalwart frame was now a far greater bulk than he remembered.

“Well, there,” she said, “the long and the short of it is, I want Jeff
should go to Harvard.”

He commanded himself to say: “I don't see why he shouldn't.”

Mrs. Durgin called out, “Come in, Jackson,” and Westover looked round
and saw the elder son like a gaunt shadow in the doorway. “I've just got
where I've told Mr. Westover where I want Jeff should go. It don't seem
to have ca'd him off his feet any, either.”

“I presume,” said Jackson, coming in and sitting lankly down in the
feather-cushioned rocking-chair which his mother pushed toward him with
her foot, “that the expense would be more at Harvard than it would at
the other colleges.”

“If you want the best you got to pay for it,” said Mrs. Durgin.

“I suppose it would cost more,” Westover answered Jackson's conjecture.
“I really don't know much about it. One hears tremendous stories at
Boston of the rate of living among the swell students in Cambridge.
People talk of five thousand a year, and that sort of thing.” Mrs.
Durgin shut her lips, after catching her breath. “But I fancy that
it's largely talk. I have a friend whose son went through Harvard for a
thousand a year, and I know that many fellows do it for much less.”

“I guess we can manage to let Jeff have a thousand a year,” said Mrs.
Durgin, proudly, “and not scrimp very much, either.”

She looked at her elder son, who said: “I don't believe but what we
could. It's more of a question with me what sort of influence Jeff would
come under there. I think he's pretty much spoiled here.”

“Now, Jackson!” said his mother.

“I've heard,” said Westover, “that Harvard takes the nonsense out of
a man. I can't enter into what you say, and it isn't my affair; but in
regard to influence at Harvard, it depends upon the set Jeff is thrown
with or throws himself with. So, at least, I infer from what I've heard
my friend say of his son there. There are hard-working sets, loafing
sets, and fast sets; and I suppose it isn't different at Harvard in such
matters from other colleges.”

Mrs. Durgin looked a little grave. “Of course,” she said, “we don't
know anybody at Cambridge, except some ladies that boarded with us one
summer, and I shouldn't want to ask any favor of them. The trouble would
be to get Jeff started right.”

Westover surmised a good many things, but in the absence of any
confidences from the Durgins he could not tell just how much Jackson
meant in saying that Jeff was pretty much spoiled, or how little. At
first, from Mrs. Durgin's prompt protest, he fancied that Jackson meant
that the boy had been over-indulged by his mother: “I understand,” he
said, in default of something else to say, “that the requirements at
Harvard are pretty severe.”

“He's passed his preliminary examinations,” said Jackson, with a touch
of hauteur, “and I guess he can enter this fall if we should so decide.
He'll have some conditions, prob'ly, but none but what he can work off,
I guess.”

“Then, if you wish to have him go to college, by all means let him go to
Harvard, I should say. It's our great university and our oldest. I'm
not a college man myself; but, if I were, I should wish to have been a
Harvard man. If Jeff has any nonsense in him, it will take it out; and
I don't believe there's anything in Harvard, as Harvard, to make him
worse.”

“That's what we both think,” said Jackson.

“I've heard,” Westover continued, and he rose and stood while he spoke,
“that Harvard's like the world. A man gets on there on the same terms
that he gets on in the world. He has to be a man, and he'd better be a
gentleman.”

Mrs. Durgin still looked serious. “Have you come back to Boston for good
now? Do you expect to be there right along?”

“I've taken a studio there. Yes, I expect to be in Boston now. I've
taken to teaching, and I fancy I can make a living. If Jeff comes to
Cambridge, and I can be of any use--”

“We should be ever so much obliged to you,” said his mother, with an air
of great relief.

“Not at all. I shall be very glad. Your mountain air is drugging me,
Mrs. Durgin. I shall have to say good-night, or I shall tumble asleep
before I get upstairs. Oh, I can find the way, I guess; this part of
the house seems the same.” He got away from them, and with the lamp that
Jackson gave him found his way to his room. A few moments later some
one knocked at his door, and a boy stood there with a pitcher. “Some
ice-water, Mr. Westover?”

“Why, is that you, Franky? I'm glad to see you again. How are you?”

“I'm pretty well,” said the boy, shyly. He was a very handsome little
fellow of distinctly dignified presence, and Westover was aware at once
that here was not a subject for patronage. “Is there anything else you
want, Mr. Westover? Matches, or soap, or anything?” He put the pitcher
down and gave a keen glance round the room.

“No, everything seems to be here, Frank,” said Westover.

“Well, good-night,” said the boy, and he slipped out, quietly closing
the door after him.

Westover pushed up his window and looked at Lion's Head in the
moonlight. It slumbered as if with the sleep of centuries-austere,
august. The moon-rays seemed to break and splinter on the outline of the
lion-shape, and left all the mighty mass black below.

In the old porch under his window Westover heard whispering. Then, “You
behave yourself, Jeff Durgin!” came in a voice which could be no other
than Cynthia Whitwell's, and Jeff Durgin's laugh followed.

He saw the girl in the morning. She met him at the door of the
dining-room, and he easily found in her shy, proud manner, and her pure,
cold beauty, the temperament and physiognomy of the child he remembered.
She was tall and slim, and she held herself straight without stiffness;
her face was fine, with a straight nose, and a decided chin, and a mouth
of the same sweetness which looked from her still, gray eyes; her hair,
of the average brown, had a rough effect of being quickly tossed into
form, which pleased him; as she slipped down the room before him to
place him at table he saw that she was, as it were, involuntarily,
unwillingly graceful. She made him think of a wild sweetbrier, of a
hermit-thrush; but, if there were this sort of poetic suggestion in
Cynthia's looks, her acts were of plain and honest prose, such as giving
Westover the pleasantest place and the most intelligent waitress in the
room.

