The Landlord at Lion's Head Part 7

Mrs. Durgin still looked serious. "Have you come back to Boston for good now? Do you expect to be there right along?"

"I've taken a studio there. Yes, I expect to be in Boston now. I've taken to teaching, and I fancy I can make a living. If Jeff comes to Cambridge, and I can be of any use--"

"We should be ever so much obliged to you," said his mother, with an air of great relief.

"Not at all. I shall be very glad. Your mountain air is drugging me, Mrs. Durgin. I shall have to say good-night, or I shall tumble asleep before I get upstairs. Oh, I can find the way, I guess; this part of the house seems the same." He got away from them, and with the lamp that Jackson gave him found his way to his room. A few moments later some one knocked at his door, and a boy stood there with a pitcher. "Some ice-water, Mr. Westover?"

"Why, is that you, Franky? I'm glad to see you again. How are you?"

"I'm pretty well," said the boy, shyly. He was a very handsome little fellow of distinctly dignified presence, and Westover was aware at once that here was not a subject for patronage. "Is there anything else you want, Mr. Westover? Matches, or soap, or anything?" He put the pitcher down and gave a keen glance round the room.

"No, everything seems to be here, Frank," said Westover.

"Well, good-night," said the boy, and he slipped out, quietly closing the door after him.

Westover pushed up his window and looked at Lion's Head in the moonlight. It slumbered as if with the sleep of centuries-austere, august. The moon-rays seemed to break and splinter on the outline of the lion-shape, and left all the mighty ma.s.s black below.

In the old porch under his window Westover heard whispering. Then, "You behave yourself, Jeff Durgin!" came in a voice which could be no other than Cynthia Whitwell's, and Jeff Durgin's laugh followed.

He saw the girl in the morning. She met him at the door of the dining-room, and he easily found in her shy, proud manner, and her pure, cold beauty, the temperament and physiognomy of the child he remembered.

She was tall and slim, and she held herself straight without stiffness; her face was fine, with a straight nose, and a decided chin, and a mouth of the same sweetness which looked from her still, gray eyes; her hair, of the average brown, had a rough effect of being quickly tossed into form, which pleased him; as she slipped down the room before him to place him at table he saw that she was, as it were, involuntarily, unwillingly graceful. She made him think of a wild sweetbrier, of a hermit-thrush; but, if there were this sort of poetic suggestion in Cynthia's looks, her acts were of plain and honest prose, such as giving Westover the pleasantest place and the most intelligent waitress in the room.

He would have liked to keep her in talk a moment, but she made business-like despatch of all his allusions to the past, and got herself quickly away. Afterward she came back to him, with the effect of having forced herself to come, and the color deepened in her cheeks while she stayed.

She seemed glad of his being there, but helpless against the instincts or traditions that forbade her to show her pleasure in his presence.

Her reticence became almost snubbing in its strictness when he asked her about her school-teaching in the winter; but he found that she taught at the little school-house at the foot of the hill, and lived at home with her father.

"And have you any bad boys that frighten little girls in your school?"

he asked, jocosely.

"I don't know as I have," she said, with a consciousness that flamed into her cheeks.

"Perhaps the boys have reformed?" Westover suggested.

"I presume," she said, stiffly, "that there's room for improvement in every one," and then, as if she were afraid he might take this personally, she looked unhappy and tried to speak of other things. She asked him if he did not see a great many changes at Lion's Head; he answered, gravely, that he wished he could have found it just as he left it, and then she must have thought she had gone wrong again, for she left him in an embarra.s.sment that was pathetic, but which was charming.

XI.

After breakfast Westover walked out and saw Whitwell standing on the gra.s.s in front of the house, beside the flagstaff. He suffered Westover to make the first advances toward the renewal of their acquaintance, but when he was sure of his friendly intention he responded with a cordial openness which the painter had fancied wanting in his children. Whitwell had not changed much. The most noticeable difference was the compact phalanx of new teeth which had replaced the staggering veterans of former days, and which displayed themselves in his smile of relenting.

