“Come, turn out!” said a voice in his ear, and he started up, to see the great dormitory where he had fallen asleep empty of all but himself and his friend.
“Make out a night's rest?” asked the latter. “Didn't I tell you we'd be the last up? Come along!” He preceded Lemuel, still drowsy, down the stairs into the room where they had undressed, and where the tramps were taking each his clothes from their hook, and hustling them on.
“What time is it, Johnny?” asked Lemuel's mate of the attendant. “I left my watch under my pillow.”
“Five o'clock,” said the man, helping the poor old fellow who had not known how to get into bed to put on his clothes.
“Well, that's a pretty good start,” said the other. He finished his toilet by belting himself around the waist, and “Come along, mate,” he said to Lemuel. “I'll show you the way to the tool-room.”
He led him through the corridor into a chamber of the basement where there were bright rows of wood-saws, and ranks of saw-horses, with heaps of the latter in different stages of construction. “House self-supporting, as far as it can. We don't want to be beholden to anybody if we can help it. We make our own horses here; but we can't make our saws, or we would. Ever had much practice with the woodsaw?”
“No,” said Lemuel, with a throb of home-sickness, that brought back the hacked log behind the house, and the axe resting against it; “we always chopped our stove-wood.”
“Yes, that's the way in the country. Well, now,” said the other, “I'll show you how to choose a saw. Don't you be took in by no new saw because it's bright, and looks pretty. You want to take a saw that's been filed, and filed away till it ain't more 'n an inch and a half deep; and then you want to tune it up, just so,—like a banjo—not too tight, and not too slack,—and then it'll slip through a stick o' wood like—lyin'.” He selected a saw, and put it in order for Lemuel. “There!” He picked out another. “Here'smyold stand-by!” He took up a saw-horse, at random, to indicate that one need not be critical in that, and led through the open door into the wood-yard, where a score or two of saws were already shrilling and wheezing through the wood.
It was a wide and lofty shed, with piles of cord-wood and slabs at either end, and walled on the farther side with kindling, sawed, split, and piled up with admirable neatness. The place gave out the sweet smell of the woods from the bark of the logs and from the fresh section of their grain. A double rank of saw-horses occupied the middle space, and beside each horse lay a quarter of a cord of wood, at which the men were toiling in sullen silence for the most part, only exchanging a grunt or snarl of dissatisfaction with one another.
“Morning, mates,” said Lemuel's friend cheerfully, as he entered the shed, and put his horse down beside one of the piles. “Thought we'd look in and see how you was gettin' along. Just stepped round from the Parker House while our breakfast was a-cookin'. Hope you all rested well?”
The men paused, with their saws at different slopes in the wood, and looked round. The night before, in the nakedness in which Lemuel had first seen them, the worst of them had the inalienable comeliness of nature, and their faces, softened by their relation to their bodies, were not so bad; they were not so bad, looking from their white nightgowns; but now, clad in their filthy rags, and caricatured out of all native dignity by their motley and misshapen attire, they were a hideous gang, and all the more hideous for the grin that overspread their stubbly muzzles at the boy's persiflage.
“Don't let me interrupt you, fellows,” he said, flinging a log upon his horse, and dashing his saw gaily into it. “Don't mindme!I know you hate to lose a minute of this fun; I understand just how you feel about it, and I don't want you to stand upon ceremony withme.Treat me just like one of yourselves, gents. This beechwood is the regular Nova Scotia thing, ain't it? Tough and knotty! I can't bear any of your cheap wood-lot stuff from around here. What I want is Nova Scotia wood, every time. Then I feel that I'm gettin' the worth of my money.” His log dropped apart on each side of his horse, and he put on another. “Well, mates,” he rattled on, “this is lovely, ain't it? I wouldn't give up my little quarter of a cord of green Nova Scotia before breakfast for anything; I've got into the way of it, and I can't live without it.”
The tramps chuckled at these ironies, and the attendant who looked into the yard now and then did not interfere with them.
The mate went through his stint as rapidly as he talked, and he had nearly finished before Lemuel had half done. He did not offer to help him, but he delayed the remnant of his work, and waited for him to catch up, talking all the while with gay volubility, joking this one and that, and keeping the whole company as cheerful as it was in their dull, sodden nature to be. He had a floating eye that harmonised with his queer, mobile face, and played round on the different figures, but mostly upon Lemuel's dogged, rustic industry as if it really amused him.
“What's your lay, after breakfast?” he asked, as they came to the last log together.
“Lay?” repeated Lemuel.
“What you goin' to do?”
“I don't know; I can't tell yet.”
“You know,” said the other, “you can come back here, and get your dinner, if you want to saw wood for it from ten till twelve, and you get your supper if you'll saw from five to six.”
“Are you going to do that?” asked Lemuel cautiously.
“No, sir,” said the other; “I can't spare the time. I'm goin' to fill up for all day, at breakfast, and then I'm goin' up to lay round on the Common till it's time to go to the Police Court; and when that's over I'm goin' back to the Common ag'in, and lay round the rest of the day. I hain't got any leisure for no such nonsense as wood-sawin'. I don't mind the work, but I hate to waste the time. It's the way with most o' the pardners, unless it's the green hands. That so, pards?”
