The evening after the fire Mrs. Sewell sat talking it over with her husband, in the light of the newspaper reports, which made very much more of Lemuel's part in it than she liked. The reporters had flattered the popular love of the heroic in using Mrs. Harmon's version of his exploits, and represented him as having been most efficient and daring throughout, and especially so in regard to the Evanses.
“Well, that doesn't differ materially from what they told us themselves,” said Sewell.
“You know very well, David,” retorted his wife, “that there couldn't have been the least danger at any time; and when he helped her to get Mr. Evans downstairs, the fire was nearly all out.”
“Very well, then; he would have saved their lives if it had been necessary. It was a case of potential heroism, that contained all the elements of self-sacrifice.”
Mrs. Sewell could not deny this, but she was not satisfied. She was silent a moment before she asked, “What do you suppose that wretched creature will do now?”
“I think very likely he will come to me,” answered Sewell.
“I dare say.” The bell rang. “And I suppose that's he now!”
They listened and heard Miss Vane's voice at the door, asking for them.
Mrs. Sewell ran down the stairs and kissed her. “Oh, I'msoglad you came. Isn't it wonderful? I've just come from them, and she's taking the whole care of him, as if he had always been the sick one, and she strong and well.”
“What do you mean, Lucy? He isn't ill!”
“Who isn't?”
“What are you talking about?”
“About Mr. Evans—”
“Oh!” said Miss Vane, with cold toleration. She arrived at the study door and gave Sewell her hand. “I scarcely knew him, you know; I only met him casually here. I've come to see,” she added nervously, “if you know where Lemuel is, Mr. Sewell. Have you seen anything of him since the fire? How nobly he behaved! But I never saw anything he wasn't equal to!”
“Mrs. Sewell objects to his saving human life,” said Sewell, not able to deny himself.
“I don't see how you can take the slightest interest in him,” began Mrs. Sewell, saying a little more than she meant.
“You would, my dear,” returned Miss Vane, “if you had wronged him as I have.”
“Or as I,” said Sewell.
“I'm thankful I haven't, then,” said his wife. “It seems to me that there's nothing else of him. As to his noble behaviour, it isn't possible you believe those newspaper accounts? He didn't save any one's life; there was no danger!”
Miss Vane, preoccupied with her own ideal of the facts, stared at her without replying, and then turned to Sewell.
“I want to find him and ask him to stay with me till he can get something else to do.” Sewell's eyebrows arched themselves involuntarily. “Sibyl has gone to New York for a fortnight; I shall be quite alone in the house, and I shall be very glad of his company,” she explained to the eyebrows, while ignoring them. Her chin quivered a little, as she added, “I shall beproudof his company. I wish him to understand that he is myguest.”
“I suppose I shall see him soon,” said Sewell, “and I will give him your message.”
“Will you tell him,” persisted Miss Vane, a little hysterically, “that if he is in any way embarrassed, I insist upon his coming to me immediately—atonce?”
Sewell smiled, “Yes.”
“I know that I'm rather ridiculous,” said Miss Vane, smiling in sympathy, “and I don't blame Mrs. Sewell for not entering into my feelings. Nobody could, who hadn't felt the peculiar Lemuel glamour.”
“I don't imagine he's embarrassed in any way,” said Sewell. “He seems to have the gift of lighting on his feet. But I'll tell him how peremptory you are, Miss Vane.”
“Well, upon my word,” cried Mrs. Sewell, when Miss Vane had taken leave of them in an exaltation precluding every recurrent attempt to enlighten her as to the true proportions of Lemuel's part in the fire, “I really believe people like to be made fools of. Why didn'tyoutell her, David, that he had done nothing?”
“What would have been the use? She has her own theory of the affair. Besides, he did do something; he did his duty, and my experience is that it's no small thing to do. It wasn't his fault that he didn't do more.”
He waited some days for Lemuel to come to him, and he inquired each time he went to see the Evanses if they knew where he was. But they had not heard of him since the night of the fire.
“It's his shyness,” said Evans; “I can understand how if he thought he had put me under an obligation he wouldn't come near me—and couldn't.”
Evans was to go out of town for a little while; the proprietors of theSaturday Afternooninsisted upon his taking a rest, and they behaved handsomely about his salary. He did not want to go, but his wife got him away finally, after he had failed in two or three attempts at writing.
Lemuel did not appear to Sewell till the evening of the day when the Evanses left town. It seemed as if he had waited till they were gone, so that he could not be urged to visit them. At first the minister scolded him a little for his neglect; but Lemuel said he had heard about them, and knew they were getting along all right. He looked as if he had not been getting along very well himself; his face was thin, and had an air at once dogged and apprehensive. He abruptly left talking of Evans, and said, “I don't know as you heard what happened that night before the fire just after I got back from your house?”
“No, I hadn't.”
Lemuel stopped. Then he related briefly and cleanly the whole affair, Sewell interrupting him from time to time with murmurs of sympathy, and “Tchk, tchk, tchk!” and “Shocking, shocking!” At the end he said, “I had hoped somehow that the general calamity had swallowed up your particular trouble in it. Though I don't know that general calamities ever do that with particular troubles,” he added, more to himself than to Lemuel; and he put the idea away for some future sermon.
