“I'm afraid your little friend at the St. Albans isn't altogether happy of late,” said Evans toward the end of what he called one of his powwows with Sewell. Their talk had taken a vaster range than usual, and they both felt the need, that people know in dealing with abstractions, of finally getting the ground beneath their feet again.
“Ah?” asked Sewell, with a twinge that allayed his satisfaction in this. “What's the matter with him?”
“Oh, the knowledge of good and evil, I suspect.”
“I hope there's nothing wrong,” said Sewell anxiously.
“Oh no. I used the phrase because it came easily. Just what I mean is that I'm afraid his view of our social inequalities is widening and deepening, and that he experiences the dissatisfaction of people who don't command that prospect from the summit. I told you of his censure of our aristocratic constitution?”
“Yes,” said Sewell, with a smile.
“Well, I'm afraid he feels it more and more. If I can judge from the occasional distance andhauteurwith which he treats me, he is humiliated by it. Nothing makes a man so proud as humiliation, you know.”
“That's true!”
“There are a couple of pretty girls at the St. Albans, art-students, who have been painting Barker. So I learn from a reformed cow-boy of the plains who is with us as a law-student and is about with one of the young ladies a good deal. They're rather nice girls; quite nice, in fact; and there's no harm in the cow-boy, and a good deal of fun. But if Barker had conceived of being painted as a social inferior, and had been made to feel that he was merely a model; and if he had become at all aware that one of the girls was rather pretty—they both are—”
“I see!”
“I don't say it's so. But he seems low-spirited. Why don't you come round and cheer him up—get into his confidence—”
“Get into the centre of the earth!” cried Sewell. “I never saw such an inapproachable creature!”
Evans laughed. “Heisrather remote. The genuine American youth is apt to be so, especially if he thinks you mean him a kindness. But there ought to be some way of convincing him that he need not feel any ignominy in his employment. After so many centuries of Christianity and generations of Democracy, it ought to be very simple to convince him that there is nothing disgraceful in showing people to their places at table.”
“It isn't,” said the minister soberly.
“No, it isn't,” said Evans. “I wonder,” he added thoughtfully, “why we despise certain occupations? We don't despise a man who hammers stone or saws boards; why should we despise a barber? Is the care of the human head intrinsically less honourable than the shaping of such rude material? Why do we still condemn the tailor who clothes us, and honour the painter who portrays us in the same clothes? Why do we despise waiters? I tried to make Barker believe that I respected all kinds of honest work. But I lied; I despised him for having waited on table. Why have all manner of domestics fallen under our scorn, and come to be stigmatised in a lump as servants?”
“Ah, I don't know,” said the minister. “Thereissomething in personal attendance upon us that dishonours; but the reasons of it are very obscure;Icouldn't give them. Perhaps it's because it's work that in a simpler state of things each of us would do for himself, and in this state is too proud to do.”
“That doesn't cover the whole ground,” said Evans.
“And you think that poor boy is troubled—is really suffering from a sense of inferiority to the other young people?”
“Oh, I don't say certainly. Perhaps not. But if he were, what should you say was the best thing for him to do? Remain a servant; cast his lot with these outcasts; or try to separate and distinguish himself from them, as we all do? Come; we live in the world,—which isn't so bad, though it's pretty stupid. He couldn't change it. Now, what ought he to do?”
Sewell mused a while without answering anything. Then he said with a smile, “It's very much simpler to fit people for the other world than for this, don't you think?”
“Yes, it is. It was a cold day for the clergy when it was imagined that they ought to do both.”
“Well,” said Sewell, rising to follow his friend to the door, “I will come to see Barker, and try to talk with him. He's a very complicated problem. I supposed that I had merely his material prosperity to provide for, after getting him down here, but if I have to reconcile him to the constitution of society!——”
“Yes,” said Evans. “I wish you'd let me know the result of your labours. I think I could make a very incisive article on the subject. The topic is always an attractive one. There is nobody who doesn't feel that somebody else is taking on airs with him, and ought to have his comb cut. Or, if you should happen to prove to Barker that his ignominy is in accordance with the Development Theory, and is a necessary Survival, or something of that sort, don't you see what a card it would be for us with the better classes?”
They went downstairs together, and at the street door Evans stopped again. “Or, I'll tell you what. Make it a simple study of Barker's mind—a sort of psychological interview, and then with what I've been able to get from him we can present the impression that Boston makes upon a young, fresh, shrewd mind. That would be something rather new, wouldn't it? Come! theAfternoonwould make it worth your while. And then you could work it into a sermon afterwards.”
“You shameless reprobate!” said Sewell, laying his hand affectionately on his friend's arm.
There was nothing in Lemuel's case that seemed to him urgent, and he did not go to see him at once. In the meantime, Fast Day came, and Lemuel got away at last to pay his first visit home.
“Seems to me ye ain't lookin' over and above well, Lem,” was the first thing his mother said to him, even before she noticed how well he was dressed.
His new spring overcoat, another prize from the Misfit Parlours, and his new pointed-toe shoes, and Derby hat, with the suit of clothes he had kept so carefully all through the winter, were not the complete disguise he had fancied they might be at Willoughby Pastures. The depot-master had known him as soon as he got out of the cars, and ignored his splendour in recognising him. He said, “Hello, Lem,” and had not time to reconcile himself to the boy's changed appearance before Lemuel hurried away with the bag he had bought so long before for the visit. He met several people on his way home from the depot: two of them were women, and one of these said she knew as soon as she looked at him who it was, and the other said she should have known it was Lem Barker as far as she could see him. She asked him if he was home for good now.
