"Anything else?" demanded Whitwell, with a glance of triumph at Jackson.
Westover studied the remaining letters. "Yes, I get one other
word-broken."
"Just what I done! But I wanted you to speak first. It's Broken Shaft.
Jackson, she caught right onto what we was talkin' about. This life," he
turned to Westover, in solemn exegesis, "is a broken shaft when death
comes. It rests upon the earth, but you got to look for the top of it in
the skies. That's the way I look at it. What do you think, Jackson?
Jombateeste?"
"I think anybody can't see that. Better go and get some heye-glass."
Westover remained in a shameful minority. He said, meekly: "It suggests a
beautiful hope."
Jackson brought his chair-legs down again, and put his hand on the
planchette.
"Feel that tinglin'?" asked. Whitwell, and Jackson made yes with silent
lips. "After he's been workin' the plantchette for a spell, and then
leaves off, and she wants to say something more," Whitwell explained to
Westover, "he seems to feel a kind of tinglin' in his arm, as if it was
asleep, and then he's got to tackle her again. Writin' steady enough now,
Jackson!" he cried, joyously. "Let's see." He leaned over and read,
"Thomas Jefferson--" The planchette stopped, "My, I didn't go to do
that," said Whitwell, apologetically. "You much acquainted with
Jefferson's writin's?" he asked of Westover.
The painter had to own his ignorance of all except the diction that the
government is best which governs least; but he was not in a position to
deny that Jefferson had ever said anything about a broken shaft.
"It may have come to him on the other side," said Whitwell.
"Perhaps," Westover assented.
The planchette began to stir itself again. "She's goin' ahead!" cried
Whitwell. He leaned over the table so as to get every letter as it was
formed. "D--Yes! Death. Death is the Broken Shaft. Go on!" After a moment
of faltering the planchette formed another letter. It was a U, and it was
followed by an R, and so on, till Durgin had been spelled. "Thunder!"
cried Whitwell. "If anything's happened to Jeff!"
Jackson lifted his hand from the planchette.
"Oh, go on, Jackson!" Whitwell entreated. "Don't leave it so!"
"I can't seem to go on," Jackson whispered, and Westover could not resist
the fear that suddenly rose among them. But he made the first struggle
against it. "This is nonsense. Or, if there's any sense in it, it means
that Jeff's ship has broken her shaft and put back."
Whitwell gave a loud laugh of relief. "That's so! You've hit it, Mr.
Westover."
Jackson said, quietly: "He didn't mean to start home till tomorrow. And
how could he send any message unless he was--"
"Easily!" cried Westover. "It's simply an instance of mental
impression-of telepathy, as they call it."
"That's so!" shouted Whitwell, with eager and instant conviction.
Westover could see that Jackson still doubted. "If you believe that a
disembodied spirit can communicate with you, why not an embodied spirit?
If anything has happened to your brother's ship, his mind would be
strongly on you at home, and why couldn't it convey its thought to you?"
"Because he ha'n't started yet," said Jackson.
Westover wanted to laugh; but they all heard voices without, which seemed
to be coming nearer, and he listened with the rest. He made out Frank
Whitwell's voice, and his sister's; and then another voice, louder and
gayer, rose boisterously above them. Whitwell flung the door open and
plunged out into the night. He came back, hauling Jeff Durgin in by the
shoulder.
"Here, now," he shouted to Jackson, "you just let this feller and
plantchette fight it out together!"
"What's the matter with plantchette?" said Jeff, before he said to his
brother, "Hello, Jackson!" and to the Canuck, "Hello, Jombateeste!" He
shook hands conventionally with them both, and then with the painter,
whom he greeted with greater interest. "Glad to see you here, Mr.
Westover. Did I take you by surprise?" he asked of the company at large.
"No, sir," said Whitwell. "Didn't surprise us any, if you are a fortnight
ahead of time," he added, with a wink at the others.
"Well, I took a notion I wouldn't wait for the cattle-ship, and I started
back on a French boat. Thought I'd try it. They live well. But I hoped I
should astonish you a little, too. I might as well waited."