He would have liked to keep her in talk a moment, but she made
business-like despatch of all his allusions to the past, and got herself
quickly away. Afterward she came back to him, with the effect of having
forced herself to come, and the color deepened in her cheeks while she
stayed.

She seemed glad of his being there, but helpless against the instincts
or traditions that forbade her to show her pleasure in his presence.
Her reticence became almost snubbing in its strictness when he asked her
about her school-teaching in the winter; but he found that she taught at
the little school-house at the foot of the hill, and lived at home with
her father.

“And have you any bad boys that frighten little girls in your school?”
 he asked, jocosely.

“I don't know as I have,” she said, with a consciousness that flamed
into her cheeks.

“Perhaps the boys have reformed?” Westover suggested.

“I presume,” she said, stiffly, “that there's room for improvement
in every one,” and then, as if she were afraid he might take this
personally, she looked unhappy and tried to speak of other things. She
asked him if he did not see a great many changes at Lion's Head; he
answered, gravely, that he wished he could have found it just as he left
it, and then she must have thought she had gone wrong again, for she
left him in an embarrassment that was pathetic, but which was charming.




XI.

After breakfast Westover walked out and saw Whitwell standing on the
grass in front of the house, beside the flagstaff. He suffered Westover
to make the first advances toward the renewal of their acquaintance, but
when he was sure of his friendly intention he responded with a cordial
openness which the painter had fancied wanting in his children. Whitwell
had not changed much. The most noticeable difference was the compact
phalanx of new teeth which had replaced the staggering veterans of
former days, and which displayed themselves in his smile of relenting.
There was some novelty of effect also in an arrangement of things in his
hat-band. At first Westover thought they were fishhooks and artificial
flies, such as the guides wear in the Adirondacks to advertise their
calling about the hotel offices and the piazzas. But another glance
showd him that they were sprays and wild flowers of various sorts, with
gay mosses and fungi and some stems of Indian-pipe.

Whitwell seemed pleased that these things should have caught Westover's
eye. He said, almost immediately: “Lookin' at my almanac? This is one
of our field-days; we have 'em once a week; and I like to let the ladies
see beforehand what nature's got on the bill for 'em, in the woods and
pastur's.”

“It's a good idea,” said Westover, “and it's fresh and picturesque.”
 Whitwell laughed for pleasure.

“They told me what a consolation you were to the ladies, with your walks
and talks.”

“Well, I try to give 'em something to think about,” said Whitwell.

“But why do you confine your ministrations to one sex?”

“I don't, on purpose. But it's the only sex here, three-fourths of the
time. Even the children are mostly all girls. When the husbands come up
Saturday nights, they don't want to go on a tramp Sundays. They want
to lay off and rest. That's about how it is. Well, you see some changes
about Lion's Head, I presume?” he asked, with what seemed an impersonal
pleasure in them.

“I should rather have found the old farm. But I must say I'm glad to
find such a good hotel.”

“Jeff and his mother made their brags to you?” said Whitwell, with a
kind of amiable scorn. “I guess if it wa'n't for Cynthy she wouldn't
know where she was standin', half the time. It don't matter where Jeff
stands, I guess. Jackson's the best o' the lot, now the old man's
gone.” There was no one by at the moment to hear these injuries except
Westover, but Whitwell called them out with a frankness which was
perhaps more carefully adapted to the situation than it seemed. Westover
made no attempt to parry them formally; but he offered some generalities
in extenuation of the unworthiness of the Durgins, which Whitwell did
not altogether refuse.

“Oh, it's all right. Old woman talk to you about Jeff's going to
college? I thought so. Wants to make another Dan'el Webster of him.
Guess she can's far forth as Dan'el's graduatin' went.” Westover
tried to remember how this had been with the statesman, but could not.
Whitwell added, with intensifying irony so of look and tone: “Guess
the second Dan'el won't have a chance to tear his degree up; guess he
wouldn't ever b'en ready to try for it if it had depended on him.
They don't keep any record at Harvard, do they, of the way fellows are
prepared for their preliminary examinations?”

“I don't quite know what you mean,” said Westover.

“Oh, nothin'. You get a chance some time to ask Jeff who done most of
his studyin' for him at the Academy.”

This hint was not so darkling but Westover could understand that
Whitwell attributed Jeff's scholarship to the help of Cynthia, but
he would not press him to an open assertion of the fact. There was
something painful in it to him; it had the pathos which perhaps most of
the success in the world would reveal if we could penetrate its outside.

He was silent, and Whitwell left the point. “Well,” he concluded,
“what's goin' on in them old European countries?”

“Oh, the old thing,” said Westover. “But I can't speak for any except
France, very well.”

“What's their republic like, over there? Ours? See anything of it, how
it works?”

“Well, you know,” said Westover, “I was working so hard myself all the
time--”

“Good!” Whitwell slapped his leg. Westover saw that he had on long
India-rubber boots, which came up to his knees, and he gave a wayward
thought to the misery they would be on an August day to another man; but
Whitwell was probably insensible to any discomfort from them. “When a
man's mindin' his own business any government's good, I guess. But I
should like to prowl round some them places where they had the worst
scenes of the Revolution, Ever been in the Place de la Concorde?”
 Whitwell gave it the full English pronunciation.