Some of them had already gone in to breakfast; the smell of the stew came out to the wood-yard through the open door. Lemuel and his friend finished their last stick at the same time, and went in together, and found places side by side at the table in the waiting-room. The attendant within its oblong was serving the men with heavy quart bowls of the steaming broth. He brought half a loaf of light, elastic bread with each, and there were platters of hard-tack set along the board, which every one helped himself from freely, and broke into his broth.
“Morning, Jimmy,” said the mate, as the man brought him and Lemuel their portions. “I hate to have the dining-room chairs off a paintin' when there's so much style about everything else, and I've got a visitor with me. But I tell him he'll have to take us as he finds us, and stand it this mornin'.” He wasted no more words on his joke, but plunging his large tin spoon into his bowl, kept his breath to cool his broth, blowing upon it with easy grace, and swallowing it at a tremendous rate, though Lemuel, after following his example, still found it so hot that it brought the tears into his eyes. It was delicious, and he was ravenous from his twenty-four hours' fast, but his companion was scraping the bottom of his bowl before Lemuel had got half-way down, and he finished his second as Lemuel finished his first.
“Just oncet more for both of us, Jimmy,” he said, pushing his bowl across the board; and when the man brought them back he said, “Now, I'm goin' to take it easy and enjoy myself. I can't never seem to get the good of it, till about the third or fourth bowl. Too much of a hurry.”
“Do they give you four bowls?” gasped Lemuel in astonishment.
“They give you four barrels, if you can hold it,” replied the other proudly; “and some the matescan, pretty near. They got an awful tank, as a general rule, the pards has. There ain't anything mean about this house. They don't scamp the broth, and they don't shab the measure. I do wish you could see that refrigerator, oncet. Never been much at sea, have you, mate?”
Lemuel said he had never been at sea at all.
The other leaned forward with his elbows on each side of his bowl, and lazily broke his hard-tack into it. “Well, I have. I was shipped when I was about eleven years old by a shark that got me drunk. I wanted to ship, but I wanted to ship on an American vessel for New Orleans. First thing I knowed I turned up on a Swedish brig bound for Venice. Ever been to It'ly?”
“No,” said Lemuel.
“Well, I hain't but oncet. Oncet is enough forme. I run away, while I was in Venice, and went ashore—if you can call it ashore; it's all water, and you got to go round in boats: gondolas they call 'em there—and went to see the American counsul, and told him I was an American boy, and tried to get him to get me off. But he couldn't do anything. If you ship under the Swedish flag you're a Swede, and the whole United States couldn't get you off. If I'd 'a' shipped under the American flag I'd 'a' been an American, I don't care if I was born in Hottentot. That's what the counsul said. I never want to see that town ag'in. I used to hear songs about Venice—'Beautiful Venice, Bride of the Sea;' but I think it's a kind of a hole of a place. Well, what I started to say was that when I turn up in Boston, now,—and I most generally do,—I don't go to no sailor boardin'-house; I break for the Wayfarer's Lodge, every time. It's a temperance house, and they give you the worth o' your money.”
“Come! Hurry up!” said the attendant. He wiped the table impatiently with his towel, and stood waiting for Lemuel and the other to finish. All the rest had gone.
“Don't you be too fresh, pard,” said the mate, with the effect of standing upon his rights. “Guess if you was on your third bowl, you wouldn't hurry.”
The attendant smiled. “Don't you want to lend us a hand with the dishes?” he asked.
“Who's sick?” asked the other in his turn.
“Johnny's got a day off.”
The boy shook his head. “No; I couldn't. If it was a case of sickness, of course I'd do it. But I couldn't spare the time; I couldn't really. Why, I ought to be up on the Common now.”
Lemuel had listened with a face of interest.
“Don't you want to make half a dollar, young feller?” asked the attendant.
“Yes, I do,” said Lemuel eagerly.
“Know how to wash dishes?”
“Yes,” answered the boy, not ashamed of his knowledge, as the boy of another civilisation might have been. Nothing more distinctly marks the rustic New England civilisation than the taming of its men to the performance of certain domestic offices elsewhere held dishonourably womanish. The boy learns not only to milk and to keep the milk cans clean, but to churn, to wash dishes, and to cook.
“Come around here, then,” said the attendant, and Lemuel promptly obeyed.
“Well, now,” said his mate, “that's right. I'd do it myself, if I had the time.” He pulled his soft wool hat out of his hip pocket. “Well, good morning, pards. I don't know as I shall see you again much before night.” Lemuel was lifting a large tray, heavy with empty broth-bowls. “Whattimedid you say it was, Jimmy?”
“Seven o'clock.”
“Well, I just got time to get there,” said the other, putting on his hat, and pushing out of the door.
At the moment Lemuel was lifting his tray of empty broth-bowls, Mr. Sewell was waking for the early quarter-to-eight breakfast, which he thought it right to make—not perhaps as an example to his parishioners, most of whom had the leisure to lie later, but as a sacrifice, not too definite, to the lingering ideal of suffering. He could not work before breakfast—his delicate digestion forbade that—or he would have risen still earlier, and he employed the twenty minutes he had between his bath and his breakfast in skimming the morning paper.
