



Produced by David Widger





THE LANDLORD AT LION'S HEAD

By William Dean Howells




Part 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 in
several 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 hospitably entertain 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