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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Landlord at Lion's Head, Volume 2
+by William Dean Howells
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Landlord at Lion's Head, Volume 2
+
+Author: William Dean Howells
+
+Release Date: August 22, 2006 [EBook #3376]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LION'S HEAD, VOL. 2 ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+THE LANDLORD AT LION'S HEAD
+
+By William Dean Howells
+
+
+
+
+Part II.
+
+
+XXVII.
+
+Jackson kept his promise to write to Westover, but he was better than his
+word to his mother, and wrote to her every week that winter.
+
+"I seem just to live from letter to letter. It's ridic'lous," she said to
+Cynthia once when the girl brought the mail in from the barn, where the
+men folks kept it till they had put away their horses after driving over
+from Lovewell with it. The trains on the branch road were taken off in
+the winter, and the post-office at the hotel was discontinued. The men
+had to go to the town by cutter, over a highway that the winds sifted
+half full of snow after it had been broken out by the ox-teams in the
+morning. But Mrs. Durgin had studied the steamer days and calculated the
+time it would take letters to come from New York to Lovewell; and, unless
+a blizzard was raging, some one had to go for the mail when the day came.
+It was usually Jombateeste, who reverted in winter to the type of
+habitant from which he had sprung. He wore a blue woollen cap, like a
+large sock, pulled over his ears and close to his eyes, and below it his
+clean-shaven brown face showed. He had blue woollen mittens, and boots of
+russet leather, without heels, came to his knees; he got a pair every
+time he went home on St. John's day. His lean little body was swathed in
+several short jackets, and he brought the letters buttoned into one of
+the innermost pockets. He produced the letter from Jackson promptly
+enough when Cynthia came out to the barn for it, and then he made a show
+of getting his horse out of the cutter shafts, and shouting international
+reproaches at it, till she was forced to ask, "Haven't you got something
+for me, Jombateeste?"
+
+"You expec' some letter?" he said, unbuckling a strap and shouting
+louder.
+
+"You know whether I do. Give it to me."
+
+"I don' know. I think I drop something on the road. I saw something
+white; maybe snow; good deal of snow."
+
+"Don't plague! Give it here!"
+
+"Wait I finish unhitch. I can't find any letter till I get some time to
+look."
+
+"Oh, now, Jombateeste! Give me my letter!"
+
+"W'at you want letter for? Always same thing. Well! 'Old the 'oss; I
+goin' to feel."
+
+Jombateeste felt in one pocket after another, while Cynthia clung to the
+colt's bridle, and he was uncertain till the last whether he had any
+letter for her. When it appeared she made a flying snatch at it and ran;
+and the comedy was over, to be repeated in some form the next week.
+
+The girl somehow always possessed herself of what was in her letters
+before she reached the room where Mrs. Durgin was waiting for hers. She
+had to read that aloud to Jackson's mother, and in the evening she had to
+read it again to Mrs. Durgin and Whitwell and Jombateeste and Frank,
+after they had done their chores, and they had gathered in the old
+farm-house parlor, around the air-tight sheet-iron stove, in a heat of
+eighty degrees. Whitwell listened, with planchette ready on the table
+before him, and he consulted it for telepathic impressions of Jackson's
+actual mental state when the reading was over.
+
+He got very little out of the perverse instrument. "I can't seem to work
+her. If Jackson was here--"
+
+"We shouldn't need to ask planchette about him," Cynthia once suggested,
+with the spare sense of humor that sometimes revealed itself in her.
+
+"Well, I guess that's something so," her father candidly admitted. But
+the next time he consulted the helpless planchette as hopefully as
+before. "You can't tell, you can't tell," he urged.
+
+"The trouble seems to be that planchette can't tell," said Mrs. Durgin,
+and they all laughed. They were not people who laughed a great deal, and
+they were each intent upon some point in the future that kept them from
+pleasure in the present. The little Canuck was the only one who suffered
+himself a contemporaneous consolation. His early faith had so far lapsed
+from him that he could hospitably entertain the wild psychical
+conjectures of Whitwell without an accusing sense of heresy, and he found
+the winter of northern New England so mild after that of Lower Canada
+that he experienced a high degree of animal comfort in it, and looked
+forward to nothing better. To be well fed, well housed, and well heated;
+to smoke successive pipes while the others talked, and to catch through
+his smoke-wreaths vague glimpses of their meanings, was enough. He felt
+that in being promoted to the care of the stables in Jackson's absence he
+occupied a dignified and responsible position, with a confidential
+relation to the exile which justified him in sending special messages to
+him, and attaching peculiar value to Jackson's remembrances.
+
+The exile's letters said very little about his health, which in the sense
+of no news his mother held to be good news, but they were full concerning
+the monuments and the ethnological interest of life in Egypt.
+
+They were largely rescripts of each day's observations and experiences,
+close and full, as his mother liked them in regard to fact, and
+generously philosophized on the side of politics and religion for
+Whitwell. The Eastern question became in the snow-choked hills of New
+England the engrossing concern of this speculative mind, and he was apt
+to spring it upon Mrs. Durgin and Cynthia at mealtimes and other
+defenceless moments. He tried to debate it with Jombateeste, who
+conceived of it as a form of spiritualistic inquiry, and answered from
+the hay-loft, where he was throwing down fodder for the cattle to
+Whitwell, volubly receiving it on the barn floor below, that he believed,
+him, everybody got a hastral body, English same as Mormons.
+
+"Guess you mean Moslems," said Whitwell, and Jombateeste asked the
+difference, defiantly.
+
+The letters which came to Cynthia could not be made as much a general
+interest, and, in fact, no one else cared so much for them as for
+Jackson's letters, not even Jeff's mother. After Cynthia got one of them,
+she would ask, perfunctorily, what Jeff said, but when she was told there
+was no news she did not press her question.
+
+"If Jackson don't get back in time next summer," Mrs. Durgin said, in one
+of the talks she had with the girl, "I guess I shall have to let Jeff and
+you run the house alone."
+
+"I guess we shall want a little help from you," said Cynthia, demurely.
+She did not refuse the implication of Mrs. Durgin's words, but she would
+not assume that there was more in them than they expressed.
+
+When Jeff came home for the three days' vacation at Thanksgiving, he
+wished again to relinquish his last year at Harvard, and Cynthia had to
+summon all her forces to keep him to his promise of staying. He brought
+home the books with which he was working off his conditions, with a
+half-hearted intention of study, and she took hold with him, and together
+they fought forward over the ground he had to gain. His mother was almost
+willing at last that he should give up his last year in college.
+
+"What is the use?" she asked. "He's give up the law, and he might as well
+commence here first as last, if he's goin' to."
+
+The girl had no reason to urge against this; she could only urge her
+feeling that he ought to go back and take his degree with the rest of his
+class.
+
+"If you're going to keep Lion's Head the way you pretend you are," she
+said to him, as she could not say to his mother, "you want to keep all
+your Harvard friends, don't you, and have them remember you? Go back,
+Jeff, and don't you come here again till after you've got your degree.
+Never mind the Christmas vacation, nor the Easter. Stay in Cambridge and
+work off your conditions. You can do it, if you try. Oh, don't you
+suppose I should like to have you here?" she reproached him.
+
+He went back, with a kind of grudge in his heart, which he confessed in
+his first letter home to her, when he told her that she was right and he
+was wrong. He was sure now, with the impulse which their work on them in
+common had given him, that he should get his conditions off, and he
+wanted her and his mother to begin preparing their minds to come to his
+Class Day. He planned how they could both be away from the hotel for that
+day. The house was to be opened on the 20th of June, but it was not
+likely that there would be so many people at once that they could not
+give the 21st to Class Day; Frank and his father could run Lion's Head
+somehow, or, if they could not, then the opening could be postponed till
+the 24th. At all events, they must not fail to come. Cynthia showed the
+whole letter to his mother, who refused to think of such a thing, and
+then asked, as if the fact had not been fully set before her: "When is it
+to be?"
+
+"The 21st of June."
+
+"Well, he's early enough with his invitation," she grumbled.
+
+"Yes, he is," said Cynthia; and she laughed for shame and pleasure as she
+confessed, "I was thinking he was rather late."
+
+She hung her head and turned her face away. But Mrs. Durgin understood.
+"You be'n expectin' it all along, then."
+
+"I guess so."
+
+"I presume," said the elder woman, "that he's talked to you about it. He
+never tells me much. I don't see why you should want to go. What's it
+like?"
+
+"Oh, I don't know. But it's the day the graduating class have to
+themselves, and all their friends come."
+
+"Well, I don't know why anybody should want to go," said Mrs. Durgin. "I
+sha'n't. Tell him he won't want to own me when he sees me. What am I
+goin' to wear, I should like to know? What you goin' to wear, Cynthy?"
+
+
+
+
+XXVIII.
+
+Jeff's place at Harvard had been too long fixed among the jays to allow
+the hope of wholly retrieving his condition now. It was too late for him
+to be chosen in any of the nicer clubs or societies, but he was not
+beyond the mounting sentiment of comradery, which begins to tell in the
+last year among college men, and which had its due effect with his class.
+One of the men, who had always had a foible for humanity, took advantage
+of the prevailing mood in another man, and wrought upon him to ask, among
+the fellows he was asking to a tea at his rooms, several fellows who were
+distinctly and almost typically jay. The tea was for the aunt of the man
+who gave it, a very pretty woman from New York, and it was so richly
+qualified by young people of fashion from Boston that the infusion of the
+jay flavor could not spoil it, if it would not rather add an agreeable
+piquancy. This college mood coincided that year with a benevolent emotion
+in the larger world, from which fashion was not exempt. Society had just
+been stirred by the reading of a certain book, which had then a very
+great vogue, and several people had been down among the wretched at the
+North End doing good in a conscience-stricken effort to avert the
+millennium which the book in question seemed to threaten. The lady who
+matronized the tea was said to have done more good than you could imagine
+at the North End, and she caught at the chance to meet the college jays
+in a spirit of Christian charity. When the man who was going to give the
+tea rather sheepishly confessed what the altruistic man had got him in
+for, she praised him so much that he went away feeling like the hero of a
+holy cause. She promised the assistance and sympathy of several brave
+girls, who would not be afraid of all the jays in college.
+
+After all, only one of the jays came. Not many, in fact, had been asked,
+and when Jeff Durgin actually appeared, it was not known that he was both
+the first and the last of his kind. The lady who was matronizing the tea
+recognized him, with a throe of her quickened conscience, as the young
+fellow whom she had met two winters before at the studio tea which Mr.
+Westover had given to those queer Florentine friends of his, and whom she
+had never thought of since, though she had then promised herself to do
+something for him. She had then even given him some vague hints of a
+prospective hospitality, and she confessed her sin of omission in a swift
+but graphic retrospect to one of her brave girls, while Jeff stood
+blocking out a space for his stalwart bulk amid the alien elegance just
+within the doorway, and the host was making his way toward him, with an
+outstretched hand of hardy welcome.
+
+At an earlier period of his neglect and exclusion, Jeff would not have
+responded to the belated overture which had now been made him, for no
+reason that he could divine. But he had nothing to lose by accepting the
+invitation, and he had promised the altruistic man, whom he rather liked;
+he did not dislike the giver of the tea so much as some other men, and so
+he came.
+
+The brave girl whom the matron was preparing to devote to him stood
+shrinking with a trepidation which she could not conceal at sight of his
+strange massiveness, with his rust-gold hair coming down toward his thick
+yellow brows and mocking blue eyes in a dense bang, and his jaw squaring
+itself under the rather insolent smile of his full mouth. The matron felt
+that her victim teas perhaps going to fail her, when a voice at her ear
+said, as if the question were extorted, "Who in the world is that?"
+
+She instantly turned, and flashed out in a few inspired syllables the
+fact she had just imparted to her treacherous heroine. "Do let me
+introduce him, Miss Lynde. I must do something for him, when he gets up
+to me, if he ever does."
+
+"By all means," said the girl, who had an impulse to laugh at the rude
+force of Jeff's face and figure, so disproportioned to the occasion, and
+she vented it at the matron's tribulation. The matron was shaking hands
+with people right and left, and exchanging inaudible banalities with
+them. She did not know what the girl said in answer, but she was aware
+that she remained near her. She had professed her joy at seeing Jeff
+again, when he reached her, and she turned with him and said, "Let me
+present you to Miss Lynde, Mr. Durgin," and so abandoned them to each
+other.
+
+As Jeff had none of the anxiety for social success which he would have
+felt at an earlier period, he now left it to Miss Lynde to begin the
+talk, or not, as she chose. He bore himself with so much indifference
+that she was piqued to an effort to hold his eyes, that wandered from her
+to this face and that in the crowd.
+
+"Do you find many people you know, Mr. Durgin?"
+
+"I don't find any."
+
+"I supposed you didn't from the way you looked at them."
+
+"How did I look at them?"
+
+"As if you wanted to eat them, and one never wants to eat one's friends."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"Oh, I don't know. They wouldn't agree with one."
+
+Jeff laughed, and he now took fuller note of the slender girl who stood
+before him, and swayed a little backward, in a graceful curve. He saw
+that she had a dull, thick complexion, with liquid eyes, set wide apart
+and slanted upward slightly, and a nose that was deflected inward from
+the straight line; but her mouth was beautiful and vividly red like a
+crimson blossom.
+
+"Couldn't you find me some place to sit down, Mr. Durgin?" she asked.
+
+He had it on his tongue to say, "Well, not unless you want to sit down on
+some enemy," but he did not venture this: when it comes to daring of that
+sort, the boldest man is commonly a little behind a timid woman.
+
+Several of the fellows had clubbed their rooms, and lent them to the man
+who was giving the tea; he used one of the apartments for a cloak-room,
+and he meant the other for the social overflow from his own. But people
+always prefer to remain dammed-up together in the room where they are
+received, and Miss Lynde looked between the neighboring heads, and over
+the neighboring shoulders, and saw the borrowed apartment quite empty. At
+the moment of this discovery the host came fighting his way up to make
+sure that Jeff had been provided for in the way of introductions. He
+promptly introduced him to Miss Lynde. She said: "Oh, that's been done!
+Can't you think of something new?" Jeff liked the style of this. "I don't
+mind it, but I'm afraid Mr. Durgin must find it monotonous."
+
+"Oh, well, do something original yourself, then, Miss Lynde!" said the
+host. "Start a movement for that room across the passage; that's mine,
+too, for the occasion; and save some of these people's lives. It's
+suffocating in here."
+
+"I don't mind saving Mr. Durgin's," said the girl, "if he wants it
+saved."
+
+"Oh, I know he's just dying to have you save it," said the host, and he
+left them, to inspire other people to follow their example. But such as
+glanced across the passage into the overflow room seemed to think it now
+the possession solely of the pioneers of the movement. At any rate, they
+made no show of joining them; and after Miss Lynde and Jeff had looked at
+the pictures on the walls and the photographs on the mantel of the room
+where they found themselves, they sat down on chairs fronting the open
+door and the door of the room they had left. The window-seat would have
+been more to Jeff's mind, and he had proposed it, but the girl seemed not
+to have heard him; she took the deep easy-chair in full view of the
+company opposite, and left him to pull up a chair beside her.
+
+"I always like to see the pictures in a man's room," she said, with a
+little sigh of relief from their inspection and a partial yielding of her
+figure to the luxury of the chair. "Then I know what the man is. This
+man--I don't know whose room it is--seems to have spent a good deal of
+his time at the theatre."
+
+"Isn't that where most of them spend their time?" asked Jeff.
+
+"I'm sure I don't know. Is that where you spend yours?"
+
+"It used to be. I'm not spending my time anywhere just now." She looked
+questioningly, and he added, "I haven't got any to spend."
+
+"Oh, indeed! Is that a reason? Why don't you spend somebody else's?"
+
+"Nobody has any, that I know."
+
+"You're all working off conditions, you mean?"
+
+"That's what I'm doing, or trying to."
+
+"Then it's never certain whether you can do it, after all?"
+
+"Not so certain as to be free from excitement," said Jeff, smiling.
+
+"And are you consumed with the melancholy that seems to be balling up all
+the men at the prospect of having to leave Harvard and go out into the
+hard, cold world?"
+
+"I don't look it, do I? Jeff asked:
+
+"No, you don't. And you don't feel it? You're not trying concealment, and
+so forth?"
+
+"No; if I'd had my own way, I'd have left Harvard before this." He could
+see that his bold assumption of difference, or indifference, told upon
+her. "I couldn't get out into the hard, cold world too soon."
+
+"How fearless! Most of them don't know what they're going to do in it."
+
+"I do."
+
+"And what are you going to do? Or perhaps you think that's asking!"
+
+"Oh no. I'm going to keep a hotel."
+
+He had hoped to startle her, but she asked, rather quietly, "What do you
+mean?" and she added, as if to punish him for trying to mystify her:
+"I've heard that it requires gifts for that. Isn't there some proverb?"
+
+"Yes. But I'm going to try to do it on experience." He laughed, and he
+did not mind her trying to hit him, for he saw that he had made her
+curious.
+
+"Do you mean that you have kept a hotel?"
+
+"For three generations," he returned, with a gravity that mocked her from
+his bold eyes.
+
+"I'm sure I don't know what you mean," she said, indifferently. "Where is
+your hotel? In Boston--New York--Chicago?"
+
+"It's in the country--it's a summer hotel," he said, as before.
+
+She looked away from him toward the other room. "There's my brother. I
+didn't know he was coming."
+
+"Shall I go and tell him where you are?" Jeff asked, following the
+direction of her eyes.
+
+"No, no; he can find me," said the girl, sinking back in her chair again.
+He left her to resume the talk where she chose, and she said: "If it's
+something ancestral, of course--"
+
+"I don't know as it's that, exactly. My grandfather used to keep a
+country tavern, and so it's in the blood, but the hotel I mean is
+something that we've worked up into from a farm boarding-house."
+
+"You don't talk like a country person," the girl broke in, abruptly.
+
+"Not in Cambridge. I do in the country."
+
+"And so," she prompted, "you're going to turn it into a hotel when you've
+got out of Harvard."
+
+"It's a hotel already, and a pretty big one; but I'm going to make the
+right kind of hotel of it when I take hold of it."
+
+"And what is the right kind of a hotel?"
+
+"That's a long story. It would make you tired."
+
+"It might, but we've got to spend the time somehow. You could begin, and
+then if I couldn't stand it you could stop."
+
+"It's easier to stop first and begin some other time. I guess I'll let
+you imagine my hotel, Miss Lynde."
+
+"Oh, I understand now," said the girl. "The table will be the great
+thing. You will stuff people."
+
+"Do you mean that I'm trying to stuff you?"
+
+"How do I know? You never can tell what men really mean."
+
+Jeff laughed with mounting pleasure in her audacity, that imparted a
+sense of tolerance for him such as he had experienced very seldom from
+the Boston girls he had met; after all, he had met but few. It flattered
+him to have her doubt what he had told her in his reckless indifference;
+it implied that he was fit for better things than hotel-keeping.
+
+"You never can tell how much a woman believes," he retorted.
+
+"And you keep trying to find out?"
+
+"No, but I think that they might believe the truth."
+
+"You'd better try them with it!"
+
+"Well, I will. Do you really want to know what I'm going to do when I get
+through?"
+
+"Let me see!" Miss Lynde leaned forward, with her elbow on her knee and
+her chin in her hand, and softly kicked the edge of her skirt with the
+toe of her shoe, as if in deep thought. Jeff waited for her to play her
+comedy through. "Yes," she said, "I think I did wish to know--at one
+time."
+
+"But you don't now?"
+
+"Now? How can I tell? It was a great while ago!"
+
+"I see you don't."
+
+Miss Lynde did not make any reply. She asked, "Do you know my aunt,
+Durgin?"
+
+"I didn't know you had one."
+
+"Yes, everybody has an aunt--even when they haven't a mother, if you can
+believe the Gilbert operas. I ask because I happen to live with my aunt,
+and if you knew her she might--ask you to call." Miss Lynde scanned
+Jeff's face for the effect of this.
+
+He said, gravely: "If you'll introduce me to her, I'll ask her to let
+me."
+
+"Would you, really?" said the girl. "I've half a mind to try. I wonder if
+you'd really have the courage."
+
+"I don't think I'm easily rattled."
+
+"You mean that I'm trying to rattle you."
+
+"No--"
+
+"I'm not. My aunt is just what I've said."
+
+"You haven't said what she was. Is she here?"
+
+"No; that's the worst of it. If she were, I should introduce you, just to
+see if you'd dare. Well, some other time I will."
+
+"You think there'll be some other time?" Jeff asked.
+
+"I don't know. There are all kinds of times. By-the-way, what time is
+it?"
+
+Jeff looked at his watch. "Quarter after six."
+
+"Then I must go." She jumped to her feet, and faced about for a glimpse
+of herself in the little glass on the mantel, and put her hand on the
+large pink roses massed at her waist. One heavy bud dropped from its stem
+to the floor, where, while she stood, the edge of her skirt pulled and
+pushed it. She moved a little aside to peer over at a photograph. Jeff
+stooped and picked up the flower, which he offered her.
+
+"You dropped it," he said, bowing over it.
+
+"Did I?" She looked at it with an effect of surprise and doubt.
+
+"I thought so, but if you don't, I shall keep it."
+
+The girl removed her careless eyes from it. "When they break off so
+short, they won't go back."
+
+"If I were a rose, I should want to go back," said Jeff.
+
+She stopped in one of her many aversions and reversions, and looked at
+him steadily across her shoulder. "You won't have to keep a poet, Mr.
+Durgin."
+
+"Thank you. I always expected to write the circulars myself. I'll send
+you one."
+
+"Do."
+
+"With this rose pressed between the leaves, so you'll know."
+
+"That would, be very pretty. But you must take me to Mrs. Bevidge, now,
+if you can."
+
+"I guess I can," said Jeff; and in a minute or two they stood before the
+matronizing hostess, after a passage through the babbling and laughing
+groups that looked as impossible after they had made it as it looked
+before.
+
+Mrs. Bevidge gave the girl's hand a pressure distinct from the official
+touch of parting, and contrived to say, for her hearing alone: "Thank you
+so much, Bessie. You've done missionary work."
+
+"I shouldn't call it that."
+
+"It will do for you to say so! He wasn't really so bad, then? Thank you
+again, dear!"
+
+Jeff had waited his turn. But now, after the girl had turned away, as if
+she had forgotten him, his eyes followed her, and he did not know that
+Mrs. Bevidge was speaking to him. Miss Lynde had slimly lost herself in
+the mass, till she was only a graceful tilt of hat, before she turned
+with a distraught air. When her eyes met Jeff's they lighted up with a
+look that comes into the face when one remembers what one has been trying
+to think of. She gave him a brilliant smile that seemed to illumine him
+from head to foot, and before it was quenched he felt as if she had
+kissed her hand to him from her rich mouth.
+
+Then he heard Mrs. Bevidge asking something about a hall, and he was
+aware of her bending upon him a look of the daring humanity that had
+carried her triumphantly through her good works at the North End.
+
+"Oh, I'm not in the Yard," said Jeff, with belated intelligence.
+
+"Then will just Cambridge reach you?"
+
+He gave his number and street, and she thanked him with the benevolence
+that availed so much with the lower classes. He went away thrilling and
+tingling, with that girl's tones in his ear, her motions in his nerves,
+and the colors of her face filling his sight, which he printed on the air
+whenever he turned, as one does with a vivid light after looking at it.
+
+
+
+
+XXIX
+
+When Jeff reached his room he felt the need of writing to Cynthia, with
+whatever obscure intention of atonement. He told her of the college tea
+he had just come from, and made fun of it, and the kind of people he had
+met, especially the affected girl who had tried to rattle him; he said he
+guessed she did not think she had rattled him a great deal.
+
+While he wrote he kept thinking how this Miss Lynde was nearer his early
+ideal of fashion, of high life, which Westover had pretty well snubbed
+out of him, than any woman he had seen yet; she seemed a girl who would
+do what she pleased, and would not be afraid if it did not please other
+people. He liked her having tried to rattle him, and he smiled to himself
+in recalling her failure. It was as if she had laid hold of him with her
+little hands to shake him, and had shaken herself. He laughed out in the
+dark when this image came into his mind; its intimacy flattered him; and
+he believed that it was upon some hint from her that Mrs. Bevidge had
+asked his address. She must be going to ask him to her house, and very
+soon, for it was part of Jeff's meagre social experience that this was
+the way swells did; they might never ask you twice, but they would ask
+you promptly.
+
+The thing that Mrs. Bevidge asked Jeff to, when her note reached him the
+second day after the tea, was a meeting to interest young people in the
+work at the North End, and Jeff swore under his breath at the
+disappointment and indignity put upon him. He had reckoned upon an
+afternoon tea, at least, or even, in the flights of fancy which he now
+disowned to himself, a dance after the Mid-Years, or possibly an earlier
+reception of some sort. He burned with shame to think of a theatre-party,
+which he had fondly specialized, with a seat next Miss Lynde.
+
+He tore Mrs. Bevidge's note to pieces, and decided not to answer it at
+all, as the best way of showing how he had taken her invitation. But Mrs.
+Bevidge's benevolence was not wanting in courage; she believed that Jeff
+should pay his footing in society, such as it was, and should allow
+himself to be made use of, the first thing; when she had no reply from
+him, she wrote him again, asking him to an adjourned meeting of the first
+convocation, which had been so successful in everything but numbers. This
+time she baited her hook, in hoping that the young men would feel
+something of the interest the young ladies had already shown in the
+matter. She expressed the fear that Mr. Durgin had not got her earlier
+letter, and she sent this second to the care of the man who had given the
+tea.
+
+Jeff's resentment was now so far past that he would have civilly declined
+to go to the woman's house; but all his hopes of seeing that girl, as he
+always called Miss Lynde in his thought, were revived by the mention of
+the young ladies interested in the cause. He accepted, though all the way
+into Boston he laid wagers with himself that she would not be there; and
+up to the moment of taking her hand he refused himself any hope of
+winning.
+
+There was not much business before the meeting; that had really been all
+transacted before; it was mainly to make sure of the young men, who were
+present in the proportion of one to five young ladies at least. Mrs.
+Bevidge explained that she had seen the wastefulness of amateur effort
+among the poor, and announced that hereafter she was going to work with
+the established charities. These were very much in want of visitors,
+especially young men, to go about among the applicants for relief, and
+inquire into their real necessities, and get work for them. She was hers
+self going to act as secretary for the meetings during the coming month,
+and apparently she wished to signalize her accession to the regular
+forces of charity by bringing into camp as large a body of recruits as
+she could.
+
+But Jeff had not come to be made use of, or as a jay who was willing to
+work for his footing in society. He had come in the hope of meeting Miss
+Lynde, and now that he had met her he had no gratitude to Mrs. Bevidge as
+a means, and no regret for the defeat of her good purposes so far as she
+intended their fulfilment in him. He was so cool and self-possessed in
+excusing himself, for reasons that he took no pains to make seem
+unselfish, that the altruistic man who had got him asked to the college
+tea as a friendless jay felt it laid upon him to apologize for Mrs.
+Bevidge's want of tact.
+
+"She means well, and she's very much in earnest, in this work; but I must
+say she can make herself very offensive--when she doesn't try! She has a
+right to ask our help, but not to parade us as the captives of her bow
+and spear."
+
+"Oh, that's all right," said Jeff. He perceived that the amiable fellow
+was claiming for all an effect that Jeff knew really implicated himself
+alone. "I couldn't load up with anything of that sort, if I'm to work off
+my conditions, you know."
+
+"Are you in that boat?" said the altruist, as if he were, too; and he put
+his hand compassionately on Jeff's iron shoulder, and left him to Miss
+Lynde, whose side he had not stirred from since he had found her.
+
+"It seems to me," she said, "that where there are so many of you in the
+same boat, you might manage to get ashore somehow."
+
+"Yes, or all go down together." Jeff laughed, and ate Mrs. Bevidge's
+bread-and-butter, and drank her tea, with a relish unaffected by his
+refusal to do what she asked him. He was right, perhaps, and perhaps she
+deserved nothing better at his hands, but the altruist, when he glanced
+at him from the other side of the room, thought that he had possibly
+wasted his excuses upon Jeff's self-complacence.
+
+He went away in a halo of young ladies; several of the other girls
+grouped themselves in their departure; and it happened that Miss Lynde
+and Jeff took leave together. Mrs. Bevidge said to her, with the
+caressing tenderness of one in the same set, "Good-bye, dear!" To Jeff
+she said, with the cold conscience of those whom their nobility obliges,
+"I am always at home on Thursdays, Mr. Durgin."
+
+"Oh, thank you," said Jeff. He understood what the words and the manner
+meant together, but both were instantly indifferent to him when he got
+outside and found that Miss Lynde was not driving. Something, which was
+neither look, nor smile, nor word, of course, but nothing more at most
+than a certain pull and tilt of the shoulder, as she turned to walk away
+from Mrs. Bevidge's door, told him from her that he might walk home with
+her if he would not seem to do so.
+
+It was one of the pink evenings, dry and clear, that come in the Boston
+December, and they walked down the sidehill street, under the delicate
+tracery of the elm boughs in the face of the metallic sunset. In the
+section of the Charles that the perspective of the street blocked out,
+the wrinkled current showed as if glazed with the hard color. Jeff's
+strong frame rejoiced in the cold with a hale pleasure when he looked
+round into the face of the girl beside him, with the gray film of her
+veil pressed softly against her red mouth by her swift advance. Their
+faces were nearly on a level, as they looked into each other's eyes, and
+he kept seeing the play of the veil's edge against her lips as they
+talked.
+
+"Why sha'n't you go to Mrs. Bevidge's Thursdays?" she asked. "They're
+very nice."
+
+"How do you know I'm not going?" he retorted.
+
+"By the way you thanked her."
+
+"Do you advise me to go?"
+
+"I haven't got anything to do with it. What do mean by that?"
+
+"I don't know. Curiosity, I suppose."
+
+"Well, I do advise you to go," said the girl. Shall you be there next
+Thursday?"
+
+"I? I never go to Mrs. Bevidge's Thursdays!"
+
+"Touche," said Jeff, and they both laughed. "Can you always get in at an
+enemy that way?"
+
+"Enemy?"
+
+"Well, friend. It's the same thing."
+
+"I see," said the girl. "You belong to the pessimistic school of
+Seniors."
+
+"Why don't you try to make an optimist of me?"
+
+"Would it be worth while?"
+
+"That isn't for me to say."
+
+"Don't be diffident! That's staler yet."
+
+"I'll be anything you like."
+
+"I'm not sure you could." For an instant Jeff did not feel the point, and
+he had not the magnanimity, when he did, to own himself touched again.
+Apparently, if this girl could not rattle him, she could beat him at
+fence, and the will to dominate her began to stir in him. If he could
+have thought of any sarcasm, no matter how crushing, he would have come
+back at her with it. He could not think of anything, and he walked at her
+side, inwardly chafing for the chance which would not come.
+
+When they reached her door there was a young man at the lock with a
+latch-key, which he was not making work, for, after a bated blasphemy of
+his failure, he turned and twitched the bell impatiently.
+
+Miss Lynde laughed provokingly, and he looked over his shoulder at her
+and at Jeff, who felt his injury increased by the disadvantage this young
+man put him at. Jeff was as correctly dressed; he wore a silk hat of the
+last shape, and a long frock-coat; he was properly gloved and shod; his
+clothes fitted him, and were from the best tailor; but at sight of this
+young man in clothes of the same design he felt ill-dressed. He was in
+like sort aware of being rudely blocked out physically, and coarsely
+colored as to his blond tints of hair and eye and cheek. Even the
+sinister something in the young man's look had distinction, and there was
+style in the signs of dissipation in his handsome face which Jeff saw
+with a hunger to outdo him.
+
+Miss Lynde said to Jeff, "My brother, Mr. Durgin," and then she added to
+the other, "You ought to ring first, Arthur, and try your key afterward."
+
+"The key's all right," said the young man, without paying any attention
+to Jeff beyond a glance of recognition; he turned his back, and waited
+for the door to be opened.
+
+His sister suggested, with an amiability which Jeff felt was meant in
+reparation to him, "Perhaps a night latch never works before dark--or
+very well before midnight." The door was opened, and she said to Jeff,
+with winning entreaty, "Won't you come in, Mr. Durgin?"
+
+Jeff excused himself, for he perceived that her politeness was not so
+much an invitation to him as a defiance to her brother; he gave her
+credit for no more than it was worth, and he did not wish any the less to
+get even with her because of it.
+
+
+
+
+XXX.
+
+At dinner, in the absence of the butler, Alan Lynde attacked his sister
+across the table for letting herself be seen with a jay, who was not only
+a jay, but a cad, and personally so offensive to most of the college men
+that he had never got into a decent club or society; he had been
+suspended the first year, and if he had not had the densest kind of cheek
+he would never have come back. Lynde said he would like to know where she
+had picked the fellow up.
+
+She answered that she had picked him up, if that was the phrase he liked,
+at Mrs. Bevidge's; and then Alan swore a little, so as not to be heard by
+their aunt, who sat at the head of the table, and looked down its length
+between them, serenely ignorant, in her slight deafness, of what was
+going on between them. To her perception Alan was no more vehement than
+usual, and Bessie no more smilingly self-contained. He said he supposed
+that it was some more of Lancaster's damned missionary work, then, and he
+wondered that a gentleman like Morland had ever let Lancaster work such a
+jay in on him; he had seen her 'afficher' herself with the fellow at
+Morland's tea; he commanded her to stop it; and he professed to speak for
+her good.
+
+Bessie returned that she knew how strongly he felt from the way he had
+misbehaved when she introduced him to Mr. Durgin, but that she supposed
+he had been at the club and his nerves were unstrung. Was that the
+reason, perhaps, why he could not make his latchkey work? Mr. Durgin
+might be a cad, and she would not say he was not a jay, but so far he had
+not sworn at her; and, if he had been suspended and come back, there were
+some people who had not been suspended or come back, either, though that
+might have been for want of cheek.
+
+She ended by declaring she was used to going into society without her
+brother's protection, or even his company, and she would do her best to
+get on without his advice. Or was it his conduct he wished her to profit
+by?
+
+It had come to the fish going out by this time, and Alan, who had eaten
+with no appetite, and drunken feverishly of apollinaris, flung down his
+napkin and went out, too.
+
+"What is the matter?" asked his aunt, looking after him.
+
+Bessie shrugged, but she said, presently, with her lips more than her
+voice: "I don't think he feels very well."
+
+"Do you think he--"
+
+The girl frowned assent, and the meal went on to its end. Then she and
+her aunt went into the large, dull library, where they passed the
+evenings which Bessie did not spend in some social function. These
+evenings were growing rather more frequent, with her advancing years, for
+she was now nearly twenty-five, and there were few Seniors so old. She
+was not the kind of girl to renew her youth with the Sophomores and
+Freshmen in the classes succeeding the class with which she had danced
+through college; so far as she had kept up the old relation with
+students, she continued it with the men who had gone into the law-school.
+But she saw less and less of these without seeing more of other men, and
+perhaps in the last analysis she was not a favorite. She was allowed to
+be fascinating, but she was not felt to be flattering, and people would
+rather be flattered than fascinated. In fact, the men were mostly afraid
+of her; and it has been observed of girls of this kind that the men who
+are not afraid of them are such as they would do well to be afraid of.
+Whether that was quite the case with Bessie Lynde or not, it was certain
+that she who was always the cleverest girl in the room, and if not the
+prettiest, then the most effective, had not the best men about her. Her
+men were apt to be those whom the other girls called stupid or horrid,
+and whom it would not be easy, though it might be more just, to classify
+otherwise. The other girls wondered what she could see in them; but
+perhaps it was not necessary that she should see anything in them, if
+they could see all she wished them to see, and no more, in her.
+
+The room where tea was now brought and put before her was volumed round
+by the collections of her grandfather, except for the spaces filled by
+his portrait and that of earlier ancestors, going back to the time when
+Copley made masterpieces of his fellow-Bostonians. Her aunt herself
+looked a family portrait of the middle period, a little anterior to her
+father's, but subsequent to her great-grandfather's. She had a comely
+face, with large, smooth cheeks and prominent eyes; the edges of her
+decorous brown wig were combed rather near their corners, and a fitting
+cap palliated but did not deny the wig. She had the quiet but rather dull
+look of people slightly deaf, and she had perhaps been stupefied by a
+life of unalloyed prosperity and propriety. She had grown an old maid
+naturally, but not involuntarily, and she was without the sadness or the
+harshness of disappointment. She had never known much of the world,
+though she had always lived in it. She knew that it was made up of two
+kinds of people--people who were like her and people who were not like
+her; and she had lived solely in the society of people who were like her,
+and in the shelter of their opinions and ideals. She did not contemn or
+exclude the people who were unlike her, but she had never had any more
+contact with them than she now had with the weather of the streets, as
+she sat, filling her large arm-chair full of her ladylike correctness, in
+the library of the handsome house her father had left her. The irruption
+of her brother's son and daughter into its cloistered quiet had scarcely
+broken its invulnerable order. It was right and fit they should be there
+after his death, and it was not strange that in the course of time they
+should both show certain unregulated tendencies which, since they were
+not known to be Lynde tendencies, must have been derived from the
+Southwestern woman her brother had married during his social and
+financial periclitations in a region wholly inconceivable to her. Their
+mother was dead, too, and their aunt's life closed about them with full
+acceptance, if not complacence, as part of her world. They had grown to
+manhood and womanhood without materially discomposing her faith in the
+old-fashioned Unitarian deity, whose service she had always attended.
+
+When Alan left college in his Freshman year, and did not go back, but
+went rather to Europe and Egypt and Japan, it appeared to her myopic
+optimism that his escapades had been pretty well hushed up by time and
+distance. After he came home and devoted himself to his club, she could
+have wished that he had taken up some profession or business; but since
+there was money enough, she waited in no great disquiet until he showed
+as decided a taste for something else as he seemed for the present to
+have only for horses. In the mean while, from time to time, it came to
+her doctor's advising his going to a certain retreat. But he came out the
+first time so much better and remained well so long that his aunt felt a
+kind of security in his going again and again, whenever he became at all
+worse. He always came back better. As she took the cup of tea that Bessie
+poured out for her, she recurred to the question that she had partly
+asked already:
+
+"Do you think Alan is getting worse again?"
+
+"Not so very much," said the girl, candidly. "He's been at the club, I
+suppose, but he left the table partly because I vexed him."
+
+"Because you what?"
+
+"Because I vexed him. He was scolding me, and I wouldn't stand it."
+
+Her aunt tasted her tea, and found it so quite what she liked that she
+said, from a natural satisfaction with Bessie, "I don't see what he had
+to scold you about."
+
+"Well," returned Bessie, and she got her pretty voice to the level of her
+aunt's hearing, with some straining, and kept it there, "when he is in
+that state, he has to scold some one; and I had been rather annoying, I
+suppose."
+
+"What had you been doing?" asked her aunt, making out her words more from
+the sight than from the sound, after all.
+
+"I had been walking home with a jay, and we found Alan trying to get in
+at the front door with his key, and I introduced him to the jay."
+
+Miss Louisa Lynde had heard the word so often from her niece and nephew,
+that she imagined herself in full possession of its meaning. She asked:
+"Where had you met him?"
+
+"I met him first," said the girl, "at Willie Morland's tea, last week,
+and to-day I found him at Mrs. Bevidge's altruistic toot."
+
+"I didn't know," said her aunt, after a momentary attention to her tea,
+"that jays were interested in that sort of thing."
+
+The girl laughed. "I believe they're not. It hasn't quite reached them,
+yet; and I don't think it will ever reach my jay. Mrs. Bevidge tried to
+work him into the cause, but he refused so promptly, and
+so-intelligently, don't you know--and so almost brutally, that poor
+Freddy Lancaster had to come and apologize to him for her want of tact."
+Bessie enjoyed the fact, which she had colored a little, in another
+laugh, but she had apparently not possessed her aunt of the humor of it.
+She remained seriously-attentive, and the girl went on: "He was not the
+least abashed at having refused; he stayed till the last, and as we came
+out together and he was going my way, I let him walk home with me. He's a
+jay, but he isn't a common jay." Bessie leaned forward and tried to
+implant some notion of Jeff's character and personality in her aunt's
+mind.