Whitwell laughed. "We heard from you--plantchette kept right round after
you."
"That so?" asked Jeff, carelessly.
"Fact. Have a good voyage?" Whitwell had the air of putting a casual
question.
"First-rate," said Jeff. "Plantchette say not?"
"No. Only about the broken shaft."
"Broken shaft? We didn't have any broken shaft. Plantchette's got mixed a
little. Got the wrong ship."
After a moment of chop-fallenness, Whitwell said:
"Then somebody's been makin' free with your name. Curious how them devils
cut up oftentimes."
He explained, and Jeff laughed uproariously when he understood the whole
case. "Plantchette's been havin' fun with you."
Whitwell gave himself time for reflection. "No, sir, I don't look at it
that way. I guess the wires got crossed some way. If there's such a thing
as the spirits o' the livin' influencin' plantchette, accordin' to Mr.
Westover's say, here, I don't see why it wa'n't. Jeff's being so near
that got control of her and made her sign his name to somebody else's
words. It shows there's something in it."
"Well, I'm glad to come back alive, anyway," said Jeff, with a joviality
new to Westover. "I tell you, there a'n't many places finer than old
Lion's Head, after all. Don't you think so, Mr. Westover? I want to get
the daylight on it, but it does well by moonlight, even." He looked round
at the tall girl, who had been lingering to hear the talk of planchette;
at the backward tilt he gave his head, to get her in range, she frowned
as if she felt his words a betrayal, and slipped out of the room; the boy
had already gone, and was making himself heard in the low room overhead.
"There's a lot of folks here this summer, mother says," he appealed from
the check he had got to Jackson. "Every room taken for the whole month,
she says."
"We've been pretty full all July, too," said Jackson, blankly.
"Well, it's a great business; and I've picked up a lot of hints over
there. We're not so smart as we think we are. The Swiss can teach us a
thing or two. They know how to keep a hotel."
"Go to Switzerland?" asked Whitwell.
"I slipped over into the edge of it."
"I want to know! Well, now them Alps, now--they so much bigger 'n the
White Hills, after all?"
"Well, I don't know about all of 'em," said Jeff. "There may be some that
would compare with our hills, but I should say that you could take Mount
Washington up and set it in the lap of almost any one of the Alps I saw,
and it would look like a baby on its mother's knee."
"I want to know!" said Whitwell again. His tone expressed disappointment,
but impartiality; he would do justice to foreign superiority if he must.
"And about the ocean. What about waves runnin? mountains high?"
"Well, we didn't have it very rough. But I don't believe I saw any waves
much higher than Lion's Head." Jeff laughed to find Whitwell taking him
seriously. "Won't that satisfy you?"
"Oh, it satisfies me. Truth always does. But, now, about London. You
didn't seem to say so much about London in your letters, now. Is it so
big as they let on? Big--that is, to the naked eye, as you may say?"
"There a'n't any one place where you can get a complete bird's-eye view
of it," said Jeff, "and two-thirds of it would be hid in smoke, anyway.
You've got to think of a place that would take in the whole population of
New England, outside of Massachusetts, and not feel as if it had more
than a comfortable meal."
Whitwell laughed for joy in the bold figure.
"I'll tell you. When you've landed and crossed up from Liverpool, and
struck London, you feel as if you'd gone to sea again. It's an ocean--a
whole Atlantic of houses."
"That's right!" crowed Whitwell. "That's the way I thought it was.
Growin' any?"
Jeff hesitated. "It grows in the night. You've heard about Chicago
growing?"
"Yes."
"Well, London grows a whole Chicago every night."
"Good!" said Whitwell. "That suits me. And about Paris, now. Paris strike
you the same way?"
"It don't need to," said Jeff. "That's a place where I'd like to live.
Everybody's at home there. It's a man's house and his front yard, and I
tell you they keep it clean. Paris is washed down every morning; scrubbed
and mopped and rubbed dry. You couldn't find any more dirt than you could
in mother's kitchen after she's hung out her wash. That so, Mr.