Just at present Mr. Sewell was taking two morning papers: theAdvertiserwhich he had always taken, and a cheap little one-cent paper, which had just been started, and which he had subscribed for experimentally, with the vague impression that he ought to encourage the young men who had established it. He did not like it very well. It was made up somewhat upon the Western ideal, and dealt with local matters in a manner that was at once a little more lively and a little more intimate than he had been used to. But before he had quite made up his mind to stop it, his wife had come to like it on that very account. She said it was interesting. On this point she used her conscience a little less actively than usual, and he had to make her observe that to be interesting was not the whole duty of journalism. It had become a matter of personal pride with them respectively to attack and defendThe Sunrise, as I shall call the little sheet, though that was not the name; and Mr. Sewell had lately made some gain through the character of the police reports, whichThe Sunrisehad been developing into a feature. It was not that offensive matters were introduced; the worst cases were in fact rather blinked, but Sewell insisted that the tone of flippant gaiety with which many facts, so serious, so tragic for their perpetrators and victims, were treated was odious. He objected to the court being called a Mill, and prisoners Grists, and the procedure Grinding; he objected to the familiar name of Uncle for the worthy gentleman to whose care certain offenders were confided on probation. He now read that department ofThe Sunrisethe first thing every morning, in the hope of finding something with which to put Mrs. Sewell hopelessly in the wrong, but this morning a heading in the foreign news of theAdvertisercaught his eye, and he laidThe Sunriseaside to read at the breakfast-table. His wife came down in a cotton dress, as a tribute to the continued warmth of the weather, and said that she had not called the children, because it was Saturday, and they might as well have their sleep out. He liked to see her in that dress; it had a leafy rustling that was pleasant to his ear, and as she looked into the library he gaily put out his hand, which she took, and suffered herself to be drawn toward him. Then she gave him a kiss, somewhat less business-like and preoccupied than usual.
“Well, you've got Lemuel Barker off your mind at last,” she divined, in recognition of her husband's cheerfulness.
“Yes, he's off,” admitted Sewell.
“I hope he'll stay in Willoughby Pastures after this. Of course it puts an end to our going there next summer.” “Oh, I don't know,” Sewell feebly demurred.
“Ido,” said his wife, but not despising his insincerity enough to insist that he did also. The mellow note of an apostle's bell—the gift of an aesthetic parishioner—came from below, and she said, “Well, there's breakfast, David,” and went before him down the stairs.
He brought his papers with him. It would have been her idea of heightened cosiness, at this breakfast, which they had once a week alone together, not to have the newspapers, but she saw that he felt differently, and after a number of years of married life a woman learns to let her husband have his own way in some unimportant matters. It was so much his nature to have some sort of reading always in hand, that he was certainly more himself, and perhaps more companionable with his papers than without them.
She merely said, “Let me take theSunrise,” when she had poured out his coffee, and he had helped her to cantaloupe and steak, and spread hisAdvertiserbeside his plate. He had theSunrisein his lap.
“No, you may have theAdvertiser” he said, handing it over the table to her. “I was down first, and I got both the papers. I'm not really obliged to make any division, but I've seen theAdvertiser, and I'm willing to behave unselfishly. If you're very impatient for the police report in theSunriseI'll read it aloud for you. I think that will be a very good test of its quality, don't you?”
He opened the little sheet, and smiled teasingly at his wife, who said, “Yes, read it aloud; I'm not at all ashamed of it.”
She put theAdvertiserin her lap, and leaned defiantly forward, while she stirred her coffee, and Sewell unfolded the little sheet, and glanced up and down its columns. “Go on! If you can't find it, I can.”
“Never mind! Here it is,” said Sewell, and he began to read—
“'The mill opened yesterday morning with a smaller number of grists than usual, but they made up in quality what they lacked in quantity.'
“Our friend's metaphor seems to have weakened under him a little,” commented Sewell, and then he pursued—
“'A reasonable supply of drunks were despatched—'
“Come, now, Lucy! You'll admit that this is horrible?” he broke off.
“No,” said his wife, “I will admit nothing of the kind. It's flippant, I'll allow. Go on!”
“I can't,” said Sewell; but he obeyed.
“'A reasonable supply of drunks were despatched, and an habitual drunk, in the person of a burly dame from Tipperary, who pleaded not guilty and then urged the “poor childer” in extenuation, was sent down the harbour for three months; Uncle Cook had been put in charge of a couple of young frailties whose hind name was woman—'
“How do you like that, my dear?” asked Sewell exultantly.
Mrs. Sewell looked grave, and then burst into a shocked laugh. “You must stop that paper, David! I can't have it about for the children to get hold of. But itisfunny, isn't it? That will do—”
“No, I think you'd better have it all, now. There can't be anything worse. It's funny, yes, with that truly infernal drollery which the newspaper wits seem to have the art of.” He read on—“—'when a case was called that brought the breath of clover blossoms and hay-seed into the sultry court-room, and warmed the cockles of the habitués' toughened pericardiums with a touch of real poetry. This was a case of assault, with intent to rob, in which a lithe young blonde, answering to the good old Puritanic name of Statira Dudley, was the complainant, and the defendant an innocent-looking, bucolic youth, yclept—'”
Sewell stopped and put his hand to his forehead.
“What is it, David?” demanded his wife. “Why don't you go on? Is it too scandalous?”
“No, no,” murmured the minister.
“Well?”
“I can't go on. But you must read it, Lucy,” he said, in quite a passion of humility. “And you must try to be merciful. That poor boy—that—”
He handed the paper to his wife, and made no attempt to escape from judgment, but sat submissive while she read the report of Lemuel's trial. The story was told throughout in the poetico-jocular spirit of the opening sentences; the reporter had felt the simple charm of the affair, only to be ashamed of it and the more offensive about it.
When she had finished Mrs. Sewell did not say anything. She merely looked at her husband, who looked really sick.
At last he said, making an effort to rise from his chair, “I must go and see him, I suppose.”
“Yes, if you can find him,” responded his wife, with a sigh.
“Find him?” echoed Sewell.
“Yes. Goodness knows what more trouble the wretched creature's got into by this time. You saw that he was acquitted, didn't you?” she demanded, in answer to her husband's stare.
“No, I didn't. I supposed he was convicted, of course.”
“Well, you see it isn't so bad as it might be,” she said, using a pity which she did not perhaps altogether feel. “Eat your breakfast now, David, and then go and try to look him up.”
“Oh, I don't want any breakfast,” pleaded the minister.
He offered to rise again, but she motioned him down in his chair. “David, you shall! I'm not going to have you going about all day with a headache. Eat! And then when you've finished your breakfast, go and find out which station that officer Baker belongs to, and he can tell you something about the boy, if any one can.”
Sewell made what shift he could to grasp these practical ideas, and he obediently ate of whatever his wife bade him. She would not let him hurry his breakfast in the least, and when he had at last finished, she said, “Now you can go, David. And when you've found the boy, don't you let him out of your sight again till you've put him aboard the train for Willoughby Pastures, and seen the train start out of the depot with him. Never mind your sermon. I will be setting down the heads of a sermon, while you're gone, that will doyougood, if you write it out, whether it helps any one else or not.”
Sewell was not so sure of that. He had no doubt that his wife would set down the heads of a powerful sermon, but he questioned whether any discourse, however potent, would have force to benefit such an abandoned criminal as he felt himself, in walking down his brown-stone steps, and up the long brick sidewalk of Bolingbroke Street toward the Public Garden. The beds of geraniums and the clumps of scarlet-blossomed salvia in the little grass-plots before the houses, which commonly flattered his eye with their colour, had a suggestion of penal fires in them now, that needed no lingering superstition in his nerves to realise something very like perdition for his troubled soul. It was not wickedness he had been guilty of, but he had allowed a good man to be made the agency of suffering, and he was sorely to blame, for he had sinned against himself. This was what his conscience said, and though his reason protested against his state of mind as a phase of the religious insanity which we have all inherited in some measure from Puritan times, it could not help him. He went along involuntarily framing a vow that if Providence would mercifully permit him to repair the wrong he had done, he would not stop at any sacrifice to get that unhappy boy back to his home, but would gladly take any open shame or obloquy upon himself in order to accomplish this.
He met a policeman on the bridge of the Public Garden, and made bold to ask him at once if he knew an officer named Baker, and which station he could be found at. The policeman was over-rich in the acquaintance of two officers of the name of Baker, and he put his hand on Sewell's shoulder, in the paternal manner of policemen when they will be friendly, and advised him to go first to the Neponset Street station, to which one of these Bakers was attached, and inquire there first. “Anyway, that's what I should do in your place.”
Sewell was fulsomely grateful, as we all are in the like case, and at the station he used an urbanity with the captain which was perhaps not thrown away upon him, but which was certainly disproportioned to the trouble he was asking him to take in saying whether he knew where he could find officer Baker.
“Yes, I do,” said the captain. “You can find him in bed, upstairs, but I'd rather you wouldn't wake a man off duty, if you don't have to, especially if you don't know he's the one. What's wanted?”
Sewell stopped to say that the captain was quite right, and then he explained why he wished to see officer Baker.
The captain listened with nods of his head at the names and facts given. “Guess you won't have to get Baker up for that. I can tell you what there is to tell. I don't know where your young man is now, but I gave him an order for a bed at the Wayfarer's Lodge last night, and I guess he slept there. You a friend of his?”
“Yes,” said Sewell, much questioning inwardly whether he could be truly described as such. “I wish to befriend him,” he added savingly. “I knew him at home, and I am sure of his innocence.”
“Oh, I guess he'sinnocentenough,” said the captain. “Well, now, I tell you what you do, if you want to befriend him; you get him home quick as you can.”
“Yes,” said Sewell, helpless to resent the officer's authoritative and patronising tone. “That's what I wish to do. Do you suppose he's at the Wayfarer's Lodge now?” asked Sewell.
“Can't say,” said the captain, tilting himself back in his chair, and putting his quill toothpick between his lips like a cigarette. “The only way is to go and see.”
“Thank you very much,” said the minister, accepting his dismissal meekly, as a man vowed to ignominy should, but feeling keenly that he was dismissed, and dismissed in disgrace.
At the Lodge he was received less curtly. The manager was there with a long morning's leisure before him, and disposed to friendliness that Sewell found absurdly soothing. He turned over the orders for beds delivered by the vagrants the night before, and “Yes,” he said, coming to Lemuel's name, “he slept here; but nobody knows where he is by this time. Wait a bit, sir!” he added to Sewell's fallen countenance. “There was one of the young fellows stayed to help us through with the dishes, this morning. I'll have him up; or may be you'd like to go down and take a look at our kitchen? You'll find him there if it's the one. Here's our card, We can supply you with all sorts of firewood at less cost than the dealers, and you'll be helping the poor fellows to earn an honest bed and breakfast. This way, sir!”