+
+Miss Lynde listened attentively enough, but she merely asked, when all
+was said: "And why was Alan vexed with you about him?"
+
+"Well," said the girl, falling back into her chair, "generally because
+this man's a jay, and particularly because he's been rather a baddish
+jay, I believe. He was suspended in his first year for something or
+other, and you know poor Alan's very particular! But Molly Enderby says
+Freddy Lancaster gives him the best of characters now." Bessie pulled
+down her mouth, with an effect befitting the notion of repentance and
+atonement. Then she flashed out: "Perhaps he had been drinking when he
+got into trouble. Alan could never forgive him for that."
+
+"I think," said her aunt, "it is to your brother's credit that he is
+anxious about your associations."
+
+"Oh, very much!" shouted Bessie, with a burst of laughter. "And as he
+isn't practically so, I ought to have been more patient with his theory.
+But when he began to scold me I lost my temper, and I gave him a few
+wholesome truths in the guise of taunts. That was what made him go away,
+I suppose."
+
+"But I don't really see," her aunt pursued,--"what occasion he had to be
+angry with you in this instance."
+
+"Oh, I do!" said Bessie. "Mr. Durgin isn't one to inspire the casual
+beholder with the notion of his spiritual distinction. His face is so
+rude and strong, and he has such a primitive effect in his clothes, that
+you feel as if you were coming down the street with a prehistoric man
+that the barbers and tailors had put a 'fin de siecle' surface on." At
+the mystification which appeared in her aunt's face the girl laughed
+again. "I should have been quite as anxious, if I had been in Alan's
+place, and I shall tell him so, sometime. If I had not been so interested
+in the situation I don't believe I could have kept my courage. Whenever I
+looked round, and found that prehistoric man at my elbow, it gave me the
+creeps, a little, as if he were really carrying me off to his cave. I
+shall try to express that to Alan."
+
+
+
+
+XXXI.
+
+The ladies finished their tea, and the butler came and took the cups
+away. Miss Lynde remained silent in her chair at her end of the
+library-table, and by-and-by Bessie got a book and began to read. When
+her aunt woke up it was half past nine. "Was that Alan coming in?" she
+asked.
+
+"I don't think he's been out," said the girl. "It isn't late enough for
+him to come in--or early enough."
+
+"I believe I'll go to bed," Miss Lynde returned. "I feel rather drowsy."
+
+Bessie did not smile at a comedy which was apt to be repeated every
+evening that she and her aunt spent at home together; they parted for the
+night with the decencies of family affection, and Bessie delivered the
+elder lady over to her maid. Then the girl sank down again, and lay
+musing in her deep chair before the fire with her book shut on her thumb.
+She looked rather old and worn in her reverie; her face lost the air of
+gay banter which, after the beauty of her queer eyes and her vivid mouth,
+was its charm. The eyes were rather dull now, and the mouth was a little
+withered.
+
+She was waiting for her brother to come down, as he was apt to do if he
+was in the house, after their aunt went to bed, to smoke a cigar in the
+library. He was in his house shoes when he shuffled into the room, but
+her ear had detected his presence before a hiccough announced it. She did
+not look up, but let him make several failures to light his cigar, and
+damn the matches under his breath, before she pushed the drop-light to
+him in silent suggestion. As he leaned over her chair-back to reach its
+chimney with his cigar in his mouth, she said, "You're all right, Alan."
+
+He waited till he got round to his aunt's easy-chair and dropped into it
+before he answered, "So are you, Bess."
+
+"I'm not so sure of that," said the girl, "as I should be if you were
+still scolding me. I knew that he was a jay, well enough, and I'd just
+seen him behaving very like a cad to Mrs. Bevidge."
+
+"Then I don't understand how you came to be with him."
+
+"Oh yes, you do, Alan. You mustn't be logical! You might as well say you
+can't understand how you came to be more serious than sober." The brother
+laughed helplessly. "It was the excitement."
+
+"But you can't give way to that sort of thing, Bess," said her brother,
+with the gravity of a man feeling the consequences of his own errors.
+
+"I know I can't, but I do," she returned. "I know it's bad for me, if it
+isn't for other people. Come! I'll swear off if you will!"
+
+"I'm always ready, to swear off," said the young man, gloomily. He added,
+"But you've got brains, Bess, and I hate to see you playing the fool."
+
+"Do you really, Alan?" asked the girl, pleased perhaps as much by his
+reproach as by his praise. "Do you think I've got brains?"
+
+"You're the only girl that has."
+
+"Oh, I didn't mean to ask so much as that! But what's the reason I can't
+do anything with them? Other girls draw, and play, and write. I don't do
+anything but go in for the excitement that's bad for me. I wish you'd
+explain it."
+
+Alan Lynde did not try. The question seemed to turn his thoughts back
+upon himself to dispiriting effect. "I've got brains, too, I believe," he
+began.
+
+"Lots of them!" cried his sister, generously. "There isn't any of the men
+to compare with you. If I had you to talk with all the time, I shouldn't
+want jays. I don't mean to flatter. You're a constant feast of reason; I
+don't care for flows of soul. You always take right views of things when
+you're yourself, and even when you're somebody else you're not stupid.
+You could be anything you chose."
+
+"The devil of it is I can't choose," he replied.
+
+"Yes, I suppose that's the devil of it," said the girl.
+
+"You oughtn't to use such language as that, Bess," said her brother,
+severely.
+
+"Oh, I don't with everybody," she returned. "Never with ladies!"
+
+He looked at her out of the corner of his eye with a smile at once rueful
+and comic.
+
+"You got me, I guess, that time," he owned.
+
+"'Touche',' Mr. Durgin says. He fences, it seems, and he speaks French.
+It was like an animal speaking French; you always expect them to speak
+English. But I don't mind your swearing before me; I know that it helps
+to carry off the electricity." She laughed, and made him laugh with her.
+
+"Is there anything to him?" he growled, when they stopped laughing.
+
+"Yes, a good deal," said Bessie, with an air of thoughtfulness; and then
+she went on to tell all that Jeff had told her of himself, and she
+described his aplomb in dealing with the benevolent Bevidge, as she
+called her, and sketched his character, as it seemed to her. The sketch
+was full of shrewd guesses, and she made it amusing to her brother, who
+from the vantage of his own baddishness no doubt judged the original more
+intelligently.
+
+"Well, you'd better let him alone, after this," he said, at the end.
+
+"Yes," she pensively assented. "I suppose it's as if you took to some
+very common kind of whiskey, isn't it? I see what you mean. If one must,
+it ought to be champagne."
+
+She turned upon him a look of that keen but limited knowledge which
+renders women's conjectures of evil always so amusing, or so pathetic, to
+men.
+
+"Better let the champagne alone, too," said her brother, darkly.
+
+"Yes, I know that," she admitted, and she lay back in her chair, looking
+dreamily into the fire. After a while she asked, abruptly: "Will you give
+it up if I will?"
+
+"I am afraid I couldn't."
+
+"You could try."
+
+"Oh, I'm used to that."
+
+"Then it's a bargain," she said. She jumped from her chair and went over
+to him, and smoothed his hair over his forehead and kissed the place she
+had smoothed, though it was unpleasantly damp to her lips. "Poor boy,
+poor boy! Now, remember! No more jays for me, and no more jags for you.
+Goodnight."
+
+Her brother broke into a wild laugh at her slanging, which had such a
+bizarre effect in relation to her physical delicacy.
+
+
+
+
+XXXII.
+
+Jeff did not know whether Miss Bessie Lynde meant to go to Mrs. Bevidge's
+Thursdays or not. He thought she might have been bantering him by what
+she said, and he decided that he would risk going to the first of them on
+the chance of meeting her. She was not there, and there was no one there
+whom he knew. Mrs. Bevidge made no effort to enlarge his acquaintance,
+and after he had drunk a cup of her tea he went away with rage against
+society in his heart, which he promised himself to vent at the first
+chance of refusing its favors. But the chance seemed not to come. The
+world which had opened its gates to him was fast shut again, and he had
+to make what he could of renouncing it. He worked pretty hard, and he
+renewed himself in his fealty to Cynthia, while his mind strayed
+curiously to that other girl. But he had almost abandoned the hope of
+meeting her again, when a large party was given on the eve of the Harvard
+Mid-Year Examinations, which end the younger gayeties of Boston, for a
+fortnight at least, in January. The party was so large that the
+invitations overflowed the strict bounds of society at some points. In
+the case of Jeff Durgin the excess was intentional beyond the vague
+benevolence which prompted the giver of the party to ask certain other
+outsiders. She was a lady of a soul several sizes larger than the souls
+of some other society leaders; she was not afraid to do as she liked; for
+instance, she had not only met the Vostrands at Westover's tea, several
+years before, but she had afterward offered some hospitalities to those
+ladies which had discharged her whole duty toward them without involving
+her in any disadvantages. Jeff had been presented to her at Westover's,
+but she disliked him so promptly and decidedly that she had left him out
+of even the things that she asked some other jays to, like lectures and
+parlor readings for good objects. It was not until one of her daughters
+met him, first at Willie Morland's tea and then at Mrs. Bevidge's
+meeting, that her social conscience concerned itself with him. At the
+first her daughter had not spoken to him, as might very well have
+happened, since Bessie Lynde had kept him away with her nearly all the
+time; but at the last she had bowed pleasantly to him across the room,
+and Jeff had responded with a stiff obeisance, whose coldness she felt
+the more for having been somewhat softened herself in Mrs. Bevidge's
+altruistic atmosphere.
+
+"I think he was hurt, mamma," the girl explained to her mother, "that
+you've never had him to anything. I suppose they must feel it."
+
+"Oh, well, send him a card, then," said her mother; and when Jeff got the
+card, rather near the eleventh hour, he made haste to accept, not because
+he cared to go to Mrs. Enderby's house, but because he hoped he should
+meet Miss Lynde there.
+
+Bessie was the first person he met after he turned from paying his duty
+to the hostess. She was with her aunt, and she presented him, and
+promised him a dance, which she let him write on her card. She sat out
+another dance with him, and he took her to supper.
+
+To Westover, who had gone with the increasing forlornness a man feels in
+such pleasures after thirty-five, it seemed as if the two were in each
+other's company the whole evening. The impression was so strong with him
+that when Jeff restored Bessie to her aunt for the dance that was to be
+for some one else, and came back to the supper-room, the painter tried to
+satisfy a certain uneasiness by making talk with him. But Jeff would not
+talk; he got away with a bottle of champagne, which he had captured, and
+a plate heaped with croquettes and pease, and galantine and salad. There
+were no ladies left in the room by that time, and few young men; but the
+oldsters crowded the place, with their bald heads devoutly bowed over
+their victual, or their frosty mustaches bathed in their drink, singly or
+in groups; the noise of their talk and laughter mixed with the sound of
+their eating and drinking, and the clash of the knives and dishes. Over
+their stooped shoulders and past their rounded stomachs Westover saw Alan
+Lynde vaguely making his way with a glass in his hand, and looking
+vaguely about for wine; he saw Jeff catch his wandering eye, and make
+offer of his bottle, and then saw Lynde, after a moment of haughty pause,
+unbend and accept it. His thin face was flushed, and his hair tossed over
+his forehead, but Jeff seemed not to take note of that. He laughed
+boisterously at something Lynde said, and kept filling his glass for him.
+His own color remained clear and cool. It was as if his powerful physique
+absorbed the wine before it could reach his brain.
+
+Westover wanted to interfere, and so far as Jeff was concerned he would
+not have hesitated; but Lynde was concerned, too, and you cannot save
+such a man from himself without offence. He made his way to the young
+man, hoping he might somehow have the courage he wanted.
+
+Jeff held up the bottle, and called to him, "Get yourself a glass, Mr.
+Westover." He put on the air of a host, and would hardly be denied. "Know
+Mr. Westover, Mr. Lynde? Just talking about you," he explained to
+Westover.
+
+Alan had to look twice at the painter. "Oh yes. Mr. Durgin, here--telling
+me about his place in the mountains. Says you've been there. Going--going
+myself in the summer. See his--horses." He made pauses between his words
+as some people do when they, try to keep from stammering.
+
+Westover believed Lynde understood Jeff to be a country gentleman of
+sporting tastes, and he would not let that pass. "Yes, it's the
+pleasantest little hotel in the mountains."
+
+"Strictly-temperance, I suppose?" said Alan, trying to smile with lips
+that obeyed him stiffly. He appeared not to care who or what Jeff was;
+the champagne had washed away all difference between them. He went on to
+say that he had heard of Jeff's intention of running the hotel himself
+when he got out of Harvard. He held it to be damned good stuff.
+
+Jeff laughed. "Your sister wouldn't believe me when I told her."
+
+"I think I didn't mention Miss Lynde," said Alan, haughtily.
+
+Jeff filled his glass; Alan looked at it, faltered, and then drank it
+off. The talk began again between the young men, but it left Westover
+out, and he had to go away. Whether Jeff was getting Lynde beyond himself
+from the love of mischief, such as had prompted him to tease little
+children in his boyhood, or was trying to ingratiate himself with the
+young fellow through his weakness, or doing him harm out of mere
+thoughtlessness, Westover came away very unhappy at what he had seen. His
+unhappiness connected itself so distinctly with Lynde's family that he
+went and sat down beside Miss Lynde from an obscure impulse of
+compassion, and tried to talk with her. It would not have been so hard if
+she were merely deaf, for she had the skill of deaf people in arranging
+the conversation so that a nodded yes or no would be all that was needed
+to carry it forward. But to Westover she was terribly dull, and he was
+gasping, as in an exhausted receiver, when Bessie came up with a smile of
+radiant recognition for his extremity. She got rid of her partner, and
+devoted herself at once to Westover. "How good of you!" she said, without
+giving him the pain of an awkward disclaimer.
+
+He could counter in equal sincerity and ambiguity, "How beautiful of
+you."
+
+"Yes," she said, "I am looking rather well, tonight; but don't you think
+effective would have been a better word?" She smiled across her aunt at
+him out of a cloud of pink, from which her thin shoulders and slender
+neck emerged, and her arms, gloved to the top, fell into her lap; one of
+them seemed to terminate naturally in the fan which sensitively shared
+the inquiescence of her person.
+
+"I will say effective, too, if you insist," said Westover. "But at the
+same time you're the most beautiful person here."
+
+"How lovely of you, even if you don't mean it," she sighed. "If girls
+could have more of those things said to them, they would be better, don't
+you think? Or at least feel better."
+
+Westover laughed. "We might organize a society--they have them for nearly
+everything now--for saying pleasant things to young ladies with a view to
+the moral effect."
+
+"Oh, do I."
+
+"But it ought to be done conscientiously, and you couldn't go round
+telling every one that she was the most beautiful girl in the room."
+
+"Why not? She'd believe it!"
+
+"Yes; but the effect on the members of the society?"
+
+"Oh yes; that! But you could vary it so as to save your conscience. You
+could say, 'How divinely you're looking!' or 'How angelic!' or 'You're
+the very poetry of motion,' or 'You are grace itself,' or 'Your gown is a
+perfect dream, or any little commonplace, and every one would take it for
+praise of her personal appearance, and feel herself a great beauty, just
+as I do now, though I know very well that I'm all out of drawing, and
+just chicqued together."
+
+"I couldn't allow any one but you to say that, Miss Bessie; and I only
+let it pass because you say it so well."
+
+"Yes; you're always so good! You wouldn't contradict me even when you
+turned me out of your class."
+
+"Did I turn you out of my class?"
+
+"Not just in so many words, but when I said I couldn't do anything in
+art, you didn't insist that it was because I wouldn't, and of course then
+I had to go. I've never forgiven you, Mr. Westover, never! Do keep on
+talking very excitedly; there's a man coming up to us that I don't want
+to think I see him, or he'll stop. There! He's veered off! Where were
+you, Mr. Westover?"
+
+"Ah, Miss Bessie," said the painter; delighted at her drama, "there isn't
+anything you couldn't do if you would."
+
+"You mean parlor entertainments; impersonations; impressions; that sort
+of thing? I have thought of it. But it would be too easy. I want to try
+something difficult."
+
+"For instance."
+
+"Well, being very, very good. I want something that would really tax my
+powers. I should like to be an example. I tried it the other night just
+before I went to sleep, and it was fine. I became an example to others.
+But when I woke up--I went on in the old way. I want something hard,
+don't you know; but I want it to be easy!"
+
+She laughed, and Westover said: "I am glad you're not serious. No one
+ought to be an example to others. To be exemplary is as dangerous as to
+be complimentary.
+
+"It certainly isn't so agreeable to the object," said the girl. "But it's
+fine for the subject as long as it lasts. How metaphysical we're getting!
+The objective and the subjective. It's quite what I should expect of talk
+at a Boston dance if I were a New-Yorker. Have you seen anything of my
+brother, within the last hour or so, Mr. Westover?"
+
+"Yes; I just left him in the supper-room. Shall I go get him for you?"
+When he had said this, with the notion of rescuing him from Jeff,
+Westover was sorry, for he doubted if Alan Lynde were any longer in the
+state to be brought away from the supper-room, and he was glad to have
+Bessie say:
+
+"No, no. He'll look us up in the course of the evening--or the morning."
+A young fellow came to claim her for a dance, and Westover had not the
+face to leave Miss Lynde, all the less because she told him he must not
+think of staying. He stayed till the dance was over, and Bessie came back
+to him.
+
+"What time is it, Mr. Westover? I see my aunt beginning to nod on her
+perch."
+
+Westover looked at his watch. "It's ten minutes past two."
+
+"How early!" sighed the girl. "I'm tired of it, aren't you?"
+
+"Very," said Westover. "I was tired an hour ago."
+
+Bessie sank back in her chair with an air of nervous collapse, and did
+not say anything. Westover saw her watching the young couples who passed
+in and out of the room where the dancing was, or found corners on sofas,
+or window-seats, or sheltered spaces beside the doors and the
+chimney-piece, the girls panting and the men leaning forward to fan them.
+She looked very tired of it; and when a young fellow came up and asked
+her to dance, she told him that she was provisionally engaged. "Come back
+and get me, if you can't do better," she said, and he answered there was
+no use trying to do better, and said he would wait till the other man
+turned up, or didn't, if she would let him. He sat down beside her, and
+some young talk began between them.
+
+In the midst of it Jeff appeared. He looked at Westover first, and then
+approached with an embarrassed face.
+
+Bessie got vividly to her feet. "No apologies, Mr. Durgin, please! But in
+just another moment you'd have last your dance."
+
+Westover saw what he believed a change pass in Jeff's look from
+embarrassment to surprise and then to flattered intelligence. He beamed
+all over; and he went away with Bessie toward the ballroom, and left
+Westover to a wholly unsupported belief that she had not been engaged to
+dance with Jeff. He wondered what her reckless meaning could be, but he
+had always thought her a young lady singularly fitted by nature and art
+to take care of herself, and when he reasoned upon what was in his mind
+he had to own that there was no harm in Jeff's dancing with her.
+
+He took leave of Miss Lynde, and was going to get his coat and hat for
+his walk home when he was mysteriously stopped in a corner of the stairs
+by one of the caterer's men whom he knew. It is so unnatural to be
+addressed by a servant at all unless he asks you if you will have
+something to eat or drink, that Westover was in a manner prepared to have
+him say something startling. "It's about young Mr. Lynde, sor. We've got
+um in one of the rooms up-stairs, but he ain't fit to go home alone, and
+I've been lookin' for somebody that knows the family to help get um into
+a car'ge. He won't go for anny of us, sor."
+
+"Where is he?" asked Westover, in anguish at being unable to refuse the
+appeal, but loathing the office put upon him.
+
+"I'll show you, sor," said the caterer's man, and he sprang up the stairs
+before Westover, with glad alacrity.
+
+
+
+
+XXXIII.
+
+In a little room at the side of that where the men's hats and coats were
+checked, Alan Lynde sat drooping forward in an arm-chair, with his head
+fallen on his breast. He roused himself at the flash of the burner which
+the man turned up. "What's all this?" he demanded, haughtily. "Where's
+the carriage? What's the matter?"
+
+"Your carriage is waiting, Lynde," said Westover. "I'll see you down to
+it," and he murmured, hopelessly, to the caterer's man: "Is there any
+back way?"
+
+"There's the wan we got um up by."
+
+"It will do," said Westover, as simply.
+
+But Lynde called out, defiantly: "Back way; I sha'n't go down back way.
+Inshult to guest. I wish--say--good-night to--Mrs. Enderby. Who you,
+anyway? Damn caterer's man?"
+
+"I'm Westover, Lynde," the painter began, but the young fellow broke in
+upon him, shaking his hand and then taking his arm.
+
+"Oh, Westover! All right! I'll go down back way with you.
+Thought--thought it was damn caterer's man. No--offence."
+
+"No. It's all right." Westover got his arm under Lynde's elbow, and, with
+the man going before for them to fall upon jointly in case they should
+stumble, he got him down the dark and twisting stairs and through the
+basement hall, which was vaguely haunted by the dispossessed women
+servants of the family, and so out upon the pavement of the moonlighted
+streets.
+
+"Call Miss Lynde's car'ge," shouted the caterer's man to the barker, and
+escaped back into the basement, leaving Westover to stay his helpless
+charge on the sidewalk.
+
+It seemed a publication of the wretch's shame when the barker began to
+fill the night with hoarse cries of, "Miss Lynde's carriage; carriage for
+Miss Lynde!" The cries were taken up by a coachman here and there in the
+rank of vehicles whose varnished roofs shone in the moon up and down the
+street. After a time that Westover of course felt to be longer than it
+was, Miss Lynde's old coachman was roused from his sleep on the box and
+started out of the rank. He took in the situation with the eye of custom,
+when he saw Alan supported on the sidewalk by a stranger at the end of
+the canopy covering the pavement.
+
+He said, "Oh, ahl right, sor!" and when the two white-gloved policemen
+from either side of it helped Westover into the carriage with Lynde, he
+set off at a quick trot. The policemen clapped their hands together, and
+smiled across the strip of carpet that separated them, and winks and nods
+of intelligence passed among the barkers to the footmen about the curb
+and steps. There were none of them sorry to see a gentleman in that
+state; some of them had perhaps seen Alan in that state before.
+
+Half-way home he roused himself and put his hand on the carriage-door
+latch. "Tell the coachman drive us to--the--club. Make night of it."
+
+"No, no," said Westover, trying to restrain him. "We'd better go right on
+to your house."
+
+"Who--who--who are you?" demanded Alan.
+
+"Westover."
+
+"Oh yes--Westover. Thought we left Westover at Mrs. Enderby's. Thought it
+was that jay--What's his name? Durgin. He's awful jay, but civil to me,
+and I want be civil to him. You're not--jay? No? That's right. Fellow
+made me sick; but I took his champagne; and I must show him
+some--attention." He released the door-handle, and fell back against the
+cushioned carriage wall. "He's a blackguard!" he said, sourly.
+"Not--simple jay-blackguard, too. No--no--business bring in my sister's
+name, hey? You--you say it's--Westover? Oh yes, Westover. Old friend of
+family. Tell you good joke, Westover--my sister's. No more jays for me,
+no more jags for you. That's what she say--just between her and me, you
+know; she's a lady, Bess is; knows when to use--slang. Mark--mark of a
+lady know when to use slang. Pretty good--jays and jags. Guess we didn't
+count this time--either of us."
+
+When the carriage pulled up before Miss Lynde's house, Westover opened
+the door. "You're at home, now, Lynde. Come, let's get out."
+
+Lynde did not stir. He asked Westover again who he was, and when he had
+made sure of him, he said, with dignity, Very well; now they must get the
+other fellow. Westover entreated; he even reasoned; Lynde lay back in the
+corner of the carriage, and seemed asleep.
+
+Westover thought of pulling him up and getting him indoors by main force.
+He appealed to the coachman to know if they could not do it together.
+
+"Why, you see, I couldn't leave me harsses, sor," said the coachman.
+"What's he wants, sor?" He bent urbanely down from his box and listened
+to the explanation that Westover made him, standing in the cold on the
+curbstone, with one hand on the carriage door. "Then it's no use, sor,"
+the man decided. "Whin he's that way, ahl hell couldn't stir um. Best go
+back, sor, and try to find the gentleman."
+
+This was in the end what Westover had to do, feeling all the time that a
+thing so frantically absurd could not be a waking act, but helpless to
+escape from its performance. He thought of abandoning his charge and
+leaving him, to his fate when he opened the carriage door before Mrs.
+Enderby's house; but with the next thought he perceived that this was on
+all accounts impossible. He went in, and began his quest for Jeff,
+sending various serving men about with vague descriptions of him, and
+asking for him of departing guests, mostly young men he did not know, but
+who, he thought, might know Jeff.
+
+He had to take off his overcoat at last, and reappear at the ball. The
+crowd was still great, but visibly less dense than it had been. By a
+sudden inspiration he made his way to the supper-room, and he found Jeff
+there, filling a plate, as if he were about to carry it off somewhere. He
+commanded Jeff's instant presence in the carriage outside; he told him of
+Alan's desire for him.
+
+Jeff leaned back against the wall with the plate in his hand and laughed
+till it half slipped from his hold. When he could get his breath, he
+said: "I'll be back in a few minutes; I've got to take this to Miss
+Bessie Lynde. But I'll be right back."
+
+Westover hardly believed him. But when he got on his own things again,
+Jeff joined him in his hat and overcoat, and they went out together.
+
+It was another carriage that stopped the way now, and once more the
+barker made the night ring with what Westover felt his heartless and
+shameless cries for Miss Lynde's carriage. After a maddening delay, it
+lagged up to the curb and Jeff pulled the door open.
+
+"Hello!" he said. "There's nobody here!"
+
+"Nobody there?" cried Westover, and they fell upon the coachman with wild
+question and reproach; the policeman had to tell him at last that the
+carriage must move on, to make way for others.
+
+The coachman had no explanation to offer: he did not know how or when Mr.
+Alan had got away.
+
+"But you can give a guess where he's gone?" Jeff suggested, with a
+presence of mind which Westover mutely admired.
+
+"Well, sor, I know where he do be gahn, sometimes," the man admitted.
+
+"Well, that will do; take me there," said Jeff. "You go in and account
+for me to Miss Lynde," he instructed Westover, across his shoulder. "I'll
+get him home before morning, somehow; and I'll send the carriage right
+back for the ladies, now."
+
+Westover had the forethought to decide that Miss Bessie should ask for
+Jeff if she wanted him, and this simplified matters very much. She asked
+nothing about him. At sight of Westover coming up to her where she sat
+with her aunt, she merely said: "Why, Mr. Westover! I thought you took
+leave of this scene of gayety long ago."
+
+"Did you?" Westover returned, provisionally, and she saved him from the
+sin of framing some deceit in final answer by her next question.
+
+"Have you seen anything of Alan lately?" she asked, in a voice
+involuntarily lowered.
+
+Westover replied in the same octave: "Yes; I saw him going a good while
+ago."
+
+"Oh!" said the girl. "Then I think my aunt and I had better go, too."
+
+Still she did not go, and there was an interval in which she had the air
+of vaguely waiting. To Westover's vision, the young people still passing
+to and from the ballroom were like the painted figures of a picture
+quickened with sudden animation. There were scarcely any elders to be
+seen now, except the chaperons, who sat in their places with iron
+fortitude; Westover realized that he was the only man of his age left. He
+felt that the lights ought to have grown dim, but the place was as
+brilliant as ever. A window had been opened somewhere, and the cold
+breath of the night was drawing through the heated rooms.
+
+He was content to have Bessie stay on, though he was almost dropping with
+sleep, for he was afraid that if she went at once, the carriage might not
+have got back, and the whole affair must somehow be given away; at last,
+if she were waiting, she decided to wait no longer, and then Westover did
+not know how to keep her. He saw her rise and stoop over her aunt,
+putting her mouth to the elder lady's ear, and he heard her saying, "I am
+going home, Aunt Louisa." She turned sweetly to him. "Won't you let us
+set you down, Mr. Westover?"
+
+"Why, thank you, I believe I prefer walking. But do let me have your
+carriage called," and again he hurried himself into his overcoat and hat,
+and ran down-stairs, and the barker a third time sent forth his
+lamentable cries in summons of Miss Lynde's carriage.
+
+While he stood on the curb-stone eagerly peering up and down the street,
+he heard, without being able either to enjoy or resent it, one of the
+policemen say across him to the other, "Miss lynde seems to be doin' a
+livery-stable business to-night."
+
+Almost at the moment a carriage drove up, and he recognized Miss Lynde's
+coachman, who recognized him.
+
+"Just got back, sor," he whispered, and a minute later Bessie came
+daintily out over the carpeted way with her aunt.
+
+"How good of you!" she said, and "Good-night, Mr. Westover," said Miss
+Lynde, with an implication in her voice that virtue was peculiarly its
+own reward for those who performed any good office for her or hers.
+
+Westover shut them in, the carriage rolled off, and he started on his
+homeward walk with a long sigh of relief.
+
+
+
+
+XXXIV.
+
+Bessie asked the sleepy man who opened her aunt's door whether her
+brother had come in yet, and found that he had not. She helped her aunt
+off up-stairs with her maid, and when she came down again she sent the
+man to bed; she told him she was going to sit up and she would let her
+brother in. The caprices of Alan's latch-key were known to all the
+servants, and the man understood what she, meant. He said he had left a
+light in the reception-room and there was a fire there; and Bessie
+tripped on down from the library floor, where she had met him. She had
+put off her ball dress and had slipped into the simplest and easiest of
+breakfast frocks, which was by no means plain. Bessie had no plain frocks
+for any hour of the day; her frocks all expressed in stuff and style and
+color, and the bravery of their flying laces and ribbons, the audacity of
+spirit with which she was herself chicqued together, as she said. This
+one she had on now was something that brightened her dull complexion, and
+brought out the best effect of her eyes and mouth, and seemed the
+effluence of her personal dash and grace. It made the most of her, and
+she liked it beyond all her other negligees for its complaisance.
+
+She got a book, and sat down in a long, low chair before the fire and
+crossed her pretty slippers on the warm hearth. It was a quarter after
+three by the clock on the mantel; but she had never felt more eagerly
+awake. The party had not been altogether to her mind, up to midnight, but
+after that it had been a series of rapid and vivid emotions, which
+continued themselves still in the tumult of her nerves, and seemed to
+demand an indefinite sequence of experience. She did not know what state
+her brother might be in when he came home; she had not seen anything of
+him after she first went out to supper; till then, though, he had kept
+himself straight, as he needs must; but she could not tell what happened
+to him afterward. She hoped that he would come home able to talk, for she
+wished to talk. She wished to talk about herself; and as she had already
+had flattery enough, she wanted some truth about herself; she wanted Alan
+to say what he thought of her behavior the whole evening with that jay.
+He must have seen something of it in the beginning, and she should tell
+him all the rest. She should tell him just how often she had danced with
+the man, and how many dances she had sat out with him; how she had
+pretended once that she was engaged when another man asked her, and then
+danced with the jay, to whom she pretended that he had engaged her for
+the dance. She had wished to see how he would take it; for the same
+reason she had given to some one else a dance that was really his. She
+would tell Alan how the jay had asked her for that last dance, and then
+never come near her again. That would give him the whole situation, and
+she would know just what he thought of it.
+
+What she thought of herself she hardly knew, or made believe she hardly
+knew. She prided herself upon not being a flirt; she might not be very
+good, as goodness went, but she was not despicable, and a flirt was
+despicable. She did not call the audacity of her behavior with the jay
+flirting; he seemed to understand it as well as she, and to meet her in
+her own spirit; she wondered now whether this jay was really more
+interesting than the other men one met, or only different; whether he was
+original, like Alan himself, or merely novel, and would soon wear down to
+the tiresomeness that seemed to underlie them all, and made one wish to
+do something dreadful. In the jay's presence she had no wish to do
+anything dreadful. Was it because he was dreadful enough for both, all
+the time, without doing anything? She would like to ask Alan that, and
+see how he would take it. Nothing seemed to put the jay out, so far as
+she had tried, and she had tried some bold impertinences with him. He was
+very jolly through them all, and at the worst of them he laughed and
+asked her for that dance, which he never came to claim, though in the
+mean time he brought her some belated supper, and was devoted to her and
+her aunt, inventing services to do for them. Then suddenly he went off
+and did not return, and Mr. Westover mysteriously reappeared, and got
+their carriage.
+
+She heard a scratching at the key-hole of the outside door; she knew it
+was Alan's latch. She had left the inner door ajar that there might be no
+uncertainty of hearing him, and she ran out into the space between that
+and the outer door where the fumbling and scraping kept on.
+
+"Is that you, Alan?" she called, softly, and if she had any doubt before,
+she had none when she heard her brother outside, cursing his luck with
+his key as usual.
+
+She flung the door open, and confronted him with another man, who had his
+arms around him as if he had caught him from falling with the inward pull
+of the door. Alan got to his feet and grappled with the man, and insisted
+that he should come in and make a night of it.
+
+Bessie saw that it was Jeff, and they stood a moment, looking at each
+other. Jeff tried to free himself with an appeal to Bessie: "I beg your
+pardon, Miss Lynde. I walked home with your brother, and I was just
+helping him to get in--I didn't think that you--"
+
+Alan said, with his measured distinctness: "Nobody cares what you think.
+Come in, and get something to carry you over the bridge. Cambridge cars
+stopped running long ago. I say you shall!" He began to raise his voice.
+A light flashed in a window across the way, and a sash was lifted; some
+one must be looking out.
+
+"Oh, come in with him!" Bessie implored, and at a little yielding in Jeff
+her brother added:
+
+"Come in, you damn jay!" He pulled at Jeff.
+
+Jeff made haste to shut the door behind them. He was laughing; and if it
+was from mere brute insensibility to what would have shocked another in
+the situation, his frank recognition of its grotesqueness was of better
+effect than any hopeless effort to ignore it would have been. People
+adjust themselves to their trials; it is the pretence of the witness that
+there is no trial which hurts, and Bessie was not wounded by Jeff's
+laugh.
+
+"There's a fire here in the reception-room," she said. "Can you get him
+in?"
+
+"I guess so."
+
+Jeff lifted Alan into the room and stayed him on foot there, while he
+took off his hat and overcoat, and then he let him sink into the low
+easy-chair Bessie had just risen from. All the time, Alan was bidding her
+ring and have some champagne and cold meat set out on the side-board, and
+she was lightly promising and coaxing. But he drowsed quickly in the
+warmth, and the last demand for supper died half uttered on his lips.
+
+Jeff asked across him: "Can't I get him up-stairs for you? I can carry
+him."
+
+She shook her head and whispered back, "I can leave him here," and she
+looked at Jeff with a moment's hesitation. "Did you--do you think
+that--any one noticed him at Mrs. Enderby's?"
+
+"No; they had got him in a room by himself--the caterer's men had."
+
+"And you found him there?"
+
+"Mr. Westover found him there," Jeff answered.
+
+"I don't understand."
+
+"Didn't he come to you after I left?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"I told him to excuse me--"
+
+"He didn't."
+
+"Well, I guess he was pretty badly rattled." Jeff stopped himself in the
+vague laugh of one who remembers something ludicrous, and turned his face
+away.
+
+"Tell me what it was!" she demanded, nervously.
+
+"Mr. Westover had been home with him once, and he wouldn't stay. He made
+Mr. Westover come back for me."
+
+"What did he want with you?"
+
+Jeff shrugged.
+
+"And then what?"
+
+"We went out to the carriage, as soon as I could get away from you; but
+he wasn't in it. I sent Mr. Westover back to you and set out to look for
+him."
+
+"That was very good of you. And I--thank you for your kindness to my
+brother. I shall not forget it. And I wish to beg your pardon."
+
+"What for?" asked Jeff, bluntly.
+
+"For blaming you when you didn't come back for the dance."
+
+If Bessie had meant nothing but what was fitting to the moment some
+inherent lightness of nature played her false. But even the histrionic
+touch which she could not keep out of her voice, her manner, another sort
+of man might have found merely pathetic.
+
+Jeff laughed with subtle intelligence. "Were you very hard on me?"
+
+"Very," she answered in kind, forgetting her brother and the whole
+terrible situation.
+
+"Tell me what you thought of me," he said, and he came a little nearer to
+her, looking very handsome and very strong. "I should like to know."
+
+"I said I should never speak to you again."
+
+"And you kept your word," said Jeff. "Well, that's all right.
+Good-night-or good-morning, whichever it is." He took her hand, which she
+could not withdraw, or feigned to herself that she could not withdraw,
+and looked at her with a silent laugh, and a hardy, sceptical glance that
+she felt take in every detail of her prettiness, her plainness. Then he
+turned and went out, and she ran quickly and locked the door upon him.
+
+
+
+
+XXXV.
+
+Bessie crept up to her room, where she spent the rest of the night in her
+chair, amid a tumult of emotion which she would have called thinking. She
+asked herself the most searching questions, but she got no very candid
+answers to them, and she decided that she must see the whole fact with
+some other's eyes before she could know what she had meant or what she
+had done.
+
+When she let the daylight into her room, it showed her a face in her
+mirror that bore no trace of conflicting anxieties. Her complexion
+favored this effect of inward calm; it was always thick; and her eyes
+seemed to her all the brighter for their vigils.
+
+A smile, even, hovered on her mouth as she sat down at the
+breakfast-table, in the pretty negligee she had worn all night, and
+poured out Miss Lynde's coffee for her.
+
+"That's always very becoming to you, Bessie," said her aunt. "It's the
+nicest breakfast gown you have."
+
+"Do you think so?" Bessie looked down at it, first on one side and then
+on the other, as a woman always does when her dress is spoken of.
+
+"Mr. Alan said he would have his breakfast in his room, miss," murmured
+the butler, in husky respectfulness, as he returned to Bessie from
+carrying Miss Lynde's cup to her. "He don't want anything but a little
+toast and coffee."
+
+She perceived that the words were meant to make it easy for her to ask:
+"Isn't he very well, Andrew?"
+
+"About as usual, miss," said Andrew, a thought more sepulchral than
+before. "He's going on--about as usual."
+
+She knew this to mean that he was going on from bad to worse, and that
+his last night's excess was the beginning of a debauch which could end
+only in one way. She must send for the doctor; he would decide what was
+best, when he saw how Alan came through the day.
+
+Late in the afternoon she heard Mary Enderby's voice in the
+reception-room, bidding the man say that if Miss Bessie were lying down
+she would come up to her, or would go away, just as she wished. She flew
+downstairs with a glad cry of "Molly! What an inspiration! I was just
+thinking of you, and wishing for you. But I didn't suppose you were up
+yet!"
+
+"It's pretty early," said Miss Enderby. "But I should have been here
+before if I could, for I knew I shouldn't wake you, Bessie, with your
+habit of turning night into day, and getting up any time in the
+forenoon."
+
+"How dissipated you sound!"
+
+"Yes, don't I? But I've been thinking about you ever since I woke, and I
+had to come and find out if you were alive, anyhow."
+
+"Come up-stairs and see!" said Bessie, holding her friend's hand on the
+sofa where they had dropped down together, and going all over the scene
+of last night in that place for the thousandth time.
+
+"No, no; I really mustn't. I hope you had a good time?"
+
+"At your house!"
+
+"How dear of you! But, Bessie, I got to thinking you'd been rather
+sacrificed. It came into my mind the instant I woke, and gave me this
+severe case of conscience. I suppose it's a kind of conscience."
+
+"Yes, yes. Go on! I like having been a martyr, if I don't know what
+about."
+
+"Why, you know, Bessie, or if you don't you will presently, that it was I
+who got mamma to send him a card; I felt rather sorry for him, that day
+at Mrs. Bevidge's, because she'd so obviously got him there to use him,
+and I got mamma to ask him. Everything takes care of itself, at a large
+affair, and I thought I might trust in Providence to deal with him after
+he came; and then I saw you made a means the whole evening! I didn't
+reflect that there always has to be a means!"
+
+"It's a question of Mr. Durgin?" said Bessie, coldly thrilling at the
+sound of a name that she pronounced so gayly in a tone of sympathetic
+amusement.
+
+Miss Enderby bobbed her head. "It shows that we ought never to do a good
+action, doesn't it? But, poor thing! How you must have been swearing
+off!"