His mother pushed back his thick hair with her hard old hand as she spoke to him, and then she pressed his head down upon her neck, which was mostly collar-bone. But Lemuel could hear her heart beat, and the tears came into his eyes.
“Oh, I'm all right, mother,” he said huskily, though he tried to say it cheerfully. He let her hold his head there the longer because mixed with his tenderness for her was a horror of her bloomers, which he was not at once able to overcome. When he gained courage to look, he saw that she had them on, but now he had the strength to bear it.
“Ye had any breakfast?” she asked, and when he said that he had got a cup of coffee at Fitchburg, she said, well, she must get him something, and she drew him a cup of Japan tea, and made him some milk toast and picked-fish, talking all the time, and telling him how his sister and her husband had gone to the village to have one of her teeth drawn. They had got along through the winter pretty well; but she guessed that they would have had more to complain of if it had not been for him. This was her way of acknowledging the help Lemuel had given them every week, and it was casually sandwiched between an account of an Indian Spirit treatment which Reuben had tried for his rheumatism, and a question whether Lemuel had seen anything of that Mind Cure down to Boston.
But when he looked about the room, and saw here and there the simple comforts and necessaries which his money had bought the sick man and the two helpless women, his heart swelled with joy and pride; and he realised the pleasure we all feel in being a good genius. At times it had come pretty hard to send the greater part of his week's wages home, but now he was glad he had done it. The poor, coarse food which his mother had served him as a treat; the low, cracked ceilings; the waving floor, covered with rag carpet; the sagging doors, and the old-fashioned trim of the small-paned windows, were all very different from the luxurious abundance, the tesselated pavement, and the tapestry Brussels, the lofty studding, and the black walnut mouldings of the St. Albans; and Lemuel felt the difference with a curious mixture of pride and remorse in his own escape from the meanness of his home. He felt the self-reproach to which the man who rises without raising with him all those dear to him is destined in some measure all his life. His interests and associations are separated from theirs, but if he is not an ignoble spirit, the ties of affection remain unweakened; he cares for them with a kind of indignant tenderness, and calls himself to account before them in the midst of pleasures which they cannot share, or even imagine.
Lemuel's mother did not ask him much about his life in Boston; she had not the materials for curiosity about it; but he told her everything that he thought she could understand. She recurred to his hopes when he left home and their disappointment in Sewell, and she asked if Lemuel ever saw him nowadays. She could not reconcile herself to his reconciliation with Sewell, whom she still held to have behaved treacherously. Then she went back to Lemuel's looks, and asked him if he kept pretty well; and when he answered that he did, she smoothed with her hand the knot between her eyes, and did not question him further.
He had the whole forenoon with his mother, and he helped her to get the dinner, as he used to do, pulling the stove-wood out of the snow-drift that still embedded part of the wood-pile, though the snow was all gone around Boston. It was thawing under the dull, soft April sky, and he saw the first bluebird perched on the clothes-line when he went out for the wood; his mother said there had been lots of them. He walked about the place, and into the barn, taking in the forlornness and shabbiness; and then he went up into the room over the shed, where he used to study and write. His heart ached with self-pity.
He realised as he had not done at a distance how dependent this wretched home was upon him; and after meaning the whole morning to tell his mother about Statira, he decided that he was keeping it from her, not merely because he was ashamed to tell her that he was engaged, but because it seemed such a crazy thing, for a person in his circumstances, if it was really an engagement. He had not seen Statira since that night when he brought her to look at the pictures the art-students had made of him. He felt that he had not parted with her kindly, and he went to see her the night before he started home, though it was not Sunday, but he had found her door locked, and this made him angry with her, he could not have said just why. If he told his mother about Statira now, what should he tell her? He compromised by telling her about the two girls that had painted his likeness.
His mother seemed not to care a great deal about the pictures. She said, “I don't want you should let any girl make a fool of you, Lem.”
“Oh no,” he answered, and went and looked out of the window.
“I don't say but what they're nice girls enough, but in your place you no need to throw yourself away.”
Lemuel thought of the awe of Miss Carver in which he lived, and the difference between them; and he could have laughed at his mother's ignorant pride. What would she say if she knew that he was engaged to a girl that worked in a box-factory? But probably she would not think that studying art and teaching it was any better. She evidently believed that his position in the St. Albans was superior to that of Miss Carver.
His sister and her husband came home before they had finished dinner. His sister had her face all tied up to keep from taking cold after having her tooth drawn, and Lemuel had to go out and help his rheumatic brother-in-law put up the horse. When they came in, his brother-in-law did not wash his hands before going to the table, and Lemuel could not keep his eyes off his black and broken fingernails; his mother's and sister's nails were black too. It must have been so when he lived at home.
His sister could not eat; she took some tea, and went to bed. His brother-in-law pulled off his boots after dinner, and put up his stocking-feet on the stove-hearth to warm them.
There was no longer any chance to talk with his mother indoors, and he asked her if she would not like to come out; it was very mild. She put on her bonnet, and they strolled down the road. All the time Lemuel had to keep from looking at her bloomers. When they met any one driving, he had to keep himself from trying to look as if he were not with her, but was just out walking alone.
The day wore heavily away. His brother-in-law's rheumatism came on toward evening, and his sister's face had swollen, so that it would not do for her to go out. Lemuel put on some old clothes he found in his room, and milked the cows himself.
“Like old times, Lem,” said his mother, when he came in.
“Yes,” he assented quietly.
He and his mother had tea together, but pretty soon afterwards she seemed to get sleepy; and Lemuel said he had been up early and he guessed he would go to bed. His mother said she guessed she would go too.