Sewell promised to buy his wood there, put the card respectfully into his pocket, and followed the manager downstairs, and through the basement to the kitchen. He arrived just as Lemuel was about to lift a trayful of clean soup-bowls, to carry it upstairs. After a glance at the minister, he stood still with dropped eyes.
Sewell did not know in what form to greet the boy on whom he had unwillingly brought so much evil, and he found the greater difficulty in deciding as he saw Lemuel's face hardening against him.
“Barker!” he said at last. “I'm very glad to find you—I have been very anxious to find you.”
Lemuel made no sign of sympathy, but stood still in his long check apron, with his sleeves rolled up to his elbow, and the minister was obliged to humble himself still further to this figure of lowly obstinacy.
“I should like to speak with you. Can I speak with you a few moments?”
The manager politely stepped into the storeroom, and affected to employ himself there, leaving Lemuel and the minister alone together.
Sewell lost no time. “I want you to go home, Barker. I feel that I am wholly to blame, and greatly to blame, for your coming to Boston with the expectation that brought you; and that I am indirectly responsible for all the trouble that has befallen you since you came. I want to be the means of your getting home, in any way you can let me.”
This was a very different way of talking from the smooth superiority of address which the minister had used with him the other day at his own house. Lemuel was not insensible to the atonement offered him, and it was not from sulky stubbornness that he continued silent, and left the minister to explore the causes of his reticence unaided.
“I will go homewithyou, if you like,” pursued the minister, though his mind misgave him that this was an extreme which Mrs. Sewell would not have justified him in. “I will go with you, and explain all the circumstances to your friends, in case there should be any misunderstanding—though in that event I should have to ask you to be my guest till Monday.” Here the unhappy man laid hold of the sheep, which could not bring him greater condemnation than the lamb.
“I guess they won't know anything about it,” said Lemuel, with whatever intention.
It seemed hardened indifference to the minister, and he felt it his disagreeable duty to say, “I am afraid they will. I read of it in the newspaper this morning, and I'm afraid that an exaggerated report of your misfortunes will reach Willoughby Pastures, and alarm your family.”
A faint pallor came over the boy's face, and he stood again in his impenetrable, rustic silence. The voice that finally spoke from, it said, “I guess I don't want to go home, then.”
“Youmustgo home!” said the minister, with more of imploring than imperiousness in his command. “What will they make of your prolonged absence?”
“I sent a postal to mother this morning. They lent me one.”
“But what will you do here, without work and without means? I wish you to go home with me—I feel responsible for you—and remain with me till you can hear from your mother. I'm sorry you came to Boston—it's no place for you, as you must know by this time, and I am sure your mother will agree with me in desiring your return.”
“I guess I don't want to go home,” said Lemuel.
“Are you afraid that an uncharitable construction will be placed upon what has happened to you by your neighbours?” Lemuel did not answer. “I assure you that all that can be arranged. I will write to your pastor, and explain it fully. But in any event,” continued Sewell, “it is your duty to yourself and your friends to go home and live it down. It would be your duty to do so, even if you had been guilty of wrong, instead of the victim of misfortune.”
“I don't know,” said Lemuel, “as I want to go home and be the laughing-stock.”
Against this point Sewell felt himself helpless. He could not pretend that the boy would not be ridiculous in the eyes of his friends, and all the more ridiculous because so wholly innocent. He could only say, “That is a thing you must bear,” and then it occurred to him to ask, “Do you feel that it is right to let your family meet the ridicule alone?”
“I guess nobody will speak to mother about it, more than once,” said Lemuel, with a just pride in his mother's powers of retort. A woman who, unaided and alone, had worn the Bloomer costume for twenty years in the heart of a commentative community like Willoughby Pastures, was not likely to be without a cutting tongue for her defence.
“But your sister,” urged Sewell; “your brother-in-law,” he feebly added.
“I guess they will have to stand it,” replied Lemuel.
The minister heaved a sigh of hopeless perplexity. “What do you propose to do, then? You can't remain here without means. Do you expect to sell your poetry?” he asked, goaded to the question by a conscience peculiarly sore on that point.
It made Lemuel blush. “No, I don't expect to sell it, now. They took it out of my pocket on the Common.”
“I am glad of that,” said the minister as simply, “and I feel bound to warn you solemnly, that there is absolutelynohope for you in that direction.”
Lemuel said nothing.
The minister stood baffled again. After a bad moment he asked, “Have you anything particular in view?”
“I don't know as I have.”
“How long can you remain here?”
“I don't know exactly.”
Sewell turned and followed the manager into the refrigerator room, where he had remained patiently whistling throughout this interview.
When he came back, Lemuel had carried one trayful of bowls upstairs, and returned for another load, which he was piling carefully up for safe transportation.
“The manager tells me,” said Sewell, “that practically you can stay here as long as you like, if you work, but he doesn't think it desirable you should remain, nor do I. But I wish to find you here again, when I come back. I have something in view for you.”
This seemed to be a question, and Lemuel said, “All right,” and went on piling up his bowls. He added, “I shouldn't want you to take a great deal of trouble.”
“Oh, it's no trouble,” groaned the minister. “Then I may depend upon seeing you here any time during the day?”
“I don't know as I'm going away,” Lemuel admitted.