“I passed through it nearly every day.”

“I want to know! And that column that they, pulled down in the Commune
that had that little Boney on it--see that?”

“In the Place Vendome?”

“Yes, Plass Vonndome.”

“Oh yes. You wouldn't know it had ever been down.”

“Nor the things it stood for?”

“As to that, I can't be so sure.”

“Well, it's funny,” said the philosopher, “how the world seems to always
come out at the same hole it went in at!” He paused, with his mouth
open, as if to let the notion have full effect with Westover.

The painter said: “And you're still in the old place, Mr. Whitwell?”

“Yes, I like my own house. They've wanted me to come up here often
enough, but I'm satisfied where I am. It's quiet down there, and, when
I get through for the day, I can read. And I like to keep my family
together. Cynthy and Frank always sleep at home, and Jombateeste eats
with me. You remember Jombateeste?”

Westover had to say that he did not.

“Well, I don't know as you did see him much. He was that Canuck I had
helpin' me clear that piece over on Lion's Head for the pulp-mill;
pulp-mill went all to thunder, and I never got a cent. And sometimes
Jackson comes down with his plantchette, and we have a good time.”

“Jackson still believes in the manifestations?”

“Yes. But he's never developed much himself. He can't seem to do much
without the plantchette. We've had up some of them old philosophers
lately. We've had up Socrates.”

“Is that so? It must be very interesting.”

Whitwell did not answer, and Westover saw his eye wander. He looked
round. Several ladies were coming across the grass toward him from the
hotel, lifting their skirts and tiptoeing through the dew. They called
to him, “Good-morning, Mr. Whitwell!” and “Are you going up Lion's
Head to-day?” and “Don't you think it will rain?”--“Guess not,” said
Whitwell, with a fatherly urbanity and an air of amusement at the
anxieties of the sex which seemed habitual to him. He waited tranquilly
for them to come up, and then asked, with a wave of his hand toward
Westover: “Acquainted with Mr. Westover, the attist?” He named each of
them, and it would have been no great vanity in Westover to think they
had made their little movement across the grass quite as much in the
hope of an introduction to him as in the wish to consult Whitwell about
his plans.

The painter found himself the centre of an agreeable excitement with all
the ladies in the house. For this it was perhaps sufficient to be a man.
To be reasonably young and decently good-looking, to be an artist,
and an artist not unknown, were advantages which had the splendor of
superfluity.

He liked finding himself in the simple and innocent American
circumstance again, and he was not sorry to be confronted at once with
one of the most characteristic aspects of our summer. He could read
in the present development of Lion's Head House all the history of its
evolution from the first conception of farm-board, which sufficed the
earliest comers, to its growth in the comforts and conveniences which
more fastidious tastes and larger purses demanded. Before this point was
reached, the boarders would be of a good and wholesome sort, but they
would be people of no social advantages, and not of much cultivation,
though they might be intelligent; they would certainly not be
fashionable; five dollars a week implied all that, except in the case
of some wandering artist or the family of some poor young professor. But
when the farm became a boarding-house and called itself a hotel, as at
present with Lion's Head House, and people paid ten dollars a week, or
twelve for transients, a moment of its character was reached which could
not be surpassed when its prosperity became greater and its inmates more
pretentious. In fact, the people who can afford to pay ten dollars a
week for summer board, and not much more, are often the best of the
American people, or, at least, of the New England people. They may not
know it, and those who are richer may not imagine it. They are apt to be
middle-aged maiden ladies from university towns, living upon carefully
guarded investments; young married ladies with a scant child or two,
and needing rest and change of air; college professors with nothing but
their modest salaries; literary men or women in the beginning of their
tempered success; clergymen and their wives away from their churches in
the larger country towns or the smaller suburbs of the cities; here
and there an agreeable bachelor in middle life, fond of literature and
nature; hosts of young and pretty girls with distinct tastes in art,
and devoted to the clever young painter who leads them to the sources
of inspiration in the fields and woods. Such people are refined, humane,
appreciative, sympathetic; and Westover, fresh from the life abroad
where life is seldom so free as ours without some stain, was glad to
find himself in the midst of this unrestraint, which was so sweet and
pure. He had seen enough of rich people to know that riches seldom
bought the highest qualities, even among his fellow-countrymen who
suppose that riches can do everything, and the first aspects of society
at Lion's Head seemed to him Arcadian. There really proved to be a
shepherd or two among all that troop of shepherdesses, old and young;
though it was in the middle of the week, remote alike from the Saturday
of arrivals and the Monday of departures. To be sure, there was none
quite so young as himself, except Jeff Durgin, who was officially
exterior to the social life.

The painter who gave lessons to the ladies was already a man of forty,
and he was strongly dragoned round by a wife almost as old, who had
taken great pains to secure him for herself, and who worked him to far
greater advantage in his profession than he could possibly have worked
himself: she got him orders; sold his pictures, even in Boston, where
they never buy American pictures; found him pupils, and kept the boldest
of these from flirting with him. Westover, who was so newly from Paris,
was able to console him with talk of the salons and ateliers, which he
had not heard from so directly in ten years. After the first inevitable
moment of jealousy, his wife forgave Westover when she found that he did
not want pupils, and she took a leading part in the movement to have
him read Browning at a picnic, organized by the ladies shortly after he
came.




