The Landlord at Lion's Head — Volume 2

William Dean Howells

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• Publié par: octo
• Publié le: 08 décembre 2010
• Nombre de lectures: 18
• Langue: English

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The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Landlord at
Lion's Head, Volume 2 by William Dean Howells
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Title: The Landlord at Lion's Head, Volume 2
Author: William Dean Howells
Release Date: August 22, 2006 [EBook #3376]
Language: English
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG
EBOOK LION'S HEAD, VOL. 2 ***
Produced by David WidgerTHE LANDLORD AT
LION'S HEAD
By William Dean HowellsPart II.
XXVII.
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 inseveral 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 hospitablyentertain 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 hewas 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 hetogether 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 2