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The Landlord at Lions Head, Complete

W >> William Dean Howells >> The Landlord at Lions Head, Complete




They had some long walks and long talks together, and in one of them Jeff
opened his mind, if not his heart, to the painter. He wanted to be the
Landlord of the Lion's Head, which he believed he could make the best
hotel in the mountains. He knew, of course, that he could not hope to
make any changes that did not suit his mother and his brother, as long as
they had the control, but he thought they would let him have the control
sooner if his mother could only be got to give up the notion of his being
a lawyer. As nearly as he could guess, she wanted him to be a lawyer
because she did not want him to be a hotel-keeper, and her prejudice
against that was because she believed that selling liquor made her father
a drunkard.

"Well, now you know enough about me, Mr. Westover, to know that drink
isn't my danger."

"Yes, I think I do," said Westover.

"I went a little wild in my Freshman year, and I got into that scrape,
but I've never been the worse for liquor since; fact is, I never touch it
now. There isn't any more reason why I should take to drink because I
keep a hotel than Jackson; but just that one time has set mother against
it, and I can't seem to make her understand that once is enough for me.
Why, I should keep a temperance house, here, of course; you can't do
anything else in these days. If I was left to choose between hotel-
keeping and any other life that I know of, I'd choose it every time,"
Jeff went on, after a moment of silence. "I like a hotel. You can be
your own man from the start; the start's made here, and I've helped to
make it. All you've got to do is to have common-sense in the hotel
business, and you're sure to succeed. I believe I've got common-sense,
and I believe I've got some ideas that I can work up into a great
success. The reason that most people fail in the hotel business is that
they waste so much, and the landlord that wastes on his guests can't
treat them well. It's got so now that in the big city houses they can't
make anything on feeding people, and so they try to make it up on the
rooms. I should feed them well--I believe I know how--and I should make
money on my table, as they do in Europe.

"I've thought a good many things out; my mind runs on it all the time; but
I'm not going to bore you with it now."

"Oh, not at all," said Westover. "I'd like to know what your ideas are."

Well, some time I'll tell you. But look here, Mr. Westover, I wish if
mother gets to talking about me with you that you'd let her know how I
feel. We can't talk together, she and I, without quarrelling about it;
but I guess you could put in a word that would show her I wasn't quite a
fool. She thinks I've gone crazy from seeing the way they do things in
Europe; that I'm conceited and unpatriotic, and I don't know what all."
Jeff laughed as if with an inner fondness for his mother's wrong-
headedness.

"And would you be willing to settle down here in the country for the rest
of your life, and throw away your Harvard training on hotel-keeping?"

"What do the other fellows do with their Harvard training when they go
into business, as nine-tenths of them do? Business is business, whether
you keep a hotel or import dry-goods or manufacture cotton or run a
railroad or help a big trust to cheat legally. Harvard has got to take a
back seat when you get out of Harvard. But you don't suppose that
keeping a summer hotel would mean living in the country the whole time,
do you? That's the way mother does, but I shouldn't. It isn't good for
the hotel, even. If I had such a place as Lion's Head, I should put a
man and his family into it for the winter to look after it, and I should
go to town myself--to Boston or New York, or I might go to London or
Paris. They're not so far off, and it's so easy to get to them that you
can hardly keep away." Jeff laughed, and looked up at Westover from the
log where he sat, whittling a pine stick; Westover sat on the stump from
which the log had been felled eight or ten years before.

"You are modern," he said.

"That's what I should do at first. But I don't believe I should have
Lion's Head very long before I had another hotel--in Florida, or the
Georgia uplands, or North Carolina, somewhere. I should take my help
back and forth; it would be as easy to run two hotels as one-easier!
It would keep my hand in. But if you want to know, I'd rather stick here
in the country, year in and year out, and run Lion's Head, than to be a
lawyer and hang round trying to get a case for nine or ten years. Who's
going to support me? Do you suppose I want to live on mother till I'm
forty? She don't think of that. She thinks I can go right into court
and begin distinguishing myself, if I can fight the people off from
sending me to Congress. I'd rather live in the country, anyway. I think
town's the place for winter, or two-three months of it, and after that I
haven't got any use for it. But mother, she's got this old-fashioned
ambition to have me go to a city and set up there. She thinks that if I
was a lawyer in Boston I should be at the top of the heap. But I know
better than that, and so do you; and I want you to give her some little
hint of how it really is: how it takes family and money and a lot of
influence to get to the top in any city."