+
+"I don't know. Was it so very bad? I'm trying to think," said Bessie,
+thinking that after this beginning it would be impossible to confide in
+Mary Enderby.
+
+"Oh, now, Bessie! Don't you be patient, or I shall begin to lose my faith
+in human nature. Just say at once that it was an outrage and I'll forgive
+you! You see," Miss Enderby went on, "it isn't merely that he's a jay;
+but he isn't a very nice jay. None of the men like him--except Freddy
+Lancaster, of course; he likes everybody, on principle; he doesn't count.
+I thought that perhaps, although he's so crude and blunt, he might be
+sensitive and high-minded; you're always reading about such things; but
+they say he isn't, in the least; oh, not the least! They say he goes with
+a set of fast jays, and that he's dreadful; though he has a very good
+mind, and could do very well if he chose. That's what cousin Jim said
+to-day; he's just been at our house; and it was so extremely telepathic
+that I thought I must run round and prevent your having the man on your
+conscience if you felt you had had too much of him. You won't lay him up
+against us, will you?" She jumped to her feet.
+
+"You dear!" said Bessie, keeping Mary Enderby's hand, and pressing it
+between both of hers against her breast as they now stood face to face,
+"do come up and have some tea!"
+
+"No, no! Really, I can't."
+
+They were both involuntarily silent. The door had been opened to some
+one, and there was a brief parley, which ended in a voice they knew to be
+the doctor's, saying, "Then I'll go right up to his room." Both the girls
+broke into laughing adieux, to hide their consciousness that the doctor
+was going up to see Alan Lynde, who was never sick except in the one way.
+
+Miss Enderby even said: "I was so glad to see Alan looking so well, last
+night."
+
+"Yes, he had such a good time," said Bessie, and she followed her friend
+to the door, where she kissed her reassuringly, and thanked her for
+taking all the trouble she had, bidding her not be the least anxious on
+her account.
+
+It seemed to her that she should sink upon the stairs in mounting them to
+the library. Mary Enderby had told her only what she had known before; it
+was what her brother had told her; but then it had not been possible for
+the man to say that he had brought Alan home tipsy, and been alone in the
+house with her at three o'clock in the morning. He would not only boast
+of it to all that vulgar comradehood of his, but it might get into those
+terrible papers which published the society scandals. There would be no
+way but to appeal to his pity, his generosity. She fancied herself
+writing to him, but he could show her note, and she must send for him to
+come and see her, and try to put him on his honor. Or, that would not do,
+either. She must make it happen that they should be thrown together, and
+then speak to him. Even that might make him think she was afraid of him;
+or he might take it wrong, and believe that she cared for him. He had
+really been very good to Alan, and she tried to feel safe in the thought
+of that. She did feel safe for a moment; but if she had meant nothing but
+to make him believe her grateful, what must he infer from her talking to
+him in the light way she did about forgiving him for not coming back to
+dance with her. Her manner, her looks, her tone, had given him the right
+to say that she had been willing to flirt with him there, at that hour,
+and in those dreadful circumstances.
+
+She found herself lying in a deep arm-chair in the library, when she was
+aware of Dr. Lacy pausing at the door and looking tentatively in upon
+her.
+
+"Come in, doctor," she said, and she knew that her face was wet with
+tears, and that she spoke with the voice of weeping.
+
+He came forward and looked narrowly at her, without sitting down.
+"There's nothing to be alarmed about, Miss Bessie," he said. "But I think
+your brother had better leave home again, for a while."
+
+"Yes," she said, blankly. Her mind was not on his words.
+
+"I will make the arrangements."
+
+"Thank you," said Bessie, listlessly.
+
+The doctor had made a step backward, as if he were going away, and now he
+stopped. "Aren't you feeling quite well, Miss Bessie?"
+
+"Oh yes," she said, and she began to cry.
+
+The doctor came forward and said, cheerily: "Let me see." He pulled a
+chair up to hers, and took her wrist between his fingers. "If you were at
+Mrs. Enderby's last night, you'll need another night to put you just
+right. But you're pretty well as it is." He let her wrist softly go, and
+said: "You mustn't distress yourself about your brother's case. Of
+course, it's hard to have it happen now after he's held up so long;
+longer than it has been before, I think, isn't it? But it's something
+that it has been so long. The next time, let us hope, it will be longer
+still."
+
+The doctor made as if to rise. Bessie put her hand out to stay him. "What
+is it makes him do it?"
+
+"Ah, that's a great mystery," said the doctor. "I suppose you might say
+the excitement."
+
+"Yes!"
+
+"But it seems to me very often, in such cases, as if it were to escape
+the excitement. I think you're both keyed up pretty sharply by nature,
+Miss Bessie," said the doctor, with the personal kindness he felt for the
+girl, and the pity softening his scientific spirit.
+
+"I know!" she answered. "We're alike. Why don't I take to drinking, too?"
+
+The doctor laughed at such a question from a young lady, but with an
+inner seriousness in his laugh, as if, coming from a patient, it was to
+be weighed. "Well, I suppose it isn't the habit of your sex, Miss
+Bessie."
+
+"Sometimes it is. Sometimes women get drunk, and then I think they do
+less harm than if they did other things to get away from the excitement."
+She longed to confide in him; the words were on her tongue; she believed
+he could help her, tell her what to do; out of his stores of knowledge
+and experience he must have some suggestion, some remedy; he could advise
+her; he could stand her friend, so far. People told their doctors all
+kinds of things, silly things. Why should she not tell her doctor this?
+
+It would have been easier if it had been an older man, who might have had
+a daughter of her age. But he was in that period of the early forties
+when a doctor sometimes has a matter-of-fact, disagreeable wife whose
+idea stands between him and the spiritual intimacy of his patients, so
+that it seems as if they were delivering their confidences rather to her
+than to him. He was able, he was good, he was extremely acute, he was
+even with the latest facts and theories; but as he sat straight up in his
+chair his stomach defined itself as a half-moon before him, and he said
+to the quivering heap of emotions beside him, "You mean like breaking
+hearts, and such little matters?"
+
+It was fatally stupid, and it beat her back into herself.
+
+"Yes," she said, with a contempt that she easily hid from him, "that's
+worse than getting drunk, isn't it?"
+
+"Well, it isn't so regarded," said the doctor, who supposed himself to
+have made a sprightly answer, and laughed at it. "I wish, Miss Bessie,
+you'd take a little remedy I'm going to send you. You've merely been up
+too late, but it's a very good thing for people who've been up too late."
+
+"Thank you. And about my brother?"
+
+"Oh! I'll send a man to look after him to-night, and tomorrow I really
+think he'd better go."
+
+
+
+
+XXXVI.
+
+Miss Lynde had gone earlier than usual to bed, when Bessie heard Alan's
+door open, and then heard him feeling his way fumbingly down-stairs. She
+surmised that he had drunk up all that he had in his room, and was making
+for the side-board in the dining-room.
+
+She ran and got the two decanters-one of whiskey and one of brandy, which
+he was in the habit of carrying back to his room from such an incursion.
+
+"Alan!" she called to him, in a low voice.
+
+"Where are you?" he answered back.
+
+"In the library," she said. "Come in here, please."
+
+He came, and stood looking gloomily in from the doorway. He caught sight
+of the decanters and the glasses on the library table. "Oh!" he said, and
+gave a laugh cut in two by a hiccough.
+
+"Come in, and shut the door, Alan," she said. "Let's make a night of it.
+I've got the materials here." She waved her hand toward the decanters.
+
+Alan shrugged. "I don't know what you mean." But he came forward, and
+slouched into one of the deep chairs.
+
+"Well, I'll tell you what," said Bessie, with a laugh. "We're both
+excited, and we want to get away from ourselves. Isn't that what's the
+matter with you when it begins? Doctor Lacy thinks it is."
+
+"Does he?" Alan asked. "I didn't suppose he had so much sense. What of
+it?"
+
+"Nothing. Merely that I'm going to drink a glass of whiskey and a glass
+of brandy for every glass that you drink to-night."
+
+"You mustn't play the fool, Bess," said her brother, with dignified
+severity.
+
+"But I'm really serious, Alan. Shall I give you something? Which shall we
+begin on? And we'd better begin soon, for there's a man coming from the
+doctor to look after you, and then you won't get anything."
+
+"Don't be ridiculous! Give me those decanters!" Alan struggled out of his
+chair, and trembled over to where she had them on the table beside her.
+
+She caught them up, one in either hand, and held them as high as she
+could lift them. "If you don't sit down and promise to keep still, I'll
+smash them both on the hearth. You know I will."
+
+Her strange eyes gleamed, and he hesitated; then he went back to his
+chair.
+
+"I don't see what's got into you to-night. I don't want anything," he
+said. He tried to brave it out, but presently he cast a piteous glance at
+the decanters where she had put them down beside her again. "Does the
+doctor think I'd better go again?" he asked.
+
+"Yes."
+
+"When?"
+
+"To-morrow."
+
+He looked at the decanters. "And when is that fellow coming?"
+
+"He may be here any moment."
+
+"It's pretty rough," he sighed. "Two glasses of that stuff would drive
+you so wild you wouldn't know where you were, Bess," he expostulated.
+
+"Well, I wish I didn't know where I was. I wish I wasn't anywhere." He
+looked at her, and then dropped his eyes, with the effect of giving up a
+hopeless conundrum.
+
+But he asked: "What's the matter?"
+
+She scanned him keenly before she answered: "Something that I should like
+to tell you--that you ought to know. Alan, do you think you are fit to
+judge of a very serious matter?"
+
+He laughed pathetically. "I don't believe I'm in a very judicial frame of
+mind to-night, Bess. To-morrow--"
+
+"Oh, to-morrow! Where will you be to-morrow?"
+
+"That's true! Well, what is it? I'll try to listen. But if you knew how
+my nerves were going." His eyes wandered from hers back to the decanters.
+"If I had just one glass--"
+
+"I'll have one, too," she said, with a motion toward the decanter next
+her.
+
+He threw up his arms. "Oh well, go on. I'll listen as well as I can." He
+sank down in his chair and stretched his little feet out toward the fire.
+"Go on!"
+
+She hesitated before she began. "Do you know who brought you home last
+night, Alan?"
+
+"Yes," he answered, quickly, "Westover."
+
+"Yes, Mr. Westover brought you, and you wouldn't stay. You don't remember
+anything else?"
+
+"No. What else?"
+
+"Nothing for you, if you don't remember." She sat in silent hopelessness
+for a while, and her brother's eyes dwelt on the decanters, which she
+seemed to have forgotten. "Alan!" she broke out, abruptly, "I'm worried,
+and if I can't tell you about it there's no one I can."
+
+The appeal in her voice must have reached him, though he seemed scarcely
+to have heeded her words. "What is it?" he asked, kindly.
+
+"You went back to the Enderbys' after Mr. Westover brought you home, and
+then some one else had to bring you again."
+
+"How do you know?"
+
+"I was up, and let you in--"
+
+"Did you, Bessie? That was like you," he said, tenderly.
+
+"And I had to let him in, too. You pulled him into the house, and you
+made such a disturbance at the door that he had to come in for fear you
+would bring the police."
+
+"What a beast!" said Alan, of himself, as if it were some one else.
+
+"He came in with you. And you wanted him to have some supper. And you
+fell asleep before the fire in the reception-room."
+
+"That--that was the dream!" said Alan, severely. "What are you talking
+that stuff for, Bessie?"
+
+"Oh no!" she retorted, with a laugh, as if the pleasure of its coming in
+so fitly were compensation for the shame of the fact. "The dream was what
+happened afterward. The dream was that you fell asleep there, and left me
+there with him--"
+
+"Well, poor old Westover; he's a gentleman! You needn't be worried about
+him--"
+
+"You're not fit!" cried the girl. "I give it up." She got upon her feet
+and stood a moment listless.
+
+"No, I'm not, Bessie. I can't pull my mind together tonight. But look
+here!" He seemed to lose what he wanted to say. He asked: "Is it
+something I've got you in for? Do I understand that?"
+
+"Partly," she said.
+
+"Well, then, I'll help you out. You can trust me, Bessie; you can,
+indeed. You don't believe it?"
+
+"Oh, I believe you think I can trust you."
+
+"But this time you can. If you need my help I will stand by you, right or
+wrong. If you want to tell me now I'll listen, and I'll advise you the
+best I can--"
+
+"It's just something I've got nervous about," she said, while her eyes
+shone with sudden tears. "But I won't trouble you with it to-night.
+There's no such great hurry. We can talk about it in the morning if
+you're better then. Oh, I forgot! You're going away!"
+
+"No," said the young man, with pathetic dignity, "I'm not going if you
+need my help. But you're right about me tonight, Bessie. I'm not fit. I'm
+afraid I can't grasp anything to-night. Tell me in the morning. Oh, don't
+be afraid!" he cried out at the glance she gave the decanters. "That's
+over, now; you could put them in my hands and be safe enough. I'm going
+back to bed, and in the morning--"
+
+He rose and went toward the door. "If that doctor's man comes to-night
+you can send him away again. He needn't bother."
+
+"All right, Alan," she said, fondly. "Good-night. Don't worry about me.
+Try to get some sleep."
+
+"And you must sleep, too. You can trust me, Bessie."
+
+He came back after he got out of the room and looked in. "Bess, if you're
+anxious about it, if you don't feel perfectly sure of me, you can take
+those things to your room with you." He indicated the decanters with a
+glance.
+
+"Oh no! I shall leave them here. It wouldn't be any use your just keeping
+well overnight. You'll have to keep well a long time, Alan, if you're
+going to help me. And that's the reason I'd rather talk to you when you
+can give your whole mind to what I say."
+
+"Is it something so serious?"
+
+"I don't know. That's for you to judge. Not very--not at all, perhaps."
+
+"Then I won't fail you, Bessie. I shall 'keep well,' as you call it, as
+long as you want me. Good-night."
+
+"Good-night. I shall leave these bottles here, remember."
+
+"You needn't be afraid. You might put them beside my bed."
+
+Bessie slept soundly, from exhaustion, and in that provisional fashion in
+which people who have postponed a care to a given moment are able to
+sleep. But she woke early, and crept down-stairs before any one else was
+astir, and went to the library. The decanters stood there on the table,
+empty. Her brother lay a shapeless heap in one of the deep arm-chairs.
+
+
+
+
+XXXVII.
+
+Westover got home from the Enderby dance at last with the forecast of a
+violent cold in his system, which verified itself the next morning. He
+had been housed a week, when Jeff Durgin came to see him. "Why didn't you
+let me know you were sick?" he demanded, "I'd have come and looked after
+you."
+
+"Thank you," said Westover, with as much stiffness as he could command in
+his physical limpness. "I shouldn't have allowed you to look after me;
+and I want you to understand, now, that there can't be any sort of
+friendliness between us till you've accounted for your behavior with
+Lynde the other night."
+
+"You mean at the party?" Jeff asked, tranquilly.
+
+"Yes!" cried Westover. "If I had not been shut up ever since, I should
+have gone to see you and had it out with you. I've only let you in, now,
+to give you the chance to explain; and I refuse to hear a word from you
+till you do." Westover did not think that this was very forcible, and he
+was not much surprised that it made Jeff smile.
+
+"Why, I don't know what there is to explain. I suppose you think I got
+him drunk; I know what you thought that night. But he was pretty well
+loaded when he struck my champagne. It wasn't a question of what he was
+going to do any longer, but how he was going to do it. I kept an eye on
+him, and at the right time I helped the caterer's man to get him up into
+that room where he wouldn't make any trouble. I expected to go back and
+look after him, but I forgot him."
+
+"I don't suppose, really, that you're aware what a devil's argument that
+is," said Westover. "You got Lynde drunk, and then you went back to his
+sister, and allowed her to treat you as if you were a gentleman, and
+didn't deserve to be thrown out of the house." This at last was something
+like what Westover had imagined he would say to Jeff, and he looked to
+see it have the imagined effect upon him.
+
+"Do you suppose," asked Jeff, with cheerful cynicism, "that it was the
+first time she was civil to a man her brother got drunk with?"
+
+"No! But all the more you ought to have considered her helplessness. It
+ought to have made her the more sacred"--Jeff gave an exasperating
+shrug--"to you, and you ought to have kept away from her for decency's
+sake."
+
+"I was engaged to dance with her."
+
+"I can't allow you to be trivial with me, Durgin," said Westover. "You've
+acted like a blackguard, and worse, if there is anything worse."
+
+Jeff stood at a corner of the fire, leaning one elbow on the mantel, and
+he now looked thoughtfully down on Westover, who had sunk weakly into a
+chair before the hearth. "I don't deny it from your point of view, Mr.
+Westover," he said, without the least resentment in his tone. "You
+believe that everything is done from a purpose, or that a thing is
+intended because it's done. But I see that most things in this world are
+not thought about, and not intended. They happen, just as much as the
+other things that we call accidents."
+
+"Yes," said Westover, "but the wrong things don't happen from people who
+are in the habit of meaning the right ones."
+
+"I believe they do, fully half the time," Jeff returned; "and, as far as
+the grand result is concerned, you might as well think them and intend
+them as not. I don't mean that you ought to do it; that's another thing,
+and if I had tried to get Lynde drunk, and then gone to dance with his
+sister, I should have been what you say I am. But I saw him getting worse
+without meaning to make him so; and I went back to her because--I wanted
+to."
+
+"And you think, I suppose," said Westover, "that she wouldn't have cared
+any more than you cared if she had known what you did."
+
+"I can't say anything about that."
+
+The painter continued, bitterly: "You used to come in here, the first
+year, with notions of society women that would have disgraced a Goth, or
+a gorilla. Did you form your estimate of Miss Lynde from those premises?"
+
+"I'm not a boy now," Jeff answered, "and I haven't stayed all the kinds
+of a fool I was."
+
+"Then you don't think Miss Lynde would speak to you, or look at you,
+after she knew what you had done?"
+
+"I should like to tell her and see," said Jeff, with a hardy laugh. "But
+I guess I sha'n't have the chance. I've never been a favorite in society,
+and I don't expect to meet her again."
+
+"Perhaps you'd like to have me tell her?"
+
+"Why, yes, I believe I should, if you could tell me what she thought--not
+what she said about it."
+
+"You are a brute," answered Westover, with a puzzled air. What puzzled
+him most and pleased him least was the fellow's patience under his
+severity, which he seemed either not to feel or not to mind. It was of a
+piece with the behavior of the rascally boy whom he had cuffed for
+frightening Cynthia and her little brother long ago, and he wondered what
+final malevolence it portended.
+
+Jeff said, as if their controversy were at an end and they might now turn
+to more personal things: "You look pretty slim, Mr. Westover. A'n't there
+something I can do for you-get you? I've come in with a message from
+mother. She says if you ever want to get that winter view of Lion's Head,
+now's your time. She wants you to come up there; she and Cynthia both do.
+They can make you as comfortable as you please, and they'd like to have a
+visit from you. Can't you go?"
+
+Westover shook his head ruefully. "It's good of them, and I want you to
+thank them for me. But I don't know when I'm going to get out again."
+
+"Oh, you'll soon get out," said Jeff. "I'm going to look after you a
+little," and this time Westover was too weak to protest. He did not
+forbid Jeff's taking off his overcoat; he suffered him to light his
+spirit-lamp and make a punch of the whiskey which he owned the doctor was
+giving him; and when Jeff handed him the steaming glass, and asked him,
+"How's that?" he answered, with a pleasure in it which he knew to be
+deplorable, "It's fine."
+
+Jeff stayed the whole evening with him, and made him more comfortable
+than he had been since his cold began. Westover now talked seriously and
+frankly with him, but no longer so harshly, and in his relenting he felt
+a return of his old illogical liking for him. He fancied in Durgin's
+kindness to himself an indirect regret, and a desire to atone for what he
+had done, and he said: "The effect is in you--the worst effect. I don't
+think either of the young Lyndes very exemplary people. But you'd be
+doing yourself a greater wrong than you've done then if you didn't
+recognize that you had been guilty toward them."
+
+Jeff seemed struck by this notion. "What do you want me to do? What can I
+do? Chase myself out of society? Something like that? I'm willing. It's
+too easy, though. As I said, I've never been wanted much, there, and I
+shouldn't be missed."
+
+"Well, then, how would you like to leave it to the people at Lion's Head
+to say what you should do?" Westover suggested.
+
+"I shouldn't like it," said Jeff, promptly. "They'd judge it as you do--as
+if they'd done it themselves. That's the reason women are not fit to
+judge." His gay face darkened. "But tell 'em if you want to."
+
+"Bah!" cried the painter. "Why should I want to I'm not a woman in
+everything."
+
+"I beg your pardon, Mr. Westover. I didn't mean that. I only meant that
+you're an idealist. I look at this thing as if some one else had done it;
+I believe that's the practical way; and I shouldn't go in for punishing
+any one else for such a thing very severely." He made another punch--for
+himself this time, he said; but Westover joined him in a glass of it.
+
+"It won't do to take that view of your faults, Jeff," he said, gravely.
+
+"What's the reason?" Jeff demanded; and now either the punch had begun to
+work in Westover's brain, or some other influence of like force and
+quality. He perceived that in this earth-bound temperament was the
+potentiality of all the success it aimed at. The acceptance of the moral
+fact as it was, without the unconscious effort to better it, or to hold
+himself strictly to account for it, was the secret of the power in the
+man which would bring about the material results he desired; and this
+simplicity of the motive involved had its charm.
+
+Westover was aware of liking Durgin at that moment much more than he
+ought, and of liking him helplessly. In the light of his good-natured
+selfishness, the injury to the Lyndes showed much less a sacrilege than
+it had seemed; Westover began to see it with Jeff's eyes, and to see it
+with reference to what might be low and mean in them, instead of what
+might be fine and high.
+
+He was sensible of the growth Jeff had made intellectually. He had not
+been at Harvard nearly four years for nothing. He had phrases and could
+handle them. In whatever obscure or perverse fashion, he had profited by
+his opportunities. The fellow who could accuse him of being an idealist,
+and could in some sort prove it, was no longer a naughty boy to be
+tutored and punished. The revolt latent in him would be violent in
+proportion to the pressure put upon him, and Westover began to be without
+the wish to press his fault home to him so strongly. In the optimism
+generated by the punch, he felt that he might leave the case to Jeff
+himself; or else in the comfort we all experience in sinking to a lower
+level, he was unwilling to make the effort to keep his own moral
+elevation. But he did make an effort to save himself by saying: "You
+can't get what you've done before yourself as you can the action of some
+one else. It's part of you, and you have to judge the motive as well as
+the effect."
+
+"Well, that's what I'm doing," said Jeff; "but it seems to me that you're
+trying to have me judge of the effect from a motive I didn't have. As far
+as I can make out, I hadn't any motive at all."
+
+He laughed, and all that Westover could say was, "Then you're still
+responsible for the result." But this no longer appeared so true to him.
+
+
+
+
+XXXVIII.
+
+It was not a condition of Westover's welcome at Lion's Head that he
+should seem peculiarly the friend of Jeff Durgin, but he could not help
+making it so, and he began to overact the part as soon as he met Jeff's
+mother. He had to speak of him in thanking her for remembering his wish
+to paint Lion's Head in the winter, and he had to tell her of Jeff's
+thoughtfulness during the past fortnight; he had to say that he did not
+believe he should ever have got away if it had not been for him. This was
+true; Durgin had even come in from Cambridge to see him off on the train;
+he behaved as if the incident with Lynde and all their talk about it had
+cemented the friendship between Westover and himself, and he could not be
+too devoted. It now came out that he had written home all about Westover,
+and made his mother put up a stove in the painter's old room, so that he
+should have the instant use of it when he arrived.
+
+It was an air-tight wood-stove, and it filled the chamber with a heat in
+which Westover drowsed as soon as he entered it. He threw himself on the
+bed, and slept away the fatigue of his railroad journey and the cold of
+his drive with Jombateeste from the station. His nap was long, and he
+woke from it in a pleasant languor, with the dream-clouds still hanging
+in his brain. He opened the damper of his stove, and set it roaring
+again; then he pulled down the upper sash of his window and looked out on
+a world whose elements of wood and snow and stone he tried to
+co-ordinate. There was nothing else in that world but these things, so
+repellent of one another. He suffered from the incongruity of the wooden
+bulk of the hotel, with the white drifts deep about it, and with the
+granite cliffs of Lion's Head before it, where the gray crags darkened
+under the pink afternoon light which was beginning to play upon its crest
+from the early sunset. The wind that had seemed to bore through his thick
+cap and his skull itself, and that had tossed the dry snow like dust
+against his eyes on his way from the railroad, had now fallen, and an
+incomparable quiet wrapped the solitude of the hills. A teasing sense of
+the impossibility of the scene, as far as his art was concerned, filled
+him full of a fond despair of rendering its feeling. He could give its
+light and color and form in a sufficiently vivid suggestion of the fact,
+but he could not make that pink flush seem to exhale, like a long breath,
+upon those rugged shapes; he could not impart that sentiment of
+delicately, almost of elegance, which he found in the wilderness, while
+every detail of civilization physically distressed him. In one place the
+snow had been dug down to the pine planking of the pathway round the
+house; and the contact of this woodenness with the frozen ground pierced
+his nerves and set his teeth on edge like a harsh noise. When once he saw
+it he had to make an effort to take his eyes from it, and in a sort
+unknown to him in summer he perceived the offence of the hotel itself
+amid the pure and lonely beauty of the winter landscape. It was a note of
+intolerable banality, of philistine pretence and vulgar convention, such
+as Whitwell's low, unpainted cottage at the foot of the hill did not
+give, nor the little red school-house, on the other hand, showing through
+the naked trees. There should have been really no human habitation
+visible except a wigwam in the shelter of the pines, here and there; and
+when he saw Whitwell making his way up the hill-side road, Westover felt
+that if there must be any human presence it should be some savage clad in
+skins, instead of the philosopher in his rubber boots and his
+clothing-store ulster. He preferred the small, wiry shape of Jombateeste,
+in his blue woollen cap and his Canadian footgear, as he ran round the
+corner of the house toward the barn, and left the breath of his pipe in
+the fine air behind him.
+
+The light began to deepen from the pale pink to a crimson which stained
+the tops and steeps of snow, and deepened the dark of the woods massed on
+the mountain slopes between the irregular fields of white. The burnished
+brown of the hard-wood trees, the dull carbon shadows of the evergreens,
+seemed to wither to one black as the red strengthened in the sky.
+Westover realized that he had lost the best of any possible picture in
+letting that first delicate color escape him. This crimson was harsh and
+vulgar in comparison; it would have almost a chromo quality; he censured
+his pleasure in it as something gross and material, like that of eating;
+and on a sudden he felt hungry. He wondered what time they would give him
+supper, and he took slight account of the fact that a caprice of the wind
+had torn its hood of snow from the mountain summit, and that the profile
+of the Lion's Head showed almost as distinctly as in summer. He stood
+before the picture which for that day at least was lost to him, and
+questioned whether there would be a hearty meal, something like a dinner,
+or whether there would be something like a farmhouse supper, mainly of
+doughnuts and tea.
+
+He pulled up his window and was going to lie down again, when some one
+knocked, and Frank Whitwell stood at the door. "Do you want we should
+bring your supper to you here, Mr. Westover, or will you--"
+
+"Oh, let me join you all!" cried the painter, eagerly. "Is it
+ready--shall I come now?"
+
+"Well, in about five minutes or so." Frank went away, after setting down
+in the room the lamp he had brought. It was a lamp which Westover thought
+he remembered from the farm-house period, and on his way down he realized
+as he had somehow not done in his summer sojourns, the entirety of the
+old house in the hotel which had encompassed it. The primitive cold of
+its stairways and passages struck upon him as soon as he left his own
+room, and he found the parlor door closed against the chill. There was a
+hot stove-fire within, and a kerosene-lamp turned low, but there was no
+one there, and he had the photograph of his first picture of Lion's Head
+to himself in the dim light. The voices of Mrs. Durgin and Cynthia came
+to him from the dining-room, and from the kitchen beyond, with the
+occasional clash of crockery, and the clang of iron upon iron about the
+stove, and the quick tread of women's feet upon the bare floor. With
+these pleasant noises came the smell of cooking, and later there was an
+opening and shutting of doors, with a thrill of the freezing air from
+without, and the dull thumping of Whitwell's rubber boots, and the
+quicker flapping of Jombateeste's soft leathern soles. Then there was the
+sweep of skirted feet at the parlor door, and Cynthia Whitwell came in
+without perceiving him. She went to the table by the darkening window,
+and quickly turned up the light of the lamp. In her ignorance of his
+presence, he saw her as if she had been alone, almost as if she were out
+of the body; he received from her unconsciousness the impression of
+something rarely pure and fine, and he had a sudden compassion for her,
+as for something precious that is fated to be wasted or misprized. At a
+little movement which he made to relieve himself from a sense of
+eavesdropping, she gave a start, and shut her lips upon the little cry
+that would have escaped from another sort of woman.
+
+"I didn't know you were here," she said; and she flushed with the shyness
+of him which she always showed at first. She had met him already with the
+rest, but they had scarcely spoken together; and he knew of the struggle
+she must now be making with herself when she went on: "I didn't know you
+had been called. I thought you were still sleeping."
+
+"Yes. I seemed to sleep for centuries," said West over, "and I woke up
+feeling coeval with Lion's Head. But I hope to grow younger again."
+
+She faltered, and then she asked: "Did you see the light on it when the
+sun went down?"
+
+"I wish I hadn't. I could never get that light--even if it ever came
+again."
+
+"It's there every afternoon, when it's clear."
+
+"I'm sorry for that; I shall have to try for it, then."
+
+"Wasn't that what you came for?" she asked, by one of the efforts she was
+making with everything she said. He could have believed he saw the pulse
+throbbing in her neck. But she held herself stone-still, and he divined
+her resolution to conquer herself, if she should die for it.
+
+"Yes, I came for that," said Westover. "That's what makes it so
+dismaying. If I had only happened on it, I shouldn't have been
+responsible for the failure I shall make of it."
+
+She smiled, as if she liked his lightness, but doubted if she ought. "We
+don't often get Lion's Head clear of snow."
+
+"Yes; that's another hardship," said the painter. "Everything is against
+me! If we don't have a snow overnight, and a cloudy day to-morrow, I
+shall be in despair."
+
+She played with the little wheel of the wick; she looked down, and then,
+with a glance flashed at him, she gasped: "I shall have to take your lamp
+for the table tea is ready."
+
+"Oh, well, if you will only take me with it. I'm frightfully hungry."
+
+Apparently she could not say anything to that. He tried to get the lamp
+to carry it out for her, but she would not let him. "It isn't heavy," she
+said, and hurried out before him.
+
+It was all nothing, but it was all very charming, and Westover was richly
+content with it; and yet not content, for he felt that the pleasure of it
+was not truly his, but was a moment of merely borrowed happiness.
+
+The table was laid in the old farm-house sitting-room where he had been
+served alone when he first came to Lion's Head. But now he sat down with
+the whole family, even to Jombateeste, who brought in a faint odor of the
+barn with him.
+
+They had each been in contact with the finer world which revisits nature
+in the summer-time, and they must all have known something of its usages,
+but they had reverted in form and substance to the rustic living of their
+neighbors. They had steak for Westover, and baked potatoes; but for
+themselves they had such farm fare as Mrs. Durgin had given him the first
+time he supped there. They made their meal chiefly of doughnuts and tea,
+and hot biscuit, with some sweet dishes of a festive sort added in
+recognition of his presence; and there was mince-pie for all. Mrs. Durgin
+and Whitwell ate with their knives, and Jombateeste filled himself so
+soon with every implement at hand that he was able to ask excuse of the
+others if he left them for the horses before they had half finished.
+Frank Whitwell fed with a kind of official or functional conformity to
+the ways of summer folks; but Cynthia, at whom Westover glanced with
+anxiety, only drank some tea and ate a little bread and butter. He was
+ashamed of his anxiety, for he had owned that it ought not to have
+mattered if she had used her knife like her father; and it seemed to him
+as if he had prompted Mrs. Durgin by his curious glance to say: "We don't
+know half the time how the child lives. Cynthy! Take something to eat!"
+
+Cynthia pleaded that she was not hungry; Mrs. Durgin declared that she
+would die if she kept on as she was going; and then the girl escaped to
+the kitchen on one of the errands which she made from time to time
+between the stove and the table.
+
+"I presume it's your coming, Mr. Westover," Mrs. Durgin went on, with the
+comfortable superiority of elderly people to all the trials of the young.
+"I don't know why she should make a stranger of you, every time. You've
+known her pretty much all her life."
+
+"Ever since you give Jeff what he deserved for scaring her and Frank with
+his dog," said Whitwell.
+
+"Poor Fox!" Mrs. Durgin sighed. "He did have the least sense for a dog I
+ever saw. And Jeff used to be so fond of him! Well, I guess he got tired
+of him, too, toward the last."
+
+"He's gone to the happy hunting-grounds now. Colorady didn't agree with
+him-or old age," said Whitwell. "I don't see why the Injuns wa'n't
+right," he pursued, thoughtfully. "If they've got souls, why ha'n't their
+dogs? I suppose Mr. Westover here would say there wa'n't any certainty
+about the Injuns themselves!"
+
+"You know my weak point, Mr. Whitwell," the painter confessed. "But I
+can't prove they haven't."
+
+"Nor dogs, neither, I guess," said Whitwell, tolerantly. "It's curious,
+though, if animals have got souls, that we ha'n't ever had any
+communications from 'em. You might say that ag'in' the idea."
+
+"No, I'll let you say it," returned Westover. "But a good many of the
+communications seem to come from the lower intelligences, if not the
+lower animals."
+
+Whitwell laughed out his delight in the thrust. "Well, I guess that's
+something so. And them old Egyptian devils, over there, that you say
+discovered the doctrine of immortality, seemed to think a cat was about
+as good as a man. What's that," he appealed to Mrs. Durgin, "Jackson said
+in his last letter about their cat mummies?"
+
+"Well, I guess I'll finish my supper first," said Mrs. Durgin, whose
+nerves Westover would not otherwise have suspected of faintness. "But
+Jackson's letters," she continued, loyally, "are about the best letters!"
+
+"Know they'd got some of 'em in the papers?" Whitwell asked; and at the
+surprise that Westover showed he told him how a fellow who was trying to
+make a paper go over at the Huddle, had heard of Jackson's letters and
+teased for some of them, and had printed them as neighborhood news in
+that side of his paper which he did not buy ready printed in Boston.
+
+Mrs. Durgin studied with modest deprecation the effect of the fact upon
+Westover, and seemed satisfied with it. "Well, of course, it's
+interestin' to Jackson's old friends in the country, here. They know he'd
+look at things, over there, pretty much as they would. Well, I had to
+lend the letters round so much, anyway, it was a kind of a relief to have
+'em in the paper, where everybody could see 'em, and be done with it. Mr.
+Whit'ell here, he fixes 'em up so's to leave out the family part, and I
+guess they're pretty well thought of."
+
+Westover said he had no doubt they were, and he should want to see all
+the letters they could show him, in print and out of print.
+
+"If Jackson only had Jeff's health and opportunities--" the mother began,
+with a suppressed passion in her regret.
+
+Frank Whitwell pushed back his chair. "I guess I'll ask to be excused,"
+he said to the head of table.
+
+"There! I a'n't goin' to say any more about that, if that's what you're
+afraid of, Frank," said Mrs. Durgin. "Well, I presume I do talk a good
+deal about Jackson when I get goin', and I presume it's natural Cynthy
+shouldn't want I should talk about Jeff before folks. Frank, a'n't you
+goin' to wait for that plate of hot biscuit?--if she ever gits it here!"
+
+"I guess I don't care for anything more," said Frank, and he got himself
+out of the room more inarticulately than he need, Westover thought.
+
+His, father followed his retreat with an eye of humorous intelligence. "I
+guess Frank don't want to keep the young ladies waitin' a great while.
+There's a church sociable over 't the Huddle," he explained to Westover.
+
+"Oh, that's it, is it?" Mrs. Durgin put in. "Why didn't he say so."
+
+"Well, the young folks don't any of 'em seem to want to talk about such
+things nowadays, and I don't know as they ever did." Whitwell took
+Westover into his confidence with a wink.
+
+The biscuit that Cynthia brought in were burned a little on top, and Mrs.
+Durgin recognized the fact with the question, "Did you get to studyin',
+out there? Take one, do, Mr. Westover! You ha'n't made half a meal! If I
+didn't keep round after her, I don't know what would become of us all.
+The young ladies down at Boston, any of 'em, try to keep up with the
+fellows in college?"
+
+"I suppose they do in the Harvard Annex," said Westover, simply, in spite
+of the glance with which Mrs. Durgin tried to convey a covert meaning. He
+understood it afterward, but for the present his single-mindedness spared
+the girl.
+
+She remained to clear away the table, when the rest left it, and Westover
+followed Mrs. Durgin into the parlor, where she indemnified herself for
+refraining from any explicit allusion to Jeff before Cynthia. "The boy,"
+she explained, when she had made him ransack his memory for every scrap
+of fact concerning her son, "don't hardly ever write to me, and I guess
+he don't give Cynthy very much news. I presume he's workin' harder than
+ever this year. And I'm glad he's goin' about a little, from what you
+say. I guess he's got to feelin' a little better. It did worry me for him
+to feel so what you may call meechin' about folks. You see anything that
+made you think he wa'n't appreciated?"
+
+After Westover got back into his own room, some one knocked at his door,
+and he found Whitwell outside. He scarcely asked him to come in, but
+Whitwell scarcely needed the invitation. "Got everything you want? I told
+Cynthy I'd come up and see after you; Frank won't be back in time." He
+sat down and put his feet on top of the stove, and struck the heels of
+his boots on its edge, from the habit of knocking the caked snow off them
+in that way on stove-tops. He did not wait to find out that there was no
+responsive sizzling before he asked, with a long nasal sigh, "Well, how
+is Jeff gettin' along?"
+
+He looked across at Westover, who had provisionally seated himself on his
+bed.
+
+"Why, in the old way." Whitwell kept his eye on him, and he added: "I
+suppose we don't any of us change; we develop."
+
+Whitwell smiled with pleasure in the loosely philosophic suggestion. "You
+mean that he's the same kind of a man that he was a boy? Well, I guess
+that's so. The question is, what kind of a boy was he? I've been mullin'
+over that consid'able since Cynthy and him fixed it up together. Of
+course, I know it's their business, and all that; but I presume I've got
+a right to spee'late about it?"
+
+He referred the point to Westover, who knew an inner earnestness in it,
+in spite of Whitwell's habit of outside jocosity. "Every right in the
+world, I should say, Mr. Whitwell," he answered, seriously.
+
+"Well, I'm glad you feel that way," said Whitwell, with a little apparent
+surprise. "I don't want to meddle, any; but I know what Cynthy is--I no
+need to brag her up--and I don't feel so over and above certain 't I know
+what he is. He's a good deal of a mixture, if you want to know how he
+strikes me. I don't mean I don't like him; I do; the fellow's got a way
+with him that makes me kind of like him when I see him. He's good-natured
+and clever; and he's willin' to take any amount of trouble for you; but
+you can't tell where to have him." Westover denied the appeal for
+explicit assent in Whitwell's eye, and he went on: "If I'd done that
+fellow a good turn, in spite of him, or if I'd held him up to something
+that he allowed was right, and consented to, I should want to keep a
+sharp lookout that he didn't play me some ugly trick for it. He's a
+comical devil," Whitwell ended, rather inadequately. "How d's it look to
+you? Seen anything lately that seemed to tally with my idee?"
+
+"No, no; I can't say that I have," said Westover, reluctantly. He wished
+to be franker than he now meant to be, but he consulted a scruple that he
+did not wholly respect; a mere convention it seemed to him, presently. He
+said: "I've always felt that charm in him, too, and I've seen the other
+traits, though not so clearly as you seem to have done. He has a powerful
+will, yes--"
+
+He stopped, and Whitwell asked: "Been up to any deviltry lately?"
+
+"I can't say he has. Nothing that I can call intentional."
+
+"No," said Whitwell. "What's he done, though?"
+
+"Really, Mr. Whitwell, I don't know that you have any right to expect me
+to talk him over, when I'm here as his mother's guest--his own guest--?"
