Westover, received next spring the copy for an advertisement from Mrs.
Durgin, which she asked to have him put in some paper for her. She said
that her son Jackson had written it out, and Westover found it so well
written that he had scarcely to change the wording. It offered the best
of farm-board, with plenty of milk and eggs, berries and fruit, for five
dollars a week at Lion's Head Farm, and it claimed for the farm the merit
of the finest view of the celebrated Lion's Head Mountain. It was signed,
as her letter was signed, "Mrs. J. M. Durgin," with her post-office
address, and it gave Westover as a reference.
The letter was in the same handwriting as the advertisement, which he
took to be that of Jackson Durgin. It enclosed a dollar note to pay for
three insertions of the advertisement in the evening Transcript, and it
ended, almost casually: "I do not know as you have heard that my husband,
James Monroe Durgin, passed to spirit life this spring. My son will help
me to run the house."
This death could not move Westover more than it had apparently moved the
widow. During the three weeks he had passed under his roof, he had
scarcely exchanged three words with James Monroe Durgin, who remained to
him an impression of large, round, dull-blue eyes, a stubbly upper lip,
and cheeks and chin tagged with coarse, hay-colored beard. The impression
was so largely the impression that he had kept of the dull-blue eyes and
the gaunt, slanted figure of Andrew Jackson Durgin that he could not be
very distinct in his sense of which was now the presence and which the
absence. He remembered, with an effort, that the son's beard was
straw-colored, but he had to make no effort to recall the robust effect
of Mrs. Durgin and her youngest son. He wondered now, as he had often
wondered before, whether she knew of the final violence which had avenged
the boy for the prolonged strain of repression Jeff had inflicted upon
himself during Westover's stay at the farm. After several impulses to go
back and beat him, to follow him to school and expose him to the teacher,
to write to his mother and tell her of his misbehavior, Westover had
decided to do nothing. As he had come off unhurt in person and property,
he could afford to be more generously amused than if he had suffered
damage in either. The more he thought of the incident, the more he was
disposed to be lenient with the boy, whom he was aware of having baffled
and subdued by his superior wit and virtue in perhaps intolerable
measure. He could not quite make out that it was an act of bad faith;
there was no reason to think that the good-natured things the fellow had
done, the constant little offices of zeal and friendliness, were less
sincere than this violent outbreak.
The letter from Lion's Head Farm brought back his three weeks there very
vividly, and made Westover wish he was going there for the summer. But he
was going over to France for an indefinite period of work in the only air
where he believed modern men were doing good things in the right way. He
W a sale in the winter, and he had sold pictures enough to provide the
means for this sojourn abroad; though his lion's Head Mountain had not
brought the two hundred and fifty or three hundred dollars he had hoped
for. It brought only a hundred and sixty; but the time had almost come
already when Westover thought it brought too much. Now, the letter from
Mrs. Durgin reminded him that he had never sent her the photograph of the
picture which he had promised her. He encased the photograph at once, and
wrote to her with many avowals of contrition for his neglect, and strong
regret that he was not soon to see the original of the painting again. He
paid a decent reverence to the bereavement she had suffered, and he sent
his regards to all, especially his comrade Jeff, whom he advised to keep
out of the apple-orchard.
Five years later Westover came home in the first week of a gasping
August, whose hot breath thickened round the Cunarder before she got
half-way up the harbor. He waited only to see his pictures through the
custom-house, and then he left for the mountains. The mountains meant
Lion's Head for him, and eight hours after he was dismounting from the
train at a station on the road which had been pushed through on a new
line within four miles of the farm. It was called Lion's Head House now,
as he read on the side of the mountain-wagon which he saw waiting at the
platform, and he knew at a glance that it was Jeff Durgin who was coming
forward to meet him and take his hand-bag.
The boy had been the prophecy of the man in even a disappointing degree.
Westover had fancied him growing up to the height of his father and
brother, but Jeff Durgin's stalwart frame was notable for strength rather
than height. He could not have been taller than his mother, whose stature
was above the standard of her sex, but he was massive without being
bulky. His chest was deep, his square shoulders broad, his powerful legs
bore him with a backward bulge of the calves that showed through his
shapely trousers; he caught up the trunks and threw them into the
baggage-wagon with a swelling of the muscles on his short, thick arms
which pulled his coat-sleeves from his heavy wrists and broad, short
hands.
He had given one of these to Westover to shake when they met, but with
something conditional in his welcome, and with a look which was not so
much furtive as latent. The thatch of yellow hair he used to wear was now
cropped close to his skull, which was a sort of dun-color; and it had
some drops of sweat along the lighter edge where his hat had shaded his
forehead. He put his hat on the seat between himself and Westover, and
drove away from the station bareheaded, to cool himself after his bout
with the baggage, which was following more slowly in its wagon. There was
a good deal of it, and there were half a dozen people--women, of
course--going to Lion's Head House. Westover climbed to the place beside
Jeff to let them have the other two seats to themselves, and to have a
chance of talking; but the ladies had to be quieted in their several
anxieties concerning their baggage, and the letters and telegrams they
had sent about their rooms, before they settled down to an exchange of
apprehensions among themselves, and left Jeff Durgin free to listen to
Westover.
"I don't know but I ought to have telegraphed you that I was coming,"
Westover said; "but I couldn't realize that you were doing things on the
hotel scale. Perhaps you won't have room for me?"
"Guess we can put you up," said Jeff.
"No chance of getting my old room, I suppose?"
"I shouldn't wonder. If there's any one in it, I guess mother could
change 'em."
"Is that so?" asked Westover, with a liking for being liked, which his
tone expressed. "How is your mother?"
Jeff seemed to think a moment before he answered:
"Just exactly the same."
"A little older?"
"Not as I can see."
"Does she hate keeping a hotel as badly as she expected?"
"That's what she says," answered Jeff, with a twinkle. All the time,
while he was talking with Westover, he was breaking out to his horses,
which he governed with his voice, trotting them up hill and down, and
walking them on the short, infrequent levels, in the mountain fashion.