After he went back to Cambridge, Jeff continued mechanically in the
direction given him by motives which had ceased for him. In the midst
of his divergence with Bessie Lynde he had still kept an inner fealty to
Cynthia, and tried to fulfil the purposes and ambition she had for him.
The operation of this habitual allegiance now kept him up to his work,
but the time must come when it could no longer operate, when his whole
consciousness should accept the fact known to his intelligence, and he
should recognize the close of that incident of his life as the bereaved
finally accept and recognize the fact of death.
The event brought him relief, and it brought him freedom. He was
sensible in his relaxation of having strained up to another's ideal, of
having been hampered by another's will. His pleasure in the relief was
tempered by a regret, not wholly unpleasant, for the girl whose aims,
since they were no longer his, must be disappointed. He was sorry for
Cynthia, and in his remorse he was fonder of her than he had ever been.
He felt her magnanimity and clemency; he began to question, in that
wordless deep of being where volition begins, whether it would not be
paying a kind of duty to her if he took her at her word and tried to go
back to Bessie Lynde. But for the present he did nothing but renounce
all notion of working at his conditions, or attempting to take a degree.
That was part of a thing that was past, and was no part of anything to
come, so far as Jeff now forecast his future.
He did not choose to report himself to Westover, and risk a scolding,
or a snubbing. He easily forgave Westover for the tone he had taken at
their last meeting, but he did not care to see him. He would have met
him half-way, however, in a friendly advance, and he was aware of much
good-will toward him, which he could not have been reluctant to show if
chance had brought them together.
Jeff missed Cynthia's letters which used to come so regularly every
Tuesday, and he had a half-hour every Sunday which was at first rather
painfully vacant since he no longer wrote to her. But in this vacancy
he had at least no longer the pang of self-reproach which her letters
always brought him, and he was not obliged to put himself to the shame
of concealment in writing to her. He had never minded that tacit lying
on his own account, but he hated it in relation to her; it always hurt
him as something incongruous and unfit. He wrote to his mother now
on Sunday, and in his first letter, while the impression of Cynthia's
dignity and generosity was still vivid, he urged her to make it clear to
the girl that he wished her and her family to remain at Lion's Head as
if nothing had happened. He put a great deal of real feeling into this
request, and he offered to go and spend a year in Europe, if his mother
thought that Cynthia would be more reconciled to his coming back at the
end of that time.
His mother answered with a dryness to which his ear supplied the tones
of her voice, that she would try to get along in the management of
Lion's Head till his brother got back, but that she had no objection to
his going to Europe for a year if he had the money to spare. Jeff could
not refuse her joke, as he felt it, a certain applause, but he thought
it pretty rough that his mother should take part so decidedly against
him as she seemed to be doing. He had expected her to be angry with him,
but before they parted she had seemed to find some excuse for him, and
yet here she was siding against her own son in what he might very well
consider an unnatural way. If Jackson had been at home he would have
laid it to his charge; but he knew that Cynthia would have scorned
even to speak of him with his mother, and he knew too well his mother's
slight for Whitwell to suppose that he could have influenced her.
His mind turned in momentary suspicion to Westover. Had Westover,
he wondered, with a purpose to pay him up for it forming itself
simultaneously with his question, been setting his mother against him?
She might have written to Westover to get at the true inwardness of his
behavior, and Westover might have written her something that had made
her harden her heart against him. But upon reflection this seemed out of
character for both of them; and Jeff was thrown back upon his mother's
sober second thought of his misconduct for an explanation of her
coldness. He could not deny that he had grievously disappointed her in
several ways. But he did not see why he should not take a certain hint
from her letter, or construct a hint from it, at one with a vague intent
prompted by his own restless and curious vanity. Since he had parted
with Bessie Lynde, on terms of humiliation for her which must have been
anguish for him if he had ever loved her, or loved anything but his
power over her, he had remained in absolute ignorance of her. He had
not heard where she was or how she was; but now, as the few weeks before
Class Day and Commencement crumbled away, he began to wonder why she
made no sign. He believed that since she had been willing to go so
far to get him, she would not be willing to give him up so easily. The
thought of Cynthia had always intruded more or less effectively between
them, but now that this thought began to fade into the past, the thought
of Bessie began to grow out of it with no interposing shadow.