“Mr. Evans stopped and said something to me that night. He said we had to live things down, and not die them down; he wanted I should wait till Saturday before I was sure that I couldn't get through Tuesday. He said, How did we know that death was the end of trouble?”
“Yes,” said the minister, with a smile of fondness for his friend; “that was like Evans all over.”
“I sha'n't forget those things,” said Lemuel. “They've been in my head ever since. If it hadn't been for them, I don't know what I should have done.”
He stopped, and after a moment's inattention Sewell perceived that he wished to be asked something more. “I hope,” he said, “that nothing more has been going wrong with you?” and as he asked this he laid his hand affectionately on the young man's shoulder, just as Evans had done. Lemuel's eyes dimmed and his breath thickened. “What has become of the person—the discharged convict?”
“I guess I had better tell you,” he said; and he told him of the adventure with Berry and Williams.
Sewell listened in silence, and then seemed quite at a loss what to say; but Lemuel saw that he was deeply afflicted. At last he asked, lifting his eyes anxiously to Sewell's, “Do you think I did wrong to say the thief was a friend of mine, and get him off that way?”
“That's a very difficult question,” sighed Sewell. “You had a duty to society.”
“Yes, I've thought of that since!”
“If I had been in your place, I'm afraid I should be glad not to have thought of it in time; and I'm afraid I'm glad that, as it is, it's too late. But doesn't it involve you with him in the eyes of the other young man?” “Yes, I presume it does,” said Lemuel. “I shall have to go away.”
“Back to Willoughby Pastures?” asked Sewell, with not so much faith in that panacea for Lemuel's troubles as he had once had.
“No, to some other town. Do you know of anything I could get to do in New York?”
“Oh, no, no!” said the minister. “You needn't let this banish you. We must seek this young Mr.—”
“Berry.”
“—Mr. Berry out, and explain the matter to him.”
“Then you'll have to tell him all about me?”
“Yes. Why not?”
Lemuel was silent, and looked down.
“In the meantime,” pursued the minister, “I have a message for you from Miss Vane. She has heard, as we all have, of your behaviour during the fire—”
“It wasn't anything,” Lemuel interrupted. “There wasn't the least danger; and Mrs. Evans did it all herself, anyway. It made me sick to see how the papers had it. It's a shame!”
Sewell smiled. “I'm afraid you couldn't make Miss Vane think so; but I can understand what you mean. She has never felt quite easy about the way—the terms—on which she parted with you. She has spoken to me several times of it, and—ah—expressed her regret; and now, knowing that you have been—interrupted in your life, she is anxious to have you come to her—”
An angry flash lighted up Lemuel's face.
“I couldn't go back there! I wouldn't do any such work again.”
“I don't mean that,” Sewell hastened to say “Miss Vane wished me to ask you to come as her guest until you could find something—Miss Sibyl Vane has gone to New York—”
“I'm very much obliged to her,” said Lemuel, “but I shouldn't want to give her so much trouble, or any one. I—I liked her very much, and I shouldn't want she should think I didn't appreciate her invitation.”
“I will tell her,” said the minister. “I had no great hope you would see your way to accepting it. But she will be glad to know that you received it.” He added, rather interrogatively than affirmatively, “In the right spirit.”
“Oh yes,” said Lemuel. “Please to tell her I did.”
“Thank you,” said Sewell, with bland vagueness. “I don't know that I've asked yet where you are staying at present?”
“I'm at Mrs. Nash's, 13 Canary Place. Mrs. Harmon went there first.”
“Oh! And are you looking forward to rejoining her in a new place?”
“I don't know as I am. I don't know as I should want to go into an hotel again.”
Sewell manifested a little embarrassment. “Well, you won't forget your promise to let me be of use to you—pecuniarily, if you should be in need of a small advance at any time.”
“Oh no! But I've got enough money for a while yet—till I can get something to do.” He rose, and after a moment's hesitation he said, “I don't know as I want you should say anything to that fellow about me. To Mr. Berry, I mean.”
“Oh! certainly not,” said Sewell, “if you don't wish it.”
Whatever it was in that reticent and elusive soul which prompted his request, the minister now felt that he could not know; but perhaps the pang that Lemuel inflicted on himself had as much transport as anguish in it. He believed that he had for ever cut himself off from the companionship that seemed highest and holiest on earth to him; he should never see that girl again; Berry must have told Miss Swan, and long before this Miss Carver had shuddered at the thought of him as the accomplice of a thief. But he proudly said to himself that he must let it all go; for if he had not been a thief, he had been a beggar and a menial, he had come out of a hovel at home, and his mother went about like a scarecrow, and it mattered little what kind of shame she remembered him in.
He thought of her perpetually now, and, in those dialogues which we hold in reverie with the people we think much about, he talked with her all day long. At first, when he began to do this, it seemed a wrong to Statira; but now, since the other was lost to him beyond other approach, he gave himself freely up to the mystical colloquies he held with her, as the devotee abandons himself to imagined converse with a saint. Besides, if he was in love with Statira, he was not in love with Jessie; that he had made clear to himself; for his feeling toward her was wholly different.
