The Minister's Charge Part 21

She swept out of the room, and her aunt, who entered it, after calling to her in vain, stood with Lemuel, and heard her mount the stairs, sobbing, to her own room, and lock herself in.

"What is the matter, Lemuel?" asked Miss Vane, breathing quickly. She looked at him with the air of a judge who would not condemn him unheard, but would certainly do so after hearing him. Whether it was Lemuel's perception of this that kept him silent, or his confusion of spirit from all the late rapidly successive events, or a wish not to inculpate the girl who had insulted him, he remained silent.

"Answer me!" said Miss Vane sharply.

Lemuel cleared his throat. "I don't know as I've got anything to say,"

he answered finally.

"But I insist upon your saying something," said Miss Vane. "What is this _impudence?_"

"There hasn't been any impudence," replied Lemuel, hanging his head.

"Very well, then, you can tell me what Sibyl means," persisted Miss Vane.

Lemuel seemed to reflect upon it. "No, I can't tell you," he said at last, slowly and gently.

"You refuse to make any explanation whatever?"

"Yes."

Miss Vane rose from the chair which she had mechanically sunk into while waiting for him to speak, and ceased to be the kindly, generous soul she was, in a.s.serting herself as a gentlewoman who had a contumacious servant to treat with. "You will wait here a moment, please."

"All right," said Lemuel. She had asked him not to receive instructions from her with that particular answer, but he could not always remember.

She went upstairs, and returned with some banknotes that rustled in her trembling hand. "It is two months since you came, and I've paid you one month," she said, and she set her lips, and tried to govern her head, which nevertheless shook with the vehemence she was struggling to repress. She laid two ten-dollar notes upon the table, and then added a five, a little apart. "This second month was to be twenty instead of ten. I shall not want you any longer, and should be glad to have you go now--at once--to-night! But I had intended to offer you a little present at Christmas, and I will give it you now."

Lemuel took up the two ten-dollar notes without saying anything, and then after a moment laid one of them down. "It's only half a month," he said. "I don't want to be paid for any more than I've done."

"Lemuel!" cried Miss Vane. "I insist upon your taking it. I employed you by the month."

"It don't make any difference about that; I've only been here a month and a half."

He folded the notes, and turned to go out of the room. Miss Vane caught the five-dollar note from the table and intercepted him with it. "Well, then, you shall take it as a present."

"I don't want any present," said Lemuel, patiently waiting her pleasure to release him, but keeping his hands in his pockets.

"You would have taken it at Christmas," said Miss Vane. "You shall take it now."

"I shouldn't take a present any time," returned Lemuel steadily.

"You are a foolish boy!" cried Miss Vane. "You need it, and I tell you to take it."

He made no reply whatever.

"You are behaving very stubbornly--ungratefully," said Miss Vane.

Lemuel lifted his head; his lip quivered a little. "I don't think you've got any right to say I'm ungrateful."

"I don't mean ungrateful," said Miss Vane. "I mean unkind--very silly, indeed. And I wish you to take this money. You are behaving resentfully--wickedly. I am much older than you, and I tell you that you are not behaving rightly. Why don't you do what I wish?"

"I don't want any money I haven't earned."

"I don't mean the money. Why don't you tell me the meaning of what I heard? My niece said you had been impudent to her. Perhaps she didn't understand."

She looked wistfully into the boy's face.

After a long time he said, "I don't know as I've got anything to say about it."

"Very well, then, you may go," said Miss Vane, with all her _hauteur_.

"Well, good evening," said Lemuel pa.s.sively, but the eyes that he looked at her with were moist, and conveyed a pathetic reproach. To her unmeasured astonishment, he offered her his hand; her amaze was even greater--_more_ infinite, as she afterwards told Sewell--when she found herself shaking it.

He went out of the room, and she heard him walking about his room in the L, putting together his few belongings. Then she heard him go down and open the furnace door, and she knew he was giving a final conscientious look at the fire. He closed it, and she heard him close the bas.e.m.e.nt door behind him, and knew that he was gone.

She explored the L, and then she descended to the bas.e.m.e.nt and mechanically looked it over. Everything that could be counted hers by the most fastidious sense of property had been left behind him in the utmost neatness. On their accustomed nail, just inside the furnace-room, hung the blue overalls. They looked like a suicidal Lemuel hanging there.

Miss Vane went upstairs slowly, with a heavy heart. Under the hall light stood Sibyl, picturesque in the deep shadow it flung upon her face.

"Aunt Hope," she began in a tragic voice.

"Don't _speak_ to me, you wicked girl!" cried her aunt, venting her self-reproach upon this victim. "It is _your_ doing."

Sibyl turned with the meekness of an ostentatious scape-goat, unjustly bearing the sins of her tribe, and went upstairs into the wilderness of her own thoughts again.

XIII.

The sense of outrage with which Lemuel was boiling when Miss Vane came in upon Sibyl and himself had wholly pa.s.sed away, and he now saw his dismissal, unjust as between that girl and him, unimpeachably righteous as between him and the moral frame of things. If he had been punished for being ready to take advantage of that fellow's necessity, and charge him fifty cents for changing ten dollars, he must now be no less obviously suffering for having abused that young lady's trust and defencelessness; only he was not suffering one-tenth as much. When he recurred to that wrong, in fact, and tried to feel sorry for it and ashamed, his heart thrilled in a curious way; he found himself smiling and exulting, and Miss Vane and her niece went out of his mind, and he could not think of anything but of being with that girl, of hearing her talk and laugh, of touching her. He sighed; he did not know what his mother would say if she knew; he did not know where he was going; it seemed a hundred years since the beginning of the afternoon.

A horse-car came by, and Lemuel stopped it. He set his bag down on the platform, and stood there near the conductor, without trying to go inside, for the bag was pretty large, and he did not believe the conductor would let him take it in.

The conductor said politely after a while, "See, 'd I get your fare?"

"No," said Lemuel. He paid, and the conductor went inside and collected the other fares.

When he came back he took advantage of Lemuel's continued presence to have a little chat. He was a short, plump, stubby-moustached man, and he looked strong and well, but he said, with an introductory sigh, "Well, sir, I get sore all over at this business. There ain't a bone in me that hain't got an ache in it. Sometimes I can't tell but what it's the ache got a bone in it, ache seems the biggest."

"Why, what makes it?" asked Lemuel absently.

"Oh, it's this standin'; it's the hours, and changin' the hours so much.

You hain't got a chance to get used to one set o' hours before they get 'em all shifted round again. Last week I was on from eight to eight; this week it's from twelve to twelve. Lord knows what it's going to be next week. And this is one o' the best lines in town, too."

"I presume they pay you pretty well," said Lemuel, with awakening interest.

"Well, they pay a dollar 'n' half a day," said the conductor.