+
+"No. I ha'n't," said Whitwell. "What about the father of the girl he's
+goin' to marry?"
+
+Westover could not deny the force of this. "You'd be anxious if I didn't
+tell you what I had in mind, I dare say, more than if I did." He told him
+of Jeff's behavior with Alan Lynde, and of his talk with him about it.
+"And I think he was honest. It was something that happened, that wasn't
+meant."
+
+Whitwell did not assent directly, somewhat to Westover's surprise. He
+asked: "Fellow ever done anything to Jeff?"
+
+"Not that I know of. I don't know that they ever met before."
+
+Whitwell kicked his heels on the edge of the stove again. "Then it might
+been an accident," he said, dryly.
+
+Westover had to break the silence that followed, and he found himself
+defending Jeff, though somehow not for Jeff's sake. He urged that if he
+had the strong will they both recognized in him, he would never commit
+the errors of a weak man, which were usually the basest.
+
+"How do you know that a strong-willed man a'n't a weak one?" Whitwell
+astonished him by asking. "A'n't what we call a strong will just a kind
+of a bull-dog clinch that the dog himself can't unloose? I take it a man
+that has a good will is a strong man. If Jeff done a right thing against
+his will, he wouldn't rest easy till he'd showed that he wa'n't obliged
+to, by some mischief worse 'n what he was kept out of. I tell you, Mr.
+Westover, if I'd made that fellow toe the mark any way, I'd be afraid of
+him." Whitwell looked at Westover with eyes of significance, if not of
+confidence. Then he rose with a prolonged "M--wel-l-l! We're all born,
+but we a'n't all buried. This world is a queer place. But I guess Jeff
+'ll come out right in the end."
+
+Westover said, "I'm sure he will!" and he shook hands warmly with the
+father of the girl Jeff was going to marry.
+
+Whitwell came back, after he had got some paces away, and said: "Of
+course, this is between you and me, Mr. Westover."
+
+"Of course!"
+
+"I don't mean Mis' Durgin. I shouldn't care what she thought of my
+talkin' him over with you. I don't know," he continued, putting up his
+hand against the door-frame, to give himself the comfort of its support
+while he talked, "as you understood what she mean by the young ladies at
+Boston keepin' up with the fellows in college. Well, that's what Cynthy's
+doin' with Jeff, right along; and if he ever works off them conditions of
+his, and gits his degree, it' ll be because she helped him to. I tell
+you, there's more than one kind of telepathy in this world, Mr. Westover.
+That's all."
+
+
+
+
+XXXIX
+
+Westover understood from Whitwell's afterthought that it was Cynthia he
+was anxious to keep ignorant of his misgivings, if they were so much as
+misgivings. But the importance of this fact could not stay him against
+the tide of sleep which was bearing him down. When his head touched the
+pillow it swept over him, and he rose from it in the morning with a
+gayety of heart which he knew to be returning health. He jumped out of
+bed, and stuffed some shavings into his stove from the wood-box beside
+it, and laid some logs on them; he slid the damper open, and then lay
+down again, listening to the fire that showed its red teeth through the
+slats and roared and laughed to the day which sparkled on the white world
+without. When he got out of bed a second time, he found the room so hot
+that he had to pull down his window-sash, and he dressed in a temperature
+of twenty degrees below zero without knowing that the dry air was more
+than fresh. Mrs. Durgin called to him through the open door of her
+parlor, as he entered the dining-room: "Cynthy will give you your
+breakfast, Mr. Westover. We're all done long ago, and I'm busy in here,"
+and the girl appeared with the coffee-pot and the dishes she had been
+keeping hot for him at the kitchen stove. She seemed to be going to leave
+him when she had put them down before him, but she faltered, and then she
+asked: "Do you want I should pour your coffee for you?"
+
+"Oh yes! Do!" he begged, and she sat down across the table from him. "I'm
+ashamed to make this trouble for you," he added. "I didn't know it was so
+late."
+
+"Oh, we have the whole day for our work," she answered, tolerantly.
+
+He laughed, and said: "How strange that seems! I suppose I shall get used
+to it. But in town we seem never to have a whole day for a day's work; we
+always have to do part of it at night, or the next morning. Do you ever
+have a day here that's too large a size for its work?"
+
+"You can nearly always find something to do about a house," she returned,
+evasively. "But the time doesn't go the way it does in the summer."
+
+"Oh, I know how the country is in the winter," he said. "I was brought up
+in the country."
+
+"I didn't know that," she said, and she gave him a stare of surprise
+before her eyes fell.
+
+"Yes. Out in Wisconsin. My people were emigrants, and I lived in the
+woods, there, till I began to paint my way out. I began pretty early, but
+I was in the woods till I was sixteen."
+
+"I didn't know that," she repeated. "I always thought that you were--"
+
+"Summer folks, like the rest? No, I'm all-the-year-round folks
+originally. But I haven't been in the country in the winter since I was a
+boy; and it's all been coming back to me, here, like some one else's
+experience."
+
+She did not say anything, but the interest in her eyes, which she could
+not keep from his face now, prompted him to go on.
+
+"You can make a beginning in the West easier than you can in the East,
+and some people who came to our lumber camp discovered me, and gave me a
+chance to begin. I went to Milwaukee first, and they made me think I was
+somebody. Then I came on to New York, and they made me think I was
+nobody. I had to go to Europe to find out which I was; but after I had
+been there long enough I didn't care to know. What I was trying to do was
+the important thing to me; not the fellow who was trying to do it."
+
+"Yes," she said, with intelligence.
+
+"I met some Boston people in Italy, and I thought I should like to live
+where that kind of people lived. That's the way I came to be in Boston.
+It all seems very simple now, but I used to think it might look romantic
+from the outside. I've had a happy life; and I'm glad it began in the
+country. I shouldn't care if it ended there. I don't know why I've
+bothered you with my autobiography, though. Perhaps because I thought you
+knew it already."
+
+She looked as if she would have said something fitting if she could have
+ruled herself to it; but she said nothing at all. Her failure seemed to
+abash her, and she could only ask him if he would not have some more
+coffee, and then excuse herself, and leave him to finish his breakfast
+alone.
+
+That day he tried for his picture from several points out-of-doors before
+he found that his own window gave him the best. With the window open, and
+the stove warm at his back, he worked there in great comfort nearly every
+afternoon. The snows kept off, and the clear sunsets burned behind the
+summit day after day. He painted frankly and faithfully, and made a
+picture which, he said to himself, no one would believe in, with that
+warm color tender upon the frozen hills. The soft suffusion of the winter
+scene was improbable to him when he had it in, nature before his eyes;
+when he looked at it as he got it on his canvas it was simply impossible.
+
+In the forenoons he had nothing to do, for he worked at his picture only
+when the conditions renewed themselves with the sinking sun. He tried to
+be in the open air, and get the good of it; but his strength for walking
+had failed him, and he kept mostly to the paths broken around the house.
+He went a good deal to the barn with Whitwell and Jombateeste to look
+after the cattle and the horses, whose subdued stamping and champing gave
+him a sort of animal pleasure. The blended odors of the hay-mows and of
+the creatures' breaths came to him with the faint warmth which their
+bodies diffused through the cold obscurity.
+
+When the wide doors were rolled back, and the full day was let in, he
+liked the appeal of their startled eyes, and the calls they made to one
+another from their stalls, while the men spoke back to them in terms
+which they seemed to have in common with them, and with the poultry that
+flew down from the barn lofts to the barn floor and out into the
+brilliant day, with loud clamor and affected alarm.
+
+In these simple experiences he could not imagine the summer life of the
+place. It was nowhere more extinct than in the hollow verandas, where the
+rocking-chairs swung in July and August, and where Westover's steps in
+his long tramps up and down woke no echo of the absent feet. In-doors he
+kept to the few stove-heated rooms where he dwelt with the family, and
+sent only now and then a vague conjecture into the hotel built round the
+old farm-house. He meant, before he left, to ask Mrs. Durgin to let him
+go through the hotel, but he put it off from day to day, with a physical
+shrinking from its cold and solitude.
+
+The days went by in the swiftness of monotony. His excursions to the
+barn, his walks on the verandas, his work on his picture, filled up the
+few hours of the light, and when the dark came he contentedly joined the
+little group in Mrs. Durgin's parlor. He had brought two or three books
+with him, and sometimes he read from one of them; or he talked with
+Whitwell on some of the questions of life and death that engaged his
+speculative mind. Jombateeste preferred the kitchen for the naps he took
+after supper before his early bedtime. Frank Whitwell sat with his books
+there, where Westover sometimes saw his sister helping him at his
+studies. He was loyally faithful and obedient to her in all things. He
+helped her with the dishes, and was not ashamed to be seen at this work;
+she had charge of his goings and comings in society; he submitted to her
+taste in his dress, and accepted her counsel on many points which he
+referred to her, and discussed with her in low-spoken conferences. He
+seemed a formal, serious boy, shy like his sister; his father let fall
+some hints of a religious cast of mind in him. He had an ambition beyond
+the hotel; he wished to study for the ministry; and it was not alone the
+chance of going home with the girls that made him constant at the evening
+meetings. "I don't know where he gits it," said his father, with a shake
+of the head that suggested doubt of the wisdom of the son's preference of
+theology to planchette.
+
+Cynthia had the same care of her father as of her brother; she kept him
+neat, and held him up from lapsing into the slovenliness to which he
+would have tended if she had not, as Westover suspected, made constant
+appeals to him for the respect due their guest. Mrs. Durgin, for her
+part, left everything to Cynthia, with a contented acceptance of her
+future rule and an abiding trust in her sense and strength, which
+included the details of the light work that employed her rather luxurious
+leisure. Jombateeste himself came to Cynthia with his mending, and her
+needle kept him tight and firm against the winter which it amused
+Westover to realize was the Canuck's native element, insomuch that there
+was now something incongruous in the notion of Jombateeste and any other
+season.
+
+The girl's motherly care of all the household did not leave Westover out.
+Buttons appeared on garments long used to shifty contrivances for getting
+on without them; buttonholes were restored to their proper limits; his
+overcoat pockets were searched for gloves, and the gloves put back with
+their finger-tips drawn close as the petals of a flower which had decided
+to shut and be a bud again.
+
+He wondered how he could thank her for his share of the blessing that her
+passion for motherly care was to all the house. It was pathetic, and he
+used sometimes to forecast her self-devotion with a tender indignation,
+which included a due sense of his own present demerit. He was not
+reconciled to the sacrifice because it seemed the happiness, or at least
+the will, of the nature which made it. All the same it seemed a waste, in
+its relation to the man she was to marry.
+
+Mrs. Durgin and Cynthia sat by the lamp and sewed at night, or listened
+to the talk of the men. If Westover read aloud, they whispered together
+from time to time about some matters remote from it, as women always do
+where there is reading. It was quiet, but it was not dull for Westover,
+who found himself in no hurry to get back to town.
+
+Sometimes he thought of the town with repulsion; its unrest, its vacuous,
+troubled life haunted him like a memory of sickness; but he supposed that
+when he should be quite well again all that would change, and be as it
+was before. He interested himself, with the sort of shrewd ignorance of
+it that Cynthia showed in the questions she asked about it now and then
+when they chanced to be left alone together. He fancied that she was
+trying to form some intelligible image of Jeff's environment there, and
+was piecing together from his talk of it the impressions she had got from
+summer folks. He did his best to help her, and to construct for her a
+veritable likeness of the world as far as he knew it.
+
+A time came when he spoke frankly of Jeff in something they were saying,
+and she showed no such shrinking as he had expected she would; he
+reflected that she might have made stricter conditions with Mrs. Durgin
+than she expected to keep herself in mentioning him. This might well have
+been necessary with the mother's pride in her son, which knew no stop
+when it once began to indulge itself. What struck Westover more than the
+girl's self-possession when they talked of Jeff was a certain austerity
+in her with regard to him. She seemed to hold herself tense against any
+praise of him, as if she should fail him somehow if she relaxed at all in
+his favor.
+
+This, at least, was the rather mystifying impression which Westover got
+from her evident wish to criticise and understand exactly all that he
+reported, rather than to flatter herself from it. Whatever her motive
+was, he was aware that through it all she permitted herself a closer and
+fuller trust of himself. At times it was almost too implicit; he would
+have liked to deserve it better by laying open all that had been in his
+heart against Jeff. But he forbore, of course, and he took refuge, as
+well as he could, in the respect by which she held herself at a reverent
+distance from him when he could not wholly respect himself.
+
+
+
+
+XL.
+
+One morning Westover got leave from Mrs. Durgin to help Cynthia open the
+dim rooms and cold corridors at the hotel to the sun and air. She
+promised him he should take his death, but he said he would wrap up warm,
+and when he came to join the girl in his overcoat and fur cap, he found
+Cynthia equipped with a woollen cloud tied around her head, and a little
+shawl pinned across her breast.
+
+"Is that all?" he reproached her. "I ought to have put on a single wreath
+of artificial flowers and some sort of a blazer for this expedition.
+Don't you think so, Mrs. Durgin?"
+
+"I believe women can stand about twice as much cold as you can, the best
+of you," she answered, grimly.
+
+"Then I must try to keep myself as warm as I can with work," he said.
+"You must let me do all the rough work of airing out, won't you,
+Cynthia?"
+
+"There isn't any rough work about it," she answered, in a sort of
+motherly toleration of his mood, without losing anything of her filial
+reverence.
+
+She took care of him, he perceived, as she took care of her brother and
+her father, but with a delicate respect for his superiority, which was no
+longer shyness.
+
+They began with the office and the parlor, where they flung up the
+windows, and opened the doors, and then they opened the dining-room,
+where the tables stood in long rows, with the chairs piled on them legs
+upward. Cynthia went about with many sighs for the dust on everything,
+though to Westover's eyes it all seemed frigidly clean. "If it goes on as
+it has for the past two years," she said, "we shall have to add on a new
+dining-room. I don't know as I like to have it get so large!"
+
+"I never wanted it to go beyond the original farmhouse," said Westover.
+"I've been jealous of every boarder but the first. I should have liked to
+keep it for myself, and let the world know Lion's Head from my pictures."
+
+"I guess Mrs. Durgin thinks it was your picture that began to send people
+here."
+
+"And do you blame me, too? What if the thing I'm doing now should make it
+a winter resort? Nothing could save you, then, but a fire. I believe
+that's Jeff's ambition. Only he would want to put another hotel in place
+of this; something that would be more popular. Then the ruin I began
+would be complete, and I shouldn't come any more; I couldn't bear the
+sight."
+
+"I guess Mrs. Durgin wouldn't think it was lion's Head if you stopped
+coming," said Cynthia.
+
+"But you would know better than that," said Westover; and then he was
+sorry he had said it, for it seemed to ask something of different quality
+from her honest wish to make him know their regard for him.
+
+She did not answer, but went down a long corridor to which they had
+mounted, to raise the window at the end, while he raised another at the
+opposite extremity. When they met at the stairway again to climb to the
+story above, he said: "I am always ashamed when I try to make a person of
+sense say anything silly," and she flushed, still without answering, as
+if she understood him, and his meaning pleased her. "But fortunately a
+person of sense is usually equal to the temptation. One ought to be
+serious when he tries it with a person of the other sort; but I don't
+know that one is!"
+
+"Do you feel any draught between these windows?" asked Cynthia, abruptly.
+"I don't want you should take cold."
+
+"Oh, I'm all right," said Westover.
+
+She went into the rooms on one side of the corridor, and put up their
+windows, and flung the blinds back. He did the same on the other side. He
+got a peculiar effect of desolation from the mattresses pulled down over
+the foot of the bedsteads, and the dismantled interiors reflected in the
+mirrors of the dressing-cases; and he was going to speak of it when he
+rejoined Cynthia at the stairway leading to the third story, when she
+said, "Those were Mrs. Vostrand's rooms I came out of the last." She
+nodded her head over her shoulder toward the floor they were leaving.
+
+"Were they indeed! And do you remember people's rooms so long?"
+
+"Yes; I always think of rooms by the name of people that have them, if
+they're any way peculiar."
+
+He thought this bit of uncandor charming, and accepted it as if it were
+the whole truth. "And Mrs. Vostrand was certainly peculiar. Tell me,
+Cynthia, what did you think of her?"
+
+"She was only here a little while."
+
+"But you wouldn't have come to think of her rooms by her name if she
+hadn't made a strong impression on you!" She did not answer, and he said,
+"I see you didn't like her!"
+
+The girl would not speak, and Mr. Westover went on: "She used to be very
+good to me, and I think she used to be better to herself than she is
+now." He knew that Jeff must have told Cynthia of his affair with
+Genevieve Vostrand, and he kept himself from speaking of her by a
+resolution he thought creditable, as he mounted the stairs to the upper
+story in the silence to which Cynthia left his last remark. At the top
+she made a little pause in the obscurer light of the close-shuttered
+corridor, while she said: "I liked her daughter the best."
+
+"Yes?" he returned. "I--never felt very well acquainted with her, I
+believe. One couldn't get far with her. Though, for the matter of that,
+one didn't get far with Mrs. Vostrand herself. Did you think Genevieve
+was much influenced by her mother?"
+
+"She didn't seem a strong character."
+
+"No, that was it. She was what her mother wished her to be. I've often
+wondered how much she was interested in the marriage she made."
+
+Cynthia let a rustic silence ensue, and Westover shrank again from the
+inquisition he longed to make.
+
+It was not Genevieve Vostrand's marriage which really concerned him, but
+Cynthia's engagement, and it was her mind that he would have liked to
+look into. It might well be supposed that she regarded it in a perfect
+matter-of-fact way, and with no ambition beyond it. She was a country
+girl, acquainted from childhood with facts of life which town-bred girls
+would not have known without a blunting of the sensibilities, and why
+should she be different from other country girls? She might be as good
+and as fine as he saw her, and yet be insensible to the spiritual
+toughness of Jeff, because of her love for him. Her very goodness might
+make his badness unimaginable to her, and if her refinement were from the
+conscience merely, and not from the tastes and experiences, too, there
+was not so much to dread for her in her marriage with such a man. Still,
+he would have liked, if he could, to tell her what he had told her father
+of Durgin's behavior with Lynde, and let her bring the test of her
+self-devotion to the case with a clear understanding. He had sometimes
+been afraid that Whitwell might not be able to keep it to himself; but
+now he wished that the philosopher had not been so discreet. He had all
+this so absorbingly in mind that he started presently with the fear that
+she had said something and he had not answered, but when he asked her he
+found that she had not spoken. They were standing at an open window
+looking out upon Lion's Head, when he said: "I don't know how I shall
+show my gratitude to Mrs. Durgin and you for thinking of having me up
+here. I've done a picture of Lion's Head that might be ever so much
+worse; but I shouldn't have dreamed of getting at it if it hadn't been
+for you, though I've so often dreamed of doing it. Now I shall go home
+richer in every sort of way-thanks to you."
+
+She answered, simply: "You needn't thank anybody; but it was Jeff who
+thought of it; we were ready enough to ask you."
+
+"That was very good of him," said Westover, whom her words confirmed in a
+suspicion he had had all along. But what did it matter that Jeff had
+suggested their asking him, and then attributed the notion to them? It
+was not so malign for him to use that means of ingratiating himself with
+Westover, and of making him forget his behavior with Lynde, and it was
+not unnatural. It was very characteristic; at the worst it merely proved
+that Jeff was more ashamed of what he had done than he would allow, and
+that was to his credit.
+
+He heard Cynthia asking: "Mr. Westover, have you ever been at Class Day?
+He wants us to come."
+
+"Class Day? Oh, Class Day!" He took a little time to gather himself
+together. "Yes, I've been at a good many. If you care to see something
+pretty, it's the prettiest thing in the world. The students' sisters and
+mothers come from everywhere; and there's fashion and feasting and
+flirting, from ten in the morning till ten at night. I'm not sure there's
+so much happiness; but I can't tell. The young people know about that. I
+fancy there's a good deal of defeat and disappointment in it all. But if
+you like beautiful dresses, and music and dancing, and a great flutter of
+gayety, you can get more of it at Class Day than you can in any other
+way. The good time depends a great deal upon the acquaintance a student
+has, and whether he is popular in college." Westover found this road a
+little impassable, and he faltered.
+
+Cynthia did not apparently notice his hesitation. "Do you think Mrs.
+Durgin would like it?"
+
+"Mrs. Durgin?" Westover found that he had been leaving her out of the
+account, and had been thinking only of Cynthia's pleasure or pain. "Well,
+I don't suppose--it would be rather fatiguing--Did Jeff want her to come
+too?"
+
+"He said so."
+
+"That's very nice of him. If he could devote himself to her; but--And
+would she like to go?"
+
+"To please him, she would." Westover was silent, and the girl surprised
+him by the appeal she suddenly made to him. "Mr. Westover, do you believe
+it would be very well for either of us to go? I think it would be better
+for us to leave all that part of his life alone. It's no use in
+pretending that we're like the kind of people he knows, or that we know
+their ways, and I don't believe--"
+
+Westover felt his heart rise in indignant sympathy. "There isn't any one
+he knows to compare with you!" he said, and in this he was thinking
+mainly of Bessie Lynde. "You're worth a thousand--If I were--if he's half
+a man he would be proud--I beg your pardon! I don't mean--but you
+understand--"
+
+Cynthia put her head far out of the window and looked along the steep
+roof before them. "There is a blind off one of the windows. I heard it
+clapping in the wind the other night. I must go and see the number of the
+room." She drew her head in quickly and ran away without letting him see
+her face.
+
+He followed her. "Let me help you put it on again!"
+
+"No, no!" she called back. "Frank will do that, or Jombateeste, when they
+come to shut up the house."
+
+
+
+
+XLI.
+
+Westover, did not meet Durgin for several days after his return from
+Lion's Head. He brought messages for him from his mother and from
+Whitwell, and he waited for him to come and get them so long that he had
+to blame himself for not sending them to him. When Jeff appeared, at the
+end of a week, Westover had a certain embarrassment in meeting him, and
+the effort to overcome this carried him beyond his sincerity. He was
+aware of feigning the cordiality he showed, and of having less real
+liking for him than ever before. He suggested that he must be busier
+every day, now, with his college work, and he resented the air of social
+prosperity which Jeff put on in saying, Yes, there was that, and then he
+had some engagements which kept him from coming in sooner.
+
+He did not say what the engagements were, and they did not recur to the
+things they had last spoken of. Westover could not do so without Jeff's
+leading, and he was rather glad that he gave none. He stayed only a
+little time, which was spent mostly in a show of interest on both sides,
+and the hollow hilarities which people use to mask their indifference to
+one another's being and doing. Jeff declared that he had never seen
+Westover looking so well, and said he must go up to Lion's Head again; it
+had done him good. As for his picture, it was a corker; it made him feel
+as if he were there! He asked about all the folks, and received
+Westover's replies with vague laughter, and an absence in his bold eye,
+which made the painter wonder what his mind was on, without the wish to
+find out. He was glad to have him go, though he pressed him to drop in
+soon again, and said they would take in a play together.
+
+Jeff said he would like to do that, and he asked at the door whether
+Westover was going to the tea at Mrs. Bellingham's. He said he had to
+look in there, before he went out to Cambridge; and left Westover in mute
+amaze at the length he had apparently gone in a road that had once seemed
+no thoroughfare for him. Jeff's social acceptance, even after the Enderby
+ball, which was now some six or seven weeks past, had been slow; but of
+late, for no reason that he or any one else could have given, it had
+gained a sudden precipitance; and people who wondered why they met him at
+other houses began to ask him to their own.
+
+He did not care to go to their houses, and he went at first in the hope
+of seeing Bessie Lynde again. But this did not happen for some time, and
+it was a mid-Lenten tea that brought them together. As soon as he caught
+sight of her he went up to her and began to talk as if they had been in
+the habit of meeting constantly. She could not control a little start at
+his approach, and he frankly recognized it.
+
+"What's the matter?"
+
+"Oh--the window!"
+
+"It isn't open," he said, trying it. "Do you want to try it yourself?"
+
+"I think I can trust you," she answered, but she sank a little into the
+shelter of the curtains, not to be seen talking with him, perhaps, or not
+to be interrupted--she did not analyze her motive closely.
+
+He remained talking to her until she went away, and then he contrived to
+go with her. She did not try to escape him after that; each time they met
+she had the pleasure of realizing that there had never been any danger of
+what never happened. But beyond this she could perhaps have given no
+better reason for her willingness to meet him again and again than the
+bewildered witnesses of the fact. In her set people not only never
+married outside of it, but they never flirted outside of it. For one of
+themselves, even for a girl like Bessie, whom they had not quite known
+from childhood, to be apparently amusing herself with a man like that, so
+wholly alien in origin, in tradition, was something unheard of; and it
+began to look as if Bessie Lynde was more than amused. It seemed to Mary
+Enderby that wherever she went she saw that man talking to Bessie. She
+could have believed that it was by some evil art that he always contrived
+to reach Bessie's side, if anything could have been less like any kind of
+art than the bold push he made for her as soon as he saw her in a room.
+But sometimes Miss Enderby feared that it was Bessie who used such
+finesse as there was, and always put herself where he could see her. She
+waited with trembling for her to give the affair sanction by making her
+aunt ask him to something at her house. On the other hand, she could not
+help feeling that Bessie's flirtation was all the more deplorable for the
+want of some such legitimation.
+
+She did not even know certainly whether Jeff ever called upon Bessie at
+her aunt's house, till one day the man let him out at the same time he
+let her in.
+
+"Oh, come up, Molly!" Bessie sang out from the floor above, and met her
+half-way down the stairs, where she kissed her and led her embraced into
+the library.
+
+"You don't like my jay, do you, dear?" she asked, promptly.
+
+Mary Enderby turned her face, the mirror of conscience, upon her, and
+asked: "Is he your jay?"
+
+"Well, no; not just in that sense, Molly. But suppose he was?"
+
+"Then I should have nothing to say."
+
+"And suppose he wasn't?"
+
+Still Mary Enderby found herself with nothing of all she had a thousand
+times thought she should say to Bessie if she had ever the slightest
+chance. It always seemed so easy, till now, to take Bessie in her arms,
+and appeal to her good sense, her self-respect, her regard for her family
+and friends; and now it seemed so impossible.
+
+She heard herself answering, very stiffly: "Perhaps I'd better apologize
+for what I've said already. You must think I was very unjust the last
+time we mentioned him."
+
+"Not at all!" cried Bessie, with a laugh that sounded very mocking and
+very unworthy to her friend. "He's all that you said, and worse. But he's
+more than you said, and better."
+
+"I don't understand," said Mary, coldly.
+
+"He's very interesting; he's original; he's different!"
+
+"Oh, every one says that."
+
+"And he doesn't flatter me, or pretend to think much of me. If he did, I
+couldn't bear him. You know how I am, Molly. He keeps me interested,
+don't you understand, and prowling about in the great unknown where he
+has his weird being."
+
+Bessie put her hand to her mouth, and laughed at Mary Enderby with her
+slanted eyes; a sort of Parisian version of a Chinese motive in eyes.
+
+"I suppose," her friend said, sadly, "you won't tell me more than you
+wish."
+
+"I won't tell you more than I know--though I'd like to," said Bessie. She
+gave Mary a sudden hug. "You dear! There isn't anything of it, if that's
+what you mean."
+
+"But isn't there danger that there will be, Bessie?" her friend
+entreated.
+
+"Danger? I shouldn't call it danger, exactly!"
+
+"But if you don't respect him, Bessie--"
+
+"Why, how can I? He doesn't respect me!"
+
+"I know you're teasing, now," said Mary Enderby, getting up, "and you're
+quite right. I have no business to--"
+
+Bessie pulled her down upon the seat again. "Yes, you have! Don't I tell
+you, over and over? He doesn't respect me, because I don't know how to
+make him, and he wouldn't like it if I did. But now I'll try to make you
+understand. I don't believe I care for him the least; but mind, I'm not
+certain, for I've never cared for any one, and I don't know what it's
+like. You know I'm not sentimental; I think sentiment's funny; and I'm
+not dignified--"
+
+"You're divine," murmured Mary Enderby, with reproachful adoration.
+
+"Yes, but you see how my divinity could be improved," said Bessie, with a
+wild laugh. "I'm not sentimental, but I'm emotional, and he gives me
+emotions. He's a riddle, and I'm all the time guessing at him. You get
+the answer to the kind of men we know easily; and it's very nice, but it
+doesn't amuse you so much as trying. Now, Mr. Durgin--what a name! I can
+see it makes you creep--is no more like one of us than a--bear is--and
+his attitude toward us is that of a bear who's gone so much with human
+beings that he thinks he's a human being. He's delightful, that way. And,
+do you know, he's intellectual! He actually brings me books, and wants to
+read passages to me out of them! He has brought me the plans of the new
+hotel he's going to build. It's to be very aesthetic, and it's going to
+be called The Lion's Head Inn. There's to be a little theatre, for
+amateur dramatics, which I could conduct, and for all sorts of
+professional amusements. If you should ever come, Molly, I'm sure we
+shall do our best to make you comfortable."
+
+Mary Enderby would not let Bessie laugh upon her shoulder after she said
+this. "Bessie Lynde," she said, severely, "if you have no regard for
+yourself, you ought to have some regard for him. You may say you are not
+encouraging him, and you may believe it--"
+
+"Oh, I shouldn't say it if I didn't believe it," Bessie broke in, with a
+mock air of seriousness.
+
+"I must be going," said Mary, stiffly, and this time she succeeded in
+getting to her feet.
+
+Bessie laid hold of her again. "You think you've been trifled with, don't
+you, dear?"
+
+"No--"
+
+"Yes, you do! Don't you try to be slippery, Molly. The plain pikestaff is
+your style, morally speaking--if any one knows what a pikestaff is. Well,
+now, listen! You're anxious about me."
+
+"You know how I feel, Bessie," said Mary Enderby, looking her in the
+eyes.
+
+"Yes, I do," said Bessie. "The trouble is, I don't know how I feel. But
+if I ever do, Molly, I'll tell you! Is that fair?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"I'll give you ample warning. At the least little consciousness in the
+region of the pericardium, off will go a note by a district messenger,
+and when you come I'll do whatever you say. There!"
+
+"Oh, Bessie!" cried her friend, and she threw her arms round her, "you
+always were the most fascinating creature in the world!"
+
+"Yes," said Bessie, "that's what I try to have him think."
+
+
+
+
+XLII.
+
+Toward the end of April most people who had places at the Shore were
+mostly in them, but they came up to town on frequent errands, and had one
+effect of evanescence with people who still remained in their Boston
+houses provisionally, and seemed more than half absent. The Enderbys had
+been at the Shore for a fortnight, and the Lyndes were going to be a
+fortnight longer in Boston, yet, as Bessie made her friend observe, when
+Mary, ran in for lunch, or stopped for a moment on her way to the train,
+every few days, they were both of the same transitory quality.
+
+"It might as well be I as you," Bessie said one day, "if we only think
+so. It's all very weird, dear, and I'm not sure but it is you who sit day
+after day at my lonely casement and watch the sparrows examining the
+fuzzy buds of the Jap ivy to see just how soon they can hope to build in
+the vines. Do you object to the ivy buds looking so very much like
+snipped woollen rags? If you do, I'm sure it's you, here in my place, for
+when I come up to town in your personality it sets my teeth on edge. In
+fact, that's the worst thing about Boston now--the fuzzy ivy buds;
+there's so much ivy! When you can forget the buds, there are a great many
+things to make you happy. I feel quite as if we were spending the summer
+in town and I feel very adventurous and very virtuous, like some sort of
+self-righteous bohemian. You don't know how I look down on people who
+have gone out of town. I consider them very selfish and heartless; I
+don't know why, exactly. But when we have a good marrow-freezing
+northeasterly storm, and the newspapers come out with their ironical
+congratulations to the tax-dodgers at the Shore, I feel that Providence
+is on my side, and I'm getting my reward, even in this world." Bessie
+suddenly laughed. "I see by your expression of fixed inattention, Molly,
+that you're thinking of Mr. Durgin!"
+
+Mary gave a start of protest, but she was too honest to deny the fact
+outright, and Bessie ran on:
+
+"No, we don't sit on a bench in the Common, or even in the Garden, or on
+the walk in Commonwealth Avenue. If we come to it later, as the season
+advances, I shall make him stay quite at the other end of the bench, and
+not put his hand along the top. You needn't be afraid, Molly; all the
+proprieties shall be religiously observed. Perhaps I shall ask Aunt
+Louisa to let us sit out on her front steps, when the evenings get
+warmer; but I assure you it's much more comfortable in-doors yet, even in
+town, though you'll hardly, believe it at the Shore. Shall you come up to
+Class Day?"
+
+"Oh, I don't know," Mary began, with a sigh of the baffled hope and the
+inextinguishable expectation which the mention of Class Day stirs in the
+heart of every Boston girl past twenty.
+
+"Yes!" said Bessie, with a sigh burlesqued from Mary's. "That is what we
+all say, and it is certainly the most maddening of human festivals. I
+suppose, if we were quite left to ourselves, we shouldn't go; but we seem
+never to be, quite. After every Class Day I say to myself that nothing on
+earth could induce me to go to another; but when it comes round again, I
+find myself grasping at any straw of a pretext. I'm pretending now that
+I've a tender obligation to go because it's his Class Day."
+
+"Bessie!" cried Mary Enderby. "You don't mean it!"
+
+"Not if I say it, Mary dear. What did I promise you about the pericardiac
+symptoms? But I feel--I feel that if he asks me I must go. Shouldn't you
+like to go and see a jay Class Day--be part of it? Think of going once to
+the Pi Ute spread--or whatever it is! And dancing in their tent! And
+being left out of the Gym, and Beck! Yes, I ought to go, so that it can
+be brought home to me, and I can have a realizing sense of what I am
+doing, and be stayed in my mad career."
+
+"Perhaps," Mary Enderby suggested, colorlessly, "he will be devoted to
+his own people." She had a cold fascination in the picture Bessie's words
+had conjured up, and she was saying this less to Bessie than to herself.
+
+"And I should meet them--his mothers and sisters!"  Bessie dramatized an
+excess of anguish. "Oh, Mary, that is the very thorn I have been trying
+not to press my heart against; and does your hand commend it to my
+embrace? His folks! Yes, they would be folks; and what folks! I think I
+am getting a realizing sense. Wait! Don't speak don't move, Molly!"
+Bessie dropped her chin into her hand, and stared straight forward,
+gripping Mary Enderby's hand.
+
+Mary withdrew it. "I shall have to go, Bessie," she said. "How is your
+aunt?"
+
+"Must you? Then I shall always say that it was your fault that I couldn't
+get a realizing sense--that you prevented me, just when I was about to
+see myself as others see me--as you see me. She's very well!" Bessie
+sighed in earnest, and her friend gave her hand a little pressure of true
+sympathy. "But of course it's rather dull here, now."
+
+"I hate to have you staying on. Couldn't you come down to us for a week?"
+
+"No. We both think it's best to be here when Alan gets back. We want him
+to go down with us." Bessie had seldom spoken openly with Mary Enderby
+about her brother; but that was rather from Mary's shrinking than her
+own; she knew that everybody understood his case. She went so far now as
+to say: "He's ever so much better than he has been. We have such hopes of
+him, if he can keep well, when he gets back this time."
+
+"Oh, I know he will," said Mary, fervently. "I'm sure of it. Couldn't we
+do something for you, Bessie?"
+
+"No, there isn't anything. But--thank you. I know you always think of me,
+and that's worlds. When are you coming up again?"
+
+"I don't know. Next week, some time."
+
+"Come in and see me--and Alan, if he should be at home. He likes you, and
+he will be so glad."
+
+Mary kissed Bessie for consent. "You know how much I admire Alan. He
+could be anything."
+
+"Yes, he could. If he could!"
+
+Bessie seldom put so much earnest in anything, and Mary loved (as she
+would have said) the sad sincerity, the honest hopelessness of her tone.
+"We must help him. I know we can."
+
+"We must try. But people who could--if they could--" Bessie stopped.
+
+Her friend divined that she was no longer speaking wholly of her brother,
+but she said: "There isn't any if about it; and there are no ifs about
+anything if we only think so. It's a sin not to think so."
+
+The mixture of severity and of optimism in the nature of her friend had
+often amused Bessie, and it did not escape her tacit notice in even so
+serious a moment as this. Her theory was that she was shocked to
+recognize it now, because of its relation to her brother, but her
+theories did not always agree with the facts.
+
+That evening, however, she was truly surprised when, after a rather
+belated ring at the door, the card of Mr. Thomas Jefferson Durgin came up
+to her from the reception-room. Her aunt had gone to bed, and she had a
+luxurious moment in which she reaped all the reward of self-denial by
+supposing herself to have foregone the pleasure of seeing him, and
+sending down word that she was not at home. She did not wish, indeed, to
+see him, but she wished to know how he felt warranted in calling in the
+evening, and it was this unworthy, curiosity which she stifled for that
+luxurious moment. The next, with undiminished dignity, she said, "Ask him
+to come up, Andrew," and she waited in the library for him to offer a
+justification of the liberty he had taken.
+
+He offered none whatever, but behaved at once as if he had always had the
+habit of calling in the evening, or as if it was a general custom which
+he need not account for in his own case. He brought her a book which they
+had talked of at their last meeting, but he made no excuse or pretext of
+it.
+
+He said it was a beautiful night, and that he had found it rather warm
+walking in from Cambridge. The exercise had moistened his whole rich, red
+color, and fine drops of perspiration stood on his clean-shaven upper lip
+and in the hollow between his under lip and his bold chin; he pushed back
+the coarse, dark-yellow hair from his forehead with his handkerchief, and
+let his eyes mock her from under his thick, straw-colored eyebrows. She
+knew that he was enjoying his own impudence, and he was so handsome that
+she could not refuse to enjoy it with him. She asked him if he would not
+have a fan, and he allowed her to get it for him from the mantel. "Will
+you have some tea?"
+
+"No; but a glass of water, if you please," he said, and Bessie rang and
+sent for some apollinaris, which Jeff drank a great goblet of when it
+came. Then he lay back in the deep chair he had taken, with the air of
+being ready for any little amusing thing she had to say.
+
+"Are you still a pessimist, Mr. Durgin?" she asked, tentatively, with the
+effect of innocence that he knew meant mischief.
+
+"No," he said. "I'm a reformed optimist."
+
+"What is that?"
+
+"It's a man who can't believe all the good he would like, but likes to
+believe all the good he can."
+
+Bessie said it over, with burlesque thoughtfulness. "There was a girl
+here to-day," she said, solemnly, "who must have been a reformed
+pessimist, then, for she said the same thing."
+
+"Oh! Miss Enderby," said Jeff.
+
+Bessie started. "You're preternatural! But what a pity you should be
+mistaken. How came you to think of her?"
+
+"She doesn't like me, and you always put me on trial after she's been
+here."
+
+"Am I putting you on trial now? It's your guilty conscience! Why
+shouldn't Mary Enderby like you?"
+
+"Because I'm not good enough."
+
+"Oh! And what has that to do with people's liking you? If that was a
+reason, how many friends do you think you would have?"
+
+"I'm not sure that I should have any."
+
+"And doesn't that make you feel badly?"
+
+"Very." Jeff's confession was a smiling one.
+
+"You don't show it!"
+
+"I don't want to grieve you."
+
+"Oh, I'm not sure that would grieve me."
+
+"Well, I thought I wouldn't risk it."
+
+"How considerate of you!"
+
+They had come to a little barrier, up that way, and could go no further.
+Jeff said: "I've just been interviewing another reformed pessimist."
+
+"Mr. Westover?"
+
+"You're preternatural, too. And you're not mistaken, either. Do you ever
+go to his studio?"
+
+"No; I haven't been there since he told me it would be of no use to come
+as a student. He can be terribly frank."
+
+"Nobody knows that better than I do," said Jeff, with a smile for the
+notion of Westover's frankness as he had repeatedly experienced it. "But
+he means well."
+
+"Oh, that's what they always say. But all the frankness can't be well
+meant. Why should uncandor be the only form of malevolence?"
+
+"That's a good idea. I believe I'll put that up on Westover the next time
+he's frank."
+
+"And will you tell me what he says?"