XII.

The picnic was held in Whitwell's Clearing, on the side of Lion's Head,
where the moss, almost as white as snow, lay like belated drifts among
the tall, thin grass which overran the space opened by the axe, and
crept to the verge of the low pines growing in the shelter of the
loftier woods. It was the end of one of Whitwell's “Tramps Home to
Nature,” as he called his walks and talks with the ladies, and on this
day Westover's fellow-painter had added to his lessons in woodlore the
claims of art, intending that his class should make studies of various
bits in the clearing, and should try to catch something of its peculiar
charm. He asked Westover what he thought of the notion, and Westover
gave it his approval, which became enthusiastic when he saw the place.
He found in it the melancholy grace, the poignant sentiment of ruin
which expresses itself in some measure wherever man has invaded nature
and then left his conquest to her again. In Whitwell's Clearing the
effect was intensified by the approach on the fading wood road, which
the wagons had made in former days when they hauled the fallen timber
to the pulp-mill. In places it was so vague and faint as to be hardly a
trail; in others, where the wheel-tracks remained visible, the trees
had sent out a new growth of lower branches in the place of those lopped
away, and almost forbade the advance of foot-passengers. The ladies said
they did not see how Jeff was ever going to get through with the wagon,
and they expressed fears for the lunch he was bringing, which seemed
only too well grounded.

But Whitwell, who was leading them on, said: “You let a Durgin alone to
do a thing when he's made up his mind to it. I guess you'll have your
lunch all right;” and by the time that they had got enough of Browning
they heard the welcome sound of wheels crashing upon dead boughs and
swishing through the underbrush, and, in the pauses of these pleasant
noises, the voice of Jeff Durgin encouraging his horses. The children of
the party broke away to meet him, and then he came in sight ahead of his
team, looking strong and handsome in his keeping with the scene: Before
he got within hearing, the ladies murmured a hymn of praise to his type
of beauty; they said he looked like a young Hercules, and Westover owned
with an inward smile that Jeff had certainly made the best of himself
for the time being. He had taken a leaf from the book of the summer
folks; his stalwart calves revealed themselves in thick, ribbed
stockings; he wore knickerbockers and a Norfolk jacket of corduroy; he
had style as well as beauty, and he had the courage of his clothes and
looks. Westover was still in the first surprise of the American facts,
and he wondered just what part in the picnic Jeff was to bear socially.
He was neither quite host nor guest; but no doubt in the easy play
of the life, which Westover was rather proud to find so charming, the
question would solve itself rationally and gracefully.

“Where do you want the things?” the young fellow asked of the company at
large, as he advanced upon them from the green portals of the roadway,
pulling off his soft wool hat, and wiping his wet forehead with his
blue-bordered white handkerchief.

“Oh, right here, Jeff!” The nimblest of the nymphs sprang to her feet
from the lounging and crouching circle about Westover. She was a young
nymph no longer, but with a daughter not so much younger than herself as
to make the contrast of her sixteen years painful. Westover recognized
the officious, self-approving kind of the woman, but he admired the
brisk efficiency with which she had taken possession of the affair from
the beginning and inspired every one to help, in strict subordination to
herself.

When the cloths were laid on the smooth, elastic moss, and the meal
was spread, she heaped a plate without suffering any interval in her
activities.

“I suppose you've got to go back to your horses, Jeff, and you shall be
the first served,” she said, and she offered him the plate with a bright
smile and friendly grace, which were meant to keep him from the hurt of
her intention.

Jeff did not offer to take the plate which she raised to him from where
she was kneeling, but looked down at her with perfect intelligence. “I
guess I don't want anything,” he said, and turned and walked away into
the woods.

The ill-advised woman remained kneeling for a moment with her
ingratiating smile hardening on her face, while the sense of her blunder
petrified the rest. She was the first to recover herself, and she said,
with a laugh that she tried to make reckless, “Well, friends, I suppose
the rest of you are hungry; I know I am,” and she began to eat.

The others ate, too, though their appetites might well have been
affected by the diplomatic behavior of Whitwell. He would not take
anything, just at present, he said, and got his long length up from the
root of a tree where he had folded it down. “I don't seem to care much
for anything in the middle of the day; breakfast's my best meal,” and he
followed Jeff off into the woods.

“Really,” said the lady, “what did they expect?” But the question was so
difficult that no one seemed able to make the simple answer.

The incident darkened the day and spoiled its pleasure; it cast a
lessening shadow into the evening when the guests met round the fire in
the large, ugly new parlor at the hotel.

The next morning the ladies assembled again on the piazza to decide what
should be done with the beautiful day before them. Whitwell stood at the
foot of the flag-staff with one hand staying his person against it, like
a figure posed in a photograph to verify proportions in the different
features of a prospect.

The heroine of the unhappy affair of the picnic could not forbear
authorizing herself to invoke his opinion at a certain point of the
debate, and “Mr. Whitwell,” she called to him, “won't you please come
here a moment?”

Whitwell slowly pulled himself across the grass to the group, and at
the same moment, as if she had been waiting for him to be present, Mrs.
Durgin came out of the office door and advanced toward the ladies.

“Mrs. Marven,” she said, with the stony passivity which the ladies used
to note in her when they came over to Lion's Head Farm in the tally-hos,
“the stage leaves here at two o'clock to get the down train at three.
I want you should have your trunks ready to go on the wagon a little
before two.”

