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.”