It occurred to Westover, and not for the first time, that the frankest
thing in Jeff Durgin was his disposition to use his friends. It seemed
to him that Jeff was always asking something of him, and it did not
change the fact that in this case he thought him altogether in the right.
He said that if Mrs. Durgin spoke to him of the matter he would not keep
the light from her. He looked behind him, now, for the first time, in
recognition of the place where they had stopped. "Why, this is
Whitwell's Clearing."

"Didn't you know it?" Jeff asked. "It changes a good deal every year,
and you haven't been here for awhile, have you?"

"Not since Mrs. Marven's picnic," said Westover, and he added, quickly,
to efface the painful association which he must have called up by his
heedless words:

"The woods have crowded back upon it so. It can't be more than half its
old size."

"No," Jeff assented. He struck his heel against a fragment of the pine
bough he had been whittling, and drove it into the soft ground beside the
log, and said, without looking up from it: "I met that woman at a dance
last winter. It wasn't her dance, but she was running it as if it were,
just the way she did with the picnic. She seemed to want to let bygones
be bygones, and I danced with her daughter. She's a nice girl.
I thought mother did wrong about that." Now he looked at Westover.
"She couldn't help it, but it wasn't the thing to do. A hotel is a
public house, and you can't act as if it wasn't. If mother hadn't known
how to keep a hotel so well in other ways, she might have ruined the
house by not knowing in a thing like that. But we've got some of the
people with us this year that used to come here when we first took farm-
boarders; mother don't know that they're ever so much nicer, socially,
than the people that take the fifty-dollar rooms." He laughed, and then
he said, seriously: "If I ever had a son, I don't believe I should let my
pride in him risk doing him mischief. And if you've a mind to let her
understand that you believe I'm set against the law for good and all--"

"I guess I shall not be your ambassador, so far as that. Why don't you
tell her yourself?"

"She won't believe me," said Jeff, with a laugh. "She thinks I don't
know my mind. And I don't like the way we differ when we differ. We
differ more than we mean to. I don't pretend to say I'm always right.
She was right about that other picnic--the one I wanted to make for Mrs.
Vostrand. I suppose," he ended, unexpectedly, "that you hear from them,
now and then?"

"No, I don't. I haven't heard from them for a year; not since--You knew
Genevieve was married?"

"Yes, I knew that," said Jeff, steadily.

"I don't quite make it all out. Mr. Vostrand was very much opposed to
it, Mrs. Vostrand told me; but he must have given way at last; and he
must have put up the money." Jeff looked puzzled, and Westover
explained. "You know the officers in the Italian army--and all the other
armies in Europe, for that matter--have to deposit a certain sum with the
government before they can marry and in the case of Count Grassi,
Mr. Vostrand had to furnish the money."

Jeff said, after a moment: "Well, she couldn't help that."

"No, the girl wasn't to blame. I don't know that any one was to blame.
But I'm afraid our girls wouldn't marry many titles if their fathers
didn't put up the money."

"Well, I don't see why they shouldn't spend their money that way as well
as any other," said Jeff, and this proof of his impartiality suggested to
Westover that he was not only indifferent to the mercenary international
marriages, which are a scandal to so many of our casuists, but had quite
outlived his passion for the girl concerned in this.

"At any rate," Jeff added, "I haven't got anything to say against it.
Mr. Westover, I've always wanted to say one thing to you. Then I came to
your room that night, I wanted to complain of Mrs. Vostrand for not
letting me know about the engagement; and I wasn't man enough to
acknowledge that what you said would account for their letting me make a
fool of myself. But I believe I am now, and I want to say it."

"I'm glad you can see it in that way," said Westover, "and since you do,
I don't mind saying that I think Mrs. Vostrand might have been a little
franker with you without being less kind. She was kind, but she wasn't
quite frank."

"Well, it's all over now," said Jeff, and he rose up and brushed the
whittlings from his knees. "And I guess it's just as well."




XXI.

That afternoon Westover saw Jeff helping Cynthia Whitwell into his
buckboard, and then, after his lively horse had made some paces of a
start, spring to the seat beside her, and bring it to a stand. "Can I do
anything for you over at Lovewell, Mr. Westover?" he called, and he
smiled toward the painter. Then he lightened the reins on the mare's
back; she squared herself for a start in earnest, and flashed down the
sloping hotel road to the highway below, and was lost to sight in the
clump of woods to the southward.