+
+"Oh, I don't know about that." Jeff lay back in his chair at large ease
+and chuckled. "I should like to tell you what he's just been saying to
+me, but I don't believe I can."
+
+"Do!"
+
+"You know he was up at Lion's Head in February, and got a winter
+impression of the mountain. Did you see it?"
+
+"No. Was that what you were talking about?"
+
+"We talked about something a great deal more interesting--the impression
+he got of me."
+
+"Winter impression."
+
+"Cold enough. He had come to the conclusion that I was very selfish and
+unworthy; that I used other people for my own advantage, or let them use
+themselves; that I was treacherous and vindictive, and if I didn't betray
+a man I couldn't be happy till I had beaten him. He said that if I ever
+behaved well, it came after I had been successful one way or the other."
+
+"How perfectly fascinating!" Bessie rested her elbow on the corner of the
+table, and her chin in the palm of the hand whose thin fingers tapped her
+red lips; the light sleeve fell down and showed her pretty, lean little
+forearm. "Did it strike you as true, at all?"
+
+"I could see how it might strike him as true."
+
+"Now you are candid. But go on! What did he expect you to do about it?"
+
+"Nothing. He said he didn't suppose I could help it."
+
+"This is immense," said Bessie. "I hope I'm taking it all in. How came he
+to give you this flattering little impression? So hopeful, too! Or,
+perhaps your frankness doesn't go any farther?"
+
+"Oh, I don't mind saying. He seemed to think it was a sort of abstract
+duty he owed to my people."
+
+"Your-folks?" asked Bessie.
+
+"Yes," said Jeff, with a certain dryness. But as her face looked blankly
+innocent, he must have decided that she meant nothing offensive. He
+relaxed into a broad smile. "It's a queer household up there, in the
+winter. I wonder what you would think of it."
+
+"You might describe it to me, and perhaps we shall see."
+
+"You couldn't realize it," said Jeff, with a finality that piqued her. He
+reached out for the bottle of apollinaris, with somehow the effect of
+being in another student's room, and poured himself a glass. This would
+have amused her, nine times out of ten, but the tenth time had come when
+she chose to resent it.
+
+"I suppose," she said, "you are all very much excited about Class Day at
+Cambridge."
+
+"That sounds like a remark made to open the way to conversation." Jeff
+went on to burlesque a reply in the same spirit. "Oh, very much so
+indeed, Miss Lynde! We are all looking forward to it so eagerly. Are you
+coming?"
+
+She rejected his lead with a slight sigh so skilfully drawn that it
+deceived him when she said, gravely:
+
+"I don't know. It's apt to be a very baffling time at the best. All the
+men that you like are taken up with their own people, and even the men
+that you don't like overvalue themselves, and think they're doing you a
+favor if they give you a turn at the Gym or bring you a plate of
+something."
+
+"Well, they are, aren't they?"
+
+"I suppose, yes, that's what makes me hate it. One doesn't like to have
+such men do one a favor. And then, Juniors get younger every year! Even a
+nice Junior is only a Junior," she concluded, with a sad fall of her
+mocking voice.
+
+"I don't believe there's a Senior in Harvard that wouldn't forsake his
+family and come to the rescue if your feelings could be known," said
+Jeff. He lifted the bottle at his elbow and found it empty, and this
+seemed to remind him to rise.
+
+"Don't make them known, please," said Bessie. "I shouldn't want an
+ovation." She sat, after he had risen, as if she wished to detain him,
+but when he came up to take leave she had to put her hand in his. She
+looked at it there, and so did he; it seemed very little and slim, about
+one-third the size of his palm, and it seemed to go to nothing in his
+grasp. "I should think," she added, "that the jays would have the best
+time on Class Day. I should like to dance at one of their spreads, and do
+everything they did. It would be twice the fun, and there would be some
+nature in it. I should like to see a jay Class Day."
+
+"If you'll come out, I'll show you one," said Jeff, without wincing.
+
+"Oh, will you?" she said, taking away her hand. "That would be
+delightful. But what would become of your folks?" She caught a corner of
+her mouth with her teeth, as if the word had slipped out.
+
+"Do you call them folks?" asked Jeff, quietly:
+
+"I--supposed--Don't you?"
+
+"Not in Boston. I do at Lion's Head."
+
+"Oh! Well-people."
+
+"I don't know as they're coming."
+
+"How delightful! I don't mean that; but if they're not, and if you really
+knew some jays, and could get me a little glimpse of their Class Day--"
+
+"I think I could manage it for you." He spoke as before, but he looked at
+her with a mockery in his lips and eyes as intelligent as her own, and
+the latent change in his mood gave her the sense of being in the presence
+of a vivid emotion. She rose in her excitement; she could see that he
+admired her, and was enjoying her insolence too, in a way, though in a
+way that she did not think she quite understood; and she had the wish to
+make him admire her a little more.
+
+She let a light of laughter come into her eyes, of harmless mischief
+played to an end. "I don't deserve your kindness, and I won't come. I've
+been very wicked, don't you think?"
+
+"Not very--for you," said Jeff.
+
+"Oh, how good!" she broke out. "But be frank now! I've offended you."
+
+"How? I know I'm a jay, and in the country I've got folks."
+
+"Ah, I see you're hurt at my joking, and I'm awfully sorry. I wish there
+was some way of making you forgive me. But it couldn't be that alone,"
+she went on rather aimlessly as to her words, trusting to his answer for
+some leading, and willing meanwhile to prolong the situation for the
+effect in her nerves. It had been a very dull and tedious day, and she
+was finding much more than she could have expected in the mingled fear
+and slight which he inspired her with in such singular measure. These
+feminine subtleties of motive are beyond any but the finest natures in
+the other sex, and perhaps all that Jeff perceived was the note of
+insincerity in her words.
+
+"Couldn't be what alone?" he asked.
+
+"What I've said," she ventured, letting her eyes fall; but they were not
+eyes that fell effectively, and she instantly lifted them again to his.
+
+"You haven't said anything, and if you've thought anything, what have I
+got to do with that? I think all sorts of things about people--or folks,
+as you call them--"
+
+"Oh, thank you! Now you are forgiving me!"
+
+"I think them about you!"
+
+"Oh, do sit down and tell me the kind of things you think about me!"
+Bessie implored, sinking back into her chair.
+
+"You mightn't like them."
+
+"But if they would do me good?"
+
+"What should I want to do you good for?"
+
+"That's true," sighed Bessie, thoughtfully.
+
+"People--folks--"
+
+"Thank you so much!"
+
+"Don't try to do each other good, unless they're cranks like Lancaster,
+or bores like Mrs. Bevidge--"
+
+"You belong to the analytical school of Seniors! Go on!"
+
+"That's all," said Jeff.
+
+"And you don't think I've tried to do you good?"
+
+He laughed. Her comedy was delicious to him. He had never found, anybody
+so amusing; he almost respected her for it.
+
+"If that is your opinion of me, Mr. Durgin," she said, very gravely, "I
+am sorry. May I remark that I don't see why you come, then?"
+
+"I can tell you," said Jeff, and he advanced upon her where she sat so
+abruptly that she started and shrank back in her chair. "I come because
+you've got brains, and you're the only girl that has--here." They were
+Alan's words, almost his words, and for an instant she thought of her
+brother, end wondered what he would think of this jay's praising her in
+his terms. "Because," Jeff went on, "you've got more sense and
+nonsense--than all the women here put together. Because it's better than
+a play to hear you talk--and act; and because you're graceful--and
+fascinating, and chic, and--Good-night, Miss Lynde."
+
+He put out his hand, but she did not take it as she rose haughtily.
+"We've said good-night once. I prefer to say good-bye this time. I'm sure
+you will understand why after this I cannot see you again." She seemed to
+examine him for the effect of these words upon him before she went on.
+
+"No, I don't understand," he answered, coolly; "but it isn't necessary I
+should; and I'm quite willing to say good-bye, if you prefer. You haven't
+been so frank with me as I have with you; but that doesn't make any
+difference; perhaps you never meant to be, or couldn't be, if you meant.
+Good-bye." He bowed and turned toward the door.
+
+She fluttered between him and it. "I wish to know what you accuse me of!"
+
+"I? Nothing."
+
+"You imply that I have been unjust toward you."
+
+"Oh no!"
+
+"And I can't let you go till you prove it."
+
+"Prove to a woman that--Will you let me pass?"
+
+"No!" She spread her slender arms across the doorway.
+
+"Oh, very well!" Jeff took her hands and put them both in the hold of one
+of his large, strong bands. Then, with the contact, it came to him, from
+a varied experience of girls in his rustic past, that this young lady,
+who was nothing but a girl after all, was playing her comedy with a
+certain purpose, however little she might know it or own it. He put his
+other large, strong hand upon her waist, and pulled her to him and kissed
+her. Another sort of man, no matter what he had believed of her, would
+have felt his act a sacrilege then and there. Jeff only knew that she had
+not made the faintest straggle against him; she had even trembled toward
+him, and he brutally exulted in the belief that he had done what she
+wished, whether it was what she meant or not.
+
+She, for her part, realized that she had been kissed as once she had
+happened to see one of the maids kissed by the grocer's boy at the
+basement door. In an instant this man had abolished all her defences of
+family, of society, of personality, and put himself on a level with her
+in the most sacred things of life. Her mind grasped the fact and she
+realized it intellectually, while as yet all her emotions seemed
+paralyzed. She did not know whether she resented it as an abominable
+outrage or not; whether she hated the man for it or not. But perhaps he
+was in love with her, and his love overpowered him; in that case she
+could forgive him, if she were in love with him. She asked herself
+whether she was, and whether she had betrayed herself to him so that he
+was somehow warranted in what he did. She wondered if another sort of man
+would have done it, a gentleman, who believed she was in love with him.
+She wondered if she were as much shocked as she was astonished. She knew
+that there was everything in the situation to make the fact shocking, but
+she got no distinct reply from her jarred consciousness.
+
+It ought to be known, and known at once; she ought to tell her brother,
+as soon as she saw him; she thought of telling her aunt, and she fancied
+having to shout the affair into her ear, and having to repeat, "He kissed
+me! Don't you understand? Kissed me!" Then she reflected with a start
+that she could never tell any one, that in the midst of her world she was
+alone in relation to this; she was as helpless and friendless as the
+poorest and lowliest girl could be. She was more so, for if she were like
+the maid whom the grocer's boy kissed she would be of an order of things
+in which she could advise with some one else who had been kissed; and she
+would know what to feel.
+
+She asked herself whether she was at all moved at heart; till now it
+seemed to her that it had not been different with her toward him from
+what it had been toward all the other men whose meaning she would have
+liked to find out. She had not in the least respected them, and she did
+not respect him; but if it happened because he was overcome by his love
+for her, and could not help it, then perhaps she must forgive him whether
+she cared for him or not.
+
+These ideas presented themselves with the simultaneity of things in a
+dream in that instant when she lingered helplessly in his hold, and she
+even wondered if by any chance Andrew had seen them; but she heard his
+step on the floor below; and at the same time it appeared to her that she
+must be in love with this man if she did not resent what he had done.
+
+
+
+
+XLIII
+
+Westover was sitting at an open window of his studio smoking out into the
+evening air, and looking down into the thinly foliaged tops of the public
+garden, where the electrics fainted and flushed and hissed. Cars trooped
+by in the troubled street, scraping the wires overhead that screamed as
+if with pain at the touch of their trolleys, and kindling now and again a
+soft planet, as the trolleys struck the batlike plates that connected the
+crossing lines. The painter was getting almost as much pleasure out of
+the planets as pain out of the screams, and he was in an after-dinner
+languor in which he was very reluctant to recognize a step, which he
+thought he knew, on his stairs and his stairs-landing. A knock at his
+door followed the sound of the approaching steps. He lifted himself, and
+called out, inhospitably, "Come in!" and, as he expected, Jeff Durgin
+came in. Westover's meetings with him had been an increasing discomfort
+since his return from Lion's Head. The uneasiness which he commonly felt
+at the first moment of encounter with him yielded less and less to the
+influence of Jeff's cynical bonhomie, and it returned in force as soon as
+they parted.
+
+It was rather dim in the place, except for the light thrown up into it
+from the turmoil of lights outside, but he could see that there was
+nothing of the smiling mockery on Jeff's face which habitually expressed
+his inner hardihood. It was a frowning mockery.
+
+"Hello!" said Westover.
+
+"Hello!" answered Jeff. "Any commands for Lion's Head?"
+
+"What do you mean?"
+
+"I'm going up there to-morrow. I've got to see Cynthia, and tell her what
+I've been doing."
+
+Westover waited a moment before he asked: "Do you want me to ask what
+you've been doing?"
+
+"I shouldn't mind it."
+
+The painter paused again. "I don't know that I care to ask. Is it any
+good?"
+
+"No!" shouted Jeff. "It's the worst thing yet, I guess you'll think. I
+couldn't have believed it myself, if I hadn't been through it. I
+shouldn't have supposed I was such a fool. I don't care for the girl; I
+never did."
+
+"Cynthia?"
+
+"Cynthia? No! Miss Lynde. Oh, try to take it in!" Jeff cried, with a
+laugh at the daze in Westover's face. "You must have known about the
+flirtation; if you haven't, you're the only one." His vanity in the fact
+betrayed itself in his voice. "It came to a crisis last week, and we
+tried to make each other believe that we were in earnest. But there won't
+be any real love lost."
+
+Westover did not speak. He could not make out whether he was surprised or
+whether he was shocked, and it seemed to him that he was neither
+surprised nor shocked. He wondered whether he had really expected
+something of the kind, sooner or later, or whether he was not always so
+apprehensive of some deviltry in Durgin that nothing he did could quite
+take him unawares. At last he said: "I suppose it's true--even though you
+say it. It's probably the only truth in you."
+
+"That's something like," said Jeff, as if the contempt gave him a sort of
+pleasure; and his heavy face lighted up and then darkened again.
+
+"Well," said Westover, "what are we going to do? You've come to tell me."
+
+"I'm going to break with her. I don't care for her--that!" He snapped his
+fingers. "I told her I cared because she provoked me to. It happened
+because she wanted it to and led up to it."
+
+"Ah!" said Westover. "You put it on her!" But he waited for Durgin's
+justification with a dread that he should find something in it.
+
+"Pshaw! What's the use? It's been a game from the beginning, and a
+question which should ruin. I won. She meant to throw me over, if the
+time came for her, but it came for me first, and it's only a question now
+which shall break first; we've both been near it once or twice already. I
+don't mean she shall get the start of me."
+
+Westover had a glimpse of the innate enmity of the sexes in this game; of
+its presence in passion that was lived and of its prevalence in passion
+that was played. But the fate of neither gambler concerned him; he was
+impatient of his interest in what Jeff now went on to tell him, without
+scruple concerning her, or palliation of himself. He scarcely realized
+that he was listening, but afterward he remembered it all, with a little
+pity for Bessie and none for Jeff, but with more shame for her, too. Love
+seems more sacredly confided to women than to men; it is and must be a
+higher and finer as well as a holier thing with them; their blame for its
+betrayal must always be the heavier. He had sometimes suspected Bessie's
+willingness to amuse herself with Jeff, as with any other man who would
+let her play with him; and he would not have relied upon anything in him
+to defeat her purpose, if it had been anything so serious as a purpose.
+
+At the end of Durgin's story he merely asked: "And what are you going to
+do about Cynthia?"
+
+"I am going to tell her," said Jeff. "That's what I am going up there
+for."
+
+Westover rose, but Jeff remained sitting where he had put himself astride
+of a chair, with his face over the back. The painter walked slowly up and
+down before him in the capricious play of the street light. He turned a
+little sick, and he stopped a moment at the window for a breath of air.
+
+"Well?" asked Jeff.
+
+"Oh! You want my advice?" Westover still felt physically incapable of the
+indignation which he strongly imagined. "I don't know what to say to you,
+Durgin. You transcend my powers. Are you able to see this whole thing
+yourself?"
+
+"I guess so," Jeff answered. "I don't idealize it, though. I look at
+facts; they're bad enough. You don't suppose that Miss Lynde is going to
+break her heart over--"
+
+"I don't believe I care for Miss Lynde any more than I care for you. But
+I believe I wish you were not going to break with her."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"Because you and she are fit for each other. If you want my advice, I
+advise you to be true to her--if you can."
+
+"And Cynthia?"
+
+"Break with her."
+
+"Oh!" Jeff gave a snort of derision.
+
+"You're not fit for her. You couldn't do a crueler thing for her than to
+keep faith with her."
+
+"Do you mean it?"
+
+"Yes, I mean it. Stick to Miss Lynde--if she'll let you."
+
+Jeff seemed puzzled by Westover's attitude, which was either too sincere
+or too ironical for him. He pushed his hat, which he had kept on, back
+from his forehead. "Damned if I don't believe she would," he mused aloud.
+The notion seemed to flatter him and repay him for what he must have been
+suffering. He smiled, but he said: "She wouldn't do, even if she were any
+good. Cynthia is worth a million of her. If she wants to give me up after
+she knows all about me, well and good. I shu'n't blame her. But I shall
+give her a fair chance, and I shu'n't whitewash myself; you needn't be
+afraid of that, Mr. Westover."
+
+"Why should I care what you do?" asked the painter, scornfully.
+
+"Well, you can't, on my account," Durgin allowed. "But you do care on her
+account."
+
+"Yes, I do," said Westover, sitting down again, and he did not say
+anything more.
+
+Durgin waited a long while for him to speak before he asked: "Then that's
+really your advice, is it?"
+
+"Yes, break with her."
+
+"And stick to Miss Lynde."
+
+"If she'll let you."
+
+Jeff was silent in his turn. He started from his silence with a laugh.
+"She'd make a daisy landlady for Lion's Head. I believe she would like to
+try it awhile just for the fun. But after the ball was over--well, it
+would be a good joke, if it was a joke. Cynthia is a woman--she a'n't any
+corpse-light. She understands me, and she don't overrate me, either. She
+knew just how much I was worth, and she took me at her own valuation.
+I've got my way in life marked out, and she believes in it as much as I
+do. If anybody can keep me level and make the best of me, she can, and
+she's going to have the chance, if she wants to. I'm going to act square
+with her about the whole thing. I guess she's the best judge in a case
+like this, and I shall lay the whole case before her, don't you be afraid
+of that. And she's got to have a free field. Why, even if there wa'n't
+any question of her," he went on, falling more and more into his
+vernacular, "I don't believe I should care in the long run for this other
+one. We couldn't make it go for any time at all. She wants excitement,
+and after the summer folks began to leave, and we'd been to Florida for a
+winter, and then came back to Lion's Head-well! This planet hasn't got
+excitement enough in it for that girl, and I doubt if the solar system
+has. At any rate, I'm not going to act as advance-agent for her."
+
+"I see," said Westover, "that you've been reasoning it all out, and I'm
+not surprised that you've kept your own advantage steadily in mind. I
+don't suppose you know what a savage you are, and I don't suppose I could
+teach you. I sha'n't try, at any rate. I'll take you on your own ground,
+and I tell you again you had better break with Cynthia. I won't say that
+it's what you owe her, for that won't have any effect with you, but it's
+what you owe yourself. You can't do a wrong thing and prosper on it--"
+
+"Oh yes, you can," Jeff interrupted, with a sneering laugh. "How do you
+suppose all the big fortunes were made? By keeping the Commandments?"
+
+"No. But you're an unlucky man if life hasn't taught you that you must
+pay in suffering of some kind, sooner or later, for every wrong thing you
+do--"
+
+"Now that's one of your old-fashioned superstitions, Mr. Westover," said
+Jeff, with a growing kindliness in his tone, as if the pathetic delusion
+of such a man really touched him. "You pay, or you don't pay, just as it
+happens. If you get hit soon after you've done wrong, you think it's
+retribution, and if it holds off till you've forgotten all about it, you
+think it's a strange Providence, and you puzzle over it, but you don't
+reform. You keep right along in the old way. Prosperity and adversity,
+they've got nothing to do with conduct. If you're a strong man, you get
+there, and if you're a weak man, all the righteousness in the universe
+won't help you. But I propose to do what's right about Cynthia, and not
+what's wrong; and according to your own theory, of life--which won't hold
+water a minute--I ought to be blessed to the third and fourth generation.
+I don't look for that, though. I shall be blessed if I look out for
+myself; and if I don't, I shall suffer for my want of foresight. But I
+sha'n't suffer for anything else. Well, I'm going to cut some of my
+recitations, and I'm going up to Lion's Head, to-morrow, to settle my
+business with Cynthia. I've got a little business to look after here with
+some one else first, and I guess I shall have to be about it. I don't
+know which I shall like the best." He rose, and went over to where
+Westover was sitting, and held out his hand to him.
+
+"What is it?" asked Westover.
+
+"Any commands for Lion's Head?" Jeff said, as at first.
+
+"No," said Westover, turning his face away.
+
+"Oh, all right." Durgin put his hand into his pocket unshaken.
+
+
+
+
+XLIV
+
+"What is it, Jeff?" asked Cynthia, the next night, as they started out
+together after supper, and began to stroll down the hill toward her
+father's house. It lay looking very little and low in the nook at the
+foot of the lane, on the verge of the woods that darkened away to the
+northward from it, under the glassy night sky, lit with the spare young
+moon. The peeping of the frogs in the marshy places filled the air; the
+hoarse voice of the brook made itself heard at intervals through them.
+
+"It's not so warm here, quite, as it is in Boston," he returned. "Are you
+wrapped up enough? This air has an edge to it."
+
+"I'm all right," said the girl. "What is it?"
+
+"You think there's something? You don't believe I've come up for rest
+over Sunday? I guess mother herself didn't, and I could see your father
+following up my little lies as if he wa'n't going to let one escape him.
+Well, you're right. There is something. Think of the worst thing you can,
+Cynthy!"
+
+She pulled her hand out of his arm, which she had taken, and halted him
+by her abrupt pause. "You're not going to get through!"
+
+"I'm all right on my conditions," said Jeff, with forlorn derision.
+"You'll have to guess again." He stood looking back over his shoulder at
+her face, which showed white in the moonlight, swathed airily round in
+the old-fashioned soft woollen cloud she wore.
+
+"Is it some trouble you've got into? I shall stand by you!"
+
+"Oh, you splendid girl! The trouble's over, but it's something you can't
+stand by me in, I guess. You know that girl I wrote to you about--the one
+I met at the college tea, and--"
+
+"Yes! Miss Lynde!"
+
+"Come on! We can't stay here talking. Let's go down and sit on your
+porch." She mechanically obeyed him, and they started on together down
+the hill again; but she did not offer to take his arm, and he kept the
+width of the roadway from her.
+
+"What about her?" she quietly asked.
+
+"Last night I ended up the flirtation I've been carrying on with her ever
+since."
+
+"I want to know just what you mean, Jeff."
+
+"I mean that last week I got engaged to her, and last night I broke with
+her." Cynthia seemed to stumble on something; he sprang over and caught.
+her, and now she put her hand in his arm, and stayed herself by him as
+they walked.
+
+"Go on," she said.
+
+"That's all there is of it."
+
+"No!" She stopped, and then she asked, with a kind of gentle
+bewilderment: "What did you want to tell me for?"
+
+"To let you break with me--if you wanted to."
+
+"Don't you care for me any more?"
+
+"Yes, more than ever I did. But I'm not fit for you, Cynthia. Mr.
+Westover said I wasn't. I told him about it--"
+
+"What did he say?"
+
+"That I ought to break with you."
+
+"But if you broke with her?"
+
+"He told me to stick to her. He was right about you, Cynthy. I'm not fit
+for you, and that's a fact."
+
+"What was it about that girl? Tell me everything." She spoke in a tone of
+plaintive entreaty, very unlike the command she once used with Jeff when
+she was urging him to be frank with her and true to himself. They had
+come to her father's house and she freed her hand from his arm again, and
+sat down on the step before the side door with a little sigh as of
+fatigue.
+
+"You'll take cold," said Jeff, who remained on foot in front of her.
+
+"No," she said, briefly. "Go on."
+
+"Why," Jeff began, harshly, and with a note of scorn for himself and his
+theme in his voice, "there isn't any more of it, but there's no end to
+her. I promised Mr. Westover I shouldn't whitewash myself, and I sha'n't.
+I've been behaving badly, and it's no excuse for me because she wanted me
+to. I began to go for her as soon as I saw that she wanted me to, and
+that she liked the excitement. The excitement is all that she cared for;
+she didn't care for me except for the excitement of it. She thought she
+could have fun with me, and then throw me over; but I guess she found her
+match. You couldn't understand such a girl, and I don't brag of it. All
+she cared for was to flirt with me, and she liked it all the more because
+I was a jay and she could get something new out of it. I can't explain
+it; but I could see it right along. She fooled herself more than she
+fooled me."
+
+"Was she--very good-looking?" Cynthia asked, listlessly.
+
+"No!" shouted Jeff. "She wasn't good-looking at all. She was dark and
+thin, and she had little slanting eyes; but she was graceful, and she
+knew how to make herself go further than any girl I ever saw. If she came
+into a room, she made you look at her, or you had to somehow. She was
+bright, too; and she had more sense than all the other girls there put
+together. But she was a fool, all the same." Jeff paused. "Is that
+enough?"
+
+"It isn't all."
+
+"No, it isn't all. We didn't meet much at first, but I got to walking
+home with her from some teas; and then we met at a big ball. I danced
+with her the whole while nearly, and--and I took her brother home--Pshaw!
+He was drunk; and I--well, he had got drunk drinking with me at the ball.
+The wine didn't touch me, but it turned his head; and I took him home;
+he's a drunkard, anyway. She let us in when we got to their house, and
+that kind of made a tie between us. She pretended to think she was under
+obligations to me, and so I got to going to her house."
+
+"Did she know how her brother got drunk?"
+
+"She does now. I told her last night."
+
+"How came you to tell her?"
+
+"I wanted to break with her. I wanted to stop it, once for all, and I
+thought that would do it, if anything would."
+
+"Did that make her willing to give you up?"
+
+Jeff checked himself in a sort of retrospective laugh. "I'm not so sure.
+I guess she liked the excitement of that, too. You couldn't understand
+the kind of girl she--She wanted to flirt with me that night I brought
+him home tipsy."
+
+"I don't care to hear any more about her. Why did you give her up?"
+
+"Because I didn't care for her, and I did care for you, Cynthy."
+
+"I don't believe it." Cynthia rose from the step, where she had been
+sitting, as if with renewed strength. "Go up and tell father to come down
+here. I want to see him." She turned and put her hand on the latch of the
+door.
+
+"You're not going in there, Cynthia," said Jeff. "It must be like death
+in there."
+
+"It's more like death out here. But if it's the cold you mean, you
+needn't be troubled. We've had a fire to-day, airing out the house. Will
+you go?"
+
+"But what do you--what are you going to say to me?"
+
+"I don't know, yet. If I said anything now, I should tell you what Mr.
+Westover did: go back to that girl, if she'll let you. You're fit for
+each other, as he said. Did you tell her that you were engaged to some
+one else?"
+
+"I did, last night."
+
+"But before that she didn't know how false you were. Well, you're not fit
+for her, then; you're not good enough."
+
+She opened the door and went in, closing it after her. Jeff turned and
+walked slowly away; then he came quickly back, as if he were going to
+follow her within. But through the window he saw her as she stood by the
+table with a lamp in her hand. She had turned up the light, which shone
+full in her face and revealed its severe beauty broken and writhen with
+the effort to repress her weeping. He might not have minded the severity
+or the beauty, but the pathos was more than he could stand. "Oh, Lord!"
+he said, with a shrug, and he turned again and walked slowly up the hill.
+
+When Whitwell faced his daughter in the little sitting-room, whose low
+ceiling his hat almost touched as he stood before her, the storm had
+passed with her, and her tear-drenched visage wore its wonted look of
+still patience.
+
+"Did Jeff tell you why I sent for you, father?"
+
+"No. But I knew it was trouble," said Whitwell, with a dignity which-his
+sympathy for her gave a countenance better adapted to the expression of
+the lighter emotions.
+
+"I guess you were right about him," she resumed: She went on to tell in
+brief the story that Jeff had told her. Her father did not interrupt her,
+but at the end he said, inadequately: "He's a comical devil. I knew about
+his gittin' that feller drunk. Mr. Westover told me when he was up here."
+
+"Mr. Westover did!" said Cynthia, in a note of indignation.
+
+"He didn't offer to," Whitwell explained. "I got it out of him in spite
+of him, I guess." He had sat down with his hat on, as his absent-minded
+habit was, and he now braced his knees against the edge of the table.
+Cynthia sat across it from him with her head drooped over it, drawing
+vague figures on the board with her finger. "What are you goin' to do?"
+
+"I don't know," she answered.
+
+"I guess you don't quite realize it yet," her father suggested, tenderly.
+"Well, I don't want to hurry you any. Take your time."
+
+"I guess I realize it," said the girl.
+
+"Well, it's a pootty plain case, that's a fact," Whitwell conceded. She
+was silent, and he asked: "How did he come to tell you?"
+
+"It's what he came up for. He began to tell me at once. I was certain
+there was some trouble."
+
+"Was it his notion to come, I wonder, or Mr. Westover's?"
+
+"It was his. But Mr. Westover told him to break off with me, and keep on
+with her, if she would let him."
+
+"I guess that was pootty good advice," said Whitwell, letting his face
+betray his humorous relish of it. "I guess there's a pair of 'em."
+
+"She was not playing any one else false," said Cynthia, bitterly.
+
+"Well, I guess that's so, too," her father assented. "'Ta'n't so much of
+a muchness as you might think, in that light." He took refuge from the
+subject in an undirected whistle.
+
+After a moment the girl asked, forlornly: "What should you do, father, if
+you were in my place?"
+
+"Well, there I guess you got me, Cynthy," said her father. "I don't
+believe 't any man, I don't care how old he is, or how much experience
+he's had, knows exactly how a girl feels about a thing like this, or has
+got any call to advise her. Of course, the way I feel is like takin' the
+top of his head off. But I d' know," he added, "as that would do a great
+deal of good, either. I presume a woman's got rather of a chore to get
+along with a man, anyway. We a'n't any of us much to brag on. It's out o'
+sight, out o' mind, with the best of us, I guess."
+
+"It wouldn't be with Jackson--it wouldn't be with Mr. Westover."
+
+"There a'n't many men like Mr. Westover--well, not a great many; or
+Jackson, either. Time! I wish Jackson was home! He'd know how to
+straighten this thing out, and he wouldn't weaken over Jeff much--well,
+not much. But he a'n't here, and you've got to act for yourself. The way
+I look at it is this: you took Jeff when you knowed what a comical devil
+he was, and I presume you ha'n't got quite the same right to be
+disappointed in what he done as if you hadn't knowed. Now mind, I a'n't
+excusin' him. But if you knowed he was the feller to play the devil if he
+got a chance, the question is whether--whether--"
+
+"I know what you mean, father," said the girl, "and I don't want to shirk
+my responsibility. It was everything to have him come right up and tell
+me."
+
+"Well," said Whitwell, impartially, "as far forth as that goes, I don't
+think he's strained himself. He'd know you would hear of it sooner or
+later anyway, and he ha'n't just found out that he was goin' wrong. Been
+keepin' it up for the last three months, and writin' you all the while
+them letters you was so crazy to get."
+
+"Yes," sighed the girl. "But we've got to be just to his disposition as
+well as his actions. I can see it in one light that can excuse it some.
+He can't bear to be put down, and I know he's been left out a good deal
+among the students, and it's made him bitter. He told me about it; that's
+one reason why he wanted to leave Harvard this last year. He saw other
+young men made much of, when he didn't get any notice; and when he had
+the chance to pay them back with a girl of their own set that was trying
+to make a fool of him--"
+
+"That was the time for him to remember you," said Whitwell.
+
+Cynthia broke under the defence she was trying to make. "Yes," she said,
+with an indrawn sigh, and she began to sob piteously.
+
+The sight of her grief seemed to kindle her father's wrath to a flame.
+"Any way you look at him, he's been a dumn blackguard; that's what he's
+been. You're a million times too good for him; and I--"
+
+She sobbed herself quiet, and then she said: "Father, I don't like to go
+up there to-night. I want to stay here."
+
+"All right, Cynthia. I'll come down and stay with you. You got everything
+we want here?"
+
+"Yes. And I'll go up and get the breakfast for them in the morning. There
+won't be much to do."
+
+"Dumn 'em! Let 'em get their own breakfast!" said Whitwell, recklessly.
+
+"And, father," the girl went on as if he had not spoken, "don't you talk
+to Mrs. Durgin about it, will you?"
+
+"No, no. I sha'n't speak to her. I'll just tell Frank you and me are
+goin' to stay down here to-night. She'll suspicion something, but she can
+figure it out for herself. Or she can make Jeff tell her. It can't be
+kept from her."
+
+"Well, let him be the one to tell her. Whatever happens, I shall never
+speak of it to a soul besides you."
+
+"All right, Cynthy. You'll have the night to think it over--I guess you
+won't sleep much--and I'll trust you to do what's the best thing about
+it."
+
+
+
+
+XLV.
+
+Cynthia found Mrs. Durgin in the old farm-house kitchen at work getting
+breakfast when she came up to the hotel in the morning. She was early,
+but the elder woman had been earlier still, and her heavy face showed
+more of their common night-long trouble than the girl's.
+
+She demanded, at sight of her, "What's the matter with you and Jeff,
+Cynthy?"
+
+Cynthia was unrolling the cloud from her hair. She said, as she tied on
+her apron: "You must get him to tell you, Mrs. Durgin."
+
+"Then there is something?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Has Jeff been using you wrong?"
+
+Cynthia stooped to open the oven door, and to turn the pan of biscuit she
+found inside. She shut the door sharply to, and said, as she rose: "I
+don't want to tell anything about it, and I sha'n't, Mrs. Durgin. He can
+do it, if he wants to. Shall I make the coffee?"
+
+"Yes; you seem to make it better than I do. Do you think I shouldn't
+believe you was fair to him?"
+
+"I wasn't thinking of that. But it's his secret. If he wants to keep it,
+he can keep it, for all me."
+
+"You ha'n't give each other up?"
+
+"I don't know." Cynthia turned away with a trembling chin, and began to
+beat the coffee up with an egg she had dropped into the pot. She put the
+breakfast on the table when it was ready, but she would not sit down with
+the rest. She said she did not want any breakfast, and she drank a cup of
+coffee in the kitchen.
+
+It fell to Jeff mainly to keep the talk going. He had been out at the
+barn with Jombateeste since daybreak, looking after the cattle, and the
+joy of the weather had got into his nerves and spirits. At first he had
+lain awake after he went to bed, but he had fallen asleep about midnight,
+and got a good night's rest. He looked fresh and strong and very
+handsome. He talked resolutely to every one at the table, but Jombateeste
+was always preoccupied with eating at his meals, and Frank Whitwell had
+on a Sunday silence, which was perhaps deepened by a feeling that there
+was something wrong between his sister and Jeff, and it would be rash to
+commit himself to an open friendliness until he understood the case. His
+father met Jeff's advances with philosophical blandness and evasion, and
+Mrs. Durgin was provisionally dry and severe both with the Whitwells and
+her son. After breakfast she went to the parlor, and Jeff set about a
+tour of the hotel, inside and out. He looked carefully to the details of
+its winter keeping. Then he came back and boldly joined his mother where
+she sat before her stove, whose subdued heat she found pleasant in the
+lingering cold of the early spring.
+
+He tossed his hat on the table beside her, and sat down on the other side
+of the stove. "Well, I must say the place has been well looked after. I
+don't believe Jackson himself could have kept it in better shape. When
+was the last you heard from him?"
+
+"I hope," said his mother, gravely, "you've been lookin' after your end
+at Boston, too."
+
+"Well, not as well as you have here, mother," said Jeff, candidly. "Has
+Cynthy told you?"
+
+"I guess she expected you to tell me, if there was anything."
+
+"There's a lot; but I guess I needn't go over it all. I've been playing
+the devil."
+
+"Jeff!"
+
+"Yes, I have. I've been going with another girl down there, one the kind
+you wanted me to make up to, and I went so far I--well, I made love to
+her; and then I thought it over, and found out I didn't really care for
+her, and I had to tell her so, and then I came up to tell Cynthy. That's
+about the size of it. What do you think of it?"
+
+"D' you tell Cynthy?"
+
+"Yes, I told her."
+
+"What 'd she say?"
+
+"She said I'd better go back to the other girl." Jeff laughed hardily,
+but his mother remained impassive.
+
+"I guess she's right; I guess you had."
+
+"That seems to be the general opinion. That's what Mr. Westover advised.
+I seem to be the only one against it. I suppose you mean that I'm not fit
+for Cynthy. I don't deny it. All I say is I want her, and I don't want
+the other one. What are you going to do in a case like that?"
+
+"The way I should look at it," said his mother, "is this: whatever you
+are, Cynthy made you. You was a lazy, disobedient, worthless boy, and it
+was her carin' for you from the first that put any spirit and any
+principle into you. It was her that helped you at school when you was
+little things together; and she helped you at the academy, and she's
+helped you at college. I'll bet she could take a degree, or whatever it
+is, at Harvard better than you could now; and if you ever do take a
+degree, you've got her to thank for it."
+
+"That's so," said Jeff. "And what's the reason you didn't want me to
+marry her when I came in here last summer and told you I'd asked her to?"
+
+"You know well enough what the reason was. It was part of the same thing
+as my wantin' you to be a lawyer; but I might knowed that if you didn't
+have Cynthy to go into court with you, and put the words into your mouth,
+you wouldn't make a speech that would"--Mrs. Durgin paused for a fitting
+figure--"save a flea from the gallows."
+
+Jeff burst into a laugh. "Well, I guess that's so, mother. And now you
+want me to throw away the only chance I've got of learning how to run
+Lion's Head in the right way by breaking with Cynthy."
+
+"Nobody wants you to run Lion's Head for a while yet," his mother
+returned, scornfully. "Jackson is going to run Lion's Head. He'll be home
+the end of June, and I'll run Lion's Head till he gets here. You talk,"
+she went on, "as if it was in your hands to break with Cynthy, or throw
+away the chance with her. The way I look at it, she's broke with you, and
+you ha'n't got any chance with her. Oh, Jeff," she suddenly appealed to
+him, "tell me all about it! What have you been up to? If I understood it
+once, I know I can make her see it in the right light."
+
+"The better you understand it, mother, the less you'll like it; and I
+guess Cynthy sees it in the right light already. What did she say?"
+
+"Nothing. She said she'd leave it to you."
+
+"Well, that's like Cynthy. I'll tell you, then," said Jeff; and he told
+his mother his whole affair with Bessie Lynde. He had to be very
+elemental, and he was aware, as he had never been before, of the
+difference between Bessie's world and his mother's world, in trying to
+make Bessie's world conceivable to her.
+
+He was patient in going over every obscure point, and illustrating from
+the characters and condition of different summer folks the facts of
+Bessie's entourage. It is doubtful, however, if he succeeded in conveying
+to his mother a clear and just notion of the purely chic nature of the
+girl. In the end she seemed to conceive of her simply as a hussy, and so
+pronounced her, without limit or qualification, in spite of Jeff's
+laughing attempt to palliate her behavior, and to inculpate himself. She
+said she did not see what he had done that was so much out of the way.
+That thing had led him on from the beginning; she had merely got her
+come-uppings, when all was said. Mrs. Durgin believed Cynthia would look
+at it as she did, if she could have it put before her rightly. Jeff shook
+his head with persistent misgiving. His notion was that Cynthia saw the
+affair only too clearly, and that there was no new light to be thrown on
+it from her point of view. Mrs. Durgin would not allow this; she was sure
+that she could bring Cynthia round; and she asked Jeff whether it was his
+getting that fellow drunk that she seemed to blame him for the most. He
+answered that he thought that was pretty bad, but he did not believe that
+was the worst thing in Cynthia's eyes. He did not forbid his mother's
+trying to do what she could with her, and he went away for a walk, and
+left the house to the two women. Jombateeste was in the barn, which he
+preferred to the house, and Frank Whitwell had gone to church over at the
+Huddle. As Jeff passed Whitwell's cottage in setting out on his stroll he
+saw the philosopher through the window, seated with his legs on the
+table, his hat pushed back, and his spectacles fallen to the point of his
+nose, reading, and moving his lips as he read.