Most of the time, in these communings, he was with her in her own home, down at Corbitant, where he fancied she had gone, after the catastrophe at the St. Albans, and he sat there with her on a porch at the front door, which she had once described to him, and looked out under the silver poplars at the vessels in the bay. He formed himself some image of it all from pictures of the seaside which he had seen; and there were times when he tried to go back with her into the life she had led there as a child. Perhaps his ardent guesses at this were as near reality as anything that could be made to appear, for, after her mother and brothers and sisters had died out of the wide old house, her existence there was as lonely as if she had been a little ghost haunting it. She had inherited her mother's temperament with her father's constitution; she was the child born to his last long absence at sea and her mother's last solitude at home. When he returned, he found his wife dead and his maiden sister caring for the child in the desolate house.
This sister of Captain Carver's had been disappointed, as the phrase is, when a young girl; another girl had won her lover from her. Her disappointment had hardened her to the perception of the neighbours; and, by a strange perversion of the sympathies and faculties, she had turned from gossip and censure, from religion, and from all the sources of comfort that the bruised heart of Corbitant naturally turned to, and found such consolation as came to her in books, that is to say romances, and especially the romances that celebrated and deified such sorrow as her own. She had been a pretty little thing when young, and Jessie remembered her as pretty in her early old age. At heart she must still have been young when her hair was grey, for she made a friend and companion of the child, and they fed upon her romances together. When the aunt died, the child, who had known no mother but her, was stricken with a grief so deep and wild that at first her life and then her mind was feared for. To get her away from the associations and influences of the place, her father sent her to school in the western part of the State, where she met Madeline Swan, and formed one of those friendships which are like passions between young girls. During her long absence, her father married again; and she was called home to his deathbed. He was dead when she arrived; he had left a will that made her dependent on her stepmother. When Madeline Swan wrote to announce that she was coming to Boston to study art, Jessie Carver had no trouble in arranging with her stepmother, by the sacrifice of her final claim on her father's estate, to join her friend there, with a little sum of money on which she was to live till she should begin to earn something.
Her life had been a series of romantic episodes; Madeline said that if it could be written out it would be fascinating; but she went to work very practically, and worked hard. She had not much feeling for colour; but she drew better than her friend, and what she hoped to do was to learn to illustrate books.
One evening, after a day of bitter-sweet reveries of Jessie, Lemuel went to see Statira. She and 'Manda Grier were both very gay, and made him very welcome. They had tea for him; Statira tried all her little arts, and 'Manda Grier told some things that had happened in the box-factory. He could not help laughing at them; they were really very funny; but he felt somehow that it was all a preparation for something else. At last the two girls made a set at him, as 'Manda Grier called it, and tried to talk him into their old scheme of going to wait on table at some of the country hotels, or the seaside. They urged that now, while he was out of a place, it was just the time to look up a chance.
He refused, at first kindly, and at last angrily; and he would have gone away in this mood if Statira had not said that she would never say another word to him about it, and hung upon his neck, while 'Manda Grier looked on in sullen resentment. He came away sick and heavy at heart. He said to himself that they would be willing to drag him into the mire; they had no pride; they had no sense; they did not know anything and they could not learn. He tried to get away from them to Miss Carver in his thoughts; but the place where he had left her was vacant, and he could not conjure her back. Out of the void, he was haunted by a look of grieving reproach and wonder from her eyes.
That evening Sewell went to see an old parishioner of his who lived on the Hill, and who among his eccentricities had the habit of occupying his city house all summer long, while his family flitted with other people of fashion to the seashore. That year they talked of taking a cottage for the first time since they had sold their own cottage at Nahant, in a day of narrow things now past. The ladies urged that he ought to come with them, and not think of staying in Boston now that he had a trouble of the eyes which had befallen him, and Boston would be so dull if he could not get about freely and read as usual.
He answered that he would rather be blind in Boston than telescopic at Beverly, or any other summer resort; and that as for the want of proper care, which they urged, he did not think he should lack in his own house, if they left him where he could reach a bell. His youngest daughter, a lively little blonde, laughed with a cousin of his wife's who was present, and his wife decorously despaired. The discussion of the topic was rather premature, for they were not thinking of going to Beverly before middle of May, if they took the cottage; but an accident had precipitated it, and they were having it out, as people do, each party in the hope that the other would yield if kept at long enough before the time of final decision came.
“Do you think,” said the husband and father, who looked a whimsical tyrant at the worst, but was probably no easier to manage for his whimsicality, “that I am going to fly in the face of prosperity, and begin to do as other people wish because I'm pecuniarily able to do as I please?”
The little blonde rose decisively from the low chair where she had been sitting. “If papa has begun to reason about it, we may as well yield the point for the present, mamma. Come, Lily! Let us leave him to Cousin Charles.”
“Oh, but I say!” cried Cousin Charles, “if I'm to stay and fight it out with him, I've got to know which side I'm on.”
“You're on the right side,” said the young lady over her shoulder; “you always are, Cousin Charles.”
Cousin Charles, in the attempt to kiss his hand toward his flatterer, pulled his glasses off his nose by their cord. “Bromfield,” he said, “I don't see but this commits me against you.” And then, the ladies having withdrawn, the two men put on that business air with which our sex tries to atone to itself for having unbent to the lighter minds of the other; heaven knows what women do when the men with whom they have been talking go away.
“If you should happen to stay in town,” continued the cousin treacherously, “I shall be very glad, for I don't know but I shall be here the greater part of the summer myself.”
