As soon as Westover had posted his letter he began to blame himself for it. He saw that the right and manly thing would have been to write to Mrs. Vostrand, and tell her frankly what he thought of Durgin. Her folly, her insincerity, her vulgarity, had nothing to do with the affair, so far as he was concerned. If she had once been so kind to him as to bind him to her in grateful friendship, she certainly had a claim upon his best offices. His duty was to her, and not at all to Durgin. He need not have said anything against him because it was against him, but because it was true; and if he had written he must not have said anything less than the truth.
He could have chosen not to write at all. He could have said that her mawkish hypocrisy was a little too much; that she was really wanting him to whitewash Durgin for her, and she had no right to put upon him the responsibility for the step she clearly wished to take. He could have made either of these decisions, and defended them to himself; but in what he had done he had altogether shirked. While he was writing to Durgin, and pretending that he could justly leave this affair to him, he was simply indulging a bit of sentimental pose, far worse than anything in Mrs. Vostrand's sham appeal for his help.
He felt, as the time went by, that she had not written of her own impulse, but at her daughter's urgence, and that it was this poor creature whose trust he had paltered with. He believed that Durgin would not fail to make her unhappy, yet he had not done what he might to deliver her out of his hand. He had satisfied a wretched pseudo-magnanimity toward a faithless scoundrel, as he thought Durgin, at the cost of a woman whose anxious hope of his aid had probably forced her mother's hand.
At first he thought his action irrevocable, and he bitterly upbraided himself for not taking council with Cynthia upon Mrs. Vostrand's letter.
He had thought of doing that, and then he had dismissed the thought as involving pain that he had no right to inflict; but now he perceived that the pain was such as she must suffer in the event, and that he had stupidly refused himself the only means of finding out the right thing to do. Her true heart and her clear mind would have been infallible in the affair, and he had trusted to his own muddled impulse.
He began to write other letters: to Durgin, to Mrs. Vostrand, to Genevieve; but none of them satisfied him, and he let the days go by without doing anything to retrieve his error or fulfil his duty. At last he did what he ought to have done at first: he enclosed Mrs. Vostrand's letter to Cynthia, and asked her what she thought he ought to have done.
While he was waiting Cynthia's answer to his letter, a cable message reached him from Florence:
"Kind letter received. Married to-day. Written.
"Vostrand."
The next mail brought Cynthia's reply, which was very brief:
"I am sorry you had to write at all; nothing could have prevented it. Perhaps if he cares for her he will be good to her."Since the matter was now irremediable, Westover crept less miserably through the days than he could have believed he should, until the letter which Mrs. Vostrand's cable promised came to hand.
"Dear friend," she wrote, "your generous and satisfactory answer came yesterday. It was so delicate and high,-minded, and so like you, to write to Mr. Durgin, and leave the whole affair to him; and he did not lose a moment in showing us your beautiful letter. He said you were a man after his own heart, and I wish you could have heard how he praised you. It made Genevieve quite jealous, or would have, if it had been any one else. But she is so happy in your approval of her marriage, which is to take place before the 'sindaco' to-morrow, We shall only have the civil rite; she feels that it is more American, and we are all coming home to Lion's Head in the spring to live and die true Americans. I wish you could spend the summer with us there, but, until Lion's Head is rebuilt, we can't ask you. I don't know exactly how we shall do ourselves, but Mr. Durgin is full of plans, and we leave everything to him.
He is here, making Genevieve laugh so that I can hardly write.
He joins us in love and thanks, and our darling Bice sends you a little kiss.
"MEDORA VOSTRAND.
"P. S. Mr. D. has told us all about the affairs you alluded to.
With Miss L. we cannot feel that he was to blame; but he blames himself in regard to Miss W. He says his only excuse is that he was always in love with Genevieve; and I think that is quite excuse enough. M. V."From time to time during the winter Westover wrote to Cynthia, and had letters from her in which he pleased himself fancying almost a personal effect of that shyness which he thought a charming thing in her. But no doubt this was something he read into them; on their face they were plain, straightforward accounts of the life she led in the little old house at Lion's Head, under the shadow of the black ruin on the hill.
Westover had taken to sending her books and magazines, and in thanking him for these she would sometimes speak of things she had read in them.
Her criticism related to the spirit rather than the manner of the things she spoke of, and it pleased him that she seemed, with all her insight, to have very little artistic sense of any kind; in the world where he lived there were so many women with an artistic sense in every kind that he was rather weary of it.
There never was anything about Durgin in the letters, and Westover was both troubled and consoled by this silence. It might be from consciousness, and it probably was; it might be from indifference.
In the worst event, it hid any pain she might have felt with a dignity from which no intimation of his moved her. The nearest she came to speaking of Jeff was when she said that Jombateeste was going to work at the brick-yards in Cambridge as soon as the spring opened, and was not going to stay any longer at Lion's Head.