“You want I should have my--What do you mean, Mrs. Durgin?”

“I want your rooms.”

“You want my rooms?”

Mrs. Durgin did not answer. She let her steadfast look suffice; and Mrs.
Marven went on in a rising flutter: “Why, you can't have my rooms! I
don't understand you. I've taken my rooms for the whole of August, and
they are mine; and--”

“I have got to have your rooms,” said Mrs. Durgin.

“Very well, then, I won't give them up,” said the lady. “A bargain's a
bargain, and I have your agreement--”

“If you're not out of your rooms by two o'clock, your things will be
put out; and after dinner to-day you will not eat another bite under my
roof.”

Mrs. Durgin went in, and it remained for the company to make what they
could of the affair. Mrs. Marven did not wait for the result. She was
not a dignified person, but she rose with hauteur and whipped away to
her rooms, hers no longer, to make her preparations. She knew at least
how to give her going the effect of quitting the place with disdain and
abhorrence.

The incident of her expulsion was brutal, but it was clearly meant to be
so. It made Westover a little sick, and he would have liked to pity Mrs.
Marven more than he could. The ladies said that Mrs. Durgin's behavior
was an outrage, and they ought all to resent it by going straight to
their own rooms and packing their things and leaving on the same stage
with Mrs. Marven. None of them did so, and their talk veered around to
something extenuating, if not justifying, Mrs. Durgin's action.

“I suppose,” one of them said, “that she felt more indignant about it
because she has been so very good to Mrs. Marven, and her daughter, too.
They were both sick on her hands here for a week after they came, first
one and then the other, and she looked after them and did for them like
a mother.”

“And yet,” another lady suggested, “what could Mrs. Marven have done?
What did she do? He wasn't asked to the picnic, and I don't see why he
should have been treated as a guest. He was there, purely and simply, to
bring the things and take them away. And, besides, if there is anything
in distinctions, in differences, if we are to choose who is to associate
with us--or our daughters--”

“That is true,” the ladies said, in one form or another, with the tone
of conviction; but they were not so deeply convinced that they did not
want a man's opinion, and they all looked at Westover.

He would not respond to their look, and the lady who had argued for Mrs.
Marven had to ask: “What do you think, Mr. Westover?”

“Ah, it's a difficult question,” he said. “I suppose that as long as one
person believes himself or herself socially better than another, it must
always be a fresh problem what to do in every given case.”

The ladies said they supposed so, and they were forced to make what
they could of wisdom in which they might certainly have felt a want of
finality.

Westover went away from them in a perplexed mind which was not
simplified by the contempt he had at the bottom of all for something
unmanly in Jeff, who had carried his grievance to his mother like a
slighted boy, and provoked her to take up arms for him.

The sympathy for Mrs. Marven mounted again when it was seen that she did
not come to dinner, or permit her daughter to do so, and when it became
known later that she had refused for both the dishes sent to their
rooms. Her farewells to the other ladies, when they gathered to see
her off on the stage, were airy rather than cheery; there was almost
a demonstration in her behalf, but Westover was oppressed by a kind of
inherent squalor in the incident.

At night he responded to a knock which he supposed that of Frank
Whitwell with ice-water, and Mrs. Durgin came into his room and sat down
in one of his two chairs. “Mr. Westover,” she said, “if you knew all I
had done for that woman and her daughter, and how much she had pretended
to think of us all, I don't believe you'd be so ready to judge me.”

“Judge you!” cried Westover. “Bless my soul, Mrs. Durgin! I haven't said
a word that could be tormented into the slightest censure.”

“But you think I done wrong?”

“I have not been at all able to satisfy myself on that point, Mrs.
Durgin. I think it's always wrong to revenge one's self.”

“Yes, I suppose it is,” said Mrs. Durgin, humbly; and the tears came
into her eyes. “I got the tray ready with my own hands that was sent to
her room; but she wouldn't touch it. I presume she didn't like having a
plate prepared for her! But I did feel sorry for her. She a'n't over and
above strong, and I'm afraid she'll be sick; there a'n't any rest'rant
at our depot.”

Westover fancied this a fit mood in Mrs. Durgin for her further
instruction, and he said: “And if you'll excuse me, Mrs. Durgin, I don't
think what you did was quite the way to keep a hotel.”

More tears flashed into Mrs. Durgin's eyes, but they were tears of wrath
now. “I would 'a' done it,” she said, “if I thought every single one of
'em would 'a' left the house the next minute, for there a'n't one that
has the first word to say against me, any other way. It wa'n't that I
cared whether she thought my son was good enough to eat with her or not;
I know what I think, and that's enough for me. He wa'n't invited to the
picnic, and he a'n't one to put himself forward. If she didn't want him
to stay, all she had to do was to do nothin'. But to make him up a plate
before everybody, and hand it to him to eat with the horses, like a
tramp or a dog--” Mrs. Durgin filled to the throat with her wrath, and
the sight of her made Westover keenly unhappy.

“Yes, yes,” he said, “it was a miserable business.” He could not help
adding: “If Jeff could have kept it to himself--but perhaps that wasn't
possible.”

“Mr. Westover!” said Mrs. Durgin, sternly. “Do you think Jeff would come
to me, like a great crybaby, and complain of my lady boarders and the
way they used him? It was Mr. Whit'ell that let it out, or I don't know
as I should ever known about it.”

