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.
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.”
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.