After he had blown out his light, she came in to see if he were comfortable. “I presume it seems a pretty poor place to you, Lem,” she said, holding her lamp up and looking round.
“I guess if it's good enough for you it is for me,” he answered evasively.
“No, it ain't,” she said. “I always b'en used to it, and I can see from your talk that you've got used to something different already. Well, it's right, Lem. You're a good boy, and I want you should get the good of Boston, all you can. We don't any of us begrutch it to ye; and what I came up to say now was, don't you scrimp yourself down there to send home to us. We got a roof over our heads, and we can keep soul and body together somehow; we always have, and we don't need a great deal. But I want you should keep yourself nicely dressed down to Boston, so 't you can go with the best; I don't want you should feel anyways meechin' on account of your clothes. You got a good figure, Lem; you take after your father. Sometimes I wish you was a little bigger; buthewa'n't; and he had a big spirit. He wa'n't afraid of anything; and they said if he'd come out o' that battle where he was killed, he'd 'a' b'en a captain. He was a good man.”
She had hardly ever spoken so much of his father before; he knew now by the sound of her voice in the dim room that the tears must be in her eyes; but she governed herself and went on.
“What I wanted to say was, don't you keep sendin' so much o' your money home, child. It's yours, and I want you should have it; most of it goes for patent medicines, anyway, when it gets here; we can't keep Reuben from buying 'em, and he's always changin' doctors. And I want you should hold yourself high, Lem. You're as good as anybody. And don't you go with any girls, especially, that ain't of the best. You're gettin' to that time o' life when you'll begin to think about 'em; but don't you go and fall in love with the first little poppet you see, because she's got pretty eyes and curly hair.”
It seemed to Lemuel as if she must know about Statira, but of course she did not. He lay still, and she went on.
“Don't you go and get engaged, or any such foolishness in a hurry, Lem. Them art-student girls you was tellin' about, I presume they're all right enough; but you wait a while. Young men think it's a kind of miracle if a girl likes 'em, and they're ready to go crazy over it; but it's the most natural thing she can do. You just wait a while. When you get along a little further, you can pick and choose for yourself. I don't know as I should want you should marry for money; but don't you go and take up with the first thing comes along, because you're afraid to look higher. What's become o' that nasty thing that talked so to you at that Miss Vane's?”
Lemuel said that he had never seen Sibyl or Miss Vane since; but he did not make any direct response to the anxieties his mother had hinted at. Her pride in him, so ignorant of all the reality of his life in the city, crushed him more than the sight and renewed sense of the mean conditions from which he had sprung. What if he should tell her that Miss Carver, whom she did not want him to marry in a hurry, regarded him as a servant, and treated him as she would treat a black man? What if she knew that he was as good as engaged to marry a girl that could no more meet Miss Carver on the same level than she could fly? He could only tell his mother not to feel troubled about him; that he was not going to get married in any great hurry; and pretend to be sleepy and turn his head away.
She pulled the covering up round his neck and tucked it in with her strong, rough old hand, whose very tenderness hurt.
He had expected to stay the greater part of the next day, but he took an earlier train. His sister was still laid up; she thought she must have taken cold in her jaw; her husband, rumpled, unshaven, with a shawl over his shoulders, cowered about the cook-stove for the heat. He began to hate this poverty and suffering, to long for escape from it to the life which at that distance seemed so rich and easy and pleasant; he trembled lest something might have happened in his absence to have thrown him out of his place.
All the way to Boston he was under the misery of the home that he was leaving; his mother's pride added to the burden of it. But when the train drew in sight of the city, and he saw the steeples and chimneys, and the thin masts of the ships printed together against the horizon, his heart rose. He felt equal to it, to anything in it.
He arrived in the middle of the afternoon, and he saw no one at the hotel except the Harmons till toward dinner-time. Then the ladies coming in from shopping had a word of welcome for him; some of them stopped and shook hands at the office, and when they began to come down to dinner they spoke to him, and there again some of them offered their hands; they said it seemed an age since he had gone.
The art-students came down with Berry, who shook hands so cordially with him that perhaps they could not help it. Miss Carver seemed to hesitate, but she gave him her hand too, and she asked, as the others had done, whether he had found his family well.
He did not know what to think. Sometimes he felt as if people were trying to make a fool of him almost. He remained blushing and smiling to himself after the last of them had gone in to dinner. He did not know what Miss Carver meant, but her eyes seemed to have lost that cold distance, and to have come nearer to him.
Late at night Berry came to him where he sat at his desk. “Well, Barker, I'm glad you're back again, old man. Feels as if you'd been gone a month of Sundays. Didn't know whether we should have you with us thisfirstevening.”
Lemuel grew hot with consciousness, and did not make it better for himself by saying, “I don't know what you mean.”
“Well, I don't suppose I should in yourplace,” returned Berry. “It's human nature. It's all right. What did the ladies think of the 'Roman Youth' the other night? The distinguished artists weren't sure exactly, and I thought I could make capital with one of 'em if I could find out. Yes, that's my little game, Barker; that's what I dropped in for; Bismarck style of diplomacy. I'll tell you why they want to know, if you won't give me away: Miss Swan wanted to give her 'bit of colour'—that's what she calls it—to one of the young ladies; but she's afraid she didn't like it.”
“I guess they liked it well enough,” said Lemuel, thinking with shame that Statira had not had the grace to say a word of either of the pictures; he attributed this to 'Manda Grier's influence.
“Well that's good, so far as it goes,” said Berry. “But now, to come down to particulars, what did theysay? That's what Miss Swan will askme.”