Westover?"
Westover confirmed in general Jeff's report of the cleanliness of Paris.
"And beautiful! You don't know what a good-looking town is till you
strike Paris. And they're proud of it, too. Every man acts as if he owned
it. They've had the statue of Alsace in that Place de la Concorde of
yours, Mr. Whitwell, where they had the guillotine all draped in black
ever since the war with Germany; and they mean to have her back, some
day."
"Great country, Jombateeste!" Whitwell shouted to the Canuck.
The little man roused himself from the muse in which he was listening and
smoking. "Me, I'm Frantsh," he said.
"Yes, that's what Jeff was sayin'," said Whitwell. "I meant France."
"Oh," answered Jombateeste, impatiently, "I thought you mean the Hunited
State."
"Well, not this time," said Whitwell, amid the general laughter.
"Good for Jombateeste," said Jeff. "Stand up for Canada every time, John.
It's the livest country, in the world three months of the year, and the
ice keeps it perfectly sweet the other nine."
Whitwell could not brook a diversion from the high and serious inquiry
they had entered upon. "It must have made this country look pretty slim
when you got back. How'd New York look, after Paris?"
"Like a pigpen," said Jeff. He left his chair and walked round the table
toward a door opening into the adjoining room. For the first time
Westover noticed a figure in white seated there, and apparently rapt in
the talk which had been going on. At the approach of Jeff, and before he
could have made himself seen at the doorway, a tremor seemed to pass over
the figure; it fluttered to its feet, and then it vanished into the
farther dark of the room. When Jeff disappeared within, there was a sound
of rustling skirts and skurrying feet and the crash of a closing door,
and then the free rise of laughing voices without. After a discreet
interval, Westover said: "Mr. Whitwell, I must say good-night. I've got
another day's work before me. It's been a most interesting evening."
"You must try it again," said Whitwell, hospitably. "We ha'n't got to the
bottom of that broken shaft yet. You'll see 't plantchette 'll have
something more to say about it: Heigh, Jackson?" He rose to receive
Westover's goodnight; the others nodded to him.
As the painter climbed the hill to the hotel he saw two figures on the
road below; the one in white drapery looked severed by a dark line
slanting across it at the waist. In the country, he knew, such an
appearance might mark the earliest stages of love-making, or mere
youthful tenderness, in which there was nothing more implied or expected.
But whatever the fact was, Westover felt a vague distaste for it, which,
as it related itself to a more serious possibility, deepened to something
like pain. It was probable that it should come to this between those two,
but Westover rebelled against the event with a sense of its unfitness for
which he could not give himself any valid reason; and in the end he
accused himself of being a fool.
Two ladies sat on the veranda of the hotel and watched a cloud-wreath
trying to lift itself from the summit of Lion's Head. In the effort it
thinned away to transparency in places; in others, it tore its frail
texture asunder and let parts of the mountain show through; then the
fragments knitted themselves loosely together, and the vapor lay again in
dreamy quiescence.
The ladies were older and younger, and apparently mother and daughter.
The mother had kept her youth in face and figure so admirably that in
another light she would have looked scarcely the elder. It was the candor
of the morning which confessed the fine vertical lines running up and
down to her lips, only a shade paler than the girl's, and that showed her
hair a trifle thinner in its coppery brown, her blue eyes a little
dimmer. They were both very graceful, and they had soft, caressing
voices; they now began to talk very politely to each other, as if they
were strangers, or as if strangers were by. They talked of the landscape,
and of the strange cloud effect before them. They said that they supposed
they should see the Lion's Head when the cloud lifted, and they were both
sure they had never been quite so near a cloud before. They agreed that
this was because in Switzerland the mountains were so much higher and
farther off. Then the daughter said, without changing the direction of
her eyes or the tone of her voice, "The gentleman who came over from the
station with us last night," and the mother was aware of Jeff Durgin
advancing toward the corner of the veranda where they sat.
"I hope you have got rested," he said, with the jovial bluntness which
was characteristic of him with women.