+
+The forenoon sun was soft, but the air was cool.
+
+There was still plenty of snow on the upper slopes of the hills, and
+there was a drift here and there in a corner of pasture wall in the
+valley; but the springtime green was beginning to hover over the wet
+places in the fields; the catkins silvered the golden tracery of the
+willow branches by the brook; there was a buzz of bees about them, and
+about the maples, blackened by the earlier flow of sap through the holes
+in the bark made by the woodpeckers' bills. Now and then the tremolo of a
+bluebird shook in the tender light and the keen air. At one point in the
+road where the sun fell upon some young pines in a sheltered spot a
+balsamic odor exhaled from them.
+
+These gentle sights and sounds and odors blended in the influence which
+Jeff's spirit felt more and more. He realized that he was a blot on the
+loveliness of the morning. He had a longing to make atonement and to win
+forgiveness. His heart was humbled toward Cynthia, and he went wondering
+how his mother would make it out with her, and how, if she won him any
+advantage, he should avail himself of it and regain the girl's trust; he
+had no doubt of her love. He perceived that there was nothing for him
+hereafter but the most perfect constancy of thought and deed, and he
+desired nothing better.
+
+At a turn of his road where it branched toward the Huddle a group of
+young girls stood joking and laughing; before Jeff came up with them they
+separated, and all but one continued on the way beyond the turning. She
+came toward Jeff, who gayly recognized her as she drew near.
+
+She blushed and bridled at his bow and at his beauty and splendor, and in
+her embarrassment pertly said that she did not suppose he would have
+remembered her. She was very young, but at fifteen a country girl is not
+so young as her town sister at eighteen in the ways of the other sex.
+
+Jeff answered that he should have known her anywhere, in spite of her
+looking so much older than she did in the summer when she had come with
+berries to the hotel. He said she must be feeling herself quite a young
+lady now, in her long dresses, and he praised the dress which she had on.
+He said it became her style; and he found such relief from his heavy
+thoughts in these harmless pleasantries that he kept on with them. He had
+involuntarily turned with her to walk back to her house on the way he had
+come, and he asked her if he might not carry her catkins for her. She had
+a sheaf of them in the hollow of her slender arm, which seemed to him
+very pretty, and after a little struggle she yielded them to him. The
+struggle gave him still greater relief from his self-reproach, and at her
+gate he begged her to let him keep one switch of the pussywillows, and he
+stood a moment wondering whether he might not ask her for something else.
+She chose one from the bundle, and drew it lightly across his face before
+she put it in his hand. "You may have this for Cynthy," she said, and she
+ran laughingly up the pathway to her door.
+
+
+
+
+XLVI
+
+Cynthia did not appear at dinner, and Jeff asked his mother when he saw
+her alone if she had spoken to the girl. "Yes, but she said she did not
+want to talk yet."
+
+"All right," he returned. "I'm going to take a nap; I believe I feel as
+if I hadn't slept for a month."
+
+He slept the greater part of the afternoon, and came down rather dull to
+the early tea. Cynthia was absent again, and his mother was silent and
+wore a troubled look. Whitwell was full of a novel conception of the
+agency of hypnotism in interpreting the life of the soul as it is
+intimated in dreams. He had been reading a book that affirmed the
+consubstantiality of the sleep-dream and the hypnotic illusion. He wanted
+to know if Jeff, down at Boston, had seen anything of the hypnotic doings
+that would throw light on this theory.
+
+It was still full light when they rose from the table, and it was
+scarcely twilight when Jeff heard Cynthia letting herself out at the back
+door. He fancied her going down to her father's house, and he went out to
+the corner of the hotel to meet her. She faltered a moment at sight of
+him, and then kept on with averted face.
+
+He joined her, and walked beside her. "Well, Cynthy, what are you going
+to say to me? I'm off for Cambridge again to-morrow morning, and I
+suppose we've got to understand each other. I came up here to put myself
+in your hands, to keep or to throw away, just as you please. Well? Have
+you thought about it?"
+
+"Every minute," said the girl, quietly.
+
+"Well?"
+
+"If you had cared for me, it couldn't have happened."
+
+"Oh yes, it could. Now that's just where you're mistaken. That's where a
+woman never can understand a man. I might carry on with half a dozen
+girls, and yet never forget you, or think less of you, although I could
+see all the time how pretty and bright every one of 'em was. That's the
+way a man's mind is built. It's curious, but it's true."
+
+"I don't believe I care for any share in your mind, then," said the girl.
+
+"Oh, come, now! You don't mean that. You know I was just joking; you know
+I don't justify what I've done, and I don't excuse it. But I think I've
+acted pretty square with you about it--about telling you, I mean. I don't
+want to lay any claim, but you remember when you made me promise that if
+there was anything shady I wanted to hide from you--Well, I acted on
+that. You do remember?"
+
+"Yes," said Cynthia, and she pulled the cloud over the side of her face
+next to him, and walked a little faster.
+
+He hastened his steps to keep up with her. "Cynthy, if you put your arms
+round me, as you did then--"
+
+"I can't Jeff!"
+
+"You don't want to."
+
+"Yes, I do! But you don't want me to, as you did then. Do you?" She
+stopped abruptly and faced him full. "Tell me, honestly!"
+
+Jeff dropped his bold eyes, and the smile left his handsome mouth.
+
+"You don't," said the girl, "for you know that if you did, I would do
+it." She began to walk on again. "It wouldn't be hard for me to forgive
+you anything you've done against me--or against yourself; I should care
+for you the same--if you were the same person; but you're not the same,
+and you know it. I told you then--that time that I didn't want to make
+you do what you knew was right, and I never shall try to do it again. I'm
+sorry I did it then. I was wrong. And I should be afraid of you if I did
+now. Some time you would make me suffer for it, just as you've made me
+suffer for making you do then what was right."
+
+It struck Jeff as a very curious fact that Cynthia must always have known
+him better than he knew himself in some ways, for he now perceived the
+truth and accuracy of her words. He gave her mind credit for the
+penetration due her heart; he did not understand that it is through their
+love women divine the souls of men. What other witnesses of his character
+had slowly and carefully reasoned out from their experience of him she
+had known from the beginning, because he was dear to her.
+
+He was silent, and then, with rare gravity, he said, "Cynthia, I believe
+you're right," and he never knew how her heart leaped toward him at his
+words. "I'm a pretty bad chap, I guess. But I want you to give me another
+chance and I'll try not to make you pay for it, either," he added, with a
+flicker of his saucy humor.
+
+"I'll give you a chance, then," she said, and she shrank from the hand he
+put out toward her. "Go back and tell that girl you're free now, and if
+she wants you she can have you."
+
+"Is that what you call a chance?" demanded Jeff, between anger and
+injury. For an instant he imagined her deriding him and revenging
+herself.
+
+"It's the only one I can give you. She's never tried to make you do what
+was right, and you'll never be tempted to hurt her."
+
+"You're pretty rough on me, Cynthy," Jeff protested, almost plaintively.
+He asked, more in character: "Ain't you afraid of making me do right,
+now?"
+
+"I'm not making you. I don't promise you anything, even if she won't have
+you."
+
+"Oh!"
+
+"Did you suppose I didn't mean that you were free? That I would put a lie
+in your mouth for you to be true with?"
+
+"I guess you're too deep for me," said Jeff, after a sulky silence.
+
+"Then it's all off between us? What do you say?"
+
+"What do you say?"
+
+"I say it's just as it was before, if you care for me."
+
+"I care for you, but it can never be the same as it was before. What
+you've done, you've done. I wish I could help it, but I can't. I can't
+make myself over into what I was twenty-four hours ago. I seem another
+person, in another world; it's as if I died, and came to life somewhere
+else. I'm sorry enough, if that could help, but it can't. Go and tell
+that girl the truth: that you came up here to me, and I sent you back to
+her."
+
+A gleam of amusement visited Jeff in the gloom where he seemed to be
+darkling. He fancied doing that very thing with Bessie Lynde, and the
+wild joy she would snatch from an experience so unique, so impossible.
+Then the gleam faded. "And what if I didn't want her?" he demanded.
+
+"Tell her that too," said Cynthia.
+
+"I suppose," said Jeff, sulkily, "you'll let me go away and do as I
+please, if I'm free."
+
+"Oh yes. I don't want you to do anything because I told you. I won't make
+that mistake again. Go and do what you are able to do of your own free
+will. You know what you ought to do as well as I do; and you know a great
+deal better what you can do."
+
+They had reached Cynthia's house, and they were talking at the side door,
+as they had the night before, when there had been hope for her in the
+newness of her calamity, before she had yet fully imagined it.
+
+Jeff made no answer to her last words. He asked, "Am I going to see you
+again?"
+
+"I guess not. I don't believe I shall be up before you start."
+
+"All right. Good-bye, then." He held out his hand, and she put hers in it
+for the moment he chose to hold it. Then he turned and slowly climbed the
+hill.
+
+Cynthia was still lying with her face in her pillow when her father came
+into the dark little house, and peered into her room with the newly
+lighted lamp in his hand. She turned her face quickly over and looked at
+him with dry and shining eyes.
+
+"Well, it's all over with Jeff and me, father."
+
+"Well, I'm satisfied," said Whitwell. "If you could ha' made it up, so
+you could ha' felt right about it, I shouldn't ha' had anything to say
+against it, but I'm glad it's turned out the way it has. He's a comical
+devil, and he always was, and I'm glad you a'n't takin' on about him any
+more. You used to have so much spirit when you was little."
+
+"Oh,--spirit! You don't know how much spirit I've had, now."
+
+"Well, I presume not," Whitwell assented.
+
+"I've been thinking," said the girl, after a little pause, "that we shall
+have to go away from here."
+
+"Well, I guess not," her father began. "Not for no Jeff Dur--"
+
+"Yes, yes. We must! Don't make one talk about it. We'll stay here till
+Jackson gets back in June, and then--we must go somewhere else. We'll go
+down to Boston, and I'll try to get a place to teach, or something, and
+Frank can get a place."
+
+"I presume," Whitwell mused, "that Mr. Westover could--"
+
+"Father!" cried the girl, with an energy that startled him, as she lifted
+herself on her elbow. "Don't ever think of troubling Mr. Westover! Oh,"
+she lamented, "I was thinking of troubling him myself! But we mustn't, we
+mustn't! I should be so ashamed!"
+
+"Well," said Whitwell, "time enough to think about all that. We got two
+good months yet to plan it out before Jackson gets back, and I guess we
+can think of something before that. I presume," he added, thoughtfully,
+"that when Mrs. Durgin hears that you've give Jeff the sack, she'll make
+consid'able of a kick. She done it when you got engaged."
+
+
+
+
+XLVII.
+
+After he went back to Cambridge, Jeff continued mechanically in the
+direction given him by motives which had ceased for him. In the midst of
+his divergence with Bessie Lynde he had still kept an inner fealty to
+Cynthia, and tried to fulfil the purposes and ambition she had for him.
+The operation of this habitual allegiance now kept him up to his work,
+but the time must come when it could no longer operate, when his whole
+consciousness should accept the fact known to his intelligence, and he
+should recognize the close of that incident of his life as the bereaved
+finally accept and recognize the fact of death.
+
+The event brought him relief, and it brought him freedom. He was sensible
+in his relaxation of having strained up to another's ideal, of having
+been hampered by another's will. His pleasure in the relief was tempered
+by a regret, not wholly unpleasant, for the girl whose aims, since they
+were no longer his, must be disappointed. He was sorry for Cynthia, and
+in his remorse he was fonder of her than he had ever been. He felt her
+magnanimity and clemency; he began to question, in that wordless deep of
+being where volition begins, whether it would not be paying a kind of
+duty to her if he took her at her word and tried to go back to Bessie
+Lynde. But for the present he did nothing but renounce all notion of
+working at his conditions, or attempting to take a degree. That was part
+of a thing that was past, and was no part of anything to come, so far as
+Jeff now forecast his future.
+
+He did not choose to report himself to Westover, and risk a scolding, or
+a snubbing. He easily forgave Westover for the tone he had taken at their
+last meeting, but he did not care to see him. He would have met him
+half-way, however, in a friendly advance, and he was aware of much
+good-will toward him, which he could not have been reluctant to show if
+chance had brought them together.
+
+Jeff missed Cynthia's letters which used to come so regularly every
+Tuesday, and he had a half-hour every Sunday which was at first rather
+painfully vacant since he no longer wrote to her. But in this vacancy he
+had at least no longer the pang of self-reproach which her letters always
+brought him, and he was not obliged to put himself to the shame of
+concealment in writing to her. He had never minded that tacit lying on
+his own account, but he hated it in relation to her; it always hurt him
+as something incongruous and unfit. He wrote to his mother now on Sunday,
+and in his first letter, while the impression of Cynthia's dignity and
+generosity was still vivid, he urged her to make it clear to the girl
+that he wished her and her family to remain at Lion's Head as if nothing
+had happened. He put a great deal of real feeling into this request, and
+he offered to go and spend a year in Europe, if his mother thought that
+Cynthia would be more reconciled to his coming back at the end of that
+time.
+
+His mother answered with a dryness to which his ear supplied the tones of
+her voice, that she would try to get along in the management of Lion's
+Head till his brother got back, but that she had no objection to his
+going to Europe for a year if he had the money to spare. Jeff could not
+refuse her joke, as he felt it, a certain applause, but he thought it
+pretty rough that his mother should take part so decidedly against him as
+she seemed to be doing. He had expected her to be angry with him, but
+before they parted she had seemed to find some excuse for him, and yet
+here she was siding against her own son in what he might very well
+consider an unnatural way. If Jackson had been at home he would have laid
+it to his charge; but he knew that Cynthia would have scorned even to
+speak of him with his mother, and he knew too well his mother's slight
+for Whitwell to suppose that he could have influenced her. His mind
+turned in momentary suspicion to Westover. Had Westover, he wondered,
+with a purpose to pay him up for it forming itself simultaneously with
+his question, been setting his mother against him? She might have written
+to Westover to get at the true inwardness of his behavior, and Westover
+might have written her something that had made her harden her heart
+against him. But upon reflection this seemed out of character for both of
+them; and Jeff was thrown back upon his mother's sober second thought of
+his misconduct for an explanation of her coldness. He could not deny that
+he had grievously disappointed her in several ways. But he did not see
+why he should not take a certain hint from her letter, or construct a
+hint from it, at one with a vague intent prompted by his own restless and
+curious vanity. Since he had parted with Bessie Lynde, on terms of
+humiliation for her which must have been anguish for him if he had ever
+loved her, or loved anything but his power over her, he had remained in
+absolute ignorance of her. He had not heard where she was or how she was;
+but now, as the few weeks before Class Day and Commencement crumbled
+away, he began to wonder why she made no sign. He believed that since she
+had been willing to go so far to get him, she would not be willing to
+give him up so easily. The thought of Cynthia had always intruded more or
+less effectively between them, but now that this thought began to fade
+into the past, the thought of Bessie began to grow out of it with no
+interposing shadow.
+
+However, Jeff was in no hurry. It was not passion that moved him, and the
+mood in which he could play with the notion of getting back to his
+flirtation with Bessie Lynde was pleasanter after the violence of recent
+events than any renewal of strong sensations could be. He preferred to
+loiter in this mood, and he was meantime much more comfortable than he
+had been for a great while. He was rid of the disagreeable sense of
+disloyalty to Cynthia, and he was rid of the stress of living up to her
+conscience in various ways. He was rid of Bessie Lynde, too, and of the
+trouble of forecasting and discounting her caprices. His thought turned
+at times with a soft regret to hopes, disappointments, experiences
+connected with neither, and now tinged with a tender melancholy,
+unalloyed by shame or remorse. As he drew nearer to Class Day he had a
+somewhat keener compunction for Cynthia and the hopes he had encouraged
+her to build and had then dashed. But he was coming more and more to
+regard it all as fatality; and if the chance that he counted upon to
+bring him and Bessie together again had occurred he could have more
+easily forgiven himself.
+
+One of the jays, who was spreading on rather a large scale, wanted Jeff
+to spread with him, but he refused, because, as he said, he meant to keep
+out of it altogether; and for the same reason he declined to take part in
+the spread of a rather jay society he belonged to. In his secret heart he
+trusted that some friendly fortuity might throw an invitation to Beck
+Hall in his way, or at least a card for the Gym, which, if no longer the
+place it had been, was still by no means jay. He got neither; but as he
+felt all the joy of the June day in his young blood he consoled himself
+very well with the dancing at one of the halls, where the company
+happened that year to be openly, almost recklessly jay. Jeff had some
+distinction among the fellows who enviously knew of his social success
+during the winter, and especially of his affair with Bessie Lynde; and
+there were some girls very pretty and very well dressed among the crowd
+of girls who were neither. They were from remote parts of the country,
+and in the charge of chaperons ignorant of the differences so poignant to
+local society. Jeff went about among them, and danced with the sisters
+and cousins of several men who seemed superior to the lost condition of
+their kinswomen; these were nice fellows enough, but doomed by their
+grinding, or digging, or their want of worldly wisdom, to a place among
+the jays, when they really had some qualifications for a nobler standing.
+He had a very good time, and he was enjoying himself in his devotion to a
+lively young brunette whom he was making laugh with his jokes about some
+of the others, when his eye was caught by a group of ladies who advanced
+among the jays with something of that collective intrepidity and
+individual apprehension characteristic of people in slumming. They had
+the air of not knowing what might happen to them, but the adventurous
+young Boston matron in charge of the girls kept on a bold front behind
+her lorgnette, and swept the strange company she found herself in with an
+unshrinking eye as she led her band among the promenaders, and past the
+couples seated along the walls. She hesitated a moment as her glance fell
+upon Jeff, and then she yielded, at whatever risk, to the comfort of
+finding a known face among so many aliens. "Why, Mr. Durgin!" she called
+out. "Bessie, here's Mr. Durgin," and she turned to the girl, who was in
+her train, as Jeff had perceived by something finer than the senses from
+the first.
+
+He rose from the side of his brunette, whose brother was standing near,
+and shook hands with the adventurous young matron, who seemed suddenly
+much better acquainted with him than he had ever thought her, and with
+Bessie Lynde; the others were New York girls, and the matron presented
+him. "Are you going on?" she asked, and the vague challenge with the
+smile that accompanied it was sufficient invitation for him.
+
+"Why, I believe so," he said, and he turned to take leave of his pretty
+brunette; but she had promptly vanished with her brother, and he was
+spared the trouble of getting rid of her. He would have been equal to
+much more for the sake of finding himself with Bessie Lynde again, whose
+excitement he could see burning in her eyes, though her thick complexion
+grew neither brighter nor paler. He did not know what quality of
+excitement it might be, but he said, audaciously: "It's a good while
+since we met!" and he was sensible that his audacity availed.
+
+"Is it?" she asked. He put himself at her side, and he did not leave her
+again till he went to dress for the struggle around the Tree. He found
+himself easily included in the adventurous young matron's party. He had
+not the elegance of some of the taller and slenderer men in the scholar's
+gown, but the cap became his handsome face. His affair with Bessie Lynde
+had given him a certain note, and an adventurous young matron, who was
+naturally a little indiscriminate, might very well have been willing to
+let him go about with her party. She could not know how impudent his mere
+presence was with reference to Bessie, and the girl herself made no sign
+that could have enlightened her. She accepted something more that her
+share of his general usefulness to the party; she danced with him
+whenever he asked her, and she seemed not to scruple to publish her
+affair with him in the openest manner. If he could have stilled a certain
+shame for her which he felt, he would have thought he was having the best
+kind of time. They made no account of by-gones in their talk, but she had
+never been so brilliant, or prompted him to so many of the effronteries
+which were the spirit of his humor. He thought her awfully nice, with
+lots of sense; he liked her letting him come back without any fooling or
+fuss, and he began to admire instead of despising her for it. Decidedly
+it was, as she would have said, the chicquest sort of thing. What was the
+use, anyway? He made up his mind.
+
+When he said he must go and dress for the Tree, he took leave of her
+first, and he was aware of a vivid emotion, which was like regret in her
+at parting with him. She said, Must he? She seemed to want to say
+something more to him; while he was dismissing himself from the others,
+he noticed that once or twice she opened her lips as if she were going to
+speak. In the end she did nothing more important than to ask if he had
+seen her brother; but after he had left the party he turned and saw her
+following him with eyes that he fancied anxious and even frightened in
+their gaze.
+
+The riot round the Tree roared itself through its wonted events. Class
+after class of the undergraduates filed in and sank upon the grass below
+the terraces and parterres of brilliantly dressed ladies within the
+quadrangle of seats; the alumni pushed themselves together against the
+wall of Holder Chapel; the men of the Senior class came last in their
+grotesque variety of sweaters and second and third best clothes for the
+scramble at the Tree. The regulation cheers tore from throats that grew
+hoarser and hoarser, till every class and every favorite in the faculty
+had been cheered. Then the signal-hat was flung into the air, and the
+rush at the Tree was made, and the combat' for the flowers that garlanded
+its burly waist began.
+
+Jeff's size and shape forbade him to try for the flowers from the
+shoulders of others. He was one of a group of jays who set their backs to
+the Tree, and fought away all comers except their own; they pulled down
+every man not of their sort, and put up a jay, who stripped the Tree of
+its flowers and flung them to his fellows below. As he was let drop to
+the ground, Jeff snatched a handful of his spoil from him, and made off
+with it toward the place where he had seen Bessie Lynde and her party.
+But when he reached the place, shouldering and elbowing his way through
+the press, she was no longer there. He saw her hat at a distance through
+the crowd, where he did not choose to follow, and he stuffed the flowers
+into his breast to give to her later. He expected to meet her somewhere
+in the evening; if not, he would try to find her at her aunt's house in
+town; failing that, he could send her the flowers, and trust her for some
+sort of leading acknowledgment.
+
+He went and had a bath and dressed himself freshly, and then he went for
+a walk in the still evening air. He was very hot from the battle which
+had been fought over him, and which he had shared with all his strength,
+and it seemed to him as if he could not get cool. He strolled far out
+along Concord Avenue, beyond the expanses and ice-horses of Fresh Pond,
+into the country toward Belmont, with his hat off and his head down. He
+was very well satisfied, and he was smiling to himself at the ease of his
+return to Bessie, and securely speculating upon the outcome of their
+renewed understanding.
+
+He heard a vehicle behind him, rapidly driven, and he turned out for it
+without looking around. Then suddenly he felt a fiery sting on his
+forehead, and then a shower of stings swiftly following each other over
+his head and face. He remembered stumbling, when he was a boy, into a
+nest of yellow-jackets, that swarmed up around him and pierced him like
+sparks of fire at every uncovered point. But he knew at the same time
+that it was some one in the vehicle beside him who was lashing him over
+the head with a whip. He bowed his head with his eyes shut and lunged
+blindly out toward his assailant, hoping to seize him.
+
+But the horse sprang aside, and tore past him down the road. Jeff opened
+his eyes, and through the blood that dripped from the cuts above them he
+saw the wicked face of Alan Lynde looking back at him from the dogcart
+where he sat with his man beside him. He brandished his broken whip in
+the air, and flung it into the bushes. Jeff walked on, and picked it up,
+before he turned aside to the pools of the marsh stretching on either
+hand, and tried to stanch his hurts, and get himself into shape for
+returning to town and stealing back to his lodging. He had to wait till
+after dark, and watch his chance to get into the house unnoticed.
+
+
+
+
+XLVIII
+
+The chum to whom Jeff confided the story of his encounter with a man he
+left nameless inwardly thanked fortune that he was not that man; for he
+knew him destined sooner or later to make such reparation for the
+injuries he had inflicted as Jeff chose to exact. He tended him
+carefully, and respected the reticence Jeff guarded concerning the whole
+matter, even with the young doctor whom his friend called, and who kept
+to himself his impressions of the nature of Jeff's injuries.
+
+Jeff lay in his darkened room, and burned with them, and with the
+thoughts, guesses, purposes which flamed through his mind. Had she, that
+girl, known what her brother meant to do? Had she wished him to think of
+her in the moment of his punishment, and had she spoken of her brother so
+that he might recall her, or had she had some ineffective impulse to warn
+him against her brother when she spoke of him?
+
+He lay and raged in vain with his conjectures, and he did a thousand
+imagined murders upon Lynde in revenge of his shame.
+
+Toward the end of the week, while his hurts were still too evident to
+allow him to go out-of-doors before dark, he had a note from Westover
+asking him to come in at once to see him.
+
+"Your brother Jackson," Westover wrote, "reached Boston by the New York
+train this morning, and is with me here. I must tell you I think he is
+not at all well, but he does not know how sick he is, and so I forewarn
+you. He wants to get on home, but I do not feel easy about letting him
+make the rest of the journey alone. Some one ought to go with him. I
+write not knowing whether you are still in Cambridge or not; or whether,
+if you are, you can get away at this time. But I think you ought, and I
+wish, at any rate, that you would come in at once and see Jackson. Then
+we can settle what had best be done."
+
+Jeff wrote back that he had been suffering with a severe attack of
+erysipelas--he decided upon erysipelas for the time being, but he meant
+to let Westover know later that he had been in a row--and the doctor
+would not let him go out yet. He promised to come in as soon as he
+possibly could. If Westover thought Jackson ought to be got home at once,
+and was not fit to travel alone, he asked him to send a hospital nurse
+with him.
+
+Westover replied by Jeff's messenger that it would worry and alarm
+Jackson to be put in charge of a nurse; but that he would go home with
+him, and they would start the next day. He urged Jeff to come and see his
+brother if it was at all safe for him to do so. But if he could not,
+Westover would give his mother a reassuring reason for his failure.
+
+Mrs. Durgin did not waste any anxiety for the sickness which prevented
+Jeff from coming home with his brother. She said ironically that it must
+be very bad, and she gave all her thought and care to Jackson. The sick
+man rallied, as he prophesied he should, in his native air, and
+celebrated the sense and science of the last doctor he had seen in
+Europe, who told him that he had made a great gain, but he had better
+hurry home as fast as he could, for he had got all the advantage he could
+expect to have from his stay abroad, and now home air was the best thing
+for him.
+
+It could not be known how much of this he believed; he had, at any rate,
+the pathetic hopefulness of his malady; but his mother believed it all,
+and she nursed him with a faith in his recovery which Whitwell confided
+to Westover was about as much as he wanted to see, for one while. She
+seemed to grow younger in the care of him, and to get back to herself,
+more and more, from the facts of Jeff's behavior, which had aged and
+broken her. She had to tell Jackson about it all, but he took it with
+that indifference to the things of this world which the approach of death
+sometimes brings, and in the light of his passivity it no longer seemed
+to her so very bad. It was a relief to have Jackson say, Well, perhaps it
+was for the best; and it was a comfort to see how he and Cynthia took to
+each other; it was almost as if that dreadful trouble had not been. She
+told Jackson what hard work she had had to make Cynthia stay with her,
+and how the girl had consented to stay only until Jeff came home; but she
+guessed, now that Jackson had got back, he could make Cynthia see it all
+in another light, and perhaps it would all come right again. She
+consulted him about Jeff's plan of going abroad, and Jackson said it
+might be about as well; he should soon be around, and he thought if Jeff
+went it would give Cynthia more of a chance to get reconciled. After all,
+his mother suggested, a good many fellows behaved worse than Jeff had
+done and still had made it up with the girls they were engaged to; and
+Jackson gently assented.
+
+He did not talk with Cynthia about Jeff, out of that delicacy, or that
+coldness, common to them both. Perhaps it was not necessary for them to
+speak of him; perhaps they understood him aright in their understanding
+of each other.
+
+Westover stayed on, day after day, thinking somehow that he ought to wait
+till Jeff came. There were only a few other people in the hotel, and
+these were of a quiet sort; they were not saddened by the presence of a
+doomed man under the same roof, as gayer summer folks might have been,
+and they were themselves no disturbance to him.
+
+He sat about with them on the veranda, and he made friends among them,
+and they did what they could to encourage and console him in his
+impatience to take up his old cares in the management of the hotel. The
+Whitwells easily looked after the welfare of the guests, and Jackson was
+so much better to every one's perception that Westover could honestly
+write Jeff a good report of him.
+
+The report may have been so good that Jeff took the affair too easily. It
+was a fortnight after Jackson's return to Lion's Head when he began to
+fail so suddenly and alarmingly that Westover decided upon his own
+responsibility to telegraph Jeff of his condition. But he had the
+satisfaction of Whitwell's approval when he told him what he had done.
+
+"Of course, Jackson a'n't long for this world. Anybody but him and his
+mother could see that; and now he's just melting away, as you might say.
+I ha'n't liked his not carin' to work plantchette since he got back;
+looked to me from the start that he kind of knowed that it wa'n't worth
+while for him to trouble about a world that he'll know all about so soon,
+anyways; and d' you notice he don't seem to care about Mars, either? I've
+tried to wake him up on it two-three times, but you can't git him to take
+an interest. I guess Jeff can't git here any too soon on Jackson's
+account; but as far forth as I go, he couldn't git here too late. I
+should like to take the top of his head off."
+
+Westover had been in Whitwell's confidence since their first chance of
+speech together. He now said:
+
+"I know it will be rather painful to you to have him here for some
+reasons, but--"
+
+"You mean Cynthy? Well! I guess when Cynthy can't get along with the
+sight of Jeff Durgin, she'll be a different girl from what she's ever
+been before. If she's got to see that skunk ag'in, I guess this is about
+the best time to do it."
+
+It was Westover who drove to meet Jeff at the station, when he got his
+despatch, naming the train he would take, and he found him looking very
+well, and perhaps stouter than he had been.
+
+They left the station in silence, after their greeting and Jeff's
+inquiries about Jackson. Jeff had taken the reins, and now he put them
+with the whip in one hand, and pushed up his hat with the other, and
+turned his face full upon Westover. "Notice anything in particular?" he
+demanded.
+
+"No; yes--some slight marks."
+
+"I guess that fellow fixed me up pretty well: paints black eyes, and that
+kind of thing. I got to scrapping with a man, Class Day; we wanted to
+settle a little business we began at the Tree, and he left his marks on
+me. I meant to tell you the truth as soon as I could get at you; but I
+had to say erysipelas in my letter. I guess, if you don't mind, we'll let
+erysipelas stand, with the rest."
+
+"I shouldn't have cared," Westover said, "if you'd let it stand with me."
+
+"Oh, thank you," Jeff returned.
+
+There could have been no show of affection at his meeting with Jackson
+even if there had been any fact of it; that was not the law of their
+life. But Jeff had always been a turbulent, rebellious, younger brother,
+resentful of Jackson's control, too much his junior to have the
+associations of an equal companionship in the past, and yet too near him
+in age to have anything like a filial regard for him. They shook hands,
+and each asked the other how he was, and then they seemed to have done
+with each other. Jeff's mother kissed him in addition to the handshaking,
+but made him feel her preoccupation with Jackson; she asked him if he had
+hurried home on Jackson's account, and he promptly lied her out of this
+anxiety.
+
+He shook hands with Cynthia, too, but it was across the barrier which had
+not been lowered between them since they parted. He spoke to Jackson
+about her, the day after he came home, when Jackson said he was feeling
+unusually strong and well, and the two brothers had strolled out through
+the orchard together. Now and then he gave the sick man his arm, and when
+he wanted to sit down in a sunny place he spread the shawl he carried for
+him.
+
+"I suppose mother's told you about Cynthy and me, Jackson?" he began.
+
+Jackson answered, with lack-lustre eyes, "Yes." Presently he asked:
+"What's become of the other girl?"
+
+"Damn her! I don't know what's become of her, and I don't care!" Jeff
+exploded, furiously.
+
+"Then you don't care for her any more?" Jackson pursued, with the same
+languid calm.
+
+"I never cared for her."
+
+Jackson was silent, and the matter seemed to have faded out of his mind.
+But it was keenly alive in Jeff's mind, and he was in the strange
+necessity which men in the flush of life and health often feel of seeking
+counsel of those who stand in the presence of death, as if their words
+should have something of the mystical authority of the unknown wisdom
+they are about to penetrate.
+
+"What I want to know is, what I am going to do about Cynthy?"
+
+"I don't know," Jackson answered, vaguely, and he expressed by his
+indirection the sense he must sometimes have had of his impending
+fate--"I don't know what she's going to do, her or mother, either."
+
+"Yes," Jeff assented, "that's what I think of. And I'd do anything that I
+could--that you thought was right."
+
+Jackson apparently concentrated his mind upon the question by an effort.
+"Do you care as much for Cynthy as you used to?"
+
+"Yes," said Jeff, after a moment, "as much as I ever did; and more. But
+I've been thinking, since the thing happened, that, if I'd cared for her
+the way she did for me, it wouldn't have happened. Look here, Jackson!
+You know I've never pretended to be like some men--like Mr. Westover, for
+example--always looking out for the right and the wrong, and all that. I
+didn't make myself, and I guess if the Almighty don't make me go right
+it's because He don't want me to. But I have got a conscience about
+Cynthy, and I'd be willing to help out a little if I knew how, about her.
+The devil of it is, I've got to being afraid. I don't mean that I'm not
+fit for her; any man's fit for any woman if he wants her bad enough; but
+I'm afraid I sha'n't ever care for her in the right way. That's the
+point. I've cared for just one woman in this world, and it a'n't Cynthy,
+as far as I can make out. But she's gone, and I guess I could coax Cynthy
+round again, and I could be what she wants me to be, after this."
+
+Jackson lay upon his shawl, looking up at the sky full of islands of warm
+clouds in its sea of blue; he was silent so long that Jeff began to think
+he had not been listening; he could not hear him breathe, and he came
+forward to him quickly from the shadow of the tree where he sat.
+
+"Well?" Jackson whispered, turning his eyes upon him.
+
+"Well?" Jeff returned.
+
+"I guess you'd better let it alone," said Jackson.
+
+"All right. That's what I think, too."
+
+
+
+
+XLIX.
+
+Jackson died a week later, and they buried him in the old family lot in
+the farthest corner of the orchard. His mother and Cynthia put on
+mourning for him, and they stood together by his open grave, Mrs. Durgin
+leaning upon her son's arm and the girl upon her father's. The women wept
+quietly, but Jeff's eyes were dry, though his face was discharged of all
+its prepotent impudence. Westover, standing across the grave from him,
+noticed the marks on his forehead that he said were from his scrapping,
+and wondered what really made them. He recognized the spot where they
+were standing as that where the boy had obeyed the law of his nature and
+revenged the stress put upon him for righteousness. Over the stone of the
+nearest grave Jeff had shown a face of triumphant derision when he pelted
+Westover with apples. The painter's mind fell into a chaos of conjecture
+and misgiving, so that he scarcely took in the words of the composite
+service which the minister from the Union Chapel at the Huddle read over
+the dead.
+
+Some of the guests from the hotel came to the funeral, but others who
+were not in good health remained away, and there was a general sense
+among them, which imparted itself to Westover, that Jackson's dying so,
+at the beginning of the season, was not a fortunate incident. As he sat
+talking with Jeff at a corner of the piazza late in the afternoon, Frank
+Whitwell came up to them and said there were some people in the office
+who had driven over from another hotel to see about board, but they had
+heard there was sickness in the house, and wished to talk with him.
+
+"I won't come," said Jeff.
+
+"They're not satisfied with what I've said," the boy urged. "What shall I
+tell them?"
+
+"Tell them to-go to the devil," said Jeff, and when Frank Whitwell made
+off with this message for delivery in such decent terms as he could
+imagine for it, Jeff said, rather to himself than to Westover, "I don't
+see how we're going to run this hotel with that old family lot down there
+in the orchard much longer."
+
+He assumed the air of full authority at Lion's Head; and Westover felt
+the stress of a painful conjecture in regard to the Whitwells intensified
+upon him from the moment he turned away from Jackson's grave.
+
+Cynthia and her father had gone back to their own house as soon as Jeff
+returned, and though the girl came home with Mrs. Durgin after the
+funeral, and helped her in their common duties through the afternoon and
+evening, Westover saw her taking her way down the hill with her brother
+when the long day's work was over. Jeff saw her too; he was sitting with
+Westover at the office door smoking, and he was talking of the Whitwells.
+
+"I suppose they won't stay," he said, "and I can't expect it; but I don't
+know what mother will do, exactly."
+
+At the same moment Whitwell came round the corner of the hotel from the
+barn, and approached them: "Jeff, I guess I better tell you straight off
+that we're goin', the children and me."
+
+"All right, Mr. Whitwell," said Jeff, with respectful gravity; "I was
+afraid of it."
+
+Westover made a motion to rise, but Whitwell laid a detaining hand upon
+his knee. "There ain't anything so private about it, so far as I know."
+
+"Don't go, Mr. Westover," said Jeff, and Westover remained.
+
+"We a'n't a-goin' to leave you in the lurch, and we want you should take
+your time, especially Mis' Durgin. But the sooner the better. Heigh?"
+
+"Yes, I understand that, Mr. Whitwell; I guess mother will miss you, but
+if you must go, you must." The two men remained silent a moment, and then
+Jeff broke out passionately, rising and flinging his cigar away: "I wish
+I could go, instead! That would be the right way, and I guess mother
+would like it full as well. Do you see any way to manage it?" He put his
+foot up in his chair, and dropped his elbow on his knee, with his chin
+propped in his hand. Westover could see that he meant what he was saying.
+"If there was any way, I'd do it. I know what you think of me, and I
+should be just like you, in your place. I don't feel right to turn you
+out here, I don't, Mr. Whitwell, and yet if I stay, I've got to do it.
+What's the reason I can't go?"
+
+"You can't," said Whitwell, "and that's all about it. We shouldn't let
+you, if you could. But I a'n't surprised you feel the way you do," he
+added, unsparingly. "As you say, I should feel just so myself if I was in
+your place. Well, goodnight, Mr. Westover."
+
+Whitwell turned and slouched down the hill, leaving the painter to the
+most painful moment he had known with Jeff Durgin, and nearer sympathy.
+"That's all right, Mr. Westover," Jeff said, "I don't blame him."
+
+He remained in a constraint from which he presently broke with mocking
+hilarity when Jombateeste came round the corner of the house, as if he
+had been waiting for Whitwell to be gone, and told Jeff he must get
+somebody else to look after the horses.
+
+"Why don't you wait and take the horses with you, Jombateeste?" he
+inquired. "They'll be handing in their resignation, the next thing. Why
+not go altogether?"
+
+The little Canuck paused, as if uncertain whether he was made the object
+of unfriendly derision or not, and looked at Westover for help.
+Apparently he decided to chance it in as bitter an answer as he could
+invent. "The 'oss can't 'elp 'imself, Mr. Durgin. 'E stay. But you don'
+hown EVERYBODY."
+
+"That's so, Jombateeste," said Jeff. "That's a good hit. It makes me feel
+awfully. Have a cigar?" The Canuck declined with a dignified bow, and
+Jeff said: "You don't smoke any more? Oh, I see! It's my tobacco you're
+down on. What's the matter, Jombateeste? What are you going away for?"
+Jeff lighted for himself the cigar the Canuck had refused, and smoked
+down upon the little man.
+
+"Mr. W'itwell goin'," Jombateeste said, a little confused and daunted.
+
+"What's Mr. Whitwell going for?"
+
+"You hask Mr. W'itwell."
+
+"All right. And if I can get him to stay will you stay too, Jombateeste?
+I don't like to see a rat leaving a ship; the ship's sure to sink, if he
+does. How do you suppose I'm going to run Lion's Head without you to
+throw down hay to the horses? It will be ruin to me, sure, Jombateeste.
+All the guests know how you play on the pitchfork out there, and they'll
+leave in a body if they hear you've quit. Do say you'll stay, and I'll
+reduce your wages one-half on the spot."
+
+Jombateeste waited to hear no more injuries. He said: "You'll don' got
+money enough, Mr. Durgin, by gosh! to reduce my wages," and he started
+down the hill toward Whitwell's house with as great loftiness as could
+comport with a down-hill gait and his stature.
+
+"Well, I seem to be getting it all round, Mr. Westover," said Jeff. "This
+must make you feel good. I don't know but I begin to believe there's a
+God in Israel, myself."
+
+He walked away without saying good-night, and Westover went to bed
+without the chance of setting himself right. In the morning, when he came
+down to breakfast, and stopped at the desk to engage a conveyance for the
+station from Frank Whitwell the boy forestalled him with a grave face.