“I don't remember just what they said,” faltered Lemuel.
“Well, they must have said something,” insisted Berry jocosely. “Give a fellow some little clue, and I can piece it out for myself. What didshesay? I don't ask which shewas? but I have my suspicions. All I want to know is what shesaid. Anything like beautiful middle distance, or splendid chiaroscuro, or fine perspective, or exquisite modelling? Come now! Try to think, Barker.” He gave Lemuel time, but to no purpose. “Well,” he resumed, with affected dejection, “I'll have to try to imagine it; I guess I can; I haven't worked my imagination much since I took up the law. But look here, Barker,” he continued more briskly, “now you open up a little. Here I've been giving you my confidence ever since I saw you—forcing it on you; and you know just how far I'm gone on Miss Swan, to a hundredth part of an inch; but I don't know enough of your affections to swear that you've got any. Now, which one is it? Don't be mean about it. I won't give you away. Honest Injun!”
Lemuel was goaded to desperation. His face burned, and the perspiration began to break out on his forehead. He did not know how to escape from this pursuit.
“Which is it, Barker?” repeated his tormentor. “I know it's human nature to deny it; though I never could understand why; if I was engaged, the Sunday papers should have it about as quick!”
“I'mnotengaged!” cried Lemuel.
“You ain't?” yelled Berry.
“No!”
“Give me your hand! Neither am I!”
He shook Lemuel's helpless hand with mock heroic fervour. “We are brothers from this time forth, Barker! You can't imagine how closely this tie binds you to me, Barker. Barker, we are one; with no particular prospect, as far as I am concerned, of ever being more.”
He offered to dramatise a burst of tears on Lemuel's shoulder; but Lemuel escaped from him.
“Stop! Quit your fooling! What if somebody should come in?”
“They won't,” said Berry, desisting, and stretching himself at ease in the only chair besides Lemuel's with which the office was equipped. “It's too late for 'em. Now o'er the one-half world nature seems dead-ah, and wicked dreams abuse the curtained sleep-ah. We are safe here from all intrusion, and I can lay bare my inmost thoughts to you, Barker, if I happen to have any. Barker, I'm awfully glad you're not engaged to either of those girls,—or both. And it's not altogether because I enjoy the boon companionship of another unengaged man, but it's partly because I don't think—shall I say it?”
“Say what?” asked Lemuel, not without some prescience.
“Well, you can forgive the brotherly frankness, if you don't like it. I don't think they're quite up to you.”
Lemuel gave a sort of start, which Berry interpreted in his own way.
“Now, hold on! I know just how you feel. Been there myself. I have seen the time too when I thought any sort of girl was too good for Alonzo W., Jr. But I don't now. I think A. W., Jr., is good enough for the best. I may be mistaken; I was the other time. But we all begin that way; and the great object is not to keep on that way. See? Now, I suppose you're in love—puppy love—with that little thing. Probably the first girl you got acquainted with after you came to Boston, or may be a sweet survival of the Willoughby Pastures period. All right. Perfectly natural, in either case. But don't you let it go any further, my dear boy; old man, don't you let it go any further. Pause! Reflect! Consider! Love wisely, but not too well! Take the unsolicited advice of a sufferer.”
Pride, joy, shame, remorse, mixed in Lemuel's heart, which eased itself in an involuntary laugh at Berry's nonsense.
“Now, what I want you to do—dear boy, or old man, as the case may be—is to regard yourself in a new light. Regard yourself, for the sake of the experiment, as too good for any girl in Boston. No? Can't fetch it? Try again!”
Lemuel could only laugh foolishly.
“Well, now, that's singular,” pursued Berry. “I supposed you could have done it without the least trouble. Well, let's try something a little less difficult. Look me in the eye, and regard yourself as too good, for example, for Miss Carver. Ha!”
An angry flush spread over Lemuel's embarrassed face. “I wish you'd behave yourself,” he stammered.
“In any other cause I would,” said Berry solemnly. “But I must be cruel to be kind. Seriously, old man, if you can't think yourself too good for Miss Carver, I wish you'd think yourself good enough. Now, I'm not saying anything against the Willoughby episode, mind. That has its place in the wise economy of nature, just like anything else. But there ain't any outcome in it for you. You've got a future before you, Barker, and you don't want to go and load up with a love affair that you'll keep trying to unload as long as you live. No, sir! Look at me! I know I'm not an example in some things, but in this little business of correctly placed affections I could give points to Solomon. Why am I in love with M. Swan? Because I can't help it for one thing, and because for another thing she can do more to develop the hidden worth and unsuspected powers of A. W., Jr., than any other woman in the world. She may never feel that it's her mission, but she can't shake my conviction that way; and I shall stay undeveloped to prove that I was right. Well, now, what you want, my friend, is development, and you can't get it where you've been going. She hain't got it on hand. And what you want to do is not to take something else in its place—tender heart, steadfast affections, loyalty; they've got 'em at every shop in town; they're a drug in the market. You've got to say 'No development, heigh? Well, I'll just look round a while, and if I can't find it at some of the other stores I'll come back and take some of that steadfast affection. You say it won't come off? Or run in washing?' See?”
“You ought to be ashamed of yourself,” said Lemuel, trying to summon an indignant feeling, and laughing with a strange pleasure at heart. “You've got no right to talk to me that way. I want you should leave me alone!”
“Well, since you're so pressing, I will go,” said Berry easily. “But if I find you at our next interview sitting under the shade of the mustard-tree whose little seed I have just dropped, I shall feel that I have not laboured in vain. 'She's a darling, she's a daisy, she's a dumpling, she's a lamb!' I refer to Miss Swan, of course; but on other lips the terms are equally applicable to Miss Carver; and don't you forget it!”
He swung out of the office with a mazurka step. His silk hat, gaily tilted on the side of his head, struck against the door-jamb, and fell rolling across the entry floor. Lemuel laughed wildly. At twenty these things are droll.
A week passed, and Lemuel had not tried to see Statira again. He said to himself that even when he had tried to do what was right, and to show those young ladies how much he thought of her by bringing her to see their pictures, she had acted very ungratefully, and had as good as tried to quarrel with him. Then, when he went to see her before his visit home, she was out; she had never been out before when he called.
Now, he had told Berry that they were not engaged. At first, this shocked him as if it were a lie. Then he said to himself that he had a right to make that answer because Berry had no right to ask the questions that led to it. Then he asked himself if he really were engaged to Statira. He had told her that he liked her better than any one else in the world, and she had said as much to him. But he pretended that he did not know whether it could be called an engagement.
There was no one who could solve the question for him, and it kept asking itself that whole week, and especially when he was with Miss Carver, as happened two or three times through Berry's connivance. Once he had spent the greater part of an evening in the studio, where he talked nearly all the time with Miss Carver, and he found out that she was the daughter of an old ship's captain at Corbitant; her mother was dead, and her aunt had kept house for her father. It was an old square house that her grandfather built, in the days when Corbitant had direct trade with France. She described it minutely, and told how a French gentleman had died there in exile at the time of the French revolution and who was said to haunt the house; but Miss Carver had never seen any ghosts in it. They all began to talk of ghosts and weird experiences; even Berry had had some strange things happen to him in the West. Then the talk broke in two again, and Lemuel sat apart with Miss Carver, who told at length the plot of a story she had been reading; it was a story calledRomola; and she said she would lend it to Lemuel; she said she did not see how any one could bear to be the least selfish or untrue after reading it. That made Lemuel feel cold; but he could not break away from her charm. She sat where the shaded lamp threw its soft light on one side of her face; it looked almost like the face of a spirit, and her eyes were full of a heavenly gentleness.
Lemuel asked himself how he could ever have thought them proud eyes. He asked himself at the same time and perpetually, whether he was really engaged to Statira or not. He thought how different this evening was from those he spent with her. She could not talk about anything but him and her dress; and 'Manda Grier could not do anything but say saucy things which she thought were smart. Miss Swan was really witty; it was as good as the theatre to hear her and Berry going on together. Berry was pretty bright; there was no denying it. He sang to his banjo that night; one of the songs was Spanish; he had learned it in New Mexico.
Lemuel began to understand better how such nice young ladies could go with Berry. At first, after Berry talked so to him that night in the office against Statira, he determined that he would keep away from him. But Berry was so sociable and good-natured that he could not. The first thing he knew, Lemuel was laughing at something Berry said, and then he could not help himself.
Berry was coming now, every chance he had, to talk about the art-students. He seemed to take it for granted that Lemuel was as much interested in Miss Carver as he was himself in Miss Swan; and Lemuel did begin to speak of her in a shy way. Berry asked him if he had noticed that she looked like that Spanish picture of the Virgin that Miss Swan had pinned up next to the door; and Lemuel admitted that there was some resemblance.
“Notice those eyes of hers, so deep, and sorry for everybody in general? If it was anybody in particular,thatfellow would be in luck. Oh, she's a dumpling, there's no mistake about it! 'Nymph, in thy orisons be all my sins remembered!' That's Miss Carver's style. She looks as if she justwantedto forgive somebody something. I'm afraid you ain't wicked enough, Barker. Look here! What's the reason we can't make up a little party for the Easter service at the Catholic cathedral Sunday night? The girls would like to go, I know.”
“No, no, I can't! I mustn't!” said Lemuel, and he remained steadfast in his refusal. It would be the second Sunday night that he had not seen Statira, and he felt that he must not let it pass so. Berry went off to the cathedral with the art-students; and he kept out of the way till they were gone.
He said to himself that he would go a little later than usual to see Statira, to let her know that he was not so very anxious; but when he found her alone, and she cried on his neck, and owned that she had not behaved as she should that night when she went to see the pictures, and that she had been afraid he hated her, and was not coming any more, he had stayed away so long, his heart was melted, and he did everything to soothe and comfort her, and they were more loving together than they had been since the first time. 'Manda Grier came in, and said through her nose, like an old country-woman, “'The falling out of faithful friends, renewing is of love!'” and Statira exclaimed in the old way, “'Manda!” that he had once thought so cunning, and rested there in his arms with her cheek tight pressed against his.
She did not talk; except when she was greatly excited about something, she rarely had anything to say. She had certain little tricks, poutings, bridlings, starts, outcries, which had seemed the most bewitching things in the world to Lemuel. She tried all these now, unaffectedly enough, in listening to his account of his visit home, and so far as she could she vividly sympathised with him.
He came away heavy and unhappy. Somehow, these things no longer sufficed for him. He compared this evening with the last he had spent with the art-students, which had left his brain in a glow, and kept him awake for hours with luminous thoughts. But he had got over that unkindness to Statira, and he was glad of that. He pitied her now, and he said to himself that if he could get her away from 'Manda Grier, and under the influence of such girls as Miss Swan and Miss Carver, it would be much better for her. He did not relent toward 'Manda Grier; he disliked her more than ever, and in the friendship which he dramatised between Statira and Miss Carver, he saw her cast adrift without remorse.