"Oh, yes indeed," said the elder lady. Jeff had spoken to her, but had
looked chiefly at the younger. "I slept beautifully. So quiet here, and
with this delicious air! Have you just tasted it?"
"No; I've been up ever since daylight, driving round," said Jeff. "I'm
glad you like the air," he said, after a certain hesitation. "We always
want to have people do that at Lion's Head. There's no air like it,
though perhaps I shouldn't say so."
"Shouldn't?" the lady repeated.
"Yes; we own the air here--this part of it." Jeff smiled easily down at
the lady's puzzled face.
"Oh! Then you are--are you a son of the house?"
"Son of the hotel, yes," said Jeff, with increasing ease. The lady
continued her question in a look, and he went on: "I've been scouring the
country for butter and eggs this morning. We shall get all our supplies
from Boston next year, I hope, but we depend on the neighbors a little
yet."
"How very interesting!" said the lady. "You must have a great many queer
adventures," she suggested in a provisional tone.
"Well, nothing's queer to me in the hill country. But you see some
characters here." He nodded over his shoulder to where Whitwell stood by
the flag-staff, waiting the morning impulse of the ladies. "There's one
of the greatest of them now."
The lady put up a lorgnette and inspected Whitwell. "What are those
strange things he has got in his hatband?"
"The flowers and the fungi of the season," said Jeff. "He takes parties
of the ladies walking, and that collection is what he calls his almanac."
"Really?" cried the girl. "That's charming!"
"Delightful!" said the mother, moved by the same impulse, apparently.
"Yes," said Jeff. "You ought to hear him talk. I'll introduce him to you
after breakfast, if you like."
"Oh, we should only be too happy," said the mother, and her daughter,
from her inflection, knew that she would be willing to defer her
happiness.
But Jeff did not. "Mr. Whitwell!" he called out, and Whitwell came
across the grass to the edge of the veranda. "I want to introduce you to
Mrs. Vostrand--and Miss Vostrand."
Whitwell took their slim hands successively into his broad, flat palm,
and made Mrs. Vostrand repeat her name to him. "Strangers at Lion's Head,
I presume?" Mrs. Vostrand owned as much; and he added: "Well, I guess you
won't find a much sightlier place anywhere; though, accordin' to Jeff's
say, here, they've got bigger mountains on the other side. Ever been in
Europe?"
"Why, yes," said Mrs. Vostrand, with a little mouth of deprecation. "In
fact, we've just come home. We've been living there."
"That so?" returned Whitwell, in humorous toleration. "Glad to get back,
I presume?"
"Oh yes--yes," said Mrs. Vostrand, in a sort of willowy concession, as if
the character before her were not to be crossed or gainsaid.
"Well, it 'll do you good here," said Whitwell. "'N' the young lady, too.
A few tramps over these hills 'll make you look like another woman." He
added, as if he had perhaps made his remarks too personal to the girl,
"Both of you."
"Oh yes," the mother assented, fervently. "We shall count upon your
showing us all their-mysteries."
Whitwell looked pleased. "I'll do my best-whenever you're ready." He went
on: "Why, Jeff, here, has just got back, too. Jeff, what was the name of
that French boat you said you crossed on? I want to see if I can't make
out what plantchette meant by that broken shaft. She must have meant
something, and if I could find out the name of the ship--Tell the ladies
about it?" Jeff laughed, with a shake of the head, and Whitwell
continued, "Why, it was like this," and he possessed the ladies of a fact
which they professed to find extremely interesting. At the end of their
polite expressions he asked Jeff again: "What did you say the name was?"
"Aquitaine," said Jeff, briefly.
"Why, we came on the Aquitaine!" said Mrs. Vostrand, with a smile for
Jeff. "But how did we happen not to see one another?"
"Oh, I came second-cabin," said Jeff. "I worked my way over on a
cattle-ship to London, and, when I decided not to work my way back, I
found I hadn't enough money for a first-cabin passage. I was in a hurry
to get back in time to get settled at Harvard, and so I came
second-cabin. It wasn't bad. I used to see you across the rail."
