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’t you pose 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’s not very 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! I hoped you 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.”
XXVII
Statira and ‘Manda Grier had given up their plan of getting places in a summer hotel when Lemuel absolutely refused to take part in it, and were working through the summer in the box-factory. Lemuel came less regularly to see them now, for his Sunday nights had to be at Mr. Corey’s disposition; but Statira was always happy in his coming, and made him more excuses than he had thought of, if he had let a longer interval than usual pass. He could not help feeling the loveliness of her patience, the sweetness of her constancy; but he disliked ‘Manda Grier more and more, and she grew stiffer and sharper with him. Sometimes the aimlessness of his relation to Statira hung round him like a cloud, which he could not see beyond. When he was with her he contented himself with the pleasure he felt in her devotion, and the tenderness this awakened in his own heart; but when he was away from her there was a strange disgust and bitterness in these.
Sometimes, when Statira and ‘Manda Grier took a Saturday afternoon off, he went with them into the country on one of the horse-car lines, or else to some matinee at a garden-theatre in the suburbs. Statira liked the theatre better than anything else; and she used to meet other girls whom she knew there, and had a gay time. She introduced Lemuel to them, and after a few moments of high civility and distance they treated him familiarly, as Statira’s beau. Their talk, after that he was now used to, was flat and foolish, and their pert ease incensed him. He came away bruised and burning, and feeling himself unfit to breathe the refined and gentle air to which he returned in Mr. Corey’s presence. Then he would vow in his heart never to expose himself to such things again; but he could not tell Statira that he despised the friends she was happy with; he could only go with a reluctance it was not easy to hide, and atone by greater tenderness for a manner that wounded her. One day toward the end of August, when they were together at a suburban theatre, Statira wandered off to a pond there was in the grounds with some other girls, who had asked him to go and row them, and had called him a bear for refusing, and told him to look out for Barnum. They left him sitting alone with ‘Manda Grier, at a table where they had all been having ice-cream at his expense; and though it was no longer any pleasure to be with her, it was better than to be with them, for she was not a fool, at any rate. Statira turned round at a little distance to mock them with a gesture and a laugh, and the laugh ended in a cough, long and shattering, so that one of her companions had to stop with her, and put her arm round her till she could recover herself and go on.
It sent a cold thrill through Lemuel, and then he turned angry. “What is it Statira does to keep taking more cold?”
“Oh, I guess ‘tain’t ‘ny more cold,” said ‘Manda Grier.
“What do you mean?”
“I guess ‘f you cared a great deal you’d noticed that cough ‘f hers before now. ‘Tain’t done it any too much good workin’ in that arsenic paper all summer long.”
‘Manda Grier talked with her face turned away from him.
It provoked him more and more. “I do care,” he retorted, eager to quarrel, “and you know it. Who got her into the box-factory, I should like to know?”
“I did!” said ‘Manda Grier, turning sharply on him, “and you kept her there; and between us we’ve killed her.”
“How have I kept her there, I should like to know?”
“‘F you’d done’s she wanted you sh
ould, she might ‘a’ been at some pleasant place in the country — the mount’ns, or somewhere ‘t she’d been ov’r her cough by this time. But no! You was too nasty proud for that, Lemuel Barker!”
A heavy load of guilt dropped upon Lemuel’s heart, but he flung it off, and he retorted furiously,
“You ought to have been ashamed of yourself to ever want her to take a servant’s place.”
“Oh, a servant’s place! If she’d been ashamed of a servant when you came meechin’ round her, where’d you been, I sh’d like to know? And now I wish she had; ‘n’ if she wa’n’t such a little fool, ‘n’ all wrapped in you, the way ‘t she is, I could wish ‘t she’d never set eyes on you again, servant or no servant. But I presume it’s too late now, and I presume she’s got to go on suff’rin’ for you and wonderin’ what she’s done to offend you when you don’t come, and what she’s done when you do, with your stuck-up, masterful airs, and your double-faced ways. But don’t you try to pretend to me, Lemuel Barker, ‘t you care the least mite for her any more, ‘f you ever did, because it won’t go down! ‘N’ if S’tira wa’n’t such a perfect little blind fool, she could see ‘t you didn’t care for her any more than the ground ‘t you walk on, ‘n’ ‘t you’d be glad enough if she was under it, if you couldn’t be rid of her any other way!” ‘Manda Grier pulled her handkerchief out and began to cry into it.
Lemuel was powerfully shaken by this attack; he did feel responsible for Statira’s staying in town all summer; but the spectacle of ‘Manda Grier publicly crying at his side in a place like that helped to counteract the effect of her words. “‘Sh! Don’t cry!” he began, looking fearfully round him. “Everybody ‘ll see you!”
“I don’t care! Let them!” sobbed the girl. “If they knowed what I know, and could see you not cryin’, I guess they’d think you looked worse than I do!”
“You don’t understand — I can explain—”
“No, you can’t explain, Mr. Barker!” said ‘Manda Grier, whipping down her handkerchief, and fiercely confronting him across the table. “You can’t explain anything so ‘s to blind me any longer! I was a big fool to ever suppose you had any heart in you; but when you came round at first, and was so meek you couldn’t say your soul was your own, and was so glad if S’tira spoke to you, or looked at you, that you was ready to go crazy, I did suppose there was some little something to you! And yes, I helped you on all I could, and helped you to fool that poor thing that you ain’t worthy to kiss the ground she walks on, Lord forgive me for it! But it’s all changed now! You seem to think it’s the greatest favour if you come round once a fortnight, and set and let her talk to you, and show you how she dotes upon you, the poor little silly coot! And if you ever speak a word, it’s like the Lord unto Moses, it’s so grand! But I understand! You’ve got other friends now! You after that art-student? Oh, you can blush and try to turn it off! I’ve seen you blush before, and I know you! And I know you’re in love with that girl, and you’re just waitin’ to break off with S’tira; but you hain’t got the spirit to up and do it like a man! You want to let it lag along, and lag along, and see ‘f something won’t happen to get you out of it! You waitin’ for her to die? Well, you won’t have to wait long! But if I was a man, I’d spoil your beauty for you first.”