Sewell had told him that he was always at leisure Monday night, and the next evening Lemuel went to pay his first visit to the minister since his first day in Boston. It was early, and Evans, who usually came that evening, had not arrived yet, but Sewell had him in his thought when he hurried forward to meet his visitor.
“Oh, is it you, Mr. Barker?” he asked in a note of surprise. “I am glad to see you. I had been intending to come and look you up again. Will you sit down? Mr. Evans was here the other night, and we were talking of you. I hope you are all well?”
“Very well, thank you,” said Lemuel, taking the hand the minister offered, and then taking the chair he indicated. Sewell did not know exactly whether to like the greater ease which Lemuel showed in his presence; but there was nothing presumptuous in it, and he could not help seeing the increased refinement of the young man's beauty. The knot between his eyes gave him interest, while it inflicted a vague pang upon the minister. “I have been at home since I saw you.” Lemuel looked down at his neat shoes to see if they were in fit state for the minister's study-carpet, and Sewell's eye sympathetically following, wandered to the various details of Lemuel's simple and becoming dress,—the light spring suit which he had indulged himself in at the Misfit Parlours since his mother had bidden him keep his money for himself and not send so much of it home.
“Ah, have you?” cried the minister. “I hope you found your people all well? How is the place looking? I suppose the season isn't quite so advanced as it is with us.”
“There's some snow in the woods yet,” said Lemuel, laying the stick he carried across the hat-brim on his knees. “Mother was well; but my sister and her husband have had a good deal of sickness.”
“Oh, I'm sorry for that,” said Sewell, with the general sympathy which Evans accused him of keeping on tap professionally. “Well, how did you like the looks of Willoughby Pastures compared with Boston? Rather quieter, I suppose.”
“Yes, it was quieter,” answered Lemuel.
“But the first touch of spring must be very lovely there! I find myself very impatient with these sweet, early days in town. I envy you your escape to such a place.”
Lemuel opposed a cold silence to the lurking didacticism of these sentences, and Sewell hastened to add, “And I wish I could have had your experience in contrasting the country and the town, after your long sojourn here, on your first return home. Such a chance can come but once in a lifetime, and to very few.”
“There are some pleasant things about the country,” Lemuel began.
“Oh, I am sure of it!” cried Sewell, with cheerful aimlessness.
“The stillness was a kind of rest, after the noise here; I think any one might be glad to get back to such a place——”
“I was sure you would,” interrupted Sewell.
“If he was discouraged or broken down any way,” Lemuel calmly added.
“Oh!” said Sewell. “You mean that you found more sympathy among your old friends and neighbours than you do here?”
“No,” said Lemuel bluntly. “That's what city people think. But it's all a mistake. There isn't half the sympathy in the country that there is in the city. Folks pry into each other's business more, but they don't really care so much. What I mean is that you could live cheaper, and the fight isn't so hard. You might have to use your hands more, but you wouldn't have to use your head hardly at all. There isn't so much opposition—competition.”
“Oh,” said Sewell a second time. “But this competition—this struggle—in which one or the other must go to the wall, isn't that painful?”
“I don't know as it is,” answered Lemuel, “as long as you're young and strong. And it don't always follow that one must go to the wall. I've seen some things where both got on better.”
Sewell succumbed to this worldly wisdom. He was frequently at the disadvantage men of cloistered lives must be, in having his theories in advance of his facts. He now left this point, and covertly touched another that had come up in his last talk with Evans about Barker. “But you find in the country, don't you, a greater equality of social condition? People are more on a level, and have fewer artificial distinctions.”
“Yes, there's that,” admitted Lemuel. “I've worried a good deal about that, for I've had to take a servant's place in a good many things, and I've thought folks looked down on me for it, even when they didn't seem to intend to do it. But I guess it isn't so bad as I thought when I first began to notice it. Do you suppose it is?” His voice was suddenly tense with personal interest in the question which had ceased to be abstract.
“Oh, certainly not,” said the minister, with an ease which he did not feel.
“I presume I had what you may call a servant's place at Miss Vane's,” pursued Lemuel unflinchingly, “and I've been what you may call head waiter at the St. Albans, since I've been there. If a person heard afterwards, when I had made out something, if I ever did, that I had been a servant, would they—they—despise me for it?”
“Not unless they were very silly people,” said Sewell cordially, “I can assure you.”
“But if they had ever seen me doing a servant's work, wouldn't they always remember it, no matter what I was afterwards?” Sewell hesitated, and Lemuel hurried to add, “I ask because I've made up my mind not to be anything but clerk after this.”
Sewell pitied the simple shame, the simple pride. “That isn't the question for you to ask, my dear boy,” he answered gently, and with an affection which he had never felt for his charge before. “There's another question, more important, and one which you must ask yourself: 'Should I care if they did?' After all, the matter's in your own hands. Your soul's always your own till you do something wrong.”
“Yes, I understand that.” Lemuel sat silently thoughtful, fingering his hat-band. It seemed to Sewell that he wished to ask something else, and was mustering his courage; but if this was so, it exhaled in a sigh, and he remained silent.
“I should be sorry,” pursued the minister, “to have you dwell upon such things. There are certain ignoble facts in life which we can best combat by ignoring them. A slight of almost any sort ceases to be when you cease to consider it.” This did not strike Sewell as wholly true when he had said it, and he was formulating some modification of it in his mind, when Lemuel said—
“I presume a person can help himself some by being ashamed of caring for such things, and that's what I've tried to do.”
“Yes, that's what I meant——”
“I guess I've exaggerated the whole thing some. But if a thing is so, thinking it ain't won't unmake it.”