However, Jeff was in no hurry. It was not passion that moved him, and
the mood in which he could play with the notion of getting back to his
flirtation with Bessie Lynde was pleasanter after the violence of recent
events than any renewal of strong sensations could be. He preferred to
loiter in this mood, and he was meantime much more comfortable than
he had been for a great while. He was rid of the disagreeable sense of
disloyalty to Cynthia, and he was rid of the stress of living up to her
conscience in various ways. He was rid of Bessie Lynde, too, and of the
trouble of forecasting and discounting her caprices. His thought turned
at times with a soft regret to hopes, disappointments, experiences
connected with neither, and now tinged with a tender melancholy,
unalloyed by shame or remorse. As he drew nearer to Class Day he had a
somewhat keener compunction for Cynthia and the hopes he had encouraged
her to build and had then dashed. But he was coming more and more to
regard it all as fatality; and if the chance that he counted upon to
bring him and Bessie together again had occurred he could have more
easily forgiven himself.
One of the jays, who was spreading on rather a large scale, wanted Jeff
to spread with him, but he refused, because, as he said, he meant to
keep out of it altogether; and for the same reason he declined to take
part in the spread of a rather jay society he belonged to. In his secret
heart he trusted that some friendly fortuity might throw an invitation
to Beck Hall in his way, or at least a card for the Gym, which, if no
longer the place it had been, was still by no means jay. He got neither;
but as he felt all the joy of the June day in his young blood he
consoled himself very well with the dancing at one of the halls, where
the company happened that year to be openly, almost recklessly jay. Jeff
had some distinction among the fellows who enviously knew of his social
success during the winter, and especially of his affair with Bessie
Lynde; and there were some girls very pretty and very well dressed among
the crowd of girls who were neither. They were from remote parts of the
country, and in the charge of chaperons ignorant of the differences so
poignant to local society. Jeff went about among them, and danced with
the sisters and cousins of several men who seemed superior to the lost
condition of their kinswomen; these were nice fellows enough, but doomed
by their grinding, or digging, or their want of worldly wisdom, to a
place among the jays, when they really had some qualifications for a
nobler standing. He had a very good time, and he was enjoying himself
in his devotion to a lively young brunette whom he was making laugh with
his jokes about some of the others, when his eye was caught by a group
of ladies who advanced among the jays with something of that collective
intrepidity and individual apprehension characteristic of people in
slumming. They had the air of not knowing what might happen to them,
but the adventurous young Boston matron in charge of the girls kept on a
bold front behind her lorgnette, and swept the strange company she
found herself in with an unshrinking eye as she led her band among the
promenaders, and past the couples seated along the walls. She hesitated
a moment as her glance fell upon Jeff, and then she yielded, at whatever
risk, to the comfort of finding a known face among so many aliens. “Why,
Mr. Durgin!” she called out. “Bessie, here's Mr. Durgin,” and she turned
to the girl, who was in her train, as Jeff had perceived by something
finer than the senses from the first.
He rose from the side of his brunette, whose brother was standing near,
and shook hands with the adventurous young matron, who seemed suddenly
much better acquainted with him than he had ever thought her, and with
Bessie Lynde; the others were New York girls, and the matron presented
him. “Are you going on?” she asked, and the vague challenge with the
smile that accompanied it was sufficient invitation for him.
“Why, I believe so,” he said, and he turned to take leave of his pretty
brunette; but she had promptly vanished with her brother, and he was
spared the trouble of getting rid of her. He would have been equal to
much more for the sake of finding himself with Bessie Lynde again, whose
excitement he could see burning in her eyes, though her thick complexion
grew neither brighter nor paler. He did not know what quality of
excitement it might be, but he said, audaciously: “It's a good while
since we met!” and he was sensible that his audacity availed.
