added, after a moment: “We sha'n't any of us soon forget what you done for Jeff—that time.”
“I didn't do anything for him, Mrs. Durgin; I couldn't,” Westover protested.
“You done what you could, and I know that you saw the thing in the right light, or you wouldn't 'a' tried to do anything. Jeff told me every word about it. I know he was with a pretty harum-scarum crowd. But it was a lesson to him; and I wa'n't goin' to have him come back here, right away, and have folks talkin' about what they couldn't understand, after the way the paper had it.”
“Did it get into the papers?”
“Mm.” Mrs. Durgin nodded. “And some dirty, sneakin' thing, here, wrote a letter to the paper and told a passel o' lies about Jeff and all of us; and the paper printed Jeff's picture with it; I don't know how they got a hold of it. So when he got that chance to go, I just said, 'Go.' You'll see he'll keep all straight enough after this, Mr. Westover.”
“Old woman read you any of Jeff's letters?” Whit-well asked, when his chance for private conference with Westover came. “What was the rights of that scrape he got into?”
Westover explained as favorably to Jeff as he could; the worst of the affair was the bad company he was in.
“Well, where there's smoke there's some fire. Cou't discharged him and college suspended him. That's about where it is? I guess he'll keep out o' harm's way next time. Read you what he said about them scenes of the Revolution in Paris?”
“Yes; he seems to have looked it all up pretty thoroughly.”
“Done it for me, I guess, much as anything. I was always talkin' it up with him. Jeff's kep' his eyes open, that's a fact. He's got a head on him, more'n I ever thought.”
Westover decided that Mrs. Durgin's prepotent behavior toward Mrs. Marven the summer before had not hurt her materially, with the witnesses even. There were many new boarders, but most of those whom he had already met were again at Lion's Head. They said there was no air like it, and no place so comfortable. If they had sold their birthright for a mess of pottage, Westover had to confess that the pottage was very good. Instead of the Irish woman at ten dollars a week who had hitherto been Mrs. Durgin's cook, under her personal surveillance and direction, she had now a man cook, whom she boldly called a chef and paid eighty dollars a month. He wore the white apron and white cap of his calling, but Westover heard him speak Yankee through his nose to one of the stablemen as they exchanged hilarities across the space between the basement and the barn-door. “Yes,” Mrs. Durgin admitted, “he's an American; and he learnt his trade at one of the best hotels in Portland. He's pretty headstrong, but I guess he does what he's told—in the end. The meanyous? Oh, Franky Whitwell prints then. He's got an amateur printing-office in the stable-loft.”
XIV.
One morning toward the end of August, Whitwell, who was starting homeward, after leaving his ladies, burdened with their wishes and charges for the morrow, met Westover coming up the hill with his painting-gear in his hand. “Say!” he hailed him. “Why don't you come down to the house to-night? Jackson's goin' to come, and, if you ha'n't seen him work the plantchette for a spell, you'll be surprised. There a'n't hardly anybody he can't have up. You'll come? Good enough!”
What affected Westover first of all at the seance, and perhaps most of all, was the quality of the air in the little house; it was close and stuffy, mixed with an odor of mould and an ancient smell of rats. The kerosene-lamp set in the centre of the table, where Jackson afterward placed his planchette, devoured the little life that was left in it. At the gasps which Westover gave, with some despairing glances at the closed windows, Whitwell said: “Hot? Well, I guess it is a little. But, you see, Jackson has got to be careful about the night air; but I guess I can fix it for you.” He went out into the ell, and Westover heard him raising a window. He came back and asked, “That do? It 'll get around in here directly,” and Westover had to profess relief.
Jackson came in presently with the little Canuck, whom Whitwell presented to Westover: “Know Jombateeste?”
The two were talking about a landslide which had taken place on the other side of the mountain; the news had just come that they had found among the ruins the body of the farm-hand who had been missing since the morning of the slide; his funeral was to be the next day.
Jackson put his planchette on the table, and sat down before it with a sigh; the Canuck remained standing, and on foot he was scarcely a head higher than the seated Yankees. “Well,” Jackson said, “I suppose he knows all about it now,” meaning the dead farm-hand.
“Yes,” Westover suggested, “if he knows anything.”
“Know anything!” Whitwell shouted. “Why, man, don't you believe he's as much alive as ever he was?”
“I hope so,” said Westover, submissively.
“Don't you know it?”
“Not as I know other things. In fact, I don't know it,” said Westover, and he was painfully aware of having shocked his hearers by the agnosticism so common among men in towns that he had confessed it quite simply and unconsciously. He perceived that faith in the soul and life everlasting was as quick as ever in the hills, whatever grotesque or unwonted form it wore. Jackson sat with closed eyes and his head fallen back; Whitwell stared at the painter, with open mouth; the little Canuck began to walk up and down impatiently; Westover felt a reproach, almost an abhorrence, in all of them.
Whitwell asked: “Why, don't you think there's any proof of it?”
“Proof? Oh Yes. There's testimony enough to carry conviction to the stubbornest mind on any other point. But it's very strange about all that. It doesn't convince anybody but the witnesses. If a man tells me he's seen a disembodied spirit, I can't believe him. I must see the disembodied spirit myself.”
“That's something so,” said Whitwell, with a relenting laugh.
“If one came back from the dead, to tell us of a life beyond the grave, we should want the assurance that he'd really been dead, and not merely dreaming.”
Whitwell laughed again, in the delight the philosophic mind finds even in the reasoning that hates it.
The Canuck felt perhaps the simpler joy that the average man has in any strange notion that he is able to grasp. He stopped in his walk and said: “Yes, and if you was dead and went to heaven, and stayed so long you smelt, like Lazarus, and you come back and tol' 'em what you saw, nobody goin' believe you.”
“Well, I guess you're right there, Jombateeste,” said Whitwell, with pleasure in the Canuck's point. After a moment he suggested to Westover: “Then I s'pose, if you feel the way you do, you don't care much about plantchette?”
“Oh yes, I do,” said the painter. “We never know when we may be upon the point of revelation. I wouldn't miss any chance.”
Whether Whitwell felt an ironic slant in the words or not, he paused a moment before he said: “Want to start her up, Jackson?”
Jackson brought to the floor the forefeet of his chair, which he had tilted from it in leaning back, and without other answer put his hand on the planchette. It began to fly over the large sheet of paper spread upon the table, in curves and angles and eccentrics.
“Feels