“I shall stay,” said the other, “but there won't be anything casual about it.”
“What do you hear from Tom?” asked the cousin, feeling about on the mantel for a match. He was a full-bodied, handsome, amiable-looking old fellow, whose breath came in quick sighs with this light exertion. He had a blond complexion, and what was left of his hair, a sort of ethereal down on the top of his head, and some cherished fringes at the temples, was turning the yellowish grey that blond hair becomes.
The other gentleman, stretched at ease in a deep chair, with one leg propped on a cricket, had the distinction of long forms, which the years had left in their youthful gracility; his snow-white moustache had been allowed to droop over the handsome mouth, whose teeth were beginning to go. “They're on the other side of the clock,” he said, referring to the matches. He added, with another glance at his relative, “Charles, you ought to bant. It's beginning to affect your wind.”
“Beginning!Your memory's going, Bromfield. But they say there's a new system that allows you to eat everything. I'm waiting for that. In the meantime, I've gone back to my baccy.”
“They've cut mine off,” sighed the other. “Doesn't it affect your heart?”
“Not a bit. But what do you do, now you can't smoke and your eyes have given out?”
“I bore myself. I had a letter from Tom yesterday,” said the sufferer, returning to the question that his cousin's obesity had diverted him from. “He's coming on in the summer.”
“Tom's a lucky fellow,” said the cousin. “I wish you had insisted on my taking some of that stock of his when you bought in.”
“Yes, you made a great mistake,” said the other, with whimsical superiority. “You should have taken my advice. You would now be rolling in riches, as I am, with a much better figure for it.”
The cousin smoked a while. “Do you know, I think Tom's about the best fellow I ever knew.”
“He's a good boy,” said the other, with the accent of a father's pride and tenderness.
“Going to bring his pretty chickens and their dam?” asked the cousin, parting his coat-skirts to the genial influence of the fire.
“No; it's a short visit. They're going into the Virginia mountains for the summer.” A manservant came in and said something in a low voice. “Heigh? What? Why, of course! Certainly! By all means! Show him in! Come in, parson; come in!” called the host to his yet unseen visitor, and he held out his hand for Sewell to take when he appeared at the door. “Glad to see you! I can't get up,—a little gouty to-day,—but Bellingham's on foot.Hisdifficulty is sitting down.”
Bellingham gave the minister a near-sighted man's glare through his glasses, and then came eagerly forward and shook hands. “Oh, Mr. Sewell! I hope you've come to put up some job on Corey. Don't spare him! With Kanawha Paint Co. at the present figures he merits any demand that Christian charity can make upon him. The man's prosperity is disgraceful.”
“I'm glad to find you here, Mr. Bellingham,” said Sewell, sitting down.
“Oh, is it double-barrelled?” pleaded Bellingham.
“I don't know that it's a deadly weapon of any kind,” returned the minister. “But if one of you can't help me, perhaps the other can.”
“Well, let us know what the job is,” said Corey. “We refuse to commit ourselves beforehand.”
“I shall have to begin at the beginning,” said Sewell warningly, “and the beginning is a long way off.”
“No matter,” said Bellingham adventurously. “The further off, the better. I've been dining with Corey—he gives you a very good dinner now, Corey does—and I'm just in the mood for a deserving case.”
“The trouble with Sewell is,” said Corey, “that he doesn't always take the trouble to have them deserving. I hope this is interesting, at least.”
“I suspect you'll find it more interesting than I shall,” said the minister, inwardly preparing himself for the amusement which Lemuel's history always created in his hearers. It seemed to him, as he began, that he was always telling this story, and that his part in the affair was always becoming less and less respectable. No point was lost upon his hearers; they laughed till the ladies in the drawing-room above wondered what the joke could be.
“At any rate,” said Bellingham, “the fellow behaved magnificently at the fire. I read the accounts of it.”
“I think his exploits owe something to the imagination of the reporters,” said Sewell. “He tells a different story himself.”
“Oh, of course!” said Bellingham.
“Well; and what else?” asked Corey.
“There isn't any more. Simply he's out of work, and wants something to do—anything to do—anything that isn't menial.”
“Ah, that's a queer start of his,” said Bellingham thoughtfully. “I don't know but I like that.”
“And do you come to such effete posterity as we are for help in a case like that?” demanded Corey. “Why, the boy's an Ancestor!”
“So he is! Why, so he is—so he is!” said Bellingham, with delight in the discovery. “Of course he is!”
“All you have to do,” pursued Corey, “is to give him time, and he'll found a fortune and a family, and his children's children will be cutting ours in society. Half of our great people have come up in that way. Look at the Blue-book, where our nobility is enrolled; it's the apotheosis of farm-boys, mechanics, insidemen, and I don't know what!”
“But in the meantime this ancestor is now so remote that he has nothing to do,” suggested Sewell. “If you give him time you kill him.”
“Well, what do you want me to do? Mrs. Corey is thinking of setting up a Buttons. But you say this boy has a soul above buttons. And besides, he's too old.”
“Yes.”
“Look here, Bromfield,” said Bellingham, “why don't you gethimto read to you?”
Corey glanced from his cousin to the minister, whose face betrayed that this was precisely what he had had in his own mind.
“Is that the job?” asked Corey.
Sewell nodded boldly.