"That's a good friend of yours, Cynthy," he said, leaning toward the girl
with a simple comfort in her proximity. She was dressed in a pale-pink
color, with a hat of yet paler pink; without having a great deal of
fashion, she had a good deal of style. She looked bright and fresh;
there was a dash of pink in her cheeks, which suggested the color of the
sweetbrier, its purity and sweetness, and if there was something in
Cynthia's character and temperament that suggested its thorns too, one
still could not deny that she was like that flower. She liked to shop,
and she liked to ride after a good horse, as the neighbors would have
said; she was going over to Lovewell to buy a number of things, and Jeff
Durgin was driving her there with the swift mare that was his peculiar
property. She smiled upon him without the usual reservations she
contrived to express in her smiles.

"Well, I don't know anybody I'd rather have for my friend than Mr.
Westover." She added: "He acted like a friend the very first time I saw
him."

Jeff laughed with shameless pleasure in the reminiscence her words
suggested. "Well, I did get my come-uppings that time. And I don't know
but he's been a pretty good friend to me, too. I'm not sure he likes me;
but Mr. Westover is a man that could be your friend if he didn't like
you."

"What have you done to make him like you?" asked the girl.

"Nothing!" said Jeff, with a shout of laughter in his conviction.
"I've done a lot of things to make him despise me from the start. But if
you like a person yourself, you want him to like you whether you deserve
it or not."

"I don't know as I do."

"You say that because you always deserve it. You can't tell how it is
with a fellow like me. I should want you to like me, Cynthy, whatever
you thought of me." He looked round into her face, but she turned it
away.

They had struck the level, long for the hill country, at the foot of the
hotel road, and the mare, that found herself neither mounting nor
descending a steep, dropped from the trot proper for an acclivity into a
rapid walk.

"This mare can walk like a Kentucky horse," said Jeff. "I believe I
could teach her single-foot." He added, with a laugh, "If I knew how,"
and now Cynthia laughed with him.

"I was just going to say that."

"Yes, you don't lose many chances to give me a dig, do you?"

"Oh, I don't know as I look for them. Perhaps I don't need to." The
pine woods were deep on either side. They whispered in the thin, sweet
wind, and gave out their odor in the high, westering sun. They covered
with their shadows the road that ran velvety between them.

"This is nice," said Jeff, letting himself rest against the back of the
seat. He stretched his left arm along the top, and presently it dropped
and folded itself about the waist of the girl.

"You may take your arm away, Jeff," she said, quietly.

"Why?"

"Because it has no right there, for one thing!" She drew herself a
little aside and looked round at him. "You wouldn't put it round a town
girl if you were riding with her."

"I shouldn't be riding with her: Girls don't go buggy-riding in town any
more," said Jeff, brutally.

"Then I shall know what to do the next time you ask me."

"Oh, they'd go quick enough if I asked them up here in the country.
Etiquette don't count with them when they're on a vacation."

"I'm not on a vacation; so it counts with me. Please take your arm
away," said Cynthia.

"Oh, all right. But I shouldn't object to your putting your arm around
me."

"You will never have the chance."

"Why are you so hard on me, Cynthy ?" asked Jeff. "You didn't used to be
so."

"People change."

"Do I?"

"Not for the better."

Jeff was dumb. She was pleased with her hit, and laughed. But her laugh
did not encourage him to put his arm round her again. He let the mare
walk on, and left her to resume the conversation at whatever point she
would.

She made no haste to resume it. At last she said, with sufficient
apparent remoteness from the subject they had dropped: "Jeff, I don't
know whether you want me to talk about it. But I guess I ought to, even
if it isn't my place exactly. I don't think Jackson's very well, this
summer."

Jeff faced round toward her. "What makes you think he isn't well?"

"He's weaker. Haven't you noticed it?"

"Yes, I have noticed that. He's worked down; that's all."

"No, that isn't all. But if you don't think so--"

"I want to know what you think, Cynthy," said Jeff, with the amorous
resentment all gone from his voice. "Sometimes folks outside notice the
signs more--I don't mean that you're an outsider, as far as we're
concerned--"

She put by that point. "Father's noticed it, too; and he's with Jackson
a good deal."

"I'll look after it. If he isn't so well, he's got to have a doctor.
That medium's stuff can't do him any good. Don't you think he ought to
have a doctor?"

"Oh yes."

"You don't think a doctor can do him much good?"

"He ought to have one," said the girl, noncommittally.

"Cynthia, I've noticed that Jackson was weak, too; and it's no use
pretending that he's simply worked down. I believe he's worn out. Do
you think mother's ever noticed it?"

"I don't believe she has."

"It's the one thing I can't very well make up my mind to speak to her
about. I don't know what she would do." He did not say, "If she lost
Jackson," but Cynthia knew he meant that, and they were both silent.
"Of course," he went on, "I know that she places a great deal of
dependence upon you, but Jackson's her main stay. He's a good man, and
he's a good son. I wish I'd always been half as good."

Cynthia did not protest against his self-reproach as he possibly hoped
she would. She said: "I think Jackson's got a very good mind. He reads
a great deal, and he's thought a great deal, and when it comes to
talking, I never heard any one express themselves better. The other
night, we were out looking at the stars--I came part of the way home with
him; I didn't like to let him go alone, he seemed so feeble and he got to
showing me Mars. He thinks it's inhabited, and he's read all that the
astronomers say about it, and the seas and the canals that they've found
on it. He spoke very beautifully about the other life, and then he spoke
about death." Cynthia's voice broke, and she pulled her handkerchief out
of her belt, and put it to her eyes. Jeff's heart melted in him at the
sight; he felt a tender affection for her, very unlike the gross content
he had enjoyed in her presence before, and he put his arm round her
again, but this time almost unconsciously, and drew her toward him. She
did not repel him; she even allowed her head to rest a moment on his
shoulder; though she quickly lifted it, and drew herself away, not
resentfully, it seemed, but for her greater freedom in talking.

"I don't believe he's going to die," Jeff said, consolingly, more as if
it were her brother than his that he meant. "But he's a very sick man,
and he's got to knock off and go somewhere. It won't do for him to pass
another winter here. He must go to California, or Colorado; they'd be
glad to have him there, either of them; or he can go to Florida, or over
to Italy. It won't matter how long he stays--"

"What are you talking about, Jeff Durgin?" Cynthia demanded, severely."
What would your mother do? What would she do this winter?"

"That brings me to something, Cynthia," said Jeff, "and I don't want you
to say anything till I've got through. I guess I could help mother run
the place as well as Jackson, and I could stay here next winter."

"You?"

"Now, you let me talk! My mind's made up about one thing: I'm not going
to be a lawyer. I don't want to go back to Harvard. I'm going to keep a
hotel, and, if I don't keep one here at Lion's Head, I'm going to keep it
somewhere else."

"Have you told your mother?"

"Not yet: I wanted to hear what you would say first."

"I? Oh, I haven't got anything to do with it," said Cynthia.

"Yes, you have! You've got everything to do with it, if you'll say one
thing first. Cynthia, you know how I feel about you. It's been so ever
since we were boy and girl here. I want you to promise to marry me.
Will you?"

The girl seemed neither surprised nor very greatly pleased; perhaps her
pleasure had spent itself in that moment of triumphant expectation when
she foresaw what was coming, or perhaps she was preoccupied in clearing
the way in her own mind to a definite result.

"What do you say, Cynthia?" Jeff pursued, with more injury than misgiving
in his voice at her delay in answering. "Don't you-care for me?"

"Oh yes, I presume I've always done that--ever since we were boy and
girl, as you say. But----"

"Well?" said Jeff, patiently, but not insecurely.

"Have you?"

"Have I what?"

"Always cared for me."

He could not find his voice quite as promptly as before. He cleared his
throat before he asked: "Has Mr. Westover been saying anything about me?"

"I don't know what you mean, exactly; but I presume you do."

"Well, then--I always expected to tell you--I did have a fancy for that
girl, for Miss Vostrand, and I told her so. It's like something that
never happened. She wouldn't have me. That's all."

"And you expect me to take what she wouldn't have?"

"If you like to call it that. But I should call it taking a man that had
been out of his head for a while, and had come to his senses again."

"I don't know as I should ever feel safe with a man that had been out of
his head once."

"You wouldn't find many men that hadn't," said Jeff, with a laugh that
was rather scornful of her ignorance.

"No, I presume not," she sighed. "She was beautiful, and I believe she
was good, too. She was very nice. Perhaps I feel strangely about it.
But, if she hadn't been so nice, I shouldn't have been so willing that
you should have cared for her."

"I suppose I don't understand," said Jeff, "but I know I was hard hit.
What's the use? It's over. She's married. I can't go back and unlive
it all. But if you want time to think--of course you do--I've taken time
enough--"

He was about to lift the reins on the mare's back as a sign to her that
the talk was over for the present, and to quicken her pace, when Cynthia
put out her hand and laid it on his, and said with a certain effect of
authority: "I shouldn't want you should give up your last year in
Harvard."

"Just as you say, Cynthy;" and in token of intelligence he wound his arm
round her neck and kissed her. It was not the first kiss by any means;
in the country kisses are not counted very serious, or at all binding,
and Cynthia was a country girl; but they both felt that this kiss sealed
a solemn troth between them, and that a common life began for them with
it.




XXII.

Cynthia came back in time to go into the dining-room and see that all was
in order there for supper before the door opened. The waitresses knew
that she had been out riding, as they called it, with Jeff Durgin; the
fact had spread electrically to them where they sat in a shady angle of
the hotel listening to one who read a novel aloud, and skipped all but
the most exciting love parts. They conjectured that the pair had gone to
Lovewell, but they knew nothing more, and the subtlest of them would not
have found reason for further conjecture in Cynthia's behavior, when she
came in and scanned the tables and the girls' dresses and hair, where
they stood ranged against the wall. She was neither whiter nor redder
than usual, and her nerves and her tones were under as good control as a
girl's ever are after she has been out riding with a fellow. It was not
such a great thing, anyway, to ride with Jeff Durgin. First and last,
nearly all the young lady boarders had been out with him, upon one errand
or another to Lovewell.

After supper, when the girls had gone over to their rooms in the helps'
quarters, and the guests had gathered in the wide, low office, in the
light of the fire kindled on the hearth to break the evening chill, Jeff
joined Cynthia in her inspection of the dining-room. She always gave it
a last look, to see that it was in perfect order for breakfast, before
she went home for the night. Jeff went home with her; he was impatient
of her duties, but he was in no hurry when they stole out of the side
door together under the stars, and began to stray sidelong down the hill
over the dewless grass.

He lingered more and more as they drew near her father's house, in the
abandon of a man's love. He wished to give himself solely up to it, to
think and to talk of nothing else, after a man's fashion. But a woman's
love is no such mere delight. It is serious, practical. For her it is
all future, and she cannot give herself wholly up to any present moment
of it, as a man does.

"Now, Jeff," she said, after a certain number of partings, in which she
had apparently kept his duty clearly in mind, "you had better go home and
tell your mother."

"Oh, there's time enough for that," he began.

"I want you to tell her right away, or there won't be anything to tell."

"Is that so?" he joked back. "Well, if I must, I must, I suppose. But I
didn't think you'd take the whip-hand so soon, Cynthia."

"Oh, I don't ever want to take the whip-hand with you, Jeff. Don't make
me!"

"Well, I won't, then. But what are you in such a hurry to have mother
know for? She's not going to object. And if she does--"

"It isn't that," said the girl, quickly. "If I had to go round a single
day with your mother hiding this from her, I should begin to hate you.
I couldn't bear the concealment. I shall tell father as soon as I go
in."

"Oh, your father 'll be all right, of course."

"Yes, he'll be all right, but if he wouldn't, and I knew it, I should
have to tell him, all the same. Now, good-night. Well, there, then;
and there! Now, let me go!"

She paused for a moment in her own room, to smooth her tumbled hair, and
try to identify herself in her glass. Then she went into the sitting-
room, where she found her father pulled up to the table, with his hat on,
and poring over a sheet of hieroglyphics, which represented the usual
evening with planchette.

"Have you been to help Jackson up?" she asked.

"Well, I wanted to, but he wouldn't hear of it. He's feelin' ever so
much better to-night, and he wanted to go alone. I just come in."

"Yes, you've got your hat on yet."

Whitwell put his hand up and found that his daughter was right. He
laughed, and said: "I guess I must 'a' forgot it. We've had the most
interestin' season with plantchette that I guess we've about ever had.
She's said something here--"

"Well, never mind; I've got something more important to say than
plantchette has," said Cynthia, and she pulled the sheet away from under
her father's eyes.

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