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.
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!”
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: