One morning Westover got leave from Mrs. Durgin to help Cynthia open
the dim rooms and cold corridors at the hotel to the sun and air. She
promised him he should take his death, but he said he would wrap up
warm, and when he came to join the girl in his overcoat and fur cap, he
found Cynthia equipped with a woollen cloud tied around her head, and a
little shawl pinned across her breast.
“Is that all?” he reproached her. “I ought to have put on a single
wreath of artificial flowers and some sort of a blazer for this
expedition. Don't you think so, Mrs. Durgin?”
“I believe women can stand about twice as much cold as you can, the best
of you,” she answered, grimly.
“Then I must try to keep myself as warm as I can with work,” he said.
“You must let me do all the rough work of airing out, won't you,
Cynthia?”
“There isn't any rough work about it,” she answered, in a sort of
motherly toleration of his mood, without losing anything of her filial
reverence.
She took care of him, he perceived, as she took care of her brother and
her father, but with a delicate respect for his superiority, which was
no longer shyness.
They began with the office and the parlor, where they flung up the
windows, and opened the doors, and then they opened the dining-room,
where the tables stood in long rows, with the chairs piled on them legs
upward. Cynthia went about with many sighs for the dust on everything,
though to Westover's eyes it all seemed frigidly clean. “If it goes on
as it has for the past two years,” she said, “we shall have to add on a
new dining-room. I don't know as I like to have it get so large!”
“I never wanted it to go beyond the original farmhouse,” said Westover.
“I've been jealous of every boarder but the first. I should have liked
to keep it for myself, and let the world know Lion's Head from my
pictures.”
“I guess Mrs. Durgin thinks it was your picture that began to send
people here.”
“And do you blame me, too? What if the thing I'm doing now should make
it a winter resort? Nothing could save you, then, but a fire. I believe
that's Jeff's ambition. Only he would want to put another hotel in place
of this; something that would be more popular. Then the ruin I began
would be complete, and I shouldn't come any more; I couldn't bear the
sight.”
“I guess Mrs. Durgin wouldn't think it was lion's Head if you stopped
coming,” said Cynthia.
“But you would know better than that,” said Westover; and then he
was sorry he had said it, for it seemed to ask something of different
quality from her honest wish to make him know their regard for him.
She did not answer, but went down a long corridor to which they had
mounted, to raise the window at the end, while he raised another at the
opposite extremity. When they met at the stairway again to climb to the
story above, he said: “I am always ashamed when I try to make a person
of sense say anything silly,” and she flushed, still without answering,
as if she understood him, and his meaning pleased her. “But fortunately
a person of sense is usually equal to the temptation. One ought to be
serious when he tries it with a person of the other sort; but I don't
know that one is!”
“Do you feel any draught between these windows?” asked Cynthia,
abruptly. “I don't want you should take cold.”
“Oh, I'm all right,” said Westover.
She went into the rooms on one side of the corridor, and put up their
windows, and flung the blinds back. He did the same on the other side.
He got a peculiar effect of desolation from the mattresses pulled down
over the foot of the bedsteads, and the dismantled interiors reflected
in the mirrors of the dressing-cases; and he was going to speak of it
when he rejoined Cynthia at the stairway leading to the third story,
when she said, “Those were Mrs. Vostrand's rooms I came out of the
last.” She nodded her head over her shoulder toward the floor they were
leaving.
“Were they indeed! And do you remember people's rooms so long?”
“Yes; I always think of rooms by the name of people that have them, if
they're any way peculiar.”
He thought this bit of uncandor charming, and accepted it as if it were
the whole truth. “And Mrs. Vostrand was certainly peculiar. Tell me,
Cynthia, what did you think of her?”
“She was only here a little while.”
“But you wouldn't have come to think of her rooms by her name if she
hadn't made a strong impression on you!” She did not answer, and he
said, “I see you didn't like her!”
The girl would not speak, and Mr. Westover went on: “She used to be very
good to me, and I think she used to be better to herself than she
is now.” He knew that Jeff must have told Cynthia of his affair with
Genevieve Vostrand, and he kept himself from speaking of her by a
resolution he thought creditable, as he mounted the stairs to the upper
story in the silence to which Cynthia left his last remark. At the top
she made a little pause in the obscurer light of the close-shuttered
corridor, while she said: “I liked her daughter the best.”
“Yes?” he returned. “I--never felt very well acquainted with her, I
believe. One couldn't get far with her. Though, for the matter of that,
one didn't get far with Mrs. Vostrand herself. Did you think Genevieve
was much influenced by her mother?”