+"You don't know about Mrs. Durgin?"
+
+"No; what about her?"
+
+"Well, we can't tell exactly. Father thinks it's a shock; Jombateeste
+gone over to Lovewell for the doctor. Cynthia's with her. It seemed to
+come on in the night."
+
+He spoke softly, that no one else might hear; but by noon the fact that
+Mrs. Durgin had been stricken with paralysis was all over the place. The
+gloom cast upon the opening season by Jackson's death was deepened among
+the guests. Some who had talked of staying through July went away that
+day. But under Cynthia's management the housekeeping was really
+unaffected by Mrs. Durgin's calamity, and the people who stayed found
+themselves as comfortable as ever. Jeff came fully into the hotel
+management, and in their business relation Cynthia and he were
+continually together; there was no longer a question of the Whitwells
+leaving him; even Jombateeste persuaded himself to stay, and Westover
+felt obliged to remain at least till the present danger in Mrs. Durgin's
+case was past.
+
+With the first return of physical strength, Mrs. Durgin was impatient to
+be seen about the house, and to retrieve the season that her affliction
+had made so largely a loss. The people who had become accustomed to it
+stayed on, and the house filled up as she grew better, but even the sight
+of her in a wheeled chair did not bring back the prosperity of other
+years. She lamented over it with a keen and full perception of the fact,
+but in a cloudy association of it with the joint future of Jeff and
+Cynthia.
+
+One day, after Mrs. Durgin had declared that she did not know what they
+were to do, if things kept on as they were going, Whitwell asked his
+daughter:
+
+"Do you suppose she thinks you and Jeff have made it up again?"
+
+"I don't know," said the girl, with a troubled voice, "and I don't know
+what to do about it. It don't seem as if I could tell her, and yet it's
+wrong to let her go on."
+
+"Why didn't he tell her?" demanded her father. "'Ta'n't fair his leavin'
+it to you. But it's like him."
+
+The sick woman's hold upon the fact weakened most when she was tired.
+When she was better, she knew how it was with them. Commonly it was when
+Cynthia had got her to bed for the night that she sent for Jeff, and
+wished to ask him what he was going to do. "You can't expect Cynthy to
+stay here another winter helpin' you, with Jackson away. You've got to
+either take her with you, or else come here yourself. Give up your last
+year in college, why don't you? I don't want you should stay, and I don't
+know who does. If I was in Cynthia's place, I'd let you work off your own
+conditions, now you've give up the law. She'll kill herself, tryin' to
+keep you along."
+
+Sometimes her speech became so indistinct that no one but Cynthia could
+make it out; and Jeff, listening with a face as nearly discharged as
+might be of its laughing irony, had to turn to Cynthia for the word which
+no one else could catch, and which the stricken woman remained
+distressfully waiting for her to repeat to him, with her anxious eyes
+upon the girl's face. He was dutifully patient with all his mother's
+whims. He came whenever she sent for him, and sat quiet under the
+severities with which she visited all his past unworthiness. "Who you
+been hectorin' now, I should like to know," she began on him one evening
+when he came at her summons. "Between you and Fox, I got no peace of my
+life. Where is the dog?"
+
+"Fox is all right, mother," Jeff responded. "You're feeling a little
+better to-night, a'n't you?"
+
+"I don't know; I can't tell," she returned, with a gleam of intelligence
+in her eye. Then she said: "I don't see why I'm left to strangers all the
+time."
+
+"You don't call Cynthia a stranger, do you, mother?" he asked, coaxingly.
+
+"Oh--Cynthy!" said Mrs. Durgin, with a glance as of surprise at seeing
+her. "No, Cynthy's all right. But where's Jackson and your father? If
+I've told them not to be out in the dew once, I've told 'em a hundred
+times. Cynthy'd better look after her housekeepin' if she don't want the
+whole place to run behind, and not a soul left in the house. What time o'
+year is it now?" she suddenly asked, after a little weary pause.
+
+"It's the last of August, mother."
+
+"Oh," she sighed, "I thought it was the beginnin' of May. Didn't you come
+up here in May?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Well, then--Or, mebbe that's one o' them tormentin' dreams; they do
+pester so! What did you come for?"
+
+Jeff was sitting on one side of her bed and Cynthia on the other: She was
+looking at the sufferer's face, and she did not meet the glance of
+amusement which Jeff turned upon her at being so fairly cornered. "Well,
+I don't know," he said. "I thought you might like to see me."
+
+"What 'd he come for?"--the sick woman turned to Cynthia.
+
+"You'd better tell her," said the girl, coldly, to Jeff. "She won't be
+satisfied till you do. She'll keep coming back to it."
+
+"Well, mother," said Jeff, still with something of his hardy amusement,
+"I hadn't been acting just right, and I thought I'd better tell Cynthy."
+
+"You better let the child alone. If I ever catch you teasin' them
+children again, I'll make Jackson shoot Fox."
+
+"All right, mother," said Jeff.
+
+She moved herself restively in bed. "What's this," she demanded of her
+son, "that Whitwell's tellin' about you and Cynthy breakin' it off?"
+
+"Well, there was talk of that," said Jeff, passing his hand over his lips
+to keep back the smile that was stealing to them.
+
+"Who done it?"
+
+Cynthia kept her eyes on Jeff, who dropped his to his mother's face.
+"Cynthy did it; but I guess I gave her good enough reason."
+
+"About that hussy in Boston? She was full more to blame than what you
+was. I don't see what Cynthy wanted to do it for on her account."
+
+"I guess Cynthy was right."
+
+Mrs. Durgin's speech had been thickening more and more. She now said
+something that Jeff could not understand. He looked involuntarily at
+Cynthia.
+
+"She says she thinks I was hasty with you," the girl interpreted.
+
+Jeff kept his eyes on hers, but he answered to his mother: "Not any more
+than I deserved. I hadn't any right to expect that she would stand it."
+
+Again the sick woman tried to say something. Jeff made out a few
+syllables, and, after his mother had repeated her words, he had to look
+to Cynthia for help.
+
+"She wants to know if it's all right now."
+
+"What shall I say?" asked Jeff, huskily.
+
+"Tell her the truth."
+
+"What is the truth?"
+
+"That we haven't made it up."
+
+Jeff hesitated, and then said: "Well, not yet, mother," and he bent an
+entreating look upon Cynthia which she could not feel was wholly for
+himself. "I--I guess we can fix it, somehow. I behaved very badly to
+Cynthia."
+
+"No, not to me!" the girl protested in an indignant burst.
+
+"Not to that little scalawag, then!" cried Jeff. "If the wrong wasn't to
+you, there wasn't any wrong."
+
+"It was to you!" Cynthia retorted.
+
+"Oh, I guess I can stand it," said Jeff, and his smile now came to his
+lips and eyes.
+
+His mother had followed their quick parley with eager looks, as if she
+were trying to keep her intelligence to its work concerning them. The
+effort seemed to exhaust her, and when she spoke again her words were so
+indistinct that even Cynthia could not understand them till she had
+repeated them several times.
+
+Then the girl was silent, while the invalid kept an eager look upon her.
+She seemed to understand that Cynthia did not mean to speak; and the
+tears came into her eyes.
+
+"Do you want me to know what she said?" asked Jeff, respectfully,
+reverently almost.
+
+Cynthia said, gently: "She says that then you must show you didn't mean
+any harm to me, and that you cared for me, all through, and you didn't
+care for anybody else."
+
+"Thank you," said Jeff, and he turned to his mother. "I'll do everything
+I can to make Cynthy believe that, mother."
+
+The girl broke into tears and went out of the room. She sent in the
+night-watcher, and then Jeff took leave of his mother with an unwonted
+kiss.
+
+Into the shadow of a starlit night he saw the figure he had been waiting
+for glide out of the glitter of the hotel lights. He followed it down the
+road.
+
+"Cynthia!" he called; and when he came up with her he asked: "What's the
+reason we can't make it true? Why can't you believe what mother wants me
+to make you?"
+
+Cynthia stopped, as her wont was when she wished to speak seriously. "Do
+you ask that for my sake or hers?"
+
+"For both your sakes."
+
+"I thought so. You ought to have asked it for your own sake, Jeff, and
+then I might have been fool enough to believe you. But now--"
+
+She started swiftly down the hill again, and this time he did not try to
+follow her.
+
+
+
+
+L.
+
+Mrs. Durgin's speech never regained the measure of clearness it had
+before; no one but Cynthia could understand her, and often she could not.
+The doctor from Lovewell surmised that she had sustained another stroke,
+lighter, more obscure than the first, and it was that which had rendered
+her almost inarticulate. The paralysis might have also affected her
+brain, and silenced her thoughts as well as her words. Either she
+believed that the reconciliation between Jeff and Cynthia had taken
+place, or else she could no longer care. She did not question them again,
+but peacefully weakened more and more. Near the end of September she had
+a third stroke, and from this she died.
+
+The day after the funeral Jeff had a talk with Whitwell, and opened his
+mind to him.
+
+"I'm going over to the other side, and I shan't be back before spring, or
+about time to start the season here. What I want to know is whether, if
+I'm out of the house, and not likely to come back, you'll stay here and
+look after the place through the winter. It hasn't been a good season,
+but I guess I can afford to make it worth your while if you look at it as
+a matter of business."
+
+Whitwell leaned forward and took a straw into his mouth from the golden
+wall of oat sheaves in the barn where they were talking. A soft rustling
+in the mow overhead marked the remote presence of Jombateeste, who was
+getting forward the hay for the horses, pushing it toward the holes where
+it should fall into their racks.
+
+"I should want to think about it," said Whitwell. "I do' know as Cynthy'd
+care much about stayin'--or Frank."
+
+"How long do you want to think about it?" Jeff demanded, ignoring the
+possible wishes of Cynthia and Frank.
+
+"I guess I could let you know by night."
+
+"All right," said Jeff.
+
+He was turning away, when Whitwell remarked:
+
+"I don't know as I should want to stay without I could have somebody I
+could depend on, with me, to look after the hosses. Frank wouldn't want
+to."
+
+"Who'd you like?"
+
+"Well--Jombateeste."
+
+"Ask him."
+
+Whitwell called to the Canuck, and he came forward to the edge of the
+mow, and stood, fork in hand, looking down.
+
+"Want to stay here this winter and look after the horses, Jombateeste?"
+Whitwell asked.
+
+"Nosseh!" said the Canuck, with a misliking eye on Jeff.
+
+"I mean, along with me," Whitwell explained. "If I conclude to stay, will
+you? Jeff's goin' abroad."
+
+"I guess I stay," said Jombateeste.
+
+"Don't strain yourself, Jombateeste," said Jeff, with malevolent
+derision.
+
+"Not for you, Jeff Dorrgin," returned the Canuck. "I strain myself till I
+bust, if I want."
+
+Jeff sneered to Whitwell: "Well, then, the most important point is
+settled. Let me know about the minor details as soon as you can."
+
+"All right."
+
+Whitwell talked the matter over with his children at supper that evening.
+Jeff had made him a good offer, and he had the winter before him to
+provide for.
+
+"I don't know what deviltry he's up to," he said in conclusion.
+
+Frank looked to his sister for their common decision. "I am going to try
+for a school," she said, quietly. "It's pretty late, but I guess I can
+get something. You and Frank had better stay."
+
+"And you don't feel as if it was kind of meechin', our takin' up with his
+offer, after what's--" Whitwell delicately forbore to fill out his
+sentence.
+
+"You are doing the favor, father," said the girl. "He knows that, and I
+guess he wouldn't know where to look if you refused. And, after all,
+what's happened now is as much my doing as his."
+
+"I guess that's something so," said Whitwell, with a long sigh of relief.
+"Well, I'm glad you can look at it in that light, Cynthy. It's the way
+the feller's built, I presume, as much as anything."
+
+His daughter waived the point. "I shouldn't feel just right if none of us
+stayed in the old place. I should feel as if we had turned our backs on
+Mrs. Durgin."
+
+Her eyes shone, and her father said: "Well, I guess that's so, come to
+think of it. She's been like a mother to you, this past year, ha'n't she?
+And it must have come pootty hard for her, sidin' ag'in' Jeff. But she
+done it."
+
+The girl turned her head away. They were sitting in the little, low
+keeping-room of Whitwell's house, and her father had his hat on
+provisionally. Through the window they could see the light of the lantern
+at the office door of the hotel, whose mass was lost in the dark above
+and behind the lamp. It was all very still outside.
+
+"I declare," Whitwell went on, musingly, "I wisht Mr. Westover was here."
+
+Cynthia started, but it was to ask: "Do you want I should help you with
+your Latin, Frank?"
+
+Whitwell came back an hour later and found them still at their books. He
+told them it was all arranged; Durgin was to give up the place to him in
+a week, and he was to surrender it again when Jeff came back in the
+spring. In the mean time things were to remain as they were; after he was
+gone, they could all go and live at Lion's Head if they chose.
+
+"We'll see," said Cynthia. "I've been thinking that might be the best
+way, after all. I might not get a school, it's so late."
+
+"That's so," her father assented. "I declare," he added, after a moment's
+muse, "I felt sorry for the feller settin' up there alone, with nobody to
+do for him but that old thing he's got in. She can't cook any more
+than--" He desisted for want of a comparison, and said: "Such a lookin'
+table, too."
+
+"Do you think I better go and look after things a little?" Cynthia asked.
+
+"Well, you no need to," said her father. He got down the planchette, and
+labored with it, while his children returned to Frank's lessons.
+
+"Dumn 'f I can make the thing work," he said to himself at last. "I can't
+git any of 'em up. If Jackson was here, now!"
+
+Thrice a day Cynthia went up to the hotel and oversaw the preparation of
+Jeff's meals and kept taut the slack housekeeping of the old Irish woman
+who had remained as a favor, after the hotel closed, and professed to
+have lost the chance of a place for the winter by her complaisance. She
+submitted to Cynthia's authority, and tried to make interest for an
+indefinite stay by sudden zeal and industry, and the last days of Jeff in
+the hotel were more comfortable than he openly recognized. He left the
+care of the building wholly to Whitwell, and shut himself up in the old
+farm parlor with the plans for a new hotel which he said he meant to put
+up some day, if he could ever get rid of the old one. He went once to
+Lovewell, where he renewed the insurance, and somewhat increased it; and
+he put a small mortgage on the property. He forestalled the slow progress
+of the knowledge of others' affairs, which, in the country, is as sure as
+it is slow, and told Whitwell what he had done. He said he wanted the
+mortgage money for his journey, and the insurance money, if he could have
+the luck to cash up by a good fire, to rebuild with.
+
+Cynthia seldom met him in her comings and goings, but if they met they
+spoke on the terms of their boy and girl associations, and with no
+approach through resentment or tenderness to the relation that was ended
+between them. She saw him oftener than at any other time setting off on
+the long tramps he took through the woods in the afternoons. He was
+always alone, and, so far as any one knew, his wanderings had no object
+but to kill the time which hung heavy on his hands during the fortnight
+after his mother's death, before he sailed. It might have seemed strange
+that he should prefer to pass the days at Lion's Head after he had
+arranged for the care of the place with Whitwell, and Whitwell always
+believed that he stayed in the hope of somehow making up with Cynthia.
+
+One day, toward the very last, Durgin found himself pretty well fagged in
+the old pulp-mill clearing on the side of Lion's Head, which still
+belonged to Whitwell, and he sat down on a mouldering log there to rest.
+It had always been a favorite picnic ground, but the season just past had
+known few picnics, and it was those of former years that had left their
+traces in rusty sardine-cans and broken glass and crockery on the border
+of the clearing, which was now almost covered with white moss. Jeff
+thought of the day when he lurked in the hollow below with Fox, while
+Westover remained talking with Whitwell. He thought of the picnic that
+Mrs. Marven had embittered for him, and he thought of the last time that
+he had been there with Westover, when they talked of the Vostrands.
+
+Life had, so far, not been what he meant it, and just now it occurred to
+him that he might not have wholly made it what it had been. It seemed to
+him that a good many other people had come in and taken a hand in making
+his own life what it had been; and if he had meddled with theirs more
+than he was wanted, it was about an even thing. As far as he could make
+out, he was a sort of ingredient in the general mixture. He had probably
+done his share of the flavoring, but he had had very little to do with
+the mixing. There were different ways of looking at the thing. Westover
+had his way, but it struck Jeff that it put too much responsibility on
+the ingredient, and too little on the power that chose it. He believed
+that he could prove a clear case in his own favor, as far as the question
+of final justice was concerned, but he had no complaints to make. Things
+had fallen out very much to his mind. He was the Landlord at Lion's Head,
+at last, with the full right to do what he pleased with the place, and
+with half a year's leisure before him to think it over. He did not mean
+to waste the time while he was abroad; if there was anything to be
+learned anywhere about keeping a summer hotel, he was going to learn it;
+and he thought the summer hotel could be advantageously studied in its
+winter phases in the mild climates of Southern Europe. He meant to strike
+for the class of Americans who resorted to those climates; to divine
+their characters and to please their tastes.
+
+He unconsciously included Cynthia in his scheme of inquiry; he had been
+used so long to trust to her instincts and opinions, and to rely upon her
+help, and he realized that she was no longer in his life with something
+like the shock a man experiences when the loss of a limb, which continues
+a part of his inveterate consciousness, is brought to his sense by some
+mechanical attempt to use it. But even in this pang he did not regret
+that all was over between them. He knew now that he had never cared for
+her as he had once thought, and on her account, if not his own, he was
+glad their engagement was broken. A soft melancholy for his own
+disappointment imparted itself to his thoughts of Cynthia. He felt truly
+sorry for her, and he truly admired and respected her. He was in a very
+lenient mood toward every one, and he went so far in thought toward
+forgiving his enemies that he was willing at least to pardon all those
+whom he had injured. A little rustling in the underbrush across the
+clearing caught his quick ear, and he looked up to see Jombateeste
+parting the boughs of the young pines on its edge and advancing into the
+open with a gun on his shoulder. He called to him, cheerily: "Hello,
+John! Any luck?"
+
+Jombateeste shook his head. "Nawthing." He hesitated.
+
+"What are you after?"
+
+"Partridge," Jombateeste ventured back.
+
+Jeff could not resist the desire to scoff which always came upon him at
+sight of the Canuck. "Oh, pshaw! Why don't you go for woodchucks? They
+fly low, and you can hit them on the wing, if you can't sneak on 'em
+sitting."
+
+Jombateeste received his raillery in dignified silence, and turned back
+into the woods again. He left Durgin in heightened good-humor with
+himself and with the world, which had finally so well adapted itself to
+his desires and designs.
+
+Jeff watched his resentful going with a grin, and then threw himself back
+on the thick bed of dry moss where he had been sitting, and watched the
+clouds drifting across the space of blue which the clearing opened
+overhead. His own action reminded him of Jackson, lying in the orchard
+and looking up at the sky. He felt strangely at one with him, and he
+experienced a tenderness for his memory which he had not known before.
+Jackson had been a good man; he realized that with a curious sense of
+novelty in the reflection; he wondered what the incentives and the
+objects of such men as Jackson and Westover were, anyway. Something like
+grief for his brother came upon him; not such grief as he had felt,
+passionately enough, though tacitly, for his mother, but a regret for not
+having shown Jackson during his life that he could appreciate his
+unselfishness, though he could not see the reason or the meaning of it.
+He said to himself, in their safe remoteness from each other, that he
+wished he could do something for Jackson. He wondered if in the course of
+time he should get to be something like him. He imagined trying.
+
+He heard sounds again in the edge of the clearing, but he decided that it
+was that fool Jombateeste coming back; and when steps approached softly
+and hesitantly across the moss, he did not trouble himself to take his
+eyes from the clouds. He was only vexed to have his revery broken in
+upon.
+
+A voice that was not Jombateeste's spoke: "I say! Can you tell me the way
+to the Brooker Institute, or to the road down the mountain?"
+
+Jeff sat suddenly bolt-upright; in another moment he jumped to his feet.
+The Brooker Institute was a branch of the Keeley Cure recently
+established near the Huddle, and this must be a patient who had wandered
+from it, on one of the excursions the inmates made with their guardians,
+and lost his way. This was the fact that Jeff realized at the first
+glance he gave the man. The next he recognized that the man was Alan
+Lynde.
+
+"Oh, it's you," he said, quite simply. He felt so cruelly the hardship of
+his one unforgiven enemy's coming upon him just when he had resolved to
+be good that the tears came into his eyes. Then his rage seemed to swell
+up in him like the rise of a volcanic flood. "I'm going to kill you!" he,
+roared, and he launched himself upon Lynde, who stood dazed.
+
+But the murder which Jeff meant was not to be so easily done. Lynde had
+not grown up in dissolute idleness without acquiring some of the arts of
+self-defence which are called manly. He met Jeff's onset with remembered
+skill and with the strength which he had gained in three months of the
+wholesome regimen of the Brooker Institute. He had been sent there, not
+by Dr. Lacy's judgment, but by his despair, and so far the Cure had
+cured. He felt strong and fresh, and the hate which filled Jeff at sight
+of him steeled his shaken nerves and reinforced his feebler muscles, too.
+
+He made a desperate fight where he could not hope for mercy, and kept
+himself free of his powerful foe, whom he fought round and foiled, if he
+could not hurt him. Jeff never knew of the blows Lynde got in upon him;
+he had his own science, too, but he would not employ it. He wanted to
+crash through Lynde's defence and lay hold of him and crush the life out
+of him.
+
+The contest could not have lasted long at the best; but before Lynde was
+worn out he caught his heel in an old laurel root, and while he whirled
+to recover his footing Jeff closed in upon him, caught him by the middle,
+flung him down upon the moss, and was kneeling on his breast with both
+hands at his throat.
+
+He glared down into his enemy's face, and suddenly it looked pitifully
+little and weak, like a girl's face, a child's.
+
+Sometimes, afterward, it seemed to him that he forbore because at that
+instant he saw Jombateeste appear at the edge of the clearing and come
+running upon them. At other times he had the fancy that his action was
+purely voluntary, and that, against the logic of his hate and habit of
+his life, he had mercy upon his enemy. He did not pride himself upon it;
+he rather humbled himself before the fact, which was accomplished through
+his will, and not by it, and remained a mystery he did not try to solve.
+
+He took his hands from Lynde's throat and his knees off his breast. "Get
+up," he said; and when Lynde stood trembling on his feet he said to
+Jombateeste: "Show this man the way to the Brooker Institute. I'll take
+your gun home for you," and it was easy for him to detach the piece from
+the bewildered Canuck's grasp. "Go! And if you stop, or even let him look
+back, I'll shoot him. Quick!"
+
+
+
+
+LI.
+
+The day after Thanksgiving, when Westover was trying to feel well after
+the turkey and cranberry and cider which a lady had given him at a
+consciously old-fashioned Thanksgiving dinner, but not making it out
+sufficiently to be able to work, he was astonished to receive a visit
+from Whitwell.
+
+"Well, sir," said the philosopher, without giving himself pause for the
+exchange of reflections upon his presence in Boston, which might have
+been agreeable to him on a less momentous occasion. "It's all up with
+Lion's Head."
+
+"What do you mean?" demanded Westover, with his mind upon the mountain,
+which he electrically figured in an incredible destruction.
+
+"She's burnt. Burnt down the day before yist'd'y aft'noon. A'n't hardly a
+stick of her left. Ketehed Lord knows how, from the kitchen chimney, and
+a high northwest wind blowin', that ca'd the sparks to the barn, and set
+fire to that, too. Hasses gone; couldn't get round to 'em; only three of
+us there, and mixed up so about the house till it was so late the
+critters wouldn't come out. Folks from over Huddle way see the blaze, and
+helped all they could; but it wa'n't no use. I guess all we saved, about,
+was the flag-pole."
+
+"But you're all right yourselves? Cynthia."
+
+"Well, there was our misfortune," said Whitwell, while Westover's heart
+stopped in a mere wantonness of apprehension. "If she'd be'n there, it
+might ha' be'n diff'ent. We might ha' had more sense; or she would,
+anyway. But she was over to Lovewell stockin' up for Thanksgivin', and I
+had to make out the best I could, with Frank and Jombateeste. Why, that
+Canuck didn't seem to have no more head on him than a hen. I was
+disgusted; but Cynthy wouldn't let me say anything to him, and I d' know
+as 't 'ould done any good, myself. We've talked it all over in every
+light, ever since; guess we've set up most the time talkin', and nothin'
+would do her but I should come down and see you before I took a single
+step about it."
+
+"How--step about what?" asked Westover, with a remote sense of hardship
+at being brought in, tempered by the fact that it was Cynthia who had
+brought him in.
+
+"Why, that devil," said Whitwell, and Westover knew that he meant Jeff,
+"went and piled on all the insurance he could pile on, before he left;
+and I don't know what to do about it."
+
+"I should think the best thing was to collect the insurance," Westover
+suggested, distractedly.
+
+"It a'n't so easy as what that comes to," said Whitwell. "I couldn't
+collect the insurance; and here's the point, anyway. When a hotel's made
+a bad season, and she's fully insured, she's pootty certain to burn up
+some time in the winter. Everybody knows that comical devil wanted lion's
+Head to burn up so 't he could build new, and I presume there a'n't a
+man, woman, or child anywhere round but what believes I set her on fire.
+Hired to do it. Now, see? Jeff off in Europe; daytime; no lives lost;
+prop'ty total loss 's a clear case. Heigh? I tell you, I'm afraid I've
+got trouble ahead."
+
+Westover tried to protest, to say something in derision or defiance; but
+he was shaken himself, and he ended by getting his hat and coat; Whitwell
+had kept his own on, in the excitement. "We'll go out and see a lawyer. A
+friend of mine; it won't cost you anything." He added this assurance at a
+certain look of reluctance that came into Whitwell's face, and that left
+it as soon as he had spoken. Whitwell glanced round the studio even
+cheerily. "Who'd ha' thought," he said, fastening upon the study which
+Westover had made of Lion's head the winter before, "that the old place
+would 'a' gone so soon?" He did not mean the mountain which he was
+looking at, but the hotel that was present to his mind's eye; and
+Westover perceived as he had not before that to Whitwell the hotel and
+not the mountain was Lion's Head.
+
+He remembered to ask now where Whitwell had left his family, and Whitwell
+said that Frank and Cynthia were at home in his own house with
+Jombateeste; but he presumed he could not get back to them now before the
+next day. He refused to be interested in any of the aspects of Boston
+which Westover casually pointed out, but when they had seen the lawyer he
+came forth a new man, vividly interested in everything. The lawyer had
+been able to tell them that though the insurance companies would look
+sharply into the cause of the fire, there was no probability, hardly a
+possibility, that they would inculpate him, and he need give himself no
+anxiety about the affair.
+
+"There's one thing, though," Whitwell said to Westover when they got out
+upon the street. "Hadn't I ought to let Jeff know?"
+
+"Yes, at once. You'd better cable him. Have you got his address?"
+
+Whitwell had it, and he tasted all the dramatic quality of sending word
+to Jeff, which he would receive in Florence an hour after it left Boston.
+"I did hope I could ha' cabled once to Jackson while he was gone," he
+said, regretfully, "but, unless we can fix up a wire with the other
+world, I guess I shan't ever do it now. I suppose Jackson's still hangin'
+round Mars, some'res."
+
+He had a sectarian pride in the beauty of the Spiritual Temple which
+Westover walked him by on his way to see Trinity Church and the Fine Arts
+Museum, and he sorrowed that he could not attend a service' there. But he
+was consoled by the lunch which he had with Westover at a restaurant
+where it was served in courses. "I presume this is what Jeff's goin' to
+give 'em at Lion's Head when he gits it goin' again."
+
+"How is it he's in Florence?" it occurred to Westover to ask. "I thought
+he was going to Nice for the winter."
+
+"I don't know. That's the address he give in his last letter," said
+Whitwell. "I'll be glad when I've done with him for good and all. He's
+all kinds of a devil."
+
+It was in Westover's mind to say that he wished the Whitwells had never
+had anything to do with Durgin after his mother's death. He had felt it a
+want of delicacy in them that they had been willing to stay on in his
+employ, and his ideal of Cynthia had suffered a kind of wound from what
+must have been her decision in the matter. He would have expected
+something altogether different from her pride, her self-respect. But he
+now merely said: "Yes, I shall be glad, too. I'm afraid he's a bad
+fellow."
+
+His words seemed to appeal to Whitwell's impartiality. "Well, I d' know
+as I should say bad, exactly. He's a mixture."
+
+"He's a bad mixture," said Westover.
+
+"Well, I guess you're partly right there," Whitwell admitted, with a
+laugh. After a dreamy moment he asked: "Ever hear anything more about
+that girl here in Boston?"
+
+Westover knew that he meant Bessie Lynde. "She's abroad somewhere, with
+her aunt."
+
+Whitwell had not taken any wine; apparently he was afraid of forming
+instantly the habit of drink if he touched it; but he tolerated
+Westover's pint of Zinfandel, and he seemed to warm sympathetically to a
+greater confidence as the painter made away with it. "There's one thing I
+never told Cynthy yet; well, Jombateeste didn't tell me himself till
+after Jeff was gone; and then, thinks I, what's the use? But I guess you
+had better know."
+
+He leaned forward across the table, and gave Jombateeste's story of the
+encounter between Jeff and Alan Lynde in the clearing. "Now what do you
+suppose was the reason Jeff let up on the feller? Of course, he meant to
+choke the life out of him, and his just ketchin' sight of Jombateeste--do
+you believe that was enough to stop him, when he'd started in for a thing
+like that? Or what was it done it?"
+
+Westover listened with less thought of the fact itself than of another
+fact that it threw light upon. It was clear to him now that the Class-Day
+scrapping which had left its marks upon Jeff's face was with Lynde, and
+that when Jeff got him in his power he was in such a fury for revenge
+that no mere motive of prudence could have arrested him. In both events,
+it must have been Bessie Lynde that was the moving cause; but what was it
+that stayed Jeff in his vengeance?
+
+"Let him up, and let him walk away, you say?" he demanded of Whitwell.
+
+Whitwell nodded. "That's what Jombateeste said. Said Jeff said if he let
+the feller look back he'd shoot him. But he didn't haf to."
+
+"I can't make it out," Westover sighed.
+
+"It's been too much for me," Whitwell said. "I told Jombateeste he'd
+better keep it to himself, and I guess he done so. S'pose Jeff still had
+a sneakin' fondness for the girl?"
+
+"I don't know; perhaps," Westover asserted.
+
+Whitwell threw his head back in a sudden laugh that showed all the work
+of his dentist. "Well, wouldn't it be a joke if he was there in Florence
+after her? Be just like Jeff."
+
+"It would be like Jeff; I don't know whether it would be a joke or not. I
+hope he won't find it a joke, if it's so," said Westover, gloomily. A
+fantastic apprehension seized him, which made him wish for the moment
+that it might be so, and which then passed, leaving him simply sorry for
+any chance that might bring Bessie Lynde into the fellow's way again.
+
+For the evening Whitwell's preference would have been a lecture of some
+sort, but there was none advertised, and he consented to go with Westover
+to the theatre. He came back to the painter at dinner-time, after a wary
+exploration of the city, which had resulted not only in a personal
+acquaintance with its monuments, but an immunity from its dangers and
+temptations which he prided himself hardly less upon. He had seen Faneuil
+Hall, the old State House, Bunker Hill, the Public Library, and the Old
+South Church, and he had not been sandbagged or buncoed or led astray
+from the paths of propriety. In the comfortable sense of escape, he was
+disposed, to moralize upon the civilization of great cities, which he now
+witnessed at first hand for the first time; and throughout the evening,
+between the acts of the "Old Homestead," which he found a play of some
+merit, but of not so much novelty in its characters as he had somehow led
+himself to expect, he recurred to the difficulties and dangers that must
+beset a young man in coming to a place like Boston. Westover found him
+less amusing than he had on his own ground at Lion's Head, and tasted a
+quality of commonplace in his deliverances which made him question
+whether he had not, perhaps, always owed more to this environment than he
+had suspected. But they parted upon terms of mutual respect and in the
+common hope of meeting again. Whitwell promised to let Westover know what
+he heard of Jeff, but, when the painter had walked the philosopher home
+to his hotel, he found a message awaiting him at his studio from Jeff
+direct:
+
+   Whitwell's despatch received. Wait letter.
+                       "DURGIN."
+
+Westover raged at the intelligent thrift of this telegram, and at the
+implication that he not only knew all about the business of Whitwell's
+despatch, but that he was in communication with him, and would be
+sufficiently interested to convey Jeff's message to him. Of course,
+Durgin had at once divined that Whitwell must have come to him for
+advice, and that he would hear from him, whether he was still in Boston
+or not. By cabling to Westover, Jeff saved the cost of an elaborate
+address to Whitwell at Lion's Head, and had brought the painter in for
+further consultation and assistance in his affairs. What vexed him still
+more was his own consciousness that he could not defeat this impudent
+expectation. He had, indeed, some difficulty with himself to keep from
+going to Whitwell's hotel with the despatch at once, and he slept badly,
+in his fear that he might not get it to him in the morning before he left
+town.
+
+The sum of Jeff's letter when it came, and it came to Westover and not to
+Whitwell, was to request the painter to see a lawyer in his behalf, and
+put his insurance policies in his hands, with full authority to guard his
+interests in the matter. He told Westover where his policies would be
+found, and enclosed the key of his box in the Safety Vaults, with a due
+demand for Westover's admission to it. He registered his letter, and he
+jocosely promised Westover to do as much for him some day, in pleading
+that there was really no one else he could turn to. He put the whole
+business upon him, and Westover discharged himself of it as briefly as he
+could by delivering the papers to the lawyer he had already consulted for
+Whitwell.
+
+"Is this another charity patient?" asked his friend, with a grin.
+
+"No," replied Westover. "You can charge this fellow along the whole
+line."
+
+Before he parted with the lawyer he had his misgivings, and he said: "I
+shouldn't want the blackguard to think I had got a friend a fat job out
+of him."
+
+The lawyer laughed intelligently. "I shall only make the usual charge.
+Then he is a blackguard."
+
+"There ought to be a more blistering word."
+
+"One that would imply that he was capable of setting fire to his
+property?"
+
+"I don't say that. But I'm glad he was away when it took fire," said
+Westover.
+
+"You give him the benefit of the doubt."
+
+"Yes, of every kind of doubt."
+
+
+
+
+LII.
+
+Westover once more promised himself to have nothing to do with Jeff
+Durgin or his affairs. But he did not promise this so confidently as upon
+former occasions, and he instinctively waited for a new complication. He
+could not understand why Jeff should not have come home to look after his
+insurance, unless it was because he had become interested in some woman
+even beyond his concern for his own advantage. He believed him capable of
+throwing away advantages for disadvantages in a thing of that kind, but
+he thought it more probable that he had fallen in love with one whom he
+would lose nothing by winning. It did not seem at all impossible that he
+should have again met Bessie Lynde, and that they should have made up
+their quarrel, or whatever it was. Jeff would consider that he had done
+his whole duty by Cynthia, and that he was free to renew his suit with
+Bessie; and there was nothing in Bessie's character, as Westover
+understood it, to prevent her taking him back upon a very small show of
+repentance if the needed emotions were in prospect. He had decided pretty
+finally that it would be Bessie rather than another when he received a
+letter from Mrs. Vostrand. It was dated at Florence, and after some
+pretty palaver about their old friendship, which she only hoped he
+remembered half as fondly as she did, the letter ran:
+
+   "I am turning to you now in a very strange difficulty, but I do not
+   know that I should turn to you even now, and knowing all I do of
+   your goodness, if I were not asked to do so by another.
+
+   "I believe we have not heard from each other since the first days of
+   my poor Genevieve's marriage, when everything looked so bright and
+   fair, and we little realized the clouds that were to overcast her
+   happiness. It is a long story, and I will not go into it fully.
+   The truth is that poor Gigi did not treat her very kindly, and that
+   she has not lived with him since the birth of their little girl, now
+   nearly two years old, and the sweetest little creature in the world;
+   I wish you could see her; I am sure it would inspire your pencil
+   with the idea of an angel-child. At first I hoped that the
+   separation would be only temporary, and that when Genevieve had
+   regained her strength she would be willing to go back to her
+   husband; but nothing would induce her to do so. In fact, poor Gigi
+   had spent all her money, and they would have had nothing to live
+   upon but his pay, and you know that the pay of the Italian officers
+   is very small.
+
+   "Gigi made several attempts to see her, and he threatened to take
+   the child from her, but he was always willing to compromise for
+   money. I am afraid that he never really loved her and that we were
+   both deceived by his fervent protestations. We managed to get away
+   from Florence without his knowing it, and we have spent the last two
+   years in Lausanne, very happily, though very quietly. Our dear
+   Checco is in the university there, his father having given up the
+   plan of sending him to Harvard, and we had him with us, while we
+   were taking measures to secure the divorce. Even in the simple way
+   we lived Genevieve attracted a great deal of attention, as she
+   always has done, and she would have had several eligible offers if
+   she had been divorced, or if her affections had not already been
+   engaged, as I did not know at the time.
+
+   "We were in this state of uncertainty up to the middle of last
+   summer, when the news of poor Gigi's sudden death came. I am sorry
+   to say that his habits in some respects were not good, and that
+   probably hastened it some; it had obliged him to leave the army.
+   Genevieve did not feel that she could consistently put on black for
+   him, and I did not urge her, under the peculiar circumstances;
+   there is so much mere formality in those kind of things at the best;
+   but we immediately returned to Florence to try and see if we could
+   not get back some of her effects which his family had seized. I am
+   opposed to lawsuits if they can possibly be avoided, and we arranged
+   with poor Gigi's family by agreeing to let them have Genevieve's
+   furniture if they would promise never to molest her with the child,
+   and I must say they have behaved very well. We are on the best of
+   terms with them, and they have let us have some of the things back
+   which were endeared to her by old associations, at a very reasonable
+   rate.
+
+   "This brings me to the romantic part of my letter, and I will say at
+   once that we found your friend Mr. Durgin in Florence, in the very
+   hotel we went to. We all met in the dining-room, at the table
+   d'hote one evening, and Genevieve and he took to each other at once.
+   He spent the evening with us in our private drawing-room, and she
+   said to me, after he went, that for the first time in years she felt
+   rested. It seems that she had always secretly fancied him, and that
+   she gave up to me in the matter of marrying poor Gigi, because she
+   knew I had my heart set upon it, and she was not very certain of her
+   own feelings when Mr. D. offered himself in Boston; but the
+   conviction that she had made a mistake grew upon, her more and more
+   after she had married Gigi.
+
+   "Well, now, Mr. Westover, I suppose you have guessed by this time
+   that Mr. Durgin has renewed his offer, and Genevieve has
+   conditionally accepted him; we do not feel that she is like an
+   ordinary widow, and that she has to fill up a certain season of
+   mourning; she and Gigi have been dead to each other for years; and
+   Mr. Durgin is as fond of our dear little Bice as her own father
+   could be, and they are together all the time. Her name is Beatrice
+   de' Popolani Grassi. Isn't it lovely? She has poor Gigi's black
+   eyes, with the most beautiful golden hair, which she gets from our
+   aide. You remember Genevieve's hair back in the dear old days,
+   before any trouble had come, and we were all so happy together? And
+   this brings me to what I wanted to say. You are the oldest friend
+   we have, and by a singular coincidence you are the oldest friend of
+   Mr. Durgin, too. I cannot bear to risk my child's happiness a
+   second time, and though Mr. Vostrand fully approves of the match,
+   and has cabled his consent from Seattle, Washington, still, you
+   know, a mother's heart cannot be at rest without some positive
+   assurance. I told Mr. Durgin quite frankly how I felt, and he
+   agreed with me that after our experience with poor Gigi we could not
+   be too careful, and he authorized me to write to you and find out
+   all you knew about him. He said you had known him ever since he was
+   a boy, and that if there was anything bad in his record you could
+   tell it, and he did not want you to spire the truth. He knows you
+   will be just, and he wants you to write out the facts as they struck
+   you at the time.
+
+   "I shall be on pins and needles, as the saying is, till we hear from
+   you, and you know hew Genevieve and Mr. D. must be feeling. She is
+   fully resolved not to have him without your endorsement, and he is
+   quite willing to abide by what you say.