There was some novelty of effect also in an arrangement of things in his hat-band. At first Westover thought they were fishhooks and artificial flies, such as the guides wear in the Adirondacks to advertise their calling about the hotel offices and the piazzas. But another glance showd him that they were sprays and wild flowers of various sorts, with gay mosses and fungi and some stems of Indian-pipe.

Whitwell seemed pleased that these things should have caught Westover's eye. He said, almost immediately: "Lookin' at my almanac? This is one of our field-days; we have 'em once a week; and I like to let the ladies see beforehand what nature's got on the bill for 'em, in the woods and pastur's."

"It's a good idea," said Westover, "and it's fresh and picturesque."

Whitwell laughed for pleasure.

"They told me what a consolation you were to the ladies, with your walks and talks."

"Well, I try to give 'em something to think about," said Whitwell.

"But why do you confine your ministrations to one s.e.x?"

"I don't, on purpose. But it's the only s.e.x here, three-fourths of the time. Even the children are mostly all girls. When the husbands come up Sat.u.r.day nights, they don't want to go on a tramp Sundays. They want to lay off and rest. That's about how it is. Well, you see some changes about Lion's Head, I presume?" he asked, with what seemed an impersonal pleasure in them.

"I should rather have found the old farm. But I must say I'm glad to find such a good hotel."

"Jeff and his mother made their brags to you?" said Whitwell, with a kind of amiable scorn. "I guess if it wa'n't for Cynthy she wouldn't know where she was standin', half the time. It don't matter where Jeff stands, I guess. Jackson's the best o' the lot, now the old man's gone." There was no one by at the moment to hear these injuries except Westover, but Whitwell called them out with a frankness which was perhaps more carefully adapted to the situation than it seemed. Westover made no attempt to parry them formally; but he offered some generalities in extenuation of the unworthiness of the Durgins, which Whitwell did not altogether refuse.

"Oh, it's all right. Old woman talk to you about Jeff's going to college? I thought so. Wants to make another Dan'el Webster of him.

Guess she can's far forth as Dan'el's graduatin' went." Westover tried to remember how this had been with the statesman, but could not.

Whitwell added, with intensifying irony so of look and tone: "Guess the second Dan'el won't have a chance to tear his degree up; guess he wouldn't ever b'en ready to try for it if it had depended on him.

They don't keep any record at Harvard, do they, of the way fellows are prepared for their preliminary examinations?"

"I don't quite know what you mean," said Westover.

"Oh, nothin'. You get a chance some time to ask Jeff who done most of his studyin' for him at the Academy."

This hint was not so darkling but Westover could understand that Whitwell attributed Jeff's scholars.h.i.+p to the help of Cynthia, but he would not press him to an open a.s.sertion of the fact. There was something painful in it to him; it had the pathos which perhaps most of the success in the world would reveal if we could penetrate its outside.

He was silent, and Whitwell left the point. "Well," he concluded, "what's goin' on in them old European countries?"

"Oh, the old thing," said Westover. "But I can't speak for any except France, very well."

"What's their republic like, over there? Ours? See anything of it, how it works?"

"Well, you know," said Westover, "I was working so hard myself all the time--"

"Good!" Whitwell slapped his leg. Westover saw that he had on long India-rubber boots, which came up to his knees, and he gave a wayward thought to the misery they would be on an August day to another man; but Whitwell was probably insensible to any discomfort from them. "When a man's mindin' his own business any government's good, I guess. But I should like to prowl round some them places where they had the worst scenes of the Revolution, Ever been in the Place de la Concorde?"

Whitwell gave it the full English p.r.o.nunciation.

"I pa.s.sed through it nearly every day."

"I want to know! And that column that they, pulled down in the Commune that had that little Boney on it--see that?"

"In the Place Vendome?"

"Yes, Pla.s.s Vonndome."

"Oh yes. You wouldn't know it had ever been down."

"Nor the things it stood for?"

"As to that, I can't be so sure."

"Well, it's funny," said the philosopher, "how the world seems to always come out at the same hole it went in at!" He paused, with his mouth open, as if to let the notion have full effect with Westover.