“He would read through his nose, wouldn't he? I couldn't stand that. I've stopped talking through mine, you know.”
“Why, look here, Bromfield!” said Bellingham for the second time. “Why don't you let me manage this affair for you? I'm not of much use in the world, but from time to time I like to do my poor best; and this is just one of the kind of things I think I'm fitted for. I should like to see this young man. When I read in the newspapers of some fellow who has done a fine thing, I always want to see what manner of man he is; and I'm glad of any chance that throws him in my way.”
“Your foible's notorious, Charles. But I don't see why you keep my cigars all to yourself,” said Corey.
“My dear fellow,” said Bellingham, making a hospitable offer of the cigar-box from the mantel, “you said they'd cut you off.”
“Ah, so they have. I forgot. Well, what's your plan?”
“My plan,” said Bellingham, “is to have him to breakfast with me, and interview him generally, and get him to read me a few passages, without rousing his suspicions. Heigh?”
“I don't know that I believe much in your plan,” said Corey. “I should like to hear what my spiritual adviser has to say.”
“I shouldn't know what to advise, exactly,” said Sewell. “But I won't reject any plan that gives my client a chance.”
“Isn't client rather euphuistic?” asked Corey.
“It is, rather. But I've got into the habit of handling Barker very delicately, even in thought. I'm not sure he'll come,” added Sewell, turning to Bellingham.
“Oh yes, he will,” said Bellingham. “Tell him it's business. There won't be anybody there. Will nine be too late for him?”
“I imagine he's more accustomed to half-past five at home, and seven here.”
“Well, we'll say nine, anyway. I can't imagine the cause that would get me up earlier. Here!” He turned to the mantel and wrote an invitation upon his card, and handed it to Sewell. “Please give him that from me, and beg him to come. I really want to see him, and if he can't read well enough for this fastidious old gentleman, we'll see what else he can do. Corey tells me he expects Tom on this summer,” he concluded, in dismissal of Lemuel as a topic.
“Ah,” said Sewell, putting the card in his pocket, “I'm very glad to hear that.”
He had something, but not so much, of the difficulty in overcoming Lemuel's reluctance that he had feared, and on the morning named Lemuel presented himself at the address on Bellingham's card exactly at nine. He had the card in his hand, and he gave it to the man who opened the street door of the bachelors' apartment house where Bellingham lived. The man read it carefully over, and then said, “Oh yes; second floor,” and, handing it back, left Lemuel to wander upstairs alone. He was going to offer the card again at Bellingham's door, but he had a dawning misgiving. Bellingham had opened the door himself, and, feigning to regard the card as offered by way of introduction, he gave his hand cordially, and led him into the cozy room, where the table was already laid for breakfast.
“Glad to see you, glad to see you, Mr. Barker. Give me your coat. Ah, I see you scorn the effeminacy of half-season things. Put your hat anywhere. The advantage of bachelors' quarters is that youcanput anything anywhere. We haven't a woman on the premises, and you can fancy how unmolested we are.”
Lemuel had caught sight of one over the mantel, who had nothing but her water-colours on, and was called an “Etude;” but he no longer trembled, for evil or for good, in such presences. “That's one of those Romano-Spanish things,” said Bellingham, catching the direction of his eye. “I forget the fellow's name; but it isn't bad. We're pretty snug here,” he added, throwing open two doors in succession, to show the extent of his apartment.
“Here you have the dining-room and drawing-room and library in one; and here's my bedroom, and here's my bath.”
He pulled an easy-chair up toward the low fire for Lemuel. “But perhaps you're hot from walking? Sit wherever you like.”
Lemuel chose to sit by the window. “It's very mild out,” he said, and Bellingham did not exact anything more of him. He talked at him, and left Lemuel to make his mental inventory of the dense Turkey rugs on the slippery hardwood floor, the pictures on the Avails, the deep, leather-lined seats, the bric-a-brac on the mantel, the tall, coloured chests of drawers in two corners, the delicate china and quaint silver on the table.
Presently steps were heard outside, and Bellingham threw open the door as he had to Lemuel, and gave a hand to each of the two guests whom he met on his threshold.
“Ah, Meredith! Good morning, venerable father!” He drew them in. “Let me introduce you to Mr. Barker, Mr. Meredith. Mr. Barker, the Rev. Mr. Seyton. You fellows are pretty prompt.”
“We're pretty hungry,” said Mr. Meredith. “I don't know that we should have got here if we hadn't leaned up against each other as we came along. Several policemen regarded us suspiciously, but Seyton's cloth protected us.”
“It was terrible, coming up Beacon Street with an old offender like Meredith, at what he considered the dead hour of the night,” said Mr. Seyton. “I don't know what I should have done if any one had been awake to see us.”
“You shall have breakfast instantly,” said Bellingham, touching an annunciator, and awakening a distant electric titter somewhere.
Mr. Seyton came toward Lemuel, who took the young Ritualist for a Catholic priest, but was not proof against the sweet friendliness which charmed every one with him, and was soon talking at more ease than he had felt from all Bellingham's cordial intention. He was put at his host's right hand when they sat down, and Mr. Seyton was given the foot, so that they continued their talk.
“Mr. Bellingham tells me you know my friend Sewell,” said the clergyman.