“No,” admitted Sewell reluctantly. “But I should be sorry, all the same, if you let it annoy—grieve you. What has pleased me in what I've been able to observe in you, has been your willingness to take hold of any kind of honest work. I liked finding you with your coat off washing dishes, that morning, at the Wayfarer's Lodge, and I liked your going at once to Miss Vane's in a—as you did——”
“Of course,” Lemuel interrupted, “I could do it before I knew how it was looked at here.”
“And couldn't you do it now?”
“Not if there was anything else.”
“Ah, that's the great curse of it; that's what I deplore,” Sewell broke out, “in our young people coming from the country to the city. They must all have some genteel occupation! I don't blame them; but I would gladly have saved you this experience—this knowledge—if I could. I felt that I had done you a kind of wrong in being the means, however indirectly and innocently, of your coming to Boston, and I would willingly have done anything to have you go back to the country. But you seemed to distrust me—to find something hostile in me—and I did not know how to influence you.”
“Yes, I understand that,” said Lemuel. “I couldn't help it, at first. But I've got to see it all in a different light since then. I know that you meant the best by me. I know now that what I wrote wasn't worth anything, and just how you must have looked at it. I didn't know some things then that I do now; and since I have got to know a little more I have understood better what you meant by all you said.”
“I am very glad,” said Sewell, with sincere humility, “that you have kept no hard feeling against me.”
“Oh, not at all. It's all right now. I couldn't explain very well that I hadn't come to the city just to be in the city, but because I had to do something to help along at home. You didn't seem to understand that there wa'n't anything there for me to take hold of.”
“No, I'm afraid I didn't, or wouldn't quite understand that; I was talking and acting, I'm afraid, from a preconceived notion.” Lemuel made no reply, not having learned yet to utter the pleasant generalities with which city people left a subject; and after a while Sewell added, “I am glad to have seen your face so often at church. You have been a great deal in my mind, and I have wished to do something to make your life happy, and useful to you in the best way, here, but I haven't quite known how.” At this point Sewell realised that it was nearly eight months since Lemuel had come to Boston, and he said contritely, “I have not made the proper effort, I'm afraid; but I did not know exactly how to approach you. You were rather a difficult subject,” he continued, with a smile in which Lemuel consented to join, “but now that we've come to a clearer understanding—” He broke off and asked, “Have you many acquaintances in Boston?”
Lemuel hesitated, and cleared his throat, “Not many.”
Something in his manner prompted the minister to say, “That is such a very important thing for young men in a strange place. I wish you would come oftener to see us, hereafter. Young men, in the want of companionship, often form disadvantageous acquaintances, which they can't shake off afterwards, when they might wish to do so. I don't mean evil acquaintance; I certainly couldn't mean that in your case; but frivolous ones, from which nothing high or noble can come—nothing of improvement or development.”
Lemuel started at the word and blushed. It was Berry's word. Sewell put his own construction on the start and the blush.
“Especially,” he went on, “I should wish any young man whom I was interested in to know refined and noble woman.” He felt that this was perhaps in Lemuel's case too much like prescribing port wine and carriage exercise to an indigent patient, and he added, “If you cannot know such women, it is better to know none at all. It is not what women say or do, so much as the art they have of inspiring a man to make the best of himself. The accidental acquaintances that young people are so apt to form are in most cases very detrimental. There is no harm in them of themselves, perhaps, but all irregularity in the life of the young is to be deplored.”
“Do you mean,” asked Lemuel, with that concreteness which had alarmed Sewell before, “that they ought to be regularly introduced?”
“I mean that a young girl who allowed a young man to make her acquaintance outside of the—the—social sanctions—would be apt to be a silly or romantic person, at the best. Of course, there are exceptions. But I should be very sorry if any young man I knew—no; why shouldn't I sayyou, at once?—should involve himself in any such way. One thing leads to another, especially with the young; and the very fact of irregularity, of romance, of strangeness in an acquaintance, throws a false glamour over the relation, and appeals to the sentiments in an unwarranted degree.”
“Yes, that is so,” said Lemuel.
The admission stimulated Sewell in the belief that he had a clue in his hand which it was his duty to follow up. “The whole affair loses proportion and balance. The fancy becomes excited, and some of the most important interests—the very most important interests of life—are committed to impulse.” Lemuel remained silent, and it seemed the silence of conviction. “A young man is better for knowing women older than himself, more cultivated, devoted to higher things. Of course, young people must see each other, must fall in love and get married; but there need be no haste about such things. If there is haste—if there is rashness, thoughtlessness—there is sure to be unhappiness. Men are apt to outgrow their wives intellectually, if their wives' minds are set on home and children, as they should be, and allowance for this ought to be made, if possible. I would rather that in the beginning the wife should be the mental superior. I hope it will be several years yet before you think seriously of such things, but when the time comes, I hope you will have seen some young girl—there are such for every one of us—whom it is civilisation and enlightenment, refinement, and elevation, simply to know. On the other hand, a silly girl's influence is degrading and ruinous. She either drags those attached to her down to her own level; or she remains a weight and a clog upon the life of a man who loves her.”
“Yes,” said Lemuel, with a sigh which Sewell interpreted as that of relief from danger recognised in time.
He pursued eagerly. “I could not warn any one too earnestly against such an entanglement.”