“Well, then, good-bye, for the present,” said Sewell, and after speaking again to the manager, and gratefully ordering some kindling which he did not presently need, he went out, and took his way homeward. But he stopped half a block short of his own door, and rang at Miss Vane's. To his perturbed and eager spirit, it seemed nothing short of a divine mercy that she should be at home. If he had not been a man bent on repairing his wrong at any cost to others, he would hardly have taken the step he now contemplated without first advising with his wife, who, he felt sure, would have advised against it. His face did not brighten at all when Miss Vane came briskly in, with the “Howd'ye do?” which he commonly found so cheering. She pulled up the blind and saw his knotted brow.
“What is the matter? You look as if you had got Lemuel Barker back on your hands.”
“I have,” said the minister briefly.
Miss Vane gave a wild laugh of delight. “Youdon'tmean it!” she sputtered, sitting down before him, and peering into his face. “Whatdoyou mean?”
Sewell was obliged to possess Miss Vane's entire ignorance of all the facts in detail. From point to point he paused; he began really to be afraid she would do herself an injury with her laughing.
She put her hand on his arm and bowed her head forward, with her face buried in her handkerchief. “What—what—do you suppose-pose—they did with the po-po-poem they stole from him?”
“Well, one thing I'm sure theydidn'tdo,” said Sewell bitterly. “They didn'treadit.”
Miss Vane hid her face in her handkerchief, and then plucked it away, and shrieked again. She stopped, with the sudden calm that succeeds such a paroxysm, and, “Does Mrs. Sewell know all about this?” she panted.
“She knows everything, except my finding him in the dish-washing department of the Wayfarer's Lodge,” said Sewell gloomily, “and my coming to you.”
“Why do you come to me?” asked Miss Vane, her face twitching and her eyes brimming.
“Because,” answered Sewell, “I'd rather not go to her till I have done something.”
Miss Vane gave way again, and Sewell sat regarding her ruefully.
“What do you expect me to do?” She looked at him over her handkerchief, which she kept pressed against her mouth.
“I haven't the least idea what I expected you to do. I expected you to tell me. You have an inventive mind.”
Miss Vane shook her head. Her eyes grew serious, and after a moment she said, “I'm afraid I'm not equal to Lemuel Barker. Besides,” she added, with a tinge of trouble, “I havemyproblem, already.”
“Yes,” said the minister sympathetically. “How has the flower charity turned out?”
“She went yesterday with one of the ladies, and carried flowers to the city hospital. But she wasn't at all satisfied with the result. She said the patients were mostly disgusting old men that hadn't been shaved. I think that now she wants to try her flowers on criminals. She says she wishes to visit the prisons.”
Sewell brightened forlornly. “Why not let her reform Barker?”
This sent Miss Vane off again. “Poor boy!” she sighed, when she had come to herself. “No, there's nothing that I can do for him, except to order some firewood from his benefactors.”
“I did that,” said Sewell. “But I don't see how it's to help Barker exactly.”
“I would gladly join in a public subscription to send him home. But you say he won'tgohome?”
“He won't go home,” sighed the minister. “He's determined to stay. I suspect he would accept employment, if it were offered him in the right spirit.”
Miss Vane shook her head. “There's nothing I can think of except shovelling snow. And as yet it's rather warm October weather.”
“There's certainly no snow to shovel,” admitted Sewell. He rose disconsolately. “Well, there's nothing for it, I suppose, but to put him down at the Christian Union, and explain his checkered career to everybody who proposes to employ him.”
Miss Vane could not keep the laughter out of her eyes; she nervously tapped her lips with her handkerchief, to keep it from them. Suddenly she halted Sewell, in his dejected progress toward the door. “I might give him my furnace?”
“Furnace?” echoed Sewell.
“Yes. Jackson has 'struck' for twelve dollars a month, and at present there is a 'lock-out,'—I believe that's what it's called. And I had determined not to yield as long as the fine weather lasted. I knew I should give in at the first frost. I will take Barker now, if you think he can manage the furnace.”
“I've no doubt he can. Has Jackson really struck?” Miss Vane nodded. “He hasn't said anything to me about it.”
“He probably intends to make special terms to the clergy. But he told me he was putting up the rates on all his 'famblies' this winter.”
“If he puts them up on me, I will take Barker too,” said the minister boldly. “If he will come,” he added, with less courage. “Well, I will go round to the Lodge, and see what he thinks of it. Of course, he can't live upon ten dollars a month, and I must look him up something besides.”
“That's the only thing I can think of at present,” said Miss Vane.
“Oh, you're indefinitely good to think of so much,” said Sewell. “You must excuse me if my reception of your kindness has been qualified by the reticence with which Barker received mine, this morning.”
“Oh, do tell me about it!” cried Miss Vane.
“Sometime I will. But I can assure you it was such as to make me shrink from another interview. I don't know but Barker may fling your proffered furnace in my teeth. But I'm sure we both mean well. And I thank you, all the same. Good-bye.”
“Poor Mr. Sewell!” said Miss Vane, following him to the door. “May I run down and tell Mrs. Sewell?”
“Not yet,” said the minister sadly. He was too insecure of Barker's reception to be able to enjoy the joke.
