Jackson kept his promise to write to Westover, but he was better than
his word to his mother, and wrote to her every week that winter.
“I seem just to live from letter to letter. It's ridic'lous,” she said
to Cynthia once when the girl brought the mail in from the barn, where
the men folks kept it till they had put away their horses after driving
over from Lovewell with it. The trains on the branch road were taken off
in the winter, and the post-office at the hotel was discontinued. The
men had to go to the town by cutter, over a highway that the winds
sifted half full of snow after it had been broken out by the ox-teams in
the morning. But Mrs. Durgin had studied the steamer days and calculated
the time it would take letters to come from New York to Lovewell; and,
unless a blizzard was raging, some one had to go for the mail when the
day came. It was usually Jombateeste, who reverted in winter to the type
of habitant from which he had sprung. He wore a blue woollen cap, like a
large sock, pulled over his ears and close to his eyes, and below it his
clean-shaven brown face showed. He had blue woollen mittens, and boots
of russet leather, without heels, came to his knees; he got a pair every
time he went home on St. John's day. His lean little body was swathed in
several short jackets, and he brought the letters buttoned into one
of the innermost pockets. He produced the letter from Jackson promptly
enough when Cynthia came out to the barn for it, and then he made a
show of getting his horse out of the cutter shafts, and shouting
international reproaches at it, till she was forced to ask, “Haven't you
got something for me, Jombateeste?”
“You expec' some letter?” he said, unbuckling a strap and shouting
louder.
“You know whether I do. Give it to me.”
“I don' know. I think I drop something on the road. I saw something
white; maybe snow; good deal of snow.”
“Don't plague! Give it here!”
“Wait I finish unhitch. I can't find any letter till I get some time to
look.”
“Oh, now, Jombateeste! Give me my letter!”
“W'at you want letter for? Always same thing. Well! 'Old the 'oss; I
goin' to feel.”
Jombateeste felt in one pocket after another, while Cynthia clung to
the colt's bridle, and he was uncertain till the last whether he had any
letter for her. When it appeared she made a flying snatch at it and ran;
and the comedy was over, to be repeated in some form the next week.
The girl somehow always possessed herself of what was in her letters
before she reached the room where Mrs. Durgin was waiting for hers. She
had to read that aloud to Jackson's mother, and in the evening she had
to read it again to Mrs. Durgin and Whitwell and Jombateeste and Frank,
after they had done their chores, and they had gathered in the old
farm-house parlor, around the air-tight sheet-iron stove, in a heat of
eighty degrees. Whitwell listened, with planchette ready on the table
before him, and he consulted it for telepathic impressions of Jackson's
actual mental state when the reading was over.
He got very little out of the perverse instrument. “I can't seem to work
her. If Jackson was here--”
“We shouldn't need to ask planchette about him,” Cynthia once suggested,
with the spare sense of humor that sometimes revealed itself in her.
“Well, I guess that's something so,” her father candidly admitted.
But the next time he consulted the helpless planchette as hopefully as
before. “You can't tell, you can't tell,” he urged.
“The trouble seems to be that planchette can't tell,” said Mrs. Durgin,
and they all laughed. They were not people who laughed a great deal, and
they were each intent upon some point in the future that kept them from
pleasure in the present. The little Canuck was the only one who suffered
himself a contemporaneous consolation. His early faith had so far
lapsed from him that he could hospitably entertain the wild psychical
conjectures of Whitwell without an accusing sense of heresy, and he
found the winter of northern New England so mild after that of Lower
Canada that he experienced a high degree of animal comfort in it, and
looked forward to nothing better. To be well fed, well housed, and well
heated; to smoke successive pipes while the others talked, and to catch
through his smoke-wreaths vague glimpses of their meanings, was enough.
He felt that in being promoted to the care of the stables in Jackson's
absence he occupied a dignified and responsible position, with a
confidential relation to the exile which justified him in sending
special messages to him, and attaching peculiar value to Jackson's
remembrances.