Lemuel's face kindled. “Oh yes! Do you know him too?”
“Yes, I've known him a long time. He's a capital fellow, Sewell is.”
“I think he's a great preacher,” ventured Lemuel.
“Ah—well—yes? Is he? I've never heard him lecture,” said Mr. Seyton, looking down at his bread.
“I swear, Seyton,” said Meredith across the table, “when you put on that ecclesiastical superciliousness of yours, I want to cuff you.”
“I've no doubt he'd receive it in a proper spirit,” said Bellingham, who was eating himself hot and red from the planked shad before him. “But you mustn't do it here.”
“Of course,” said Mr. Seyton, “Sewell is a very able man, and no end of a good fellow, but you can't expect me to admit he's a priest.”
He smiled in sweet enjoyment of his friend's wrath. Lemuel observed that he spoke with an accent different from the others, which he thought very pleasant, but he did not know it for that neat utterance which the Anglican Church bestows upon its servants.
“He's no Jesuit,” growled Meredith.
“I'm bound to say he's not a pagan, either,” laughed the clergyman.
“These gentlemen exchange these little knocks,” Bellingham explained to Lemuel's somewhat puzzled look, “because they were boys together at school and college, and can't realise that they've grown up to be lights of the bar and the pulpit.” He looked round at the different plates. “Have some more shad?” No one wanted more, it seemed, and Bellingham sent it away by the man, who replaced it with broiled chicken before Bellingham, and lamb chops in front of Mr. Seyton. “This is all there is,” the host said.
“It's enough for me,” said Meredith, “if no one else takes anything.”
But in fact there was also an omelet, and bread and butter delicious beyond anything that Lemuel had tasted; and there was a bouquet of pink radishes with fragments of ice dropped among olives, and other facts of a polite breakfast. At the close came a dish of what Bellingham called premature strawberries.
“Why! they're actuallysweet!” said Meredith, “and they're as natural as emery-bags.”
“Yes, they're all you say,” said Bellingham. “You can have strawberries any time nowadays after New Year's, if you send far enough for them; but to get them ripe and sound, or distinguishable from small turnips in taste, is another thing.”
Lemuel had never imagined a breakfast like that; he wondered at himself for having respected the cuisine of the St. Albans. It seemed to him that he and the person he had been—the farm-boy, the captive of the police, the guest of the Wayfarer's Lodge, the servant of Miss Vane, and the head-waiter at the hotel—could not be the same person. He fell into a strange reverie, while the talk, in which he had shared so little, took a range far beyond him. Then he looked up and found all the others' eyes upon him, and heard Bellingham saying, “I fancy Mr. Barker can tell us something about that,” and at Lemuel's mystified stare he added, “About the amount of smoke at a fire that a man could fight through. Mr. Seyton was speaking of the train that was caught in the forest fires down in Maine the other day. How was it with you at the St. Albans?”
Lemuel blushed. It was clear that Mr. Bellingham had been reading that ridiculous newspaper version of his exploit. “There was hardly any smoke at all where I was. It didn't seem to have got into the upper entries much.”
“That's just what I was saying!” triumphed Bellingham. “If a man has anything to do, he can get on. That's the way with the firemen. It's the rat-in-a-trapideathat paralyses. Do you remember your sensations at all, when you were coming through the fire? Those things are very curious sometimes,” Bellingham suggested.
“There was no fire where I was,” said Lemuel stoutly, but helpless to make a more comprehensive disclaimer.
“I imagine you wouldn't notice that, any more than the smoke,” said Bellingham, with a look of satisfaction in his hero for his other guests. “It's a sort of ecstasy. Do you remember that fellow of Bret Harte's, inHow Christmas came to Simpson's Bar, who gets a shot in his leg, or something, when he's riding to get the sick boy a Christmas present, and doesn't know it till he drops off his horse in a faint when he gets back?” He jumped actively up from the table, and found the book on his shelf. “There!” He fumbled for his glasses without finding them. “Will you be kind enough to read the passage, Mr. Barker? I think I've found the page. It's marked.” He sat down again, and the others waited.
Lemuel read, as he needs must, and he did his best.
“Ah, that's very nice. Glad you didn't dramatise it; the drama ought to be in the words, not the reader. I like your quiet way.”
“Harte seems to have been about the last of the story-tellers to give us the great, simple heroes,” said Seyton.
When the others were gone, and Lemuel, who had been afraid to go first, rose to take himself away, Bellingham shook his hand cordially and said, “I hope you weren't bored? The fact is, I rather promised myself atête-à-têtewith you, and I told Mr. Sewell so; but I fell in with Seyton and Meredith yesterday—you can't help falling in with one when you fall in with the other; they're inseparable when Seyton's in town and I couldn't resist the temptation to ask them.”
“Oh no, I wasn't bored at all,” said Lemuel.
“I'm very glad. But—sit down a moment. I want to speak to you about a little matter of business. Mr. Sewell was telling us something of you the other night, at my cousin Bromfield Corey's, and it occurred to me that you might be willing to come and read to him. His eyes seem to be on the wane, some way, and he's rather sleepless. He'd give you a bed, and sometimes you'd have to read to him in the night; you'd take your meals where you like. How does it strike you, supposing the 'harnsome pittance' can be arranged?”
“Why, if you think I can do it,” began Lemuel.