“I'm glad Jeff didn't tell you,” said Westover, with a revulsion of good
feeling toward him.

“He'd 'a' died first,” said his mother. “But Mr. Whit'ell done just
right all through, and I sha'n't soon forget it. Jeff's give me a proper
goin' over for what I done; both the boys have. But I couldn't help it,
and I should do just so again. All is, I wanted you should know just
what you was blamin' me for--”

“I don't know that I blame you. I only wish you could have helped
it--managed some other way.”

“I did try to get over it, and all I done was to lose a night's rest.
Then, this morning, when I see her settin' there so cool and mighty with
the boarders, and takin' the lead as usual, I just waited till she got
Whit'ell across, and nearly everybody was there that saw what she done
to Jeff, and then I flew out on her.”

Westover could not suppress a laugh. “Well, Mrs. Durgin, your
retaliation was complete; it was dramatic.”

“I don't know what you mean by that,” said Mrs. Durgin, rising and
resuming her self-control; she did not refuse herself a grim smile. “But
I guess she thought it was pretty perfect herself--or she will, when
she's able to give her mind to it. I'm sorry for her daughter; I never
had anything against her; or her mother, either, for that matter,
before. Franky look after you pretty well? I'll send him up with your
ice-water. Got everything else you want?”

“I should have to invent a want if I wished to complain,” said Westover.

“Well, I should like to have you do it. We can't ever do too much for
you. Well, good-night, Mr. Westover.”

“Good'-night, Mrs. Durgin.”




XIII.

Jeff Durgin entered Harvard that fall, with fewer conditions than most
students have to work off. This was set down to the credit of Lovewell
Academy, where he had prepared for the university; and some observers in
such matters were interested to note how thoroughly the old school in a
remote town had done its work for him.

None who formed personal relations with him at that time conjectured
that he had done much of the work for himself, and even to Westover,
when Jeff came to him some weeks after his settlement in Cambridge, he
seemed painfully out of his element, and unamiably aware of it. For the
time, at least, he had lost the jovial humor, not too kindly always,
which largely characterized him, and expressed itself in sallies of
irony which were not so unkindly, either. The painter perceived that he
was on his guard against his own friendly interest; Jeff made haste to
explain that he came because he had told his mother that he would do
so. He scarcely invited a return of his visit, and he left Westover
wondering at the sort of vague rebellion against his new life which he
seemed to be in. The painter went out to see him in Cambridge, not long
after, and was rather glad to find him rooming with some other rustic
Freshman in a humble street running from the square toward the river;
for he thought Jeff must have taken his lodging for its cheapness,
out of regard to his mother's means. But Jeff was not glad to be found
there, apparently; he said at once that he expected to get a room in the
Yard the next year, and eat at Memorial Hall. He spoke scornfully of his
boarding-house as a place where they were all a lot of jays together;
and Westover thought him still more at odds with his environment than
he had before. But Jeff consented to come in and dine with him at his
restaurant, and afterward go to the theatre with him.

When he came, Westover did not quite like his despatch of the
half-bottle of California claret served each of them with the Italian
table d'hote. He did not like his having already seen the play he
proposed; and he found some difficulty in choosing a play which Jeff had
not seen. It appeared then that he had been at the theatre two or three
times a week for the last month, and that it was almost as great a
passion with him as with Westover himself. He had become already a
critic of acting, with a rough good sense of it, and a decided opinion.
He knew which actors he preferred, and which actresses, better still.
It was some consolation for Westover to find that he mostly took an
admission ticket when he went to the theatre; but, though he could not
blame Jeff for showing his own fondness for it, he wished that he had
not his fondness.

So far Jeff seemed to have spent very few of his evenings in Cambridge,
and Westover thought it would be well if he had some acquaintance there.
He made favor for him with a friendly family, who asked him to
dinner. They did it to oblige Westover, against their own judgment and
knowledge, for they said it was always the same with Freshmen; a single
act of hospitality finished the acquaintance. Jeff came, and he behaved
with as great indifference to the kindness meant him as if he were
dining out every night; he excused himself very early in the evening
on the ground that he had to go into Boston, and he never paid his
dinner-call. After that Westover tried to consider his whole duty to him
fulfilled, and not to trouble himself further. Now and then, however,
Jeff disappointed the expectation Westover had formed of him, by coming
to see him, and being apparently glad of the privilege. But he did not
make the painter think that he was growing in grace or wisdom, though he
apparently felt an increasing confidence in his own knowledge of life.

Westover could only feel a painful interest tinged with amusement in
his grotesque misconceptions of the world where he had not yet begun to
right himself. Jeff believed lurid things of the society wholly unknown
to him; to his gross credulity, Boston houses, which at the worst were
the homes of a stiff and cold exclusiveness, were the scenes of riot
only less scandalous than the dissipation to which fashionable ladies
abandoned themselves at champagne suppers in the Back Bay hotels and on
their secret visits to the Chinese opium-joints in Kingston Street.

Westover tried to make him see how impossible his fallacies were; but
he could perceive that Jeff thought him either wilfully ignorant or
helplessly innocent, and of far less authority than a barber who had the
entree of all these swell families as hair-dresser, and who corroborated
the witness of a hotel night-clerk (Jeff would not give their names)
to the depravity of the upper classes. He had to content himself with
saying: “I hope you will be ashamed some day of having believed such
rot. But I suppose it's something you've got to go through. You may take
my word for it, though? that it isn't going to do you any good. It's
going to do you harm, and that's why I hate to have you think it, for
your own sake. It can't hurt any one else.”

What disgusted the painter most was that, with all his belief in
the wickedness of the fine world, it was clear that Jeff would
have willingly been of it; and he divined that if he had any strong
aspirations they were for society and for social acceptance. He had
fancied, when the fellow seemed to care so little for the studies of the
university, that he might come forward in its sports. Jeff gave more and
more the effect of tremendous strength in his peculiar physique, though
there was always the disappointment of not finding him tall. He was of
the middle height, but he was hewn out and squared upward massively. He
felt like stone to any accidental contact, and the painter brought away
a bruise from the mere brunt of his shoulders. He learned that Jeff was
a frequenter of the gymnasium, where his strength must have been known,
but he could not make out that he had any standing among the men who
went in for athletics. If Jeff had even this, the sort of standing in
college which he failed of would easily have been won, too. But he
had been falsely placed at the start, or some quality of his nature
neutralized other qualities that would have made him a leader in
college, and he remained one of the least forward men in it. Other jays
won favor and liking, and ceased to be jays; Jeff continued a jay. He
was not chosen into any of the nicer societies; those that he joined
when he thought they were swell he could not care for when he found they
were not.

Westover came into a knowledge of the facts through his casual and
scarcely voluntary confidences, and he pitied him somewhat while he
blamed him a great deal more, without being able to help him at all.

It appeared to him that the fellow had gone wrong more through ignorance
than perversity, and that it was a stubbornness of spirit rather than a
badness of heart that kept him from going right. He sometimes wondered
whether it was not more a baffled wish to be justified in his own esteem
than anything else that made him overvalue the things he missed. He knew
how such an experience as that with Mrs. Marven rankles in the heart of
youth, and will not cease to smart till some triumph in kind brines it
ease; but between the man of thirty and the boy of twenty there is a
gulf fixed, and he could not ask. He did not know that a college man
often goes wrong in his first year, out of no impulse that he can very
clearly account for himself, and then when he ceases to be merely of his
type and becomes more of his character, he pulls up and goes right. He
did not know how much Jeff had been with a set that was fast without
being fine. The boy had now and then a book in his hand when he came;
not always such a book as Westover could have wished, but still a book;
and to his occasional questions about how he was getting on with his
college work, Jeff made brief answers, which gave the notion that he was
not neglecting it.

Toward the end of his first year he sent to Westover one night from a
station-house, where he had been locked up for breaking a street-lamp
in Boston. By his own showing he had not broken the lamp, or assisted,
except through his presence, at the misdeed of the tipsy students who
had done it. His breath betrayed that he had been drinking, too; but
otherwise he seemed as sober as Westover himself, who did not know
whether to augur well or ill for him from the proofs he had given before
of his ability to carry off a bottle of wine with a perfectly level
head. Jeff seemed to believe Westover a person of such influence that
he could secure his release at once, and he was abashed to find that
he must pass the night in the cell, where he conferred with Westover
through the bars.

In the police court, where his companions were fined, the next morning,
he was discharged for want of evidence against him; but the university
authorities did not take the same view as the civil authorities. He
was suspended, and for the time he passed out of Westover's sight and
knowledge.

He expected to find him at Lion's Head, where he went to pass the month
of August--in painting those pictures of the mountain which had in some
sort, almost in spite of him, become his specialty. But Mrs. Durgin
employed the first free moments after their meeting in explaining that
Jeff had got a chance to work his way to London on a cattle-steamer, and
had been abroad the whole summer. He had written home that the voyage
had been glorious, with plenty to eat and little to do; and he had made
favor with the captain for his return by the same vessel in September.
By other letters it seemed that he had spent the time mostly in England;
but he had crossed over into France for a fortnight, and had spent a
week in Paris. His mother read some passages from his letters aloud to
show Westover how Jeff was keeping his eyes open. His accounts of his
travel were a mixture of crude sensations in the presence of famous
scenes and objects of interest, hard-headed observation of the facts of
life, narrow-minded misconception of conditions, and wholly intelligent
and adequate study of the art of inn-keeping in city and country.

Mrs. Durgin seemed to feel that there was some excuse due for the
relative quantity of the last. “He knows that's what I'd care for the
most; and Jeff a'n't one to forget his mother.” As if the word reminded
her, she added, after a moment: “We sha'n't any of us soon forget what
you done for Jeff--that time.”

“I didn't do anything for him, Mrs. Durgin; I couldn't,” Westover
protested.

“You done what you could, and I know that you saw the thing in the right
light, or you wouldn't 'a' tried to do anything. Jeff told me every word
about it. I know he was with a pretty harum-scarum crowd. But it was
a lesson to him; and I wa'n't goin' to have him come back here, right
away, and have folks talkin' about what they couldn't understand, after
the way the paper had it.”

“Did it get into the papers?”

“Mm.” Mrs. Durgin nodded. “And some dirty, sneakin' thing, here, wrote a
letter to the paper and told a passel o' lies about Jeff and all of us;
and the paper printed Jeff's picture with it; I don't know how they
got a hold of it. So when he got that chance to go, I just said, 'Go.'
You'll see he'll keep all straight enough after this, Mr. Westover.”

“Old woman read you any of Jeff's letters?” Whit-well asked, when his
chance for private conference with Westover came. “What was the rights
of that scrape he got into?”