“Is it?” she asked. He put himself at her side, and he did not leave her
again till he went to dress for the struggle around the Tree. He found
himself easily included in the adventurous young matron's party. He
had not the elegance of some of the taller and slenderer men in the
scholar's gown, but the cap became his handsome face. His affair with
Bessie Lynde had given him a certain note, and an adventurous young
matron, who was naturally a little indiscriminate, might very well have
been willing to let him go about with her party. She could not know how
impudent his mere presence was with reference to Bessie, and the girl
herself made no sign that could have enlightened her. She accepted
something more that her share of his general usefulness to the party;
she danced with him whenever he asked her, and she seemed not to scruple
to publish her affair with him in the openest manner. If he could have
stilled a certain shame for her which he felt, he would have thought he
was having the best kind of time. They made no account of by-gones in
their talk, but she had never been so brilliant, or prompted him to so
many of the effronteries which were the spirit of his humor. He thought
her awfully nice, with lots of sense; he liked her letting him come back
without any fooling or fuss, and he began to admire instead of despising
her for it. Decidedly it was, as she would have said, the chicquest sort
of thing. What was the use, anyway? He made up his mind.
When he said he must go and dress for the Tree, he took leave of her
first, and he was aware of a vivid emotion, which was like regret in
her at parting with him. She said, Must he? She seemed to want to say
something more to him; while he was dismissing himself from the others,
he noticed that once or twice she opened her lips as if she were going
to speak. In the end she did nothing more important than to ask if he
had seen her brother; but after he had left the party he turned and saw
her following him with eyes that he fancied anxious and even frightened
in their gaze.
The riot round the Tree roared itself through its wonted events. Class
after class of the undergraduates filed in and sank upon the grass below
the terraces and parterres of brilliantly dressed ladies within the
quadrangle of seats; the alumni pushed themselves together against the
wall of Holder Chapel; the men of the Senior class came last in their
grotesque variety of sweaters and second and third best clothes for the
scramble at the Tree. The regulation cheers tore from throats that grew
hoarser and hoarser, till every class and every favorite in the faculty
had been cheered. Then the signal-hat was flung into the air, and
the rush at the Tree was made, and the combat' for the flowers that
garlanded its burly waist began.
Jeff's size and shape forbade him to try for the flowers from the
shoulders of others. He was one of a group of jays who set their backs
to the Tree, and fought away all comers except their own; they pulled
down every man not of their sort, and put up a jay, who stripped the
Tree of its flowers and flung them to his fellows below. As he was let
drop to the ground, Jeff snatched a handful of his spoil from him, and
made off with it toward the place where he had seen Bessie Lynde and her
party. But when he reached the place, shouldering and elbowing his way
through the press, she was no longer there. He saw her hat at a distance
through the crowd, where he did not choose to follow, and he stuffed the
flowers into his breast to give to her later. He expected to meet her
somewhere in the evening; if not, he would try to find her at her aunt's
house in town; failing that, he could send her the flowers, and trust
her for some sort of leading acknowledgment.
He went and had a bath and dressed himself freshly, and then he went for
a walk in the still evening air. He was very hot from the battle which
had been fought over him, and which he had shared with all his strength,
and it seemed to him as if he could not get cool. He strolled far out
along Concord Avenue, beyond the expanses and ice-horses of Fresh Pond,
into the country toward Belmont, with his hat off and his head down. He
was very well satisfied, and he was smiling to himself at the ease of
his return to Bessie, and securely speculating upon the outcome of their
renewed understanding.
He heard a vehicle behind him, rapidly driven, and he turned out for
it without looking around. Then suddenly he felt a fiery sting on his
forehead, and then a shower of stings swiftly following each other over
his head and face. He remembered stumbling, when he was a boy, into a
nest of yellow-jackets, that swarmed up around him and pierced him like
sparks of fire at every uncovered point. But he knew at the same time
that it was some one in the vehicle beside him who was lashing him over
the head with a whip. He bowed his head with his eyes shut and lunged
blindly out toward his assailant, hoping to seize him.
But the horse sprang aside, and tore past him down the road. Jeff opened
his eyes, and through the blood that dripped from the cuts above them he
saw the wicked face of Alan Lynde looking back at him from the dogcart
where he sat with his man beside him. He brandished his broken whip in
the air, and flung it into the bushes. Jeff walked on, and picked it up,
before he turned aside to the pools of the marsh stretching on either
hand, and tried to stanch his hurts, and get himself into shape for
returning to town and stealing back to his lodging. He had to wait till
after dark, and watch his chance to get into the house unnoticed.