Lemuel rose and looked about with a troubled glance. Sewell continued: “Any such marriage—a marriage upon any such conditions—is sure to be calamitous; and if the conditions are recognised beforehand, it is sure to be iniquitous. So far from urging the fulfilment of even a promise, in such a case, I would have every such engagement broken, in the interest of humanity—of morality——”
Mrs. Sewell came into the room, and gave a little start of surprise, apparently not mixed with pleasure, at seeing Lemuel. She had never been able to share her husband's interest in him, while insisting upon his responsibility; she disliked him not logically, but naturally, for the wrong and folly which he had been the means of her husband's involving himself in; Miss Vane's kindliness toward Lemuel, which still survived, and which expressed itself in questions about him whenever she met the minister, was something that Mrs. Sewell could not understand. She now said, “Oh! Mr. Barker!” and coldly gave him her hand. “Have you been well? Must you go?”
“Yes, thank you. I have got to be getting back. Well, good evening.” He bowed to the Sewells.
“You must come again to see me,” said the minister, and looked at his wife.
“Yes, it has been a very long time since you were here,” Mrs. Sewell added.
“I haven't had a great deal of time to myself,” said Lemuel, and he contrived to get himself out of the room.
Sewell followed him down to the door, in the endeavour to say something more on the subject his wife had interrupted, but he only contrived to utter some feeble repetitions. He came back in vexation, which he visited upon Lemuel. “Silly fellow!” he exclaimed.
“What has he been doing now?” asked Mrs. Sewell, with reproachful discouragement.
“Oh,Idon't know! I suspect that he's been involving himself in some ridiculous love affair!” Mrs. Sewell looked a silent inculpation. “It's largely conjecture on my part, of course,—he's about as confiding as an oyster!—but I fancy I have said some things in a conditional way that will give him pause. I suspect from his manner that he has entangled himself with some other young simpleton, and that he's ashamed of it, or tired of it, already. If that's the case, I have hit the nail on the head. I told him that a foolish, rash engagement was better broken than kept. The foolish marriages that people rush into are the greatest bane of life!”
“And would you really have advised him, David,” asked his wife, “to break off an engagement if he had made one?”
“Of course I should! I——”
“Then I am glad I came in in time to prevent your doing anything so wicked.”
“Wicked?” Sewell turned from his desk, where he was about to sit down, in astonishment.
“Yes! Do you think that nobody else is to be considered in such a thing? What about the poor, silly girl if he breaks off with her? Oh, you men are all alike! Even the best! You think it is a dreadful thing for a young man to be burdened with a foolish love affair at the beginning of his career; but you never think of the girl whose whole career is spoiled, perhaps, if the affair is broken off! Hasn't she any right to be considered?”
“I should think,” said Sewell, distinctly daunted, “that they were equally fortunate, if it were broken off.”
“O my dear, you know you don't think anything of the kind! If he has more mind than she has, and is capable of doing something in the world, he goes on and forgets her; but she remembers him. Perhaps it's her one chance in life to get married—to have a home. You know very well that in a case of that kind—a rash engagement, as you call it—both are to blame; and shall one do all the suffering? Very probably his fancy was taken first, and he followed her up, and flattered her into liking him; and now shall he leave her because he's tired of her?”
“Yes,” said Sewell, recovering from the first confusion which his wife's unexpected difference of opinion had thrown him into, “I should think that was the very best reason in the world why he should leave her. Would his marrying make matters worse or better if he were tired of her? As for wickedness, I should feel myself guilty if I did not do my utmost to prevent marriages between people when one or other wished to break their engagement, and had not the moral courage to do so. There is no more pernicious delusion than that one's word ought to be kept in such an affair, after the heart has gone out of it, simply because it's been given.”
“David!”
But Sewell was not to be restrained. “I am right about this, Lucy, and you know it. Half the miserable marriages in the world could be prevented, if there were only some frank and fearless adviser at hand to say to the foolish things that if they no longer fully and freely love each other they can commit no treason so deadly as being true to their word. I wish,” he now added, “that I could be the means of breaking off every marriage that the slightest element of doubt enters into beforehand. I should leave much less work for the divorce courts. The trouble comes from that crazy and mischievous principle of false self-sacrifice that I'm always crying out against. If a man has ceased to love the woman he has promised to marry—orvice versa—the best possible thing they can do, the only righteous thing, is not to marry.”
Mrs. Sewell could not deny this. She directed an oblique attack from another quarter, as women do, while affecting not to have changed her ground at all. “Very well, then, David, I wish you would have nothing to do with that crazy and mischievous principle yourself. I wish you would let this ridiculous Barker of yours alone from this time forth. He has found a good place, where he is of use, and where he is doing very well. Now I think your responsibility is fairly ended. I hope you won't meddle with his love affairs, if he has any; for if you do, you will probably have your hands full. He is very good looking, and all sorts of silly little geese will be falling in love with him.”
“Well, so far his love troubles are purely conjectural,” said Sewell with a laugh. “I'm bound to say that Barker himself didn't say a word to justify the conjecture that he was either in love or wished to be out of it. However, I've given him some wholesome advice which he'll be all the better for taking, merely as a prophylactic, if nothing else.”
“I am tired of him,” sighed Mrs. Sewell. “Is he going to keep perpetually turning up, in this way? I hope you were not very pressing with him in your invitations to him to call again?”
Sewell smiled. “You were not, my dear.”
“You let him take too much of your time. I was so provoked, when I heard you going on with him, that I came down to put an end to it.”
“Well, you succeeded,” said Sewell easily. “Don't you think he's greatly improved in the short time he's been in the city?”
“He's very well dressed. I hope he isn't extravagant.”
“He's not only well dressed, but he's beginning to be well spoken. I believe he's beginning to observe that there is such a thing as not talking through the nose. He still says, 'I don't know as,' but most of the men they turn out of Harvard say that; I've heard some of the professors say it.”
Mrs. Sewell was not apparently interested in this.