+
+   "I could almost wish you to cable me just Good or Bad, but I know
+   that this will not be wise, and I am going to wait for your letter,
+   and get your opinion in full.
+
+   "We all join in the kindest regards. Mr. D. is talking with
+   Genevieve while I write, and has our darling Bice on his knees.
+   You cannot imagine what a picture it makes, her childish delicacy
+   contrasted with his stalwart strength. She says to send you a
+   baciettino, and I wish you were here to receive it from her angel
+   lips. Yours faithfully,
+
+               "MEDORA VOSTRAND.
+
+   "P. S.--Mr. D. says that he fell in love with Genevieve across the
+   barrier between the first and second cabin when he came over with us
+   on the Aquitaine four years ago, and that he has never ceased to
+   love her, though at one time he persuaded himself that he cared for
+   another because he felt that she was lost to him forever, and it was
+   no use: He really did care for the lady he was engaged to, and had a
+   true affection for her, which he mistook for a warmer feeling. He
+   says that she was worthy of any man's love and of the highest
+   respect. I tell Genevieve that, she ought to honor him for it, and
+   that she must never be jealous of a memory. We are very happy in
+   Mr. Vostrand's cordial approval of the match. He is so glad to
+   think that Mr. D. is a business man. His cable from Seattle was
+   most enthusiastic.
+
+                  "M. D."
+
+Westover did not know whether to laugh or cry when he read this letter,
+which covered several sheets of paper in lines that traversed each other
+in different directions. His old, youthful ideal of Mrs. Vostrand finally
+perished in its presence, though still he could not blame her for wishing
+to see her daughter well married after having seen her married so ill. He
+asked himself, without getting any very definite response, whether Mrs.
+Vostrand had always been this kind of a woman, or had grown into it by
+the use of arts which her peculiar plan of life had rendered necessary to
+her. He remembered the intelligent toleration of Cynthia in speaking of
+her, and his indignation in behalf of the girl was also thrill of joy for
+her escape from the fate which Mrs. Vostrand was so eagerly invoking for
+her daughter. But he thought of Genevieve with something of the same
+tenderness, and with a compassion that was for her alone. She seemed to
+him a victim who was to be sacrificed a second time, and he had clearly a
+duty to her which he must not evade. The only question could be how best
+to discharge it, and Westover took some hours from his work to turn the
+question over in his mind. In the end, when he was about to give the
+whole affair up for the present, and lose a night's sleep over it later,
+he had an inspiration, and he acted upon it at once. He perceived that he
+owed no formal response to the sentimental insincerities of Mrs.
+Vostrand's letter, and he decided to write to Durgin himself, and to put
+the case altogether in his hands. If Durgin chose to show the Vostrands
+what he should write, very well; if he chose not to show it, then
+Westover's apparent silence would be a sufficient reply to Mrs.
+Vostrand's appeal.
+
+   "I prefer to address you," he began, "because I do not choose to let
+   you think that I have any feeling to indulge against you, and
+   because I do not think I have the right to take you out of your own
+   keeping in any way. You would be in my keeping if I did, and I do
+   not wish that, not only because it would be a bother to me, but
+   because it would be a wrong to you.
+
+   "Mrs. Vostrand, whose letter to me I will leave you to answer by
+   showing her this, or in any other manner you choose, tells me you do
+   not want me to spare the truth concerning you. I have never been
+   quite certain what the truth was concerning you; you know that
+   better than I do; and I do not propose to write your biography here.
+   But I will remind you of a few things.
+
+   "The first day I saw you, I caught you amusing yourself with the
+   terror of two little children, and I had the pleasure of cuffing you
+   for it. But you were only a boy then, and afterward you behaved so
+   well that I decided you were not so much cruel as thoughtlessly
+   mischievous. When you had done all you could to lead me to this
+   favorable conclusion, you suddenly turned and avenged yourself on
+   me, so far as you could, for the help I had given the little ones
+   against you. I never greatly blamed you for that, for I decided
+   that you had a vindictive temperament, and that you were not
+   responsible for your temperament, but only for your character.
+
+   "In your first year at Harvard your associations were bad, and your
+   conduct generally was so bad that you were suspended. You were
+   arrested with other rowdy students, and passed the night in a police
+   station. I believe you were justly acquitted of any specific
+   offence, and I always believed that if you had experienced greater
+   kindness socially during your first year in college you would have
+   been a better man.
+
+   "You seem to have told Mrs. Vostrand of your engagement, and I will
+   not speak of that. It was creditable to you that so wise and good a
+   girl as your betrothed should have trusted you, and I do not know
+   that it was against you that another girl who was neither wise nor
+   good should have trusted you at the same time. You broke with the
+   last, because you had to choose between the two; and, so far as I
+   know, you accepted with a due sense of your faithlessness your
+   dismissal by the first. In this connection I must remind you that
+   while you were doing your best to make the party to your second
+   engagement believe that you were in love with her, you got her
+   brother, an habitual inebriate, drunk, and were, so far,
+   instrumental in breaking down the weak will with which he was
+   struggling against his propensity. It is only fair to you that I
+   should add that you persuaded me you got him only a little drunker
+   than he already got himself, and that you meant to have looked after
+   him, but forgot him in your preoccupation with his sister.
+
+   "I do not know what took place between you and these people after
+   you broke your engagement with the sister, until your encounter with
+   the brother in Whitwell's Clearing, and I know of this only at
+   second hand. I can well believe that you had some real or fancied
+   injury to pay off; and I give you all the credit you may wish to
+   claim for sparing him at last. For one of your vindictive
+   temperament it must have been difficult.
+
+   "I have told you the worst things I know of you, and I do not
+   pretend to know them more than superficially. I am not asked to
+   judge you, and I will not. You must be your own judge. You are to
+   decide whether these and other acts of yours are the acts of a man
+   good enough to be intrusted with the happiness of a woman who has
+   already been very unhappy.
+
+   "You have sometimes, however--oftener than I wished--come to me for
+   advice, and I now offer you some advice voluntarily. Do not suppose
+   that because you love this woman, as you believe, you are fit to be
+   the keeper of her future. Ask yourself how you have dealt hitherto
+   with those who have loved you, and whom in a sort you loved, and do
+   not go further unless the answer is such as you can fully and
+   faithfully report to the woman you wish to marry. What you have
+   made yourself you will be to the end. You once called me an
+   idealist, and perhaps you will call this idealism. I will only add,
+   and I will give the last word in your defence, you alone know what
+   you are."
+
+
+
+
+LIII.
+
+As soon as Westover had posted his letter he began to blame himself for
+it. He saw that the right and manly thing would have been to write to
+Mrs. Vostrand, and tell her frankly what he thought of Durgin. Her folly,
+her insincerity, her vulgarity, had nothing to do with the affair, so far
+as he was concerned. If she had once been so kind to him as to bind him
+to her in grateful friendship, she certainly had a claim upon his best
+offices. His duty was to her, and not at all to Durgin. He need not have
+said anything against him because it was against him, but because it was
+true; and if he had written he must not have said anything less than the
+truth.
+
+He could have chosen not to write at all. He could have said that her
+mawkish hypocrisy was a little too much; that she was really wanting him
+to whitewash Durgin for her, and she had no right to put upon him the
+responsibility for the step she clearly wished to take. He could have
+made either of these decisions, and defended them to himself; but in what
+he had done he had altogether shirked. While he was writing to Durgin,
+and pretending that he could justly leave this affair to him, he was
+simply indulging a bit of sentimental pose, far worse than anything in
+Mrs. Vostrand's sham appeal for his help.
+
+He felt, as the time went by, that she had not written of her own
+impulse, but at her daughter's urgence, and that it was this poor
+creature whose trust he had paltered with. He believed that Durgin would
+not fail to make her unhappy, yet he had not done what he might to
+deliver her out of his hand. He had satisfied a wretched
+pseudo-magnanimity toward a faithless scoundrel, as he thought Durgin, at
+the cost of a woman whose anxious hope of his aid had probably forced her
+mother's hand.
+
+At first he thought his action irrevocable, and he bitterly upbraided
+himself for not taking council with Cynthia upon Mrs. Vostrand's letter.
+He had thought of doing that, and then he had dismissed the thought as
+involving pain that he had no right to inflict; but now he perceived that
+the pain was such as she must suffer in the event, and that he had
+stupidly refused himself the only means of finding out the right thing to
+do. Her true heart and her clear mind would have been infallible in the
+affair, and he had trusted to his own muddled impulse.
+
+He began to write other letters: to Durgin, to Mrs. Vostrand, to
+Genevieve; but none of them satisfied him, and he let the days go by
+without doing anything to retrieve his error or fulfil his duty. At last
+he did what he ought to have done at first: he enclosed Mrs. Vostrand's
+letter to Cynthia, and asked her what she thought he ought to have done.
+While he was waiting Cynthia's answer to his letter, a cable message
+reached him from Florence:
+
+   "Kind letter received. Married to-day. Written.
+
+                         "Vostrand."
+
+The next mail brought Cynthia's reply, which was very brief:
+
+   "I am sorry you had to write at all; nothing could have prevented
+   it. Perhaps if he cares for her he will be good to her."
+
+Since the matter was now irremediable, Westover crept less miserably
+through the days than he could have believed he should, until the letter
+which Mrs. Vostrand's cable promised came to hand.
+
+   "Dear friend," she wrote, "your generous and satisfactory answer
+   came yesterday. It was so delicate and high,-minded, and so like
+   you, to write to Mr. Durgin, and leave the whole affair to him; and
+   he did not lose a moment in showing us your beautiful letter. He
+   said you were a man after his own heart, and I wish you could have
+   heard how he praised you. It made Genevieve quite jealous, or would
+   have, if it had been any one else. But she is so happy in your
+   approval of her marriage, which is to take place before the
+   'sindaco' to-morrow, We shall only have the civil rite; she feels
+   that it is more American, and we are all coming home to Lion's Head
+   in the spring to live and die true Americans. I wish you could
+   spend the summer with us there, but, until Lion's Head is rebuilt,
+   we can't ask you. I don't know exactly how we shall do ourselves,
+   but Mr. Durgin is full of plans, and we leave everything to him.
+   He is here, making Genevieve laugh so that I can hardly write.
+   He joins us in love and thanks, and our darling Bice sends you a
+   little kiss.
+
+        "MEDORA VOSTRAND.
+
+   "P. S.  Mr. D. has told us all about the affairs you alluded to.
+   With Miss L. we cannot feel that he was to blame; but he blames
+   himself in regard to Miss W. He says his only excuse is that he was
+   always in love with Genevieve; and I think that is quite excuse
+   enough. M. V."
+
+From time to time during the winter Westover wrote to Cynthia, and had
+letters from her in which he pleased himself fancying almost a personal
+effect of that shyness which he thought a charming thing in her. But no
+doubt this was something he read into them; on their face they were
+plain, straightforward accounts of the life she led in the little old
+house at Lion's Head, under the shadow of the black ruin on the hill.
+Westover had taken to sending her books and magazines, and in thanking
+him for these she would sometimes speak of things she had read in them.
+Her criticism related to the spirit rather than the manner of the things
+she spoke of, and it pleased him that she seemed, with all her insight,
+to have very little artistic sense of any kind; in the world where he
+lived there were so many women with an artistic sense in every kind that
+he was rather weary of it.
+
+There never was anything about Durgin in the letters, and Westover was
+both troubled and consoled by this silence. It might be from
+consciousness, and it probably was; it might be from indifference. In the
+worst event, it hid any pain she might have felt with a dignity from
+which no intimation of his moved her. The nearest she came to speaking of
+Jeff was when she said that Jombateeste was going to work at the
+brick-yards in Cambridge as soon as the spring opened, and was not going
+to stay any longer at Lion's Head.
+
+Her brother Frank, she reported, had got a place with part work in the
+drug-and-book store at Lovewell, where he could keep on more easily with
+his studies; he had now fully decided to study for the ministry; he had
+always wanted to be an Episcopalian.
+
+One day toward the end of April, when several weeks had passed without
+bringing Westover any word from Cynthia, her father presented himself,
+and enjoyed in the painter's surprise the sensation of having dropped
+upon him from the clouds. He gave due accounts of the health of each of
+his household; ending with Jombateeste. "You know he's out at the brick,
+as he calls it, in Cambridge."
+
+"Cynthia said he was coming. I didn't know he had come yet," said
+Westover. "I must go out and look him up, if you think I could find him
+among all those Canucks."
+
+"Well, I don't know but you'd better look us up at the same time," said
+Whitwell, with additional pleasure in the painter's additional surprise.
+"I guess we're out in Cambridge, too," he added, at Westover's start of
+question. "We're out there, visitin' one of our summer folks, as you
+might say. Remember Mis' Fredericks?"
+
+"Why, what the deuce kept you from telling me so at once?" Westover
+demanded, indignantly.
+
+"Guess I hadn't got round to it," said Whitwell, with dry relish.
+
+"Do you mean that Cynthia's there?"
+
+"Well, I guess they wouldn't cared much for a visit from me."
+
+Whitwell took advantage of Westover's moment of mystification to explain
+that Jeff had written over to him from Italy, offering him a pretty good
+rent for his house, which he wanted to occupy while he was rebuilding
+Lion's Head. He was going to push the work right through in the summer,
+and be ready for the season the year after. That was what Whitwell
+understood, and he understood that Jeff's family was going to stay in
+Lovewell, but Jeff himself wanted to be on the ground day and night.
+
+"So that's kind of turned us out of doors, as you may say, and Cynthia's
+always had this idee of comin' down Boston way: and she didn't know
+anybody that could advise with her as well as Mis' Fredericks, and she
+wrote to her, and Mis' Fredericks answered her to come right down and
+talk it over." Westover felt a pang of resentment that Cynthia, had not
+turned to him for counsel, but he said nothing, and Whitwell went on:
+"She said she was, ashamed to bother you, you'd had the whole
+neighborhood on your hands so much, and so she wrote to Mis' Fredericks."
+
+Westover had a vague discomfort in it all, which ultimately defined
+itself as a discontent with the willingness of the Whitwells to let
+Durgin occupy their house upon any terms, for any purpose, and a
+lingering grudge that Cynthia should have asked help of any one but
+himself, even from a motive of delicacy.
+
+In the evening he went out to see the girl at the house of Mrs.
+Fredericks, whom he found living in the Port. They had a first moment of
+intolerable shyness on her part. He had been afraid to see her, with the
+jealousy for her dignity he always felt, lest she should look as if she
+had been unhappy about Durgin. But he found her looking, not only very
+well, but very happy and full of peace, as soon as that moment of shyness
+passed. It seemed to Westover as if she had begun to live on new terms,
+and that a harassing element, which had always been in it, had gone out
+of her life, and in its absence she was beginning to rejoice in a lasting
+repose. He found himself rejoicing with her, and he found himself on
+simpler and franker terms with her than ever before. Neither of them
+spoke of Jeff, or made any approach to mention him, and Westover believed
+that this was not from a morbid feeling in her, but from a final and
+enduring indifference.
+
+He saw her alone, for Mrs. Fredericks and her daughter had gone into town
+to a concert, which he made her confess she would have gone to herself if
+it had not been that her father said he was coming out to see her. She
+would not let him joke about the sacrifice he pretended she had made; he
+had a certain pain in fancying that his visit was the highest and finest
+favor that life could do her. She told him of the ambition she had that
+she might get a school somewhere in the neighborhood of Boston, and then
+find something for her brother to do, while he began his studies in the
+Theological School at Harvard. Frank was still at Lovewell, it seemed.
+
+At the end of the long call he made, he said, abruptly, when he had risen
+to go, "I should like to paint you."
+
+"Who? Me?" she cried, as if it were the most incredible thing, while a
+glad color rushed over her face.
+
+"Yes. While you're waiting to get your school, couldn't you come in with
+your father, now and then, and sit for me?"
+
+"What's he want me to come fer?" Whitwell demanded, when the plan was
+laid before him. He was giving his unlimited leisure to the exploration
+of Boston, and his tone expressed something of the injury, which he also
+put into words, as a sole objection to the proposed interruption. "Can't
+you go alone, Cynthy?" Cynthia said she did not know, but when the point
+was referred to Mrs. Fredericks, she was sure Cynthia could not go alone,
+and she acquainted them both, as far as she could, with that mystery of
+chaperonage which had never touched their lives before. Whitwell seemed
+to think that his daughter would give the matter up; and perhaps she
+might have done so, though she seemed reluctant, if Mrs. Fredericks had
+not further instructed them that it was the highest possible honor Mr.
+Westover was offering them, and that if he had proposed to paint her
+daughter she would simply have gone and lived with him while he was doing
+it.
+
+Whitwell found some compensation for the time lost to his study of Boston
+in the conversation of the painter, which he said was worth a hundred
+cents on the dollar every time, though it dealt less with the
+metaphysical aspect of the latest facts of science than the philosopher
+could have wished. He did not, to be sure, take very much stock in the
+picture as it advanced, somewhat fitfully, with a good many reversions to
+its original state of sketch. It appeared to him always a slight and
+feeble representation of Cynthia, though, of course, a native politeness
+forbade him to express his disappointment. He avowed a faith in
+Westover's ability to get it right in the end, and always bade him go on,
+and take as much time to it as he wanted.
+
+He felt less uneasy than at first, because he had now found a little
+furnished house in the woodenest outskirts of North Cambridge, which he
+hired cheap from the recently widowed owner, and they were keeping house
+there. Jombateeste lived with them, and worked in the brick-yards. Out of
+hours he helped Cynthia, and kept the ugly little place looking trim and
+neat, and left Whitwell free for the tramps home to nature, which he
+began to take over the Belmont uplands as soon as the spring opened. He
+was not homesick, as Cynthia was afraid he might be; his mind was fully
+occupied by the vast and varied interests opened to it by the
+intellectual and material activities of the neighboring city; and he
+found ample scope for his physical energies in doing Cynthia's errands,
+as well as studying the strange flora of the region. He apparently
+thought that he had made a distinct rise and advance in the world.
+Sometimes, in the first days of his satisfaction with his establishment,
+he expressed the wish that Jackson could only have seen how he was fixed,
+once. In his preoccupation with other things, he no longer attempted to
+explore the eternal mysteries with the help of planchette; the ungrateful
+instrument gathered as much dust as Cynthia would suffer on the what-not
+in the corner of the solemn parlor; and after two or three visits to the
+First Spiritual Temple in Boston, he lapsed altogether from an interest
+in the other world, which had, perhaps, mainly flourished in the absence
+of pressing subjects of inquiry, in this.
+
+When at last Westover confessed that he had carried his picture of
+Cynthia as far as he could, Whitwell did his best to hide his
+disappointment. "Well, sir," he said, tolerantly and even cheeringly, "I
+presume we're every one of us a different person to whoever looks at us.
+They say that no two men see the same star."
+
+"You mean that she doesn't look so to you," suggested the painter, who
+seemed not at all abashed.
+
+"Well, you might say--Why, here! It's like her; photograph couldn't get
+it any better; but it makes me think-well, of a bird that you've come on
+sudden, and it stoops as if it was goin' to fly--"
+
+"Ah," said Westover, "does it make you think of that?"
+
+
+
+
+LIV.
+
+The painter could not make out at first whether the girl herself was
+pleased with the picture or not, and in his uncertainty he could not give
+it her at once, as he had hoped and meant to do. It was by a kind of
+accident he found afterward that she had always been passionately proud
+of his having painted her. This was when he returned from the last
+sojourn he had made in Paris, whither he went soon after the Whitwells
+settled in North Cambridge. He left the picture behind him to be framed
+and then sent to her with a letter he had written, begging her to give it
+houseroom while he was gone. He got a short, stiff note in reply after he
+reached Paris, and he had not tried to continue the correspondence. But
+as soon as he returned he went out to see the Whitwells in North
+Cambridge. They were still in their little house there; the young widower
+had married again; but neither he nor his new wife had cared to take up
+their joint life in his first home, and he had found Whitwell such a good
+tenant that he had not tried to put up the rent on him. Frank was at
+home, now, with an employment that gave him part of his time for his
+theological studies; Cynthia had been teaching school ever since the fall
+after Westover went away, and they were all, as Whitwell said, in clover.
+He was the only member of the family at home when Westover called on the
+afternoon of a warm summer day, and he entertained him with a full
+account of a visit he had paid Lion's Head earlier in the season.
+
+"Yes, sir," he said, as if he had already stated the fact, "I've sold my
+old place there to that devil." He said devil without the least rancor;
+with even a smile of good-will, and he enjoyed the astonishment Westover
+expressed in his demand:
+
+"Sold Durgin your house?"
+
+"Yes; I see we never wanted to go back there to live, any of us, and I
+went up to pass the papers and close the thing out. Well, I did have an
+offer for it from a feller that wanted to open a boa'din'-house there and
+get the advantage of Jeff's improvements, and I couldn't seem to make up
+my mind till I'd looked the ground over. Fust off, you know, I thought
+I'd sell to the other feller, because I could see in a minute what a
+thorn it 'd be in Jeff's flesh. But, dumn it all! When I met the comical
+devil I couldn't seem to want to pester him. Why, here, thinks I, if
+we've made an escape from him--and I guess we have, about the biggest
+escape--what have I got ag'in' him, anyway? I'd ought to feel good to
+him; and I guess that's the way I did feel, come to boil it down. He's
+got a way with him, you know, when you're with him, that makes you like
+him. He may have a knife in your ribs the whole while, but so long's he
+don't turn it, you don't seem to know it, and you can't help likin' him.
+Why, I hadn't been with Jeff five minutes before I made up my mind to
+sell to him. I told him about the other offer--felt bound to do it--and
+he was all on fire. 'I want that place, Mr. Whitwell,' s'd he. 'Name your
+price.' Well, I wa'n't goin' to take an advantage of the feller, and I
+guess he see it. 'You've offered me three thousand,' s'd I, 'n' I don't
+want to be no ways mean about it. Five thousand buys the place.' 'It's
+mine,' s'd he; just like that. I guess he see he had a gentleman to deal
+with, and we didn't say a word more. Don't you think I done right to sell
+to him? I couldn't 'a' got more'n thirty-five hundred out the other
+feller, to save me, and before Jeff begun his improvements I couldn't 'a'
+realized a thousand dollars on the prop'ty."
+
+"I think you did right to sell to him," said Westover, saddened somewhat
+by the proof Whitwell alleged of his magnanimity.
+
+"Well, Sir, I'm glad you do. I don't believe in crowdin' a man because
+you got him in a corner, an' I don't believe in bearin' malice. Never
+did. All I wanted was what the place was wo'th--to him. 'Twa'n't wo'th
+nothin' to me! He's got the house and the ten acres around it, and he's
+got the house on Lion's Head, includin' the Clearin', that the poottiest
+picnic-ground in the mountains. Think of goin' up there this summer?"
+
+"No," said Westover, briefly.
+
+"Well, I some wish you did. I sh'd like to know how Jeff's improvements
+struck you. Of course, I can't judge of 'em so well, but I guess he's
+made a pootty sightly thing of it. He told me he'd had one of the leadin'
+Boston architects to plan the thing out for him, and I tell you he's got
+something nice. 'Tain't so big as old Lion's Head, and Jeff wants to
+cater to a different style of custom, anyway. The buildin's longer'n what
+she is deep, and she spreads in front so's to give as many rooms a view
+of the mountain as she can. Know what 'runnaysonce' is? Well, that's the
+style Jeff said it was; it's all pillars and pilasters; and you ride up
+to the office through a double row of colyums, under a kind of a portico.
+It's all painted like them old Colonial houses down on Brattle Street,
+buff and white. Well, it made me think of one of them old pagan temples.
+He's got her shoved along to the south'ard, and he's widened out a piece
+of level for her to stand on, so 't that piece o' wood up the hill there
+is just behind her, and I tell you she looks nice, backin' up ag'inst the
+trees. I tell you, Jeff's got a head on him! I wish you could see that
+dinin'-room o' his: all white colyums, and frontin' on the view. Why,
+that devil's got a regular little theatyre back o' the dinin'-room for
+the young folks to act ammyture plays in, and the shows that come along,
+and he's got a dance-hall besides; the parlors ain't much--folks like to
+set in the office; and a good many of the rooms are done off into soots,
+and got their own parlors. I tell you, it's swell, as they say. You can
+order what you please for breakfast, but for lunch and dinner you got to
+take what Jeff gives you; but he treats you well. He's a Durgin, when it
+comes to that. Served in cou'ses, and dinner at seven o'clock. I don't
+know where he got his money for 't all, but I guess he put in his
+insurance fust, and then he put a mortgage on the buildin'; be as much as
+owned it; said he'd had a splendid season last year, and if he done as
+well for a copule of seasons more he'd have the whole prop'ty free o'
+debt."
+
+Westover could see that the prosperity of the unjust man had corrupted
+the imagination and confounded the conscience of this simple witness, and
+he asked, in the hope of giving his praises pause: "What has he done
+about the old family burying-ground in the orchard?"
+
+"Well, there!" said Whitwell. "That got me more than any other one thing:
+I naturally expected that Jeff 'd had 'em moved, for you know and I know,
+Mr. Westover, that a place like that couldn't be very pop'la' with summer
+folks; they don't want to have anything to kind of make 'em serious, as
+you may say. But that devil got his architect to treat the place, as he
+calls it, and he put a high stone wall around it, and planted it to
+bushes and evergreens so 't looks like a piece of old garden, down there
+in the corner of the orchard, and if you didn't hunt for it you wouldn't
+know it was there. Jeff said 't when folks did happen to find it out, he
+believed they liked it; they think it's picturesque and ancient. Why,
+some on 'em wanted him to put up a little chapel alongside and have
+services there; and Jeff said he didn't know but he'd do it yet. He's got
+dark-colored stones up for Mis' Durgin and Jackson, so 't they look as
+old as any of 'em. I tell you, he knows how to do things."
+
+"It seems so," said Westover, with a bitterness apparently lost upon the
+optimistic philosopher.
+
+"Yes, sir. I guess it's all worked out for the best. So long's he didn't
+marry Cynthy, I don't care who he married, and--I guess he's made out
+fust-rate, and he treats his wife well, and his mother-in-law, too. You
+wouldn't hardly know they was in the house, they're so kind of quiet; and
+if a guest wants to see Jeff, he's got to send and ask for him; clerk
+does everything, but I guess Jeff keeps an eye out and knows what's goin'
+on. He's got an elegant soot of appartments, and he lives as private as
+if he was in his own house, him and his wife. But when there's anything
+goin' on that needs a head, they're both right on deck.
+
+"He don't let his wife worry about things a great deal; he's got a
+fust-rate of a housekeeper, but I guess old Mis' Vostrand keeps the
+housekeeper, as you may say. I hear some of the boa'ders talkin' up
+there, and one of 'em said 't the great thing about Lion's Head was 't
+you could feel everywheres in it that it was a lady's house. I guess Jeff
+has a pootty good time, and a time 't suits him. He shows up on the
+coachin' parties, and he's got himself a reg'lar English coachman's rig,
+with boots outside his trouse's, and a long coat and a fuzzy plug-hat: I
+tell you, he looks gay! He don't spend his winters at Lion's Head: he is
+off to Europe about as soon as the house closes in the fall, and he keeps
+bringin' home new dodges. Guess you couldn't get no boa'd there for no
+seven dollars a week now! I tell you, Jeff's the gentleman now, and his
+wife's about the nicest lady I ever saw. Do' know as I care so much about
+her mother; do' know as I got anything ag'inst her, either, very much.
+But that little girl, Beechy, as they call her, she's a beauty! And round
+with Jeff all the while! He seems full as fond of her as her own mother
+does, and that devil, that couldn't seem to get enough of tormentin'
+little children when he was a boy, is as good and gentle with that little
+thing as-pie!"
+
+Whitwell seemed to have come to an end of his celebration of Jeff's
+success, and Westover asked:
+
+"And what do you make now, of planchette's brokenshaft business? Or don't
+you believe in planchette any more?"
+
+Whitwell's beaming face clouded. "Well, sir, that's a thing that's always
+puzzled me. If it wa'n't that it was Jackson workin' plantchette that
+night, I shouldn't placed much dependence on what she said; but Jackson
+could get the truth out of her, if anybody could. Sence I b'en up there I
+b'en figurin' it out like this: the broken shaft is the old Jeff that
+he's left off bein'--"
+
+Whitwell stopped midway in his suggestion, with an inquiring eye on the
+painter, who asked: "You think he's left off being the old Jeff?"
+
+"Well, sir, you got me there," the philosopher confessed. "I didn't see
+anything to the contrary, but come to think of it--"
+
+"Why couldn't the broken shaft be his unfulfilled destiny on the old
+lines? What reason is there to believe he isn't what he's always been?"
+
+"Well, come to think of it--"
+
+"People don't change in a day, or a year," Westover went on, "or two or
+three years, even. Sometimes I doubt if they ever change."
+
+"Well, all that I thought," Whitwell urged, faintly, against the hard
+scepticism of a man ordinarily so yielding, "is 't there must be a moral
+government of the universe somewheres, and if a bad feller is to get
+along and prosper hand over hand, that way, don't it look kind of as
+if--"
+
+"There wasn't any moral government of the universe? Not the way I see
+it," said Westover. "A tree brings forth of its kind. As a man sows he
+reaps. It's dead sure, pitilessly sure. Jeff Durgin sowed success, in a
+certain way, and he's reaping it. He once said to me, when I tried to
+waken his conscience, that he should get where he was trying to go if he
+was strong enough, and being good had nothing to do with it. I believe
+now he was right. But he was wrong too, as such a man always is. That
+kind of tree bears Dead Sea apples, after all. He sowed evil, and he must
+reap evil. He may never know it, but he will reap what he has sown. The
+dreadful thing is that others must share in his harvest. What do you
+think?"
+
+Whitwell scratched his head. "Well, sir, there's something in what you
+say, I guess. But here! What's the use of thinkin' a man can't change?
+Wa'n't there ever anything in that old idee of a change of heart? What do
+you s'pose made Jeff let up on that feller that Jombateeste see him have
+down, that day, in my Clearin'? What Jeff would natch'ly done would b'en
+to shake the life out of him; but he didn't; he let him up, and he let
+him go. What's the reason that wa'n't the beginnin' of a new life for
+him?"
+
+"We don't know all the ins and outs of that business," said Westover,
+after a moment. "I've puzzled over it a good deal. The man was the
+brother of that girl that Jeff had jilted in Boston. I've found out that
+much. I don't know just the size and shape of the trouble between them,
+but Jeff may have felt that he had got even with his enemy before that
+day. Or he may have felt that if he was going in for full satisfaction,
+there was Jombateeste looking on."
+
+"That's true," said Whitwell, greatly daunted. After a while he took
+refuge in the reflection, "Well, he's a comical devil."
+
+Westover said, in a sort of absence: "Perhaps we're all broken shafts,
+here. Perhaps that old hypothesis of another life, a world where there is
+room enough and time enough for all the beginnings of this to complete
+themselves--"
+
+"Well, now you're shoutin'," said Whitwell. "And if plantchette--"
+Westover rose. "Why, a'n't you goin' to wait and see Cynthy? I'm
+expectin' her along every minute now; she's just gone down to Harvard
+Square. She'll be awfully put out when she knows you've be'n here."
+
+"I'll come out again soon," said Westover. "Tell her--"
+
+"Well, you must see your picture, anyway. We've got it in the parlor. I
+don't know what she'll say to me, keepin' you here in the settin'-room
+all the time."
+
+Whitwell led him into the little dark front hall, and into the parlor,
+less dim than it should have been because the afternoon sun was burning
+full upon its shutters. The portrait hung over the mantel, in a bad
+light, but the painter could feel everything in it that he could not see.
+
+"Yes, it had that look in it."
+
+"Well, she ha'n't took wing yet, I'm thankful to think," said Whitwell,
+and he spoke from his own large mind to the sympathy of an old friend who
+he felt could almost share his feelings as a father.
+
+
+
+
+LV
+
+When Westover turned out of the baking little street where the Whitwells
+lived into an elm-shaded stretch of North Avenue, he took off his hat and
+strolled bareheaded along in the cooler air. He was disappointed not to
+have seen Cynthia, and yet he found himself hurrying away after his
+failure, with a sense of escape, or at least of respite.
+
+What he had come to say, to do, was the effect of long experience and
+much meditation. The time had arrived when he could no longer feign to
+himself that his feelings toward the girl were not those of a lover, but
+he had his modest fears that she could never imagine him in that
+character, and that if he should ask her to do so he should shock and
+grieve her, and inflict upon himself an incurable wound.
+
+During this last absence of his he had let his fancy dwell constantly
+upon her, until life seemed worth having only if she would share it with
+him. He was an artist, and he had always been a bohemian, but at heart he
+was philistine and bourgeois. His ideal was a settlement, a fixed
+habitation, a stated existence, a home where he could work constantly in
+an air of affection, and unselfishly do his part to make his home happy.
+It was a very simple-hearted ambition, and I do not quite know how to
+keep it from appearing commonplace and almost sordid; but such as it was,
+I must confess that it was his. He had not married his model, because he
+was mainly a landscapist, perhaps; and he had not married any of his
+pupils, because he had not been in love with them, charming and good and
+lovely as he had thought some of them; and of late he had realized more
+and more why his fancy had not turned in their direction. He perceived
+that it was already fixed, and possibly had long been fixed.
+
+He did not blink the fact that there were many disparities, and that
+there would be certain disadvantages which could never be quite overcome.
+The fact had been brought rather strenuously home to him by his interview
+with Cynthia's father. He perceived, as indeed he had always known, that
+with a certain imaginative lift in his thinking and feeling, Whitwell was
+irreparably rustic, that he was and always must be practically Yankee.
+Westover was not a Yankee, and he did not love or honor the type, though
+its struggles against itself touched and amused him. It made him a little
+sick to hear how Whitwell had profited by Durgin's necessity, and had
+taken advantage of him with conscientious and self-applausive rapacity,
+while he admired his prosperity, and tried to account for it by doubt of
+its injustice. For a moment this seemed to him worse than Durgin's
+conscientious toughness, which was the antithesis of Whitwell's
+remorseless self-interest. For the moment this claimed Cynthia of its
+kind, and Westover beheld her rustic and Yankee of her father's type. If
+she was not that now, she would grow into that through the lapse from the
+personal to the ancestral which we all undergo in the process of the
+years.
+
+The sight of her face as he had pictured it, and of the soul which he had
+imagined for it, restored him to a better sense of her, but he felt the
+need of escaping from the suggestion of her father's presence, and taking
+further thought. Perhaps he should never again reach the point that he
+was aware of deflecting from now; he filled his lungs with long breaths,
+which he exhaled in sighs of relief. It might have been a mistake on the
+spiritual as well as the worldly side; it would certainly not have
+promoted his career; it might have impeded it. These misgivings flitted
+over the surface of thought that more profoundly was occupied with a
+question of other things. In the time since he had seen her last it might
+very well be that a young and pretty girl had met some one who had taken
+her fancy; and he could not be sure that her fancy had ever been his,
+even if this had not happened. He had no proof at all that she had ever
+cared or could care for him except gratefully, respectfully, almost
+reverentially, with that mingling of filial and maternal anxiety which
+had hitherto been the warmest expression of her regard. He tried to
+reason it out, and could not. He suddenly found himself bitterly
+disappointed that he had missed seeing her, for if they had met, he would
+have known by this time what to think, what to hope. He felt old--he felt
+fully thirty-six years old--as he passed his hand over his crown, whose
+gossamer growth opposed so little resistance to his touch. He had begun
+to lose his hair early, but till then he had not much regretted his
+baldness. He entered into a little question of their comparative ages,
+which led him to the conclusion that Cynthia must now be about
+twenty-five.
+
+Almost at the same moment he saw her coming up the walk toward him from
+far down the avenue. For a reason, or rather a motive, of his own he
+pretended to himself that it was not she, but he knew instantly that it
+was, and he put on his hat. He could see that she did not know him, and
+it was a pretty thing to witness the recognition dawn on her. When it had
+its full effect, he was aware of a flutter, a pause in her whole figure
+before she came on toward him, and he hurried his steps for the charm of
+her beautiful blushing face.
+
+It was the spiritual effect of figure and face that he had carried in his
+thought ever since he had arrived at that one-sided intimacy through his
+study of her for the picture he had just seen. He had often had to ask
+himself whether he had really perceived or only imagined the character he
+had translated into it; but here, for the moment at least, was what he
+had seen. He hurried forward and joyfully took the hand she gave him. He
+thought he should speak of that at once, but it was not possible, of
+course. There had to come first the unheeded questions and answers about
+each other's health, and many other commonplaces. He turned and walked
+home with her, and at the gate of the little ugly house she asked him if
+he would not come in and take tea with them.
+
+Her father talked with him while she got the tea, and when it was ready
+her brother came in from his walk home out of Old Cambridge and helped
+her put it on the table. He had grown much taller than Westover, and he
+was very ecclesiastical in his manner; more so than he would be,
+probably, if he ever became a bishop, Westover decided. Jombateeste, in
+an interval of suspended work at the brick yard, was paying a visit to
+his people in Canada, and Westover did not see him.
+
+All the time while they sat at table and talked together Westover
+realized more and more that for him, at least, the separation of the last
+two years had put that space between them which alone made it possible
+for them to approach each other on new ground. A kind of horror, of
+repulsion, for her engagement to Jeff Durgin had ceased from his sense of
+her; it was as if she had been unhappily married, and the man, who had
+been unworthy and unkind, was like a ghost who could never come to
+trouble his joy. He was more her contemporary, he found, than formerly;
+she had grown a great deal in the past two years, and a certain
+affliction which her father's fixity had given him concerning her passed
+in the assurance of change which she herself gave him.
+
+She had changed her world, and grown to it, but her nature had not
+changed. Even her look had not changed, and he told her how he had seen
+his picture in her at the moment of their meeting in the street. They all
+went in to verify his impression from the painting. "Yes, that is the way
+you looked."
+
+"It seems to me that is the way I felt," she asserted.
+
+Frank went about the house-work, and left her to their guest. When
+Whitwell came back from the post-office, where he said he would only be
+gone a minute, he did not rejoin Westover and Cynthia in the parlor.
+
+The parlor door was shut; he had risked his fate, and they were talking
+it over. Cynthia was not sure; she was sure of nothing but that there was
+no one in the world she cared for so much; but she was not sure that was
+enough. She did not pretend that she was surprised; she owned that she
+had sometimes expected it; she blamed herself for not expecting it then.
+
+Westover said that he did not blame her for not knowing her mind; he had
+been fifteen years learning his own fully. He asked her to take all the
+time she wished. If she could not make sure after all, he should always
+be sure that she was wise and good. She told him everything there was to
+tell of her breaking with Jeff, and he thought the last episode a supreme
+proof of her wisdom and goodness.
+
+After a certain time they went for a walk in the warm summer moonlight
+under the elms, where they had met on the avenue.
+
+"I suppose," she said, as they drew near her door again, "that people
+don't often talk it over as we've done."
+
+"We only know from the novels," he answered. "Perhaps people do, oftener
+than is ever known. I don't see why they shouldn't."
+
+"No."
+
+"I've never wished to be sure of you so much as since you've wished to be
+sure of yourself."
+
+"And I've never been so sure as since you were willing to let me," said
+Cynthia.
+
+"I am glad of that. Try to think of me, if that will help my cause, as
+some one you might have always known in this way. We don't really know
+each other yet. I'm a great deal older than you, but still I'm not so
+very old."
+
+"Oh, I don't care for that. All I want to be certain of is that the
+feeling I have is really--the feeling."
+
+"I know, dear," said Westover, and his heart surged toward her in his
+tenderness for her simple conscience, her wise question. "Take time.
+Don't hurry. Forget what I've said--or no; that's absurd! Think of it;
+but don't let anything but the truth persuade you. Now, good-night,
+Cynthia."
+
+"Good-night--Mr. Westover."
+
+"Mr. Westover" he reproached her.
+
+She stood thinking, as if the question were crucial. Then she said,
+firmly, "I should always have to call you Mr. Westover."
+
+"Oh, well," he returned, "if that's all!"
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Landlord at Lion's Head, Volume 2
+by William Dean Howells
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