"Well!" said Whitwell.
"How very--amusing!" said Mrs. Vostrand. "What a small world it is!" With
these words she fell into a vagary; her daughter recalled her from it
with a slight movement. "Breakfast? How impatient you are, Genevieve!
Well!" She smiled the sweetest parting to Whitwell, and suffered herself
to be led away by Jeff.
"And you're at Harvard? I'm so interested! My own boy will be going there
soon."
"Well, there's no place like Harvard," said Jeff. "I'm in my Sophomore
year now."
"Oh, a Sophomore! Fancy!" cried Mrs. Vostrand, as if nothing could give
her more pleasure. "My son is going to prepare at St. Mark's. Did you
prepare there?"
"No, I prepared at Lovewell Academy, over here." Jeff nodded in a
southerly direction.
"Oh, indeed!" said Mrs. Vostrand, as if she knew where Lovewell was, and
instantly recognized the name of the ancient school.
They had reached the dining room, and Jeff pushed the screen-door open
with one hand, and followed the ladies in. He had the effect of welcoming
them like invited guests; he placed the ladies himself at a window, where
he said Mrs. Vostrand would be out of the draughts, and they could have a
good view of Lion's Head.
He leaned over between them, when they were seated, to get sight of the
mountain, and, "There!" he said. "That cloud's gone at last." Then, as if
it would be modester in the proprietor of the view to leave them to their
flattering raptures in it, he moved away and stood talking a moment with
Cynthia Whitwell near the door of the serving-room. He talked gayly, with
many tosses of the head and turns about, while she listened with a vague
smile, motionlessly.
"She's very pretty," said Miss Vostrand to her mother.
"Yes. The New England type," murmured the mother.
"They all have the same look, a good deal," said the girl, glancing over
the room where the waitresses stood ranged against the wall with their
hands folded at their waists. "They have better faces than figures, but
she is beautiful every way. Do you suppose they are all schoolteachers?
They look intellectual. Or is it their glasses?"
"I don't know," said the mother. "They used to be; but things change here
so rapidly it may all be different. Do you like it?"
"I think it's charming here," said the younger lady, evasively.
"Everything is so exquisitely clean. And the food is very good. Is this
corn-bread--that you've told me about so much?"
"Yes, this is corn-bread. You will have to get accustomed to it."
"Perhaps it won't take long. I could fancy that girl knowing about
everything. Don't you like her looks?"
"Oh, very much." Mrs. Vostrand turned for another glance at Cynthia.
"What say?" Their smiling waitress came forward from the wall where she
was leaning, as if she thought they had spoken to her.
"Oh, we were speaking--the young lady to whom Mr. Durgin was talking--she
is--"
"She's the housekeeper--Miss Whitwell."
"Oh, indeed! She seems so young--"
"I guess she knows what to do-o-o," the waitress chanted. "We think she's
about ri-i-ght." She smiled tolerantly upon the misgiving of the
stranger, if it was that, and then retreated when the mother and daughter
began talking together again.
They had praised the mountain with the cloud off, to Jeff, very politely,
and now the mother said, a little more intimately, but still with the
deference of a society acquaintance: "He seems very gentlemanly, and I am
sure he is very kind. I don't quite know what to do about it, do you?"
"No, I don't. It's all strange to me, you know."
"Yes, I suppose it must be. But you will get used to it if we remain in
the country. Do you think you will dislike it?"
"Oh no! It's very different."
"Yes, it's different. He is very handsome, in a certain way." The
daughter said nothing, and the mother added: "I wonder if he was trying
to conceal that he had come second-cabin, and was not going to let us
know that he crossed with us?"
"Do you think he was bound to do so?"
"No. But it was very odd, his not mentioning it. And his going out on a
cattle-steamer?" the mother observed.
"Oh, but that's very chic, I've heard," the daughter replied. "I've heard
that the young men like it and think it a great chance. They have great
fun. It isn't at all like second-cabin."
"You young people have your own world," the mother answered, caressingly.