The exile's letters said very little about his health, which in the
sense of no news his mother held to be good news, but they were full
concerning the monuments and the ethnological interest of life in Egypt.
They were largely rescripts of each day's observations and experiences,
close and full, as his mother liked them in regard to fact, and
generously philosophized on the side of politics and religion for
Whitwell. The Eastern question became in the snow-choked hills of New
England the engrossing concern of this speculative mind, and he was
apt to spring it upon Mrs. Durgin and Cynthia at mealtimes and other
defenceless moments. He tried to debate it with Jombateeste, who
conceived of it as a form of spiritualistic inquiry, and answered
from the hay-loft, where he was throwing down fodder for the cattle
to Whitwell, volubly receiving it on the barn floor below, that he
believed, him, everybody got a hastral body, English same as Mormons.
“Guess you mean Moslems,” said Whitwell, and Jombateeste asked the
difference, defiantly.
The letters which came to Cynthia could not be made as much a general
interest, and, in fact, no one else cared so much for them as for
Jackson's letters, not even Jeff's mother. After Cynthia got one of
them, she would ask, perfunctorily, what Jeff said, but when she was
told there was no news she did not press her question.
“If Jackson don't get back in time next summer,” Mrs. Durgin said, in
one of the talks she had with the girl, “I guess I shall have to let
Jeff and you run the house alone.”
“I guess we shall want a little help from you,” said Cynthia, demurely.
She did not refuse the implication of Mrs. Durgin's words, but she would
not assume that there was more in them than they expressed.
When Jeff came home for the three days' vacation at Thanksgiving, he
wished again to relinquish his last year at Harvard, and Cynthia had to
summon all her forces to keep him to his promise of staying. He brought
home the books with which he was working off his conditions, with
a half-hearted intention of study, and she took hold with him, and
together they fought forward over the ground he had to gain. His mother
was almost willing at last that he should give up his last year in
college.
“What is the use?” she asked. “He's give up the law, and he might as
well commence here first as last, if he's goin' to.”
The girl had no reason to urge against this; she could only urge her
feeling that he ought to go back and take his degree with the rest of
his class.
“If you're going to keep Lion's Head the way you pretend you are,” she
said to him, as she could not say to his mother, “you want to keep all
your Harvard friends, don't you, and have them remember you? Go back,
Jeff, and don't you come here again till after you've got your degree.
Never mind the Christmas vacation, nor the Easter. Stay in Cambridge
and work off your conditions. You can do it, if you try. Oh, don't you
suppose I should like to have you here?” she reproached him.
He went back, with a kind of grudge in his heart, which he confessed in
his first letter home to her, when he told her that she was right and he
was wrong. He was sure now, with the impulse which their work on them
in common had given him, that he should get his conditions off, and he
wanted her and his mother to begin preparing their minds to come to his
Class Day. He planned how they could both be away from the hotel for
that day. The house was to be opened on the 20th of June, but it was not
likely that there would be so many people at once that they could not
give the 21st to Class Day; Frank and his father could run Lion's Head
somehow, or, if they could not, then the opening could be postponed till
the 24th. At all events, they must not fail to come. Cynthia showed the
whole letter to his mother, who refused to think of such a thing, and
then asked, as if the fact had not been fully set before her: “When is
it to be?”
“The 21st of June.”
“Well, he's early enough with his invitation,” she grumbled.
“Yes, he is,” said Cynthia; and she laughed for shame and pleasure as
she confessed, “I was thinking he was rather late.”
She hung her head and turned her face away. But Mrs. Durgin understood.
“You be'n expectin' it all along, then.”
“I guess so.”
“I presume,” said the elder woman, “that he's talked to you about it.
He never tells me much. I don't see why you should want to go. What's it
like?”
“Oh, I don't know. But it's the day the graduating class have to
themselves, and all their friends come.”
“Well, I don't know why anybody should want to go,” said Mrs. Durgin.
“I sha'n't. Tell him he won't want to own me when he sees me. What am I
goin' to wear, I should like to know? What you goin' to wear, Cynthy?”