When he got back to the Wayfarer's Lodge, whither he made himself walk in penance, he found Lemuel with a book in his hand, reading, while the cook stirred about the kitchen, and the broth, which he had well under way for the mid-day meal, lifted the lid of its boiler from time to time and sent out a joyous whiff of steam. The place had really a cosiness of its own, and Sewell began to fear that his victim had been so far corrupted by its comfort as to be unwilling to leave the Refuge. He had often seen the subtly disastrous effect of bounty, and it was one of the things he trembled for in considering the question of public aid to the poor. Before he addressed Barker, he saw him entered upon the dire life of idleness and dependence, partial or entire, which he had known so many Americans even willing to lead since the first great hard times began; and he spoke to him with the asperity of anticipative censure.
“Barker!” he said, and Lemuel lifted his head from the book he was reading. “I have found something for you to do. I still prefer you should go home, and I advise you to do so. But,” he added, at the look that came into Lemuel's face, “if you are determined to stay, this is the best I can do for you. It isn't a full support, but it's something, and you must look about for yourself, and not rest till you've found full work, and something better fitted for you. Do you think you can take care of a furnace?”
“Hot air?” asked Lemuel.
“Yes.”
“I guess so. I took care of the church furnace, last winter.”
“I didn't know you had one,” said the minister, brightening in the ray of hope. “Would you be willing to take care of a domestic furnace—a furnace in a private house?”
Lemuel pondered the proposal in silence. Whatever objections there were to it in its difference from the aims of his ambition in coming to the city of Boston, he kept to himself; and his ignorance of city prejudices and sophistications probably suggested nothing against the honest work to his pride. “I guess I should,” he said at last. “Well, then, come with me.”
Sewell judged it best not to tell him whose furnace he was to take care of; he had an impression that Miss Vane was included in the resentment which Lemuel seemed to cherish toward him. But when he had him at her door, “It's the lady whom you saw at my house the other day,” he explained. It was then too late for Lemuel to rebel if he had wished, and they went in.
If there was any such unkindness in Lemuel's breast toward her, it yielded promptly to her tact. She treated him at once, not like a servant, but like a young person, and yet she used a sort of respect for his independence which was soothing to his rustic pride. She put it on the money basis at once; she told him that she should give him ten dollars a month for taking care of the furnace, keeping the sidewalk clear of snow, shovelling the paths in the backyard for the women to get at their clothes-lines, carrying up and down coal and ashes for the grates, and doing errands. She said that this was what she had always paid, and asked him if he understood and were satisfied.
Lemuel answered with one yes to both her questions, and then Miss Vane said that of course till the weather changed they should want no fire in the furnace, but that it might change, any day, and they should begin at once and count October as a full month. She thought he had better go down and look at the furnace and see if it was in order; she had had the pipes cleaned, but perhaps it needed blacking; the cook would show him how it worked. She went with him to the head of the basement stairs, and calling down, “Jane, here is Lemuel, come to look after the furnace,” left him and Jane to complete the acquaintance upon coming in sight of each other, and went back to the minister. He had risen to go, and she gave him her hand, while a smile rippled into laughter on her lips.
“Do you think,” she asked, struggling with her mirth to keep unheard of those below, “that it is quite the work for a literary man?”
“If he is a man,” said Sewell courageously, “the work won't keep him from being literary.”
Miss Vane laughed at his sudden recovery of spirit, as she had laughed at his dejection; but he did not care. He hurried home, with a sermon kindling in his mind so obviously, that his wife did not detain him beyond a few vital questions, and let him escape from having foisted his burden upon Miss Vane with the simple comment, “Well, we shall see how that will work.”
As once before, Sewell tacitly took a hint from his own experience, and enlarging to more serious facts from it, preached effort in the erring. He denounced mere remorse. Better not feel that at all, he taught; and he declared that what is ordinarily distinguished from remorse as repentance, was equally a mere corrosion of the spirit unless some attempt at reparation went with it. He maintained that though some mischiefs—perhaps most mischiefs—were irreparable so far as restoring the original status was concerned, yet every mischief was reparable in the good-will and the good deed of its perpetrator. Do what you could to retrieve yourself from error, and then, not leave the rest to Providence, but keep doing. The good, however small, must grow if tended and nurtured like a useful plant, as the evil would certainly grow, like a wild and poisonous weed, if left to itself. Sin, he said, was a terrible mystery; one scarcely knew how to deal with it or to attempt to determine its nature; but perhaps—he threw out the thought while warning those who heard him of its danger in some aspects—sin was not wholly an evil. We were so apt in this world of struggle and ambition to become centred solely in ourselves, that possibly the wrong done to another,—the wrong that turned our thoughts from ourselves, and kept them bent in agony and despair upon the suffering we had caused another, and knew not how to mitigate—possibly this wrong, nay, certainly this wrong, was good in disguise. But, returning to his original point, we were to beware how we rested in this despair. In the very extremity of our anguish, our fear, our shame, we were to gird ourselves up to reparation. Strive to do good, he preached; strive most of all to do good to those you have done harm to. His text was “Cease to do evil.”
He finished his sermon during the afternoon, and in the evening his wife said they would run up to Miss Vane's. Sewell shrank from this a little, with the obscure dread that Lemuel might have turned his back upon good fortune, and abandoned the place offered him, in which case Sewell would have to give a wholly different turn to his sermon; but he consented, as indeed he must. He was as curious as his wife to know how the experiment had resulted.