Westover explained as favorably to Jeff as he could; the worst of the
affair was the bad company he was in.

“Well, where there's smoke there's some fire. Cou't discharged him and
college suspended him. That's about where it is? I guess he'll keep out
o' harm's way next time. Read you what he said about them scenes of the
Revolution in Paris?”

“Yes; he seems to have looked it all up pretty thoroughly.”

“Done it for me, I guess, much as anything. I was always talkin' it up
with him. Jeff's kep' his eyes open, that's a fact. He's got a head on
him, more'n I ever thought.”

Westover decided that Mrs. Durgin's prepotent behavior toward Mrs.
Marven the summer before had not hurt her materially, with the witnesses
even. There were many new boarders, but most of those whom he had
already met were again at Lion's Head. They said there was no air like
it, and no place so comfortable. If they had sold their birthright for a
mess of pottage, Westover had to confess that the pottage was very good.
Instead of the Irish woman at ten dollars a week who had hitherto been
Mrs. Durgin's cook, under her personal surveillance and direction,
she had now a man cook, whom she boldly called a chef and paid eighty
dollars a month. He wore the white apron and white cap of his calling,
but Westover heard him speak Yankee through his nose to one of the
stablemen as they exchanged hilarities across the space between the
basement and the barn-door. “Yes,” Mrs. Durgin admitted, “he's an
American; and he learnt his trade at one of the best hotels in Portland.
He's pretty headstrong, but I guess he does what he's told--in the
end. The meanyous? Oh, Franky Whitwell prints then. He's got an amateur
printing-office in the stable-loft.”




XIV.

One morning toward the end of August, Whitwell, who was starting
homeward, after leaving his ladies, burdened with their wishes and
charges for the morrow, met Westover coming up the hill with his
painting-gear in his hand. “Say!” he hailed him. “Why don't you come
down to the house to-night? Jackson's goin' to come, and, if you ha'n't
seen him work the plantchette for a spell, you'll be surprised. There
a'n't hardly anybody he can't have up. You'll come? Good enough!”

What affected Westover first of all at the seance, and perhaps most of
all, was the quality of the air in the little house; it was close and
stuffy, mixed with an odor of mould and an ancient smell of rats. The
kerosene-lamp set in the centre of the table, where Jackson afterward
placed his planchette, devoured the little life that was left in it.
At the gasps which Westover gave, with some despairing glances at the
closed windows, Whitwell said: “Hot? Well, I guess it is a little. But,
you see, Jackson has got to be careful about the night air; but I guess
I can fix it for you.” He went out into the ell, and Westover heard him
raising a window. He came back and asked, “That do? It 'll get around in
here directly,” and Westover had to profess relief.

Jackson came in presently with the little Canuck, whom Whitwell
presented to Westover: “Know Jombateeste?”

The two were talking about a landslide which had taken place on the
other side of the mountain; the news had just come that they had found
among the ruins the body of the farm-hand who had been missing since the
morning of the slide; his funeral was to be the next day.

Jackson put his planchette on the table, and sat down before it with a
sigh; the Canuck remained standing, and on foot he was scarcely a head
higher than the seated Yankees. “Well,” Jackson said, “I suppose he
knows all about it now,” meaning the dead farm-hand.

“Yes,” Westover suggested, “if he knows anything.”

“Know anything!” Whitwell shouted. “Why, man, don't you believe he's as
much alive as ever he was?”

“I hope so,” said Westover, submissively.

“Don't you know it?”

“Not as I know other things. In fact, I don't know it,” said Westover,
and he was painfully aware of having shocked his hearers by the
agnosticism so common among men in towns that he had confessed it quite
simply and unconsciously. He perceived that faith in the soul and life
everlasting was as quick as ever in the hills, whatever grotesque or
unwonted form it wore. Jackson sat with closed eyes and his head fallen
back; Whitwell stared at the painter, with open mouth; the little Canuck
began to walk up and down impatiently; Westover felt a reproach, almost
an abhorrence, in all of them.

Whitwell asked: “Why, don't you think there's any proof of it?”

“Proof? Oh Yes. There's testimony enough to carry conviction to the
stubbornest mind on any other point. But it's very strange about all
that. It doesn't convince anybody but the witnesses. If a man tells
me he's seen a disembodied spirit, I can't believe him. I must see the
disembodied spirit myself.”

“That's something so,” said Whitwell, with a relenting laugh.

“If one came back from the dead, to tell us of a life beyond the grave,
we should want the assurance that he'd really been dead, and not merely
dreaming.”

Whitwell laughed again, in the delight the philosophic mind finds even
in the reasoning that hates it.

The Canuck felt perhaps the simpler joy that the average man has in
any strange notion that he is able to grasp. He stopped in his walk and
said: “Yes, and if you was dead and went to heaven, and stayed so long
you smelt, like Lazarus, and you come back and tol' 'em what you saw,
nobody goin' believe you.”

“Well, I guess you're right there, Jombateeste,” said Whitwell, with
pleasure in the Canuck's point. After a moment he suggested to Westover:
“Then I s'pose, if you feel the way you do, you don't care much about
plantchette?”

“Oh yes, I do,” said the painter. “We never know when we may be upon the
point of revelation. I wouldn't miss any chance.”

Whether Whitwell felt an ironic slant in the words or not, he paused a
moment before he said: “Want to start her up, Jackson?”

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 intel

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