“She didn't seem a strong character.”
“No, that was it. She was what her mother wished her to be. I've often
wondered how much she was interested in the marriage she made.”
Cynthia let a rustic silence ensue, and Westover shrank again from the
inquisition he longed to make.
It was not Genevieve Vostrand's marriage which really concerned him, but
Cynthia's engagement, and it was her mind that he would have liked to
look into. It might well be supposed that she regarded it in a perfect
matter-of-fact way, and with no ambition beyond it. She was a country
girl, acquainted from childhood with facts of life which town-bred girls
would not have known without a blunting of the sensibilities, and why
should she be different from other country girls? She might be as
good and as fine as he saw her, and yet be insensible to the spiritual
toughness of Jeff, because of her love for him. Her very goodness might
make his badness unimaginable to her, and if her refinement were from
the conscience merely, and not from the tastes and experiences, too,
there was not so much to dread for her in her marriage with such a man.
Still, he would have liked, if he could, to tell her what he had told
her father of Durgin's behavior with Lynde, and let her bring the test
of her self-devotion to the case with a clear understanding. He had
sometimes been afraid that Whitwell might not be able to keep it
to himself; but now he wished that the philosopher had not been so
discreet. He had all this so absorbingly in mind that he started
presently with the fear that she had said something and he had not
answered, but when he asked her he found that she had not spoken. They
were standing at an open window looking out upon Lion's Head, when he
said: “I don't know how I shall show my gratitude to Mrs. Durgin and you
for thinking of having me up here. I've done a picture of Lion's Head
that might be ever so much worse; but I shouldn't have dreamed of
getting at it if it hadn't been for you, though I've so often dreamed
of doing it. Now I shall go home richer in every sort of way-thanks to
you.”
She answered, simply: “You needn't thank anybody; but it was Jeff who
thought of it; we were ready enough to ask you.”
“That was very good of him,” said Westover, whom her words confirmed in
a suspicion he had had all along. But what did it matter that Jeff had
suggested their asking him, and then attributed the notion to them? It
was not so malign for him to use that means of ingratiating himself with
Westover, and of making him forget his behavior with Lynde, and it was
not unnatural. It was very characteristic; at the worst it merely proved
that Jeff was more ashamed of what he had done than he would allow, and
that was to his credit.
He heard Cynthia asking: “Mr. Westover, have you ever been at Class Day?
He wants us to come.”
“Class Day? Oh, Class Day!” He took a little time to gather himself
together. “Yes, I've been at a good many. If you care to see something
pretty, it's the prettiest thing in the world. The students' sisters
and mothers come from everywhere; and there's fashion and feasting
and flirting, from ten in the morning till ten at night. I'm not sure
there's so much happiness; but I can't tell. The young people know about
that. I fancy there's a good deal of defeat and disappointment in it
all. But if you like beautiful dresses, and music and dancing, and a
great flutter of gayety, you can get more of it at Class Day than
you can in any other way. The good time depends a great deal upon the
acquaintance a student has, and whether he is popular in college.”
Westover found this road a little impassable, and he faltered.
Cynthia did not apparently notice his hesitation. “Do you think Mrs.
Durgin would like it?”
“Mrs. Durgin?” Westover found that he had been leaving her out of the
account, and had been thinking only of Cynthia's pleasure or pain.
“Well, I don't suppose--it would be rather fatiguing--Did Jeff want her
to come too?”
“He said so.”
“That's very nice of him. If he could devote himself to her; but--And
would she like to go?”
“To please him, she would.” Westover was silent, and the girl surprised
him by the appeal she suddenly made to him. “Mr. Westover, do you
believe it would be very well for either of us to go? I think it would
be better for us to leave all that part of his life alone. It's no use
in pretending that we're like the kind of people he knows, or that we
know their ways, and I don't believe--”
Westover felt his heart rise in indignant sympathy. “There isn't any
one he knows to compare with you!” he said, and in this he was thinking
mainly of Bessie Lynde. “You're worth a thousand--If I were--if he's
half a man he would be proud--I beg your pardon! I don't mean--but you
understand--”
Cynthia put her head far out of the window and looked along the steep
roof before them. “There is a blind off one of the windows. I heard it
clapping in the wind the other night. I must go and see the number of
the room.” She drew her head in quickly and ran away without letting him
see her face.
He followed her. “Let me help you put it on again!”
“No, no!” she called back. “Frank will do that, or Jombateeste, when
they come to shut up the house.”