Miss Vane did not wait to let them ask. “My dear,” she said, kissing Mrs. Sewell and giving her hand to the minister in one, “he is a pearl! And I've kept him from mixing his native lustre with Rising Sun Stove Polish by becoming his creditor in the price of a pair of overalls. I had no idea they were so cheap, and you can see that they will fade, with a few washings, to a perfect Millet blue. They were quite his own idea, when he found the furnace needed blacking, and he wanted to use the fifty cents he earned this morning toward the purchase, but I insisted upon advancing the entire dollar myself. Neatness, self-respect, awe-inspiring deference!—he is each and every one of them in person.”
Sewell could not forbear a glance of triumph at his wife.
“You leave us very little to ask,” said that injured woman.
“But I've left myself a great deal to tell, my dear,” retorted Miss Vane, “and I propose to keep the floor; though I don't really know where to begin.”
“I thought you had got past the necessity of beginning,” said Sewell. “We know that the new pearl sweeps clean,”—Miss Vane applauded his mixed metaphor—“and now you might go on from that point.”
“Well, you may think I'm rash,” said Miss Vane, “but I've thoroughly made up my mind to keep him.”
“Dear,dearMiss Vane!” cried the minister. “Mrs. Sewell thinks you're rash, but I don't. What do you mean by keeping him?”
“Keeping him as a fixture—a permanency—a continuosity.”
“Oh! A continuosity? I know what that is in the ordinary acceptation of the term, but I'm not sure that I follow your meaning exactly.”
“Why, it's simply this,” said Miss Vane. “I have long secretly wanted the protection of what Jane calls a man-body in the House, and when I saw how Lemuel had blacked the furnace, I knew I should feel as safe with him as with a whole body of troops.”
“Well,” sighed the minister, “you have not been rash, perhaps, but you'll allow that you've been rapid.”
“No,” said Miss Vane, “I won't allow that. I have simply been intuitive—nothing more. His functions are not decided yet, but it is decided that he is to stay; he's to sleep in the little room over the L, and in my tranquillised consciousness he's been there years already.”
“And has Sibyl undertaken Barker's reformation?” asked Sewell.
“Don't interrupt! Don't anticipate! I admit nothing till I come to it. But after I had arranged with Lemuel I began to think of Sibyl.”
“That was like some ladies I have known of,” said Sewell. “You women commit yourselves to a scheme, in order to show your skill in reconciling circumstances to the irretrievable. Well?”
“Don'tinterrupt, David!” cried his wife.
“Oh, let him go on,” said Miss Vane. “It's all very well, taking people into your house on the spur of the moment, and in obedience to a generous impulse, but when you reflect that the object of your good intentions slept in the Wayfarer's Lodge the night before, and in the police-station the night before that, and enjoys a newspaper celebrity in connection with a case of assault and battery with intent to rob,—why, then youdoreflect!”
“Yes,” said Sewell, “that is just the point where I should begin.”
“I thought,” continued Miss Vane, “I had better tell Sibyl all about it, so if by any chance the neighbours' kitchens should have heard of the case—they read the police reports very carefully in the kitchens——”
“They do in some drawing-rooms,” interrupted Sewell.
“It's well for you they do, David,” said his wife. “Yourprotégéwould have been in your Refuge still, if they didn't.”
“I see!” cried the minister. “I shall have to take theSunriseanother week.”
Miss Vane looked from one to the other in sympathetic ignorance, but they did not explain, and she went on.
“And if they should hear Lemuel's name, and put two and two together, and the talk should get to Sibyl—well, I thought it all over, until the whole thing became perfectly lurid, and I wished Lemuel Barker was back in the depths of Willoughby Pastures——”
“I understand,” said Sewell. “Go on!”
Miss Vane did so, after stopping to laugh. “It seemed to me I couldn't wait for Sibyl to get home—she spent the night in Brookline, and didn't come till five o'clock—to tell her. I began before she had got her hat or gloves off, and she sat down with them on, and listened like a three-years' child to the Ancient Mariner, but she lost no time when she understood the facts. She went out immediately and stripped the nasturtium bed. If you could have seen it when you came in, there's hardly a blossom left. She took the decorations of Lemuel's room into her own hands at once; and if there is any saving power in nasturtiums, he will be a changed person. She says that now the great object is to keep him from feeling that he has been an outcast, and needs to be reclaimed; she says nothing could be worse for him. I don't know how she knows.”
“Barker might feel that he was disgraced,” said the minister, “but I don't believe that a whole system of ethics would make him suspect that he needed to be reclaimed.”
“He makes me suspect thatIneed to be reclaimed,” said Miss Vane, “when he looks at me with those beautiful honest eyes of his.”
Mrs. Sewell asked, “Has he seen the decorations yet?”
“Not at all. They are to steal upon him when he comes in to-night. The gas is to be turned very low, and he is to notice everything gradually, so as not to get the impression that things have been done with a design upon him.” She laughed in reporting these ideas, which were plainly those of the young girl. “Sh!” she whispered at the end.
A tall girl, with a slim vase in her hand, drifted in upon their group like an apparition. She had heavy black eyebrows with beautiful blue eyes under them, full of an intensity unrelieved by humour.
“Aunty!” she said severely, “have you been telling?”
“Only Mr. and Mrs. Sewell, Sibyl,” said Miss Vane. “Theirknowing won't hurt. He'll never know it.”
“If he hears you laughing, he'll know it's about him. He's in the kitchen, now. He's come in the back way. Do be quiet.” She had given her hand without other greeting in her preoccupation to each of the Sewells in turn, and now she passed out of the room.