The Minister's Charge Part 33

"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 pa.s.s 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--compet.i.tion."

"Oh," said Sewell a second time. "But this compet.i.tion--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 succ.u.mbed 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 a.s.sure 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 ign.o.ble 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 n.o.ble 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 n.o.ble 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?"