The torrent of her words rolled him on, bruising and tearing his soul, which their truth pierced like jagged points. From time to time he opened his lips to protest or deny, but no words came, and in his silence a fury of scorn for the poor, faithful, scolding thing, so just, so wildly unjust, gathered head in him.
“Be still!” he ground between his teeth. “Be still, you—” He stopped for the word, and that saved him from the outrage he had meant to pay her back with. He rose from the table. “You can tell Statira what you’ve said to me. I’m going home.”
He rushed away; the anger was like strong drink in his brain; he was like one drunk all the way back to the city in the car.
He could not go to Mr. Corey’s at once; he felt as if physically besmeared with shame; he could not go to his boarding-house; it would have been as if he had shown himself there in a coat of tar and feathers. Those insolent, true, degrading words hissed in his ears, and stung him incessantly. They accused, they condemned with pitiless iteration; and yet there were instants when he knew himself guiltless of all the wrong of which in another sense he knew himself guilty. In his room he renewed the battle within himself that he had fought so long in his wanderings up and down the street, and he conquered himself at last into the theory that Statira had authorised or permitted ‘Manda Grier to talk to him in that way. This simplified the whole affair; it offered him the release which he now knew he had longed for. As he stretched himself in the sheets at daybreak, he told himself that he need never see either of them again. He was free.
XXVIII.
Lemuel went through the next day in that licence of revolt which every human soul has experienced in some measure at some time. We look back at it afterwards, and see it a hideous bondage. But for the moment Lemuel rejoiced in it; and he abandoned himself boldly to thoughts that had hitherto been a furtive and trembling rapture.
In the afternoon, when he was most at leisure, he walked down to the Public Garden, and found a seat on a bench near the fountain where the Venus had shocked his inexperience the first time he saw her; he remembered that simple boy with a smile of pity, and then went back into his cloud of reverie. There, safely hid from trouble and wrong, he told his ideal how dear she was to him, and how she had shaped and governed his life, and made it better and nobler from the first moment they had met. The fumes of the romances which he had read mixed with the love-born delirium in his brain; he was no longer low, but a hero of lofty line, kept from his rightful place by machinations that had failed at last, and now he was leading her, his bride, into the ancient halls which were to be their home, and the source of beneficence and hope to all the poor and humbly-born around them. His eyes were so full of this fantastic vision, the soul of his youth dwelt so deeply within this dream-built tabernacle, that it was with a shock of anguish he saw coming up the walk towards him the young girl herself. His airy structure fell in ruins around him; he was again common and immeasurably beneath her; she was again in her own world, where, if she thought of him at all, it must be as a squalid vagabond and the accomplice of a thief. If he could have escaped, he would, but he could not move; he sat still and waited with fallen eyes for her to pass him.
At sight of him she hesitated and wavered; then she came towards him, and at a second impulse held out her hand, smiling with a radiant pleasure.
“I didn’t know it was you at first,” she said. “It seems so strange to see any one that I know!”
“I didn’t expect to see you, either,” he stammered out, getting somehow upon his feet, and taking her hand, while his face burned, and he could not keep his eyes on hers; “I — didn’t know you were here.”
“I’ve only been here a few days. I’m drawing at the Museum. I’ve just got back. Have you been here all summer?”
“Yes — all summer. I hope you’ve been well — I suppose you’ve been away—”
“Yes, I’ve just got back,” she repeated.
“Oh yes! I meant that!”
She smiled at his confusion, as kindly as the ideal of his day-dream. “I’ve been spending the summer with Madeline, and I’ve spent most of it out-of-doors, sketching. Have you been well?”
“Yes — not very; oh yes, I’m well—” She had begun to move forward with the last question, and he found himself walking with her. “Did she — has Miss Swan come back with you?” he asked, looking her in the eyes with more question than he had put into his words.
“No, I don’t think she’ll come back this winter,” said the girl. “You know,” she went on, colouring a little, “that she’s married now?”
“No,” said Lemuel.
“Yes. To Mr. Berry. And I have a letter from him for you.”
“Was he there with you, th
is summer?” asked Lemuel, ignoring alike Berry’s marriage and the letter from him.
“Oh yes; of course! And I liked him better than I used to. He is very good, and if Madeline didn’t have to go so far West to live! He will know how to appreciate her, and there are not many who can do that! Her father thinks he has a great deal of ability. Yes, if Madeline had to get married!”
She talked as if convincing and consoling herself, and there was an accent of loneliness in it all that pierced Lemuel’s preoccupation; he had hardly noted how almost pathetically glad she was to see him. “You’ll miss her here,” he ventured.
“Oh, I don’t dare to think of it,” cried the girl. “I don’t know what I shall do! When I first saw you, just now, it brought up Madeline and last winter so that it seemed too much to bear!”
They had walked out of the garden across Charles Street, and were climbing the slope of Beacon Street Mall, in the Common. “I suppose,” she continued, “the only way will be to work harder, and try to forget it. They wanted me to go out and stay with them; but of course I couldn’t. I shall work, and I shall read. I shall not find another Madeline Swan! You must have been reading a great deal this summer, Mr. Barker,” she said, in turning upon him from her bereavement. “Have you seen any of the old boarders? Or Mrs. Harmon? I shall never have another winter like that at the poor old St. Albans!”
Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells Page 318