“Of course I do. You don't happen to read French?”
Lemuel shook his head hopelessly. “I studied Latin some at school—”
“Ah! Well! I don't think he'd care for Latin. I think we'd better stick to English for the present.”
Bellingham arranged for Lemuel to go with him that afternoon to his cousin's and make, as he phrased it, a stagger at the job.
The stagger seemed to be sufficiently satisfactory. Corey could not repress some twinges at certain characteristics of Lemuel's accent, but he seemed, in a critical way, to take a fancy to him, and he was conditionally installed for a week.
Corey was pleased from the beginning with Lemuel's good looks, and justified himself to his wife with an Italian proverb: “Novanta su cento, chi è bello difuori ê buono di dentro.” She had heard that proverb before, and she had always considered it shocking; but he insisted that most people married upon no better grounds, and that what sufficed in the choice of a husband or wife was enough for the choice of an intellectual nurse. He corrected Lemuel's pronunciation where he found it faulty, and amused himself with Lemuel's struggles to conceal his hurt vanity, and his final good sense in profiting by the correction. But Lemuel's reading was really very good; it was what, even more than his writing, had given him a literary reputation in Willoughby Pastures; and the old man made him exercise it in widely different directions. Chiefly, however, it was novels that he read, which, indeed, are the chief reading of most people in our time; and as they were necessarily the novels of our language, his elder was not obliged to use that care in choosing them which he must have exacted of himself in the fiction of other tongues. He liked to hear Lemuel talk, and he used the art of getting at the boy's life by being frank with his own experience. But this was not always successful, and he was interested to find Lemuel keeping doors that Sewell's narrative had opened carefully closed against him. He betrayed no consciousness that they existed, and Lemuel maintained intact the dignity and pride which come from the sense of ignominy well hidden.
The week of probation had passed without interrupting their relation, and Lemuel was regularly installed, and began to lead a life which was so cut off from his past in most things that it seemed to belie it. He found himself dropped in the midst of luxury stranger to him than the things they read of in those innumerable novels. The dull, rich colours in the walls, and the heavily rugged floors and dark-wooded leathern seats of the library where he read to the old man; the beautiful forms of the famous bronzes, and the Italian saints and martyrs in their baroque or Gothic frames of dim gold; the low shelves with their ranks of luxurious bindings, and all the seriously elegant keeping of the place, flattered him out of his strangeness; and the footing on which he was received in this house, the low-voiced respect with which the man-servant treated him, the master's light, cordial frankness, the distant graciousness of the mistress, and the unembarrassed, unembarrassing kindliness of the young ladies, both so much older than himself, contributed to an effect that afterwards deepened more and more, and became a vital part of the struggle which he was finally to hold with himself. The first two or three days he saw no one but Mr. Corey, and but for the women's voices in the other parts of the house, he might have supposed himself in another bachelor's apartments, finer and grander than Bellingham's. He was presented to Mrs. Corey when she came into the library, but he did not see the daughters of the house till he was installed in it. After that, his acquaintance with them seemed to go no further. They were all polite and kind when they met him, in the library or on the stairs, but they showed no curiosity about him; and his never meeting them at table helped to keep him a stranger to them under the same roof. He ate at a boarding-house in a neighbouring street, but he slept at the Coreys' after he had read their father asleep, and then, going out to his late breakfast, he did not return till Mr. Corey had eaten his own, much later.
He wondered at first that neither of those young ladies read to their father, not knowing the disability for mutual help that riches bring. Later, he saw how much Miss Lily Corey was engrossed with charity and art, and how constantly Miss Nannie Corey was occupied with social cares, and was perpetually going and coming in their performance. Then he saw that they could not have rendered nor their father have received from his family the duty which he was paid to do, as they must have done if they had been poorer. But they were all fond of one another, and the father had a way of joking with his daughters, especially the youngest; and they talked with a freedom of themselves which puzzled Lemuel. It appeared from what they said at different times that they had not always been so rich, or that they had once had money, and then less, and now much more. It appeared also that their prosperity was due to a piece of luck, and that the young Mr. Corey, whom they expected in the summer, had brought it about. His father was very proud of him, and, getting more and more used to Lemuel's companionship, he talked a great deal about his Tom, as he called him, and about Tom's wife, and his wife's family, who were somehow, Lemuel inferred, not all that his own family could wish them, but very good people. Once when Mr. Corey was talking of them, Mrs. Corey came in upon them, and seemed to be uneasy, as if she thought he was saying too much. But the daughters did not seem to care, especially the youngest.
He found out that Mr. Corey used to be a painter, and had lived a long time in Italy when he was young, and he recalled with a voluptuous thrill of secrecy that Williams had once been in Italy. Mr. Corey seemed to think better of it than Williams; he liked to talk of Rome and Florence, and of Venice, which Williams had said was a kind of hole. The old man said this or that picture was of this or that school, and vague lights of knowledge and senses of difference that flattered Lemuel's intellectual vanity stole in upon him. He began to feel that the things Mr. Corey had lived for were the great and high objects of life.
He now perceived how far from really fine or fashionable anything at the St. Albans had been, and that the simplicity of Miss Vane's little house, which the splendour of the hotel had eclipsed in his crude fancy, was much more in harmony with the richness of Mr. Corey's. He oriented himself anew, and got another view of the world which he had dropped into. Occasionally he had glimpses of people who came to see the Coreys, and it puzzled him that this family, which he knew so kind and good, took with others the tone hard and even cynical which seemed the prevailing tone of society; when their acquaintances went away they dropped back, as if with relief, into their sincere and amiable fashions of speech. Lemuel asked himself if every one in the world was playing a part; it did not seem to him that Miss Carver had been; she was always the same, and always herself. To be one's-self appeared to him the best thing in the world, and he longed for it the more as he felt that he too was insensibly beginning to play a part. Being so much in this beautiful and luxurious house, where every one was so well dressed and well mannered, and well kept in body and mind, and passing from his amazement at all its appointments into the habit of its comfortable beauty, he forgot more and more the humility and the humiliations of his past. He did not forget its claims upon him; he sent home every week the greater part of his earnings, and he wrote often to his mother; but now, when he could have got the time to go home and see her, he did not go. In the exquisite taste of his present environment, he could scarcely believe in that figure, grizzled, leathern, and gaunt, and costumed in a grotesque unlikeness to either sex. Sometimes he played with the fantastic supposition of some other origin for himself, romantic and involved like that of some of the heroes he was always reading of, which excluded her.
Another effect of this multifarious literature through which his duties led him was the awakening of the ambition to write, stunned by his first disastrous adventures in Boston, and dormant almost ever since, except as it had stirred under the promptings of Evans's kindly interest. But now it did not take the form of verse; he began to write moralistic essays, never finished, but full of severe comment on the folly of the world as he saw it. Sometimes they were examinations of himself, and his ideas and principles, his doctrines and practice, penetrating quests such as the theologians of an earlier day used to address to their consciences.
Meantime, the deeply underlying mass of his rustic crudity and raw youth took on a far higher polish than it had yet worn. Words dropped at random in the talk he now heard supplied him with motives and shaped his actions. Once Mr. Bellingham came in laughing about a sign which he saw in a back street, of Misfit Parlours, and Lemuel spent the next week's salary for a suit at a large clothing store, to replace the dress Sewell had thought him so well in. He began insensibly to ape the manners of those about him.
It drew near the time when the ladies of the Corey family were to leave town, where they had lingered much longer than they meant, in the hope that Mr. Corey might be so much better, or so much worse, that he would consent to go to the shore with them. But his disabilities remained much the same, and his inveterate habits indomitable. By this time that trust in Lemuel, which never failed to grow up in those near him, reconciled the ladies to the obstinate resolution of the master of the house to stay in it as usual. They gave up the notion of a cottage, and they were not going far away, nor for long at any one time; in fact, one or other of them was always in the house. Mrs. Corey had grown into the habit of confidence with Lemuel concerning her husband's whims and foibles; and this motherly frankness from a lady so stately and distant at first was a flattery more poisonous to his soul than any other circumstance of his changed life.
It came July, and even Sewell went away then. He went with a mind at rest concerning Lemuel's material prospects, and his unquestionable usefulness and acceptability; but something, at the bottom of his satisfaction, teased him still: a dumb fear that the boy was extravagant, a sense that he was somehow different, and not wholly for the better, from what he had been. He had seen, perhaps, nothing worse in him than that growth of manner which amused Corey.
“He is putting us on,” he said to Bellingham one day, “and making us fit as well as he can. I don't think we're altogether becoming, but that's our fault, probably. I can't help thinking that if we were of better cut and material we should show to better effect upon that granite soul. I wish Tom were here. I've an idea that Tom would fit him like a glove. Charles, why don'tyoupose as a model for Barker?”
“I don't see why I'm not a very good model without posing,” said Bellingham. “What do you want me to do for him? Take him to the club? Barker'snotvery conversational.”
“You don't take him on the right topics,” said Corey, not minding that he had left the point. “I assure you that Barker, on any serious question that comes up in our reading, has a clear head and an apt tongue of his own. It isn't our manners alone that he emulates. I can't find that any of us ever dropped an idea or suggestion of value that Barker didn't pick it up, and turn it to much more account than the owner. He's as true as a Tuscan peasant, as proud as an Indian, and as quick as a Yankee.”
“Ah! Ihopedyou wouldn't go abroad for that last,” said Bellingham.
“No; and it's delightful, seeing the great variety of human nature there is in every human being here. Our life isn't stratified; perhaps it never will be. At any rate, for the present, we're all in vertical sections. But I always go back to my first notion of Barker: he's ancestral, and he makes me feel like degenerate posterity. I've had the same sensation with Tom; but Barker seems to go a little further back. I suppose there's such a thing as getting too far back in these Origin of Species days; but he isn't excessive in that or in anything. He's confoundedly temperate, in fact; and he's reticent; he doesn't allow any unseemly intimacy. He's always turning me out-of-doors.”
“Of course! But what can we old fellows hope to know of what's going on in any young one? Talk of strangeness! I'd undertake to find more in common with a florid old fellow of fifty from the red planet Mars than with any young Bostonian of twenty.”
“Yes; but it's the youth of my sires that I find so strange in Barker. Only, theoretically, there's no Puritanism. He's a thorough believer in Sewell. I suspect he could formulate Sewell's theology a great deal better than Sewell could.”